After a week in our posh lakeside retreat, reality has set in. We're now in a tiny little apartment which, frankly, is not up to my high standards:

You call this a breakfast nook??? Where's the kitchen island? The built-in wine rack? The wet bar?

Actually, the place is fairly livable. The only real downside is that you can only steal wireless internet from the far corner of my room, and even then only on alternate Thursdays between 1:30 and 1:33 pm. (Hence the long gap in blogging.) On the bright side, we live next door to some "urban homesteaders" who have an alpaca and ~20 long-haired rabbits in their back yard. So that's something, I guess.

The other downer is that I haven't made any human friends my age yet. Luckily, I have all of the companionship I need in the form of my freakish bobble-head quasi-anime sidekick, Kitty Cat:

She's eating her cat food right now.

I haven't just been hanging around our flat, taking care of my pets. One evening we went out to see the local baseball team, courtesy of daddy's law firm:

The Foam Finger of Justice made sure that no one wanted to sit within a three-row radius of us.

Most of the time mom and I go gallavanting around town while daddy goes to work. But the first highlight of the summer so far was our weekend in Vancouver. Daddy is quite the cheapskate (not sure where he gets it), so he put us all up at the local hippie hostel. The bunk-beds were pretty sweet:

What are you guys DOING down there???

We schlepped the bikes all the way across country, and we finally got to use them.

The best part was the aquarium. I got to find out where Moby Dick's been hanging out all of these years:

...and then took home the obligatory miniature plush version:

I named him "Splashie." He's on a different diet from Kitty Cat.

The next day, we took a cable car up to the top of a mountain above the city. A freak hailstorm blew through and lightning struck one of the towers, electrocuting some dude. They shut the cable cars down, so mom and dad had the bright idea of walking down the mountain. Luckily, I slept through most of the next two hours. I've been told that daddy's heroic effort carrying me for two miles down a 50% grade trail got him a special reward from mommy later that night.

This picture doesn't do justice to the misery and the agony that happened while I was asleep.

But daddy's expression comes a little closer...

This past weekend gave me a real taste of what Seattle is really all about. So there I was, with the family, waiting to watch the local neighborhood Summer Solstice parade...

Just minding my own business when...

Holy hell! I do NOT remember Spider Man and the Statute of Liberty ever looking like THAT...

That's right. Naked bikers to the left, naked bikers to the right. Clearly, I need to reconsider this whole Seattle thing. Or get naked, paint my body and join them. One or the other:


The rest of the parade managed to stear clear of nudity, although I did detect some subtle political undertones:



I'll try to be better about staying in touch in the next few weeks. It's just that it makes me so angry that we can't steal free internet at our apartment. Seriously, what's the world coming to?