One hundred-plus degrees. Both Saturday and Sunday.

We got through the weekend. Before that, we got through the week. Sometimes it was a challenge. Last week I often felt (say it with me) off; I tried when I could to take it easy and be gentle with myself. I seemed to be getting enough sleep; I don't think that was my issue. But from the week's start, I felt off. I chose the later of two days Mom had suggested for her visit to see me, because I didn't feel up for having company last Monday, for instance. (We visited Thursday. And last night Mom and Dad stopped by briefly on their way back from a family gathering here in town.) Wednesday, as I sometimes do, I paid the Belmont Goats a visit. Took pictures. Here are my most recent shots. Visiting the goats can help. So did spending several hours Friday at Beulahland, then riding around for a while (up to Lloyd Center Mall for a change of venue) because one of the servers at Beulah passed along an all-day TriMet bus pass someone no longer needed. I didn't have to be limited to my usual 2 1/2-hour bus pass!

Having survived the week, I then survived a hot weekend: 100° on Saturday and 101° on Sunday. Hydration, hats and shade were my frequent companions those days. I still got out; I didn't want to be a shut-in. On Saturday I got over to Beaverton, visited a handful of friends, and went with one of them to a Hillsboro screening of Wonder Woman. My second screening; my friend's first. She was mixed on the film; I still liked it a lot. I appreciate the film's earnestness, which is never undercut by its humor, thank goodness. I'm so glad this film exists, and is doing so well. (FYI: I have no interest in the fifth live-action Transformers film. None.) Friends,crankily, and s good film over the weekend. Good.

Welcome to this week.

Luckily I was awake enough this morning to see, in the bathroom sink, a spider.

I wasn't surprised by it — well, not too surprised by it — and made sure I didn't drown it: I turned on the water less strongly than normal, so as not to splash it. My hands clean, I opened the bathroom window, gave the spider my fuller attention, helped it get out of the sink, found where it then hid under the counter, got it onto a piece of toilet paper, and let it go out of the window.

Leaving the spider for another of the house residents to find would've been cruel and wrong.

I'm sure the spider was happier, and I certainly was. That was this morning.

Another highlight of the day involved no spiders at all (other than the many spiders who are always close to us, whether we're inside or outside): Mom drove into Portland to visit. We went to coffee (Rain or Shine Coffeehouse at SE 60th and Division), walked on Mt. Tabor — yes, a full-fledged extinct volcano in SE Portland, and that is cool — and the further indulgence of fast food and a cone at the nearby Dairy Queen, before Mom drove me back to where I live. We went on to other things today.

Did the spider go on to find flies to eat? I hope so!

"Juneuary." It describes how Portland often is wet and cool in early June. Juneuary is really in progress today.

We've had a lot of days like this in 2017. A lot. Portland broke a record for rain and snow over this past fall and winter. From October 1st, 2016 to April 30th, 2017, nearly 150 of those 212 days had measurable precipitation.

Yeah, it's gotten a little old. Today's not as cold as some days: we got above 60°, barely (it's 62 right now), but drizzle, drizzle, drizzle.

Wednesday afternoon — I'm glad I got outside in it — we were about 71, with sun. I soaked up some of it. If I were flying today, I could get above the clouds and maybe soak up more. Except airplane windows are small and let in relatively little light. (Isn't there an airplane design that would have windows in the ceiling? Hmm...) But, as I sometimes do have to tell myself, there will be more sunlight. There will be more warmth. Maybe before July.

In my 17th year (whoa) of living in Portland, I've noticed more and more a reaction of mine:

I wonder what parts of Portland were like in the 1980s. I saw certain, circumscribed parts of the city back then, a decade where I grew more aware of the wider world; I saw the areas my family members lived in or visited. I started to fall in love with the view from the top deck of the Fremont Bridge, heading into downtown; I remember how it looked before the new U.S. Bank building, a.k.a. "Big Pink" (really), was built in 1985 on downtown's north end. (Until then, very few tall buildings were in the north part of downtown. That's changed.) But I have a deeply incomplete image of Portland from then; and relatively few films or shows were being made in town, either, so we have little documentation of the town that way. (Old films are never a complete record of a city anyway, even in a place like New York where so many films and TV shows are shot.)

