Howard and Dave's Barbershop

Max got his first haircut in a long time today.
He's been wanting Jimmy Neutron hair, which sticks up about a foot, and what with one thing and another, it's been a long time. Pursuing the Neutron Style, we did find that the Plaid Pantry carries hair gel. The woman there was surprised, but it's true. Smells like grape.
Lisa did touch it up a little while ago, but his bangs have been in his eyes for weeks.

We went down to Howard and Dave's Barbershop on Cowls street, mostly because every morning when we ride our bikes to school, Max weaves in between them on the sidewalk as they're opening up their shop to start their day. They always smile and crack some comment.

The shop is great. Comfortable. Two old-fashioned chairs and some smart-ass regulars.

This was Max's first time in a grown-up barbershop, and he didn't like the idea of no video games. In practice, though, he looked through a car magazine and bantered with the guys. Got some gum from the machine. Pretty fun.

I liked it, too. I've never gotten a professional haircut in my whole life.
As a child, my mom cut my hair to much wailing and crying, which turned into mean comments as I got older, and finally culminated in No More Haircuts. I had a friend cut my hair in college, but she exactly cut off the part I told her to keep (the Bozo undergrowth that supported the straight hair on top). She was totally acting in my best interest ('get Philip laid'), but my hair was never designed to be long. Too lank. Next was midnight head-shavings at Nine Gables, with friends, housemates and mohawks. Finally, my friend Molly cut her own hair, and told me "you've GOT to cut your own hair! It's SO FUN!" It was fun, and I did a pretty good job of it, but how hard is a mohawk, really?

That reminds me of a story I heard in the barbershop. The subject of 'myths' came up, and one of them insisted that the "famous story" of some loggers from one of the local mills cutting a hippie's hair with a chainsaw was a true story, and cost the mill owner "a lot of money." A crew was coming back from work and passed a hippie on the road ("a real long hair"), and that was too good to pass up, so they buzzed him so close he had to jump in the ditch. He come up out the ditch and let fly with a one-fingered wave, "and those guys nearly turned that thing over backing up so fast". They jumped out, held him down and cut his hair off with a chainsaw.
Ow. About half of us thought that must've just pulled the hair out in chunks, but some thought it could've been done cleanly, if they held the hair on both sides. The noise and the terror, though, must've been awful.

Reminds me of the time me and my hippie friends were driving around and came across a logger alone in the woods. We almost ran him down, then jumped on him and superglued a big blonde wig to his head.

Nothing like that happened to Max, though. He got a great haircut, which took twice as long as anyone else's, but cost less. Go figure. Probably because just about the time Dave was finishing up with the cut, I said "don't be afraid to cut it short - we never comb it," so he went over the whole thing again, making it shorter. Two haircuts, but he only charged for one.

Really enjoyable experience.

Nice lunch from Red Fox bakery

I was on my way to Harvest Fresh to try out their sandwiches when I was distracted by the Red Fox bakery. The Red Fox lady and her kid came into Dustpan Alley the other day, and I figured I'd return the favor.

There was a disturbing sign in the window warning of coming price increases, since this has been the worst year for the MidWest since the Dustbowl years, and wheat crops are being lost.

The fella in front of me asked if their coffee was good, and the girl said "it's the best. We use Illy."
The guy said, "well, I warn you, I'm a coffee connoisseur!"and described the custom blend of six beans he likes to drink. Like a dick I chimed in with, "then I don't think you're going to be happy with Illycafe."
I got to chatting with the guy and his wife, and told the story of when I roasted a pound and a half of green Jamaican Blue Mountain beans in a cast-iron skillet. Best coffee I've ever had.
The guy's wife is like "oh, no! Now there's something else you've got to try!" :)

He said there's no good coffee in the South, "but maybe you disagree." I did disagree, but only second-hand. When I was growing up, my father had my Grandma mail regular 20 lb packages of coffee in red bags from Louisiana, since there was no decent coffee to be had in California at the time. The guy had to admit that Louisiana French Roast was good, and that before he got into his "bean-thing", he'd mix some Lausanne(?) coffee with chicory into his Maxwell House to give it a bit of a kick.

