Open Harvest volunteering today: I feel like I'm becoming part of the family there. With each passing week, I learn a little more. I've also started to become more self-directed. Since I've now got a pretty good repertoire of things to keep track of, I can look at something and think ok, that needs to be done, rather than wandering back to the manager after every little task to say, "What's next, boss?" (Which I suspect was starting get annoying for them as well as me.)

Occassionally, if there is something that needs to be done that I don't already know about, somebody can holler, and then I get to learn something else new. Today, that new thing happened to be pricing some clearance items and arranging them on the shelf. Zap.

There's a little coffee right next to the store. For a while, I had been thinking I should go in and check it out sometime, just for the sake of seeing what it's like.

I'm not a big coffee drinker these days. I don't inhale lattés like Kramer. Nor do I have a laptop. (I'm not even certain if they have wifi, though it seems like a distinct possibility.) Little coffee shops and me like one another well enough, but we don't hang out together very often.

After my shift ended and I had done my shopping, and I happened to see T wandering into the coffee place right as I was exiting Open Harvest, I decided, "What the hell, why not make it today?"

So I wandered into the mostly vacant late-afternoon scene, and ordered a small cappuccino. T and G were sitting together at one of the tables. Hard to miss, since there was hardly anybody else in the building.

As I walked away from the counter with my drink, G waved and asked if I wanted to join their table.

"Well, sure!"

The three of us hung out for a while, shooting the breeze so to speak, and I learned of T's bold plan to move to Portland next month. She knows almost nobody in the city, has no job lined up, and no idea exactly where she's going to live yet. But she's going to move there! She likes Portland, and wants to live there, dammit.

I found the whole thing simultaniously hilarious and admirable.

G and T were going to visit a friend in need, so they needed to leave. (At some point, I'd like to ask G more about her life. She told me she was born in California (very near where I was born, apparently), but her accent would suggest that she grew up somewhere outside the United States. On another occassion, perhaps.)

Having finished my hot drink, I wandered outside, mounted Serenity, and made the journey back to Base.

My cooking experiment for the evening: Split pea soup. I did use some vague ideas combined from a few recipes I'd looked at online, as well as taking a few peeks at the ingredients list in one of the pre-made soup mixes at Open Harvest. It turned out quite well, I think. Yanthor and Anya apparently thought so too, based on their comments.

After dinner, I indulged in some Dream Theater DVD watching/listening. Some of the most amazing and intricate music around. This is one case where I get just about as much out of watching those guys play their instruments as the sounds they produce. It's just incredible to see their hands fly across those guitars, keyboards, and drums. Truly, a mastery of the art.

In my dreams, I can play the keyboard with as much fluence and effortlessness as Jordan Rudess.

I guess that will do it for tonight. Peace, brothers and sisters.