Remember when I told you about my annual family reunion at Waterton? About how my family has been staying in the same hotel (some of us even in the same room) for 62 years?

Well last week that hotel, the historic Kilmorey Lodge, burned to the ground. It was a very, very sad moment for me, for the rest of my family, and for everyone who had visited the city and stayed at the hotel.

After my dad sent out the email announcing the fire, we all started responding. In a matter of hours, the emails being exchanged amongst cousins, aunts and uncles went from shocked to sad to hopeful. I was surprised by which of my relatives reacted strongly and which ones seemed hardly affected. In the end, though, my uncle Gerry was right – we don’t go back every year because of the hotel. We go back because the drinking age is 18. Waterton is where our family gathers to celebrate and continues to make wonderful memories.

Thank goodness I was past the emotional stage (and therefore was able to laugh) when I received an email from my aunt Sally with this announcement:

“The Cardston fire department has done a thorough investigation and has determined that the cause of the blaze was spontaneous combustion. They have concluded that during the evening of Monday Feb. 19th a load of laundry was completed and folded while still warm and placed in a cloth tote bag. The combined heat generated in the bag was sufficient to start this laundry and tote bag on fire. The fire quickly spread to engage the entire wooden structure resulting in the destruction of the Kilmorey Lodge in Waterton Lakes National Park.”

After I stopped laughing, I had a few follow-up questions. Aside from getting the date wrong, I don’t feel that they have sufficiently explained how this hotel caught fire in the middle of a cold, snowy, Canadian mountain village. I mean, what sort of laundry spontaneously combusts? And what can I do (and what HAVE I been doing) to keep this from happening to me?

(It reminds me of a Simpsons episode in which a salesman says to a group of people, “Folks, how often have you opened the morning paper only to have the rubber band fly off and hit you right in the eye?” Marge enthusiastically responds with, “Never. But it’s my number one concern.”)

Waterton won’t be the same without the Kilmorey, but I’m glad they at least found out about this very alarming laundry vulnerability somehow. Hopefully when they rebuild it they will learn from past mistakes.

My Sophomore year of college, my friend Audrey and I took a road trip for Spring Break. We took my car down to her parents’ house in the Bay Area and spent a few days in the sun, then drove to central Oregon to meet some friends of ours that were spending the week at a cabin there. Somewhere in central Oregon, about 2 hours from our final destination, we got a little bit lost on back roads and it started to snow. It was already dark and we’d been in the car for so long we were more than a little loopy. I was driving when Audrey said, “How come whichever way we turn, the snow is still coming RIGHT AT US?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. She had to be joking. Everyone knew that snow always looks like it’s coming at you when you’re driving, but it’s clearly not possible. I reasoned with myself that Audrey was, by far, one of my most sarcastic friends and that she couldn’t be serious about this. I mean, she was born and raised in the Bay Area, but she’d seen snow before. She had to have driven to the mountain to ski at some point, right?

I responded, half joking, half serious, and totally confused: “What, have you never driven in snow before?”

When she replied that she hadn’t, I didn’t know what to say. I can’t really explain how I felt except to say it was probably the same way she felt the previous year when I asked her why people in movies always went to doorways in earthquakes.

Why did I tell you this story, you might ask? Because it was one of the first times I realized that not everyone understood winter. And I was reminded of this revelation again last Sunday when it began snowing in Portland for the first time this year. I’ve seen Portland drivers try to deal with a few inches of snow before, but their inability to do so never ceases to amaze me. I met a guy from Wisconsin last weekend who described Portlanders (and specifically their reaction to snow and ice on their roads) as adorable.

In the spirit of the season, here are my Top Five Favorite Things About Snow in Portland:

1. The obsession Portlanders have with chains. See here. This is not a joke. Chains were required earlier this week on any road anywhere in the Portland Metro area, due to roughly 1-4 inches of snow. And no, studded snow tires don’t count.

2. The 2008 edition of “Portland-drivers-on-snow-and-ice” video. Hard to believe no one was hurt in the making of this video.

3. Arctic Blast 2008.  That’s what the news networks are calling it.  It’s just a few inches of snow. Accompanied by something called “Arctic air.”

