PAgent’s Progress

The Pittock Mansion is one of Portland’s landmarks. Situated on a 46 acre estate on a hilltop 1,000 feet above Portland, it was the home of Henry and Georgiana Pittock.

Henry Pittock came to Oregon in 1853 at the young age of 19. Starting out penniless, he eventually attained ownership of the Oregonian newspaper, with investments in real estate, banking, railroads, steamboats, sheep ranching, silver mining, and the pulp and paper industry.

The Pittocks began planning and designing their dream home in 1909, and the Mansion was completed in 1914. The Pittock family lived in the mansion until 1958, when it was put on the market. Unfortunately, a severe storm in 1962 caused extensive damage to the Mansion, and concerned citizens convinced the City of Portland to restore the Mansion and convert it into a historical monument and park.

Today, I took the kids to see it. It’s quite a place. The building itself was impressive for its time, with a central vacuum system, intercoms, and indirect lighting. The master bathroom has sitz bath, and a shower system having multiple spigots, including needle jets surrounding the bather, an overhead ’shampoo’ showerhead, two showerheads at waist height pointing inward, and a ‘bidet’ shower head mounting near the floor and directed upward (you can see a picture of the shower here). The sweeping main staircase is marble, the mansion is sandstone, and incredible handcrafted woodwork can be found in nearly every room (you can see a picture of the fabulous staircase here).

In addition to novelties like the sleeping porches (I want one!), I pointed out additional details to the kids, like the absolute separation between the family quarters and the servant’s facilities. The servant’s entrance, the servant’s stairwell, and the servant’s rooms were nearly completely hidden from view, while most rooms had some means of summoning “the help” if they were needed. It’s good to be the boss.

In addition to the Mansion, the estate has a Gate Lodge which is a small house in itself, and a gift shop in the original garage. But the greatest attraction at the Pittock Mansion is the sweeping view it offers of Portland. From the front lawn, you can see Mount Saint Helens, with it’s truncated top to the northeast:

While Mount Hood dominates the downtown area to the east:

It’s well worth a visit to soak in the vista from the top of the hill, and think about what it must have been like to live in such a palatial home. To give you a tiny taste, I took a panorama looking toward downtown. It still doesn’t do it justice.

Update: Don’t ask me why it didn’t occur to me to take pictures INSIDE the Mansion. It just didn’t. Fortunately, others are not so absent-minded. If you want to see a damn near complete tour of the interior of the Pittock Mansion, these folks have done the work for you.

Man, biking to work two days in a row is no fun. My legs feel like noodles cooked way past al dente. But, if Nietzsche is to be believed, since it didn’t kill me, it will make me stronger.

The other day the Program Manager at my favorite radio station sent me an email. It seems he was soliciting input on how to improve the station, and had selected me (among a multitude of others, I’m sure) to tell him what I liked and disliked about it.

So I did. I told him I loved the on-air talent, and like the station, except for two things: I don’t appreciate the segments when they call people up pretending to be an outrageous character and try to make fools of them. If someone calls in to the station, hoping to be put on the air, fire away. Make them look like an idiot. But to call up someone who’s just trying to do their job and try to make them look stupid, that’s not cool. That’s too much like shock radio, and I don’t need it.

And I told him I hate the music. I honestly don’t know how a program manager is going to react when told that he has an ardent listener who absolutely loathes the music rotation, but he asked for feedback, so he got it.

I can’t wait to see if he responds to my email.

My desire to bike to work has virtually nothing to do with saving money, or saving the planet. While those are laudable goals, they are not mine. I’m mostly interested in not dying prematurely. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes this rationale for bicycling seems terribly ironic (see “Dear Idiot” below).

However, as the price of gasoline begins creeping skyward again, keeping the petroleum industry’s profits nice and fat for another year, I began to wonder if my commuting by bicycle would have any practical impact.

The last time I gassed up the Corolla, I spent $29.51 for 10.5 gallons of gas. I generally go about 280 miles between fill-ups. Let’s call that 10.5 cents per mile. My commute is a little less than ten miles, each way. Let’s call it 19 miles round trip. That works out to about $2.00 a day in gas I save when I ride my bike.

Wow, that’s … more than I expected. Mind you, I don’t think of it as ’saving’ money, more like deferring payment. I will still drive to work, and I will still have to fill up my car, but every day I ride my bike pushes that trip to the gas station off by two bucks.

Interesting.

Dear Idiot,

I’m the cyclist you cut off this morning when you made your right turn from Barbur onto Hamilton. I’m sure you remember me. I was on a blue recumbent bicycle, in the bike lane, and I had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting your piece-of-shit blue car.

I’m just curious: What were you thinking? Were you in such a hurry to get to work that you couldn’t slow down for the three seconds it would take me to clear the intersection? It would be a tiny bit comforting to think that you didn’t see me, but when you accelerated into the turn in order to get in front of me, it became pretty obvious that you knew I was there.

I realize that I can appear more svelte on my recumbent than I really am, but let me assure you that I’m a pretty solid guy. Combined with my heavy steel ‘bent, we represented a considerable mass moving at a pretty good velocity. I assure you, if not for my hyperactive awareness of traffic, catlike reflexes, and the fact that I had recently adjusted my brakes, I would have hit your piece-of-shit blue car.

I wonder how you would have explained the sizable PAgent-shaped dent in your passenger-side door to the police. Or your parents. Or your parole officer. I mean, when a cyclist riding in a bike lane manages to T-bone a crappy car like yours, it doesn’t take CSI:Portland to put together the sequence of events. Of course, it may strain credulity to believe that you actually accelerated in order to cut me off, but I suppose such behavior isn’t unthinkable when dealing with a driver who has the IQ of an anesthetized mollusk.

I’d like to believe this was a simple miscalculation. That you realize what a close call you had, and that in the future, you will give bicyclists a wide safety margin, instead of playing chicken with them. Unfortunately, I suspect you and your piece-of-shit car will continue to careen around the Portland Metro area until you manage to either total it, or lose your license.

I just hope nobody gets hurt in the process.

There is an upscale rock and gem shop near my office. I often shop there because, as I have mentioned previously, my wife and daughter are rock freaks. Virtually nothing makes them happier than for me to bring them home a rock. And while some rocks are quite expensive (diamonds, for example), there are some lovely minerals that are quite affordable.

It’s becoming harder to visit my local fancy rock shop, because the help there is so darn helpful. I don’t like people hovering over me as I shop. I especially don’t like people hovering over me and talking to me as I shop. And I particularly dislike people hovering over me and trying to talk to me about new age crystal woo-woo philosophy.

Let me say that, like many other subjective phenomena, it is entirely possible that for some people, certain crystals give them distinct sensations. It is even possible (although not probable) that those sensation are not entirely due to the expectation that they will occur, e.g. the placebo effect. Nevertheless, I personally have never picked up a crystal and felt it heat up, cool down, vibrate, levitate, clear my chakras, or otherwise interact with my person other than through direct physical contact. Perhaps I am insensitive to the Greater Mysteries.

Therefore, I would suggest that salespeople who follow hard-headed and skeptical customers such as myself around the rock store pointing out which stones are “energy stones”, which ones “redirect your chakra”, and which ones have “exceptionally high vibrational energy” are simply going to force us out of the store screaming. I’m there to buy rocks that I like. I’m not there filling a prescription.

Please leave me alone.