Month: April 2006

  • Growing Up in Central Oregon: Introduction

    This is a series I’ve been mulling over for a while now and even at one point promised Simone I would write. I’ve been wanting to write it partly because I think the perspective of growing up in rural Central Oregon is unique, and partly because I think there’s some good stories to tell. So bear with me.

    First off: an introduction. The background. I’m laying the groundwork and setting the stage…

    We moved to Central Oregon in 1976, when I was three years old. At that time Bend was still a tiny timber town and my dad had a job with then-Willamette Industries’ particle board plant. Rather than living in Bend, however, my parents purchased a house on five acres east of town, at the edge of the bump-in-the-road known as Alfalfa.

    Aerial view of Alfalfa OregonAlfalfa is located roughly 15 miles east of Bend and 25 miles southeast of Redmond, north of Highway 20 and near the Deschutes-Crook County border. It’s primarily an agricultural community, with acres of irrigated field crops and livestock dropped right down into the middle of the desert, a verdant oasis of farmland carved out of the sand, sagebrush, bunch grass, scrub juniper and outcroppings of lava rock. Aside from the fields and farms, there’s a small general store and gas station, a grange hall, a power substation and not much else. (The old Alfalfa School, which I attended through fourth grade, closed many years ago.)

    Oddly enough, even though closer geographically to Bend, Alfalfa resides within the Redmond school district. The Redmond school district, in fact, was a marvelous bit of Central Oregon gerrymandering: not only did it encompass Alfalfa, but also Sisters, Terrebonne, and, most puzzling of all Tumalo, which is situated at Bend’s back porch. Consequently, Redmond had the second largest school system in the entire state of Oregon, outside of Portland.

    Or so we were told. As kids faced with a one-way bus ride of 45 minutes to an hour, we were not impressed.

    While much of Alfalfa is a farming community, our five acres only had the minimum of what one could consider a farm: we raised chickens, we had one milk cow on an acre of pasture, and we had vegetable gardens. The majority of the acreage was natural High Desert. As a result I never really identified with the farming mindset one would expect from rural living; looking back, I can see a distinction between what I would dub “Desert Folk” (like ourselves) and Farmers.

    I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. But there’s definitely a different viewpoint from growing up on a farm or ranch—where you are literally living your livelihood—and growing up on one of these desert parcels. I’d venture to say living on the desert lent more of a freedom and immediacy to us as kids than to farming kids; don’t get me wrong, there were chores—chickens to feed, for instance—but none of the same general commitments to growing up on a farm.

    Okay, now that I’ve muddied up that issue…

    The only way to get to our house was to leave the highway and travel about a mile down a gravel road. Actually, calling it a “gravel road” is entirely too generous; it was actually a rocky road scratched out of the dirt, loosely scattered with red cinders. Of course, the mailboxes and the school bus stop were both situated at the highway; both activities (checking the mail and catching the bus) were thus not casual jaunts. If you missed the bus, there were good odds that you missed the bus, and if you couldn’t catch it a few miles down the road (drive like mad!), you were out of luck. More than a few nightmares involved running late for the bus stop and seeing the bus flash by without stopping…

    Rural living also imbued me with an appreciation for space; our nearest neighbor was about a quarter of a mile away, as the crow flied. You know the phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors”? I think a better version of that would be “A few acres make good neighbors.” Even though I can appreciate the convenience of living in town, I’d still be perfectly happy out on a few acres somewhere, with the nearest neighbors up over the hill.

    This should give you a pretty decent idea of where I’m coming from. Of course, I’ve barely scratched the surface, and there are plenty of tales to tell… all true, of course. :)

  • I forgot!

    I’m pretty sure I had something cool I wanted to blog about today, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I’m having a Moment.

    In the meantime, enjoy Shannon’s latest quote of the week: “i wish i knew how to roller blade and could beat up people because i’d totally want to be a roller girl.” T-shirt fodder! Yes, I laughed.

    I’m also working on a big blog entry that should be up in a day or two. It’s a beginning of something bigger that I’ve been lazy to start. Be warned!

  • What happens if Jack Bauer doesn’t like me anymore?

