How to comment

There are quite a lot of you who read this blog and may not know how to comment. There are also a lot of people reading Joe's blog that don't know how to comment. This is my attempt to show you how to do this 300 miles away.  Please email or call me if you need further clarification. 

Step One: 

Read my post and think of clever quips that will make me chuckle.  

Step two: 

At the bottom of every post you'll see an envelope icon, and right next to it is the "# comments" link.  It looks like this: 

Click on the text that says "0 Comments" 

Step three:

You will be directed to a page that looks like this: (sorry I can't make it bigger!)

Click inside the box underneath the words "Post a Comment". Then you type your endearing message and click the button below that says "Post Comment".  From there, Blogger should guide you through the verification process and your message will be posted directly to the site! 

Hooray! You did it! 

Or maybe, "Booo, that sucked and I still couldn't do it!"  If this is the case, you should just call me. Or you can click here to read Blogger's version of this tutorial, which isn't nearly as cute. 

I love getting feedback from you all and I know Joe does, too. I hope this helps! 

This isn't it

If you've been waiting for a post about the inside of my apartment, you can just go ahead and get disappointed now, because this isn't it.

This is me on the porch, melting from the scorching (may!?) heat, drinking Sessions beer and feeling my brain slip slowly into Friday night. No doubt I won't see it again for awhile.

But this is the weekend! This weekend I take pictures of the apartment. Assuming I don't drink too many Sessions.

Until then, I'll direct you to my Flickr page , where you can get jealous looking at pictures of the night we spent at an old Chrysler dealership on Sandy Boulevard.  Joe and I arrived at midnight and stayed till 3 in the morning--a schedule that, I assure you, is totally out of character.

Our good friend Ryan Berg is spending nights there for awhile until the owners install a real security system--one that doesn't rely on nunchucks. The owners also bought a trashed Vespa for us to trash further. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun.

Elliott Avenue

I had to start a Flickr Pro account to accommodate all the photos I took of the apartment. This is the first indication that I may have a problem.

A very beautiful problem called Elliott Avenue. But let me start from the beginning. 

Joe and I moved to Portland exactly one year ago on May 1st.  Joe stayed with his brother Ben for a couple of weeks to find an apartment and during this time he was introduced to a place called Ladd's Addition.  Below, is a drawing of the "grid."  Each of those little diamonds you see is a large rose garden and the big circle in the middle labled "LC" is Ladd's Circle, a big round-about and park that marks the very center of Ladd's Addition.  The whole grid spans about 10 x 10 city blocks.  

Ladd's Addition

In addition to its unusual layout, Ladd's is special because of the trees. It is consistently 10 degrees cooler in Ladd's at all times of the year because the trees here are so enormous. The sky becomes a dappled haze of green and blue, barely discernable through the gently swaying canopy of shaded Elms.  

Definitely Narnia

And as I'm sure you've all guessed, Ladd's is full of equally enormous houses. But just off the big circle, soaking up the rarest bit of sunshine in Southeast Portland, are 3 little stucco duplexes.  These apartments emerge from the labyrinth of trees and alleys like little mushrooms, blooming oddly from the dark mystery of the forest floor. At least, thats how they looked to me. Its almost hard to take them seriously at first. 

Ladd's Addition, like Narnia, seems like a distant wonderland. When Joe took me to see these little stucco duplexes exactly one year ago, it was with a far off future in mind. We assumed that Ladd's is surely reserved for that Portland oddity: the filthy rich hippie.   

Fast forward 9 1/2 months and Joe and I are once again seeing greener grass on the other side. Our plan was to take it slow and continue on a month-to-month lease until something popped-up.  But providence had other plans.  One saturday afternoon while Joe was sailing, I stumbled upon an ad for those same little duplexes--ran to meet the owner, filled out an application and within 2 days, Joe and I were about to call 1943 SE Elliott home.  On exactly May 1st, we moved into our new apartment. 

Nesting is such a long process, and I'm sorry to say that for this little chicky, its not quite finished.  We still have so much to do.  Namely, figure out how to arrange a living room that has doors on every wall.  But we're feeling really good about all this. 

For the sake of brevity, and your sanity, I won't  bore you with all the details (right now).  But you can rest assured that I'll fill you in later.  You can see more photos of the move and of our new apartment below--and on flickr of course.  Hope to see you soon!

A total cafe binge

After what feels like weeks of non-stop movement I plopped myself down in a coffee shop this morning and haven't budged for close to 3 hours. Alone, riding a sugar high of immense proportion, and accompanied by a laundry list of things to do on the internet--its been a total cafe binge.

