Hello!

I'm back! The quarter is over, my brain is utterly fried, my teeth are ground down to tiny nubbins and I got five hours of sleep last night and spent all day today squabbling with Dutch over ridiculous things.
Because I am barely able to form sentences, I will use bullet points to catch you up on the excitement of the last few weeks:

• This year we are making our first attempt at Easter (the pagan variety, emphasizing gluttony and spring - Jesus is off the radar) as parents, and I discovered some key things about egg dying (things that presumably would have been obvious to anyone with more than a driblet of brain cells remaining in her skull). One, COVER THE TABLE WITH SOMETHING WATERPROOF. Two, don't refrigerate the eggs first, because they get all dewy, and the crayon trick won't work. Three, use white eggs, you idiot.
• I'm going to have a sister-in-law! Actually, I'm not sure that's the right term. Sister-in-law-in-law? At any rate, Cook's brother (Antarctic Uncle) is engaged (to Green Thumb Girl), and we're pretty excited.
• My office orchid (inherited from my former boss) which has been mangy and neglected since arriving in the office 14 months ago, is in full bloom! Four beautiful purple blooms, and I am so proud. I feel like I personally generated those flowers.
• Granddad came to visit for 36 hours. Dutch was so thrilled that she was speechless when he arrived, and then pretty much didn't stop talking until he left.
  
• Rockstar Uncle came to town! I went to the show, and took the opportunity to add to Cook's excellent collection of Rockstar Band t-shirts. (This is also why I got five hours of sleep last night. I told Rockstar that I was going to leave before the end of the show, and he said "But you don't have to work tomorrow, do you? You can sleep in...", indicating a blissful ignorance of the average wake-up time for 3-year-olds.)
  
• Cook and I both had job interviews. Unsuccessful job interviews, but still exciting and nerve-wracking.
  
• We're going on vacation! Mount Saint Helens, Seattle, and the Olympic Peninsula in five days. I'm so looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to the one day when Dutch is in daycare and I am on vacation.
  
• I got all my textbooks for next quarter, and I think I should probably start reading them now.
  

I think that about covers it, approximately. I will write more when I find myself with a better grasp of English.

Urban girl, living in an urban world.

It seemed to me today that I encountered an unusually high proportion of noticeably peculiar people. On the bus this morning, I counted two people reading wacko religious tracts (sitting next to eachother but apparently unaffiliated), one transvestite, and three people behaving in ways that crossed the boundary of"normal" public behavior (including the guy sitting next to me, compulsively rocking back and forth, moving his hands in complicated repetitive ways, and occasionally growling in an oddly charming feline way). But none of them crossed the boundary of acceptable public behavior - nobody was cursing or screaming or being mean to anybody else, or ranting incoherently or even just being stinky (all of which I've witnessed fairly frequently on the bus). They were just a little... different. Even the lady in the white tracksuit who glanced suspiciously around at everybody else for the whole trip didn't see any reason to panic.

This is one of the many things I like about living in a city. Freaky people are everywhere, and that's okay (usually). It's okay to ride to work squeezed in with lots of other people who are Seriously Different Than You. It's okay to have your comfort zone squeezed a little along with your shoulders. I like to think that this is a good thing for Dutch to see, to learn that people can be peculiar and still be included in normal life. Whether or not she turns out Seriously Different herself in some way (and hey, who doesn't, in some way?), then she'll know that Different people are part of normal life, and are not to be automatically feared or excluded.

However, it's also one of the many things I don't like about living in a city. Riding on the bus or walking around downtown means having LOTS of comfort-zone-squeezing encounters, and sometimes I feel a little too squeezed, by irritation, anger, fear, disgust, sympathy, pity, and all kinds of other awkward emotions. Also, it's hard explaining to a loud preschooler why that guy smells bad and has pants that are all wet around the crotch.

Two weeks, umpteen billion things to do.

