Friday, after spending the day playing and recording drum tracks for my own version of one of Breanna’s songs from her previous band, I walked to the store to get ingredients for dinner.  Walking back up my street, arms full of groceries, I found that the police had all of the streets blocked off, and there were people standing on the sidewalk watching, all the way up the street.  I asked someone what was going on, and she said that it was drug-related, and that they were trying to get into the house of a person who was both selling and using drugs.  I continued walking on MyStreet, and a cop stopped me and told me that I wouldn’t be able to get through on MyStreet for a while.  I asked which way he’d recommend I go to get home, and he said I could walk up NextStreet and be out of harm’s way.  I thanked him and took the opportunity to quickly survey MyStreet in the process.  There were officers with rifles, and a SWAT team with an armored vehicle of some sort parked a block from my building, on the other side of the street.  I walked home quickly and grabbed my camera.

The neighbor lady across the street saw me and called laughingly to her husband, “Hey, he’s taking photographs!”  Someone walked over and asked the plainclothes policeman what was up, and according to NeighborSusan, “Apparently it was actually shooting-related. They located, or at least thought they’d located, a suspect for a shooting that occurred elsewhere at some previous time.”  The cop was telling people to stay inside for about half an hour.  I did, and listened with my window open.  I heard no gun shots, and the multitude of cars drove away half an hour later, so I’m assuming that means the incident ended well enough.

I guess you could say the jury’s still out on what really happened, (I’m gonna go with the shooting scenario rather than the drug scenario; drug busts don’t usually involve that many big guns and vehicles, unless it was a huge operation) but that was certainly not something you see every day in this neighborhood.

This Christmas season has been stressful, disappointing, exhausting, and marked by a conspicuous lack of financial means, all of which has left me feeling less than inspired to write much lately.  I’m still around, just completely broke (again. . .for the fifth consecutive month!), incredibly busy and stressed out.  Trying like crazy to feel like my usual happy-go-lucky self, with varying degrees of success.

The weather here in Portland is warming, and it’s been raining steadily for the last couple of days, so much of the snow is melting and disappearing.  We now have flood warnings in effect for parts of town and the state.  I took the chains off my car, one of which had broken and was hanging on by a mere thread inside the wheel.  I didn’t even realize it was still attached (I thought it fell off on the freeway the other day, and I haven’t driven since then) until I went out today to take off the remaining right one and saw the left one barely poking out from underneath the car.   I ruined my yellow rain jacket in the process, by getting grease all over both arms.  Niiiiice.   Well, it’s true that I wanted a new rain jacket anyway.

I found out yesterday that my grandma died on Christmas Day, at the age of 96.  For the record, I should mention that my brother and I didn’t know her very well.  I feel more disconnected and strange about it than anything else.  My family isn’t particularly close, on either side, either geographically or emotionally, and that’s what makes me saddest of all.  We hadn’t seen her for ten years, and it had been at least that long before that.  I’d been intending to reach out to her again lately, actually, and a couple of months ago, I got her address from my dad so that I could write to her and send some pictures.  He told me that I’d better do it soon, because she was ‘starting to lose it’, and that she’d been taking a turn for the worse these last few months.  I really regret that I didn’t write like I intended to, and that the time got away from me.  I wish that I’d had the chance to reconnect with her in some way.

I thought she’d be particularly happy to know that I play the cello now, because my grandpa (who died when I was about nine, but who I hadn’t seen since I was six) used to play the cello also.  I didn’t even know that until one day when I was about twenty-six or something, and I happened to mention to my dad, “I think it would be really great to learn how to play the cello.”

He gave me a strange, thunderstruck look and said, “I wish you would have said something earlier.”  He told me about my grandpa, and how he had an orchestra-quality instrument that was at my grandma’s house, but that she had recently GIVEN AWAY.  My dad continued.  “In fact, he put himself through college on a cello scholarship, I believe, and he played semi-professionally back in the 1920′s and 30′s.  After he died, his cello was in her attic, untouched and unused, for decades.  She kept it this whole time, hoping that maybe one of you guys would show some interest in it, but you never said anything, so she gave it to a student at her church.  She would have gladly given you his cello for nothing.”   My jaw literally dropped.

I didn’t get a cello and start playing until about four and a half years ago, when I saw an ad for one online, and offered to trade one of my electric guitars for it.  The person accepted, and I’ve been a happy cellist ever since.  Mine turned out to be an excellent quality instrument, an Ernst Heinrich Roth from the early 1960′s.  It needed quite a few repairs and modifications, since it had had a difficult life in a public school district.  I got done the repairs done as I was able to, and now it’s a perfectly good semi-professional level instrument.   I loveitloveitloveitloveitloveit.  It has a full, warm sound that newer instruments just can’t replicate.

And yes, sometimes when I’m playing, I wonder what they would think.  My grandpa, who knew the instrument so well, and my grandma, who kept it faithfully in the hopes that one of her children or grandchildren would play one day, to keep a connection with them and give them a gift they would very likely treasure for their entire lives.

Here are some pictures for you, grandma.  Wish you could have seen them, and also heard what was happening in my life when they were being taken.

After yesterday’s post, I walked out and about in my neighborhood and took a few pictures.  This neighborhood is beautiful anyway, but with this much snow it’s even more beautiful.  And the Christmas lights and everything. . .it’s just an amazing treat.

Here are the ones from last night. . .

. . .before I went home to my sort of warm apartment.   I woke up this morning to go to work, and found that it had snowed a couple more inches overnight.  I had to take a picture of my forlorn little car.

