Category: All (-ish)

Sunday Walk

I wanted to get out of the house today and the sun was also about, so on a walk I went. I stopped to take pictures of a lot/house I’ve always had my eye on. It’s been unoccupied for some time, and I suspect that it will be torn down soon and several houses will be built in its place. I had the idea to put a tiny house in this corner, rent out the bigger house and use the rest of the lot for an expansive garden, but I am lacking the capital to do any of those things. So here are some pictures instead.


From the alley corner. There was a large hedge along the alleyway which has been cut down. This was my first clue that perhaps this lot is due for some changes. In my world, the backyard would have the bulk of the garden beds. Where that shed is would be the tiny house.


Side yard. In my plan that parking would be severely reduced and berries would be planted along this side of the house.


From the front. I would remove the beech tree and a lot of the overgrown foundation plantings and put in an edible, permaculture landscape in the front yard.


As someone who gardens in a small space and thus needs access to all the sunlight I can get, I’m not the biggest fan of planting Douglas Firs in residential backyards. Aside from the sun issue, in most cases their height is out of scale with the house, the yard, and in general with the neighborhood. However, on this street of storybook houses, I love the effect of the Douglas Firs planted behind the houses. It completes the “enchanted forest” effect.

Here’s a nice house with a good-sized yard. Both need a bit of tending.

But look at those great shingles!

Closeup!

My walk took me to Killingsworth, a street I enjoy because it hasn’t much gentrified. In places, it reminds me a bit of the South Boston I lived in during the late 90s. Of course, I never came across the likes of the Jubilee Tabernacle in South Boston, but I delight in its presence here.

Full view of the Jubilee Tabernacle.

See? Gifts with Style? How could I not love Killingsworth?

Finding myself hungry, I ate at the Saraveza Bottle Shop and Pasty Tavern. I had a pasty and soup and went along with the regulars and had some beer. They were having a Valentine’s-themed tasting and I greatly enjoyed my choice of a Cherry Farmers Beer whose name escapes me. Oh wait, they have helpfully listed it on the web site. It was: Upright’s “Blend Edmunds” Cherry Farmhouse“Barrel aged wheaten ‘Four’ with tart cherries & barrel aged ‘Six’ with dark sweet cherries” Right. What they said. It was good. I enjoyed it.

Light-headed from the beer, I wandered over to the Max stop and rode home.

Essay: In praise of Darlene

I watched the television show Roseanne for a few seasons and enjoyed it for its irreverent humor and the fact that the cast of characters didn’t have entirely new outfits every single episode. (The regular appearance of wardrobe items made the show more “real” to me than non-décor “décor” or the factory Rosanne worked in.) I have not seen the show since the early 90s, but the other day I was thinking about Darlene and how much she meant to me as an adolescent.
Becky, the Connor family’s older daughter, was the girl I knew I was supposed to be. Becky spent hours on her hair, fashion and makeup and did what she could to fit in with the popular people and to get boys to like her. She was “typical American girl” right down to the –y ending of her name, so popular with girls in the 80s.
Darlene was just Darlene. Not only did she sport that out-of-fashion first name, she was a tomboy, flopped onto the couch in her jeans and lacked any accessories or hairstyles to perk up her personality. Darlene really just wanted to be Darlene. She was flip and funny and found most of the things her sister did ridiculous. I will forget Darlene asking Becky about kissing.
“Why do you have your mouth open?” Darlene asked in response to Becky’s illustrative pose.
“So he can put his tongue in my mouth,” Becky replied to Darlene’s disgust. As someone who at that point had never been kissed, I related to her reaction.
Though Darlene’s life appealed to me, I followed the Becky path by reading Teen Magazines for several years of my adolescence. I stopped when I realized that every other month I was treated to an article describing how to give myself a manicure. I did my best to make myself attractive, though I always felt—much like Becky—that I never had quite the right clothing. My name even ended with the appropriate –y ending. I wasn’t overtly trying to fit in and run with the popular people, but I certainly didn’t want to stray far enough from the norm to draw attention to myself as being weird.
Adolescent culture promotes conformity so strongly—in your own crowd, at the very least, and ideally the greater group. I had many examples from television of how I should act and the message was generally the same: do what you can to fit in; boys won’t like you if you are too different. But there were beacons of hope scattered here and there on the landscape. Darlene was one.
To this day I have incredibly warm feelings for Sara Gilbert, perking up whenever she appears on screen. Like many people, I got through adolescence as best I could. Under my thin adolescent veneer of self-confidence I looked everywhere for examples of how to be. I got lessons from the usual: friends, family, teachers, books. It was nice, every once in a while, to see examples in the media of who I might be.
Postscript. My time watching Roseanne was short, lasting only a few years until I got my first job or possibly my first boyfriend. But the show was on for quite some time and I have no idea how Darlene turned out. Did she stay cool? I hope so, but I’m not willing to watch the entire series to find out.