    Since it’s 24 night, I thought I’d share this quote I thought was hilarious (emphasis mine):

    As an actor, you want to be loved or liked, and when the guy you’re playing suddenly turns evil, you feel marginalized. It sounds silly to verbalize, but you start thinking, ‘What happens if Jack Bauer, America’s avenging angel, doesn’t like me anymore?’

    Man, that just about sums up the entire show.

  • Bend, Oregon Monopoly

    The title refers to the board game, not a business monopoly. Sorry to anyone coming here looking for juicy Bend business gossip. :)

    According to CNNMoney, Monopoly is updating its look with modern places and landmarks and further, letting users vote on their board placement. That’s pretty cool, and it brings to mind the panoply of custom Monopoly games that are floating around out there on just about every conceivable topic.

    Which led me to wonder: Is there a custom Bend, Oregon Monopoly game anywhere? I tentatively want to say that I might remember seeing one at one time—perhaps in one of the shops downtown—but I’m pretty doubtful. A cursory web search revealed nothing.

    So maybe I’ll make one. It’d certainly be easy enough to print out new board spaces and glue them onto an old game; anyone have any suggestions as to what they’d like to see on Bend Monopoly?

    (And then, of course, we’ll have to play at the next blogger meetup.)

  • Blogday, Earth Day, and a lawn rant

    When I said “the first part of my day” in my earlier post today, I really had no idea that actually meant “the entire day.” Somehow I always undershoot these estimates with the misplaced optimism… like also thinking I’d only need one load of compost…

    In order to topdress the lawn with compost, I had to borrow my dad’s truck so I could haul it in bulk (ever tried to cover several thousand square feet of lawn with only bags of fertilizer? Me neither, and I wasn’t about to try). My mom had suggested steer manure compost, and most places in town that offer it (always in a mix with “yard debris”) were outrageously expensive, so we settled on getting it from Hershey Cattle Company over in Redmond for only $15 per yard. This is actually a 40/60 mix of manure with topsoil or something, but it was still half as costly as the next place.

    The catch, of course, to borrowing Dad’s truck was that I had to drive out to his place (in Alfalfa) and help him load a couch into the back of the truck, which he’d promised to a co-worker. So out I went at 8:30 in the morning. We loaded up the couch, tied it up, and I followed him back into town.

    I helped him deliver the couch, to an apartment complex behind COCC, which of course was on the second floor, up a narrow, cracked concrete staircase. Once that was done, we were back to my place, where Dad took my car back home and left me with the truck. By now it was about 10:30.

    Let me digress for a bit about Earth Day, since I did mention it in the title to this post. Today being both the anniversary of this blog and Earth Day, it was of course the perfect day to do Earth-friendly yardwork with (ahem) organic eco-friendly fertilizer. My wife transplanted flowers. I worked out in the sun all day. So it doesn’t get any more “Earth Day” than that, despite the goofy guy in a “Cat in the Hat” hat on Z21 yapping about how cool it was that there was some parade downtown to celebrate… how cool the Earth is, or something (hey, his words, not mine). Okay, digression over.

    I left around 10:50 or so for Redmond. (I actually had to turn back after two blocks because I forgot my tarp. You didn’t think I was going to drive all the way back from Redmond with a truckload of manure and not have it tarped, did you?) Let me just say this about my dad’s truck: I know it’s been awhile since I had my S-10, but holy crap the clutch on his truck is way looser than mine was and that truck’s seen some miles (and it was only a year older than mine). I was about halfway to Redmond before I got used to driving it.

    Got to the Hershey place, paid for a yard (which pretty much fills up an S-10 truckbed), and panicked a bit when the guy dumped the load of manure into the truck with the backhoe and I thought for a moment the shocks were going to go. All of a sudden I was driving a rear-wheel low-rider—really low. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive home (on busy Highway 97 nearly the whole way). So I tarped up the load, tied it, and was pulling out when I realized another nasty little surprise had crept up on me.

