• On the 6th we went to our company’s holiday party, held for the second year running at Uptown Billiards. This is the first year that Kyla and I were actually able to go, thanks to a delightful lack of Snowpocalypse this time. I shot a few games of pool, watched others lose money at the card table, noshed on many more delectable lemon tarts than I ought, and generally had a good time.
• My holiday shopping was completed by December 12th this year. I’m very, very happy about this. (Now, my holiday wrapping, on the other hand… well. Er.)
• We “enjoyed” one hell of a cold snap the week of the 6th… and my roomie took most of that week off from work, so I was on the train each direction. It wasn’t fun, but I managed okay… except for the morning that I was stupid enough to forget adding a sweater to my bundle-up layers. Whoops. See, Hillsboro is always several degrees colder than downtown Portland, and it’s a 15-minute walk from train station to office… ugh. Still: It beats suffering another Snowpocalypse.
• Among all of the buying neat things for friends and loved ones, I did sneak in a purchase just for me: A Logitech G110 “gaming” keyboard for my main computer. Now, don’t think I bought it because the keys light up (blue, red, or purple). I bought it for the anti-ghosting, and because reviews indicated that among gaming keyboards, it’s the one which still functions reasonably well as a regular keyboard, something at which many of the “gaming” rigs seem to fail utterly. Oh, and it wasn’t hideously expensive, either.
• I love knowing that my kids are going to love their presents. Sometimes, being Dad is awesome.

Now, let’s see if I can stay on top of this “journal” thing I’m supposed to be doing…

Crazy aside: We ended up renting a Chevy Malibu sedan from Enterprise; the previous renter brought it back because it was too old. If that car was manufactured before 2004 I’d be stunned, people. “Too old?” As Kyla said, “Let me show you my beat up old Ford Escort, lady.”

At any rate, after a few hours’ travel spent kibbutzing and listening to Daft Punk and other odd road-music selections, we arrived and proceeded to wander the length and breadth of the place, looking at fishies and crustaceans, snapping photographs, and amusing ourselves with silly banter.

Photographs, I said!

Some of the pictures make for good journal fodder, so we’ll highlight them…

Both of the kids tried their hand (as it were, ha ha!) at the “Crab claw grip” contraption to see if they were as strong as a crab’s claw.

Modern kid-friendly museums love to have a “crawl inside” exhibit. This one was more amusing for those on the outside than for those on the inside, especially since the crabs were all facing outward so the view from inside consisted mostly of crab butts.

Allow me to introduce to you the stuff of nightmares: The Japanese spider crab.

Much like during the previous visit, Erica took full advantage of the opportunity to play in the tidepool exhibit. (I honestly have no idea where Alex wandered off to during this part of the tour… much like last time, come to think on it.)

The highlight of the aquarium experience is a walk through the underwater passage. Unfortunately, photographs taken from the inside of a curved transparent reflective surface tend to come out… poorly. I guess you truly had to be there, but here’s an idea of what it was like.

It took a few tries, but I was eventually able to get a picture in which both of my children were smiling.

I think we all had a good time… even if I had to convince my kids to show it!

In those early years after moving to middle-of-nowhere, Washington state, our little family spent a lot of time with Mom’s mother and stepfather, probably because they had a reasonable amount of money on hand and we, er, didn’t. (When Mom was married to one particular sleazeball, however, we didn’t spend a lot of time with the grandparents. I won’t name names, ’cause Sis may read this and her blood pressure will go up enough just thinking about it.) My step-grandparent, one Mr. Dobson, joined us for dinner at Lindsey’s one day. I’m fairly certain that Mom, Sis, Grandma and “Grandpa” and I were the dinner party, but I won’t swear to that on a Bible or anything.

Hey, who’s going to turn down pizza? But, wait! What’s all of this icky garbage on top? Olives? They make my stomach turn, and that’s just from the smell. Mushrooms? I can tolerate the fungus occasionally, nowadays, but back then it was another icky foodstuff I tried to avoid. So, being something under the age of ten years old, I childishly voiced my disdain for the selected toppings.