Luckily, my friend was warming up his truck to take his girlfriend to work, and they offered to drive me also, since her work is right near mine.  That really made my morning.  There were only a handful of us who actually made it in to work today, and it was so cold inside the building that most of us bailed out after a few hours.  I left at noon, and I’d worn my jacket and scarf the entire time, and even my hood occasionally.  Three people left around ten-thirty, but I stayed until my fingers couldn’t really type anymore.  There were a couple of diehards who stayed on after I left, but they didn’t think they’d be there for long.

I certainly wasn’t the only one who was home from work today, either.  The streets were filled with families and couples who were out enjoying the snow.  And they were friendly, too!  I couldn’t believe it.  Everybody greeted me, or waved, or smiled, or even flirted, in a way that (I’m here to tell you) they rarely do.  I kept thinking, ‘Where was all this friendliness in all those times when I was feeling lonely and sad, and felt like something must be wrong with me because no one would so much as glance at me when I was walking on the street?’  But that’s neither here nor there.  It was nice, and I appreciated it.  It was so nice, in fact, that I kinda wanted to stay out longer, and keep crossing paths with people, on purpose.

I stopped in at Aztec Willie’s for a yummy burrito, which gave me enough energy to shovel my sidewalk, which I found still sucks after all these years.  You’d think that with technology being the way it is, there’d be some sort of process that could make the act of shoveling obsolete.  C’mon, science, can we get on that, please?  The polar bears need all the ice they can get.  Isn’t there some way to get this up (or down) to them?  I mean, JEEZ.

So then it was time to deal with my car.  I got all the snow off it, but the windows and sides are encased in ice that’s about a quarter of an inch thick.  Clearly I’m going nowhere today, unless it’s by foot.

This couple had the right idea; forego the driving and the walking, and go straight on to skiing.

I also have a smallish secret that I’d like to let you in on.  Every time I see her walking on the other side of the street, to the grocery store or something, I want to say, ‘want to go to breakfast?’ or ‘your eyes are beautiful; what color are they?’ or ‘ditch the zero and get with the hero’. . .you know, something really romantic like that to completely sweep her off her feet.

Anyway, don’t tell her I said all that.  She and her guy seem really genuine and nice, and I don’t want to mess that up for them.  Really I don’t.

So to change the subject back to the actual one we’re SUPPOSED to be talking about, I’ll leave you with this nice picture of my snowy, wonderful neighborhood.

This weekend we’ve had quite the snowstorm, which is extremely unusual for Portland.  I’ve lived here for almost thirteen years, and I haven’t seen snow like this before.

Yesterday I was supposed to go to a Christmas party in an eastern suburb of Portland, so I got my car all scraped off and warmed up, and it drove fine (six inches is not a lot of snow), but the air was so cold, and there was so much blowing snow that the windows kept freezing over, and I kept having to stop and scrape them off every few blocks.  That got old really quickly, so I called my friends and said, “I’m gonna have to veto this trip.”  They actually persevered and drove out, but ended up staying overnight (which RockShowGirl and I weren’t prepared to do; luckily we stayed home), and I just got a call from them saying that their car was stuck and that they were waiting for a bus.  Luckily, they just now caught one.

Earlier this afternoon, I wanted to take a walk and get some pictures of my neighborhood, on my way to ApparentlySafestGrocery, since this much snow is so uncommon.   The pictures I took didn’t end up being very compelling, but here’s what the neighborhood looks like.

Some good Samaritan took the liberty of pulling lots of the wipers off of the windshields of cars, so that they won’t get frozen when the freezing rain starts.  Wait a minute. . .what am I saying?  It’s already started.

Most people are heeding the advice of the weather forecasts and not driving.  In fact, I saw lots of people who appeared to be out walking in the snow just for fun.  One family had a young son who decided to ski, and I thought that would make a nice picture, so I grabbed my camera, and as soon as I did, the kid fell face first into the snow.  I’m not gonna lie; it was hilarious.

So I ran my errand, bought my ingredients, and came back to make dinner, which consisted of mushrooms, red peppers, onions and garlic cooked in red wine, butter, salt and pepper.  The vegetables were then served over a bed of linguine.  (I’ve always wanted to say ‘bed of linguine’, can’t you tell?)  It may very well have been the best dinner ever.  You should totally try to make it yourself; it’s easy, delicious, sexy, and totally improvised.  You just start adding ingredients and seasonings to your own taste, and it’s perfectly acceptable to taste it while you’re cooking to see how it’s coming along.

So now I’m in for the night, but I’ll leave you with a short video to show you what it was like today outside my apartment.   The snow was falling, and the wind was blowing, and it was all very pretty.

The Plan for this evening is to get all bundled up and walk out to Broadway, to take some pictures of the snow and the Christmas lights.  Wish me luck!

OneYearAgo

My Halloween was fun, but not exactly in the way I expected it would be.  My Plan was that I would dress up as a grown-up Harry Potter, with a lightning-shaped forehead scar and a wand, but just dress the way I normally do, with no wig or anything.  I thought that would’ve been very clever and hilarious, but I wasn’t able to find a makeup kit for the scar here locally, so that was the end of that.

At work, there were a whole bunch of people who dressed up, some of whom were very clever.  One of my friends dressed up as the dead girl from the movie The Ring.  I wanted to take a little video of her, and she asked if I wanted her to walk in a creepy way, and I said, “No way, it’s much creepier if you just walk normally.”