We really are going to Texas to try to balance family responsibilities. We have wonderful friends here in Oregon, I am a native son, we love the unparalleled beauty and we even love the weather (most of the time). That being said, Davy Crockett’s famous quote when he resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives resonates with us. He said, “…you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” The reason it resonates with us has to do with the draconian land use laws, the horrible Portland freeways, the outrageous new minimum wage that will drive small business into the ground, the abysmal public education system and a coarsening libertine culture that is abortion friendly, anti-traditional marriage and, frequently anti-Christian.
Oregon, we love you and our roots are here, but unless law, culture and our personal responsibilities change, to paraphrase Oregon governor Tom McCall, “We will come visit again and again… But for heaven’s sake, we don’t plan to come here to live.”
Betty Blonde #488 – 06/18/2010
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Lorena just came back from Seattle. She was up there for about five days to help Kelly because she has time for nothing but studying. In her PhD program she has to do two formal papers in addition to her dissertation. They are full-blown research projects with experiments and formal write-ups good enough they are often published in scholarly journals. Since first year students generally have never done such formal research, they have to learn everything from scratch. That was certainly true for Kelly. Kelly’s presentation of her first year paper takes place the second week of February and she is working every waking hour on the paper, her TA responsibilities, research for her advisor and the classes she has to take.
Lorena and I actually drove out to Mulino to look at an old schoolhouse on a little less than an acre of land to decide whether we wanted to buy and remodel it into a house. It was very, very cool, but it would have been more work than we wanted. We hate this waiting, especially with the holidays almost here. If we were at a different stage in life, maybe we would have done it, but now is not the time. So there is nothing to do but keep looking until we find something that is close enought to “right” that we can pull the trigger. In the meantime, we work a lot on the weekends, go to McDonalds before breakfast on Sunday–no down side to their sausage burrito–and go back to work on Monday.
Lorena and I will have lived in our studio apartment for six months by the end of July. We have a great view from the apartment. We can walk to restaurants, shopping, work and two grocery stores. Our 24/7, very excellent fitness club is in the same building as the apartment. Lorena can scratch her gardening itch at the community garden where she has a small plot for $22 for the season. The only downside so far is it is hard to entertain for dinner or have overnight guests. We want to move into a house eventually by enjoy where we are right now and have no idea where we should be. So we are going to sign up for another stretch in the studio and wait.
Christian flew in yesterday from Phoenix via Palm Springs. It was a typical spring day up here in Oregon–clouded over, but what, to us was a nice comfortable temperature. No rain. The thing that gave us confidence that Christian is getting acclimated to his new clime is that he was cold as soon as he stepped out of the plane. The picture to the left shows him right after we got to the apartment, studying Probability Theory with his sweatshirt on under a comforter. Lorena and I were in short sleeve shirts feeling quite toasty.
It feels a little surreal to us that we derive such a high level of satisfaction from life within walking distance of virtually everything we need in a small apartment in the suburbs of Portland. I mentioned Lorena’s community garden spot (
She has started her next foray out into the community by getting her transcripts sent from all over the country to the local community college. She spoke with a lady from church who has been an administrator at the college for years and found the college has an office just a few blocks from our house. Lorena went there and the facility was really nice. She is not sure she will be able to take all the classes she needs to finish her degree in Wilsonville, but she will be able to get her academic advising done her. 
Lorena and Christian went down to Ikea and bought a new, muchly needed dresser yesterday. It would have been a very sad visit to Tempe if there was not at least one piece of new furniture involved, so I think Lorena met all of her goals. It was classically Lorena. When I asked how the visit went, she gave me a list of the level of cleanliness and orderliness of each of the Christian’s rooms and all of his clothes.
To my way of thinking, one of the great benefits of living in a studio apartment in the city is to NOT have a garden or any gardening duties. I should have known Lorena would find a work-around. The first thing she did was put up a 
The most fabulous feature of our new apartment is that it is WAY easy to maintain. We are going to enjoy as long as that lasts. Lorena found out that she could even do a little apartment gardening. We have one flower box and will probably get a second, we like the first so much. There is room for on (and maybe even three) more.
These pictures are the room where we really spent most of our time. You could call it the kitchen, but it was really not just a kitchen. It was a living room/kitchen/breakfast nook with a fireplace and it was (for us) a very big room. There is a formal dining room and a separate, more formal living room where we did a few things, but this is the room where we lived. It belonged more to Lorena and Christian than Kelly and I because they were almost always there. Lorena worked in the kitchen and the laundry room next to it while Christian studied at the bar across from the stove, often with his cat Rubix laying on his arms.
We entertained mostly in this room, too. It was the place where we had the most seating, so people gravitated there. We did not entertain frequently, but when we did, it was usually with a pretty good sized crowd from church or school or both. The formal dining room was too small, so we set up tables that ran from the area in front of the fireplace all the way past the breakfast nook.
It might be at least partially because I am listening to Kelly’s really excellent Enya channel on Pandora, but there are lots of additional reasons to feel melancholy and nostalgia. We just received two very touching emails about some dear friends in their very last days on this earth. The are the same era as Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. They have been good and faithful people all their lives so there is joy in this, too, but we are hearing this kind of news way to often these days. It is hard to lose those who have been an example and an encouragement in all the right ways over the entire course of my life.
We have decided to minimalize our material goods while we wait to see where we will land in the next few years. We have already sold a bunch of stuff. This is a picture of Christian putting a bunch of the rest of the stuff on Craig’s List. It actually feels very, very good. The funny deal is that we are only really intent on keeping mementos, the homeschool and other books we have not already sold, photos and a few pieces of furniture.