Portland Day Trip

Yesterday I got an early start. I drove down to Tacoma to pick up my old roommate Katherine (Her kids got to stay home with their dad, who is on his Christmas break from school). We loaded up into my car and then kept driving all the way down to Portland. It's not really that far, but a three hour drive in each direction can still be pretty daunting. Traffic wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected from everyone's warnings to me, and we made it to downtown Portland ahead of schedule. I can neither deny nor confirm the rumors that I drove in a bus lane while I was trying to figure out where to park in front of the Bankcorp building.


Melissa, another of our roommates from college, left work early and came down to meet us. We spent a really nice day going to the mall, having lunch together, driving around Mel's old childhood haunts to get a tour of Portland, and then we got to meet Melissa's family. She's got four kids, which is pretty hard to believe until you're reminded of the fact that three of them are triplets. All I have to say about that is WOW. I'm amazed that she and her husband are able to manage with their 5 year old autistic son and three 2 year olds.They're all absolutely adorable and sweet, and Katherine and I enjoyed spending time around them and getting hugs and cuddles throughout the afternoon.



We left Portland in the evening and headed back up to our neck of the woods. Since it seems like it gets dark here sometime around noon in the winter, it was dark the whole way home, but the roads weren't that bad. All in all, it was a really nice day off.

-Amy

Lions and Tigers and Bears

Lions and Tigers and Bears

-Oh, my.

You often hear about a month or a season going in like a lion and out like a lamb, or even the other way around. This fall, unfortunately, sort of came in like the proverbial lion, but it passed over the lamb and went straight for the tiger and bear instead. Even now that we’ve gotten through it, somehow keeping our heads afloat through the craziness of it all, the mere mention of the word November makes me want to run away screaming.

One of my old roommates from college emailed me earlier today asking me how NaNoWriMo had gone, and I started laughing out loud before admitting to her that I hadn’t quite finished this year. Here is a little bit of what we’ve had going on that’s kept us from blogging - and writing - lately.

Oct 2-3 - Tom finished the last credit he needed to get his associate’s degree. We had to chuckle when he went to talk to a counselor and discovered he only needed one more dinky little P.E. credit to finish up his degree. He had a good time in the class, which turned out to be as much psychology as P.E., and now he’s finished with all the requirements.

Oct 12 - Tom’s birthday. He turned 31 this year, and I can hardly believe it, because I’m only 6 months behind him.

Oct 22 - While taking a shower, I turned and took a chunk out of my elbow with a sort of hook that hangs my razor in the shower. Tom held a hankie to the gushing wound while I tried to dry off and get dressed with my other hand - and let me tell you, that took some serious concentration. He walked me across the street to the urgent care when we couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. They weren’t able to stitch anything, because there was nothing there to stitch - it had just gotten scooped right out. Also, because of the angle it had severed the blood vessels, they wouldn’t quite clot for awhile and it was still bleeding for a few days. I never realized how important it was for me to have use of both arms with the work I do, because I started getting blood blisters on my other elbow from overusing it doing deep tissue, haha.

Oct 31 - I finished the second draft of last year’s NaNoWriMo novel (Demonsgate) with a few hours to spare before the new challenge began. This was the first complete second draft from scratch I’ve ever done (not using any of the original text from the first draft) so I was really proud to get through it.

Nov 1 - NaNoWriMo began. This is the 50,000 word novel challenge that we’ve participated in for three years now. We went to a big area write-in on the night of Oct 31, and then at midnight silence ensued and everyone began typing and scribbling away on their novels. It was a really fun event with I think about 130 people participating just at the Denny’s we were at. While we were there, Tom - who was drafting his novel by hand; yes, that means with a pen and paper - wrote about 1400 words on his novel, and I typed about 4000 words on mine. We were both off to a pretty good start.

Nov 2-5 Tom does his first dry-runs for his newspaper delivery job. It went pretty badly, but he figured it could only get better. Boy, was he wrong.

Nov 4 - Tom went in for oral surgery (after a long morning of driving one of his paper routes to try and find all of the addresses on the list). Everything went well, though he was pretty sick for a day or two afterward from the pain meds and anesthesia.

Nov 8 - Tom and I headed to the U district to try and fulfill a contract to deliver newspaper ads to a list of people. The list was generated by a computer. Even though this is supposed to be a route you never have to leave the car for, Tom and I both spent a lot of time trucking up and down the streets on foot, looking for addresses that didn’t exist. I had my first asthma attack ever while going up about ⅛ mile of stairs in the cold. That was not my best moment.

The people Tom had a contract with had no earthly clue that what they were asking of their people was impossible, and after a very long and cranky day where we each made about $2.00 an hour for our efforts, we made the decision that we would cut our losses and back out of the contract. Luckily we didn’t have to pay anything to do this; Tom just didn’t get anything for the work he had done already.

One unexpected blessing that came from this disaster was that because Tom had cancelled the contract and started looking for something else right away, he was able to get a great writing contract with an online business directory company called Patch.com. He’s now writing business listings and thoroughly enjoying what he’s doing. It’s nice for him to be doing more work that also looks good on his resume. Also, after that lousy paper delivery experience, he really appreciates being able to do what he loves to do and get paid decently for it.

