Grand Lodge passport page stamped

It’s Cosmic Tripster Round Two!  We have pledged to take five years to finish this time, getting our final stamp sometime in 2021.

Today’s task was to visit Grand Lodge to get all their stamps.  We’ve stayed at Grand Lodge before (40th Birthday Vacation) and I love it.  They’ve recently renovated the Attic and opened more rooms, which I was excited to see.

Here’s the background of how the new rooms came to be named after books.  The Lavender Lady (the ghost immortalized in paint on the second floor) had a hand in the naming.

I loved these quiet nooks and crannies, perfect for curling up and reading.

The hallways are dark and cavernous, which is fun too.

All the hotel locations give you a clue and then you must go find the McMenamins thing (usually a painting or photograph).  Once found, you take a picture, then show the picture to the front desk and collect your stamp.

This month’s clue stumped us:

A quiet space, no place to go
Softly lit by the mushroom’s glow
No place to sit, not a toad stool in view
Come find me, find me all of you

(This clue is even better when read in a dramatic fashion.)

Most of the clues aren’t terribly hard.  This one was.  We started at the top and worked our way down to the bottom and nothing jumped out as the answer.  I took a second look at the clue and decided it must be on the third floor, because the rooms were new and they wanted people to know about them, hence the “come find me” repetition. So back up we went.

Two more trips the length of the hallway and we hadn’t found what we were looking for.  Thank goodness we overheard a kid say to his dad, “and here’s the other secret room…”

Secret room!!!!!!!!!!

The walls move!  There is a secret stairwell!

The stairwell is Lord of the Rings-themed and lit with blacklight.

In this terrible picture, Matt poses with Gollum, who is painted on the door that comes out on the second floor.

Okay!  That was very cool.  But it didn’t fit our clue.  From the kid’s “other” comment we knew there was a second secret room.  But we had to find it.  It was tough.  We walked up and down the hallway, pushing on the walls.

And we found it!

This was a small closet, painted with mushrooms.   It was very cool.
Having found what we were looking for we collected our last stamp and our prize.  We both chose the grab bags and were rewarded with a growler cozy, a wine glass and two postcards.This was a very fun passport page to complete.  Thanks, Grand Lodge.

A day of things to be grateful about

Things have been tough lately.  I hate keeping up with news (and keeping up with the news is something I love) because I come away informed, yet also angry and frustrated.  I feel powerless to change anything.  It’s March in Portland and it’s cold and rainy and there is no sun and it doesn’t seem like spring will ever come.  Every single thing I do seems like a waste of time.

And today I made myself write down one thing every hour that I was grateful for.

I’ve done gratitude journals before, and they don’t do much for me.  Having to think of five things each night means that I think of the same things every day, more or less, so it gets repetitive and feels like an obligation.

But this worked.  Something about repeatedly finding things to be grateful/thankful about during the day elevated my mood.  You noticed I wrote down the date at the bottom.  I had planned to keep doing this every day until things improved, but one day was exactly what I needed.

Phew!

I hadn’t seen this house for years

This house is on Montana between Lombard and Rosa Parks, also known as the walk to tap dance class.  When I moved to Kenton in 2007, the lot was a little overgrown, but in the 10 years following, blackberry bushes took over and the house disappeared behind the brambles.

The blackberries have been cleared away, giving me my first view of the house in years.

It’s pretty beat up and on a big lot that is very close to the train, the Interstate and two grocery stores.  This house isn’t long for this world.  (Going to that website gave me no information about this particular house.)

Three sentence movie reviews: Before I Fall

It’s like the movie Groundhog Day, but not funny and also about teenage female friendships instead of a sardonic weatherman.  No one is going to watch this movie, and that’s too bad because as Zoey Deutch lives the same day again and again, it’s fascinating to peel back the layers of the relationships in her life.  There are some bits of drag near the end, but overall, a well-crafted and interesting movie.

Cost: $5.35
Where watched: Regal City Center Stadium 12  (I’m in a theater rut lately)

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2017/before_i_fall.html

Vintage Cakes: Lemon and Almond Streamliner Cake

I forgot to take my traditional cake-with-Vintage-Cakes picture, but this one is more fun.

As you might guess, it was Deborah’s birthday.  I offered to make a cake.  She mentioned she liked lemon, so I found this recipe.

I’m a chocolate girl, so I never would have made this for myself.  But it is a-mazing!  The Almond cake (which introduced me to almond paste) is delicious and joins perfectly with the lemon curd on top.

This is also a fairly forgiving cake, as I put it in the wrong sized pan (9×1-inch is not quite the same as 9×2-inch) and it spilled over onto the bottom of the oven.  Turns out that aside from the extra-crispy bottom, that spillover was very tasty too.

I also didn’t put all the lemon juice called for in the lemon curd, but it was still divine.

I’ve learned from Julia Child not to tell everyone your cooking/baking mistakes, so I kept mum about my cake baking trials.  No one noticed anything amiss and the cake was very well received by all.

I’ve also learned that when you freeze a piece the lemon curd becomes something like sorbet.

Another Vintage Cakes winner!

The mysterious case of the bagged legumes

For years I’ve been buying beans (and also rice) at Fred Meyer that came in a one-pound bag of thin plastic that flopped around.  This was fine by me.

Then, one day Fred Meyer’s bean (and rice) bags all got thicker, until they could stand up.  They also developed a zip-top closure.  This seemed excessive for me, as I usually either make the whole batch of beans in the bag, or pour extra into a mason jar to store.  But it wasn’t actually a troubling thing, so I rolled with it.

Today I went to grab a bag of black beans, and *poof* all the beans had been converted back to the original thin-plastic floppy bags.

What gives? File this under: changes I don’t know about and will never know about.

My next picture will be a blockbuster

This is from a review about the new King Kong movie, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts.  He directed Kings of Summer, which I adored.

Here’s what he said.  “No one saw [Kings of Summer] which was heartbreaking…So I decided I wanted to make a big movie, because I wanted people to see the next film I made.”

Here’s what my #52womeninfilm project taught me.  Women make movies all the time. And no one sees them. And they don’t get the choice of their next picture being a big film.

I’m happy for Vogt-Roberts being able to make a big film for his next movie.  But I can’t help thinking about all the women directors who would also like their next movie to be a big film and don’t get that opportunity.

Then later, this list of “untested” directors.  What do they have in common?

“Vogt-Roberts says he landed the gig because the producers like how he had turned the woods in ‘The Kings of Summer’ into a veritable character in the film.”

And I would also venture to guess that the producers (four male, one female) liked him because he reminded them a little of themselves.  Which is why Hollywood is the way it is.

Three sentence movie reviews: Logan

This will go down in my own personal movie history as the superhero movie that demoted superhero movies to second-run priority status.*  It turns out what I’ve been enjoying about superhero movies is their PG-style violence; this move was chock-full of full-on R-rated violence that I did not enjoy at all.  Post-movie discussion led us to the interesting conclusion that Wolverine is our favorite X-Man character, but is only interesting when he’s part of an ensemble cast.**

Cost: $5.35
Where watched: Regal City Center Stadium 12 with Matt.

*Not completely this movie’s fault. Deadpool and Antman helped.
**I’ve seen all the Wolverine movies and they are all sort of “eh.”  Even this one, with great acting by both Jackman and Dafne Keen, not to mention Stephen Merchant.

http://www.impawards.com/2017/logan_ver2.html