Oregon adventures with no pictures

I guess I'm not staying current with the blog because I can't find the cable for my digital camera. All my photos are stuck in my crappy camera. And I must be a visual person or something, since I feel like I can't blog without the photos. I know I've used it since we moved, but it's become lost. Boo.

Anyway, since my last post, we received and built the Ikea bookshelves. I was pretty amazed at how huge the boxes were when they arrived, and though I was still mad about how long it took to get them, and the price of the shipping, I was kind of relieved that we hadn't tried to haul them ourselves. It took 2 days to build them and then organize the books. The building part was easy...I was very slow with the organizing and that took a day and a half. The end result is pretty impressive, so it's too bad I don't have pictures I can upload yet.

We went to see a band at a theater in town which reminds me of the Rialto in Pasadena. You know, the vintage seats and vintage sound system...but it's Portland, so instead of being a historic movie house, like we'd find back in LA, it's a historic adult burlesque theater. Evidently Portland is famous for having the most strip clubs per capita in, I don't know, the country? The world?

We went camping in Washington with Mike's motorcycle gang, and spent the weekend riding all over the NW. I got to see Astoria for the first time, but no Goonie adventures this weekend, since we were with a group who had other sightseeing in mind. Astoria is on the bank of the Columbia River, which is so big that I didn't know it was a river. I thought it was the ocean. We rode over on a bridge that is at least 4 miles, and at that time I still thought it was the ocean. On the Astoria side you can see the bridge is so long that it disappears into the horizon and seems the Bridge to Nowhere.

We camped in Washington on the Columbia River, where we got to see the biggest barges I've ever seen in my life shipping cars and electronics and who knows what else. It was very cool except for when I was trying to sleep and it was foggy and those damn barges have to blow their foghorns every 60 seconds.

Mike took his state board exam for nursing last Thursday, passed the test, and got his license yesterday! He's officially an R.N.! Now if only he could get a job...he still has to go through a kind of nursing residency program and there seem to be some wait lists for those. But he is going to a nursing job fair thing tomorrow so we'll see what the recruiters have to say.

Tonight we went to an event called Street of Dreams, which is a group of builder/contractor showcase houses. We looked at 5 houses of ridiculous size...one I actually got lost in...but none really knocked our socks off. It was weird. Our favorite showcase house that we've ever seen is the 2007 Lake Tahoe Sunset Magazine Idea House. We like that one so much that we may even buy the blueprints. The houses we saw tonight had nothing on the Sunset Lake Tahoe house. But we did get to watch a couple of deers eating grass off of one of the patios. That was fun. And for some reason one of the houses had a giant painting of Nichelle Nichols, but not as she looked as Uhura, but how she looks now on Heroes. And since we are currently watching Heroes we kind of got a kick out of it. I wonder if she lives in Portland or something.