The Multnomah Villager

So we were down in Rancho Mirage over spring break, laying out in the sun and spending some time in Joshua Tree National Park, were I used to go over spring break with the Outdoor Program at PSU back in the day. One morning we’re grabbing breakfast in the bar at the Westin Mission Hills Resort when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something familiar.

“Hey!” I said, “that kid over there has got a Multnomah Village shirt on!”

Sure enough he did, and we talked to his mom for a while. It’s pretty much “old home week” for Oregon and Washington people in southern California during spring break, and this year, we were yet another in the long line of Subarus headed down and up I5 for a little of the sunny stuff.

Phil sent me this email…

Hi - I’m a Villager also and regular play in and around the village on my acoustic gypsy jazz guitar, especially in summer when the weather’s good. Is it possible to post that my group “Gypsy Jazz West” now has a monthly gig upstairs at the Lucky Lab in the village every LAST MONDAY of the month from 7-10pm. All acoustic Gypsy Jazz group, with guest musicians, from guitars, to violins to clarinets, etc…playing the music of Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club of France.
Our next gig is Monday March 31st.

Sounds cool to me. I’m definitely a supporter of jazz events, or any music really, in the Village.

Hopefully, you all got a chance to get out and walk “the circuit” on Wednesday night. A serious impro9vement over the bitter cold of last year, after braving the crowds up in the Village earlier in the evening, Jr V took us out on his trick-or-treating route.

He was dressed as “Ash Ketchum“, who’s the main character in the Pokemon cartoon series. His costume had been a hit among Pokemon fans at the MaplewoodHalloween parade earlier in the day, and sure enough - we hadn’t gone far before he was getting some knowing thumbs-up from kids and adults like who are familiar with the characters. In particular, there were a group of sixth graders up on Canby Street who paid particular attention to him, which impressed Jr. V a great deal. So thanks David, and your friends, for being cool and letting a first grader tag along on your trick-or-treat route. He was pretty excited to be hanging out with the big kids and you guys really helped make this Halloween night a great one.

What’s this you ask? Well, of course it’s a clumsily stitched panorama of last weekend’s Maplewood Picnic! (click it - it gets bigger) We all headed over to Maplewood Elementary for the big neighborhood shindig, put on by the Maplewood Neighborhood Association. Even though this is not a school event, it’s held on the grounds of the school and quite a few of Jr. V’s friends were there.

We didn’t go to this event last year - I can’t figure out why not, but we certainly won’t miss it next year. They really put on the dog. The hot dog, that is. As well as free popcorn, ice cream, coffee, soda water, iced tea and cupcakes! We donated a few bucks after grabbing like our 200th thing of popcorn. As you can see, there were several tents set up - all the free food was along the blacktop, above, and the community booths were out along the ball field. At some point the police showed up with a paddywagon (do they still call them that?) and all the kids piled into the back to be locked in for a bit. I vividly remember when I was a kid, walking home from school, our route took us past the police station, and of we were really lucky - we could talk them into putting us in a jail cell for a while. Some fascinations are timeless I guess. {Insert Lindsey Lohan joke here.}

The new playground is up and in full effect! It was literally crawling with kids the whole time.

Another view of the great new playground.

Did I mention there was live music, and a raffle? Lots of fun was had, and despite threatening clouds, it never rained. We’ll definitely go again next year. Thanks Maplewood NA!

There was a bit of a geek summit a Journeys last night, when talk of wi-fi router configuration between Brian and myself attracted some other bar-goers, who turned out to be blog readers and recent commenters. Yes, it was K2 (of Zella.org) and Lame-o Bike Commuter (of Sustainthis. org). Turns out we work not far from each other. K2 whipped out her….. Linux phone from China, and there was much oohing and aahing, plus discussion of kids, the best routes over Terwilliger and how many years ago any of us were anything cloe to TJ’s age. Nice to meet you both, hopefully we’ll see each other again, and yes one of those times will be on a bike.

