Of Bread and Portland

Green Dragon Brew Pub

We're back from Portland; loved it there again. We had a lovely time visiting Amanda and Ryan, they put us up in their spare bedroom and acted as tour guides to all the cool, hip places around their neighborhood. Portland has a lot of cool and hip places: sustainable sushi, brew pubs, movie theatres that let you buy and drink beer, mass transit that goes out to the airport. It's a great place to be.

The weather was bright and sunny, in contrast to San Diego, which was overcast while we were gone. Good timing on our part. Kat has been judiciously keeping to her new exercise regime (and I've been joining when possible) so while we were in Portland we took long walks and Kat and Amanda did yoga.

We liked the area where Ryan and Amanda live, with the old Victorian style housing, communities and an organic blend of residential and commercial. We also visited Ryan's cousin's place, which is a renovated condo downtown with huge, floor-to-ceiling glass windows that span one entire side of the living area. Very nice as well. Seems Portland has it all.  ;)

There was a lot of "when are we moving here?" questions being asked. We are looking in to it. I'd love to work remotely, there are a few of my co-workers who do that.  They fly in a week every month or two for meetings that have to be done face-to-face. I could live with that. Cheaper living conditions, flights to rack up frequent flier points, working from home, what is not to love? Of course working from home may drive me nuts due to lack of interaction with other people. I know I can be efficient working at home, I do it occasionally now, but not sure what would happen if I worked from home for weeks on end: Kat would come home from a hard day wanting to relax and I'd be  "WE MUST GO OUT!".

Update since I wrote this: I spoke with my boss about working remotely and he thinks we may be able to work it out. I guess that is one benefit about being employed by a flexible large company

My department has moved buildings, so now we are in a nicer one. Not the top of the line building that some other, more important, groups are in, but better than we had. I get the feeling IT is at the butt end of list when it comes to making employees comfortable. After all, we aren't really revenue generating, we're nothing but an expense. Since we are no longer near a place for acceptable coffee I moved the espresso maker Kat bought a while back in to my office but I have still to work out where everything goes. This week I realized that I'd stored my lunch food, coffee and my towel in the same drawer. My towel smelled of coffee and banana. It wasn't bad, just disconcerting.

Kat made bread last week, it was very successful. She picked up a book that has a different way of making bread. Rather than mix, pulverize, recover, pulverize, ignore, pulverize, it includes a lot of waiting. I'll let Kat describe it better since - (This is Kat, I'm taking over this post...)

The book is "My Bread" by Jim Lahey, and the technique he describes is not really "new". In fact, it's very old. The concept of letting a very moist dough rise for up to 24 hours before baking it inside a cast iron pot in the oven, dates from the Roman era. I highly recommend the book and the technique. It's summer now of course, which means I'm not keen to bake a lot right now, but I'm eager to try a cinnamon-raisin recipe next. Okay, I'll hand this back to Phillip.....

... The results were lovely, good crisp crust and tasty spongy interior. The crust was very crisp, so crisp that I didn't realize I'd sliced up the roof of my mouth and tongue until I took a sip of wine. Ouch. (Kat again....)  He exaggerates. It was excellent bread. Especially for my first try! (/ end Kat)

One of the many reasons I love Kat is because she is a grounded, down to earth kind of person. She is taking 'Spa Techniques' in school right now and is covering such things as wraps and hot stone. Body wraps sounded vaguely interesting until Kat told me that it essentially immobilizes you and then they leave you for 20 min. I'm suddenly no longer interested. She was saying that the job of the massage therapist is to sit there and pay attention to the client for the 20 minutes that they are immobilized (which makes sense, what happens if sneeze then fall off the table?). In class people were channeling energy with dance and tracing glyphs over the wrapped person ... um, okay. I think I'd prefer the person to check facebook rather than tracing some bizarre glyphs over me while I'm stuck there.

Her hot stone class was talking about how the massage therapist should choose stones that 'speak' to them. If I told people that I was connecting with stones and that they were speaking to me they'd assume I'd fallen off my bike and taken a head wound. Kat figured she'd find stones that were a good weight and were nice and smooth. See why I love her?

We've booked our flights back home, so we will be sending emails to people letting them know when we will be back in town. I'm excited about re-purposing my grass cutting boots back in to the winter boots they were originally made to be :)