Nancy and Jane

Voodoo Doughnut

Nancy and Jane, childhood friends of the boss, arrived in Portland Monday after a week-long cruise down the Columbia River from Lewiston, Idaho. We picked up Jane at her hotel near the airport and headed into town. We stopped at Voodoo Doughnut, the east side location, and then went down to Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland. 

I picked out a couple of science fiction novels, Nemesis by Isaac Asimov and Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I haven't read anything by Asimov in like a zillion years. I read pretty much all of his stuff when I was younger. Nemesis interests me because it involves a large self-contained spaceship with a population of people that has gone to a nearby star. There's all kinds of technical problems with making that kind of voyage but technicians can figure that kind of thing out. The part that's a complete mystery to me is how are you going to get a group of people to live in a confined space for an indefinitely long time without killing each other or going crazy. Is it possible? Anyway we'll see how Isaac sorts it out. Maybe I'll learn something. 

I read another of Bacigalupi's books a while back, The Windup Girl, and it was pretty great. As I recall it involved a girl with some kind of cybernetic-biomechanical enhancements that gave her, I don't know, high-speed ability or something, but it was problematic because if she used it very much she would overheat and she was already living in the tropics so staying cool was already a problem. Seems to me there was also a big shop that employed elephants turning big turnstiles or something. I also remember there being the remains of giant animals like skeletons or exoskeletons that were part of the landscape. 

Since I found these two books and the girls weren't done browsing I headed down to the coffee shop and got myself a $4 cup of coffee in a ceramic cup. The coffee shop used to be run by Powell's but they've turned it over to some other outfit and now the coffee shop area is for coffee shop customers only. It's okay, I can afford $4 for a cup of coffee. I walked over to the corner of the room to find a seat. 

There's a bench against the wall and some small two-person tables in front of the bench and then chairs facing the opposite side of the tables. I picked out a place to sit and at first I was going to sit with my back to the window looking back at the room which is kind of my go-to orientation but then I thought, you know, I'd like to watch what's going on outside. I have a good view here and it's raining outside and inside it's nice and dry so I sat at the other side of the table and then I thought this is the kind of position somebody doing, you know, surveillance would choose. 'Oh look there's a man's in a coffee shop looking out the window. Is he looking at anything in particular? No, he's just in the coffee shop looking out the window.' But a person with a suspicious turn of mind would wonder what he's watching. Is he watching that building across the street waiting for the bad guys to show up? But if they saw me hesitate when I sat down they might think well no he's not looking for anything he's just looking out the window. On the other hand someone might think that would be deliberate ruse to make you think that he's not doing surveillance, he's just looking out the window. You could argue either way.

The girls wanted to do some shopping so we headed over to Northwest 23rd. I took a nap in the car. While I am dozing there, a little box appeared in my vision. It was just big enough for two or three letters. They looked like letters that were printed in the books I had been reading. The letters were sliding by, right to left, too fast for me to make out if they were actually words or not. I was a little short of sleep, which is why I was napping, but in any case it was very strange.

We had lunch at Fireside. I got a cheeseburger, it was delicious. 

On my way there (two blocks from the car) I was accosted by two people asking for spare change and passed one guy, flailing his arms, gyrating and cursing loudly, next to another guy curled up in a ball by the wall. Just typical downtown Portland. I had to use the restroom several times while we were out and about. Three of those restrooms required a passcode to unlock the door. The only one that didn't was the one at IKEA, which is its own little empire.

Note - I originally dictated this to my phone and when I said 'deliberate ruse', the phone transcribed it as 'deliberate rouse'. Now when I am editing this for the blog I saw the word rouse is wrong but I couldn't think of what the right word was, so I asked Webster for synonyms for deceive and it did not list ruse. Took me a while, but I eventually remembered ruse.