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I’m thankful for Portland’s quirky immersive art

Mid-November found us back in Portland, this time joined by my sister, with the primary goal of the trip to visit with my aging grandmother, scheduled in short visits on alternating days so as to not overstay her energy levels. To those family and friends we did not manage to connect with on this trip or back in June, I offer my sincerest apologies.

As part of our effort to not overstay our welcome with Grandma, we once again stayed in downtown Portland with an amazing view of the riverfront and a couple blocks away from the Portland Saturday Market. What we somehow missed in June, possibly because of the later sunset, was the number of murders that appear at sunset by the river; Portland is apparently known for its crow population (among other things).

A snail at the Portland Aquarium
At Wonderwood Indoor Mini Golf, a sign that reads “ALL HAIL the Misfits Mischief Makers Creators and Collectors. Yours truly, the Rat King”
At Wonderwood Indoor Mini Golf, a couple distressed-looking mushrooms and a butterfly along the carpeted slope for one of the holes.
At Wonderwood Indoor Mini Golf, assorted characters looking on at the carpeted slope for one of the holes. Multiple carpet textures are in play, as well as some odd bumps.
At Wonderwood Indoor Mini Golf, possibly the weirdest hole, requiring the player to either stand on a wobbly wooden log or use their golf club as a cue stick.
At Wonderwood Indoor Mini Golf, the continuation of the weirdest hole – the plinko adventure below depends on how far along the uneven, carpeted bridge your ball proceeds before rolling out again at ground level.

Portland is also a prime location for quirky art, or in the case of this blog post, quirky immersive art. We revisited the Portland Aquarium, vaguely justifying the repeat visit because my sister hadn’t been there yet, and a few days later, explored Mike Bennett’s other immersive art experience, the Wonderwood Restaurant & Indoor Mini Golf. While I have absolutely no golfing experience, I have played a few rounds of mini golf over the years, and this was by far the craziest set of holes I’ve played. (Please note that I’m not particularly good at mini golf. Par is something that exists for other players.)

In addition to Mike Bennett’s delightful art, I could tell we were in for something different when we noticed the plethora of extraneous holes at the first hole, with writing inside like “Nope”, “Wrong”, and “X” (which did not, in fact, mark the correct spot). In addition to odd patches of mismatched carpet texture, deliberate bumps in otherwise flat surfaces, one of the holes has you teeing off at chest level (depending on your height, of course), with the choice of standing on a wobbly log or a nearby step to hit the ball onto a narrow, unevenly cut, carpeted (with multiple textures) bridge above a plinko-style structure that drops your ball back out to ground level. While we had the option of playing again – your admission covers unlimited plays in the same day – we opted to escape (this time) across the street to a lovely yarn & book store.

A selfie of me at the Hopscotch Interactive Art Experience wearing a cocktail shirt (no, really, it has line art of cocktails... and flamingos) with multicolor lights streaming across and behind me. — A selfie of me wearing a cocktail shirt (no, really, it has line art of cocktails… and flamingos) with multicolor lights streaming across and behind me.

Hanging lights at the Hopscotch Interactive Art Experience. The lights were constantly rotating between colors as you walked among the dangling strings. — A selfie of me wearing a cocktail shirt (no, really, it has line art of cocktails… and flamingos) with multicolor lights streaming across and behind me.

A couple days later, we explored another nearby immersive art exhibit: Hopscotch. We weren’t sure what to expect from this one, I had picked up a brochure at the airport in the 20-minute gap between our flight arrival and my sister’s, so we were working from a single page description and photos, including “23,000 sq. ft. of total immersion in the unexpected” and “15 vibrant installations from 40+ local, national, and international artists.” This turned out to be another delightful experience, with some exhibits being harder to leave than others, like the colorfully lit trampoline room (not much bounce, but the wall lights are reactive to nearby activity) and a ball pit. Tickets do need to be purchased online, and if you’re visiting on a Saturday, ahead of time. Don’t show up like we did and be disappointed that it’s sold out, though that did offer us the opportunity to visit the nearby Hippo Hardware store and walk across the Burnside Bridge; we then pre-purchased tickets for Sunday.

If you know of other immersive art exhibits – anywhere! – I’d love to hear about them.

MRIs are annoyingly loud

A couple years ago, I posted about my first MRI experience, which was for my hip. While I found the sound variance fascinating with a headset, this week, I experienced an MRI without one, and it was definitely annoyingly loud at various stages, even with the earplugs they provided. When it wasn’t too jarring, I was – as I was concerned about in my previous experience – bored.

