Trans/plant/portation

In my quest for all things interesting in the Walla Walla valley, a friend (former physical therapist of mine, actually) and I went out to Dixie, Washington, a town a little to the east of town. Unlike towns on the east coast, many miles of farmland separate Dixie from Walla Walla. We curved around the rolling foothills of the Blue Mountains, passing the occassional pickup truck, but otherwise we had the road to ourselves. About 10 minutes later, my friend pulled into what seemed to be a random house behind some strategically grown pine trees, put there, presumably, to break the desert wind and keep the house from a near-constant pounding. A large German shephard came out to greet and inspect us, not necessarily in that order. He clearly knew my friend but not me, so he gave me a good growl as a warning that I not do anything  stupid nor make any sudden moves.

As we walked around the free-standing garage, I saw that there were other people assembled here, a kind of makeshift Zen meditation and country sermon, as it were. They sat on a variety of plastic lawn chairs and wooden benches, and all among them, floating with the sound of tiny racing cars, were hummingbirds. Tom, the 84-year-old who has lived in this house all his life, shook my hand and welcomed me into the inner circle, and I moved slowly (for the hummingbirds skirt away if they see jerky motion) to a bench to watch the nature show. My friend stood just next to a bird feeder and put her fingers out in case a hummingbird decided to sit on her for a few moments. They aren’t still long, not while they’re tanking up on sugar water just before they go to sleep.

Hummingbird’s hearts beat at a frenetic 500 to 800 times a minute, until they sleep at night, and then they take a mini-hibernation before resuming their pollination activities for the next day. Their metabolisms are astronomically huge — weighing in at something like 1.3 ounces, they are the smallest birds in the world, yet they take in great quantities of fuel. On this night we saw something like 100 birds, totaling 3 species, my personal favorite being the orange Rufous. They have neck feathers that if they catch the sun at just the right angle, seem to glow from inside each feather. It was mesmerzing.

I was clearly the newbie to the group, as I had not brought a camera. I’ll make sure that I take one along next time. Tom’s house, festooned with hummingbird feeders of all kinds, draws something like 600 to 700 hummingbirds at the height of their season. It’s one of only a few places in the world with such a concentration of them. Perhaps only pictures can describe the joy of sitting and watching a group of hummingbirds jockey for position at a feeder — the male birds let the female birds in, but show no chivarly to other male birds, which they yell at to find another watering hole. Scratch that — perhaps only seeing them in person and experiencing it oneself is satisfactory.

The 2009 Walla Walla Balloon Stampede is this weekend, and events kicked off yesterday at the snappy hour of 6 AM. Stampede is kind of a strange word to associate with rudderless airborne vehicles that drift on the wind, but it is the wild west out here, so I presumed the name was really more about the other, more rodeo-esque events that take place in this region. But after going to take pictures of the hot air balloons, I now also realize it does refer—a bit, at least—to this event itself.

Balloons launch from several locations in town, and I plus a few friends picked a junior high school football field as our location to watch the events unfold. About 30 or 40 pickup trucks were parked within a few feet of each other, and just as dawn was breaking, they started unfurling their tarps and balloons and testing their heaters. This gave the audio effect, for someone who had gotten up at 5 and not had a cup of coffee, of little dragons learning to cast fire.

I was surprised that the balloons were set up so close to each other, thinking that they’d need lots of space for each one, but everything went off without a hitch, despite the fact that 5,000 people had gathered to see the event (which is about one-sixth of the WW population, for those who care about such things). Each balloon had vents at the top that the handlers made sure were properly velcroed in place, and the top of every balloon had a long rope that the presumably strongest handler would hold on to, in order, I think, the manage the rate at which the balloon went from horizontal to vertical. So picture the early breaking dawn, temperatures in the low to mid 60s, colorful fabrics strewn all about the grass, and thousands of children running around, dodging taut ropes and sleepy grownups who are looking at the sky taking pictures. And nobody got hurt.

