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A quick rundown of our first day in Portland (since even though it’s 10:30pm here, 1:30am at home, and I am pretty tired):

It was a really clear and beautiful day today and as we descended into Portland, we had a great (spectacular, even) view of Mt. Hood.

Mt. Hood

Once we were on the ground, Dan and I picked up our rental car at the airport, then picked up Beth from her nanny gig and drove over to Voodoo Doughnuts.  It’s been on some show on the Food Network before and Dan was all about it.  I mean, I wasn’t complaining or anything.  They have all sorts of crazy doughnuts (as you can see).  Dan got a maple bar with bacon on it and their signature doughnut is shaped like a little person and when you bite it, raspberry jelly oozes out.  You can also get married there (they had it on the menu), but I think I’ll just take a doughnut.

Voodoo!

Then, we went back to Beth’s house for a bit.  She just moved to a new place and they have chickens and geese!  Check it out.  I was obviously mesmerized (and also a little worried about the white one, who I hear is mean).

Chickens!

Then, we went to an early dinner with Beth and her guy, Pawl.  Our waiter was funny.

Pawl and Beth

Then, we went to a movie (Micmacs) at one of those cute little theaters where you can eat a meal in the theater (sorta).  We all liked the movie.  Who doesn’t love crazy French films?  Now, bed.  Tomorrow, Eugene!

(For the record, there is an apostrophe in the title of this post, but wordpress doesn’t like it.  And, I don’t like wordpress right now.)

This morning, I got a quick run in and then Dan and I went over to Ben’s for a pancake breakfast provided by my mom, who drove down with Guido just to spend the day in Columbus.  The pancakes were great and we all huddled around the table taking turns getting the next pancake and chatting about how Guido and Dan somehow always end up buying the same shoes (It’s weird, really; I think they are somehow cosmically joined at the feet).  Of course, with all the eating and chatting, I forgot to take a picture.  Oh well.

After breakfast, we went outside to play some cornhole (everyone else) or just sit around (me).  Here are my mom and I relaxing:

Next time, let's do this in Duck.

And here was the view (at least for a minute) from my seat:

The back of Ben and Rachael's heads

Tonight, I’m heading to the interfaith dinner at the mosque and will blog about that asap.

Tonight, we got to go to our second baseball game of the season.  This one was a Columbus Clippers game, our minor league team.  But first, we had Ben, Rachael and Megan over for dinner.  They brought delicious locally-made veggie burgers and amazing yellow-watermelon.  I made a hummus/veggie tray and two dishes that I was proud of (sorry if you already saw these pictures on facebook!).  First, was a quinoa, black bean and corn salad:

Mmm!

Then, I made Dan’s new favorite, curried carrot bisque (the swirl is a little bit of maple syrup):

Mmmmmm!

I forgot to take pictures during dinner, but it was quite a feast and we had a nice time sitting around and chatting.  After dinner, we put our walking shoes on and headed down to Huntington Park, the new baseball stadium that was just built last year, and one of the many reasons it’s so nice living downtown in walking distance to a bunch of cool things.  Here we are on our way:

Ben, Rachael, Megan and Dan take High Street

When we got to the stadium, we were sitting in the sun for a bit.  But when the sun went down, it was such a pretty night.  Check out the stadium at dusk:

Nice, right?

And, here we are, me and my honey:

A lucky girl

That little old lady next to me was pretty cute too.  It was a good night, even though we were getting killed (8-0) when we left in the 7th inning.  Now, we’re at home, watching UFC 118.  I don’t think I’ll make it to the main event… Night!

Yesterday we drove down to Cincinnati so that we could celebrate my mother-in-law, Joyce’s, birthday.  Dan also need to get some work time in with his Dad because Angelone Arcade has four more orders!  First, we went to Jess’ house for lunch and a delicious homemade ice cream dessert.  Here’s Joyce opening up her Coach gifts:

The rest of the day was spent with family hanging out, stopping at the outlets to be sure Joyce got what she wanted, and then eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

On a side note, since Dan was downloading pictures last night, we finally have nice pictures from the Reds’ game on flickr (see piictures tab for all the new ones!) and I really like this one of Uncle Ray, a lifelong die-hard Yankees fan.  When in Rome.

Today, I worked from home at Pete and Joyce’s house.  They have a nice deck in the back.  I consider it a good day at work when I get to be barefoot all day. 

