McMinnville

You are currently browsing articles tagged McMinnville.

Christmas 2003; Acclimating back to McMinnville

December 27, 2003 in Life, Sports, Work | No comments

Hey, what do you know? An update, and within a month of my last update- not too shabby considering that I have been without a sturdy internet connection since moving back home. So what’s new, you ask?

Two weeks in and everything seems to be going well. I still have a job anyway, so that’s good. Actually, I’m not all that sure that I could have done anything to get fired if I had wanted to- all I’ve really had to do is read and observe people doing my eventual job. And for someone who’s quite good at sitting, it isn’t too hard to look stellar doing just that.

The real show starts in about four weeks, but until then I’ve got one more week of reading and participating in conference call classes (ick) before taking off to Seattle (well, Redmond, actually) for three weeks of claims school.

Everyone seems to agree that claims school is typically fun, so that shouldn’t be too bad. Plus, I’ll be able to play in Seattle at night. The only downside is that the Sonics/Cavs game featuring Lebron James appears to be sold out. Guess I’ll have to buy scalped tickets.

My two weeks in McMinnville have actually been pretty good. I’ve gone out to play pool with Bambi and bugged her at work a few times (if I can’t get me fired, I can try to get <i>someone</i> fired) and I’ve seen two Blazer games with Wells. Derek was supposed to join us for both, but was unable due to unforeseen circumstances. As for other activities, I saw the Oregon men play the Portland Pilots at the Chiles Center with my mom and brother, and I enjoyed Christmas with the whole family.

Oh yes… Christmas. I received a book (Moneyball, by Michael Lewis), a bunch of clothes (which is great, since I hate clothes shopping), a Blazer ticket package, a new wallet, a piece of the Joey Harrington billboard, a picture of John Navarre being sacked by Igor Olshansky and several other Ducks, a DVD of all the Beatles’ appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, and I’m sure any number of things that at the moment I cannot recall. In other words, I did quite well in the area of gift receiving… after all, that’s what Christmas is about, right?

In other news, I probably ate mad-cow disease meat over Christmas break, which means I will die of a brain-wasting ailment in a few years, and I seem to have hit a creative stride of late, which means that eventually more things will be appearing on this site. I’m going to try to think of a way to update this site while I’m in Seattle, which will probably consist of intruding on Lauren’s life in order to commandeer her computer for an hour or so over a couple of days. I don’t know- we’ll see. For now, I’ll leave you all to try to figure out what “go eat a corndog” means.

New Job

December 11, 2003 in Life, Website, Work | No comments

Well, for only the third time in its seven-year existence, my web page has moved. That’s right, Saturatedpratt.com has launched and left the University of Oregon and its Gladstone server behind with the other cast off servers of the past.

So, what prompted this move you may ask? Well, aside from the burning desire to spend money on something I can get for free (namely, web hosting), I am finally leaving the University of Oregon. That’s right, Mr. Pratt got a job.

This weekend I’ll be moving up north to begin working as an insurance claims representative. I know, it’s a corporate job and seems to be contrary to my previous post’s celebrity guest appearance, but they’re willing to pay me money to work, and do so during the daytime. So, for once and for all, goodbye Officer Pratt, hello Corporate Whore Pratt! (For brevity, you can call me C.W. Pratt, but not C.W- that’s taken.)

Over the next couple months I’ll probably be splitting my time between McMinnville, where I will live with my parents during the workweek, and Eugene, where I will attempt to preserve independent Chris on the weekends. We’ll see how it goes, but if I start asking for permission to drink a beer, I’ll know that it’s really time to get a place of my own. Really, it shouldn’t be too bad… for the short term anyway. It’s definitely going to be weird though.

For now, it looks like I’ll eventually be moving to the Portland area sometime after I get back from my training in Seattle in January or February. Hopefully Derek and I will be able to find some sort of nice, inexpensive shelter. I feel pretty bad for leaving Greg and Wells earlier than I thought I would, but I’m going to continue sending down rent and using the place as much as possible until either my lease runs out or they find a replacement. Then again, who could replace me?

