Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Congrats Paul and Molly on your secret marriage last weekend.

Mary’s site is back up and in need of updating.

Here’s Jeremy modeling the most depressing video poker room I’ve ever seen. Spotted at the (otherwise very nice) Veritable Quandry restaurant downtown.

Katherine didn’t really get naked. It’s just a photo trick.

Today it’s random photos to cover up that I spent most of the weekend in front of this computer working on my reel. The first picture is of the haunted playhouse in Kim’s grandma’s backyard. The next one is a cubed egg made with an egg-cuber (naturally), a present from Margaret. And the wolf is from Reel Em Inn, which has the best fried chicken and nicest waitress I’ve encountered in Portland.
Apparently, I missed a very interesting party on Saturday night.

Inside it’s completely different from the movie, kind of the archetypal ski lodge with a touch of Fraggle Rock.

There’s no wide hallways for kids to ride their bigwheels.

This was in the newish looking ski hangout for teens. Clusters of trophies are huge in Portland.

Yes, yes. Redrum! Ginni stopped by today and we drove up to the Timberline Lodge atop Mount Hood. Jeez, this feels like so long ago! I remember being very scared of falling off the mountain, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as driving through Veil, CO. It was mother’s day and instead of wisely eating at the buffet at the lodge, we ate Taco Bell and Hardys.

Tomorrow, we go inside!

We celebrated my birthday last week at Sloan’s restaurant in North Portland and as soon as I sat down, I had all these false-suppressed memories of maybe not even me, but some child being taken here in the late seventies and being told their parents were splitting up. I have no idea why. It was a really great place. The waitress told Stephen she used to hang out with Heart.

Booths at the bar! Genius!

You might think it’s impossible to beat ‘booths at the bar’ but this table was connected to the cab of an 18-wheeler that was built into the side of the building.

I highly recommend checking this place out. The food was pretty good and it seems like they could really use the business. Plus there was a middle aged transvestite there, very conservatively dressed who was playing pool and she was wearing a special ‘pool playing glove’ with flowers on it.

Kim’s amazing house in New Orleans, kind of a juke-joint version of Pee Wee’s Playhouse…

More evidence of the old family sign business. Kim is holding Mr. Bingle, a local department store-created xmas character. I don’t remember that he helped Santa in any way, but just flew around and did stuff in the air. He had a very memorable jingle, though. My hope is that his head gets reconnected one day.

This is what it was like outside that night.

So I didn’t make it the Safari Club this weekend, but here’s a similar place in Paris I would like to visit/live. More pictures here.

At the Rose Fest on Saturday.

The last of the old New Orleans photos. The picture of Kim is from a visit to the St. Roch cemetary. I’ve always liked it because it reminded me of the last scene of Suspiria.

New Orleans, 1992. Jeez, I’ve been running with this sign schtick for a while it seems. I’ve been threatening to only be interested in Nascar as some ‘new leaf’. This was taken one day when Kim and I drove from Baton Rouge to New Orleans using the rickety old highway that connected the two cities before the soulless interstate came along. When we saw this, we were both all, ‘Oh-no-they-didunt!’ Well, the original French definition for ‘cretin’ is ‘innocent victim’, so maybe that’s what they meant. Though if you’ve ever been on Airline Highway, you could see how it could go either way.

From the chapel at the Saint Roch cemetary in New Orleans, one of the most baffling places I’ve ever been. Upon entering, you see an altar where a life-life statue of Jesus lies in a glass coffin. Off to the right is the small room featured, which is full of statuary that depicts organs healed by St. Roch if you said enough prayers. Does no one send flowers? And who made these? Was there really a business you went to and said, ‘So my arm/heart/brain is healed after X number of rosarys I performed and now I have to pay the piper and get a stone reproduction of my foot made to hang in a small chapel.’ This is one of those moments where people from the not that distant past seemed as alien as the ancient Greeks.

One of the truly great signs of NO. It’s still there. I check every time I’m home. And the neon still lights up. Kim’s dad told me the sign company he worked for years ago created this and my admiration soared.

I didn’t recognize who this was when I first scanned it. Yikes.