Winding down another week.
July 1, 2004
This has been a pretty good week.
Despite my best efforts, my mind and my body have fought the good fight and one of them–I’m not sure which, yet–won and I can’t bring myself to rise at 5:15 AM any more. Since I’m not jogging before work every day, I’m not getting the amount of exercise that I’d liek to be, and in the interim until I can figure out a better bright idea I’m swimming in the pool in the apartment complex after work. I’ll take smelling like chlorine any day over jogging whiel it’s still dark out. Getting up at 6 AM, while still early as hell, is just so much easier on me. Though I am noticing that I’m a bit more tired during the day. Funny, don’t you think?
Swimming, however, means that a few muscles in my body that previously hadn’t gotten much useage are now a little sore. Alas, the pool isn’t big enough to do full laps and I’m a bit rusty on my swim techniques anyway, but I’m getting enough body movement to eat away some of the guilt from not exercising in the mornings anymore. Plus it just feels good to relax in the water after a day of sitting on my butt for the better portion of nine hours.
Monday I went over to my Dad’s after work and helped him install the new microwave, but I had forgotten I had a previous dinner engagement and instead of staying for dinner there drove back home to pick up my sister, then we met my Mom, an old friend of hers from when they grew up in Hawai’i together, andthat woman’s sister. They’ve come through Portland ever summer for awhile now, and it was good to see them again. My Mom chose the venue for dinner and rightly knew to choose a McMenamins, but because she didn’t read what I had written to her, she went to the wrong McMenamins.
Yeah, yeah, I know, Mom, I’m still rubbing it in. But it seems to me that the differences between North and South are fairly extensive. 
So instead of going to the fabulous Rock Creek Tavern, thanks to some quick-thinking and a cell phone conversation we ate at the less-than-stellar Cornelious Pass Roadhouse. The Roadhouse is on the National Registry of Historic Places, but the house itself is no longer used as the restaurant like it was last time I was there, and instead they have a lot of outside seating. It’s nice to be in a big courtyard, but being right next to a very busy road and still within hearing distance of Highway 26 doesn’t make for the best atmosphere. I’ll take Rock Creek any time over that. Well, I guess there’s always NEXT year.
I meant to write on Tuesday, if just for the funny thing that happened that morning. Well OK, not funny, just humorous for a moment. I walked out of the building to go to my car, and there was a racoon climbing up the tree right outside the door. Now racoons, if you’ve ever seen them, have an interested method of climbing trees. Cats will basically run straight up a tree, but a racoon grips the bark with all its paws spread-eagled and inches its way up the trunk like a climber. So I walked out, heard the sound, turned my head and said “Hey Racoon,” but it didn’t run away, didn’t drop off the tree and scamper away, but it sort of slightly turned it head to acknowledge me, slowed down for a moment, then resumed climbing. Well at least it paid me SOME attention insetad of ignoring me all together.
I finally got my AC adapter that I purchased off eBay at the beginning of June, and so once again my laptop is in use. Unfortunately, due to either some strange bug in the adapter or my battery being completely run-down to 0% and also sitting around for a month unused, the battery light is flashing the code for battery overheat. So I bought a new battery. I needed to do that, anyway, since the one I have when unplugged works for about 10-15 minutes and then threatens to quit on me, so I figure I’ll find out if the AC adapter is causing problems or if it was just my battery the died. It’s good to have my laptop again, though, even if I can’t unplug it and use it without the AC adapter in it. I like being able to sit on my futon and use a computer while I watch TV instead of sitting in my computer desk chair and straining my neck to see what’s on. I know, I know, the epitome of laziness. Or I could be doing neither, I know. Old habits die hard, though. For me, TV and computer just go together from years of doing it. I can’t watch TV on my computer’s TV card anymore for a reason that I’m technically not supposed–not unwilling, just not supposed–to mention, so instead I have to use my laptop. It’s a good little machine, and it’s served me well.