balloon raising

One of these balloons launches first—it’s called the “hare” balloon—and is chased by the other launching balloons. Hence part of the stampede moniker. We knew this because we had, I should have guessed there would be one, an announcer to tell us this, and to call out the names of people flying each balloon like it was a very colorful, in-the-air quinceanera. This guy was a Garrison Keillor wannabe if ever there was one, which I know is a big statement to make. I really did a double take to make sure I wasn’t suddenly in an episode of Prairie Home Companion. Put this guy in a hockey rink and one would get a very entertaining play by play. Really all he lacked was the quality of tone that Garrison has, that kind of half a piece of toast in his mouth sound. If he would just talk with food in his mouth, he’d be a dead ringer.

balloons away

One by one balloons floated into the sky, they drifted east, chasing the rabbit. At this point the pickup trucks for each would leave the field (“Please give the trucks egress, folks,” said the announcer. Egress? Wow.) and then would chase their balloons around and out of town. I suppose this is another aspect of the stampede. I stayed put and snapped 200 photos instead.

balloon

After all of them had launched we headed over to Clarette’s restaurant for breakfast, and I have to really think hard about when the last time was that I ate breakfast before 8 in the morning. A long, long time. Perfectly serviceable eggs over easy, served old school with the toast already buttered. The coffee was delightful, and I’ve decided I miss coffee that hasn’t been overroasted into bitterness. It was a little thrilling to see the balloons making their way overhead while we were in the middle of the city. Probably the neatest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been out here, majestic snow-capped mountains aside. Now if I could just get Susanne to go up in a balloon with me, that would be the real stuff of fun.

It was in the nadir of the winter that a long-time Walla Wallan approached me and told me to hang in there, the spring in Walla Walla is beautiful and I will really enjoy it. I trusted her, thinking that she wouldn’t knowingly lie to me, except that the people in this town have also declared the following:

1. It doesn’t snow here all that much (we got 40 inches last winter, the height of your average 9-year-old)

2. Oh, you’ll find a job out here, it just may take a few months (9 and counting, is that still “few”?)

3. Vote McCain!

So I took her very genuine statement as well intentioned but potentially far, far off the mark.

Spring did, in fact, uh spring. The wheat started out green on the rolling hills around town, a lovely contrast with the swimming pool blue skies. Daffodils and then tulips started popping up, and in town, the tree buds have given way to bright green baby leaves.

Spring, however, now appears to be over. It lasted something like 8 days. The past three days have been mid-80s, no humidity and lots of bright sunlight. One wonders how hot this desert town will get in the next month, and when we’ll see our first 3-digit degree day. I’ll start a pool on that, I’m sure.

Small town life continues despite the surge in temperature. I’ve been here long enough that shopkeepers know how I like my coffee and my haircut, and ask what I’m going to make for supper when I am in the grocery store. It’s nice and invasive at the same time, and I’m a little surprised that I think that, given that I sometimes was irritated by the constant anonymity of living in a large city. But I do appreciate the friendliness.

Walla Walla hosted a cycling race last weekend, the Tour of Walla Walla. Imagine what my sentence will be:

It was a short race. They looped through the downtown area several times to complete the race. Why they didn’t go through the prison facility or the plutonium plant, I have no idea. We cheered them on, however, and I was happy that someone had brought a cow bell. You really can’t have a bike race without a cow bell.

Tour of Walla Walla bike race

Our other excitement of the week was a fire across the street from our house. We had come in our back door from visiting with a friend, and thought the air smelled funny, like barbeque gone horribly wrong. Then we were inside, playing cards with Kurtis, and a few minutes after that, noticing some blinking lights from the street. A quick look with the blinds pulled aside and we could see that one of the apartments in the senior housing center across the way was on fire. The city had sent three fire trucks and a host of police cars, all working to put out the flames and get the residents out safely. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, but it was more than a bit unnerving to see firefighters in full gear running up the stairs with hoses and axes.

Walla Walla has 48 full-time fire fighters, and I think the majority of them were there at the scene. The next morning the building bore the scars of the event.

building after the fire

Given that the rain is pretty much over for the season, I wonder how often fires happen in and around town now. We have no Santa Ana-like winds here, but we do have wind, and it is sometimes intense. I suppose given that the town doesn’t own a snow plow, having about 50 people to put out fires is a sign they’ve had to deal with the dryness before. And hopefully that fire last week is the closest it will ever come to us.

