No Rose Bowl for my Beavers

Oh bother.

Somewhere, though, I'm sure Cheryl is very very happy.

What I am thankful for

This has been a very horrible year all around, but I am thankful for my many friends and family members, both mine and Cheryl's, who have been there for me during these difficult past few months.

Words cannot express how much you all have meant to me.

Turkey day, indeed

Since I watched the Stephen Colbert Christmas Special last weekend, I can’t get Elvis Costello’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” out of my head. Trust me, I’ve had worse songs rattling around in my head, and this was one of the better versions I’ve heard.

This is going to be my first major holiday without Cheryl, and to be honest, this ain’t easy. For the past few years, Cheryl and I would usually spend Thanksgiving Day with her rambunctious family in Eugene, end the festivities with a massive 16-or-so-player game of hearts or dominoes, then drive out to the Oregon Coast, where my folks have a time share dealie, and spend the rest of the weekend there.

Last year, if I remember correctly (I could look it up on the blog but I’m trying not to get emotional as it is), Cheryl was between IL-2 treatments and we decided not to try two trips to Oregon in a one-month span, so we had a wonderful time doing Turkey Day at our place with our friend Vanessa, cooking Cornish game hens, then playing Wii Bowling afterwards.

This year, I’ve flown back down to Oregon and I’m staying with my folks; they’re staying at Seaside, not the central Oregon coast as they have previously. And, man, everything’s setting me off right now. Driving past the Oregon Zoo, where we’d gone to “see the aminals” before her appointment where we learned the IL-2 wasn’t working anymore. Driving past the Rose Garden, where I’d managed to wrangle last-minute Blazer tickets last spring and we saw the Blazers beat the Lakers before one of Cheryl’s ipi treatments.

And driving by Providence Medical certainly didn’t bring back any good memories. It feels like I’m playing the world’s worst version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

God, I hope I’m doing better by Christmas. I certainly don’t feel very thankful for much of anything right now.

Hopefully a good night’s sleep will help.

Until then; sing it, Stephen:

A bit of a down weekend

Most people look forward to the weekend. Me, not so much these days. Aside from Vanessa, I just don't have many friends up here anymore, and hence, not much to do. Workdays keep me and my brain occupied, but on the weekend, it's pretty much just me, the kitties and large heapings of sports and movies on the TV.

I've been pretty good most days but today - it's cold, winter's rolling in and I'm just feeling really, really lonely. And I found out I didn't even make the interview process for that job in Redmond I had high hopes (that'll serve me right for getting my hopes up).

Who'd have thought I'd look forward to Mondays..

The only reason to ever own a Roomba

Roomba Driver @ Yahoo! Video

End-of-the-week blog dump

The sun has come out for the first time in...what, two weeks? Yesterday, though, was probably the last Saturday Market of the year. What few veggie merchants showed up had decidedly end-of-the-year wares that didn't look all that appetizing. I will give Moscow this, during the summer, they've got a top-notch farmer's market. Most Friday's, some fish merchants come into the Co-op to sell just-caught-that-morning fresh fish, and I'd usually pick up some halibut or salmon for dinner that night (as Cheryl would request, "get some fish-fish," in our curious pidgin language).

Friday morning, Bruce Ellis, Cheryl's boss at the Forest Service, stopped by to pick bits of USFS property that I still had, and to drop off an album that the crew down in Orofino had put together of Cheryl. Very nice and greatly appreciated.

Also, Mia sent me a CD of the pictures Cheryl had taken on their vacation in Norway a few years ago. Cheryl had thought those pictures had been lost when her computer crashed a while back, and I still have the journal notes of what picture was taken where.

Vanessa came over last night to watch a little football and we tried my new huckleberry-infused vodka - pretty tasty stuff. Wonder if there might be a market for an independent distiller of infused spirits...Oregon is currently the biggest source of start-up distilleries, much like the microbrew boom of 20 years ago. Yes, we Oregonians like our hooch, but we like quality hooch.

