Mt. Tabor.

OK, I admit that it won’t be as cool as an air conditioned room, but it will be cooler and possibly more fun. I recommend going all the way to the top of Mt. Tabor where you will find a nicely paved circle with plenty of grass in the middle and some of the best views of the city available. The best part is that it will be shady, a couple of degrees cooler, and if you are lucky, breezy.

The options are numerous: volcano crater, reservoir, play area for kids, stair climbing, biking, running, hiking, picnics, and more.

What’s your favorite secret to beating the heat during the sunny summers in Portland?

Basically the South Waterfront district is hosting a series of talks with local sustainability gurus, it’s free and open to the public, and they even provide some catering and wine while bringing in a different sustainability expert each time. The next installment is July 10th 6-8pm at the Discovery Center (0680 SW Bancroft) with Regina Hauser, the Executive Director of the Oregon Natural Step Network. She will be discussing the Natural Step’s approach to living a more sustainable lifestyle. Here is a snippet from the description on the South Waterfront Sustainability Event page:

Sustainability asks us to live and work in a way that allows our children and future generations to flourish. How do we know if we’re doing the right thing? The Natural Step provides a framework for understanding sustainability which can be used as a guide for short and long term decision making.

The Natural Step is a global not-for-profit advisory and education organization dedicated to sustainable development. It gives decision-makers a shared, science-based understanding of sustainability and a unifying framework for moving towards sustainability.

(quoted from SWF Sustainability Speaker Series post)

You can RSVP for this event by contacting Jeremy Solly at jeremy@southwaterfront.com or calling 503.222.7788.

We speculated about what might replace it, but we feared the worst. What if they put in yet another Starbucks? or Subway? or *shudder* McDonalds. Even worst, would they turn it into another condo building? Then yesterday, I got some amazing news.

New Seasons, another locally owned health food store, announced yesterday that they would be moving into the old Daily Grind location. Rejoice! I’ll have to wait until 2009, but then I will be able to walk to a great, local health food store with a deli. Awesome.

Beautiful, exceptionally well written, and just downright interesting, Culinate is one of the best forward-thinking food blogs anywhere. Which is why it’s extra cool that it’s from Portland.

Next time you’re looking for a recipe, curious about food, or simply just looking for examples of beautiful preparation—be that food preparation or blog preparation—swing by Culinate, an awesome Portland blog.

This is not news.  Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone bet a steak dinner that the social isolation and decline in social capital was a national phenomena.  He lost.  Portland was the one exception.

But we cannot rest on our laurels.  We all need to continue to participate in community and ensure that Portland continues to be the awesome place that we know and love.  Here are some upcoming opportunities:

The City Club of Portland is a 93 year old organization that relies on volunteer research efforts to affect public policy.  At their annual meeting on Friday, Steve Schell will be reflecting on City Club’s research in his talk “City Club Research: A Quiet Catalyst For Momentous Change.”

Another important effort is the Bureau of Planning’s update of the 1980 Comprehensive Plan and the 1988 Central City Plan. The Planning Bureau says: 

The Portland Plan is an inclusive, citywide effort to guide the physical, economic, social, cultural and environmental development of Portland over the next 30 years. The plan will build on the work the community did through visionPDX, which captured and fleshed out our shared values of sustainability, equity and accessibility, and community connectedness and distinctiveness.

There are two upcoming opportunities to participate in The Portland Plan as part of the Community Summits on Saturday, June 14th.

Being a small business owner with an early bedtime, I don’t get out much these days.  But sometimes great music will come and find you.  Several months ago I met Marie Schumacher at CubeSpace’s monthly nonprofit networking event.  Marie and I got together over coffee so that she could pick my brain about consulting and her organization PDX Vox.  As a thank you, she sent me a copy of her CD Sometimes at Night, which was some of the best new music I had heard in months (if not years).

Fast forward to now.  After many, many months, Marie sent me an email about an upcoming gig on June 1st at 1pm in the afternoon at Springbox Gallery, 2375 NW Thurman St., Portland. Yes, this is a show that is business-owner and parent friendly.  How cool is that!??!?!?!?  And with a suggested donation of $5-$10, it is cheap to boot.  That alone is cause for some serious celebration.

But wait, there’s more.  Portland also has a great new resource to find new music, with an emphasis on the homegrown stuff from the Pacific Northwest.  When OPB shifted their on-air music programming to an online music page, that opened up a whole new world for those of us who didn’t stay up late enough to listen to David Christensen’s music show Ecleticity.  Now we can access streaming music and well as download studio performances and check out playlists and all sorts of fun stuff.

I still don’t sit still long enough to listen to as much music as I would like, but I am enjoying these new opportunities nonetheless and invite you all to join me.

Fast forward a couple of years to the completion of the A, B, C terminal renovation. At the time, it was new and shiny, but unconnected to the poor D and E terminals. I was always a little sad when my flight was scheduled to leave from the no mans land that was D or E.

Now, we have choices. The gates are all connected by a walkway, so I can eat wherever I want and I can pick the shorter of the two security lines. We can choose between Starbucks or Coffee People and fast food or sit down restaurants in addition to Powells and other stores with entertainment for the flight.

However, my favorite thing about the Portland airport has to be the free and stable wireless. With the security rules in full force, the free wireless makes getting to the airport early bearable. If you are lucky, you might even catch one of the piano players or other musicians providing some free entertainment.

And sure, nothing beats a good “OH” tweet. But sometimes, you’re looking for a little more catharsis.

If only there were somewhere to vent your bile and snark on a larger stage. If only…

Enter Overheard in PDX

Part voyeur daydream, part sad commentary on life as we know it, Overheard in PDX is a never-ending stream of the strange things that come out of other people’s mouths, submitted by people who were lucky(?) enough to hear them.

A quintessential part of the Portland experience, I’ve heard it said that Overheard in PDX is an awesome Portland blog.

I’ve been working downtown for almost 8 years now and I bump into people I know all the time. A couple of weeks ago I went to lunch with a buddy of mine and we bumped into some old coworkers from a previous employer. We weren’t talking on the sidewalk for more than 5 minutes when another fellow walked up that knew everyone else but me! Next thing you know, everyone is catching up and reminiscing about old times.

I like to promote local business as much as I can, and at the very least, I try to always work with local representatives. As such, I often run into people that used to work for so-and-so and now work with so-and-so.

One particularly funny incident came up when we realized that a new vendor we were meeting was someone we actually had a bad experience with when they worked for a different vendor a few years earlier. Only we we all met face to face did it dawn on us! We thought “oh no, it’s that crazy vendor!” and he thought “oh no, it’s those crazy customers!” We worked everything out in the end, but it just goes to show that you just never know who you’re going to run into.

The thing is, this isn’t an occasional thing… it happens all the time to me.

And recently, Twitter has become the way folks in Portland are staying connected. For example, did you know that the Portland Police is on Twitter? Further, the officer that posts is one of the funniest and most informative folks I’ve read on twitter. I’ve never felt such a personal connection to the Police before. It sounds corny, but I’m glad that the Portland Police Bureau is savvy enough to use this new medium to stay connected with us.

Of course, there are many awesome Portland Blogs that help us stay in touch with each other.

The moral of working and living in Portland is clearly “Don’t burn your bridges!” Post a comment and let me know other ways Portland stays connected.