Here are the blog posts thus far about our honeymoon in July 2016; more to come!
Recently I decided the MEADOR.ORG website’s appearance needed a refresh. I don’t change the website’s appearance on a whim. This would only be the sixth change in its general appearance in the twenty years MEADOR.ORG has been online.
But I’d been using the Choco theme since 2011, and its stitched leather folio look was skeuomorphic, something Apple famously abandoned in 2013. Even staid Microsoft shifted to flat design with Windows 8 back in 2012. I like Sacha Greif’s take on the design changes we’re seeing across computing platforms.
MEADOR.ORG used the WordPress.com Choco theme from March 2011 to November 2016
I’d also noticed how many websites were now using large images to introduce themselves and their stories, which Jake Rocheleau calls the Hero Image Trend. Given the preponderance and popularity of travel posts and their accompanying photographs at MEADOR.ORG, it made sense to start using a large header image and make use of the “Featured Image” option at WordPress.com to customize that header image for individual posts, while randomizing the header image for the long scroll of the default homepage.
So I began searching for a new theme. This blog has been hosted at WordPress.com since 2008, and that service has a slew of choices. Thankfully they let you try out a new theme on your blog, tweaking the settings to see how it all fits together, before imposing it on the published site. Plus they now have some pretty nice filters to search for themes with specific features. That let me quickly narrow down my choices: I wanted to keep the format of a single wide column for posts with a right sidebar for widgets for recent posts, tags, etc. while supporting a large header image and posts with a Featured Image.
The customized Twenty ten theme applied to MEADOR.ORG
I actually stepped back in time for my choice of the Twenty ten theme, which was the default theme for WordPress.com posts back in 2010. It met all of my criteria and had the bonus feature of allowing me to randomize the header image that would appear when loading a page (versus a specific post).
When viewing a page instead of a particular post, the site now loads any of over 75 different header images drawn from the photographs I’ve taken for my travelogues
I uploaded over 75 panoramas from my library of photos I’ve taken on my day hikes since 2009, cropping them to fit the header image proportions. Now a random selection from a collection of my favorite panoramas will greet visitors to the home page and older posts.
Now I can upload and crop a photo to the ratio of 940 x 198 and designate it as the header image for a particular post. I’ll do that for most new posts, since my Facebook page and its cross-posting to Twitter drives most of the traffic to individual posts on our website.
My posts are text-heavy, so I paid attention to that as well. At first I tried Merriweather Sans, but eventually opted to use the Merriweather serif font, which has a large x height.
For headers, I tried almost every available font before settling on the largest size of Fondamento. I liked how it resembled calligraphy. Its uneven strokes are not good for small font sizes, making it problematic for the small date headings I’d been putting on my posts. So I’ll now use a larger size for any date header and the PHOTO ALBUM | SLIDESHOW header links I include on travelogues.
UPDATE: In July 2017, tired of watching the screen load with the default fonts and then redraw with my selections, so I gave up and used the default fonts in this theme.
I can’t predict how long this new look will last, but it seems fresh and engaging. I expect the big header images will sustain this choice for some time.
This is the sixth “look” for the website in its 20 years of existence
I was very excited on our honeymoon to finally visit the International Rose Test Garden in Portland, Oregon. At long last I would get to see many of the roses I had seen and read about only in books and online.
It is called a test garden because it is not just a showcase for known varieties. For decades the garden hosted All American Rose Selections trials, which tested the same roses in gardens across the nation. After that effort ended, in 2013 the American Garden Rose Selections began, which recognizes roses that are easy to care for, disease resistant, and suitable for different regions of the country.
Here are some shots of roses that were being tested during our visit:
Later on our honeymoon Granger and I stayed on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. We visited the famous Butchart gardens north of Victoria, but in the city we also found a few roses at Beacon Hill Park.
Surprisingly, the most impressive roses I saw on the trip were in a plot south of The Empress hotel in Victoria, just a five minute walk from our room at The Magnolia. It was a lovely setting with no crowds, allowing me to browse to my heart’s content.