Today is my last day in Cincinnati for the week.  This morning I got up and ran in the heat.  Then, I went into Heritage to help Jess set up my old room.  I don’t think I’ve talked about it before, but my sister-in-law, Jess, was a third grade teacher at the same school where I was a sixth grade teacher (she was my in).  She has taught third grade for twelve years, but this year, the district and the state are having all kinds of financial problems and they eliminated a third grade section at our school and Jess was bumped to sixth grade.  Sixth grade science to be exact, my old room to be even more exact.  Quite a coincidence, I know.  So, even though I’ve been gone for two years and someone else has been teaching in “my room,” I went in to help sort out some things and give some advice about room arrangement, computers, the location of various supplies, etc.  I didn’t feel all that helpful, but I did feel like I was in the twilight zone.  Three years ago (for the fourth year in a row), I was setting up this room and preparing for my own school year.  It was kind of nice, but I think it might have cured my nostalgia.  I forgot how overwhelming it can be to walk into a classroom at the end of summer.  There is much to be done.

A crowded table

This afternoon, I did a bit of schoolwork and then Joyce made dinner and had a few people over (see picture at left).  Then, we walked around to the preview of tomorrow’s neighborhood garage sale.  I got the book Julie and Julia for a $1.  Sweet.

Today was all lump lumping around the house while it thundered and rained outside.  I read, I wrote, I ate.  I like days like this.

Terry's Turf Club

For dinner though, everyone got together and we headed down to Cincinnati (the real and actual city of) to a place called Terry’s Turf Club.  It was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives recently, so my brother-in-law Jeff thought it would be fun to try it out.  The place is a restaurant conundrum if I ever saw one.  It’s all neon signs, cracked paint, giant plastic hamburger, ancient movie theater chairs outside to wait and all sort of other delightfully tacky decorations.  It’s definitely a dive.  But, at the same time it has gourmet toppings for burgers like red pepper and goat cheese sauce, or mango curry sauce or red wine and mushrooms.  It’s confused.  I like that.

Shitake Burger with Mango Curry Sauce

Dan got the burger with red wine and mushroom sauce and, lucky for this vegetarian, they had the option to get a portabella or shitake mushroom burger.  Since I’ve seen and eaten many a portabella burger, I opted for the shitake burger and added the mango curry sauce.  The burger was stacked high with the most enormous shitake mushrooms I had ever seen and the mango curry sauce was delicious, but in my humble opinion, the bun had way too much butter on it.  I felt like I got a mouthful of butter with every bite, which don’t get me wrong, isn’t the worst flavor or anything, but it was almost too rich (in Dan’s words).  So, while I finished the whole burger and enjoyed myself thoroughly, my stomach was really churning for the rest of the night.  Ugh, dive food.  Good thing we stopped at Graeter’s so I could get some mint chip ice cream to calm my stomach.  Oh wait, that’s mint tea that does that?  My bad.

Last night we went to the Reds game.  Yes, it was pretty hot, but we managed to survive.  The Reds, however, did not.  They got beat pretty badly. I haven’t been a big baseball fan since the Indians went to the world series in 1995 (and then broke my heart), but, still, there are things I like about baseball and going to the park made me remember some of those things.

1) Fights!  Oh, yes, I love baseball fights.  I don’t know why it’s sort of disturbingly exciting to see any fight (maybe because it

Fight, fight, fight!

doesn’t happen very often? or maybe it’s just me and my raised-in-the-Canton-hood mindset?), but baseball fights are exceptionally awesome.  Here’s why.  The two guys that exchange words are never the only two to fight.  The outfield comes running in.  The managers come running over.  The whole dugout is cleared and there’s no longer a little fight between two guys, but a war between two teams.  Those baseball players, they may stand around for 90% of the sport, but they ain’t no weenies.  Last night the first batter of the night got into a fight with the catcher.  I thought it was a good omen, turns out it wasn’t.  Worst part?  The first time that catcher (for the Cardinals) was up to bat, we all booed him and then he hit a homerun.  That must have been very satisfying for him.  Anyway, the picture is the view I had of last night’s fight.

2) No cheerleaders.  Yeah, baseball has more dignity than that.  But, I must say that I’m not a fan of those stupid fuzzy monster mascots/nonmascots that every team has now for some reason.  I liked the redlegs mascot, but not the dumb monster.  But hey, at least there weren’t any annoying cheerleaders (speaking as a one-year-only annoying cheerleader).

3) Pop-up foul balls.  I’m not sure if that’s exactly how you say it, but I like when the foul balls go really high and then into the stands.  The going really high part is important because 1) when the foul balls come flying directly at you, you fear you might die and 2) it builds the “Where’s it going to land?  Do I have a chance?” excitement.  Last night I think I saw the best foul ball catch in history.  The ball popped straight up and directly backward toward the windows where the announcers and television people sit.  A few of the windows were open and a single hand, reached out and snatched the ball and then disappeared.  It was so weirdly anticlimactic and mechanical that it seemed kind of like a joke.  It was awesome.

