Off to Portland this weekend. I may be online—we’re taking the laptop with the wireless card—but may not be, either; sometimes it’s nice to unplug.
Tag: Portland
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Portland Spring Beer Fest
From /dev/beer I just read about the Spring Beer & Wine Fest going on in Portland this next weekend, April 9 and 10. Over a 100 different beers to sample. Sounds like fun, I haven’t been to a brew fest in ages. Too bad it’s short notice, though. Damn.
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Casting Call
From katu.com, Big-time movie director holding open casting call in Portland: Gus Van Sant is looking for people for his next movie:
…show up on Sunday, Feb. 29, for an open casting call for Portland writer-director Gus Van Sant’s latest movie, a story about rock ‘n’ roll in the Northwest grunge heyday.
The casting call will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. February 29 at the Child Services Center of the Portland Public Schools located at 531 S.E. 14th Avenue at Stark.
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Zoo
This weekend we were in Portland, visiting the Zoo and hanging out with our friends Justin and Raegan. It was a good trip, but damn hot; fortunately, we had brought the kids’ wagon along and I pulled them around the Zoo rather than having them walk/run everywhere in the heat. They had a great time.
And that Saturday night we had barbecued pork chops and cold beer. The perfect end to a good (hot!) day.
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Is there a doctor in the house?
My wife and I went to the Bon Jovi concert in Portland Monday night, and talk about a show. Damn right.
The Goo Goo Dolls opened for them, and they were very good, too. Played to the audience nicely. Good choice to open, the crowd loved them.
When Bon Jovi hit the stage, though, the audience went nuts. And if the Goo Goo Dolls plays up the crowd, then Bon Jovi has it down to an art form; they love their fans. I mean, the audience sang the entire first verse of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” not just the chorus, which you’d expect.
Anyway. They played for 2 hours, a great mix of old and new of just about every hit you could name. Interestingly, Richie Sambora sang “I’ll Be There For You” while Jon took a quick break offstage.
It was a great show, hell yeah.
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What are all the colors of the rainbow?
Our trip to Portland today was definitely one of the odder ones.
In short: The good news is, Kaitlyn’s eyes are as good as they’re going to get, according to the doctor, which is pretty damn good. No more surgeries. The bad news is, the doctor recommended a second eye surgery for Brandon, before he turns 2 if possible. Definitely not what we want to hear.
As for the (gory) details of the trip, this is a doozy: Brandon threw up on himself and he and the car smelled like puke the rest of the day. We had to buy him a new shirt at Goodwill because the one he was wearing stank so bad.
Then Sherri managed to spill a bunch of orange juice all over her lap and seat while trying to fill the kids’ cups with juice. That wasn’t as bad as the vomit, though.
After the eye doctor we went to the Lloyd Center Mall and had a highly mediocre cheesesteak lunch from a food court restaurant called Steak Escape (yes, they actually have a website).
On the drive home, we saw the brightest rainbow I have ever seen when driving through Madras. I wish I could have taken a picture of it; it was truly spectacular and almost made it all worth it.
Incidentally, the answer to the question in the title is: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (purple). Seven colors. Sherri didn’t believe me that there are 7 colors and that indigo was counted, until we got home and she looked it up online.
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Kon-Tiki
We’re heading up for a day trip to Portland tomorrow for Kaitlyn’s post-op visit to the eye doctor to check how her eyes have progressed since surgery. Have to get up at 6 am though, that’s a bummer.
Here’s a link too geeky/cool to pass up: The Contiki Operating System and Desktop Environment. It’s an operating system with built in web server and web browser originally written for the good ol’ Commodore 64. This may not seem like such an accomplishment given today’s advanced systems and seemingly limitless power, but for those familiar with the C64— or especially anyone who owned/used one— all I can say is: Damn.
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More random things
While in Portland for Kaitlyn’s surgery, we found a little bit of time to go to Goodwill to accomodate my wife’s eBay habit. Browsing through the science fiction section of their used books, I happened across a paperback Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson that was in pretty good shape. I’d been wanting this book, and for the super-low Goodwill price of $1.99 I couldn’t pass it up. So it was just icing on the cake to find out the book was also signed by the author!
I’ve been playing with Wikipedia a lot lately, even contributing some articles and editing others. I’ve mentioned Wikipedia before, but I’ve been becoming addicted to it and had to slip in a mention again. Go check it out. You’ll be glad that you did.
We got a new computer a little over a week ago, an eMachines from Costco. Cheap, and far better than the other computers in the house. Unfortunately, I’m still not completely caught up with installing all my old software to it, so my Palm eBook “project” has been delayed. Rest assured, it will be continued again. Soon, I hope.
PHP rocks. Yeah, I just had to slip that in there.
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Portland recap; To-do list
Portland was really good. We picked a good hotel this time (we’ve stayed in some real dives) and the Portland Spirit dinner cruise was fantastic. I’d highly recommend anyone looking for something nice to do in Portland, check this out.
TODO list for chuggnutt.com:
- Get blog search working
- Get the featured “Check it Out” link-thing working, so it rotates through actual links rather than just the one
- Drop in some more pages of content
- Uhm… more links?
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Portland Spirit
We’re off to Portland tomorrow, without the kids, for an anniversary dinner cruise on the Portland Spirit. Should be a pretty good trip; I may even get to finally see Star Wars Episode II.
Here’s an interesting little piece of news/trivia: Deschutes Brewery is apparently bottling their beers in a new bottle (they were simply plain brown 12-ounce bottles): brown with a nice raised imprint of hops around the bottle just below the neck, and gold caps (formerly they were silver). These were from a six-pack of Mirror Pond Pale Ale picked up at Fred Meyers today. I can’t find any mention of this bottle upgrade on their web site, but maybe it’s to help celebrate their 14 year anniversary.
Random Web Link: It’s been around for awhile, but still proves entertaining: The Greedo Assassination Conspiracy Page