Just a notice that this blog will be going on hiatus for a little over a week; we're heading down to San Diego for spring break, and unless something really interesting comes across the laptop screen (yes, I'll be checking periodically), I won't be blogging much. Have a good spring break, everybody!

In yesterday's BuzzTouch Design podcast, Brian gets the exclusive word on upcoming concerts this summer at the Les Schwab Amphitheater. Seven concerts are revealed (two of which are already listed on the concert site); here are five:

• July 2 - Chris Isaak
• July 3 - Alison Krauss & Union Station
• July 6 - Sugarland
• July 25 - The Fray
• September 29 - Kenny Rogers

And the final two? Go listen to the podcast—it's worth it and short (just over six minutes long). I'd hate to steal Brian's thunder! :)

This is one of those things which is not immediately obvious but contains a ton of useful information: the Bend Parks and Rec site has a listing of all parks in the city area. For awhile now, I was interested in the fact that Google Maps shows the names and locations of all the known parks, but I wanted more info, and found the Parks and Rec listing.

But a couple of things with that. I don't think the Parks and Rec listing is fully up to date—at least, based on some discrepancies between Google Maps and P&R. For instance, Google Maps shows "Skyliner Summit Park", but that doesn't show up on the P&R list anywhere.

On the other hand, Google doesn't show Foxborough Park, and P&R does. So it's not clear who's the most authoritative.

Another interesting thing: P&R has an "interactive map" of the parks, tied to their listings. However, the "interactive" part of this map is a bit limited—it's simply a clickable image map. In this day and age, I want to see the Google Maps functionality built into a true interactive map. Or at least, the P&R map should highlight on the image where a park is when you roll over the text listing (go to the page and you'll see what I mean).

Overall, between Parks & Rec and Google Maps, there's a pretty comprehensive directory of Bend parks available. Now if they could only be organized and merged in an easily-searchable single location...

More pictures from the house fire across the street. I don't have any of the fire itself—when we first watched, there was still smoke rising from the roof—but I took several of the fire fighters clearing away roofing material, wood, and the chimney from the roof.

Apologies for the mediocre quality of these pictures... it was dusk and the low-light conditions along with the zoom was enough to get the point, but some came out shaky. And actually, when it was starting to get really dark, they brought one of the engines over with a set of bright spotlights to illuminate the scene:

You can see the light pole sprouting up from the top of the truck. And here's a shot of the lighted-up scene at full dark:

The house is behind the juniper trees there; unfortunately, that was the best angle from the street that the truck with the lights was able to get. There's actually quite a bit of light reaching the house, though.

Breaking, real-time news: the house across the street was on fire; firefighters were on the scene relatively quickly and were able to contain the flames. Trucks started arriving around 6:15 or 6:20, I believe; we heard the rumbling outside during dinner, but didn't know what was causing it until we looked outside. (They weren't running with sirens.)

The house, located in the northeast Bend neighborhood of Terrango, is an older one, with a wood shake roof; the fire was (apparently) localized to the roof area around the chimney.

We had four fire engines, one SUV, an ambulance, and at least one police car (closing the street) on the scene. Thankfully, it appears nobody was hurt, the fire was caught in time.

More as I find out about it...

I loves me a good used book sale, and April is offering up two—on the same day, no less!

First is the Friends of the Library Spring Book Sale, at the Library Administration building downtown (where it's always held) on Saturday, April 14th. It runs from 10am until 4pm.

The other sale is the Bulletin's—from 9am until 3pm at their location (1777 SW Chandler Avenue). This is a donated book sale:

Please donate paperbacks, hardcover, and softcover books in good condition. Sorry, but no textbooks, magazines, National Geographic magazines, or Reader's Digest condensed books, please.

They're accepting donations until March 30th.

I'm thinking go to the Bulletin's sale at 9, and then the Library's at 10. If you're into that sort of thing.

Over on the empty lot on the northeast corner of Hill Street and Irving Avenue, there sits a little green building inside of a fenced area. It's an old garage, and along the top of the garage door a faded sign is decorated with shamrocks and says, "Harp Hall."

It's very unassuming, fronting the alley that runs behind the roller rink (the Midtown Ballroom) and sharing the cinderblock lot with a few seemingly non-running cars. I first noticed it last year when I was taking a walk during my lunch hour; intrigued, I Googled it and came up with basically nothing, other than an oblique reference to Harp Hall being a garage pub, now closed.

So I filed it away in the back of my mind until a month or two ago when The Source Weekly mentioned it in an article:

[Duane] McCabe had seen enough of his friends piling into his downtown-Bend garage to take in a Sunday football game or the NCAA tournament while getting nothing in return. Rather than turn them away, McCabe opted to start charging them. Brilliance is the word we're looking for to sum up that decision. After securing the proper liquor license and accomodating his garage with a wood-burning stove, a few more chairs and various other pieces of furniture, McCabe's garage turned into a fully functioning bar.

And then this month the current issue of Bend Living tells a more detailed verson of the story behind Harp Hall, which opened in 1996:

Recent Celtic culture in Bend is the story of Harp Hall—a garage converted into a makeshift pub, modeled after the pleasure and social clubs of New Orleans and attended largely by members only. It had Guinness, Harp, Irish whiskey, music, the close camaraderie of early Irish clans and, of course, stories of its origin.

Harp Hall mobilized thereafter and began its own traditions. Its members would march through downtown streets and bars on St. Patrick's Day.

"We're proud of the fact that we'd get a standing ovation at the D & D [bar]," McCabe said. Some admirers had even reserved tables at The Pine Tavern every March 17 to witness the merry marauders, McCabe said. So charismatic was their appeal, McCabe added, they were even cheered by the same publicans when, forgetting they had already marched through a bar, they returned for an encore.