4) Putting the fans on the big screen.  I don’t know why I get kicks from seeing kids staring off in a daze, only to be shaken by their parents, pointing to the screen trying to tell them that they’re on, looking around and then waving like crazy.  Last night they did the “Kiss cam” where they point the camera at couples and then they are supposed to kiss.  It was cute.  But then at the end, they put the camera on two of the Cardinals.  They noticed, stared at the camera for a second, and the one guy grabbed the other and laid one on his cheek.  I like a good sense of humor.

5) The music that each of the batters pick to play when they are at bat.  I think it’s interesting to hear what the players pick and it gives me a few moments to dance in my seat.  I especially like the hip hop selections.  I was very excited, though, to hear that Henry Rolen had picked Viva La Vida by Coldplay.  I can’t resist movement during that song.  If I was up to bat, my choice, hands down, would be Gold Digger.

6) The changing of the pitcher.  I don’t know why, but I think when they decide to change pitchers, it’s sort of regal ceremony.  The manager and the catcher walk to the mound with their heads down, solemnly.  A few other serious looking guys join them.  The pitcher remains calm, nodding.  The whole group exits as the relief pitcher is released from the bull pen.  This is especially fun during a championship series when they have a big closer and they make the release from the bull pen extra dramatic (I’m thinking of good ol’ Jose Mesa!).

7) The slowness of the sport.  I like the fact that people, for the most part, sit casually at baseball games.  Their relaxed state is punctuated only by occasional excitement.  There are nine innings nicely paced by the rituals of the batters and the pitchers, scraping the dirt with their toe, tapping home plate with their bat, taking a couple of slow practice swings, swaying carefully before settling into their own careful stance, while the pitcher tosses the rosin bag and pauses with the uncanny ability to slow down time and capture everyone’s breath before they make their slow-motion pitch that somehow manages to speed up to 90mph.  This goes on through the tops and the bottoms of innings, requiring a 7th inning stretch (which I like a lot).  Being at a baseball games makes it easy to imagine what it felt like to live in a “simpler time” (whether or not that is something that really ever existed).  I like to imagine that as I watch this familiar American scene, it could just as easily be 1920 as 2010.  A few seats in front of us, there was a frail elderly man with wispy white hair, wearing a tailored long-sleeved shirt in the 93 degree heat, holding his grandson (or great grandson?) on his lap watching the same game I imagine he has watched since he was just as small.

An aside: Of course, as I wake from that nostalgic dream, I know that the baseball players of yesteryear were slimmer, hit less home runs (because they weren’t all on steroids), played in stadiums that weren’t named for big corporations and actually wore pants that fit.  Seriously, what happened to baseball pants anyway?  In high school, that would have been number 1 on my list.  Baseball pants.  In the last 15 years they’ve become a little saggy for my taste. 

Sunday night, Dan and I headed south to Cincinnati for the week.  We picked up Uncle Ray from the airport bright and early Monday morning, hung around with the family all day and then took Ray to the mall in the evening to get his new iPad.  He loves it.

Today, I got up early again to run before meeting a couple of my teacher friends for breakfast.  I offered to help them set up their classrooms, but they preferred breakfast.  I know why.  They knew that we would get very little classroom setting up done what with all the yakking that would be taking place.  They are very wise indeed.  So, instead we ate breakfast and yakked it up, most likely annoying the poor waitress who was down a table for a few hours.  But, it was oh so nice getting to tell them how I was doing, hearing about travel, weddings and babies, and listening in on some Very Important School Business.

It reminded me that I’d been wanting to share a story from my first year at Heritage… a puke story, so… fair warning.

