I write about myself because I can.

Monthly archives for August, 2005

A Monday moment

Aug29
2005 Written by Andrew

I made Erika dinner on Saturday night, and I must say, I outdid myself. I didn’t pull out all the stops like I did when I made her dinner the first time, or even for Valentine’s Day, but I think this meal turned out better than most. There wasn’t a salad, nor was there bread, but since we’re both watching our food intake (both in quality and quantity) I decided to skip those courses.

I bought a small wedge of brie to share and some of the classic Carr’s water crackers, and we munched on those while dinner finished cooking, sipping glasses of a $30 bottle of wine I picked up at the Wild Oats near her apartment. I bought a bottle of it to take to Erika’s friend Kim’s birthday party, and I liked the glass of it I had so much I went back and bought a bottle for myself. For the main course of the meal, I made a lovely two and a half pound pork roast with apple cider vinegar and thyme, a side of brown and wild rice, and steamed broccoli. Dessert was rasberry sorbet (Erika loves rasberries) with a glass of port. It turned out quite well, if I do say so myself, which was a relief since I was afraid that I wouldn’t be up to fixing dinner that night. I hadn’t felt very well on Friday, and even though we’d made the dinner plans I wasn’t sure if I’d be up for A) the hours of cooking involved, and B) the eating of the rich food. Fortunately I felt a bit better Saturday morning and was more willing to cook and eat than I had been the night before.

Erika’s been talking about renting Shrek 2 for a few weeks, and so I decided to surprise her and I picked it up at Hollywood Video to watch after dinner. Little did I know she had a similar thing in mind, and so on her way to my apartment she went to the very same Hollywood Video and picked up the very same movie. Eerie.

Before dinner on Saturday, I drove over to my Dad’s house and delivered another load of stuff. I’ve been going through all my computer stuff to get a big pile of things to donate to Free Geek, and once I get it all to my Dad’s I can sort and figure out exactly what can be tossed and what can be given away. Why do it at my Dad’s, you might ask? Because frankly, I need his Escape to do it. I have too much stuff to really fit into my car, and once we go through his attic and get HIS computer stuff out of there, we’ll have a sizable pile that only a small SUV can transport to the organization. There’s a lot of stuff going out, really. Nothing terribly big or expensive–that I would have already sold–but it’s clearing out a lot of room from both my closet and from the storage unit we rented when my Mom was in the process of moving.

I also took him out to lunch. He considered that to be a “storage fee” for my leaving a load of stuff at his house, so I suppose that’s fair. I’ve taken a lot of stuff over there, some of which I don’t really know what to do with. For example, my Gettysburg battlefield model set with hundreds of little plastic Union and Confederate soldiers (meant for eventual painting, but still neat in their regular plastic colors)? What do I do with that? It’s kind of neat, interesting to look at, but I have no freaking idea what I should do with it. Box it up, I guess. I have a lot of things like that, stuff I kind of want to keep but really don’t know what I should do with. How much room should your childhood take up, anyway?

This week is starting off fairly dully, but it’s going to end on a bang. You see, this Friday I’ll join my Dad and Erika at PGE Park and catch my second baseball game of the season–one of the last ones, actually–and be seated in one of the luxury suites at the park, thanks to my Dad’s work connections. Catered food, good view, good company–what more could you ask for at a game?

Other than that, same old, same old. Erika and I went for a jog Sunday morning, and she managed to make it three times around Commonwealth Lake, which means she went for a full 2.5 miles without stopping. I’m proud of her for being able to do that–she’s come a long way in the last couple of months since she started jogging again. In fact, she went jogging every day last week while I only went three times–even though I went further each time, she still beat me in total mileage. My plan for this week is to go at least two more times besides yesterday’s jog (I went the full 5k/3.1 miles while Erika stopped at 2.5 miles) to try and shake some of the pounds I feel like I’ve put on lately. I had a substantial lunch, so I shouldn’t be weak or hungry when I jog today. It helps having the best bento in the city two blocks from your office.

Hope everyone has a good week.

Posted in Erika, Family, Food, Geekery, General

Has it really been two weeks?

Aug22
2005 Written by Andrew

As I jogged this afternoon after work, I realized that it’s been close to two weeks since I last posted. As Erika put it recently, with so few nights to myself I just don’t know what to do sometimes and on those rare occasions when I have opportunities to write (and when I’m not at work, which is where I’ve done a loty of writing in the past) I just can’t bring myself to sit back down in front of my computer. I’d just rather jog, eat dinner, have a Diet Coke or two, and watch some TV that my TiVo faithfully records even when I’m not here.

So…I have some time tonight, and as I said, I haven’t written in some time. So let’s go backwards in time, shall we? Paritcularly since if I try and start at the beginning I’ll probably skim. Or maybe I should just do that anyway.

Last night without Erika’s company I found myself playing computer games. On Friday I picked up this month’s copy of PC Gamer magazine which has a free 14-day trial to a game I’ve been wanting to play, World of Warcraft. With 3.5 million subscribers worldwide (at $49 for the game and $15 per month) the game is what you might call successful, but I was unconvinced as to whether I should buy it. I played it before it was released in a half beta test / half marketing promotion, but my computer was being an absolute freak and I didn’t get a chance to play it while my computer was needing a part to be fixed.

In case anyone’s wondering, I didn’t like it all that much, I won’t be picking up the full game and I won’t be investing $15/month to play it.

Saturday Erika and I joined her Dad on a road trip up to the Ikea in Seattle, my first trip to the Swedish home retailer. Now, as we pulled up I realized that I should have given my aunt and uncle a call who live not too far from there, but since we didn’t really have time for lunch or anything it probably wouldn’t have worked out too well. So…my apologies, Barbara. I was in your neck of the woods, but with my girlfriend and her Dad and shopping. Next time, perhaps.

