MacGuyver, Penthouse Dreams and PCP

This weekend was full of bloggable experiences, so I will cut to the chase.

#1 The Ward Campout – I went camping with the young single adult congregation that I belong to at McIver State Park. Say it out loud. It sounds like MacGyver. He wasn’t there though. There were two very memorable experiences at that campout, one of them entertaining and one of them not so entertaining. The entertaining one was when we played kissing rugby. Instead of explaining the rules of the game, I will just tell you this: you basically try to kiss someone on the face while they try and stop you. I may or may not have tackled a girl in my ward to the ground, pinned her down and kissed her, and there may or may not be an incriminating picture of this on my friend Courtney’s blog. If our blog posts about the weekend seem pretty much the same, it’s because we basically spent the weekend together. Except for the belly dancing class. I didn’t go to that.

The other less entertaining event of the campout was the horrific noise that woke me up at around 2:30 or 3:00 am and went on for about an hour. (Courtney’s version is much less dramatic). Two people brought their dogs camping with them. The noise that woke me up led me to believe that a bear had captured one of the dogs and was dragging it through the woods while eating it alive. The other option was that some pigs were being slaughtered nearby. How she slept through it, I’ll never know. Someone explained to me the next morning that they were in fact coyotes. Coyotes? I thought those things only existed in cartoons with roadrunners or on bad t-shirts howling at a full moon. At any rate, I don’t like them.

#2 Street of Dreams – Saturday after returning from the campout, a group of us went to the Portland Street of Dreams. This year it was held downtown in the Pearl District instead of out in suburbia. We spent the afternoon touring million dollar penthouses and coveting. Well, except for the one penthouse with the random gross stuffed animals scattered throughout the place. That was just weird. Afterwards, we hit up Cha Cha Cha for some delicious Mexican food.

#3 Portland Cello Project – Portland is great for music. Portland Cello Project (or PCP as it is affectionately referred to) is one of many reasons why Portland is great for music. PCP is an indie cello orchestra. Sometimes they do Bach and sometimes they do a concert at the Doug Fir Lounge and do covers of songs by Madonna, Justin Timberlake, George Michael, A-ha and Michael Jackson, just to name a few. They did the latter on Saturday night and I went with roughly the same crowd that did Street of Dreams. For the vocals, they got a bunch of singers from local bands. They did Man in the Mirror and I sang along, even though I didn’t have my hairbrush with me. At the very end, all the vocalists came out on stage with headphones and they all sang We Are the World. That was the most fun I remember having at a concert.

Another fun part of that concert happened before, and Courtney mentioned it in her blog post. There was an erotic arts festival going on next door to the Doug Fir and we accidentally almost bought tickets to that instead of PCP. Courtney and I waited outside for other friends to arrive and got in some good people watching time. It was magical.