How did the trip go? A little something like this…

Friday, Daytime: Packed, hit the store for last minute needs, headed to train station, picked up tickets (whew!), met Kyla who was taking the same train for different reasons.

Friday, Nighttime: Rode the train (which left only fifteen minutes late), watched The Illusionist (enjoyable movie overall, Edward Norton is good and Paul Giamatii is superb), disembarked (arrived only fifteen minutes late, something of a miracle for an Amtrak run), met Jak at station, went to Jak & Karawynn’s house, met Sam (cat) and Tessa (dog), settled in, drank orange juice, got the grand tour of the place, met Tom and also Stacy (both humans) and hugged on Karawynn, chatted with everyone for a while, finally slept.

Saturday, Daytime: Had toasted ciabatta bread and orange juice for breakfast (yum), sat around shooting the breeze with fellow Pooligans, went shopping for dinner ingredients, then shopping for wine (during which I amused myself by looking for our clients’ labels), continued on to a quick spree through the Pike Market area, went back to Jak & Karawynn’s place, met Maggy again, read through the printed copies of Digger (outstanding stuff, I kid you not), helped a wee tiny bit with meal preparation (“here, wrap these cobs of corn in foil”).

Saturday, Nighttime: Enjoyed a dinner of grilled ahi steaks and corn-on-the-cob and garlic bread and juice, watched with amusement while others ate grilled mushrooms and grilled garlic and grilled onions and grilled zucchini and salmon (and drank plenty of wine, which oddly enough never set off my “drunk people trigger”), told the story of last year’s Denver trip (the search for the perfect steak dinner, which I assure you was not intended as an indictment of the no-red-meat menu that night, especially not after the ahi turned out to be so incredibly scrumptious!), conversed and chatted and shot the breeze and such, finally staggered off to bed.

Sunday In Brief: Woke up late, put stuff together (nearly forgot my deodorant!), said goodbyes, went to King Station, boarded, had the good fortune to sit next to a companionable and reasonably intelligent person for the entire four hour ride, arrived in Portland, was greeted by Kyla (who had arrived mere hours before, on the previous train), went home, ate dinner, vegged out and then conked out.

All in all, I had a splendid time. My allergies troubled me a bit, and I enjoyed a couple of moderately unpleasant headaches, and (of course) sleeping in a strange location was challenging, but those are the only downsides of note. Mind you, I sort of feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend…

I’m heading to The Emerald City this weekend to visit with distant friends. I have clothes, allergy medicines, toiletries, snacks and amusements prepped and packed. There’s no doubt that I’ll forget to pack something I actually want or need, but I’m reasonably certain that I have the basics covered.

This is my first chance to get (and stay) out of town in quite some time. I hope for a reasonably relaxing and enjoyable couple of days. I also, of course, hope that Amtrak doesn’t screw things up more than they already have.

Be good, and I’ll see you next week.

Happiness is… receiving two text messages on my phone within thirty seconds of one another, one each from two of my favorite people, letting me know that they’d bumped into one other unexpectedly at one of the downtown Starbucks locations. (With as many of those one can find in Portland, the odds against this are higher than you might think.) As in, one was standing in line right behind the other. Serendipity at its finest, I think.

It’s the simple things that can turn an otherwise-drab morning into something quite a bit more tolerable, no?

Here’s an amusing bit of luck for you: This morning on the way in to work I stopped at the Starbucks for my usual hot cocoa and a pastry. (I normally get one of the breakfast sandwiches, but I try not to get stuck in that rut.) The total came to four dollars and eighty cents. I knew that my refillable card had somewhere in the vicinity of five dollars left, so I had the cashier give it a swipe just to see what would happen.

Imagine my surprise to see the receipt which read that my card, after completing the purchase, had zero dollars and zero cents remaining!

Neat, huh? Now if only I could translate that kind of luck into something involving serious amounts of cash…

I was almost asleep and then remembered that I wanted to get this posted before it slipped my mind completely.

Related to an earlier disaster regarding certain bank accounts, today I uncovered another slightly smaller disaster. During the process of getting things remedied, the customer support representative on the phone needed to verify that I am who I say I am. The bank’s preferred method of doing so, apparently, involves asking a series of multiple choice questions. Today I got the “addresses you’ve used before” quiz set. As this was being explained to me I stated confidently that I’ve only moved twice in the last decade so it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

Yep. I opened my big mouth again. You’d think I’d know better by now: The instant I make a definitive statement I’m proven wrong almost immediately.

The first question went back to the heady days of my early marriage. The second question was a trick, as none of the presented multiple-choice options were valid. For the third, they went back to my earliest days as a semi-independent functional adult person. It’s a good thing I remembered the street names or I might’ve had a much more difficult time getting today’s crisis settled!

I hasten to point out, mind you, that I’m very grateful that policies are in place to verify that the person who calls Washington Mutual to monkey around with my account is actually Me and not just some random identity thief who was able to learn my SSN and DOB. I highly approve of this sort of protective policy in general.

That’d make a fine band name, anyway. They would’ve been playing at the lightswitch rave in my bedroom last night. Though a proper rave would’ve included underdressed party girls, wouldn’t it? Damn my luck.

Let me explain. (There isn’t too much, so I don’t need to sum up.) You see, apparently the 5th of July is the night on which the neighborhood kids get to light off the cheaper fireworks. Their weapon of choice? The strobe bomb (or whatever its technical name is, which I can’t be bothered to look up right now on account of being very, very tired and a bit cranky). I gotta tell ya, it’s awfully difficult to get to sleep when my bedroom is illuminated to almost daylight brightness several times per second for ten seconds, every few minutes, for well over an hour. Occasionally they changed gears and lit off various screamingly noisy things. Hooray for variety. I think they ran out of ammunition around 11:30, then settled for just talking at full volume for a while. Neighbors, schmeighbors. Nobody needs to work the next day, right?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to see about staggering and stumbling my way through my workday.