Open Buddha

It’s been a relatively busy weekend. On Friday, I ran off during lunch and turned in my first paper for the term. One down, three to go, at least for that class. I’m still working my way through Edmund Burke but I have to finish it very soon.

In the evening, Madeline came over relatively late. We stayed up late playing a cranium card game and the watching Big Trouble in Little China because she’d never seen it. Kids these days.

Saturday, after breakfast and dropping her off, was a bit of studying and other work about the house. R and I did go out for the late evening though. We met a bunch of our friends at Club Noc Noc downtown. Saturday night has been their Industrial/Goth night for a while though I’m told that their remodel is recent. We hung out until a bit after midnight. We met Thomas and Allison, who were acquaintances of a friend of ours. They were introduced to me as ‘Al.’ I got to have one of those "Oh, you’re Al BILLINGS!" moments a short while later. It turns out that they are on the local e-mail list for the Church of Mez and have seen me post there before. Allison runs http://www.velvetgarden.com, as it turns out as well (in fact, that’s her on the front page now that I look at it…). They moved up here from San Francisco after living there for a few years.

R loves it when people recognize me in public. It’s usually because of my website. I keep telling her that I’m famous but she doesn’t seem to be buying it.

I did get one real surprise of the evening when Harold McNeil walked in… For those that haven’t known Harold forever, he is a once-local artist who does a lot of "dark" artwork via mostly pen and pencil. He used to have work up around a bunch of places in town. He moved to Portland a few years back and he mentioned to me that he’d been living abroad for a year (I believe, the club was loud). He’s back in town now though.