Whaaaat?

Welcome to one of the best dinners of your life! Tammy cooked up Chicken in Cider and Bacon Sauce!? Are you joking, you may ask incredulously? No! Cider And bacon sauce. With parmesan potato wedges and green beans cooked in the chicken broth with more bacon. This was a seriously great weekend.

Sunny Portland

One more set of sunny pictures from this past weekend. These are from a bridge up on Vista, not too much of a hike. This is the first time we have ever gotten Mt. Hood on film (digital?) and I feel pretty good about it. Hope everyone out there had a great Easter weekend!

Some Hippos

These are some hippos we made. Our techniques are still pretty unsound, but we are improving, definitely an up and coming phenom you should be looking out for.

Let me hear you say Rooftop Access!

We are finally hitting some good weather these days. Today was a joyous 68* with more sun than you could shake a stick at, if you were into that kind of thing. So here we have the three major views from our rooftop patio, which is where you live the life.

This is looking due west up at Nob Hill. Fancypants places nobbing it up on their fancy hill.

Up next we have our view due north with the Freemont Bridge and Mt St. Helen's off in the distance. You can usually see it pretty clearly, but I still haven't figured out the right setting on my camera to really light it up. Nonetheless, it is magnificent.

Finally we are looking a little east, but mostly due south. If you look closely you can see where Benton Fraser first followed the trail of his father's killers. For various reasons, he stayed. You can also see a bit of the downtown skyline, which is probably a bit more interesting at night.

The one incredible downside, though, is that there is no grilling allowed. This is severe disappointment, but we must carry on.

This week we shall see some very silly cupcakes, a little bit more of downtown Portland, and finally some Mt Hood. Tammy found a pretty sweet little bridge with a great view of the city and for the first time in decades, a clear view of Mt Hood.

Enjoy your Easter everybody!

Welcome to the show Pokey

We are finally in business! In honor of the Gumby cartoon that was playing throughout the whole buying process, we have decided to name it Pokey after one of the greatest ponies of all time. This little dude is AWD (ready for Mount Hood and snowboard trips next winter), with a bike rack, and cd player. Yes, this means I am back in the business of mix cds.

The buying process wasn't too bad actually. A couple weeks of research and then three days of actual shopping around. The amount of information available online lets you get superprepared before going in, so we were feeling comfortable enough to buy early on. First day of shopping around I went out with Sam and Sean to a few dealerships: Subaru, Toyota, and Honda. There were several options available at Toyota and Honda. We were hoping for a small suv, but were pretty doubtful that something like that would be in our price range. But hooray hooray, not only did our top choice (crv) drop into our price range, but it had decent mileage and a 6 month power train warranty, which was an absolute rarity. So we ended up in the upper levels of our price range, but got the car we wanted in our price range and even managed to bargain down about $1200.

Things have been going well so far with more and more trips across the river, getting out to soccer games without having a 35 minute bike ride, and Tammy getting over to work everyday. Pokey is holding up. I'll have more pictures soon, and I'm sure Pokey will start making it into some vacation pictures as well. Seattle for the second weekend in May and Montana sometime this summer. Road trips are now on the table. That is glorious news.

Anyway, things are looking up. It looks like sun all week, I am up off my butt and running in the mornings, I'll start work sometime this month, and I found a bike/workshop volunteer dealie that will start in May. I am now a person that does things.

Portland's very own Godzilla

I nearly fell off my bike the first time I saw this guy looming over Stark St. And just as suddenly as he appeared, he is gone once more, returned from whence he came. He bides his time waiting for the day that Portland will need him.


I also want to point out that the top two floors of this building are residential. Someone woke up on a Saturday morning with an enormous crab right outside their window.

Life is Bananas

1. I have a job
2. I have my own company?
3. We quite nearly have a car
4. The Bulls are great, or should I say Los Bulls
5. We tried to buy some plants for the apartment and the lady at the garden store said no

Clearly, there are many bananas. I think all of these will be covered in more detail at a later date, but here we go.

1. Melody has set me up with some work with RDC3 doing some work with Razor's edge for OES and maybe Marylhurst. At the very least, it looks like I'll have work for the next 3 months. Wooo!

2. For tax purposes and some other reasons, I am setting myself up as an independent contractor for this. I think this means I own my own business. I'm not sure yet. This should start to solidify in the next week, and maybe start work this month.

3. We have put a deposit down and they have pulled the car off the sales floor. Either Monday or Tuesday we will be heading over to sign the final papers for a 2000 Honda CR-V. I had planned out a series of posts detailing the car process from the point of view of a first-timer. I may still write out a wrap-up post to go with some pictures, but no series on the lengthy process as this all took about 3 days.

4. The Bulls clinched the first seed in the east, are well ahead of the Lakers in the West, and might still catch the Spurs for best record in the league. I am endlessly jealous of Mom, Dad, Nate, and Dana for having a set of tickets for each series including the finals if they make it. So jealous.

5. We need plants for our apartment. We face north and north only. We were denied plants. Even though there are many low light and indoor plants a person may have, and we saw at least a couple at this store, we were denied plants. No plants for us. The end.

Pictures of the car up this week, clarification on job status soon, and there are some pictures I still need to get of Tammy's camera for a post. One of these photos is of the tremendously large crab that ravaged downtown Portland.

Cannon Beach

The McBeths are in town this week, which is super exciting. This is the first time we've seen Sean out here, and it is not often we get Sam as well. We made a quick trip out to the beach yesterday, to Cannon Beach, Seaside, and Astoria. A little chilly, but I always do like getting out to the beach. These shots are from Cannon Beach, which I suppose is pretty popular with the surfers, although there weren't any out there yesterday.

Astoria turned out to be pretty cool as well, but we didn't spend too much time there. I had to get back for a soccer game, so we didn't get around as much as I would have liked. Regardless, it was a hilly little town alongside the Columbia River right next to the ocean.

I'll have more stuff this week as we continue our McBeth adventures. I think I'm finally out of the woods with whatever kind of illness I had, so I can focus once more and get back to writing.

Ice Cream Cake

Another creation of Tammy's kitchen, although this one wasn't the unmitigated success that we have seen in the past. Mostly I think it came down to the fact that the ice cream cake just isn't quite worth it. It tasted pretty good, although not quite as good as some of the other cakes we've done, but it was several times over more work than other cakes. Also, decorating went poorly. We tried to do frosting with a ziplock bag. All in all it was a herculean effort, but not one that will be repeated. I think we'll focus more on baking, and if needed, just add the ice cream at the end. That's the moral of the story. You can always add ice cream at the end.

A few pictures ago

Back in business with a few pictures from Nate's visit. We still are far from adequate when it comes to taking pictures, but we're working on it. So I thought I'd show you the Waffle Window we found down an alley.

One of the classiest places we've found so far. We also have a few shots from our night over at the Silver Dollar Horses Horses Saloon, or something like that anyway. The three of us played pool and somehow we all lost.

All the concentration and serious faces in the world couldn't help us sink a shot, but at the very least we were evenly matched.