What is this life?

I feel unmoored. Nothing has happened to make me feel this way, particularly. I think it's the cumulative effect of everything. Not only does the entire world appear to be falling (further) into chaos and tribality, and the national situation seems unsalvageable, but Oregon is flooding (better than burning? maybe...), the political left is unable to stop tearing itself apart at any level, The Good Place is over, parenting a teen is the hardest thing, and I'm looking menopause right in the eye. Also, I'm still on the downward slope of the happiness curve.

My job, building on my last job, involves talking and thinking a lot about things that have to change - we have to build more densely in our cities, and we have to get around more without cars - but that are incredibly difficult for people to imagine changing. The way humans normalize things is staggering to me, whether it's normalizing purging and dehumanizing your enemies or normalizing traveling around at speed in a mostly-empty metal box that emits air pollution (that gives us heart attacks and cancer and alzheimers and learning disabilities and HAIR LOSS), messes up the climate, and crushes to death 40,000 Americans a year.  We are capable of accommodating and rationalizing so much. And pushing on it makes me feel exhausted. I'm not naturally inclined to activism; I like being a cog, and I don't like saying things that make people scrutinize me. (I love lecturing to passive, approving audiences, though - let me know if you've got one of those needing a speaker.) However, my personal theory of What We Need to Do (which is well-supported by research - I swear I am not making this up) can come across as wildly radical to normal people. Even the most liberal people mysteriously believe in a whatever-deity-granted right to free parking for eternity. And this makes me feel kind of unhinged all the time. It's totally possible that I SOUND unhinged a lot of the time. The other day I was explaining my theory of transportation systems to a person I had just met in a professional context, and he listened to me explain that a person who takes transit instead of driving to a destination, even if they go there for the most nefarious purpose, such as murder, has made a prosocial choice of transportation, and then he said "Do you say this kind of thing in public?"

So there you go. Unhinged, unmoored. However, I just want to say, please consider driving a little less. It was 65 degrees in Antarctica today. Maybe look into how you could get involved in local upzoning efforts, or maybe some advocacy around bike infrastructure. Bumblebees are going extinct. Ask city hall to dedicate right-of-way to buses instead of car storage. I'll let you off the hook about menopause, but you should definitely take the train next time.

More updates

Yeah, that's pretty much all this blog is now - it's my facebook for all of you.

Things are fine. The kids wrapped up the semester, so they're at the half-way mark of the school year. There's an info session at the middle school coming up for incoming sixth-graders, an unwelcome reminder that our year off from middle school is also half over. 

Winter is warm and swampy around here. We seized some rare sunshine recently to go for a walk in a place we haven't visited since 2013. (We do not go for walks very often...)

Happy end of 2019!

Hi!

Catching you up: We decorated our house a little bit.
















































































































Then we went to Maine!

Then we took the train to Boston for a brief visit. We saw the USS Constitution and we also watched TWO movies!* In the THEATER!

*Knives Out and Little Women. That's who we are.

hi!

All's well! We're busy.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving with the Rockstars. There was delightful chaos.

We're been moving Duchess to the basement and revising the upstairs room to be Skipper's alone. It's a lot of work (mostly done by Cook, of course), but I think things will be settled, finally, by the end of 2019, three-ish years after starting the process. So... yay!

Also,

Skipper has grown nearly an inch since July, devastating her clothing budget and making us speculate that maybe SHE's going to be the child who grows to an enormous adult height, since Duchess appears to be done with growing.

(This is Pioneer Square, where the Christmas tree was set up this weekend, and an enormous poop was also set up to advertise something.)

Duchess turned fifteen! She's thriving, and also pretty much mad at me all the time, so I'm not going to invade her privacy by writing any more about her. Suffice it to say that she's come a long way.

In other news, we're all fine. Skipper's also thriving; she has a nice bunch of friends, reasonably decent teachers, and fifth grade is feeling pretty comfortable. I'm still trying to figure out how to be good at my new job, but loving how much I get to learn.

Halloween: Skipper went trick-or-treating with her best friend - they planned and executed a weird coordinated costume concept in which they were bank robbers but somehow opposite? At any rate, they had a great time. Skipper's best ever Halloween.

 
 

Kids both got haircuts!

First day of school (3 days later than everyone else)

Vacation debrief

After we got home yesterday, having traveled back in time 9 hours, Skipper could not stay awake until the end of the day (understandably). This morning I showed her this picture from yesterday afternoon, and she said "yeah, I'm not sure what happened."
























We're all pretty addled from jet lag (though Duchess claims she's totally readjusted and is fine, presumably to lay the foundation for her argument that she should be permitted to see Boyfriend today, which we did allow...) and wobbling through today. I'm contemplating a few Travel Lessons Learned.

1) Clean the house just before you leave. (Cook pointed this out today.) We had a housesitter come and nurture the guinea pigs, and we weren't sure how much she'd be living in the house vs coming to visit it daily, so we cleaned the weekend before we left, and it was lovely to return to a house that didn't require vacuuming and toilet cleaning and whatnot.

2) Stay somewhere nice and spacious at the end of the trip. We have made the mistake before of staying in cramped quarters right at the end of our long vacations, and this time I intentionally splurged on a really big, comfortable airbnb for two nights at the end, where the girls could have their own rooms (and we had two bathrooms) and we could all hide from each other a bit. Which we needed.

