Checking In

Hello, there! It's been an absurdly long time since my last post - life has been busy! Things have happened! For example:
  
I moved out of the shoebox apartment where I spent a great 2.5 years, and joined forces with Bill at the house he has lived at since before I met him.

We share the house with two roommates and a cat, have a small but lovely garden, and the spare bedroom became "my room," where all of my stuff lives and I have a sewing table and a futon for guests.

Life is so much easier without our constant going back and forth between each other's homes, although there are the small irritations of living with housemates (lack of space in the fridge being a primary one for me), although the housemates themselves are excellent people. Most of my kitchen gear is in storage in the basement since the house was well furnished already, so it will be fun unpacking it all someday.

It's been an unnervingly hot and dry summer in the northwest, but we've made the most of it. Sail camping, a fantastic backpacking trip in the North Cascades, a family reunion in Port Townsend, and my birthday at a cousin's new farm - this summer has been one of the best.

 

Day four of five in the North Cascades

Point Wilson lighthouse and Admiralty Inlet

How I spent my 31st birthday

 A summer ritual

It's been summer since April, with weeks of temperatures over 95 F, and even if the entire American West wasn't burning right now, I'd be ready for fall. But now we're praying for rain and here, at the edge of September, I am absolutely looking forward to cooler nights, wool socks, red leaves and baked squash. I've got some new autumn-y projects to work on which I will share here, as once again I try to revive my writing a bit. I hope you're all well, and I look forward to spending more time here in the coming weeks.

Whales in Wood

I'm quite behind the times in posting these photos, but other things got in the way. BUT: two weeks ago, Bill became a featured artist at a store in downtown Portland, and we spent a Sunday afternoon at the open house for the show, which went great. His five humpback whales are all made without any metal or glue; they are held together entirely by notching, pegging and lashing (with artificial sinew). He used the same steam-bending techniques he learned when building his Greenland skin-on-frame kayak, and I have to say the results are pretty amazing. The whales attract a lot of attention, and each one is in a slightly different part of the swimming motion--so they are a pod swimming together. I'm pretty proud of Bill. Boy, is he talented!

(Also, these whales are for sale. $1995 each [80 hours of labor for each one!]. Contact me or Boy's Fort if you are in the area and happen to be interested!)

In With the New

2013 has been an awesome year (see previous post), but the last few weeks have been sufficiently out of the realm of my usual routine to make me eager for a fresh year and a return to normalcy. Five days before Christmas, I had surgery, and precisely a week later, on the 27th, so did Bill. Both were non-emergency outpatient procedures, but enough to keep each of us on painkillers and in bed for the better part of a week. Bill took amazing care of me, along with the help of my excellent friends, and by the time Bill's turn rolled around, I could get around enough to take care of him. We had a nice low-key Christmas with my parents visiting, and sunshine for three days, with lots of good food and many games of Bananagrams. At this point we've still got a few days of laid-up-ness to go, and we're both good and ready to get back to normal. We both lead active lives, and tend to guage the goodness of a day by our level of productivity during it, and when you're healing and can't move around too much, all of that kind of goes out the window. So we've been playing cribbage, reading a lot, knitting (me), learning to knit (Bill), watching The Woodwright's Shop on PBS, and finding out that we can spend two weeks in almost constant contact with each other without conflict (yay!).

I won't be fully back to normal for another month or so (most aggravating of all, no biking for me until almost February), but returning to work routines and being able to take care of ourselves will be awfully refreshing (I took two full weeks off work, so I've still got another week free. I miss going to work, but also I don't). I've never had surgery before, and it's been ages since I've had any illness that kept me inactive for more than a few days, so it's been a huge adjustment. It was kind of nice to have an excuse to lay around watching movies for the first few days, but that gets old pretty fast. I'm up to taking a 15-minute walk every day, and am already restless get back to hiking and biking and other activities to combat the cloying gray that is a Portland winter.

I'm happy to greet the new year, and to look forward to traveling to new places, working on new projects, pursuing my public health career and of course becoming an aunt in just a few short months (mid or late March!). I've been dreaming of camping trips with Bill to sunny dry places, trips to the coast for sun, wind and salt air, backyard barbecues on warm summer nights, getting back on my bike for miles and miles, and working with new recipes from my Christmas present cookbooks. With any luck, and a little bit of effort, the new year will contain all of these things and more.

So it's out with the old, in with the new. 

I wish you and yours a bright, happy, healthy and adventuresome 2014!

Fall Settling

Fall came in like a lion this year. The first half of September was sunshine and the hottest days of the summer, then the universe flipped a switch and then CRASH-BANG: storms and wind and branches falling on power lines and record rainfall.

It rained sideways a lot last weekend. 

Wonderfully, the last two days have been gorgeous and blue.

I was still in summer mode and sudden fall weather was a bit of a shock to my system, but I'm adjusting now. I'm home in Portland after gallivanting all over the place all summer, and it's wonderful to not have to think about packing for trips, to be able to lay in bed on a weekend morning and think of all the things that can be done that day, here.

