Still here.

 Well. Here we are. It's a sunny day, and I'm sitting in the back yard with a travel book, imagining a vacation I might take some day* and listening to Patsy Cline. That's all good. I've got Dog #7** out here with me, and he's sleeping hard in the way that dogs do, making me feel sleepy myself every time I look at him.

Things are okay. We all continue to feel pretty crushed by current events, though Cook and I both do still have jobs and we all get up every day and do the things we have to do. We continue to recognize that we are extraordinarily lucky. And yet, this is a dismal slog.

We've been spending a lot of time outside since the smoke siege, trying to store up some air and sunshine for the long winter ahead. There may not be enough air and sunshine.

 

* I can't even tell you how much time I've spend thinking about multi-day walks in Scotland and Wales. Days. Maybe weeks.

** Dog #7 is a people-loving 80-pounder with a massive (mastiff) head. He drools abundantly, gets "mouthy" (aka "bitey") when he's excited , and is really leash-reactive to other dogs, which means that if he sees another dog, he lunges to the end of the leash, and sometimes gets so worked up that he leaps and writhes like a fish, barking and snarling and actually frothing at the mouth, which given that he already looks scary in his resting state, must look like a nightmare to the poor people walking past. He may never get adopted...

Dogs, an update

 Dog #4 was adopted in August, and we were dog-free for a month. During that time, we had two overnight dogs. Dog #5 was a refugee from a California shelter who needed overnight accommodation before going to a rescue shelter in Portland. She was allegedly a Great Dane/Border Collie mix, and I adored her. She was like a baby giraffe with feathers. She was adopted out of the shelter the first moment she was available the following weekend, not by me.

Dog #6 was another subfoster, a stumpy charmer who lay down flat on his belly in a way that made me laugh every single time. 

Dog #7, our fourth official foster, will arrive this weekend. We set up the crate and got out the tick jar in preparation!

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. 

 

End of summer

 We're wrapping up our summer with some time in Washington. We stayed a few days at a house on Mason Lake, alternating swimming, inept paddling, dozing, eating, playing video games, and watching movies. Cook and I made the girls eat Klondike bars and watch old movies so we could relive our childhood vacations. (This is what children are for, right?)

Went for a short hike at Big Creek. (Staircase is closed, so we'll have to come back another time...)

Went camping again, again

 Another gentle car-camping trip! We camped at Seaquest this time, and hiked the Harry's Ridge trail. None of us except Duchess had seen Mt. St. Helens up close-ish before, and the trail offers a good view of the side of the mountain that blew out in 1980, and the lake where dead trees are still floating. It rained the night we arrived, but Saturday was beautiful, and there were ripe huckleberries and strawberries along the way, and a lot of very nonchalant chipmunks.

Went camping again

We're jamming all of our summer into August. Three camping trips and a house rental! This weekend was the second camping trip, a very gentle local adventure. We did get some river rafting in, which was very fun. Otherwise, mostly hammocks and berry foraging.