The Hawthorne and Belmont Neighborhood

Here are photos that I've taken in my new neighborhood. People saw me wandering around with a camera and taking pictures, and they gave me odd looks. That's one way to make an impression on new neighbors.

Bamboo!

The architecture around here is impressive: here's a Victorian house with a tower, and across the street is a stucco apartment building from the 1920s.

Strangely, this looks like a governor's mansion. It's probably a commune.

I thought the plants here were at least as interesting as the house. Later I noticed that the balcony is, um, under construction.

I've seen so many beautiful flowering trees lately. Achoo.

A Japanese archway stands between a house and an apartment building. Japanese garden architecture, particularly gates and fences, are popular in Portland, Oregon.

This is a Chinese temple (presumably Zen) with gold letters on the wall proclaiming it the Buddhist Preaching Association, North America (or something like that).

Quanyin statue in the garden

The neighborhood is full of cats. This particular cat purred and rolled around on the sidewalk and let me pet her.

This is one of many cement sculpture/benches, and it has an acquatic theme. It's in the front yard of a big old house, which might be divided into apartments or might be a communal living situation.

A purple house trimmed with yellow, and with Tibetan prayer flags.

Landscaping is in. Flowers spill out over the sidewalk, like a water fountain made of plants.

This tree looks like a claw reaching up for the sky.

These stones look like Buddhist offerings to me, like on Vulture Peak in India.

A Japanese gate.

A friendly cat and bamboo.

I hope someone fixes up this big old house and moves in.

The Portland Dharma Center, or Zen Center.

Flowers like tiny bells.

This is a strange, twisty plant. (That's not the botanical jargon.)

Daphnes, with a powerful aroma. They're reminiscent of lilacs. I wonder if there's a flower named after Scooby Doo.

An outdoor mural....or impressive graffiti.

The popular Avalon Theater, a combination movie theater and pinball machine arcade. It's quite an experience.

Guesthouse with sculptures in the front lawn.

I'm not sure it's clear in the photo, but this sculpture on the gate includes a bird playing an old saxophone. It's a real saxophone.

This bright and sunny house is at an intersection that has vestiges of paint on the pavement, I think forming a sun shape that used to fill the intersection.

Murals with a Hispanic theme.

More metal fence art, and beyond that is a brightly painted Mexican restaurant and an equally bright bus.

Oozing flowers

Another friendly cat.

This yard art is amazing.

African masks made of found items, such as forks.

Goddess shadowbox. It's not really visible in this photo, but the shadowbox includes a tiny Willendorf Goddess.

Another random pretty house.

Maybe this house was painted to match the flowering trees.

Umbrella-like flowering tree

Salmon Street Writer's Group

I've never seen this kind of plant before, but I've seen several in this neighborhood.

Glorious orange

Tame Squirrels

While I was taking a walk in my new neighborhood, I stopped in front of a tree that seemed to be full of bird feeders. A couple of squirrels were on the tree, and one of them jumped down and scurried toward me. She stood about six inches away from me, looking up as if she expected me to feed her. I took her picture instead.

While I was out taking pictures of the squirrels, two people came out and I learned that they raised the squirrels. Someone found four baby squirrels at a construction site and brought them to the woman I met, and she bottle fed them. Now they eat all kinds of nuts, right out of your hand. I fed the tamest squirrel a couple of peanuts, and she scurried down the tree trunk and touched my hand with one paw while taking the shelled peanuts.

This squirrel's name is Lucinda (if I recall correctly), and she's had babies. Another squirrel was called Yoda.

A Grand Day Out in Seaside, Oregon

It seems a few members of the Vegetarian & Vegan Meet-Up Group were scared off by the weather: it was supposed to rain in Seaside, where we were going to collect litter on the beach. It’s an annual volunteer event organized by an organization called SOLV, which stands for Stop Oregon Litter and Vandalism. I figured rain wouldn’t be a big deal; after all, it’s Oregon, so it rains a lot and it’s usually a gentle, calm rain, not the torrential grumbly thunderstorms of Kansas.

It took over an hour to get to Seaside, Oregon, which turned out to be a cute touristy seaside town with rows of old-fashioned flat-fronted wood shops and restaurants. We parked in a lot for free, a couple blocks from the Lewis and Clark statue at a turnaround on Broadway. The statue ends the road, because beyond that is the beach and the Pacific Ocean. By the time we arrived, the rain had gotten to be surprisingly heavy by Oregon standards. We walked in the rain to the beach, and despite the rain and chill I grinned and nearly hopped at sight of the white foamy waves under the grey sky, and the seagulls flying and walking and squawking.

