Alberta Street Glove Tree

Throughout the winter I've noticed many orphan mittens and gloves along the bike lanes and streets of Portland. Maybe this is because I lost my own long-used and much-loved polyester "Miller Beer" fingerless gloves? (I don't remember where they came from. They were probably found on the street as well. Still, I'd had them forever and they'd served me well for spring and fall biking.) In a vain hope of finding mine, all the other dirty, soggy flattened ones caught my eye. Wouldn't it be nice if these gloves could be reunited with their owners?

The other day I noticed that some community-minded stranger(s) implemented an idea I've long considered. There is now a "Glove Tree" on a corner of Northeast Alberta Street and 20th.

The sign says it all:


This weekend while cleaning up the street in front on our house, I found a solitary red glove. Since the glove tree was nearby, why not make use of it? I grabbed a few extra clothes-line pins (to donate to the cause) and took a neighborhood stroll to hang up the glove. Oddly enough, on the way home I found the matching half about a block away! Sadly this other hand was pretty threadbare, having spent the last month or so in the gutter of Alberta Street getting ground up by car tires and muck. It's heartening to know some lonely owner may be reunited--and now with the complete pair. At the very least someone else can make use of a pair of gloves.



If you're biking in NE Portland and see a stray glove, you now know where the lost and found is.

Union Steam Baths, Astoria Oregon

Just for the heck of it I'm posting these few photos of the Union Steam Baths in Astoria, Oregon. I am so bummed that I never had a chance to experience this place before it closed. A few inside photos can still be seen at this outdated website.






The Finns have a lot of history in the lower Columbia River. Becky even has some ancestors who were part of this group. It's too bad that the community is dissolving to the point of not being able to support the community steam bath of Astoria. The old Finnish bakery, the Home Bakery, is still kicking. I never seem to make it to Astoria when it's open though.

Here's a pic of the Suomi Hall:


To give a sense of the historical importance of the Union Steam Baths, the Suomi Hall, which is the old Finnish Social Club (hence the blue and white paint), is right across the street from the now-closed public steam bath.

I wonder if enough sauna enthusiasts could be brought together to persuade the current owner to fire up the boiler for a weekend?

I think there may have been a similar place in downtown Portland. I'll have to do more research on this one.

Solar food dryer failure!

I've had a couple of spectacular failures with the products of the solar food drier recently. Since this is how I learn, and one of the reasons I chose to keep this blog, here I humbly share my failings.

The cloudy color in this jar of prunes is grain moth silk:


Grain moths, curse you! We have them in our kitchen and it seems like they've always been here. I partly blame the rye crisp crackers we kept in the lower kitchen cabinet for the last two years. It's odd how rye crisp tends to keep even in the paper wrapper. It's not amusing, however, to discover what a wonderful food source these Swedish crackers are for grain moths. I suspect they crackers were the launching pad for a very healthy population in our kitchen.

The grain moths tend to get into everything eventually but I thought that my hard-earned horde of dried fruit was secure for a couple of reasons. First it was dried fruit and as such protect by being desicated and containing a concentration of fruit sugar. Larvae would prefer starchy flour and similar items, not dry and sugary fruit. Quite the opposite, they thrived in it. Ugh!

I first noticed a problem when I found little dark spots in the morning hot cereal. No, that's not random fruit fiber. It's grain moth larvae poop. I only figured this out after finding a moth floating in the bowl.

At the bottom of this jar are little brown granules of insect droppings.


The second problem was that the moths got into a number of jars I had falsely assumed were well sealed. Here is the lesson: Do not trust new one-gallon pickle jars! I had been collecting them from the backs of restaurants. I liked them because they seal (or so I thought!) They are clear, so you can see what's inside. And they are large which makes them practical for storing food in bulk.

Here's a photo of a jar with the modern commercial quarter-turn lid:


The problem with this type of lid is that you simply can't tighten these down enough by hand to keep them air-tight. A good test to check if a jar will seal properly is to fill it with water and turn it upside down. If it leaks then it's suspect. Of course I only figured this out after my disaster.

All told, I lost about one and a half gallons of prune and about a quarter of a gallon of dried Asian pear and apple. Normally a few moths here and there don't bug me, but this fruit got infested really thoroughly really quickly.

My lesson here is to stick to classic half-gallon canning jars. The classic Mason jar requires over 360 derees of rotation to seal. This may provide better leverage to get a tight seal with the lid. At one point in time, gallon jars were made with this type of lid. It was a nice jar standard and the country is that much poorer that we don't have these readily available to use anymore. I now have to buy expensive half-gallon Mason jars. I don't like this but at least they seal properly.

The other fruit preservation failing was with a small batch of figs I dried. I discovered a neglected but fantastic fig tree near my work downtown. (The quality of fig trees really seem to vary from tree to tree.) The fruit was falling on the ground so I decided to "liberate" the tree from waste and do some help-myself gleaning. Here I think I didn't dry the fruit enough and they molded in the jar. Next year they'll get a better drying even if they get kind of tough and leathery.

I had to wait for a free weekend to take photos of the moldy figs since I'm at work when it's light out. During this time, the jar mysteriously ended up in the driveway. It appears to have become a science experiment of our daughter, Greta. Not sure what the appeal of mold was but that's what happened with it.



I guess it is pretty impressively fuzzy. Thank goodness she didn't open it inside.

Trek Singletrack, my utility bike in progress

From Trek Singletrack 930

There isn't much to share here. Mostly I'm putting up a personal document of my own accomplishment.

I've mostly finished building a bike, a pink(ish) Trek Singlestrack. I found it as a frame, stripped save the fork and crank, abandoned outside the trash room of the building I manage. The frame appealed to me because it was light. You don't see too many lugged mountain bike frames. It was made in the U.S. (probably one of the last by Trek) and it was built out of double-butted True Temper Ox Comp 2 tubing. It's surprisingly light for being a steel mountain bike frame.
My regular commuter bike is a Gunnar Crosshairs (a cyclocross bike). I can't ask for a better commuter bike but it has some limitations. Mostly, it's expensive. I get nervous locking it up so I wanted a more practical utility bike I could use for getting groceries and such. Also the Gunnar's frame is probably too small for me and I have to be really careful about hitting my foot on the front tire taking slow-speed corners. Because the bike has fenders this can cause real problems. It's not too much of a big deal but it gets in the way of carefree casual riding.

The Singletrack was made up of new parts and ones that I scrounged. I found another abandoned frame downtown. It was an old Novara (REI) mountain bike. It too had been largely stripped, but I did get complete brakes and pedals off of this one.

I bought a bunch of used parts from the Community Cycling Center including a seat stem, shifters and a rear XT derailleur. On Craigslist I found an old set of fancy XTR-hubbed wheels. The rear went on with a new cassette and chain. As part of a maintenance class I took, I replaced the bottom bracket bearings with a new cartridge and repacked the front fork bearings.

For me, as a novice bike mechanic, my biggest accomplishment was building the front wheel. This was my first wheel build. I did this using a dynohub. I'm still undecided if dynohubs are all that useful but they have a lot of nerd appeal to me. It's fun to generate my own electricity as I ride. Building the wheel was fairly straight forward. I appreciate how the process requires a practiced physical knack. It's an art in that you need to think but also use your senses and a certain finesse.

The bike rides well. It feels secure and seems to have reasonably good geometry, upright but not too steady. All I need to do with it is add some fenders and racks and it will be a great urban utility bike.