So I finally decided what to spend part of my bonus and last paycheck on. I figured there was no point in buying something that I probabyl won’t get as much use out of as I’d like–so no Gamecube, Playstation 2, or Xbox just yet–and I didn’t want to get DVDs that I won’t be watching just yet, so instead I decided to put some more money into my laptop that I use all the time. The AC adapter was a needed purchase that while I hadn’t planned on it, didn’t cost me much money. I bought a new mousepad instea dof a shiny new mouse for my desktop mouse, so that didn’t cost much money, though I certainly needed it. I love the mousepad I have now, though it’s a special one that’s very thin and tends to move around a lot on my desk. I could tape it down or something, but nah, that would sort of ruin the gradiant of it. Plus, I’ve had it for about six or seven years. Time to move on. Lastly, I bought a new stick of RAM for my laptop, which will put it up to 512 MB. I shouldn’t see too much of a performance increase, but on a system that’s just a Pentium III 800 Mhz, I need all the RAM I can get.
Yesterday was the last day for one of my coworkers, and so we had a pizza party. Not jogging in the mornings probably didn’t help that, but I was too full to have any dinner last night, so I essentially ate two meals. Not to mention the fact that I was out seeing Spider-Man 2 with my sister. Very, very, very good movie. It’s far and away the best comic book mvoie I’ve ever seen, and I think it ranks up there in the best regular movies, as well. So much of the time comic book movies focus just on the powers and the hero(es), but Spider-Man 2 and well as the original took the time to give the alter-ego and the surrounding people in his life expose as well. For instance, remember how much more powerful Tim Burton’s Batman became when you knew why he felt the need to avenge crime in Gotham City? Though there wasn’t a whole lot of screen time given to Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man 2 firmly establishes the fact that Peter Parker and Spider-Man are one and the same. What happens to one happens to the other, and when the mask comes off at the end of the night there isn’t some magic shift that happens and Peter Parker is a normal guy again. His and Spider-Man’s fates are entwined.
I doubt I could laud the movie too much without plagarising some of the reviews that I’ve read in thought if not in words, so I’ll be brief. Spider-Man 2 isn’t really a superhero comic book movie. It’s a movie that just happens to be about a superhero. Better than the first, yes, better than all the others out there, I’d say yes, as well. I had an extraordinary amount of fun while watching it but I didn’t have to check my brain at the door, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again. I highly recommend that you all see it, and I expect that by the end of the weekend it will have surpassed the orignal’s five-day intake of $114 million. I would be willing to wager that in the end, this movie makes upwards of $900 million in the theaters, potentially even matching Titanic’s gross of $1 billion. I probably won’t see it again this weekend since that’s when the crowds will be out, but I plan on dragging both my parents to it at some point in the near future.
I’m told that my aunt, uncle, and cousin are coming to town in the next couple of weeks, and there’s been some initial interest in the Bridgeport Brewery as a destination for them to explore. I recommend not only the excellent pizza, but trying a bit of the beer, as well. I made a point to mention that you don’t HAVE to buy a pint or a half-pint, but that they also sell a brewery sampler that gives you a bit of each of their most popular beers. Probably the best for non-beer drinkers, but since you’re at a craft brewery, you’ve GOT to try what they make there. Not to mention that Bridgeport is the best brewery in the city. I’ll stick with a pint or two, naturally. I’m also tryign to get them to a McMenamins, since while serving a large variety of ale and spirits (including their own wine, I might add), they maintain a family-friendly atmosphere. That’s one of the reasons why I like the chain, actually, because I’m not forced into going to a smokey bar for a beer.
Oh yes, and I might add that I found out on Sunday that McMenamins is the 3rd-largest brewpub chain in the US, following Rock Bottom and Gordon Biersch. not bad for a chain of pubs found only in Oregon and Washington.
So yes, thus ends another day of extolling the virtues of Bridgeport and McMenamins. I actually haven’t had a beer since Monday, believe it or not, though I do plan on hoisting a couple of pints tomorrow after work with my coworkers again. And then this weekend are beef cubelets, onion rings, my sister’s birthday, and of course, the 4th of July, though my plans for that are as of yet undecided. Well, aside from the birthday celebration, but I was thinking fireworks-wise. Perhaps I’ll buy a few of my own this year like I used to do in years past, though I promise not to get as many as I have in years past. There are funny stories behind that, but I’ll save them for another day.
Until next time.
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