I'm in the middle of a two-week period in which I have the following deadlines/events (not in order of importance):
- 1 full proposal to a funder
- 2 LOIs to funders (What!? You don't work for a nonprofit? That would be Letter Of Inquiry, you lucky soul.)
- 1 meeting with a potential funder
- 1 job interview
- 1 professional informational interview
- 1 scholarship application
- 2 final papers
- 2 final presentations
- 1 final project
- 1 quiz
- 2 important work meetings
- 1 daycare potluck
- 1 playdate
- 1 St. Patrick's Day party

I just want to say:

Yikes.

Kudos to one of my two readers!

Yup - the book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. She wants to read the chapter where the rats get caught in the marketplace over and over and over and over....

New dress. Same old song.

She's singing a song that goes "race me down the mountain, Bo!"

Extreme strolling

Yesterday Dutch and I went for a walk. We had to leave Cook home alone with the computer for a while so he could work on a school project, and I needed to take some photos of the wildlife refuge for a school project of my own (really), so I decided we would walk the length of the park, as a roundabout way to get to the commercial area about a mile south of us. (A commercial area containing two toystores and the library, which was key for luring Dutch to come with me.)
As usual, Dutch was game about walking in the park - I assigned her to "scout" nice views and signs of spring, so she trotted ahead and duly reported all interesting features and events.
Unexpected bird calls = scary.

We were having a lovely time until we found a little staircase leading up to a sketchy-looking trail up a steep slope (to the mortuary, which is one story high at the top of the bluff, and a spooky, fortress-like five stories high at the bottom of the bluff). Because my school project addresses connectivity and walking-paths, I decided that we should hike up the trail. We did, past the base of the mortuary, the trash, the broken beer bottles, the rusty metal scraps with sharp edges... Dutch started to cry when we were half way up, at the exact same time that I realized that I had made a Mistake. It would have been worse to go back down at that point, so I kind of half-shoved her up the rest of the way, trying to speak calmly and cheerfully while silently freaking out about the fact that I was struggling to find secure footing for myself while propelling my large, frightened child up a muddy cliff studded with puncture-wound hazards.

But we made it. No problem. We were both a little shaky, though, and Dutch refused to eat her snack until we were half a mile away from the Cliffs of Doom.

The impressive part, though, is that Dutch walked three miles and climbed a minor mountain in sequinned pink mary-jane-style shoes. (They're a little the worse for wear.)

Treehouse

It's spring. In a few weeks, our apartment (on the second floor) will be surrounded by flowers. Portland just explodes with growth in the spring; the first spring we were here, I was overwhelmed with all the greenery and damp fertility. I worried a little about getting pollinated somehow (this in spite of the fact that I allegedly majored in biology) and busting out in these beautiful pink blossoms I was seeing everywhere. Not that that would have been that bad, really.

Anyhow, it's really lovely, and I'm looking forward to it. So is Dutch, who's suddenly gone all girly and wears dresses every day in radiant shades of joy (mostly pink, red, and orange, I mean).

A fun game!

Guess What Dutch is Obsessively Demanding To Have Read To Her!

The Clues - these are some questions we have been hearing for the last two weeks:
1)"What is the difference between a lab and a laboratory?"
2)"Why do people not like rats?"
3)"Why do some rats have to die?"
4)"Why are mice afraid of owls?"
5) "Why do people plow up the dirt?"
6)"What is a mouse doctor called?"

Backstage passes

Dutch has been talking about how she wants to see her uncle playing in his band (which is coming to town, and she's very bitter that I'm refusing to take her to the show), so yesterday I showed her a Youtube video of the band. I got her all excited - "Come see Rockstar Uncle playing in the band!" and we sat down to watch it. After about thirty seconds, she looked at me, perplexed, and said "They're standing still." "Yup," I said, and there was another pause, and then she asked "When are they going to march?" and I realized that she has believed, probably pretty much since she learned how to talk, that her uncle plays in a marching band.

Filler

I'm behind. Two homework assignments, three final papers, one quiz, and two presentations to go, and I'm swamped. I have no time to think or write anything that doesn't involve statistics or negotiation or urban design. So I am posting three pictures from a month or so ago in lieu of actual creative content. Enjoy! I'll be back ... some time...