chuggnutt.com

This is part of an ongoing series of articles that I'm writing on Central Oregon and growing up here; you can view the introduction here and the series as a whole here.

Living relatively self-sufficiently on five acres, we always had some livestock. For all intents and purposes, we had a farm, but it was more of a small family farm than the big operations I usually think of when I hear the term (with cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, etc.).

At any given time our livestock generally consisted of one milk cow and a coop full of chickens. Along the way we tried out different animals, but this was the general combination that held.

Read on...

The Cowboy Dinner Tree was fabulous. A real experience, one I would absolutely do again! So this review will mostly consist of gushing over the meal (I can't think of anything bad to say), followed by a few pictures. Read on...

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This is part of an ongoing series of articles that I'm writing on Central Oregon and growing up here; you can view the introduction here.

Growing up on the desert, water takes on a special, almost symbolic, significance. You are constantly surrounded by sand, sagebrush, juniper trees, dry vegetation like bunchgrass and cheat grass, all of it broken up by undulating mounds or ridges of dark lava rock... and not a drop of water in sight.

...I was going to write some pithy metaphor about how the mind grows to reflect the desert environment around it and consequently understands water to be as precious as it is to the ecosystem, but you know what? I'm not that high-fallutin'.

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Last week I met with a local businessman who was interested in finding a local PHP expert/consultant for a project that he's expanding. He already has a long-distance PHP guy doing work for him, but also wanted someone local. This got me to thinking; aside from myself and a few isolated individuals, and Alpine, who are the PHP people for Central Oregon? Are there any PHP-specific shops or consultants who are available for this kind of thing? If not, why not? And how would anyone find out about them?

My next thought, invariably, was We need a local PHP user group for exactly this kind of thing. A local organization where any and all of the PHP programmers/users can get together, and perhaps build a directory of services and maybe even host events.

Would this be of interest to anyone? I'm actually pretty ignorant about the user group thing (it's probably been close to a decade since I've been anywhere near a user group type of function), so I may not actually know of which I speak. For instance, is there already a Central Oregon PHP user group that I'm totally unaware of?

I'd be interested in getting involved one way or another. What says the community-at-large?

Something I hadn't blogged yet but thought I should "break": I've been approached by the new publisher of the High Desert Sun newsletter to write for them. I said yes, of course, and the first article I'm turning in (by tomorrow) is based on my Reynolds Pond blog entry from about a year and a half ago.

I hadn't heard of the High Desert Sun before, but it's a newspaper-format newsletter that covers most of Central Oregon: Bend, Redmond, Prineville, Alfalfa, Powell Butte, Terrebonne, Madras and Crooked River Ranch. (I culled those from the "Locations" page on the website, it's possible they also cover Lapine, Sunriver, and Sisters as well.) The publisher found my little corner of the web here and liked my writing well enough to invite me to write for the paper.

Cool! It's not huge, granted, but it's a start. Of course, if I become a regular writer for the newsletter, then I'll need to start thinking things up to write about—I'd hate to have to recycle stuff from my blog all the time. :)

Halloween blogging #1

The Fall 2005 issue of Bend Living (no link love, their site sucks and the "current" links point to other articles) has an article titled "Ghost Stories" that explores some of the supposedly haunted places in Bend and Central Oregon. And on the radio last week, they were asking for people to call in to name the haunted places we have around here, so I thought it'd be fun to blog it a bit.

The Bend Living article mentions the Deschutes County Historical Society building, the old Reid School in downtown Bend. Supposedly the ghost of George Brosterhous, who died there in 1914, haunts the place.

The Shadowlands Haunted Place Index for Oregon (which I can thank Rhys for mentioning, if I remember correctly) mentions five for Bend:

The Congress House: This was mentioned on the radio, and is the subject of the only ghost story for Bend found in Ghosts and Strange Critters of Washington and Oregon. According to the Shadowlands site, "there have been a few families that have lived there that have either died or something tragic has happened to them due to living in the cursed house," which is identified in the ghosts book as the McCann House. I don't know about cursed; the book simply mentions that sometimes figures are seen in the upper story windows, and gives a short history of it.

The O'Kane Building: Mentioned in the Bend Living article, too. There's "ghostly smoke, weird lights, footsteps, and voices," and occasionally a voice that calls out orders in the restaurant.

