independence

getting more than a little excited about one of my most favorite holidays. can you tell?

brought to you by the loverly andria lindquist

all other images via weheartit

edna j.

so i took a trip home to OR this weekend and visited this little raisin, edna j. drydale.

vintage braves cap courtesy of spencer barnes' minors team

spencer's closet - dallas, OR - circa 1997

she's my 92 year-old great grandma and is totally outrageous. i took davy crockett to pay her first visit to GG and edna was enamored with my little ball of sweet black lovin'. the best thing about grandma is hearing what comes out of her mouth. since her days are exclusively filled with eating and TV (primarily COPS, major league baseball and the occasional episode of matlock), reality gets strangely garbled for her and she ends up regurgitating outlandish tales that paint her and my great grandpa as american folklore. lucky for y'all, i committed these tall tales to memory for your viewing pleasure.

GG: how's your job overseas going?
KT: oh, i live in seattle now. my job's fine.
GG: no, you work overseas...
KT: uh, no, rem does. he's flying airplanes overseas. he gives people gas. his wife is in spokane flying helicopters.
GG: rem got married?!
KT: uh, yeah grandma. last year. you have a picture of it right there. see? that's rem and that's ashly?
GG: that's REM?!!?
KT: ha, yes. yes, it is. they live in spokane.
GG: oh so you bought a house?
KT: no, rem and ashly bought a house. in spokane.
GG: ohhhhh yeah. it's right next door to our house in spokane.
KT: come again?
GG: yeah, we have a house right next door. with six foot fences so the dogs can't jump out.
KT: niiiiiice. that's gotta be super convenient for you.

grandma LOVES reminiscing about colorado. her and great-grandpa used to live there as kids and adults. my grandpa even literally got stuck in the kissing camels at garden of the gods and the fire department had to come get him down. that one actually is true. the following tale is 69% false.

GG: you know your grandpa laid curb in colorado. all of colorado springs.
KT: really...
GG: he was the best cement finisher in all of oregon (ah, i see we've jumped states here)
KT: doesn't surprise me
GG: and he built the air force academy.
KT: by himself?
GG: pretty much. and he built fort kit carson.
KT: wowwwwww. that's awesome. so he pretty much built all of colorado springs.
GG: yep. best cement finisher in all of oregon

and have i mentioned she's addicted to MLB?

KT: what are you watching?
GG: the world series (in actuality it was a recap of baseball in the 70s)
KT: who's playing?
GG: my boys!
KT: ahhhh, who's your boys?
GG: oh i can't remember right now. america.
J: isn't america always in the world series?
KT: (just go with it)
GG: america and japan. we're killing them.
KT: oh reallllllly.
GG: oh yeah, i love the dodgers. (she has zero affiliation with the dodgers)

i wish i would have taken pictures of her wall decor. someone (cough*grandmamatie*cough) has cut out kitschy pictures from her boston terrier calendars and pasted them on HUGE pieces of posterboard. they now masquerade as "tasteful wall hangings". great grandma swears those are her champion bulldogs - and she's kind of right. my family has raised bostons for 4 generations and she did have at least one champion, sampson.

GG: those are my champions
KT: i see that. which ones are those?
GG: oh, you know, that girl.
KT: you mean chica?
GG: no...
KT: sampson?
GG: i don't know. that girl.
KT: i remember chica & stubby. wasn't chica mom's dog and you took her when rem was born?
GG: that was your grandma matie's dog. i took her because i had a big backyard. 6 foot fences.
KT: ohhhhh yeah...in spokane. next to rem and ashly.
GG: exactly.

i promise you she's not crazy, just hysterical to listen to. i used to try and correct her stories but it's wayyyyyyyyy more fun to just roll with them. when she used to live in her own house and watch COPS on heavy rotation, she'd swear up and down that the dallas PD visited her neighbors on the reg, arresting them and getting them "facedown on a tarp with their hands cuffed behind their back". literally directly seen on COPS. it's a shame too, her poor neighbors were actually really nice people too.

i can't only hope to be this badass in 68 years.

i kept marveling at how still davy was sitting and how she kept looking directly at the camera.

come to find out edna had an iron clasp on davy's windpipe for the better part of a minute.

first week of summer

holler. favorite season is officially HERE. it teased us seattleites with sun and fun on tuesday and has since petered out. definitely am not letting the weather dampen my spirits (literally) though...spending lotsa time catching up with rad people in beautiful places. please believe i've been putting in long hours at my favorite place in seattle, discovery park beach. davy can shed her civilized ways and run naughty and free while i play to my heart's content. don't you see why i love it so?