I woke up from a dream a couple of nights ago in which I was riding the front half of a two-person bicycle down a hill in the rain on a busy city street. I think we’ll call that a stress dream. But the only way I could have imagined this as a dream was as the regurgitation of an actual memory of going down a rainy hill on a two-person cycle with my other half screaming in fear the whole time. Steering was a nightmare. There was this sense that even if you wanted to stop or slow down, your partner wasn’t with you on that, and you were just about to hurtle out of control. It’s one thing to learn how to ride a bike, but it’s quite another to cause muscle memory confusion because half of the muscles riding the contraption aren’t yours and so the bike is constantly making unanticipated moves.

I suppose that gets better with practice, for those intrepid individuals who can push past the first wall of terror and shock. I am not so strong. We rolled the bike back next to the garage at my sister’s old house in Connecticut and sat down on the lawn until the shaking stopped.

But I acknowledge that some things get better with time. Walla Walla, for its own efforts, is mildly more fun to live in during springtime than in the nadir of winter. I am reminded, by the colorful daffodils and tulips that have pushed out of the ground on people’s lawns and in downtown, that we are an oasis in the desert. I am hearing now about things that were either held back from me because of my temporary disability, or because I am getting to know people better: there’s a fun group who go bowling every Thursday night, there’s another gang who started a Stitch ‘n Bitch on Wednesdays, there’s a shepherding dog trial event coming up in May, and a hot air balloon race in a few weeks, east of town, I think.

One of the things we have been able to do through my varying stages of not having a left ACL, having a dead person’s ACL replacement, and having a rehabilitated knee, is hit the restaurants. It is with this gratitude that I can write a bit about one notable venue, Pho Sho.

Cute name aside, Pho Sho has a small but strong menu of salads, rice and spring rolls, and, of course, pho. The pho tai, a rare beef pho, is the most delightful. Spicing is minimal and left up to the customers, via a series of chili and spice jars out on the tables, and folks should take advantage of them. Spring rolls are fresh—I often crave the peanut sauce that accompanies them. Entrees are priced in the high $8-to high $9 range, and I have wondered exactly why the price points are so tight but different, but that doesn’t really matter if you’re not going to own your own restaurant, I suppose. The chicken pho is less expressive but still well seasoned. Pho, though, really works better with beef. If you’re going to go veg, you’ll be happy that the vegetarian pho comes with amazingly crunchy cubes of fried tofu. 

The place is well lit, and the minimal decoration lets you appreciate the clean lines of the room and the heavy wooden tables. The communal table in the middle of the room is a great way to meet new neighbors, which translated into, in this small city, creating new friends to see the next time you sit down here to eat. A very satisfying, interesting meal, expect to pay about $30 for two big bowl of pho, an appetizer, and a pot of green tea.

spring wheat field, walla walla

Susanne and I were making our monthly trip to Costco last weekend when we pulled into the gas station just past the Bad Broccoli Plant. Well, we needed gas, and it usually has a better price than in town. It’s also notable for a few other reasons, namely:

it is next to the “tattletale light,” as described on a local news broadcast, to catch speeders, the only one of its kind for 20 plus miles.

it is located on Humorist Road. I swear, I haven’t found any humorists there, and I’ve asked around.

it is patronized by completely clueless drivers who pull up to one of only four pumps, walk inside, eat a hot dog, walk outside, and then pump their gas, 15 minutes later.

The only thing that makes this place tolerable is the gas prices. Consistently they were about 15 to 20 cents cheaper per gallon than in town. I am sorry to report that those prices are no longer deep discounts, so perhaps our foray on Sunday will be our last for a while. However, I did get to observe the following exchange between two obviously teenage women.

Teenager #1: (standing next to gas pump, smoking, wearing an oversized WSU sweatshirt and purple sweatpants, hair up in a ponytail) I hear you’re not talking to Cherie anymore.

Teenager #2: (drinking Diet Pepsi, wearing a faded t-shirt and tight jeans) That bitch.

Teenager #1: What happened?

Teenager #2: You know, I don’t even care anymore. Whatever. She’s gonna stay fat after having that baby, not like I did. I lost all my weight right away.

