A perfect day

Today was a really awesome Memorial Day, much better than last year’s. I couldn’t remember what I did last year until I looked at my calendar and remembered that I was driving back from Vancouver on Memorial Day, after having attended my graduate school graduation ceremony and visiting friends. The graduation and friends part was nice, but not the drive back.

But today was great. I took two friends – who moved here from Kansas last year – out to the Columbia River Gorge for some waterfall-viewing and hiking. It started off cool and cloudy, but the sun came out in the afternoon. We stopped at the Vista House on Crown Point for the classic panorama view of the Gorge, then stopped to see Latourell Falls, Wahkeena Falls, and Multnomah Falls, the most impressive of all. We hiked up to Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls for the up-close-and-personal view of the falls, which is really awesome. I’ve seen that waterfall more times than I can remember, in all seasons and weathers, and I never fail to be impressed by it. I can only imagine what it’s like to see it for the first time.

We hiked a 4.5-mile loop starting at Horsetail Falls and going up through the lush green forest past several other waterfalls to Triple Falls. That’s where we ate lunch in the sunshine under a wonderfully blue sky. After the uphill hike to get there, our lunches tasted delicious, and that sun felt really great. We hiked back down to the car and went to Cascade Locks for ice cream, milkshakes and onion rings. Mmmmm…..

I spent the afternoon reading a book by the Willamette River and spent the evening walking the Springwater Trail along the river. It was just too nice to be inside. As I sat reading, and later walking, I thought how lucky I am to live where I do. It is so beautiful here. And I got to introduce two newbies to that beauty today! I am so excited that summer is here and that lots more hiking awaits me. I’m positively euphoric!

What am I doing here?

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. I have the day off. It’s overcast, but it’s not cold and it’s not raining. So why am I spending the day in my apartment doing laundry and cleaning up my former roommate’s mess?

The mess that was left

It’s 11:30 p.m. I’ve been cleaning for three solid hours. I’m tired. And unhappy. When I got home at 6:30, I’d already had a long day, teaching a computer class on one end of town this morning, then filling in for a sick staff member at a library at the other end of town. So I nearly cried when I came home and found my apartment trashed.

No, I wasn’t burglarized. My roommate moved out this morning and didn’t clean up as she left. In fact, not only did she not clean, she did not lock the door when she left, and she left a whole bunch of stuff behind too. The living room is littered with miscellaneous items that she ran out of room for in her car: pillows, markers, blankets, towels, a staple gun. The kitchen cupboards were full of with boxes and cans of food, much of it expired. The closets are full of towels, numerous boxes of unopened Christmas lights, fans, snacks, luggage, ace bandages, a sewing kit still wrapped in plastic, and cold medicine, among other things. And cleaning supplies! When collected from the various cupboards and closets and put together, I discovered that I have no less than 24 containers of cleaning supplies, ranging from sprays to bleach, disinfectant wipes to Comet. Why on earth is there such an abundance of cleaning supplies in this place?

So, while other Portlanders were enjoying this beautiful evening that started us off on the holiday weekend, I was throwing out old food, creating a huge Goodwill pile, and making more than 15 trips to the recycle bins and dumpster. New roommate moves in tomorrow morning, and there’s no way the apartment or her bedroom is going to be clean and ready by then. There was just too much to do and too little time. I’m tired. I need to go to bed. I hope new roommate understands.

I am now a cat owner

My roommate is moving out on Friday. She has accepted a job in California. She can’t afford to keep both the cats, and since Charmin has taken a liking to me since the day I moved in, my roommate asked if I would keep her. Charmin is such a sweetie that I’m more than happy to call her my own. She’s so affectionate that she’s sometimes more like a dog than a cat.

Lurch and stall

My sister and I are going on a week-long trip to the Wallowas in about a month. We’re taking her Subaru Outback, which is a manual. I’ve never learned how to drive a stick, but she can’t be expected to do all the driving on the trip, so I’m learning how. We had our first lesson this morning. I think I caught on pretty fast. I lurched around the neighborhoods of North Portland, stalling nearly every time I had to start from a complete stop. That is hard. Shifting while driving is easy. But accelerating from a dead stop is hard. I always seemed to let that stupid clutch out too fast. One thing is for sure: driving a stick is the ultimate in multi-tasking. Watch the road, watch for other cars, don’t ride the clutch, oh-wait-now-I’m-shifting-put-in-the-clutch, and so on. I’ll get the hang of it eventually.

