It’s supremely difficult juggling an expensive digital camera, a vintage Kodak Duaflex IV and a hyper-active, squirrel-crazed schipperke. However, occasionally he does stand still and lets me take a shot like this.
Category: Oregon
Autumnal in Oregon
Posting at a rate of about one a month I’m afraid… Autumn in Oregon is a special time though.
Unlucky in photo competitions, lucky in radishes
So Atticus didn’t win a prize on the LA Times contest… I don’t know what he’d have done with a Nikon D300 anyway. But the 170+ “Best” votes are reward enough, t’was a fun journey and thanks, once again, to everyone who voted 😀
Yesterday I went to WordCamp Portland and it was a very useful day out. Normally when I go to a conference it’s to see family and friends doing Sociology presentations, or further back, about the finer points of managing a non-profit organisation, but this one yesterday was all about WordPress and blogging and I’ll probably write a techy what-I-learnt-thing post over at the business end of agaveweb.com when I get a moment. It’s definitely spurred me on to developing a couple of free themes from scratch and releasing them into the wild. Maybe a plugin too. It was cheap, cheerful, informative & well-organised. I am proudly wearing my free T-Shirt today. More conferences should have kegs of beer available from lunch time onwards too. Talking of which, I learnt about a Portland institution called Beer and Blog with weekly Friday meetups in PDX, so I might investigate that too. (actual group photo)
Despite my disparaging remarks about my allotment a few posts back, I was thinning out the radishes today and pulled up what, to all intents and purposes, look like actual, edible, undamaged radishes. And they taste okay too. Most of them ain’t ready (ripe?- do radishes ripen?) yet but this bodes well… Have a photo:
Also last night we barbecued, then finished off the last season of The Wire.
Today: heading out of the city to see if the leaves are looking properly autumnal yet.
Food, TV, Waterfalls
According to Peter Trigg’s Calendar – “My kind of Somerset”… It’s the first of September, meaning we can look at a grainy picture of All Saints’ Church, Aisholt for 30 odd days. Stateside, we’re at the end of a bank holiday weekend (Labor (sic) Day). And summer is officially over.
On Friday we went out to a Greek restaurant down the road, Eleni’s I believe it’s called, which is muy fancy, pricey and delicious and then after that to our nearest pub, the Black Cat or somesuch… Saturday was a race against time to get both cars emissions tested which took far longer than it should have. They both passed the test, but due to inadequate directions we probably contributed more greenhouse gasses into the environment while we driving two cars around lost for an hour than would be ideal. The next step is going to the DMV to get Oregon plates for the cars. You have 60 days after moving to do this, but Drsita needs them to get a parking permit up at the uni and you feel very self-conscious driving around with California plates as they’ve a reputation for uncourteous, reckless driving. And rightly so, I’ve not heard a single car horn beeped in anger since getting here. And, of course, everyone cycles or uses public transport.
On Saturday evening we went with a couple of friends to El Toro Bravo, a tapas bar would you believe. Again, excellent food. And after that we started on The Wire season 4…
Yesterday we set out early for a new set of waterfalls… Photos abound over here. Incidentally, I’ve started flagging any photos with people in on Flickr as “only available to Friends & Family” since I’m a bit wary after Sita’s picture got used in an academic paper and I only found out about it when it turned up on BoingBoing… If you’d like to be added as a Flickr friend let me know, it’s one level above ‘contact’ and you’ll get to see people as well as waterfalls and skies.
After the waterfalls we went to a farmers’ market and there I took my favourite picture of the day:
Sneak preview of our Portland residence…
YouTube lets you annotate your videos now, but apparently the notes only show when you’re on their site. Click here for the annotated video.
We interrupt this prolonged silence
to recommend this course to you in the Fall Autumn… Check out the last professor on the Faculty link too… Sign up now!.
Flickr’s your best bet for a rounded view of our adventures over the last week. Click on the ‘flight of microbrewed beers’ pic below for the Oregon set.