The Ink-Pot and the Palette

It's spring. The neighborhood is full of daphne-scented breezes. Tulip spears are poking up everywhere. I picked up my cashmere pullover at the drycleaner yesterday and didn't even bother to un-paper it--it's going into storage for the next eight months. I slept with the bedroom window wide open last night.

( I hate spring. )

Back in 1912, when my house was built, Portland was booming, and housing for railroad workers was going up fast and cheap. They dug a hole, set some sturdy timber posts in concrete piers, laid beams across them, and put up walls and a roof.

There was a woodstove. No central heat, no insulation, no double-glazed windows; just a box of wood and glass, hovering about three feet above a depression in the soil, with a thin wooden skirt between that crawlspace and the east wind.

Fast forward a century, and a tiny house in an ungentrified working-class neighborhood is, not surprisingly, hardly improved at all. There are electric space heaters now (of the recalled-for-fire-hazard sort), and some cheap landlord of the past insulated the roof to 70s standards, but the house is still bloody cold in the winter.

Well, that's all about to change. The Clean Energy Works contractors spent the morning here assessing and measuring, and whee! It looks like I'm getting not only big fluffy insulation on all six sides of the cube, but what amounts to an actual heating system, too.

Just think! I'll be able to sit in my living room on a January night, rather than having to go to bed just to keep warm.

It's homeowner geekery at its finest, but I'm really pretty excited.

A couple of things happen when it snows in a city that doesn't get much snow: there isn't significant public investment in snow-management, like plows and gravel trucks and big union-wage standby crews with bus-tire chains, so the streets remain snowy; people who learned to drive here don't know how to drive in snow, and people who learned to drive in snow go ballistic over the idiot locals' inability to handle it.

(These same people go out of their way to hide their in-migrant status every other day of the year. Me, I'm a native, but I learned to drive in Hawaii: that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. My absolute policy when two or more snowflakes fall is no-drive, no-complain.)

So when we have a completely unpredicted snowfall in Portland, as we did yesterday, the place becomes a giant clusterfuck of insane traffic, accusations of City and DOT malfeasance (graft, corruption, fuckwittery, you name it), foul tempers, car wrecks, and general madness.

It seems that bicyclists were just about the only people getting home in good time last night. I wasn't one of them, me being on vacation and all, but my sister was, and she's one of many cyclists reporting today that it was kind of pleasant, riding home on deserted streets in the bright new snow.

Before it all melted today, I rode Clyde to the grocery store and the coffee shop, just a few blocks, to find out what it was like. It was frankly kind of scary. I didn't have good control and I would not have wanted to be anywhere near moving cars. I might consider studded tires.

But it hardly seems worth it, because we just don't get that much snow...

When the days are short and nasty, and the evenings long and chilly, just remember:

Put the kettle on. Pour 1 shot of single-malt Scotch whisky into a mug.

Add a generous tablespoon or so of good honey. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and add a bruised slice of fresh ginger root or a couple dashes of powdered ginger.

Fill the rest of the mug with boiling water. Stir, let sit for a minute or two, add something good to read or watch, and sip at your leisure.

It's good for what ails you, if what ails you is a dry scratchy throat, chilly fingers and toes, restless cabin fever, or a great desire to feel cozy.

This was a moment captured around noon today by the Mt. Hood High Resolution Web Cam.

( Pretty. Cold. )