When my brother, Turd, bought this house, it was covered by shrubbery and painted pumpkin orange with sidewalk gray trim, but as you can see it was still a great find. Built in the early 1920′s, it had some of the best elements of the arts and crafts era that was just ending and the [...]
Back in 2004 I was working on a house in Irvington, and a neighbor dropped by to chat. A loquacious gal, she had soon informed me that her elderly father had been moved to a nursing home, so she and her husband planned to fix up his house and move in; it was just down [...]
When I walked into the Bureau of Development Services, finding it packed as usual, I filled out my form to place in the first of five boxes, and settled in for a long wait. The plans I was submitting were for an extensive remodel, a rebuild, really, of a house that, had it not been [...]
UPDATE BELOW: Awesome picture from New York. Today Occupy Portland was scheduled to meet at 8:00am at the East end of the Steel Bridge, so I went down to take a look. I walked along the west side waterfront, figuring that would give me the broadest view of what was happening, and alert me to [...]
Occupy Portland assembled just outside my front door earlier today, at a rally/walkout for Portland State University students. As you can see, it was reasonably well attended, and eventually led to a march on, appropriately enough for debt-saddled students, the Bankruptcy Court, I’m not sure which one. Though I left as the march departed, I [...]
In the aftermath of the of the rout of OccupyPortland yesterday afternoon, I decided to take a look at the oft-touted “damage” to the parks. Peering through the hastily installed cyclone fences at a crew of city workers, who had doffed the ever-so-telegenic masks worn by the earlier invaders, all I saw was what any [...]
Back in high school and college, a trip to the Columbia Gorge wasn’t really about appreciating its beauty, but about getting away to party and make mischief, which we naturally did with some frequency. In the process, though, I did manage to discover a lot of favorite spots, surprisingly few of which I’ve forgotten in [...]
In an earlier post, I wrote about the ongoing renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal building, a bland 1970′s-looking hulk being completely retrofitted under the stimulus bill. Currently, it’s one of three cranes left in a skyline that had more than a dozen just a few years ago, one stands idly over a project [...]
I was a little worried, as I prepared to head to the waterfront to assemble for Occupy Portland; I had just gotten an email from Daily Kos asking me to “pledge” to occupy, and it said I would be joining 37 other hardy souls. “Really?” my friend Denise asked, “there’s only going to be 37 [...]
Today, when I wasn’t really planning to write anything, I got an invitation to a birthday house party by the Obama campaign. My first thought was, “Wait a minute, these guys know it’s my birthday? That NSA spying has gotten really out of hand….” Unfortunately, the truth is even worse: I’m invited to a “house” [...]