Regular Life

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. 

An interlude outside regular life

We took a mini-vacation! We drove to Cottonwood Canyon State Park and stayed two nights in a cabin, took a walk along the John Day River, and did a lot of reading. We saw a tiny snake and some medium-sized rabbits and contemplated how little we understand geology. It was lovely. 

MORE vacationing close to home

We went to Herron Island for the weekend - a weird private island deep in the crevices of Puget Sound. We did a lot of not very much. We read, we watched movies, we played dumb games on our phones (well, I did, at least), we walked around the island, we admired the probably problematically friendly deer, we messed around at the island's park where they have pickleball stuff (we do not actually know how to play pickleball) and a big field full of deer poop, and we paddled about on a flotilla of paddle-things. It was pretty great.

Vacation

 We went on a trip! Saw a bunch of lovely relatives, floated on a river, looked at mountains, gazed at the skies. And there was a puppy.

Well, the AIR is better

Finally, yesterday, the air cleared up. We opened ALL the windows and breathed a lot. Cook and Skipper both went running this morning for the first time in 8 days. Breathing is AMAZING.

 

Air quality

We live only in our house now. Our lives have been constrained for six months now, but looking back on those constraints, they barely seem meaningful. We went to the library to pick up books (couldn't go in or browse), we took walks with friends (couldn't get close to each other), we lay in the hammock in the yard. We biked to the grocery store to shop (wore a mask, stayed away from people). But now the west coast is on fire, and Portland is full of the ghosts of forests.  This is how it looked at 8:30 this morning out our window (except a lot yellower than the phone camera will accept). It's not fog, it's smoke.

The air quality has been terrible for nearly a week now, and the last few days it's been beyond terrible. We were not prepared for this - don't have air purifiers or the right kind of furnace filters, and only realized that we needed them after the stores were already sold out. We can stay inside with the windows shut, which is more than a lot of people can do right now, but that's all. We have headaches and sore throats and our lungs ache. I am so starved for fresh air that I dream about suffocating. There's nowhere we can go, because it's like this everywhere around us. 

It feels emotionally extra-difficult coming on top of months of quarantine - even the little things we could control before we can't control now. We can't control anything. We're just waiting inside our box for something to change. 

 

Well, we're suffocating in wildfire smoke over here. The sky has been yellow for days, air quality is bonkers bad, and it's starting to feel really suffocaty and oppressive, and probably this will have long-term health effects on our bodies. HOWEVER, we are not on fire. So - yay?

In other news, we're a week into remote school. That's not great, but we're muddling through. Skipper is finding it difficult to get back into Japanese in this context, and Duchess is trying to figure out how to successfully take a dance class remotely. Skipper was assigned to write a paragraph about what she wants to be when she grows up, and I helpfully suggested a bunch of post-apocalyptic jobs like "diviner" and "food scrounger" and "dowser."* I cried in a remote staff meeting last week.** Even Cook, perfectionist workaholic of the family, is finding it hard to just Do The Work.

However, Cook and I STILL HAVE JOBS.*** And only some of our coworkers and friends have had to evacuate their homes. And we still don't know anybody who's gotten a covid diagnosis. So - yay?

I don't know. I hope you're all well, or well-ish, or whatever we can hope for in these exceedingly bleak times. Practicing your dowsing, maybe? Hang in there.

* These are all apparently not words she knows how to write in Japanese, so I don't even know what she's been learning for the last six years.

**The check-in prompt was "how are you feeling about fall" so there was no hope that we were going to get through the meeting with a less than 25% weep-rate.

***My job, btw, is to make transportation policy that supports good climate and environmental health outcomes. I am not feeling very successful. My boss, who has been fighting for climate policy in Oregon for a decade, watched the Republican legislators walk out and shut down the legislative session this year to prevent climate legislation from passing, which meant that a bipartisan wildfire prevention bill, among many other bills, died without a vote. She's very angry and sad this week. 

 

We're still okay, pretty much

 I've developed a new facial twitch, and I stayed up till midnight last night finishing the Hilary Mantel trilogy. (Was I sobbing loudly in the bathroom at 11:45, sitting on the step stool, hunched over Thomas Cromwell's execution? Yes I was.) And tonight I attended a video conference meeting hosted by the principal of the middle school, learning about how Skipper will experience her 6th-grade fall. It's really sad and shitty, and I am feeling angry and sad about all of this. 

However, Skipper and Dog #4 and I went camping! It was fun.