Futility Now

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.

Living in Silverton reminds me of these dioramas I saw in a carefully curated if wee bit dusty museum run by an adorable (but, um, wee bit dusty) husband and wife in the mountains in France.

It was the day Kate, Sylvia, & I went out without Joaquin, who had to telecommute (totally unfair). I know it was near Lamalou-les-Bains, but in an even smaller town. Olargues, maybe?

Anyways, what I want to be clear about is that I mean this as a compliment. It is seriously cute in Silverton. The people are seriously friendly here. And almost everyone is extremely well groomed (which is actually more than I can say for some of the citizens of le tinytown francais, right?).

I still feel like an outsider as a resident, maybe because I’m still doing all of my grocery shopping in Portland on the weekends, and spend all my weeknights making project samples while streaming Battlestar Galactica. So whose fault is that. As a teacher, however, I feel very welcomed and appreciated, and since I’ve already sung my swan song for Molalla, I feel at liberty to say this was absolutely the right move for me to make professionally. (Whew.)

How the other move, the Steelhammer Rd part, fits in to everything is still tricky and weird. Maybe I should try to find a way to quantify things.

This week:

moonlight and deer foraging in the yard, +1 Silverton
two separate death matches with hornets in the living room, -1 Silverton

I guess that’s even steven for now.

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.

Pictures from the window of a friend’s place in North Portland.