I have photos, somewhere, of what I saw: Grandpa Irv was a photographer already, I was becoming one, so those show a slice of Portland back then, but, still, just a slice, just a bit.

Memory can change those views, too. I simply don't remember all of the places I walked past or rode in cars past; I wasn't the one navigating or driving so I didn't need to know. Thinking "Okay, we had a picnic in a park" almost certainly won't help me figure out which park. I've likely often gone to or past places Eighties-Me already saw, and didn't know it, in the 17 (again, whoa) years I've been a resident.

So it's a small gift when I can tell, or at least feel, that some area still feels very Eighties. In 2009, I deliberately saw the film Watchmen at the Roseway Theater, since its neighborhood still has what feels like its Eighties look (Watchmen takes place in an alternate version of 1985, so this seemed apt). Each street I've lived on probably hasn't changed much in its look since not just the Eighties, but from even earlier; houses from the Forties, Thirties, and Twenties are along all of those roads, and many have kept their basic outside looks since being built.

Portland is in the midst of what feels like an overwhelming building boom (seemingly almost all expensive apartments argh), so I find some relief in seeing how people remember older Portland. I live near a community center with all sorts of photos of the neighborhood from past decades. That neighborhood had a streetcar line running down Foster Rd. then turning south on SE 72nd, near where I now live, with the curve onto SE Woodstock Blvd. where the track headed farther east. Also, Portland is one of those cities that too often mark places by what used to be there, which is kind of an unhelpful habit. "Yeah, that was once the Sandwich Depot, back four restaurants ago, before Tarboush and before Big-Ass Sandwiches. Now it's Big's Chicken." (We just hit the one-year anniversary of Big-Ass Sandwiches closing. I miss that place.) Seriously, sometimes we come close to saying "Turn left where the laundromat got torn down." (That's Busy Bee Cleaners, which used to be just south of SE Foster and Powell. Fr'ex.)

At some level, I'm sensing that a place obviously has history, but I don't know the details of it. And I'm craving the details. Is it my length of time here? Is it the redevelopment boom? A little of both, I'm guessing. There. It's noted.

It hit me (ow) that when someone I know asked me today "What did you do this weekend?," I didn't have that much of an answer. It was a weekend that felt like a lot happened, and a lot did, but most of what happened mostly didn't happen to me. So. I decided to list what did happen.

I'll start with Friday, which was a nice and comfortable day. I bussed downtown, visited Powell's, ran into my friend Mike Russell in Powell's southeast lobby, then found and bought a relatively rare, and very good and fun, Star Trek novel, John M. Ford's 1987 book How Much for Just the Planet? I'd seen the book on the shelf on a previous visit, and I felt lucky that it was still there, when I could buy it. As I had cash on me, I also went to the Alder St. food cart pod and revisited a cart I liked to go to when I worked near there in 2014-15, Huong's. I got fried rice with chicken and some shrimp, some of which I ate downtown (in Director Park) and the rest which I took home.

While I was on my way home, a few miles away from me, the attack happened. The attack that led to Saturday's memorial. And Portland's mood jolted, as people in town and people around the world tried to process that that could have happened.

Saturday, I dressed nicely, like for a weekday at an office job. That afternoon, I headed to the memorial at Hollywood Transit Center. I was part of the mass of people, there as a sign of support for the victims and survivors. I felt I should be as presentable as possible, even in as informal a city as Portland. After I'd attended, I walked for the rest of the night: down Sandy (running into another friend, Andrew Hill, who was headed to the memorial), over to Beulahland at NE 28th and Couch to eat and regroup, then home. Yes, a walk. It's a long walk, but doable: takes an hour-and-a-quarter at highest walking speed and a little longer if, like me on Saturday night, I was walking slower. I slept OK that night.