brain's art installation
crashing down...check that water action

vicious attack dog protecting me from wayward floating stumps

digging x 1,000

the view

the goods

tides a comin' in

brain's art installation #2 - red rock & dungeness baby crabs

found: one elf village complete with flagpole and firepit

love love lovinggggg summer

has nothing to do with my week. has everything to do

with how much i freaking love max e. hinton

partner in crime for the evening

playing catch-up at the boxcar with an old SPU'er

exactly why NW is best

alex clare

ob.sessed. can't get over him.

if his voice were a math equation it would look sometehing like this:

voice of ben carson (hot bodies in motion), adele & gary go PLUS music of deadmau5 EQUALS alex clare

perhaps better described by forrest j. underwood as "Black Keys meets Dubstep"

you be the judge...







whaddya think???

picture this

by some mysterious form of magic, my iPhone refuses to die. although it persists in constantly jumping out of my hand and landing on the hardest surfaces imaginable, dropping every single call at least 4 times, and being super ugly, the thing still takes a decent picture, tweets and texts like a fiend - keeping me relatively happy. here are snippets of my past week in pictures. i've been spending inordinate amounts of time at discovery park beach (my most favorite place in seattle) with the puppy getting some good think time in. even managed to hit up the fremont naked, ahem, solstice festival this weekend (no pictures...you'll thank me) and inhale some buca di beppo this weekend with new friends, home friends and texas friends.

wakarusa

have i mentioned before that i have the best friends in the entire world? i wouldn't say it if it weren't true. two such people falling into that illustrious category are max hinton and forrest underwood. we occasionally call ourselves the gleesome threesome and have also been known to label ourselves as "hetero-lifemates". thank goodness they erased our first meeting from their memory because it was BAD. as hard as it is to imagine, they came to a party at my brother's house and i was a total bee-yacht-ch to them. luckily our second meeting was off-the-charts memorable as we got to help our very best friends get engaged in fort worth, texas. two weekends ago we added to our cache of golden life experiences and converged on mulberry mountain in ozark, arkansas for wakarusa 2011. seriously, imagine a weekend of going to bed at sunrise every day, being with your best friends 24/7, listening to so much killer music your heart just wants to burst and getting to relive all of that every day. i'll spare you most of the sweaty details and let the pictures do the talking.

paris

showing some pre-weekend love for all two of you who read this thing on fridays. it cut my heart deeply to have missed my new obsession at wakarusa last weekend (post on that coming next week) because, quite frankly, grace potter and the nocturnals have stolen my heart. and in all honesty, i'm jealous of her. her badass-ness. her raspy, rocker voice. her LEGS FOR DAYS. oh and her bangs are awesome. i tried fake bangs last night and in the wise words of andria, "uh...you look like a total hippie" - and not the good kind. it probably didn't help that my hair is on a 5 day, no wash binge and looks strikingly similar to a lion's mane.

i have to give solid ups to one, forrest j. underwood, for bringing grace into my life. i'm pretty sure he a) wishes grace's name were actually paris and b) truly means it when he sings, "i wish i were in paris" along with the ear snack below. PLEASE, if you do anything good for yourself this weekend or in your life in general, put GP on heavy, heavy rotation. your body, mind and spirit will thank you for it. she's currently making the rounds @ america's greatest music festivals but has a bangin' tour schedule going on right now as well.

if you're interested in hearing more of grace & the nocturnals you can do one or both of the following:

1. email me at kbarnes@spu.edu and i will dropbox you the entire album or,

2. turn on your favorite local country station and hear her sultry croon cover the multitude of sin's kenny chesney's voice creates on their duet, "you and tequila"

happy friday fellow music lovers. happy friday.

p.s. the aforementioned forrest j. underwood just happens to be an extremely eligible bachelor who also happens to bring the party wherever he goes and happens to be a C-130 pilot for the air force...interested?

airplanes

i get so good at posting regularly and then life gets in the way. soon i feel all out-of-sorts and realize the reason why i'm feeling so off is because i haven't been writing! vicious cycle. i have about 7 posts floating around in my head and keep saying, "i HAVE to get this up on the blog before i forget!" the problem is that a lot of times, when i'm having these blog-worthy experiences, i always wish i had paper and pen with me to record every detail. although jotting notes isn't the most conducive to a heartfelt conversation, i always wish i'd have written it down in the moment. enough of the diatribe, here is the first in a long line of "catch-up" posts.

