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. 

 It's a beautiful fall-ish day here, sunny and just cool and breezy enough to be autumnal. A friend gave me a fresh apple today. Our yard is full of the smell of fermenting grapes. (Sure, Cook made some juice, but there are still a LOT on the vines.) The girls have a month of school behind them and are settling in. 

We haven't yet figured out where all our stuff goes now in the new house configuration, so things still feel a bit unsettled here. We're also still getting used to having Duchess gone. We're glad she's out there in the world, as she should be, and she seems to be thriving (if grumpy about Midwestern humidity), but we also haven't quite shaken out into the new triangular normal. 

I've also apparently entered a stage of life where I keep being surprised by how much time has passed. Cook and I have now been married for 22 years, which means that our marriage is probably graduating from college and getting a job. We've lived in our house for 12 years. Somebody at work recently referred to a mild local political kerfuffle that happened a decade ago, and I realized that while I will never be a full-fledged Portlander,* I've logged nearly 17 years of my adulthood here. Somehow. And somehow I have friends here whom I've known for a decade or more. I recognize that this is how time actually works, but it still boggles my mind.

* This requires at least being born here yourself, and ideally having at least one parent born here as well. 

Dear lord it is somehow time for school again

 I read somewhere that as you age time feels sped up because your sense of time is determined by the way you sort experience and memories, and as you age you have more established categories (which I imagine as file folders) in which to place experiences as you have them, so your brain does not have to take the time to build new categories, just drops the experiences into the established categories and moves on.* 

Point is, the last year has passed extremely quickly for me, presumably because I am so old that nothing is new to me any more. And yet, in that time I have moved out of and back into our house, started a new job, and experienced a kid going through the college application process and then leaving for college. Feels like that should have taken longer. 

We're starting a new school year, and a new phase of school for both kids. Skipper had her first day of high school yesterday, and Duchess has her first day of college next week. Skipper is tackling high school (loud, chaotic, class sizes of 30+, confusing, etc., and thus not at all Skipper's jam) with her usual grim determination. When I asked her how the day was, she said "It was okay. Only 171 more days to go!"**

Duchess, after a week and a half of the crosscountry preseason, is starting freshman orientation proper tomorrow (and meeting the rest of her fellow freshmen, including her roommate). She's having a pretty great time so far, in Duchess style, which means that she has been getting acquainted with every single person on campus, including the lady who serves pasta in the dining hall and a French guy she met in the dorm elevator. (He lives in Paris. Imagine LIVING IN PARIS and deciding to go to college IN MINNESOTA.) She has been generously communicative with us in this initial stage, and it's been fun vicariously experiencing the collegiate delight of going somewhere new and starting a new life with lots of comfortable safeguards. She's making lots of new experience categories.

*I tried to look this up to determine if this single-sentence paragraph has any actual science behind it or if I just completely made it up, and the search results I got were along the lines of "when will my toddler learn to sort objects" and so I may have made it up.

** I don't know where she got this number, or if it's accurate. 

Next steps

 Duchess and I went to Minnesota to deliver her to college. She had a LOT of feelings about this, as you can imagine, but the predominant feeling was excitement. 

This is Duchess sadly saying goodbye to Portland.

We stayed the night in St Paul, got into the dorm the next morning. 

Duchess is housed in The Worst Dorm on Campus (a time-honored rite of passage for unlucky freshmen across the country). She's making the best of it, though, and already relishing her new adventure. She's going to thrive, grim cinderblocks be damned.

(And I got to do a little bonus touristing - it's been 25 years since I last saw Minnesota!)

Summer! We've had a couple of brutal heatwaves, a charmingly tiny canine houseguest who adores Skipper, some ultimate frisbee, and a trip to Seattle to see family and watch baseball. We finally get to moved back into our house (after exactly the kind of exhausting, overbudget, much-drawn-out renovation project that makes people tell you never to do a renovation).

Duchess had an early-summer trip to Sweden that she enjoyed enormously- it's hard not to be won over by Sweden at midsummer, and Duchess got three weeks of endless daylight, wild strawberries, swimming, weird lawn games, and excellent public transportation. Plus a million mosquito bites, but you can't win everything.

We took a road trip to eastern Oregon! We started off with a minor league baseball game in Washington.

Then we went south to Wallowa Lake to camp for a couple of nights, just as severe thunderstorms settled in the area.

We stopped to pay our respects to the confluence of the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Cook loves a confluence.

We also stopped for Dutch Bros, a great Oregon cultural tradition that Cook does not find appealing, being a black-coffee-acquired-cheaply-and-on-foot guy, so he insisted that we park and walk up to the window instead of driving through. 

Wallowa Lake is beautiful when it isn't pouring rain. 

Our activities were curtailed by the intermittent lightning and downpours, and by Duchess's stress fracture (preventing her from walking far), so we visited downtown Joseph and downtown Enterprise.

Cook and the girls bravely swam in the lake. I'm given to understand it was quite cold. 

We splurged and took a tram up to the top of a mountain. Duchess was not a fan of the tram, but Skipper really was.

We drove to Baker City, stopping in Lostine for coffee along the way, and then Lagrande to visit another bookstore.

Took a day in Baker City, visited the Oregon Trail wagonruts.

We drove to Bend, stopping for pie, ghost towns, and a very large wagon replica.

In Bend, we visited relatives and the Deschutes River. 

And then we came home! Eastern Oregon is really, really beautiful, and we were also so glad to return home!