What was Mr. Dobson’s rational, reasoned response? He scraped every last olive and mushroom off of the entire pizza… and placed this unwanted bounty on my plate. That’s right, folks. Everyone else got to eat plain sauce-and-cheese pizzas while I choked down what I could of the disgusting glop in front of me. One child complains, everybody suffers. Perhaps there was supposed to be a lesson for me in the experience, but if there was, I didn’t take away what he’d hoped for. Mostly I left the table with the devout belief that my “grandpa” was a complete asshole. Not that I had the words for such a sentiment for a few years yet, but you get the picture.

Oddly enough, this experience didn’t turn me off to pizza entirely. We never invited “grandpa” to dinner at a restaurant after that, though…

I was only eight years old; my sister, not yet three. Mom was dating a guy who owned two Ford Mustangs, one small and black and nifty, the other big and green and ugly. He owned, or at least had the run of, some property in the Cascade foothills within reasonable driving distance of Brewster, WA. We were at his little cabin in the woods for the weekend. I think that we were skinning logs that morning, but it may have been the previous day. (Bear with me. We’re talking about a temporal distance of twenty-six years, after all.)

I remember what sounded a bit like a sonic boom, but with that curiously muffled quality that a great distance imparts to any loud noise. We were all outside, and I think we all immediately knew what happened. I knew, anyway, and Mom wasted no time hustling us away from the cabin and back into town.

What came next is a bit vague, though I do have a clear memory of Brewster later on (possibly the next day), with overcast skies and a couple of inches of ash covering everything in sight. During one summer, a couple of years later, Sis and I were living in Soap Lake with The Savages (Ken & Virginia) and there were still ashdrifts all over the desert.

All I can think now is, “I’m glad the prevailing winds would carry the ash away from Portland if that happens again.” Well… I also think, “I hope Hood doesn’t go next!”

The scene is… some sort of event, many years ago. I was a young’un, not yet a teenager even. It may have been a county fair. There’s a chance it was a boat show at the Expo Center. I’m fairly certain that the venue was covered, but don’t hold me to that. The point is that there were various things to see and do, and my family was seeing and doing. Mostly seeing.

The cast consists of myself and… well, probably Sis and maybe Mom and I kind of think that her mother was with us, but I can’t be sure. We were a small group, maybe four or five of us, so maybe step-grandpa was with us, or maybe one out of the string of men in Mom’s life. Maybe it was random other people.

Yes, I’m filing this under “Memories.” Yes, my memory really is this hazy for much of my early life. Deal with it.

At this event we came across a handwriting analysis booth. That’s right, the deal was that if you write a sentence (very likely the best-known of the pangrams, “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.”), they’ll tell you what kind of person you are. I was young, bored and gullible, so I gave it a shot. This is back when I could still more-or-less write in cursive.

I don’t remember what else was on the analysis sheet they gave me, though I’m sure it included concepts like “too snarky for his own good” and “probably needs to get out more.” What statement I found interesting was, “will prevaricate to prove a point.” I thought that was an awfully nice thing to say about me. Hey, it sounded good. A big word like that must mean something bold and positive, right?

The elders with whom I traveled finally set me straight. “Prevaricate means lie, Karel.”

Oh.

Looking back, I probably took it to mean something like “persevere.” Ah, well. I was young.

I wasn’t too young to recognize the truth of it, though. There’s always been a part of me willing to sacrifice a bit of truth to convince people of something. Even in my darker days I didn’t really lie all that much about what I had or hadn’t actually done. It’s more a matter of being in a debate and exaggerating my chosen example which illustrates why I’m right. (Of course I’m right. Right?)

And thanks to that handwriting analysis, I keep this fact in the back of my head as often as possible so I don’t let that impulse run away with me. At least, not any more than I can catch myself doing…

The Denver story is less about why I went (to learn how to use the systems management interface at my new job) than it is about the dinners I ate. No, really. It’s all about steak, where we found steak, how good the steak was, and the journeys to and from the steak.

What? I like steak.

My boss and I arrived Monday night and settled in at the hotel. We were hungry, we hadn’t met any of the other course attendees, and we weren’t about to eat at the hotel itself. So we walked a couple of blocks to the Bennigan’s.