Anyway, he had a cup of coffee (with milk) and when the girl asked him if it was good, proclaimed that it was "in the range of acceptable."

Anyway. The Red Fox has no debit machine, so I scaled back from the Turkey and Apple sandwich I wanted to an Egg Salad Sandwich ("egg-selent salad") so I'd have enough to leave a tip, because I thought I'd stay instead of take my sandwich to go. I thought I wanted a coffee, too, but not after it became such an issue.

The egg salad was really good. The bread was a little crumbly for the job, but I also got a beautiful little 'salad', which was either the worlds most compact salad, or the fanciest, tastiest garnish in the world. It was a leaf of baby romaine, with a cherry tomato, a baby carrot and something shredded maybe (I ate it in two bites and I forgot to dissect it, sorry), dressed with a nice vinaigrette.
And a macaroon. Oh, the macaroon was great. Even a bad macaroon is pretty yummy, but this one was crispy and chewy and very flavorful, and made me downgrade all other macaroons in my estimation. Now they all seem either too gummy or too burnt in comparison.
I could see eating one of those macaroons every day as part of my morning coffee ritual. I may even try it with the Illy Cafe coffee...

First fixie I've sighted in McMinnville

Young fella named Alex had a rebuilt Raleigh fixie in front of Tommy's Bikes! The only other fixed gear bike I've seen in Yamhill County was on top of a car at the skatepark in Newberg, and the owner had come down from Portland.

Alex's fixie was a nice medium dusty blue in the neo-classic style. Flipped and clipped homebrew bullhorns, a single interruptor brake, and a 42x16 gear. He says it's light enough to keep up with cars on Evans Street. I believe him, but this is semi-rural Oregon. Max can keep up with cars on Evans.

He's from here, but he might be moving to Portland soon. They've got tons of fixies. We need you here, dude!

Oregon food: Uwajimaya

I feel like I wrote this entry already, but I can't find it.

Clinton and I went to a monstrously large Asian food market in Beaverton called Uwajimaya. Clinton says it's about half the size of the one in Seattle, and doesn't have the non-MSG choices the Seattle one has.

I gotta say it's overwhelming.

Walking into the first aisle, floor to ceiling with alien colors, big Japanese text, and not a lick of English was an overload. I didn't know where to look. I walked down the aisle trying not to miss anything, but being visually pummelled and pushed from shelf to shelf. "What IS this?" It would be like an Estonian from 1953 walking unprepared into the detergent aisle at Safeway. Wearing 3-D glasses.
I've never been a mid-century Estonian, but I have worn 3D glasses in the detergent aisle.

Pretty frickin' cool. I bought a bunch of cheaper beverages to try. I didn't want to get anything I didn't think I'd drink, and I didn't want anything that cost FIVE DOLLARS. There were some mighty spendy beverages, mostly weird Hawaiian-flavored things with Japanese writing.
I got some Lichee drink, which was good, but ended with kind of a grainy texture, some Strawberry Milk Tea which was super-yummy, and Max wants me to get a lot more.

Also some "Hello Boss" canned coffee. I got that in memory of the canned coffee I bought Angelina at the "Happy Super" Chinese market on Clement Street in San Francisco. We had that can for YEARS. It said "drink on Feb 31", so, y'know, we could never drink it.
(We lived over the Happy Super for a couple months right after we got married, and I remember watching them deliver whole dead pigs right under our window. Years later, I went into the City to visit my friend Tara at The Other Place when she was a bartender there, and passed by the Happy Super, only to find all its stuff out on the street and Going Out of Business signs in the window. I took a 'frozen food' sign which graces our freezer to this day.)

Anyway... we didn't buy an entire roast pig, and we didn't get any steam-table Chinese... but we could have.

I did buy some chocolate-covered mushroom cookies and some milky popsicles, and Clinton and I each bought an indecipherable box of something that seemed really exciting. Like tiny somethings, but we couldn't tell what. The shelves we got them off had what may have been little boxes of plastic models of things like "Secretary coming through door", and "Spacy Housewife", but we couldn't tell.