Sunday, another nice day like Friday and Saturday had been, I hung out for the midday in the coffee shop near where I live, listening to a podcast (on headphones, I'm not a jerk) and having coffee and a muffin. After a library visit, and that evening once I was home, I watched the first of the two film adaptations of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I'm pacing myself; I haven't watched Part Two yet. I wasn't surprised that I wibbled a bit during Deathly Hallows Part One; those stories can hit me emotionally.

And then there was Monday, which went differently than I'd planned because when I boarded a bus, my TriMet bus driver converted my ticket (usually a 2 1/2-hour ticket) into an all-day ticket. LET'S USE THAT. As first planned, I headed down to the Belmont Goats and hung out, putting goats and reading, for a bit; but then, instead of heading to the store as I'd first figured, I went up to the Max and rode trains up to PDX. As I've said before, I'm someone who sometimes visits airports just to visit them. I spent a few hours there, watching people come and go, editing photos I'd taken of the goats, and looking out at the planes. Shopping happened at the Gateway Fred Meyer, since I had to get off of the Max there to change lanes anyway. Then home, then night. Then, now.

So. Things did happen. Still, feels like more did.

This is not about Memorial Day, even though I'm posting it on Memorial Day and it's about a memorial.

On Friday on Portland's Green Line Max, a man murdered two men because they tried to stop him verbally assaulting two young women. You've heard. I considered digging up a link to coverage of the killings, but I decided I didn't want to.

The verbal assault, the attempt to deescalate the assault, and the murders all happened on Friday, as the Max train where it all took place pulled into Hollywood Transit Center in NE Portland. About 26 hours later — after the deaths, after the arrest of the attacker — people held a memorial at the transit center. I joined.

TriMet and the Portland Police closed the center to buses, which let people off near the center instead, so that as many people could fit in as possible. Hundreds of people. Maybe over a thousand. They stood in the transit center's grassy knoll, on the roads around the grass, on the steps and the ramp up to the bridge to the Max platform. Lots of people. Lots of sad, angry, hurt people, wanting to do something, even if it was simply to be there as a show of support.

------


Portland is hurting. We're trying to regroup.

I do not want to say much more; I fear that I risk making this somehow about me, when it's not. I'll end with this: it is good I went. It is good so many Portlanders went, and have left memorials to those we've lost, to others who've been hurt.

And I, and we, have a lot to think about.

Getting to Portland Meadows at 5 in the morning for my work as an extra was involved. Too early for buses, I wasn't going to drive, I wouldn't be able to get a ride there, paying for a taxi (which I didn't even think of possibly doing) would cut into my earnings for the day, and I've yet to use Uber or Lyft. So I got permission from my friends Ryan and Kristen to sleep at their home, closer to Portland Meadows.

And I walked.

A four-mile walk, but that was more manageable than what would've been a 10-mile walk from the house where I live.

Yes, I was willing to walk that walk. Took about an hour and 15 minutes, from a little after 3:30 to 4:45. I was careful around traffic.

If I'd gotten called back for Wednesday work, and it had been an early call again, I had a different plan for getting there. I would've come home, showered, gotten some sleep, awakened late at night, ride late buses to North Portland, and stage myself at the 24-hour Heavenly Donuts on N. Lombard, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and reading until it was time to walk up to the track. Which is a mile-and-a-half walk.

In many case, walking works. Eventually. (I kind of like knowing that if absolute push came to absolute shove and for some reason I needed to get from Portland to my parents' Dundee home, it's 30 miles, a doable one-day walk. But I'd most likely have to do that if civilization collapsed, which I hope it doesn't...)

On Tuesday, I was "moving furniture." I mean, I was an extra.

I got to be one of the dozens (sometimes hundreds, occasionally thousands) of people you see in the background of a movie or TV show. I've done it before, but unpaid and in a small crowd for a Portlandia sketch. This time was for the TNT fantasy-adventure show The Librarians, which is shooting its fourth season. On Monday a friend who works on Portland film and TV projects asked people via Facebook to apply as an extra if they were available this week. I was. I confirmed that in this case (though not usually), a selfie to show what I look like to the company that casts extras would be enough, I emailed those selfies, and got notice to show up at the Portland Meadows horse racing track.

