P I C N I C

Picnic has opened! It’s been a great week. Me and Jen have made friends with Pierre and Annebelle at Pulehu Pizza and Jeff at Cameron Books. Also, our old buddy from Green Castle, Elloy, is running his Taco Yucateco cart in the lot. Customers from last year, and even 2 years ago!! have returned for more lunchtime goodness. Meagan Kennedy wrote an amazing piece about the cart complete with some great photos.

Right now it’s Sunday and I’m reading some magazines and cookbooks. Jonathan Waxman has some good ideas for tasty sandwiches: avocado and crab; wilted greens, garlic, and chevre; eggplant, peppers, and pesto. Also my friend Sarah has strongly advised me to look into her favorite sandwich: avocado, salsa, and gruyere.

Yes yes, I am always late. So many repairs to do on this creaky old contraption! But we are now on the home stretch for opening and are getting our menu and suppliers all ironed out. Groundwork Organics, a great farm, has unfortunately decided to stop doing deliveries and concentrate on farmers markets instead. Kookoolan chicken ranch has some veggies and we are getting chickens and eggs from them. Todd Edwards at Olé Latte has started roasting coffee and we will be brewing some of that, alongside Courier Coffee’s excellent beans. So this time it’s for real, and we will be open this coming Monday!

The new lot is great and all the other carts have been super friendly and welcoming. We’re excited to be among such good neighbors, surrounded by tall buildings, in the hustle and bustle of downtown.

Spring is here and the birds are scouting and the squirells are frisky eating buds and chasing down mates. All winter I’ve been wanting to use my fathers Nippon Kongaku 300mm f4.5 lens. I’ve got it paired with a CX format sensor for an effective focal length of 810mm. Pretty good for getting uncropped images of those manic rodents. Now that it’s actually pleasant outside I’m inclined to do some nature photography.

I’m always hearing people talk about how the enormous cat population in urban areas, and Portland in particular, is a tradgedy and a half for the birds (nobody cares about the squirells ). But in my experience hiking around the wilderness in the Cascades, the Wallowas, the Adirondacks, and the Kiso mountains, the density of birds and rodents is much less then in urban areas. Perhaps in the woods they are more skittish of humans? But one can look down upon a canyon and see hardly any movement, whereas in my backyard alone on any given day are a multitude of critters. It didn’t take me more then 5 minutes of sitting around with my cats to spot these guys! The birds are busy eating the spilled cheese puffs of the nursing homo sapiens, the squirrels are collecting trash to bring home and stuff in their burrows for insulation, and the raccoons are being lazy gorging themselves on the compost buffets. That kind of bounty doesn’t exist out in cold harsh nature.

People ask me if I recognize Steve? Are one of these squirrels Steve? I don’t know. But the 2nd and 4th squirrel is a female. And to my eye they could all be the same squirrel. I really cannot tell them apart.

Finley went on many camping expeditions to get his bird photos. I love looking at the self portraits they took and how they set up their site and cooking equipment. Theres an article on him over at wikipedia, and they have one of his bird photos there.