Daniel85

So… Laura and I are off for our weekend in Portland tomorrow, bright and early on a 7:45 train. AmTrak should be an interesting experience.

The hotel we’re staying at is pretty nice: http://www.hoteldeluxeportland.com. It has a classic Hollywood/Art Deco theme, so it’ll be a nice setting for our little getaway.

I managed to pack within a decent timeframe, which is a first for me. I’m usually still packing right up until the morning before a trip. Here’s all the stuff I crammed into my bag:

We’re only going for two days, so all that junk may seem a tad superfluous… but I love packing for trips. I love packing every possible thing I can. I pack more books and miscellaneous reading material than I usually read in a year, articles of clothing that I’d never wear in regular rotation anyway, an entire cupboard-full of snacks, and enough notebooks/pens for a Hemingway safari.

I don’t know why it is that I love trip packing so much. All the little gadgets and knick-knacks and essentials crammed into every pocket of your bag… it’s just so cool. I think maybe this worship of objects comes from being a boy of Generation X/Y/whatever we are… I just like having my accessories. I’m like a GI Joe or something. “New from Hasbro… Daniel Roberts, Australia’s favourite slacker! With realistic unshaven appearance! Comes complete with five empty notebooks, PEZ dispenser, copy of The Catcher In The Rye, and personal graphic novel library! Also available: Dreamgirl Laura.”

Some DVDs, for watching on the train ride. The chick flicks were Laura’s idea, I swear. Well, Love Actually isn’t bad at all… but The Holiday?! Sadly enough, I have actually seen it before. 

Laura found this awesome 80s toy/fad book last week. Okay, first of all… it’s designed to look like a Trapper Keeper. Second of all, it has chapters about freakin’ Choose Your Own Adventure and scratch-n-sniff stickers. Tell me that’s not awesome.

Plus, the interior design makes it look like a notebook, complete with lined pages. All the pictures are made to look like stickers, and the illustrations are all biro ink sketches, completing the notebook aesthetic. Rad.

So here’s my reading material, plus our Portland guidebooks. Laura actually set me a limit of 10 books, stating something to the effect of ‘You’re going away to a nice hotel. For a weekend. With me. You think you’re gonna need books?’ Still, I thought I should probably bring some X-Men.

And what trip would be complete without mindless glossy magazines and digest-sized comics?

I also picked up the latest copy of Ebony, because it has an extensive Michael Jackson interview and photo shoot. Laura of course gave me endless crap about wanting to buy a black women’s magazine. Fair play. And of course the ‘I’m only buying it cos it has Michael Jackson on the cover’ excuse just doesn’t fly, because she only barely tolerates my obsession with the King of Pop.

Alright, then. Bon voyage. Wait, I’m not supposed to say that. It might actually be bad luck if I ‘bon voyage’ myself. Oh well. Ta-ta!

I finally ended up sending my package-o’-presents home for Christmas. Here’s how it all stacked up:

It turned out to be a little difficult getting all the stuff into the box we had, but I managed to find a configuration that fit it all in with room to spare. I guess all those nights spent playing Tetris under the covers with one of those light/magnifying glass things on my Game Boy weren’t for nothing after all.

The package ended up costing us a princely $82 (USD) to post. Next time, everyone’s getting helium balloons and quill pens for Christmas.

We finished decorating the tree last night, except for the angel, which we put on tonight. That was about the extent of our Christmas activities today, because I was not really in the mood for much of anything with the cold that hobo in downtown Seattle gave me. So we just stayed in today… Laura went out and got me some meds (and an Archie comic– awesome girlfriend!), then she made me some soup and we watched Return To Oz. Good times.

Sorry for the blurriness of the shot, but it’s kind of hard to get a decent shot when you’re also trying to get the lights. You can’t really see, but we have some awesome ornaments on there. Ronald McDonald, Sebastian and Flounder, The Rescuers… awesome stuff.

I’m still feeling a little under the weather, but there’s a bonfire/Christmas ship thing down at the marina tonight which is kind of a big deal, so I’ll probably head out for that. Gotta love local/community-geared Christmas events.