Harp Hall the garage pub is no more; but the Harp Hall Annex lives on, upstairs above the Domino Room (both part of Midtown), says The Source: "The Midtown Ballroom ultimately adopted Harp Hall—making it no longer technically a garage pub."

I was able to find a random page on the web with some photos of the pub here. Who knew?

Just an interesting bit of Bend history I thought I'd share in time for St. Patrick's Day.

Updated 3/19: Fixed a link.

As promised when I blogged about it before, JC's expanded space was officially opened to the public today. Not monumental news, but it's always noteworthy in this town when a construction project finishes on time.

Don't forget they're having their grand opening this Saturday, St. Patrick's Day, too.

The Bend Restaurants blog has a mouth-watering write-up of Deschutes Brewery's annual Spring Dinner last Saturday, the 10th. These events are six-course beer pairing dinners, where each course is paired with a different Deschutes beer.

I've always thought it would be fun to do, but typically they run in the over-$50 range (this last one was $55), which tends to give me pause. The review, though, makes it look like it's totally worth it. Pictures too. Maybe I'll keep an eye out for the next one...

In the meantime, on the brewery's Mountain Room Upcoming Events page, the 3rd Annual Barrel Tasting is taking place on June 16th (Saturday). Cost is only $35. I could get into that.

I thought it'd be fun to write up a guide to places to go if you're going pub hopping on St. Patrick's Day. My only criteria? Pretty loose and arbitrary; any place that I think of as primarily where you would go for a drink—not necessarily to eat. And it has to be a pub or tavern or thereabouts—not restaurant lounges, and nothing fancy. Sorry Astro Lounge, I'm lookin' at you.

Basically, the kinds of places I think would make for a good Irish pub crawl. Any other suggestions?

St. Patrick's Day is coming up this Saturday (already?), and McMenamins has a two-day celebration going on. In addition to having their seasonal Irish stout on tap (it's pretty good), they are:

Featuring live music by the Moon Mountain Ramblers, The Severin Sisters and others, with McMenamins Irish Stout, Irish dancers, outdoor tents, barbecue specials, beer trucks, Silly Lilly the Clown, facepainters and more…

The celebration is going on all day Friday and Saturday; music starts at 1pm and is free. If the weather is nice it could be a lot of fun!

Starting Monday, March 12th, work is set to begin on a roundabout at the intersection of Bond and Wilson, on the edge of the Old Mill District. Traffic will be detoured; check out the image below to see how it's being routed.

Via this blog.

In my previous post Kina in the comments pointed to the site Restaurants For Sale Online, basically a searchable directory of—you guessed it—restaurants for sale. Checking out what they have for Bend, there are four items:

• A "Concert venue/Night club/Restaurant" for $1.2 million.
• Vino Mercato ("Busy Bend Bistro with Great Lease") for $225K.
• Coffee Shop and Deli for $98,000.
• Restaurant with Full Liquor License for $549K.

None of these are listed by name, and I don't think this is a complete listing—all four are by the same agent with Compass Commercial. However, digging around the descriptions of each, it's probably not terribly hard to figure out what these are.

(Of course, Kina could probably just tell us outright. The rest of us would have to guess.)

For instance, the restaurant for $549K opened in July of 2004... does catering... seats 45 inside and 32 on a summertime patio... and is 1195 square feet. Any guesses?

Papa's Pizza, south of town across from Fred Meyer, is changing its name to "Pappy's Pizza." My wife saw this while in the area today.

Vino Mercato, the wine bistro and deli downtown, is closing. It was a blurb in the paper today and Duncan mentions it on his blog. I actually remembered hearing about this a couple of weeks ago, but it went over my head at the time.

In its place will be a new restaurant, details unknown.

Who else saw the blurb in Saturday's paper about Redmond's UFO convention being planned for June?

If the Redmond Historical Commission, The High Desert Society of the Arts and the Redmond Downtown Merchants have their druthers, airplanes won't be the only craft descending upon Redmond come June. The groups are pulling together to put on the first UFO convention in Central Oregon on June 23.

Details are sparse; they were holding a meeting this evening to explore all the angles. I'd be curious to hear how that went...

And that sure seems like an eclectic bunch to be holding a UFO convention. I wonder if they're envisioning something more commercial like "sci-fi/X-Files convention" rather than "weirdos wearing foil hats convention."

I am often amazed at how much freely available information the City and County have put online—not that I think this is a bad thing, mind you. What's more amazing to me is the fact that more people don't know about all of this! In this article I'll show you how to find out information on any property in Bend—including aerial images. This is all publicly available data pulled from three sources: Deschutes County's DIAL data (property assessment information), the City of Bend's online GIS Internet Browser, and Google Earth.

The DIAL data contains all the pertinent ownership, sales, and tax information you could want on a property; the GIS system contains precise taxlot and property line information, as well as information about zoning and various geographic features; and Google Earth contains fairly recent aerial images of the area, as well as allowing access to mapping features and all sorts of user-generated information. Combining all three gives you a powerful tool for querying nearly any sort of property information you could want—and all of it is available for free.

Read the full article after the jump.

JC's Bar and Grill has announced their grand opening party for Saturday, March 17th starting at 6pm. The occasion, of course, is celebrating the completion of their expansion (which seems like it's been going on forever) into the old Australia (Oztralia? What was the name of that store?) space next door.

Our doors will officially be open Thursday, March 15 at 11:00 and yes, KC FLYNN will be playing that Thursday night in a much larger JC's and a much better staging area!

Our PARTY to celebrate though is Saturday, March 17th - yes St. Patty's Day! KC FLYNN Is going to be our special guest and will probably be playing around 6:00. It'll be a good time, so you don't want to miss it!

And yes, we will have Green Beer all day long!

Well, cool. Does this mean that their Wildfire Brewing isn't far behind?