I understand why I didn’t have a headset this time. Technically, I had two MRIs back-to-back: one of my spine and one of my brain. It’s safe to assume that they don’t want a headset showing up while scanning your head.

Good news! No concerns at all about my brain. Well, at least not on an MRI.

Bad news! We’re back to arthritis in my neck being the likely cause of the tingling in my fingertips that I have been experiencing since May. The EKG I mentioned back in July that was checking for nerve damage/carpal tunnel showed nothing significant, which led to me seeing my Primary Care Physician (PCP), who then referred me to Neurology.

On the plus side, the neurologist is amazing – attentive, taking notes, looking up possibilities while we were talking about my symptoms and eliminating options based on symptoms that I don’t have. She called me within a couple hours of the MRI results hitting the system to discuss what I should try next. I’ll schedule a follow up with her in a month or so to discuss the effectiveness of the latest possible solution.

Fall progresses in bursts

I swear, from one day to the next, the trees suddenly changed color. I’m sure there was a progression, yet I somehow missed it. What I haven’t missed is the subsequent delivery of many of those beautiful leaves onto our lawn.

Three photos over the course of four days show the slow progression, most noticeably in the upper left branches, which are now creeping towards bare. It could be gradual from here, with more branches showing each day… or, as happens periodically when you live near the Windy City, a blusterous day could sweep in and shake the rest of those leaves lose. That already happened to a tree across the street.

Done before the first snow!

*checks the weather forecast for the next week or so*

Done well before the first snow!

A stained patch of driveway where the last of the mulch pile sat, with two plastic buckets bearing the remnants of that pile.

A partial view of the back yard from the living room, with fresh mulch around and in the vegetable beds and under the recently trimmed mulberry tree, and brilliantly red leaves on the maple tree, offset by neighboring trees that are still mostly green or lightly yellow.

And, delightfully, done mulching for the season.

For those of you following along at home, we went through about 35 cubic yards of mulch this year, dispersing it to a mix of previously and newly mulched areas, such as around the raised beds in the vegetable garden (old) and creating a back perimeter path (new). Our most recent new spot, which finished out the mulch pile, is in the front yard, set up for a variety of fruit that will be growing in the area.

Normally, I’d say we’re done gardening for the season. It is, after all, November. But the growing season has been entirely weird, I picked some raspberries earlier this week and we have some white strawberries still, though I don’t expect those will have time to ripen. It’s warm enough that weeding can still happen, which is really just a head start for spring weeding.

Happy Samhain!

Or happy Halloween, depending which you celebrate. Both is, of course, an option. As we wrap up the harvest season, at least those of us in northern climates that are rapidly moving towards winter, we celebrate the shifting seasons with Samhain, taking the opportunity to mourn our losses at this point in the year when the veil between the living and spirit world is considered to be at its thinnest.

In the United States, we also celebrate Halloween, a holiday that has derived from Samhain and similar celebrations. While Halloween parties usually fall on the weekend that precedes the holiday, whatever day of the week Halloween falls traditionally sees children donning costumes and going door-to-door trick-or-treating, requesting goodies (typically candy) from their neighbors. Many towns now have designated trick-or-treating hours, usually ranging a couple hours before and after sunset; our hours are 4-8pm, with a 5:50pm sunset.

A gathering of crocheted critters as handouts for trick-or-treaters: a purple spider, four white ghosts, and two Frankenstein monsters.

We live in an area of town where trick-or-treating is light: the yards are reasonably wide, and there are no sidewalks or street lights, all of which discourage families from wandering our block. We usually see a handful of people before dark and that’s it. That is not, in my mind, worth buying a large bag of candy for, since we would then need to eat the remainders. Instead, I have a box of toys I set on a table by the front door with a “please take one” sign. These toys keep easily between years – unlike chocolate – and can be added to when the box starts to run low.

Though it’s not running low yet, I wanted to experiment with crocheting a ghost this year. And once I had made a couple of those, I wanted a spider – a pattern I’ve crocheted before – and threw together a couple Frankenstein monsters as well. Other than the spider, these aren’t stuffed… in terms of shape, they’re essentially upside down pots, holding themselves up on the weight of the yarn. Hopefully they’ll be enjoyed by the small number of people who wander by our house.

Another fabulous Dorkstock!

