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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

 
10:06 PM: august avalanche [#] [6]

life keeps tumbling by before i can write about it! there's yet more to say, but here's some of the story so far:

* i celebrated my 35th birthday at the corner of 35th and oak: a fun picnic at laurelhurst park with bubbles, hula hoops & bocce ball. alas, my traditional trip to oaks park was thwarted because it's not open on mondays. oops! but sven & i headed to the rivershore and found an awesome sunbleached stump half-submerged in the water to sit and talk for a while.



* sven & i celebrated our 5th anniversary: i made him a little book and we went to chez machin for our traditional crepe lunch. usually we also pick blackberries on powell butte, but when we got to the top we found they had all been bulldozed out! it really changes the nature of the landscape up there.

* sven, kristen, todd & i went to see the rose city rollers. it's the kind of thing that's fun to do once a year -- if you bring earplugs. there was a marriage proposal at the beginning; kristen & i groaned because we think that's a terrible tactic. also, it turns out people who go to the roller derby have the best bumper stickers.





* i did my first bridgepedal! i did the 6-bridge family ride. i was worried i wouldn't make it to the top of the fremont bridge before they closed it so i got through the other 5 bridges as quickly as possible. going down i5 on a bike is like riding in a mad max movie! but riding to the event i scraped my knee pretty good when i slipped on the streetcar tracks on sw 6th. it wrenched my handlebars -parallel- to the bike! fortunately i wheeled her down the street and someone helped get rose straightened out. it was my first accident on her and i'm glad neither of us was seriously or permanently damaged!





(that last image from bikeportland)

* later that night i attended sven's clown soiree, a culmination of the classes he's been taking from barnaby.






* sven & i watched the perseids in the field down the road until dawn. in addition to dozens of shooting stars (including he best one i've seen in years), we saw eight(!) satellites. around 4 a.m. i heard a rustling behind us and i turned to find a fox passing us in the tall grass less than 8 feet away.

* sven & i went to the oregon historical museum to see the puppetry exhibit and afterwards we had a summer dinner on the patio at lovely hula hands.

* i've seen "iron man" (not bad), "wall-e" (pretty good) and "the last mimzy" (bleh. but i see how i really would have liked it when i was 12, and it's based on one of my favorite scifi short stories).

in other news:

* i've been doing a lot of patient advocating at ppcw and it looks like i'll be doing even more volunteer work during political season.

* i've also done a lot of gocco teaching at the iprc, but i worry that january will be a difficult month, as supplies are expected to cease being manufactured in december.

* i took a class on "ninja stitching" which has been helpful in knowing how to mend clothes and sew softies, but the class is over now and i have a half-finished apron to show for it.

* last but certainly not least: sandy's getting married next month! :D congratulations, sandy!

Thursday, August 14, 2008

 
12:41 AM: leeann's visit [#] [0]

i am quite far behind retelling the month's events: visits & holidays take up a lot of time! here's the first installment, the last week of june:

* i helped a persian gymnast fluent in 4 languages carry his bag up the hill near michaelmas' place

* michaelmas & i celebrated our 10th anniversary! :*

* leeann visited: we visited multnomah falls (alas, on the day it rained!), we saw kim at powell's, attended the 31 show, visited 23sandy, did the poetry bridgewalk tour (which included talking to the morrison bridge operator and watching the counterweight swing from the inside), went to saturday market, rode the tram, checked out 10 tiny dances at the south waterfront (interesting dances included "Wet?," "See/Spot/Run," and "Project X," where i wrote about needing to contribute to consumer spaceflight), a collective letterpress yard sale, scrap, lark press, and pix. we ate homemade crepes, oatmeal, french toast, and at the restaurant at multnomah falls (they have surprisingly good onion rings), sushiville, pho van, and the little red bike cafe (i wanted pok pok or nutshell, but they didn 't work out).


[leeann at multnomah falls]


[inside the morrison bridge]


[the tram]

here's a little movie i took of the morrison bridge counterweight swinging as the bridge is lifted! it's the whole thing, so about 5 minutes; the person walking in and out of frame is the leader of the poetry bridgewalk. my camera apparently only takes 3 minutes of video at a time, so there's a little glitch where i had to splice two videos together.


(but i don't know why it's doing this weird double video thing. just look at the first one: the second one looks like a rtsp call for no good reason. a little help?)