backlog: visiting family in Portland
Mar. 29th, 2004 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubMy parents flew out at the beginning of Oliver's spring break, Saturday two weeks ago, and they drove up the coast highway. This entailed collecting many sea-worn pebbles, and innumerable grains of sand, and I need to borrow a vacuum cleaner. It can wait until after I finish getting dribs of potting soil on the carpet too. Anyway, they reached Josh and Brooke in Portland by the middle of the week, and I went down to visit for a night.
We rendezvoused in Powell's. This goes without saying. It would have gone, if we hadn't said anything, that we'd each have decided that the others would decide to rendezvous in Powell's; Powell's is a Schelling point. (Haul: one on growing carnivorous plants, one on curious trees, one on peppers. Until recently I thought they were all C. annuum, and they're not, so I need a book on peppers.)
J and B have just bought and moved into a loft in a converted warehouse. It's a single roughly rectangular space, five faces concrete and the sixth glass. As such it offers an unconstrained combinatorial explosion of arrangements of furniture and belongings, whose exploration I am told my parents directed, parade-officer on viewing-stand style?, after I left and after all more practical jobs had been done. We took packing paper to recycle, and jammed unwanted stools into my car for a Goodwill run, and we cut up two rolls of old carpet (probably hundreds of scratching-posts worth) that was taking up their storage shed in the basement, such that the pieces would just fill my car to brimming, and took it to the dump. There are worse jobs than to drive the simply enormous bulldozer at enraged-rhinoceros speed to slam a mountain of rubbish a foot sideways. But a rhinoceros has a broader field of action.
Nowhere around could a car sit on the street for longer than a few hours, so we visitors were always stepping out to reposition our cars. Future visitors may wish to be aware that fine legal distinctions apply. My reading of the fine print on the ticket is that after your hours are up in a lettered Portland parking zone, you may not immediately repark anywhere in that zone. May you park in another zone for seventeen seconds and then come back? Unknown. A metered zone, just for completeness here, is different. You cannot feed the meter, and you cannot immediately repark on the same block face, but you can repark around the corner.
We rendezvoused in Powell's. This goes without saying. It would have gone, if we hadn't said anything, that we'd each have decided that the others would decide to rendezvous in Powell's; Powell's is a Schelling point. (Haul: one on growing carnivorous plants, one on curious trees, one on peppers. Until recently I thought they were all C. annuum, and they're not, so I need a book on peppers.)
J and B have just bought and moved into a loft in a converted warehouse. It's a single roughly rectangular space, five faces concrete and the sixth glass. As such it offers an unconstrained combinatorial explosion of arrangements of furniture and belongings, whose exploration I am told my parents directed, parade-officer on viewing-stand style?, after I left and after all more practical jobs had been done. We took packing paper to recycle, and jammed unwanted stools into my car for a Goodwill run, and we cut up two rolls of old carpet (probably hundreds of scratching-posts worth) that was taking up their storage shed in the basement, such that the pieces would just fill my car to brimming, and took it to the dump. There are worse jobs than to drive the simply enormous bulldozer at enraged-rhinoceros speed to slam a mountain of rubbish a foot sideways. But a rhinoceros has a broader field of action.
Nowhere around could a car sit on the street for longer than a few hours, so we visitors were always stepping out to reposition our cars. Future visitors may wish to be aware that fine legal distinctions apply. My reading of the fine print on the ticket is that after your hours are up in a lettered Portland parking zone, you may not immediately repark anywhere in that zone. May you park in another zone for seventeen seconds and then come back? Unknown. A metered zone, just for completeness here, is different. You cannot feed the meter, and you cannot immediately repark on the same block face, but you can repark around the corner.
