The Multnomah Villager

So Jr. V and I were driving home from the JCC yesterday when we noticed his friend Craig in front of the Lucky Lab. We had to swing home first, but we headed back up the hill to the Lab with the plan of having a slice of pizza with Craig, his Mom and sister. Alas, they must have been leaving when we say them, since they were no longer there. Jr. V however, being properly raised, cannot enter a pizza place without getting some pizza, so we ordered a couple of slices and sat down to eat. I must say that the pizza tasted better to me than it has an recent memory - nice and spicy with good hand-thrown crust. I’m apparently not alone in this opinion, since Bob over at Journeys mentioned that the pizza seemed uncommonly good to him last time he had a slice as well.

Jr. V and I enjoyed watching the natty dread pizza maker throwing the dough.

I noticed that the cornerstone from the old Masonic Lodge (which the Lucky Lab used to be) is built into the bar.

Somebody just came to this ‘blog off of a Google search for the phrase, “the Citizen Kane of Talking Pig Movies”.

Glad I could be there for ya.

Stopped back into Journeys last night for a late-night beer or two after putting Jr. V to bed. I probably didn’t get up there until about 8:30 or so. I wasn’t expecting many people in the place - although there were a few. Shannon had my corner barstool, owner’s privilege and all, so I holed up in the other corner and skimmed a magazine while downing a beer. Bot the bartender, Patrick and Bob remembered me by name from Friday afternoon, which is impressive considering how many people must have been through there over the weekend, and you know my retiring nature and all.

I did not “out” myself as the Villager, since I’m OK with just being a regular guy while out and about.

There are now several travel guidebooks distributed around the place, I stoked my annual island fever by leafing through the Maui guide, and lamenting the fact that now that Jr. V is in school, we have to take vacations in the summer, along with everyone else. Typically, our favorite Maui season is right about now.

Bob and I traded golf course stories for a while, after I moved over to the bar and fell into conversation and storytelling with the other folks. The late-night Monday vibe at Journeys is right up my alley. If you haven’t stopped in for a beer or wine (or port, yay!) yet, you certainly should pop in for a quickie when you get the chance. It’ll be interesting to see how this place evolves.

During our walk on Saturday, we stopped into said and had a nice talk with Sue. And yes, the name of the business is “said” - pronounced like “she said…” It’s an acronym for Sue Augustyn Interior Design, and is NOT pronounced “sigh-eed”. Sue shared an amusing story about that misconception that seems to involve the Department of Homeland Security! Amusing, that is, if she doesn’t find herself on the “no fly list”.

Asides aside, it is MUCH more colorful inside her space than even I though it would be. She and her hsuband have done a HUGE amount of remodeling to the space, and although it’s packed to the walls with accessories of every color (and lots of red) and shape it doesn’t seem overly crowded with stuff like some interior places can be. Um, be prepared for animal parts. There is quite an assortment of antlers, horns and hides in there. Now for my part, I like antlers, you know, as a concept, and Jr. V was captivated by some of them. But just so you’re aware. Killer furniture and art pieces.

This is the kind of place that I could very easily find a Christmas present for my Dad and Stepmother in, which is good. It’s the kind of place that makes you wish you lived in a new house, or had lots of money to remodel, or perhaps buy that killer modern house next to West Hills and fill it with interesting pieces of art. Well, until you remember the six-year-old, the cats, and all the Pokemon cards….

Sue was very gracious, especially considering the fact that we had Jr. V in tow, and I hope things go well. There’s very few “designer level” decor places west of downtown. Oh a piece of trivia. She used to be “Frills” in Hillsdale.

So Saturday morning, as is our habit on weekends, we went up the hill to have breakfast in the Village. For some reason, instead of turning down and hitting our usual table at O’Connor’s, we decided to go down to Marco’s and eat there. This is highly unusual for us, in fact I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten breakfast there before. We were out early, so we ha dlots of elbow room in the sun-filled dining room. I was amused to watch the boy at the next table who was all of maybe 11 years old, hitting on our waitress. He’s got quite a crush on her. “Fabas indulcet fames” indeed. I’m not going to spend too much time deconstructing Marco’s. The food is good, although a little expensive for breakfast, in my opinion - a person should certainly be able to get two eggs any style, bacon, toast and coffee for well under $10. Anyway, after the World’s Most Bacon-Filled Omelet we hit the sidewalk well-fed, although I was grumbling a bit about the price. Note that these comments apply to breakfast, and the tasty-looking chocolate cake in the dessert case has got me thinking about checking out Marco’s dinner menu sometime soon. So we walked up and grabbed a couple of “Magic Tree House” books for Jr. V at Annie Blooms and then popped into Baby! Oh Baby! to look around and bit and chat up the owner. Time to head home and realx for a bit before gearing up for a longer walk on this sunny very warm March day.

Early afternoon finds us heading up the hill again following the sound of a bagpiper in front of Renner’s which we can hear from halfway down the hill. I am reminded of the rants made by a former acquaintance of Scottish descent, abour how the Irish have appropriated bagpipes as a symbol from the Scots. Anyway, we head up through the Village and the streets are busy since it’s sunny and like 65 degrees. We’re in shorts and maiing tracks for Baskin Robbins up in Hillsdale for a nice cone. We stopped for a second at the Lucky Lab, so that Jr. V could say hello to John Blanck, who’s the principal at Maplewood, and was enjoying a slice and a pint in the outdoors with some friends.
We then headed up Capitol and stopped into said for a nice chat with Sue, which I’ll post about later.

