With apologies to Tracy the librarian

A few months ago, I posted what I thought was the best e-mail from Tracy the librarian. I was totally wrong.


This is the best e-mail I've ever received. From my grandpa, on a Monday night:

Sugar I want to ask you a question and tell me the truth i am confess on your life style as a Lesbian,
i am watching Springer and it seems like it is a hold lot of slipping AROUND and when they arre confronted it is a hold lot of butt kicking going on you dont go threw that do you please advise. Love you more each day.
looking forward to your reply
love you
XXXXXXXooooooooo papaw

Deceptively Spring

Here is my seasonal video of everything I did this spring. Oddly, I forgot to video the rain, which is the real underlying theme. June was the wettest Portland has ever had. Luckily, I made time to leave the state:

spring 2010 from Casey Parks on Vimeo.

Blogger unbound

Every once in a while, in between stories of roads and water rate increases, I get to do a funny little story like this one. Definitely fun to meet these guys:

HILLSBORO -- Jeff McRitchie isn't deluded enough to think people are awake before dawn, reading the blogs he posts hourly. No one else could possibly be as interested in the stories he writes about the document-binding business.

That's OK. What matters is this: Google has started to notice him.

Website traffic has tripled, and sales are up enough that the 40-person company has hired an additional employee to work on the site. It's all because McRitchie launched one crazy experiment: He pledged to blog every single hour of every single day for 72 days -- about document binding.

McRitchie, 30, works for a Hillsboro-based national company called My Binding. Basically, it sells anything that acts like staple but is not a staple, including those plastic coils that keep documents together.

Read the rest on Oregonlive. (Click that sentence, and it'll take you there).

Megan threw Claudia a surprise party

All my friends have birthdays in April, May or June. I went to two parties this weekend, the second of which was a surprise for Claudia.

Birthday art

Flan made these for my birthday last month:

Summer heat

Reader, I am waiting with bated breath for the heat to hit Portland. The forecast promises 80s for this weekend, so why am I still wearing a coat?

All this heat-thinkin' has me thinking about a video I made last year of some 14- and 15-year-old girl rockers who wrote a song about the week in Portland when it was 108 degrees. The lyrics are a little hard to make out, but this is one catchy song:

Jellyfish Rave - Summer Heat from Casey Parks on Vimeo.

Across the stage

from the last Explode into Colors show:

Up a rope

Ev in LA: