beautiful, funny, sad & true

1. caught a cold

2. went to see my friend Keith (he and I were in Dirty Martini together last year) with his jazz group called the Blue Cranes at a tiny but great place called Valentine’s. They tore it up. Awesome show.

3. stayed home from work on Tuesday. Coughed my lungs out and just generally felt crappy.

4. went to work on Wednesday, but went home sick at lunch time. Met Joan for lunch. First time I’d seen her in a week. Went home, napped for a while, then went to Todd’s play reading.

5. went to work and stayed all day today. Going to BoringFish’s house for dinner. We’re making it ourselves, yo.

So that’s the latest. I didn’t forget to write, just haven’t had much to tell about lately. Except the fact that this anime series I’ve been watching–called Haibane Renmei–just keeps getting more and more beautiful. If I can find it for sale, I intend to buy it.

Bad news about my Christmas holiday. I’m going to Seattle for the weekend, and I was planning to stay from Friday night to Tuesday night. I just found out today that my workplace is open on Christmas Eve, so that means I’m not going to be able to be in Seattle on the actual Christmas Day, like I was planning to. Grrrrr. Have I mentioned recently how much it sucks to have a day job? Cause it does. It’s really starting to get in the way of my life.

I suppose that’s good, because it means that I have a life. It would be infinitely worse to have nothing going on, but it sure does make for tricky scheduling and frustrating disappointments sometimes.

Is it just me, or is it kind of a Weird Energy Weekend?

Gonna keep it short and sweet this time; that’s all I’m going to say. But it certainly feels like Mercury is in retrograde or something.

J: Are you at a zoo, surrounded by chimpanzees?

me: No, I’m at Lloyd Center [mall in NE Portland], and there are a bunch of screaming kids everywhere. It’s pretty much the same thing.

J: (laughs) That’s hilarious. You should put it in your blog.

You have to love cell phones.

One time I was hiking in the Columbia river gorge, along a dirt road that was covered with leaves. I called my brother to say hello. A couple of minutes into the conversation, my brother asked me, “What are you doing? Are you crunching potato chips right into the phone?”

“No, why?”

“Because it sounds like you’re doing that.”

“No, I’m hiking. Those are leaves.”

“Oh man, that was so loud I couldn’t even hear what you were saying.”

The moral of the story is that I’m not going to buy another Motorola phone. Mine isn’t even a cheap one, but the sound quality is terrible. I don’t recommend them; in fact, I recommend against them. They also make this buzzing sound that never goes away. Almost every single conversation I have goes like this, at some point:

them: “Hey, do you hear that noise?”

me: “Yeah, it’s my phone.”

them: “It’s really annoying. And loud.”

me: “Yeah, I know; everybody tells me that. I hear it too.”

them: “It’s kind of a buzzing sound.”

me: “Yeah, I know. It’s my phone.”

them: “Man, that’s loud. You should go get a new one.”

me: “I know. This one sucks. It was expensive, but it still sucks.”

them: “Wow, that’s really lou–”

me: “Yeah, I know. Can we talk about something else now?”

I’ve been freezing all day.

I walked to work–not an uncommon occurrence in itself–to find that the heating system at work is still on the proverbial fritz, so the corner of the building that I work in has been unheated for a full week now. It’s like 55 degrees in that corner. Three of us started bringing space heaters, but since I walked today, I forgot to bring mine. Oops. I borrowed a worthless little one from someone, and it at least kept my feet warm, but I had to keep my hoodie’s hood pulled up all day to keep from shivering. Still kinda did, though.

I walked downstairs to go home, and it was pouring rain outside. It still is, as a matter of fact. I stuffed my little bag inside my coat and headed home, shivering and coughing, with my pant legs and hood soaking wet.

I got home to a toasty warm apartment, and found the best postcard in the history of postcards waiting for me. My friend Andrea spent the last month in Switzerland with her Man (‘boy friend’ sounds so junior high), and kept an amazing blog of her trip. I thought I’d seen all the pictures, but boy was I wrong:

She flew in and out of the airport in Paris, so they took the opportunity to do some more sightseeing there. Le Pure Cafe, incidentally, is the little cafe that was featured so prominently in the movie Before Sunset. You probably recognized it too. What a great postcard. Thank you, Andrea! I love it. It put a huge smile on my face, and it brought plenty of warmth to me on an otherwise cold night.

Welcome back!

Like I wrote about the other day, there’s this new thing called geocaching. Okay, maybe it’s not that new, but it was new to me, at least. Todd was telling us on the way that people who don’t know about geocaching are called ‘muggles’, which I think is lame. Why can’t this game have its own separate lexicon of terms instead of borrowing from Harry Potter? I mean, I like HP and everything, but it seems kinda cheesy to trivialize this game by associating it with something that it has no need to associate with. But that’s neither here nor there.

The short description of the game is that it’s a scavenger hunt. You use the GPS to find the pre-arranged destinations that are posted on the web site. It’s easy to get kinda geeked out on the technology, but the best sites will take you to interesting and amazing places where you normally would never go, and you never know what they’re going to be like. All you know is the set of coordinates, and maybe a few hints from the web site, but that’s about it.

So on Sunday, Todd, Ben (another actor/theater director from the play-reading group) and I headed out. We met Hunt (yet another actor/theater director) and he joined us for a search too. He had his daughter with him, so he could only join us for one, and this was the one.

This is Ben, by the way. The panda thingy was hidden inside the rock wall you can see in the background. It’s actually a little box with a notebook inside, where you log your visit and then take a trinket from inside the box (leaving something in return, of course).

So we went from there to a couple others down in Lake Oswego. Really beautiful place, and there were several different ‘caches’ in the park. The first one was up the hill a bit, buried in some shrubbery. The newly-fallen leaves and pouring rain made this one particularly challenging.

After that, we followed the trail down into the main part of the park. I love this picture.

Todd said it reminds him of the end of the movie Being There, which I remember hearing about, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen.

From there, the game took us to a bridge (but the hint said ‘don’t cross the bridge’). So we found that one, and then headed over to the best and most challenging one of the day, by far.

This park apparently is the site of the oldest iron smelter in Oregon, and it’s now the oldest surviving one in the western United States. This particular ‘hunt’ required us to read the informational signs in order to work out the next clue. Todd’s classic comment of the day was, “Oh shit. . .we have to do math.” So we worked it all out, and it took us to this amazing place.

Left to right, is me, Todd, and Ben. I love our ‘vini vedi vici’ pose in this picture. We were thrilled to have succeeded after all that scrounging, and we were exhausted, freezing, and soaking wet, but with a bunch of great memories, excited to head out again very soon.

I know I’ll be going back to that particular park again sometime, just for fun, because it’s so beautiful and interesting.