action figures sold separately

but first, just an apology to any of you who may be trying to view or link to specfic archive pages. the archive republishing at blogger is not functioning, and i’ve not gotten any word back from support (in like 13 days or so…). we are working on it and will try to resolve it soon. in the meantime…

• i wouldn’t normally link to a for-profit business site just for a recommendation, but in portland, there’s a few sources for the good stuff you need when setting up house like mirador (where we found good canning and storage jars and chatted the propriatirx up about the various qualities of different brands of garlic peeling tubes) and endura wood products (specializing in recycled and sustainable wood for just about any project. Christopher, the super skilled super friendly brit, whose shop in back of endura sometimes does jobs for their customers, helped us build a frame-and-slat thing to keep the girls from pawing the window in the mud room.
• i didn’t know that david duchovny was a big animal lover, but apparently he did paintings for this group i’m interested in checking out, farm sanctuary.
• our pal trevor is in palestine again, and soon we’ll be linking to more of his writings
• billy bragg and the blokes were just amazing the other night (thursday) here in portland. after negotiating our way through roseland’s unannounced and very hardcore security (almost couldn’t bring in our bike stuff, see they let women in with purses, but men can have nothing, fully wak) we got a couple of brews and watched black 47 warm up. the hour and a half of rollicking billy was so great, with newer stuff and totally inspired re-interpretations of the old stuff. some updated lyrics, cool new riffs and tempos, and of course his poignant or hilarious banter between songs. i’d always wanted to see him, and it was so worth it.
• the portland off-leash dog meeting we went to was not as contentious as it could have been, but there were a couple of detractors on hand, who just need to get over themselves. looking forward the the next C-SPOT meeting, that’s citizens for safe parks with off-leash territory. will update more on the whole portland off-leash stuff here later.

still in the throes of moving (packing boxes, giving stuff away, saying goodbye…), but here’s a few taxday links to get ya rolling for A20:

• Robert Jensen on our buying the carnage of Palestinians
• the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
• support the soldiers refusing
• Middle East Children’s Alliance
• Anti-Zionist Jews: Time to dissociate from Israel
• and lots more on our links pages

on “public” radio tonight, Symphony Shorts had William Hurt reading a good short story. reminded me of how he is really just my favorite ever.

among the very cool super excellent things happening in portland, which we are discovering in the process of moving here, are a few of the places we’ve spent dead presidents in the last week:

• Citybikes worker owned cooperative (on Ankeny at 7th and also 19th, whose website must be down??)
• the expanding and wonderful People’s Food Store (on SE 21st, whose teleport, um make that earthlink site is also down)
• the recently opened Alberta Co-op Grocery (on NE Alberta, of all places)
• the super grassroots Comunity Cycling Center, also on NE Alberta.
• La Cruda, which for a gringo-operated mexican restaurant has really good food, and the menu is very veggie and vegan-friendly and contrary to the one bad review at that site, the service we had there today was great. [edit — la cruda is no more, now you’ll find there the lovely if slightly full of itself savoy tavern and bistro]
• even though the archives are not working perfectly, see the other places we’ve recently blogged about in portland. that’s an incentive for me to get the archives working right. grr.

anyhow, i’ts most exciting to be moving up now to puddletown, and we’ve tested out 3 of the 5 official off-leash dog parks and they are all pretty good. perhaps a more full report on that after we’ve fully settled in and tried them all. woof!