Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

For the last week or so, Portland has been in the icy grip of winter come early. It's been snowing pretty much every day: everything from a light sprinkle to a full blizzard with howling 50mph winds over at Troutdale, where cold wind has been roaring down the Columbia River Gorge. When the snow first started, the weather teams on the news were fairly unconcerned. They expected less than an inch of snow in Portland itself and told us that the system would move on soon. Here's Christine out in the light snow of the first day, when it was a fun novelty (as an Australian, I'm easily impressed by snow and still find it fascinating!).

However, it soon became apparent that the cold, snowy weather was going to set in for a longer period of time, and basically, all hell broke loose. As I may have mentioned before, Portland TV news is obsessed with the weather, and any sort of snow storm at all was an excuse for that obsession to become full-blown scare-mongering. You'd think it was the end of the world based on the coverage that a couple of inches of snow is getting. Entire news bulletins have been given over to the weather (Seriously! There was no other news at all, nothing local, national or international!), filled with radar and satellite images, ODOT highway camera shots and a veritable horde of reporters stationed at every potential motoring trouble spot around town. They went to tire shops to report that snow chains had sold out, we were warned to stock up on food in case we couldn't leave the house, they told us that roads were icy and impassable and that we shouldn't leave the house unless our needs were imperative and urgent. In short, a media-hyped "Snowpocalypse" was upon us, and yea verily, Portland trembled in fear.

Christine, having grown up in Idaho Falls – where they can get huge amounts of snow each winter – was incredulous. People interviewed on the news who were from Spokane and Montana were similarly dismissive of Portland's hysterical attitude to a tiny bit of snow. Because faced with the terrifying prospect of 2 to 3 inches of snow, the city basically shut down. Schools closed for the entire week. Businesses told their staff not to come in to work. Churches cancelled services. The roads are almost entirely devoid of traffic.

In a way, the hysteria is somewhat justified, purely because Portland just isn't used to snow. It rarely snows on the floor of the Willamette Valley, and sticking snow is rarer still. Until this last week, I had only seen tiny flurries of sad, wet snow that lasted for 20 minutes or so in Portland, melting almost as soon as it hit the ground. Sustained snow like this is a rare occurence and Portlanders don't know how to deal with it. Multnomah County only has a handful of snow plows and de-icing trucks. Even working around the clock, they can't keep all of Portland's roads clear. People aren't used to driving on snowy or icy streets - many people interviewed on the news have admitted to not knowing how to fit snow chains at all - and accidents then ensue. I've seen something very similar to this when I was in England in January 2004. A light dusting of snow across the south-east of the country basically brought everything to a complete standstill for three days for exactly the same reasons - little or no infrastrucure to deal with it, and a lack of knowledge amongst drivers.

The weather only really got nasty last night, as the snow turned into what is known as freezing rain. This rain freezes instantly upon landing, and covers every surface with thick, crunchy ice. The snow, which had been fresh and fluffy up until then, suddenly had a creme brulee-like crust of ice on top, which broke as you walked upon it. Cars were rimed with thick ice, which has to be broken off before going anywhere.

Here, Christine inspects our car as we attempted to thaw it out this morning. The engine is on with the heater at full blast to defrost the window from the inside - you can see a lighter patch of ice where it is beginning to detach from the windscreen. Then it's a matter of scraping and tapping the ice off the windows until they are clear. The process took us over half an hour; some of the ice on the window was a good 5mm thick!

This is the view as we drove down Interstate Avenue after freeing our car. A good few inches of snow mask the lane markings and the curb, but the All Wheel Drive of the Subaru does an admirable job of making driving in these conditions relatively easy. Certainly not anywhere near as bad as the news would have you believe. One thing to note is that the MAX light rail (the tracks are in the middle of the road above) was not running along the Yellow Line through our neighbourhood today. The points down at the Rose Quarter have frozen solid, making it impossible for trains to come our way! Trains are also not running to the airport for the same reason - not that it matters, as most flights out of PDX have been cancelled. I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge has also been closed due to the blizzard through there last night. This turn of events certainly merits the media's attention, but after having been told that the End of Days is upon us for over a week now, it kind of feels like the boy who cried "wolf!" to me now - if you sensationalise everything, then what do you do when things actually get bad?

