This post was recovered from an old blog that I had while going to college at Oregon State University. I’ve only updated misspellings or dead links, but left any cringe worthy things or immature thoughts. I’ve decided to leave them as a snapshot of who I was and to see how far I’ve come. Any photos have been freshly edited and so are not the same as what was originally posted. Over the years I had several blogs, most lost to time, and I wanted to recover some lost memories and reflect on my life.

he past couple days I’ve been working hard on getting this blog to look how I want it to. I think I’m about there, I just need to get everything lined up and stuff. Yet again I’m sorry for not posting my vLog up on time, but I should have it up sometime this weekend. I’ve been super busy with school, getting this blog up, and sleep.

For now I thought I would post up some of my pictures from when I went to Portland a couple weeks ago. This first image is taken in downtown Portland at the waterfall park. I’m not sure what the building in the background is. Anyway this was a couple weeks ago and was taken at 2am or so. My girlfriend and I decided to stay up late and cruise around downtown to take pictures.

Being away from Portland, now that Corvallis is our home, it’s like a different city. When we go up there it’s almost like a vacation and Portland is a great vacation town. We try to eat out a new places or go places we’ve never gone in our past 17 or so years living there.

I was born and raised there, but it doesn’t feel like home anymore to me. I love the city to death, but it just seems to be to big for me. The traffic and the people are too much. Now that I don’t live there I think I’m beginning to love the city more due to me not experiencing the bad parts so much. It’s sad to think this, but I don’t know if I’ll ever live there again.

The next couple of photos are of my dad and I’s trip to the gorge for some fly fishing. It’s been a while since I’ve gone and I had a great time, although I didn’t get much fishing done. I enjoy being out in the wilderness by a beautiful stream just as much as catching some trout. I guess that’s good too because I didn’t catch anything! Oh well there’s always next time. My dad caught 4-5 I think and they were in the 7-8 inch range which is good for this little creek. 7-8 inches may seem small to most, but my dad and I both have 2 wt fly rods we built ourselves. With these 2 wt’s an eight inch fish feels like a hog.

If you’ve never been fly fishing then you can see how insane we are. To the left is all the different fly patterns we can use (and there are hundreds more). In reality we probably don’t need to be so precise, but we like to think we are really fooling the trout.

The day before fathers day my girlfriend and I went to Mississippi Ave. which is an up and coming area in Portland. It’s sort of a mix between the Pearl district and the Hawthorne district. The pearl district is next to downtown and is full of yuppie, eco snobs. They don’t support being good to our planet just to be good, but rather because it’s the latest trend. Hawthorne is a bunch of new age hippy/punks that like to ride bikes, get tattoos, and eat healthy food. I like Hawthorne as it has some hole-in-the-wall types of places that are cool. Mississippi is where the 80’s kids are moving. There’s a vintage(used) video game shop (is Mario vintage yet?), some cool places to eat, a nursery which has chickens running around, and the ReBuilding Center. The rebuilding center is awesome because it sells used wood, doors, windows, cabinets, lights, and anything else from houses. Prices aren’t bad either.

If your ever in Portland Mississippi is definitely one of the places to visit to experience some of the “local” culture.

Finally the last big thing I did while in Portland was go to IKEA. It was not nearly as nuts as the first time I went (a couple months after it opened), but it was still pretty crowded. I don’t know what it is with people and IKEA, almost everyone I know thinks they are awesome. I’ll admit that the style of a lot of there products is pretty nice and I wouldn’t mind having, but the quality is just not up to par with me. When I have a house I want to have nice handmade furniture from local carpenters and such. Something that will last generations and only get more beautiful with age.

Anyway we were at IKEA for a while and I snapped this photo of the carts. It’s legion waiting to be called into battle.

Sorry for being so bad at writing. I need to get better at introductions and conclusions, but I don’t have the energy to wrap this post up with some lesson or cool slogan.