Our spider-senses did not fail us. My box (which I got for Angelina, because she loves weird tiny shit) had a tiny plastic Meat Gift Box, where you put the stickers on the meat, constructed the box, and packaged it all up. Whoa. The whole thing is about an inch and a half long.

Clinton's had the goods, though. It was things you might stock a convenience store with. A roll of film, a film canister to put it in, and a tiny box you construct to put the canister inside of. Tiny candies. Salt? Gum?

Antique Fly-In and airshow

When my dad was here, Max and I took him to the antique fly-in. There were hundreds of old planes, which my dad loves. There were three Bellancas, like my dad had when I was a kid.

Max liked the snow cones, the corporate jet the crew dicked around with for 20 minutes getting parked, and the shuttle ride across to the Air Museum.

The museum is the home of the Spruce Goose.
Most people are surprised the Spruce Goose is in McMinnville, including my dad, who's an aviation enthusiast (he just came from the huge EAA fly-in at Oshkosh). Seems like they could do some better promotion, if people with an interest don't even know where it is.


Let me digress: I think there should be big billboards on I-5. "A beautiful detour to see the Aviator's masterpiece." There is a billboard on 99W in Dundee, showing the Spruce Goose in the clouds, which is just bullshit, since the thing only flew once, for about a minute, just a few feet off the water.
A better billboard: make several, featuring cropped-in views of the plane. How often do you have pictures of things on billboards that are way bigger than the billboard? Put three billboards in series, a couple miles apart. The first one shows two engines and a float, the second one shows the bow and cockpit, third one is looking down the wing so you get an overview of the whole. Mostly the signs would be that distinctive silver-gray, and they'd have the current tagline "it's big."
Sorry. That's the kind of thing I think about. Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

The Spruce Goose is big. So big you don't even notice the huge wing stretching over all the other planes, because your brain interprets it as 'ceiling'. They have an SR-71 Blackbird sitting under the wing next to a Titan missile. Lots of good stuff, including a bunch of helicopters. It seems like they changed a lot of the toys in the store, and focus more on models you can build, including one that was $120. They used to have a lot more hideously-expensive-Chinese-made crap, like the $20 plastic aircraft carrier that sinks. It did come with several little metal airplanes, but it was worth about $5 and still should've floated. I have a personal war with shitty toys that make my kid cry 15 minutes after I've bought it. Every time I break my "no shitty toy that breaks right away" rule I regret it. Plastic crossbow pistols? Total Crap. Good for about 15 minutes of wailing. Sinkable aircraft carrier? Mediocre crap, good for 3 days of peevish complaining.
Boy, another digression.

Aside from the toys, Max likes the flight simulator you can climb inside of. Basically it's a videgame with a really cool seat. He got good at it right away. Unfortunately, it was out of order this time.
The other cool kid thing is the set-up that lets you send a Navy jet down a wire to land on a carrier deck. It seems to work no matter what you do, but my dad explained you're supposed to catch the middle rubber band. It's cool to play with, but it might be due for a tune-up or clearer explanation of the goal.


The nice thing about the McMinnville event is that a lot of the planes are parked on dirt, so you don't have that hot asphalt cooking you. Airplane events are usually really bright and hot, then they get loud. My favorite part was the pint of Sierra Nevada I had.
I do like to look at old planes, though. My favorites are the Ercoupes and biplanes or floatplanes of any kind. My dad said my mom would've gotten an Ercoupe "if she was single." She liked all the planes with the extra round vertical stabilizers, like the Bellanca and the Constellation (her favorite plane, I think). The Ercoupe is kind of the Nash Metropolitan of airplanes.

I was startled to see my Ercoupe search turn up this page on Sheldon Brown's site. He's the guru of all internet bicyclery, and a seminal figure of the fixed-gear renaissance. Small internet world.

