1. I stayed calm when my flight from Portland to Spokane was canceled and it all worked out. Alaska Airlines rebooked me for a Saturday morning flight, booked me in the Monarch Hotel in Clackamas, and the hotel has a shuttle service. I was in my room by 12 with a relaxing day stretching out before me.
2. That relaxation was made possible mostly by Terry Turner. He came to the hotel and picked me up and we went to the Stillhouse in Oregon City. I had a great steak and mushroom pie with a couple pints of Old Speckled Hen. We closed out our visit to the Stillhouse with a superb McCarthy's single malt scotch. I felt like I was living in the year 800 that scotch was so deep and transporting. We then went to the McMenamin's Sunnyside pub where I enjoyed a couple of Hogsheads with a Hammerhead back.
3. You might think because I first wrote about what we drank, that that was what mattered most to me during this relaxing afternoon with Terry Turner. That's not true. What we drank came in a distant second behind fascinating conversation about our jobs in the Silver Valley, mine in the Zinc Plant and Terry's in the Sunshine Mine and the Kopper Keg. I learned more about the mine than I had known before and many of the stories were funny. We also talked about other stuff like conserving fish habitat and the challenges of making work places in Oregon more racially/ethnically diverse. Terry made me think that, in general, maybe I should be so quick to cringe whenever I hear the word "training" no matter what the training is about. I cringe even if it's a training about how to walk a dog for the animal shelter or it's a training for how to volunteer at a warming center. I should probably try to get over this. I have agreed with the purpose of most of the trainings I've attended over the past thirty years or so, but almost always found the training itself to be dispiriting and to work at odds with the good things they were meant to help us trainees with.
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