Greatest show on earth

The views from the house were mesmerizing.  The weather was different everyday and combined with the tides and all the rock formations, it was the greatest show on earth.

Walking in Yachats

Besides the fabulous views of crashing waves, one of the things I liked best about where we stayed is all the places we could walk from the house.   Along the way the wild plants were amazing and many of the houses were fun.

Lots of Jupiter's Beard already in bloom

Salal in bloom.

Isn't this a fun fence?

Spanish lavendar in bloom.  It looks much happier than the clump I killed...

Red hot poker must also do very well in Yachats.

Rugosa roses along the coast

This house is too funny.  The whole side is glass and each room looks like a sitting room with two chairs.  John said he would put manikins in all the chairs so you couldn't tell where the real people were.

This room has red chairs so they are easier to see in the photo.

The Oregon Coast

We stayed in a fabulous place on the coast.  It was not a place for beach lovers or children.  More posts will be coming but I had to share one video of our view from inside the house.

When I say ugly, this is what I mean

I know the people who live near it are unhappy.  Who can blame them?  Their space and light have been intruded on.  There was no parking allowance made for this building either.  And that is also taking its toll on the neighborhood.  I think the building is really inappropriate for its site.

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And here is another one.  No yard.  Light taken away from neighbors.  And so very ugly.

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It used to look like this before they put up those monstrosities on its site.  You can see that it had a yard and trees and fit with the neighborhood.  They divided the lot and put up two houses on hormones.  I think there should be a rule: a new house cannot be more than 10% larger than the average size of a house in that immediate neighborhood (excluding outliers).   And what happened to valuing trees and green space!

Some time ago (a year?) we went for a walk in this neighborhood, which is south of Division.  It's my favorite kind of neighborhood with modest comfortable old houses from the first half of the 20th century... lots of styles and fun things to see.  There were these new houses on hormones stuck in the middle of this neighborhood of much smaller homes.  Those new houses were so out of place, dwarfing their existing neighbors.  It was so evidently richer people taking over the neighborhood of poorer people.  Not improving it.  Just taking it over.

There were signs up from some developer who was snatching up properties.   I wanted to deface those signs and tear them down.  And an old institutional building had been torn down and replaced with those awful houses that looked like they belonged in the suburbs (if you read the article, the developer intended that).  I meant to blog about walking in another great  Portland neighborhood but I was so horrified by what I saw that I didn't take a single photo.   Nor did I blog about it.  Butit left a hole in my heart.

So please, if you are thinking of moving to Portland, don't.  It's a bad time.  We are suffering terrible homelessness, not enough housing, sky high rents and real estate prices, unbridled growth, lots of gang violence and shootings, and conflict on the streets amongst bicycles, cars and pedestrians.     I'm with Tom McCall.... come and visit but don't move here.   More people are making our problems much worse.

More garden

The fairy garden is coming along.  

John's favorite reading spot.

Walking in the park

One of my favorite things about where we live is all the places we can walk and that the walks are very pleasant.    We run most of our errands on foot.  It's amazing what we can walk to in a mile or so.  In a mile and a half, the world is our oyster.  Many of our destinations take us through Laurelhurst Park.  It's a wonderful park with lots going on.  Today there were dog walkers,  runners, picnickers, sun bathers, hula hoop practicing and that is just the things I remember.

Our errand today was buying coffee at Stumptown.  It was John's second errand walk.  He went to the library and the grocery store earlier in the day.

I think this is my favorite azalea because it smells so good.  It gets too large for our yard though.

We had quite a rain the night before and there was some flooding in the park.

This little guy was fascinated by the ducks.