Sam's visit around Thanksgiving. Day #1 Monday.

The hearts are warm, the bellies are fully, the gluttony is over, and it is time to report on the Thanksgiving holiday.

Sam, my nephew flew in on Monday. I had a relatively quiet night Sunday night; finishing my last case about about 3:30am, as I had arranged to be post-call that day so that we could spend the day in Portland. I wasn't too tired, so we went to the airport, picked him up, and then drove downtown. After some discussion, we decided to take him to one of our favorite Portland restaurants, Old Town Pizza. The pizza is pretty good pizza, with fresh ingredients, but moreover, it is a great venue.

Side note here - Alicia and I do have three favorite restaurants in Portland. They include Old Town Pizza, The Whole Foods Grocery store, and, since Sam's visit, a Middle eastern place downtown. They make the list because we have eaten there at least once, and have not had a bad experience. It turns out that we do not go to Portland very much. As such, if you are a conesseuir of great eateries, you may not want to us to be the final judges of taste.

After a quick lunch, we started roaming around a bit. As Old Town Pizza is near Chinatown, we walked around there some.
After some brief discussion, we decided to go to the classical Chinese garden. The way we arrived at that decision was that nobody really had any opinion of what to do, and didn't want to make a decision. I thought it would be kind of dumb (and it turns out that everyone else did as well), but it was fascinating.

We first walked in and saw some nice gardens, and trees and buildings and such. Yep, seemed pretty dumb to pay $5.00 to see that. I was ready to go after about 3 minutes. However, Alicia insisted that we go on the tour (I think mainly because we had paid the $5.00). Lucky for us, we had a rock-star of a tour guide who discussed layers of symbolism and ideas. He had studied the dynastic periods during which the gardens of this sort were made, as well as the meaning of the architecture, environment, and the Chinese languge and poetry that were around the garden. At the end, the garden itself seemed to be more like poetry. He was well versed in Chinese and showed us cool things like the Celestial hall of Permeating Fragrance, and the Tower of Cosmic Reflection.

Note to self: There are too few names for rooms at our house. I think it would be cool if we changed the name of the Garage to Glorious center of transportive Beginnings or something of the sort. The bonus room could have a cool name too. Reflective salon of something or other. Stitiching? Elliptical Running? Consider and discuss with Alicia.

Back to Portland. After an interesting afternoon in Chinatown, we drove up to the Pearl District to show Sam my office. Actually, it is in a swanky part of town, but I don't ever go there unless I have to sign some things, so we didn't really go up to see the office. However, the lower part of the building has a store called "Storables" and I was anxious to look there for a cart.

I'm interested in finding a cart because of the cool bassinets they have in the hospital. Let me explain. A few weeks ago some of our friends had a baby. We went to visit them in the hospital, and were immediately impressed by the bassinet they had in the hospital. It is essentially those clear plastic baby crib things that looks like Tupperware on top of a cart with wheels and drawers so you can put stuff in it.

Instead of buying one of those mincing little girly bassinets, why not make one with the tupperware thing on top? Then, after you are done having babies, you take the baby Tupperware thing out, and the cart can be a Kitchen cart with a butcher block, or used in the workshop. I think it is a great idea, but I've been having a heck of a time convicing Alicia.

Anyway, I wanted to see if they had a cart I could use, or a baby shaped plastic thing. Sadly, they didn't have precisely either one of them. Sam was a good sport looking around the Storables building. Afterwards we ran across the street to Whole foods to get good bread for stuffing.

We then took Sam to Powell's books, because, well, if you love books like the Pimentels, and you come to Portland, you have to go to Powells. We browsed and talked books until it got to be about 3:30pm, and we wanted to miss traffic in Portland.

After that, we drove home, visited, planned for the next day, and relaxed. Sam showed us Second Life, his computer environment where he has one of his classes, we talked about music, looked at maps and just hung out. It had been a pretty good, but the fun was only starting.

Next: Good food in Salem with Sam: Day #2 Tuesday.