Clearly we have been behind the times...

Apologies, it's been too long, and I just had noticed that I never published a post I wrote back in April so that was the earlier email you may have received.

Apologies all around.

Anyhow, Dan and I have returned from a fantastic trip to Portland for the 2014 JASM conference.  It was a fantastic week and we had a lot of fun.  Karrie came down with a friend from Seattle and visited us for the day on one of the rainiest Portland days ever.  We still had a lot of fun, had some tasty food, and saw some neat parts of Portland.  I haven't spent much time in PDX so it was nice to get a tour around town and see some new spots. 

The conference was a lot of fun as well.  I saw a few talks each day, and got to catch up with old friends from NOAA so that was pretty great.  I got to sit in a few NEON talks as well so it was nice to get a little more info on what my job is all about (The aquatics portion of our site is not yet in place so we don't have a lot of details about it just yet, but seeing the overview as presented to the scientific public was pretty informative).  Overall we had a great week, we ate a lot of amazing food we don't usually get here in T-Town, got to ride mass transit like it was our job, and sipped A LOT of fantastic coffee, including Stumptown's nitro coffee - a cold brew coffee infused with nitrogen - why you ask?  I just don't know what to say except -why not? The coffee was creamier tasting without being anything more than coffee infused with N2 gas.  It tasted kinda like a Guinness without actually being a Guinness..

Anyhow, other amazing places we tried: Toro Bravo, Frank's Noodle House, Mirakutei, Pambiche, Burnside Brewery, Base Camp Brewery, Rogue Brewery, Green Dragon (Pub), Nong Khao Man Gai many food carts to be named.

In other words, a lot of good food and drink, happiness to get us by until our next big city trip!  Now we are home in the sweltering heat keeping Hannah nice and happy.  We celbrated Memorial day with a nice grill session where Dan put a couple of nice pork tenderloins to task.  We ended the evening with a viewing of Rocky 4 (because, really, why not) and that got us extra revved to be proud americans....

down with russians!

Here are some photos from the last few weeks.

xo