Category: Structures

Goodbye to house.

I can’t say I’m sorry to see this house go as it has been boarded up since at least 2007, when I moved to the neighborhood.  Plus, once a gang of homeless people had a huge fight in the backyard while I was walking by and the bad vibes have never dissipated.

I felt compelled to make a record of its being though.  Poor house.  Too bad no one took care of you.
Any bets about what will replace it?  It’s sandwiched between a gas station/cheap tobacco store and a house that has a coffee shop.  I’m guessing it will be commercial rather than residential, but you never know.  Then again, it could just become a vacant lot.

New Glass!

My Aunt Carol has been on a clean and purge streak and boy, did I win.  Do I want the cactus glasses that were my Great-Uncle Tom’s?  Yep.  Do I want the cocktail glasses that were my grandmother’s?  Yes ma’am.
Uncle Tom’s cactus glasses. There were 12, but I’ve learned that they don’t stack well, so now there are 10.

Grandma’s cocktail glasses, which would be even more amazing if I had put them against something white, so you could see the fabulous color.

They have these pretty roses etched on them.

And this is fabulous.  It has a glass stir stick and I love the shape.  Plus, the cups stack.
And now I must purchase something to contain all this glassware.

Cold

Like I mentioned in the killing frost post, it’s been cold here.  And it doesn’t really get this cold here.  But temperatures insist on hovering in the 20s.  Here’s the thing about unseasonably (I should be using a word that means weather-not-in-the-normal-temperature-range.  Is there such a word?) cold weather.  We don’t have the proper wardrobe.  Pants are the big problem.  Normally, in Portland, I just wear the same kind of pants year round.  They serve me through the “heat” of summer and the “cold” of winter.  I’ve lived in places where it really does get cold and let me tell you, I had a separate part of my closet for winter pants.  But here it doesn’t make sense to do so.  The result is that I walk around with very cold legs until things return to normal.

But look!
 

Winter weather is also quite pretty!
 

Big Trimet day.

Wanna come along?  Well, you missed the first part, because I didn’t think to take pictures.  Imagine the Lombard Transit center, where I picked up the #4 and rode it over to Vancouver street.  There, I disembarked and went to the Dishman Community Center to swim.  Finished there, I walked to MLK to grab the #6.  Here we can switch to photos.

Across the street from this stop for the #6, are two houses, both alike in dignity/ in fair Portland where we lay our scene.  They are also apparently owned by the same person, who painted them the same color.
 

Where I came from:  Dishman.
 
I disembarked at Burnside and MLK to switch to the #20.  I probably had enough time to walk up to the theater, but was hungry, and wanted to leave time for a lunch more substantial than popcorn.  While at this stop the gentleman waiting with me asked me what I took the picture of.  When I explained it was for my blog he asked, “Who reads it?”  I told him that friends did and his reply was “Oh” and he ceased talking to me.  This amused me.  I guess I wasn’t a famous enough blogger for him.
 
I went with Tapalaya for food and had a very good pulled pork sandwich with two sides:  collards with bacon and a black-eye pea salad.
 
My movie destination was right around the corner.
 
Waiting for the #20 again.  This was my longest wait of 20 minutes.  O! Sunday schedule, why must you thwart me!  Happily, my time was taken up by watching a disaffected youth cross Burnside, forcing cars to stop for him while he flipped them off.  He then stood behind a pole that was part of the building across the street and in short order a police cruiser pulled up, parked and talked with him then searched. him.  A second cruiser arrived to help with the search and a third cruiser showed up, searched him again and then took him away.  He didn’t seem to be opposed to the idea and I wondered what story I missed there.  Of note:  the first police officer was a man, but the other two were women.
 
The #20 deposited me a block from my work, where I ran a quick errand.
 
Then walked to the Yellow Line and had to wait another 10 minutes.

From the Yellow Line, I disembarked and walked the final four blocks to my home.  Thanks Trimet for ferrying me around.

Baghdad Refurbished.


Before seeing a free showing of My Own Private Idaho, I heard the end of the lecture on the history of the Baghdad Theater.  I arrived for the lecture during the period when the Baghdad was going through a transformation to a “multiplex” which meant walling off the balcony for a separate theater and shoehorning a third theater, called the Back Door Theater, behind the main theater space.  All McMenamin’s movie screens show slide shows before their movies begin, and interspersed with the slides for the many McMenamin’s products are historic pictures.  I have been seeing the picture of the Back Door Theater for years and wondered about it.  Now I know.

This picture was a poster for a premiere that happened at the Baghdad:  They Live.  Among other things, this  forgettable movie had the involvement of the man who invented the propeller beanie.  Thus the explanation of the strange juxtaposition of these two pictures.

The history of the theater was quite interesting and I was sorry I didn’t prioritize listening to the entire lecture.

Snow in November. Or: How I learned that film people are annoying.

Across the street from my school, prop cars were parked in the lot and by the end of the day it looked as if snow had drifted all around.  It was pretty cool.  At recess that day, a guy with an earpiece came over and asked when the children would be outside and we told him the schedule.  “Okay,” he said, “We’ll try to work around that, but we really need to make this movie.”  Maureen and I shrugged.  It didn’t make a difference to us whether or not the movie got made.

The next morning the cars and the snow were still there.  But now they were intermittently making it snow.
 

I caught several pictures of the massive amount of standing around that is movie making.
 
Though it’s pretty cool to see the snow.
 
The trouble started at morning movement, when the phone rang and some guy from the production company explained that they were making a movie and could the children not have recess today.
Nope.
What about if we give a donation?
That would have been something to talk about before today.  Today is happening.  Schedules are set.
Can’t you just push back the recess?
Nope.
 
A man appeared at the door.
What if we donated $500.00 to the school?
At this point, I turned it over to my boss, who ran around to see if people would be okay with that.
Nope.  One teacher was hugely insulted by the offer.  And one class wasn’t there to say, either way.
So 4/5 recess was indoors, but 2/3 and K/1 gleefully ran about, while people with earpieces held their index finger over their lips and looked vaguely disgruntled.
 
The thing I find hard to believe is that they could plan ahead to take down the Absolute Vodka advertisements that are usually in the windows of the bar across the street, but missed the fact that a school and a playground were 20 feet away from their location. It’s not like this is the first time we’ve had the industry within a stone’s throw of our school.  Television films down here all the time and, aside from poaching all the parking spaces, they aren’t much trouble.

So if you see the movie Wild and come across a scene where Reese Witherspoon is shoveling “snow,” know that it was a lovely November day, where not 20 feet away children were having recess.

What’s the plan for the tree?

I’m walking out the door for a day of playing Settlers of Catan (I know you are jealous) and I see that my neighbor has people doing work on his parking strip.  They’ve pulled out all the bamboo and have hacked off several branches from the Flowering Plum.  I figure they are just doing a rough cut for a rather aggressive pruning job and go on my way.

But when I look out the window the next morning, I find that the work appears to be complete, for there is mulch spread all over the parking strip, yet the tree has been hacked to bits, and still left standing.

What the hell is going on?  I hate flowering plums.  We have one in front of our house too. They were planted along the street when the Max line went in and you can see two on the other side of the street in this picture.   I think they are ugly trees, save for the four days in the spring when they are blooming.  I’ve wanted to replace ours with something more pleasing to the eye since the day we moved in. But I haven’t because it would ruin the uniformity.

However, I would never just chop it back like this and leave it.  It’s ugly.  Either take the tree all the way out, or trim it properly.