Author: stenaros

Leverage filming here. Lucky us.

In walking to school from the Max, I cross a parking lot and the attendant and I have our friendly morning wave. This morning, the parking lot was packed. I was puzzled, until I walked by the next parking lot I encountered and remembered that the TV show Leverage is filming here. These trailers for the production were taking up two parking lots, forcing the usual parkers into the first lot.
I know little about the show, aside from the fact that all the press releases state that it stars “Oscar winner Timothy Hutton.” To me, the fact that they have to advertise that Timothy Hutton is an Oscar winner doesn’t really scream, “I want to spend my time watching it.”

Here, they have commandeered the parking lot nearest to my school.
One of my favorite thing about movie/TV crews is their self importance. More than once, I’ve been walking down the street, headed toward my intended destination and had someone with a walkie talkie and a tool belt tell me in an arrogant tone that I will have to walk a different way “because we are filming.” Once, I had to circumnavigate an entire city block to get into the library because their “filming” was much more important than my returning my books.

This crew was no different. Every morning, from 9:45-10:15, the children at my school go into the North Park Blocks for “Morning Movement” which is a large motor movement P.E. thing that the teachers run. This morning was no different except that not one, but two teachers were approached by crew members asking them to keep the children quiet because there was “filming going on.” Seriously?

Seriously.

Houses and Plans

I first noticed this house when it was being renovated. It is a huge and beautiful house with a huge and beautiful double lot. I had plans to buy it and take in foster children and we would have a huge garden. They would learn self-sufficiency skills, I would get to run a large household–without giving birth to any children, the house would be full of life and all would be right with the world. Alas, it seems they are dividing the lot and putting in more houses. I’m a fan of infill, just not sometimes when it keeps me from double lots where I could have a stupendous garden.

Scenes from a bike ride

I meandered a bit on my way to Garden Fever this morning and caught these pictures.

My favorite kind of North Portland house: set back from the road, colorful paint, huge garden, and artistic touch.
The gate had these great trees sculpted on it. Notice also the cinder blocks keeping the gate from falling open. That would be a sign that the artist lives in residence and made this him/herself.
This is one of my favorite houses on N. Williams St. It looks very farm house-y and has a productive front yard with a great chicken run.
Taking a closer look, you can see that these hens are partisan.

Flower Communion

Flower Communion was today at church. I love this ritual. It is simple, but moving. Everyone brings a flower and places it in a basket, the flowers are blessed and everyone takes a different flower upon leaving. It was started in the 1920s in Czechoslovakia by Norbert Capek and brought to the United States in the 1940s by his wife. Unitarian Universalists adapt many religious traditions as part of their faith; this is one of the few that was created within the church.

Three sentence movie reviews–William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream


The fairies in this film were a bit too twee, and the title makes me laugh (did they think we would confuse it with the other guy’s Midsummer Night’s Dream?) I saw this in the theater, but was again reminded how Sam Rockwell (Sam Rockwell, of all people!) managed to steal an entire scene. Might I also observe that Calista Flockheart is unable to look anything but ridiculous in Edwardian garb?

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/1999/william_shakespeares_a_midsummer_nights_dream_ver2.html

The only poem I’ve ever memorized

Juke Box Love Song
Langston Hughes

I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem’s heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day–
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.

I studied Langston Hughes my junior year of high school. We each had to pick an American author to read for the year and I chose Hughes, partially because of this poem, partially because he was black, and partially because I knew that it would be easy to read the majority of his works because poetry goes down more quickly than prose. I was a lazy high school student.

I enjoyed reading Langston Hughes much more than I thought I would and so I will always be thankful for Mrs. Pirose and that year-long assignment. Though Mrs. Pirose and I didn’t get along. I ended up transferring out of her class three-quarters of the way through. Still, there was some good with the bad.

I am embarking on a new project. Each month, I will choose a poem to commit to memory. I think someone famous like Winston Churchill said that if you have memorized good poems, you will always have good company. On my bike rides back and forth to school, I have ample time to declaim to myself. Check back at the end of the month to see how I did with this month’s selection.

Books read in April

There were a lot of missteps this month. I hope the drought is almost over.

Read
Full Catastrophe Living
Jon Kabat-Zinn
I read this book as part of my “get rid of psorisis in 2009” campaign. In my research, I read about a study where patients undergoing UV treatment for psorisis who listened to the body scan meditation associaited with this book showed more improvement than patients who didn’t. I’m not undergoing UV treatment, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to see what this book has to say. Plus, I was intrigued by the title.

This is not a thin book. It is very, very long and as my library due date approached, I had to read 50 pages per night to finish it. However, despite it’s length, this book does more than any other book I have come across, to take the woo-woo out of meditation and yoga.

What this book asks you to do is not easy: spend 45 minutes per day meditating or doing yoga. One of the points made by the author is that in order to integrate this thing that will make your life easier into your life, you must first deal with making your life harder. It is a pain to make time every day for “the practice” but by week four three people asked me if I’d been on vacation lately. “You look so calm” they said.

Looking like I’ve been on vacation without actually going? I can get on board with that.

Sorcery & Cecelia
Patricia Wrede & Caroline Stevermer
I love books that seem to take place in normal time–either today or in history, but then have a slight twist that throws them a little bit into the fantasy realm. This is one of those books. It takes place circa Jane Austin and the two main characters have the same cares of concerns of young unmarried ladies of that day.

However, in this book’s world, sorcery is common, although looked down upon by some, including Cecelia’s Aunt. This is, when you get right down to it, a mystery, but the historical setting and the inclusion of sorcery give it just enough twist to make it different. For people who enjoy books composed of letters between main characters, this book provides that. In a reading year that hasn’t been very spectacular, I enjoyed this greatly.

The concise guide to self-sufficiency
John Seymour & Will Sutherland
Self-sufficiency looks so lovely when illustrated so beautifully. This is a smaller version of a larger book, designed with urban, or semi-urban people in mind. Includes instructions of how to kill and dress your chickens, among other things I will most likely not need to do.

Trellising: how to grow climbing vegetables, fruits, flowers and trees
Rhonda Massingham Hart
Good resource. Discusses the different kinds of trellis one would want and the different kinds of things to plant on them. It also has a very good section on espaliering trees.

Arches and Pergolas
Richard Key
Very nicely illustrated book about how to build several kinds of arbors. You may see an arbor from this book taking its place on the front porch.

Started but did not finish
Waking the Dead
Scott Spenser
I sort of liked this movie, but found it a little lacking and so I checked out the book to see if it could give me more. It didn’t.

My sister’s Keeper
Jodi Picoult
I could see where this was going. That, combined with the fact that I was more sensitive than usual to descriptions of medical procedures (they give me the heeby-jeebies) meant I wasn’t long for this book.

Did not even start
An irresponsible age
Lavinia Greenlaw