Category: All (-ish)

North Portland Swimming Planning Meeting

The Columbia Pool isn’t coming back, and that means I have a very long wait until the new aquatics center opens in 2029. But perhaps by attending ALL the meetings, the time will go by quickly. Today’s meeting involved wandering through the displays and giving feedback via post-it notes.

There were a variety of professional people to chat with. I learned from a swimming pool builder that Olympic sized swimming pools are very expensive to heat, and very large. There was a diagram showing that an Olympic size pool is bigger than Pioneer Square.

Knowing that, I could give the feedback that it wasn’t super important to have an Olympic sized swimming pool. Though I would like to swim in one at some point.

Baby Blanket for Baby Coulee

My coworker Sarah is due in February, so there is a baby shower on Thursday. I made this little blanket for the new parents.

I think this is the first baby blanket I have hand monogrammed and I’m quite pleased at both the chain stitch and how swoopy the C is. I did not draw the C, but I grabbed it from one of the alphabets I had squirreled away.

The theme of the party was Space Dinosaur Cowboy and I was trying for all three things, but JoAnn’s was not connecting me with any cowboy stuff. But I did like the stars and then the not-at-all concerned dinosaurs hanging out in the snow.

I ended up making the bias binding. When I do that, I always make extra because it’s a really mood killer to come up a few inches short of bias binding. (How do I know? Because I’ve done it.) But then what to do with the extra bias binding? I had the idea to poke two holes in the plain brown wrapping and make a bow with it.

SnIce and Leora’s Memorial Service

I had planned on riding my bike to the memorial service, but then this happened.

It wasn’t really snow, but more like flaky ice, as shown in this photo of the cover to a downtown Max station.

Despite the weather many people attended Leora’s service. I was glad I did as I got to hear about many different stages of her life.

One thing I learned at the service was that Leora was not only an avid biker, but also a writer of biking-inspired haikus. Here are some of my favorites:

Riding in low gear
Eyes were bigger than panniers
Curse you, bulk aisle

White cherry blossoms
Look just like shards of windshield
Ahead in the road

Biking in a skirt
You just got passed by a girl
Sorry I flashed you

Cheap margaritas
Do not mix with rolling hills
Pedal home to barf

Morning hastiness
Is not a bike rider’s friend
Where are my panties?

Think I have a flat
Keep checking my tires’ air
No, just out of shape

SKS: More Raygun Fun

I think the humor here is that listening to NPR still isn’t cool. But I started listening in 1993, so you can decide for yourself if I listened before it was cool. Or “cool.”

Sara reports that she is back in Arcadia and that this is racing with the postcards coming from Iowa. She said her mom was popping them in the mail on 11/28. We’ve established that Iowa won.

SKS Postcards from Iowa

“Hiowa from Iowa” she begins. Delightful. Sara found these postcards at Raygun: The Greatest Store in the World. She enjoyed the store and recommended a website follow. I can confirm they have many very funny things.

Sara reports that their AirBNB was close to this bridge and that they found downtown Davenport to be a very charming and walkable area.

Books Read in November 2022

Picture Books

The Year We Learned to Fly
Woodson and Lopez
Read for Librarian Book Group

A book about getting through tough times that doesn’t hit you over the head with the tough times. This would probably be a good book for all ages who are feeling the weight of struggle. Great interplay of words and illustrations.

Middle Grade

Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution
Sherri Williams
Read for Librarian Book Group

A fabulous example of quality middle grade! Great writing, a big issue depicted on a personal level, the main character navigating her troubles without her parents (but not because she’s an orphan or at camp) and a lot of feeling.

My only quibble is that the kid causing all the problems didn’t really take responsibility for the harassment and abuse. This book wrapped up very quickly.

Recipe for Disaster
Aimee Lucido

An enjoyable middle-grade novel combining baking (including recipes) and exploring what it means to be Jewish.

Enemies
Svetlana Chmakova

Graphic novels are great vehicles for showing those big middle-school feelings. This was a fun capsulation of awkward and confusing friendships.

Ride On
Faith Erin Hicks

Horse girls! I have a soft spot for them. Norrie is full of bluster and outrage. Victoria is new at the stables after experiencing a loss.

Young Adult

Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix
Anna-Marie McLemore
Read for Librarian Book Group

I enjoyed this retelling of the Great Gatsby recast with trans young men as Nick and Jay as well as the overlay of Latina culture. McLemore is very good at writing romantic feelings. Lots of good squishy stuff there. I did wonder at having the main trio be 17, 18, and 19 years old. It strained credibility.