Three sentence movie reviews: Hamlet (2000)


It was a mistake to follow along with my copy of Hamlet as I watched this movie as vast parts of the play (including, most egregiously, the scene including the famous lines “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio”!!!!) are not in this version of the movie. Ethan Hawk has those great brooding eyes and he made a pretty good Hamlet, but I found Julia Styles’ (and I know this was not her fault, but still) rave-inspired clothing to be overly distracting to her performance. The New York City setting worked, though I found the “corporation”rather than “country” setting to be a bit off.*

*Fun fact for Casey Affleck fans: It is Casey Affleck himself who plays Fortinbras, the eventual “winner” of it all. Though we only see his picture, never the actor himself.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Artist


I loved this movie and have enthusiastically recommended it to many people. Their reaction is similar to my own before I saw it, namely: “Isn’t that the one where they don’t talk AT ALL?” And yes, it is, but it is also a wonderful movie, full of humor and drama and complex characters and a delightful dog; which means that you should go and see it, despite the fact that there is NO TALKING AT ALL.

ps. It’s a good one to take your church-going grandmother too. She will like it a lot.

A Walk to Vancouver

A sunny day and an afternoon movie date in Vancouver. How best to get there? I could drive, but the traffic will be awful. I could ride, but then would have to get the bike back somehow and post-movie plans complicate this. Or! I could walk! Friend Kelly agreed to drive me back (we had another event to go to after our movie) and so I walked.

One of my favorite signs. How many miles of Interstate 5 are in Oregon? Why 308.

I could see all three mountains. Here, a shining Mount Hood.

A tiny view of Mount St. Helens peeking over Vancouver.

Mt. Adams was somewhere there, it just wouldn’t show up for its picture.
Thanks to Kelly for making my nice walk possible.

Essay: Nerdfighters!