Nov 14 - I got released from being a Relief Society instructor and put in with the Young Women as the Laurel advisor. This is a first for me, as I’ve spent most of my life teaching in Relief Society. Even though I feel pretty intimidated, I’m really excited for the change and the challenge. I’ve only been there a couple weeks now, but I love my Laurels and really feel like it’s the right place for me to be. It’s just one more testimony to me that church callings are placed on our shoulders just when we need them most.

Nov 16 - my dental visit. Thankfully, the dentist told me that other than the huge hole I have where two thirds of my tooth had broken off, the rest of my teeth are looking great. Root canal and crown, here I come! :P

Nov 17 - Tom visits with a UW admissions counsellor. The good news? He has the grades to get in. The bad news? He still has a couple prerequisite classes to take before he can be accepted. He scrambled, registering at Green River Community College for winter term starting in January (same place he got his associate’s degree)

Nov 18 - Devin drops by on his way home from working in Canada for the summer. He’d had a really long week of sleeping in his car, so he was pretty excited to get out of said car and hang out at our place for a few hours. He played with Legos and took a breather before starting the last leg of his journey to Utah. He was nice enough to loan us his movie projector while he was out of the country, but even though it was really nice I must admit I didn’t shed any tears at getting his equipment out of the living room.

Nov 20 - Our 6th anniversary. We went and saw a movie (Harry Potter), watched the annual tree lighting ceremony here at Renton Landing, and then came home and cooked dinner. It was a really fun super-date. On one hand, I can hardly believe we’ve been married for 6 years, and on the other hand I can hardly believe it hasn’t been longer.

Nov 22 - First snow of the season. Holy. Cow. When the forecast said it looked like snow, I figured we would be getting some light flurries that would quickly melt and turn into puddles by the time they reached the ground. I did not count on the complete and total shut down of the greater Seattle area because of the weather. We got about 4 inches of snow here by our apartment, but the plows didn’t even try to come through here for two days. It’s strange coming from Utah - where all of the roads are constantly being plowed and salted through the winter - to Seattle - where people have decided that rock salt is too environmentally unfriendly to be used on the roads, and there can’t be more than one or two plows covering each town in the region. So many of my clients couldn’t talk about anything else when they came in for massages - that is, if they were able to make it - and people were cancelling left and right because the ice got to be so bad out there. What a different world this is in the winter! At least now while I write this there is no trace of the snow left anywhere around. All is just as it should be in Seattle in November - damp, not frozen.

Nov 25 - Thanksgiving Day! We had a great Thanksgiving dinner at Janet’s house. Since the mountain passes were too snowy and icy to get through, Abby, Jeremy and Lorena weren’t able to make it over for the holiday with us, so our gathering consisted of a whole 5 people. That sounds laughable for someone coming from my background. I don’t remember a family Thanksgiving with less than about 15 people since I was a little kid; more often than not we had something like 20 to 50 people bustling around for the holiday. It was really bizarre to have only 5 of us, and all adults too, though I wouldn’t say it was a bad thing. We all enjoyed the conversation, and it was very peaceful - unlike any Thanksgiving with my family will probably ever be! Every dish was absolutely superb, and we all went away with lots of leftovers.

Nov 30 - Well, we got to the end of NaNoWriMo and for the first time in three years, neither of us finished our novels in time. We both had to look back on the crazy month we had and shake our heads. I’m grateful that we survived another month of insanity, and I’m gonna say that the 26,000 and 32,000 words respectively that we each wrote on our novels is something to be proud of.

Note: There is the slightest chance I’m trying to make myself feel less guilty for not finishing the challenge, and I do realize this, lol.

Dec 1 - I had a freakish allergic reaction to who knows what. I was home on my lunch break eating and was just about to gather my things together to go back to work when I thought my mouth felt funny. I went to the bathroom mirror to investigate, only to discover that I had big blisters forming on my lips, and they were swelling up as I watched. Soon the swelling travelled to my tongue and throat, at which point I asked Tom to run me over to the nearest pharmacy to get me some liquid benedryl. That was weird. The swelling went down about 15 minutes after I took a swig of the benedryl, and I didn’t have any other problems after that. Luckily the front desk girls at work took care of clearing the rest of my schedule, so it was okay that I zonked out and slept off the drugs for the next four hours. I’m such a sissy when it comes to drug tolerance.

Tom and I are looking forward to the coming days and weeks. We have Christmas just around the corner and then a trip to Utah in January for my brother Ryan’s wedding reception.

We hope life will quiet down a little so we can stop long enough to catch our breath, but the biggest thing we’re feeling as we come out of this end of autumn somehow still intact is gratitude. We’re so grateful that we’ve had six years together so far and look forward to many more. We’re so grateful that we have family and friends who love and look out for us. We’re grateful we live in such a great apartment so close to everything. We’re grateful for the work we do have, even when it’s not as much as we would like. We’re grateful for this beautiful city and the wonderful people we meet everywhere we go. We’re grateful for the holidays that remind us to slow down and remember the people we love and the reasons we go through life in the first place.

Thank you everyone for all that you bring into our lives. Thank you for taking the time to keep in touch and let us be a part of yours as well.

-Amy