Portland

I had a great day in Portland yesterday. I went to the temple, which was lovely, and afterwards I picked up my bro and we walked a bit through his neighborhood.

I'd like to be able to say this is some cool local street vendor, but it's Trader Joe's. They had luscious flowers outside, but sadly most of my photos were blurry :( This is the best one.

Our walk took us to the Ram's Head, a branch of McMennamin's, which is an Oregon chain of pubs, I guess, if you can call half a dozen restaurants a chain. They do lovely fish and chips, and of course I approve of their decor :)

After dinner we saw "The Men Who Stare at Goats". It was hilarious, more especially because they kept going on about Jedi warriors and using the force, and Ewan McGreggor, who is Obi-Wan, the ultimate Jedi in the Star Wars movies, kept looking utterly clueless and asking, "What's a Jedi?". You probably have to be a Sci-fi geek to appreciate the humor, but it cracked me up. Yes, yes, I know it's rated R, but only for language and for one brief, incidental, non-gratuitous bit of nudity involving Ewan McGreggor and George Clooney and hospital gowns, which frankly I enjoyed.

Also yesterday morning, before any of these other activities, I went to Mt Hood community college, where there was an information meeting about a program I'm looking in to. MHCC has the only Mortuary Sciences degree in the northwest. I have long thought that working in the funeral industry would be a rewarding way to spend one's time, being there for people at that most trying time, preparing remains for their eventual resurrection. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to do it or not. I'm not sure it's what the Lord wants me to do at the moment, but the meeting was very interesting, particularly watching the other people there and how they reacted to certain things. There were about 20 people there. At the end of the meeting they took us into the embalming lab. Normally there is no one there unless they are actually performing an embalming, but yesterday there were workmen fixing the cooler, so the normal inhabitants of the cooler were moved into the lab. So there was one body on a table at the far end of the room, wrapped in plastic. Many of the potential students seemed quite reluctant to enter the room, or go to the far end where the table was. They all huddled near the door. I kept thinking, "dude, if you have trouble with this, you shouldn't be here".