whoa whoa whoa-wa!

Guess fucking effing (trying to clean up my language for Marc's holy night) what? A new Forever 21 has opened in Coronado Mall!! Woooooooo!! (Oh no. Is this what it feels like to be one of the older ladies going crazy for Sex and the City in the midst of 20-somethings? OH WELL! Too excited to care!!!)

This calls for a high school themed celebration. Clueless viewing party tomorrow night?!

Plusies, I have a 65 dol dol gift card for F21 and no duh obvies am going to spend it right now. We're going bar hopping tonight for Jay's 30th bday and I need to look cuter! NO, CUTER!! NOOOOO CUUUUTTTTEEERRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Portland vs. Portland

El trip-o to Portland-o was all business. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.* Even if driving wasn't an issue I reluctantly admit beer goggles would have hindered our search for mind blowing apartments in the City of Roses.

*which in our non-Monopoly-world meant Do not drink your weight in microbrews, do not slip the strippers ten dollars through your ass cleavage WHICH IN talking-to-our-parents-world meant we didn't have to censor what we actually did in Portland dot dot dot it just feels weird/wrong when you don't have to white lie to your parents. Is this what "growing up" feels like?

We needed a feel for the city and its neighborhoods. We were looking for someplace "hip" and "young," not a complex, 2 bedrooms, somewhere under (hopefully much under!) $1200/month, and allows our fur kids. We might trade in "hip" and "young" for "s'alright" and "under 35" if it has a 6 month or month-to-month lease since our favorite hoods on our 1 day visits might not be our favorite hoods when we are actual Portlanders.

This real estate map did nothing for us and made me feel like a newlywed Stepford just for looking at it. Yarf! (Yawn + Barf!) The Sunday Oregonian may have been more helpful :^/ Oh wellsies!

Probably the best parts of the day were how Marc and I agreed about almost everything we wanted in a neighborhood and apartment. We both got panic attacks in neighborhoods that felt too family oriented and fell in love with Belmont and Hawthorne which felt urban, friendly and very alive and I'm sure the brew pubs on every corner made Marc's eyes turn into pulsating hearts. Yeah, I can't describe it better than I think we just fell in love with the Belmont and Hawthorne districts. We were speechless and bumbling just driving through their streets. (Yay!)

For lunch we drove back toward downtown Portland.

Street food in Portland is the Indian Arts in Albuquerque.

I kept my eyes wide open (not difficult because I already look like I have some sort of wide eyes disease) for classic Portland scenes* like bicyclists who have more power than motorists, geeks who are millionaires from their start-up companies but who still eat $2 calzones on the sidewalk, girls sunbathing in parks on the one sunny day of the year, bookstore owners with fluffy blond hair, Tom Hanks, adults dressed as wizards, someone walking 12 dogs and roller derby girls.

*Honestly I do not know Portland very well and am making up these stereotypes which I may or may not have taken from Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail.

We took a quick trip over the bridge to Vancouver, Washington. It felt like cupcakes and good neighbors and Main Street, USA but I could be totally wrong. There's no fucking way I'm living near a cupcake store.

Back in Portland.

This lady has a living plant and Christmas tinsel tied to her helmet and bicycle.

Oh, right... before we found Hawthorne District and were hopelessly driving about, Marc had the idea to find someone who looked like they could be our "friend" and quietly pursue them to see where they lived. It was a complete disaster for three reasons: 1) People are perceptive to strange cars following them down the sidewalk. 2) People don't like stalkers. 3) Not everyone goes home in the middle of the day. Damn.

The baseball game in Salem that afternoon meant we needed to leave Portland early. Sat in traffic for two hours and played games, imagined our future in the Northwest and complained about all the beers and strippers we didn't get to experience while in the city. Next time though!

The next day, before going to the airport we stopped at Portland's Saturday Market.

And I did see an adult dressed as a wizard. In fact, I saw many. I saw several distinct groups of adults dressed as wizards which makes me a little worried for moving there.

You'll visit me though, right?

Salem vs. Salem

Salem killed it last week, man. For the first time in ever we had a mostly sunny week and I didn't try to slit my wrists in my dreams. Wooo! Along with the rest of the change jangling meth heads and homeless teenagers in floppy sneakers and kool-aid colored hair, we enjoyed the weather as much as we could with Marc's mom's mini cooper convertible top dooooooooown. So we put our hands up, they were playing our song, nodding my head like yeah, moving my hips like yeah... actually they weren't playing our song because neither of us are really "into" Temple of the Dog or Nirvana (obviously we are, like duh, into those bands being from Generation Y but after 15+ years of listening to the same singles it does the same for me as if I had heard a toilet flushing. Safe, reassuring, encouraging but absolutely not so exciting. Too bad.) since the radio stations in Salem are capital-L in Love with grunge.

An actual shadow which means actual sun rays were actually burning me. This means a whole fucking lot in Salem.

Marc told me his mom is leaving Mikey to us in case she croaks. It's in her will. Is this a normal summer vacation topic in Jewish families? Marc, let me know!

A day in the life of a suburbanite.

Salem has a frightening way of eating up my days like they are tasty lemon muffins. I think mainly my efforts to stay out of everyone's way and pretending to be the perfect daughter-in-law slash family and make sure my pouting and uncontrollable urge to talk about boobs all the time are kept under restraint and figuring out how to have quiet sex with Marc take so much energy that hours feel like ticking seconds. Either that or I have dissociative identity disorder and my other personality is the one having all the fun. Zing.

Marc's mom's house is very different from the one in which I grew up... althoooughhhhh... replace his parents' display cases of salt and pepper shakers with my parents' milk crates of hippie records and their leather bound editions of the Hebrew Bible with our leather bound editions of classic UFO abductions and I'd feel more at home. Our parents' loving to the point of neurotic households and annoying sibs are really the only similar thread.

Off to see the nieces.

We took a field trip to downtown Salem. Sitting outside of the courthouse. Eating a large snickerdoodle cookie.

And another field trip to the gym outdoor pool where my bathing suit was highly inappropriate but whatever the girls at their age don't care about nip slips. We played Sharky and Taxi Driver and Up and Down which are all games we made up and might officially be called something different.

Next time I'm feeling crabby I'm going to remember how sweet it felt to watch Bailey carefully place this ladybug on a plant away from the pool so she wouldn't get wet. Cute faint. Life is Short faint.

Oh, the rest of the week was filled with the same junk. Doing chores for Mom, chasing the girls around their back yard, kissing boo-boos, drinking coffee, walking the dog. At one point we bought a 4 Loko (that horrible alcoholic energy drink about the size of truck exhaust pipe) to secretly drink at the baseball game with the fam but didn't go through with it for fear of getting caught. It made this 26 year old feel 16 (wait, what?! 16 was a decade ago?!?!)

Anyway, the sun was intoxicating. I could have put up with the suburbia blues if the sun kept up like this. Now to figure out what happened to those unaccountable hours...

It's another hurts to move morning

Remember this?

Classic cartoons from the early 90's feel like home cooked meals.