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...Continued from yesterday: And behold, on the fourth day, my last day in Portland, there was sun, and an itsy-bitsy spider miraculously hanging out above Romaine's front porch.  Granted, it was not warm, bright L.A.-style sunshine we woke up to on Sunday morning, but that mild, cool Portland sunshine. However that was enough to encourage us to get out bright and (sort of) early and walk about a mile through the surrounding neighborhood,           
 ..which was already packed with the Sunday morning breakfast crowd,  ...but we eventually got a nice table outside.  Breakfast was outstanding. Romaine ordered a spinach and mushroom scramble with a side of polenta and the biggest, fluffiest freshest biscuit, which she generously shared with me,  ..seeing how my tongue was hanging out for that biscuit,. Meanwhile I had the Croque Madame, an egg on top of grilled ham and cheese , hot crispy French fries and a most delicious dill pickle, which really set off the rest of the meal, and which I likewise shared with Romaine.  And I really appreciated my saucer-sized cup of tea. Tea-drinkers will know what I mean, as in restaurants we often feel like the poor relations next to the coffee drinkers.    After breakfast we walked back home,       By then the sky was looking overcast again, which put us back into "Breaking Bad" mode for a few hours.  But then the sun came back out so we decided to take Lucy on her belated walk around Mt. Tabor,  ...a beautiful city park set upon a dormant volcano.   The plan was to walk round the hillside for a bit then let Lucy run free in the dog park. Now, I guess I had imagined that the dog park would be a fenced-off square of play ground-type area, where the dogs played in the center while the parents sat on benches along the edge and chatted while their poochies played. Not at all so. The Mt. Tabor dog park was a sequestered forest area with a suggestion of a path,  ...where the dogs were free to run, play, 
 As for me with my phobia of big aggressive dogs, this was a little like wandering through one of my recurring nightmares, the Big Dogs After Me one. Of course the dogs weren't after me, as I tried telling my phobia, they just wanted to run around and play, but I'm sorry to say my phobia won out and Lucy's fun was cut a bit short on my account. Sorry, Lucy. 8/ It was an overall nice hike, though, and by dinner time we felt we'd earned the right to take on nourishment, seeing as we'd finally spent the greater part of a day doing something more healthy than watching 'Breaking Bad" For dinner we tried a Chinese restaurant where the food, though nicely presented, tasted kind of bland.   Our fortunes were pretty good, though.
 ...and mine. 
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...Continued from yesterday: Portland, Oregon is located in the heart of the Pacific Northwest temperate rain forest, the largest temperate rain forest ecoregion on the planet.  Which means lots of rain. And, the upside, a proliferation of plant life.  
 And there are flowers everywhere.    They seem to grow effortlessly, 
 ...gifts from the rain, 
 ...but without the snakes.  ...Continued from yesterday: Saturday morning we had a brunch date with Romaine’s sweet friend, Atsu,  …after which we planned to catch an outdoor art show downtown. We drove a couple of blocks from Romaine’s house to Atsu’s, then walked a couple more blocks to the Ankeny Tap & Table, 
 The food was really good. Romaine’s Virgin Mary could have been a meal in itself, served up with olives, asparagus, and a square of crave-inducing bacon.  We all ordered the scramble of the day, which was eggs mixed with arugula and havarti cheese and topped with pea sprouts. The scramble was delicious, as were the seasoned potatoes and the generously buttered sour dough toast.  As it turned out, the Portland rain gods were with us, as by the time we were done eating the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through. Mayhaps it was our spirit of gemultlichkeit that morning that invoked the sunny weather to match our mood.  So we drove downtown to the art show,    …where we saw lots of art.          We were all particularly enchanted by an item we saw among a display of arty rain gear, a beautiful, eye-catching, bright red rain coat.  And it was so Portland: - I mean, what could be more Portland than a funky raincoat? But I could even see rocking it around Columbus. Except that upon closer inspection it looked to be kind of small, more Atsu's size than mine or Romaine's, and we all agreed that it would look really cute on her. Then we looked at the price tag. $349. Oh well, we guessed it was supposed to be art, after all. We wondered who would buy that $349 raincoat? In fact who would buy up all those racks of $349 raincoats? It started to rain again so we went home to ponder the question while we watched "Breaking Bad".  Friday morning the sun was out, sort of. We planned to go downtown in the afternoon and try to snag some cheap, last-minute tickets to "The Lion King" then hang out down town, walk around, eat, then walk around some more until the evening performance. But in the meantime we figured we'd go grab some brunch then take Romaine's doggy Lucy for a hike in Mt. Tabor Park, one of Portland's many beautiful hills and green spaces.
