Forest Park

Today we went on a hike in Portland's Forest Park. It was a pretty cool place. There were moss and ferns everywhere, which made for beautiful scenery in every direction. Forest Park is just over 5,150 wooded acres and is the largest, forested natural area within city limits in the United States. Although the most of the trail we went on was only open to people and dogs, other sections are open to bicyclists and people on horseback.

The trees in the park were very tall and straight. I did a lot of looking up.

Much of the ground was carpeted in ivy which also grew up trees, choking out just about everything. Poor other trees.

One pretty neat thing is that many of the trees had ferns growing off of them. There were even some large stumps with ferns growing off of their tops, which to me looked like stumps with afros.

The only troublesome part of the hike was that many sections of the trail were very muddy and required artful crossing. We all managed to survive the hike without falling though....one lady we passed on the trail wasn't so lucky, her front side was covered in mud. We did not laugh at her.

Beverly Cleary Walk

Peter, Kathy & I went on a long walk on Monday, over 7 miles! The walk took us on a tour of the neighborhood where children's author Beverly Cleary grew up and based most of her books on. We also walked by the high school where the music teacher, which the film Mr. Holland's Opus is based on, taught. Thankfully there was no rain the whole time, what luck.

This house had nothing to do with Beverly Cleary, it was just crazy. Talk about going overboard on the statuaries and lawn ornaments.


Here is a cool sculpture we found along our walk. It's worth enlarging this picture to get a good look at all of the different objects used to create this three-headed goat creature.
Here's my only Beverly Cleary related picture: Ramona's in the center, Ribsy, the dog, on the right, and Henry Huggins on the left.

Bowling

I went bowling with Stacie & George last weekend. I am really bad at bowling. I got like 40 points the first game and in the 20's the second game. I missed all of the pins a lot.

My Snowman

These are pictures of my snowman that I made in December. I meant to post these awhile ago but just never got around to it. He started out with just a face but then I added the half-lime hat and peter gave him a nice lantern (even though the heat wasn't exactly good for him).

The final touch was a nice orange scarf.
In the morning though...he did not look so good anymore.
Later that day he lost his nose and his hat. It was all very traumatic for him.
By the end of the day all that was left were his snowman parts. Sorry the picture is positioned the wrong way.