Entries from January 2009 ↓

Or possibly: Green for Fort Beer

Take your meaning however you find most appropriate at time of reading. Most probably your fortune is being told right here, right now, in the picture below.

Pic: A co-worker pulled out an impromptu free-style game of scrabble at work today while I was reading the paper. This obviously calls for the creation of a Serendipity category around here. Cheers!

Now, off to find my neti pot since it sounds like you folks on the internets have some kind of cold/sinus infection and now my nasal passages are having a hypochondriacical reaction to it.

(Note: Updated for correct spelling of Neil Gaiman and the correct award, whoops!)

This is very fun — I’m taking a snapshot here in case this disappears in a bit — but I was just informed that Couch is currently third on Powell’s bestseller list (updated hourly) — behind Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but ahead of – good lord, and it just won a Caldecott Newberry – Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

This is likely a result of being a part of Powell’s incredibly awesome Indiespensable program along with Tinkers author Paul Harding.

Go Couch!

We’ve been surviving pretty well for a couple of years with a small, fuel-efficient car for the four of us but if, for example, I was at work and Laura wanted to head to the store, it was getting harder and harder to lever a couple of small surly kids into a bike trailer without some sort of resulting bloodbath.

For about — oh, 4.2 seconds we thought about buying another car — but who are we kidding? This is Portland and we really, really don’t want another car, for a number of reasons. That’s when we found out about Xtracycles.

So this Sunday we got our nerve up and went and bought ourselves an Xtracycle Radish and jerry-rigged another seat onto it. It’s a real beauty. I very much want to see a Mad Max remake with just these type of bikes.

Because of its long wheelbase it’s such a smooth, cadillac of a ride.

via PDX Writer Daily and Reading Local. Eulogy here. Very sad, a really great book store.

I remember seeing, among others, Jim Harrison read there — his book of poetry Letters to Yesenin was very influential on me at a time I needed it. 

23rd Ave Books will be missed.

Obvious conspiracies were being hatched here:

The racket they made was unbelievable.
Whereas the next pond over was completely empty:

Is this something I should know about? I find that with a season of very odd weather and climate change, I’m spending a lot more time looking for signs. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure it would be such a great thing to be forewarned about the apocalypse.

Also, along the lines of  apocalypse-thwarting news, happy inauguration day!