Weekend Update

This week:
I’m enjoying having several books going at once. I’m not sure yet whether I’m a converted book polygamist but I like having books of different styles and settings to choose from so I can switch back and forth whenever I need a change of pace.

I finished Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m still reading The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen, Dear, Mr. Holmes by Steve Hockensmith and You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark. Dear Mr. Holmes is short stories and Celia Rivenbark’s book is a collection of humorous essays so I need to pick another novel to toss into the currently reading mix.

My current audiobook is still Polar Shift by Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos. It’s read by Scott Brick and I think I’m a convert to the audio format for Clive Cussler’s books. They’ve always read like adventure movies to me and I think the audio option works well.

Other than books and reading:
We took ourselves on a bit of hometown tourism last weekend and did the “Portland 4T” the four “T”s stand for Trail, Tram, Trolley and Train.
(click on the photos to see them full size)

This is a fun way to spend an afternoon. We started up by the zoo and took a couple of trails through the greenspaces and parks of the city.

The first destination was Council Crest which is the highest point in Portland. It was a clear sunny day, but there was a haze in the air from forest fires in the mountains and we couldn’t see the mountains through it. It was still a gorgeous view of both the city and on the other side the valley just west of Portland.

After another trail hike where at points we could only hear the birds and not the noise from the city that surrounded us we ended up at the top of the hill at Oregon Health Sciences Center.

This is where the upper station of Portland’s Aerial Tram is. We’ve talked about taking the tram ever since it opened but never have managed to do so yet. Right next to the Tram station is an observation deck with another beautiful view.
The tram ride down to the waterfront was pretty and fun.

Our next T of the afternoon was the Portland Streetcar (also called the Trolley). We took this into downtown. By this time we were more than ready for a late lunch and to rest a bit.

A conveniently located Pizza shop was a perfect place for a break.

The final T was the Light Rail Train back to our starting point. This is basically my routine commute on the days I work downtown so wasn’t anything novel for me, but was still a nice end of the loop.

It was a great way to spend a nice afternoon. Both Council Crest and the upper Tram station are places I want to go back to when we have one of those clear crisp days without fire related haze so I can get some photos of the mountains and the full range of the views.

It’s a great combination of hiking and riding that I’d recommend to both folks who live in Portland as well as visitors. I’ve included a few photos for today, but I plan to put together a full album of the photos I took and will post a link here on the blog when I get that done.

Added to my TBR List (To Be Read) this week:
Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman
Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman
I read about this one in a Shelf Awareness newsletter and it sounded like a delicious blend of Southern Gothic and Horror story that definitely has my interest.

Tilt-A-Whirl by Chris Grabenstein
Tilt-A-Whirl by Chris Grabenstein
When both BethFishReads and Jen from Jen’s Book Thoughts tell me they know I’d like a series I pretty much know I need to read it. This does sound like my kind of series so I trust them.

Into the Silence by Wade Davis
 Into the Silence by Wade Davis
Ever since I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air I’ve been fascinated with stories of Mt. Everest. Last year I read Ghosts of Everest which was about both the 1924 Mallory Expedition and the Expedition that found his body on the mountain in 1999. This new book due out in October looks like a thoroughly researched history of the British climbers and their efforts to summit Mt. Everest in the 1920s

Purchased this week:
Once again, I didn’t buy anything this week. I’ve got so many books already in the house that I really want to read soon that it’s taking something really special for me to move from the ‘add to TBR list’ stage to the ‘buy it now’ stage of book interest.

I also returned the two library books I had out because there was just no way I was going to get to them before they were due back. They’ll both be coming back sometime soon.

Have a great weekend!!
http://whimpulsive.net/2011/09/09/weekend-update-september-10-2011/
whimpulsive.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-41
68796
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SHSVKV4UKMSXZ2VGCG6DD2CZQKVYQWEX
<urn:uuid:e25524af-bfe3-45cc-a21e-cab1957f1de7>
2014-09-16T07:23:24Z
69.195.124.215
sha1:MNR2LWEL4PR57UUK53MUFOBA272FVENL
<urn:uuid:3e68e8e9-dccd-498b-ad02-25d207f687e4>
http://whimpulsive.net/2011/09/09/weekend-update-september-10-2011/
response
<urn:uuid:80feb43c-4973-4afb-9318-c1d023968e89>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-196-40-205.us-west-1.compute.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-41
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for September 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf