The cats were happy to see us when we got home last night. I took the day off because I've racked up a bunch of vacation and to have a day to recover from the weekend's frivolity. (Actually driving mostly.)
I spent this morning playing around with the css stylesheets for this page using the Web Developer add-on for Firefox. It's fun but I wish I were a better designer.
Caitlin's at Lincoln Midwest Ballet Company's summer camp. I hope she can invest enough in it to get something out of it.
In just a few days, it's off to Dallas for a visit.
I thought about several different posts I could make yesterday, but I never got around to updating because of the activity surrounding getting ready to go out of town. Caitie, her friend Kelsey, Barbara, and I made the trip to KC last night. We ended up getting out of town about 7:00, and rolled into the hotel about 10:15.
The trip was uneventful.
The girls and I will be hitting Worlds of Fun today, while Barbara has opted out in favor of working on her project for her records management class.
I enjoy bjournalling, and I'd like to discipline myself back into
regular updates. They say a habit becomes ingrained after 30 days of
repetition, so, starting today, I'm plannning an update a day for the
next 30 days. If they
are right, they days after that will take
care of themselves.
I'm looking forward to getting out of town for a few days. Barbara and I are headed to Milwaukee for a long weekend. In preparation, I purchased a GPS Navigation System, and dropped the car off for an oil change. (Unfortunately, that means I didn't cycle to work this morning.)
The Nav System was something we'd debated about since getting one with the rental car while we were in Oregon and Washington. We loved having one, but when we got home, we decided we really don't travel by care enough for it to be worth the cost. I broke down because I found a really good deal, and GPS is so freaking cool. I'm still in the phase where you go around with it, programming in destinations that you already know how to get to because it's so freaking cool.
I've been asked, why TomTom instead of Garmin? The answer TomTom runs Linux and uses open source software. I wanted to give my money to the company operating on the side of openness.
Planning Commission tomorrow, preceded by a briefing on the proposed lighting standards.
Oh, and this is freakishly awesome.
It's a pretty good sign that a vacation has been long enough when I come pack from a day's outing, and can't formulate an entry for Get Up 8.
Went here. Went there. Did this. Did that. Portland is nice.
Blah blah.
It's a good sign, too, when I'm excited about the trip home. Even when the weather is predicted to be three inches of snow on top of a quarter inch of ice. (What the hell is up with that?)
I realized I haven't updated once since arriving in Portland. I'm sitting in the airport, early for my flight, and I'll say this about Portland: there's free wifi in the airport.
How civilized.
The Bluebird Guesthouse was a great place to alight at the end of the day. Having a kitchen available was a plus, though we didn't take advantage of it. We though we might, but we didn't. Our room was comfortable, and the rate was excellent. The bus line downtown was just outside the door, and there's a local coffee shop half a block up the street, not to mention pubs, restaurants, a patisserie. (There was a highly recommended Thai streetfood stand across the street too. It was disappointingly authentic: nothing vegetarian on the menu.) We probably could have stayed right in the area of the guesthouse, and had a plenty good time.
Instead of having a good time staying near our accomodations, though, we had a great time gallivanting all over the place. We went here. We went there. We did this. We did that. Highlights included:
sakery.)
Et cetera. It seemed like we packed a lot in.
On days when we did use a car, we paid the little bit extra for a GPS navigation system. Honestly, I don't know how we got a long without one in the past. If I didn't know my way around Lincoln so well, I'd be tempted to buy one for Barbara (ahem) for Christmas. The downside: you'd never get lost anywhere. That's also the upside. I want this for my phone. (Along with a good camera and ogg player. Or just a tricorder, like I've always said. Oh, now, I also want an ebook reader built in too, with an e-ink display, but only if it has wifi built in and DRM-free content I can swap with my friends. Authors, please: I want to read your books. I'll pay you for them! Then I'll give copies to my friends to read, and they'll pay you for your other books! But I digress...)
Here's a newsflash: with the internet, cell phones, email, and social networking sites, I felt more in touch with the goings-on back home than I ever have on a vacation. I know, I know: is that a good thing or a bad thing? Being gone this long, it made be feel more in control and more comfortable with being physically not-present. I was able to coordinate plumbing work and snow removal (thanks Darren and Amren), and knew within hours when Lorenzo had torn into the bag of dry cat food and made a huge mess (sorry Shannon). I was also able to share my pictures and blog entries, when I bothered to write them, in a timely fashion, and won't have a huge pile of stuff to deal with when I get back to the office.
