Portland Adventures

If only the weather had been better. As I said, I recently went to Portland to visit Lia, who is one of my very favorite people. When I arrived we were at a bit of a loss on what to do. We'd planned on hiking, and most of Portland is outdoor activities, but the weather was being fractious. So we dropped my bag at her place and we went on a walk at a nearby park while the weather misted on and off at us. We chatted and caught up, and eventually the park let us out onto a playground. I saw a teeter-totter and immediately got excited. They're banned from most playgrounds now on the basis that they're dangerous, but here was a line-up of them. I bee-lined toward them and Lia followed along. We hopped on and quickly realized we were almost the same weight. Lia is taller than me, and skinnier, and has always weighed less, but we were close to perfect balance. So we scooted and leaned and after a while we were a perfectly balanced scale. We grinned at each other in delight.

Later when we described this moment to her boyfriend Adam he scoffed and said you could get any two objects to balance based on where you put them and where the fulcrum is. We told him to shut up and stop stealing the wonder out of our experience. The next day we had tentatively planned to hit the zoo, or the bookstore. When we woke up the weather hadn't improved, and from misting had turned to fully drizzling sporadically. So we bussed down to Powell's instead. For those who haven't been, it's a haven of literature. This is me in bookstores:

So we wander around Powell's, and I decide that instead of shoes without holes in them, what I really need is more books. So I debate and shuffle books around and finally settle on three while Lia flipped through whatever caught her eye. We went up and watched their printing press, smelling the glue, and laminate, and paper. Finally we decided to head back to her place after a few hours of remarking how great it would be to just live in Powell's. We chatted for a while about high school drama, and where people were now. An old fight between me and another girl got brought up, and we couldn't quite remember the details. We wondered if my old Livejournal was still around, and if I'd written about what had happened. So we pulled it up, and I had. But since we were logged in we were able to see posts I had written for my eyes only, which detailed experiences with my first boyfriend. We didn't realize at first that they were private, and I couldn't believe I'd posted stuff this explicit about my life when I finally noticed they were private.

Adam was only able to hang out with us in the evenings after he got off work, but we got along swimmingly. My favorite moment was during a discussion about banjos. I lifted my hands up and played an air-banjo, and looked up to see Adam frowning at me.

"What?" I asked. "Your banjo impression was you playing bass with a southern accent." I dropped my hands, "Oh yeah? Let's hear your banjo." And that's when he schooled me at playing imaginary banjo.