My routine is changing a little bit now. One of the main reasons is this excellent person:

Meet Bill, who has been rocking my socks off for the last 2+ months. He's an incredibly talented woodworker, teacher and outdoorsman. He has designed a beautiful shaker-style island/cabinet for my kitchen, which is being built from entirely reclaimed wood. I know nothing about cabinetmaking, and he insists on teaching me as we go. I have no complaints.

Drafting the plan for the cabinet.

All summer I got out of the habit of cooking much, because with so much traveling I had to limit the fresh food that was in the house, so it wouldn't go bad while I was away for several days. Now I am adjusting back to thinking differently about cooking and shopping, while taking into account that I'm at Bill's a couple evenings a week, and he is at mine another couple evenings. I'm reveling in cooking and eating fresh baked goods, squash and apples, and hot soups and stews to counteract the horrific weather of late. This is a new favorite recipe.

At the garden, things have mostly been put to bed for the winter. Leeks, cabbages and collards are still growing, my seed garlic should be arriving any day, and the last of the green tomatoes are ripening on my windowsill.

These days I'm job searching, looking to start my public health career, and I'm excited about some of the opportunities that are coming my way. I'm taking a photography class at a local arts center, and stoked to learn more about using my new camera, but disgruntled that my ancient computer has a hard time handling the big, best quality photos.

Soaking up autumn, taking a ridiculous number of photos, a shot at my dream job, a great guy, and the coziness of the shift in seasons. I try not to take any of these moments for granted, when happiness is so easy.

Some observations from the world of online dating

[Alternate (pessimistic) title: People and the Internet are Horrible]

In late March, I ventured into the world of online dating. I've met some genuinely awesome people as a result, but this post is not about them. It's been an alternately curious, terrifying, hilarious, WTF glimpse into what humanity does when it doesn't have to talk to someone face to face. It's also been an interesting psychological experiment on myself.

Here's some things I've learned:

• Venturing back into the dating scene when you're six weeks out from completing graduate school and about to take the biggest exam of your life is either the best or the worst idea ever. I haven't decided yet. 
• Taking their dating profiles at face value, I should believe that approximately 99.9% of straight male Portlanders ages 28-33 are "laidback and easygoing." Way to not be a cliche, dudes.
• Asking a dark-skinned man who messaged you whether he enjoys hiking or camping (since he never mentions it in his profile or has any pictures of said activities) can result in him accusing you of racism.
• I feel the need to shower after finding out that a 58-year-old with a Pomeranian in his profile picture has viewed my profile. 
• The vast majority of acquaintances who learn that I am meeting people online seem to require some kind of justification for my actions, and to be confused as to why I would be driven to such a desperate means of finding a man. To the point that I feel the need to give an explanation before they even ask. As in, I work (and went to school) in female-dominated fields, all of my friends are paired off so I don't often meet new people through them, and I sure as hell don't go to bars to meet guys (do people actually do that at my age?), so my venues for meeting someone organically are limited. In this day and age, I think meeting people through a website is a perfectly acceptable way to find dating partners, and I don't feel any shame in it. In fact, I think I kind of prefer it. You get the chance to screen out people based on issues that might not come up till much later in a non-online-meeting scenario.
• Oddly, at least half of the guys whose profiles I have viewed seem to feel this same shame of being online, with taglines such as "I won't tell anyone we met online" or "We can say we met at the park."
• A good rule is to only go on dates with guys who can spell and use punctuation properly.
• If you're on a date and the guy starts vocally judging you for how long it took you to get back into dating after your last breakup, it's acceptable (actually, it's recommended) that you ditch him and go home to watch The Big Bang Theory and drink wine. 

Questions I have for guys on online dating sites:

• What, exactly, compelled you to make your username Stud_Beefpile?
• Do you honestly think that messaging a girl with the one-liner "Let's make a baby" is going to get you anywhere? 
• Same goes for "hi there...im just at work being bored lol :)"
• Ditto "I bet you read National Geographic to look at pictures of naked tribesmen, and then claim you're just reading the articles." What the f***? (I'm looking at you, Stud_Beefpile)
• What possible reason could you have for casually mentioning on your otherwise sane profile that you think racist jokes are the funniest ones? 

Yes, online dating can bring out the worst (and weirdest) in people, but it's getting more and more common and I know many people who have married someone they met this way. So it gives me hope. Also it gives me the opportunity to engage in messaging exchanges like this:

Guy: "When did you go to New Zealand? I have been there twice."
Me: "I was there from fall of 2010 to spring of 2011."
Guy: "Wow, we overlapped! I was there in the spring of 2010 and again in December 2011."

The powers of deductive reasoning are not strong with this one.

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There are many excellent blog posts out there about the horrors of online dating. This blog (WARNING: a bit graphic!) made me realize that the worst messages I've gotten are Shakespearean sonnets in the scheme of things. This Buzzfeed post just cracked me up.
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