4. My need to defend myself for complaining about this weather, while still feeling superior to everyone around me. The bottom line is that I know how to deal with snow, ice, and cold. The problem is that the city of Portland doesn’t. They don’t have any plows, they don’t salt the roads, and I actually saw a Tri-Met employee downtown yesterday breaking the ice in the MAX tracks with an iron rod and then blowing out the chunks with a leaf-blower. Yes, I may complain that it’s cold and difficult to drive on certain roads. This is not because I learned nothing in my 18 years in Montana. It is because I am always cold and because Portlanders would rather cancel work and stay home safe than take the actions necessary to operate business as usual. I don’t blame them. I just think I’m better than they are.

5. Snow days. In the 13 years I went to school in Montana, I had one day off because of weather. And it was because the roads were so icy the superintendent was worried about school buses driving on them. This week in Portland, schools were closed just about every day. Most people didn’t go to work (except at my office, where we think that because the doctors have to go to work every day, we should, too. Thank goodness there were fundraisers available to the citizens of Portland this week!)

They really are adorable.

…Or at least before it was so mainstream.

My friends like to hold annual events. Birthdays may or may not be a big deal every year, but certain things, like the International BBQ Symposium and Cinco de Mustache, are not to be missed or under-celebrated. They are holy days.

The sweater party is one such event. This year was the 6th Annual Christmas Sweater Party. I indoctrinated my cousin Brian and his girlfriend Anna as well…

They did really well on such short notice! Anna even came with hideous, gaudy gold earrings and a pin to go with the gross sweater she got at Goodwill. Turns out Brian’s dad actually wore that tie years ago (although hopefully not with a plaid smoking jacket). They both acquired their headwear at the party.

Kyle told us his secret to getting the best sweaters: shopping in July. He said that he has to shop in the off-season since Ugly Christmas Sweater parties are now so popular they’ll soon have their own theme on evite.com.

I wouldn’t normally post this photo since it’s so blurry and because Anna looks so funny, but it was really necessary to show some sort of group shot. This also happens to be the only one we got of Julia’s sweater, which is just incredible.

I really have no idea why this party idea ever caught on outside our circle. If people around the world start growing disgusting facial hair every spring for Cinco de Mayo I’m going to worry.

I drove to Seattle today to meet up with my mom and play for the weekend. This evening, we had dinner with some old friends of both of my parents – he was a resident with my dad here in Seattle and they have kids around the same age as my brother and I. On the way over to their house, my mom asked me if I remembered going there as a kid to visit. I told her a few random memories I had of playing with their girls and exploring Seattle, and also told her the following story, which I’ve decided to recount here for all to enjoy.

Once, when I was about 6 and my family came to Seattle to visit, one of the girls, Claire, who is a few years my senior, had just gotten some pet fish. She was very excited to show them to me and rushed upstairs to point them out and tell me their names. Then she looked at her dad and asked if she could feed them, to show me what they looked like when they ate. I was moderately interested in the fish, but in fact more focused on whatever Claire thought was cool, since she was older than I was. She thought the fish were cool, so I thought they were the most fascinating things I’d ever seen.

Anyway, her dad said that she didn’t get to feed them today, since she fed them yesterday and they only needed food every other day. In my entire 6 years of being, I had never heard someone use that phrase, “every other day.” So I took him literally. I actually thought that Claire fed her fish every single day but this particular one. Every OTHER day but today. And I was pissed. I looked at her dad, assuming he was maliciously not allowing me to see these incredible creatures feed. He had chosen today, of all days, to invite my family into his house, knowing I wouldn’t be granted the only satisfaction I would crave. I thought to myself, Why did we come here TODAY?!

But he didn’t look like a mean person. So I went to my dad and asked him why his friend wouldn’t let me watch the fish eat. And my dad patiently explained what it meant to do something every other day, never knowing the definition I had made up on my own. And I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet that by the time he had finished explaining the term, I’d already moved on to whatever cool thing Claire was doing at that moment.

Alright, Luda, I see how it is.

But I’m not happy.

Reppin' tha 406

I had to share this with someone.

Last Saturday night we had a big event for work and I stayed up late helping tear everything down and helping my boss celebrate a fantastic fundraiser. I had to get up at 8 the next morning to do Race for the Cure. When I went to bed, I was already a little cranky about not being able to get a good night’s sleep.

