My wife and I spent last weekend exploring our new surroundings in Portland, Oregon. We moved here about a month ago from the Phoenix area and I’m still impressed with, oh, trees, and leaves on the ground, and free water that falls unsupervised from the sky and rolls about on the streets, that still seems strange to me. Sort of gratuitous. Portland especially seems to have an inexhaustible supply of small neighborhoods with tons of character and neighborhood feeling, pockets of the city that people have cared for and looked after, like you’d care for a garden. And it’s all to a human scale, not an automobile scale, again a big contrast from Arizona and completely refreshing. The city’s going to fill up our weekends for the foreseeable future, and that’s a great prospect.