The rest of this post blends shots of roses from throughout our honeymoon. We made this a separate post from the day-by-day ones Granger is posting. I love roses as much as Granger loves Star Trek, but we both realize only some of our gentle readers will be interested in those things. I’ve sorted the shots into categories for you.
I was surprised to find that a lot of roses I had read about and in which I’d had lukewarm interest were quite spectacular when viewed in person. Here are a few.
Here are some roses that are always great no matter where I see them. The Peace Rose has an interesting history, and several sports such as Love and Peace, Chicago Peace, and Glowing Peace.
Here are some roses that were real showstoppers for me.
I also found a few roses that I’d never heard of:
We also saw quite a few unfamiliar miniature roses:
I realize many people are not as interested as I am when it comes to growing roses, but they would like something colorful yet easy to grow. There are so many, I won’t even try to identify them. If you’re looking for a good show of color but don’t care too much if there is fragrance, anything with these words in the title are your best bet: shrub, landscape, groundcover, drift, “Carefree”, or “Meidiland”.
The Knockout roses are quite popular due to how easy they are to grow, but to me, their colors aren’t really that spectacular, they have no fragrance, the blooms aren’t very large, and they aren’t challenging enough. They truly require zero maintenance, and they’re very disease resistant.
Here are shots from the trip of roses that are easy to grow, excluding knockouts:
If you need to fill in a blank spot in a bed, any of the aforementioned easy to grow roses will do the job. The only ones I have had any experience with are Carefree Wonder and Iceberg, which were vigorous growers. The Carefree Wonder bushes “fluffed” out pretty nicely. You could use them as a hedge since they are so dense. Here are a few pics of mine:
There were a few beautiful roses whose names we didn’t save, but the pictures came out great:
And finally here is the rose named for the International Rose Test Garden:
Honeymoon Day 4: Columbia River Gorge >
< Honeymoon Day 3: International Rose Test Garden | Other Honeymoon Posts
Pink Martini’s ninth studio album is Je dis oui!
The band Pink Martini has released what I regard as its best album in years: Je dis oui! The title is French for I say yes! and is the multicultural mélange one expects from these outstanding performers from Portland. Their ninth studio album features 15 songs, many of them original, in French, Farsi, Armenian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Xhosa, and English. The album was so good I made my own online guide to it with background on each song and translations into English.
I’ve loved this group since I discovered them in 2007, hearing their standout cover of Amado mio when it played over the end credits of Carlos Cuarón’s short You Owe Me (Me La Debes). The group’s songs were so wonderful I did something quite uncharacteristic, buying a ticket to their show in Fort Worth and driving down over a weekend to hear them. I was blown away by Thomas Lauderdale, China Forbes, and the rest of the group, staying after the show to have each band member sign my souvenir T-shirt. Since then I’ve attended their shows whenever they performed in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, or Fort Worth.
Storm Large & China Forbes
This latest album is particularly strong, with much less of the kitsch and treacle that has snuck onto their recent albums. Fans of the group know that band co-founder China Forbes lost her voice in 2011, with Storm Large joining the group as China’s vocal cords recovered from surgery. The group’s 2013 album Get Happy featured China on only four of its sixteen tracks, and she was absent from 2014’s Dream A Little Dream collaboration with the von Trapp great-grandchildren. China’s rest paid off with a full recovery, and she and Storm now trade off headlining the live shows. I’m delighted to find that China sang lead vocals on almost half of the songs on this latest album, with Storm joining China on one song and performing solo on two more.
Two songs feature NPR’s Ari Shapiro, who has appeared on previous albums, including one of my wife’s favorite tracks from the Get Happy album, Yo Te Quiero Siempre (I Will Always Love You). Two classics from the 1930s oldies feature guest artists: Rufus Wainwright does a standout cover of Rodgers and Hart’s Blue Moon, while Portland, Oregon civil rights activist Kathleen Saadat really sells Cole Porter’s Love for Sale. When I heard that fashion designer Ikram Goldman was making her singing and recording debut, I worried it would be a cameo I’d want to skip after an initial listen, but she holds her own.
