Category: What the…?

Fortune from sometime in the past found in a pocket:

On Friday your creative side will shine forth with exceptional ideas.

Maybe it was some other Friday.

That’s Mr. Iggy “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee” Pop to you.

Twenty years ago today I was taking a short leave from my job at Powell’s Books (where I was the desktop publishing guy doing the maps, signage, and ad design) to finish my undergraduate thesis at Reed College. I’d been working full-time at Powell’s and additionally putting in some extra hours in a variety of capacities on campus since I’d returned to school in 1987: first as a “t-watcher” in the computer (terminal) labs, doing book returns for the bookstore, and — on this particular day — working on the Reed News weekly in the school’s Publications Office.

Despite the fact that our jobs at Powell’s paid very, very little, I’d gotten antsy about finding a house to buy at the beginning of my thesis year. The rental Barbara and I (and her sister Lori, and our cats, and Lori’s cats, and Lori’s dogs) had been living in was up for sale, and although it had been on the market without result several times before (one time, Barbara’s landlady had told her she’d accept a used couch as down payment if she wanted to buy the place), real estate in Portland was starting to pick up from the late-’80s doledrums of the Reagan/Bush years and I was worried that we’d be caught short having our home sold out from under us without any place to go while I was trying to finally graduate from college. So we started searching in the winter of 1989/1990.

We started working — if you can call it that — with a real estate agent who we didn’t realize until a few years later had been a high school classmate of Barbara’s. She was useless, steering us toward houses far outside the area we were hoping to buy into (i.e. somewhere near the Sunnyside neighborhood between Hawthorne and Laurelhurst where we were living). A couple of times we’d met with her and toured a place and given her the go-ahead to make an offer only to find out that the house had closed before we’d even set foot inside. In at least one case, that turned out not to be so bad, as the house next door to the one we tried to make an offer on ended up on the cover of Willamette Week as a notorious drug house the cops hadn’t been able to shut down for years. But we didn’t know that at the time, and it was stressful going through the process over and over, particularly as Barbara was having to cobble together the financing from our rather shaky budgetary situation.

We were forced to take the initiative ourselves, looking for signs in the neighborhood, checking out listings, looking at houses ourselves. So it was on a Wednesday morning as I got settled into my temporary desk in Eliot Hall that I made a quick scan through the Oregonian’s real estate classified section.

It was a very different market in Portland at that time. Prices were far lower, but so were the number of listings. Given the changes newspaper classified advertising has gone through over the past two decades, strict comparisons are difficult, but the Wednesday paper of March 14, 1990 had a grand total of two home listings in the West Portland section. The section for Southeast Portland had eleven, several of which were pitched as “good income producers” or duplexes meant to be “owner-occupied.” Then there was this:

LAURELHURST $42,500

Walk to Laurelhurst Park, FHA appriased [sic], one owner over 48 years, 2 story, 4bdrm, basement w/extra toilet, storms, lrg formal dining rm, big kit & nook w/ceramic tile & bath w/tub and tile, shower, gar & more. Priced below FHA appraisal for quick sale.

The rental house we lived in was itself just four blocks from Laurelhurst Park (closer than most of the homes in the Laurelhurst neighborhood, in fact). The price was in the lower range for the neighborhood, meaning it was almost within our reach if you looked at our finances with rose-colored glasses. I got on the phone with the realtor immediately to find out the address — it was only three blocks from our rental — and since I was going to be working or in class until the afternoon, Barbara called Lori at home to get her to take a look at the outside. She said it looked OK to her.

I arranged to meet the owner that afternoon. Frida Rasmussen was 80, had heart problems, and on doctor’s advice she was planning to move into an apartment. She’d been living in the house since 1942 — alone since her husband had died twenty-five years earlier — and while early on she’d added some things like the tile to the bathroom and kitchen, a lot of the subsequent work on the place was necessarily done on the cheap. But we fell in love with the place. Best of all, since we were neighborhood people, Frida knew us by sight, particularly Lori, who regularly walked through the area with her Sheltie, Rebecca, who was particularly distinctive because a horse kick had left her hind legs useless and she used a cart to get around for years. Barbara was smitten with the place when she saw it that evening. Despite the bad roof (how bad we weren’t to find out until the following year when Barbara and I replaced it ourselves), Frida’s extensive use of a bilious color called Monsoon Green for all trim and many other painted surfaces, asbestos shingle siding that was cracked and falling off in many spots, the dropped ceilings with acoustic tile, etc., the fact is that at the level of housing we were looking at, those were the norm for pretty much every house.

Our enthusiasm for the place may have been our saving grace. Barbara didn’t like the greenish-gold carpet in the living and dining rooms or the gray weave thing on the floor in the fourth “bedroom” (what we call The Situation Room, which has entrances to the stairs, the bathroom, the back hall, my office, and the living room) or the then-thirty-year-old gold wallpaper in the living room, but her love of the location and the house and her common decency kept her from making the mistake of the other potential buyers who walked through the house talking about how they’d rip out this or that thing Frida had spent her hard-earned money on. Our offer went in at $45,000, and Frida took it, despite her having to wait a bit longer for the deal to close.

