Bonny Portland

One of my favorite (if not favorite) holiday's is upon us. I love going out on Halloween and seeing all the cool costumes. Especially love you ladies out there going all out to look a special kind of sexy (Olivia is Queen of Halloween Hotness).

We carved our pumpkins last night, Its really hard to take a picture in darkness with our SLR. You basically need a tripod, that we don't have, because the aperature stays open until it acquires enough light. The result is usually blurry at best, freakishly streaky at worse.

We also finally found GOOD SUSHI in Portland!!! Its a place currently called Masu East, but soon to be Bamboo Sushi. In fact, we had a hard time finding it because they changed the signage yesterday. Not only was the sushi awesome, but they are going to be the FIRST certified sustainable sushi restaurant in the USA (possibly the world) when the official re-opening happens in a few weeks.

All the fish was extremely fresh. We sat at the sushi bar and even saw the chef clean and prepare our horse mackeral (similar to spanish mackeral). After we had two orders, one filet made two pieces/one order os sushi, the chef asked if we wanted the bones? Bones? Yep. They deep fry them and turn into the craziest potato chip you may have ever had. DEFINITELY something to try.

Everyone, Enjoy Halloween and if you're in Portland, give sustainable sushi a try.

In days 2 and 3. The original estimate from the truck driver was that he would arrive on tuesday to deliver the rest of our furniture and belongings. It got pushed back till wednesday, so Olivia and I used the day to get some errands done, but also relax a little bit.

We went to breakfast at Francis Restaurant. Again, Olivia enjoyed it much more than I. She had an omelette that looked pretty good, I had the special: cornmeal pancakes with lemon. I also ordered an italian ice that came in the hugest mason jar I've ever seen. 32 ounces, at least. Big props to the restaurant for doing their part to be sustainable. Plenty of vegan and vegetarian options, take home boxes made for composting, responsible sourcing of their ingredients. Overall, willing to give this place another go.

After breakfast was a trip to get groceries at New Seasons. We had to go because when we were looking for places to live, almost EVERY listing included the distance to New Seasons. I guess I would describe it as if Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and a Co-Op decided to mate and produce offspring. It has a great selection of every item. Has your more hard to find foods but also has a good deal of the national brands too. They make their own sausages and breads and everyone was super friendly. I can't imagine this not becoming our normal grocery store, especially since the prices seemed normal for everything (if not cheaper than what we are used to in Hell-A).

A little later we made a practice trip for Olivia's new job at Comcast. Turns out its a pretty easy commute, around 15-20 mins. I'm glad she won't have to travel too far.

For Dinner, we went to the best pizza place (if you exclude my childhood favorite) I've ever been to. Apizza Scholls. We tried this on one of our visits to Portland, it had been featured on Anthony Bourdains travel channel show "No Reservations". It is better than can be accurately described. They are open Tues-Sat, 5-9pm or until the dough runs out. They make all the dough themselves, and it takes 24 hours for it to set. Therefore, on busy nights, which seems like 100% of the time, its more likely they run out of dough than make it to the end of the night. Its a really unique place. They all take the same vacations, everyone works every day. They can be "Pizza Nazis", only 3 toppings per pizza and some other rules, but it all makes sense in the end. Even being lactose intolerant, I can eat as much of this pizza as I want. (Quality hard cheese = no problems.)

While there we learned that they are having a special Sunday meal for one of their servers that has been ill. They are not usually open on Sundays but they are having special pizza's and all the proceeds go to medical bills and expenses. If you are in PDX, I'd make a trip.

On wednesday Olivia had to go to go to work. I had to manage the movers. Immediately, I get a phone call telling me they can't get the truck to my street and they'll have to use a shuttle. You know, the shuttle the moving company told me about 4 business days before the move and had me sign a form for extra charges, if needed, but they were 99% certain wouldn't be needed. I don't know if all moving companies are like this, but to recap, every day that they did something they attempted to extort more money from me. I fought this one too and gave the driver plenty of options for getting to my street or an adjacent street. After a while, *magically* he was able to park on the street. All I can say is that you have to stand up for yourself in these situations. They're looking for the pushovers that will just pay whatever to get their stuff. Remember: you have legal options if they try to "hold you up". The movers themselves were actually friendly and did a good job. City of Portland gave them a ticket for double parking because I was unable to secure a permit from the city. How does the city expect you to have multiple days notice when the moving companies themselves don't know when they're going to drop off your stuff? And then, to give tickets for this is crazy. My first WTF portland experience.

The rest of my day was spent getting the bed put together, getting the maintenance crew to finish some unfinished problems with the new apartment, getting the cable installed and ready to watch and generally moving boxes from place to place.