This whole idea of disconnection
? Overrated.
We're on the last leg of our Northwest tour, in Portland. Since it was a travel day, we didn't really do a whole lot, in the sense of going out and seeing things. The drive from Seattle to Portland—
I'm going to interrupt myself here to announce that Barbara just checked the bed for bedbugs. I hadn't even thought about that before now, and now I don't think I'm going to be able to stop thinking about it.
Where was I? Oh, right—the drive from Seattle to Portland was exciting. It rained the whole way, and the spray from other traffic often reduce visibility to 100 yards, maybe less. That's not very far at 70 mph. I need to talk about the place we're staying, the Bluebird Guesthouse, and the fantastic meal we had at the Farm Cafe, but I'll save that for another entry. What I really want to talk about are impressions and experiences in Seattle that I haven't mentioned yet.
We had heard that public transportation in Seattle was not as good as it is in Portland. If that's the case, then the buses in Portland must fly, and pick you up outside your window. Basically, we only touched the car to drive to Kirkland to have lunch with the Tyburski family on Saturday. Otherwise, it just sat, parked outside the B&B, while we rode #10 bus downtown. Further, the buses, some of them anyway, are electric, riding along overhead cables streetcars without the rails. It made me think it would be cool to have cars that could extend similar booms and plug in to the transportation power grid. Also interesting are the bus routes that run through dedicated tunnels under the city. They're like an underground, but quieter. I was impressed by the cleanliness and the convenience of the system, as well as the politeness of the users.
For vegetarians, pizza is often a pretty good choice for a meal.
Pizzerias are common, and one has nearly complete control over the
toppings. We've had three pizzas since starting our tour, two on the Oregon
coast, and one in Seattle. None have been fantastic. The one we had at
the Lumberyard in Cannon Beach gets one star out of five. It was a soggy
bog of cheese with a dull crust. At the Main St. Pizza Co. in
Tillamook we got a pie that was okay, but much too expensive for what it
was: so, two stars. At Toscana
Pizzeria we got the best of the bunch, noted on the menu as the
Di Capra
. It had no sauce as such, but was topped with olive oil,
goat cheese, spinach, roasted red pepper, and kalamata olives. The
toppings were excellent, and well proportioned. I like a stone-baked
crust, though, so even this tops out at 3.5 stars.
When in Seattle, don't try to describe the location of a thing by saying, it's next to Starbuck's. That just doesn't work.
I think a saw Jason Truesdell
in the Pike Place Market sunday evening. I should have said, Hi, are
you Jason? I like your blog,
but as an introvert, all I could
manage was an inward, Oh, I think that's a blogger I like...
For New Year's, I should resolve to be more outgoing. Like Barbara. She's good at that sort of thing.
Also Sunday, we were able to see the exhibition Japan Envisions the West, which had just reopened at the Seattle Art Museum. It was a completely different take on Japanese visual arts from any I've seen before. It demonstrated the effect of European and, later, American influence on Japanese art, as well as how the Japanese aesthetic reverberated through the culture of the west as well. While there, we were able to observe a tea ceremony presented by Urasenke Seattle in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the sister cities relationship between Seattle and Kobe, Japan. Unfortunately, difficult seating arrangments made it had to see as well as we would have liked. Still, live shakuhachi and koto performance and getting to see how many scoops of macha to use in a bowl made it time well spent.
I talked about In The Bowl previously, but it's worth noting that we went there three times during our stay, and mentioned it to everyone we talked to. To give you an idea of the atmosphere, on the walls there was Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Native American iconography. Sunday night, people were hanging out the door; we got a great table by the window, and enjoyed a meal of appetizers. To top off a meal, diners are brought a serving of black sticky rice pudding. Recommended.
Finally:
Dear Seattle,
We had a wonderful time visiting you, but if you'd clean the fallen leaves out of your gutters, your streets wouldn't look like rivers with tiny strips of pavement running down the middle of them.
Signed, me
We were bummed to discover Cake were playing Portland tonight; it would have been a good show to catch. On the other hand, we saved about a hundred bucks by missing it. Tomorrow, which it is already and I'm still up because we're doing laundry, we're visiting the Torii Mor Winery.