Part II- OreGUN

So more catch up-- probably the last catch up because its all becoming so distant and arbitrary now! Piling on more and more time-dirt!
Christmas was great. Lots of family and children and food. Then about two days before New years I ate some bad salmon sushi before roasting one night and ended up being pukey for a few days- so I spent New Years in bed playing online Scrabble!

I'd been complaining to anyone who would listen for like half a year that I wanted to drive up to Portland. Beck and I finally made plans to go and caught the tail end of that huge storm that hit the west coast, which was pretty stressful but weirdly refreshing in a nitty-gritty kind of way. It felt good to struggle with chains in a snowstorm under the too-bright gas stations lights and freeze our fingers and scrape our knuckles and wrestle with tires on the snow-packed cement, and finally end up paying some short crazy guy named Patrick $20 to do it in 5 minutes. This was up in Weed, CA and it was coming down hard and it was already dark. We were trying to make it to my friends Rebecca and Joe's house in Medford. After about 5 painfully slow chainy-bumpy miles on the freeway, both the road and the sky cleared up. Absolutely vanished. Bummed we had just paid good old Patrick $20, but relieved we would have to drive 35 miles per hour all the way to Medford, we pulled over at some sketch truck stop and tore them off and threw them in the back of the car. Maybe 15 minutes later there's a glowing yellow sign saying chains are required over the California-Oregon border pass. We pull over with all the other pissed off people with 2-wheel drive and tried to tackle the chains again with our newfound Patrick-wisdom... the next guy was nice and only charged us $10.
Finally arriving at Joe and Rebecca's place -damp and delirious- and drinking wine and eating food with them and finally curling up in a nesty-bed together was one of the best feelings I've experienced in a long time. Probably since that time I had to report to jury duty last year... and after a crappy morning of sitting in their weird anxious lobby full of unlucky citizens getting pulled into court, I and a small group of leftover people were told we were off the hook... That was a great drive home.
The rest of the Oregon trip was very awesome and refreshing. We hit Eugene for a night, then two nights in Portland before we dragged our feet for 600 miles back home.
Here are the digital fruits of our travels. We tried to get as many phallus's as we could. I think we got four!

(phallus #1) (phallus #2)(phallus #3)

Ever since I looked at Stephen Shore's American Surfaces I've been really into photographing my food. If you have a camera-phone or a digital I think you should try it. Just for a couple days. See what happens.

Everybody vote tomorrow! If you're still on the fence or just havent done your homework, go here. Or youtube last weeks debates.

(missyouportland.)