Ubergeek-femmes

Mailslot in our kitchen. Sob.
Our landlady, as most of you know, has taken it in her head to turn the bungalow we have been living in into a duplex. So now, instead of having three floors of living space, we now have 1 1/2, as well as a downstairs neighbor named Ross.

As part of this, she has had her contractors frame and wall off the interior hallway between our kitchen and dining room. Whatever.

However, I was genuinely shocked when her contractor installed a mailslot in our kitchen. See, the downstairs doesn’t have a seperate address, so there’s nowhere to send the mail for that guy. So his mail comes with our mail, which is deposited through our exterior mailslot. We then are expected to sort it, and take his stuff into our kitchen and shoot it through his mailslot, which puts it in his hallway. Glad our mail isn’t handled that way, I’m way too paranoid to have checks delivered to random strangers and just hope that they are honest enough to deliver it to us. The new guy is pretty lucky he got Brian and I as upstairs neighbors rather than some crazy person.

SIGH.

Anyway, I’m in the middle of uploading some pictures I took to flickr, if you check out my stream sometimes.

Also, Mt Hood is burning:

Mt Hood on fire.

Don’t worry, it’s not near the Timberline, although it is threatening another historical hotel. It’s grown to about 800 acres and is called the Gnarl fire. Sparked by lightening, it grew much larger due to the hot (over 100 degrees) weather we’ve had for the past three days.

Mt Tabor Adult Soapbox Derby, 2007.

O no, the Mt Tabor Adult Soapbox Derby is this weekend on Saturday, and I made other plans!! I am going to have to seriously decide if I can move my plans around.

One of Dr. Evermor’s birds.

O neat, there’s a book out now on Dr. Evermor. Powell’s even has it too :)

I have a whole flickr set devoted to his stuff; I don’t like how most of them turned out. I’d love to go back with a few different cameras and take more pictures.

A good sized busy weekend. We missed the farmers’ market but Brian got to sleep in so it was completely worth it. Mostly we just hung out on Saturday during the day, I think.

Symphony in Grant Park in NE Portland.

Saturday night, we walked to Grant Park to see the Symphony. Portland has concerts in the park all summer, and it switches parks. Next week, the symphony is at Laurelhurst Park, which I like, so we may try to make it to that too.

After they handed all the children in the park recorders and whistles, we decided that that might be enough culture for one day, and walked back to the house to hang out for a bit before going to see some bands - we saw New York Rifles, Oh Darling and Another Cynthia. A pretty good show, although Another Cynthia definitely was the best as always. They played some stuff not on the two CDs I have, nice.

Really wanted to stay out and have a drink upstairs after the show, but we had plans on Sunday to do some exploring, so it was home to bed.

Shaniko Hotel and wood sidewalk in Shaniko, central Oregon.

Sunday, we grabbed Jimm and headed out along the Gorge for a drive, turning into Central Oregon to see what had been billed as a ghost town. It was a neat old town, Shaniko, but not really a ghost town.

Still, it was super awesome to talk to the weaver who hangs out at the school house, and walk on the wooden sidewalks and check out all the old buildings in the middle of nowhere. Central Oregon in that area used to be one big sheep herd, and Shaniko was set up to process the wool and act as a clearinghouse. I think the number the weaver told us was that there were 100,000 sheep wandering around. During the Dust Bowl, there was a huge drought which killed off most of the sheep (except for one large ranch that had been foresighted enough to get grazing rights to some pasture on the other side of the Cascades) and that sort of ranching just sort of fell by the wayside, taking Shaniko with it.

Jimm and Brian eating lunch outside of the Shaniko Cafe in Shaniko, Oregon.

We had a good picnic sitting on the side of the old closed hotel - salad, blueberries, strawberries, hummus, pita, the last of the blueberry muffins I made last week.

Cars in Shaniko, Oregon.

Lonely car in Shaniko, Oregon.

Drove through the country some more until we found a mountain finder which showed us that we were looking at Three Sisters, Mt Washington, Mt Hood, Mt St Helens, Mt Rainier, Broken Top, and Three Fingered Jack. Pretty cool. When Brian got into the car at the mountain finder, he reached down and picked up a huge fist full of spent bullets. I didn’t look but he said that the ground was completely covered with them. Heh. Hopefully they were shooting at tumbleweeds and not at cars.

Vintage Dan & Louis Oyster Bar matchbook cover

Finished the weekend by eating at Dan & Louis Oyster Bar finally. I have matches from the 70s when my parents used to go there. The restaurant is celebrating its 101st anniversity. Really cool atmosphere. The clam chowder was amazing; the fish I had was not so much. It was just okay, when we go back I’m going to get oysters next time. Very cool place to stop and get a beer and some seafood.

Posting this here so that I remember to follow up and investigate it further. Flickr & Getty Images.

If any of you have a Masters in Folklore, the Oregon Historical Society is hiring someone to be their Folklore Programs Manager. I say that mostly because at various parts of my life I dreamed about studying folklore and fairy tales professionally, and it’s something I pretty actively collect and follow. It’s the sort of degree that everyone would tell you you were nuts to go after while you were studying it, yet here’s a job for it, right now.

An auspicious day - my cousin Steve and Sheila had their baby today, a little boy. They are evenly balanced now, two boys and two girls so now that’s it!

Continuing the theme of making me smile because people I love are having little ones for me to smile at, our friends Marcio and Abby had a little girl today! YAY! I know I normally don’t post about babies (not so much my thing) but it does genuinely make me happy that people I think are intelligent, fun, good-hearted and nice are having children who will be loved and raised right. Woot!

