Ah, we’re quite the travelers this year: tomorrow we’re flying out to Florida for a week. We’ll be visiting my wife’s grandparents near Fort Lauderdale and yes, taking some time to drive up to Orlando for Disney World.
It probably goes without saying that I won’t be online much, or at all. We’re taking the laptop, but time and connectivity may not permit much. I’m not too devastated by this.
See y’all on the other side.
According to Metroblogging Portland, Corno’s Food Market is going to be torn down. Wow.
I say “wow” because there’s a more personal connection for me: my grandfather is one of the Cornos that used to run the place. Granted, it’s been closed for something like 10 or more years, and my grandfather hadn’t worked there for longer than that, but it’s still kind of a shock. (In fact, I think my dad may have mentioned to me that Corno’s was going to be destroyed.)
During the holidays, we’d always get the gift box from my grandparents full of (among other things) fresh fruit and nuts and such from the Market. One of the perks. And before that—well before that, before I was even born (or at least too young to remember)—we’d get the hookup from my grandfather when he ran the meat department. Yep, cheap meat.
Change, indeed. Today was our eldest’s first day of kindergarten. Huge transition! She’ll be riding a bus and everything. She attends in the afternoon; our youngest is in a new preschool, attends in the mornings, five days a week (at the old preschool it was only three). The schedule change is still taking some getting used to, I think.
The whole household dynamic is different since our cat died. It feels that way to me, at least; things seems shifted, somehow, at angles to the way they were before.
We painted the kids’ rooms this past weekend, changing from the rather bland “toasted almond” that came with the house to more vibrant blues, purples and pinks. The difference is striking.
And of course it’s that time of year again—the weather’s changing; you can feel the autumn coming in the air. The days are getting shorter. It’s definitely feeling like fall to me.
So this seems to be the month of change. What’s next?
I may not be posting much this weekend. Today we had to have our oldest cat, Bob, put to sleep. He had a cancerous intestinal tumor that was inoperable. He was also 12 years old, he lived a long good life; we’d raised him from a kitten so this is especially hard.
…it’s like losing a member of the family. He really was the best cat you could ask for. Thankfully I got to be there with him in the end, and bury him.
I’m not functioning all that well right now, good thing it’s a long weekend.
Yep, home again, home again. Actually we got home yesterday (Sunday), but it’s taken me two days just to get started catching up on email and stuff. Anyway, it was one hell of a vacation! Internet access was spotty to none for most of the trip (you could pay 50 cents a minute for access from the ship that was little better than dial-up when it worked), so it turned into an offline sabbatical.
I imagine I’ll post some pictures and stories in the coming days. Right now though I’m still catching up, and decompressing. It was back to work today, which always sucks after a long vacation.
Wednesday (today, even though it’s only 12:30 am) is the start of our big vacation: 12 days worth. It’s the longest vacation we’ve had in… ever, maybe. So my offline status may extend a bit, even though we’re taking the laptop with us. Though with internet access, who knows…
What are we doing? Well, prepare to be jealous: We’re going on an Alaskan cruise. Yep! It’s my in-laws 35th wedding anniversary, so they’re taking the family on a cruise. Nice, huh?
Told you you’d be jealous :).
We’ll be stopping in Seattle first for a couple of days, to visit some old friends (we’re driving to Vancouver, B.C. for the cruise itself), so all in all it’s going to be a very busy vacation. If I have time to blog, I may do so. Or maybe not! It might get really quiet around here if I’m gone for nearly two weeks.
If I’m not around, try reading some of our other local blogs. Or check out Wikipedia, they’ve got some good stuff there.
Starting tomorrow (er, today… Friday), I’m gonna be offline. We’re going camping for the family reunion all weekend. It’ll be nice to unplug for a while.
And nice to be camping, too. It’s one of those things I really like to do, but only ever do it once a year—yep, at the family reunion. Which is fine, but it always turns into such a production… it’d be nice sometime to throw a bunch of gear in the car and just go, maybe take more time than a weekend, and just… I don’t know, decompress maybe.
But I’ll take what I can get. We’ll have a great time, we’ve got a really good campsite this year, it’s gonna be good.
