Last Thursday, also known as Halloween, was wet and chilly. I expected that we’d be inside for the evening.
Grandpa Nelson was happy to stay inside, but Auntie Bridgett wanted to get out and do some “Reverse Trick or Treating”, where we walk around the neighborhood and hand out candy. It’s always fun seeing kids in costumes and chatting with folks.
We got to see all the houses lit up in their spoooky glory, looking shinier with the rain.
We met Cindy, who had a heating pad under the blanket on her lap, so she could stay warm while handing out candy. She even had a tube on her banister, so folks could catch candy as it rolled down to them!
On the way home, we stopped for a ‘mocktail’ at Eris, our buddy Tony’s bar. We chatted a bit, then headed home to watch some classic horror. For me, Bêla Lugosi in Dracula is a Thumbs Up, but the older, silent “Nosferatu” is a Thumbs Down.
We are having lots of rain here in Portland, so I imagine the evening’s Halloween activities will be mostly inside. It is the beginning of “Doing things inside” season, after all.
Cold outside, good food inside. Yummy salmon quiche!
Grey outside, bright inside.
And we just keep getting up, cooking, making stuff, reading, learning and taking care of each other … whatever the season.
It’s nearly the end of October, and we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in a very long, rough election season.
Here in Oregon, we have mail-in voting. If it’s hard for you to get around, you just fill in your ballot and mail it off.
But if, like us, you enjoy the feeling of delivering your ballot safely to a protected place, you can walk it down to a ballot collection site. That’s what we did, at the temporary home of the Belmont library.
We walked down between drizzles, deposited our ballots, chatted with the librarians, and then headed across the street to Seven Virtues Coffee for snacks. Pastries and coffee are a fine way to celebrate Democracy, don’t you think?
Now we just sit tight and hope for the best come Election Day, November 5th.
Since Portland is built on both sides of the Willamette River, we have lots of bridges. There are ten traffic bridges, one railroad-only bridge, and one just for pedestrians and public transit, within the city limits.
And within a few years, we will be down to nine. Starting in 2027, the Burnside Bridge, which has spanned the Willamette since 1926, will be closed and replaced by a modern, “earthquake ready” bridge.
This is important because Burnside Street and the Bridge are a major transportation artery through the city, running 18 miles east to west. Three bus routes cross it, and 45,000 cars, 2,000 pedestrians and 4,000 bicycles are estimated to cross it every day. It is predicted by geologists and engineers that if a magnitude 8 earthquake happens along the Cascadia subduction zone, none of the current bridges will survive, cutting off much of the population from water, help, and supplies.
Screenshot
We went to McMenamin’s History Pub to hear Sharon Wortman tell us about it. Sharon gave a wonderfully educational talk on the history and future of the Burnside Bridge.
The new bridge is estimated to cost 900 million dollars and take four years to complete, re-opening in 2031. It is an inverted Y designed to withstand an 8.0 earthquake. With good fortune and good healthcare, Grandpa Nelson and I will live to see it finished.
Here is a still shot I grabbed from the video on the website, showing how the new bridge should look.
Sharon’s talk was part history, part engineering, and part personal memoir. She is a great speaker with a real emotional and intellectual connection to her subject, and the audience enjoyed every minute of it.
I know this blog has only scratched the surface of this enormous subject. If you want to know more and get all the nitty-gritty information, a good place to start is the website https:// http://www.multco.us/earthquake-ready-burnside-bridge.
The Friends of Lone Fir is a non-profit, volunteer group who help maintain and educate folks about our wonderful local pioneer cemetery. They put on tours of the Women in Lone Fir, symbolism and architecture of tombstones, and headstone cleaning workshops.
And this year, the Friends hosted a five Saturday series of tours called Twilight Tombstones. On each Saturday in October and one in November, guides lead four groups of twenty through the cemetery, telling stories of the folks buried there.
It was sold out in minutes!
This year, Auntie Bridgett volunteered with me. She greeted folks at the gate and steered them in the right direction.
My job was “tour support”, which means I made sure our group, lead by Peregrine and Paul, stayed together. I also answered extra questions from the folks in the group. It was a delightful, educational, exhausting evening.
The fun began even before the tours started! A friendly group of Zombie Carolers came by after serenading the Dead, and shared their songbook with us. Their songs are not for the squeamish, featuring such delightfully gruesome tunes as “Rudolph the Undead Reindeer” and “Good King Wenceslas Tastes Great.”