Ikea was a pretty…well, the only word I can think of is surreal…experience. You know how home furnishing stores set up little dining room, living room, or bedroom arrangements? Ikea sets up whole rooms of their stuff, complete with walls. They even had two little displays welcoming you to “their 850 square foot house!”–on both of ‘em. As I said, it was quite surreal. Unlike normal stores, Ikea literally has arrows on the floor guiding you in the right direction to walk, with a twisty path taking you through the whole store. But never fear! You don’t have to go through the entire store to get to the sections. They have “shortcuts” and maps all over.

Plus, they serve Swedish meatballs in the restaurant in the middle of the store. Like I said, surreal.

I didn’t end up buying anything, but Erika got a couple of little things and her Dad bought some stuff for his place, including a desk. The thing about Ikea, as much as everyone raves about them, is that they have original-looking but far from unique furniture. I mean, by this point everyone (well, that I know) has a bunch of stuff from Ikea. I saw stuff there that was exactly what a bunch of people in college had–I don’t mean the same design, I mean the same stuff. Why would I want to decorate with things that everyone has? I mean, their couch selection is lousy, all their bed designs look the same, and Kitchen Kaboodle has a much better selection of cookware. Call me snobbish if you will, but I just didn’t see the appeal. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my day, but I don’t get the fuss over Ikea.

That night I got my hair cut at a place up the street from Erika’s (rated #3 in the city by the readers of Willamette Week magazine, no less!) and we went to the birthday party a friend of hers was having.

Friday niht I went with a few of my coworkers to a sweet pub called the Horse Brass. It’s a traditional English-style pub, from the decor and dartboards to the menu and beer selection–all 50 of them they stock. We had a few drinks, I had the best fish and chips in the city, and generally had a good time. That was actually my second time there in a week, as the previous Saturday I’d gone with my Dad, my grandmother, and Erika to have dinner there and to scope it out. Good times.

Ug, this is already turning into a list of things that I’ve done in the last two weeks, so let me break up the order a bit.

Erika’s doing a 5k “Race for the Cure” run that she signed up for through work, and so I decided to pony up the $25 and do the run, too. Heck, it’s for a good cause, I get to go on a Sunday morning jog with my girlfriend, and it’s a doable distance. 5 kilometers, for you metric-impaired folks, comes out to 3.1 miles in American distance. Don’t sweat it–I had to do the math, so that’s the only reason I know it. My current jogging distance that I try to do twice a week is 2.5 miles, and 3.1 is exactly the next step that I can take–it equates to exactly one more lap around Commonwealth Lake where I currently jog. I decided to judge it for myself today, and so I did my usual route + 1 lap, and I was able to do it without too much trouble. Actually, when I do the actual run next month, it’ll probably be easier because I’ll have a water supply (I don’t jog with a water bottle anymore…it started hurting my shoulder), I’ll be doing it in the morning cool, and it’ll be a straight route and not laps. I looked at the route this morning, and it looks pretty interesting. I get to jog across two bridges and on both sides of the river.

I could have done the “Sleep in for the Cure” program they offer where you pay your money, get the t-shirt, and don’t have to show up and jog, but nah, I can do a 5k run without too much trouble.

Last week I had a pretty horrible day at work on Monday, partially my fauly but mostly not. One of my coworkers needed to use Microsoft Netmeeting, and since it requires ports to be open that our firewall usually blocks off, I went into the firewall configuration and opened them up for him. Now, this particular firewall we use–in addition to also being our DSL modem–has an odd requirement that every time you make a change to it, it forces you to restart the unit and you lose your Internet connection for about 45 seconds or so. I opened the ports, rebooted the modem, we lost Internet access, it came back up 45 seconds later, but our website and email server…well, it stayed down. No Internet access for it, which meant that no one could access our website, no one could send or receive email, and most importantly, no one could place any orders on our website.

Oy. Panic began setting in almost immediately.

We don’t really have a network administrator at work to fix our server and the like, but when it comes to the server and the Internet connection, I’ve been the go-to man for the most part. Server needs fixing? Ask Andrew. Need something done with your email? Ask Andrew. I don’t mind since most of the time it’s easy, but this time I was totally baffled. I checked every setting I could think of both in the firewall and on the server, and nothing made a difference. I put every single setting back to the way it had been, still nothing.

Long story short, I was there until 7 PM, and I still couldn’t fix it. I was on the phone with my boss practically the whole time, followed his suggestions when I ran out of ideas, I even called our Internet provider who, as I figured, had a collective IQ of about 100 in the whole phone bank. I had such a bad afternoon I emailed Erika once I restored Internet connection to the other machines in the office (I kept having to take down our connection to troubleshoot) and told her I needed to see her, even though we hadn’t made plans for that night. She was sweet, understanding, and offered to buy me dinner whereever I wanted, and then drove me home. It didn’t fix my day, but it went a long ways towards making it better.

The next morning, it still wasn’t fixed, of course, but my boss took over the troubleshooting and spent much of the morning on the phone with our brilliant DSL provider again. Another long story short, it turned out that the particular model of firewall/DSL modem we have has a nasty tendency of losing settings when you reboot it. Unless I’d known the one specific arcane setting that I knew I hadn’t seen enabled, I wouldn’t have known that it had gotten disabled on that first firewall restart. All in all, the server was down for about 22 hours, and I estimate that I cost my boss perhaps $2000 or more in sales. Well, I didn’t physically cause it, but since I was the last one to touch it…well, that meant it was my responsibility in my mind. Not a great couple of days, but it passed without reprimand once my boss realized once he took over that it wasn’t due to human error. Well, not 100% at any given rate.