Only other thing I have is that while I haven’t got back into the routine of weight lifting and yoga and pilates (but I’m working towards it), I did walk 6 miles yesterday. Now, two of those miles were to go get a beer or two, but still! Progress. I’m looking at a good hike for sometime this week, a new place definitely.

Now. Off to walk two miles today. Anyone know how many steps in a mile? I’m curious if I did the stereotypical 10,000 steps yesterday, but I haven’t found a pedometer I like yet.

Brian at Kenny & Zuke’s.

Let’s see…posting a picture from last week. Brian and I had a weird day where I needed to get something signed by a notary, and the notary we use was out for a while so we went and tried lunch at Kenny & Zuke’s, which has been on our list pretty much since it opened. It’s a deli a block from Powell’s. It definitely lives up to all the positive reviews I’ve heard, the food was yummmmmmy. Brian got their rueben, I got the grilled cheese. So good I wasn’t even able to identify the cheese, it just all came together as amazing. Great fries too. I’m not sure that I’d be able to bring my vegetarian friends there on a regular basis, but man, it’s a deli, which is all about the meat, so that’s not a slight against it! Besides, you have to love a place that has 12 different root beers.

Friday I met up with Laurie and Cindy at the Tin Shed. Laurie and I aren’t certain when the last time that we saw each other, but we are guessing about 30 years or so. Laurie and Cindy used to babysit me when I was a kid, and my dad used to tutor them in math. They had really sweet things to say about him, and you know me, I try to absorb anyone’s memories of my dad so that I get to feel that I knew him (he died at the age of 34 when I was a little kid). Really wild to see them - Laurie still looks like herself, and Cindy looks like herself too, but different somehow. It’s funny because the picture of them I have in my head is probably from when they were 17 or so, it’s like holding up a picture from a yearbook next to someone. We had a blast, and I hope we get to hang out some more (Laurie just moved back to Portland from Seattle at the same time I moved into town). We seem to have a lot in common.

They had mentioned Hopworks, which reminded Brian and I that we wanted to go try their restaurant, having only had their beer (and loved it - organic IPA, organic anything beer, yummmmmm). The restaurant rocked - the website had a way of putting in where you were coming from and generating the best bike path to get to them. We had their pizza and it was awesome. I had the pale and Brian had the IPA and then we gave up and got a taster’s tray so that we could sample everything. It’s rare that I get those and like every single beer, but I did this time. Super impressive, and they are green and sustainable and every good adjective I can heap on them. The inside of the pub was comfortable and has a pool table, and this is definitely going to quickly become a favorite hangout. We bought a growler right away to take home with us, bring our growler collection up to three now.

So much for giving up beer, huh? I’ll try harder next week. I kinda over did it with wine when our neighbors were over so I needed a break from it, so to speak.

All good otherwise, the Sold sign went up on our house Saturday, I’m so excited and happy to see it!

Some of the very best drinks I’ve ever had were at Bryant’s. You had to know how to get there, if you weren’t familiar with that part of town (hint: turn left at Tony’s House of Columbian Hair) and it looks just like a house in the neighborhood, but then you walked in, and sat at a round naugahyde booth, and ordered a drink.

If it was during the week, Shirley’d bring you a bowl of cheese popcorn too. And you didn’t just order a drink, you’d order a flavor or a combination of flavors, and no matter what you came up with, Shirley would tell you its name.

It was so dark in there, when you’d go outside at 1 a.m., you’d cringe a bit because the light was so bright outside. Truthfully.

Shirley used to serve Brian’s parents when they were our age, and after we “discovered” it, they were very amused that we went there, and pleased to hear that Shirley still worked there.

A good number of drinks would arrive at the table lit on fire, which helped you see the people you were with. All of them were awesome, and at the time, only $5, so you knew how to plan for your drink budget.

I just heard they closed for a while, I’m actually happy I didn’t know that before they re-opened under new ownership. Usually when I hear that someone has bought a place I loved, I am certain that it won’t be the same or they’ll ruin it. Reading the article, my heart was sinking a bit as I continued to think about it. However, it sounds like the new owner gets why Bryant’s was so cool. And it looks like he’s going to keep all its mystique. Here’s to people doing stuff right, and oh, if any of you in the Milwaukee area go, can you let me know how much a Black Magic costs now?

Brian in the forest on Powell Butte.

Yesterday while running errands we went and finally tried Kenny and Zuke’s, which is an awesome deli by Powell’s downtown. Brian had a reuben, and I had the grilled cheese. The bread and cheese were great and the french fries were awesome too - although with the amount of butter and salt I had at one meal, I needed to make up for it later by walking for 2 1/2 miles. Also not a huge amount of vegetarian (makes sense, it *is* a traditional deli after all) so it will remain on my good list but probably not some place I can go every week because I’d have to get the same things over and over. But really really good, and you carnivores that hang out with us will likely be treated to it at some point.

We walked along the river from near the Hawthorn bridge to the Steel bridge, over the Willamette river, past the Oregon Brewers’ Festival (can you believe we didn’t stop in?) and back over the Hawthorn bridge. It was fun and good; Brian hadn’t done that walk yet.

Today we wandered over to Powell Butte again for a good hike. We did the part in the shade (through the forest) and also hiked down the side of the butte to street level and back up again. I brought blackberries, blueberries and walnuts to eat on the way, but it only made us hungrier. We stopped at Burgerville on the way back to get Walla Walla onion rings which are amazingly good. Brian almost can’t resist them, it’s funny. I accused him of thinking Walla Walla onion season was the best season of all - he didn’t really disagree.

We’re thinking tennis tonight, but I may just be too tired from the hike and need to mellow.