portland is for good times

Posted in adventure, everyday kimli by kimli

Ed and I have been together for 12 years; married for seven. After all that time, he knows that when I get cabin fever for some excitement – something that happens if I go more than one weekend without Adventure – it would behoove both of us to do Something Fun, and damn quickly before I literally have a tantrum. To this end, we (okay, I, but he wisely went along with it) decided to spend our anniversary weekend having an Adventure: we drove down to Portland, Oregon.

We stayed at the Inn @ Northrup Station, which is apparently in a super trendy neighbourhood. The hotel was super perfect – right on the street car line, close to a million things, quiet, funky, awesome. I would absolutely recommend that you stay there if you get a chance. There were giant jars of saltwater taffy everywhere!

mmm taffy

Our trip was great. We arrived on Friday afternoon, and checked into our hotel just before 5pm. We chilled out for a bit, then went out to do a little shopping – relaxing trip or not, I was in a tax-free state and I had Grand Plans. I bought some Doc Marten boots and some sassy clothes, then we headed back to the hotel for some Adult Swim and sleep.

shiny!

It rained all Saturday morning, so we hung out and waited for the rain to go away. It lifted at noon, so we hopped the streetcar and wandered around Portland. We did a ton of awesome stuff on Saturday – lunch at a haunted pizza parlor, video games, Powell’s, Voodoo Donuts, Stumptown Coffee, the Saturday Market – our feet hurt. We sat to rest our feet at the waterfront, and were simultaneously hit with a bizarre sense of déjà vu – we’d been here before. It wasn’t our first trip to Portland, but we’d never been down to the waterfront before – so why did we recognize our surroundings?

Ed had a memory of doing jumps through the park and I remembered parking my car in the hideout to save the game, and we figured it out – Grand Theft Auto 3. The part of town we were in was accurately represented in Liberty City to the point where we recognized where we were based on a game neither of us had touched in 6 years. Hah!

up up down down left right left right b a start

That evening we had dinner at Casa del Matador around the corner from the hotel. The food was awesome – I had a pomegranate margarita – but it was admittedly a little hard to enjoy because of the drunken, aging party girl sitting next to us. She and her party were there when we arrived and still drinking when we left, and each time she would sober up a little it got quieter – then someone would order shots, and her volume and obnoxiousness would go through the roof again. There’s nothing sadder than an aging bar star, and she made me really glad I’ve never been into that scene.

okay!

We awoke fairly early on Sunday and got ready to check out. I was sad, because I’d love to spend some quality time in Portland (with my scooter) – but we’ll be back. Not knowing what to do but knowing I should stay out of Powell’s Books for the sake of my ability to pay rent this month, we decided to take the streetcar for the entire route and see the city that way. It was a nice ride until the hobo got on – he was smelly – and we got to see a lot of the city and the university. After the streetcar trip, we got back into the Mazdabator and hit the road after a couple of stops at Trader Joe’s for trail mix and Target for all the socks in the world.

Our ride home was uneventful save for two incidents. We stopped for lunch in the fake Vancouver, and went to Burgerville because it is crazy delicious. After we ate lunch I treated myself to a blackberry sundae, because their ice cream is amazing. The overly attentive lobby boy made the sundae for me, but there was an .. incident.

if i had a houseboat i could live here

When applying the whipped cream to the sundae, the nozzle malfunctioned. Apparently when this happens, it is not advisable to apply more pressure to it in the hopes that something comes out – because when something DOES come out, it’ll explode with great force and spray cream everywhere.

And I mean everywhere.

I received a face full of cream from a strange man. I was too surprised to do much more than laugh, but I was covered in it – the whipped cream shot out with amazing force and covered the wall, the cooler, the ceiling, the guy, and me. All the employees rushed to my aid because I was laughing too hard to do anything for myself – I had a gaggle of people surrounding me trying to get whipped cream out of my hair and off my clothes. It was hilarious and sticky, and you could see everyone struggling mightily to keep the innuendos under check. The sundae guy was relieved that I found it so funny, and he thanked me multiple times for being such a good sport – what else would I have done; it was clearly an accident and also it was hysterical. I am pretty sure these things only happen to me – I am a magnet for creamy surprises.

cute yet spooky.

The drive to the border was boring, but when we got to the truck crossing there were a million cars trying to get into Canada. I convinced Ed it was a good idea to go to the Duty Free store, where I stocked up on clearance Clinique and bought myself some expensive perfume as a reward for bypassing over an hour of traffic. We crossed the border without incident, and made it home by 8:30 last night.

Today is our actual anniversary, and we have the day off. We’re going to buy ourselves a Playstation 3 with the contents of the Puggy Bank (Katamari Forever comes out tomorrow !!), be shot by Miranda and Reilly, and maybe go out for dinner later. All good things that require me to wear pants, so I should really get going already.

