Category: Family

  • Almost seemed like a long weekend

    Seemed long because we had so much going on. Friday night my wife and I stayed at the Pine Ridge Inn here in town for an early anniversary trip (my mother stayed with the kids). While having dinner at Cork Friday night, I happened to see an old friend walk by the window, and this was about as unlikely an encounter as it gets: this is someone I knew and worked with in Spokane, back in the mid-90s, whom I haven’t seen in nearly five years, and currently lives near Seattle. So when I first saw him (and his wife and son) walk by the window of a restaurant in downtown Bend, at first I thought I’d had too much wine.

    Turns out they came down for the weekend, pretty much spur-of-the-moment, and hadn’t had a chance to call us yet.

    Saturday we checked out the Saturday Market (pretty small around here), then hit the Bite of Bend. We hooked up with our friends again there, and made plans to have Father’s Day dinner at our place with my family. Of course, we had to go shopping to get everything we needed, so we picked up the kids, hit Costco and Safeway, and had a quick dinner at Subway.

    As to the Bite of Bend, I’ll write up a mini-review after this.

    Sunday, Father’s Day. Nice, leisurely day, except for all the house cleaning in preparation for having everyone over. Everyone had a good time, even when the massive storm hit (we were barbecuing, wouldn’t you know). Rain, hail and thunder—it hailed so much that there were still drifts in the backyard hours later. And actually the rain pretty much stopped by the time I was out cooking on the grill, so it was no big deal.

    So yeah, it definitely felt like we had a long weekend. After leaving work on Friday, I didn’t get on the computer at all (except to shut it down) the entire weekend, til work on Monday… that was kind of nice. Kind of a mini-vacation from it all.

    But, back to it.

  • This Memorial Day weekend…

    Sunray Premium Playground 2005 (AKA swingset monstrosity)…I’ve been tasked with putting together this monstrosity of a swingset. I’ve had help, my father-in-law yesterday and today, and tomorrow my dad pitches in. We may finish tomorrow.

    Happy Memorial Day to everyone else. I’ll likely be cursing before the day is out.

  • My mom’s blog

    So I’ve helped my mom to set up and start a weblog, to be found at DianeAbernathy.com. She’s a real estate agent, herbalist, teacher and more, it should make for interesting reading. Go check it out, I’m making the case that a weblog is much better tool for building an online presence and influence than a typical real estate agent’s website (for instance).

    Incidentally, I set the blog up using WordPress, which I mostly find to be pretty good software. I’d recommend it for anyone who has their own server, it was about the quickest and easiest software to set up that I’ve ever seen. And so far it works pretty well, too.

  • Not much to speak of

    Don’t have much to write about. Okay, that’s not totally true; I’ve got some things I want to write about, but they’ll run long and that’s not really what I feel like doing at nearly 11:30 at night. The topics? You’ll see why I’d run long:

    • Evolution
    • Ebooks
    • Reviews of some regular books I’m reading

    So instead, tonight, I’ll stick with the mundane things that tend to bore the hell out of people…

    We steam cleaned the carpet this last weekend. It’s amazing how much dirt and pet hair had accumulated in the ten months we’ve been living here. Amazing and gross. Makes me want to get rid of all the pets.

    This next weekend we need to dethatch the lawn and try to restore parts of it. I hate lawn maintenance. Makes me want to get rid of all the grass.

    The week before last, when I was sick, it turned out I had a bronchial sinus infection. I ended up getting antibiotics to get rid of it, which is something I almost never have to do.

    I’ve been teaching my five year old to play checkers. She’s got a good grasp of the rules, though needs to learn strategy and how to see the big picture. I’m pretty impressed by how quickly she picked it up, though. I have a feeling the strategy part will come to her pretty fast and then I’ll be frustrated at how I get beat every time :)

  • Addition at five

    My daughter, who’s five, has been learning addition of late. She knows a lot of the single-digit addition, like one plus two, three plus three, like that, but what’s funny is that instead of saying, “One plus two equals three,” she tends to say, “Plus one plus two equals three.” It’s that extra “plus” that prefaces the statement that totally makes me think she’s doing math via Polish notation.

    I know, only a computer geek would get that.

  • This week

    Yes, I’m finally back posting. It’s been a week.