At 5:18 a.m. Tuesday.

I made it (thanks, Ryan and Kristen, for letting me crash on your North Portland home's futon Monday night!) and joined well over a hundred people who'd pretend to be patrons of a Colorado horse racing track. (Portland doubles for worldwide locations on the show, which is also set here.)

I got signed out and finished the day at 8:20 p.m. Subtract an hour for lunch, and that's 14 hours. I already knew, thanks to friends who've done this, that shooting days are long. I had snacks, water and a book.

Being an extra, I heard a fellow extra say, is like being in a jury pool, except you're far more likely to be used as an extra. A production just needs people; the producers and assistants figure out as they go how to use them. You're herded around based on the needs of the shots. Assistants make quick, snap decisions of how to use people, pointing to you or your group and saying Go here and do this. Certain extras get makeup if they're going to be featured prominently. Others get clothes from the show's wardrobe. I was there in my own clothes, with one extra shirt in my backpack in case they needed me to look different. (They didn't, but I'm amused by the thought that I could've wound up being two different people on this show.)

Most of the time, you wait. "Extras Holding" at this location was part of the Portland Meadows stands, with a cart with pub-grub snacks nearby, as were restrooms. (I made what almost was a huge mistake by leaving my paperwork, i.e. THE WAY I'D GET PAID, on top of a restroom dispenser; luckily I had time to go back and find it before this became a problem).

The stuff I got to do (in other words, where I'm most likely to show up in the completed episode):

• Pretend to be watching the finish of a horse race from an outside patio. For the needs of the scene, where a fight takes place between several people including Rebecca Romijn's main character Eve Baird, we were told to ignore the fight and focus on the race — in other words, we needed not to watch what was really happening and pretend to watch something that wasn't (the horse racing wasn't filmed at the same time). Moviemaking magic! (TV-making magic in this case, but that's not the term that's used.)

• React to that same fight from the interior stands, because that particular camera angle would show the stands and it would've looked weird if they were empty.

• Cheer a horse — which was literally a production assistant running on the track, because the horses were resting a well-deserved rest from the other running they did today, and weren't needed for the shot.

• Watch real horses really race; the shot's focus is on the horses, but having people in the foreground adds to the verisimilitude.

• Walk past Romijn and Christian Kane (an Angel/Leverage veteran who plays main character Jacob Stone) as they find out a key part of the plot. I was one of three men chosen to do this. "Our asses will be famous!" one of us joked.

(We did this quietly, because the focus needs to be on the main characters and what they learn. If I'd gone rogue and said something, to another extra or to Romijn and Kane, I probably would've been fired on the spot. EXTRAS DO NOT DO THIS. Unless they're getting paid to do it, which means they were hired in a different process by different people. There are tiers and protocols to all of this, and I made sure to respect that. Not the place to try to show my (non-existent) improv skills.)

Sometimes I was holding a prop betting ticket and a prop cup, with some water in it, to avoid that thing you see in so many shows where there's clearly nothing in someone's cup. Other people were holding clear glasses with fake beer, wine, or Scotch-and-ice in them; some extras played servers carrying platters of fake drinks, with plastic tinted to look like fluid. Less damage if they're dropped! No spills!

Amidst all this was lunch, from 12:30 to 1:30. Productions feed you welllll. (At least they should; if they don't, something's wrong.)

There was so much activity. I'd go into a room under the stands to get snacks and see stunt people practicing a fight they'd film later. I had conversations with fellow extras while we were either just standing around between shots or standing in the far background of a shot, needing to look like we're talking. I was in a queue of people waiting for one scene, and what sounded like a fight was happening in the next room, a landing at the top of stairs, but I couldn't be sure because the action was taking place around a corner. The many TVs in the stands were showing footage especially edited or shot for this episode: stock footage of horse races, fake ads for race track meal specials, the casino-owner character appearing in a house ad next to a busty, red-dressed and red-hatted brunette blowing a kiss.

