Weblogging from the hotel room at the Westin in downtown
Portland. This was kind of a brutal trip, but fun. I was up at 4:30 AM
EST to get ready for our 8:15 flight. All in all, the flight was
pretty pleasant. The security scan was a huge pain in the ass. I tried
to demetal myself, but missed a single quarter, which set off the
metal detector. The flight was mostly empty, which is always good from
a comfort standpoint. I listened to WREK the whole way in the form
of CDs I have burnt of MP3s saved from the streaming archives. I
listened to Personality Crisis (post-punk/new-wave) and Psych Out
(psychedelic) from September. I also read the first half of Kelley Eskridge’s novel
Solitaire. After getting to PDX, we were pleased to
find out that the light rail goes all the way to the airport. We rode
it to within 2 blocks of the hotel, which allowed us to check-in at
11:45 AM. After some lunch at Pizzicato Pizza, we power shopped at
Nordstrom’s Rack, Ross to get D outfitted for a wedding. After that,
we had some tasty mochas at Coffee People. We went to Lloyd Center for
some mop-up shopping, and then ate at Red Robin. That was the end of
our consumer day, except for a quick run I made to Reading Frenzy,
where I bought the graphic novel of Ghost World, a
Noam Chomsky book, and an issue of Left of the Dial, an
indy music magazine. Basically our agenda was/is to shop at and eat at
places we don’t have in Atlanta. Powells is still open for several
more hours and is only 4 blocks away, but I’m too bushed to go. At
this point, I’ve been up for 18 hours after 4 hours sleep the last
three nights. We haven’t really made much of an effort to hook up with
friends this time, since we didn’t really know what we were doing or
when. I’ll be back in two weeks and will try to be more social then.