Lots of ground to cover. On Monday, 11/22 it snowed here in Seattle and caused rush hour gridlock. I left my car in the building garage and caught a 41 bus to Northgate. Got on it at 6:30 p.m. and got off it at 10:30. Fortunately, I snagged a spy thriller from the library at our office and went to the bathroom before I started on this ride. Due to the snow we left for Portland on Tuesday during the day to take best advantage of daylight and warmest temperatures. I had planned to work Tuesday, but best laid plans and all that.
We stayed at Flanders Lofts at 4th and Flanders in downtown Portland. It is a one bedroom condo we rented via VRBO.com. It was nicely arranged and decorated, plus with a kitchen Kathy and Lauren could get together to do some cooking on Wednesday.
While in Portland we visited:
~Rose's Restaurant on 23rd N.W.
~the Polish pottery store...something Kathy had her on her mind.
~Thai Peacock Restaurant
~Biwa restaurant, where we met up with Lauren, Erich, and Jared.
~Macaroni Grill downtown (read on for an interesting story on this).
On Thursday we went to 535 E. Knott Street to Jared's and Erich's upstairs apartment. There we met Charlotte, Jared's girlfriend, and all of us collaborated on a lovely Thanksgiving meal. Turkey, cauliflower with cheese, potatoes, green bean casserole, fruit salad, brussel sprouts with bacon, macaroni and cheese, pecan pie with whipped cream and plenty of booze! Then we played Cranium and yours truly can spell words backwards like crazy! A fine time was had by all. I felt very lucky to be a Dad getting to hang with his daughter. All the other young people there were not with their parents.....
We also went to a McMenanims theatre where we saw "Inception"...a very trippy sci-fi movie about planting dreams in people's heads. Leonard Di Caprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page. Adding to our movie watching for the weekend, we saw "A Single Man" on demand at the condo. It was pretty good about the real grief and the real love in a gay couple's life in the '60's but I hated the ending. Then, on Black Friday, after mall crawling a while at Pioneer Place in downtown we saw "Love and Other Drugs" with Jake Gyllenhall and Anne Hathaway.
After the movie we went across the street to Macaroni Grill for a farewell dinner with Lauren. She was headed to Eugene to spend a few days with friends there before flying back to D.C. on Sunday. Our meal was interesting in several ways. First, I ran into Jane Weinold, a coworker from Seattle, and her daughter. Second, the tables are covered with white butcher paper and equipped with crayons. our server, Eliza, wrote her name upside down and backward so of course I had to and so did Lauren. We then got Kathy to sign it on my theory that even though it was destined for the trash, for a brief time it was a historical artifact of our evening together and based on relativity it was a moment that would live forever. Somewhere in the far distance some one has not yet seen it because the light has yet to reach them....I know, I know...
Finally, while we were doing this stuff at Macaroni's, a few blocks to the east the Christmas Tree lighting was occurring and so was a failed terrorist plot to blow up a van parked near the tree! Yes, the event, or thankfully non-event, that is in the news played out within a few blocks of us. The bomber was busted at the Train station which is about 200 yards from the condo we had rented!
So, we had a lovely long break with our daughter and other young people, and a mass murder bombing that might have threatened us was foiled. A lot to be thankful for.
