The move to Maine: Our new city Portland.

After finishing up my BFA senior thesis and graduating we packed up all our belongings and headed East. Off into the sunrise.

My wall of the BFA Thesis show.

Somehow we ended up arriving in Maine a whole day before we had planned on arriving, but with driving through the night and switching off the whole way there with only a short stint in Minnesota where we took a quick nap at a truck stop, and then two stop overs with some relatives of Jessye, we were making good time.
When we arrived in Maine they were having rain showers, which were apparently making up for the fact that the season switch had gone from winter to summer and it was finally making up for the absence of spring.
Our beginning in Maine started out with being lazy at Jessye's grandparent's place in the woods on an island in Harpswell, Maine.  Spending the day watching TNG on BBC America and short trips out when family members would visit.

The Pemaquid Light House.

Dobra Tea. Where I work.

Then within a month of moving to Maine Jessye found a couple of jobs and I started working at a tea house in Portland right when we moved into a new apartment.  We found an apartment that was low income in an old hotel that has a beautiful view of the city as well as the ocean and inland, if you look to the sides.  It was constructed in the early 20th Century and all the doors and floors seem to show sagging, but it adds a certain charm.  It seems that we are living in two rooms that have had the doors separating them opened.  So the bedroom is oddly the same size as the living room/dining room.

The living room/dining room of our apartment.

Middle Street Portland 1904. This street (which is the one
 where I work) was torn apart, were almost none of these
buildings exist anymore so that they could remove the bend
in the street and link it up to another that causes all kinds of
strange 5 lane to 2 lane confusion. If I am right most of the
buildings on the left shown have been torn down to make a
parking garage with a movie theater on the ground level.
- source SHORPY.com

The thrifting in this town seems to be a bit hit or miss.  I was expecting so many more antique/thrift shops but all of them seem to be outwards from the city.  Which is on par with a lot of things in this city though..  From our outward perspective this city was gutted in the 1950s/60s to make it more accessible for cars (read as tourists) and has since sprawled out in a strange manner.  Grocery shopping can be quite the frustration sometimes with the only supermarkets being a few miles away from us in areas not so accommodating for pedestrians to get to.  Thankfully the immigrants seem to have found the area in which we live (I think that our building being partly low income has helped with some of that) and we have a small Asian grocery store two building down from us.  Sadly they don't carry too much produce (and when they get it in they sell out very quickly) but they do have the fixings for quite a few tasty dishes and at the beginning of the winter one of the owners showed us how to make an Asian soup base that has since become one of our favorites.
When it was still warm out we would watch as the Grandmother of the Asian market would work at a rooftop garden she had built for herself.  Not knowing the legality of such things she made it so it couldn't be seen from the street below, but our apartment has a perfect view of it.  She would use the tending to the plants as a way to keep the grandchildren occupied as they would climb out the window to the garden to prune and water.

Early morning rain as seen from our apartment.

But then then snow came and all the plants left the rooftop.  It took a while though.  We kept having false summers that when we thought we were finally done with summer the temperature would jump up to 30 again.

The first snow as seen from our apartment looking inland.

The snow was quite different from what I was expecting.  Most of it was so dry and it would come from inland instead of from the water.  And once it snowed we were somewhat stuck.  The couple of miles to the supermarkets all of a sudden became grueling treks, if we were even to attempt.  So the result was a lot of rice and Asian dishes, but thankfully a Thai noodle bowl restaurant opened up next door to the Asian grocery store and on some of those nights of getting off later and not having the energy to then track down food to make dinner we had amazing $5 noodle bowls.

Tommy's Park near Dobra.

Not having a vehicle has helped a bit though with the winter as I have never had to deal with snow bans before where all vehicles are required to be off the roads so that the snow plows could clear all the streets.  This, of course, also resulted in a lot of knocked down road signs.  Also places to keep bikes seems to be in short supply so there were many a bike to be seem buried in snow banks only to be seen again, when the snow melted, mangled and looking awful.  It is a strange town with transportation..  The bus drivers all seem angry, but then again the only people that seem to use the bus system seem to be not the kinds of people to make someone happy.  It seems that if you are needing to use the bus system that it will take most of the day to plan out having to wait at stops hoping that the bus will actually arrive.  It is a poor system that I would relate to the fact that as I said before the city was gutted to aid cars, not really public transportation or public housing.  Perhaps I will write again about all my thoughts on that subject..

Me at my first Friday opening.

Now to end the never ending winter I got a last minute show at Dobra.  I haven't really been working on artwork that much since ending university, but from time to time I have found the time to sit down and do a little bit.  I have been spending much more time playing around with drafting programs measuring things out around me and then drawing them.  Examining the old architecture of our apartment, although because of all the sloping it has been somewhat of a challenge..
One of the things I have been trying to figure out since moving here has been the cultural differences between the West Coast and the East Coast.  A lot of things don't feel that different, although I would have to say that people from Maine seem to be awful at driving.  Then again I have noticed in the past that old people aren't usually the best at driving and there are certainly are a lot of retirees here..  Then there is the concept of the potluck which people know about and do here, but it never really seems to function in the same fashion as in the West.  They just seem to fall a little short of what they could be..  I think Jessye and I will just start hosting more potlucks.  I am actually wanting to try hosting a potlatch since I have been finding a lot of French porcelain dishes and the like to replace what we moved here with, so perhaps I will try something a bit different with this "what is mine is your's" culture..
So there is a brief catch up in my adventures, excluding quite a bit (like our brief trip to NYC/Jersey City to see Dustin and Natasha), but more can be said later.