Mt. St. Helen's

From my office I can see Mt. St. Helen's and today there is smoke/steam/whatever rising from the top of it! So here you have a Midwestern boy who's yet to even go out and explore a mountain, never really seen mountains up close except driving on highways and today there's a Volcano smoking outside my window! This is a link to the Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam. How big is Mount St. Helens? Big. I can see it on the horizon to the north while driving in on the expressway and to the east the immense Mount Hood. I took Heidi to Jo-Bar for Valentine's day. It's the restaurant where we met. It's a very trendy place in the NW Portland. The menu is new each day. She had elk and I had a steak. Now I've never had elk before (and neither had she actually) but it was damn good and this is the Pacific Northwest. Also I thought it was weird that the server gave us a spoon for the bone marrow... that's right. You scoop out the bone marrow and eat it with a spoon. It was ok but the meat was far better. I've been wanting to see the movie Walk the Line about Johnny Cash. I don't really have any of his music and Heidi bought me the The Legend of Johnny Cash CD. I listened to it on the way to work this morning and it was very good. I'm not a country fan and I certainly wouldn't consider it country by the way it sounds. She also got me Teacher Man. Basically it's the 3rd book from Frank McCourt, an Irish immigrant. I read Angela's Ashes (great book [a Pulitzer Prize winner] although it didn't get really good until about half-way through it and he writes in a very strange first person small child-like manner - basically writing as if he was dictating as of whatever age he is the moment the event he's writing about is happening) and Tis late last year (2005). I'm looking forward to reading it.