Happy anniversary, Ed! You are a Good Egg.

nah nah nah nahnahnahnah katamari damacy

19Sep2009

immigration

Posted in everyday kimli by kimli

I’ve never attempted to immigrate to another country before, but if someone could tell me how to move to Portland, that would be super.

I LOVE it here. It feels like a hip, funky version of home. I’m as Canadian as they come, but I would drop almost everything to be able to live and work in Portland.

Our hotel is amazing. We’ve found ourselves in the Suite of Kings – there’re two TVs! Wacky. Without knowing, I booked us into the uber trendy part of town, right on the street car line. Today we took it to the Pearl District and walked in a random direction. Evidently we picked a good way to walk, because we’ve had pizza at Old Town Pizza, donuts at Voodoo, coffee at Stumptown, wandered through the Saturday Market, and Ed had to use a crowbar to pry me out of Powell’s Books. We’ve only been outside for 4 hours, but we’ve seen so much and it is all awesome.

I want to move here. Portland needs technical writers, right?

18Sep2009

eureka

Posted in adventure, angst, everyday kimli by kimli

I’ve figured it out!

I know why I’ve spent the last two weeks being angsty and melodramatic and much, much less talkative than usual! It was really bothering me that my inner monologue couldn’t even come up with a decent reason for my non-stop sour mood to the point where I couldn’t even write about it – there was badness, it was huge, yet no words would come out to explain away the melancholy. That’s really unlike me – I have a soliloquy for every damn situation – but I figured it was one of a dozen or so reasons I had to be down in the proverbial dumps.

It’s not, though. The first half of this month has been uncharacteristically shitty for me, and it’s NOT because of any of the following things:

The impending end of summer
My near-death experience by a) frat boys, b) a truck, or c) the aporkalypse
The ambitious yet utterly insane work calendar I set up for myself
My missing self-esteem
Cheddar puking on every single thing on my desk yesterday morning
Having to skip 7 or 8 Fun Things because I was too sick to go outside
Missing my friends because of the hamtrax and uncooperative schedules
Being absent from work for 3 unplanned days, forcing me to cram 9 days of work into 4
An insensitive husband making dumb comments about my appearance
Being out of Diet Coke

It’s none of those. Yes, they’ve all negatively affected me one way or another, but I’ve gotten pretty good at shrugging these things off and continuing my Life’s Work of being ridiculous – but not this time, and I’ve finally figured out why.

Four years ago today, my dad selfishly decided he was done with life and succumbed to his advanced age and raging stomach cancer. I miss my dad, and every year around this time I am filled with sadness and guilt at his death. The very fact that I am sad leads to another sad – while it’s perfectly natural for me to miss my father and be upset at his passing, if I were to be perfectly honest with myself I would have to admit that I am TOTALLY CHOKED a) that he died at all and b) that September is now a sad month for me when it used to be filled with awesome.

I love September. There’s so much going on – long weekends, gorgeous days, pretty colours, cozy sweaters, parties, BBQs, super fun events, killer sales on school supplies. It’s usually a month of happiness, too – anniversaries and happy times and celebrating the fact that we made it another year without killing each other. All good things.

Then, right in the middle of it all, is a giant behemoth of sad. My dad passed away on September 18th, and while his death remains suspicious in my mind – 91 year old men don’t suddenly contract cancer just like that and then die – every year I struggle with balancing my natural September delight with sadness and missing my dad. Every year before now I’ve been completely conscious of the Deathiversary, and appropriately angst-ridden – but this year, while it didn’t slip my mind, I’ve been dealing with swine flus and work and a dozen other things that have weighed heavily in my brain juices. My dad is always on my mind – I’ve finally been able to put his memory into Happy House, whereas Sasha still lives in the Burst into Random Tears Condo – but THIS September, I tried to bury the Deathiversary in Other Things, and clearly failed miserably.

Strangely, I feel much better now. I miss my dad – hell, I’ll always miss my dad – but this month has been really, really weird for me and it’s just a relief to realize WHY. And now that I know why, I can deal with it and get back to normal (for me anyway; it involves glitter and stripper shoes).

I love you, dad, and I miss you. You suck for being dead, but I’m glad you’re in a better place. Look after Sasha for me, and don’t let her eat your chicken.

Ed and I are off to Portland for a mini anniversary trip. I will buy things, he will tell me I’m pretty until I tell him to shut up, and hopefully when we return on Monday I will be in a much better frame of mind. I’m more or less already there, but I think getting out of the country will be good for me (if only for the tax-free shopping and beer at 7-11).

Sorry for being out of sorts, but I’m better now.

15Sep2009

wanted: group of friends willing to commit crimes

Posted in everyday kimli by kimli

Why are so many movies based on unstable people knowing what you did last summer?

