We got into Portland a little past midnight on Friday.

M had a lacrosse tournament there, and a friend from college wanted to visit, so we decided to just make a weekend trip out of it.

It was good!  Portland has a lot of similarities with Seattle (a reality that is greeted with equal amounts of derision from Portland and Seattle natives alike, as far as I can tell), which means it's always relatively easy to visit: there are different shops and the streets have different signs, but it's a different flavor of the same scoop of ice cream.

There are things about it that I wish I could hold onto forever: the flat roads that are endlessly bikeable, the cheap beer (I had a $7 imperial stout at Cascade that was possibly the best beverage I had ever tasted!), the Powell's.

Sometimes travel feels like triangulation: collecting little snippets and puzzle pieces of what it feels like to live well.

Sometimes travel is just following an impulse to spend a weekend without opening your laptop.  (Okay, I opened it *once*.  Just to check my email -- and then to write this.)

Still, I'm happy to be back home.  I'm happy to spend the last bit of the evening reading *S.* and listening to Belle and Sebastian.  I'm excited to spend the week chipping away at our backlog of television -- *Fargo*, *American Gods*, *Silicon Valley*, *Master of None*, *Brooklyn 99*, and *Leftovers* might be too much.  

I'm happy to get back into the swing of things -- it's nice to have a change of pace, but the reason my pace is my pace is because *I really like my pace*. 

Happy Sunday.  I hope you kick up your heels.