About half the pictures I took ended up being AVIs. The mode switch on Angelina's ELF is easily changed when pulling the camera out of one's pocket. The little switch slides over, and "RRr". They start with one frame of a nicely composed airplane, then a sickmaking swing through a 95 degree arc, some asphalt, and then another frame of the same plane. Ick.

Robin Williams in McMinnville!

The buzz on the street on Saturday was "Hey, did you see Robin Williams?!" Apparently (everyone seemed to know this), he was in rehab in Newberg.

Angelina's mom saw him twice. Once on the street, and then when he went into Tommy's Bikes.
Nancy at Found Objects said Linda's daughter ran after him and said "you've got to come into my mom's shop!" He walked the two blocks back to Hopscotch with her, and bought some toys.
That just makes me happy; what a guy!

He used to come into the Coffee Roastery where Angelina worked, and he was always charming and down-to-earth. "Regular", even. Once he entertained some friends of mine for about half an hour with an impromptu routine on the bench in front of the Book Depot.

I wish I'd seen him. I wanted to say "Hey... don't I know you from Mill Valley?"

Registering your car in Oregon

The lady in the DMV told us that if you're stopped by a cop, and he finds out you've been a resident of Oregon for more than 30 days and haven't changed your plates, you can be fined $3000. That was at 5:00 on the 30th day. We drove real carefully down to DMV the next morning to fill out all the paperwork and take our Driver's License tests.

I don't know if that's true, or just some DMV-lady fun.

Oregon collects your Driver's Licenses to ship back to your home state (which is a shame, since I make paintings of peoples' licenses), but they don't tell California that your car is now registered in Oregon.
I got a renewal notice from CA DMV, and had to call to find out what to do about having moved (there's no info on the DMV website). You have to send a photocopy of your Oregon registration to the California DMV in the envelope they provide for the registration payment.

Someone we know had a motorcycle-only license in California, but received a regular Class C license with a motorcycle endorsement in Oregon. I guess they'd never encountered anyone who didn't have a car-driving license before.
Or else it all comes down to the people behind the counter.

Getting to PDX from McMinnville

Two rules:
1. Never let your guest arrive at 5:20. That's peak commute traffic and just sucks.
2. Do not take 205 to the airport if they do. Just go 82nd Avenue like a real person.
3. Arrivals at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon can suck, too. Getting to the airport takes an hour and ten minutes, but getting home takes an hour and forty. Three hour round trip.

Another Rule:
4. Allot an hour and a half to get to the airport, so you're only 20 minutes late...

I just took two hours to get to the airport, so I got there about an hour late. Coming home only took an hour, though, since traffic had cleared.

I'm going to do some experimenting with getting off 84 at the Hollywood District and taking NE Sandy...
Bringing my dad home from the airport Friday, I decided to try the Sherwood-Tualatin Road to get to 99W, but as soon as we passed the regular Tigard exit traffic on the freeway was backed up dead. I took the next exit and followed my nose back to 99W.

Pronounciation

Many years ago, a good friend of mine had a wicked manager named "De-BORE-ah". This is the common name "Deborah", with the accent on the wrong syLAble (my friend appreciated this perspective). That lady must've been from Northern Oregon, because a lot of their nouns are acCENted just that way. My theory is that it was One Guy in the early settler days who made funny pronunciations on purpose, as a legacy to future generations.

Whe I encounter suspect words, I just never utter them aloud, like at a party where I've immediately forgotten the person's name I'm

Peony: "p-OH-nee".
My physical therapists claimed it was a West/East thing. If you're from the East, you say "PEE-uhnee". I told them I grew up in California and had never even HEARD "pOHnee" and it was probably just a Northern Oregon thing. They didn't like that.

Dahlia: "ah" like in "apple". "DAL-ee-uh"

Willamette: "Will-AA-mit" rhymes with 'Dammit".
We were crossing the Willamette, and I was emphatically practicing "WillAmette!" and Max pipes up, "DAD! That's a bad word!"

Tigard: "TIE-gard"
Not "tiggerd", which does sound cuter.
There was a Robert Crais book that had a psychopath in it who hailed from Tigard.