Pink Martini
My online guide to the album
Albums struggle in these days of streaming music services, which sadly don’t deliver much remuneration to musicians. This album is worth a close listen, although if you want to understand the lyrics you would likely be thwarted by an album with only three songs in English. So I went on a mission to get lyrics and translations, happily finding great liner notes and other online resources which I used to create my own online guide to the album.
Standout tracks for me after listening to the album for the first time:
If you have a streaming service, call up the entire album for a listen. And if you’re like me, go and buy the album, because these tracks are worth owning outright.
Sorry for the long delay in resuming the posts about our honeymoon, but this school year is the most hectic I’ve ever had. I’m still teaching almost 80 students in three classes while directing a Chromebooks pilot project across 13 English classrooms at the high school, directing a pilot year of the Canvas learning management system at our school, handling district communications, and chairing both the science and STEM departments. That keeps me hopping, but I’m finally ready to post Day 3 of our honeymoon. Each weekend I hope to post about another day of our honeymoon. Enjoy!
When Wendy and I were considering possible dates for our wedding and subsequent anniversaries, I knew it should be summer when we schoolteachers could travel. Wendy lobbied for July 4: “We could have fireworks on our anniversary every year!”
But I resisted, not wanting our anniversary to coincide with holiday closings if we were out and about. I’m also not fond of the often startling loud pops and bangs of neighborhood fireworks around Independence Day. So I suggested and Wendy graciously accepted July 1 as a nice easy date to remember that’s still pretty close, temporally speaking, to the annual fireworks displays.
Thus we found ourselves in Portland on Independence Day, anxious to visit the International Rose Test Garden. I’d visited the adjacent Japanese Garden in 2009, not paying particular attention to its neighbor. But I remembered it when I began dating Wendy the rose lover, and I was not surprised when she once told me that on her bucket list was visiting the famous rose garden in Portland.
The History of the Garden
Portland’s love of roses dates back to the late 1800s. The Portland Rose Society was founded in 1889 by Georgiana Burton Pittock, the wife of newspaper publisher Henry Pittock. She and her husband helped ensure that almost half a million bushes of the then-popular Madame Caroline Testout hybrid tea rose were planted along Portland’s sidewalks. By 1905 Portland had 200 miles of rose-bordered streets.
When World War I broke out, Jesse A. Currey, rose hobbyist and Sunday editor of the Oregon Journal, became alarmed that the hybrid roses grown in Europe would be destroyed in the bombings. He convinced city officials to institute a rose test garden by 1917, situated in the hills west of downtown Portland. English hybridists began sending over roses, and in 1921 Florence Holmes Gerke, the city’s landscape architect, designed the garden and its amphitheatre. The garden was dedicated in 1924.
The garden has several sections. There’s the Royal Rosarian Garden which is home to namesake roses of all past Prime Ministers of that civic group whose members are greeters and ambassadors for Portland. Henry Pittock was one of the founders. The Shakespeare Garden was relocated from another park in 1945, and originally intended to only include herbs, trees, and flowers mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. (A similar odd goal, of bringing to American every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s play, afflicted our nation with the starling.) Nowadays that section contains roses named after characters in the plays and features a relevant quote from the bard,”Of all flowers methinks a rose is best.”
In 1970 a Gold Award garden was established, filled with roses honored annually since 1919 by the city’s award for best new rose variety. The Miniature Rose Garden followed in 1975 as one of six testing grounds by the American Rose Society. For decades the garden hosted All American Rose Selections trials, which tested the same roses in gardens across the nation. But that effort died out, so in 2013 the American Garden Rose Selections began, which recognizes roses that are easy to care for, disease resistant, and suitable for different regions of the country.
Our Visit
We had breakfast at McCrae’s Country Cafe in Gresham and drove over to the gardens, arriving there around 11:30 a.m. The parking lots were packed, so I drove up a steep side street and parked in a trail lot. As we made our way down, we passed another lot where a couple was gloomily inspecting their car. Someone had smashed one of the windows to break in. Wendy and I had not left anything of value visible in our rental car, so we hoped any thieves would spare it.
