My City...

I roam Flickr whenever I'm researching something (it's great for travel), or often when I'm just bored. I particularly like to collect pictures of places I know, or want to know, or things I like. I found this beauty, likely taken from Mt. Tabor, looking west toward downtown.

CSA

Andy and I have decided to join a CSA this year. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and works on the idea that individuals can buy a "share" of a farm for a given period of time. Basically, you pay X amount to the farm at the start of the year and get X amount (one share) of what they produce. Different farms have different numbers of shares, different seasons, different crops, etc. There are plenty of CSA choices in Portland, some offering only vegetables, some for meat, cheeses, flowers, even one for honey. All fresh, all local. I chose a fairly large farm that some of our friends recommended from last year. It's one of the few that I found that grow both veggies and fruit. For 18 weeks this summer/fall we'll pick up pounds of produce every Thursday. We've pledged to eat ALL of it. I'm stoked.

You can read about our CSA here.

For all our other farmers' market needs there's always Saturday's market in the Park Blocks. I'm pretty stoked about that too.

Woe unto us...

Our furnace is dead. Done. Finished.

For eleven days, our house was a little cold. Have you ever seen your breath in your own house? You can, when it's 47 itty bitty degrees.

The cats quickly learned to sleep wherever the space heater was (it travelled around the house based on our current or planned location). Someone who shall remain unnamed happened to have a four day business trip. To California. Someone else learned how many layers of pants, socks, and sweaters a person can really wear at once.

Fortunately, the lovely men of Something or Other Heating came and installed our brand new, super energy efficient, not at all archaic gas furnace. I can now reclaim my favorite reading spot - on top of the dining room register.

New Year, New Blog!

After a brief, unpublicized, and overall bad go at this last fall, here I am again, attempting this blog business. As someone known for being a horrible keeper-up-with-folkser, I'm hoping this will prove successful. I make no claims at deep, thought provoking prose (for that you can try my friend Andrew's spot), just notes and pictures and occasional bizarre ramblings about all the thing we do or don't get into.

Christmas

We spent Christmas here in Portland before popping over to Colorado for New Years.

It was a bit strange not to be with family for the holiday, but we had a great Christmas Eve at the coast and enjoyed Christmas unwrapping presents with the furry children (they were not impressed with the wrapping paper hiding their catnip mice) and later with good friends who shared their lovely dinner with us.