3) Avoid booking 6:30 AM flights.

Scandinaviacation

We returned yesterday from a two-week-long vacation in Norway and Sweden.

We flew into Bergen, and took the light rail to an airbnb in a lovely old neighborhood. The building was 300 years old, with a shop on the ground floor. It was not raining the day we arrived, something we did not appreciate enough at the time, since Norway pretty much rained on us continually, with only occasional brief sunbreaks. We spent two days touristing in Bergen - on day one, we visited the Maritime Museum, Haakon's Hall, Rosencrantz Tower and Bergen City Museum. We also went up the Floibanen funicular and ate our first pølse (why do American hotdogs not come wrapped in a  potato pancake with crispy fried onion topping?). (Later we would eat reindeer pølse, plukkfisk, fish pie and about a ton of candy. No pickled fish, though.)

On the second day, we visited Gamle Bergen, rode the little Beffen ferry, and browsed through tourist stores selling troll dolls in the Bryggen.

 There were a LOT of tourists in Bergen, most of them not American. (Though we did enjoy being enveloped by an American group from "Kosher Cruises," a participant of which commented that the weather was "meshugeneh.") There were also quite a few signs in the bathrooms, presumably for the education of tourists from places where toilets aren't the same:

In Bergen, we also went on a quest to the mall to find pants for Skipper, and ended up also buying her a yellow raincoat that she adores and that came in very handy for keeping her dry and also easy to find in a crowd.

We rented a car and drove to an airbnb in Leikanger, where we stayed for four nights while poking around the Sognfjord area. We visited the glacier museum and Boyabreen glacier and Bokbyen.

On our most ambitious day, we drove the Aurlandsfjellet, a scenic road over mountains that has been replaced for normal driving by a 24 kilometer tunnel, and now is only open in summer, and driven only by tourists. Norway is full of narrow roads, and in many places there's only room for one car at a time, and you have to pull over (or back up in order to pull over) into one of the frequent pull-out spots to give way to oncoming traffic. Also, there are a lot of sheep with strong opinions about who owns the roads. We stopped at the Stegastein viewpoint on the way down, and ate our lunch on a rock just up the hill from the parking lot.

Duchess took a photo out the bathroom window at Stegastein.

After Stegastein, we drove to Gudvangen to catch the car ferry that runs up the Naeroyfjord to Kaupanger, and then home from there. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of spectacular scenery.

We stayed at a house that was right on the fjord, in Leikanger. It was cold, and full of flies, but the view was unbeatable.

On a very rainy day, we abandoned our hopes of seeing a stave church, and went instead to the Sogn Folkemuseum. These pigs were, I think, Skipper's favorite thing about the entire trip.

We drove back to Bergen, returned the car, and spent a last afternoon in Bergen. (We did some successful thrift shopping in Bergen and then Oslo, though we never did find Skipper the affordable Norwegian sweater she yearns for.)

We caught the morning train to Oslo. This is a very pretty train ride.

In Oslo, we walked to the Vigelandspark, and then walked back to the hotel past a punk/anarchist squat house.

We took a bus to Sweden. This is what it looks like when you cross into Sweden.

The reason for the whole trip was to honor my mom's request to gather her children and their families at her childhood summer home in Sweden. I've been there a few times, most recently eighteen summers ago. It hasn't actually changed a lot, unlike basically everything else in my life and the world.We spent five nights there. Cook and my brothers and the kids did a lot of things like sailing and kayaking and playing croquet and kubb and a ridiculous golf/croquet hybrid that my older brother made up on the spot using plastic lawn furniture. I mostly sat around reading or staring off into space. (I realize that this is what everybody now expects of me, so I really don't even need to stipulate what I do on vacation. This is what I do.) Sometimes I held Ume or listened to Momotaro talk about dragons.

 

We wrapped up our trip by taking the bus back to Oslo and spending a final day and a half there. The half day we spent wandering around Slottsparken and Frogner. Skipper's fantastic raincoat enjoyed a final Norwegian outing, because it was, naturally, raining.

We took the museum ferry over to the Bygdoy peninsula and went to the Viking Ship Museum, the Folk Museum and the Fram Museum. I enjoyed all of these museums - I like (reading about) Vikings and polar exploration very much. And my favorite thing about the many Norwegian folk museums we visited is that people in Norway (and presumably elsewhere) in the 14th-19th century would lick their spoons clean and then put them in some kind of storage space, like a wall hanger or... a crack in the wall.

Also, we saw a Norwegian rowing club from the ferry.

We ferried back to the city center and ate some expensive mediocre Italian food at an interesting new development down by the waterfront - very yuppie, but with lots of art and really nice public space for sitting near the water and people watching.

We got up at 3:30 AM Sunday morning, Oslo time, and arrived back in Portland just before noon Portland time. It was a really, really long day. (This is a photo of us waiting for the airport train at the Nationaltheatret station at 4:25 AM. Note Cook's vacation beard, which was shaved off later that day when we got home. RIP.)















And that's the trip! It was exhausting and exhilarating and disorienting. Now we have to go back to work and school (the girls missed their first three days of school - poor Duchess is starting highschool, and will have to jump into freshman year three days late) and return to normal life. Cook said, the night before we came home, that he would miss being in a place where he doesn't really understand anything, where the signs are mysterious. I think that's what I like about traveling, too - you're always off balance.