I’m going to get this part of my rant, right out of the way. I know Merritt Paulson meant well when he bought the Timbers and the Beavers in 2007. I know that he wants very much to be the guy that brings relevance to other sports not called basketball to Portland. I get that. Problem is, he misplayed his hand locally in trying to balance both teams playing at PGE Park downtown.
And so, in the end, (at least from my citizen’s view) he was left to scramble on where to stick the Beavers since it was clear the Timbers would play at PGE Park exclusively. Worst of all, the time was running out and no solutions could be made on where the Beavers would play. And so, traditions that were established, kids who actually emulate some of these guys, and all of the fun of being in a mid size ball park in the middle of Portland were all thrown out.
As a baseball fan, I will admit that a Beaver’s game is NOT MLB. But it IS a fun time with all the trimmings of a big league game. Good food, great intimate ball park, and the 7th inning stretch. The seats are affordable and it’s a great way to spend an afternoon. My son and I started to go to games over the last 3 years and it’s become a quasi family tradition now. Thanks to Merritt and his business partners, these traditions for THOUSANDS of Portland families are now being shipped to Lake Elsinore, California (??!!) for the 2011 season.
So Merritt, thanks. Thanks a lot. It’s tough to understand how Portland couldn’t accommodate both teams but we’ll never know how now. So with that, I’ll give you the final 7th inning stretch we’ll experience in Portland for a LONG time. Good show dude, you suck.
In the past, I’ve been not so good about taking time for myself and my family in the Summer. Sure, I’ll take a couple of days here and there but this Summer I decided to do it a bit differently and took 10-12 days to just check out of work and life. It was a great decision because I think I’ve been outdoors almost 90% of the time on this break and overall have spent a large percentage of my time outdoors this Summer. Doesn’t hurt that the weather has been incredible.
On the coast
What a view
My son and I have done a lot of hiking this summer. We’ve been out to the Clackamas River twice together (I’ve been another 3 times solo), we’ve gone to Forest Park inside of Portland and we’ve gone to the coast to hike the Ecola State Park trail. I get a lot of satisfaction from hiking and from getting out to places that are incredibly silent. I prefer the sounds of the environment over any other. It keeps me calm and balanced. But I really enjoy sharing the outdoors with my kid. It’s very satisfying to see that he is developing a fondness for being outdoors. And for me, there is nothing that can take the place of being outdoors amongst the elements.
Lookit!
Forrest Park
So to that end, I’m glad that this Summer was different thus far in taking larger time out to hike and to share it with the kid. He’s got the passion now and is always up for an adventure whenever I ask. Considering where we live, I think that is very important. Oregon has hundreds of destinations and many of them are around Portland and it’s a crime to not take advantage of them. It seems that so many people who do live here do just that, never taking advantage of the parks we have. Even the ones within the city. I don’t get that but I look the other way and make sure that I take advantage of all of it and more. Next Summer, I’m going to plan a longer hiking season with a camping trip thrown in for balance on the hike. Planning starts……..now.
While I was blissfully hiking over this past weekend, the music world and more specifically, the world of drummers lost a truly gifted player named Richie Hayward.
If you’re in the know, then you know he was/is/forevershallbe the indomitable rhythmic spirit of the great Little Feat. If you’re not in the know, I suggest you rush out and get any of the first 6 Little Feat discs and more specifically Waiting for Columbus which is truly one of THE greatest live records EVER recorded. The man was seriously one of the funkiest humans that ever picked up sticks. He WAS the swamp in their swing.
I feel honored to have met him at NAMM in 1994. He was gracious, humble and warm having not known me or having any idea why I was talking with him (I was trying to get an endorsement with Remo heads and he was there at the same time). He will be missed but thankfully we have TONS of his music on disc and on video. To wit, enjoy this killer clip from 1976 doing “Fat Man in the Bathtub”.
So, I don’t pretend to be an expert hiker. But, I do enjoy it a great deal. I’ve invested in some decent gear, and I love to get outside and just go. I’ve been sharing it with my son and I also enjoy hiking solo.
Recently my son and I hiked a portion of the 8 mile Fish Creek Trail on the Clackamas River about 10 miles east of Estacada, Oregon. It is a truly gorgeous place as some of these videos can attest to on the water. Today, I decided to do the full 8 mile loop and it was righteous. I needed to get away from town and just commune with the quiet of the forest and the river. 16 miles in Chaco sandals was quite an experience but it worked.
I’m thankful that I live in such a gorgeous state where all one needs to do is drive 30 minutes in any direction to find tranquility. Drive another hour and you are in the sticks! This trail is halfway between both.
To see the full collection of shots I took today you can click to my Flickr page or watch these videos.
The videos are fun. It was 100+ degrees on this day and I jumped in the river twice! The 3rd one was captured in a rather perilous spot standing knee deep in a strong current. Almost fell in while capturing .
My band Dull Boy Jack played at our good friends SwellPath’s last big 1st Thursday gathering for Summer 2010. We had the pleasure of playing it last summer and had a great time doing so.
Last year we took a more calculated approach playing specific set lengths and trying to keep it like one of our normal shows but this year was way different and I think that had a lot to do with the crowd. There were SO many people out on the streets it was incredible. We had crowds gather here and there during the first 2 sets but by the time we started the 3rd set…either the booze had set in for the people or they were interested in hearing some music because we had an awesome 3rd set.