Tualatin: "t-WAL-a-tin"

Willamina: "Wil-a-MEEN-a"

Chemeketa: "...uh... sha-MEK-e-tuh"
I figured out how to pronounce this be hearing the BMX announcer pronounce "Chehalem"

Chehalem: "sha-HAY-lem"

Champoeg. Guess. No, really, guess.
"sham-POOey"
My physical therapists* were like "how did you think it was pronounced? "uh, 'cham-PO-egg'."

Soda: is pronounced "pop."


*I had surgery for a broken arm, and I've been going to McMinnville Sports Medicine for physical therapy. They're great, and we talk about all sorts of stuff while they're causing my anguish.

Oregon State Parks: Ed Grenfell

Ed Grinfell park is just outside McMinnville, and was pretty cool. Kept two adults and three weans entertained for... four hours? There's a creek, very accessible and perfect for dam-building or dam-busting (go Rex!).

The hunt for bottle-caps took an hour and a half, and I'm afraid we just about cleaned the place out. Max got a quart of bottle caps, and I think Rex and Elena got about the same. A half gallon of discarded bottle caps. While the two "Rolling Rock"s and three "Sol" caps were graphically the best, the breakdown was mostly Corona, lots of "BL", "kingsabeers", several Coors mountain caps (lame graphic), about five Heineken, and one Deschutes. I think good beer drinkers put the caps in their pockets.
Anthropologically speaking, the vast majority of caps could have come from ONE party of three who Really Like that spot.
Oddly, no Miller product at all...

The Oregon State Parks are celebrating 50 years in existence with some geocaching fun called "tanglebox", which is just a great name.

The practice of carving elaborate protestations of undying love into the living bark of the trees on the park side of the "human bridge" (the kids wanted to differentiate it from the car bridge, I guess) seems to be alive after all these years. I wonder how Debbie and Mike are doing... and "Bandit"?
H.H. n R.W. must've carved theirs this morning; there were still curls of red bark at the base of the tree. Go Love!












Poking around the Oregon Parks & Rec site, I found out about this Willamette Valley bikeway. We'll return to this later.

things to do: Portland Zoo

That's a good zoo.
Max and I went a few weeks ago and spent four or five hours at the zoo, only getting to the Lorikeet area and the train after they'd closed. We went again with my Dad, and started with the train and the loris. We stayed til closing again, and I don't think we saw a single thing we'd seen the first time through. It's like two whole zoos.
There are still the hippos and most of the Africa exhibit to see. It's a three-day zoo.

This time we bought the whole-shebang package that includes the Butterfly Experience, the Train, and the 3D Thrill Ride!. $50 for the three of us: kid, adult and grampa.
We did the train first, since we'd missed out last time.

The train is cool. There seem to be three separate trains that run through Washington Park and the zoo, out through the trees along a narrow guage track. It's really cool when the two trains pass each other near a little park. It would be fun to have a picnic there and watch the trains go by. There's a short stopover at a station above the Rose Test Garden, and they'll let you get off and catch a later train, but I don't think anyone did. Next time maybe, just to try one of the other trains.

The thrill ride turned out to be right by the train station, so we did it, too. It was pretty fun; I laughed out loud several times as big critters poked their faces out of the screen. 3D glasses and hydraulic rumbleseats!

The butterfly experience is far more mellow. You go into a big landscaped tent and look at impressively beautiful South American butterflies up close. They land on people, and you can see banks of pupae inside a glass case. These pupae will hatch soon to make a new generation of butterflies in the exhibit.
It's like the Lorikeets, but with less wet poo.

There's one penguin that seems to really like kids. Max was up against the aquarium, moving back and forth, and the penguin would follow him, right next to the glass. He seemed to commune with the other kids, too. Maybe he's studying us.

We went into an area up behind the Tillamook Farm thing that we didn't even know was there last time. At the top of the path there are bald eagles, and there's a hollow concrete log for kids to climb through. I think the log was Max's favorite thing.

Last time we were at the zoo I noticed one of the gumball machines in a bank of ten wasn't screwed down. I thought "You could totally steal that!"
This time, there were only nine.

