I got a nice table in the window and a cup of tea; they gave me a ceramic mug when I said I was staying here, even without my asking. That was pretty cool. I got through the stacks from both classes in a little more than an hour; that bodes pretty well for the workload over the summer. (It helped that a lost a lot of people from the evening class). What also bodes well is the the overall quality of the writing is pretty high; I don't think I'll have a lot of working herding stragglers into the main group. All in all, a pretty successful first assessment.
I woke up without an alarm about 6:30 am. I cleaned up all my stuff from the trip, updated budget for the end-of-the-month, answered emails, and like that. This week, we need to get the Company Picnic organized, and I spent a little time on that, too. Otis got up a little later and started prepping for her morning massage appointments. We had breakfast, and then I packed up the laptop and papers I had to respond and headed down to the Tully's in Wallingford.
We made it home before 9:30, but we were a bit fagged out. Some Red Envelopes had shown up, so we stuck Rabbit-Proof Fence into the spectrator and watched it pretty much in silence. It's a fairly serious film, anyway; I felt it was not so much Good as Important. The narrative arc is fairly flat, even though I found the young girl who played the lead very engaging. Kenneth Branagh, on the other hand, was in his standard Evil Englishman mode, giving more of a schematic than a performance. The scenery was spectacular. Perhaps the biggest event of the evening, however, was the first occasion of Otis reclining on the couch with both of the cats (on her chest and lap) at the same time. Needless to say, she loved it, and went to bed happy.
On the way back, we found a new place to eat: Thai Dish, a little restaurant off the outlet exit from I-5 at Centralia, just down from the Arco station. The food was passable if not extraordinary, but the proprietor is friendly and the service fast, and it was such a nice change from fast food or a Shari's/Denny's kind of place. I would suggest you try it on your next run down or up the corridor; our Cap Hill types will want to ask for extra spicy (they lean to mild).
Otis had managed to take a side trip to Lake Oswego on her way to pick me up at class; it's actually easy to do if you miss an exit in Portland, and coming back from Janzten Beach she did just that. Nonetheless, she was there right on time, and we even gave a classmate a ride to the train station before we hit the road to Seattle at about 5:30 pm or so.
The second day of class was much like the first, but with some technical glitches that required Scott to skip one lecture segment that I would have enjoyed; nonetheless, it was another productive day and I enjoyed it. I had pizza for lunch, but I had to go to the okay pizza place (Pizza Shmizza) because I couldn't find the good pizza place (Hot Lips) I had been told was in the area. During the afternoon session, I was one of the whiners who got Scott to critique our work first so we could leave on time. (I loved the class but we wanted to hit the road early.)
On Saturday morning, we availed ourselves of the complimentary breakfast at the motel. It was actually pretty good; I liked that they had hard-boiled eggs, even if Otis declined them. The coffee was awfully weak, though. After breakfast, Otis got ready for another day of adventuring that was to include the sales-tax-free shopping and I walked through the Pearl down to the school. (I noticed along the way that there are more runners in Portland than I see in Seattle.)
After dinner and our stroll, we just relaxed in our room and wound up watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the cable until we went to sleep. We both thought it was a bad movie and that even the action sequences (much less the "plot" or "story") were pretty boring, yet somehow we could not turn away...
After freshening up, we walked through the neighborhood. Otis was in the mood for Italian, so we ate at Pastina Pastaria. The food was good and pretty inexpensive; the ambiance could have been a little cozier. We skipped dessert in lieu of walking the neighborhood some some with gelato cones from a place down the street. The Pearl really is a cool neighborhood, perhaps a little self-consciously so, but the street life and shops and restaurants and wonderful combination of big, old houses, new condos, and converted industrial lofts are really tempting.
We broke for lunch and I ate at a nearby diner with a fellow from class; I had a good veggie burger and Jeff, my classmate, told me about his plans for a webcomic. The afternoon sped by with more studio work and we didn't even get through all the critique before we had to call it a day. I called Otis as I left and we met in the neighborhood and headed back to the motel to start the evening.
After tea, Otis headed off to see how early she could check in to the Holiday Inn Express (she'll tell you about her adventures on her own blog) and I walked the few blocks to the art school. I'll be posting details on the course and samples of my classwork on my comix blog, so I won't repeat that stuff here. Suffice it to say that even though the class felt more like confirmation than enlightenment, it was well worth it, and that Scott McCloud has an excellent classroom presence. The class started off with a lecture and then moved into a studio room, where we created pieces and worked in small groups to put Scott's theories into practice on paper all morning.
The alarm got me up at 4:00 am and we easily made it out of the house before 5:00 am, even with making coffee and toasting some mini-bagels for the road. The drive down was a piece of cake; the weather was mostly clear and we didn't hit any traffic to speak of until the Interstate Bridge. We got there early enough to take a little tour of the Pearl District, the gentrified industrial neighborhood that both our motel and the college are in (about twenty blocks apart). Ever since Weiden + Kennedy Advertising moved into the Pearl, more and more restaurants and hip hangouts have sprung up, more and more buildings have been converted to residences, Trendy-Third Avenue has extended north, and the city has put in a streetcar to connect the district to downtown. The result is something like what you'd get if you crossed Broadway with Belltown and added mass transit - totally cool. We stopped at the Tea Zone (a lot like Remedy Teas) and had some quiche and crumpets for a more proper brekkies.
Thursday passed according to plan: teaching, TCB, and more teaching. We actually went to bed pretty early, knowing that we were hitting the road in the morning for my class in Graphic Novel Storytelling with Scott McCloud down at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland.
