Days 80-96: Pretty quiet around these parts.

Yup.  Preeeeetty quiet.

I am hoping to hear about a job very soon.  Two interviews and some paperwork filled out and about a week of waiting to hear for sure, so.  Fingers continue to be crossed.

I've been in a near constant state of low level freakout about the election, as most of you probably know since I've been bombarding you all with emails and Facebook hoohah and so forth.  Rachel Maddow has been helping.  A lot.  If you aren't watching her show on MSNBC already then I can't recommend it enough.  You can watch the episodes online if you don't have cable (like us).  Smartest commentary around and also a truly civil and courteous tone.  Very helpful.  

In the meantime, we're finally unpacked completely.  The final box was full of cds, and all the books are on the shelves and we're finally getting some art on the walls, too.  Another jam has found its way into jars and into our cupboard, plum/pluot with a little raspberry this time.  We're planning a run at apple butter this weekend, since John doesn't seem to think a weekend is complete now without a little canning.  I'm not arguing.  I love me some apple butter.  I only hope the stuff we come up with is anywhere near as good as my Grammer's was.

We've been going to the dog park and picking up awesome sticks...

But mostly, I can't stop noticing the trees and the colors.

Unbelievable.  Also?  Hills.  Portland has hills.  Chicago?  Not so much.  In Chicago the thing I noticed all the time was the city.  Buildings and traffic and noise and smells.  Here I just can't stop looking at nature.  The birds.  The plants.  Everyone has gardens.  The hills are a mix of evergreens and spectacular fall colors and the light on the mostly bright, sunny days so far this October is pure gold.  We're living on the east side of town, which is far more residential and our street and neighborhood is pretty low-key.  We went to the west side of town Saturday night to go to a performance by a small local opera company (in a bar!  like edgy Chicago theater!  neat!) which was downtown, and then ate dinner in the area that is exactly like Lincoln Park in Chicago (swanky shops, expensive houses and upscale doodads).  Being in the midst of all that was disorienting and a little strange.  The life we've been leading, or at least the life I've been leading since we've been here is so quiet and small.  It feels incredibly good.  After being in the bustle it was so good to come home.

Days 76-79: More company! And our first experiment with jam.

When we lived in Topeka, KS my momma was friends with a lovely woman who would stay with me when my folks went out of town, who became one of those people who are much more than family friend, for whom there is no really good title except a family one.  She became Aunt Kippy (her childhood nickname).  

Aunt Kippy moved to Chicago in the early 90's, so when I went there to go to college I had family nearby, just in case.  I used to house and cat sit for her when she went out of town, and she would take me out to brunch or dinner every now and again to make sure I stayed in one piece.  My mom would stay with her when she came into town, and her apartment was the place where I found out my father was gone.  I love her dearly, and even though we haven't always been in close touch, seeing her again is just picking up the threads of a conversation we started a long time ago.  As luck would have it she lives in Seattle now with her marvelous boyfriend Dean, and the two of them came down to visit not only us but her brother Chris this weekend.  

On Friday we went to a French bakery and cafe for lunch, up in the Alberta district.  We caught up and bought some pastry and adorable smiley apple and pear shaped cookies....

 and took a picture of really cute graffiti....

 before heading over to the International Rose Test Garden, which is phenominally beautiful, even in October.  I can't wait to see what it looks like in June.  

On Saturday it was a gorgeous sunny morning, so John and I took Punkus to the dog park and walked to Home Depot, then met Kippy, Dean, brother Chris and his son Seven for a dinner of incredible Thai food.  Certainly the best Thai food I've eaten here so far, maybe the best I've ever had.  Wow.  I can't wait to go back there.  We then piled into the car, literally, and found a coffee shop for a quick after dinner drink.  Afterwards, we said goodbyes and John I walked home under the clear starry sky and a mostly full moon.

Sunday was another spectacular morning and we found one of the few still open farmer's markets and bought a whole lot of tomatoes, some garlic and a flat of three pints of raspberries and three pints of blueberries.  

After a run to the grocery store for some canning supplies, we made a first attempt on jam, blueberry and raspberry.  

