This weekend is on the road, via Salem, Forest Grove and Portland. Routes will be figured out on the fly by picking obscure highways. Several friends and I will be catching up. Some friends (woo-hoo, Aaron and Christina!) will be taking me to my first in-theater Rocky Horror Picture Show in years. There will be coffee (sup now Buckley, and, er, everyone?) ducks, discussions about Russia (sup now, Penn?), long drives through places I haven’t been before, and beer cheese soup (sup now, Sam & Taylor?).
A long weekend away — just what this chappie needs. Enjoy your weekend too.
If you need any eats suggestions, email me or pop in at PortlandFood.org or Chowhound.com/pacificnw.
I’d like to state two things:
(1) Ant can now identify a few species of duck by the common name
(2) he resisted the urge to use my nice, shiny keyboard
We had a fun time in the Grove, so I hope the rest of the weekend goes well for him.
http://penn.typepad.com/photos/vz_newts/stclair_binocs.html
Good thing I wrote these down… Birds we saw & identified…
– Northern Pintail
– Greater Scaup
– Baufflehead
– Canadian Geese
– American Coots
– Mallards
Scaups, bauffleheads… and the weird thing is that I’m not making those names up. Duck names are strange.
Oh & MSG – chow suggestions? You bet I’ll drop you a line mate!
umm . . . buffleheads. They’re called buffleheads.
We also saw a hooded merganser ^^
duck names are strange, yes, but don’t you like strange, new, and interesting things? just pretend like you were visiting another culture 🙂
Buffle, bauffle, tomato, tomahto, same diff…
Duck names are indeed strange. Which makes sense, given that biologists often name them, and biologists are very, very strange 🙂
I do like your idea about treating it like visiting another culture – it really is, isn’t it? That’s a great way to look at it.
when we teach bio, we try to maintain the mentality that this is a new language students are learning (to varying degrees of success, mind). Thinking and speaking like a biologist is really different from mainstream vernacular. I’ve got a coupla blog posts fermenting about it, so maybe I’ll have to write one out soon.
The upshot of it all is that, if you think about it like visiting another culture, it really puts a sense of adventure into everything you’re doing, and I’m all about feeling like I’m on an adventure.