Tag: friends

The last Breakfast

For five years, our friends Laurie and Burt have been hosting Breakfast once per month in their home.  They live less than a mile away, so Matt and I have attended regularly.  Free food!  We’re good at that.

Today is, alas, the last Breakfast.  I brought a Gingerbread Man friend along, so you will see him in these photos.

This is Burt and Laurie’s house, which I love.  Partially because Burt and Laurie live there, but partially because it’s a very old house (for Portland), has a really awesome fireplace that came around the Horn, and also because you can see how the house grew as time went on.

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Laurie and Burt always have a variety of beverages, including coffee, hot chocolate, orange juice and water.  Because this was the last Breakfast, there was also champagne to make mimosas.

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Laurie poses with the food.  There are always scrambled eggs, feta cheese, potatoes, vegetarian sausage, bacon and fruit.  Plus either pancakes or waffles and some small sugary bready thing like mini cinnamon rolls.  It’s a great spread. Laurie’s nephew and his mother also are enjoying breakfast.

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Burt is the pancake/waffle man.  His pancake/waffle job keeps him in the kitchen, but he pops in and out while things are cooking.

IMG_4881It’s been fun to have five years of breakfasts.  I will miss the second Saturday food and conversation.  Thanks Burt and Laurie!

Patton Oswalt at the Newmark.

Kelly got us tickets for Patton Oswalt for my brithday.  Today we go.  Thank Kelly!  (Also, I’m just now noticing that service charge!  Preposterous!)

I greatly enjoy the architecture of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA) and the Newmark Theater is my favorite among the complex’s theaters. Its small and intimate and has simulated boxes as well as stars on the ceiling.

We were closer than the first row! We were actually sitting in rows of removable chairs where the orchestra pit usually is.  We were very close!  This is a non-zoomed picture.

And here’s a zoomed one.  Patton Oswalt is telling us he’s relieved to be in Portland.

I was quite transfixed by his belt buckle. 

This was a great show.  He chatted about all manner of topics, my favorite of which was his opining on the day where he had to visit the Post Office and the D.M.V. on the same day.  He told us it wasn’t the employees who were the problem, they were on it.  It was the customers who were all crazy.  Patton Oswalt feels my customer service pain!

Zoolights

Deborah and I visited Zoolights to see the choir she is usually a member of perform.  They sang Christmas songs and songs from their repertoire.

Then we walked around and took in the lights.  (And the animals.  We saw the baby elephant! He was, predictably, quite cute.)

This is a river with alligators and hippopotamus and other animals.

I grabbed a photo of this kid because he looked too young to have a Letterman jacket.  He struck me as maybe a freshman, maybe.  I looked a little closer and guessed from the early 1990’s dates on the patches on the jacket that it was perhaps first his father’s jacket.
(Letterman jacket side note.  I was checking the spelling and found this Portland Oregon store that made me want to get my own Letterman jacket. I want the all-wool with the sailor collar.)

Self portrait with Deborah. (And lights)

We sat and people watched and chatted under this great dragon.
It was a fun night.

Photo from October 1990, poem by Gary Soto

Another good one taken by Cindy.  That’s me on the left and H on the right in Pleasanton, California where we traveled with the marching band for competition during the autumn of our sophomore year.   I’m wearing fishnet stockings with zebra striped glow-in-the-dark Converse high tops. My friends and I were prone to wearing the fishnet/Converse combo from time to time.  That was the band trip that H arranged for all the boys in the band to sing “16 Candles” to me on my 16th birthday.

Also in the same photo album a poem/snippit of a poem by Gary Soto that I really liked when it was handed to me by Mrs. Brown, my awesome ninth grade English teacher.  Thank goodness I kept it, because I can’t find it anywhere online.