So, it turns out that when I said I’d be going up to Journeys LATE on Friday, what I meant what that I’d be getting there right about 5PM. So the weather was so incredible yesterday that all of us at my office decided we pretty much needed to close at 4PM and get out of there. So I found myself home a little before 5. Like any good long-time Oregonian faced with the first warm day of the year (note, this can mean any day above 50 degrees), I popped home and tossed on a pair of shorts, a “Hawaiian” shirt and headed up the hill to Journeys. Yeah, I know I said I’d go up there later - but the family’s plan kept changing up until the last minute so I had to fit a beer in early.

Journeys is small. This makes it the kind of place that is going to encourage you to converse with your fellow bar goers, since it’s certainly an intimate experience and it will get full fast. There’s two rooms - the front room with the bar and seating for 6-8 people at small tables, and then a small back room which is the sort of place I prefer to hang out and hold court. This back room was filled with bright sunlight on this day, and I’ll have to pop back there after dark to see what it feels like at night. This room will eventually be filled with travel guidebooks for the perusal of the guests. I’m looking forward to this. Here’s a crappy camera phone picture of the back room:

I’ll have to pop in with a real camera and take some picks of the main bar which is nice. They have all kinds of foreign coins embedded in the tile surface of the bar (who knew that Aruba had square coins?) and after a few of the other early stoppers-in took off, I relocated from the back to the corner bar-chair, which may become a favorite haunt since it allows for good people-watching, conversation surfing and a birds-eye view of traffic passing by on Capitol. I was talking to Bob, the co-owner about the “lawn chair service” that they had going on yesterday and how it’d be a good idea to install stadium lawn chair seating for the Multnomah Days parade. That’d be a great place from which to watch the parade - we’ll see if he goes through with it - of so, save me a seat!At some point I fell into a conversation with the people next to me, who recently moved to Portland from Denver. She is an ex-dentist and asked me if I lived in the neighborhood. I said yeah, I’ve been here a while, I like it, in fact I write a website focused on this area. At which point the ex-dentist (whose name is Kristin, but I have no idea how she spells it, and I’m somewhat fascinated by the idea of someone being a young ex-dentist, can you tell?) so anyway she exclaims, “You mean you’re The Villager?!” I said yeah, I’m the guy, and Kristin says, “Your website is one of the reasons we moved to this neighborhood!”. Cool!And it gets more amusing than that - since she’s from a little town called Sudbury Mass, which no one has heard of unless they, like me used to hang out at Victory Cigar on Boston Post Road in Sudbury when I was in Boston on such a regular basis that I became a regular there.

And it’s conversational moments like that, that are going to make Journeys a cool place to hang out.

4PM-11PM. Closed Tuesdays.

Oregonian film critic, Village resident and friend of this ‘blog Shawn Levy addressed the City Club of Portland last night. The subject of his talk was “Portland as a Film City” and if you missed it on OPB Radio, you can grab an MP3 of the talk via the City Club’s website, or by downloading from this link Portland as a Film City, Shawn Levy (MP3, 15MB). Do my bandwidth a favor and right-click and save this file, instead of streaming it…

I get the impression that Shawn’s no too fond of the new Eddie Murphy movie?

At our annual Christmas Eve open house this year, we were trading stories with our across-the-street neighbors when the subject of this website came up. The phrase “So! It’s You!” was used. Well, here is where the tables turn. Here’s a link to the Multnomah Village section of my neighbor’s blog featuring a couple nice image galleries of life in the Village over the last couple of years. We’re just blogging fools down this side of the street, aren’t we?

Oh man, I’ve been seeing this headline all day, but I just found out that the police officer who was injured last night is our former neighborhood officer Scott Westerman! He’s pretty banged up…. So say a prayer or light a candle or do whatever you do to send your best wishes Scott’s way… Man I don’t know what to say about this - he’s a great guy - sometimes you forget that police officers put it all on the line every day.

Here’s a link to the article on KGW.com

And here’s a link to my post about the police officers reception in October - a post that’s getting some search engine action right now, I notice.

Jack Bog’s Blog has also got a post about this - news travels fast when we get around to reading it…

Our new neighbors own what I suspect is the World’s Largest Dog. Welcome to the neighborhood! If you should see the World’s Largest Dog walking about the village (he’s a St. Bernard) his name is Jefferson.