AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING
After several years of my working on the Port Townsend house while commuting to Portland, Bob and I were divorced, and I moved to Port Townsend permanently.
FIRST DAYS IN PORT TOWNSEND
Yes, I am enjoying being in Port Townsend--especially with the very intimate warm welcome given me by old man weather.
IT ONLY RAINS AT NIGHT IN PORT TOWNSEND
Like “the four o’clock wind,” the rain also seemed to be on a timer, and obliged the inhabitants by turning on its sprinklers mostly at night.
PORT TOWNSEND SUMMER
It was spring when I first moved to Port Townsend. At least it was spring on the calendar. It was April but it felt more like winter.
NEILS AND GORGEOUS DAVE
My first job was the remodeling of a large waterfront house on Discovery Bay with its own sandy beach and view of Mt. Baker. It was the perfect site for the onset of my fledgling career.
REAL LIFE ONE ACT PLAY
PLACE: Bayshore Enterprises, Port Townsend: a school and work-training facility for mentally challenged adults.
WALTER
That would have been the end of our friendship except that Walter told me he had also heard that I knew how to dance and wanted to know if I would teach him.
THE WOJT HOUSE
In 1979 Richard and Kay Wojt (pronounced Voit) asked me to design an energy efficient house for them. Until then, I had only done remodelings.
SPAIN AND CONCRETE BIDS
When Jim Malcolm got his sailing monolith to Spain, sometime in 1979, he invited Bob and me to join him there. He was in Alicante, just south of Valencia on the Mediterranean Sea.
THE DEATH OF KINGS (Queens, Princes, Princesses, Etc.)
Bob and I spent a few days in Madrid on our way to Alicante. We took a tour of the Royal Palace.
LA MURALLA ROJA
Several years before our trip to Spain, I had seen, in an architectural magazine, a recently completed Spanish building complex on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
GLITCHES IN WOJT’S HOUSE
The first disaster was the roof.
DANCER LOOSES HEARING
I hear that the guests of the Palace Hotel have been complaining about the noise from The Judge’s Chambers, a drink and dance place across the street. Well, if the people at the Palace can’t stand it, how do you…
ROCK SHOPPING
Would you like a really gigantic rock for your back yard or for landscaping a pent house roof garden? Well, back your car right up here and my quary friends will load it on top. It will only cost you…
STARLING STEW
Have you ever heard of brilliant people with brilliant ideas who just never get anywhere with them? Well meet yours truly, a genius in the bud if not the bloom.
LEMON TAHINI DRESSING
When I was in Seattle, if I was anywhere near the University District, I always went to the Sunlight Café for a salad because they had a salad dressing that must have been the best dressing in the world. It…
THE HOOD CANAL BRIDGE
On the morning of Tuesday, February 13th, 1979, a gale force wind sunk the Hood Canal Bridge. It was a pontoon bridge that connected those of us on the Olympic Peninsula with the east side of Puget Sound.
BACK TALK
What a downer it is to have a back that keeps slipping around like an errant husband, even going out in the middle of the night. Last week it was canes and crutches and a creaking voice. This week it…
ELEVATED ICE CREAM
This is perhaps my all time favorite of the buildings I designed in Port Townsend. In fact, when the open house was held, I wandered around through it as giddy as a headless chicken.
KISSING YOUR IDIOT
“All our lives are idiots that we have given birth to, but there comes a time when we must take our lives in our arms.”
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
I think I will paint him red, hose him down and set him beside some white chickens so that everything can depend on him, and he can be very important to all of us forever and ever.
THE FABULOUS MOOSE EPIC
And right there (!) broadside to my staring-eyed face was a MOOSE--all seven feet of it! It was HUGE.
MOOSE AFTERWARD
You may think this is the end. It isn’t.
SCANDIA DANCING
To begin with I want to say that, as far as I know, I am not Scandinavian. However, my knowledge is sketchy, and considering the history of America, or even of the world, anybody could be anything if you go…