Category: home and garden

Michelle and I found a house. We saw it at 12:30pm, made an offer at 4pm, and the seller accepted it by 5:30pm. It had been on the market for less than 12 hours. Portland is hot, but so is our new home

We’re going to be living about a block north of the Alberta Arts district. Within 2 blocks are a thai restaurant (though the locals say the other one down the street is better), a southern bistro, a taqueria, a sushi/tapas place, a wine bar, a donut/coffee shop, a fish & chips place, a locally owned video rental spot, a pizza shop, and more than I can wrap my head around. More will follow. There’s going to be a balloon tied to our mailbox, that’s for sure.

Here’s a piece about the neighborhood from last month and carried by several major papers, including my birthplace’s paper. And here’s a walking map and pictures of the neighborhood.

Is it wrong to reach over the fence to snip a rampant blackberry vine? The neighbors clearly aren’t cultivating the crap and it keeps sending shoots over the fence into my yard to start a new colony. Well, it’s probably wrong, but is it worse than letting blackberries establish?

On our walk yesterday, Barley and I encountered a birder in the neighborhood. We could tell because of the spotting scope, so we decided to strike up a conversation using the scope as kindling. It turns out that he, and a number of people in my neighborhood are birders, but he’s got the great fortune of having a hummingbird nest in his front yard. He offered us a look, and enlightened us to the family.

The birds were Anna’s hummingbirds and the nest was barely visible in the spotting scope and virtually invisible to the naked eye despite being only 20 feet from it. We were also informed that Anna’s have been moving northward in the last decade and now winter in the Portland area, which I’d noticed from the pair at Gabriel park near the off leash area and the chirping on our morning walks. I think that my being able to describe what they sounded like was enough to convince my neighbor I wasn’t just some yokel so he regaled me some more.

The nest itself, tiny and indistinguisible from the tree it was hanging in, was made of lichen and cotton that the homeowner had left out near the feeders he kept stocked over the winter. Even the bleeched white fiber didn’t stand out, and the nest itself wasn’t much bigger than the pine cones it was built against. Yet the tiny little beaks sticking out of it were plain to see when the mother came back to feed them god knows what. It was quite amazing and I must get a feeder out soon.

I can’t retrace the steps exactly, but I happened upon Robert Harrison Architects Northwest Romantic Modernims today and was quite pleased by it. We’re sort of relegated to purchasing a craftsman style bungalow, but I share the sentiments expressed. And I don’t see any reason why an old house cannot evolve. That’s part of the fun, right?

Michelle, Barley and I walked around the Richmond neighborhood today for some variety. The walk was less for Barley and more for our enjoyment and education as its one of the areas we think we could someday afford to live. The neighborhood seemed really like a nice fit, and having Hedge House to the south, Bagdad Theater, Bridgeport Ale House, and Horse Brass to the north make it seem all the better. Anyway, that’s a ways off, so we just had lunch at Hedge House with Barley then came home.

My parents got a christmas card from our childhood dentist that included this clipping from the Cody Enterprise. The picture was taken in the back yard of our old home in Cody. The trees in the picture were all planted by my family. The paved area the warden is standing on was our playground, but the new owners apparently wanted a basketball court instead.

Every so often a black bear or two would wonder into town and cause a small fuss, but it was mostly just entertaining. Sometimes we’d ride our bikes to see them when they had been treed, or poled, or whatever.

After I got home from the dog park with Barley, I started to eat some wounded gingerbread men. Looking out the window, I was amazed to find the back yard full of birds. The cherry tree alone had juncos, chickadees, a flicker, a downy woodpecker, a house sparrow, and a scrub jay in it all at once. I tried to take pictures of it as quickly as I could, but the scrub jay flew away.

I used photoshop to sloppily paste images of the tree together, but the zoom on my camera, the varying angles at which the images were shot, and the upcoming final presentation for my Geographic Thought class all led to a rather large, blurry, and far-from-stellar image. I don’t recommend looking at it unless you’re on broadband.

This was too damn cute not to be a holiday card. So the season’s best to everyone from the Portland Freeds. Er, the West Portland Freeds.

We just finished putting up our new LED christmas lights. They use 80% less energy and the diodes are rated for 200,000 hours. Assuming the cords don’t break, we’re set for a long time.

I also helped my parents put up their new red LED christmas lights. They’ve been using the same strings of red C7 bulbs for nearly 20 years, and the same decorating scheme for the same. In fact, I’ve helped my dad put up the lights for most of those years. Some years we couldn’t find red replacements so we’d spray-paint clear bulbs red.

Anyway, the dilemma now is what to do with those old strings of lights. Give them away? Or remove them from use? They’re quite inefficient, but by giving them away we’re at least preventing the purchase of more. But hey – 20 years is a pretty good stint for christmas lights.

Addendum:
It just turned dark enough for the new LED lights to be appreciable. In contrast to the small incandescent bulbs, they’re rather blue and dim. Michelle is kind of disappointed because they “lack warmth”, but that’s exactly why they save energy – they aren’t producing heat. I think they’re beautiful, but we could work on twisting them to line up better.

Since my nose was plugged, the sun was out, and the walnut leaves down, Michelle and I decided to finish up the leaves. You can’t compost walnut leaves because they contain the toxin juglone, otherwise we’d have shredded them up like the others.

Barley somehow found a paintbrush in one of the piles, and was quite pleased with himself.

My parents gave me their old leaf shredder, and it wasn’t happy with the dampness of the leaves, so I ended up mowing over the piles several times before covering the beds. Its a good thing I didn’t mow over the paintbrush.

Finally, I raked the leaves off the roof and cleaned the gutters. Barley caught the leaves as they came off the roof. He was fascinated by the maple helicopters.