Matt and I are Nerdfighters, and we were with our people for a few hours on Sunday. Nerdfighters are fans of John and Hank Green, two brothers who post video logs weekly on their YouTube channel. If I posted a regular video log people would have exciting insights to my laundry processes and the fact that I go through long stages of avoiding housework. But John Green is a writer of young adult books and Hank Green—among other things—plays guitar and writes funny songs and so their video posts are fun and funny and they have tons of fans.
The Vlogbrothers (it seems odd to call them the Green Brothers) are unapologetically smart and embrace their intelligence in a way I don’t often see on the Internet. Their full-on embrace of all their nerdy passions attract other nerds. There’s a vocabulary all its own (Nerdfighters, Nerdfiteria, French the Llama, etc.) and a hand signal and t-shirts and challenges to do good things in the world. John Green’s book tour (with special guest Hank Green) was our first chance to see other Nerdfighters. I had been warned by a friend who saw an earlier show in Virginia that the audience consisted of people much younger than themselves and indeed the majority of our audience looked to be in high school and the rest looked to be in college. The other people were the parents of the high schoolers and a smattering of people like Matt and myself, “actual adult” Nerdfighters.
The show was a mish-mash: a visit from a sock puppet voiced by Hank, a section from John Green’s new book, Hank playing a few songs. After his second song, an audience member yelled “encore” and Hank nicely explained that he was just getting started and that the encore would come at the end of the show. John Green talked about how he came to write his latest book, emphasizing that we have a limited amount of time on earth and using it to follow the lives and romances of the cast members of the Jersey Shore might not be the best use of that limited time.
In some ways it was not at all like a book reading or a concert. During one song Hank stopped abruptly, apologized and explained about the “panic bubble” that sometimes emerges when he plays live for people. There was also a question and answer session where the brother still talking when the time ran out was given a slight shock, something the audience found hilarious
The people attending? Nerds. I just watched a video of the encore song and someone observed that Nerdfighters have something of a “look.” They weren’t sure what it was, but there was one. I would have to agree. People had clearly dressed up for the show, but in a way that struck me as vaguely Canadian in that if the outfit was fun, the colors were off. Or perhaps the colors were great, but the hair was greasy, and not in a “hip” greasy way. I eavesdropped on conversations and found them significantly nerdy. And everyone was so nice. The lines were long and people just patiently waited to get to whatever they were getting to. No one danced during the songs until the very end when someone yelled, “Can we dance?” loud enough so Hank could hear it. Hank gave his blessing and people leaped to their feet. Did you miss that? The audience was so polite that they waited for permission to dance at their own concert.
I watched people throughout the show. There was a skinny high-school looking guy with a haircut and clothes-matching ability that pointed toward a possible homosexual identity. He stood to the side of the theater and danced with himself during every song. There was a somewhat large girl so overcome by the final song she squealed and danced to the front of the venue, her curly hair streaming behind her, tamed by a shiny scarf. There was the girl behind me who was a fan of John Green’s book Paper Towns and knew every word to every song. There was the woman in the front row who happily held the video camera for the final number and then patiently waited for someone to collect it. There were the four girls, spotty and a bit awkward wearing jeans and red shirts emblazoned with John Green’s face on a pizza.
I’ve had enough years to enjoy what makes me nerdy and embrace it rather than wishing I was cooler. But during my years in high school and college I would have loved to have a worldwide group of fellow Nerds to hang with, even if our hanging was mostly virtual. Thank you Vlogbrothers for making nerdy fun.

Requiem: Tempeh Pizza Burgers Recipe

In going through my recipe three-ring binder, I was resistant to throwing out this recipe, even though I haven’t made it since the mid-90s. I think it is because this was the first thing I remember making with tempeh and it was delicious and filling, something that a lot of my vegetarian recipes hadn’t been supplying. It was a recipe that took a lot of steps though, so I don’t think I made it ever again, preferring to pan-fry my tempeh and season it with soy sauce.

Should you so desire to make tempeh pizza burgers of your own you can squint at that picture or seek out the cookbook.

Requiem: Jar

Okay, I find this ridiculous, but I couldn’t just recycle this jar without first taking a picture. This is a glass Miracle Whip jar, from the era when all condiments came in jars, not plastic bottles.

It also has masking tape and the remains of a label in my grandmother’s handwriting. This was the reason it was hard to let go of. I have many other examples of her handwriting, but I liked the link of the jar across generations.

I’ve added my own label.
Whew. Pictures taken, now jar can be recycled.

New Loo Ceremony.

The school took part in the First Flush ceremony for the newest Portland Loo. As usual, adding children to the mix was delightful.

Listening to the speeches.

Waiting to sing our songs

Tara is ready to lead the 4/5 chorus.

After singing, (“New Loo” performed by the 4/5 chorus to the tune of “Blue Moon.” Also, “Skip to my Loo” by the entire school) we did the first flush by doing a massive “all school” push that began in the K/1 grade blend and traveled up through the grades. Each student carefully–for the most part–pushed the arm of the student next to them all the way to the end of the line…

…where Julie passed off the flush to Tara and she ran inside and pushed the button. This resulted in a great photo that was in the Saturday Community Section of the Oregonian. Sadly, the photo is not included with the web site article.

The Oregonian’s video (which sadly includes an ad) has a slide show and the Skip to My Loo song.