Portland Party

Yesterday afternoon we hosted a housewarming-cum-farewell party at the new Boots HQ. We spruced up the place a little, stocked up on snacks, beer, ice and bottled water (it was near 90°F) and waited for folks to arrive.

Adam, the chef from Acadia across the street, was the first to arrive. He could not stay as he was working but he dropped of some crawfish potato salad and roasted vegetable salsa for the party. A fantastic gift and it was without doubt THE culinary highlight of the afternoon.

Judith got the party started when she wandered over from next door. She lives there with her partner Richard and a growing menagerie of animals – the latest addition being an African Grey parrot that smacked into a nearby shop window. Judith and Richard are taking care of it and learning lots about exotic birds.

Back in July 2001, we hosted a BootsnAll meeting at the Ringler’s Annex in downtown Portland. So there were a few familiar faces at the party yesterday…

Deanna and Kathryn

Paget Engen

Dewey and Donele

There were also some new people we were very pleased to meet…

Ken (pictured far right), first heard of us in the Oregonian article a few years back. He’s started to get back into the site more now that he has some more time to travel.

John Daters works at the Portland Zoo right now, but he’s getting ready for a 3 month stint in South America. Should be cool and hopefully we can twist his arm for some stories.

Paget also brought her sister, Jeffi who stumbled onto the idea of crawfish head finger puppets after watching Anthony go to town on the potato salad.

Eric and his wife (I’m not going to disgrace myself by trying to spell her name) are also our neighbours and told us all the good places to go in China. Eric lived and worked there for 4 years, fell in love, married, and now they plan to move back there and live somewhere near Lijiang.

Matthew and Robin are in planning mode for their RTW trip, departing around September 2004. Sean was prepared to help them out as much as he could until he found out they were NY Yankees fans (just kidding!).

Also Yankees fans were Lisa and Adam, our neighbours from 2 doors up (sorry, I was too slow with the camera). They’re both architects who have made some additions to their house. We’re hoping they might have some tips for us when we get around to home improvements.

Chris Damitio showed up in his ‘78(?) VW bus that has been a pretty constant companion during his travels. Chris has just written a book called Rough Living which is available at Book Locker.

We were also very lucky to see Natalie and Andy, our friends from Eugene. They’ve just purchased a house in Thurston and it looks huge in the photos we saw. Natalie will have an office for her gift basket business and Andy will have a homebrewing room for experiments with hops and grain.

Ex-Eugeneian Tiffany made an appearance, which is just as well since she’s been badgering us to move up to Portland for some time and this was the first we’d seen of her. Just kiddin’, Tiff.

Throughout the course of the afternoon, we invited our guests to answer a quick quiz, testing their knowledge of BootsnAll and local breakfast joints. Thanks to our association with local winery, Cooper Mountain Wines (Cheers, Dewey!), we’ll be giving the winner 6 bottles of our Pinot stash and a BootsnAll hat and t-shirt.

Towards the end of the evening, Deanna told us a cool story. At the last Portland BootsnAll meeting, we met Matt, who had just been laid off from his job. Deanna had invited him to the Portland meeting after he’d jokingly said he was going to spend his new freedom traveling. Yesterday, Deanna told us Matt had gone to Europe, fallen in love and is now married and living in Melbourne, Australia. Bet he didn’t see that coming when he stepped onto the tarmac of a foreign country.