Recommended videos

I like to watch videos while I hand quilt.  Here are three I really liked.  I watched them on Amazon Prime, but I am sure they are available other places as well.

Like Sunday, Like Rain

The End of the Tour

Paper Planes

I would bet you money on this

Here is an example of a lovely old home that WAS not too far away.  It stood about a hundred years before this wave of unbridled growth and greedy developers knocked it down and put up two houses on hormones. They are over sized and fill up the lot.  No room for vegetation and trees except a little square of lawn for the dog to poop.  And I would bet money that the new houses with their shoddy materials and construction, won't last 50 years.  What a shame.

This got demolished and replaced

With two of these.

Notice the crappy wood used for the stairs.  Bet they will be replacing those stairs within ten years.  The greedy developer is Vic Remmers, who is doing a lot of this.   I read he owns 141 properties in Portland.  I wonder how many will be demolished.

The house that was torn down was not in bad repair.  It needed some paint and a face lift.  Here is the listing for the old house, which is still on Zillow, but a little wrong.  It has some old facts and some new facts.

 The original house sold for $600,00.  One of the new houses sold for $938,000 and one sold for $927,000, which totals to $1,865,000 in sales and is  $1,265,000 more than what they paid for the house they knocked down .  My research says that it costs a builder around $300,000 to build one of these houses.  The likely gross profit to the developer/builder (after paying for materials and worker bees) is therefore well over half a million dollars.  Yes, developers are making a killing here at our expense.

Portland city government used to value trees and green spaces.  Now they will let builders and developers destroy anything and build anything no matter how ugly.  They say we have to squeeze in to make way for the mongol hordes.  But I can't see how building giant single family homes helps us in any way.

Here is the lovely new landscaping (aka a place for the dog to poop).

And here is the new deck.  I bet it won't last very long in our weather.  Looks like really cheap wood.  It is my experience that when even the visible materials are poor, the hidden materials are even worse.

Here is a house in Portland with its trees cut down in preparation for demolition.  Many of the houses they are demolishing are very nice houses.  Nicer than the replacements.  Nobody wins except the greedy developers.

source

So this is why I beg you not to move to Portland.  We don't have room for you without destroying our lovely city.  You won't like it anyway when all the good bits have been destroyed.

Neighborhood Walks

John spotted these windows which protrude from the wall for no reason except they look good.

Close up of window.

Poppies!!

These poppies seeded themselves here.  It was a fortunate occurrence.   I can't take credit for planting them but at least I was smart enough to leave them where they decided to be.

Finished Wanda's Quilt

I mentioned a while ago that I was quilting a quilt I bought from my friend Wanda.  Well, I finished it!  I am sort of sad about that because I really liked doing it.

Early garden season

The garden is early this year.  The roses are already at peak and this hot spell will speed their season along.  We already have some day lilies.  We may even get bee balm flowers within a few days and that is very early.

This is the garden on the alley side.

This portulaca is new to me.  It is very red.  The portulaca should like this heat.

Early hot spell is upon us

The heat is on.  Another weather record is about to be broken they say.   Ninety-ish today followed by two days of around 100.  We watered and put up parasols to protect the most delicate plants from the searing sun.   

I bought the parasols at Amazon.  This is the third season for most of them.  I used to tie the parasol handles to pieces of rebar.  That worked but it was tedious to assemble/disassemble.  This year John cut bamboo sections so that the rebar can fit in one end and the parasol can fit in the other end.  The bamboo is cut so that the node (the closed part) is in the center of the bamboo section.  It works great.  Another successful rinky dink project!