The area around Denver’s new airport is rather strange. Apparently nobody wanted that sprawling monstrosity in their backyard, so it’s located way the heck out in the middle of nothing and nowhere. The hotel industry, sensing the conjunction of cheap land prices and impending planeloads of tourists, built little islands of hospitality near the epicenter of the aforementioned nothing and nowhere. Our hotel was in one such cluster including about seven other hotels plus a couple of restaurants. We elected not to try Ruby Tuesday, so Bennigan’s was the only choice we had.

As near as I can tell, Bennigan’s is like any other mainstream American chain restaurant. In the Portland area, Applebee’s is the rough equivalent. The food was decent, but nothing to write home about. Which is to say that if it wasn’t for the other meals I ate during the trip, you’d not be reading about this one.

On our way back to the hotel, I heard a horrible electronic-sounding screeching noise from one of the trees we walked past. I looked intently but couldn’t find the device which was malfunctioning. Remember this, later on…

During our first session of class the next day, a sales guy for the company hosting the event sauntered into our cramped little meeting room and asked, “Hey, who wants to go to downtown Denver?” Well, duh. We’d already seen enough flat brown wasteland to suit us for years to come, so my boss and I joined the group after classes that evening. This was my first trip in a limousine, and it was one of the most surreal transportation experiences of my life. The interior was done up with odd vari-colored lighting (including many, many fiber optic dots all over) and black plastic and so forth, leading one of our cohorts to quip that it looked like something out of a Lionel Ritchie video. You can get a (somewhat blurry) sense of the ambience from this picture my boss took with his phone’s camera:

That’s how we ended up at The Keg, thanks in part to rave reviews from a couple of our party’s members. Well, the food was pretty good, but I’m not certain it was worth the kind of price tag I was seeing. The service left a lot to be desired… like, service. Slow, sloppy, error-prone waitstaff contributed to our second night’s meal being the longest of the three, objectively and subjectively.

There isn’t much to say about the limo ride back to the hotel other than to point out that I was very glad when it was over.

Our first two steak experiences had the lot of us fired up. Surely, somewhere in Denver, we could find a truly satisfying steak dinner! So we did what any traveller would do: We asked the hotel staff. They directed us to a sign-up sheet for a service which would pick us up, drive us to and deliver us back again from a little restaurant called Emil-Lene’s.

Did I mention that the driver was the restaurant’s owner, or that the chariot of choice was one of those short-bus vehicles usually used to shuttle the elderly and infirm? Yes, that was a fun little trip, folks.

How can I best describe Emil-Lene’s itself? It’s another middle-of-nowhere location, except the building itself looks like a ranch-style home that’s had extra rooms grafted on. Here I was, traveling with business owners and well-paid techies, and they were starting to wonder what they’d gotten themselves into. Once seated, we were treated to our first amusement of the night, namely the wine list which came hand-written on some sheets of notepad paper. (Don’t look at me; my boss is the wine drinker.)

That paled in comparison to the amusement value of the menu, though. See, there is no written menu. The waitress presented us with our options. “You can have sirloin in X ounces, Y ounces or Z ounces. You can have prime rib in X ounces, Y ounces or Z ounces. You can have filet mignon in X ounces, Y ounces or Z ounces. You can also have a salmon dinner or a chicken dinner.” That was the menu, folks. (I went for the filet, in case you’re wondering.)

To top off the fun, when it came time to add pepper to our salads, out came the biggest peppermill I’ve ever seen. Seriously, this thing was huge. The patron would hold the bottom of it over his plate while the waitress reached up in order to spin the ball at the top. Don’t believe me?

www.pickonus.com

Obviously.

Let’s wrap this up. The steak was heavenly. So was the dessert, namely fresh-made ice cream with chocolate fudge topping, which I was not going to partake of originally but felt compelled to eventually based on the reactions of everyone else around the table. It wasn’t just the best steak dinner of the trip, but in fact it was the best steak dinner I’ve enjoyed in many years.

So, if you’re ever travelling to the Denver area and are hankerin’ for some steak: Emil-Lene’s.

Oh, and that noise from earlier? I heard it again, magnified a thousand-fold, outside of Emil-Lene’s. Perhaps you’ve already guessed what it was.

Cicadas.