Month: April 2010

I noticed last week that there was a dumpster in front of the house Barbara and I (and her sister Lori) used to live in, just a few blocks away from where we moved to 20 years ago. It was a small, two-bedroom place, with a tub and no shower, a basement, and a yard the size of a small mattress; wedged between another house and a car battery shop. When I mentioned I used to live there to the guy out front of the place smoking a cigarette, he told me it was going to be back on the market soon.

Barbara and I walked past it on our way to the store on Sunday, and there was an estate sale going on. We hadn’t been in the place since May of 1990, and being snoopy we went in. I went back with her to get a couple of pictures, including this one of what used to be our living room (and where I slept when I first started to come to Portland “for concerts”), and Barbara went back for an additional trip because Lori showed up that afternoon.

The house was packed to the gills with stuff, despite the fact that people were buying things at a steady clip and the sale had been going on since Friday. We looked through omething as a memento of the woman who’d lived there after us for two decades, but the only thing Barbara wanted out of the pile was this “Hagar the Horrible” strip from the window in the front door. She’s not a “Hagar” fan, but she’d put it in the window herself in 1988 and the woman who’d bought the house had left it there ever since.

I don’t know how long now that I’ve been patronizing Fujin on Hawthorne. Not as long as Barbara and I have been customers at Hunan — because that dates from back when we were both working at Powell’s and I left there nearly twenty years ago — but it’s been a long time and I’ve probably been there more often because it’s close to home and where I had my office. Becky, one of the co-owners, had a birthday on Monday and I took her a card. This was my fortune:

An enjoyable vacation is awaiting you near the mountains.

We’ll see.

Not a picture of another smart car but another odd car that caught my eye: a Citroën Acadiane panel truck. There’s someone with a bunch of Citroëns closer in to the river on SE Belmont, and they were shopping at the Safeway on Hawthorne when this photo opportunity presented itself.

We monitor them all.

I wrote a long encomium to Tiger Lily on her sixth birthday last month, and I’d been meaning to do the same for her putative sister, Jasmine, when her turn came up on 26 March. But I failed.

That’s a sad thing, because despite the uninformed meanderings of some writers about how cats are “indifferent” to their owners, the reality is Jasmine is one of the most jealous animals around and would be quite unhappy if she was cognizant of the fact that I wrote about her sister and not herself.

Though she’s the younger of the two girl kitties, Jasmine is the Princess of the house. In part that’s because she’s the only one who cares about being Princess. Tiger Lily could care less, but Jasmine’s nose gets out of joint any time she perceives a slight. She is the Mistress of Sulk, and we’ve spent more time than I care to think about coaxing her out of her moods.

In this, she takes after one of her predecessors, Manderlea, who, when we lived next to a battery shop on SE 38th & Belmont, would go sit on their roof in the rain to show everyone how disgruntled she was. Jasmine has a lot of Manderlea’s mannerisms (despite the fact that the closest they ever came is the former walking over the latter’s grave in the backyard): a tendency to flounce into the room, a penchant for jumping to the highest point (refrigerator, cabinet, etc.) and perching like a vulture, and an insatiable curiosity that drives her to check out whatever Barbara’s doing. The big difference is, indeed, big: because Jasmine’s about fifteen pounds; twice Manderlea’s size and half again as big as either of the two other cats.

That makes it all the more impressive (and potentially dangerous to fragile items) when she decides to pop up on top of a cabinet from the back of a chair. Or when she decides to come down. She’s obsessed with the fishing pole toy Barbara made for Jackie Chan back in his youth (his acrobatics chasing after it was what earned him his promotion from “Boy Kitty”). She’ll pull it out of it’s hiding spot four or five times a night, but if one of the other two cats hears her chasing it and shows up to get in on the action, she’ll leave because she doesn’t like to share.

She’s the one who shows up when there’s company. She’s the one who rolls on her back on the sidewalk to get pets from passers-by. It was Jasmine squeezing her body into a tiny basket Barbara was using for tinder that’s led to us having four wicker baskets in the office and living room (for three cats!) Like she was a lobbyist or something. She’s six.

He is risen! (Although technically it’s not until tomorrow….)

photo by Nathan Pryor

It was almost exactly eight years and eleven months ago that Barbara and I went to Amsterdam (after the wedding in Ireland of our friends Annie and Eric) and saw our first smart car.

I’ve never been much of a car guy — Barbara knows more about the workings of an engine than I do, heck, I can barely get the hood open — but I’ve always been attracted to odd cars. I don’t know why, exactly, but I suspect that it has something to do with my folks. Dad says that he taught me to recognize Karmann Ghias at an early age; he had a Chevy Corvair when my brother and I were kids; my first car was a 1975 AMC Pacer that Dad had bought for work. So I didn’t really have much of an option but to be smitten when I saw a smart parked on the street during our trip to the Netherlands in the first days of May 2001.

It was to be a thwarted obsession for several years, though. I read about the smart online. I looked at the various models and used the online configuration tools (in German). I essentially stalked smart. Then I started seeing reports about people bringing them into the US, movie stars ordering them in Europe and having to wait for months for them to arrive, and worst of all, the godawful cost of these “gray-market” cars: upward of $30K for what was supposed to be an economical city car. Way out of my league.

I persisted, however. I was even interviewed by Tom and Ray of NPR’s “Car Talk”, asking about how to get one imported (although they cut me from the show; they didn’t really have any advice to offer). So it just remained an unscratched itch for years. (Meanwhile, on a trip to Germany, Dad had acquired his own hankering for a smart roadster).

According to the Department of Energy, on 2 April 2001, a gallon of regular gasoline on the West Coast was selling for an average of $1.54, which was half again what it had cost two years before. So to my mind, even back then, it seemed like a move to smaller vehicles might not be such a bad idea. Five years later, it cost a dollar more. In the summer of 2008, the price of a gallon of regular on the West Coast spent six weeks above the $4.20 mark, a 175% increase over what it had cost the month before we went to Amsterdam.

But in early 2007, a notice went out to interested parties that there was finally going to be an official importation of smart fortwo models (the roadster had been discontinued) into the US. For a $99 refundable deposit, you could reserve a car. Later in the year, people who’d plopped down their hundred bucks got a chance to choose their options and order up their car. Of course, between the time I put down my deposit and the time I got to configure my smart, I’d been laid off from my job, but I didn’t let that deter me: obsession knows no recession. Red, with red interior and a cabrio top to make the most of the sunny days.

A smart dealership opened up in Portland in January 2008 and they started getting in about 30 or so cars a month. I got the call April, and I picked up the smart car two years ago today.