You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2008.
Glenn Beck is a bit bombastic at times, but I like what he wrote here.
Portland is such a nice place to live, what with the emphasis on sustainability, green living, public transportation, not to mention all of the cool outdoorsy things right in front of you like the Willamette river, the hiking trails in Forest Park, the Columbia Gorge a short 30 minutes east of the city.
Even the weather is cooperating with a beautiful sunny 75 degree day forecast, finally here in the middle of June.
So you can imagine my joy when a city and an area that has already given me so much to be grateful for went that extra step and offered up a free buzz while walking to work.
A new MAX line has been in construction along 5th and 6th streets for the past year. Since my office is on 5th, I’ve had a ring side seat as the street was torn up and rebuilt with shiny new rail lines, the curbs reshaped and the intersections redone with spiffy new brick work in an oh so Urban chic herringbone pattern.
Last week they finished installing the pole supports for the power lines and stringing those lines. This week, they’ve been painting those poles a nice, unobtrusive institutional gray. You can smell it from two blocks away. It’s some sort of industrial strength paint designed to bond with metal. The first whiffs don’t really do more than warn you of what to expect but as you walk further into the invisible zone around a pole, your nose wants to pack its bags and run home to momma, without so much as a forwarding address. But you press on because you’re already committed to heading in that direction. Besides its only this one right here you need to pass. You get closer and the astringent smell fills your head with its strangely cloying sweetness, so much so that it feels like that’s all that’s in your head, this smell. For a few seconds you feel heavy, then you feel a slight rush in your arms and you’re past the pole, out of the chemical zone and in fresh air again.
So thanks, Portland. You go above and beyond.
This past Memorial Weekend the Great Prognosticators of Weather had predicted partly sunny days, which is the same as partly cloudy in parts of the country where it doesn’t rain as much as it does here. You see the allusion, it rains SO MUCH that when the clouds finally do part, it’s partly sunny. There’s no point in calling it partly cloudy when fully cloudy is the default behavior.
Not that it mattered, the Weather Prognosticators were WRONG WRONG WRONG. It stayed fully cloudy all that weekend and into that Monday, but by Sunday, after a hundred or so years of the clouds and rain, we decided to bid a hearty “Fuck You” to the weather and the oh so smug Weather Prognosticators and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.
So we did. I’ve been to the Oregon Zoo, briefly, and wasn’t too impressed. It a zoo, after all, and unless you have a hard on for listless African beasts laying around in enclosures faked to look like natural habitat, once you seen one zoo, you’ve seen them all. The cool thing about the Oregon Zoo, though, is where it’s at, namely Washington Park, which has a lot of other cool places to visit, too.
So we went to the Japanese Gardens.
Maybe it was the cloudy weather laying down a mellow atmosphere, maybe it was the fact that we drove a mile or so into Washington Park on a winding road through some beautiful, primeval forest, thereby losing, or at least temporarily suspending, our connection to the modern, hectic, world, but the vibe at the gardens was one of peace and tranquility.
Where the city is one big knot of humanity moving as fast as possible, as loud as possible, the gardens were still and silent. The moment I stepped through the gates, I felt all my tension and stress leave my body. There is just no way a person can be angry, or sustain any negative emotions for any length of time while in the gardens. The beauty of the place just overwhelms you and makes you happy to know such a jewel can exist in the middle of a major metropolitan area.
My photos do not do the place justice, but I am inspired to improve so that I can better convey the awesomeness of it.