I need to make sure I say nothing that even approaches being a spoiler, and what we shot is so out-of-context for people who were there for just the day that it'd be a fool's errand to try and reconstruct the plot from what I saw (plus The Librarians is a fantasy show whose ad slogan is "Because Magic," so the possibilities of what could be happening are even wider than they'd be on, say, SVU), but here are some details I feel safe adding: the episode's main guest actor is Richard Kind, from Spin City, Gotham, Inside Out and the 1994 film StarGate. (Made by Dean Devlin, The Librarians's main producer.) The director was Eriq La Salle, who was Dr. Peter Benton on ER, was also in 1988's Coming to America, and recently was a welcome presence in the film Logan. I hadn't known he also directed, but he's done a lot of that for TV, such as for Dick Wolf's shows.

There's still a weird disconnect when I see people I've mainly seen in films or on TV standing right there, but I made sure a) to be cool and b) not to ogle. The actors and filmmakers are doing a weird job, but it's still a job. Yes, they're often attractive; I'm reminded of how a writer once called actors and models "the professionally good-looking." (Nicely, a lot of the extras were striking, attractive people, too.) It's also their job to say what are often very hard-to-deliver lines, make it sound natural, and sell to the audience what's happening. I know I am not an actor; there are subtleties to the craft I can appreciate but not emulate. Everyone in the main cast of almost anything we watch has been working for years or even decades, and that earns my respect.

In the last scene we shot, during the 7 o'clock hour, I reacted to a particular race's finish. A man standing behind and above me, one of the people the shot focuses on, says a key line; two of the main characters pass him and say lines in sardonic reaction to that line. Out of context, it feels nicely like the sort of happy ending Leverage, which was made by a lot of the same people as The Librarians, used to do. I got to react in — again, I'm trying not to spoil anything — a happy way, hugging and high-fiving the people near me. Many times; we did many takes. And then finally the director said "Cut" for the last time that day, and thanked all of us. We were done.

I wonder if the day went longer than planned, in order to finish at the location. Earlier in the day the extras company emailed us to say we might be needed Wednesday for one last scene, and just in case, I planned for how to get back to Portland Meadows if needed. I wasn't called back for this. I got home late, ate a little bit, then crashed and slept the sleep of the dead. I was wiped.

I have no idea when this Librarians episode will air, but will let you all know when it does. There's no guarantee I'll be visible, since editors might choose shots I was never in (or might say "Who's that distracting extra acting badly? Cut him out of the shot!"), but if I am, you'll see me in black pants, black hard shoes, my dark-grey paisley shirt, and my black hat. I'll show no pictures, either; we weren't allowed to take them.

It was a long day, but it was honestly fun. I'd like to do that again. Heck, I wish I'd done it for Leverage, which I really like, or Grimm, which is fun and clever, but hey, now I know I can do it, and there are chances to do so.

Friday was another long-walk day, with me leaving downtown by a route I often took back when I worked at OHSU. I walked the sidewalk of the Ross Island Bridge; I was the only person either walking or bicycling on that sidewalk at that time. (I wonder if the opening of the far more pedestrian- and bicyclist-friendly Tilikum Crossing has cut down on most Ross Island Bridge foot traffic.)

But right before I got to the bridge, a vehicle taking the ramp from the bridge westbound to the I-5 southbound ramp slowed down, drove around the sidewalk island I was about to cross to, and stopped. Pointing the wrong way on an on-ramp; it'd be facing any vehicles needing to turn from SW Kelly (leaving downtown) onto the freeway. The woman on the passenger side unrolled the window, and the man driving leaned over and asked me "Hey, where's the Old Spaghetti Factory?"

Shoot, I froze up. I get worried about steering someone wrong, or confusing them, and the roads at the west end of that bridge are confusing for giving directions. Wanting to be quick, I apologized that I didn't have directions, and just added "It's south of here." The driver, to his credit, moved quickly and got going, and got off of the ramp where he'd been pointed the wrong way, heading north on Kelly.