It was a long road from March 14 to mid-June, when Barbara and Lori finally moved into the house. It took an FHA loan (at 11%) to get us in, and we had to make a number of temporary improvements to pass the inspection. The roof was an immediate issue, as Barbara found out when she went up to do some tarring on the bodged-together “gutters” and her butt went through some of the shingles. A basement window with dry rot was replaced with glass bricks. As it turned out, my concerns about having the rental sold out from under us were correct, and we ended up clearing the last of our stuff out of there in the afternoon following my graduation ceremony at Reed, which featured Oregon Symphony conductor James DePriest and a torrential rainfall. The funeral for my father’s step-father was the week before graduation. Barbara did the heavy lifting to get the financing taken care of, since the down payment on the house consisted mostly of the few thousand her mother had left Lori and Barbara when she’d died a year and a half before.

Frida needed the money from the sale before she could afford down payment on an apartment, and there were several weeks after we had to move out of the rental before the deal on the house closed. We and the menagerie needed someplace to stay. Frida liked us but hated cats and she had no obligation to let us move in before final closing (although she did let us move some stuff into the garage). Barbara’s father hates all animals and though he had the space in his house in southwest Portland, refused to let his daughters bring them. We ended up moving out to my grandmother Margaret’s farm in Gresham (she was away for a time after her husband died), putting the cats into a cat hotel we could ill-afford, but the neighbor who cut the front yard for my grandmother drove over the septic tank field with his tractor and all of the drains started backing up. Barbara’s friend Paula came through and let us stay with her for the duration. Oh, did I mention that before we could take possession of the house I left town for a seven-week summer program at New York University?

So, today’s not the 20th anniversary of the day we moved in. Barbara moved in on a different day than I did — I wasn’t back from New York City until July — but it is the day that we first saw our house as a potential home. It’s a day to celebrate a certain amount of luck; not to mention probably one of the best decisions I’m ever likely to make (i.e. “Despite the fact that we’re broke we have to buy a house now!”) because there’s probably no way we’d be able to afford to buy into this neighborhood today. In the twenty years we’ve been here, it’s gone from a neighborhood with skinheads, heroin addicts shooting up at the abandoned Foremost Dairy, and condemned houses across the street with squatters and guys peeing off the porch in the morning to a pretty uneventful middle-class community (albeit one with a methadone treatment center half a mile down the road).

Thanks on this anniversary to everyone who helped make our little home possible.

Barbara spotted this in the newspaper circulars a couple of months back — what with the early spring you may not need them now — but apparently this company has no problem advertising gloves “Lined With ‘Anti-Freeze’ Sherpa”. You’d think that they’d be ashamed to admit that the insulation component of their hand protectors came from the bodies of the indigenous people of the Himalayas, but apparently whatever parts of the Sherpas they’re using are really good insulation.

Tuesday night I was once again a substitute on Team Rum, Sodomy, & the Stumbling Drunks at the pub quiz at Shanahan’s in Vancouver, doing my part to bring them a first-place victory, which meant my cut of the winnings was slightly less than cost of my drinks and snacks and the gas to drive there and back, even in the smart car.

My eighteen-month period on the wait list for JEOPARDY! ends a month from tomorrow. Then it’s time to try out a fifth time.

No idea how this happened (click on the picture to enlarge), and I’ve never seen it before, but when I went to pull this ice tray ouf of the freezer last night, there were two spikes of ice sticking out of the cubes at about a 45-degree angle, on either end of the tray, pointing in different directions. I kind of don’t want to empty the tray until I’ve figured out what happened.

The blog seems to have gotten away from me lately; I noticed the other day it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted anything, and the month of February was pretty light, even by the standards of the blog lately. I haven’t been entirely sittin on my ass, however.

For one, I’ve had a project rattling around in my brain for twenty-five years or so that I’ve taken a couple of stabs at in various written forms but never really got gelled. Finally, after a few takes on it as a novel/screenplay/whatever, a proposal for a graphic novel series is done through the first draft. So that’s something.

The job search goes on, although it’s been pretty sparse pickings out there for the past (nearly) three years. When I was giving blood this morning, the phlebotomist just about had me convinced that I could walk into a job driving bloodmobiles around for the the Oregon Red Cross chapter, but when I jokingly mentioned that I didn’t know whether I could handle carrying the boxes of blood because I (really) tend to faint at the sight, he put the real kibosh on it by telling me that they’re training the drivers to take blood these days, and while I’ve managed to get over some of my squeamishness about blood and needles, there’s no way that’s going to resolve itself at my age.