Good thing they didn’t see that my jaw was hanging open. Back in my day, in my Catholic school, girls would actually hide their pregnancies. How . . . nice that we’ve gotten more permissive? I certainly am not advocating for shaming girls in painful, difficult situations. But to see that completely ignored in favor of making nasty comments about one’s pregnancy rate, well, I think we’ve gone a bit off the rails there.

Meanwhile, spring has come to the valley. I had no idea before I moved out here that wheat starts its life green, but I suppose that’s not terribly surprising. It does make for some striking landscape.

walla walla in spring

The daffodils have popped up and opened, the tulips are sticking their heads out from the ground, people are talking about gardening, and the river and creeks are flush with all of winter’s precipitation. Rushing, hard water, that gushes through town in small levees, first through the eastern outskirts of town, and into downtown. Years ago, intrepid and stupid Whitman students would get the futile idea to go tubing down the canal path, only to wind up outside Macy’s, bruised and naked, suddenly aware of the power of a fast current. The path for the water is gated off, but every now and again, some person will get the urge to make the Walla Walla equivalent of a trip down Niagara Falls in a barrel. With all the snow we had last December, this would be a particularly bad spring to take a ride at the impromptu water park.

Latest on the Walla Walla Freecycle list: a “gently used” maternity belt that the soon-to-be former owner just washed so it still has a little “fuzz” on it, and ferret cages from a family who realized all too late that ferrets are not the pet for them. Anyone else picture screaming toddlers running away from a snapping rodent running amok in the house?

I got up early today, well, early for me, meaning 7:30, well after sunrise but hours before the sun would reach its peak in the spring sky. I got in the car for a long ride to Portland, first following the Columbia River and then dipping down to the interstate. I had plugged in my iPod which is bursting at the seams with 18 gigs of music, I had made a fresh thermos of coffee, and had downed a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. I had brought with me a banana, directions, my cell phone, and not much else. 

The road from here, Walla Walla, to there is filled with microclimates. East of the Cascade Mountains one will observe magpies; west of them there are none to be found. Out here in eastern Washington/Oregon there are many rolling hills as part of the scrubland landscape–red-brown rocks and outcroppings share space with tan brush that gives the effect of looking like sheep that need to be shorn for the year. Thirty miles west of Walla Walla the gorges begin, and the royal blue river winds through the high hills as if to thumb its nose at the typically pale blue sky up ahead. And that sky is empty; only the long series of enormous windmills dare to drive up that high, standing over the scene like silent giants, spinning slowly and methodically as I zipped by. (Note to Oregon State Patrol: “zipped” means under or at the speed limit.) 

The rolling hills slowly begin to grow, and as they acquire the status of height, they pick up other things: taller scrub brush, small evergreen trees, fine dustings of snow. These, in turn, evolve to another status as deciduous trees appear on the side of the road, the evergreens get taller and taller, and the dust gives way to a thickening green carpet of moss and wild grasses. Now the blue river cutting through the rock looks complementary to the other Mother Earth colors, and then the dams begin, controlling and harnessing its flow.

The dams are not without their controversy. Fishermen wail that their harvests are at all-time lows, just 40 years after the dams were installed. Farmers cry out to keep the dams because they rely on the steady irrigation. Conservationists fret about the livelihood of the salmon spawning capability, tourist guides in Idaho bemoan what the dams are doing to their industry, and security experts talk quietly about risk assessments. I, however, am single-minded in my quest to reach my destination, and decide to defer the arguments for another moment. Such is my luxury.

Dead ahead of drivers on I-84, all of a sudden, is Mount Hood. It looms in the background like a gigantic screen saver and I have to blink many times before I realize it’s the real deal. Snow-covered as far as I can see, top to bottom. A sign that flashes by on my right tells me that it is 11,000 feet tall. That’s two or so miles high, I calculate vaguely. I see the hillsides around it; now they look like a velvet cloth has been cast over them, with the soft grass and moss and the dry patches of sand worked in. I bet this is the doing of the giant windmills. I see parts of two or three windmills passing me on the highway, dismembered on a series of WIDE LOAD-marked semis. Each truck comes with its own pacer car that alerts other drivers to the mystery of the cargo — it can take two or three trucks to figure out what these very very large pieces of white metal are, until you’ve figured it out the first time. 

