No more bushy bushes,

This picture does not do justice to the mound of plant life I extracted from my garden today. Seriously, I worked outside all day, removing the boring bushes and then replacing them with all sorts of perennial goodness (echinacea, brght pink yarrow, coreopsis, blueberry bushes, a short squat variety of black eyed susans) and a few zinnias, African daisy's and portulaca's I couldn't resist.

No audience today, I'm prettty sure that over the weekend that apartment was emptied. I look forward to a poop free front yard!

a victory any way I can get it

I love my yard; it’s huge, but most of the space is taken up by either grass, gravel, enormous trees or rhododendron bushes. The best and most sunny garden space is in the front yard, along a fence in a nice bed about four feet wide by twelve feet long. When I moved in it was filled with bushes that someone had obviously planted to fill the space. They are maintenance free extra thick bushy bushes. They are green, bushy, and I think they might turn colors in the fall. Other than being busy (did I mention they are bushy) they don’t necessarily merit much description. I decided that this space was much too valuable to fill with uninteresting bushy bushes.

Last week, I yanked the first two out. It took a little while and for most of it I had an audience. Across the street from me is a tri-plex structure, with two properties in front and one in the back. I’m not entirely sure who lives in the back but both units in the front have interesting characters. On the left are Lana and Dave. I think she is a stripper, and I’m really not joking. If not a stripper, than an aspiring one, or a proponent of stripper heels for all occasions. I’m not sure. I have no idea what Dave, her boyfriend, does other than wonder around in a white boy gangster getup. But, they both wave back at me and have attempted to plant vegetables and lay bark in a small strip of a garden in the concrete wasteland in front of their house. They also hung a large pot of hot pink petunias, so they can’t be all bad. But, neither of them were my audience.

Next to them, is, as they informed me, Annie, a very young very pregnant mother of three kids all under 8. Chloe, Skylar, and Kaden. Living in the same household is a big-titted pitt bull who wanders the neighborhood pooping at will and a young pit bull named Tank. A puppy and a baby, what is this woman thinking? According to approximately four-year-old Kaden (who has a slight speech impediment which led me to think the puppy’s name was Taint for a few days), Tank is a bad puppy. “He bites.” Kaden explained as the fawn colored puppy gnawed on my fingers. Why yes, he does.

Kaden was my audience. The two boys are a bit wild, both are super cute and have pierced ears and coast down the hill at scary speeds. I have observed them kicking at a bucket screaming, “Shit, shit, shit.” I assumed there was a spider or something equally worthy of profanity in the bottom of the bucket. I have taken to talking to Kaden who watches everything I do with an air of amused superiority. I was hacking at the bushes and he was riding up and down the street.

I pruned the leaves and branches back so that I could figure out how big the base of this plant really was and then started digging. I dug, lifted, dug, pulled, lifted, and dug for about 10 minutes. I was having very little luck. Kaden had stopped his bike on the street and was watching me. I pulled again to no avail. He was watching me, bemused.

“You think I’ll be able to do it?” I asked.

His grin was infectious and innocent. He shook his head, “No, you’re not strong enough.”

I had just been called out by someone barely out of diapers. He flexed his arm. “I’m strong enough.”

I bet you are kid. I dug, and lifted, and tugged some more and the whole thing came out. The solo member of the peanut gallery giggled and rode off.

In your face four-year-old.

No rockets red glaring, but some fun pink fountains

I’m pretty indifferent to fireworks.

What I do like however, is watching people watch them.


The Fourth of July has never ranked very high among my favorite holidays or reasons to get together. I always remember being disappointed in the events as they actually unfolded. Happily, this year (and really the last several) was quite the opposite. At a party where I knew only a few people, I had a good time, surrounded by close friends and relative strangers who also turned out to beautiful, kind, funny people, who are examples of my favorite Portland stereotypes. It’s wonderful when people are both classic examples of what you think they will be AND surprisingly different. A happy irony.

Of course, this probably says much more about myself, as the one assigning those stereotypes and making those categorizations. Once I decided (about a year in) that I didn’t care that I wasn’t cool enough to live/socialize in Portland, people crackled to life both the stereotypes and exceptions. Amazing how much bigger the world seems when you are not overly concerned that you are not the center of it.

Adventures in plant identification part 1

Columbia Springs, a local environmental education non-profit, offers on a bunch of classes for educators. These classes are often all day workshops whose appeal is twofold first the topics are usually interesting, covering the environmental/nature themed gamut from owls, to geology, to salmon, to bats. The other great thing is that the full day classes often offer substitute reimbursement, which means the cost of the substitute in not taken out of my paycheck and I miss the entire workday for “professional development”.