That's when it dawned on me that until he'd turned to rendezvous with me, the driver had already been pointed the right direction: that I-5 on-ramp also has a lane to get not only to South Waterfront, but to SW Bancroft St., the street that that location of the Old Spaghetti Factory is on. IT ALMOST WOULD HAVE BEEN SIMPLE. Except even if I had realized that while he was stopped, would my telling him "Just go the way you were going!" have gotten him to try and turn around right there, with traffic coming fast off of the bridge and maybe with traffic coming from downtown too? This could have gone badly.

I wish I'd just pointed towards the tall, striking South Waterfront buildings looming beyond the bridge and said "It's on the other side of those." That would've been a better guide.

I'll hope they figured out how to get to where they wanted to go.

While downtown this afternoon, I poked my head into the new section of the longtime Portland video arcade Ground Kontrol. For over a decade it's been located on NW Couch between 5th and 6th Avenues; it will be again, because it's expanded into the former home of the bar/internet café Backspace on 5th. Now that the expanded part is open, the owners have started remodeling the older part, and will link both parts with a hallway.

Look what they did in the new space. LOOK WHAT THEY DID.


As in


Nice.

A quick catch-up on where I've been and what I've been up to:

As time's gone on, my job hunt has continued. Here's some of what else:

Monday was a stay-close-to-home day. Not much to report.

Tuesday, I let myself have Turkish coffee, a very occasional treat. (I usually have it at Nicholas's, a Mediterranean chain here in Portland I've liked for decades; I hadn't been to a Nicholas's in a while.) I had this Turkish coffee at my first visit to Marino Adriatic Café, on Division near 39th Ave./Cesar E. Chavez Blvd. More walking and reading-while-walking, though when I passed through neighborhoods I hadn't been to before I was more likely to put down the book and look around.

Wednesday, I drove to get my friend Riona and go to the Bunk Sandwiches on NE Alberta, which was giving away free grilled cheese sandwiches for Grilled Cheese Day. It was also a fundraiser; we donated to Dollar For Portland, which helps local people who've had massive sudden medical expenses. After donating, we got our sandwiches (chips, too), sat outside, got lightly but not badly rained on, and visited. It had been a while. Plenty to catch up on.

Thursday and Friday, I again went on long walks throughout SE. Thursday I went to the Belmont Library then up to Mt. Tabor, walking near the reservoirs. Friday was errand-focused: groceries plus more TriMet tickets, which currently make more sense for me than a monthly or weekly pass.

This morning, so far, I've stayed put. OK, now I have other things to do than rest...

Closing out with pictures from the west slope of Mt. Tabor, Thursday at about 5:00:

In Portland, drastic measures for drastic traffic

RIGHT HERE IN RIVER CITY — With downtown Portland's Morrison Bridge under major repairs for the next several months and with traffic on the span reduced from six lanes to two, the city has decided to combat congestion and help get cars in and out of downtown by building the city's first trebuchets.

Cars, SUVs, delivery vehicles, recumbent bikes and more can be loaded into the machines and thrown across the Willamette, bypassing bridge traffic and with only birds in the way.


(file photo)

To catch vehicles after they're flung, Portland will install nets in the Reverse Bungee rides that usually come to town for the Rose Festival.


(file photo, too)

East-west traffic will be handled just north of the Hawthorne Bridge, with cars going west-to-east launching from just south of the same bridge.



Yelling "Wooooooo!" will be encouraged.

Tall bikes will not be allowed due to height restrictions.

"This city has actual pirates, so a trebuchet is well within the realm of possibility for Portland," explained Fletcher Ness of Far-Flung Siege Engine Technologies, which is providing equipment. "We hope to relieve traffic with the efficiency of using the air above the Willamette plus the added thrills of Fast and Furious stunts.

"This is the closest most of us will get to flying cars."

Ness added that the system will be tested with two-person Smart Cars, because "those cars are like shot puts."

