8 posts tagged “portland”

There is this girl who sells these unique wrap-around-you-forever skirts (made out of pieces of other skirts and pants as well as fabric pieces) at the Portland Saturday Market. I love them, in fact my pal Sherry bought me one for my birthday this year. If I could get a decent pic of mine with my cell phone camera, I would post it, but it is mostly done in blacks and hard to photograph. Anyway I discovered she has a web site of sorts up and developing....and I borrowed a pic or two from there to help promote what she is creating.... it might be a matter on personal taste, but I adore what she creates....not so crazy about the shorter skirts, but the mid calf ones hang nicely and flow well.... recycling taken to a new level:

On her site if you poke around,(the addy is along the side of the first pic) she shows some of the skirts both on and unwrapped.... this would be a great way to keep using something you use to wear and can't anymore because your size has gone up or down.... people just swarm around her booth at the market. Sometime fresh PNW funky is hard to find in Portland....

I got off work at 10am, dropped my time cards for the week at the office, and rushed home to meet my pal Sherry for a trip to Saturday Market. Karina and Keegan hitched a ride with us so they could go to The Rose Festival for the day.  It seems like there are lot's of new artists at Saturday Market but with Portland State University buying up a chunk of downtown, the market is being forced to move to a smaller area, and the move will displace about 90 sellers. This makes me more than a tad sad.

Anyway for today we enjoyed the music and had a nice lunch of ice tea with hummus, tabbouleh and falafel, lettuce, tomato and onion gyros smothered with Tzatziki Sauce. After lunch Sherry insisted on buying me a very neat mudcloth bag and a beautiful necklace pendant since she is working on my birthday and we cannot go to dinner and a play like we planned next weekend. She also gave me a 7" Aztec Zodiac Calendar she bought me on her vacation. On my end of things, I finally got to give her the gifts I got for her Bday today too, ( an Amir Beso CD and a beautiful lacquer and inlaid pearl bento box), gift days are always fun whether you are giving or getting.
My loot:

BTW, I found this great healthy eating web site, with lots of nice recipes.... in case you are looking for new things to cook: http://www.whfoods.com/index.html

Off to buy the cats some food, then I am sewing and painting tonight until my bedtime

My son just finished up following an older guy (60-ish) from Portland around for a month. (I wish I could remember his name). Anyway, the guy he followed hired him to follow him and film him so it was not like spy stuff or anything. At the end of the month he had Pat put together a video of him living off of McDonald's food for a month,( he chose them since they are portrayed as the lead demon in the fast food makes you fat media reports, and he lives closest to one of them). He had a full lab workup and a complete physical done prior to starting filming and another done after the month was up. No salads or healthy options for this guy, he ate the most calorie heavy items on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus 2 large milkshakes each day... every day of the 30 days.

This all started when he got into a heated discussion with friends about fast food because they wanted to do lunch at a salad bar and he wanted to go to McDonalds. Seems one of his friends told him it was a proven fact that eating fast food can kill you. Refusing to believe any hype by the media that says fast food gets you fat and unhealthy like it's a proven fact, he wanted to prove this kind of media induced hysteria was wrong. I've seen the video at my son's house where he was editing it. At the end of the video his rather surprised OHSU doc is on the film outlining the post 30 day results.

Not only had he gained NO weight at all, (in fact he lost 4 pounds), but his labs actually improved rather than going down. No, he did not exercise insanely for hours every day, in fact the only thing he did to offset the way he was eating was he walked or ran 1 mile after each meal, or he walked and ran for 3 miles at the end of the day, or he rode his bike for 5-6 miles. That's it. In fact his labs showed actual improvement in his good cholesterol, and decreases in the bad, and they were sizable changes. His point...it's not what you eat, it's what you do with it once you eat it, and if people are responsible and do moderate exercise, they can eat anything they want. I found it all pretty interesting.... he did this for his own reasons but if I were him I would be knocking on the McDonald's Corp headquarters door with it. At the very least, I would be calling Oprah.

Cross posted from my live journal

The sun was out and it was fairly warm so Viola and I took a ride today after her doctor's appointment. She needed to get out and so did I, (out as in away from the city). So we drove out towards Mt Hood. On a side road we found a parking place near the river, and I pulled off my shoes and waded in the shallow water, icy cold, it felt good. I had brought a light dinner with us, wine poached chicken sandwiches on homemade bread, a chef salad, wine and a chocolate milk for Keegan who we dragged with us. Keegan was having a blast making wood boats with toothpick and leaf sails on them with me. He and I sent them into the rapids and on their way to new adventures, he made up a story about every ship we cast into the river.

As we ate dinner, Vi announced she had decided while watching me that I was certainly not a city girl and she pondered why I was here. "So I can torment you Vi, of course". She laughed and questioned me intently on where I would live if not here.... I do not know. Honestly, I don't. I have no direction, no secret place, no sense of belonging, not here, not anywhere. I am floating, drifting just like the boats Keegan and I made today and set free on the river. I have no anchor. I use to love the south coast of Oregon, until I discovered it's ugly side. It was so easy to leave it once I realized how tarnished and dirty it was there. I actually felt like I belonged there for awhile and when that feeling left, it was gone as if it had never existed in me. I feel empty a lot of the time.... like big part of me is missing. I do not know where to find that part that I have lost along the way.

Parts of Portland I would miss I guess, even though I am not a fan of city living. The culture, the art stores, the variety of things to do and see. I HATE driving you have to do in a city, it sucks my will to live and I have to drive a LOT in my job. Buses are not an option in my job, and frankly as good as our local public transit "Trimet" is, it sucks to stand in the pouring rain and wait for a bus. I would love to live someplace small, where everything is a short bike ride away from home, in a small owner built cob house, a short car drive from a large enough town to find the few things I would miss about not living in a city.... I just do not know where such a place exists that I could afford to live in.

Portland has it's cool side, here are two video examples of what the kinds of things that make it cool and tolerable:
The Rebuilding Center and The Portland Convergence Project

In with the yuppies and urbanite trendies, there are some forward thinking people with simple lifestyle agendas I agree with and find comfort in. It could be worse, I could be in a much worse place than this. I just know in my soul that I am not home yet, that's all. It was nice of Vi to notice I am unsettled, and even nicer of her to actually care that I am.

The escape was like a boost to my soul, the drive home was nice, and in route home Vi told me she doesn't expect to live forever but she would appreciate it if I would stick around and look after her till she is ready to go, because she needs someone like me in her corner. But if I decide I have to go, she wants to go with me, even if it means living in a mud hut and wearing tye dye." She really IS amusing some days.... even Keegan laughed out loud at the thought of Vi decked out in tye dye. (She will be a very hip 82 next monday).

Cross posted from livejournal

I go often, lot's of people in Portland do, the drumming and fire circle happens the first and 3rd Sunday each month under the Hawthorne Bridge. Some people come to drum, some to fire dance and some to watch.... I go to watch, my 5yo grandson dances, till he is exhausted...without fire of course.

The pics are not mine, but anyone could use these layouts for their hometown or personal pics:

But the rest of Portland Metro got "zip". In fact we were quite sunny 7 miles away out in Clackamas when Karina called me freaking out about the snow where she was. I didn't believe her till I got the picture.