I made my Dad very happy two weekends ago when I took over a bunch of stuff from the storage unit Heather and I are renting and dumped it in his house. He knew I was doing it, but I know he loves it. Some of it went into the attic, but most of the stuff I took over went into a pile for me to continue sorting through to be donated to the Free Geek computer charity I mentioned before. I sorted some of it, but I need to bring over the stuff from my closet here before I can make a definitive pile to prepare to take. I want to make one trip and not have to keep driving over there–plus I’ll need the Escape. No way I can take it all in my car.

And this upcoming weekend, since Erika once again gets to spend her Saturday doing training for the upcoming merger her credit union is doing with another credit union, I might go back to the storage unit and pick up some more stuff and get more out of there. There’s not that much stuff left in there, but I need to get it out pretty soon since the unit is only paid through the end of August. It’s good to have deadlines, yes?

That’s about all I can think of to say, except that last Saturday night I had the best sleep I can remember having in a long time. I feel asleep on one side around 11 PM or so, and I didn’t wake up until about 6 AM the next morning and I was still on that side. No tossing, no turning, just hard, peaceful, wonderful sleep. That was a blissful change from the night before, when like clockwork at 2 AM, Erika’s downstairs neighbor decided to get vocally amorous next to an open window. At least the weather will get cold again soon and she’ll have to close her window. Or maybe she’ll go to Cabo San Lucas for the winter, but either way her sexual exploits hopefully won’t keep me awake for much longer.

So, there you have it. I’m officially in training for a 5k run, work is going fine despite a slight and somewhat costly snafu last week, and I’m feeling pretty good in general. I’ll try and update again soon…but hey, I know better than to say things like that seriously anymore. But…well, you know.

See you next time, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

Posted in Erika, Geekery, General, Work

Friday (mum/rum/bum)blings

Aug12
2005 Written by Andrew

I have two projects I’m supposed to be working on at the moment, neither of which works and neither of which I can do anything about. It’s a rough job, but someone’s got todo it.

The White Stripes concert was–if you’ll pardon the expression–bitchin’. I forget that yes, people do occasionally read my blog, so both my Mom and my sister asked me about it Wednesday. I guess even if I hadn’t written that I was going, Heather would have remembered because she did, in fact, buy the tickets for me originally and I paid her back out of my two successive paychecks. At $40 a ticket plus TicketMaster’s 5000% service charges, it required me to pay her back in two installments. Ah well, the concert was well worth it.

My experience with concerts has been somewhat of a mixed bag throughout my life. As a kid, my Mom took me to a lot of free concerts with mostly unremarkable people–that is, people I wouldn’t have normally paid money to see but who were interesting to hear nontheless. I heard Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who sang with Paul Simon on his “Graceland” album, Riders in the Sky, and numerous other people. She also sprang for a few concerts that I vaguely remember such as Joan Baez, Kenny Rogers (laugh all you want), and Raffi. At least, I think I saw Raffi. It wasn’t until I was in high school I went to my first “real” concert, U2. At least I started off well.

This concert, however, was probably one of the best concerts I’ve seen. Muscially, I mean. It wasn’t a fantastic show with lights and smoke and 100-foot tall swizel sticks like U2 was. It wasn’t a hard-rockin’ hard-poundin’ dance fest like The Crystal Method. It was just pure, unadulterated, rock and roll and blues. The lead singer/lead guitar of The White Stripes is a phenomenal guitar player. He had a control over his guitar unlike any I’ve ever seen before, where sometimes he’d play the song like it was on the album, other times he’d break into guitar riffs and solos that reminded me of something 70′s stadium rockers might do. Of course, it also helps that on some songs he sounds like Robert Plant (lead singer of Led Zeppelin) and others he sounded like Janis Joplin, so his antics fit right into his sound. But the band has a sound all its own despite those similarities, sounding and looking more like they just stepped out of a garage to play their first show. I think that’s why people like them, honestly.

In any case, it rocked. I highly recommend their new album “Get Behind Me Satan,” where despite the title it’s just pure unadulterated rock and roll sans parental warning, sometimes heavy on the guitar like the opening song “Blue Orchid” and other times folksy and acoustic. No bass line, no glam rock, just guitar and percussion, sometimes percussion and piano. It’s a great purchase if you’re looking for a CD. Plus it has a great album cover.

Despite the fantastic concert, though, it’s been kind of an odd week overall, including a confusing late-night conversation, an unexpected email, and just a general mental malaise. I’ve had strange and occasionally frightening dreams all week, and I’m hoping that this weekend will provide some respite from things.

On Wednesday, Erika and I went over to my Mom’s new house so I could set up her computer and get it ready for the cable company to hook things up for her, and as thanks she took us out to dinner at a slightly-upscale chain of Italian restaurants, Bugatti. Not bad food, probably a step above Olive Garden. Good pizza. They even had a beer on tap I’ve been wanting to try but haven’t had an opportunity to taste yet. During dinner, I noticed that one of the TVs in the bar was on Fox News during “The O’Reilly Factor,” and it was tough to pull my eyes away. I don’t like Bill O’reilly one bit, as a preface to this little story. I think he’s a blowhard that represents everything I hate about political commentators who think that because they have an opinion, it makes it right. He doesn’t show any respect to anyone who he disagrees with, he badgers guests on his show, and worst of all, he doesn’t show any independent thought when it comes to politics. To me, he’s more annoying than Ann Coulter but less venomous.