A little before 7 AM, I heard a very loud car alarm going off somewhere outside my window. It wasn’t one of those Dane Cook car alarms that runs through all the options, though. It just did the first two sounds. (The ones that correspond with “HELLOOOO? I’M A CARRRRR?”) Over. And over. And over.

I did not punch a baby. But after about 5 minutes, I was starting to go a little crazy. And I was pissed off that I was awake almost a full hour before my alarm was supposed to go off. So I got out of bed to look out the window at what car it was, maybe even give the owner or anyone outside a dirty look from the 6th floor window.

And I noticed a funny thing when I got out of bed – the alarm wasn’t coming from outside my window. It was coming from the hallway of my apartment building.

So, of course, I quickly put on a sweatshirt, grabbed my purse and cell phone, and ran down all 6 flights of stairs.* It smelled pretty bad in the stairwell, but when is that even noteworthy? When I got outside I saw a bunch of my fellow tenants standing across the street; all of the twenty-somethings in their pajamas with angry looks on their faces; all of the elderly folks fully dressed, coiffed, and gossiping amongst themselves. There were two fire trucks near the building and the firemen had taped off a rather large area. They were just casually wandering around near the entrance to our building in their suits and boots that weigh hundreds of pounds, making it quite clear that they were bored.

I walked up to a couple of sweet white-haired old ladies and asked them what happened. “There was a gas leak,” one of them replied. “Didn’t you smell it? It smelled awful!”

Lady, I’m running on about 5 hours of sleep. I’m not firing on all cylinders. I’m not even opening my eyes all the way ’cause it kinda hurts. I didn’t think about why the stairwell that always smells funny smelled a different kind of funny this morning.

Then I realized that the firemen were walking in and out of the door to the hot dog place on the first floor of our building (which I will call WonderDog), and the door was shut. They had broken the giant plate of glass in the door to get in and were now stepping on the glass shards on the ground as they shuffled in and out with their heavy boots. Crunch. Crunch.

After about ten minutes, the firemen let us back in the building. I went upstairs, changed into different sweats and a different t-shirt, and left for Race for the Cure.

Fast forward – Monday evening. I check the mail when I get home from work, just like every other day, and there’s a sign posted above the mailboxes from the owner of WonderDog, apologizing for Sunday’s alarm. It turns out the pilot light in their water heater went out, which made everything smell like natural gas (only a moron wouldn’t have noticed). To make it up to us, WonderDog would allow all of the building residents to EAT FOR FREE for the rest of September. (Keep in mind, this was last Sunday, so there were still quite a few days left in September.)

Sunday, my “roommate” Amanda and I went to WonderDog and got free beers and dogs. And damn, were they amazing.

* I actually also threw on my pedometer. I haven’t blogged about this yet, but we’re having a competition at work wherein everyone wears a pedometer for 100 days and the person with the most steps logged at the end wins a prize. I’m losing terribly, so I try to have my pedometer on every single second possible. I needed all the steps I could get on Sunday morning. One could even say I was more worried about getting those steps than potentially saving my own life.

It’s no secret that I’m not very good at this whole being-a-grown-up thing. Occasionally I pay a bill late because I forget to open my mail for a week or two. Sometimes I go to work looking like I got dressed in the dark because… I did. And I’m still trying to figure out why books and beer are usually higher on my list of expenses than, say, food and clothing.

But one thing I’m really bad at is being in an “adult” relationship. Because I haven’t really ever done it. The only things I know about dating in your mid-twenties I either learned from my friends (who are mostly in long-term relationships that started with a random drunken college make-out) or movies. So, basically, movies. Which is why I got really nervous about my mom and my brother coming to visit this past weekend. Clearly, I want Brad to meet the fam, but if there’s anything Hollywood’s told me, it’s that meeting someone’s parents is a huge deal. Even if I don’t think it is.

So I talked to Brad about it last week. I tried to play it cool – Hey, I would love for you to meet my family, but I totally understand if it’s a little overwhelming to meet them so soon…blah blah blah. And of course he wasn’t worried at all. He said he definitely wanted to meet them, I just needed to tell him when and where to show up. So I made plans for my mom, Pete, Brad, and I to have drinks together on Saturday night.

