Found!

Found on 07/31/06, by the side of Baker Creek Rd about a half mile before Orchard View.

If this is yours, by all means contact me to claim it. Otherwise I'll have to tie it to the front of my bike like a lucky albatross.

Shocking Driving in Yamhill County

In Ashland, even up as far as Eugene, driving is easy. People drive normal. Up here in North Oregon, though, people drive different.

They pull out in front of you. You're driving down a street, and another car comes to a stop at a cross street. He looks at you, and when you get 20 feet away - he pulls out in front. Calmly. Slowly. Not so you have to slam to a stop, but you definitely have to come off the gas and apply some brake. You have to Deal With It. People do it all the time. In fact, they do it every time.

The other thing they do up here is when you come to a stop sign at a cross street. There's a car coming, so you wait. And wait. Five minutes later, the car finally passes. "I coulda gone three times! What is wrong with these people?!"

It took me several weeks to realize that out here in Yamhill county people Drive The Speed Limit. Huh? They do WHAT? That took a little getting used to. Now I'm the one that SUVs and Jettas with Washington plates crowd up behind on 99 West. "What? What's your hurry, bub? What's wrong with you?"

Another weird thing. Everyone turns into the nearest lane.
I'm facing you across 99 West. We're both going to turn North when the light changes. We both have our blinkers on(!). Here in McMinnville, we both get to go as soon as it's green. I know you're turning into the curb lane, and you know I'm turning into the other one. It's like traffic magic every day (except I don't even drive my car every day).

People in jacked-up trucks with obnoxious stickers do it. Grammas in Cordobas do it. Hispanics in import tuners with tinted windows do it. Even I do it.

But I need to be in the curb lane! Easy. I put on my signal and change.

Something really shocking. Left on red. You can turn LEFT from a two-way street, onto a one-way street on a RED light. This may be legal in California, but I don't think I've ever seen it. It blew my mind the first time I saw someone zip a left on a red into a gap in traffic. WHAT?!
Well... it looks safe. And the Oregon drivers' handbook says you can. And the people behind you in that left-turn lane looking at the oncoming traffic waiting for their green sure want you to.
It's pretty cool when you do it. You feel like you're getting away with something.

Yamhill County Telephone Fun - "Time"

What time is it? What time is it REALLY?
When we first moved here, all our clocks were different, and they were all wrong. I finally got it straightened out, only to learn that Max's preschool's clocks were 3 minutes fast. Since then we've gotten so late dropping him off that three minutes doesn't matter, though...

So how to get the correct time? Call "Time".

Growing up in Northern California, I could always call POP-CORN to get the time. Here, if you want the time you call... [break for a 15 minute session with the phone book] um... [let's dial "0" for the Operator and ask her]. The Operator says there are three phone numbers for Time in McMinnville. I ignored the two enemy prefixes and wrote down the 503 number.

To call Time (aka the Speaking Clock) from McMinnville, you dial 1 (503) 266-8463.

With "popcorn", the whole exchange is Time, and any 767 number works, but here it appears that 8463 is the only good number. Mercifully the other ones I tried didn't connect to anyone.

Looks like 1K0-DAMN-TIME or 1 (503) BOO-TIME to me.

Yamhill County Telephone Fun - "Dial 1"

McMinnville has some funny phone-fu.
It is ALWAYS necessary to dial the 503 area code first, even if you're calling next door. It is SOMETIMES necessary to dial "1" first. The only way to know which is which is trial and error.

If you guess wrong, you get the loud "Boop-boop-boop" sound, and then a recorded voice tells you you're an idiot. You hang up for a second to make it stop, but when you put the phone back to your ear to dial correctly, the voice is Still There, still loud. You have to leave the receiver down for three seconds.

The phone book says "Newbert" is a local call, but when you call Newberg you'd better dial that "1".

This unfortunate aspect of the Yamhill County phone system would've been a dealbreaker if I'd known about it before I moved here. It's me, though. I have a short phone fuse. Surprises or frustrations on the phone bring out the chimpanzee in me. Payphone steal my money? Automated phone systems of any kind? The kind where you have to TELL it your choices? Don't get me started.
Basically the handset is a short-handled beatin' stick, and my first reaction is to use it to beat the rest of the phone to death.

McMinnville Postcards

Here are some more postcards for McMinnville.

The awesome tanks north of McMinnville on Hwy 99w.

The feed store. Beaver brand feeds!

Well duh.

Pacific City

Guess how hot it was in Pacific City yesterday. It was 108 in McMinnville, so Max and I went to the beach.
How hot was Pacific City? Sixty-seven degrees. It was bliss.

We climbed to the top of the huge dune two times, ran around in the waves a lot and built a sandcastle with roads.

I lost one of his trucks when we were running along the beach, but when we came back to the castle from the surf... there it was in the bed of his dump truck! Wow. People are cool.

Pacific City is cooler than Lincoln City, and rumor has it that it will have a skatepark soon. There's a brewpub right on the beach, cool barnacle-covered rocks to avoid while running in the water, and that crazy sand-dune. It's like 150 feet high and you can run down it like a pinwheel!

