LIFE: The Birthday Report
Hey kids! Had a fun birthday weekend jaunt up to Portland. Did the required visits to worship at the altar of Powell's Books and Excalibur Comics, and also had a fun visit to blogpal Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber at Mercury Studios, a comic creators' "collaborative" of sorts downtown. (Jeff is currently writing the swell Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four and other stuff, and Steve just drew the most recent issue of DC's Gotham Central, to barely touch on their credits. And Jeff told me about a nifty-sounding top secret project he's got coming from Marvel next year which I won't reveal upon pain of death and dismemberment.) A great studio to go see and I enjoyed talking to Jeff and Steve, and thanks for letting me drop by!
And I got birthday loot: Avril bought me the "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" DVD, and I took a big ol' box of books up to Powell's and got several things in trade,
including The Complete Peanuts Vol. 4, 1957-1958 (when "Peanuts" started getting reallly good), "How We Are Hungry: Stories" (I likes the Dave Eggers) and "Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll", a music fanboy's dream book all about one of my favorite cult bands. Plus, at Excalibur Comics I found the long-sought "Essential Super-Villain Team-Up" paperback! Five hundred pages of megalomaniac super-villain warfare from the swingin' '70s! I can now die happy. Dr. Doom commands it!We poor country yokels always enjoy visiting the Rose City, where them buildings are real tall and there's all kinds of colors of people and all. We took Peter for a visit to the Portland Children's Museum.
As we're rapidly discovering there are few spots one can take a rampaging toddler out in public and not constantly be yanking him away from deadly drops, electrical outlets or various other life-shortening devices. The PCM is cool because it's basically an entire playhouse full of kid-friendly interactive exhibits, like a "water room" and a "music room" and a "car room" and so forth. My favorite was the "dig pit," which is a big room filled entirely with what looks like blue tire chips for kids to play in. Peter ran amok for two hours or so at the museum before collapsing in a heap, and we all drove back to the rural hinterlands. We'll be back in Portland before too long, though -- one must get their city fix!
No comments:
Post a Comment