I did take some time to practice and make a brief appearance in Phillip Kerman’s “Video Production On the Cheap” presentation at Ignite Portland last week (if you watch the video on YouTube, I’m just past the halfway mark at 2:30).

And I took some time this week to brush up on my PHP and SQL, then add some CSS and jquery. The new collapsible archive sidebar for the site is the the result. Yes, I’m catching up to the early part of the decade, Web-wise.

But the real reason for today’s post is that yesterday was the sixth birthday of Tiger Lily, the cat who’s biting me on the shin as I type this.

Barbara brought Tiger Lily (closest to the camera in the picture above) and Jasmine home on the same day in May 2004, but they’re not littermates and Jasmine’s actually a couple of weeks younger. Tiger Lily was an unusual pick for Barbara — enamoured as she is of long-haired cats — but her personality reached out at Barbara through the wire of the cage (or perhaps that was her claws).

Even though she was the elder of the two kittens by a significant proportion in those early days, Tiger Lily seemed to grow slowly. With hindsight, that can be partially attributed to the fact that her sister is — as our vet puts it with his inimitable table-side manner — “a big gal,” at fifteen pounds of muscle and fluff. Compared to that, it’s not too surprising that we attributed to Tiger Lily a “failure to get big” syndrome. Now that she’s six, she’s grown into being the Mary Lou Retton of cats: compact, muscled, and acrobatic (and at over ten pounds, actually heavier than our middle-aged Jackie Chan). A seemingly-slow growth pattern did earn her the nickname “ittle bittle,” which was soon shortened to just “Biddle.” Thus did the little routine cat things she does also become “biddling.”

Her early career was nothing like the squeaky-clean Retton’s. The first and second summers of Biddle’s life were particularly marked by episodes of theft. Any number of items from the neighborhood, including fronds of plants, toys, and even a wooden-handled barbeque fork, were brought through the cat door into the house. In the picture above, she’s gnawing on a Nerf rocket on the couch. Sometimes, this worked to our advantage: one of the items she routinely brought in were cat collars, and since she and our other two cats were continually managing to get them off (with the attendent pet license and identification tags), that was a good thing. A less salubrious outing was the time our neighbor came over asking if we’d seen anyone who might have stolen a silk scarf she’d knitted herself years before off of the fence in her back yard where it had been drying. Barbara suggested that it could possibly have been “our thieving cat” from the beginning, but the neighbor thought it was far too big for a small cat to have pulled off the fence and made away with. We did a quick look around but didn’t see anything, then Barbara consoled her and showed her some of the remodeling we’d been doing while I took a further look outside. Tiger Lily hadn’t been able to get the scarf through the cat door, apparently, but she had buried it under some damp leaves under out tree in back. The scarf was in need of washing again, and the trip through the hole under the fence in the teeth of a cat had loosened a couple of threads, but our neighbor was happy to see it, nonetheless. No picture of that one.

Not as much drama these days. Tiger Lily’s the only of the three cats to go on the roof any more (although she prefers to be let back in through the sky lights now to jumping back on the tree). She’s the only one who makes any real attempts to catch rodents (I do have a photo of an impressive-sized rat from a few months back). And she’s the one who’ll keep up with a play toy the longest, although she never gets it out to show she wants to play like Jasmine does. Tiger Lily’s still the wildest of the three, even when she’s sleeping on a warm computer.

Cheney has chest pains

Whatever could be hurting?

It can’t be his heart

Predictions/advice from the cookies we got at Hunan last week.

My cookie:

Slow and steady wins the race.

Barbara’s cookie:

Promote literacy. Buy a box of fortune cookies today.

It was Valentine’s Day/Chinese New Year, so you know they’ve got to be accurate.

Standing on the borderline
Between joy and reason
Tending carefully my fire
Waiting for my season
I know who these people are
I know what they stand for
Corruption’s built into this plan
Nothing’s under the other hand

Tricks and trials await the child

Instinct keeps me running
Running like a deer
Instinct keeps me running
Running through the grinning shadows

I have seen the sludgy beach
And the poisoned river
I have met the lordly rich
They’re just getting stiffer
This whole place is like a maze
Or like some Medusa
Let me out I can’t accept
A second rate life story

Tricks and trials await the child

Instinct keeps me running
Running like a deer
Instinct keeps me running
Running where the sorrow bless me
Instinct keeps me running
Running like a moose
Instinct keeps me running
Running to keep one chance open

Marks on walls, the common outlet
Tell the truth and always will
Marks on wall destroy the thought
Of perfect sunny civilization

Tricks and trials await the child

Instinct keeps me running
Running like a deer
Instinct keeps me running
Running through the grinning shadows
Instinct keeps me running
Running like a bear
Instinct keeps me running
Running to keep one chance open
Instinct keeps me running
Running cause I don’t believe it
Instinct keeps me running
Running through the bare emotion
Instinct keeps me running
Instinct keeps me running
Running
I’m running, running, running, running

—Iggy Pop, “Instinct,” Instinct