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Chuggnutt!

Tag: Bend

  • Hobbit holes in Bend?

    Now this is some kind of crazy:

    The hobbit holes will hold lawn mowers instead of diminutive, barefooted halflings from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, but The Shire aims to bring some Old World styling and a fantasy setting to Bend’s east side.

    “We call it the place of enchantment, and we are building to that (motto),” said Ron Meyers, the developer whose business card identifies him as Lord of The Shire….

    The application submitted to the city for development calls for a mix of 31 cottages and townhomes on 6.2 acres off Benham Road east of the Parrell/Sisters Mobile Home Park. The project also will have 1.5 acres of common open space that will include trails, ponds, landscaping and an amphitheater, some of which are in place.

    Hobbit holes already are cut into the side of the hill, and Karl Anthony, whom Meyers describes as a “spiritual artist,” held a concert at the amphitheater a few weeks ago.

    It will be the homes themselves, however, that give The Shire its unique look.

    Cottages will evoke English country homes. Townhouses will be built to look like medieval city streetscapes.

    Yeah. Good luck with that.

    …actually, I’d be real curious to see what it looks like when they’re done. Jeez, just when I thought the real estate market around here couldn’t get any weirder…

    One thing the Bulletin forgot: the web site address for “The Shire.” Kind of important, there.

    But that’s okay, I found it: The Shire of Bend, Oregon.

  • Hard drinkin’

    Heard about this on the radio this morning, and I wanted to blog it before I forgot about it. On the front page of the Bulletin today there’s a picture of three people floating the river (a popular summer activity here in Bend)—which by itself is no big deal. However, the focus of the article that accompanies it is on the excessive alcohol consumption that goes along with the river floaters.

    Back to that picture. Three people floating the river with booze in hand. Here’s the picture:

    People floating the Deschutes River with drinks in hand
    Photo courtesy of The Bulletin

    I’m not against drinking, rafting, drinking while rafting necessarily, but damn! That’s some hard drinkin’ in the picture. The guy on the left is drinking some kind of hard liquor, the middle guy a beer, and there’s at least two more bottles visible with them. The girl has a Jagermeister. I like Jager and all, but that’s way too hardcore for me.

    Besides, everyone knows the proper way to drink Jager is chilled, ideally right out of the freezer ;).

  • Chelsea Lane is closing

    Just a quick note about Chelsea Lane, a nice little wine shop that used to be downtown but is now located at the factory outlet stores on south Highway 97: they’re closing! I don’t know when the last day will be, but right now they’re selling their wines at 30% off, and beer for 15% off. I picked up four normally-spendy beers there the other day.

    Get down there while the getting’s good. It’s really too bad they’re closing; I don’t really know of any other wine shops in Bend (dedicated/exclusive wine shops—not just wineries or places that also sell wine), except maybe for Vino Mercato.

  • The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend

    Note: This post was originally written way back in 2005, when most of the world still considered Trump to be (at best) an orange-skinned clown with questionable tastes and shady dealings. Of course now it’s 2022 as I update this and we all know he’s even more of a racist shitbag who absolutely destroyed our democracy, so there’s really nothing more to see here.

    I just heard about this at work today, people claiming that Donald Trump said the number one place to invest in/develop/buy/smoke real estate is Bend, Oregon. One guy—a local land engineer even—claims that Trump said this on Larry King Live. He may even be developing something here!

    Folks, it just ain’t true. Someone’s blowing smoke up your ass. It’s a rumor someone started to get people talking about Bend real estate. There’s no information online alluding to this, and even the transcripts of the Larry King Live episode in question don’t bear it out. Bend is not even on Trump’s radar.

    Let’s move on now, m’kay?

  • Comments on some of the Bulletin’s news

    You can tell I’ve been busy these last few days: I’ve got a number of things to write about but haven’t had the time to until now. These next couple of things are about articles that appeared in the Bulletin.

    First: 7-story hotel planned for downtown. This, of course, will be literally right next to the five-story parking garage. I’m a little ambivalent about this. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad for downtown Bend, but does it have to be a seven-story monstrosity? Plus, it’ll turn into a cost-overrun, logistical nightmare typical of recent downtown development.

    To be fair, though, the city has yet to approve the application. We all know that that’s just a formality, though, right?

    And the plan is to put a swimming pool on the sixth floor. Uh, okay. I know I sure wouldn’t want any room directly beneath several thousand tons of water suspended 55 feet or so above the ground… but that’s just me.

    The other item is this: Post office will test for anthrax. Yeah, that’s timely and relevant, what, three years later? Is this really news? I think bioterrorists have probably figured out by now that anthrax is kind of a no-go anymore, and are more likely to have something different cooked up. Seems to me the post office should be expanding the scope of their testing, if they’re really worried about it…

  • Bend SummerFest

    This last weekend was the Bend Summer Festival (“SummerFest” for the rest of us, it’s shorter and easier to say) and despite my expressed ambivalence in the past toward the various seasonal festivals around here, we went on Saturday and had a pretty good time.

    The weather was decent while we were there, except for a brief interlude during which it downpoured rain—about five minutes worth, and then the mini-squall moved on. Typical Central Oregon weather, though sooner or later some local will trot out the old chestnut about it snowing on the Fourth of July…

    There’s great shopping to be found there—for adults. The kids got bored pretty quickly as we wandered among the various tents. I got bored after a while, too; there’s only so many arts and crafts you can look at before they start blurring together. Ultimately we did buy two framed prints from a photographer, and my wife got a bracelet and a scarf/wrap thing.