As I mentioned last week, it was time for Dorkstock again. This is always a fun weekend for me, not the least of which is because I get to play and run games like Cartoon Frag and Life-Sized Kill Doctor Lucky. This year’s Dorkstock was momentous in several way: the debut of the Gamehole Plush Monster Island (minor tweaks are needed to a couple characters who were overly powerful), along with Steve Jackson & John Kovalic’s announcement about Munchkin 2nd Edition, as well as plans for a Munchkin RPG with 9th Level Games made for an exciting weekend.

When it comes down to it though, what makes conventions shine in my life are the people. Some of our Dorkstock crew gathered on Wednesday night, taking the rare opportunity to play games among ourselves after our initial room set-up. Thursday morning, before an early start at Life-Sized Doctor Lucky, I was delighted to find out that my best friend from high school – whose podcast, Memoirs of a Neurodivergent Latina, I’ve mentioned before – was attending for the first time, GMing for Monte Cook Games just down the hall from Dorkstock. Despite our busy schedules, we managed to grab some time together across a couple meals and random encounters. Maybe next time we can play a game together.

Gamehole Plush Monster Island

Every year, John Kovalic designs a new plush for Gamehole Con, the parent convention that hosts Dorkstock. A couple years ago, it occurred to me that I could combine those plush into a Monster Island game, a game I’ve owned for a couple decades now. The hard part, beyond retroactively acquiring a second set of most of the plush (the owlbear, alas, is no longer available), was coming up with their stats and special abilities while keeping the variety of creatures somewhat balanced in game play.

Plush Bulette faces off against plush Rust Monster on a green fabric mat with a blue fabric pond near a plush rainbow food truck. Assorted meeple are nearby, presumably fleeing from the battling kaiju, not unlike the Bulette who was strategically retreating.

Among other things, I needed to take into account that some abilities just wouldn’t be useful against other monsters. The cute orange beast pictured here, for example, is a Rust Monster. But the other monsters don’t wear armor! They do, however, have the ability to pick up and throw several crocheted food trucks and garbage cans, all of which are theoretically made of metal. While it would have been amusing to let the Rust Monster just destroy those items, it seemed better to let is recover health by consuming them, though playtesting went through a couple iterations of what that restored health value would be.

Preparing for a battle of four plush monsters: Rust Monster, Gelatinous Cube, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Kobold. On the green fabric play area with blue pond, in addition to the monsters, there are three crocheted food trucks, two crocheted trees, three crocheted garbage cans, and a scattering of plastic meeple.

But I didn’t make the food trucks just for the Rust Monster. Food trucks are part of the Gamehole Con tradition, adding food options beyond the convention center selection. And if there are food trucks, well, there have to be people (OK, meeple) gathered near them. This was one of the places where I tweaked the Monster Island game mechanics… each monster has two special abilities, and they’re activated by consuming meeple. That includes the Rust Monster’s ability to heal by consuming metal… they lost in the last playtest round because while they were in reach of a metal item, they were out of meeple. Oops. (The pictured kobold is a stand-in from 9th Level Games’ Kobolds Ate My Baby!, since the kobold is this year’s plush.)

While both scheduled Monster Island events for this weekend are sold out, the rules and plush will be available in Dorkstock’s games library for play in the room (Waubesa – up on the second floor of the convention center) for anyone who feels a need for a silly kaiju battle.

Mulberry trimming

Most years, after the mulberries are done for the season, I do a quick trim of the branches I can reach that are extending too far over the lawn. A couple key phrases in that sentence were “most” and “I can reach”… I am not particularly tall, and I never quite got around to bringing the ladder out each year to trim the higher branches. That resulted in quite a sprawl, particularly at the higher levels, that I didn’t really want to deal with myself, and a fruit tree that was taller than we wanted, primarily because we had no way to reach so much of that fruit.

A view of the back yard and house focused on a sprawling mulberry tree before it was trimmed.

If you’ve never had mulberries – and I personally have never seen them available uncooked in stores – you might be wondering why we didn’t just collect them when they fell. Mulberries are quite juicy, while resembling a small blackberry. I assume this juiciness is the reason for the lack of commercial availability; they don’t keep well. It also means that when they hit the ground, they immediately collect dirt. To be fair, this doesn’t stop the birds, rabbits, and other critters from eating them… we’re just a bit pickier.

A view of the back yard focused on a sprawling mulberry tree during the trimming process, with trimmed branches on the ground.