Drums and setlist
JT's weapons
We started off with some good blues tunes and by the time we got to “Hoochie Koochie Man” we had quite a crowd lined up. Playing 1st Thursday reminds me of Mardis Gras since there is a constant stream of people walking by and it’s rather festive. This gathering is not too much different except that there’s less drunk people and open displays of skin (which when you’re on stage can be quite interesting, but that’s another post….). We had a big crowd hanging out after that song and also sold some CD’s and even had some gig offers from doing what we do. It was pretty cool. Especially because gigging with the trio is something we haven’t done a lot of in 2010.
JT is ready!
JT's rig
I will say that this gig fired us up and has us re-calibrating what to do in 2011. We have 2 records out for sale and a 3rd that we need to finish. I think now the focus is how many shows do we want to do a year and where do we want to play? These 1st Thursday gigs are awesome though because of the format. We’ll see what this does for our planning.
This past weekend (July 31st) some good friends from work and I competed in the annual Portland Trailblazers Street Jam 3+3 tournament. Our company (CMD Agency) sponsored us and even had jersey’s made for us (we called ourselves ‘RUN CMD’) and overall we had a great time. I learned a lot from competing in this tourney as well. Here then, is some of what I learned….
Number 1: Playing basketball at the local LA Fitness, and playing street ball are as different as speaking German and Spanish. The 4 of us (Gerardo, Chris, Jack and myself) had been hooping at LA Fitness near the office, every week since May of 2009. Not to get prepared for this tournament, oh no..that came organically out of the thin air. We play because we like it and it’s a great way to stay in shape. We also play with some other LA Fitness members and by and large, our games are friendly. They get intense sure, but nobody fouls aggressively or makes dirty plays. Boy, fouling….was that an eye opener at the Street Jam. We got mugged in the 3 games we played. By the time we were playing our last elimination game on Sunday morning (8/1/2010) we were giving it back too. But in the end we got out street balled by the competition. We just weren’t seasoned at street ball enough.
Number 2: Playing in the “Under 6′” category doesn’t mean anything. In fact, I could have played with Latvian midgets and the refs wouldn’t have called anything. We played a team that had 2 dudes who were at LEAST 6’2″. I’m sorry, but that’s just not a fair playing field. Why bother having categories? And yes, it did make a difference. In the end, their height advantage was evident on the boards. And it still pisses me off. Was their height advantage a game breaker in the end? Probably not. We COULD have hustled more, played more scrappy but it was really tough to overcome that jumping disadvantage. All of us are 5’11″ and we plain old got “out thugged” by the height and constant jersey grabbing. But that’s for another point…..
Number 3: …..Which is, hey Portland Trailblazers Street Jam 3+3 tournament referees….WHAT THE HELL IS A FOUL ANYWAY? Ok let me get this straight…I stand straight up, jump in the air with the shooter, make contact because HE jumped into me and I am guilty of fouling? But then on the next possession, my teammate (Gerardo) goes strong to the hoop, gets hit mid air on the ball and arm and get’s sent crashing to the blacktop, but that’s called a block? C’mon. What rule book are you people calling the game from? And by the way, while we’re on it, why didn’t the 2 refs in ANY game we competed in ever talk to one another when they disagreed on a call? Who’s call was right in the end anyway?
Catching a breather
Number 4: Regardless of all these frustrations, it was still a LOT of fun to compete in this tournament. Personally it was VERY satisfying to do it and be a part of my team. I looked around a lot and I think I might have been one of the older players in the competition and I take great pride in that. I mean, I’m not an NBA player but I do hustle and am giving it my all. I am a HUGE NBA fan and basketball means a great deal to me. That I can still actively compete at this age is a big deal and I will play as long as I can given the physical limitations that my body imposes on me as time goes by. I do know this, if we’re all still at CMD next year, we’re going to enter this competition again but we’re going to get our thug on and knock some heads.
The competition draws blues bands from all over the western United States and is usually the best time to catch hot West Coast blues bands doing their thing with the winner travelling to Memphis, Tennessee to play one night with other top blues acts from around the country. It’s kind of a grind, 9 bands in a night. Everyone uses the same back line (drums, amps, etc) and each act gets only 10 minutes to set up.
We went on in the early part of the first night and did a yeoman’s job in my humble opinion (I had to deal with a monster 8 piece drum kit, a big deal considering I play a 4 piece kit). We did a 5 song set showcasing some of our more rocking stuff. This clip is our last song from the set, a medley of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Pride and Joy” (done DBJ style) and “Love Rocket” from our second record “Sweet Sassy”.
Thanks to Chrissy Van Osdol for capturing it on vid for us.
As I struggled with my WordPress instance bombing on me the other day, it occurred to me that I was unaware how dependent I had become to having such a tool manage my website. Once I realized the extent of the issue I was having, I even resorted to uploading my old static website to my server while I figured out the problem. I quickly realized when re-deploying my old website how much of an effort it used to be to maintain it and update it with no current CMS modularity that I have come to enjoy using WP. Then I realized (as if this weren’t enough to think about) that I have 2 “bloggy” sites…one on Posterous and this website you are reading.
So of course, this made me debate why I have a website altogether. It used to be for showcasing my projects and my web based offerings but I left that side of my career behind eons ago. These days I have moved more to the planning/strategy side of the street and so therefore, by design I guess, my website needs are best quantified by what I have to say. Sigh…so THEN, I read through a lot of my posts to investigate if I felt I had something interesting to say. I determined that though I am not providing expert analysis or other kinds of genius through this website I AM having fun and so therefore, WORDPRESS IT IS!
Going forward I plan to be more active in using it too.
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