Computer drama that is. You see, after returning from a lovely dinner with Grandma and the Henningsgaard-Sullivans (minus Lucy who is enjoying her very first Camp Kiwonilong teen week) I scooped up my computer, launched World of Warcraft, and…my pristine little Macbook shuddered and shut down. Ok. Switched her on again, let her warm up a bit, loaded WoW and…died. Third time’s a charm? Not quite. Three rapid-fire shuddering involuntary shutdowns.

I restarted my computer and set her on the nice hard desk to cool off. Browsing the Internet didn’t seem to have the same adverse affect the game did. It seems (surprise, surprise) that lots of the Macbooks have these little overheat shutdown problems. A Mac with overheating problems? Are you kidding me? Dad suggested that I could live with it, but my last machine went three years before it fried. I’m not ok with a $2000 machine freaking out in two months. I’m also not that thrilled about driving all the way to the Apple Store in Portland, but hey, I’ve got to take care of my baby computer. (I could play WoW with only minor shuddering if I turned the resolution way down. Needless to say, I didn’t purchase a fast computer with a beautiful monitor to mess around with grainy graphics.)

In more exciting news, the court website launched today. It still requires some minor revisions (I copied and pasted loads of old content and I’ve been notified of more than one typo), but it’s not looking too terrible considering I have as much artistic instinct as a small tree frog. I realized after I uploaded it that I’d totally reorganized the front page without checking it on Safari (ironic, at school I always forget to check IE) but it looked fine here at home (after I convinced my computer to work). .

Also, Brooke is in town for the week. She’s a counselor at Camp Kick-A-Lot, so while she’s working in the evenings she’ll be free after 8pm. How fun will it be to have multiple friends here over the weekend?!? Ryan will be in town playing music at the Urban Cafe, so it’ll be like I have a social life! Woo!

Ok, going to save and publish this post, back her up, and shut her down. Cross your fingers for me and my fickle hardware.

Tiffany (one of the girls I work with at Vassar) has a (pretty awesome) internship with Six Apart this summer, and she sent the media studies majors invitations for Vox accounts. Vox is a new social software web app, centered around blogging. I haven’t really checked it out, although I’m tempted. Unfortunately, my poor blogging habits on my own dear website are staying my hand. I’m afraid that I am too irresponsible to mother any more blogs at the moment.

But it’s tempting.

Last week was Beach Week. Our family goes all the way to Gearhart (20 mins from my own home) to play at the beach and wallow in our familial peculiarities. Very nice to see everybody, very relaxing to take afternoons off work.

On Friday I drove Mom’s car to Eugene to meet my friends for the hottest weekend of the summer — temperature-wise. The evening was almost unbearably steamy, so we snuck food and drinks into the Gateway Cinemas ($1.50 a ticket) to watch X-Men 3. The first summer term ended last week, finishing off Tim’s college career for good, so we celebrated for him. Saturday morning we drove to Fall Creek for cliff-jumping and inflatable-mattress-floating in the icy mountain stream. I took off around 3pm, driving up to Madras to meet one of Grandpa Tom’s high school friends. My parents and I slept at Kah-Nee-Tah and drove home this morning.

I lent Ryan a book of short stories I just purchased and finished, “Last Night” by James Salter. I had mixed feelings, so I’ll be interested to hear his reaction. I found some of the stories to be shockingly poignant, and Salter displayed a remarkable talent for sculpting powerfully concise character sketches. It was the tone of the stories that bothered me. They positively swam in the sort of jaded futility that I find totally unproductive. The stories’ painful beauty assaulted the innocent, almost naive perspective that I cultivate as my ideal worldview. I suppose there is more than one way to respond to heartbreak, but casting the whole world in cold colors strikes me as extreme and vicious — shallow, even, for all its textures. Incomplete, at the very least.

Uncle Bill called me on Wednesday night and made a tempting proposition. He offered to let me tag along to Eugene when he flew Ellie to lacrosse camp Thursday afternoon. I thought about it at length, arguing back and forth with myself. On one hand, Eugene offered many of my dearest high school friends and a predicted weather forcast of sunny 80’s. On the other hand, I am supposed to be earning money and nurturing a vibrant Astoria social life. Hmmm.

So I flew out in the little Cessna 340. The motions it made in turbulence were a little disturbing at first, but it felt better when I imagined us as a really fat seagull. Seagulls tend to shake in a strong wind, but I’ve never seen one explode and plummet out of the sky. When I relaxed I realized that Uncle Bill knows a little bit about flying, and he exhibited a comforting combination of confidence and care.

I’ll run through the weekends events.

Grandma and Grandpa were infinitely generous in picking me up and offering me a place to stay. While I had a number of couches at my disposal, the Building, with it’s comfy shed-bed and private shower, provided the height of luxury. Ryan and Adam picked me up in Ryan’s little red truck and we went to their apartment, a beat-up little summer place in the Commons. Adam made a lovely chicken pasta dinner and as I ate I admired the moldy-smell smashed-wall dirt-splattered-ceiling combination that ranked the apartment, in my opinion, very highly in the scale of stereotypical college dives. I’m not being critical here, mind you, I was totally charmed. After our lovely dinner Ryan retired to his pile of homework and Adam and I walked (a brisk 40 minutes) to Max’s Bar. Moe’s Bar (in the Simpsons) is supposedly modeled after Max’s. At any rate, we met Joe and Tim there and drank a bit and marveled the fact that so many 21+ Astoria kids are wandering the streets of Eugene. Crazy.