One of my mom’s best friends from college, Marty, just recently moved to Portland, so she was excited to stay with him for the weekend. Pete was going to stay at my apartment on the floor, because Brian’s (awesome) friend Kim was in town and had dibs on the couch, but I decided to stay at Brad’s instead and give Pete the bed. My mom got in late Friday night, so Marty picked her up at the train station and she said she’d call me for breakfast on Saturday morning.

Bright and early Saturday morning, I got a call from my brother saying my mom had called about breakfast and he didn’t know whether it was okay to tell her that I wasn’t actually at my apartment with him. I called her back and told her I had stayed at Brad’s, since there were so many people staying at my apartment and this way Pete didn’t have to sleep on the floor or share a bed with his 25-year-old sister. She responded, “Meg, there are about a million reasons for you to stay at Brad’s, and that is the least of them.”

I told her she and Marty should go pick up Pete and go to breakfast and I’d meet them there. Brad had to drive me home and get his bike, plus I needed to shower and get ready. So, we drove to my apartment and were hugging goodbye in front of the entrance when I looked across the street and saw my mom and Marty, standing in the Park Blocks, waving and giggling at us.

Now, one thing I haven’t told you about Marty is that he’s a photographer. He never leaves home without at least one camera. So he wasted no time in picking up the one around his neck and snapping a few “paparazzi” shots of us.

This was me, being embarrassed and explaining to Brad that he didn’t get to wait until that night to meet my mom. Turns out he was actually excited to see her. I was the only one who was mortified.

Moral of the story: I’m awkward. Brad’s not. My family loved him. And I look absolutely terrible in the mornings.

Two of my closest friends (Talia and Alex) moved to Chicago on Monday. I’m currently in denial and doing anything I can to distract myself. Bob Costas has come to my rescue.

Side note: Did you know that this is the SEVENTH TIME Bob Costas has covered the Olympics for NBC since 1992? Madness.

Even though I love watching the crazy stuff like synchronized diving, I live for beach volleyball, swimming, and gymnastics. I could watch Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh all day. They are so damn good at what they do and always look like they’re having fun. And I think I speak for just about every American girl when I say that gymnastics and ice skating were my gateway drugs to the Summer and Winter Olympics, respectively.

But swimming has become particularly interesting to me recently. Not just because of Michael Phelps and his amazing feats, but also because of people like Katie Hoff, Natalie Coughlin, Jason Lezak, Ryan Lochte, and Dara Torres. The other reason is because my cousin Kevin has been assigned by the Baltimore Sun to follow Katie Hoff and Michael Phelps (native Baltimorans) and all of their gold-medal-seeking adventures. He knows more about Michael Phelps than I may ever want to (including his eating habits), and even had to take a break from our family golf tournament in Waterton to call Michael’s mom Debbie from a pay phone to get some insight and hopefully a few quotes.

In every screen shot of the Water Cube, I’m looking for Kevin in the crowd, wondering if he’s sick of the smell of chlorine or the echoing cheers yet. Or if he still finds the whole thing interesting and surreal, even though this isn’t the first time he’s covered the Olympics for the Sun.

But at this point, I have to share with you my favorite part about Kevin covering swimming. And that is the following two videos (which I apparently can’t embed in this post).

ChloriNATION Episode 15

And the follow-up episode:

ChloriNATION Episode 16

U-S-A! U-S-A!

About 8 months ago, I decided to buy a bike. Since I live in one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world and live right downtown, I thought it would be a good idea. I could take my bike places instead of walking, driving, or braving public transit in Fareless Square.

So I got on Craigslist and found a used bike for $60. I asked Alex to come with me to get it, because the guy selling it lived in Clackamas. Not only did I have no idea where Clackamas was, but I definitely did not want it to be the last place I was seen alive. And clearly, Alex would save me from any harm. We borrowed Amanda’s car, threw the bike in the trunk, and then stored it in Alex and Talia’s garage until the weather was nice enough for me to ride it home.

Yesterday was a pretty nice day. I woke up at 10:00 and wasn’t planning to do anything until 1:00, when the Plastics were meeting for lunch before our Brewfest marathon day. Sounded like a good day to take the bus to T&A’s and ride my bike home.

I found enough change in my room to buy a bus ticket, since the only cash I had was in $20 bills, hopped on the bus and got off by their house. As I was walking through the McDonald’s parking lot, I threw my bus transfer ticket away, since I would be riding my bike home. I don’t think I need to add a foreshadowing note here for you to see where this is going.