Seagulls

We all met up on the beach and took big white and green plastic bags for collecting litter. Many other people, of more or less all ages, were also slowly walking on the beach in the rain, even though it didn’t look like an especially littered beach.

Many seagulls

We trudged along with our bags and I picked up many tiny bits of bright blue or turquoise plastic and bits of thread or string. I picked up something dark brown and curvaceous that I thought was a broken piece of a bottle, but I later realized that it was a piece of weird seaweed. I often stopped to take a picture or gawk at something extraordinary.

Guess what: even more seagulls.

In addition to the foamy white waves shushing and shushing in the ocean, and the seagulls swooping and gliding and walking along on the beach, I came across countless broken shells and broken sand dollars. I put some of these pieces in my water-resistant coat pocket and found a small white shell that was complete, but I never came across a whole sand dollar. But the most amazing sight, and the most unexpected, was the seaweed.

A walrus-sized pile of seaweed. Weird.

I had no idea that seaweed comes in many sizes and colors. It can be blackish green and dark green and medium green and grayish green and even pink. It can be as thin as the reel out of a cassette tape, or as thick as a boa constrictor. I kept seeing seaweed that was at least four inches in diameter, hollow in the center, and ending in a bulb with many talons sticking out of the top. The first time I saw one of these bulbs, I thought it was a dead octopus. The seaweed looks slick and slimy, of course. All along the beach were swirling arrangements of seaweed in different shapes and sizes. We encountered quite a few huge mounds of jumbo-size seaweed, like beached Cthulhu monsters, or gigantic plates of noodles. James actually arranged one pile of seaweed so that it had a hair of eyes and a mouth: spontaneous outdoor art.

Cthulhu comes ashore, creeping ever closer.

Chili peppers?

Imagine this wrapped around your sushi.

Yummy noodles

Bad hair day

I collected the remnants of fireworks and a few other plastic things besides the tiny bits of blue and turquoise, and some more string and thread, and several cigarette butts, but that was it. I didn’t fill much of the bag. By the time we had been out for, say, forty minutes, it was very windy and the rain was torrential. Someone later described it as like a tsunami. As we headed back, we were walking directly into the wind, and it was a vicious struggle. We were terribly cold, soaked to the skin, and eager to get indoors to a heated and dry place. We turned in our bags, which were certainly not very full, and wandered around the charming downtown of Seaside. We went into a mall with a lively carrousel in the center; the animals included ostriches, light blue sea monsters, and cats with fishes in their mouths, in addition to more traditional carrousel critters. In a toy shop a five-foot-tall sock monkey was attached to the window, as if it wanted to get out.

We went to a beautiful sushi restaurant, decorated with many paper lanterns and silk curtains, and I ate sushi for the first time. I’ve been to a dozen different countries, and here in Oregon I went to a beach on the Pacific Ocean and a sushi restaurant, both for the first time in my life. I went to the bathroom to wash my sandy hands and rearranged my bedraggled hair, taking it down and putting it piled up on top of my head, before I even looked at the menu. After I returned to the table and ordered, I placed napkins on my chair seat and they became utterly soaked, of course. I noticed what looked like a little tea house behind us, with silk curtains in the doorway and straw mats for guests to sit on, around a table over a sunken space.

Lewis and Clark statue (with a shaggy dog at their feet)

We had a pot of green tea with earthenware cups, and each of us held the cups with both hands and savored the heat from the tea, in addition to the taste as it warmed our mouths and throats. The server brought out sushi arranged on leaf-shaped plates and square plates. I’m more familiar with Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese food (not to mention Nepalese and Tibetan) than with Japanese, and I had never tasted wasabi paste before. You’re supposed to use little rectangular dishes to mix soy sauce with green wasabi paste, which is made of horse radish. Then you pick up a sushi wrap with your chop sticks and dip it in the sauce. I discovered that the less wasabi, the tastier. The little rolls of sushi were dainty little works of art with vegetables, nuts, and plums in the center. James had ordered one of every vegetarian sushi dish, and he encouraged us all to help ourselves, and oh we did. I let others take some of the tempera sushi that I had ordered (along with a delicious plate of fried tofu in sauce). Since we were sharing all these dishes, someone commented that it was a communal meal.

