The past week’s glorious weather has permitted me to actually look up and around as I’ve pedaled my bike throughout town. The veil of drizzle was lifted and the sun illuminated some things I hadn’t been paying attention to. Such as:
Yard signs. This may be too much to ask in a town where one still sees Kerry bumper stickers on the backs of Subarus, but the most recent election was held a month ago. It’s OK to take down your Yes on Measures 66 & 67 yard sign. (By the way, we won.)
Perhaps people don’t know how to dispose of them–the campaign has disappeared and won’t take them back. The plastic sign probably isn’t sanctioned for curbside recycling, so it will have to go into the landfill or stuffed in with all the plastic grocery store bags you’ve been meaning to take to a recycling center for the past several months. Or years.
The wire standard upon which the sign was fitted and then stuck into the ground may be able to be repurposed, however. Collect a dozen of these things and use them as wickets in a game of bowling ball croquet.
Gardening. Evidently some people are too busy in their gardens to take down their campaign signs. Yes daffodils are blooming and cherry trees are blossoming, but come folks, it’s February. In another week or so, it will get colder and most certainly, rainier. If you plant veggies now, except for the root kind, they’re going to catch cold and die or at least be stunted. Really, you can wait until the end of May to do most of your planting.
Nevertheless, I am in the market for strawberry starts.
Bicycling. The latest city survey showed a slight drop in the number of people riding bicycles in the past year, but I don’t buy that. Most of the counts are done on the bridges over the Willamette River. The bicycle mavens at City Hall think it’s due to the crappy economy—fewer jobs downtown, so fewer people commuting in all transportation modes. Add to that the fact that most of last year, downtown was a complete mess with the work on the transit mall and other road projects. Driving was impossible, but even biking wasn’t fun in some areas.
Possibly even a bigger factor was the emergence of food cart pods outside of downtown, such as on Southeast 11th Ave. and Hawthorne and on upper Mississippi St. No longer did fresh-air fanatic bikers have to scuttle downtown for a quick lunch.
My own observations indicate an increase in bicycling. This winter has been mild, but even during the rainy days, I’ve seen a lot more people on bikes. What’s really startling is the amount of gray hair poking out from under the bike helmets. Geezer Boomers have inflated the ranks and it’s unnerving to see some of them zip by me as I grunt my way up a hill.
Cars. Any random survey of the inner city will reveal that while Subaru’s are ubiquitous, the official car of the People’s Republic of Portland is the Volvo 240, arguably the best card, dollar for dollar, ever made (full disclosure, I own an ’86 240 wagon, butter yellow). Volvo made the 240 series for 18 years and since they are virtually indestructible, hundreds, if not thousands, are still going strong, even though the last one built was in 1993.
Following is the number of Volvo 240 cars advertised for sale on craigslist during the past week for selected major cities:
Atlanta 8
Chicago 1
Detroit 4
Houston 4
Los Angeles 12
Miami 4
New York 4
Portland 25
San Francisco 25*
Seattle 15
*The entire San Francisco Bay area, which has a population of seven million.
Notice that Volvos are more prevalent in liberal cities, which prompts me to ponder a political conundrum. Liberals advocate for government regulation, gas mileage standards and consumer protection programs to protect people from making bad decisions, and then turn around and buy sensible cars like Toyotas, Hondas and old Volvos on their own. Conservatives decry the “nanny state,” and then buy stupid vehicles such as Hummers and Escalades.
Daylight. I get off work usually around 7 p.m. and these days, it is dark when I ride my bike home. If we were now on daylight davings time, however, my ride would be about at dusk, and thus much more pleasant. I’m not complaining, since we’ll be switching the clocks over soon enough, but while we remain on Pacific standard time, I have to ask: why is it called “standard time?” We now have daylight savings time for more than seven months a year and standard time for less than five months. So shouldn’t the time when more daylight occurs at the end of the day be called standard time? And then when we set the clocks back in the fall, shouldn’t that be titled “daylight deficit time?” Just sayin’.
*The headline is a quote by Albert Einstein on how he came up with his Theory of Relativity.
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