Cooped up and Snowed In

This is our chicken coop around 6 am today.

Painted The Town

When Tom visited two weeks ago, he mentioned an area in Portland with interesting shops. It's on NW 23rd street, from Burnside north for 10 or 15 blocks. That's where we went yesterday.
We went to Noah's New York bagels, Escape From, a New York style pizza place; the pizza was great. We found a replacement for our defunct toaster, in a four-bangin' Kitchen-Aid with candy-apple red sides. The theory is that Kitchen-Aid appliances last a loooonnggg time. If it lasts about five times longer than the generic ones we've had, then we'll be money ahead. And of course enjoying the luxury features along the way.
I bought some jeans off the shelf from the Lucky jean company. Luckily they were half off, or I would have paid as much as the toaster for one pair of jeans with about half the life worn out of them, saving me the work of putting all that wear into them. Convenience costs.
I almost had to get them for the novelty of getting pants that fit right off the shelf.
Recently I heard about the benefits of bathing in sea-salt. So, all day, starting with our visit to Lush, I kept my eyes peeled for a decent price on sea-salt. Supposedly it can cure all your problems, which is an attractive proposition. Unfortunately the sea-salt harvesters must be aware of the elixir-like properties of their product, because it costs more than Evian water. We once bought 25 pounds of table salt from Costco for $2.50. The best price I found on sea-salt yesterday would have run me $4,000 for an equivalent 25 pound bag! Come on people, this stuff is found on three-fourths of the planet's surface. What happened to the principles of supply and demand?
Moving on.
We also hit the World Market, where their cheap bags ripped open causing one of our group to smash a bottle of wine on the floor. They were very professional, realized they got stuck with horrible, rip-prone bags, and immediately replaced the items without question. Although Bun-Bun, who was in tow all day, came away smelling like she'd been too long at the wharfs.
What was fascinating though, was the magical powder they used to clean up the spilled wine. I'm going to have to try to look it up and recommend it to everyone for liquid spills on hard floors. They just sprinkled it on and voila! Swept away an entire bottle of wine with a broom and a dust-pan, clean as the day it was made. The kids were impressed by a statue of a duck, and Arthur insisted that I peer into the hole that he found, where you could see inside it. A perfectly round hole, just below the tail-feathers provided a choice view to the internals of the 8 foot tall duck.
Finishing up, we hit Moonstruck for a truffle and some hot chocolate, a kids store for some new rain boots and slickers. Got the matching dinosaur type for Arthur and the frog pattern for Jamey. Then off to Finnegan's, dinner at Isabel, Asian/Mexican fine dining; Powell's
10 hours, all tallied, of fun in the city.

Dinner Train

Driving home through Battle Ground I noticed something that made me chuckle out-loud: the Spirit of Washington dinner train. Back when we lived in Renton, our house was only a block or two from the depot where the Spirit of Washington was based, making nightly dinner runs from Renton to Woodinville and back. One of the nicer things about leaving that neighborhood was escaping the blanket of soot that fell out of those large diesel engines as they idled.
I'm in no danger of being enshrouded in soot from it in it's present location. But I did have a fleeting notion that the train was stalking me. And that ludicrous notion is what made me chuckle.

The Tastes of The Father

We hear a lot about the sins of the father, but we don't hear about the tastes of the father as much. I'm talking, in particular, about musical tastes. All of us grow up listening to the music of our parents' taste to some extent. Sometimes we're deeply influenced by those tastes. I've read many an interview with successful musicians who related how they spent hours listening to their parents' record collection.
To come to the point, I've lent Arthur the use of my new MP3 player these past few nights and so far he's been listening to Leonard Cohen and Pink Martini. Leonard Cohen, he refers to as the 'Old Man Songs'.
At dinner yesterday, he said
"When I was listening to the Old Man songs, I heard him say 'When they said repentz repentz repentz, I wonder what they meant.'"
Some may consider this signs that the tastes are really sins, but I couldn't be happier.

Arthur's Bunny Song

Here is a song Arthur made up.