I wrote several paragraphs about my thoughts of the show, but I erased them because it’s just not worth writing about. I talked about how he badgered the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq and the apparent need to dub all the soldiers in Iraq “heroes,” but I think I’d rather let it pass without further comment.

Plus, most of the people who read my blog probably couldn’t care less about my opinion. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m an opinionated person (no, really), I enjoy talking about my opinions whether people share them or not, but I think that on this issue I’d prefer to shut my trap and keep my opinions to myself. Not because I fear a backlash, but mostly because I’m just tired of talking and thinking about these issues. So I’ll remain silent.

This weekend will be quite busy. Tonight after work I’m going out with coworkers for the first time in three weeks. Erika has to go to an eight-hour training session tomorrow (paid, thankfully) so I’ll have the morning and afternoon to myself. My plan is to take the bus from downtown to Lake Oswego, have my Dad pick me up, take the Escape back to my place, shower and get ready for the day, then haul a load of stuff from the storage unit back to his place. Mainly computer stuff and stuff to go into the attic, though I might try and find a place for my bike somewhere tomorrow since I can now afford to get it fixed up for usage.

Stop laughing, Dad. Just because it got hauled to Beloit and I never rode it doesn’t mean I won’t ride it now.

My extra computer stuff is all going to be donated to a Portland company called “Free Geek.” They take donations of computer equipment to build computers for people who don’t have them. To qualify for a computer, you pretty much just have to volunteer for a certain number of hours with them, and then they’ll give you a machine at the end. Not a bad deal, really. It’s easier than selling the equipment–not that I’d get much for things, anyway–but I need to go through my stuff and see what can be donated and what I want to keep to throw away. I can probably get rid of a lot of stuff, and so tomorrow I’ll go through what I can and get things ready to take over there. I won’t actually do that tomorrow, but I can certainly begin sorting.

After I make a hole in the storage unit, I’ll head back over to my Dad’s and drop it off and sort it. I promised him I’d help him load my grandmother’s huge stero system into a van to take down to a local church that said they’d take it, and then that evening we’re going to head into Portland to go to a pub for dinner and so he can drop me off at Erika’s once she’s done with her training.

Sunday, Erika and I were thinking of going downtown to the Bite of Oregon on the waterfront, but since you have to pay to get in and pay to sample food and wine, we may skip it. So, it’s going to be a fairly busy weekend. I probably won’t get the respite I seek, but at least I won’t be working and I can spend some time with Erika, my Dad, and my grandmother.

On one final, unelaborated note: thanks Mom.

Posted in Beer, Erika, Family, Food, Geekery, General, Work

A few hundred miles later and a few shades darker.

Aug09
2005 Written by Andrew

What a weekend. We had a blast camping in Bend, and despite the heat we had a great time.

I took off from work two hours early on Friday so that we could get an early start, but by the time we got everything in Erika’s car and picked up her frined Bonnie, we were headed out of town at 4 PM–not the greatest time to be on the highway on a Friday afternoon. Fortunately Bonnie lives in Boring (yes, there’s a town in Oregon named Boring) so we were well out of the city by then. We took the boring (no pun intended) route to central Oregon, via highway 26 east and then south on 97. It’s fast, it’s straight, and while it gets you there in a few hours it’s dull, lifeless, and pretty much the worst way to drive.

On our way there, we got stuck in a huge traffic jam resulting in an accident that had both northbound and southbound lanes comletely blocked. I called my Dad to find out what the deal was, and the best he could find was that the delay was expected for between 20 minutes and 2 hours. Yikes. When traffic started moving again less than an hour later, we came across the site of the accident and saw a pickup pulling a horse trailer with its front smashed in, an RV that had been run halfway off the road with a huge dent in the back, and at least one flipped car a bit off the road down the hill. Guess someone took a curve too fast. Yesterday I searched and searched, but I couldn’t find any published information on the wreck, either from the Portland Oregonian or from the Warm Springs, Madras, or Bend newspapers. I was kind of surprised–we saw a helicopter flying away from the accident when we got there, and I had assumed that it was taking someone to the hospital. Surely that should garner a few lines of print, yes?

Anyway, once we got past all that we had the worst dinner of our lives at the Madras Taco Time. I haven’t eaten at a Taco Time since 1997 in Eugene before the U2 concert, and thanks to that lovely meal I think it’ll be another eight years before I return. Erika and I both expressed the same sentiment regarding our meals: “I don’t understand, isn’t Taco Time supposed to be better that Taco Bell?”

Once we finally reached Smith Rock, though, the drive and the meal became worth it. Our campsite was phenomenal. We camped in the bivouac area just west of the day use parking lot, and we were fortunate to find spots on the rim of the Crooked River canyon there at Smith. Literally, about 10 feet from hundred-plus foot dropoff. When we got there and had the tent set up, I walked over to the rim, sat down on a rock and dangled my feet over the edge, popped the top off a bottle of Mirror Pond Pale Ale (from Bend’s own Deschutes Brewery), looked up at the huge rock formations in the dusk light, and thought to myself “Damn, this is about the most perfect place on the face of the planet.” Sometimes words just don’t do you any good, y’know? It’s one of those things that I’ll never be able to fully describe, sitting there on the canyon rim looking at the huge rock formations with the day’s last light making them a stunning orange color. Pictures can show you what it looks like, but it’s not the same.

This was the third time I’ve been to Smith, the first of which was a couple of summers ago when I tried to hike there but had to turn back due to the heat. I took a few pictures then that you can see here on the pages from that trip. You can’t quite capture the feeling, though, since most of those were taken from inside the canyon while hiking. We were up high on the canyon rim this time, and while I did take a bunch of pictures this time, I need to clean some of them up before I post them.

