Tag Archives: oysters

Aug14

Exploring Fort Stevens and Astoria… IN OREGON YO! This is my new JAM! – Day 1

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Exploring Fort Stevens and Astoria… IN OREGON YO! This is my new JAM! – Day 1

Wednesday, 17-June-2015

Our first day at camp, and my first day (yes, my first day ever) in Oregon! I know, it’s kind of crazy… but I got hired to this new job sight unseen – I did two phone interviews, and then they offered me a job. No in-person, nothing. And I’d never felt the draw to take a trip out to Oregon – it’s beautiful, I’m sure, but there were other places that had called out to me just a little bit louder.

But now, I was in Oregon. Our tents were set up, and the cars mostly unpacked.

So we packed back into the cars, and headed into town. If you had asked me, I couldn’t have pinpointed for you exactly why I wanted to visit Astoria… but for various reasons the name stuck out in my head.

(Ed note: Dark Astoria, from the City of Heroes video game. So Long, Astoria, the album that Ben loves. The Goonies, a pretty damn good movie. The name just generally being freaking cool)

So we headed in, looking for the one thing that we did know Astoria was famous for – its breweries.

Since we had driven all day, we didn’t aim to do a full pub crawl – instead, we picked one place and hunkered down for an evening of food and tastings. Our choice was Buoy Beer… mostly because it was easy to get to, and highly rated on Yelp. Yeah yeah, make fun of us for using yelp. We were on a road trip and you weren’t, ohh fancy-pants.

Buoy Beer Brew House. Bison Burgers. Bevies of Bountiful… Boysters. And beer. We ate hamburgers and drank beer and slurped oysters. It was delicious and amazing. I’ll admit, hindsight being 20/20, that the oysters weren’t as good as New England oysters. But the Bison burgers and the beer were very much top notch.

Top notch enough that we could barely move as we wandered Astoria after we’d eaten and drank our fill. But we did – we explored a bit and walked off some of the food coma. Or at least enough of it that we could make it back to camp that night, and pass our surprisingly early.

Feb4

How to make a bad day… not so bad.

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14-Jan-15

 

I had a rough day.

In all honesty, I couldn’t pinpoint any single bit that made it worse than a normal day… I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I guess.  And then had the bed explode, and stab me with a knife made of doom.  It wasn’t pleasant.

The workday didn’t make it any better, especially when I had a last-minute project dropped on my lap, which kept me at work just long enough to have to bail on a date.  Seriously – one of my biggest frustrations is how everything is always timed just close enough that it reminds you how it could have been… instead of definitely being absolutely too late to keep my plans, instead I was only 15min late… so that little voice in the back of my head kept reminding me that, maybe, I could have made it.  That this other option was still just close enough that I could maybe rush and make it only a little late…

But no – Instead, I cut my losses, canceled plans, and drove home.

I knew how to make it a better night though – delicious dinners, with delicious drinks, and delicious relaxation.

 

An alternative title to this could be: “the night I practiced shucking oysters”

Because that is exactly what I did – I stopped in at the butchers shop to get a pair of steaks.  One for dinner, and one for lunch tomorrow.

Then, I salted them, and left them to sit while I walked down the street to whole foods, while listening to an amazing album.  At whole foods, bread and oysters (along with sauce, and an oyster knife) were bought.

Then I walked home… taking just long enough for the album to finish playing all the way through.

Oysters were shucked while the oven was heating up – then eaten while I was cooking the steak and cutting up the tomatoes to go with it.  The bread was tossed into the oven to warm up right before the steaks were ready, and it was done by the time they had sit and rested after being cooked.

Scotch, of course, was sipped liberally throughout the process.

 

By the time I was done eating?  Well, nothing had really changed in the real world.  But my outlook on it was markedly improved.