I talked to my boss this morning and now I’m taking Wednesday off as well. That means I’ll be burning 64 vacation hours.

Tomorrow night, I’m meeting up with Beth and Paul to drop off Reggie. Oh, I’m going to miss the little shit. He’s been so good lately. Tonight, though, he’s not too happy with me because he wanted more kibble and I put the bowl up.

Wednesday, I have about a bazillion errands to run before I leave. It’s good that I took the day off. The biggest thing I need to work out yet is my food to take on the plane Thursday morning.

Thursday, I need to be up around 4:00 AM, catch my cab at 4:30, and be checked in and ready for a 6:00 departure.  I must get some sleep on the flight or I’ll be a mess when I get there. When I get to San Francisco, my shuttle is all set to pick me up at the airport and take me to my hotel. Then I’m catching up with another Pug Villager for drinks and perhaps dinner.

Friday, I’ll be running around San Francisco. One of my must-do things is to visit my favorite adult toy stores for gay men.  Friday night, I’m having dinner with Allan.

Saturday, I’m having brunch with Allan at Foreign Cinema and then seeing John Saturday afternoon/evening.

Sunday, I have a shuttle picking me up at the hotel at 5:30 which should get me to the airport by 6:00 for an 8:00 flight. Since I have a completely unrestricted ticket, I could take a later flight if necessary.

So far, I have zero plans for Portland. That will change, I’m sure. From what I understand, there is a mass transit line that runs from the airport right to my hotel.  I’ll have to figure that one out.

The best part of this is that my hotels and shuttle are already paid for. The only things I need to worry about are my food and play. I’ll also need to pay for getting to/from the airport in Portland and Boston. Those are cheap. This vacation won’t put me into debt.

I just got the revised bill for my insurance now that I have the new car. My insurance has more than doubled. Keep in mind that I didn’t have full coverage on my car before, so that justifies some of the increase.

I really can’t complain because my insurance is still half of what I paid in Rhode Island.

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Earlier today, I got a message from another Pug Villager asking me what airport I was flying into. He said that if I was flying into Oakland, it would take me quite some time to get into San Francisco from the airport.  Fortunately, I’m flying into San Francisco International, and that means my transportation won’t be impacted too much by this. Even if I were going in and out of Oakland, I’d probably take BART, which shouldn’t be impacted by this, other than some extra passengers.

I did look at flying into Portland from Oakland on Southwest, which offers that route non-stop. I’m glad I made the decision I did, which is flying from San Francisco. Oakland was just a little bit out of the way for me.

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  Originally uploaded by mikehillwig.

My friend Liz has a little guy who just turned a year old. He’s a cute little thing.

We were all at Beth and Paul’s house yesterday, and I was wondering how the Pugs would react with the little guy. Reggie really wasn’t interested in him, and I was perfectly okay with that.

Brutus took a liking to him, and it was kind of cute. At one point, the puppy got too close, and Brutus let him know that it was perfectly unacceptable and chased him off. Brutus had the biggest grin on his face while he protected the little guy.

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  Originally uploaded by mikehillwig.

Today was Sunday, and I didn’t want to cook up a ton of food since I’m leaving very early Thursday morning. It was a good day to make soup.

I opened a few cans of tomatoes and chopped up some fresh roma tomatoes. Then I chopped up an onion and a few cloves of garlic. It all got tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper. These got roasted for about 45 minutes at 400 degrees. After it came out of the oven, it went into a big sauce pan where I hit it with the immersion blender. Then I slowly stirred in about three cups of homemade chicken broth. Finally, I added two small packages of fresh basil and let this simmer for an hour or so.

This made for some good soup. The only thing I might have done differently is to have hit it again with the blender to hit the basil since I have a bunch of whole basil leaves wilted throughout the soup.

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  Originally uploaded by mikehillwig.

I’m working on a project right now, going through all of the pictures in my iPhoto library and uploading tons of them to my Flickr account. I started with my Reggie pictures from 2005, then some of my family, and now I’m doing all of my Buddy and Brutus photos. I never realized just how many good pictures I have. This is one of my favorites.

Oh, and I’m actually posting this via Flickr’s blog function. I configured Expression Engine to use the Blogger API and then configured my Flickr account to use said API.  Lets see if it works.

I did a quick Google search for “Portland eats” to see what I could find in terms of food. It led me to whereportlandeats.com. It looks like a good starting point to find some good eats in Portland.

Citysearch also led me to Cheap Eats.

Today was a good day. Reggie and I went out to Beth and Paul’s house. They were having a little gathering because his parents are in from the UK.  Sam came up with Murphy and Howie. Dave and Liz had Alex with them. He’s getting SO big.

It was a great day, and Beth, as one would imagine, had all kinds of good food on hand.

It was a great day and now I’m very tired. It’s time for bed.

Sandra Lee is a disaster of a celebrity on your network. Please cancel her show.

She is everything that should NOT be put on television for people who love food.

I can tolerate Rachel Ray. But Sandra Lee is horrendous.

What do I want to do on this trip? I’ve been to San Francisco many times but never Portland.

I have a week to fill and so far zero plans. Any suggestions?