Posted in: chaosboy, portland, weather on December 21, 2008 at at 3:36:00 PM 1 comments    

The ad shown above is possibly the most reprehensible piece of television advertising I have ever seen. Whoever thought this concept up should be taken out and force-fed the advertiser's product until they throw up or something.

It looks to me like the ad is trying to play off the success of Borat – simple people from a strange foreign country who are all craving the taste of America. And therein lies the problem - surely there should be places in the world where people just don't eat burgers. It's not part of their culture or their way of life. What right does an American burger conglomerate have to come in and feed them this stuff, even for just an ad? It smacks of arrogant cultural imperialism to me and makes this ad extremely unpalatable.

Note the way that the ad actually says very little that actually backs their claim that "the Whopper Virgins have spoken". There's no "9 out of 10 Inuits tested prefer our burger to the competitors", the ad just says "these individuals prefer the Whopper". So maybe only the three or four people we see actually prefer the Whopper. What if they fed burgers to 400 Thai tribesmen and only one liked it? Ah, weasel words at their very finest.

Finally, the look on some of their faces as they point out the Whopper seems to suggest they'd rather be eating anything else than a burger (Check out the Romanian lady at 19 seconds). However, they're only given the choice between the two burgers in front of them. It's almost like they're being asked "which pile of mud tastes better?" and a victory seems damning with faint praise.

Really, the only way this ad could be worse, be more cultually insensitive, is if they'd decided to take their beef-filled sandwiches to a small village in India and ask them what they thought of it.

Posted in: advertising, chaosboy, united states, weirdness on December 15, 2008 at at 10:24:00 AM 1 comments    

We have wheels!

Although Portland is a great city for biking around and has great public transport options, there are times when you just need a car. Whether it's for a shopping trip, a party in the far reaches of south-east PDX or – most importantly for me – for getting the heck out of of town on weekends. Up until now, we've got by with using Zip/Flex cars for shorter trips and hiring cars/hitching rides for those longer journeys, but these do require some degree of planning and aren't exactly spontaneous methods of transport.

So we started looking around at options for a car of our own. By the strangest of coincidences (or not), Christine's mom was looking to get herself a new car and was more than willing to cut us a good deal on her old Subaru Forester. We just had to come up with the cash in a lump sum, as she rightly said that monthly payments to her would put an unnecessary strain of family friendships. We had around half of the money already, so set out to obtain a loan for the other half.

To cut a long story short, it was an adventure in itself. We found out that while I am on my "interim" 2-year Green Card, I actually don't exist in terms of a credit rating. My rating is ZERO and will not move until I qualify for my full 10-year Green Card. This meant that Christine had to qualify for and take on the responsibility for the loan all by herself - my income could not be added to hers as proof of ability to repay the loan! In the end, we had to take a secured loan where the car itself stands as equity and the interest rate is somewhat horrific. The good news is that Christine will have an awesome credit rating when we finish paying the loan off!

Once the money was secured, we just had to get ourselves to Idaho Falls to pick up our new car. Plane fares the day after Thanksgiving are possibly the cheapest fares of the holiday season, and the planes themselves amongst the emptiest I have travelled on in the US. We spent a couple of happy, lazy days with Keener and Karen (gotta love having a beer in the hot tub out on the deck!) before taking possession of our new wheels and driving back to Portland.

I had made sure to get an Instructional Driving Permit from the DMV before we left, meaning that I can drive so long as a licensed driver is sitting next to me. It's kind of embarrassing to be treated like an "L" driver when I've driven for over 10 years in Australia without a single accident, but them's the rules! This meant we could share the driving on the way home, some 760 miles (1,200km) away. We took two days to drive home, taking the (slightly longer) scenic route rather than racing home along the (very dull) Interstate. Along the way, we stopped off at two of the most amazing places I have ever seen – Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho and the Painted Hills in Central Oregon.