Speaking of football, good heavens, it looks like the OSU Beavers have a very real chance of making the Rose Bowl! Whodathunkit? Next week's Arizona game will probably be the last real roadblock, as I just don't see Oregon posing much of a challenge during the Civil War (cue foreshadowing music)

At present, I've got my laptop back (huzzah), watching the NFL and keeping track of my fantasy
football team, which is miraculously back from the dead (my first pick this year was Tom Brady, that should give you a hint of how much I sucked), thanks to judicious trades and gleaning the waiver wire. Might even make the playoffs this year.

Vanessa, her brother and I might be getting into the Moscow curling league. Curling! Whenever it's on the late night Olympics coverage, I'll stay up until 2 a.m. watching it, and I have always wanted to try it. Hey, it'll get me out of the house once in a while, at the very least. And the ice rink is just across the street from me, so I won't have far to go.

Talked to my boss last Friday - he's only been here a few months, but he seems like a pretty cool cat - and told him my plans were to stay in the area at least through the end of the term, but after that, I'm putting some feelers out, but promised that I'd give him plenty of notice and make sure the department was going smoothly before I bugged out. He told me he understood, and while he'd like me to stay, if I was to quit mid-term, he'd understand.

I've had bosses who would have fired me for making that statement, so his understanding and empathy is greatly appreciated.

I will say this, the job has improved greatly since he took over. Well, we have moved into new digs, so we're not stuck in a 105-year-old twice-condemned asbestos-filled craphole. That helps. And my boss is pretty hands off and trusts me to do my job, which is my preffered management style.

No word on that one job in Redmond I've got my fingers crossed for. It's a governmental agency, and we all know how fast they move - talk about glacial.

Right now, the Stinkus is tearing around the place like she's got ants in the pants, and Pearl has reverted to her deep hibernation cycle.

I think that's about everything for now.

Random musings on a slow day

The weather up here has been positively Willamette Valley-like the past week and a half. Overcast, blustery, windy - I don't think I've seen the sun for the past several days. And let me tell you, when the sun goes down up here, it gets dark. Seriously. It's like there's a black hole or something up here at night.

I'm doing okay, and seem to have settled into a pattern that gets me through the days, which usually involves 1) go to work, 2) watch TV/surf the internet the rest of the night. My computer has been in the shop the past week, however, so I have been sans the web for a while. For an internet addict like myself, it's been very hard. Man cannot live on basic cable alone.

I do a little packing now and again, although last weekend was hard. I packed up a lot of Cheryl's stuffed animals, including her teddy bear she'd had since she was a wee tyke, and that set me off for a while. Every day is a little bit better, but I'm still tremendously lonely up here.

And that is the source of my great conundrum: should I stay or should I go? It's no secret that I wasn't happy up here even in the best of times, and I cannot wait to get back to central Oregon. It's home, it's where friends and family are, and it isn't this gawd-awful place. However, I do have a job (with good benefits), and finding a job even in the best of times in Bend is an adventure, and to read the newspapers, this is the worst recession the country has been in since the Great Depression.

Do I stay someplace I don't like, simply because I have a job, or move for my own mental well-being and hope I find a job sooner than later? Ay, that's the rub. On the bright side, I've got a line on a couple of job possibilities in central Oregon, and I hope hope hope that one of them pans out. I've got inside connections working for me, and the older I get, the more I learn it's not what you know...but who you know.

Still, I probably should have sent the shoebox full of $20s in with my job application. Never hurts.

I suppose they could have been worse...

So, one of my favorite pastimes, now being part of a family of Ducks, is mocking the great ugliness that is the sports uniforms of the University of Oregon. And my team's colors are orange and black! When you put out uniforms that make that combination look good, well...

...and don't get us started about the marching band, ahem, "uniforms." Cheryl was in the band when they had capes and Musketeer-style hats, really good for keeping out the rain they were always marching in. She despised the Nike-era "uniforms" that looked that the unholy union of a Nazi biker gang and a road crew.

But getting back to the anecdote at hand, a few years ago, the University of Oregon, clearly green with jealousy over the back-to-back college baseball championships won by the mighty Beavers of Oregon State, decided to bring back their defunct baseball program (sadly, throwing the storied UO wrestling team under the bus, but that's another story), throw a ton of Nike dollars at them and see if they could buy a national title that way.

