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Friday morning, Brooks and I headed over to Astoria, Oregon for a couple days at the coast. It was foggy and a bit low-light, but we had a great time wandering the town. Some highlights:
- Dinner at Clemente’s: we ordered the Summer Halibut, which arrived in a lovely blackberry/Pinot Noir reduction, and the halibut fish and chips. Both were outstanding. Tangentially, we recognized a lot of fixtures from IKEA.
- The view from our room: the Holiday Inn Express winds up being a fabulous place to stay in Astoria, given its location, which is practically right under the Astoria-Megler Bridge. I took many pictures from my comfortable perch on the fourth floor. Additionally, the picturesque Astoria trolley runs along the waterfront and hence passed right below us as well.
- The Columbia River Maritime Museum: boasting very interesting architecture in the style I think of as “coastal,” the museum kept us entertained for hours. Um…they have a whale-bone swift on display. And lots of old boats. And tons of models of varying quality.
- Walking through the warehouses on the water front. Fun!
[Click image for higher-res view]
Oregon, or at least the game, gets a nod on xkcd.
Our tomatoes have finally been ripening. This has occasioned all kinds of anticipation, as well as plans to have my mom come for a visit in a couple weekends and teach me to can (while Dad helps Brooks with the new, meth-head-deterring fence).
But even before the great canning fest of 2009, I had more immediate plans to use two huge heirloom tomatoes that were finally ready for eating. Oh yes. They were to be combined with our own lemon cucumbers, basil, red onions, and oregano into a delicious Greek salad tomorrow night, when my brother passes through Portland on his way to his new Coast Guard assignment in Alaska.
You will note the past tense. Were. For, when I turned the corner on the way home from work today, a meth head was picking one of them. And by the time I got to the driveway, he was eating it. While I applaud his interest in nutrition, this was Our Tomato. Really, the first of the heirlooms. And therefore special.
This occasioned some rolling down of window and yelling on my part, followed by some fleeing on meth head’s part.
Ok, I wish he had fled. But the bastard insolently ambled, and even turned around to shout at me when he overheard me tell my brother on the phone that he had said. “I took your tomato; I’m a moron.”
But wait, there’s more! Meth head later returned, clearly casing the joint out. I tremble for our carrots. But Brooks was in the carport and spied him, and bless him, he gave the meth head a Great Fright. OH god. I wish I had been there to see it. However, others were. I take comfort in that.
I also hope that our taillights aren’t broken out tomorrow.
On to more delightful topics. No one has stolen the flowers from the front yard. Yet.
The St. Johns neighborhood has a lot of meth addicts. This is a reality that is simultaneously fascinating and tiresome; the meth users who wander the area are clearly wrecked by the effects of drug use, and their decision-making processes suffer just like their skin, hair, teeth, and general physical health. As for genuinely violent criminal motivations, most of them seem incapable of much more than wandering the streets, high on meth, looking for cans to steal so they can 1) return them for the cash deposit value and 2) buy more meth.
We don’t have a fence. Not having a fence is, obviously, the same as having a sign out that says “meth heads welcome to rifle through contents of trash and recycling at will.” It’s possible to be standing right there and have a can wraith (our nickname for them) come up and start checking out your trash.
This is troubling, as we do not want to support the meth culture, however accidental and unintentional the aid may be.
Our current solution is simple:
1) Decoy glass recycling bin, visible from street, gets the wine bottles and other non-deposit items. If a meth head approaches the bin, he/she will assume that one of their colleagues has already collected the tribute. Meth heads being rather unmotivated, this is enough to keep them from further investigation.
2) Out of sight around the corner is the “real” recycling bin. Given our affection for microbrews, it’s quite the gold mine.
3) We return the bottles to the store ourselves, as there seems to be no other guaranteed way of keeping them from falling into meth-y hands.
But now I am faced with a dilemma: what to do with the deposit money? It’s not much, but it seems, I don’t know, special. I think we should start saving it up, but for what? More beer? Too easy. Trip to Europe? Would take too long, unless we dramatically increase our beer intake. Meth addiction program? Um, maybe. Is there a good one? I don’t know.
Any ideas?
I’m still pretty gleeful as I write this. Last night, we had a really, really great experience with a local business owner.
I have terrible respiratory allergies, and one of the things that has become more and more troubling for me over time is tobacco smoke. It used to be that it occasionally would provoke a coughing fit, but now it’s an invariable and awful consequence of being exposed to smoke. This means that we have to scout out the road ahead of us when we are walking and cross streets to avoid smokers, leave outdoor seating at restaurants when a smoker lights up, and that my day can at any instant be reduced to a fit of coughing and choking when some freewheeling tobacco lover exercises their stupid right to smoke what seems like everywhere but inside businesses.
Since Oregon’s anti-smoking laws came into effect, I thought it would be easier. In fact, it’s worse, if anything. Smokers now hang out outside of dive bars and smoke on the sidewalk, which is….hello….a place shared with people who may NOT be smokers, and every outdoor dining area I have been in is still crawling with them.