    The eye surgery went very well, as good as it could have gone, and except for red eyes, you wouldn’t even know our son had surgery. The only real issue we’ve had is a bit of a struggle when we give him his eye medicine (topical ointment). Other than that, everything went through with flying colors.

    Coming back from Portland Wednesday we ran into some snow and a short delay on the Santiam Pass. Right about at the summit, in the worst of the snow, traffic was backed up on a corner because somewhere up ahead (out of sight) a truck or snowplow or something had apparently spun out. Otherwise it was a fairly uneventful drive.

    Thursday and Friday were catch-up days at work, and it didn’t help that I had my employee review Thursday morning (nearly two hours shot) and the annual company meeting Friday (the entire first half of the day gone). So I’m still behind on some stuff and that won’t go away as I have six more days off this month (three holiday days and three vacation days). Incidentally, my review went fine.

    Did some Christmas shopping today. Picked up a few things, need to get more. We have “Secret Santa” at work next week and I have two of five gifts so far.

    And to top it all off, my right wrist is hurting like a son-of-a-bitch. All going blind jokes aside, it’s been sore all week and since yesterday it’s just killing me; I don’t know if it’s onset carpal tunnel or a pinched nerve or what, but the source of the pain seems to be the base of the thumb joint at the wrist, and I can’t make much of a fist nor grip anything with any strength. Nor is there really a full range of motion without it being painful. Typing is not terrible, but not great. Gah. Must be getting old.

  • In Portland

    Sitting in the Red Lion Inn at the Convention Center in Portland tonight; we’ll be here for the next couple of days. Not a pleasure or casual visit, though; tomorrow our son (he’s three) has corrective eye surgery for esotropia.

    It’ll be his second such surgery (our daughter, who’s five, has also had two eye surgeries). It’s simultaneously a minor and a major surgery; minor because there’s nothing being transplanted, or amputated, or anything like that, and major because he will still be fully anesthetized and getting the full surgical “treatment.”

    The gory details? The lateral muscles of the eyes—those attached to the sides—are moved forwards or backwards on the wall of the eyeball to correct the respective alignment problem. Yes, this involves removing them from where they attach and sewing them onto a new location. Freaky? You bet, but at the same time utterly amazing at what can be accomplished in this day and age.

    Anyway, that’s the latest in case blogging gets light the next couple of days. (Though tonight I’m blogging a bit.)

  • 20 pounds

    I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving this year. Ours was, except for the fact that I was sick. Nothing serious, I just came home from work early Wednesday totally drained, achy, throaty—all the usual signs of the flu. Went to bed for awhile, got up for dinner (soup), went to bed early. Took much medicine. Slept poorly, but fortunately it “merely” turned into a troublesome cold. (This is the latest I’ve been up since Tuesday, and I won’t be up for much longer.)

    We had a small group for Thanksgiving this year—just us and my mom. Despite that, we still had a 20 pound turkey to roast for some insane reason. That thing was a monster. It’s still a monster, sitting in the fridge waiting to be carved… but it was delicious.

    Okay, enough for tonight. Gotta go cough some more before bed.

  • San Diego or bust

    We’ll be on the road all next week—well, starting this week, really, since we’re leaving Friday night—on our way to visit my brother in San Diego. Road trip!

    From Bend, San Diego is about a 16 or 17 hour drive. Since the kids are little, we’re spreading that over three days each way, taking it easier than just plowing on through. Of course, the portable DVD player we bought for the car should help out, too.

    Needless to say, I’ll be mostly offline for nine or ten days, starting Friday afternoon. I have a slightly older laptop computer that I’m taking, but I just got it and it doesn’t have network access, either Ethernet or wireless (has the slots for them, though). I may be able to get it set up for network before we go, otherwise I’ll just rely on the modem in a pinch.

    Or not. We’ll just see.

  • Reynolds Pond

    On Sunday I took the kids to the local swimming hole that I frequented when growing up: Reynolds Pond. As to be expected for something located in Alfalfa, there’s not much online about it, so I thought I’d remedy that a bit. Herewith a bit of local geography and history, along with some wistfulness over the passage of time.

    Alfalfa is located about 15 miles east of Bend, north of Highway 20 and near the Deschutes/Crook County border. It’s primarily an agricultural community, with acres of irrigrated field crops (largely hay) and livestock (cattle and sheep) dropped right down into the middle of the desert. Aside from the farmland, there’s a small store and gas station, a community grange hall, a power substation and not much else. (The old Alfalfa School, which I attended through fourth grade, closed many years ago.)

