I really don’t want to be that guy who only gets one blog entry done per month, but there are just too many things trying to distract me. However, in effort to thwart the evil plans of my enemies, I’m going to write about these “distractions”. One per day, until I can’t think of any more.

Okay, maybe one every other day. I don’t want to overcommit to anything.

But I’m not going to start today, since I need to recap the weekend for y’all. Feng came to visit along with Miss X, and just as in past escapades, we all had a pretty good time.

McMenamin’s breweries are everywhere in Portland, and they’ve “taken over” in almost a literal sense. The one of which I speak today is the place we visited on Friday night, practically as soon as our familiar friends had stepped off the train. What used to be Kennedy Elementary School, is now known as the Kennedy School Brewery. That’s right. What’s cooler than drinking liquor in school? Original features include bathrooms and gymnasium, sized for middle-schoolers, while newer additions are things like the detention bar, honors bar, and movie theater bar.

Saturday found us making the trip to the Portland Art Museum for the “Splendors of Imperial Japan” exhibit. You know, whoever they hire to inform us with those placards they stick on the displays definitely need to be fired. The viewer: “Say, that’s a nice statue of a mythical beast. I wonder what it is?” Placard: “Statue of mythical beast. Artist unknown.”

So that’s the point in that? I don’t care if you don’t know who the friggin artist is, I do care to know what the heck it is that I’m looking at. I learned more from feng talking about the exhibits than I did from anything the museum had to offer. You’d think that I’d have learned my lesson from the treasures of ancient China exhibit in Seattle, but I didn’t. I now suspect that all museums just suck when it comes to history. How’s that for irony?

Dinner was a fabulous sushi meal, and we did a good job of having almost every specialty drink on the menu. We did have to draw the line at the Long Island Iced Tea with Rumpleminz though. I think my most experimental drink of the evening was the cucumber margarita. Surprisingly enough, it sounds better than it tastes. I certainly didn’t want another, but one wasn’t too bad.

Sunday provided such nice weather that we just didn’t have the heart to sit inside all day, so a trip to the park seemed like a pretty good idea. And it was, except for one drawback. The football.

See, having a relatively solitary childhood, I somehow missed out on some of the fundamentals that most people just take for granted. Like learning how to throw a football, for example. Frisbees, no problem. They’re common enough that most people will have them, and you just sort of pick it up. Footballs are a little different in that they usually only appear in slightly larger groups of people, and excuses can be made as to why you don’t want to play, which is much more preferable than letting everyone know what a total loser you are because you can’t throw.

Unfortunately, in a group of four people, there’s not much you can do to avoid getting the ball thrown to you. Catching… not really a problem. I’ll take a hit with the ball, and as a result you pretty much catch it. But you can’t fake throwing. Everyone sees the ball spinning through the air like a boomerang, and that’s when the laughter starts.

Very embarrassing.

However, after an hour of humiliation I did start to get it. By the end I was throwing… well… not with the best of them, but I was at least able to get the ball to spin without tumbling end over end. And with decent accuracy as well. Now I won’t have to hide in the shadows any more when the football is brought out at parties. No more dirty little secret. No more throwing like a little girl.

Last on the weekend agenda was the trip to the Japanese garden (my, at the time it didn’t seem like 75% of our activity was Japanese based – just in retrospect). At the risk of sounding like a tourist guide, I’m going to say that Portland’s is quite exceptional. It’s got several different areas, with enough variety to spend a decent amount of time without thinking “seen that”. Overall, quite a peaceful and enjoyable experience… except when people step right into your framing area as you’re about to snap a photo.

That pretty much sums it up, and since I’m working on a site redesign, I don’t have time to spend blathering away all day. I promise I’ll make an effort to write more than one entry a month though. In fact, I’ll try to write no less than one a week. It doesn’t help my cause any that my retarded writing class instructor is making us write journals, since after doing that my mouth is left with a bad taste for writing… but that’s a story for next time.