Month: December 2022

The Native American Youth and Family Center community garden in Portland’s Cully neighborhood was bustling Thursdays with volunteers who’d put traditional Thanksgiving plans aside to honor the Indigenous community.

The Un-Thanksgiving event was established last year to offer an alternative to the colonist-centric holiday.

“There’s a lot of colonial holidays that twist and invent stories of an American myth,” said organizer Mick Rose. “They create a sense of ownership and a lie about land being given rather than land being stolen. This event is really about de-investing from that narrative, because we know it’s not true.”

Volunteers were tasked with cleaning and rebuilding the garden, which houses several spaces for different native plants. The event continues Friday, from 11 am to 2 pm, and anyone is welcome to contribute.

Rose – a member of the Diné, Omaha and Pawnee tribes – was grateful to see so many volunteers in the

So… my good friend (a very reputable Santa Barbara resident with the initials of JD) texted me that the REAL urban myth is that the property’s deed includes a clause that any owner must adorn Rover (the Garden Street dog statue) throughout the year with appropriate costumes. I dug a bit more and found that the deed clause is probably not a myth. See below please.

The Dog Statue House
October 8, 2018 National Purebred Dog Day®

Do you live in an area that has a statue that gets dressed up in appropriate holiday attire?

You do if you live near the corner of Mission and Garden in Santa Barbara, California. “Rover,” a 4-foot tall, 340-pound bronze Labrador Retriever, has been standing guard over Santa Barbara’s Upper Eastside neighborhood for nearly 115 years, a house that heads a line of five historic houses known as Crocker Row.

The dog statue

Gardening was a favorite pastime of the late Rick Noordam, who served as chair of the Post Falls Parks and Recreation board.

“If you knew Rick, he and his wife (Nancy) were avid gardeners,” Parks and Recreation Director Dave Fair said to Post Falls City Council members during their Nov. 15 meeting.

“Rick was not just instrumental in it, but he was the driving force behind us getting a community garden,” Fair said. “He worked on the fundraising, he got volunteers involved, he and his wife volunteered for two years supervising it actually working in the garden, he got the Rotary behind building the building. It was a labor of love, that endeavor.”

To honor Noordam’s contributions to the River City, the city council unanimously voted to give the Post Falls Community Garden a new name — the Rick Noordam Community Garden.

Major Ron Jacobson said he knew Nordam through

On the north-west edge of Shanghai, over one hundred salespeople in black suits gathered around a replica of a Country Garden residential development as an enthusiastic instructor offered guidance on how to sell apartments.

Behind the glistening showroom for Project Exquisite, workers and cement trucks moved in and out of a vast construction site where the scaffolded towers were close to completion.

The scene evoked the glory days of China’s multi-decade real estate boom, but the sector is in crisis. Country Garden, the country’s biggest developer by sales, has emerged as one of the most prominent survivors in an industry plagued by construction delays, defaults and falling sales for more than a year.

New policy support from Beijing has raised investors’ hopes that the worst is over. The government this week said it was ready to deploy over $162bn of credit from state banks to developers in what is the