So, we were at Sam’s martini bar in the Pearl, Olive or Twist. The name is awesome, I know. We were sitting outside, and someone a table away lit up. I was immediately apprehensive, but the wind was blowing his direction, so it was ok for a couple minutes. Then it shifted, and I immediately started coughing. GRRRRR. We collected our drinks and headed inside, but Sam spotted us, noted my obvious gasping for breath, and asked if the smoke was bothering us. We said yes, and he told us not to go inside, that he would take care of it.
And bless his heart forever, Sam went over to the smoker and asked him to leave. Never, ever, ever has a business owner done anything to protect their customers from smokers while I was around, and I am incredibly appreciative. It was nice for once to have the smoker have to leave, not me.
I’m highly aware that I have family members and friends whom I love who smoke, but I just don’t believe it’s right that smokers be able to endanger my health and foul up public spaces.
So, it was Thursday morning. Thursday as in the day that’s after the day the neighbor had said he would be out of the meth house across the street. And he was, of course, still there. The criminal factor in the neighborhood was becoming disproportionate, even for St Johns.
At this point, he had been “packing” for some 30-odd hours, aided no doubt by some kind of uppers. And a great help they had been–the truck, while lamentably still across the street, was piled high with what I can only describe as a a precarious and random pile of rubbish. No beds were yet in sight, which made us think that another night of being neighbors with him + criminal consorts was in store.
7:25 am. I leave for work, my mind filled with fantasies of not coming home to more of this view:
But at this rate, expectations were low. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 3 (Thursday)
I had no idea that the St Johns Burgerville would prove such a treasure trove of linguistic chaos. Witness the June marquee, which Brooks most obligingly photographed for me during last night’s evening perambulation.
Either way, we’re all going to have a good time!
We left off the tale of the adventures of our anti-hero as Tuesday night fell. It still felt like Tuesday night when his friends began to arrive Wednesday morning, probably because it was…still night.
4:05 am. Friends of neighbor begin to arrive.
6:00 am. The increasing volume of evictee’s efforts are an effective alarm clock.
6:00:07 am. Standing in living room window, spying on watching the “progress.” So far, they have succeeded in loading the defunct Harley in the FRONT of the trailer. This took no small effort, as merely days before, neighbor had lost a key part to the bike in his lawn. It happened to be essential to starting that lovely piece of…work.
We did not offer to help him find it.
6:45 am. Two bicycles have now joined the Harley in the front of the trailer. I spy a cardboard box on the premises. This is promising. How long can it possibly take to pack a crack pipe and several empty Jack Daniels bottles? And once the 4-year-old’s stuff is packed, dad’s stuff can surely fit into an additional few boxes. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 2 (Wednesday)
In retrospect, I should have lived blogged this. For that huge FAIL, I will always be sorry. We were, however, very caught up in the memorable moments of the past few days.
Background: ex-felon who rents the house across the street is a nuisance. He hits on the women in the neighborhood, married and single, and doesn’t get the standard social cues of “leave me alone, you freak. I’m not interested.” He rides his Harley on the street (and on the sidewalk, because why wouldn’t you?), at incredible speeds and with incredible amounts of noise, any time of the day or night. He neglects his child. He shouts. He accuses. He has a parade of skanky people in and out of his house, day and night. Some leave so high they can hardly walk and also try to engage in conversation with cars.
He is, in other words, a bad-ass MoFo who is pathetic (and even sympathetic) in his own ways.
But he’s, at last, no longer a neighbor. Here’s how it went down; times are somewhat approximate.
Tuesday evening, 8 pm. We note suspiciously normal older couple at house across the street. They haven’t arrived on loud Harleys, they haven’t driven motorcycles down the sidewalk at 50 mph, and they do not appear interested in either buying or selling meth. They are clean, and it’s even possible that they shower regularly.
Tuesday evening, 8:01 pm. I find Brooks downstairs and ask if he’d recognize neighbor’s landlords, since I think they may be across the street.
8:01:14 pm. Brooks is now in the front yard, innocently watering. Watching from the window, I realize I was right–those were the landlords.
8:02 pm. Brooks waves at landlords, who cross street and engage in conversation.
8:09 pm. Animated conversation continues.
8:15 pm. Brooks comes inside, confirms that they are the landlords, and gives me the GLORIOUS news that the problematic tenant is being evicted for non-payment of rent.
8:15:10 pm. Celebration ensues. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 1 (Tuesday)
My newly arthritic ankle tells me that rain is likely today. This is an outcome I didn’t see coming when I broke my foot months ago, and I still hope it’s just coincidence that every day there has been rain in the last month, I have woken up with inexplicable soreness. I find this quite amusing but at the same time annoying.
The one confounding factor to my newly-minted weather predictor is that I had a wee bicycle accident last weekend. More of a falling over than an actual crash, it involved trying to go up a hill and finding the limit of my atrophied muscles. However, I did fall over on the offending foot, so…maybe it won’t rain today. Either way, life is good.
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