Kid Friendly

Oregon is amazingly kid-friendly, with skate parks and stuff to do all over.
McMinnville has two skate parks, Newberg has one that's in the top five worldwide, and Lincoln City has a nice two-part park. The Newberg park is right next to the Chehalem Valley BMX track, where Max raced his first BMX moto last night.

He came in 2nd and got a big trophy because it was his first race. Generally they give out medals on Wednesdays and trophies on Saturday. The announcer called him "Mad Max", which is obvious, but still funny.

Racing only takes about an hour and a half. We left at eight p.m., right after Max got his trophy. I hope that wasn't a terrible breach of etiquette.

It was really fun to watch, and Max liked the racing a lot, but hated the noise of the gate coming down. An air compressor keeps the gate up, and when it drops there's a loud FFSSHT and a clang. The first time, Max was so stunned that he just rolled down the hill to the first jump. The second time, I was holding him up by the back tire with my knees, and when the gate went down he didn't go anywhere at all. Oops. I moved and yelled "Pedal all the way to the hill!" like the other kids' dads.

Max was the only kid there without a full-face helmet and 'racing clothes'. He's very concerned about image, but I'm more concerned about his bike. He was also the only kid on an old-school fat-tired BMX tank. The other racers all had 'minis', which run narrow slicks or semi-knobbies. They also weigh a lot less and look a lot cooler, with gear more appropriately-sized for a five year old. The cranks on Max's Schwinn are 170mm long, which is the same as my road bikes.

Word is you can buy a good mini for about $100 on Craigslist. I want two, so I can set one up with the narrowest drop bars I can find, and maybe a fork with a front brake and an offset appropriate for road-riding. Maybe one day Kogswell will make a kid's bmx-to-roadbike conversion kit.

The BMX track is really cool just to ride around on, but the fact that there's an active racing scene there is phenomenal. The first time we went to Newberg it was to skate, and we went back every day for a week, taking Max's 16" Gamma-Ray. He'd skate for a while, bike for a while, skate for a while, then have one of those awful Power-Ades that taste like greasy kool-aid and stain his mouth like he's a vampire that's been feeding on astronauts with Tang for blood.

For all the kid stuff, I expected more places for dogs. All the big parks, frisbee-golf fields and skateparks, but no dog parks. California has a ton, and Killingsworth Park in Portland has a big off-leash dog area, but it seems like Yamhill County has none. I think it's because people around here don't treat their dogs as kids.
They have kids for that.

Dundee Postcards

I made some postcards for McMinnville and Dundee.
I wanted to celebrate the quirky and weird; the stuff that will not survive the impending pimpification that's looming over this valley. I want people to come into the shop and laugh and say "what IS the story with that purple house?" And buy the card to show their friends how cool and different Yamhill County is.

I had the idea, when I lived in Santa Rosa, to document the 'eyesores' I saw everyday, or that I remembered from my childhood. Weird things, not necessarily attractive, that I loved.

I got the idea from a letter in the Pacific Sun (small Mill Valley newspaper) calling for the 'renewal' of the Tam Junction area. If you go to Stinson Beach from 101, Tam Junction is where you make the left to go over the hill. It's fairly divey, but it's real. I didn't like it when the strip-mall went in there and Dan's Liquors moved out of the surf shop building. I used to buy Charleston Chews there when I was a kid and they were three feet long. I like the dusty divey reality of the place, and here was someone suggesting that box stores and parking lots would be better, "like the renewal at the Flea Market."
The Sausalito Flea Market was a big dusty lot across the freeway from the houseboats where vendors came from all over to sell weird weird things and you could buy spring rolls from Vietnamese vendors in trailers and go back on Sunday night or Monday morning for the Free Market and dumpster dive all the stuff people didn't think it worthwhile to truck home again.
I bought my $12 Ciro-Flex camera there, which I still use to take my sprocket-hole pictures. I found $5 blown up against the fence once, and I have a set of antique drafting bows and dividers someone threw into one of the 50-gallon drum garbage cans.
They bulldozed that place, put up a huge empty parking lots and dotted some Best Buys, Hornswoggler BBQ places, crapfood drivethroughs and similar jewels of western thought. There's a Ross there now, the emptiest Ross I've ever been in.

It made me sick to think that something similar might happen happen to Tam Junction, and I thought "boy, I should document these places before they disappear!"

I failed.

I thought I had time. In the couple of months I thought about the project, some of my favorite eyesores quietly disappeared. The controversial railroad trestle at Larkspur Landing was hit by a truck and had to be removed. The boarded-up white Victorian, up on blocks by the South Petaluma Boulevard offramp for years and years, suddenly wasn't there.

Already the 'Bottleneck' sign is stripped back to "closed honey", so yay, I got the picture. The trailer underneath the big Honey sign was gone the other day, too, but now it's back. For some reason I really like seeing it on my way up to Newberg or Dundee. It's one of my familiar friends.

I'm working on some more postcards, and I want to print them up with some info on the back, and a square for the stamp. That's what makes a postcard real, and not just a picture. A white border might look good and old-fashioned, too.

I'd like to sell them stamped, or stamp them as they're sold. The post office is only a block away, but it would be ideal to wander around, buy a quirky postcard, write to a friend while eating a panini at Luigi's Daughter, then mail it from the Hotel Oregon. Easy.