Saturday morning before it heated up we took a hike, Bonnie heading for Misery Ridge while Erika and I took the Monkey Face/Morning Glory trail. Our path took us along the Crooked River while Bonnie’s took her up and over the rocks and around behind, eventually looping back to our trailer. We reached the end of our trail, turned around and hiked back, but Bonnie caught up with us a few minutes later. All in all, about a four mile hike for each of us.

Even by 11 AM, though, it was getting quite warm, and the hike hadn’t done us any good so we took showers that we thankfully got for free having paid the camping fee. Neither Erika or I had brought towels so we just used our shirts to dry us off, and in the heat whatever we couldn’t get was dry by the time we walked back to the campsite, anyway. Erika’s cousin Owen met up with us, and the four of us went into Bend to tool around for awhile. We had lunch at this Indian buffet rerstaurant I remembered from a previous trip, got some ice cream, then headed south to the lava river tunnel. I did that one of the last times I was in Bend, but none of the others had and it’s always a fun hike. It’s only about a mile or so long, but ince it’s a constant 42F inside it was marvellous to get out of the sun and itno the cool air. I wore a hoodie, but my toes got pretty cold in my sandals.

For dinner, we went to the Deschutes Brewery and Public House. Not much more to say there besides the fact that they have great beer. They also have the best-looking growlers I’ve ever seen. A growler, for you non-beer drinkers, is a large half-gallon container that you can get beer to go from breweries in. Typically you pay a fee for the growler and the beer, then if you take it back you can get it refilled for about $10 or so. Not bad for a half-gallon of beer. McMenamins uses Mason jars for that purpose. I’ve never actually purchased a growler before, because believe it or not, I don’t find myself in situations where I drink that much beer, probably not even with another person. In any case, they had extremely well-made growlers. The handle was made out of metal and was fashioned into what looked like a fish of some kind, and the top was a latch-sealable clay lid with a rubber gasket. All in all, it cost $35, including the beer. To refill it, though, was only $11.

As a comparison, most other breweries’ growlers that I’ve seen have a plastic screw-top lid and the handle is made of the same glass of the rest of the container.

I did walk away with a Deschutes Brewery t-shirt, though, so I could make sure that I left with a souvenier of some kind since a growler, as beautiful as it was, would have been way too expensive and a waste of beer. Even I have my limits as to how much beer I can or will drink in one night. I already have two Deschutes pint glasses, one for the brewery itself and one for Mirror Pond Pale Ale.

Sunday morning, Erika, Owen, and Bonnie went for another hike, but I felt more like sticking around camp. I essentialyl just sat on the canyon rim and admired the rocks and the canyon for a few hours, watching the wildlife and the few hikers I could see hundreds of feet down in the canyon every now and then. When they got back, we packed up and headed off.

Originally, we were going to take the McKenzie Pass out of Bend–a spectacular drive that takes you through a lava flow and past the Three Sisters, Three-Fingered Jack, and Mt. Washington–but I was so tired I said that I would prefer to take the same route back that we took going towards Smith. Taking McKenzie Pass was my idea in the first place, and I had slyly arranged that particular trip home both so I could take some more pictures from the scenic vistas on the way home, but also so that we could stop at at least one of the McMenamins in Eugene where we’d end up. Not onyl did I prefer to get home, but the idea of that boring drive up the I-5 corridor from Eugene to Portland excited me about as much as a root canal.

Besides, there was a brewery on the way home I negotiated a stop at in place of McMenamins. Erika seemed to take the idea of stopping there in stride, and with but a roll of her eyes she agreed. Her price was that we stop in Sisters before hitting the road, though, so that she could poke around and check out the shops. It turned out to be a bit more kitschy than she remembered and kind of a tourist trap, but we had a decent lunch, some ice cream, and I had some chocolate-covered coffee beans to try and keep me awake on the drive home.

Incidently, they didn’t work, and neither did the sodas I had. I feel asleep. Bonnie fell asleep. So did Erika, which created an interesting problem since she happened to be driving at the time. I missed it, but I guess she drifted part of the way off the road before she jerked herself back awake. When we reached Goverment Camp where the Mt. Hood Brewing Company was, Erika needed a replacement driver, and I, being unable to drive stick shift, was exempted and Bonnie had to drive the rest of the way home while Erika napped.

As I said, it’a a long, dull, drive. It didn’t help that Bonnie and I fell asleep.

So I’m back in Portland, sadly at work instead of still camping at Smith. I did miss having a full shower including soap, shampoo, and shaving, but I’d definitely rather be sitting on the edge of that canyon, despite the heat and mosquitos that plagued us and ate us alive that first night before we retired to our tents.

Tonight I’m headed over to Erika’s, probably grabbing a sandwich up the sreet at Wild Oats, and then we’re going to go hear the White Stripes in concert, part of my birthday present to her two months ago. I’ve been looking forward to this since I first picked up their latest album on a whim, and Erika’s been looking forward to camping at Smith since…well, last summer. It’s just a week of doing these things we’ve wanted to do for awhile!

Until next time.

Posted in Beer, Erika, General

Friday!

Aug05
2005 Written by Andrew

I’m not entirely happy with this new layout that I picked–no, I didn’t come up with it myself, it’s just a theme–but it will serve until I can get a few things done in teh backend of my site and get a clearer idea of what I want it to look like. I have one of my coworkers who’s a pretty damn good graphic designer working on some site logo ideas for me, and then I can make the colors a little better, rearrange some stuff, blah blah blah. I know the following sentence doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I figure that a lot of people would probably skim this paragraph since it’s dull, uninspired, and technology-related, so I have to end on a nonsensical sentence to make people wonder what they’ve missed. I really like bacon, too!