As far as the what happened the rest of the time between now and my last update, the following events occurred in order: A drunk guy on his bike crashed in to my parked car and damaged the left front fender, Simon and Garfunkel were awesome live in Seattle, I met “Jesus” while patrolling the EMU one night, I had my first Krispy Kreme, the Ducks turned their season around, won the Civil War, and will play in the Sun Bowl, Thanksgiving came and brought with it cheesecake and stuffing, the Twins didn’t hire me, and Linfield lost to a team named the Johnnies. That’s about it.

Stay tuned for more frequent updates, as I now have most of the other pages on this site fully functioning, and of course, I now have more incentive in actually updating the page.

November; Sickness

November 27, 2000 in Life, School, Work | No comments

Aw yes… The holidays are upon us, which invariably means that Chris is once again battling some form of bronchitis. It seems that whenever I am ready to jam myself full of turkey and stuffing, whether it be Thanksgiving or Christmas, I find myself confined to the sofa sipping from a glass of water and taking in whatever holiday marathon is taking place on The Learning Channel. This Thanksgiving it was “Junkyard Wars.” It was pretty cool because this team of fat, British bikers turned a Land Rover into an amphibious vehicle, kicking the crap out of a Royal Navy Team. When I saw them, I couldn’t help but think back to an old Monty Python skit advertising the hip new “Royal Nayvee” (Which, by no cannibalism, I mean that there’s a certain amount). It made me laugh, which unfortunately hurt a lot.

Aside from TLC, I also watched my fair share of Comedy Central- which was nice since we don’t have it here in Eugene. I loaded up on SNL repeats and The Daily Show when whatever was on TLC or the History Channel didn’t interest me.

Unfortunately, this meant that I spent almost every waking moment of the two days that I was in McMinnville sitting in front of the television- save for the hour or so that I spent at the doctor’s office getting prescriptions for stuff that would make me not want to get out of bed for days.

But it wasn’t all bad, I did get to clean my Bimmer and see my family, so that was cool. I just would have liked to be able to leave the house, or at least eat. I arrived back in Eugene Friday night, at which time I cleaned my room a little, watched “The Perfect Storm” in Curtis’ room and retired to bed where I stayed until roughly noon. Saturday was spent driving around Eugene visiting many, many thrift stores and a guitar shop with Vanessa. Our goal was to find a petticoat for her to wear under her gorgeous new dress for her mother’s wedding. Though we stopped at more stores than I can count, our mission ultimately proved unsuccessful. She still tried on the dress for me, and yes, she still looked beautiful- even without the extra poofiness that a petticoat would have provided. We were out until about 6:30, when I had to come back to my room for duty. It was good timing too as I made it back just as our steak had hit the Red Devil Grill (The Ultimate Outdoor Kitchen) over on the Watson porch. I proceeded to have a delicious steak dinner with Pete, Josh, Curtis, Roland, and Taka. Vanessa was there too, but she didn’t really eat, so she doesn’t count. The food was good, we made a lot of jokes, and it was the first real meal that I had had in a few days, so I was happy.

The next day was spent laying in bed until about noon, when my election coverage intake was interrupted by Mary and Jen, who were coming to make sure that I had been taking my medication and drinking plenty of water. They proceeded to make me drink water out of an empty Weinhard’s root beer and choke down my huge pills. While that wasn’t very pleasant, it was reassuring to know that they would prefer that I not die. The rest of the afternoon was spent lounging around my room with an assortment of people, including Mary, Jen, Peter, and Patrick until I decided that showertime is traditionally before 3:00. Eventually, I emerged from my room to pick up Cassie from the train station. It was the first time all day that I had actually left my room, so that felt good. Besides- Cassie is a sweetheart, so I had to.

Cassie and I returned to my room where we watched The Simpsons with Mary, Peter, and Kayla. This was eventually interrupted by over five cop cars outside Hamilton, but that’s another story. Once we were done standing in the cold, inhaling pepper spray, I followed through on my threat to make Cassie watch “American Beauty.” She seemed to like it, and I of course still regard it as genius. With the exception of my comforting Mary through “Apocalypse Now” later that night, this essentially ended my Thanksgiving weekend. I’m going to aim at ceasing my illness sometime this week, but no promises. We’ll see how the week goes- all things considered, this weekend was pretty cool.