A quick stop at the Hoot Owl for a bottle of water and soon we’re eating ice cream on the porch beside Baskin Robbins watching cars go by and enjoying the sun. Our walk continues up the hill, as we’re headed for the playground at Rieke. We took a little side trip to Alternate Universe to ogle Magic cards and soak in the gamer vibe, which was a little bit of a system shock for Mrs. V, having not been exposed to gamers in such a concentration before now. As we started to cross the street towards Rieke, clouds were beginning to move in and we began to suspect that our sunny walk might end with a damp tramp home. Alas, it was not to be as the sun held out for our return.

A big walk on a nice sunny Saturday. Nothing wrong with that.

Well, today this site hosted its Ten Thousandth Visitor. I started the site on June 25th, 2005 and it took until September 14 to get the first thousand visits, and now we’re at 10,000. This site has been great fun for me to create and maintain, and I hope people continue to visit! Thanks for all your comments. If you like the site, pass on the link to a friend. Let’s see how long it takes to get to 20K!

Info: The “official” #10,000 hit the site from Portland, via a bloglines page. Spent 3 minutes on the site, and is running Firefox on Windows XP.

So, it turns out that when I said I’d be going up to Journeys LATE on Friday, what I meant what that I’d be getting there right about 5PM. So the weather was so incredible yesterday that all of us at my office decided we pretty much needed to close at 4PM and get out of there. So I found myself home a little before 5. Like any good long-time Oregonian faced with the first warm day of the year (note, this can mean any day above 50 degrees), I popped home and tossed on a pair of shorts, a “Hawaiian” shirt and headed up the hill to Journeys. Yeah, I know I said I’d go up there later - but the family’s plan kept changing up until the last minute so I had to fit a beer in early.

Journeys is small. This makes it the kind of place that is going to encourage you to converse with your fellow bar goers, since it’s certainly an intimate experience and it will get full fast. There’s two rooms - the front room with the bar and seating for 6-8 people at small tables, and then a small back room which is the sort of place I prefer to hang out and hold court. This back room was filled with bright sunlight on this day, and I’ll have to pop back there after dark to see what it feels like at night. This room will eventually be filled with travel guidebooks for the perusal of the guests. I’m looking forward to this. Here’s a crappy camera phone picture of the back room:

I’ll have to pop in with a real camera and take some picks of the main bar which is nice. They have all kinds of foreign coins embedded in the tile surface of the bar (who knew that Aruba had square coins?) and after a few of the other early stoppers-in took off, I relocated from the back to the corner bar-chair, which may become a favorite haunt since it allows for good people-watching, conversation surfing and a birds-eye view of traffic passing by on Capitol. I was talking to Bob, the co-owner about the “lawn chair service” that they had going on yesterday and how it’d be a good idea to install stadium lawn chair seating for the Multnomah Days parade. That’d be a great place from which to watch the parade - we’ll see if he goes through with it - of so, save me a seat!At some point I fell into a conversation with the people next to me, who recently moved to Portland from Denver. She is an ex-dentist and asked me if I lived in the neighborhood. I said yeah, I’ve been here a while, I like it, in fact I write a website focused on this area. At which point the ex-dentist (whose name is Kristin, but I have no idea how she spells it, and I’m somewhat fascinated by the idea of someone being a young ex-dentist, can you tell?) so anyway she exclaims, “You mean you’re The Villager?!” I said yeah, I’m the guy, and Kristin says, “Your website is one of the reasons we moved to this neighborhood!”. Cool!And it gets more amusing than that - since she’s from a little town called Sudbury Mass, which no one has heard of unless they, like me used to hang out at Victory Cigar on Boston Post Road in Sudbury when I was in Boston on such a regular basis that I became a regular there.

And it’s conversational moments like that, that are going to make Journeys a cool place to hang out.

4PM-11PM. Closed Tuesdays.

Interior of Baby! Oh Baby! Newly opened this week.

Friday the 16th…. 4PM to 11PM. I’ll see ya there, although I won’t be going up there ’til late, maybe around 9PM or so. There is a private pre-opening event on Thursday. Hopefully, I can take some pix on Friday while I’m up there, and I give you all the lowdown if you’re not able to make it there yourself.Seriously though, as I mentioned to Bernadette Tuesday night at the MNA meeting, I’m not sure why I’m so excited for this place to open. I’ve never been the type of guy who hangs about in bars, except for a few crazy months in 1993-1994…. However, for some reason I’m really anticipating Journeys opening.

Man, that downtime last week really screwed things up. I have been virtually erased from Google. I was a first screen search hit for practically anything in the Village until last week, and now it’s as if I don’t exist (at the dotcom domain). I’ve republished my sitemap, and my hits are about the same but Google acts pretty fast if they spider your site and get a 404. There are a few sites that link here, and that will help me regain my visibility, but man - losing your Google seniority sucks big time.