I didn’t get into the Dukes of Hazzard sneak-preview on Tuesday, sadly. Erika and I didn’t get there in time and there was already a huge line to get in, and we got within maybe 50 feet of the doors before they started turning people away. Instead of just leaving, though, we decided to see something else. Erika had already seen Charlie and the Cholcolate Factory, so instead we settled on Fantastic Four. Any good, you ask? Not particularly. It rated somewhere between the steaming pile of elephant crap that was Daredevil and the brilliance of Spider-Man 2. A few laugh-out-loud moments, some good special effects, but honestly, how many more movies are we going to see that has the following plot progression?

Person/persons are introduced
Person/persons have an accident or encounter with something extraordinary
Person/persons start to notice changes in abilities
Villain is introduced, begins to wreck havoc on city
Person/persons rises above previous mediocrity to fight villain
Person/persons save the city, defeat the villain
Possibility for a sequel is left open

I never thought I’d be the one to say it, but enough with the superhero movies already. Really. I’m tired of them. It’s not that I have no desire to see some of the fictional characters I’ve enjoyed the most brought to the big screen, but for every one Batman Begins we have three Daredevils. I have zero desire to see Wonder Woman made. I couldn’t care less if they did a Silver Sufer movie. You know why? Because those characters are too big for 120 minutes of screen time. These people have saved the world numerous times, fought innumerable villains (a lot of times the same ones…stupid Gotham City jails!), and we’re expected to grow close to them in a two hour movie? It’s like reading the first issue of a comic book every time, and I’m tired of first editions.

I’d be willing, to paraphrase one of my coworkers, to give up another movie with the same quality as Batman Begins if it meant not having to sit through the Daredevil-quality movies that are likely to follow. As much as I enjoy seeing these characters brought to life in a format other than print, each one of these movies is like reading the first issue again and again. Honestly, I have no desire to see Wonder Woman on the big screen. I have no desire to see a Silver Surfer movie. Why? Because you can’t capture the depth of these characters in 120 minutes, and it’s the characters that ultimately make the story for superheroes.

Then again, the fewer superhero movies are made, the more video game movies will be made. If you think Daredevil or The Punisher was bad, wait until you see Doom. Nothing like taking things that have no story and injecting one yourself, like say, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and of course, Super Mario Brothers. Point of note, there hasn’t yet been a well-received–either crtically or from moviegoers–movie based on a video game. Doom is next on the list, and there are rumblings of lots more to come. Microsoft recently pulled a PR stunt where they delivered scripts of a movie based off their game “Halo” to studios by messengers dressed in full costume of the main character. Now, despite how popular this game is, all this says to me is that A) Microsoft has a lot of money to spend, and B) they want to make more.

You can’t successfully make movies from video games. You heard it here first. Bring on the best writers, the best directors, and the best special effects companies in the business, and I’d be willing to wager that you’ll never have a successful movie based off a video game. Why? Because you can’t capture the feeling. These games aren’t about the story, they aren’t about the characters, they’re about you. First-person shooters, where you control the actions of the main character and can “see” through their eyes, are the most popular type of game because it immerses the gamer into a world they can interact with, let them do things they can’t do in real life. You can take part in a big storyline, save the world, fight off alien hordes, send demons back to the Hell from whence they came, but really, who wants to see someone else do those things? It’s much more fun and satisfying to do them yourself.

I have no doubt that it’s possible to make a movie with as much care as say, X-Men or Spider-Man when it comes to sticking close to the source material that made the franchise so popular, but the idea of seeing The Rock or Karl Urban on screen shooting demons really doesn’t appeal to me at all, despite the–and I’ll go out on a limb here–dozens upon dozens of hours I’ve spent in my life playing “Doom.” Even games with a story such as “Halo” or “Half-Life” couldn’t be nearly as successful as their digital inspiration because you’re still watching some dude do what you did yourself. Sure, if they cast a capable actor as the lead role in Half-Life it would probably be enjoyable to watch, but there’s no sense in watching Guy Pierce suit up in his HEV and bash monsters with his crowbar when I can sit in front of my computer and make the movie myself–and do it slightly different every time, too.

To me, Microsoft’s PR stunt shows that they’re serious about making the movie and serious about it being close to the source material, but I’m as excited about that as I am about my most favorite computer game of all time, Half-Life. It’s as if a billion voices rose up in anticipation and then were silenced with an uninterested “Meh” when they realized the final product will be vastly inferior to the inspriation.

Superhero movies bring a character previously in a static form to life. Video game movies take the life away from the character and make them static. I just can’t get excited about that.

Wednesday night was the beer thing I got recruited for, but it wasn’t a tasting as I’d previously expected, but rather a small focus group to help judge marketing efforts by a small brewery in their efforts to redesign their image. I didn’t sign anything forbidding me to mention the name of the company, but I’ll avoid it nonetheless. There were only five of us there, and despie our different looks we all shared the same passion for microbrews, so we spent an hour critiquing packaging, label designs, etc. I’d never really thought about how to define what interests me in a beer, but it was fairly illuminating to me as well as the people who will get the information in the end. It wasn’t just a “I like design A better than B” kind of thing, either, but we really had to explain why A was better than B.

Plus it paid me $65, so hey, I’m always game to tell a brewery how to change if they’re willing to pay me for it.

