Booky!

Booky Goatherd has arrived in Portland, and she is just as I expected: gracious, kind, diplomatic, good-humored, brilliant, sparkling, and a pleasure in every way. She's even the height I thought she'd be. She and K. wanted to sample "Northwest Cuisine," so they treated Sue and me to dinner at the Wildwood, which prides itself on locally-sourced humanely-harvested food quite like that served in this episode of Portlandia. While they enjoyed pedigreed tuna, bottle-fed lamb, and Poblano pepper enrobed in cream sauce and impregnated with succotash, I had a salad of chanterelle mushrooms gathered by meditating monks and cooked by chanting yogis. The food was fabulous, but the noise was unbelievable; we had to shout at each other all evening. It was like being enclosed in a tiled squash court with fifty two-year-olds and five construction workers wielding jack-hammers. (I wonder if noisy restaurants is an American thing. I certainly can't think of anywhere else I've been so daunted by it.) It took us a few blocks to be able to hear again and to recompose our molecules.

We ended up back at my place, entertained by Mamasan and talking (softly) late into the night about music, culture, relationships, and the difference between face-to-face and online community. This morning we took the streetcar down to Powell's, where I got this shot of Blip's most famous book-person.

You may note a new camera. A dear and generous blip friend who recently got a new Leica mailed me his Fujifilm X100S to play with for a while, and it arrived on Saturday morning just before we left for Powell's. I took it out of the box, did not consult the manual, left my Nikon at home, and started shooting. I thought I had it on auto white balance and auto ISO, but somehow all my shots of Booky were overexposed. I was able to save this one somewhat with a B&W conversion. I'll read the manual before I use it again.