It was SPATTERY.  We ended up with about 1/4 of the jam splattered on the floor and the stove and the wall and in the dog's bowl and on John's pants.  Our candy thermometer wasn't working terribly well, and its supposed to be 220 degrees or so before you pour it into jars, so we got it up to something I'm going to call "angry boil" before we took it off the heat.  Not sure if it was totally right, but it seems to have set up beautifully and the color is spectacular.  Yea!  Jam!

We also made tomato sauce and canned that.  We're 80.  But canning is awesome!  John says this is only the beginning, and next is making jam with no sugar, just apple juice.  And then making our own apple juice.  And then, naturally, world domination.  It is only a matter of time, people.

Days 49-75: We make this house our own which involves a whole lot of trips to Home Depot. They love me there.

It took us awhile to get the internet tubes hooked up at our house, which meant walking down to the wifi cafe with the spotty connection should one wish to check one's email, and I had my hands full yanking out carpet and padding in the upstairs which led to pulling out carpet staples one at a time which led to stripping off old carpet pad adhesive in a seven step process with smelly, smelly chemicals, which led to painting the floors a beautiful dark brown which led to me being a very happy camper!  Because, dude.  That carpet was nasty.

Not having internets at home made blogging and job searching a little difficult, so both kind of had to wait a bit.  The job search is now in full swing and so blogging was, of course, my next priority!  Except that now I've pulled off all the hideous vinyl wallpaper in the dining room so now its time to sand and paint!  Joy!  Home Depot here I come!  Again!

There is also Ms. Punk to consider, of course.  And despite being a wee bit prissy about the wet grass (not at all new), she seems to be loving it here.  It doesn't hurt that one of us is mostly around all the time.  Nope, that doesn't hurt at all.  We've been going to the local dog park every other day or so, and she's also thoroughly enjoying lots and lots of naps in her chair.  John decided that she should have a chair in our front room that she's allowed to get up on and see out the window to watch the neighborhood goings on.  My mom gave us a big armchair that fits the bill and this has been a pretty big hit with her.  

She also now has the opportunity to freak out at a mail carrier once a day, something she was not able to do in our old apartment.  She may be enjoying that part a little too much, but it is nice to have a mail alarm of sorts.

Last weekend we had Bob and Tasha, friends from Chicago, here in town with us which was serious fun.  The weather obliged us being completely Pacific Northwest-y with the intermittent (and sometimes not so intermittent) rain.  This did not even remotely stop us from going out to the spectacular Columbia Gorge area and looking at really beautiful waterfalls, and doing some exploration of the city.  Seeing familiar faces made me super happy an it was fun to share some of the things we're loving here, like our local farmer's market and the fact that apple trees and blackberry canes are all over the place and the yummy all night doughnut place with weird doughnuts and the clean and mercifully quiet public transit system and on and on.

So I'm continuing to look for jobs, and John is currently doing a four month contract position with Intel,  and we're doing pretty darn good.  We're all signed up with a car sharing service now which means we'll be going hiking very soon, so hopefully I'll have more photos of a happy mountain dog to show you very soon.

Days 45-48: More lots and lots of driving. In a really big truck! A yellow one!

Once we got back to Denver, we spent two days running errands and getting everything ready for the move on Monday, moving furniture down to the storage unit and finding all the stuff we had unpacked at my mom's house.  I made a run to Costco with my mom which involved buying an absurd amount of toilet paper and paper towels, and also an area rug.  Costco.  Always surreal.

Monday morning John picked up our truck and Punk and I met him and the movers at the storage unit.  We got on the road by noon and drove the first leg of the journey to Salt Lake City through the most boring and unattractive bits of Colorado and Wyoming.  Except for some really neat rock formations in Wyoming.

Spirits in the cab of Behemoth II were high!

Allegedly the part of Utah we eventually drove through was pretty, but sadly we were in the dark by then.  We hit the hotel on the north side of town and passed out.

We breakfasted and mounted up the next morning and did get to see a bit of the pretty of Utah before plunging into more boring in Idaho.  Except for a nifty gorge we drove over on our way to lunch.  GORGE!

With a golf course in it!  Before we left Colorado John had spoken to his aunt and uncle who live near Eugene and they had warned him about two things regarding eastern Oregon.  One, that parts of it would look very much like Martian desert, and two, that we would eventually hit lava fields and not to be too surprised when we did.  The terrain of eastern Oregon is like no other place I've ever seen.  When we first crossed the border it was fairly standard hilly farmland and green fields, but then it just got weird.

