Thank you Misc

Random bits from the past weeks/weekends:

Last weekend I volunteered for this and helped paint someone's house. I now know what I am up against this summer.

In the local neighborhood association newspasper, Concordia News, I saw a blurb about changing some of the streets which are still gravel potted ancient things into greenspaces. Sounds like a good idea and helps Portland live up to its best cities in the US to walk city standards.

In the quarterly publication from the Historical Society, Oregon Historical Quarterly, I read a review of a book called Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 by William G. Robbins. Its an environmental history book that "begins at the state level and follows the ripples of political dissent outward into the national mainstream." Brings to mind the state's environmental cadence of give and take.....big fish runs; now endangered mostly due to the dams. Field burning. All beaches are public access. The bottle bill. The Mt. Hood Freeway that never was. Cutting down the forests "under the guise of encouraging more vigorous second-growth forests". The Willamette River as a Superfund site. The Urban Growth Boundary legislation. Governor Tom McCall's famous quote "come visit us again and again.....But for heaven's sake don't come here to live." Sounds like an interesting book covering the give and take of leaving things as they are for nature to take care and man's needs to work the land for his use.

The fittest I ever was did not involve a gym. It involved running on a track for 20 minutes each (or maybe it was every other) day. It involved swinging an axe (if you have trees and they fall down in your yard.....it takes a long time, a lot of digging, and axe swinging to get the stumps out of the ground by hand). It involved a manual labour job requiring shovelfuls of green bean trimmed ends that didn't make it on the not food conveyors onto the not food conveyors.

Today I took a nap.........

"Only an Engineer would take a photo of the bridge support", Sydney Harbour Bridge, New South Wales, September 2005, photo by LHD, title by CMD