We finally got our Christmas tree a couple of days ago, which is a feat, considering we’ve been talking about decorating our balcony for the past two weeks with no progress. At least we have our Tannenbaum visible through the window now, so we don’t look like the Grinches of the apartment building.

The genius working at the tree lot tied the tree to Laura’s car before any of us were in it, leaving us no way to get in. We all managed to get in after much climbing over gearsticks and handbrakes.

So far we’ve only advanced to the light stage. We may hit the tinsel stage by Christmas Eve.

We went to see Jersey Boys last night. Laura was pretty excited to finally be able to see “the 2005 Tony-award winning smash hit” (Her words. Nerd.) being the huge Broadway nut she is, and hey, it’s Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, so everybody wins. The show was awesome. What wasn’t awesome, though, was the hobo who coughed all over me at the sandwich shop we ate at before the show, and the ensuing cold that I woke up with today. And just four days before our Portland trip, too.

Apart from that, we’ve been pretty busy with Christmas stuff. I finally managed to finish all my Australia-bound shopping, after running around for the last few days trying to get everything to send in time for Christmas. I was subjected to gross humiliation earlier this evening, when we were at a drugstore picking up a few final items. My mum wanted me to get her an American women’s magazine, so as I was buying it the thing wouldn’t scan, leading the lady at the checkout to call across the store “Scott! This issue of Woman’s World isn’t scanning!” And of course he didn’t hear her, so she repeated “WOMAN’S WORLD. It isn’t scanning!” Thankfully the woman recognised the potential embarassment of the situation, and added “For this young lady here”, pointing toward Laura. It was pretty hilarious, in a “you got any economy size bottles of painkillers here?” kinda way.

Things have been pretty busy here, what with getting ready for Christmas and planning our weekend in Portland, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like to. I have a bunch of random stuff from the last few weeks I want to blog about, so maybe at some point soon I’ll just do a random mish-mash entry. Regardless, I couldn’t let another day pass without blogging about the snow we got here last week.

Now, I’ve seen snow before (went up to the mountains a couple of times as a little kid), but I have little recollection of those trips, and I know I’ve never actually seen snow *fall*. I got to see it last Saturday, when we got some minor snowfall that lasted a couple of hours. We were about to head out with some of Laura’s friends when Laura spotted it and alerted me, to my giddy joy.

At first it was just a light flurry, not sticking on the ground at all, which is understandable because we live close to the water. As we drove up to the area where Laura’s best friend lives, though, it got heavier and was actually sticking. We went to get lunch and by the time we left the restaurant there was a shallow, yet beautiful, cover on the ground and trees.

I was pretty excited, and may even have performed an impromptu ’snow dance’, of which (thankfully) there is no photographic record. (Or at least none that Laura could ever possibly convince me to show anyone.)

After lunch we were hanging out at Laura’s friend Lena’s place for a while, and she let us borrow some ski gear so we could go frolic in the wintry wonderland.

The snow cover was just a light dusting, really, but I was overjoyed to see it, partly because I haven’t seen snow since I was around 4, and partly because it’s so incredibly cool to have snow around this time of year. (Excuse the rather fem pose and expression. It was cold!)

So that was cool, if short-lived. That was the only snow we’ve had so far, but it’ll definitely snow again, and I’m hoping we’ll get some close to Christmas. If I have to endure this frickin’ Northwest winter, I better be getting some Christmas snow in the deal, is all I’m sayin’.

What’s up with you guys? Anything going down Down Under? (Shit, I’ve only been here a couple of months and I’m already making lame ‘Down Under’ jokes.) I’m missing the homeland a little. Strangely enough, though, there’s an ‘Aussie Meat Pie Bakery’ about ten minutes away from here. It’s kind of a weird place to have such an establishment. Yesterday we picked up some Arnott’s Shapes, Chicken Twisties, and a Wagon Wheel there. Ah, the tastes of home! I just need a strawberry Big M, maybe 50 cents worth of chocolate Mates, and I’ll be set.