Portland Weekend

I'm back! And I had a wonderful time this weekend with my lovely sister. I got to see a bit of PSU, including the lab where Lacey sorts through gazillions of little bits of shells, and identifies bones from various animals. I also learned there that cow pelvises make excellent masks (or would, if there were a good way to keep them on).

On Saturday night we went to the Portland Megaband contra dance, which was absolutely incredible, so I'm going to gush about it a lot. In a lot of ways, the Megaband is really the antithesis of what I think of as a good contra dance band. I mean, they have a conductor for goodness' sake. I thought that was hilarious. But it was an absolute kick to dance to. For one thing, they can build tension like nobody's business. They can start out small and just keep adding and adding instruments, and each time you think they've hit a climax, they find something else to throw into the mix to intensify it even more. Wow. Plus, with such a huge selection of instruments, they could do random little things like the piccolo + snare drum march in the middle of one of the dances. That was amusing.

The dance was in PSU's ballroom, which is quite nice and very big. And it was just packed with dancers. It was amazing. And lots of very good dancers as well. I very much enjoyed every single dance I did. Oh, and I had a couple of wonderful waltzes with Lacey. In spite of the crowds, we managed to steer into enough space for redowas and pivots and turns and everything. And the waltzes they played were quite nice. They were both probably my favorite dances in a long time.

Lacey treated me to some yummy, homemade carrot-cranberry muffins (with forgotten butter, but we worked that out) and we made carrot juice on Saturday, which turned out very nice. Sunday afternoon we made a big bowl of fresh guacamole which we pretty much just devoured for lunch. Also on the subject of munchies, we visited the New Seasons Market, which is sort of a Whole Foods ++. They had a bunch of free samples of different kinds of curry that were all really good. And we noticed that at their deli, in place of plastic silverware, they had all-natural, organic, biodegradable, gluten-free utensils. Should have gotten a picture of that.

Anyway, it was all much fun, and I was happy to spend some time with Lacey for a couple of days. Good weekend.