Lorena finally threw me out of the upstairs. We have visitors coming and she firmly believes, after over a quarter-century, I am too much of a slob to have my office anywhere close to an area where visitors might visit let alone spend a night or two. Actually, we are planning to do some remodeling downstairs in the near future and were hoping to do that work before I moved everything down, but there are too many visitors planned and the timeline keeps stretching out, so we decided to bite the bullet and make the move. I REALLY like it. It feels a lot closer to nature on the bottom floor and I can still see Mt. Rainier when clouds/fog/smoke/haze is not blocking the view.
I enjoy going to Boston a lot, but it nice to get home. We have deer and other littler animals in the yard all year long, but this time of year they come in droves to eat the fruit that has fallen out of the trees. Because we pruned the trees this year, there is a lot more fruit on the ground than last year so we have lots of visitors. This one is cleaning up under the plum tree. Actually, it is nice to have them, not only because we like to watch them, but because they clean up the rotting fruit that would make a mess otherwise.
I am on the plane flying to PDX from Boston. Lorena worked frantically for the last week getting the house ready for an influx of twenty-somethings. Fortunately we have a couple of friends to help us as the hired servants. Actually, we look forward to it all and are looking forward to meeting a few new young people and to hang out and talk about life with old (in both the “we have known them for a long time” and the “they are getting past middle age” senses) friends.
Our dear friends from Chula Vista to spend one night in Centralia with Lorena. I wish I could have been there, but they will be back in a few days to stay one or two more nights. They are family and we hope this becomes a habit.
And of course, whenever we get new boxes, we cannot throw them away for several days because it gets immediately inhabited. Lorena said Kiwi sat slept in the box all day, only coming out for food.
I imagine the amazing improvements to the features and image quality of cell phone cameras have done away with a big chunk of the snapshot camera market. When we move to Washington, I found our old Canon camera that was really a great little camera at the time we bought it. I took a few pictures with it and then put it away. The image quality and easy of use of my Note 4 was way better. That has been multiplied even more with the Pixel 2 phones Lorena and I purchased a few months back. So, it was a little bit of a surprise when Kelly told me she wanted to get a “Polaroid” camera that takes pictures that print immediately onto a 2.4″ x 1.8″ snapshot paper. Talk about retro. The funny deal is I remember when the first instant Polaroid cameras were the new-new thing and very expensive. I guess it is all kinds of fun for the right kind of people at the right kind of party. We will see.
Kelly and Christian are getting ready for a celebration of sorts. The party games have started to arrive. They are not horseshoes, but similar and we already have an amazing croquet set we got for our wedding and has been used for only seminal events like this one. Lorena and I are pretty much the hired servants, but our buddies Al and Michele will be here to suffer with us, so it is all good.
I am a big fan of JetBlue since I took my first flight from Seattle to Boston on them a couple of months ago. I was bragging about them on the way to the airport this morning. We found much better flight times between PDX and Boston than the flights from/to SeaTac so we were pretty pleased. I mentioned this to the gate agent before I got on the plane. He said, “Too bad this is just a seasonal route. Next week is the last flight until next season.” Really too bad because it is a lot easier for us to get to PDX than to SeaTac (same distance, but way less traffic an hassle getting to PDX). Then, after I got on the plane I was going to take a picture of the refrigerator and the baskets with snacks in them that were available on the Seattle based flights. They did not exist on the smaller plane flying to/from Portland. To top it off, it turned out there is no power for laptops at the seats nor even a USB port to charge cell phones. Oh well. The gate agent said they were really considering adding the Portland/Boston flight a permanent one, but it is still a hard choice WITH NO REFRIGERATOR!
I have flown in and out of Portland International Airport more than any other airport for my entire professional life. Honestly, PDX had lost its luster over the years as the Portland culture seemed to coarsen in lockstep with the aging of the quite famous PDX carpet. While the city of Portland and the State of Oregon maintain their unparalleled beauty, (well, that is true for the City of Portland, only if you do not look too close) the coarsening of the culture has not abated. That can not be said about PDX anymore. Most of my travel was pre-remodel and now they have the new carpet installed. It is a joy to fly in and out of here now. It is not really up to the level of our beloved RDU airport, but that is really just a regional airport so might not be a fair comparison and PDX is almost that good anyway.
After taking the first few flights since returning to the Pacific Northwest out of SeaTac airport to China, Boston, and Phoenix–a truly horrible airport situated in an impossible place–we have decided we will fly out of Portland whenever possible and only fly out of SeaTac when we need to see Kelly before or after the flight. The drive down to PDX is really beautiful and not even close to the horror of driving through Olympia/Tacoma/Seattle traffic. It is a whole lot easier to get to PDX from the north rather than the south, so we are grateful for that. too.
