Recap of the past month

Dear blogosphere: I have not been reading your blogs much in the past few weeks.

Dear twitterverse: I have not been keeping up with your tweets much, if at all, in the past few weeks.

Work has been pretty busy the past few weeks. We have an end-of-the-month deadline that, fortunately, is not one of those impossible-even-when-working-80-hour-weeks deadlines, but is a decent challenge and entirely attainable. Meeting the deadline means fame and fortune for everyone on my team (okay, not exactly, but we all want to make the deadline.) My time for reading blog posts and tweets has suffered a bit–as well as my time, energy, and motivation to make them. So here’s a quick summary…

A few weeks ago was the Flugtag. My meager photoset is up on Flickr. It was pretty crazy-packed this time around. The gates opened two hours before the first flight time and I thought my hour-before would give enough time to spare. The bus ride over should have been my first warning. The #14 was so packed that the driver blew right past bus stops full of people. Every time there would be an angry, insulted, and disappointed “heeeeyyy!” from the people outside as the bus went past without even slowing. Honestly–angry, insulted, AND disappointed all in one breath, starting with the angry “h” and the disappointed trailing off “yyyy.” The Flugtag this year seemed longer than in previous ones. It was thirty-someodd entries and at about 20 we got tired of standing, packed in like sardines, and went to the south waterfront McCormick & Schmidt’s bar. The had the event fed in to the big screen TV there, sans audio and with some horrible video compression blockiness, but we watched the remainder of the event in the air conditioning, drinking wonderful microbrews.

Last weekend, I went with Northwest Paranormal Investigations (a group whose events I’ve been absent from a lot recently because of work, life, and Kim’s business) to the Edgefield. I have a brief photoset of some of the more touristy things. This particular investigation was pretty informal and not officially sanctioned by the hotel. It was mainly wandering the halls without drawing a lot of attention to ourselves–so obviously without a whole lot of gear. The Edgefield is one of those places with a weird history. It started life as a Poor Farm–a large plantation of what was basically indentured servants; the lived for free on the farm in exchange for their work in the fields. It has since been a childrens’ tuberculosis hospital, a nursing home, and several other things, but closed down in the 60s. Between then and when it was bought by the McMenamins in 1990, there were squatters, taggers, and (supposedly) satanists. The found that a large pentagram was painted on the floor of one of the rooms and weird stuff was happening there and on the floor above. The brought in bagpipers (?!) to help exorcise things.

There is a painting of the room and the pipers, with the (possibly offensive to some) pentagram conveniently obscured by an entirely-out-of-place coat rack. Not only is the coat rack nowhere near an entryway–it is in a second-floor hallway–it is a good 10 or 15 feet long and so perfectly obscures just a portion of the painting that it appears to have been custom made just for the purpose. At any rate, here is the painting:
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The door of each room has a painting depicting a person from the Poor House. The one on the supposedly haunted room features the very same pipers in a configuration that looks very similar to a pentagram:
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And i will conclude this section with one more photo from the Edgefield. This is the elevator. It’s a small service elevator. Upon entering, you are surrounded by this lady: three on the back wall, one on each side wall, and two on the front wall. When the door slides closed, there is yet another of her on the door (but with a flower instead of a face), completing the circle. I am not claustrophobic at all and never have a problem with elevators–but this particular elevator really left me feeling closed in.
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We have a new kitty! As you may or may not remember, there is this black-and-white fuzzy guy who has been hanging around our house:
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We finally got confirmation from neighbors that nobody knows who he belongs to. He isn’t fixed, had a bit of a runny eye, and was a bit feral (not crazy wildcat, but rough around the edges.) If he belonged to anyone, he was seriously neglected. We finally took him to the vet yesterday. $300 and a nearly clean bill of health later (he’s on some antibiotics now and was badly dehydrated), I guess he’s ours.
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Last night, we had dinner out in Beaverton. It’s a suburb of Portland, and only about 20 minutes away, but feels like an entirely different world. I’ve been detached from suburbia for so long that it feels like a foreign place these days. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot of the same feelings I got from the last time I went down to visit Orange County.

Posted in: Dear Diary Portland

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