Old Mt. View Hospital: I'm not sure where this is, the site says it's now an apartment building next to Drake Park. Floor creaks have been reporting, like someone's walking around.

The Old Smoke Stacks: They must mean in the Old Mill District, which isn't relevant anymore since they're building it out... But it sounds like teenagers would sneak in there at night to see if the place was haunted.

The Pilot Butte Cemetary: Also mentioned in Bend Living. Reports of ghostly blue orbs floating around.

Independently of these sources, I've also heard the Lara House Bed and Breakfast is haunted. Ironically enough, it's located on Congress Avenue... just like the Congress House mentioned above! (Cue cheesy horror music.)

Other places mentioned in the Bend Living article include the Downing Hotel building in downtown Bend, current site of The Grove restaurant, Bronco Billy's in Sisters (the old Hotel Sisters building), Sunriver Resort's Great Hall, and the New Redmond Hotel in (you guessed it) Redmond.

Shadowlands mentions Redmond, too. In addition to footsteps, there "have been pictures taken and in the pictures there are clearly orbs in the lobby hall. Feelings of a strange presence in the rooms in the middle of the night. Apparitions of a woman have been reported."

So, what else have we got around here? Anyone know of any haunted places I didn't mention?

This article in the Bulletin Monday caught my eye: Dinosaur discovery. Part of a plesiosaur was unearthed over near Prineville last summer:

The self-trained paleontologists found what is believed to be the first remains of a marine reptile called the plesiosaur that has been found in the Pacific Northwest.

It is also thought to be only the third vertebrate fossil uncovered in the area so far from a rock formation that dates back to the Cretaceous period, the last of the three periods of the Dinosaur Age....

When South Dakota paleontologist James Martin excavated the site in May on behalf of the BLM, he found at least two nearly complete teeth, tooth fragments and a 3-foot-long lower jawbone of a 90 to 100 million-year-old plesiosaur. The pieces may constitute 80 percent of its lower jaw.

Martin thinks it was from a large-headed, short-necked plesiosaur that was 25 feet long from head to tail.

Pretty cool stuff—it's a long article (for the Bulletin), gets into detail about plesiosaurs. And, there's another first that I'm aware of: using Wikipedia as a source (and citing it in the article). That seems to me to be pretty clueful. Have they mentioned Wikipedia before?

I got a copy of Wednesday's Bulletin today (the Community Life section) that mentions my blog (see The Bulletin quoting my site?). The article is about both Reynolds Pond and Mayfield Pond, both east of Bend, as little-known oases in the desert. I wasn't quoted directly, but I got a paragraph:

Go to www.chuggnutt.com and you'll find a wistful description of Reynolds Pond written by a person who spent a lot of time out there as a child. On a return visit 12 years later, the author noted that several barren islands in the pond were now covered with vegetation.

That sounds about right. I don't know about spending "a lot of time out there" but I did write that I frequented the pond growing up, so that's fair, I guess.

Jim Witty, the Bulletin's travel writer (I think), wrote the article. When we used to get the paper, I enjoyed the accounts of Oregon and beyond he would write for the weekend travel section. Thanks, Jim!

According to this article in the Bulletin, a woman in Prineville gave birth to a 14 pound, 1 ounce baby. Holy c-section, Batman! Still, as big as that is, it doesn't quite beat the 16.7 pound baby born last month. And then for some bogglers check out these Guinness World Record entries for heaviest births.

Just looked out my back door a few minutes ago and was mildly surprised to see snow falling. I'd heard there was a chance, but you never really expect it this late in the year. Oh well, welcome to Central Oregon—you gotta wait at least until June before you can guarantee no snow.

Sweeping the local news this evening is the South Sister earthquakes: more than 100 shook the area three miles west of the South Sister today, with a magnitude of up to 1.5 on the Richter scale. Bend.com has the best writeup on the story I've seen online.

The quakes were occurring in the northeast part of an area centered three miles west of South Sister, in which the ground has undergone what scientists call "crustal uplift" (but others have called "the bulge") by as much as 25 centimeters (about 10 inches) since late 1997....

The magma appears to be accumulating at a depth about four miles below the ground surface, and measures about 50 million cubic yards in volume.

Interesting stuff; of course the entire Cascade Range is geologically active, so it's not really a surprise, but with the South Sister about, oh, 30 miles away, this news has more than a few people worried, I'm sure.

Personally, I'd expect Mount Hood to be the one to erupt first, of all of them.