My first year at Heritage was my second year teaching, but I had student-taught at Heritage and I was glad to be back at the elementary school that made me feel very welcome, even lucky, to be around such a great group of teachers and a nice crop of students.  It was mid year, and we were coming up on our volcano unit.  I had a great idea.  I would allow students to create volcanoes (that’s not the great idea), but instead of giving them step-by-step instructions, I would let them determine how much of each ingredient to use to construct it.  It would be an inquiry lesson inside of a content lesson and it would be experimental, it would be open-ended and it would be fun.  Before I go any further, it’s worth noting that for one reason or another the classrooms at Heritage had carpet instead of the standard school-issue linoleum.  This is not a good idea in an elementary school where things get spilled and accidents happen pretty frequently.  And, my room had, in it’s first incarnation, housed Kindergartners, so there’s really no telling what was on that carpet.  There were many unidentified stains that I didn’t really like to think about and I certainly preferred that students not even sit on the carpet during group projects or indoor recess.  And as a Science teacher, I did not help the carpet situation.  In fact, I made it much much worse every time I pulled out raisins and peanuts to make conglomerate rocks or filled basins with water to illustrate the way that the plates ride on currents of magma or set up a fake crime scene with carefully (usually) placed drops of fake blood or had that one spaghetti/marshmallow building contest or… well, you get the idea.  The janitor started to enter my room each evening with disdain.  Actually, there’s a really good (bad) story about that particular janitor that I’d rather not go into, but suffice it to say that he wasn’t the typical nice, helpful, kindly janitor… still, I don’t blame him for being generally annoyed by me.

So, back to those volcanoes (now that I’m sure you can guess where this is going).  I gathered up a bunch of materials which included flour, sand, plaster of paris, water, paint, paper towel tubes, and paper plates (that’s all I can remember).  I also created a nice little handout that would “guide” student experimentation.  It was conservative.  Make a plan and test a small amount of each mixture before actually making the whole volcano.  That morning, I lay out all of the materials, students start arriving, and we go through our typical morning routine, unpacking, doing classroom chores, waiting for announcements, etc.  When it’s time, all of the 6th graders head to their first period classroom.

Honestly, I don’t remember anything between the beginning of that first period and the moment I looked around at absolute chaos.  Clouds of flour and plaster of paris surrounded the desks and covered large swaths of the thoroughly soiled carpet.  In other places, the carpet was sopping wet or sand was being ground into it.  Kids were running around with doughy concoctions covering their hands, getting it in their hair and on their clothes.  I shout for someone to go grab a giant trashcan and broom from the cafeteria, so that we can get rid of some of the mess when one student yells, “She’s gonna be sick!”  I look over at a tiny little girl with blunt shoulder length hair and small wire rimmed glasses.  She’s got her hands in a bin of a soupy mixture looking sick and saying something about how she doesn’t like the way the stuff feels.  I tell her to take her hands out and urge her to get to the sink, but just as she takes her hands out and the goop drips on the floor, she leans over her chair and throws up all over that poor, pitiful carpet.  I pause, I look around at what I did, and having no other choice… “Get the janitor!”

A few years later, my room was the first to have linoleum installed.

The past two days have been nice.  Nice enough to forget about blogging.  Yesterday, I read outside on the porch (I’m re-reading Eat, Pray, Love in preparation for the movie that comes out on August 13, that Marcy and I will be seeing together.  I have to say, I’m not disappointed).  Then, I cleaned all morning and ran errands all afternoon.  It was a good day to get things done.  I also had the chance to stop at the library (I had to return some books since I finished reading two books in six days!) and browse at my leisure.  I love browsing the library.  I found two more books and was forced out because the library closes at 4pm on Friday (what’s up with that?).  Later on, Dan and I went out to the North Market for dinner and then to Denise’s for ice cream.  Then, we went home for a little while before heading out to meet up with some school/work friends to celebrate my friend, Nicole’s, successful dissertation defense, which means she is now a real PhD, which means it’s fun to call her doctor and which makes me feel like maybe someday I might get there too.  I hope.

Today, I got up to run 14 miles.  It was such a beautiful morning that I can’t complain (even though my legs are tired).  It was 61 degrees when I woke up, and compared to last weekend, was absolute humid-free heaven.  When I got home and showered up, Dan and I went out for brunch and then walked around Easton for a bit.  Then, I took a much needed nap and made dinner.  We were thinking about watching a movie, but instead we’re just hanging out, Dan playing games, me reading (well, right at this second I’m blogging).  Tomorrow, we pack up for a week in Cincinnati.  Uncle Ray is coming into town early Monday morning! 

P.S. Happy Birthday to my cousin Beth!

After the sweatiest 12 mile run of my life, I decided to make a quick trip up to Canton.  I went to Marcy’s yearly family gathering (called the LAUB) and had a nice time chatting with my BFF and some of her cousins, sticking my feet in the lake and watching lots of babies run around.  Then, I went to a cookout at Julie’s where she and Katie were happy to take some of my clothes that Plato’s didn’t want.  Eat it, Plato’s.  And, now I’m spending the night at my mama’s where Guido promised to make me a delicious breakfast in the morning.  It better be good Guido! 

What a nice day!