Keeping Portland Weird

First,
after the fashion of so many great discoveries,
I accidentally created an interesting snack.

Feeling hungry, having cheese and crackers on hand, and trailed by a thought bubble depicting a friend of mine making a snack of microwaved cheese on bread (cheesy bread!), I put a few slices of white cheddar on one of those little Breton crackers and stuck it in the microwave. For 30 seconds.

Yes, that is kind of long. ideally, I would've done like, 11 or 12 seconds. But it's one of those microwaves where as soon as you hit the '1', it starts itself up for 1 minute. I am not patient enough to figure out how to stop it from doing this and usually just mentally subtract my desired amount of time from the 1:00 and manually override the microwave when I see fit. There is also a button that says 30sec. This one is useful if I am concerned that I may forget to stop the microwave soon enough (yes, this is actually a valid concern)

So I hit the 30 sec button.
And walked off to put something away in the bathroom, allowing all 30 seconds to elapse. I figured the cheese would just be very melty and very hot and I would suffer for this by trying to eat it too quickly.
I was wrong.

This is what I found in the microwave:



The cheese did not just melt over the cracker.
It solidified in a bubbly crispy lace pattern.

This is interesting because the cheese lace pattern part is actually an acceptable fancy appetizer. You take a baking sheet, spread some oil on it, and arrange shredded cheese in a small flat disk pattern. When baked, the cheese becomes this lacy crispy cheese chip.

Apparently, you can do the same thing, but on a cracker in the microwave.




Also,
last Friday:

Hearing of a strange occurrence to befall the fountain downtown, I biked over:

Just some pudgier-than-usual looking people loitering by the fountain. I suppose, Portland was ranked as the Fat Capital of the US a while back wasn't it? (Come on Milwaukee!)



Oh, but then:



I think there was supposed o be an official beginning,
but when 1800 hours came and no such signal was forthcoming, a friend of mine jumped up, yelled "PillowFIIIIIGHT!
and that was it.


And I saw this cool shark-looking car on the way home.



I wonder if the lady behind the car saw me take the picture and knows she's in a photo somewhere. I wonder how many photos I'm in the background of.