Category: blahblah

Last night I ventured out with Lolly to see Nels Cline and Glenn Kotche at the Doug Fir. It’s the first show I’ve seen in… well, a while and it was awesome. It was the first show I’ve gone to where I was late (they actually started at 9pm!), and the first show I’ve been to where it was easier to see the artists as the show progressed. I think both Lolly and I drew a fair amount of satisfaction from the number of people who left during the show.

Nels started the set with some guitar and accessory noises (which we missed most of) and was followed by Glenn doing a solo set, which was the coolest live solo drum set I’ve seen. He used a combination of a small kit, an electronic pad, a sampler, a loop and some really funky cymbals. His Monkey Chant was excellent.

The two played a small set together to finish that mixed some great sample looping and perfect guitar control for a rather cool mix of interstellar travel and angry garbage compactor sounds.

The city (I assume) just painted crosswalks on each block along northeast Alberta. It’s quite a change considering there were only maybe 3 between MLK and 33rd. Anyway, I’m appreciative since it reminds folks to slow down. Alberta is much more enjoyable as a pedestrian anyway.

One benefit to not actually being a vegetarian is that when you find flecks of beef in your meal, all isn’t lost.

It is a little weird to pay more for a vegetarian meal than the carniternative.

I don’t have breakfast as often as I should lately, but I’ve been trying to get better about eating something in the mornings. Michelle got some fruity Cheerios recently, and the other morning while pouring a bowl, this fell in.

Growing up, I loved the last bowl of cereal because it polluted the milk with goodness. The extra grain and sugar sediment were a treat, especially when it stained the milk some unnatural pink color. So when I saw this hunk, my first reaction was “jackpot!” So, I bit in to it, started crunching, and immediately spit it out. It was compressed dye or something, but the flavor was foul, and my saliva turned an evil sludge brown.

All I can figure is this regular cheerio got stuck going through the flavor extruder and backed up with all the dye/flavor gunk. Not quite the prize I was hoping for.

I caught up with my fellow Foggers this weekend near Mt. Hood for some snowshoeing and charades. It’s only the third time I’ve been out on modern snow shoes, and I must admit that I quite like them. I can’t remember the trail’s name, nor the lake we shoed to, but we were on the PCT for the majority of the trek. The only drawbacks I see to shoeing are when you have a nice level stretch you could glide on with skis, and of course, going downhill.

The weather was just about perfect and we even got a nice glimpse of the mountain afterwards.

Suddenly this has become a 4-day weekend.

It’s days like this I hate going to work. Walking Barley this morning was a delight because the sky was absolutely cloudless and the sun rising was framed with perfect dawn colors and silhouettes of trees and rooftops. The bus ride to work allowed me to enjoy the brightness of the city in early morning. Wisps of steam of the power plants on top of buildings, the shiny red of alder branches in the hills, and the clean white of the volcano to the east. Even my walk to the first meeting of the morning was pleasant; dry grasses with glowing yellow in the sun, frost on moss between bricks and the strange glacial blue of melt-off crystals on the ice spots were all too photographic for the morning to be spent looking at a screen.

It’s also days like this I’m glad I’m not homeless. My fingers ached after walking Barley and scraping two sets of windshields. Feeling the cold in your bones is nice when you know you can get out of it.

Portland is having “special storm coverage” on most media outlets again today. It’s quite embarrassing, and it’s making us soft.