Back in Portland and back to work.

February 25, 2004

Well my weekend was fantastic, and I’m sorry I didn’t get a post up before now. I couldn’t over thr weekend because I was out of town without Internet access, and then Sunday night I was to tired to do one. Well, I’ll to all that in a bit.

I did get some sleep Thursday night, thank goodness. Just to be certain that there wasn’t anything funky going on with my body, I took a sleeping pill and crashed. Hard. I enjoy taking sleeping pills once in awhile when I really need it because it’s guaranteed sleep, but this particular brand has a tendency to make my mouth very dry and me still wake up now and then very, very thirsty. Regardless, I ended up getting up at close to 11 AM, twelve hours after I’d turned my lights out and my TV off. I was quite well-rested.

After getting packed and everything I needed into the car, I drove over to my Dad’s by way of John’s Marketplace. John’s, as you may remember, is the store in Portland that sells 900 different beers, and my Dad had requested that I pick something up for us to have with dinner that night. I ended up with four different bottles, three of them new kinds. The fourth was another bottle of the Full Sail Imperial Porter that I tried last weekend, the special brew by Full Sail that was aged in Jim Beam barrels. I figured something like that is too special to only have once.

Anyhow, I bought two bottles for my Dad and I to share and one to split with Heather. The bottle we had when he got home was one I thought I’d never be able to try; a beer only sold in one state and brewed for only one reason: the Governator Ale brewed by the Portland Brewing Company especially for Arnold’s ascention to the position of Governor of California. It’s only supposed to be sold in California, but the guy who runs John’s has connection, apparently, so he got a few cases to sell for himself. The other bottle that I got for have with dinner was a Rogue Imperial Pilsner from the Rogue River Brewing Company here in Oregon. Though the bottle cost me a good $11.49, it came in a fantastic bottle that said “Buy me!” every time I saw it. Good beer, but not good enough to pay that much multiple times. I’ll get to the last bottle later.

Saturday morning I got up around 5:30 AM and headd out the door at 7, barreling down I-5 for my five-hour drive. About two hours into the drive or so, I got a call from Heather on my cell phone, and she had a slight problem. It seems that she had stopped for some breakfast at a McDonald’s about an hour outside of Fort Bragg (my first indicator things weren’t going well…she was about an hour and a half behind me) and was withdrawing money from her checking account at an ATM and she discovered she was somehow missing about $100, which gave her a grand total of $16 in her account. Not nearly enough for the trip. So she had to wait while her grandparents deposited money in her checking account so that she could gas up and the like.

Now the funny thing was, I could just keep driving and smile to myself thinking that this was classic Heather behavior. I found out later that she was late getting started (as usual) because she couldn’t find her credit card (sounds familiar when it comes to her), though she’d lost it so she canceled it, then found it in her backpack later (also a standard Heather event). That culminated with the missing or miscounted money from her account. I mean this all in good fun, of course, but Heather’s a bit flighty, and none of that surprised me. Even better, when I say “classic Heather behavior”, I could actually mean either Heather Darrow OR Heather Self, my sister. My sister’s a bit flighty, too, and I can see any and all of those happening to her, as well.

In any case, it all worked out. She got to Gold Beach about three and a half hours after I did, but she still got there. I almost ran out of gas on the way there, though, because I misjudged how far it would be. I assumed that I could make it to Gold Beach, but about 50 miles North of the town, the gas light came on and there wasn’t anywhere for me to stop. I had been watching the indicator move down fairly steadily, but there was nothing I could do about it, and when the light came on I started getting a little more nervous, because I knew that there wasn’t anywhere to stop for awhile. I ended up driving about ten or fifteen minutes at 70 MPH with the light on, so I was still burning gas like there was no tomorrow. I ended up putting in 14.6 gallons when I finally came to a gas station, and according to Ford’s website, the Ford Escape has a fuel capacity of 16 gallons. The model my Dad has is a couple years old, though, so I don’t know how accurate that still is. It was close, though.