We went to dinner really close by at Koji Osakaya Japanese Restaurant for some sushi. I really hope this wasn't indicative of the sushi I can expect in Portland or that I've been spoiled by easy to come by good sushi in LA. The sushi here is really underwhelming and nothing of note.

Now its late morning on the 4th day. I spent time getting the Tivo converted for the new cable set-up and the never ending task of updating all my accounts and shipments to the new place.

Environment link of the day: Saw this article about the new Chevy Volt. I was real excited about it when it was first announced but now I'm of the opinion that GM/Chevy will find new ways to fuck it up. Here is to hoping I'm wrong and an American car company can do something useful again.

Finally! In Portland! The DSL kicked in about 5pm today. No desk or chairs yet, so I'm stretched out on the floor trying to post this without getting rug burn. Lots of stuff has happened the last 2 days. Lets see how much I can remember.

I forgot to point out how country Redding, CA was. It was like being in the south, without the accent or the sweet tea. Lots of trucks, Carrie Underwood blasting from their speakers and blonde girls with their bouffant style bangs. Least I managed to get out of town without hearing any karaoke....

But not without watching Beenie take a poop on a pillow. We were getting ready to leave the hotel room and Olivia was cleaning up their litter box. Sensing we were about to go on another drive and wanting to show her anger, she plopped a poop on a pillow and then proceeded to wipe her butt on the way for good measure... least it wasn't my pillow..

The first thing I noticed after driving into Oregon, other than a nanny-state like insistence on driving slow, was the constant road construction: all financed by some Oregon Transportation Act that they must have had a vote for. I know its an exaggeration, but I don't remember too many 5 mile stretches where I didn't have to slow down because of road work.

We got to the new apartment around 5:30. The management people at the Lloyd Place Apartments couldn't have been nicer. She waited after hours for us and then did a real inspection of our unit, finding several problems that were mostly fixed this afternoon by a cool maintenance guy.

After getting Beenie and Dion situated with some food and a pooper, I insisted we run to the nearest bar, the Broadway Grill and Pub, showing the Sunday Night Football Bears game. Everyone had been telling me we didn't have a chance in that game. I arrived at halftime to see the Bears with a bit of a lead. I ordered the 9 beer sampler and started rooting on the Rex-less Bears. The 2nd half didn't disappoint as the good guys piled it on and posted a convincing road victory against the hardest opponent on their schedule. Superbowl, here we come!!

This morning we woke up and headed for breakfast at the Cadillac Cafe. The food was alright, Olivia liked it more than I. They did have a real Cadillac in the place, though. They also had a Coconut dessert that I'll come back to try.

Somewhere during the day, Olivia and I marvelled at the kismet that had us have our first full day in Portland on the one year anniversary of our engagement. Weird how the world works sometimes. I booked us a table at the best seafood restaurant in town, Jake's Famous Crawfish.

Next stop was Pacific Lifestyle Furniture. Olivia has been jonesing for a liveable couch for years now and after hearing that these couches were 100% made in Oregon with no foreign materials or parts, I was sold. It also helped that the overall price was less than half of similar things she had shown me in Pottery Barn catalogs. It's being made to order and should arrive on the 18th.

We headed home and I decided to find out just how far Jamba Juice was from my door. Good news, not that far. Its in a rather non-descript mall (Lloyd Center), but they don't use styrofoam cups!! Yes! Like Santa Monica, I figure Portland must not be a fan, I'll have to research this. It sucked in LA to have to remember where the city lines were in order to find a styrofoamless beverage container.

I also bought $100 worth of CFL lightbulbs today. This was after I had already replaced 4 light fixtures in the house with CFLs I brought with me. We have 2 bathrooms with 6 vanity lights each. We also have an overhead light in the living room that was stocked with 4 ornamental/candelabra lights. I'll be taking all these lights with me when I move, but until then, Yeah Earth! and Yeah saving money on the electric bill. Efficiency = easiest way to save energy/money. Have I mentioned the power company out here let me purchase 100% wind generated power? this blog brought to you by NATURE!!

Dinner at Jake's was awesome. We had this when we came out for my birthday last year. The Dungeness crab, still good, but not as awesome as last year. The Razor clams, still REALLY good. Both of us were happy with our dessert selections as well. 2 out of 7 Oysters were milky. The rule of thumb is only eat them in month's that have a 'R' in them, but its probably still a little too close to summer for comfort. I look forward to the colder months to eat them up.

Good first day overall. Sun was shining all day. Where's all the rain????

PS: Oregon Girls don't pump gas........

and apparently the guys don't either. Regular folks aren't allowed to pump their own gas. I don't know what kind of training the attendants must take, but I'm sure its extensive...