After we stood up from the table and were no longer drinking hot tea, I found myself shivering convulsively. The meal was wonderful, but I would have liked the heat turned up more. I was still soaking wet, and remained so until after I got home and took off my wet, sandy clothes, took a steaming hot shower, and was wearing a dry change of clothes. Aside from the cold, wet, and wind, I had a great time. Next year I’ll be sure to have an extra change of clothes in my car and bring my Wellington boots and wear a trench coat instead of a short rain-resistant jacket. I now have raincoats for all occasions.

Another Thing About My New Neighborhood

I think that people who have long hair and cats should get a discount on apartments with hardwood floors. A big discount. This isn't St. Louis, where apartments with hardwood floors are common. Here you have to pay significantly more for hardwood floors, and it seems like the pretty buildings dating to the 1920s are more costly than these drab 1970s buildings.

But at least my apartment building is surrounded by pretty, brightly painted Victorian houses. And cats. They're all over. I've seen at least five in the parking lot already. It's the neighborhood in general--while I walked to Safeway this afternoon, I stopped every so often to pet cats, and one of them was a Himalayan with bright blue eyes. And yesterday while I was unloading my car and leaving stuff sitting outside my front door, the next door neighbor had their door open with the screen door closed, and a big black cat with yellow eyes sat right in the doorway and watched me in fascination. Soul mate. The call of the Cat Goddess. If people reacted to me the way cats do, I'd already have a job at Powell's Books.

My New Neighborhood

I'm right in the center of the Hawthorne-Belmont area, so I'm only about three blocks north of Hawthorne, which is full of independent (and in many cases eccentric) stores and restaurants. There are also plenty of bus stops along Hawthorne, so I don't have excuses for continuing to indulge in my bus phobia (it seems to be a combination of fear of getting lost and fear of getting yelled at by a bus driver--I had some bad experiences in St. Louis). Starting probably in April, there's a farmer's market just about a block from my apartment.

I'm planning on applying for volunteer work at a library that I haven't yet visited--it's the Belmont branch, on Belmont and 39th (I'm on Salmon and 21st), so it's within walking distance.

Today I took a walk to Safeway in order to get a jug of honey (I know it's extravagant, but it's for health reasons--my chain-smoking mother messed up my respiratory system during the first almost two decades of my life, so my throat gets clogged up easily). I saw a grey tomcat in the parking lot (I've seen at least five cats in the parking lot of my new apartment complex) and walked down the street past brightly-painted big Victorian houses, one of which has Tibetan prayer flags strung across the front porch and has a front yard almost entirely surrounded by dense bamboo. I came to a corner, turned, petted a big blue-eyed Himalayan cat, then a few seconds later petted a grey and brown tabby with white boots, and soon came to Hawthorne Blvd. Straight across the street was the Grand Central Baking Company (which is kind of like the St. Louis Bread Company), and about a block up the street was a fabric store called Cool Cottons (where I'm thinking I should drop off my resume). On the other side of the street, as I kept walking, there's a fruit and vegetable market in a tent called Uncle Paul's or something like that, with big neon hand-made signs with messages like "Kiwi 25c! Wow!" I was tempted to stop there instead of Safeway, but I decided I'll do that next time. Safeway (a regular grocery store) is on Hawthorne and 27th, a short walking distance.

Walking back from Safeway, I walked along the side of the street that Uncle Paul's Market is on, so I got a closer look, and I walked past the intersection where I had first gotten onto Hawthorne. On almost the corner of Hawthorne and 20th there's a little 1940's era movie theater (where I went with my dad to see the latest Indiana Jones flick) where I discovered they're showing Coraline at 3:30 on Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow I'm going with the Vegetarian Meet-Up Group to the Coast for volunteer work cleaning the beach, but I'm thinking I'll be going to the movie on Sunday. I read the novel Coraline and am a really serious Neil Gaiman fan--Neverwhere is probably my favorite fantasy novel and I've read it 7 times.

On a previous visit to the new apartment, before I moved in, I noticed a purple and green Victorian house with the sign Salmon Street Writer's Group out front. They have writing workshops and they do cost money; who knows, maybe someday I'll teach workshops there. Further past the writer's workshop is a deadend with a red brick school facing it, and next to the school is a plain park which, at the time, was full of seagulls. I have so got to take my camera there on a rainy day--it seems like I see more seagulls on wet days.