I Love Bureaucracy. No, I Really, Honestly Do.

We're in the midst of full-on house-buying crazytown, a quest that took me to the Bureau of Something Something near PSU last week to look for old plumbing permits. While there, I was reminded again of the grace of professional bureaucrats and the ease of navigating a huge bureaucracy. Want to know the secret? Here you go:

1. Be really nice to the bureaucrats.

These people spend their professional lives in front of spreadsheets and/or the public, both of whom can be bitches. Bureaucrats do not hate you; what they want is to have an easy time doing their jobs. What they want is a nice, polite person to make reasonable requests of them and to then follow the rules in having those requests fulfilled. They want you to be patient and understanding. If you do these things...they will DO WHAT YOU WANT IN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL CAPABILITIES AND CAPACITY. They will get you that permit! They will process that request! They will transfer your child to the other school! They will DO THESE THINGS. Sorry to e-shout.

In short, to brag, I always get what I want with bureaucrats, because I am nice to them.

Verily Shall I Endeavor!

...to do the following things!

1. I shall ignore the fact that I am on a bike, miserably racing past dorks in their silly bike clothes and dodging traffic. Note that this willful ignorance will not preclude me from due caution.
2. I shall eschew the three hours of video game leisure I have per week in favor of maybe closer to 1.5 hours of it, along with 1.5 of something more useful!
3. I shall write some new tunes for The Nervous. For lo, at some point shall we practice yet again!
4. I shall continue my miserable fucking workout routine, in the vain quest of...what? Who knows?!
5. I shall continue diving head-first into technical challenges at work about which I know...precious little.
6. I shall blog slightly more frequently!
   

Big-Time Update, You Guys

House! An offer we made was accepted on a pretty neat house off of Rosa Parks in North Portland. Tomorrow is the inspection, and if that goes well, the days after are the other inspections (sewer, radon, Indian burial grounds, etc.), then comes the appraisal and title verification, and if we don't explode into bloody stains from the stress by then, eventually we write the biggest check ever written and become Dr. and Mrs. Zoidberg, homeowners. Crazy.

Bikes! I am the only person in Portland who has realized that you go much faster if you stay in the hardest gear on your bike (as far as I can tell. This is just the evidence talking.) Also, it's official: I kind of hate commuting by bike, but the exercise is so good and the price is so free that I can't stop doing it. Gotta be heart-healthy! Gotta burn those calories! Gotta have a good excuse to eat more Pad Khee Mao!

Babies! Plan C is equal parts brilliant, adorable, and totally bloody lazy. No walking, still. Little talking, still. Oh, she CAN talk if she wants to, she COULD finish learning to walk if she wanted to, but she's only just getting around to having more than one tooth, so she doesn't feel like doing much of anything but stealing hearts when she goes out and pointing at things and saying "buh?!" when she stays in.

My wife! Is hot. She gets sick of me telling her that, but it's the truth.

Fun stuff! A captcha (the download letters nonsense) the other day was "options typlig," which is my new pseudonym, or at least my new nom de plume. Also, I've agreed with my homie K to greet her by saying "DANGEROUS WEAPONS!"

Music and Pizza

Part I: Today, the men of The Nervous joined forces to produce the soundtrack for our homie K's 15-Minute Filmfest movie, a mockumentary about a kid who wears wigs all the time. We produced (wrote and recorded) three songs and one background musicy thing in the course of five hours:

1. A sad song.
2. A happy song.
3. A thrash-punk song for the part where the kid burns his wigs.
4. A weird ambient thing.

As ever, The Nervous were Clean, Punctual, and Efficient.

Part II: B, Plan C and I went to our favorite pizza place in Portland last night: American Dream. I just love that place. We always get a medium pizza with BBQ chicken and artichoke hearts. We also drank a pitcher of Full Sail Amber. Plan C was adorable, saying hi to everyone and being cute as the dickens. What I was most interested to see is that the Indie Rock Hipsters that used to work there back during Portland V. 1.0 are gone, replaced by Metal Hipsters! Those metal hipsters can really make some pizza, though!