memorial day weekend i had a barnes family colorado adventure to celebrate the nuptials of deb durey and colin lockhart. my standard fare for flying is: sit, read, pass out, and read. i hate talking to people next to me and am sure to put off the "don't bother me" vibe every time. seriously, if you start small talk with someone on an airplane, you HAVE to draw it out the full 2.5 hours or else it's. so. awkward. and if you're in the middle seat, you can't even pretend you're a) hunting for the beverage cart (aisle seat) or b) enjoying the scenery (window). but here i was, breaking the trend, and had my first in-flight conversation with two adorable old guys. for some reason, as i was boarding a flight back to PDX, i felt like i just had to sit between these two "boys".

ron sits to my left. his hair is like the whitest cotton candy you've ever seen and it boyishly curls over the edge of his ballcap. he's tan and his eyes are like water - they sparkle, they jump and just draw you in. the guy's got a killer smile too. we get to talking and come to find out he's an ordained minister and travels the world with his wife (who's a midwife) doing missions work and serving others in times of natural disaster. he's been to NOLA to help katrina victims 5 times and was about to make a trek to joplin, missouri with samaritan's purse. they have 5 children and something like 12 grandchildren and even some great-grandbabies in there too. one child is a missionary in brazil and another goes from job to job because a 9-5 just isn't for him. so he is now a tenter for a circus (seriously...he sets up circus tents!) and doesn't go to church, which takes ron's smile down a couple of watts. ron is the all-star pitcher for denver's 70-and-over softball league and is headed to reno with the team manager, bill, for the champsionship games (: love this! my two favorite things about talking with ron are hearing his love story and the way he talks about his kids. he told me more than once that his children are "the loves of my life" and now that he's retired, he spends as much time as he can doting on them and spoiling his grandbabies because, "life really begins when you have grandkids".

ron's family-owned company installs bleachers in highschools and sports field and also dabbles in the scaffolding world. he's been married for 54 years to a drop-dead gorgeous woman. i see a picture of her and exclaim, "ron! she's a BOMBSHELL!". he tells me i have no idea and went right into how they met - 54 years ago ron rolled into denver to install a bleacher set in a high school gymnasium. this beautiful girl was working the concession stand at the time and immediately caught his eye. according to ron, "week one. i asked her out. she said no. week two. i asked her again. she said yes, but only if it was a group date because i could be a creep or something. week three. we get engaged. week four. we got married in vegas. and that was 54 years ago." BALLLLLIN story, right? don't tell the other guy, but ron kind of stole the show for me, total favorite and made my heart feel about ten times too big just talking to him. he even asked me about my acorn and anchor tattoos and took the time to listen and said he loved them (:

bill sits to my right and is a retired lieutenant colonel in the army. he made two tours to vietnam and told me all about it. bill literally said, "i have never even told my kids about my time over there" and launched into the devastation and hurt he'd seen there. with tears in his eyes he tells me about his friends who never came home. about the street that all the soldier's wives lived on and having to see the black car drive up week after week. he breaks my heart. but he also makes me smile when he says he's been proudly married for 51 years to his beautiful "girlfriend" (love it that he still calls his wife his girlfriend). we get into politics and our love of republicanism with all it's good, bad and ugly. he even tells me allllllllll about the old folks' softball leagues and his love for Christ. at the end of our conversation, i ask him what the secret is to being happily married for so long. bill says, "just have a good time. laugh a lot. all the time, be laughing. go on adventures and just live life. live it together." best advice i've heard in a long time.

this fledgling "talking-to-others-on-a-plane" experience set the bar high and, wouldn't you know it, started a new trend of being friendly on flights! i met a gorgeous 32-year old arkansan engineer on a flight from dallas to little rock last week who told me everything i needed to know about going to my first music festival and filled me in on the glories of "america's most under-appreciated state". he seriously was a looker, so much so that i told him he really needed to audition for the bachelor (: AND to make things even better...he does contract work at laughlin air force base in del rio! small world, eh?

on my trek back to the NW, i also talked to an cutie immigration law student on the hour-long flight from little rock to DFW who i noticed had a great manicure and a wakarusa bracelet on. we bonded over the music and our experiences there and i left with a new friend (: though currently based in LA with her doctor boyfriend, she's from gig harbor, washington - just 45 minutes away from seattle! if i have had such awesome experiences talking to people in the past 2 weeks, think about all the opportunities and friendships i've been missing out on the past 24 years! changed my mindset on talking to my airplane neighbor for sure. so now i'm dying to know...do y'all talk to people on planes?

i would definitely talk to this guy on a plane...