Oh what a doozy...

Okay, its been far too long.... quick recap:

I'm on the west coast. I went to San Francisco on March 7 for a family wedding, stayed out there for an extra week to play in wine country with my parents, then hung out in San Fran with my brother and sister in law for a week, then flew up to Portland! Portland has been in-frickin'-credible. I've been hanging out with old friends that I haven't seen in ages and it's been so, so nice. This city is so laid back, friendly, easy to get around, green, and there's a whole city block devoted to being the best book store I've ever been to! It's called Powell's and I'm pretty sure I've spent more time there than anywhere else in Portland and I've bought enough books to warrant the purchase of another bag in order to bring them home. I'm pretty sure it's my little heaven on earth.. or at least in Portland :) It's become a nice haven.

Portland has been so great. In so many ways. It's felt like a vacation, I've felt like a true independent traveler but I've been able to spend all this sweet quality time with friends. I've been able to take off to the coast and go solo camping and hiking with no company but a beautiful golden retriever (that a friend lent me for the week!) as well as have amazing nights out with old friends and by the end of the night be good friends with all of their friends. Wine and beer help in that, of course :) Workwise it's been a whirlwind... I've basically just been reading. Reading, reading, reading. And that's been bliss.

One of the series I was reading is called Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. It's pretty darn great. There are three books out right now and the fourth and final book will be released in August. I'll give a full summary in my next post, but the short answer is a girl named Bella moves from Phoenix AZ to Forks Washington (population 3,100) and ends up falling in love with a very loveable vampire named Edward. It's told from her point of view, and is wonderfully descriptive... but the time you're 100 pages into it, you're pretty much in love with Edward too. So anyway, my first day out there I was at a bar with my friend Noodles and all of her friends; we're sitting around, shooting the shit, they're asking me about what I"m doing in Portland and I give a quick sum up of my studies and the books I'm looking at, ending with Twilight as that was the one I was reading at the time. Well one of Noodles's friends says, 'I'm an assistant director, and my girlfriend is working on that set; we can probably get you on the set.'

Holy. Poop.

So I try to stay cool and convey my enthusiasm and crazy desire to do that and it looks like it's all going forward! We planned for me to go onset for the whole week of April 7-11 and just observe the whole film process. So after camping and all of that, I'd read the Twilight books twice through and was thoroughly obsessed with the tales (if you know me, you'll understand the level of obsession we're talking about here). So much so, that I had a free weekend on the 5th and 6th and decided to take my little rental car up around the Olympic peninsula in Washington and explore the towns of Forks, La Push and Port Angeles where the books take place. Of course I loved it because it was just another crazy outlet for my obsessions, but I could justify it work wise because I really wanted to see the actual towns and compare them to the books' descriptions and then to the film's depiction. My next post will be a crazy long journal about that trip.

Well the end of this tale is that the girl I was going to go to work with on the set of Twilight ended up quitting her job last week. She was going to try and set me up with a coworker to still be able to observe, but as I haven't heard anything from her, I assume that's not gonna work out. I'm crazy disappointed, but as that is the only negative glitch in my entire time in Portland, I'll learn to get over it. Blarg is the word of the week, but I'm still managing to enjoy myself in the city of course, and still get other work done, but I had to force myself to stop reading Twilight and actually focus on something else; I think I need a mourning period!

Anywho... so that's the quick update for now. Thank god for the nomad life; this year in the States has been incredible. It's been better than the best therapy to spend all this time with friends and family, traveling and in new and exciting or old and comforting cities. In each place I've traveled to I've made great work connections, had wonderful life experiences, and have expanded every horizon I have in scholarship, selling myself, conversation and experiences. I'll be glad to go back to Bangor, but this year away has taught me how to self-discipline, how to network...well, not just how to, but it's forced me to. I think I would have been too complacent if I'd stayed in Wales this year. I would have just floated along and waiting for assignments to come my way and stuff; this way, I've really found where my interests are leaning, where my passions can take me, and how I want to spend the next few years.

It's not all solved yet, in fact I think more questions have come up instead, but it's all been such a beneficial experience in every sense of the word.

Ok... enough for now. More to come soon.