    You ever drive a pickup truck when it’s fully loaded in back? And by “fully loaded” I mean overloaded? Yeah, besides the obvious (it takes a lot longer to speed up and slow down), the entire front end seems to float around, like you’re suddenly piloting a wobbly boat. I hadn’t really remembered that little phenomenon since living at home and hauling over-burdened loads of hay. I was less than thrilled.

    The drive home was uneventful, though (if a little tense). By the time I got back it was nearly 11:30.

    Now, this compost was really good, really soil-like in composition. It still stank like steer manure, but it might as well be topsoil in appearance. I figured it would be easy to spread, because we have this little Turf Builder® spreader with adjustable spray opening, and I could just walk around the yard, pushing the spreader and blithely spraying manure all over the place. So I load it up, and the thing won’t work worth a damn. It’s just too small for what we’re dealing with.

    So that meant back to the tried-and-true method for cursing gardeners everywhere: wheelbarrow and shovel, and spreading it by hand.

    And of course today was a windy day. Not just breezy, but big wind gusts that would come in and handily blow steer manure dust from the shovel all over the place—in your shoes, on your clothes, in your face and eyes. Very lovely. I think I can still sense the stuff in my nasal cavity. But I got a rhythm going finally, and went back for a second load at about 2:30.

    Same routine as before, only I think this load was heavier: piloting a jerky boat down the gusty highway. This load went quicker, thanks to my wife helping, and we even had a couple of wheelbarrow loads left over (now in a pile out by the shed). By the time I’d showered and was sitting down to relax, it was 5:20! Where’d the day go? Oh yeah, I got a bunch of shit done… (rim shot).

    Now I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but I’m really getting tired of owning a lawn. I think I’m beginning to hate it, actually. The stupid thing is full of dry and dead patches, there’s not enough topsoil underneath the front half (thus necessitating the topdressing), watering is a joke during the summer months (we’re on the edge of the High Desert, remember?), and general maintenance of what amounts to a crop of an invasive plant species is wearing very, very thin with me.

    And what are lawns good for, anyway? Let’s see, sitting on (watch out for bugs)… avoiding dog poo… playing croquet on (if you’re British)… lawn darts (try not to kill the opponent)… hmmm. Jeez, when I was growing up, we had very little lawn, and we kids always ran off to play in the dirt and rocks and trees anyway. Go figure.

    (Okay, not entirely true; the lawn made a good wrestling ring when we were trying out WWF wrestling moves. But they say kids shouldn’t do that nowadays, so…)

    Me, I’d be perfectly happy with a little more natural Central Oregon wilderness. But that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.

    The rest of my day involved drinking some beer and reading my favorite new book. Now that’s the right way to end a day.

    And oh yeah, I even sunburned my neck a bit. Now I’m just a red neck hauling manure around in an old truck.

    Go figure.

  • Blogiversary

    Yes, it was exactly four years ago today that I started this blog. I don’t have much to say right now, I just wanted to mark the occasion.

    Though I should probably do something special for it. The first part of my day will be hauling manure around, topdressing the yard, so I guess I’ll have to come up with something better for later. ;)

  • Best spam name ever

    I’ve seen this name show up a few times now in my email spam filter: Natalie Gadzooks. Perhaps it’s not the best spam name ever, but every time I see it, it makes me laugh.

  • Quote of the year

    I’ve just gotta give Shannon props for writing up the quote of the year: “i thought it was cool in a blog stalker sort of way.” Love it! I am totally going to steal it. :)

    Okay, maybe not for the entire year… but I’ll give it to her for April, at least.

  • I used to drink there!

    Thumbnail photo of Snoops Saloon in Spokane, WashingtonOne of the Flickr feeds I’m subscribed to is photos tagged with “Spokane,” since we lived up there for a few years a decade ago.

    One of the photos that showed up tonight is here: a tavern I used to drink at named Snoops. Yeah, it was kind of a dive, but what are you gonna do? I was in my twenties. :)

  • You know what the Easter Bunny is doing the other 364 days of the year?

    The Easter Bunny hates youOh, this is such a twisted, twisted thing to laugh at, and yet I couldn’t stop laughing: The Easter Bunny Hates You (video).

    I wouldn’t let the kids watch this one, lest they be scarred for life…

    Thanks, Shannon!