The Week In Review

The weekend was spent house hunting.  Uneventfully I should say.  Trying to find a nice rental in the city is a challenge.  Some of the landlords are just nutty.  Some of them have basements or garages that you cannot use because the owner is storing stuff in them.  The idea of the owner coming around on Saturday morning and hanging out in my basement to get something would be weird.  Besides, why would I rent space I can’t use?  I have about a month and a half before I have to go with a plan B…which would mean something far out of the city…the ‘burbs.  I’m tired of the ‘burbs.

We went to one of the local parks on Sunday and it was an adventure.  There was a group of scary lesbians there.  I saw a little girl compliment one of the scary lesbians on her “snake” tattoo.  The lesbian replied, in a gruff voice, “That’s not a snake.  It’s a tiger.”  Granted, you could only see the tail of the tiger.  The actual tiger was thankfully hidden by her shorts.

My wife saw a dead monkey on the side of the road the other day.  It had been hit by a car.  While I have not lived in Portland that long I am fairly certain monkeys are not indigenous to the area.  One has to wonder where they monkey came from.

I had the pleasure of spending $800 to get my wife’s car fixed this week.  This should put me in a bad mood for at least a week or two.

While riding the train home the other day I saw a guy that was sleeping.  The odd thing was he had ants crawling all of him.  I am fairly certain he did not get them on the train.  So, not only did he manage to get a bunch of ants on him, but he managed to fall asleep with ants crawling all over him.  I have attached an image for the non-believers.

Portland Rose Festival

I took the family to the Portland Rose Festival this weekend.  The Rose Festival is like a big county fair sort of thing.  They have the regular rides, carnival games, fireworks, floats, and whatever else you might want to do.  

The kids really enjoyed it.  They liked the music and everything else really.  Very cool family friendly atmosphere.  My oldest daughter enjoyed it the most.  We spent $25 on pony rides because she liked them so much.  Maybe horse riding lessons are in her future.    

The other thing she really enjoyed what this person in a huge bear suit.  My daughter is autistic and I just have to wonder what she thinks when she sees stuff like that.  For all I know she thinks that was a real bear.

Sunday was a complete bum day.  I got nothing but cleaning done.

My parents

My parents visited around two weeks ago for 10 days.  I have decided that 3-4 days is tolerable, but anything more becomes really difficult.  My kids are on a pretty strict routine. Now that my oldest is going to school she needs to be asleep by 8:30pm.  When people come to visit they become loony.  They get over excited, don’t want to sleep, get over tired, get whiney, etc…  

We went to the coast with my parent’s weekend before last.  The pacific beaches are completely different from the gulf coast.  It’s usually very cold.  During Spring Break the local news heralded the “perfect” beach weather and cut to shots of college students with coats on playing on the beach.  Prefect indeed.  It’s also a fair walk to the actual shore where we went.  The difference between high tide and low tide was pretty staggering.  

The place we visited is called Seaside, OR.  It was originally named by people involved in Lewis and Clark Expedition.  I can only presume they had run out of catchy names at that point and just decided Seaside was good enough.

The coast is striking…simply gorgeous.  The tsunami warning signs that line the beach are pretty hilarious.


At one point I was pushing my daughter on the swings on the beach and this young lady came up next to me and started to swing.  She kept looking over, basically trying to come onto me in a coy way.  Later everyone pointed this out.  My wife also pointed out that this girl was probably half my age.  While possibly close to being true – I gauged her age as 20, everyone else thought she was more like 18 – I really dislike the concept.  Getting old is not fun.  

We went to the large mall here last weekend and my daughter decided she wanted to go ice skating.  She’s autistic (or something similar) and has never gone ice-skating before.  She got it in her mind that she wanted to do this.  My wife had to take the bullet here as I’ve never been.  My daughter really enjoyed it.  She fell a lot but we plan on taking her more often to see if she can become better at it.

I had breakfast with my father while he was here and we discussed the family genealogy.  He’s done a lot of research on the subject.  Appears my great grandfather was a blacksmith.  Another relation was a sharp shooter and tracker who killed a man that stole his horse.  The rifle disappeared recently.  One of the relatives stole it rather than let it be donated to a museum.  I have some Irish blood and am probably a distant relative of John Adam.  Not surprising, but still unpleasant all the same, my forefather did indeed own slaves.    

I am happy I’m back on my workout routine.  It’s going really well.  I want to drop about eight pounds and drop my body fat ratio in addition to toning everything.  My bother, who is five years older than me, did a stress test recently and pretty much failed.  Looks like he has some possible heart blockages.  He’s overweight, so it is a good motivation to stay fit.

I built a computer for myself last week.  I cost about $700 and probably would have cost another $500 if I bought it pre-built.  It was actually pretty fun figuring out how to build it.  

Today marks 10 years of marriage for me.  This is really hard to believe.  The wife and I will probably do something later this summer, but for now there’s just too much going on to get away.

Lastly, the reality company came by with the owners of my current rent house to inform me that they do plan on selling.  This means that in two and a half months I’ll be moving yet again.  We may look into purchasing.  The housing market is starting to get soft here so I expect to see some of the prices coming down soon.