The new ‘hood

January 28, 2018

Our timeline for leaving our condo is firming up fast. We're aiming to get it on the market by early March, which is really approaching quickly. Things are occurring so rapidly that it feels like we're living in the eye of a hurricane. It's exhilarating, stressful, and a bit exhausting. In the last few days, we've met with the realtor, the stager (I didn't even know these were a thing - they furnish and arrange your property for sale so it will present to the best affect), the painter, and the carpet layer. Also, we've continued to strip down our belongings, donating or tossing things that we don't intend to put into storage. Our place is starting to look pretty bare - not all that much is left besides the furniture, actually. Yesterday a chunk went to my sister Elizabeth, who lives in the same building. She's taking in a few belongings that she generously offered to fit into her décor for the next five or ten years, until we settle down again somewhere.

I’m glad Elizabeth found a place for this on her shelves. We bought it and had it shipped home from a small pottery shop outside of Rocamadour on a bike tour about twenty years ago.

This Bukhara is the first carpet we bought when we moved in. I’m glad it just fits in Elizabeth’s hall also.

Also, we leased a small (5'x6') storage unit a few blocks away, and scheduled the furniture move. This Thursday (four days from now), we'll move nearly all of the furniture out. We'll put what we can into storage, but most of it will go to Goodwill or some other charity. That will give us just another three days to clean out everything else - ourselves included - before the painter arrives on Monday.

So where are we going? Here:

Looks like a friendly-enough place. I like seeing the Black Lives Matter sign in the yard.

We'll be staying for the next month at Stacey's Placey, an Air B&B over on the inner east side of the river. We need to stay in town during February, to be on hand for the condo renovation and sale activities; and also to be here for PIFF, the Portland International Film Festival. This is one of the few fixed points on our annual calendar: every February we devote about three weeks to a frenzy of film viewing, packing about forty foreign films into a three week period. It's one of the highlights of the year for us. Even after we're on the road, we expect to keep coming back to town for this, especially since my father's birthday also falls in February.

We’ve spent our Februaries at PIFF for 19 of the last 20 years (we missed out the year I injured my knee).

We booked our room this morning after a nice chat with Stacey, the owner. We'll have a studio apartment in the bottom of her home. It should work well for us, and has all the essentials: internet, a fridge, a microwave, secure storage for the bikes, private access.

We're excited about the idea of living in a different part of Portland for a month, and in an older residential neighborhood rather than the forest of high rises that the Pearl has evolved into over the fifteen years s8nce we moved there. It will feel almost like traveling, we think - we'll be walking through a different neighborhood with different diners and coffee shops than we've been close to for the last fifteen years; and it's far enough from our home that it will shake up our day rides a bit, getting us closer to the east hills.

The weather is incredible today - it's warm, sunny, almost sixty; it feels like spring, not the end of January - so I take a break from move preparations and hop on the bike to go check out the new neighborhood. It's in a small corner of town I'm not that familiar with and I want to get the lay of the land, see what's close by so I can imagine what our new routine will be like.

I like it. Within a half mile we'll have an attractive coffee shop, one of our favorite restaurants in town, a trattoria new to us that looks very promising, a bike shop, and the friendliest grocery in town. Looks like a fine place to hang for a month.

Sounds friendly enough. We’ll find out for ourselves and report back.

Looks like there will be coffee. We’ll be fine.

And other beverages as well. All the essentials are covered, as long as we can find a meal somewhere.

Phew - we can get a meal here, at this Tuscan trattoria on Clinton Street. Looks like a great place, very friendly. I had a nice chat with the chef, Vincenzo, while checking out the menu.

Or, if we’re tired of pasta we can walk a few blocks further to Nuestra Cucina, one of our favorite restaurants in town.

Or, for a beer and a quick bite we can go here. Great name.

And, as a bonus feature, we’ll like having a bike shop three blocks from our new home.

First though, we need to get out of the condo. There’s a ton of work left still. Hi ho, hi ho.

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Andrea BrownWelcome to the ‘hood! We love it here too. You have barely scratched the surface of coffee and eateries so prepare yourself.
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