For those of you unfamiliar with the Kennedy School, it’s a bed and breakfast that’s part of the McMenamin’s family of pub’s and lodgings.

They bought out a circa 1930’s elementary school and turned the whole thing into a bed and breakfast replete with restaurant, hot mineral pool, couch & end table furnished movie theater (with no commercials or trailers! — complimentary when you stay there), endless hallways of original art, and free wifi!

What more can a geek couple ask for!

(And yes, it is definitive now, Jen is a total geek – despite all protests to the contrary – see the post on her ‘You got WiFi?’ inquiry with the uber-tatt’d Kennedy School night desk clerks if you think I’m exaggerating).

I first visited the Kennedy school nearly five years ago to the day (late February 2001) while in Portland to hang out with my friend Don.

At the time, Don was a struggling writer who I’d struck up a friendship with online (how we met is a very funny story I will jot down sometime, hopefully soon – no promises – keepin’ it loose here – trying hard not to over promise and under deliver).

Anyway, Don was making like $2 a year as a writer and eating a lot of tuna. He’d had one book published that, though very good, was on the fast track to out of print.

I, in contrast, was still riding an absurd up tic on the pendulum-swing-O’life (funny how they come and go, eh?)

This swing had me commuting to Bermuda twice a quarter for three week stints doing web design on an insurance company web app (really, you can’t make shit like this up, it’d be rejected outright by the script screener as too ridiculous).

That phat assignment combined with the fact that I’d begun making my move on the very-hot-out-of-my-league-Mars-Hill-pastoral-admin-named-deacon-Jen had me in a mood to spread the love before it went ephemeral on me – if you know what I mean.

I had a another friend from Mars Hill at the time named Karl who was an aspiring writer. He was a very funny gent who wrote the announcements for the church and had a knack for side-splitting observationalist prose.

As a guy who decided a long time ago that encouraging folks to develop their creativity within the context of community was an important use of my time, I figured I would take Karl along with me on a trip to Portland to visit Don.

Turned out to be a great weekend — one of the highlights of which included Don introducing us to the Kennedy School over lunch.

That trip to Portland was also my first introduction to Powell’s bookstore – a place that, from the moment I walked through the door, was (and continues to be) – magical.

Romantic anecdote (about the girl, not Don or Karl) –

I still remember going outside Powell’s north west entrance while Don was paying for some books and making a phone call to a certain deacon-admin-hottie asking her for our first date (chronologically anyway) – funny how things come full circle, isn’t it?

And yeah, this photo is of me in front of that same entrance to Powell’s — 5 years, two kids, and many adventures later — snapped by the hottie herself.