The place I’d made reservations for was place called Ireland’s Rustic Lodges in Gold Beach. It wasn’t a really nice place, but it wasn’t a Motel 6 or Econo-Lodge, either. No phone in the room, all wood-paneled. It was a pretty nice place, and for what we paid a good deal, too. I lay around and recuperated from my five hour drive while I waited for Heather, and when she finally got there we basically went straight to dinner. Unfortunately, Gold Beach is pretty small and we didn’t have many choices as to where we could go, so we found a place we thought would be fairly inexpensive but it turned out to be the “nice” place of the town. So we ate cheap. I got the cheapest thing on the menu, the fried prawns for $14, and Heather got a small pasta dish. We were still hungry afterwards, though, so we bought some food at the grocery store to have while we hung out that night. After dinner we went back to the motel and just hung out, talked, watched TV, that sort of thing.

Now, about the beer I’d brought. I had seen this bottle in John’s on a display case as you walked to the back where all the beer was, and the sign on it that said “Careful!” is what caught my attention. It was a pricey bottle at $9.99, but I had to try it just once. Brewed in Boulder, CO (which is why I wanted Heather to try it), this beer is called “The Beast” and clocks in at a remarkable *15.7%* alcohol. That’s right, this particular beer is more than three and almost four times as alcoholic as a regular bottle of beer. More alcoholic than wine, more alcoholic that Triple Sec, Amaretto, Kaluah, Schnapps, you name it. 31.4 proof beer is not to be messed with, but I had to try it for myself.

And I’m never having it again, either. Heather didn’t like it and thought it tasted like cough syrup, so I had to drink the whole bottle by myself. I really, really dislike getting drunk off beer. I think that it’s a waste of good beer (since that’s all I ever really drink, never cheap canned stuff) and it’s too filling for me. I also dislike how my mouth tastes the following morning. Well I am ashamed to admit that I did get a bit tipsy off this stuff, but is it any wonder at 15.7% alcohol in a 26 oz. bottle? I tend to drink beer fairly fast, and this stuff pretty much took the energy out of me. That was a non-driving night, anyway. After watching some TV and talking for awhile, we decided to go to sleep, which I was most grateful for.

The next day I got Heather up at 7 AM and we went for a walk on the beach in the cold then got some breakfast at a nice pancake house in town. Then we went back, packed, and tried to find some tidepools to check out. Unfortunately the tide was on its way back in, so we found another beach and just sat on a log, watched the waves coming in, and talked for a couple hours. By the time we’d gone to get some lunch, it was about time to head out, so I pulled out of town at 2:30 and booked it home. The first leg of the trip I was almost exhausted, but I knew I could make it to I-5 where things would be a lot better. After a couple hours on the road I got some caffeine and the trip became much more enjoyable. I could have gotten a bottle of beer like one guy I passed, but nah, I didn’t think that would have been such a good idea.

This was definitely the longest solo drive I’ve ever done. 300 miles door to door, five hours on the road. The stretch on I-5 was one of my personal best: 180 miles in 150 minutes. My Dad called just as I was about to pull onto I-5 and asked me where I was, and when I told him he said “So what, three? Three and a half hours?” Nope, I told him, I’ll be home at 7:30. He didn’t think it would be possible, but at exactly 7:30 on the dot I walked into the house. I could have made better time, but I had to slow down to at least 60 when I-5 ran through towns and to stop for gas, of course–BEFORE the light came on this time. I didn’t mind the drive itself, but doing it alone and two days in a row was kind of a pain.

In any case, we’re planning on doing it again soon, probably weekend after next most likely, though in a different place because it takes her so much longer to get there than me. That it, of course, also depending on finances–which I should be OK on by that time. I talked with Martin on Monday and we did some work over the phone, and he said he’d cut me a check for the amount that he owes me in pay. I also have a new assignment to work on, which I should probably have finished by Monday. I didn’t do any work on it today because I had some things I wanted to take care of and I didn’t feel right billing him for a day in which I didn’t put it my full effort. Mostly this involves making some more phone calls, but I have some other avenues to investigate for getting the information I need, too. But I have work to do and another paycheck to spend…er, deposit…headed my way.

And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon…I mean Portland.

Posted in Geekery, General