We did some driving. To give some perspective, the distance from Palm Springs to Malibu is 142 miles. Over 80% of that distance is urban, suburban, commercial or industrial. And I can’t show in the above map that we took the same freeways multiple times for multiple trips. It was probably a 500 mile weekend. [...]

Thank you all for coming. Thank you to those who traveled long distances: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Seattle, Las Vegas, Okinawa, and West Los Angeles. It’s an honor to have our grandparents here from Massachusetts and an honor to have Gary’s family here from as far away as Japan and, AND… Cleveland. Thank

You may remember me mentioning this, perhaps it has slipped your mind, and if that is the case, let me remind you that we have three very big, important weddings this year. THREE. One, two, three weddings. Big ones. A best friend’s wedding, a sister’s wedding and then our own wedding. This season has loomed [...

A couple weeks ago, I paid off my car. For the past year, I had been making double and triple payments every month. Every spare bit of money I scraped together, I put towards my car. I put my tax return into my car. I put overtime pay towards my car. When Dave reimbursed me [...]

Guess where we went for my birthday? Guess who was really super excited because he hasn’t been there since here was a a child? I was pretty excited too. As a literature major, I took a class in Children’s Lit. I still have all the books. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has always been one of [...]

While other folks planned to grill meat products, drink alcohol products, and light off gunpowder products for 4th of July, we packed up the car with our camping gear and headed for the woods. If you don’t live in Portland or Oregon, you might not realize that summer 2010 has not yet arrived. When I [...]

A related tangent. Here is an after effect of relocating frequently: an unwarranted familiarity with items that would normally be lost and forgotten. Every time I move, which for the past 10 years or so has been once a year or sometimes twice a year, I purge more items that I have been lugging with [...]

Right around this time ten years ago, I graduated college. I was 26. I had been living in Boston for six or seven years. I took a rather circuitous path to finishing school. When other kids my age were focused on getting though college, I took time off to work at the Grand Canyon for [...]

Ah, midsummer. Seems like a cruel joke doesn’t it? Remember last weekend? Thirty six hours of sun and 85 degrees? We will remember those hours fondly when 2010 was known as The Year With The 36 Hour Summer. We’ll bore the grandkids with our wistful stories and try to keep from spitting our teeth out. [...]

So this current episode of stress is a bit ongoing, which is fine. It’s fine because I “see” it happening. I’m grumpy and sensitive, but at least I’m aware of it. That should make my insufferability somewhat more tolerable, and almost pleasant for those who have to talk to me. Yes, I’m cr

If you live in or near Portland, you were beginning to think summer was never going to arrive, didn’t you? After all these weeks of overcast skies, I heard even native Oregonians bellyaching about the weather. I have come to understand that the threat of regular rain does not completely dissipate until July 5, you [..

In the past couple of years, I have transitioned from being primarily in a state of stress to, oddly, NOT being in a state of stress. It was not a sudden transition, but moving from constant anxiety to relatively low anxiety occurred more rapidly than I thought possible. While I’ve always thought I was an “anxio

Some time in the beginning of the year, we sat down with our calendar and looked at the weekends of the summer months. We had several weddings, a bunch of street fairs and a number of festivals we didn’t want to miss. But we wanted to make sure we got some camping in this summer [...]

This is the nineteenth day in a row that we have gotten rain. Some days have just been a little rain, but other days have been an ass ton of rain. It rained all night last night. It’s raining right now. What a perfect time to kick off our Summer Camping Season. The car is packed [...]

Despite growing up in a rural Massachusetts town, I don’t remember going to a lot of county fairs. I don’t think I went to any, actually. I think they had some in New Hampshire. So I don’t think I really comprehended what a true county fair was until I dated someone from Iowa, who spoke [...]

I don’t know about you, but I like to know stuff. I like to know regular, get-through-the-day stuff, but I like to know odd stuff too. Mostly odd stuff, actually. I often don’t know why I know something, where I heard it, or why I remember it. And it’s usually incomplete bits of knowledge, which [...]

What a problem to have. I have saggy pantaloons. I need to wear a belt with jeans that used to fit. I have a few pairs of pants that always seemed too short. I thought as I lost weight, they’d hang lower. And they do. Now they are an okay length, but they feel a [...]

I find myself thinking this often as I read the news, or hear about what is going on in the world. “What next?” Not just our day to day events, but our consumption and reaction to news. And not “what next?” from a cranky old lady perspective, like what will these damn [...]

Holy crap. It wasn’t drinking too much, or staying up until 5am. It wasn’t dancing or doing shots. It wasn’t the utter brain explosion from visiting the completely different planet that is Las Vegas. It was a nearly naked Korean woman that kicked my ass. I was in Vegas this past weekend for my sister’

My weekend: Las Vegas. Not a bachelorette party for me, but for my sister. 48 hours of drunkenness from foo-foo girlie drinks. It’s going to be in the 90s. My ass hasn’t seen sun since 2007. Wish me luck. Dave’s weekend: Eating food that I don’t enjoy. This primarily involves eating stinky little fis

You know what a “dick truck” is. It’s a truck driven by a dick. Most often, but not always, a guy. You can tell, just from the truck, that the guy driving it is probably a dick. Sometimes a douche, but mostly a dick. You see dick trucks much more outside the city. Any city, really. [...]

We try to go see something different every time we go to Astoria. We’ve been to the Astoria Column. But we hadn’t actually climbed to the top. It was closed before. We had the opportunity this time and Dave asked me repeatedly, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” Well, yes. It’s 164 stairs, so of [..

We had been planning for weeks to go to the Wooden Shop Tulip Fest. Today was the last day. We’re not procrastinators. We’re not! Okay, we are, but at least we actually went. This post is going to take a while to load, because I put the photos in all super huge and big, for your [...]

My shoulder has been screwed up for the past few weeks. It’s sort of a weird internal pain that sharpens with simple, casual motions. I learned that it might be a rotator cuff issue which is remarkable because I’m not athletic at all, and it would be most likely I damaged it in my sleep, [...]

Some people get outraged too easily. I have the opposite problem. I don’t get outraged easily enough. Or rather, I don’t know what the hell to do when I’m angry about something. It’s a problem. Thankfully, I really don’t have cause to get angry very often. I’m pretty good at being unflap

So for some reason, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting stuff done. It’s outrageous. And unfamiliar. I have a mostly mental, but partially written down, and rather wildly divergent list of projects. And I’m working on them all. Not everything is finished, because there’s no such thing as b

Over at Dave Knows! Go see! I think I missed my calling. I should have been an interviewer. Maybe even an interrogator. “How many fish can you name? Now! Now! Now!”

I learned this in college. What I Learned in College from Mile73 on Vimeo. It was very dry cider, not beer. You can try this at home, kids! It’s like a homemade lava lamp. Sort of.

I will have to write about this in more depth one day, but one of the more remarkable transformations that has occurred since  moving to Portland, is that my life seems CALMER. I am less of an anxious nutjob. I don’t think I’ve lost my ability to be a nutjob, I think I just have [...]

I’ve now been driving in Portland for a bit over two years. I still stand by my early pronouncement that drivers here are much more civilized than other cities. At least cities where I have spent time driving. You can tell even with just a 48 hour trip, even in Seattle, where you figure the [...]