Sunday afternoon, I walked from the house to downtown. As in "walked the whole way." Up SE 70th to Foster, then zig-zagging from Foster and Powell to about 8th and Belmont, then up to the south sidewalk on the Morrison Bridge, because I wanted to see if it was open (a major bridge repair just started and most though not all of the bridge lanes are closed). Then to Pizza Schmizza for two slices of pizza, then to Pioneer Place to see Logan with friends.

I zig-zagged so I could take as close to a diagonal path as possible plus see some neighborhood blocks I hadn't been on before. I walked in order to save a TriMet ticket; the night before I'd used two when I'd hoped to use one. Yes, to save a bus fare I walked nearly six miles. Sometimes I do this.

I did bus home after the film.

My liberty card was punched, and it took me a little while to realize it. I'd planned out a Thursday night trip to North Portland then Old Town Portland — first to Bridge City Comics to pick up a month's worth of books waiting for me, then to Sequential Art Gallery on NW Broadway to see art by a local comics artist I'm acquainted with. See, for most of the day when you buy a TriMet ticket, it's good for 2 1/2 hours, and I planned my trip around that; it wasn't until I was boarding the bus near Bridge City Comics that I looked at my ticket and saw it was good through the end of the service day. Strictly speaking, I could've jumped on a bus with it until 1:00-ish.

Me being me, I took more time. I do when I can.

Often on First Thursday, a monthly art event in Portland, I go only to Sequential Art, where I know the proprietors. This time, I let myself wander into a couple of other galleries. Plus I hung out at Sequential Art, as I often do; after I'd seen the art I sat outside, read, and people-watched. Gave a heads-up to a woman and a young girl that a guy on a bike was riding towards them on the sidewalk so they'd be less surprised by him.

It can feel like work, me getting into a mindset to look at art. I'm learning, and hoping, to relax more about it: I'm not going to "get" everything, and not every piece will speak to me. It's no one's fault if that happens. (Unless the art is really poorly done.) Plus I had enough on my mind last night — several subjects and issues, not getting into them at the moment — that I could easily distract myself from the artworks. Too easily.

But I got out, and visited people and places, and saw stuff I otherwise wouldn't have seen.

Different scenery. That's what I was craving. So late this morning I let myself walk for four miles: up to Foster Blvd., over to Powell, then down all the way to Milwaukie and Powell at the northern end of my old neighborhood. From there, I bussed — I've ridden TriMet less the past month, since I've been using bus tickets instead of buying the monthly bus pass — over the Ross Island Bridge, and treated myself to lunch at the Lair Hill Bistro. Hadn't been there for years, and hadn't been there even semi-regularly since I stopped working at OHSU which is on Marquam Hill, the hill above Lair Hill. (Bigger hill above a smaller hill. Work with me here.)

I'm glad I went back. Had a poached salmon salad. Also a broccoli and cheese soup, and I generally don't like that soup but this one was good.

After that, I walked and bussed down to the Collaborative Life Sciences Building, where I've hung out before, so I could sit and get online, then before my bus ticket expired I hopped one more bus home.

• A breakfast at Bertie Lou's Café, a Sellwood diner I hadn't been to before but which a friend had recommended. Small, bustling place, and people there were being amusing. I feel I added something to the bustle and noise, as I sat and ate at the counter. (I'd first sat at a two-seat table, but when I heard the owner telling two customers that he didn't have an open table for two I got up and asked "Would it helped if I moved?" Yes, it did. So I did.)

• A drive to get to the diner, then more driving later (after I walked from the diner to the Sellwood branch library and back to the car) since I can always use driving practice.

• A change of scenery, by car: I braved, I mean drove through, downtown (past the Central Library to see where the two sick oak trees formerly in front had been removed), then through the Pearl, up into the Northwest Portland industrial area where I worked in 2012, past the Montgomery Park building, then up Hwy. 30 to the St. Johns Bridge. Scenic! And in and out of sun and rain, since today's weather was variable. I drove around to Columbia Blvd. then NE 42nd, and zigzagged back to where I live.