Azar on Fire
Olivia Abtahi

One of my reading peccadillos is that I find books that include song lyrics to be cringeworthy experiences, especially songs that are made up for the book. Every time I read them, I feel a profound embarrassment for the author. It’s often like reading poetry written by young teenagers.

So this book, with copious lyrics, was a struggle.

It was also a long and rambling book, but by ignoring the lyrics, I enjoyed it. The main character is a freshman in high school and I don’t come across that grade level often in YA. She’s finding her voice (quite literally, she’s got something wrong with her vocal chords). And she’s making new friends.

The Getaway
Lamar Giles

Great worldbuilding and a solid amount of time showing us the supposed utopia before spinning into the reality. This is a horror novel and it’s the kind based on documented human action that makes it that much more horrible. I had to switch to daylight reading.

The cover is very evocative, but I don’t think it matches the story.

The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School
Sonora Reyes
Read for Librarian Book Group

This rambles in a not-terrible way. I enjoyed Yamilet’s story of figuring out how her new school is going to work and how to come out and live as a lesbian, both at school and at home.

My Nest of Silence
Matt Faulkner
Read for Librarian Book Group

A story in two parts. The strong story is the graphic novel portion that gives readers the real story of what’s happening to Mak as he serves in Europe during World War II. His letters home don’t tell the entire story. The prose part of the book focuses on Mak’s 10-year-old sister Mari who is stuck in Manaznar. That story focuses on how the camp and the war affect Mari’s mental health, a welcome angle of the relocation. The writing was a little too dependent on exclamation points for my taste.

Inheritance
Katharine McGee

For completists, this novella will provide insight. People looking to pass the time will also find it adequate. It doesn’t break any new ground.

Grownup Fiction

Book Lovers
Emily Henry

Henry does a great job subverting the classic small-town romance story by centering on the big city career-minded female who is usually the villain. I also enjoy her attention to detail at the sentence level.

The Bad Muslim Discount
Syed M. Masood

Two immigrants, Anvar and Safwa, make their way to the US from Pakistan and Iraq, respectively, at different ages and points in their lives. Their paths cross in San Francisco. This book is lacking the zany characters and humor of Masood’s YA novels, but it remains a compelling story.

Grownup Nonfiction

You Are a Badass
Jen Sincero

Sincero is of the love-yourself, tap-into-the-universe-and-it-will-provide ilk. Aside from advice on those fronts, she’s got a solid list of recommended books at the end.

Young Nonfiction

Unequal: A Story of America
Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Favreau
Read for Librarian Book Group

The authors provide chapter after chapter illustrating how racism is baked into the United States. There are many contemporary examples to illustrated that we’ve not left racism in the past. Most chapters focus on one individual to illustrated a theme, and there is a good mix of female and male and famous and less or not famous. I appreciated the spotlight on racism in the northern states, but did wonder why the racist acts and policies of western states were not included in the mix.

Sweatshop Overlord at Portland Center Stage

Matt and I took in a delightful performance of Kristina Wong’s Sweatshop Overlord. It discussed how Wong’s livelihood as a performance artist tanked during the pandemic. To help and to distract herself, she began sewing masks. Her efforts eventually grew into the Auntie Sewing Squad, a group of many women, who sewed mask after mask, month after month through the first years of the pandemic.

As all good plays, this had all the feelings.

SKS Freebee Taco and Art Card

Sara sent two postcards that managed to arrive the same day. This first one gives me a free taco if I bring the postmarked card to Puesto. Judging from their locations, I will not be eating a free taco from Puesto.

This one Sara picked up at NCTE exhibit hall at the national conference. It is from A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends and the image is from Philip Waechter.

Sara sent these from Iowa, where she was spending Thanksgiving. The postcards are postmarked 11/22 and arrived on 11/25. And that includes a Thanksgiving holiday!!!! There appear to be much better postal routes between the Midwest and Portland than between Northern California and Portland.

City Strides

Someone at work mentioned the City Strides website, and I investigated and found it was just the kind of thing I would love, so I signed up. Once you register with the website and hook up your movement tracker, it maps the streets you’ve run or walked. It also tells you the percentage of the city that you have run. As you can see, I have a lot of running and walking in the streets that are about a half mile from my home. It drops off steeply after that though. I think I’m maybe at 2% for all of Portland’s streets.

That thick line that goes all the way to Ainsworth is the Neighborhood 5K route that I did monthly in 2021. I also walked it a lot on weeknights after work during winter 2022. Now that I have City Strides I can branch out and try and collect more of these streets.