    The children’s section was great. Like last year, it was sponsored by the Working Wonders Children’s Museum and had a bunch of fun and educational things to do. The best part was the bird house building; Home Depot had donated crates of kid-friendly bird house kits (seven pre-cut board plus nails and screws) and kids could assemble them and take them home for free. Well, kids and adults; I ended up putting together most of the two we took. But it was still a very cool idea.

    Food—good (mmmm Philly cheesesteak sandwich…); alcohol—good but some confusion reigned as to when they could start serving. OLCC rules say not until noon, but no one was allowed to start til sometime after that, not sure why… regardless, my wife finally got to taste some good wines and I had a beer (only had time for one), a tasty Ropewalk Amber from BridgePort Brewing. There was a big selection of other beers on their sheet, too, I was impressed.

    We didn’t catch any music—a consequence of having small kids who are impatient—but it was still a pretty good SummerFest. I like it best of the various Bend seasonal festivals.

  • Did Barcelona close down?

    In this case, “Barcelona” refers to the restaurant in Downtown Bend, in the St. Clair building. The reason I’m wondering if they’re closed is because they have a banner reading “Restaurant fire sale Monday” and the interior looks, well, disassembled.

    Anyone know what the scoop is?

  • Munch ‘n Music

    So on the spur of the moment this evening we decided to go to this year’s first Munch ‘n Music and have dinner. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any good website source for Munch ‘n Music, so for those of you not from Bend, here’s the three-second explanation:

    Thursday evenings during the summer in Bend, free concerts in Drake Park are accompanied by food and craft vendors, and a beer garden. Parking is hell.

    This was the first one we’d been to in years, so the beer garden was new to me. We didn’t stay for the full concert—we never do, really, with young kids—but we did enjoy Pilot Butte Drive-in‘s cheeseburgers and fries. We hadn’t had them since forever and they were utterly delicious. It’s the only place you can get Pilot Butte after lunchtime these days! Score! The kids had Pizza Mondo. I was totally jonesing for some elephant ears, but the line was too long and we were on the way out.

    My wife got a new toe ring and the kids got an ice cream bar and cotton candy. It was a fruitful trip.

    One of these days we’ll try staying for the full concert. And I will get some elephant ears!

    Update: My wife found the website… it’s www.munchandmusic.com. Go figure. Couldn’t find it on the search engines, so that’s saying something.

  • Bend Farmer’s Market

    Wednesday after work (around five) I met the the family down at Bend’s farmer’s market in Drake Park. Strangely enough, it was the first time I’d been to it, despite living in Bend for, oh, most of my life. I liked it a lot; we ended up buying a bunch of stuff, including giant cookies, three kinds of berries, a bouquet of flowers, cherries, dried apples, and fresh vegetables (including zucchini—I’ve been totally wanting to make zucchini bread for ages, and I’ve got a nice big one now to do so). I was hoping to score some fresh honey, but I didn’t see any (I’d heard honey mentioned on the radio that morning when they were promoting the farmer’s market).

    Next time we go back I think I might also pick up some locally-made cheese, from Juniper Grove Farm in Redmond (no website that I can find). And maybe a baguette.

    What’s funny is Shannon was there too—but we missed her. Next time we’ll need to coordinate better :). Or how about this? Get a blogger/friends/family thing together at the farmer’s market, buy a bunch of food there, and have a picnic dinner in the park.

  • Bite of Bend mini-review

    I don’t get out to many of the local festivals, but we did hit the Bite of Bend last Saturday, so here’s my mini-review. Actually, the one thing I really wanted to see at the Bite of Bend was the Iron Chef competition among six local chefs, and I got to see a bit of that—so this review will probably focus more on that than anything else :).

    They had closed off most of the Old Mill District—the main drag between the parking lots at the movie theater and the smokestack building—and even so, we were able to find parking in the theater lot fairly easily. At the time we got there (around 11:30), most of the upper lot (above the theater) was empty, too. That’s pretty good for an event like this, particularly in Bend.

    Decent selection of food, too, and just okay on the beer. When you see a sign saying, “Beer garden” I guess you expect more than four beers on tap. Although, in addition to the one wine vendor, the Bendistillery was there serving up hard alcohol. Nice!

    Actually, the food selection was more than decent; to me it seemed like a lot and a good variety. There could have been more—Pilot Butte Burgers would have been nice, for instance—but c’est la vie.

    Didn’t pay any real attention to the music. That’s about all I can say about that.

    Ah, but the Iron Chef competition was fun. I actually only got to wander over to it three times (everyone else thought I was weird to get excited about it), but I managed to see the start of the first contest—secret ingredient (tombo tuna) and all—and come back later to watch the matches in action. I don’t know who won any of the match-ups, though. And I don’t think they had to make more than one dish (unlike the TV show, which requires four or five), but it was still a lot of fun to watch. Interestingly, Standard TV and Appliance had set up a big screen HDTV off to the side and had two camera guys filming the competition up close—so you could watch the details on the TV. I was hoping they were recording it all and would broadcast it on the local cable channel, but I haven’t seen anything about that.

    It would have been cool to have someone doing an intelligent (i.e., knowledgeable about food and cooking) running commentary, but I guess not everyone’s as into the Iron Chef thing as I am. Regardless, I hope they do this again. Maybe they could do it at some of the other festivals and not just Bite of Bend…?

    Any other Bendites have reviews they’d like to post here?