New year

 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! 

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. 

Christmas!

The girls and I went to Seattle to see the Rockstars and my mom before Christmas, and returned to have Christmas proper with Cook and Papa Big Cook.





















































































































































































































































































































































































































Cook bought Skipper refill pellets for her beanbag chair, and the refilling process amused me enormously. Notice Skipper lying on the floor, enjoying her holiday sloth very thoroughly.

Hi!

We saw the eclipse. It was awesome. We didn't take any good photos.

We took the train to Salem at the crack of dawn. It was a beautiful day. There was an English family sitting across from us who were tackling their THIRD try at a cloudless experience of a total eclipse.



























We tried to find breakfast, but the restaurant ran out of food. (There were a lot of people in Salem.) So we bought coffee and scones and planted ourselves in a little parklet. We tested our glasses. They were legit.

































































I had been kind of dubious about the utility of taking a day off work and schlepping to Salem, a town that is very pleasant but isn't exactly the stuff of exciting day trips, but I read something to the effect of "If you're anywhere near the totality, get your ass there, or you're an idiot," so I dutifully bought train tickets. It was worth it; I've seen a partial solar eclipse before, but I've never seen anything like the totality. My phone was not up to the task of photographing a hole in the sky, so you'll have to imagine it, or look at the bajillion excellent photos on the internet, or think back to your own memory of it.


















































































These are the shadows. We kept going back to look at them, because I think they're such a cool part of an eclipse.

And then we went to a history museum and then we had a mediocre lunch (because all the good restaurants had hour-long lines) and then we went to the Capitol, because we were in Salem! And then we waited at the train station for our ride home, and Skipper fell asleep...

Keeping pedestrians safe in Salem apparently means making sure they don't get hit by... rollerblades.

And then we went home. A good day.