I suck because...

Should I count the ways?

1. I haven't blogged in eons.
2. I got a haircut that, when I wear my hair in a ponytail, looks like a sad, bad bowl cut.
3. For dinner, I ate crackers and mayonnaise.
4. I cannot do math.
5. My garbage stinks but I don't have the energy to take it outside.
6. My Dexter DVDs are insanely overdue.
7. I haven't blogged in eons.

I do have some good news: I fell in love with a new city. The Ham. Or, Bellingham, to you laypersons. Here are some photos, with brief explanations of what I saw when I took the blog out for a walk.

1. Here I am in Fairhaven (charming neighborhood of Bellingham) with Anne, and a minivan that looks exactly (and I mean exactly) like the car I was driven around in as a child. The sentence I think I heard most when I was young was, "We need to run errands." And errands, friends, were always run in a white minivan with wood paneling. When I was five and I stole a candy bar, the white minivan with wood paneling was my getaway car (though neither the van, nor my mother, had any idea).

2. Have you ever seen anything happier, or more enticing, than a used bookstore so full of books that they're stacked knee-high into every possible corner? I cannot begin to describe how this place suited me. I want to live there, and never leave it, and have someone bring me fish and chips every day. Some people might think it looks like an inky, musty death-trap. I say: Heaven. In Fairhaven!

3. This, here, is a double-decker bus out of which are sold fish & chips, and ice cream. Upstairs, on the deck, are some mannequins, and doll heads, and cut-outs of human faces. No big deal. The bus smells very enticing, unlike most busses, with nice looking people sitting outside, and I really wanted to go in. But we'd just eaten a huge breakfast, so I could only look longingly from the sidewalk. At one point, Robert said, "You must really like that bus. You keep looking at it." I did really like that bus.

4. On several of the nights in Bellingham, we ended up at the Ranch Room, which features a jukebox, a Sopranos pinball game, and a 24-hour diner. At one point, I slid the camera across the table to Robert, so he could take a picture of dear Anne and me. We smiled, he snapped the photo, and said, "Turned out good." Then he handed the camera back, and I saw that this was the photo he'd taken. Thanks.

5. Look, I'm no photographer (as this blog frequently proves). I'm just a standard, pose-and-smile picture-taker. So, I feel enormously proud for capturing this moment. We were on our way to the antique mall (Bellingham is full of antique malls, used book stores, vintage boutiques, and other stores that specialize in cool stuff that is old and cheap), and the entrance features this curious banner: "Fantastic! Congress of Oddities." Which is just a striking statement, and one that is often an appropriate description of my life, and certainly seems appropriate to the photo above, featuring Matt and Robert.

In conclusion, Bellingham is my kind of town. And the friends that live there are my kind of people. And the friend that got stuck road-tripping with me out there--well, he doesn't believe in sharing drinks, which I find odd. But he does believe in loaning out treasured CDs, and not guilt-tripping people when they need to make yet another pit stop, so he's okay too.

Sloggishly, sluggishly, sheepishly yours,

Kendall