Wonderfalls. I need something light, fun, and weird every now and then. And who doesn't enjoy a strange bout of psychosis? Besides, it was a good show that just wasn't given a real chance. Like many of Fox's better shows. Strange, that.

However, there are a lot of good ones, and they didn't get to run their course, like Arrested Development and Gargoyels (has to be under the originator of the show). Space Above and Beyond, which was forced to end too soon.

In someone else's blog. I've had it happen before (its very flattering!) but this one caught my attention.

Shameless self-promotion by promoting others promoting self (say that five times fast):

http://www.thing-of-beauty.com/vogue-sponge-by-frost-indri

We went to the Beaverton Farmer's market today. Its set up every Saturday in the "downtown" district of Beaverton. Read: 10 min walk from where we live. I think. I've never timed it, but it feels like ten min.

It was a very rich farmers market. I got a Lions-mane mushroom to try. I predict that Justin will shrug and say "it tastes like a mushroom." We also got what looks to be red spring onions. (A lot like the onions that used to grow wild in my back yard growing up, only bigger and reddish-purple.) Justin got a spicy mustard from the local Nun's that he likes. Divinely Original. And then there was a local cheese wench who sold some lovely french style soft cheeses.

There were loads of fresh produce everywhere. Good food, and about 3 arts vendors. Looks like a prime and virgin market for functional ceramics. :} Mwa ha ha ha ha! Etc.

I enjoyed myself, and look forward to a time when we have some sort of income.

Justin and I went to Abhiruchi. The food was SO good. Prices... about $15 for a meal, plus $2.50 for a drink (If you got either the Mango Lassi or the Mango Milkshake.) But we had a coupon for half off one meal.

A meal came with appetizer (thin crispy flat-bread thing), the veggie curry of the day, jasmine rice, about three different dips, nan, your main course, and a desert.

It was a LOT of food. and it was so good. If we could afford it, and if Justin was into the ritual restaurant visit every week (I had El Toro almost every Saturday night growing up) I would so have this place on my list. The atmosphere was good, the music was authentically Indian, even when it had a western influence, and the waiter was awesome. The goolab Jammun (spelled completely phonically) was a bit intense, with none of the subtle spice that I was expecting, but it was still good. The kheer (rice pudding with topica(sp?)) was warm, and it was good. I mean, I HATE rice pudding, but I've never had it warm nor with cute little balls of topica swimming in it. I actually enjoyed about two mouthfuls.

And now I have lunch for tomorrow. *happy*

Went well. He was cranky and complained the whole way leading up to it, but then he had a blast during the party. He didn't want me to come (he wasn't going to be at the house, never mind that he never goes outside of it except to go to the dentist) he told Patty to uninvite people (seriously, there weren't going to be a lot of people to begin with).

But he had a huge smile after the first person came in. Thank God he's decided to start wearing his dentures.

Curses: my computer seems to have a virus, or its just plain being sucky. Either way, its going to be a week before I can play Fallout again, and I'm likely to have to start over. XP

Sushi: We reciently tried two sushi places. One tonight one earlier in the week.

Mio Sushi: Justin said the sushi was good. The chicken Katsu I had was definitely good and went really well with the soy sauce. However, there was a dipping sauce they provided under some strange tsomethingkatsu name. If it wasn't pure A-1 steak sauce, then it was just a slightly altered A-1 Steak sauce.

The salad was mediocer, but they gave me a huge portion of rice to make up for the miso soup that I couldn't eat. (seaweed-ikky fish taste.)

Star sushi: Sushi was pretty good for $3 a pop, and even better, it was served up on the conveyor belt. ^_^ So much fun! I mean, I only got the chocolate chip carrot cake cookie off the conveyor belt, but I was kept amused by the dishes passing me by the entire meal.

BTW, the C^5 was way better than the warm cheese cake.

