Freestyle Love Supreme at the Armory

Matt and I both enjoyed the documentary Freestyle Love Supreme, both for seeing people in the Hamilton world before Hamilton (baby Lin-Manuel!) and for the marvel that is hip hop improv.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that we could see the show in Portland!

This was a double win as I discovered that Portland Center Stage offers a smattering of seats for every show at $25 each. A very big discount. (They are on the sides, but it’s a worthy tradeoff, as far as I’m concerned.)

The above two pictures were taken before the show and these two were taken during the part of the show where we were allowed to take pictures.

The stage set was amazing. All those speakers lit up and changed colors. And the hip hop improv was also amazing and very funny.

This is well worth your time! Check out the documentary or see Freestyle Love Supreme live, if you can.

Not Going into Work Tomorrow

There are some parts of the country where snow on April 11 isn’t weird. But Portland is not one of those places!

And unlike every other Portland snowstorm where forecasted snow is the talk of the town for a week straight, I had no idea this was coming. The morning of, I somehow missed noticing the snow when I opened my bedroom shade, and even as the radio announcer was saying “Snow in Portland right now,” I though he just meant the West Hills.

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened the curtains and, Wow! Snow! In April!

That bush in the picture leaned right over. I think it was the weight of the snow on the leafed-out limbs plus the fact that the ground wasn’t frozen. Once the snow melted, we hammered in a post and pulled it right back into place, so no harm done there.

Needless to say, I put off my plan to go back to the office until the next Tuesday.

Marge duMonde’s Cow Cards

I found a stack of these postcards at Scrap at ten cents apiece. They are perfect for the messages I’m sending to my friend about each episode of the Gilmore Girls because I can write on the back and spill onto the front, if I need to.

The message on the front of the card amuses me, though a friend did mention an opportunity was missed by not saying Saturday Moooovies.

One of them came with writing on it, though I didn’t notice until I got it home.

I couldn’t find anything online about Marge duMond (at least not this one) but I didn’t do an extensive search.

Anyway, these cards are so great, I went back and bought 100 more of them. So thank you to Marge for making them.

Unearthing the Tiffin

Ah, that lovely time when I got laid off from my job and happily put away all my accoutrements that had to do with going into the office.

I’m going to start going into my company’s Portland office one day a week, so I pulled out my tiffin so I could drag my lunch along with me.

I do enjoy the compactness of this design.

Tiffins hold a lot of food, though. And near the end of my last in-office job, I discovered that I could cut a circle out of plastic and divide up the different parts of my lunch so that I only had to bring the top part.

Podcast Project: Postcard Update

I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls and then listening to the Gilmore Guys podcast after each episode. This means I have to find something to do while listening, and since it’s been so cold, weeding is out. So for the first time in years, I have updated my postcard display.

Many of these postcards are from when Sara was in grad school. She’s had her PhD for three years now, so you can see how they have piled up.

In a perfect world, I would automatically update them once I had 40 new postcards to display. But after this update, I have a backlog of more than 40. So these will stay for a few months and then we shall see what happens.

Random Song: “Holy” Justin Bieber

Yet another song I found by listening to the Daily Download while doing early grocery shopping on Saturday morning. Carson Daily suggested I watch the video, which he called “very moving,” and so I did that too.

It’s definitely a song that sticks in my head.

My views of famous and wealthy underaged children has been evolving. I think Justin Bieber has done a lot of stupid things in his life. But I also think getting famous is hard for adults with fully formed personalities, and so I think we have entirely unreasonable expectations that a minor could navigate that situation with grace and class.

Bieber’s publicity (because how does one separate the person from the machine that made him?) is going full tilt on his new phase. The songs I’ve heard from the album feel very much like he’s processing his rich and famous youth. He’s gone the path of Christianity and marriage. Both of those eventually might not be the saviors he seems to think they are, but according to the glowing Vanity Fair profile I read, have done a lot to smooth out a lot of the not-so-flattering things that have been published about him in the last few years.

This song is repetitive, because those are the kinds of songs that kids today make, but I like his repetition of the word holy, and I enjoy the bridge that seems to be a response to the criticism of the short engagement period and his relative youth when he married.

They say we’re too young and
The pimps and the players say, “Don’t go crushin'”
Wise men say, “Fools rush in”
But I don’t know 

I also tip my hat to the rhyme of “crushin” with “fools rush in.”

Justin Bieber has thousands of bad choices behind him, some of which are probably harder to forgive than others (like his treatment of the women in his life.) He probably has one million stupid choices in front of us, just like the rest of us who aren’t millionaires have thousands of bad choices in front of us. But hopefully he’s on the upswing and finding a life that isn’t so extreme.

In further Justin Bieber news, I greatly enjoy this song.