that’s not to say I haven’t been working on things,
I just haven’t been writing about them...
maybe this page will be another collection of various notes.
yesterday evening I went out with a broom, dustpan, and 5 gallon bucket and swept up sand/gravel.
a week prior I had soccer practice with a small group, it only lasted like 1-1.5 hours
I was still amped so I ended up riding my bike from grant park to the top of mt.tabor,
I was looking for this bag of bark chips with plants growing from it,
I couldn’t find it, seems that parks and rec put it to use...
lesson learned, materials in a city can disappear in a day... or week (photo from the 25th)
walking around portland parks in the fall is quite interesting,
all the bags of straw, bark chips, or mulch layed out by storm drains or the bottoms of hills,
I’ve got photos, but they are still being developed
~I was wanting to collect this as it would relate to the tax cut a homeowner receives for directing rainwater away from the street (having downspouts go towards plants/soil)
my friend maya’s mom is a realator and she said the city doesn’t care what you do with the water, so long as it doesn’t end up in the sewer,
though there are rules about rainwater collection... so maybe not that (taxes and mosquito proofing)
since I wasn’t able to procure the bag, I decided to keep biking around looking for sand or apshalt, ended up going to 72nd ave before heading back home,
but I recorded locations of curb plants, sand, and gravel...
last night I collected the sand/gravel;
the broom and dust pan works a lot better (faster) than the vacuum does, but it is fairly limited to the middle of the street and sometimes the gutters. I can’t get the sand in the cracks without electicity
as I was holding the broom pushing away all the leaves in the gutters looking for that sweet sweet sand,
I was even more aware of my presence, maybe because I was closer to a house,,, and cause it seemed like they could be home... regardless, I was afraid of getting in trouble... it felt more like theft than before.
what quelled this feeling was the thought that passers by would assume that I had lost a piece of jewlery and was looking for it...
something about the idea that there was something more valuable, or that something that was “my property” justified me scraping through gravel in a gutter,
that monetary value of an object in relation to justifiable behavior makes me think about people who go to parks with a metal detector. They are often looking for something that was lost by someone else... why is that more okay? (percieved... cause I’ve never actually had anyone hassle me)
anyways the idea that people thought I might be sifting gave me some peace of mind
reminds of this youtuber that my classmate davis showed me who “pans for gold” by scraping the sidewalk cracks outside of gem stores in big cities.
also reminds me of a scene from young sheldon... lots of clips in the endless scroll*
*I watched the episode in question S3 E14 a slump, a cross and roadside gravel (no oxford commas in young sheldon)... anyways embarassingly I preemtively made a page called “young sheldon” expecting to have that much to write about...
the b plot is sheldon and his brother collecitng roadside gravel and unsuccessfully trying to extract platinum from it,
the platinum comes from catalytic converters and is expelled as micro particles through the exhaust.
I guess now people just saw off the actual catalytic converter, kids these days
I made some more cob, this time using some of the sand I had been collecting,
smells really bad, like dusty street...
I had to procure some dirt from the side of the building,
as well as mix in some really wet clay scraps from our studio’s reclaim bin,
so still haven’t quite nailed down a pure cob harvest...
though it could be argued that I just did
I went out to collect plants from streets.
the ones in the gutters were easy enough to take out,
same goes for any that were in old pipes
others were growing out of cracks in the cement,
I couldn’t dig them out and pulling them out resulted in tearing away most of the root system,
so I turned to propogation, attempting to regrow some roots for later planting
the tree-of-heaven (in jar closest to window in first photo) was the first to die off, or at least look far worse than when I collected it.
I suspect now is not the time of year to be collecting