It’s been hot this week. Hot for Oregon, at least. In the 90′s, not much humidity thankfully, and sunny upon sunny. It’s even been hot at night, which makes for no end to discomfort going to sleep. Yesterday I decided to see just how strong I was and I went jogging in 95 degree heat. My normal route now takes me 2.5 miles jogging and another half-mile walking, and I figured I’d cut it short. I was honestly very physcially comfortable jogging in the heat, though I desperately needed water. My mouth and throat dried out so quickly in the heat it became uncomfortable to swallow several times because all my piping was dry, and I think if there had been rows of people handing out little cups of Gatorade I could have jogged further. Fortunately, I stopped after the 2.5 mile mark.

Kinda dumb, huh? Illuminating–and sweaty, but dumb.

Today I’m knocking off work early and heading over to Erika’s, and thenm we’re heading over to Eastern Oregon–where I wager it’ll be as hot if not hotter than it is here now–and camping at Smith Rock State Park. I’m looking forward to spending some time over there again, even if by Sunday I’ll desperately need a shower and Erika may be ready to strangle me. I guess I shouldn’t worry too much–she’s seen me Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week already and she hasn’t snapped yet.

We don’t have any specific plans at Smith Rock except maybe a bit of hiking, dinner in Bend on Saturday night, and seeing some of the sights, but it should be a blast nonetheless.

Happy Friday, all. Hope your weeks have gone well. For those of you (and you know who you are) who I may have inadvertantly offended through my digital words, well, you already know I’m an ass, don’t hold it against me. :) For the rest of you, I’m taking my camera and two sets of batteries to Bend and I plan on taking lots of pictures. Have a good weekend that I plan on posting to my site…eventually.

Posted in Erika, Geekery, General, Movies

Beertopia

Aug01
2005 Written by Andrew

Why is Monday the only cloudy day of the week? It was hot and beautiful all weekend, and then Monday morning–bam–cloudy and cool. I actually slept under my comforter last night it got so cold. Naturally, it’s supposed to hit 96 degress by Wednesday, but leave it to grey, dreary Monday to kick off the week.

This past weekend was the big Oregon Brewers Festival here in Portland, and instead of going out for drinks at Happy Hour, my coworkers and I made plans to go and sample beer, instead. As we left for the brewfest, though, I had an odd experience I felt I should comment on. One of my coworkers is a pretty religious guy–takes the Bible literally, both in the stories it tells as well as the timeline it follows, goes to church multiple times a week both for worship and social functions, etc.–and he made a comment that I felt was worth writing about. As he left for the day, I called out “Sure you don’t want to come with us?” His reponse to me was: “Sure you don’t want to come to church with me?”

That comment struck me as odd, both confusing and somewhat insulting. I’ve commented on it before in social circles, but I’ve never really sat down and written about it. When exactly did religion and alcohol become mutually exclusive in this country? I’ve seen nothing in the Bible from my past readings that explicitly or vaguely prohibits consumption aside from lessons about vices and their danger. As a matter of fact and tradition, religion has embraced alcohol in many ways throughout the centuries. Jesus’ best known miracle was turning water into wine, and Catholics drink wine (traditionally) during communion to represent the blood of Christ. As for religious people drinking, the Italians are about as Roman Catholic as you can get, and wine is not just a drink, but a part of their culture. The same goes for the French with their wine. The English are overwhelmingly Anglican, and there is a rich tradition of English beer extending back hundreds of years even before Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church. The Irish are fairly religious (either Protestant or Catholic, depending on where you go…as sensitive a subject as that is still) and there’s a long–albeit somewhat more on the “vices and their danger” side of things if you believe popular culture–tradition of alcohol being accepted within that culture. Heck, Guinness is practically the national drink in Ireland! Some of the best beer in the entire world has been brewed in Belgian monastaries by monks for nearly 1000 years. Monks! Servants of God, brewing beer since before Protestant churches even existed! In fact, it was the Belgian monks who were first responsible for the addition of yeast to beer in the first place, referring to the effects of the yeast on the brewing only as “God is great,” if you believe the literature on the subject.

So where did things go wrong in the US? Even the puritan Pilgrims who made the voyage from Europe in the Mayflower, so extremist in their religious views they were exiled from their respective states and sought a new home where their ultra-conservative beliefs could be allowed to flourish, were forced to come ashore on Plymouth Rock when they did because they had run out of…wait for it…beer. Seriously, stop laughing. Those who are typically–though incorrectly–viewed as settling this country, drank alcohol. Those who founded this country in the late 18th century drank alcohol. Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest scholars of the 18th century on two continents and a Founding Father of the United States, was once quoted as saying “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants to be happy.” Religious people around the world drink. Martin Luther, one of the architects of the Protestant Reformation, once wrote “We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old.” I can go on and on quoting scholars and leaders of the world, from Plato to Sophocles to Abraham Lincoln to Ernest Hemmingway to Winston Churchill. So why is there such a schism now that alcohol is seen as wrong to religious folk in the US?

I can understand if your religion specifically prohibts consumption of alcohol like Islam or Latter Day Saints, but why shun something that has such a rich history among both people of the world as well as religion in general when there is nothing that specifically prohibits it in your particular faith? My coworker isn’t Muslim or Mormon, so why the association of church as the anti-alcohol? I just don’t get it. I don’t buy the old “alcohol leads to…” argument the same way I don’t buy the “rock and roll leads to…” arguments of the 1950′s or the “violent video games lead to…” that began in the 1990′s.

So there you have it–my confusion for the weekend.