Lorena checked the apples in our trees in the back yard and found that we probably could have (should have) been harvesting them for a couple of weeks now. She bought herself the business end of an apple picker pole and attached it to the end of the very long pole, Carolyn C. give to her as a gift about a decade ago. I have to tell you that has been about the most useful gift she has ever gotten. She has used it for a gazillion things and now it is receiving double duty both for apples and 
dusting of very high places. Now she is a state of high applesauce production mode. We need to get Bob over here soon because we have entirely too many of them. I think the pruning we had our yard crew perform in February really did the trick. So far we have gotten peaches (crazy sweet), pears–really small, but tasty, and now the apples. We really need to get set up to put a garden in which mostly just means we need to level out a spot, put up a really high fence to keep out the deer, and maybe put in a raised bed.
The first gazillion times the neighbor’s tomcat came by for a visit, Kiwi threw a hissy-fit (literally). It has been tapering off for awhile and now is to the point where the neighbor cat, Jack, sits outside the screen door while Kiwi lounges somewhere within view and they stare at each other (or not) for hours on end.
Lorena bought a fire pit at Ace Hardware yesterday. We checked out the ones at Walmart, Home Depot, and several other places, but this was the best we could find for how much money we wanted to pay. I think it will work well. We are hoping in inaugurate it sometime this coming weekend. Maybe even roast some weenies. We have not decided yet whether we want to put it on the deck or just use it on the concrete pad beside the kitchen. Probably the latter–we have a hose right there in case anything gets out of hand.
The whole valley behind the house is obscured by smoke from forest fires. It is kind of crazy how often this happens and it is because logging does not occur as it did when I was growing up in Oregon. Because of that the snags and underbrush do not get cleaned up and thinning does not occur so there is just massive amounts of fuel ripe for these big fires. This is our second summer in this house and it happened last year, too. We hope someone comes to their senses and the forests get opened up again so this does not happen so much in the future. It would be good for the economy, too.
Lorena, Kelly, and I went to a church convention yesterday. She got asked to translate from English to Spanish for one of the meetings. It was a two hour long meeting, so she asked me if I would be willing to translate for the last speaker. I had actually not done it for awhile, but said yes and had a ball. I forgot how fun it is to translate. The funny deal is that I seem to focus on what is being said better when I translate, too. I hope I get to do it again soon.
Slowly but surely we are getting stuff done at the house. Today, the asphalt repair guys came and fixed up the driveway. They were nice guys and did a great job. We had a little bit of a setback with the house painting because the painter fell off the roof of our house while we were out of town. He is a great guy and a great painter, but he busted himself up pretty well. He will come back as good as new, but we are feeling pretty sorry for him right now.
I started this last read through the Bible, reading a couple of chapters per day, but pretty quickly went to three chapters and then, most weeks, I ended up reading a two to three extra chapters on Wednesdays (for Bible study) and on Sundays. It dawned on me that I was getting through the Bible fairly quickly. Based on where I am now, I can get through the entire Bible in a year if I average a little under three and a half chapters per day until November 15 of this year–I started on November 16, 2017. I am going to take a stab at it. I have been enjoying my reading more and more all the time.
Lorena signed up for class today at Centralia College. She is taking only one class, but it will get her into the system and she only has a few left before she gets her Associates Degree. Astronomy is a five hour online class. We hope to be able to use Bob’s telescope if the weather cooperates. Hopefully, she will be able to finish up in a year or so if she takes one or two classes per semester. They accepted almost all of her credits so we are in a very good place for her to attend.
Our friend, Bonnie, picked up the computer that arrived at our house when we were off visiting in Boston and Tempe last week. Lorena met with her for lunch yesterday to pick it up. It is a beautiful, brand new, Dell 5491 14″ touchscreen, i7 laptop with all the requisite amounts of memory and drive space to work on the relatively large images with which I work in my job. I love the computer, but it is a hassle to switch all the work I have been doing on the personal computer I used while I waited for my work computer.
First, I am reminded of the invasive nature of Windows (not to suggest Apple is any less so–they are probably even worse). I work in Linux, so I have to install that, but leave the computer dual-booted because I write cross-platform software. Then, I need to install Qt, OpenCV, Boost, and a ton of tools like Gimp, ImageJ, Filezilla, the Brave browser, Git, VirtualBox, etc, etc, etc. AND then I get to do it all again so all this stuff is available on both Windows and Linux. It will be really nice when it is complete, but it will be a full day of work to be up and running where I was with the previous computer.
I am not complaining TOO much–it will be really nice when I am up and running and I really do not mind the kind of brain-dead work, but I lose a day and there is a lot to do.
Every time Lorena visits Christian in Tempe, she washes all of his unwashed clothes, irons and/or folds them and puts them away, does a deep cleaning of the entire house, but especially the bathroom, buys him more bottled water than he could drink in three months (you need to stay hydrated in Tempe), makes a Costco run because Christian does not have a Costco card, and generally is an organizing/cleaning whirlwind for the entire time she is there. The thing my very sophisticated and world-wise older cousin Merle said about his dear older sister is that “the mothering instinct in that woman has gotten way out of hand.” This, I think, is certainly true of Lorena–in a good way (of course)!
Today would have been Grandpa Milo’s 89th birthday. He was an exceptional father and an exceptional man. Every man has his flaws, but Grandpa Milo was always kind and pulled out all the stops when he saw a need. He and Grandma Sarah both truly had a heart for the underdog. It is nice to remember him and to be thankful to God for such a father.