I have taken no fewer than ten of these classes. One of the best that Amy (the organizer/teacher) has put on actually took place at Lewisville Park. I think the title had something to do with forestry and the speakers were a career national parks service forester, a woman doing her PhD on mosses and lichens and a professor from Lewis and Clark University. I wish I remembered his name but I was most impressed by this part of the day. He armed us with plant identification guides and we set out on a quick moving hour-long hike in which he had us watching for specific plants and stopping to identify unknowns. He would also stop us and play a sort of “What do you think happened here?” problem solving and group think sort of game. Like any good teacher, he never identified our ideas as right or wrong, but encouraged his class of 20 educators to keep discussing the answer. Yay! Best Practice!

It was in this class that I was first introduced to the plant guide I referenced a few days ago. And, in this same spirit that I include this photo. After looking through the book I find that this what is called a manroot or bigroot. According to the book, “the large size of the root s the source of both common names.” The book also informs me that this is a common member of the “other families” section of the plant identification book. I wonder what the criteria are to make it into the “other families” section as opposed to (and yes this is a real category) the “oddballs.”

Really, I want to make bawdy jokes at the name and spiny gourd shape, or “football-shaped bladders.” But, I feel to do so would simply be overkill. The spikey hanging ball is its own joke. Anything else would be redundant.

Adventure dog at rest (Lewisville Park)

Finally, it feels like summer, hot and clear. Not, too hot, but with crystal blue skies – sun glinting of the leaves and water, glaring off the rocks. Two rafts with two teenage shipmen in each, just floated/bumped by; they are now out of sight. I am now free to return to just my sports bra in attempt to get some sun on my rolls of white flesh.

Sam is happily bushwhacking, obviously feeling like quite the adventure dog as he tramps through the grasses that tower four feet tall. In an uncharacteristic move he is also trailblazing through the water and, with wet and muddy feet, over my book.

Happy (oh and 3 days, 3 posts)

Happy is the other current theme. Nice combo huh? Hot pink and happy. There was a brief depressed, angry, annoyed, and alone explosion over the past weekend, and if I think too hard about it it’s easy to fall into one of those four categories, especially when considering the black void that is my romantic life, but it’s day four of doing almost nothing. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Currently ranking in the top set of happy things in my world.

1. The dog park.
I am seriously convinced that any dog park would give Disneyland a run for it’s money in the smiley people/animals department. Where else can happy adults of similar dispositions stand around, and watch exuberant creatures frolic. I mean sure, I suppose that kids playing in the park might be similar, but with dogs there’s so much less responsibility. I don’t constantly have to worry if my dog is going to grow up to be a productive member of society. He won’t. Why? He’s a dog.

2. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series
Young adult lit, maybe even a bit before that, but this series is great. The main character is son of a god, and hangs out at a camp for heroes, has a Cyclops for a half brother and a satyr for a best friend. Oh yeah, and if that wasn’t enough there are all these great esoteric Greek mythological references, none of which I can place but all of which are really interesting.

3. Summer
Not just am I not working. I’m enjoying my summer in not Texas, and while some people may espouse the virtues of the lone star state, and I miss the music, I’d be hard pressed to find ANYONE who would consider it a great place for a summer vacation. It hit 90 here today and might get up to 95 tomorrow, but there’s almost no humidity and the mosquitoes wait until dark to descend. The most taxing thing I’ve done all day was take a yoga class, at 10:30 this morning. How crazy when your workout can go anywhere during your day, it doesn’t have to be squeezed in between IEP meetings and getting home to take the stupid dog out.

4. Projectplaylist.com

This site is idiot proof and I don’t have to buy a darn thing. The best things on my list right now? Katy Perry’s, “Waking Up in Vegas” (which I especially love because the video has a returning character from Bones) and a live version of The Indigo Girls’, “Closer to Fine”. Cake’s, “Rock and Roll Lifestyle” also is on there, really because it makes me feel better about not being a black wearing, tattooed, hipster, and I always love the subtle irony of Portland radio stations playing this song.

a fuschia themed world

I recently painted the walls of my study in this exact shade....Alter of Roses is what it says on the can. American Vetch, is what my plant bible, Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and Mackinnon. This is the coolest plant book every with lots of random facts and interesting information, including but not limited to a recipe for wine using Oregon grapes and salal, two native evergreen plants. Normally, I'd side with mother nature over Walmart but truthfully Vetch sounds like a curse word.

The lion, because I know you're jealous, cost me 10 cents at a crazy yard sale somewhere east of Mount St. Helens.