The first post of a new blog is bloated with the implication of Great Import. I’ve sat here considering what to write about for several fraught minutes (43, to be exact) and all I can really think of is that it’s so weird, my husband isn’t coming home from work tonight. He’s going to Portland instead.

Portland is one of those places: people who haven’t been there tend to roll their eyes at you when you wax poetic about its many charms. I’ve heard it called the Milwaukee of the West*, which suits me just fine. I enjoyed living in Milwaukee. Even the frequent blizzards carried a certain glamour, at least until you had to dig your car out of a snowbank with a broom** because you didn’t have the foresight to own a shovel. In my estimation, Milwaukee and Portland have the following things in common:

• proper devotion to beer
• interesting, amazing, engaged people doing whatever strikes their fancy, on a scale from weird to wonderful
• predilection for art of all kinds
• natural water features
• bacon in virtually everything

You can’t get coffee in Milwaukee like the sublime coffee you get in Portland, which is why Portland wins. Also, there’s a preponderance of restaurants specializing in Southern cooking in PDX. I’ve never had fried green tomatoes as good as my grandma’s anywhere except at Pine State Biscuits. Sealing the deal, Ground Kontrol has so many more games than the Landmark. Plus? Waterfalls.

Bon Voyage to my husband. Bon Matinée to my weblog.

*come to think of it, maybe it’s just us Milwaukeeans who call it that…

**actual events more amusing in retrospect than they seemed at the time