We are now the proud parents of a little cuddle monster! We adopted a five year old miniature poodle mix from the Oregon Humane Society on Saturday. His favorite things are cuddling on my lap, snuggling by the fire, and sneaking onto our bed for more cuddles while we sleep.
Hendrik meeting Orion (formerly Couver, formerly Cooper?) at the Oregon Humane Society.
More snuggles!
A few weekends ago, we hosted a Star Trek The Next Generation potluck and trivia party. We had a ton of fun making themed food and cocktails.
Earl Grey tea and croissants, à la Captain Picard! Same tea mugs as in the show.
Klingon blood sausages for Worf.
Cellular peptide cake with mint frosting (actually chocolate inside for Counselor Troi, from Helen Bernhard’s Bakery).
Rozhenko Mud Bath (prune juice cocktail), Romulan Ale, and Synthehol.
The trekkies!
We’re developing more and more local habits. This week, we grilled salmon for the first time.
Nancy did a perfect job cooking the fish. We used just about the last of our garden produce (plus some eggplants form my mother) as sides.
Before you know it, we’ll be roasting our own coffee.
-Hendrik
The food scene in Portland is pretty fantastic, including our assortment of food carts/trucks. In fact, we have so many of them that when they cluster together in an empty lot or parking lot, we use the collective noun, pods. I had never heard this term until we moved here! We recently met some of Hendrik’s work friends for brunch at the food cart pod on SE 32nd and Hawthorne to try Matt’s BBQ Tacos, Portland’s 2019 Cart of the Year.
Hendrik, stuffed full of tacos, enjoying a mural on one of the food carts.
The tacos were indeed delicious but I still miss the tacos in Austin, TX. The ambience of the pod is fantastic! We might have to go back and get coffee on that double-decker food bus.
Almost every Monday night for the last two years, we have been going to trivia night at our local pub with Hendrik’s old friends. This isn’t just any trivia night. It isn’t run by Big Trivia, a product of the trivia gastro-industrial complex. No, it is fresh, local, organic, fair-trade, farm-to-table trivia from our very own Shannon of Shanrock’s Triviology. We always have fun playing and sometimes we even win!
Trivia at the end of the rainbow (15th Avenue Hophouse)!
One of the best parts about trivia is the team names. We’re Four Score and Seven Beers ago and our arch nemesis team is the Irvington Gentlemen’s Militia. As our out-of-town friends, whose visits happen to overlap a Monday, know, we won’t miss trivia for anything. We just bring them along! Thinking of trivia gets us out of bed on Monday morning and gets us through the work day.
Hendrik and I are pretty good at the “Book Learning” and “Chotchkies” rounds but we are terrible at music, TV, and movies. Hendrik loves trivia so much that he split up the decades and assigned team members to start studying music. Hendrik may be the only who is actually studying but he has learned so much music from the ’70s and ’80s. He listens for hours every day on Spotify and he is getting pretty good at identifying bands. I’m supposed to learn the ’90s but if this were school, I would be a D student.
Only 2 days until we can go to trivia again!
For Labor Day weekend, we went wine tasting in the Willamette Valley. We had originally selected a 38 mile bicycle loop near Dayton with 6-8 wineries, which we found recommended in Portland Monthly. However, we quickly realized it was way too much to fit that all in during the 6 hours a day that wine tasting rooms are actually open. So the first day we did a 20 mile round-trip out and back to Hauer of the Dauen and Mystic Winery and on the second day we went about 15 miles round-trip to the Stoller, Durant, Remy, and Seufert wineries. We learned the hard way that they typically put wineries on top of hills. They have excellent views but we were always covered in sweat and panting by the time we got there. It was also hot and humid that weekend so that didn’t really help.
The Willamette Valley is known for Pinot Noir. So far I haven’t found any Oregon wines I really like so I thought this weekend was my opportunity to find good Pinot Noirs. It turns out there is no such thing. I found this quote that perfectly describes how I feel about them:
Pinot Noir is a grotesque and ghastly wine that tastes akin to a defective, sweet, faded, diluted red Burgundy from an incompetent producer.
-Robert Parker, 2002.
Hendrik enjoying the live music, wine, and views from Mystic.
With a little effort, we found some reasonably good routes, but no bike lanes. It certainly wasn’t up to the standards of Fietsparadijs Limburg. We had a great time and found some wine we liked but next time we’re going to try some wine in the Columbia River Gorge. I put in an honest effort and I think I’m going to say no to Pinot No-ir.
We’re enjoying the beginning of Fall with the last of this year’s garden-fresh produce (apples, tomatoes and peppers). Also seasonally appropriate, we’ve started baking.
Here we have a strawberry-apple pie with Texas-shaped pie dough pieces in the top crust. It was delicious.
-Hendrik
For our final day in Lima, we celebrated our eighth anniversary (just a few days early).
Our first stop was Huaca Pucllana, a pre-Incan ruin in the center of the city. It is made of rows and rows of mud bricks.
Hendrik at Huaca Pucllana. So strange to stand on an ancient ruin with the city skyline behind you.
After our tour there, we walked to the coast and strolled along the coastal walk from Mira Flores back to Barranco (the two main tourist neighborhoods). We ate crepes and did a little souvenir shopping at Larcomar, a mall built into the cliffside.
Hendrik basking in the cloudy Lima ambience
For dinner, we indulged in the excellent Lima restaurant scene. Lima has three of the top 50 restaurants in the world so Hendrik reserved a “bar” table for us at Astrid and Gaston. Given how many delicious courses we were served, I can’t imagine what the menu for the standard full seating would have been like. We had squash ravioli, shrimp tamales, scallop ravioli, and pork belly. Even the bread was divine. Although it was a bit pricy, it was still much more affordable than it would have been in the US.
From dinner, we took a taxi straight to the airport and flew back home.
EisenOrem Adventures 