Eventually I hit actual traffic, and by traffic, I mean more than one tractor-trailer and a nervous-looking woman in a 1990 Ford Escort. I have a moment where my sense memory comes back to me, so I change my distance to the car ahead, lest some jerky driver try to cut me off. I tell myself this is one of the good things about Walla Walla. 

I finally make it to my goal, shut off the car, and walk inside the building, my legs having stiffened up during the long drive and barking at me for neglecting their care. One hour later, I’m back in the car, heading home, to go through the process in reverse, and this time, with the setting sun behind me, gradually turning to a burnt umber and snuffing itself out just as I pull in to the driveway.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about freecycle over the years — people who see the value in giving or getting things for free instead of throwing them away or heading to Walmart yet again have told me they really like freecycle for handing them easy access to things they need or would like to pass on. It stops just short of bartering, so you don’t need to offer anything other than the obligation to come pick up the item yourself.

I signed on to the Walla Walla freecycle list. I didn’t really know what to expect. In a rural town of 30,000, what things would appear? How soon would people respond? 

farm field east of Walla Walla

My friends in DC have gotten and let go of a lot of kids’ toys, but I haven’t seen anything like that. Ferret cages and supplies, on the other hand, are on the Walla Walla list. There’s also one particular person who puts out requests for things several times a week, items like a washer and dryer, baby clothes, that sort of thing. I read these email messages and I get nervous. Has the local Freecycle always been this busy, or is it an effect of a poor economy? Are people posting because they value doing things a little off the grid, or is there distress I should be reading into the letters?

Perhaps Freecycle is not for me, if it’s going to make me anxious like this.

Someone posted that they had a Betta fish to give away. Being a fan of such creatures, and wanting to get back in the pet-caring-for community, I sent in an email saying I could pick it up anytime. I didn’t hear back, and three days went by with no “Claimed” or “Retrieved” notice from the original poster. I stayed up all night — was the fish okay? Had he been on his last legs? Was he in the sewer system — the Valhalla for trusty but short-lived aquarium animals? Would he meet Chairman Mao in his next life, perhaps? The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became. My mind raced to thoughts of a painful, slow death for the fish and wondering if they thought I was somehow undeserving of parenting their little friend, based only on my email address. I reread my email — I didn’t sound like a fish-focused ax murderer. But then I went on to wonder if ax murderers realized they sounded crazy. Perhaps I was blind to my own insanity!

Days later, the email followup appeared: many, many people had written in to claim the fish. The forlorn, nearly-dead Betta I had pictured was a little off-base: clearly this was the most beloved fish in all of Walla Walla County. Loved and free.

I could make a flag of that. And put it on Freecycle.

We call our house the “Liar House” because it looks adorable on the outside but inside, living there, you realize quickly that except for being haunted, it’s about as welcoming as the Amityville Horror. To explain:

There are three kinds of outlets in the house. They are:

1. Outlets that don’t work

2. Outlets that work but that don’t hold a plug

3. Outlets that work and do hold a plug

We’ll call the first group -O. We’ll call the second group O-h, and the third group O+h. 

Now then, there are also holding tactics, consisting of tape (t), furniture (f), and small animals (a), which admittedly, don’t work very well unless they’re sleeping. It should also be noted that a is only a theoretical tactic, as yet unused in the household, but for the purposes of our exploration here, will be included in the analysis. Each tactic has its advantages and disadvantages. T, for example, does not require any remodeling of the room but may give way at any moment, or may dislodge paint on the wall. F, on the other hand, can be aesthetically more pleasing than gobs of tape, but may also require the user to be perfectly still for an extended amount of time (see deep vein thrombosis).

A typical scenario goes something like this: 

If –O, then identify new O

O-h+t=O+ht

Other scenarios may be more complicated, however:

O-h+a=O+ha until (a–f)(a+t)=O

In the above example, the animal holds the plug in the outlet with its body until it decides to claw the furniture and the owner(s) must bind it with tape to the wall to keep it in place. Future removal of tape is likely to be a significant disadvantage of this approach.

