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.

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.

Finley top; Bohlman bottom; 1901

Several of the barrels I picked up second hand have busted bung staves. Darn it! When I topped up the wine in them they would weep wine around the wood with the hole in it. I called up Grochau and he had a few which I picked up. These ones are in much better shape. My pump kit has slowly took form. As you can see in the photo, I have a surge dampener clamped on to the output. That’s the tall stainless tube. I’m testing the flow rate with my dinky little air compressor. 81 pounds per minute, as measured by the scale.

Lindsey has informed me that her Cherry tree was cut through with rot and had curled back upon itself in an attempt to heal. This curl is called the maiden wood, or the maiden branch. It’s the maiden something.

Then I was off to lunch. I wandered towards Picnic’s old location, at 10th and Washington. It’s been nostalgic for me now that Todd has moved Ole Latte there. From Addie’s I got a bacon jam and apple sandwich on a Little t baguette. The seating is not so good downtown, especially since Randy Leonard smacked down on the unlicensed structures, thus making Addie’s wonderfull little porch an illegal seating area! I remembered the cantilevered grate attatched to 808 Grinds and walked down there to eat. To my great surprise, on my old corner, was my favorite street musician singing away to the accompanyment of his keyboard and drum machine! I felt lifted with joy! This is why I love Portland, moments like these.

Now, my mission at the lot was actually to find GW and ask him to spread the word about a project I’m trying to see if I can make work. I would also be interested in feedback from readers of this site to let me know their moral opinions about it. I’m wondering if I can get the bottle collectors, the ones with the shopping carts, to collect used bottles for my wine. I am determinied to bottle all my wine in reused bottles. I have done this ever since I started making wine 7 years ago. In the past the amounts I needed were small, 100 bottles or so per year. Last year I needed 350 bottles. So in those quantities it was easy just saving what I drank and having a few friends who saved for me as well. But in October I will need 3000 bottles! As I’ve mentioned before, me and Jen were collecting the bottles ourselves with increasing success as we gained some knowledge of the right places to look. The idea came to me one day last summer when a guy with a shopping cart full of cans asked me if I had any work he could do for me, such as rake leaves. I asked him if he could collect wine bottles of a Burgundy shape and I would pay him twice the going rate of a beer bottle. He didn’t seem very interested but he took my card and I asked him to think about it. A few days later his wife April calls me very excited and says she can collect thousands for me. They come by later that day with a shopping cart full of wine bottles, about 50 if I remember correctly. April is surprisingly responsive, showing me bottles she has suspected were not usefull. Champagne, apple cider style bottles with a crown cap, riesling bottles. These are all not usable by me, yet I surprise her by saying that I do not care about the color. After this display of eagerness on Aprils part I never hear from her again. Currently I am collecting all my bottles myself, but I am pursuing collaborations with these bottle collectors.

Updated: 02-28-2013-1003

First of all, I find it amazing that the above string of numbers can identify, from a span of 10,000 years, a moment in time to within a minute!

OK, I realize I didn’t end the story. I did meet GW. He passed in front of me while I was eating my sandwich. He looked, I thought, a little worse for the wear since I last saw him, perhaps 3 months ago. He’s pretty old to be living on the streets, he’s in his 50′s. But I asked him if he could ask around and see if anyone was interested in this idea of mine. He said he could collect a lot for me, but I tried to talk him out of that. I wanted him to get me a connection with some people who collect bottles as a daily routine. I had brought along a bottle of my 2011 pinot, with wine, to give to show him the size. I wanted also to show him an example of a wine bottle that I cannot use for rebottling purposes. Some regions in France and elsewhere require all the licensed DOC wineries of that district to use a common sized branded bottle, which is of course copyrighted. I didn’t have a bottle of this type at my house, nor did I have a bottle at the winery, as I throw these ones away or don’t collect them. Before lunch I walked to Vinopolis and bought a Chateuneuf du Pape to show to GW as an example of a branded bottle that is nonetheless in the Burgundy shape. After we had chatted for a bit and he seemed eager to go I said he should keep the bottle of my wine. He initially demurred, but I insisted. Then he said that perhaps he should take the Chateuneuf instead, assuming it to be less expensive then my wine. That was charming and made me happy, but of course my wine for me is very cheap and Chateuneuf is not.

We went to a local place in Brooklyn called Romans. Elena got a plate of meatballs in tomato sauce and I had a braised dandelion salad with poached eggs, anchovy, and salty crouton bits. Also we went to Del Posto, which I was excited about. We split a pork ragu with shaved Perigord truffles on top. I don’t eat French truffles very much at all and was very interested to compare them to the Oregon black truffles. The aroma is strong and pungent, however the flavor was more subdued and less perfumed, with notes of soil and compost. I think the best Oregon truffles could certainly stand up, but the size of the truffle our waiter was shaving was enormous! It was much larger then a testicle. Overall the restaurant is definitely more about the ambiance and the fawning service. The waiter described practically every single ingredient in every dish! The food is surprisingly simple, although totally delicious.

I visited the September 11th memorial. What a crazy scene. I was expecting a park, a feeling of contemplation, reflection. How naive of me. Nowhere is our new Orwellian world made more clear then at the 9/11 memorial. The park is ringed with construction, razor wire, an intense police presence, and literally *thousands* of security cameras. Often every 10 feet. I was told to get a ticket. Ok. Where does one get a ticket? From the man who checks if you have a ticket. So I got my free ticket from the same guy checking if other people had tickets, and then passed into the security screening room, which looks like a TSA checkpoint at the Bagdad airport. Dozens of armed police, X-ray machines, more video cameras. I thought I was just going to a park! I asked one official, “what’s the security for?” He responded, “haven’t you heard what happened here?” Ok. Sure. I wonder how long access to this park will be screened this way? Anyway, once inside its pretty intense. The pools are truly monumental and beautiful in a very morbid way. The water drains into central depressions which are just deep enough that from the ground one cannot see the bottom, creating a sense of infinite depth. I wandered around, gazed up at the 1776 foot tall freedom tower still under construction. All around the park is construction, and we are hemmed in by the razor wire and the hundreds of police officers standing around watching for terrorists.

Today I’m flying to Minneapolis to visit my grandmother and cousins.

A few years ago Carye Bye from Red Bat Press made me labels for my 2009 Utopia vineyard wine. They came out great and I was henceforth determined to do letter pressed labels on my future commercial production. I do have a penchant for doing things myself and lo and behold the IPRC recently moved to a warehouse just 3 blocks away from my winery! So awesome! For those of you who don’t know the Independent Publishing Resource Center is a quasi public workshop providing binding, printing, scanning, screen printing and related tools. Martha’s book was typeset there. They also have classes. So I took a class, letter pressing 101. I’m on my way to making my own labels!