    Reynolds Pond is in the southeastern part of Alfalfa, off the beaten track, and, aside from the irrigation canals and duck ponds, is the only sizable body of water in the area. The only way to get there is to leave the main road at either the Alfalfa Store or near the landfill substation and travel about a mile down the dusty, rocky, bumpy, narrow dirt roads that criss-cross the entire area.

    Despite all that, it’s still the place everyone goes for swimming and fishing. Yep, fishing: even though it’s pretty small, years ago it was stocked with fish—more on that in a bit.

    I found a decent mention of it from this page titled, “A brief history of The Badlands Wilderness Study Area“:

    In the high desert country of Central Oregon is an area referred to as the Badlands. The Badlands, named in the 1920’s because of its harsh terrain is a surprisingly undisturbed area tucked in between Bend and Horse Ridge…. There is a wide diversity of basalt flow formations within the study area. Beautiful, twisted, Western Juniper trees cover much of the area with an understory composed of bitterbrush and bunchgrass. There is big sage, two varieties of rabbit brush, Idaho fescue, squirrel tail, needle grass, and phlox. Reynolds pond lies in the northwest portion of the WSA [Wilderness Study Area] and is the only surface water. Water levels in the pond are dependent on flows in the canal and consequently can fluctuate widely. When full, Reynolds Pond covers eight surface acres and is a nice addition to the WSA.

    Learn something new every day: even though I spent a good part of my summers going to Reynolds Pond, I never knew it was about eight surface acres in size, or that it’s the only surface water in the Badlands.

    Overall, Reynolds Pond is fairly shallow; one of the deepest parts I ever found was probably 14 or 15 feet, but most of it is wadeable. While swimmable, the bottom is made up of slimy, silty mud that squishes between your toes and turns the water cloudy the instant you disturb it. There’s a fair amount of vegetation, too—we always called it “seaweed” even though it’s merely the run-of-the-mill freshwater weeds that are long, thin and ropy.

    The pond was stocked with fish years ago, largemouth bass and redear sunfish. I’ve never seen a particularly large fish from the pond myself, but apparently the state record for redear sunfish was pulled out of there in 1992 by a Terence Bice—a whopping 1 pound 15 ounce fish, but the fact that a record fish of any kind was caught there is kind of impressive.

    One distinct feature that we always loved were the islands: four or five mounds of dirt rising out of the water at odd spots. One was right off the shore—you could wade to it in water that barely came up to your knees—it was the smallest of the bunch, no larger that a Volkswagon Bug probably. The others, larger and (relatively) harder to reach, were always the more desirable targets for their size and who-could-make-it-all-the-way cachet. But really, they were nothing but mounds of dirt comprised of the same sandy soil and lava rock that shows up everywhere else in the desert. There was some reedy grass that grew around the larger ones’ “shores” and some thin bunchgrass and such that peppered the top of them, but once you climbed up on one you quickly got bored with the drab conquest and went back in the water. They were cool because they were there, but they weren’t much to look at.

    Or at least, they weren’t much to look at over a decade ago (the last time I’d been there, I figure, was 1992). Imagine my surprise when we pulled up Sunday and found that every island is covered—and I mean entirely covered, every inch—with bright green trees and vegetation! (Sad to say, I couldn’t rightly identify the tree species other to say it’s the same type of willowy, reedy tree that you find along the banks of the Deschutes River.) Vastly, vastly changed from when I was last there. And there’s not just the trees and grasses and various shrubs on the islands; there’s forests of reeds around the islands, actual cat tail freshwater reeds, not just marshy grass. And the trees and plants were growing along the opposite shore, hugging the rim of the pond, too.

    It was one of those moments where you are acutely aware of the passage of time; where there’s such a polarizing disconnect between what you remember and what there is that you cannot even process it at first. I mean, 12 years had passed since I was last there; trees have grown and matured, the entire mini-ecosystem has changed. I wish I had pictures of how it used to be, to compare.

    Otherwise, it was a great time with the kids. Watching them play in the water, remembering the times I used to spend there, made me realize that some things never truly change.

    And finally, one other intersting link: A Reynolds Pond hike from the MSN Groups “Day Hiking Oregon”. With some pictures, even.