Max is going again today with his class.

things to do: OMSI

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is one of those legendary kid-places in Portland. It's like the Exploratorium, only more cleanly presented. The Exploratorium might have the edge in terms of interactivity, but OMSI is way cleaner and brighter, with no fear of your kid wandering off and getting turned into an exhibit.

There was an exhibit about the monster "Big Pipe" sewer project in Portland, there was something about all the scary scary nuclear and chemical waste stored in vast tanks in the desert up in the Columbia Gorge. Upstream. My cousin Mart lives up there near the Hanford Site, and she'd told me about it years ago. "There's tanks out there NOBODY knows what's in them."

We spent three hours upstairs, looking at that stuff, playing in the kid area and seeing some critters (there are Giant Hissing Cockroaches and Red-Kneed Tarantulas on view everywhere you go in Oregon), then stopped in at the Robot exhibit downstairs for another hour.

Cool stuff: actual robots under glass with videos of them working, an industrial robot that you can race against to make designs out of plastic shapes, and an interesting interactive 'flower' garden.
We bought a "jitterbot robot" kit, which is an electric motor, a chunk of foam and a piece of hot-glue-gun glue stick. You're supposed to put wires into the foam to act like 'legs', but there weren't any wires in the bag, so we taped crayons to a plastic cup and set the thing off.

It was pretty late (about 7), when we left, but we got our bikes out of the car and went for a little ride down the riverside bikeway, and down onto one of the docks. That was pretty cool; the bike loop around the river is great, and appears to be an active bike-commute corridor.

Yamhill County Fair

The Yamhill County Fair is pretty small, at least compared to the Sonoma County Fair.

The Good:
The weird animal exhibit. Snakes, a lynx, and a chameleon in a tree. Pretty cool. Everywhere you go in Northern Oregon you'll see two things. A red-kneed Mexican tarantula, and a giant hissing cockroach. They had five or six different tarantulas, though, which was cool. Very thorough.
The chickens. We always like the chickens.
Lots of horses competing in the arena.

The Bad:
There was a small display of award-winning vegetables. Outside, unattended, on blue paper trays was a selection of shriveled vegetables. Of the five winners in 12 categories, there were maybe three families represented.

The weird:
The Sherriffs had a trailer set up with a meth exhibit, showing all the household cleansers, solvents and decongestants that go into making meth at home. It was like a little how-to on cooking speed. "Build your own meth lab!"

Carnivals are just a rip. $4.75 to run up and down some ladders and slide down a slide. Max enjoyed it, though.

Maybe the focus was the rodeo, which we missed.

Oregon Food: Berries

Mmm...

Blueberries for $1.99 a pint. Weeks of them. In Santa Rosa, blueberries are $4.99 per 1/2 pint. The produce guy at Harvest Fresh said "even in season?" Dude, there IS no blueberry season in Sonoma.

Strawberries like I haven't tasted in 14 years. Strawberries that rival Swanton Road strawberries. Our friend dropped off a basket of strawberries that had lost their gloss, but with such intense flavor that I ate them all. They were like syrup.

Blackberries.
Fresh* blackberry sauce on vanilla ice cream.

I like fruit in theory, but in practice I usually don't eat much. I think I eat so many berries because there's no commitment. I can open the fridge and say "I'll just have three." Three pints!


* 8 minutes old.

Longer Days

When we moved here in April, we noticed that the days were a lot longer. We noticed it, and other people commented on it, too. "The days are longer here. Boy, it's like summer!" Noticeably longer days. The funny thing is, that in early April the difference was only 14 minutes; 7 on each end.
Santa Rosa Portland

By the Summer Solstice, though, the days (well, THAT day) are 50 minutes longer. Twenty-five minutes in the morning, 25 in the evening.

It's 'cause we're closer to the pole. On HWY 18 at near Otis, there's a road sign that says "45 degrees north; halfway between the North Pole and the Equator". Well that's just cool.

Santa Rosa is at 38.440N, and McMinnville's at 45.19611N.