On the road again: Portland, day 4

I'll spare you the work portions of the day, which admittedly dominated it, and mention the high points.

Lunch was at the Heathman Restaurant & Bar in the Heathman Hotel, and the meal was, as always there, quite good. High points included a soup of local mushrooms and a made-on-the-spot bleu cheese dressing on my Cobb salad. I had ordered a side of the dressing and they did not carry it, so they grabbed some bleu cheese and made me a small batch. That's service!

In addition to work, we invested a little over an hour roaming part of the Pearl district of Portland. Though I wasn't as taken by the area as some folks have been, I enjoyed the wandering. Besides, you have to love a place with a Ben & Jerry's and a cupcake shop side by side.

I opted for room-service dinner and work so that I could cram in Margaret Cho's Beautiful show at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Simply being in the hall was a treat; what a magnificent place! If you're in Portland and can find an excuse to attend a show there, do it. Cho's show was what one expects from her: funny, dirty, political, funny, sexy, funny, and occasionally preachy--but always funny. I laughed and enjoyed myself, and I was reminded again how hard it can be for those who are different from the mainstream in a way that society decides to stigmatize. I've never understood why another person's sexual orientation was my business, and I still don't think it is. I'm happy to support her preaching of tolerance.

Enough of my day. On to the book!

The nights before morning flights

I hate them. In addition to forcing me to wake up during what would normally be prime sleep time, they also inevitably shorten due to all the extra stuff I have to do to leave town. Last night was particularly bad, because I woke up Sunday morning in a small puddle due to a leak in the waterbed and so had to sleep Sunday night in a different bed. Between that change and all the work, I wound up hitting the sack at 2:10, not falling asleep until after 3:10, waking up a bit after four o'clock and then again after five o'clock, and finally getting up for good at 5:45 a.m. I didn't complete a single sleep cycle.

Travel went reasonably well, with only one thirty-minute delay that I filled with work thanks to good T-Mobile bandwidth in DFW. I also made solid progress on the paper edit of Slanted Jack, though I'm still nowhere near the end.

The Heathman Hotel here in Portland is lovely, as usual, and dinner at its restaurant was quite good. If I hadn't already been up for almost 21 hours, the vast majority of it working, and if I weren't still staring at a couple more hours of work, I'd be positively cheerful, or maybe that's giddy from fatigue. Whatever.

Back to it.