I was glad to see that Sorority Row had finally opened in theatres, because it would mean a sharp decline in the number of times I had to watch the trailer during commercial breaks. Over the weekend while I was bored and sick, I spent some time looking up the spoilers for the movie mostly just to see who the killer was and if they changed the plot from the original version (yes, brilliance of this caliber was a remake). There was nothing particularly shocking or interesting about it all – the plot was basically a cookie cutter of teen slasher flicks from the 90’s:

A group of friends do something terrible by accident
The group collectively thinks that hiding the mistake (which is always a body) is clearly the most logical thing to do
The group dynamic changes with the BURDEN of GUILT
Just when they think they’ve gotten away with it, they start receiving messages from the dead person threatening to tell people what they did
Almost everyone ends up dead in complicated and gory ways
It’s not the dead person after all; they’re dead
Oh here is a convoluted reason that the killer – who is loosely connected to the dead person in the first place – slaughtered the group in the name of crazy unstable man justice instead of, you know, doing almost anything else

DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Seriously, are there really that many groups of friends who accidentally kill someone and decide to keep the secret instead of telling authorities? Would they not know by now that this is just a really bad idea and will inevitably end with a fish hook in the back of the skull? Maybe I was just a really boring teenager, but my horrible scandals would have gone a lot differently:

I borrow my mom’s car to take a group of friends to the beach
There’s no drugs or alcohol or teenage sex romping, just animated discussions about comic books and Super Big Gulps
I’m busy laughing at a terrible joke when I back the car into a cement post, denting the bumper
The group collectively thinks that hiding the mistake is clearly the most logical thing to do – we pop the dent out and use nail polish to fill in the scuff marks
The group dynamic changes with the BURDEN of GUILT
I start receiving ominous text messages seemingly sent by the bumper threatening to tell my mother what I did
No one ends up dead or stabbed through the face with a machete
It turns out the threatening messages are a viral marketing campaign from an auto body shop and my heightened sense of guilt made it seem as though I were being stalked by a shadowy unstable person (or gecko) in a rain slicker
My mother never finds out I dented her bumper
… OR DOES SHE???

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN I smell a sequel

As much as I wish my teenage angst bullshit had a body count, there’s just no scandal there. They’ll never make a teen slasher flick about my life, and that’s one regret I’m just going to have to live with forever. *sigh*

I never get to have any fun.

13Sep2009

squeeze my head for delirious juice

Posted in everyday kimli by kimli

another day another hour another handful of pills
i can’t tear open these blister packs
another edit on the page of my never ending ills
i forget my name in the dead of the night
i keep tumbling down down down down
the box car tells me that it’s alright
if i can wake up, it’s likely i didn’t drown

this fever is making me rhyme
i don’t normally think in verse
this swine flu better kill me soon
prose is bad; country rock is so much worse

i’ll probably recover and put this week all behind me
another pebble in my nylon bag of tricks
it’s day six and i’m all out of the words that define me
i don’t know the usernames of the nerds that i licked
media frenzy says i could die now but i don’t believe it
i’m perilous but this isn’t enough
my end will come with a ridiculous display
an octopus, tuesday morning, two pine trees and marshmallow fluff

11Sep2009

it’s alive?

Posted in everyday kimli, medical anomaly by kimli

This is the longest I’ve been able to sit up since Tuesday. I am not entirely sure I am not hallucinating this – am I real? Are you? When I think words they appear on the screen, so clearly this can’t be real. Awesome; I’m hallucinating a blog post. Welcome to Delirious Juice Dot Com!

HAH the idiot girl downstairs who keeps trying to smoke out her windows and getting caught and in shit is now standing in a bathrobe on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. Suck it, bitch. This is a no smoking building. I only wish it was raining.

When I cough, pieces of my lungs come up. They are gross and spongy. I do not like it. My whole body hurts, but less than yesterday – yesterday was not a good day. Today I am slightly more alive, but not by much.

I’m so dirty. I wonder if I could manage a shower later.

Ed skipped a business trip to stay home with me. I feel terrible about this, but I’d have done the same for him. Apparently I need adult supervision when I’m in the throes of horrible death flu – yesterday I had a screaming freak out because something went POP! and then I panicked because it was late and no one was around. I missed a really important phone call because I was so out of it, and since Tuesday I’ve watched 15 hours of CSI yet don’t have the foggiest idea how to commit the perfect murder. This flu sucks ass.

I am so not looking forward to work on Monday – I’ve effectively fucked my entire month because of this, and I haven’t got a clue how to get my schedule back on track. Of all the rotten times to get sick ..

I will be glad when I am better and not mostly dead. At least my chills seem to have subsided; for the first time since Tuesday night I am neither too hot nor too cold. It’s a small win, but I’ll take it.

9Sep2009

aporkalypse now

Posted in everyday kimli, medical anomaly by kimli

The entire universe is conspiring against me.