Craters of the Moon is a giant lava field spreading across the Snake River plain, a huge black scar that suddenly appears as you drive along the highway. Within the park, giant cinder cones rise up above the twisted black lava, while underneath your feet lie huge lava tubes – caves left behind as rivers of lava cooled over, forming long tubes. We spent a long time exploring the park, going down into one of the lava tubes, Indian Tunnel. This tube is the only one you can explore without a helmet and a light source, as regular roof collapses have left many "skylights" along the tunnel's 800 foot length. The tube is over 50 feet wide and 30 feet high and is an amazing sight. One day, we will return properly equipped and explore the other tubes, some of which have permanent ice on the cave floor!

The Painted Hills – which we saw on the second day – are part of the John Day Fossil Beds, one of the most important sources of prehistoric mammalian fossils (and their entire ecosystem) in the world. The hills themselves are an ancient riverbed, with layer upon layer of different coloured alluvial soils – and their attendant fossils – now compressed into beautiful folded hills. Much like Uluru in Australia, the hills can change colour completely depending on the light and the forms created by light and shadow are nothing short of amazing.

We were treated with more spectacular sights as we reached the home stretch – the Cascades mountain range spread out before us, high volcanic peaks dotting the horizon from north to south, with Mount Jefferson (below) and Mount Hood being particularly view-worthy as sunset approached.
Finally, we reached home and began our new life with our own transport. Now we just have to get enough cash together to register the car in Oregon, and I have to get around to getting a real driver's license!

Posted in: chaosboy, idaho falls, oregon, photography, travel on at at 8:57:00 AM 0 comments    

The end of year holiday season lasts much longer in America than it does in Australia - it starts at Halloween and continues unabated until New Years. Between candies in October, turkey dinners in November and the festivities of Christmas still to come, I have come to a horrible realisation – I'm gaining weight in an appalling way.

I hadn't weighed myself since I arrived in America, but I knew that when I arrived I was around 80kg (176 pounds). Well, someone thought it would be a good idea – believe it or not – to have a set of scales at a Thanksgiving dinner (why, God, why?). Weighing in for a laugh, I was shocked to discover that I was weighing in at 190 pounds (86kg), which is as big as I have ever been. Last time, I had the benefit of backpacking around Europe, walking 10-20km a day and living on a diet of bread and sausage for six months to help me get back down to a svelte 70kg (154 pounds). This time, however, I'm going to have to do this the hard way.

Even though I ride my bike all over town, it hardly seems to count as exercise anymore. My body has got so used to riding that I barely get puffed even going up the big hill along Interstate Avenue on the way home. With a gym membership out of our price bracket at the moment (not that gyms have ever really worked for me before!), I decided that I would have to start jogging to get a better all-over workout. Christine got me an iPod Nike+ kit cheap through her store, and I set out for my first run. For my first run, I thought I'd start easy and do a 4-mile loop along a cliff-top road near our house. Boy, was I in for a shock.

I could barely run for three minutes at a time without being completely out of breath and getting a really sore back. Walking at a moderately fast pace was okay, but I'm going to need to do more than that to burn some calories. Fortunately, the Nike+ website that links to the device you put in your shoe has a training program that builds you up from a walk to running over a 12 week period. I've been doing it for just over a week now and I'm already feeling a little more capable, although there's still a way to go! I find that the training program is all the incentive I need to get out and do my half-an-hour a day, although the incredible cold snap (temperatures well below freezing from Tuesday through Friday, with a big chance of snow sticking in Portland itself) that Portland is about to go through may tax my resolve over the next few days! Here's to continued exercise and weight loss... kind of like a New Year's Resolution a few weeks early!

Posted in: chaosboy, exercise on December 13, 2008 at at 7:41:00 PM 0 comments