I had intended to write a post today about our new home. This isn't going to happen for a couple of reasons.

1) The internet in this coffee shop is atrocious, and I think the only reason I keep coming back is because they offer at least 7 different kinds of cake at all times. And as you may remember from the last post: I have a lot of pictures to post--it could take all day in these conditions.

2) Have you ever been so toally mezmerized by a person's voice and then looked at their face and been so totally appalled that it is the origin of that noise, because there is just no way that a voice that distinguised and manly could come from a person who looks like Ron Weasley? Well I've been having this experience for last 2 hours. Rather than being productive and making good use of my time, I've been eaves-dropping on a conversation between a british real estate broker, who sounds like a most jaw-droppingly handsome TV personality but does in fact look just like Ron Weasly, and two squirly 20-somethings who are trying to sound like they have the upper hand. Its been interesting.

In lieu of something more exciting, I share with you the following list of thoughts that have been occupying a lot of my time. How drole!

Things I'm Thinking About:

Dogs: Specifically that I want one and everyone keeps telling me that I should not get one. I've been waiting 5 years for a dog, and I just don't want to wait any longer! I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think about this every day. Its getting ridiculous.

Unemployment: Because its looming on my horizon. My position with Americorps ends in August and I am literally terrified of being unemployed in the Portland job market. To make matters worse, I've been poking around on Craigslist job postings to mentally prepare myself (emotional flagellation?) and am becoming increasingly depressed and cynical about the situation. Not only are there very, very few jobs available that I am interested in, but I have reached the point where I doubt that I am actually qualified for anything. I am an expert in nothing, and is it just me, or does 3+ years experience as a barista seem like overkill?

Photography: There is just nothing more frustrating than knowing what you want the picture to look like and not being able to create it. This is so frustrating, in fact, that I have taken to just pointing the camera in a general direction and releasing the shutter. The sad thing is that my only good shots arrive this way.

Web and Graphic Design: I've been dabbling in these fields at work with limited success. Thankfully I work with a non-profit. But my curiosity has peaked. I've turned my design eye on and I'm wondering if this is something I could actually be good at? I'm especially interested in the propensity to make money, which is actually turning out to be much harder than I anticipated. Karl doesn't know this yet, but sometimes, while I'm spacing out at work, I imagine us running a really amazing firm together and its very exciting. (Karl: Feel free to let this thought linger...)

Pickles: Has it ever crossed your mind how political a pickle can be? Not just any pickle, but one you've made yourself, from a home-grown vegetable. Joe is making some planter boxes for our new space and I'm seriously considering my pickling prospects. It turns out pickling is really just a function of boiling water properly, which seems pretty reasonable. If the Obama's start pickling their Victory Veggies at the White House--you heard it here first.

This is just a teaser

This is just a teaser, because the real thing is too big to tell all at once. The last 4 weeks have been really full of exciting new developments.

First, and most importantly: we moved. The gravity of those two words won't be obvious to you unless you've experienced the pain of living through 112 degree days on the third floor of a brick apartment building, a pain that can only be countered by drinking cold beer in your underpants next to an army of Wind Machines--for 3 months straight. Needless to say, my world has been a bit chaotic these last few weeks. We packed; we cleaned; we had no internet. Those first two chores were a breeze compared to the last. I thought maybe I could suck it up and make some life changes, but the sad reality is that I'm just a little bit addicted to the World Wide Web.

Saying goodbye to our view of the big city. 

The second, almost equally amazing development, is my budding career in photography.  Joe bought a new toy, something we fondly refer to as "the grown up camera." Its a Canon Rebel XS and its teaching me a lot about the meaning of Fully Manual.  Its also inspiring me to explore more film photography--but considering that I've taken close to 700 pictures in two weeks, I think I'll stick with digital until I get my training wheels off.

If you're keen on plot, this is the part where you surmise that all 700 of those photos are of our new apartment. I make the excuse that I'm "playing with the aperture"--what I'm really doing is trying to capture the adorable speckled sunlight on my porch, and the languor of hanging plants, and the strange serenity of an empty birdcage in a rainstorm.  This translates to 2 dozen photos of bricks, plants and miscellaneous objects that are always poorly framed and rarely successfully formatted. Photography is complicated.

Long story short: I have a lot to share and its going to take awhile. After 3 long weeks without internet we'll finally be connected on thursday, at which point I can resume blogging in my nightie with a glass of wine.  Fully clothed with coffee is messing with my mojo.