Since the move, I’ve been having neck pains. I was trying to wait for our Oregon insurance to kick in before trying to find a chiropractor here. But Sunday night, things got much, much worse. I am working on day three of severe pain. I saw a chiropractor on Monday that didn’t seem to do…

We had a housewarming party last night to break in our new place in Portland. I went all out and made ice cream, beehive honey cake, meatballs, and pizza from “scratch” and we had spaghetti, salad, brie, wine, grapes, strawberries and lots of laughs. It felt so great to have a house full of people,…

As I was chowing down on breakfast today, I was looking through my fantastic Portland Nursery Vegetable Garden Guide. It mentioned something about a garden journal and I realized I should probably start documenting what I’m doing. I’m new at this and I’m sure I have many painful lessons to learn. So here goes, here’s…

I take breakfast very seriously. Leaving San Francisco meant leaving the Pork Store Cafe. This fact alone made it hard to move. So it was important that we find a breakfast place on par with the Pork Store as soon as possible, to make our transition easier. We found it in Fuller’s at NW 9th…

This bee house was made from: new, clean paint can (found at Lowe’s in the paint section). 1″ flexible hose Natural Bamboo Fiber (from JoAnn’s) Small piece of screen Clear Caulking I drilled a 1″ hole in the top of the can for the hose. I inserted a 14″ piece of hose into the hole…

I ran across a website called Portland Pie-off, illness oh yeah, discount you heard me right. And they had this video on their website, which I liked a lot, because I like pie, and I like that my president likes pie.

I looked for a recipe yesterday that included some of the things currently in my fridge. I have a beautiful head of napa cabbage that I used for homemade pot stickers last week and I didn’t want it to go to waste. I searched for napa cabbage and apples and found this great recipe on…

Apple 79 was yet another Jonagold from the $1 bin at Limbo on 39th and Holgate. I really don’t remember what I was doing when I ate it. I remember I was sitting at our kitchen nook, i remember we were doing something, maybe writing a list? I really should walk over to Whole Foods…

As of Friday evening, I’ve been getting back into projects and trying to get my studio set up. I cleared a path to my easel, but then gave into my urges of making native bee houses. Spring is here and I don’t want to miss out of the bumble bees coming out of hibernation. I…

Good news from Berkeley. Parks are focusing on attracting more bees by planting more bee friendly flowers. The City Council is poised to transform all the city’s parks and open spaces into habitats for bees. If the council approves the resolution, all future landscaping would be “pollinator-friendly” flowering native plants intended to attract bees, bats,…

On his way to work today, Tom spied this free kitchen cabinet around the corner from our house. As soon as I got his message, I rushed over in our car and heaved it into the back (all by myself! It was heavy). It will be perfect as a surface for doing my encaustics and…

We were regulars at quite a few Haight Ashbury restaurants. When I came up to Portland to find us a new home, the right neighborhood was just as important as the house. I found our house in Westmoreland, just down the street from the Sellwood district. It seemed to have everything we needed to keep…

I’ve been trolling freecycle for free garden stuff. We have pretty bare front, side and back porches and I’d like to do some container planting. Today I scored a few terra cotta pots. Yesterday I scored a bunch of iris bulbs that someone had thinned from their yard. They will be great in a little…

One of the deals with our move was that Tom would use his amex points to get me a Kitchenaide. It’s one of those things that I’ve dreamed about having since I was a kid. I’m sure it’s a pretty common dream for anyone who loves to cook. We didn’t have a kitchen big enough…