Futility Now

Last weekend was the Mighty River Classic, where I gave out the trophies mentioned here, and even got one of my own, although it was for 3rd place, which isn’t exactly what I was hoping for.

Both of these are of my first bout. Between them, the guy had to sort of sit and recover from the rib kick that he would have avoided if people had only noticed that I had already knocked him in the head with my fist.

This was my loss. I was trying to circle out and punch him, when I should have been circling in and away and kicking him. Sad emoticon.

This was the 3rd/4th bout, which I also won.

On Sunday I engaged in another incredibly manly activity: plumbing! I have been putting off fixing the pipes under my kitchen sink and flush with, umm, defeat that wasn’t as sound as it could have been I finally convinced myself to get around to it.

Just to round things out, here’s Yoshi demonstrating his civic pride by posing as the Jantzen girl.

So I’m 35 now. To help assuage the misery, I wanted to have a little excursion. Sadly, I waited way too long to call hotels and things were more or less booked up. Doing the best to ignore the lingering stench of Paul Graham, I signed up for Air BnB and booked the weekend on a boat moored under a bridge in Oregon City.

It was pretty great.

I realize now that I never got a picture of the boat, but here is where it was:

Here is Hazel looking furtive after eating spaghetti.

Here are some views off of the boat:

I was able to fulfill a long-standing fantasy of mine by getting photographed in front of this hilarious mural.

Because we were going to a boat and wanted to save time we bought bloody mary mix. It was. . . not as bad as it could have been.

Here’s a little something that I had to say about man’s inhumanity to man:

We stopped here after we checked out and ate this:

We came home and Yoshi seemed largely unchanged.

After avoiding the inevitable for months, maybe years, we finally caved to the food cart craze. Our first cart: Eurotrash, where I had a waffle with two pieces of bacon inside it, and eggs, and J had a sort of breakfast quesadilla that benefited from a healthy dose of hot sauce. It wasn’t great (nor was it exactly Euro-anything…), but it was cheap, tasty, and fast. That last bit is pretty impressive, if you consider that our other major brunch contenders often ask a good 45 minutes of waiting for a table.

The other exciting (?) innovation was at the coffee cart, where we picked up strong french press — the stir sticks were buckwheat linguini (ahem, uncooked). Oh, Portland.

While we ate (and tried to avoid getting mauled by toddlers and their SUV strollers), we admired the building across the street, and daydreamed about buying it and living on the top floor, with a second apartment converted to an office studio. I would manage it and teach ceramic workshops and write articles for magazines, and J would do something brilliant and computery.

Then we decided to walk over a bridge; we picked the Hawthorne. It’s a good thing we like it, because we were on it for longer than expected — it went up to accommodate a (presumably) very important sailboat.

It was hot.

Sunday, today, we almost didn’t leave the house, but hunger and peanut butter toast fatigue set in, so we went to a second cart, um, grouping or whatever, and had fried fish. Fine cuisine it was not, but satisfying, yes.

P.S. Sadly, I have no pictures to represent the other notable part of our weekend, which was spent spacing out to the Eluvium album over and over and over again.

More graveyard photos:

(Those cookies were SO terrible.)

Here are some dudes in old-timey diving suits attending a crypt:

Here’s some stuff around Belleville:

Here is some delicious food that we ate:

Here are some pictures from out second trip to the Marche au Puce:

Here’s me looking maudlin:

And all you can hear is a radio somewhere, playing a pig of a song:

You can go to Pere Lachaise with a plan to visit all of the important dead people, or you can show up with Vittel, cookies, some Orangina, and two mini-pitchers of chilled wine, and have yourself a picnic.

Then you can wander around looking for shadowy corners in which to exchange kisses, since cemeteries are sort of sexy. In an admittedly weird way.

The crumbly stone! The rusty metal! The fonts! The dead!

Unlike Notre Dame and The Centre de Pompidou, I didn’t cry at Pere Lachaise, but I think I still managed to have a religious experience.

Note: Yes, I realize the video is sideways. Shrug.