Tag: Portland

It snowed!

Aside from that stuff at Christmas that was really ice pretending to be snow, we have not had much in the way of the white stuff this winter. And here we are, in late February, with a snowstorm.

This was the perfect kind of snow. It looked very pretty and also didn’t really stick on the roads, so things weren’t very snarled up.

Thanks, winter, for being so polite. And pretty.

Morris Marks House moved

This house used to sit near the corner of SW Main Street and SW 13th.  That location is very close to the First Unitarian Church, so I used to see it often, coming and going from and to church.  During that time, it seemed to go from minimally occupied, to unoccupied, and I crossed my fingers that it would survive as it has incredibly good bones.

As you may guess from this photo, it did!  It was moved to a grand location where it overlooks the cars exiting 405.  The Oregonian covered the move (because who doesn’t love a good house moving?) and you can read the September 30 story about the moving of the Morris Marks house by clicking this link.

I look forward to its restoration.

Get the dirt out

Here we are looking at the corner of Davis and 10th. This is the block I’ve been watching change. Currently, there are two dump trucks on the block itself and three waiting.  Excavation is always the first part of the high-rise project.
And here we see the actual excavation. This reminds me both of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and Fuel by Ani DiFranco, that stalwart of my late 90s/early 2000s experience.

An obituary that caught my eye

You know how you hear about people having to cross state lines to get married (Mildred and Richard Loving, for instance) and you think that perhaps that only happened in the south? (Maybe that’s just me, thinking along those tracks.) 

Here is a woman who had to cross the Columbia River to marry, because Oregon didn’t allow a white man to marry an Asian woman.  The rest of her life is also interesting.  What stories might her parents have told her, of their life in China?  And what stories could she tell us about being an orphan at 16?  Or her experiences volunteering for the Rose Festival and the Portland Rose Society?

Broadway Building Rehab and Broken Branch

I’ve featured this building before on this blog.  It’s getting an update.  The Passport Photo place on the corner has moved into the middle space while they renovate.

It’s a to-the-sidewalk renovation, and I’m interested in how they have built a temporary new interior while they work on the exterior.

And also how the corner entrance looks like it will be maintained, along with its light.

Around the corner in the North Park Blocks, a branch is down.

A big branch!

I return to Portland to find I’ve entered some sort of hell.

Having spent five lovely days in breezy Minneapolis, Minnesota I returned to Portland and found:

The Gorge was on fire.  A teenager being irresponsible with fireworks started a fire that burned through large swaths of everyone’s favorite hiking destination.  Multnomah Lodge was only saved due to an all-night battle by firefighters.  I-84 was closed for more than a week, Hood River lost a chunk of their tourist season, towns had to evacuate, hikers were stranded overnight, and many people posted pictures of their favorite Columbia River Gorge sites on social media.  The sorrow was immense.

Ash was everywhere.  The Gorge isn’t far from our North Portland home, and there was a light dusting of ash in the fifth quadrant.

It was friggin hot.  You know how when you’ve been having lovely cool summer experiences and you find yourself plunged into triple digit temperatures and it just doesn’t feel very good?  That was Portland in the week after I got home.

My work computer was stolen.  While I was enjoying my Jucy Lucy at Matt’s Bar, my office was being broken into by people who used the fire escape.  They took two computers, a projector, and a favorite throw to wrap everything in. This meant that I spent my first day back at work with a brand new laptop, which had none of the same ports as my old laptop. So instead of working from three screens (one laptop, two monitors plugged in) I worked with one tiny laptop screen.  It is very hard to do my job with one tiny laptop screen.  Plus all of the installing of programs and getting everything up to speed.

It was probably the bumpiest re-entry I’ve experienced.