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I ended up getting a folding bike. I had resigned myself to getting an eight speed, but Justin and I decided to go search out the one store in the city that carried all things "odd" about biking. Basically, they carried recumbents and folding bikes. We just don't have the room for a recumbent, but it was painfully tempting. Justin has a slight "crush" on the recumbent trike that he sat in while I took my new bike out for the test run. He said that it felt like sitting in a cock-pit, and it felt like it should go really fast. No clue if it does, but it felt like it should.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. So I was resigned to getting an eight speed, but this store, Cumberland bikes, had a 21 speed for the same price that I was seeing online for the 8 speed. ! ^_^ So now I'll be able to try to keep up with Justin a little better, AND I'll have a better time on the train than he will (so par for the course.)

This episode of the X-files creeped me out badly when I was a kid. How could it not? I had a patch of trees that I often felt watching me in the dark in my back yard, a house that had used white noise to talk to me, and a mom who loved to garden (thus lots o' lush greeness.) No 600-700 year old trees, mind you, but I think my imagination was powerful enough to get past that little problem.

Yep. Nothing like being scared of the dark when you're 15. Ah, X-files. Good memories. Good show. Creeeeeeeepy first season, when the acting isn't terrible.

It's too damn addictive.

http://www.redrobin.com/

Interesting menu choices, but still that bland chain taste. It was bloody expensive too.
I had a Prime rib Au Jus, and Justin had the 'Burger. We shared a tower of Onion rings.

The best part of the experience was the tower of Onion rings. It's a great way to display and serve the onion rings, as the rings are kept from breaking apart. They were warm, big, and crispy. The dips, ranch and mayo-barbecue, were lacking, but the onion rings t shroom hemselves were pretty good.

The Prime rib was greasy, and small. It had a nice peppery taste, but I ended up pulling off pieces of meat that were 70% fat. Ew. The Fries were "garlic Parmesan" which was interesting at first, but quickly grew old. With all the cheese and garlic I found it impossible to use a dipping sauce on my fries without an extraordinarily bad taste.

The Strawberry Lemonade was good, but the strawberry chunks were too large and too dense to permit drinking with ease.

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I miss the Phantom Gourmet. :(
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There's also a Halal Market down the road and to the left from us. Its great, cause they have about 75% of their goods with Arabic lettering on the boxes. Since farsi and arabic share portions of their alphabet, large portions, we can practice our reading there, and with goods we buy there. We also saw some Farsi that we recognized, so... Yeay!

Hooters isn't the only restaurant that we've been to here. Franly, they're all blurring together, so I can't list them all. Thre've been a couple of chinese restaurants, a couple of mexican, two fast food, and good burger joint called "Burger USA" that's a local place (good lemonaide, BTW).

We went to the burger joint right after I got some serious drilling done on my teeth. Unfortunatly, Houghton has ruined my teeth.

You know that they didn't fluoridate the water? That's how houghton did it. I brush daily. Twice even. Once in the morning, once in the evening. I floss once a day. But while I was at Houghton, I went from No cavities to 10 Cavities. Now, because of one of those cavities, I'm within a hairs breath of getting a root canal.

Turns out that my 16 shot experience with my wisdom teeth effected me far more than I thought. I mean, I know it's given me a near phobia of needles coming at me. I also found out that it gave me a sever fear of dental work. I was terrified of the whole thing. From the possibility of a root canal to the drilling of my teeth. I was afraid of how much it was going to hurt, and that the medications weren't going to have any real effect on me. I was able to keep from crying in the office, but I did have to call home to speak to Justin.

They put me on Nitrous Oxide. It worked. I don't know if it was working the way it was supposed to, or if it was just the lack of oxygen to my brain, but it worked, so who gives a rat's ass? And then the relief of it working kicked in and that was even better. So I wasn't panicking, and I was able to ignore the needles coming at my face, squelching the fear. (And since I had that suction tube, I really could squelch it by having the air whistling right next to my ear so I couldn't hear those awful fear inducing noises.)

So the whole experience was near painless. I could still feel a pain and such on the inside of my gums and between the teeth, but they didn't do much there. It was actually a rather painless experience. Thank God.