• Dealt OK, I think, with bad driving, and tried not to cause bad driving either. I've told myself this many times: other people driving carelessly or stupidly should not cause me to lose focus and drive carelessly or stupidly myself. I find myself venting at cases of bad driving I see, but I try once I vent to let it go, and not dwell on it. I know I can dwell. I try not to when behind the wheel.

• A nice, filling dinner back at the house: chicken breast cut up into spaghetti, plus salad and a glass of warm broth for a drink. Hey, this works for me.

Wednesday night, two walkers in SE Portland were struck by cars. Both suffered serious injuries, though last I heard, none of their injuries were life-threatening.

One pedestrian was struck on SE 82nd between Holgate and Foster, sometime before I got back to SE on a bus from North Portland; I'd been hanging out at a signing at Bridge City Comics. That stretch of 82nd was closed. Our bus driver first pulled over at Holgate to get guidance from a dispatcher; best way around?

The route the driver was told to take, it turned out, wasn't the best way. It led to a turn that the driver wouldn't do, because the turn would've been illegal, then led to the bus riding, slowly, down what turned out to be an unimproved street. A bumpy street. Which led to a T-intersection that, from first glance, did not have enough room for the bus to turn — had it turned, it would've hit parked cars.

Here's where we wish a bus could launch vertically. Or that maybe King Kong — no, Mighty Joe Young, he's more helpful — lift up the bus to point it in the right direction.

In one away I was lucky: I didn't have to see the end of this bussing saga (by then, the driver was asking for a supervisor to come to the intersection and guide him when backing out the bus), because the bus had gotten stuck at SE 65th and Schiller, which is a manageable walk from where I live. So I walked. When I've needed to, in this town, I've walked miles at a time.

One of these days I'll manage to walk 10 or more miles in a day.

I hope the bus got out fine. And I hope the walkers who'd been hit will recover quickly.

This morning, for more than a few minutes, in fact for a few hours in one case, I could open windows.

My bedroom window, open for a while. A bathroom window, open briefly (while I showered). Parts of the house, getting outside air that had in it hints of spring. Meaning, I hope, air that's been mainly in the house was able to circulate with air from outside of it.

Portland's having a nice day, finally, is the thing.

Today's car-errand was getting gas, using a 50¢-per-gallon discount I'd earned because today was the last day I could use it (thanks, Kroger gas rewards!). So today gave me a good excuse to do more driving, to stay used to driving. Got up on some freeways: up I-205 to I-84 out to Troutdale before turning around and retracing. Weather was dry and traffic wasn't too nuts.

It's a route I took for a time back in 2004 when I temped out around Gresham: that year I spent some weeks working in two different food processing plants. I phased that out and looked for other work because it turned out to be a 30-mile round-trip drive from my then-apartment in Brooklyn. Bad idea when you're working not much above minimum wage. That fall I got my first hospital job, an easier and bus-friendly commute. That was a good idea.

It was also a good idea to brave I-84 around Troutdale and Gresham. It's a freeway stretch I started to dislike in the late Nineties, when I lived in Hermiston, Oregon and would visit Portland. On the nine miles from Troutdale to the 205/84 interchange, traffic picked up significantly, and so did — it seemed — bad driving. I'd get annoyed and nervous on that stretch. Eventually I started getting off the freeway at Troutdale and using surface roads to get through Portland. But avoidance only gets you so far. Vigilant driving gets you farther. And I did a little of it.

I've lived in Portland since January 2001. I was born here, too, and visited about once a year for my entire youth, and my appreciation of the town has grown over time. (My perception of it is more complex, as is suited for growing up and seeing negatives as well as positives; I'm not blind to Portland's issues.) Also, I get around a lot of it. About quarter to 6:00 tonight, after walking down Hawthorne Blvd., I was waiting for the bus — at a stop about three blocks from where I first lived, back in 2001 and 2002 — before I moved to my apartment in the Brooklyn neighborhood.

Here's that shot, taken at SE 50th and Clay: