Vancouver and Portland

-

Morning routine. Drive to Vancouver. Quality time with Fernanda, TC, Elisangela, and Fabio. Neighborhood walk. Drive to Portland Airbnb. Evening exploring the neighborhood. Beers at Hinterland. Mediterranean dinner. EDM at Scoreboard with cousin Patrick.

Warm hospitality and evening wandering

Events and activities that occurred on Saturday, January 31, 2026

The drive north to Vancouver was uneventful, which is exactly what you want from a winter drive through the valley. Fernanda's house offered warm hospitality—quality time with her, TC, Elisangela, and Fabio, capped by a wonderful dinner and a long walk through their neighborhood. The kind of unhurried visiting that reminds you why you make the trip.

The show at Scoreboard
After settling into the Portland Airbnb and catching a brief nap, the evening called for exploration. Hinterland provided the first stop for a couple of beers, followed by a Mediterranean place for dinner. The anchor of the evening was Scoreboard, where my cousin Patrick was performing as one of the DJs. We caught up between his sets, the kind of connection that makes the trip worthwhile.

Joey messaged late, needing a place to stay on her way back from Portland. The house would be empty anyway—an easy yes that added a pleasant note to end the day.

The evening wandering through Portland's neighborhoods, moving between spots without a fixed plan, carried its own satisfaction. Sometimes the best nights are the ones you don't overthink.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Humanity Worth Saving?

-
Image
It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.   That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants. What does the universe...
Read more

Understanding

-
One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...
Read more

Identity

-
I recommend the book ... Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment  by Francis Fukuyama In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.
Read more