Beautiful, but weird.  After passing thought the Martian desert the highway descends into an area called The Great Basin, which is an enormous plain in the midst of the mountains, home to the longest, straightest road I have every driven in my life.  We drove until after sunset without a curve or a turn, past farms and dirt roads that branched off left and right.  Slightly surreal in a sort of David Lynch-y way.

Eventually there was a curve.  We stopped for the night in Burns, Oregon, a main street town which looked very like every other main street town I've come across in the midwest.  We found and checked into our motel, and walked the dog down the aforementioned main street to the only open restaurant, a Chinese place.  We passed and were passed by a whole lot of pickup trucks and there were some guys with weird vibes hanging around outside the bar we walked by, and the local bank had a lot of dead animals and pelts hanging on its wall, clearly visible from the sidewalk after hours.  All in all the same strange, David Lynch-y feeling from the whole nighttime town.  We carried our take out back to the room and ate a whole lot of fried things while watching the most recent Die Hard movie on HBO, which was surprisingly awesome!  We woke up a little late the next morning, got coffee and pastry from the main street coffee shop, full of cotton candy haired little old ladies and farming gentlemen into their third cup of coffee talking about environmental legislation, and got on the road.

Fernambo Llama enjoys his mornin' java.

The drive to John's aunt and uncle's place was more or less straight west up and over a pass in the Cascades, through National Forests.  Really beautiful.  Although we saw even more of the pine beetle devastation that we'd seen in Colorado.  For those of you who haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth (and I would STRONGLY encourage you to do so) the pine beetle is a parasite that attacks and kills lodgepole pines.  Usually it is killed off by at least two weeks of hard freeze, but we haven't had that in some time due to global warming, and so huge swaths of pine trees throughout the western United States, from Alaska to New Mexico which should look like this....

....now look like this.

We saw a staggering amount of this in Colorado, and it was sad to see it here as well.  But there you have it.  We also finally passed the lava fields that John had been so excited about.  LAVA FIELDS!

Happy John!

We arrived in Junction City in the afternoon and John's Uncle Marty drove out to meet us and guide us down the back roads to their farm.  I can't tell you how much we loved being there, all three of us (especially Punkus).  It is exactly the kind of place John and I would love to have someday.  Acreage enough for a big vegetable garden and pasture, apple trees and blackberry bushes and a hundred year old oak tree.  Small house with room enough for company.  It was like coming home.  Jackie and Marty were incredibly welcoming and delighted to see us and since John hadn't seen them or their daughter Cathy for some time, busied themselves getting caught up and Punk and I played some fetch and I tried to keep her from harassing the sheep too terribly.  

Cathy works for a sheep farm further north and has four sheep of her own who live with Jackie and Marty and are spoiled rotten by Marty, who feeds them lots of apples and saltine crackers.  It was hilarious to watch Punk explore her biological imperative through the fence at the sheep, who initially resisted, but then realized THEIR biological imperative and ran from her.  Very fast.  And kind of resentfully.  With lots of "meeeeeeh" sounds.  Cathy also took me to the neighboring farm where her horse is boarded and I got to soak up some horse love and hand feed some apples, which made the 12 year old in me who never, ever got over her horse thing very, very happy!  Next time we go down to visit Cathy has promised to take me riding and to that I say squee.  SQUEEEEEEE!!

The next morning we woke up early and walked down the lane a bit with the pup and soaked up the quiet and the lovely.  

After breakfast, Marty and Jackie loaded us up with veggies from their garden and zucchini bread and we traded some of our peach jam for some of Jackie's currant and raspberry and Punk said goodbye to her new sheep friends.  Who were very happy to see her go.  Jackie and Marty had us follow them up to Cathy's place, which was on our way north to Portland, and we got to see more family and Cathy sent us away with dried lavender and a new dog bed that she made herself.  The drive up to Portland took no time at all and then we were HERE!  What the hell?!??!?!

We met the movers, and it took about two hours to finally unload our stuff for good, and we called a pizza place, set up our bed, put food in our faces and then collapsed in a big pile of exhausted and finally home in our own house.  Our own house!