Alex and Talia were out, but they gave me the combination code for their garage. I got the bike out, closed the garage, cleaned all the dead spiders off the wheels, hopped on the bike, and immediately fell over when the pedals wouldn’t turn. After I cleaned myself off and checked to see if anyone had seen me (they had), I flipped the bike over and noticed the chain was, as they say, completely FUBAR.

While repeatedly telling myself what a self-sufficient and resourceful badass I am, I assessed the situation, figured out (roughly) what the issue was, and tried to fix it. I wish I could say I fixed it MacGuyver-style with a ballpoint pen, a piece of gum, and some dental floss, but all I really had to do was put the chain back on the gears the right way, which took me about a half hour. I rode down the street and back, but the bike was making all sorts of weird noises.

Side note: Alex and Talia’s next door neighbors have a daughter who’s about seven. At the same time I was struggling to figure out how a bike could break when it hadn’t been touched in 8 months, she was teaching herself to ride a unicycle on their street. I have never felt so worthless in my life. Every time she passed me, she said hi just to rub it in that she could talk AND ride a unicycle at the same time.

I called Alex and asked where the nearest bike shop was, imagining that I could just ride over there, get some screws tightened quick-like and then ride home as planned. To make this ridiculously long story a tad bit shorter, I will reveal some information I didn’t have at the time: The nearest bike shop was actually 7 blocks away from where I was. Alex, however, sent me to where said bike shop was located TWO YEARS AGO, approximately a mile away. So I walked my bike there, worried it would break again if I rode it, putting me through a very embarrassing wreck. Then I called Alex and told him there was no such bike shop at the intersection he gave me, which he didn’t believe. I called Brian and had him look up the address of the place. Then called Alex and asked him if he was confused and meant to send me to the closer place, to which he responded, “Well yeah, there’s one there, too, but I swear there should be one where you are.” (The more adept of my three readers may wonder at this point why he didn’t send me to the close one in the first place if he knew it was there.)

Anyway, I called the place, found out they moved while Alex wasn’t looking two years ago, and walked my bike back towards where I started. When I got to the shop, I told them what I thought the problem was and they said they needed to replace the part, which would take at least a day and cost me $28. Could I come pick it up tomorrow?

So that’s how I ended up standing on the corner of 20th and SE Powell when I was supposed to be at lunch, covered in bike grease and sweaty as hell, carrying a bike helmet and lock, kicking myself for throwing away my bus transfer ticket. I didn’t bring any bus money with me and wasn’t really interested in begging for it at the 7-Eleven. I called Ben and Amanda, who graciously offered to come pick me up, even though they had literally just driven by that exact spot five minutes ago and were now on the other side of town. I decided to walk up Powell while I waited for them. In the process I found some really interesting places in SE Portland I wasn’t previously familiar with, including a place that has a whole cement lot full of bouncy castles, one of which was shaped like an elephant and full of children bouncing and screaming in delight. At one point I was texting Amanda to tell her where I’d walked to, when I ran into a tree branch. Face, meet tree branch. While I was standing on the sidewalk laughing at myself, I heard Ben and Amanda yelling “MEGO! MEGO!!!” from their car. I ran across a busy street to get to them, opened the car door, and seeing that the back seats were folded down, dove into the trunk.

The happy end of this story is that I made it to lunch about a half hour late, showered and wearing different clothes, and enjoyed about 6 hours of the Brewfest with my ladies. However, just when I was starting to forget how strange my life can be, I ran into all of my brother’s friends from high school standing outside the bars downtown. It was after midnight, I was walking home from the post-brewfest party at Berbati’s and once again heard someone yelling my name in the street. My brother’s buddy Aaron is getting married next month and his best man lives in Portland, so the bachelor party was an entire weekend of debauchery at the Oregon Brewers Festival (sprinkled with visits to bars and classy strip establishments). My brother is in the wedding, and would have been here if he didn’t have to be in school. So the boys decided I needed to represent him at the bar. I ended up spending the next four hours drinking and hanging out with them.

A broken bike, a brewfest, and a bachelor party. Sounds like a nice little Saturday.

I received this email today at my work email address. I definitely do not know this person.

Hi Megan,

Kathy
P.S. Taking metamucil at night is making a good difference!!

Any ideas for how I should respond?