Daily Life

 I have a new co-worker who lives about five miles away and yesterday I rode my bike down to his house so we could carpool into work.  It was a slow ride, but thanks to the Portland bike map I found a route with very limited car traffic, but I did finally give up and walk the bike up the side of Mt. Tabor.  Hopefully I'll be riding my bike a lot this summer, but I'll get a set of "slick" tires which will be a lot nicer to use on pavement.

Emily & I have been kicking around the idea of selling the house and renting for a while as we try to figure out what comes next. I have nothing against the area where we live, it is clean, safe and usually very quiet, but it is a long way away from most of the people we hang out with. The only real point of attachment to the house is all the work I have done in the backyard, namely next year should feature fruit production from June until late September and when the Kiwi plants are established we would have fresh fruit through the winter. In a couple of weeks the PGE tree trimming company will be delivering 10 yards of wood chips that I will spread over all paths around the yard. I'm have assuming that some of the wood chips will be coming from trees like black walnut which is allelopathic thanks to a compound known as juglone and actively inhibits plant growth.

Emily regularly says that the plants in the backyard seem happy when I'm around, I know the dogs love it when I'm in the backyard, but I'm concerned that the people buying the house from us are going to rip out all the plants and replace them with uniformly green, weedless grass which is one of the biggest insult I can think of.

Yesterday there was a rather late in the day low tide and for once I remembed to bring my sandals with me.  The result of this combo was finding 30 sand dollars in the span of 30 mintues, not counting the two live sand dollars I found.  Naturally I did return the two live sand dollars back into the deepest part that I could manage.  

Beyond the cool eco people that are here in Portland and besides the 10 or so people that voted for Bush, emissions of carbon dioxide in Portland and Multnomah County have dropped below levels not seen since 1990, the first time a major U.S. urban area has shown such a decrease. Given the train wreck that is peak oil, we need to get off fossil fuels entirely and the City of Portland appears to get it at least on this issue.

I really need to figure out a way to work closer to where I currently live, live closer where I currently work, work from home more, or just really get into riding my bike 20 miles one way every morning. I am planning on selling my 2003 Toyota Echo and/or giving the 1994 Buick Wagon away to buy something I can run on biodiesel so when peak oil hits in the next few years I can buy locally produced fuel. The other upside of running 100% biodiesel is you are burning carbon that was only recently sequestered in plant matter so you are not adding any net carbon to the atmosphere.

Over this wonderful four day weekend I managed to get a handle on a number of gardening and house projects that I didn't really have a good feel on what was needed. I finally got around to removing the dead arbor vitae but in place of cutting them down I managed to push them over and I'm planning on mounting them upside down in the garden and use them as a bean and pea trellis. In other bean related news I discovered/noticed that the fava beans I planted next to the garage are doing wonderful and I'm thinking about giving away the rose bushes to make room for more fava beans.

I finally figured out why the back porch was leaking and managed to get away from the hornets while scampering from oneside of the roof to the other. The back porch has a fairly strange design and I haven't yet figured how what they were thinking. They built it on a cement pad with untreated wood and the have this funky strip of foam between the hanger mounted where the gutter would usually be and the corrugated sheet metal which makes up the porch roof. The problem is the foam has broken down so whenever enough pine needles build up on the porch roof water overtops the foam and leaks down onto the cement pad. Of course you can't easily get at the foam because of a foot wide strip of sheetmetal that covers the funky strip of foam that is partially under the roof tiles. So you have to lay down on the roof of my house and then pull up the strip of sheet metal to see the foam and this is about the time I discovered the hornet's nest.