It's 2024!
Portland is in the throes of a major winter weather event - a snowstorm but with such cold temperatures and high winds that it has felt violent and stressful rather than peaceful and hushed. We're supposed to have an ice storm tomorrow to finish it up.
Our holiday was lovely; low-key and cozy. We played the Reindeer Games again (kids won).
Duchess has gone back to college, and we're all facing the long slog of January/February but also, hey, a new year! Another trip around the sun!
Fall is over!
We hosted a Japanese high school student for three weeks, which was awkward and weird and also sometimes delightful. Our guest was a cheerful, easily-pleased 17-year-old whose English conversation skills are pretty weak, so conversations were limited to simple topics and short sentences.
She had classes and field trips during the day on weekdays, so we were responsible for evenings and weekends. This required us to perform a better version of our life. Before she arrived, we cleaned up and organized and put away some remaining things we'd been procrastinating, and after she arrived, we had to just be better - make a salad at dinner time, plan outings on the weekend. Instead of getting a takeout pizza, we got pizza from three different places and did a taste test. Instead of lying around procrastinating chores on Saturday morning, we went bowling. Instead of doing extra chores on the three-day weekend, we went to visit some waterfalls. All of this took more time and energy and money than our normal life, but it was more of life, and that felt good. Also, I like bowling.
It was a good fall for trees this year.
We had a lovely Thanksgiving visit from Uncle Rockstar and family.
Skipper's school district was shut down for weeks by a teacher strike, but the timeline was uncertain the whole time, so she never knew if she would be going to school the next day. It was wearisome, but I felt very fortunate that Skipper is old enough to stay home alone and too young to have to worry about getting reference letters or learn AP content. She's back at school now, and they've taken away half of her Christmas holiday (to make up part of the 11 lost teaching days), so she feels quite resentful.
Duchess will be home in a few weeks, and has already begun scoffing at our mild winter weather, now that she's a hardened Minnesotan. (Cook and I, who were in Minnesota during an exceptionally cold streak in January 1994 when the temperature stayed below zero for days,* just shake our heads and mutter things like "you just wait" when she talks about how she's gotten used to temperatures in the 20s.) We're looking forward to seeing here,
*It was really cold, my friends. It was so cold that the governor closed all the public schools. (We still had class, and I remember wearing basically all my clothes for the trip across campus to attend bio lab.) It was so cold that we went out and tried to blow bubbles and they FROZE AND SHATTERED IN THE AIR.
We did it! We got here! This year we're hunkering down at home for the holiday. The kids are on a 2-week holiday, and Cook and I are taking a few days off here and there.
We did our traditional walk to a local pop-up Christmas tree lot, and picked an extremely bushy tree to carry home. (Duchess was in the lingering tail end of a bout with the flu, so she stayed home and peered out the window.)
This weekend I took the girls to The Pumpkin Patch on Sauvie Island, a place where u-pick meets consumer kitsch, and the parking lots overflow with cars from all over the region. We haven't been there in a while. Duchess brought a new friend she met in French class, an exchange student (somewhat bewilderingly) from Sweden, and Skipper brought a friend whom she first met when they were both toddlers tagging along to their big sisters' kindergarten dropoffs. It was a nice outing, and the kids were all good company. I'm generally opposed to chauffeuring, and I usually stay out of the way of their friends, because I am embarrassing, but I was reminded today that it is often a pleasure to hang out with them and their friends, who are generally interesting and funny and able to keep a conversation rolling merrily along. (And apparently I was able to keep my embarrassingness under the tolerance threshold.)
Things are fine. The weather has been unseasonably warm and sunny. Duchess is in the throes of college applications. Skipper continues to do crosscountry and ultimate frisbee. Cook has been taking time off work to do house work, because that is still how he rolls. I just emptied my entire work email inbox into a new folder labeled "old stuff - unsorted" so that I can PRETEND I don't have 300 un-dealt-with emails looming over my head. I recommend this dumb psychological trick - I feel amazingly relaxed.
I went to Sweden! I had to pick up Skipper from camp, and I did some touristing on my own in Stockholm and also got to visit some family and friends as a wonderful bonus.
I really enjoyed poking around Stockholm on my own and with Skipper. The transit (including ferries!) is fantastic, the public spaces are abundant and delightful (if short on public bathrooms), the bike and pedestrian infrastructure is good, and the cardamom buns are delicious. Skipper declared that Stockholm has "cool old stuff and nice new stuff" and she's not wrong.
I stayed part of the time in a hostel in a former prison in Södermalm.
Bonkers statue of St George and the dragon in Storkyrka. I loved this dragon, which was carved in the 15th century and has spikes made of antlers and generally is extremely cool.
Gamla Stan
We are alive! Not much to report. Cook has a new job, still in government, but doing a different kind of work. I have the same job. Duchess ...