Spent half a day Saturday at the county fair, which was both good and bad. The bad part was that it was hot—damn hot—and expensive. The good part is that it’s the Fair and we had fun—and we got there when they opened so we didn’t have to deal with the crowds and lines like Chris did.
You know what I like best about the fair? The livestock and the crafts. The stuff the fair is actually supposed to be about: showing your animals, or your goods, and the competition between those things. I particularly like the poultry exhibit, probably because we raised chickens growing up. I enjoy viewing the rest of the livestock, some more than others (the sheep are just “eh”), but the birds are the best.
The canned, prepared, or grown foods are highlights, too. I particularly like the beer and wine showings; there’s never many anymore, but it’s still cool. I remember when I entered my homebrew in the fair some years back; I brought home several ribbons. That was cool.
The kids loved the rides, of course. I could personally do without: they’re expensive and you have to wait too long in the heat. I remember liking the rides well enough when I was younger, I think; at least, the “boring” stuff I described above didn’t interest me. I wonder at what point that changed…
All good fun. I even won some stuffed toys for the kids at the midway games. Know the secret to winning those games? They’re easy; the secret part is how much each individual game costs! That’s how they get you. If you want to win a big prize, you basically need to shell out $16-32 per game (assuming you win each “throw” you buy). That’s some crazy economy of scale, right there.
All in all, a good, tiring time was had. Maybe next year I’ll brew some beer to enter in the fair; my wife is convinced that if I’d entered my pumpkin ale, I would have won first prize. Possibly. But that’s what next year is for.
So on the spur of the moment this evening we decided to go to this year’s first Munch ‘n Music and have dinner. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any good website source for Munch ‘n Music, so for those of you not from Bend, here’s the three-second explanation:
Thursday evenings during the summer in Bend, free concerts in Drake Park are accompanied by food and craft vendors, and a beer garden. Parking is hell.
This was the first one we’d been to in years, so the beer garden was new to me. We didn’t stay for the full concert—we never do, really, with young kids—but we did enjoy Pilot Butte Drive-in‘s cheeseburgers and fries. We hadn’t had them since forever and they were utterly delicious. It’s the only place you can get Pilot Butte after lunchtime these days! Score! The kids had Pizza Mondo. I was totally jonesing for some elephant ears, but the line was too long and we were on the way out.
My wife got a new toe ring and the kids got an ice cream bar and cotton candy. It was a fruitful trip.
One of these days we’ll try staying for the full concert. And I will get some elephant ears!
Update: My wife found the website… it’s www.munchandmusic.com. Go figure. Couldn’t find it on the search engines, so that’s saying something.
It started with housecleaning, since we were hosting a party at our place. We managed to finish up in time to go to the Pet Parade, which is always fun (though, as someone was telling me later, is just crazy with too many people compared to four years ago). The highlight of the Parade worth blogging about was the flying dog. Someone had harnessed up a little rat dog of some kind to a bunch of big helium balloons, and had it tethered on a leash at about four feet in the air. My thought was, if they drop the leash, the dog is gone—I hope they have a pellet gun!
For the balloons. The balloons. Yeah, I know what you thought I meant the gun was for.
Oh, we saw Shannon in the Parade, as well. And apparently Chris was in it too. A fake monkey? What?
We fought our way to Drake Park where my wife was looking for toe rings and I bought the kids each a beanbag snake. This was the “old fashioned celebration” part of the public festivities they were advertising, I guess—craft vendors and food, though we didn’t make it as far as the food.
The party at our house was pretty good. We had my family, old family friends, Shannon and Simone for a little while, a friend of my wife’s and even some of my coworkers. The best part of course was the fireworks, especially for the kids. I set off a lot of them, and we were treated to just as many (legal and otherwise) from elsewhere in the neighborhood.
And this was the first year we let the kids stay up until 10 to watch the Pilot Butte fireworks show (which according to the news this evening is the largest in Oregon. Who knew!). We have a nice view of Pilot Butte from our yard, so it was a treat.
The only downside was going back to work the next day (today)… unpleasant. Maybe I’ll start taking July 5th off from now on…
