Category: General

A day with family & friends

Post author By ryan
Post date September 30, 2007
2 Comments on A day with family & friends

Today was sort of a busy day. It started off with a drive out to Forest Grove to visit with my Grandma (meeting my brother Travis, his wife Mrs T and my nephew Henry there). Had a good couple hours visiting there before Kelly and I followed Travis back to his house to hang out for a bit before driving home. I snapped several photos of Kelly holding Henry, to the left is one of ’em. Awww, so precious!

After leaving my bro’s house we headed back into Portland to go over to Miranda & Brian’s place for a small gathering of friends before they flew off on a three week visit to Peru… the friends were those who had agreed to keep an eye on their house and cats. On our way over we thought we’d stop and get dinner, and finally decided to try out an old Portland staple, the Pagoda, a ‘Chinese-American’ restaurant and lounge that has been around since 1940. The food was, frankly, exactly what I’d been craving… that kind of good bad Chinese food. Chow mein, pork fried rice, fried shrimp, egg rolls, etc. It was delicious, even if highly unhealthy. The atmosphere is really fun and over the top. The service was very very good. Kelly and I will definitely be back. Just not too soon. 🙂

After stuffing ourselves we went to Miranda and Brian’s and had a good hour or so hanging out before going home to relax on the couch, continuing to watch the first season of Heroes on DVD.

Household productivity & Goose Hollow Inn

Post author By ryan
Post date September 29, 2007
4 Comments on Household productivity & Goose Hollow Inn

Today was a productive day. While it wasn’t exciting, it was the kind of day that makes you feel a little bit better nonetheless. One of those days where you put things in their right place. You know, balancing the accounts, paying bills, taking back bottles & cans followed by a big grocery run, and getting to spend time doing a bit of pruning & cleaning up the yard. See? Very boring. But it was good because all of the above tasks had been in the back of my mind for a couple weeks now.

This evening we met up with our good friends Ty & Aymie (and Ean and a friend of his) at our old haunt, the Goose Hollow Inn, for dinner and drinks to celebrate Ty’s birthday (Happy Birthday Ty!).

Kelly & I decided to take mass-transit to the Goose, which involves a similar route I take to work every day (short bus ride to the MAX train, and on into downtown). However, we got into downtown and discovered there was construction on the line, similar to the one mentioned a couple months back, only on the next street up. This meant getting off the train, walking 8 blocks, and then catching the train again to go on to the Goose Hollow stop. Because of this Kelly & I were a little bit late. However, it was a great time, and I got to have a few pints of Guinness and the Goose’s fantastic reuben sandwich.

After spending many hours chatting away, Kelly & I decided to get going homeward, and got on the MAX. Naturally, we ran into the same construction mess going home, only with longer delays. Between waiting for the connecting train, and then waiting for our bus, it took us a shocking hour and 40 minutes to get home. Urgh. Stupid construction.

Beer Food General Work

The week in review

The week has been both busy and lazy. Here’s the story…

On Sunday, Kelly and I supported some local businesses. We started by going to a local pizza place, Bob’s Rocket Pizza, which we’d recently read rave reviews of. The staff were very friendly, and while there’s limited seating indoors (or outdoors) it’s well worth going to. The pizza was fantastic. Probably among the best I’ve ever had. And fortunately it’s right up the street! While waiting for our pizza, we visited a newcomer to the area, Rose’s, that specializes in hand-made ice-cream, hamburgers, fries, and shakes. We picked up a pint of Oreo Cookie ice cream while waiting for our pizza, which was also fantastic. Later that night (after filling ourselves on pizza and ice cream) we watched some of season three Doctor Who.

Monday I met Miranda at Moon & Sixpence after work for a couple pints and some food before heading home. Miranda & Brian leave for Peru in a week. Jealous. Hrmph!

Tuesday I met Snooks at Kennedy School for a few beers, and to chat about geeky television like Torchwood (and Doctor Who) among other geeky things before going home early and going to sleep.

Wednesday I woke up feeling a bit ill and decided to work from home (and got quite a bit of work done). Kelly and I stayed in and watched several episodes of Heroes (season 1, on DVD). What a great show!

Today after work I met Kelly at Lloyd Center so I could do my (pretty much) annual clothing run, where I finally break down and buy clothes, something I dislike doing. After that we met my brother Travis at Rose & Thistle for a couple pints and some dinner. Had a good night. Tired.

General

Kelly’s home!

Among mess I got myself into over the past few days, Kelly made it home safely on Monday from her trip to New York to visit some friends. She had a blast, and got to see a lot of cool stuff, which I’m sure she’ll blog about once she finishes going to interviews, working on papers for school, and working at her internship. No, she’s not busy at all!

Also, in other news, our friends Miranda and Brian moved into their new house near to us, and over the past few days (today included) we’ve gone over to visit them. Glad to have more friends living in the neighborhood.

Beer Entertainment General Technology Television

I broked the internets!

Haven’t written in a few days. I intended to, but I couldn’t. I broked the internets! 🙂

It all started Saturday, which was truely a day to myself. I didn’t leave the house except for some grocery shopping (translated: I bought beer and some meat to grill). I spent most of the day tinkering around my home office, backing up data, updating software, and researching some new computer equipment to buy. Fun stuff, yeah? Yeah, well it was for me. And, it was nice to spend a day doing practically nothing. Not seeing anybody, not going anywhere, just hanging out by myself. Well, me and the cat I guess.

The research was for a new WiFi access point. I have been running on a dinosaur, the original Apple Airport (known as the Graphite model) since around the year of our lord 2000 AD. It was old, slow, and though it worked, I’ve recently been using the wireless a lot more (what with the new laptop) and it’s shocking how long it takes to transfer a large file over that old, slow WiFi connection. I also wanted to move to a WiFi router, something new that could take the place of my old WiFi access point and my old ethernet switch. One power plug instead of two, one or two less cables snaking along the wall, etc. This, after loads of research, lead me to the newly released Apple Airport Extreme (1 gigabit ethernet version).

While out grocery shopping Saturday I tried to visit the nearest Mac store and buy one, but they’d closed. Oh well. I spent the night surfing the net and watching season 3 of Black Books, a very funny / snarky English comedy series.

Sunday however, I was able to purchase my new toy. So I got home with it in the afternoon and set in getting it all hooked up. One thing I knew was going to happen in all of this was that my current setup was going to break a lot… my old setup was such that my broadband modem fed into my Linux server, which then fed to my ethernet switch, which then fed into my old WiFi access point. Long story short, a LOT of configuration was done on my Linux server to get all this working… and I had to undo it all, and do a lot of new stuff, to get everything back up and running.

I had however underestimated how much of a pain some of it would be. Getting my network up and running and getting my computers online was really easy. That part only took 10 minutes. What was more troublesome was getting my Linux server happy again, and then discovering some things that meant some larger changes to my setup (new nameservers, routing for my domain name, port forwarding, blah blah blah). What that all means is that Circusgeek was offline for a couple few days until everything got sorted out. Which, as far as I can tell, happened today sometime. Now I’m finally able to post to my blog again. Hence, the long-winded post. 🙂

Now that it’s all running, things are faster and I’m happier overall. More than anything, I’m just glad to have everything running again. What a pain in the ass!