Eh Bradah, How's It?

This week has been a whirlwind after returning from Hawaii in the middle of the night last Sunday and ankle surgery last Tuesday.   Plus, the Blazers are in the playoffs for the first time in 5 years.  Yeeehaw!

We made the trip to Maui as part of a combined family vacation and visit with my Uncle Daveyboy who's been deep in a battle with prostate and bone cancer since the Holidays.  Good news...after facing near defeat in January, he bounced back with the help of chemo therapy. Advantage Daveyboy.  Besides an occasional stomach pain and sporadic insomnia,  his day-to-day life has returned to a stable state and as he proudly notes "I eat like a horse".  I'm not sure if he means sheer caloric quantity or the bales of leafy Mr. Ed veggies (or both), but he looks great thanks to waves of support from family, friends, angels and caregivers.  

We also overlapped with The Goob (aka my Pop) visiting his Bradah Daveyboy.  The day after arriving, our families spent an afternoon at the uncrowded, wind-protected yet thorn-ridden Malealekelaala (sp?) Beach.  It was surreal to watch The Goob and Uncle Daveyboy cradling little Buddy with a beach backdrop and deep azure ocean.   Then, out of nowhere, Daveyboy whipped out his Bible and questioned our knowledge of John 3:15 to which Bunny point-blank fired off a concise recitation.  We duly noted that Buddy is the only begotten son of Bubby, who is the only begotten son of The Goob.   

"Best ye be begettin' before ye get forgotten" - Bubby Reno, 2009. 

Bunny christened River (aka Buddy Rio) with a new nickname on Maui:  Wubby.  An all-too-appropriate name as the tropical weather revealed layers of "wub" as he turned two (months) on Hawaii.  Wubby also figured out how to sleep 9 hours at night during the trip.  With that kind of sleep, anywhere feels like vacation to newborn parents.  But, it certainly helped to have Heavenly Hana smoothies and fresh Ono grilled fish salads just outside our doorstep.    

We stayed down the road from Uncle Daveyboy's farm, in the quaint little bustling beach town, Paia.  Bunny remembered the charm and good vibe of Paia from our last visit to Maui in 2002 when a 1-month-conceived Lilly Star was going through rapid cell division inside Bunny's belly.  Maybe that's why Lilly's a natural Pacific Islander:   swims like a fish, gracefully hulas with wavy hands, tans effortlessly, and prefers barefeet.  Upon her return, Lilly found the Aloha immediately at the Nalu Kai Lodge.  Our low-key 1960s retro accommodation was easiest to enter directly through the middle of the town's primo gelato shoppe. 

 

Most mornings, we'd wake up really slow and then connect with our Maui family (my Uncle, Aunt and cousins plus Bunny's cousin Kate who lives with her daughter, Zoe Paloma, at the other end of the island), but we also had a neighborly coincidence one sunny morning at the Lodge tiki bar.  

First Bunny whispers, "Don't look now, but I think that guy in the hammock is our neighbor from across the street back in Portland."  Bunny notes familiar faces nearly everywhere she goes, but she's certain that this guy (Ambrosio) is our neighbor, so I encourage her to confirm our destiny.

Meanwhile, Ambrosio's fiance (Melise) is laying on the cordovan watching us watch her groom and thinking, "That little girl looks familiar."  

As it turns out, Ambrosio and Melise were living across from our house for the past two years and remembered Lilly Star as the sweet pixie who would always offer raspberry greetings to her neigbors.  Somehow, we all ended up at the same 9-unit Hawaiian lodge at the same time, so we celebrated with a big tiki Surf & Turf BBQ family dinner to honor both Daveyboy and our new friends/former neighbors.  After marrying on Maui, these lovely newlyweds are off to a honeymoon on the Big Island and new residence in Bavaria.  Ausgezeichnet! 

My Uncle calls these strange, reassuring coincidences Maui Magic.  Believe it baby!

Aloha!

The Power of Community

The past week has been thoroughly inspiring and powerful, starting with a waterfront ride along the banks of the mighty Columbia last Sunday. I had been hearing about the reknowned Marine Park ride for years, but finally ventured along the I-205 bike path far enough North to reach the river. The stunning vistas of a snow-smothered Mt. Hood were complemented by a warm evening breeze and honking migratory water fowl. Sheer beauty.

Besides reflecting breathtaking landscapes, the Columbia River has been generating most of the Pacific Northwest's power renewably for over 70 years. Lilly and I love the old Woody Guthrie song written for the Bonneville Power Administration dam construction program in the 1930s:

"Roooll On Columbia, Roll On. ROOOOOLL On Columbia, ROLL On. Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, so roll on Columbia roll on."

She's also a big fan of the Busby Berkeley dance routines from the 1930s. We borrowed an awesome compilation of his film sequences from the library shortly after Buddy Rio's birth. If you're not familiar with his mind-bending set designs, check out this primer from the Magnetic Fields Busby Berkeley Dreams. Busby had a gift for visually capturing the modern era's synchronicity necessary to lead us out of the Great Depression with a hopeful determination. Now, here we are again - deep in the waters of economic recession and hopeful that the power of community will float us back to shore.

Each working day last week demonstrated Portland's strength as we collaborate selflessly to serve the greater good of our community. On Monday, the city's foremost green builders gathered in a renovated hall of the old Henry Weinhard's brewery and collectively imagined our nation's first office building designed to achieve the Living Building Challenge.

If the integrated design team is successful, the building's ecological and social benefits will restore habitat and reverse human impacts on global warming all while eliminating utility costs and raising the productivity, health and happiness of the building's occupants.

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to present the City of Portland's climate protection steps to a Sunnyside Environmental Middle School Climate Teach-In. The enthusiastic cheers from this eco-crowd reassured me that the responsbility of our children will surely lead us to a stable climate while raising their quality of life to an irreversible standard. Afterwards, I visited Lilly's kindegarten class at Sunnyside where we shared a lego-model of a living house complete with native plant and animal species inhabiting its ecoroof.

On Wednesday, I returned to Weinhard's for a net-zero energy and water technical design sessions for the Living Building ecocharette. Then Thursday, the collaboration continued with the release of a new, local green building standard for small commercial buildings. And finally on Friday, I attended a soft opening for the DaVinci Arts Middle School new music building in our neighborhood -

the nation's first net-zero LEED Platinum freestanding classroom AND a perfectly inspiring intersection between art & science in design. All througout the week, there was a sense of camaraderie and collective accomplishment -- We're all in it together!

The power of Portland's community as we collaboratively bring our sustainable visions to life is nothing short of a design revolution. When shared between like-minded progressive cities, this cultural explosion will surely reinvent how we integrate with our natural systems post-recession.

Spring Smiles!

After a seemingly neverending stretch of chilly rain, today was the first sunny weekend day of the year near 70 and the neighborhood community came out in droves.  Plenty of smiles abound with early Spring blossoms.   Returning from an afternoon Stacatto Gelato-break,  Bunny and Lilly could hardly walk a block without a fond community reconnection from the long Winter.  We are very fortunate to witness our neighborhood emerge from a down-and-out slum into a hip-happenin' hotspot between recessions.  

This past week has also been a transition for Buddy Rio from fleeting daydream smiles to a smile-a-thon everyday.  It's like a daily present that he shares with whoever is willing to receive his gift.  First he gazes right into the eyes of his beholder.  Then, once his focused attention is acknowledged, he goes into a series of smiling contortions and giggles.  The whole process is reciprocally contagious until his next big urp or diaper change.