I spent much of Friday chatting with Grandma and Grandpa, which was fun and relaxing. In the evening Pearl and Brooke hosted a vegan barbeque with delicious kabobs and lentil burgers. After completely gorging ourselves Brooke, Pearl, Adam, Joe, and I walked/biked/longboarded down the street to watch an outdoor showing of The Princess Bride. The whole grassy hill was full when we arrived, but we discovered some prime seats behind the screen. The projection glowed right through, and the picture was perfectly crisp (if backwards) on the reverse. Brooke and Pearl lent me a bike, so I rode all the way back home from South Eugene. Adam very generously rode with me to my grandparents house before backtracking to the apartment, so I felt safe and escorted the whole time.

Saturday I met Brooke and Pearl at the edge of campus and we went on to the Saturday market to purchase loads of fresh Oregon cherries, raspberries, and blueberries. We rode on to the river bike path and swam out to an island with our fruity treasure. Adam, Ryan, and Joe were apparently swimming at the same time. We never could find them, an inconvenience that allowed us to selfishly gobble up all the berries ourselves. I won a cherry pit spitting competition and fell down a bunch in the water and narrowly avoided a sunburn, so it was all quite satisfying. After drying a bit we rode to Sweet Life Bakery and treated ourselves to more delicious things. Pearl had a sundae with a rasberry brownie, vegan coconut icecream, and dark chocolate sauce that was possibly the most decadent-and-wonderful thing of all time. Possibly.

Saturday evening Pearl and Brooke rode home and I went on to Ryan and Adam’s. Both the boys were rather burnt from the day in the river, and when Adam ran to the store to fetch aloe he returned with three shiny bottles of Jones soda. We sipped our various flavors and chatted and rested until Adam and I roused enough energy to bake brownies. Quite a bit of lazy, chatty, brownie-eating time passed, and then Brooke arrived and we all played spades until the middle of the night. Brooke and Adam won by a landslide, which had more than a little to do with the fact that Brooke managed to be dealt 5+ spades (and no few aces) every hand.

Which brings us to this morning, as I return to the seductive hum of my little computer and procrastinate about my packing chores. I have mixed feelings, because being unemployed in Eugene feels like the most delightful situation of all time. I know that I’ll want to buy fresh organic groceries next year and that my ability to do so rests soley on my summer profits, but at the same time… This weekend was so colorful and energetic, so rich and social and fun, it is difficult to rouse enthusiasm for the social sinkhole epitomized by the 40-hour Astoria work week. But on I go, just a few weeks left.

On Sunday afternoon I stopped by the Sunday Market oyster booth that Luke works at (remind anybody of a Taylor Brown story?) to gift him some of our freshly purchased raspberries and blueberries. He mentioned that he’d call me later and, much to my surprise, he actually did. The invitation consisted of an “if you want to, thought I’d just mention, guys playing music, not much for you to do” sort of deal. I received many such obligatory invitations over the years in the role of neglected high school girlfriend, and found that they were often loud and rowdy endeavors with very little entertainment value. Even so, I nearly always accepted out of a sense of obligation and self-reproach that mirrored — on Luke’s part — the invite’s inspiration.

I prepped with a book, a cell phone, a laden purse, and a bowl full of cookies. Gritting teeth against forced social interaction (my primal lazyantisocial urges are waging war against my more socially appropriate neural regions) I headed towards the tail end of Irving. The scene was much as I expected. Dear Joey gave me a great hug and asked after school and life and smiled in her mother-hen cocked-head way. Luke and a rowdy bunch of recent high school grads played clashy screechy music in the basement and I wedged myself in a doorway in order to provide a stable place for the awkward young men to avoid looking directly at. Luke is actually quite a lovely musician, but clashy music is not his forte, and his heel-dragging combined with (and this is speculation) my disturbing female presence cut the session short. We found ourselves alone in the basement, Luke strumming himself back to calm with his acoustic guitar, when he made a most intriguing proposition. He offered to show me his skunks.

I accepted, and we rushed up the stairs to Renias old bedroom where two fist-sized baby skunks were bouncing around, one on the bed, another trapped in a wire toy airplane. Luke scooped them up and brought them downstairs where we played “pull out the grass” and “wriggle your fingers like little worms” to entertain them. They’re terribly energetic creatures, running all around us in circles. Wherever Luke walks they follow him around in a little line. When they’re scared they stand side-to-side, tails pointing in opposite directions. In a word, they’re the most adorable pets I’d ever seen. I was wary at first that they’d spray, but Luke assured me they’d only sprayed twice: once at the cat and once when his girlfriend Melissa sat on one. He was right, we were safe.

So that’s the skunk story, and as questionable as it sounds, I am entirely enchanted with the babies. Their mom died in Melissa’s yard so she rescued them and they’re the sweetest things ever. They have funny personalities, they have soft little noses and pokey little paws, and they fit in pockets. They’re the best. I hope to go take pictures as soon as I have a chance so I can share their adorableness with the world. Stay tuned.