So no, the outlets don’t work so well. The refrigerator oozes a slow drip of water down the back interior wall such that we periodically have to take out the crisper drawers and mop out a small lake from the bottom. The dishwasher is nonexistent, as is the garbage disposal, so we keep an old cottage cheese container next to the sink to collect the small bits of food from the plates as we’re washing them. Large snowfalls seem to beget more waterfalls in the kitchen down a side wall, not unlike the fridge drippings. Our bathtub periodically backs up and spits back chunks of black detritus, or worse, sewage. And yes, we know it’s actual sewage. We have noses.

It’s been an interesting living experience, to say the least. Any given day might be shower-free, or we could skate across the kitchen floor because the fridge has overflowed again. But it’s nice at night, when we warm ourselves by the 62-degree heating ducts, knowing that some part of the house (right next to the boiler, probably), is availing itself of our $265 heating bill’s efforts. Yes, here in Walla Walla, things are a little reversed, if that’s a possible concept. There is one liquor store and yet more than a dozen wine tasting rooms. There is precisely one each Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and KFC, which is nice. There are two Rite Aid pharmacies in town. I think there may be more cattle in the county than people, but I’ll have to check on that. 

The businesses are holding their own for the most part, although a couple restaurants have closed since the big drop in the economy last fall. It’s not so much that Walla Walla has escaped the downturn, so much as it is that W2 is already pared-down. It’s not a flashy town, it has its snippets of hipness in an Austin is weird kind of way. But at its heart it is utilitarian, and what people needs survives. Even if Walla Walla aspires to be a resort for the Richie Riches of Seattle, Portland, and northern California, it is primarily supported by the residents here.

I am one of them. I make the city survive on my endless purchases of mopheads and Draino. So be it. 

Last February Susanne and I hosted a baby shower for our good friends who, obviously, were having a baby. There are a lot of parties in and around DC, I suppose, on a daily basis, and not just because two and a half million people live there. I think parties of all sorts — showers, cocktail parties, work happy hours, holiday get-togethers, poker nights — are part and parcel of the culture there. It’s something that after living there for more than a decade, I now take for granted. I presume that everyone knows all of the etiquette around hosting, attending, and being made the spotlight of social occasions. And that’s not to say that I think every party is like the parties of DC. I certainly don’t think it’s standard for to see people from the Department of State and Department of Commerce to get into an argument about which of their jobs is more important. Although on the other hand, I suppose that fight happens in some form at many parties no matter where they’re held.

But DCists do have a protocol for these things. If it’s informal, an evite goes out to a few or everyone the host has ever met, so you look down these long, multi-page lists of names and email abbreviations trying to figure out who’s been invited, and it soon starts to look like the streaming green nonsense characters in the Matrix movies. If it’s formal, you’ll get an invitation in the mail — in which case you have no idea who else may be coming, but depending on the event, you can guess. 

The emphasis on knowing who else will be there isn’t to determine whether you yourself should show up, it’s to ascertain the annoyance and idiosyncrasy factor of the event. Will there be a lot of really cool “kids” (and by kids, I mean mid-to-late 30-somethings who still shop at Abercrombie & Fitch) there? If so, bring your Foucault references and general disdain for establishment.* Expect a crowd mainly of the host’s coworkers? Get ready for a support group masquerading as soiree. A bunch of folks from Baltimore? Don’t be surprised if you see people putting ice cubes in their pinot grigio glasses, hon. I don’t know why, it’s just a thing I’ve noticed.

All of these differences, of course, are important because they help you meet the expectations for the event and have fun.

In Walla Walla, it is different. Forget evites — I’ve sent out two so far and only about 25% of the people who come to the event have RSVP’d on the Web. Forget even having a distinct idea of who to invite or who may wind up arriving on one’s doorstep. Instead of the East Coast “it’s my birthday and here’s who I want to see” mentality, it’s more of a “oh, don’t do anything for little ole me” sense. But friends, being who they are by definition, affectionate for their pals, say, “oh no no no, we need to do something, so let’s have a party.” And then each friend runs off to his or her own corner to plan a fete of the grandest proportions. Thus, the more friends one has, the more parties that may be taking place, on the same night, with the same people, same themes, and potentially, same bag of chips.