When I first heard of this, oh lordy, how I gave Cheryl a hard time about what those uniforms would look like. Will they come out in lemon yellow unitards? Bring back Roboduck? And Cheryl could only shake her head sadly, as she knew she had no defense against the truth.

They finally unveiled the new Duck baseball uniforms today:


Okay, they could be worse. The "O" on the pants looks like a janitor's key ring, and I hope that they never wear that giant yellow "O" in an actual game as it looks like a giant bull's-eye. But, once again, they have managed to make a team that frequently wears radioactive orange uniforms look good.

Man, I was really hoping for the spandex unitard. That truly would have been worth mocking.

Yes we can!

It's no secret that Cheryl and I were - and are - tremendous supporters of Barack Obama. He's the first candidate we ever donated money to, and I know one of Cheryl's great regrets would be not being able to vote for him in the general election.

Last night, Vanessa came over and we watched the election results, flipping around between NBC, CNN and MSNBC (those giant electronic maps do look very spiffy in HD), and when 8 o'clock rolled around and the left coast offically gave the election to Obama, Vanessa got a little sniffly, and I know Cheryl would have been a little emotional as well. The cherry-on-top for us would be, somehow, Al Franken winning the senatorial election in Minnesota, which might yet happen. We were both big fans of Al Franken's books, and to see him get elected (and, by default, Bill O'Reilly head a-sploding) would be beyond cool.

This will be a moment that we can tell our grandchildren about. Others have said it more eloquently, but to me, the fact that we have elected a man with a decidedly odd name, raised by a single mother and grandparents, and just happens to be black - these are the ideals that this country was founded upon. This is what America is supposed to be, where a man like Barack Obama can rise to the highest office in the land.

I wish him well, as he - and we all - have a lot of work ahead of us.

Remembering Cheryl

It's a slow day. I'm packing up some kitchen stuff, watching football, and just generally being lumpy. The winds have blown through, taking most of the remaining leaves off the trees, and the streets are generally a soggy mess of smushed leaves. Reminds me of Eugene in the fall.

Last week, Vanessa and I drove down to Eugene for Cheryl's celebration of life. It was a nice drive, and a long drive is made much easier with a friend. We stayed with Cheryl's folks Friday night, and Rosemary had put together a lot of photo albums from the pictures we'd hauled out of storage. I'd never seen most of Cheryl's baby picture, and boy howdy, were she and her sister redheads back then. That's one of the few times I got a little choked up that weekend, as this was supposed to be the year we were going to try hatching a rugrat, and I know that little guy (or gal) would have had that uber-red hair.

The longhouse was everything we were hoping for, big, roomy, and for a woman dedicated to archaeology and Native American cultures, it really was her cathedral. It was a beautiful warm autumn day, the leaves were still turning, the skies were clear and the sun was shining - the eternal winter rains had not yet arrived.

Rosemary spoke for a bit about Cheryl, and then I picked up the story about the point where we met, and I managed to make it through without completely losing it. I was so happy that we had so many people there; family, friends from as far away as Hood River, Seattle and Pullman, co-workers, and many of them shared their stories of knowing Cheryl as a smart, loving and warm person. I was especially glad to have Dr. Dennis Jenkins speak, as Cheryl always spoke highly of him as a teacher and mentor to her.

Thanks to all who came, and to all who shared their memories of Cheryl.

Afterwards, some of us wandered around the Natural History Museum, where Cheryl worked and volunteers for several years after college (a pretty spiffy little museum, and one of Cheryl's co-workers from the museum mentioned how they are still using Cheryl's organization system there), then we wandered down to the East 19th St. Pub, which is where we had our first date all those years ago.

At least, I think it was our first date. The more I think about it, our first date might have been at Rennie's Landing. Well, I know for a fact that our second date was at the 19th St Pub, but that's another story.

In short, it was a perfect sendoff for a very wonderful woman who will be greatly, greatly missed.