How to dump my laundry basket full of clean clothes in the filthy, rain-sodden parking lot behind the Chinese restaurant.
How to change a tire in the cold, spitting Oregon rain, on the side of a busy Portland freeway.
Even though only one tire needs replacing, four-wheel drive cars need to have all of their tires replaced [...]
Category Archives: Life
Things I Know I Know That I Didn’t Know I Knew Last Time I Was Here
Tamagotchi
I realize now that this whole writing thing brings with it an alarming clarity of thought, something I’ve sorely missed since I stopped doing it on a regular basis. I make no promises, but indeed this would be a good habit to cultivate again.
Part of the problem is that while I have been writing, [...]
Rice Balls
We’re done. Kate and I have finished our applications to graduate school, all of our transcripts have been submitted, and our recommenders have completed their assessments of our qualifications. In the end we only applied to three schools, as the fourth school on our list made considerable effort to come across as an [...]
Slayer
Phew. It’s been a busy holiday, though hardly in the conventional sense. On Wednesday they sent me home early from work, partly because I was sick, but mostly because I was being a regular old sourpuss on account of being sick. I went home and took a three hour nap, and then [...]
Hot Air
The other night I went to see Playground, Warren Miller’s new ski flick. I believe this was about my third or fourth snow pr0n movie of the season, and to be perfectly honest I’m going to vomit if I need to sit through another half-hour of Alaska heli-skiing. Seriously, I don’t care how [...]
Xenakis
I yearn for those olden days where we would write at length of such subjects banal, yet of recent my limited mental faculties have been tied up with liquor and graduate statements. Sometimes these two will act in concert with one another, usually to amusing but altogether useless results.
With that noted, allow me a [...]
Gauntlet
As of this weekend, Kate and I are finished with the GRE. Honestly, the only way they could have made this process worse is if they tested us under conditions similar to the short-lived game show The Chamber. After about the third hour of taking the test I was ready for the blasts [...]
Sum of All Futures
After a three-month leave the rains have returned. They arrived Saturday night as we were camped at 6,100 feet up near Cloud Cap on Mount Hood. We had a wonderful evening gathered around the campfire with bellies full of Pibber, and irreverent of our most optimistic hopes it never dropped below freezing that [...]
Cool Down
The sun still feels hot but the air has taken on a distinct chill. The Cascades are whispering, and once again the cold breath from the upper elevations is winding its way through town, carrying with it the taste of nameless forest groves. Hood River has all but emptied out, and while we [...]
Vertigo
I’ve been going full-throttle for so long that it’s hard to believe the summer is almost over. In two weeks the tourons will go their separate ways and we’ll get our quiet little town back, for better or worse. Then in two months the rains will sock us in and even amongst us [...]