Years ago, during one of University Park’s magazine drive fundraisers, we subscribed to a magazine called Mental Floss. We loved the smart, funny articles and illustrations, and we kept receiving it until it went out of print in 2017.
Here’s a little history of the magazine, as found via a Google search. Mental Floss was launched as a print magazine in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2001, by then-Duke University students William Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur. The pair wanted a magazine that was fun, interesting in the way that their favorite professors’ lectures were.
The magazine grew rapidly, becoming enormously popular. Pearson and Hattikudur sold it to other folks in 2012, but have continued their success-via-fun/smart with a podcast called Part Time Genius. Besides the online e-zine, there are also games, t-shirts, and books available.
This past Christmas, Auntie Bridgett gave me a “Fact a Day” Trivia calendar, and I have been enjoying it so much. Sometimes, days will go by when I forget to look at it, and then I get to pull a bunch all at once and have several good chuckles.
Today’s pull included an explanation of how the Unabomber got his name (because he targeted UNiversities and Airlines) and that H.A. Rey and his wife Margaret, authors of the “Curious George” children’s books, escaped occupied Paris in 1940 on bicycles, taking their precious first manuscript with them.
It is monster movie season, as usual. But with it also being a rather tense Election season here in the States, none of our household was feeling the need of adding more terror to the mix. So we have focused on animation, both drawn and stop-motion, for our Halloween entertainment.
I avoided “Hotel Transylvania” for years because it just looked too silly. But it is really fun. Dracula, a widower with a just-come-of-age daughter, has created a “safe space” for monsters, where they can vacation away from villagers with torches and pitchforks. There is also a nice culture clash storyline with a human fellow who wanders in. No gore, no stress, lots of fun animation and puns galore.
“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” has been Auntie Bridgett’s favorite her whole life. It is sweet, with Linus faithfully waiting in the pumpkin patch for his unorthodox hero to arrive. Every year, I get irritated at Lucy’s casual cruelty to Linus and Charlie Brown, only to see her redeem herself when she fetches her broken hearted little brother from the Pumpkin Patch and tucks him into bed.
Our choices are not all so lighthearted, though. Frankenweenie features a boy who uses his newly-acquired scientific knowledge to bring his dog back from the dead. This year, because we lost our dear Mousie, it felt sad and a little too close to home.
Paranorman, a stop motion animation created by Laika Studios here in Portland, is also a favorite. A little boy who sees (and is very polite to) ghosts is tasked with keeping the local witch spirit in her place. The crisis brings out the best in some and the worst in others, and the characters are delightfully quirky.
For me, the darkest of all the movies we watch is Coraline, also created by Laika Studios. The girl who wishes for a perfect world with attentive parents and fun activities gets what she asks for, and it takes help from a bossy cat and odd neighbor boy to get her out of it. Neil Gaiman wrote the original story, and it is wonderful, deep, and scary.
This is what we have been entertaining ourselves with these getting-darker evenings, as it gets too chilly for after dinner walks.
Have a wonderful weekend, stay warm, and we’ll chat later.
Our growing season is over here in the suddenly chilly Northwest. I put the garden to bed last week, and now I have written my last Garden Journal entry.
I made this year’s Journal out of an up-cycled movie list book, re-working the covers with collage. It seems I made fewer entries this year than last… am I running out of things to say about the garden?
I played with a lot of different media this year, anyway.
I watercolored the layout, both as I planned it to be…
and as it turned out.
I used collage when I wanted to show beauty but had no garden…
… and watercolor when I knew exactly what I wanted to show, in this case, how the first zucchini ended up.
I challenged myself to show the complex form of tomato plants.
And, sometimes, I just played with color.
I’ll be out of town for a big chunk of the next gardening season, and I’ll make another Journal when I get back. We’ll see what happens then.
We are in the ramp-up to what Grandpa Nelson calls “decoration season”. It starts with Halloween and flows past Thanksgiving, right into Christmas. Every time we go out for a walk to the market or post office, we take time to “check out the spooks”.
And we are never disappointed! This gigantic Japanese maple sprouts eyes and fangs, looking like Sweetums the muppet.
This skiing skeleton is perched on a vegetable arbor, and does not look very confident.
This “normal sized” demon-dude has a motion detector, and shoots up to ten feet tall when you walk by! It kind of takes your breath away.
At the same house, the smaller creatures are situated so they look even better in harmony. This long shot past the ghoul to the demon is really good decoration planning.
Dear Liza 