Hats

This is a picture of my grandfather and me last weekend. We have some hats on.

I spent 40 bucks on a vintage pork pie at Puttin' On the Ritz, the decidedly old-school vintage store in Eugene that's been around since the early 90s. It was worth it because now I have three rad hats. In fact, along with being bloody exhausted and not getting to read for fun, the thing I don't like about biking to work is that I don't get to sport a dapper hat every day.

And my hats: they are dapper.

Food Carts I Have Known

The big thing in Portland w/r/t* food is the food cart phenomenon. There are tons of those guys, packed with mostly really great food for very little money. A few notes:

1. Until recently, my favorite was Creme de la Creme, a French bistro cart in the pod by our apartment (the pod is at Belmont and about SE 44th.) Croque madames, onion tarts, etc., with amazing salads with amazing vinaigrette. Unfortunately, they started copping some attitude ("best French restaurant in Portland," per Yelp) and they now charge a 50 cent to-go fee, which is a big what-the-fuck since they're a bloody FOOD CART and the whole POINT is that you get it to go. They also charge too much: 8 bucks a meal is 2 - 3 bucks more than I want to spend at a food cart. Still tastes good, anyway.
2. Thai! I always go to Thai Sky at the square-block-big pod at 4th and Oak, a block from my job. It's in direct competition with two other Thai carts at the same pod, so they're all locked in a "lunch = 5 dollars, that's it" kind of price war. The Pad Khee Mao is just divine. I have yet to get anything else, because why bother?
3. There are lots of other really good food carts! I already ran out of literary steam, however, as it is 9pm on a work night and B and I polished off some booze and played with Plan C.

Mostly I just bring peanut butter sandwiches to work, but boy do I count down the days in between Pad Khee Mao days. There are six of them.

* "With regard to" - funny prickish abbreviation I got from David Foster Wallace, essays by which I am perusing on days where I don't ride "my" bike but instead take the bus.

The Deadly Spear-Hand to the Throat

Ha! What the heck am I on about?!

1. Trying out Chrome instead of Firefox, at least in Windows. Firefox has been dragging ass on my laptop, and I'm weirded out by the whole direct jump from 4.x to 5.x in the course of a month or whatever it was...
2. I really need to get better about taking pictures and videos. Plan C is adorable. Portland is beautiful. My friends are stunningly good-looking. The world needs to see these things.
3. Hostin' the in-laws this weekend. Yesterday I basically sat around with my father in-law and drank and talked shit. That's what we do.
4. Sending in pre-approval paperwork tomorrow! House-hunting to commence shortly thereafter! I saw a five bedroom, two bath house in our price range on the listings the other day (I mean...I'm sure something was wrong with it, but it was still HEARTENING to see that much house for an amount we could afford.)
5. Coffee's still my north, my south, my east, my west, my working week, my day of rest.

Patriotic Observations

This was not pre-meditated, but I ended up wearing my KGB shirt (with the above image on the back) today. Happy 4th everybody!

1. So far, the new season of True Blood is living up to expectations! Naked vampire squabbling!
   
2. I really missed hanging out with other inked-up old punks during the Exile. The joint birthday party of H + D the other night was a wonderful return to form.
3. I almost bought a single-speed bike the other day. B convinced me to simmer on it, especially because E doesn't get back from Germany for about a month (at which point she'll presumably want her bike back. Doh!)
4. My kid has grown like a fucking FOOT in the last month or so.
5. Yes, yes, I know I shouldn't eat so much carbs. But...it's like my only vice! Besides the drinkin', I mean!
6. I like playing Dragon Age on my computer and Dungeons and Dragons in real life. There have also been some discussions of me running a 4th ed. Vampire game.
   
7. The really successful run buying pants the other week obviated the need to do anything productive this weekend.