P-Town and the Quasi-Mellow Weekend

ROAD TRIP!
One of the things The Mrs. brings to our relationship is a collection of pretty cool people, mostly musicians, from her past.  Add my own cool musician-type people and you've got a great weekend in Portland.  Actually, it was only an overnight, technically speaking.  But what we managed to cram into 24 hours!

I'm still exhausted.

We left early Friday afternoon, which made it possible to make the jaunt in exactly three hours.  The Mrs. surprised me by directing us, not to the Ramada by the airport, but to the Hotel deLuxe, where she'd scored a pretty awesome queen-plus-valet-parking-plus-restaurant-credit deal.  We were upgraded to a king room too.  Good thing too, because although the rooms are nicely appointed, they're teeny.

We cleaned up, changed and headed over to my friend Chris D.'s house for dinner.  Chris used to play keyboards for a Bay Area band called The Rise many years ago, at one point sharing the Epithet recording label with a fledgling dreampop project called And Tears Fell.  Chris and I have been in and out of communication for the last couple decades, but recently got caught up again and it was great to finally meet his wife, Laura, and kids (and introduce them to my new bride).  After some Italian takeout and some more catching up, we headed off to a great dive bar called Cactus Jack's.  SweetJuice started playing at 9PM and didn't stop until the proverbial doors had been blown off the joint.  We finally got out of there at a quarter of 1AM, but not before they'd invited a former bandmate up to play guitar, another friend to play sax, and The Mrs. herself to sing on one of their songs.  Adam had actually asked us both to come up and play one of our songs at the break, but by the time the second set started, I was exhausted.  It did give us impetus to get a few songs ready for public consumption, however.

It was a late night, and we were up by 0830 hours.  Breakfast with my Mozart Air Raid bandmate, Gordon, and his wife, Heather.  We followed that with a brief stop at Gordon's house before heading back home.

We were so sapped by the time we got home that we just changed into sweats and bummed around for the rest of the day.

Sunday came, and with it some guy time online with Ron & Hans, while The Mrs. went for a walk with Stephanie.  I got my walk in when it came time to grab some milk and eggs so that I could make red beans & rice with cornbread for dinner (one of our new faves) while The Mrs. went to get her hair cut.  We chilled out to some more Buffy episodes and were happy to flop into bed at 10PM.

So here we are, looking at another week, but with a semi-restful, semi-active and totally awesome weekend behind us.