Category: To Occupy my Time

What the Constitution Means to Me

Portland Center Stage gave us a great show with What the Constitution Means to Me.

Rebecca Lingafelter was excellent as Heidi Schreck, the young woman who participated in Veterans of Foreign Wars speaking competitions.

As Marissa Wolf, PCS artistic director, says in the program, “Immediately, we’re lifted into a powerful world in which she maps legal rights and history onto her own body and invites the audience into this crucible through emotions, sometimes thriller-esque storytelling.”

I also really liked the set, which had a pieced together diorama quality. In this rather dark photo, you can see the large paperclip that is holding the eagle to the curtain.

Alas, we caught the penultimate show, so we couldn’t spread the word. But if this show should appear in your town, do make time for it.

Planning Oscar Nominated Shorts

When the Oscar nominations were announced this year, I was very pleased that I had already watched all the films in many categories: Picture (all 10!), Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Costume Design, Editing, and Production Design.

But then I needed to catch up with the animated shorts. It took some planning, but I fit all three programs into one weekend. Here were my favorites.

Favorite overall program: documentary short (as per usual).

Favorite documentary short: The Last Repair Shop (one of the best shorts I’ve seen in years.)

Favorite live-action short: tie: Red, White and Blue, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

Favorite animated short: Our Uniform

It was a good weekend of moviegoing.

Portland Winter Light Festival

I have been meaning to go to the Portland Winter Light Festival for many years. This year, Matt and I finally made it to a downtown location. The festival is spread throughout the city.

Here we are in Pioneer Square.

Pioneer Square had all the fire. You can see one example on the far left. The tentacles framing Matt’s head also opened and emitted fire. I hadn’t pictured fire as part of the celebration. But of course there would be fire. The original winter light.

Fire also came from these flowers intermittently.

Down by the World Trade Center we found a lot of different kinds of light. This demonstration let children play with the streamers. The adults did better at really making them flow, though.

A tesseract of light!

Another view of Pioneer Square with the strongman game showing the fire exploding.

I Escape to Downtown

I had movies I needed to see, so on Saturday, I got my hiking shoes and hiking poles out and walked to the Max stop. It was pretty slippery. The Max easily took me downtown where it was less slippery, and I hiked over to the Living Room Theater to catch up with All of Us Strangers.

On Sunday, I repeated the trip, but this time sans poles. I saw the Zone of Interest at Cinema 21. When I came back to the Max stop, someone had made this cute snow sculpture.

Birthday Present Embroidering

I bought eight different handkerchiefs from Etsy. They all had different designs, but all were of the flower variety.

With that starting point, I monogrammed each one a little differently. This was my favorite.

The lines reminded me of guidelines on paper when we were learning cursive.

This was a late birthday present, but it turned out well. Though I should have ponied up a bit more money for the handkerchiefs. They were scratchy, overall.

Beginning to Thaw

The path I scraped out on our sidewalk has enlarged, so it’s slowly warming up.

It really does help things to melt when sidewalks are shoveled. Something Portlanders don’t do because “the snow will be gone tomorrow.” Perhaps that feeling is ready for a climate change update.

The car is covered in ice, though it isn’t as thick as it was earlier in the week. Driving out of that ice slick is also keeping us from using the car.

And the Ice Continues to Storm

Rain and light freezing rain? That means more ice.

It was at this point in our multi-day storm that I felt trapped and went and shoveled the ice away from the sidewalk and the front step. I slipped and fell on that front step, so both that and cabin fever motivated me. Ice is still covering the car and the garbage can. We only have trash pickup every 4 weeks, so we were willing to wait for them to catch back up.

Meanwhile, in Southwest Portland…

My mom’s very tall oak tree quietly set itself down in the back yard.

Southwest Portland had a ton of trees go down, and this was one.

It did a pretty good job not hitting things, though. The gray shed took the brunt of it.

All family members living in Southwest Portland were without power for varying amounts of time. I felt very snug and warm in my North Portland home.