How did I miss this!

Yours truly was playing in Rocky Mountain National Park over the weekend, out of touch from the world and taking in the views as evidenced by the pics below.

On Friday morning I scurried out of the house around 4:30 to catch my flight and managed to leave every electronic device I owned behind.  It was liberating!  Four fantastic days later I returned to hours of social media messages and emails to catch up on… (please spare me the ‘it’s a hard life’ speech)  I powered through most of my backlog yesterday, but somehow missed seeing a very important announcement… and today I am KICKING myself!

Dave Chappelle performed a FREE show at Pioneer Courthouse square in downtown Portland last night/ early this morning!  If only I had known!?$%@!!  Anywho, here’s what went down…

Check out the full story with Video here

Curry Wars

Trrickleup and her dude love the Chaat House and have been witnessing this rivalry first hand.  SW 12th and Yamhill has the best Indian cart food in town.  Nice to see someone is taking notice of the hilarity happening on this corner!  The Willamette Week article is well worth the read.

Can I get a restraining order with that dahi vada?

Burgertastic!

It doesn’t have bacon, but it’s sure might help your heart skip a few beats… its burger and cheese sandwiched in doughnut… delish!

… like you needed ANOTHER reason to come to Portland…

Full story here

[courtesy of themoment.blogs.nytimes.com]

On Wisconsin

We finally made it. We’re in the land of milk and honey – with special emphasis on milk. That’s right. We’re in Wisconsin for the holidays. We being myself and my lovely fiance.

News flash: people that live in Wisconsin are deliriously happy to be here. It’s like a cult – led by Brett Farve. No matter how cold the weather, Wisconsinites in Wisconsin love to be from Wisconsin and can’t imagine why more people don’t live in Wisconsin and why anyone who does live in Wisconsin would ever leave Wisconsin. When you’re from Wisconsin, everything relates to Wisconsin in some way. If something was invented, it was likely invented in Wisconsin. If a record was broken, it was probably broken by a Wisconsinite, or someone related to the Wisconsinite, however thrice removed. The pride is beyond measure.

Give me a chance to explain. Someone can grow up in Podunk-a-waukee milking cows and smoking corn husks or even in a suburb outside a nice post-industrial village like Green Bay, go to the first-rate University of Wisconsin – Madison for pennies on the dollar with in-state tuition, get wasted at Badger games and State Street Brats, Paul’s Club, and the Red Shed, graduate with practically no student debt, get a job at a bio-tech mill or in the Capitol making a comfortable salary, discover the magic of happy hour at Genna’s, Cocoliquot, Natt Spiel, go to graduate school or law school – also UW-Madison for dirt cheap – start a “career” doing something productive like saving the world or designing the next generation of Harleys, find a spouse, get hitched, buy a mortgage, make babies, and start it all over again. But with fewer cows.

This, I hypothesize, is the life cycle – subject to myriad variations – of the remarkably self-actualized and joyful Wisconsinite. And I’m not knocking it. Quite the opposite, actually. Besides, they’d hunt me down if I did. This is a cult, after all.

What I find so interesting is the reaction I get whenever I try to explain this phenomenon – and it is a phenomenon – to the surprisingly large number of non-Wisconsinites that populate the rest of the world.