Day off in Portland
TODAY: Grad school assignments, Powell’s, lunch with a friendFood - McMenaminsIt was tough to get up this morning.Real, warm beds are tough to get out of. I heard the commotion of Josh, Shawna and Ella getting ready for the day, but it was colder outside of the sheets. So I slept a few more hours before confronting my constitutional law assignments for the week.By the time I was finished, it was time for me to meet a friend for lunch.I hadn’t seen Astin in about a year. It’s funny how sometimes you meet up with an old friend and you talk about the old days. We didn’t. We talked about where we go from here. We talked about what influences the decisions you make as you settle into life. We talked about what happens when you take a break from the person you think you should be though laziness, selfishness or other distractions and how you get back to taking care of like the way you should. Yeah, just some light banter between friends who have known each other since kindergarten.We talked about living in a small town, and how everyone will eventually know your business, but how the charm of a small town which has to endure the pain of a cold winter, can be forgiving. Can being the optimum word. We talked about how big towns have more people, but if you really look at your life and see how many people you spend quality time with during the week, it doesn’t really matter much if the population of your town is 750,000 or 750. People need community and connections, but close connections aren’t more than a few people on any given week.That made me feel better. Not that I have been regretting my move, but without a drive to focus on, the day allowed me to be a little more pensive.So I walked around downtown Portland after we met for lunch and walked into Powell’s, which is a city block of bookstore and was completely overwhelmed to the point I couldn’t decide what to buy, so I bought nothing.I have a 36-hour ferry ride to Alaska starting on Friday, but I couldn’t focus on a genre, and thus left empty handed.Tomorrow might be the highlight of the top north. Northern Exposure is my favorite show of all-time and Roslyn is the city where it was filmed. I’ve been to Talkeetna which is the Alaskan city which was the inspiration for the show, but Roslyn, WA is where it was filmed. It’s over an hour out of the way, but why not?TOMORROW - Portland - Roslyn (via McMenamins in Centralia and Cabela’s in Lacey)- 236 miles