If I find the right inspiration and dodge distractions I can get a blog piece posted on time. It’s time I take the deadline serious too. It has the feel of a self-imposed deadline but I’m learning the hard way how important deadlines are. Things get in the way. Take, for instance, a sunny Friday afternoon when I’ve been asked to help volunteer for the community garden where I learned about a community garden plot that you have to pass through a trailer park to find. This volunteering took my wife, Ronna, and me into the neighborhood of our favorite pizza place so we had to stop for happy hour. Dinner followed a trip across the street to a garden store where we picked up some kale starts to replace our potato crop that we harvested and Ronna made into the best potato salad I ever ate. Kale starts meant we had to go to our garden plot to plant the kale and water the garden. I bog you down with this minutiae because I was planning a completely different blog post that needed photos and was something that was going to be a long-winded piece that wasn’t going to come together in a half hour like this one might. Now I can take more time to put a cohesive touch on my next blog post due to an inspired last-minute switcharoo.

Needless to say I’ll be written up for missing my deadline. It’s a violation of the sacred tenants of Orbit customer service. Even if only one person was expecting to read a post at the usual time and place and couldn’t, I’ve failed. If it makes you feel any better it was all worth it to blow off blogging for a few hours on a sunny Friday. I was trying to get to writing but I ran out of time. Word has it that I will be receiving written notice, a warning from Orbit big cheese Simmon Wills.  He’s given himself the complicated and meaningless title of Managing Editor of the Orbit Partners Limited Corporation and the inflated salary to go with it. I cower in my cube every time I see him blasting through the halls in his three-piece suit. No matter, I’ll make more of an effort to plan ahead and I’ll be ready to slap something together to avoid future confrontations with Mr. Wills. I also want to sincerely apologize to those I kept waiting.

To placate the missed deadline in some way I empty out the confines of the photo backlog that had no place to go until it was time for them to be strung together in this manner.

Of all the randomness I’m about to document I took this picture because I liked the image. Pasted on a strange, long, skinny, rectangular traffic signal sign near the Denver Ave MAX stop train tracks there seems to be no way of telling what the sign is trying to say except perhaps “don’t drive, walk, or bike here.” Plain, simple, direct lines create a cool image that breaks up the slanted bar mystery sign monotony.

When I encountered John Wayne peering down on the Bison Coffeehouse in the Cully neighborhood, it seemed like a coincidence or then again a strategic marketing plan. Regardless I liked the juxtaposition of the cowboy looking over the cowboy coffee shop with its buffalo heads and cow hide chairs. John Wayne’s image is shilling good will for the Foundation for a Better Life in one of those Pass It On campaigns. The black and white treatment served to upgrade the aura a bit.

This bulletin board caught my attention when I was coming out of a TJ Maxx restroom. I was struck by trying to figure out what the phrase “Leveraging Differences” could possibly mean. If it’s something that has to do with a retail strategy it’s still an utter mystery.  It seems so mystifying that no one could think of anything to put on the bulletin board that used the phrase as a title.

Being downtown this week on foot, I saw this sign on the door to Mary’s Club, one of Portland’s historic strip clubs. I couldn’t pass up a photo op because the sign created a minor contradiction in my mind. Is it fabulous or cool inside? Why can’t it be both. If a certain degree of fabulousness overrides the cool factor can’t someone update the sign? A full investigation would have made me late for my temp job interview.  Anybody’s speculation is probably better than mine.