An old man kitty interlude: Antares, sleeping on a heated pad.
Antares Interlude
Category: To Occupy my Time
I Spy in this Little Free Library
It’s a LFL with an attic! And what caught my eye?
It’s one of the tools of my trade!
It’s the Chicago Manual of Style, one of the two major stylebooks copy editors consult. What a good find.
It is, however, the previous edition, so it will be slightly different than today’s version. But for a person who is CMOS curious, they will avoid the rather large cost of the book.
Ole Bolle Troll
Someone at work clued me into this delightful public art project brought to us by the Scan Design Foundation: six trolls built by Thomas Dambo scattered throughout the Pacific Northwest. Here is the Portland one: Ole Bolle
As you can see, Ole Bolle is quite popular
The trolls are built from recycled materials, and you can see how nicely those recycled materials came together.
Look at that foot!
And that hand with fingernails.
Once you look in the door, you can see what the troll is after. I don’t blame him, especially that delicious looking cake.
They did a great job of making his face very kind.
Here is an attempt at a mom-and-me self portrait. No dice though. It was just me.
So here is mom with the troll.
Same Same Rx
And then there is the day when you and your cat are taking the same medication. I was taking it for the rash on my face (the doxycycline cleared it up nicely) and Antares because he is continually sneezy (it didn’t solve the problem).
Highly Improving Badge
Look, a badge! That says I’m highly improving.
It was a rough ride back from Vancouver. My battery didn’t turn on and that bike is HEAVY! Also the approach to the I-5 bridge is a big long hill.
I’m not sure if I was highly improving. It took me about a week to recover from that ride.
New Visual Aid
I’ve reached a point in middle age where I cannot read things, especially recipes, without glasses but my distance vision is still fine. When cooking, it’s annoying to take my glasses on and off, so I bought this magnifying glass to help me along.
Happy Days by NWCTC
Matt and I went to see the NWCTC perform Happy Days in the Lloyd Center Mall. It took place in the former Victoria’s Secret as it did last year, when I saw The Fever.
It’s not quite as easy to see the layout of VS because of the curtains, but you can see the iconic black and white stripes on the walls.
While I deeply loved last year’s production, I found Samuel Beckett’s play to be tedious. I’m not so much into absurdist plays. Neither was the guy next to me who looked at his Apple watch more than four times.
The program says about the play, “It is considered a ‘summit role’ for female actors, presenting a unique opportunity of intense theatricality.”
Diane Kondrat (Winnie) and Chris Porter (Willie) were very good in their roles.
Hopscotch
Our vacation continued in Portland (because it’s important to vacation in your own town) with a visit to Hopscotch, an immersive art experience.
I loved this mural, and would love to have the artist paint a mural on the side of our house. Someday, maybe.
This installation was made of plastic garbage bags, and the lights changed colors making things seem otherworldly.
Here’s a close-up with slightly different colors.
This was my favorite installation. Because a ball pit is a very fun thing, especially when not in a Chuck E Cheese and with fun lighting.
Matt really liked this room, but I did not. You put on a headset that showed you, but from a different perspective. Then you got to walk around and shoot a basket and other fun things while dealing with that perspective.
This installation was a maze of neon.
From there, we went to Clarklewis and had a delicious dinner and many, many people wished us a happy anniversary (and also engaged us in conversation about our wedding.)
Wrapping up Sisters and Headed Home
In Sisters, the air quality was terrible. Smoke from two forest fires was funneled right into the town. Because of that, we didn’t do any walking back and forth to the downtown area as I did on my last visit. But our very large room was a perfect place to hole up.
On Monday night we saw Blue Beetle at the Sisters Movie House and concluded that while Blue Beetle didn’t want to hurt anyone, he didn’t mind if his family did.
We also did another Exit escape room game, getting out of the labyrinth in just under an hour and a half.
On Tuesday, we stayed inside and played another escape room game, this one called the Deserted Lighthouse. It included four puzzles that you had to assemble in order to solve it, plus other things. I didn’t love it. Putting puzzles together while a timer is ticking isn’t my favorite thing. And we didn’t do very well, I think maybe getting 2 stars out of ten.
From there we drove to downtown Sisters to find food and stopped in at the Open Door to see if they happened to have a table. They had us wait a few minutes because someone was a no-show for their reservation and they wanted to see if they would appear. They did not, and we had a delicious dinner. Thanks, Open Door.
On Wednesday, after eating breakfast and lounging around, we took our timer photo and headed home.
On the way there, we stopped at On Any Sundae, and had a frozen treat. I tried the frozen “lasagna,” which was many layers of delicious fun. Matt got an overstuffed waffle cone. Both were quite good.
Leaving Summer Lake, Riddle Routes Bend
On the previous day, we left the Walker Trail Trailhead and headed to Lakeview for some lunch. We heard a squeal. It was intermittent, so at first we ignored it. Eventually we pulled over and had a look. But we know little about cars, so that wasn’t helpful. On we continued to Lakeview where we ate at a Chinese restaurant and headed back to our lodgings. Unfortunately, as we drove through town the squealing was super loud, so much so that people’s heads were turning. We pulled over and again looked at where we thought the source was, our front tire.
A man in a truck pulled over, immediately diagnosed the problem as a rock stuck in the wheel. He first crawled under the car to see if he could work the rock out that way. That didn’t work, so he asked us to pull the car up onto the curb and did another check. No rock. From there, he got a jack out of his truck and asked for our tire iron. That’s the level of car knowledge I have, so we could supply that. He took off the tire, but no dice. Back to the truck he went for more tools and he disassembled the breaks. It was at this point I did feel a prickle of worry that he might not be able to put things back together, but it was late afternoon on Sunday in a small town, so he was probably our best bet.
It turned out the rock was buried as deep as it could be in the workings of the tire. Our good Samaritan found it, reassembled everything, and was on his way. We compensated him for his time because when someone helps two city folk with no car knowledge in a small town, that is a very lucky thing.
We took the rock with us, and here Matt is modeling it for the camera.
So tiny, yet so loud! The rock then joined the other rocks in the driveway of our cabin.
On this day, it had rained all night and into the morning which wasn’t great for stargazing, but made for a cozy night playing board games in the cabin.
From there, we took the very long way to Bend taking Highway 395 past Lake Albert over to Highway 20. On Highway 20, driving became normal again, with much traffic. We stopped at Hampton Station for lunch and found it was overwhelmed with customers and almost out of food. Our sandwich choices were limited, but they were good.
In Bend, we did a Riddle Route and had fun exploring the city that way. I grabbed this picture of a very stripy couple walking while we were on our route.
The air quality in downtown Bend was hazy, but not terrible. But once we got to the north part of the city it was very smoky and then increasingly smoky on our drive to Sisters, where we checked into 5 Pine Lodge and shut ourselves in for the night.