Category: Structures

I can’t look away.

This photo doesn’t accurately capture the object of my fascination and for this you should thank me. This gentleman, who I sat behind on the train, clearly had trouble shaving all the hair from his head. The hair caught in the fat rolls was rather long, and you could see how the clippers and razor missed them. As he would turn his head, different hairy patches were exposed. I tried hard to concentrate on the newspaper, but I kept getting distracted.

Last day of school

Just like the other days of our cold and rainy spring, the last day of school arrived with children bundled up in winter coats, feet in solid, warm shoes. I spent the last recess of the 2009-2010 school year bundled up against the cold and wearing a wool hat. It started to pour about ten minutes before the last recess ended, which was also the end of the school day. Because the trees in the North Park blocks had leafed out, most of the children didn’t notice how hard it was raining. But just as I was about to blow the whistle to end the recess, lightning flashed and thunder cracked nearby. We ended our soggy, rainy spring and our soggy rainy school year by escorting a bunch of cold but excited 2/3 students inside.

“Why do we have to come inside just because of a little lightening?” asked more than one child. They are such Portlanders. They think hail is snow and because lightening rarely strikes the Portland metro area, they don’t know to be afraid of it.

Portland Roses

A Master Gardener once told me that Portland, Oregon is a dumb place to grow roses. Apparently, they enjoy the desert-type climates of California much better than our dark, cold and rainy days.

And yet, Portland is well known as the City of Roses. We have a Rose Festival, for goodness sake and everyone seems to want to go to the Washington Park Rose Garden when they visit. If they are so darn hard to maintain here, why do we Portlanders insist on growing them?
I realized today, on yet another cold and gray spring day, that our hearty pioneer ancestors most likely grew up in climates much sunnier than ours in the winter. They probably grew roses because if anything is cheering against yet another day of gray skies, it is a profusion of colorful roses. Thank goodness there is a neighborhood rose garden on my walk to the train.

Sun!

Friday, I was exhausted. “You would think,” I told one of my colleagues, “that I had worked 40 hours this week and done six interviews and a kindergarten roundup. However, due to my 32 hour a week work schedule and several conflicts, I did none of them. Still, I could hardly motivate myself to get to the ballet Friday night. When I came home, I was the kind of tired where it seems like a better option to sit on the couch and stare at the wall because going to be takes to much energy.

Saturday was a different matter. I woke up remarkably refreshed–a well rested rising being a rare occurrence in my life. I went to the gym, did laundry, hung it to dry, harvested some greens and radish from the backyard, cooked and ate them, spent several hours alternating through homework and planting root vegetables in the garden, folded and put away all of my laundry and hung out with Matt. All with a level of energy I haven’t had in forever.

It was the sun. Yesterday the sun shown all day. It was warm, and promised of summer. The vegetable beds dried out. The mustard plant flowered. The asparagus shot up. The cilantro threatened to bolt. It warmed my back as I was planting seeds and Matt came back from his bike ride with a sunburn.

It rained all of May. If you live in Portland, you know what I mean. It rains a lot here, yes, but this rain was persistently nasty and cold. I’ve only worn sandals once this year. My summer clothes sit in a box under my bed. There is threat that the strawberries will rot in the field, if it doesn’t warm up. We’ve had a month solid of March rain, with its reminders of winter, rather than May rain, with its promise of summer. Today it is raining again. I think I’ll be okay, thanks to that one glorious day of sun.

Springtime 2010: Rain Wins!

Yep. It rains here. But I must say that it usually doesn’t rain quite this long, hard and–let’s face it–Biblically, as it has this spring. We get rain, but we also get warmer days with sun and promises of summer. We bring out our sandals. We pull out our shorts and skirts and short-sleeve tops. Usually May is a great month, some rain, but a lot of sun and happiness.

Not this year. Day after day the rain hammers us. If we don’t get rain, we get gray skies all day long. And cold? It has been freezing. I’ve not worn sandals once and it is JUNE. One of my workmates checked into prices for a last-minute ticket to Las Vegas for the weekend where it is a lovely 90 degrees. But nothin’ doing. There were no cheap flights and so we are left huddled under blankets and longing for warm spring to arrive. Perhaps even before summer does.

This fellow’s outfit

Walking to work, I sometimes walk in the same direction as the art students. I could not get over this guy’s outfit which was a one-piece with puffy sleeves and pantaloon-type leggings. He also had some sort of matching large handkerchief attached to his getup. There was a guy walking near me and he was staring so much he almost walked into a lamppost. This is the kind of outfit that Sinefeld-type episodes get written about.