Bonny Portland

We were super excited to go to the Kennedy School, a property of McMenamins, for the first time last night. As mentioned before, its a former public school that was bought and turned into a bar. Its been on Dave Atell's Comedy Central show and is pretty well known. We chose Sept 17th for our trip because it is also known as"Halfway to St. Patrick's Day," the worlds favorite holiday (tm). Several of the McMenamins historic properties were having Irish themed singing and dancing so we were "all-in". Unfortunately, upon further review, all this was happening at 5 or 530pm. How the heck are people who work supposed to go?? They did have some non-Irish events going on later in the evening, but, whaaa? Kennedy School must wait for another day.

Disappointed about not being able to have some Irish fun, we decided to take our first trip/meal in the Pearl District. Knowing it was a bit more pricey than the area we live in, we decided to try a sushi place as the places around us have been waaaaayyy disappointing. (Are we finally going to have something to miss from LA???)


We decided on Hiroshi. Widely touted on review sites as one of the best in Portland. Everything was fresh and decidedly presented well. However, it was more like going to a fine dining restaurant where a good deal of effort was placed on ambiance. They also did not have sushi accompaniment staples : Unfiltered Sake and Plum wine. It quickly became clear that if we were going to get full, it was going to cost more than its value. As we were walking around Olivia saw an ice cream shop she wanted to try. Off to desert!!


Maybe its the fact that I haven't had _real_ ice_cream in years, but the Cool Moon Ice Cream shop was amazing. Everyone there was A+ nice and let Olivia sample as many flavors as she wanted. All local, all natural, and all made right there in the shop. Great flavors. I broke down and dared my lactose intolerant self to have a cone with Black Cherry and a flavor that tasted like Nutella. Well worth it!!! Olivia had some sort of Coffee and Summerberry. Great way to end the night, and I didn't even get sick!

A little slower today. Maintenance got all the work done in the apartment and now all the faucets work without spraying us with water! Its peculiar. I've had to change every lightbulb in the apartment because they're the incandescent energy sappers, but all the water flow has been set up for ULTRA low flow. I couldn't even rinse the sink out this morning after shaving. I'd say I'm pretty green, but I don't quite buy the water famine talk, yet, outside of the the desert regions like Hell-A and Arizona/New Mexico. Desalination becomes an energy game. It is very energy intensive, but if you have clean energy, whats the problem? I'm more worried about water quality than water scarcity. All the runoff and overuse of pesticides and fertilizers have made our water supplies tainted. Similarly, why do i need drinking water to flush the toilet or water the plants?

I ate lunch alone at a McMenamins brewpub. They are a local chain of brewpubs known for taking interesting spaces and making cool pubs. They have two I'm really excited to go to, the Kennedy School, where they took an old school and converted it and the Baghdad, a movietheater you can drink at. Unfortunately, the one near my house is rather plain and sedate. The beer was good and the fish and chips tasty.

Dinner was at the cheese den, but they call it Pastini. Its near the house and we had a coupon from the Chinook Book to try. I assume one of the chefs is from wisconsin because everything had 2 scoops of cheese on it. The Caesar salad? 2 (ice cream) scoops of cheese. The chicken marsala that didnt taste or look anything like chicken marsala? 1.5 scoops of cheese. The food was NOT good here. I don't have anything positive to say about the place other than the servers were nice.

Encouraging news on the job front. I made it to the "equally ranked eligible list" for one of the city jobs i submitted for before our move. Here's to hoping an interview is close behind