Cocooning In Portland

...Continued from yesterday:
    So then on  January 2 I flew from Los Angeles to Portland to visit Romaine for the weekend before returning  to Columbus on Monday. 
    I arrived in Portland on Friday evening, and as Romaine's sweet poochie,  Luka, had just had surgery that day, was feeling not great and had to wear, as Romaine calls it, "the cone of shame", poor guy:

    ...we didn't want to leave him alone so we decided to spend the weekend staying home, eating, and - my personal favorite - watching movies.
    Which was not an unpleasant prospect, as Portland was in its season of incessant winter rain, and Romaine's house is so lovely and cozy (see post from 8/25/2014).  And this time it was lovelier still since she'd had her living room painted a deep turquoise blue:

Old shade                                                                            New shade

   The living room looked awesome, as did the rest of her house (Again, see post from 8/25/2013 for more photos of Romaine's house).
    In honor of my visit Romaine had stocked up on my favorite Portland delicacy,

...which I feasted on as we settled in, me on the couch and Romaine on her favorite old lazyboy that she calls her  "Archie Bunker chair",  to wrap ourselves in blankets and begin our movie binge.
    We started Friday night with an old 1963 Frank Sinatra movie showing on TV called "Come Blow Your Horn".  It was actually really good,  a comedy of errors about an aging ne'er-do-well womanizer:

...who can't get out from under the thumb of his over-bearing (and funny!) parents.

    Saturday morning Romaine invited some friends over for brunch, another pleasant activity suitable for a rainy Portland day:

    The food was so good, we had a spinach, tomato, red pepper and avocado salad, a fruit salad with a honey dressing that one of Romaine's brought, an out-of-this-world mushroom quiche that Romaine picked up from a local bakery

called La Provence,

...and the brunch piece de la resistence, these La Provence pastries:

    Were they every bit as heavenly-tasting as they looked, even more so?
    Ohhhh, yeah!

    After brunch, with the rain still falling outside, Romaine and I settled in again to take up where we left off on our movie-marathon.
    We spent the remainder of Saturday munching on brunch left-overs and watching:
  1.  "Frozen" - Amazingly, I hadn't yet seen it, and now that I have seen it I have to live with the burden of being the only gal in the galaxy who is left cold by "Frozen."  But I guess I should just let it go.
    2. "Breakfast On Pluto" - A story about a transvesite from a small  town in Northern Ireland who was orphaned as a child and who goes to London to find himself and his mother.  A film only for the very arty.
    3.  "Hot Tub Time Machine"  - The story of three middle-aged losers who get into a hot tub which inexplicably takes them back in time where they do all kinds of things that make no sense, then when the hot tub returns them at the end of the movie they're not losers anymore, but are rich and successful and have beautiful wives, though the movie doesn't explain how that happened, either.  Don't worry, I didn't spoil it.  Trust me.
    We started off Sunday watching "Saving Woodstock", an interesting and engaging flick about how the 1969 Woodstock music festival came together.
   By the middle of the afternoon we were running low on provisions, having finished off most of the previous day's brunch left-overs, so I volunteered to make a food run.  I was ready to give the couch and the TV a brief rest, anyway.   
    So I ventured out into the rain,

    ...though I must admit, if there's any place that looks cheery in the rain, it's Portland:

...and brought back food from the Laughing Planet, a great little eatery:

    ...as well as a few  sides from Zupan's, the corner grocery store:

    Now that we were re-stocked and ready to resume our watching, I suggested that Romaine should see "The Interview,"  as it had become a cultural (or lack of culture) icon of our time. I kind of wanted to see it again to see if I'd like it any better or worse watching it minus the hype, which has evaporated with the turn-over of the 24-hour news cycle, as had the patriotic agenda that hung on the film when it came out two weeks ago.
    So we watched it and came up with this analysis of "The Interview":   it's a (mostly) hysterically funny movie up until about the last 15 minutes.  Then the last 15 minutes are so bad and leave such a bad taste that you forget about how funny the first hour and a half was.  And so you go away thinking you've seen a really lame movie, when you've really only seen a lame 15 minutes, but the 15 minutes came at the end.  Or, as Romaine observed, "The first part of the movie is cheezy sophisticated, the ending just plain cheezy".  Thus the whole movie comes off as cheezy.
    Maybe it was all the talk about cheese that put us in the mood for pizza, so Romaine ordered us a veggie deluxe from a local pizzeria called Hammy's:

    It was over-the-top delicious and the perfect accompaniment to our last movie of the weekend, that great classic, "Men In Black".
    Ah, the guilty pleasure.