I decided earlier in the summer to hire someone to trim the tree, rather than having to find the time to trim it and get the branches down to the appropriate size for the township’s branch pick-up. As you can see in this photo taken during the trimming, there were some sizable branches removed. Conveniently, my neighbor had hired a company, Paulo & Sons Tree Services (who can be reached here), mid-summer, when his branch overhanging my driveway cracked near the trunk. I kept their contact information, promising to reach out once the mulberry harvest ended for the season.

A view of the back yard and house focused on a the significantly reduced mulberry tree.

To be clear, our mulberry season usually finishes in July, nicely timed with our next wave of raspberries and strawberries, affording us the opportunity for some triple berry dishes. This has been a strange growing season in our garden – I picked a ripe strawberry today, in October, and saw another recently formed flower – and our mulberry harvest didn’t actually wind down until mid-September. In fact, the timing worked out nicely for the tree trimming to happen in cooler weather; it was still in the 80s last week. I’m hoping the raspberries are about done, so I can trim them before the branch pick-up ends for the season. (Edit: the raspberries said “I’m not dead yet!” So I ate some.) I’m happy with the trimmed mulberry, and glad someone else did the work.

Temperature blanket update and ideas

A crocheted patchwork blanket with one square representing each day's temperature, beginning with a mixed blue and white in the bottom right from February, progressing to the far left row in October with 5 red, 1 yellow, and 9 orange squares.

The temperature blanket continues, of course, with another three months of warm weather added in the latest six rows. In this photo, that’s the left side, which has the occasional yellow (65-74) with more orange (75-84) and red (85-94). Fortunately, dark red’s only appearance, for temperatures 95 and above, was on the last travel day shown, when we flew back from Portland, Oregon as they started a heat wave.

When I started this blanket, I was working on the concept based solely on word-of-mouth, having heard the idea from friends at various points, including one who started her blanket in January. I recently stumbled on a Temperature/Weather Blanket group on Facebook and am in awe of the variety of different ideas for the same basic concept. Beyond the basic rows or granny squares (like mine) are the expanded ideas with lows and highs, sometimes as half of the same row, which makes for fascinating color blends. There are rows or squares as month dividers, special colors or add-ons to mark significant dates for the blanket’s owner (not necessarily the person doing the work), and squares per week or month, building out to longer rows later in the square. And it’s not all squares! There are hexes and flowers and circles all joined in appropriate ways. One layout I’m considering for the future is a calendar design – in addition to the squares for each day, there are filler squares to finish out the rectangle for a monthly calendar, along with a top row indicating the month, and then the months can be joined to form the larger blanket.

And that’s just the blankets! There are also weather snakes… same basic concept, a row per day of a crochet plush snake, which I have to say, is tempting for some future year. There are also embroidered designs, from a dozen cat silhouettes in a variety of colors to a daily temperature tree, which is available as a kit here. I am seriously considering that one for 2026, as a good way to improve my embroidery skills. Once I have more practice, I may consider an embroidery chart for something like the cats.

Which creative temperature idea fascinates you the most?

The return of the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show

In a whirlwind of political controversy, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show, a late-night talk show, was suddenly suspended “indefinitely” last week, then just as suddenly restarted, airing again on Tuesday, September 23rd. The cancellation was evidently a response to the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appearing on a conservative commentator’s podcast and threatening the company that produces the show. (His threats went over so well that fellow Republicans were criticizing his comments as attacking free speech.) This sudden turnabout was undoubtedly due to the financial setbacks experience by the parent company… someone called Disney… as consumers took a stand, cancelling streaming subscriptions and vacations, apparently to the tune of several billion dollars lost in less than a week.

Until this week, I had never watched the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show. The entire concept is antithetical to my lifestyle… “late night” is something that I usually only experience at conventions, and I generally prefer to read news rather than watch it. Don’t get me wrong, I only altered half of that… I watched the episode on YouTube the morning after it aired. According to YouTube’s count, so have 15 million (and counting) other people, so I’d say it’s doing fairly well.

I almost feel bad for The Onion, faced with the outrageous reality that they’re competing with, and yet that same outrageous reality makes it easier for the late night comedians, including Jimmy Kimmel, to find easy targets. And with malfunctioning escalators (allegedly sabotage, rather than the reality of an emergency stop triggered by his own team) and teleprompter (again, run by his own team), you’d almost think this administration is trying to provide fodder for those late night shows.

What we saw was a successful boycott with a specific target – restoring the show – influencing a mega-corporation. Imagine what we could accomplish as a country if all of those consumers who have a strong opinion about free speech would vote.