The Comfy Inn is completely surrounded by asphalt, but that doesn’t keep someone from gardening.
Containers under the stairs:
A flower box full of vegetables.
Motel Garden
Tiny house not long for this world
I’ve long enjoyed the section of North Omaha Avenue north of Lombard. Five blocks north of Lombard, the street runs into Winchell, making for a nice quiet place to walk. The houses are mostly small and look a bit disheveled in the positive way that says to me, “we love our houses and we are doing things to them as time and money allows, but alas, we have many interests and not much money, so things are what they are.”
This house is located at 7626 N. Omaha Ave. I’ve liked this house for years for a lot of reasons. It’s tiny, and has a large lot. My mom and I happened to go to a house sale here, so we got to go inside. The woman who was having the house sale was an artist, so there was a lot of art, which always gives me a good feeling. There was even a nice chicken run for chickens. Sadly, it seems the owner was moving because she was in foreclosure.
Portland Maps (An Information Service Provided by the City of Portland) tells the sad story. In 2007, the house sold for $175,000, which is overpriced, in my opinion. I suspect it went into foreclosure in late 2009 when it sold for 105,000. It was on the market a few months ago for $125,000. I was wishing to buy it, but am currently lacking in cash for superfluous house purchases. In December of last year, the house sold for a remarkable $70,900! The new owners (Mark & Lorena Connelly) have applied for a permit to tear the house down, that is the sign on the fence to the right.
I’m sad to see this house go, and hope that the house that replaces it will have the charm that this one does. I’ll keep us updated.
6/3/11 Update. I walked by this morning and the house was gone. Thank goodness I took the picture when I did.
20MPDC 5/24/11
Wednesday 5/18
Nothing
Thursday, 5/19
I spent 15 minutes continuing to rue the fact that I decided to make a web site in WordPress, rather than Blogger. It looks prettier, but I could have been done with this two weeks ago. WordPress is not intuitive. It’s not even understandable when I’m looking at the help screen instructions. Today I manged to get a picture uploaded (yay!) and then spent the rest of the time trying to turn off comments and make a category. It’s getting close to done, though.
Friday 5/20
Two days of 20MPDC in a row! Today I finished the blog and finished the quarter sheet flyers to pass out. Next I will make a “tear off” poster to hang up in a few places.
Saturday 5/21
Nothing
Sunday 5/22
I printed out my Harvest Helper flyers and sliced them up. They are ready for distribution.
Monday 5/23
Starting tomorrow I will pass out my Harvest Helper fliers on my morning walk. I’ve now moved on to garage sale 20MPDC. I’ve picked my tentative date (July 9) and today I labeled items for sale. I also straightened my storage shed to better hold items for sale after I label them. I’m pricing everything very cheap (mostly $1.00 or under, a lot of the stuff I priced today was 25 to 50 cents) so that it will be bought and taken away from me. I’ve been to garage sales lately and everyone seems to have an overinflated sense of their items worth. For instance, at a sale I went to recently they had a nice vintage metal cooler. Very retro cool. But priced at $75.00? At a garage sale? I think not. Maybe in a vintage store placed in a very yuppie part of town. But not at a garage sale.
So from now until July 9 I will be decluttering and pricing things for a garage sale at the same time.
Tuesday 5/24
15 minutes of pricing everything that has been sitting by the front door, waiting to go to the Goodwill. I had a realization in the middle of the night. I’ve been looking for a metal shelf on which I can set the seed starts. I want to pay less than $10.00 for one. It turns out, I have a metal shelf already. It sits by the front door and collects things that rarely, if ever, get taken to Goodwill. That’s not a good focal point for the living room/front area. So I will price everything on it for the sale, store the items in the storage closet for the sale and move the shelf outside to hold the seed starts. Brilliant!
Three sentence movie reviews: Fast & Furious
Abandoning articles in the title altogether and using the more compact ampersand instead of the wordy word “and,” this movie sees the triumphant return of Vin Diesel, who calmly drives his car under a burning, rolling gas tanker in the first scene, and THAT is what I’ve been missing during the last two movies. The FBI apparently had trouble meeting their recruiting quota of blue-eyed blondes as Paul Walker–who has previously proved himself to be an unreliable agent–is now back working for the man. Maya’s back, Lettie’s back, everyone is back, including, in case you missed the bulletin up above, Vin Diesel, which is all you need to know about this movie.
poster from: http://stenaros.blogspot.com/2011/05/three-sentence-movie-reviews-fast-and_22.html
Three sentence movie reviews: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
The first thing that this movie asks you to believe is that the main character–who looks old enough to have done a stint in the army and then gotten his bachelor’s degree with the GI Bill*– is in high school. But it’s not like these movies are realistic in any way, anyway. Tokyo looks good, as usual, and it’s fun to watch the cars drift,** but this movie has really nothing to offer except for screen time with Sung Kang, who is fun to watch; overall this is a Fast and the Furious movie you can easily miss.***
poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2006/fast_and_the_furious_tokyo_drift.html
*IMDB tells me he was 24 when the movie came out.
**IMDB also tells me that the stunt drivers did all the drifting in real life, it wasn’t created in CGI.
***”I don’t want to watch any of them!” I hear you thinking. I totally get it. I’m just going through a thing, please stand by for return to normal movie viewing habits.
Three sentence movie reviews: 2 Fast 2 Furious
I heard this was a pretty bad movie, and I don’t deny that is does not rank high on any measure of a movie, mostly because there is no Vin Diesel to perk up any scenes. However, it is not the worst movie I’ve seen this year—at least, I don’t think so–and there are some memorable scenes like the great car scramble. Though Tyrese Gibson’s Roman Pearce’s character is not super developed, he has some amusing lines and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is always entertaining, so there are worse ways to spend two hours of your life.
poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2003/two_fast_two_furious_ver6.html
Three sentence movie reviews: The Fast and the Furious
The fact that I remembered absolutely nothing from the first time I saw this 10 years ago indicates that there isn’t much to this movie. However, that doesn’t make it an enjoyable wad of cotton-candy-viewing the second time around. Paul Walker is less wooden than Keanu Reeves in Point Break (another favorite) and Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel, which means that despite the fact I don’t have any interest in cars in general and illegal street racing in particular, I greatly enjoyed this movie.
poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2001/fast_and_the_furious.html
Infill, is there another way?
I’m a fan of infill. As someone who was not born and raised in this great city, but happily live here, I support people who love Portland moving to Portland. Projections are that roughly one zillion people will be living her by 2050 and I want my compact urban environment to be maintained for all those newcomers. I’m not a fan of sprawl. I don’t really care that the infill houses don’t match the existing ones in the neighborhood or that infill houses look alike. After all, a lot of neighborhoods don’t have “matching” houses and most neighborhoods have banks of houses that were clearly built by some developer of the past as a row of them will be strikingly similar.
Infill in Portland mostly looks like variations of this:
Houses are 1500-2500 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths with a garage and a tiny front and back yard. My problem with infill is that this standard 3 bedroom/2.5 bath doesn’t really make sense for a lot of Portlanders. For a family of four, 3 bedroom houses are great. But there are an awful lot of Portlanders who are not a family of four. There are also an awful lot of Portlanders who would rather have less house and more yard. I’m wondering if we can’t look to a different model of infill for them.
One of my favorite things about North Portland is that it has a lot of very small houses on big lots. What worries me is that these are not seen as being worth preserving. Often, when they go on the market, they are bought by someone who tears them down and replaces them with the standard infill house.
But what if the tiny house, large lot became an infill choice? Tiny houses are much easier to maintain, heat and cool. If placed on a standard sized lot, they leave room for a large garden. They are all about sustainable. And they are cute. Take a look of some of these:
The Sebastarosa is 750-847 square feet:
Three sentence movie reviews: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Due to the fact that there is that whole time travel thing going on, this movie is also overly long. However, the dementors are suitably scary and they did an excellent job with the hippogriff. It struck me, as I was watching Hermione explain everything to Harry, that this may be one of the few places in the Hollywood cannon when the female character saves the day and makes no excuses for her smarts and also is not punished by the shunning of the male characters, drug use or eating disorder.
poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2004/harry_potter_and_the_prisoner_of_azkaban_ver3.html
20MPDC 5/17/11
Well, I reported something this week, but blogger chose to roll back things to Wednesday, thus erasing the hours of work on the blog I did on Thursday. I am not at all happy with blogger at this moment.
Thursday 5/12/11
I did work today but blogger erased it.
Friday 5/13/11
Nothing
Saturday 5/14/11
Nothing
Sunday 5/15/11
Nothing.
Monday 5/16/11
I spent half of the time choosing a photo for the “about” page on the harvest helper site. Then I spent the rest of the time unsuccessfully loading the photo onto the site. Why did I think doing this in wordpress would be a good idea? I do not find wordpress user friendly AT ALL. I will try again tomorrow.
Tuesday 5/17/11
Nothing