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- A tumblr site dedicated to the people and places that make up Oregon and Southwest Washington.
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annak's comments:
on Foot Traffic
As a long-term (30+ years) Portland pedestrian, I observe that if I cross a street with a person walking a dog, and maybe a parent with a child, you are more likely to get cars to stop.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on Making Economics from Lemonade
Second comment: I live in NW Portland and found a young girl, with her mother sitting behind her, selling lemonade on the hot August evening. I bought some; it might not have been the best but I had to support and admire the girl for wanting to do it and the mother for supporting her.
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on Making Economics from Lemonade
I had a lemonade stand with my sister and two friends. I realized even then, and now looking back, that if my mother had not stopped her work and gone to the store to buy more frozen lemonade, we wouldn't have finished the day. And if one of the girls hadn't promised her aunt to attend church with her, we wouldn't have sold as much. So behind most kids' endeavors are indulgent, helpful adults.
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on The Bard in Oregon
I took several classes in college in Shakespeare but I never understood the language and its careful use until I took an acting class here in Portland. The teacher was so good at pointing out the meter and the pronunciation, the use of rhyming to end a scene, the addition of another "foot" to signal a thought or change of idea. It was fascinating. Everyone should have a real actor teach them Shakespeare at least once.
posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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on Family Time
I lost all of my close family in the last two years and I have kept busy volunteering. I was very grateful to several extended family and friends for inviting me to spend Christmas with them but I had already signed up to help on Transition Project's Christmas dinner. Next year, I may do something different; this year I feel good about helping others in some small way as the best present I could give myself and in the spirit of my family.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Bottling It Up in Cascade Locks
I don't want to keep people from getting jobs but I have seen a documentary about water rights where Nestle did the same thing to a small town in Wisconsin or Michigan. In just a year or so, Nestle's endless sucking of the water left the residents without water for their own use. The Nestle plant had the security of an army base. Then they up and left, with the town poorer than it was before. Why can't some company in Oregon sell the water? Why can't it be bottled in some "green" bottle that decomposes in the landfills? And as the water gets more expensive and people can't afford to use plastic bottled water, where is Nestle going to be and what happens to Cascade Locks?
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on As We Are: Illiteracy
Someone told me once that people who cannot read have honed other skills, such as observing people closely, using various strategies to find out what they need to know to do a job or get around. They are VERY brave. We should remember that for most of history, very few people could read and they used these skills of observation. People used to have to remember lots of poetry, stories, Bible verses and church services -- think of how their brains worked that are so different from our word-information drenched society. They had the focus we often lack.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Society's History
Regarding the racisim behind interning the Japanese, yes, an uncle of mine, ordinarily a great hearted person, asked me what would I do in the same situation.
One of the strangest things was that J. Edgar Hoover was against interning Japanese whereas California justice Earl Warren was for it.
And regarding the status of the Germans during World War II, I think of the story of the great American singer Marian Anderson while on a concert tour in Texas or Oklahoma was forced at the train station to eat a sandwich in the broiling sun while German prisoners of war got to go inside the cool train station. Racism is never far away from the American experience in one form or another. (on the other hand, my uncle, whose name was Adolf, was checked out by the FBI; he was safe: he was Norwegian.
posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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on Society's History
After many years of thinking about it, I finally signed up as a volunteer with the Oregon Historical Society in the library. Although some family deaths have kept me away from volunteering recently, I would go back in a second. The staff is dedicated and helpful, the area is calming in a wretchedly distracted world. It gives me and others a sense of "this too will pass" because, from the history of Oregon and the whole Northwest, we know booms and busts will take place again and again and people survived. We should have a sense from the history that they did survive and we should work to smooth out the bumps and make us a more stable, eager, open society. Why are Oregonians and Washingtonians so little interested in the history of their area? I don't know that I know the answer.
posted 4 years, 2 months ago
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on Soccer City, USA?
posted 4 years, 2 months ago
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