Ghost Town

Our friend Di's visit to Portland. #DayofDi

Second tree lighting in two days. #pearlportland

#AustintheBeagle was determined to get into the living room at our framily's [portmanteau: friends+family] house on Thanksgiving.

Arrival of the 2015 holiday tree in Portland (12 November 2015) and Tree Lighting Ceremony (27 November 2015).

Today at the tree lighting ceremony, my wife and I joined thousands of other Portlanders in singing carols wishing each other, among other festive tidings, a "prosperous bathroom." (from the "Holiday Songbook" passed out at the event)

Since I am using the "Star Wars" skinned Google, Maps shows our car as an X-Wing Fighter. I wish. We'd be in Eugene by now instead of stuck on I-5. (Except that I'd have to ride in the R2 seat in the back since my wife is piloting.) Does anyone remember the old Ed Haynes song "I don't wanna die on I-5"? I might end up doing just that since it looks like that's exactly where we're going to be for the next century.

When I was growing up, we always had two different kinds of dressing for Thanksgiving: a drier cornbread dressing and a wetter dressing in which the vegetables were boiled in chicken broth. There's a lot more, of course, to both recipes. Each was delicious in its own way; the recipes came down from my two grandmothers. I got the directions from my mom (mom's notes couldn't properly be called "recipes"). I've made both in the past, but this year we decided to only take one dressing on the road. So I combined what I liked best about each and added a few touches of my own. I fear that my grandmothers might be spinning in their graves over this particular creation. So, this Thanksgiving, I give you the Two-Grandma Graveroller Combo Dressing.

Venting I see this all of the time on Broadway by the Chipotlebola, a couple of blocks from my building. This guy is parked behind the row of parked cars that separates the bike lane from traffic. He apparently thinks it's a lane of traffic, so there he sits behind the empty cars, waiting for them to move. He has Nevada plates, so maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. But probably 90% of the people I see in this predicament have Washington plates, and they should know better. He is also blocking a very heavily used pedestrian crosswalk for no reason.

My bike, ready for the holidays. Here's a question for people who use Strava. Do you log every ride or just long/conditioning rides? I ask because I've logged basic getting-from-here-to-there rides sometimes and haven't sometimes, but my town has made noises in the past about using the Strava heat map to make cycling infrastructure decisions and I'd like my often-traveled routes to be considered in such decisions. OTOH, I don't want to spam people every time I ride ten blocks to the grocer. (But the only people on my Strava are, like, my brother and sister-in-law and a couple of IRL friends, so maybe it doesn't matter much.) Sometimes, I mark these rides private, but I don't know if those end up in the heat map. Honestly, I haven't been using Strava at all recently because of decision paralysis on this issue (I tend to be an all-or-nothing person on this sort of thing). But I want to try it out again with the Google Fit update. (In the past the sync ...

Ever since since I signed up during the invite-only Beta phase, my tag line on G+ has been "I hear your name in certain Circles." Guess I have to think of something else now that Circles has been de-emphasized.

via Dingo Dizmal