I had an annoying little tickle in my throat all day yesterday. It felt like I swallowed a hair or something, and it was lodged in my wind pipe and poking me every time I spoke. I didn’t think much of it – I swallow hair all the time – and went about my duties for the day.

Then I read about the outbreak of Swine Flu at PAX. I’m a paranoid person by nature, with a severe case of hypochondria and a misplaced sense of melodrama – naturally that tickle in my throat wasn’t something easily explained away by the cats sleeping on my face, I had nerd-borne piggy sniffles! I’ve been SWINE’D!

I thought back over my weekend, remembering each and every sickly face that glanced my way. Strangely, it wasn’t just a horde of anonymous unwashed masses that appeared but people near and dear to my heart: not only had I been exposed to bacon lung at PAX, I spent quality time with sick people!

Ali was just getting over an awful cold. Shan was deep in the throes of a nasty sickness. Josh was manly and stoic, but still showing signs of having caught whatever viral yuck Shan was carrying. I had been literally surrounded by sick people all weekend long: was it any wonder that I was probably mutating the H1N1 virus into the next strain that’ll spell the end of the world?!

I’m sick. My throat is killing me, I have a nasty cough out of nowhere, I’m nauseous, and I ache all over. I know I should go to the doctor to find out if I really do have hamthrax, but I don’t know that I could get myself there. All I want to do is crawl back into bed and moan dramatically (silently; it hurts to talk). This sucks.

And what of my incredibly tight September schedule? I’ll admit that my first concern wasn’t for my health or that I may very well be Patient Zero for the K1ML1 virus that kills millions, but that my being sick would mess up my training schedule that took me weeks to arrange. I don’t have TIME to be elbow deep in the Aporkalypse; I have a schedule to maintain!

.. then the BossBoss told me we were pushing the launch date out by two weeks because one important piece hadn’t been programmed properly.

I’ve made up my mind; I’m keeping my baby schedule – but now I have 10 more days as a buffer. I feel less bad about moving today’s training session (especially as it means I won’t be breathing all over my subjects all day, spreading the other white flu), but I need to get better and get things back on track. I hate being sick. Up yours, swine flu. If I have a fatal case, I am going to be SO PISSED OFF.

8Sep2009

swine’d?

Posted in everyday kimli by kimli

Swine Flu has officially been confirmed at PAX, and people are advised to see a doctor if they have any symptoms. I’m fine, personally – I don’t have time for swines therefore I will not get any – but if you’re feeling icky and you spent the weekend licking nerds, take care of yourself and radio for a medic when you’re down.

8Sep2009

bizzy !!

Posted in everyday kimli by kimli

Today was the first day of my September from Hell, so updates for the remainder of the month will be at worst sporadic; at best late and brief. Here is a perfect example: my next training session begins in 9 minutes and I have to pee and I’m out of ice cubes.

As I mentioned in the post below, I have 5 PAX Prize Packs to give away – check the Facebook Fan Page for contest instructions!

omg so busy

7Sep2009

pax recap

Posted in everyday kimli, nerd by kimli

PAX 2009 was:

awesome
exhausting
strange
fun
not quite what I expected
going to be attended next year, but with A Plan
a good time
definitely worth pre-registering for

PAX was A+; would buy again.

We were at the event for about 6 hours on Saturday before bailing – the lure of a Built Burger BBQ at Doug and Ali’s place was too strong and delicious to resist. It was a very full day though, and even though we were beat after just six hours, I could have easily spent the day there if I had planned things out better. For starters, I had no idea that the passes for the evening’s concerts were handed out to the first several thousand people through the door each morning – so even if I had made plans to see the MC Frontalot and Jonathan Coulton shows, I wouldn’t have been able to. Next time, Gadget, I will make a plan and see the shows and panels that interest me.

We spent most of our time in the Main Exhibition hall, trying out new games and people watching. There were so many strange nerds around – some normal, some unfortunate, some clearly on some sort of day release program. I wished I had a stable internet connection and a computer; I could have just live blogged what I was seeing around me for three days straight it was so surreal.

A third day of PAX seemed a little over the top, but we went for a few hours to do some last minute things – get some more swag, buy new mice, and see John and Scott. We made a quick side trip to Archie McPhee’s so I could stock up on Random Things to give away, and after a couple hours of Sunday PAX we hit the road. We were home by 6pm, and enjoyed a leisurely evening knowing we still had a full day off ahead of us.

In retrospect, staying up until 3am was a bad idea but they were showing a Bones marathon on Showcase and I love that show. I used the time wisely though, going through the huge pile of swag we brought home from PAX. The thing is, I can’t or won’t use most of it – so I did the only logical thing: I made 5 piles of random awesome, and I will give them away via the Fan Page on Facebook. Check there later today for what you’re going to have to do to get a PAX Prize Pack!

Lastly, here are some pictures: