Today we met with Joe, Pam, and the owners of the apartment complex in NE Portland we are considering converting to a permaculturally oriented cohousing community or ecovillage. We got good news. The current owners are willing to sell to the four of us as partners in the project! So over the next month or so we will be finalizing the details of the transaction.

This means we will be moving to NE Portland by this fall to reside in the complex as we work on its conversion to a more sustainable community. We are naturally quite excited by this turn of events and are looking forward to the project. We have been dreaming of living with other permaculturists for several years -- we will finally have our opportunity.

Afterwards the four of us met and discussed details of how we will go about the process. There is much to be done as we have quite ambitious goals: reclaiming much of the paved area for conversion into gardens, setting up community garden, composting, and recycling areas, weatherization of the dwellings characterized by seventies era construction, addition of new green features like solar water heaters, construction of a common house, and more.

We hope to use our blog to document some of what we are doing and to convey the excitement of a nascent ecoloigcally minded community in NE Portland.

On another note, Vlad and Luke helped me this morning almost double our composting capacity. Due to the large volume of compost we have from Food Not Bombs and New Day School, our existing four compost chambers are full. The three new chambers built from discarded pallets will allow us to take advantage of this valuable resource to more quickly build the soil fertility of our SE Portland permaculture site.

We've been back in Portland a little over 24 hours and are getting re-acclimatized to Oregon. Still having some jet lag due to the 16 hour time difference between here and Philippines. It was raining when we arrived but things dried out enough to see last night's lunar eclipse.

We're already resuming our Portland projects. We've got plenty to do in our permaculture garden, called Amrita for "nectar", located here in SE Portland.

We have been working with the Food Not Bombs vegan mass feeding program and accepting all their excess organic produce and food scraps in our large, and expanding, compost area. We have already filled 4 compost chambers, each probably 2 cubic yards, from their abundance. So we will be working with Vlad, one of the group's leading and most energetic members, to construct 3 more chambers. Our compensation for this, besides the satisfaction of working with such a worthy group and great, idealistic folk, is that virtually all our own organic produce needs are met. Yesterday afternoon I spent several hours processing asparagus, apples, pears, oranges, potatoes, tomatoes, purple and green kale, lettuce, leeks, and peppers. All these organic vegetables would have ended in the compost pile had I not gleaned them! When we arrived our fridge was bare. Now it is filled with many dishes.

We will be planting several more fruit trees on the property in the next few weeks. Already we have 5 apple trees. We have pear, prune, and cherry trees waiting to plant. The grapes need pruning, and we plan also to move the large rainwater collection swale to a different location in the yard. We will be adding more rain chains and have already obtained a thousand gallon scrap iron water tank from craigslist for rainwater collection that needs installation. Last fall we replaced the dysfunctional wide driveway with a much narrower strip driveway and its landscaping needs to be completed. We plan to plant strawberries in the center strip.

Our community garden plot at Clinton Community Garden needs some preparation for spring. Its kale garden has been supplying fresh greens through the Fall and Winter to the neighboring New Day Ananda Marga School.

This afternoon we are meeting with our partners Joe and Pam Leach to continue work on a thirty plus unit cohousing/ecovillage concept we would like to implement in inner NE Portland.

The idea is to take an existing apartment complex with many typically American environmentally unfriendly attributes and turn it into a showcase of green building and sustainability concepts.

For example, the existing parking area is right in the middle of the property, dominating the site in an automobile-oriented but pedestrian (and especially children) unfriendly manner. Our plan is to move this parking to the (ideally, street side) perimeter. This will drastically reduce the site's impermeable surface and get cars out of the main site. Additionally, it will allow us to channel all pedestrian traffic into one common entrance area, facilitating social interaction among the residents. The center of the site can then be reclaimed for an organic community garden and other community space. We are contemplating other uses, such as a children's playground and a greenhouse.

In cohousing fashion, we would like to expand the inside common areas to include a dining and meeting area, laundry center, and workshop space.

Today is our last day in Manila and we have been working on updating our blog and web photo albums and posting restaurant reviews for places we have visited. Also, doing our last emails. We also plan to go out for lunch and try to visit some places with soy soft serve ice cream.

Yesterday we did our last grocery shopping, and then went to a spa for a one hour full body massage for each of us.

We also finished watching some DVDs we had available. They were apparently pirated versions of current first run US movies copied, reportedly, in China. We should have guessed, since the latest James Bond movie, which just recently appeared in theaters, only cost one dollar. The packaging made them look like official copies. Although the image was decent, the English subtitles, apparently supplied in China, were outrageous (and non-sensical) and the sound also very poor! It just goes to show you get what you pay for.

Tonight is our flight back to San Francisco. We are looking forward to Spring in Oregon, gardening, and resuming work on our multiple Portland projects!

Tomorrow is our last day in the Philippines, so we are wrapping up all the projects we want to complete before our departure. We want to finish seeing the DVDs we purchased here. We want to go to a nearby spa for massage. We will have one last trip to Chinatown and the local malls to do final shopping.

This morning we are bringing our diary up to date and processing our most recent batch of photos. The latter includes editing out poor shots and duplicates, naming and captioning the good photos, and stitching together multiple shots into panoramas. Once this is done we will update our on-line blog and photo albums.