March 20, 2025
Rained out again
The weather app is colorful when we open it up this morning. An atmosperic river is pointing an alarming dagger painted in intense shades of yellow, red and orange at the heart of Portland. Not far to the east is a wide, solid horizontal ice blue band. It’s snowing in the mountains, it’s cold enough that snow is coming down to the lower foothills, and it’s down in the thirties here on the valley floor. No hikin’ and bikin’ today, that’s for sure.
I look with approval at the Raven when I head down for coffee, glad I’d left it parked on the street like I’ve been doing most nights so I don’t have to walk two blocks in a downpour to Elizabeth’s building where I’d have parked it otherwise. It’s convenient, but a mixed blessing because half the parking spots here are beneath crow trees. It’s a shitty cycle - one morning I walk out and the poor bird is a complete embarrassment; and the next morning there’s been a downpour that’s washed it nearly clean again. At this point we’re just living with it until we give it a proper bath just before Shawn arrives to drive it back east to it’s new home.
It’s an eat-at home day today so I decide to skip Caffe Umbria this morning and go to nearby Lovejoy Bakery instead where I can start the morning with their Lovejoy Breakfast: a traditional with two eggs, bacon or sausage, home fries and multigrain toast. That, coffee with a refill and a 25% tip sets me back about $20, which seems fair.
The bright young woman who takes my order is friendly as we comment on the downpour. Her English is excellent even though it comes with an Eastern European accent, but she has some trouble picking up some of my words because I’m prone to mumbling - especially before coffee puts things to rights a bit. I intrude a bit and ask her where she’s from and get the answer I suspect - the Ukraine. A further probe places her home as Kiev.
That gives me the opening to tell her that Rachael and I considered a bike tour from Kiev to the Mediterranean some years ago, which astonishes and delights her. I tell her the plan was to head straight west to southern Poland and then bike south through Slovakia to Budapest, picking up the route we abandoned at the Slovakian border back in 1999 because the roads were too dangerous. It’s easy to place when I started dreaming up that scheme - it would have been in the summer of 2019. We were biking back from Victoria to Portland and a mega-meetup in Keith and Kathleen Classen’s back yard, joined by the Mathers, the Grampies, and Jackie and Al. I’m not sure, but that set of ten might still be the largest CB gathering to date.
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In any case, I’m certain that’s when I started dreaming up a ride from Kiev because it was inspired by a breakfast stop somewhere in Skagit or Snohhomish County. The menu was a mix of Ukrainian and traditional American items. Ukraine was well off my radar at the time so I probed the server about her background. She came here from Kiev also, and went on at length about what a beautiful, vibrant city it is.
The morning gets filled with Rachael’s outing to the gym while I work on the itinerary for the upcoming tour - we’ve changed our minds and have decided to book everything for the whole nine months after all, so there’s a raft of work to be done.
Next up is a trip back down to Living Room Theaters for a matinee showing of Black Bag, the newest film by Steven Soderbergh. Featuring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbinder in the leading roles, it’s a delightful suspense film full of plot twists - typical Soderbergh, and much more to our tastes than Anorka that we both wish we could rewind the reel and unsee parts of.
Also more to our taste is Thai Vintage PDX, a restaurant on the inner east side that we’re trying for the first time. We think it’s terrific and think we should make it back before we leave for Bari in two weeks. We tell our server this but she tells us we’d better hurry because they’re closing their door for a month when the owners head back to their home in Laos next Wednesday. She advises us that if we want to come before then it should be Sunday because after that they’ll start running their inventory down and many dishes will become unavailable.
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3 weeks ago
It’s still raining when we drive back toward town,so the rest of the day gets spent indoors, watching it come down while Rachael reads her latest crime novel and I sample a new NA beer and pick up with the booking project.
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3 weeks ago