We spent three hours at the garden, admiring and photographing the specimens before indulging in a late lunch of hot dogs from a food stand. We were hardly alone; throngs of tourists from various nations scampered about, taking varying levels of interest in the flowers. One visitor’s hair was as showy as some of the roses.
The grounds are simply awash in roses, mostly planted in rows that are two bushes deep for ready access. There are some nice archways of climbing roses as well. To one side of the garden is a hillside amphitheater, thankfully more grass than stone and in better shape than most such venues these days.
Wendy is the rose expert, so she worked up a separate post about the various roses we saw in the Pacific Northwest. She highlighted the ones she was thrilled to finally see in person, some she’d never heard of, and the real showstoppers. For this post, I made a couple of collages of my favorite rose shots from our Independence Day visit.
Pittock Mansion
After touring the rose garden, we fled the crowds rather than try to take in the recently reopened Japanese Garden. I had a memorable walk there back in 2009, enjoying the beautiful and contemplative surroundings. The holiday crowds ensured that peace would be hard to find this time around, so I set it aside for some future vacation.
So we climbed back up the hillside to our car, relieved to find it unmolested by thieves. Back in 2006, I’d visited the grounds of the Pittock Mansion, which graced a nearby high hillside. I drove us over there to take in the view.
Henry Pittock built the French Renaissance-style château on the west hills of the city, two miles west of downtown Portland, in 1914. He was born in England but raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he apprenticed in his father’s print shop. He left there at age 17 to travel on the Oregon Trail by wagon train in 1853. He couldn’t get a job at the largest newspaper in the territory over in Oregon City but landed a meager job as a typesetter for Portland’s weekly Oregonian. For six months his lodgings were blankets he spread out below the front counter of the shop.
He married Georgiana, the daughter of a flour mill owner who had also traveled to Oregon by wagon train. They raised five children in a small house on a block of land he had bought for $300 in 1856. He held onto that land, which proved a wise investment: Henry leased it out in 1912 for $8.3 million.
Henry became editor and publisher of the weekly, making it into a daily newspaper. He built it up by ensuring that he brought news about the Civil War to Portland days ahead of his competitors. Henry was an outdoorsman, participating in bicycling and mountaineering clubs. He climbed Mt. Hood four times. Georgiana loved gardening and kept a terraced flower garden at the mansion covered with every kind of flower imaginable. She originated Portland’s annual Rose Festival.
As often happens with palatial homes in America, Henry and Georgiana actually enjoyed their grand new home in the hills for only a few years. Georgiana died in 1918, and Henry passed eight months later. The property remained in the family for decades, although they struggled to maintain it. It was placed on the market in 1958 and sat empty. Windows were blown out and roof tiles dislodged in a large storm in 1962, leaving the interior exposed to the elements for 18 months. Developers planned to raze it and put in a subdivision. Thankfully the city and private donations stepped in to purchase it and save it for posterity. Although I’ve never ventured inside, an Oregon Live post has lots of interior photos. Only a few of the furnishings are original, but they do have Henry’s small bed. I’m reminded of Frank Phillips’ even smaller bed at his Woolaroc lodge.
The mansion grounds were busy with families out for a stroll. The estate was 46 acres and is now a park that connects to miles of trails wandering the surrounding steep hills. Wendy and I walked out for the great view of the city below, and then walked the old drive to enjoy the interesting plants.
We walked partway down a trail, but were bushed and tired of our fellow tourists. So we traipsed back up to the car and fled east back to our hotel.
In scouting out dinner, I was delighted to discover there was a Godfather’s Pizza less than a mile from our hotel. I have many fond memories of eating at the long-gone franchise on Campus Corner at the University of Oklahoma. The next day we would venture out for a long drive on the historic Columbia River Gorge Scenic Highway.
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Meador Manor 