The brewfest itself was a lot of fun. Picture 13,000 people who you share a passion with all crammed into an area the size of a football field, and that’s what the brewfest is like. I saw dozens and dozens of brewery and beer shirts. I saw kids who looked like they couldn’t have been more than a day over 21 and I saw people who might have given my grandmother a run for her money comparing ages. I saw clean-cut, professional men with full mugs and men who looked like they hadn’t shaved or gotten haircuts in months sipping tasters. From what I saw, the ratio there was perhaps 60/40 of men to women, which is pretty good overall. 72 different breweries, 72 different beers. One thing was crystal clear, though: Portland loves its beer.

As an off-topic side note, did you know that Portland has more breweries than Munich?

I went down with my coworkers and my Dad, who met me at the office. I had exactly $20 to spend, which meant that after the $4 mug purchase I could try 16 4-oz tasters of beer or get four full mugs. I opted for the larger number of tasters, but by the time Erika showed up a little after 6, I was about beered out after only maybe five or six samplers. It didn’t help that one of my coworkers knew someone from one of the breweries, and so we got let into the VIP tent they had where she was pouring free beer from a keg. I had a couple of mugs of that (remember, these are small, maybe 12-oz plastic mugs), and then after Erika and her friend Bonnie were done with their tastings, I still had 10 tokens left. Oy. They were getting hungry, so we wandered over to the Rock Bottom Brewery.

None of us were really interested in more beer, but it was close and we knew what kind of food we’d get. I did, however, want to try a seasonal beer called “Saison de Vin” (that’s “Season of Wine” for you non-French speakers) they had, so I just ordered a small glass. Bleah. I disliked it so much, I could barely drink it, but I hated to see it go to waste so I choked it down over the course of the meal.

To use up my spare tokens, I decided to go back the next day with my sister, so I met her downtown and we tried a few more beers, including the two Hawaiian brews. I’m sorry to report, however, that both of the Hawaiian beers were weak and tasteless. While waiting for heather, I had a great chat with my friend Ali from Beloit who I haven’t talked to in about a year. Ali is the one of the ones who I watched “Dune” and “Babylon 5″ with at school, and when I told her about Erika and how she’d enjoyed both of those series when I forced her to watch them, Ali said–completely deadpan, of course–”She’s a keeper.”

As Heather and I left, though, we were waiting at the 1st and Oak MAX stop when we were approached by a guy with a clipboard. Being downtown, I figured charity, registering to vote, or petition signing, but it turned out he represented a market research firm doing a taste test of some kind relating to beer. He asked me a few questions, I gave him my cell number, and off he went. I figured I wouldn’t hear from him, but Sunday afternoon I got a call from him and we worked out the details. I guess I answered all the right questions, because I fit squarely into the demographic they’re looking for to taste whatever it is they want me to taste. He kept asking about specific brands I’d had, and that I liked microbrews seemed to be the answer he was looking for.

I’m a bit leary about doing a market research thing after the stupid television market research thing Heather and I did out at Washington Square a few years ago, but she got a door prize out of it, so it can’t have been all bad. I figure it’s a win-win scenario for me, personally, barring any unforseen ambushes. Either the client the research firm is working for is a big macrobrewery like Bud, Miller, or Coors and I can tell them their beer tastes and looks like…well…we all know what American macrobrewery beer looks like, or the client is a microbrewery and I can flex my palate. I’m getting to the point where I can identify the type (type–not brand–i.e., Belgian, IPA, etc.) of beer by the scent alone, and I enjoy showing off my almost utterly useless talents. Either way, I’m getting paid $65 for one hour of work, so I’ll come out ahead in the end. $65 is about what I’d ask for to sit through a 60-minute commericial, if that’s what it turns out to be.

This is a busy week, but I’ll sum up. Tuesday, Erika and I are going to a free showing of The Dukes of Hazzard that I won tickets to. It was either that or Skeleton Key, and while the latter was my first choie, it fell on the night Erika and I are going to see The White Stripes next week. Wednesday night is my beer taste test thingy, Thursday night I’m making dinner for Erika, and then Friday Erika and I are headed over to Bend to go camping for the weekend at Smith Rock with her friend Bonnie and her cousin Owen.

Smith Rock should be a lot of fun. I stopped by there with my Dad a couple of years ago, but the last time I got out and walked around was when I was in Bend two summers ago. I tried to hike at Smith then, but I got such a late start and it was so hot, I could barely go on after an hour or two. I might try again, though. Better than sitting around for two days. I suggested that we go out to dinner Saturday night either at the Deschutes Brewery or the Bend Brewing Company, which seemed like it was well-received from those going. I haven’t been to either place, and since Bend Brewing doesn’t bottle its beer for sale in stores, it would be interesting to try. Then again, Deschutes beer on tap…tempting. We’ll see. The others may hold a revolt before then and want to do something else, and I don’t have the nerve or desire to make a stink about it if they do. I did, however, turn down going to the Bend McMenamins, so I’ve already gotten brownie points with Erika for the trip.

It be, though, that I am considering exchanging said brownie points for a visit to a McMenamins or two in Eugene on the way back. We’re thinking of going over the Santiam Pass on the way back to Bend–an absolutely beautiful drive from what I remember the last time I did it with my Dad going out to Bend–and it would put me in prime position to visit any number of three McMenamins in Eugene I haven’t been to yet. I’m more concerned about the drive, mind you, but I might have to use the old “Well, since we’re here already argument.” I won’t be driving, though, so in the end, it’s up to Erika. She, after all, calls all the shots. Or at least I let her think so for my own good. :)

That about sums things up. I’ll probably be too busy to write again this week, but I’ll do my best. Hope your Monday isn’t as dreary as mine.

Posted in Beer, Beloit, Erika, Family, Food, General, Movies

About me

Early 30's, Portlander, professional geek, runner, cook, beer drinker, beer brewer, gamer, occasional blogger.
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