  ...where Romaine ordered the yummy mushroom omelet - we liked the little mushroom identifier - served up with a mountain of hash browns done to perfection,  …while I had my standard, sunny side up eggs – these were extra large and likewise served with a Mt. Hood-sized portion of awesome home fries. Toast was maybe a tad over-toasted, but it was well-buttered, so that was good.  After bunch we returned to Romaine’s house and decided to catch just one more episode or maybe two of “Breaking Bad” before we ventured out for our hike with Lucy. But one or two turned to three or four, and we figured we could maybe skip the hike around Mt. Tabor, since Lucy didn’t look in any big hurry to go either,  ...and we’d have plenty of time to take her for a walk later then leave for downtown around 4:15 pm. But then the rain started up again, our easy chair and couch felt more and more comfy, and “Breaking Bad” got more and more addicting, as did the tofu dip Romaine had bought especially for me, my Portland favorite 
 …and before we knew it 4:15 pm had come and gone, and we decided it was too rainy to go downtown, anyway, and really, getting last-minute “Lion King” tickets on a Friday night would be hit-or-miss, so we decided to just watch a little more a “Breaking Bad” and catch the 7:30 showing of “Florence Foster Jenkins” at a nearby movie theater. We invited one of Romaine’s friends to the movies with us. This meant we’d have to turn off the TV, haul ourselves up and go. And Lucy still needed her walk, of course. By 6 pm the rain had stopped so we took Lucy for her walk around the neighborhood. 
 Everything grows everywhere in Portland.    We swung by Zupans, a local super market, for some sandwiches to nosh on before we left for our movie.  We really enjoyed “Florence Foster Jenkins”, which starred Meryl Streep, wonderful, as usual, as the wealthy, deluded New York patroness of the arts in the 1940’s who believed herself to be a talented opera singer though she couldn’t carry a tune, and Hugh Grant as her husband who bribed people to come to her concerts and opera critics to write wonderful reviews of her terrible performances.   We liked the movie so much, and had such a nice evening with Romaine’s friend, that we were glad we’d pulled ourselves away from “Breaking Bad.” And besides, after the movie there was still time for one more hit.  Last Thursday I said good-by to Los Angeles, and hello to my dear ones in Portland, Oregon: my sister Romaine. 
       
 When my plane arrived in the middle of the afternoon the skies were - not unexpectedly, never unexpectedly in Portland - overcast. By the time we arrived home from the airport it was drizzling. Soon it was raining, which squashed our original ambition to catch an outdoor concert that evening. "How about we watch a little 'Breaking Bad' instead?" suggested my sister. The rain was falling outside. It was nice and cozy inside. Curling up on the couch with some "Breaking Bad" sounded good. As we'd both seen the first season we started with season 2. But after a couple of episodes of the tragi-comic trials and tribulations of the hapless high school chemistry teacher turned meth cook, we were hooked..  We broke for dinner though - by then the rain had stopped - and met up at a great little local Mexican restaurant called Sandovals,  
 The food was soooo good: Holly had beef-filled flautas, or fried tacos, Romaine had a fresh and lovely-looking steak salad, 
 ...then we headed back to Romaine's house where we settled in with cups of warm tea, Romaine in the easy chair, me stretched out on the couch, and got back to "Breaking Bad."  |
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October 2026
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