This morning Katie and I got up at 6:00, got on our bikes, and rode to my neighborhood waffle stand to eat enormous vegan waffles drenched in maple butter and wrapped around slabs of veggie sausage.
Sunrise vegan sausage waffle sandwiches. It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? And by 7:15 we were back at my house, full of waffles and coffee and tea, playing lightning-round Set until it was time for me to go to work.
Last night we went to the weekly Portland Spelling Bee, which takes place at a local pub over beer and vegan pizza. When you get dinged out for misspelling a word (in my case, peirastic; in Katie's, philippics), you get a hug and a lollipop and a round of applause before you sit down.
We made this point to each other several times over the course of the weekend: it's not that it's remarkable that these things exist. Across the width of the inhabited world there are probably multiple sunrise waffle sandwich stands, several vegan pizza pubs, and numerous drunken spelling bees. In a sufficiently large city it becomes statistically likely that you will find something like this. But Portland is not a sufficiently large city, and it has all of them. Even North Portland, which is merely a small pie wedge of the city, has all of these things and many more. Someone hijacked the truck that was supposed to carry the creative, nerdy people and their pet projects all across the world, and they wound up concentrated here by mistake.
I'm sorry, California. I may never be able to live in you again.
Posted by dianna at October 16, 2007 09:28 AM