That is until the bill, since I still don't have dental insurance. :/

So it turns out that we're not just near one train station, but two.

The gerbils are rejoicing (even though they don't know it yet.) The seventh, last, and shortest day of this moving gerbil-hell is over. Once again the earth will be stable and vibrations will never again be the order of the day.

I saw several interesting things today. One was a Ford Explorer upside-down, balanced on the hood and windsheild, and facing in the wrong direction in the middle of the high-way. We saw the dust of the accident, though we were to far back to see the actual acident. I just want to say that the Idaho police were VERY on top of things. We were very close to the accident when it happened, and they got there before us, even though we weren't stopped for very long.

Didn't see any bodies, and the four other cars that were stopped seemed to be intact. So it seemed to be an accident of sound and fury with little substantive damage (beyond the inverted bohemouth.)

Northern Idaho is very lovely, though Justin found himself unable to appriciate it as much as he was drivin and not feeling the most comfortable winding through the mountains.

We saw 7 dust devils in Washington, which was, contrary to what I was lead to believe by popular discussion, devoid of trees and actually a very dry, dusty, high desert.

Right now I'm sitting in a lovely Lodge in Oregon. Its in a town called Borden, and for the size of the room we got, it was rather deciently priced. Since we couldn't go all the way into Portland and expect to have our room, since we've no key, we stopped early today, and decided to try for someplace half-way nice to celebrate our aniversery. Alas, the only rooms they had left were the suites, which we only $34 more than the average hotel room price we've been paying on this trip. Its beautiful, large, and actually pretty nicely priced.

Now, Justin's waiting for me so we can go into the hot tub. :) I'm not going to keep him (or myself) waiting a moment more. Not even for the sake of Grammer or Spelling!

Last night we arrived in Fargo, around 8:45. It's a very flat town, which is very strange to me. I've always been used to variation on the ground. I'm kinda enjoying the difference, and yet, I'm not ever wanting to live here, both for the flatness and the winters (which we are all familiar with thanks to the Movie by the same name.)

So we go to our first choice of hotel, the Sleep Inn, and find out that (a) there are no rooms and (b) there is a wrestling convention/competition in town. This is very disheartening, after 9 hours of driving. There is only one room left in the town. Its at the AmericInn.

Yeah, Justin slept there.

We also went to dinner at a 1920's themed restraunt called "Speak Easy." It was actually very good food, and the theme was kinda' fun. All the waiters were walking around in Fedoras. Justin told me that he could barely hear a fake tommy-gun sound when the waiters would go in and out of the kitchen. Posters of Public Enemy #1 were up, as were styalized paintings of the times more memorable characters.

Ah, the power of sleep to get Justin into places we'd never get him into otherwise. I'm hoping that the only restraunt available tonight is going to be a "Medevil Times." :}


So we just discovered that 7 days means we're going to get there a day early. Which is funny, considering how when Justin and I looked at the calender, he declaired that we would be arriving on the 23rd. (Right now he's blaming this on me. This, of course, is bull hockey because (a) I'm bad at legistics and he knows it, therefore he always does his own numbers and (b) after the initial look at the calander (during a heated discussion about how long we were going to take to get across the country (justin's perfered option was 2-3 days XP)) I had to ask him just about every other day when we would be getting in Portland.

Gerbils get high on paint fumes.

High gerbils are bitey.

Avoid in the future.

The Kipple decided to breed big this time.

RIP Thomas Disch

Better luck next time around.

I'm thinking about one of these for my next bikes: http://brandscycle.com/itemlist.cfm?category=147&sort=pricedesc&gclid=CO2nkbfVtZQCFQVkswodZUEKUQ

Its between this and a recumbent. The problem with the Recumbent is the Tri-Met. Could I get the recumbent onto the train?

Yes, now you too can make your own little pony, but with out having to take out hair, mold plastic, or even paint.




http://jwebgen.com/index.php

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get my ponies to breed. Even if I add a male into the mix. :/

I can't wait to be out of RI.

2 more weeks.