Again, DC has its own issues. Our baby shower last year, for example, was marked by an older couple — longtime family friends of one of the new parent’s parents — who were spirited, to say the least. The gentleman walked in, asked if we had free long-distance, and when we said we did, asked to use the phone. In fact, he asked Susanne to dial it for him, and then proceeded, during the entire shower, to talk on the phone in an attempt to get Dubai Airlines to hook him up with a cheaper flight to Uzbekistan. His wife, meanwhile, refused to eat anything we’d prepared because apparently she only eats once a day, and only at salad bars, so Ruby Tuesday is kind of a way of life for her. Everyone else, for their parts, seemed to enjoy themselves, despite the occasional holler from the husband, who had made his way upstairs to our bedroom, where he’d sat on the bed to argue with the airline.

In this context, we are again going to a baby shower this weekend. Actually, we’re the site of a baby shower and we’re attending another. For the same person, and for the reasons I listed before — that friends have gone off and made plans without conferring with each other. I’m not sure if we’ll have the kind of personalities one finds out in the east, but we may have a Baby Shower Meets Groundhog Day. Only time will tell.

*Now that Barack Obama has been elected President, these folks have a lot more conversation time on their hands, since there is no evil Bush/Cheney administration to bash. It seems to have been upsetting for them.

This time last year, Susanne was mulling a job offer to move out to what we thought at the time was the West Coast. And what we thought at the time would be a cute little house in a quaint little town with lots of promise of new adventure and experiences. Also last year around now I was finally starting to recover from a surgery and a subsequent major infection. I was itching to get back to the office and sink my teeth into some projects.

our xmas eve abode

We received, in fact, all of our wishes. Susanne took the job, the house sure is cute from the outside, the town is indeed quaint, and we’ve had the new experience of purchasing and installing snow chains. We’ve also sampled some local wines and cuisine, met some new people, had a fun trip cross-country, and seen a major natural wonder up front and close.

Before we left DC, Susanne defended her dissertation and earned her Ph.D., we introduced our families to each other, we got married (twice, in fact), and hosted a whole slew of memorable parties and get-togethers with friends. I at least felt like a successful person loved by many and complete with two ACLs in my knees.

To say this past fall has been a let down would be a large understatement. It’s hard to move anywhere, let alone on the other side of a continent. It’s challenging to walk away from a very secure, well paying job and try to plant stakes with people who don’t know you or your reputation. It’s even more difficult to establish a new home on one good leg, and then you notice that all of these frustrations are combining with each other in this minestrone soup way and you can’t tell which flavor is which anymore, or what is really bugging you. Susanne had to get up to speed on the school, the climate of the college, the students, the new digs, and the increasingly grumpy partner. We have been stressed. We have been searching for the things that can sustain us — getting to know people, exploring our new environment, reveling in the nice things about our new town — but we do get tired and weary.

Spring holds promise. I know now that any such promise will come attached to things I’d rather not have to encounter, but it will be there nonetheless. Nothing so far in this life of mine has gone according to any sort of plan. I’ve learned more by trying to adapt or meet a challenge than I have in attempting to set things up a certain way and ticking off my lists item by item. So I adapt.

I remember the evening of my wedding, dancing with my darling, and thinking about all of what was ahead of us. Not just for 2008, but for 2018, and 28 and 38. There will be so much, and a lot of it won’t be easy, and I know that is tritely put. I am ready for the good things in 2009. They don’t have to come to me, necessarily, I’ll try to make them happen. I do seem to love a good struggle. There must be a fulfilling, good job out there for me. There must be a way to make our circumstances work — if not for 20 years, then maybe a few, in this town of many waters. I resolve to be positive-focused and forward-looking. But those things I thought of last July that I thought I would experience this fall — they haven’t happened, and either I adjust to new expectations, or I push harder to make things happen. In any case, I’m going to approach Spring 2009 differently than I did this fall. With the sense of adventure I felt on my wedding evening. Because life is what it is, and I might as well find a way to enjoy it.