On space westerns

I keep hearing about this Firefly show that was on TV about four or five years ago. The show was canceled after 14 episodes, so knowing it wouldn’t take me forever to get through it, I broke down and got it on DVD from the library. I’ve been watching the episodes over the past two months and I finished the last one a few weeks ago.

I must admit that the concept sounded hokey to me. I’ve heard people call it a sci-fi western, or a space western, and now that I’ve seen it I’d say that’s pretty accurate. And though it sounded like a stupid idea before, I have to say that I actually quite enjoyed the series. I really liked the camaraderie between the characters and the witty banter. After seeing the series, I got Serenity from the library, which is the movie they made in 2005 to kind of continue the story. I actually saw the movie when it first came out, because the reviews I read said it was good and you didn’t have to see the series first. WRONG! In 2005 I thought the movie was incredibly stupid and I had a lot of trouble following the story. Now, having seen the series, understanding the chemistry between the characters, recognizing the often cheesy dialog as a trademark of this show, and knowing the background story, the movie was WAY better. I can’t believe anyone would recommend the movie to a non-Firefly watcher. In any case, I hope they make another one.

The tags on my pants

Did I seriously just get dressed in my PJs and discover that the new pants I had been wearing all afternoon and evening still had a tag on them? You know, the kind that fold over the waistband? Wow, I’m SUCH a dork!

It’s like the time in college when I spent the afternoon in town shopping at Old Navy and I wore my new zip-up hoodie to something that night and someone asked, “new sweatshirt?” and I was like, “yeah! how did you know?” and they pointed to my ribcage where there was still one of those long size stickers that say “M” a dozen times. Doh!

Plethora of Pictures

Winter in the Pacific Northwest is not a great time for photography. We don’t have pretty snow (except for a few rare days) and the days are gray with flat light that is terrible for picture-taking. But now that spring is in full swing, I find that I suddenly have a whole bunch of photographs from recent outings, and not much time to go through them all. Work shifts at my libraries have picked up recently, so while I’ve been able to use my days off to go out and shoot, I haven’t had as much time to process the pictures afterwards.

I have good reason to want to get on the ball with that picture-processing, because there are quite a few contests and competitions coming up in the next few months that I’d like to enter. And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to direct you to the June issue of Popular Photography & Imaging, in which you will find the photograph below. They have a contest in each issue called “Your Best Shot.” My picture of icy Multnomah Falls was selected as the first place winner for June! So next time you’re in the bookstore, look me up on page 27!

A little carried away

I went to the big REI anniversary sale today with just two things in mind — a sleeping bag and hiking socks — but I walked out less than an hour later having spent three times as much as I’d planned. I shouldn’t have been surprised. This often happens when I shop at REI sales. It’s practically the only time I ever shop there. Today the damage was especially large because of the sleeping bag purchase, but if I’m going to go backpacking with Deborah this summer, I need a lighter one than the one I already own.

I did get socks, four pairs in fact, at $11.89 a pop. But you can’t put a price on good hiking socks. I got a Northwest Forest Pass, which is a required parking pass at many trailheads and something I’m glad to pay for since the Forest Service needs all the help it can get. But after that, my purchases leaned less towards “need” and more towards “want”. Such as the two gazetteer atlases: one for Oregon and one for Washington. And the Columbia Gorge hiking book that I could get from the library for free. And the polarized sunglasses, the two cute tops, and the new set of lightweight long underwear. Sigh. I’m going to go wallow in my purchases now, thank you.

Reunion? What reunion?

Most of my friends graduated from high school the same year I did: 1997. Which means that everybody is having their ten-year reunions this year. Oh wait, did I say everybody? Ha ha! I meant everybody except me. Here it’s May already and nobody from my class appears to have done anything at all towards planning a reunion. People tell me that the senior class president is supposed to plan it. I didn’t know our class president, and I have no idea where she is now or what she’s doing. She’s not on Classmates.com or MySpace.

I did not like high school. It was not a happy time for me. College was where I blossomed. But even though I did well academically in high school, I though it was dumb. As such, I don’t know why I care about a reunion. I guess it just makes me exasperated that even ten years later, my experience with my high school continues to be dumb. I’m not even entirely sure I’d go to the reunion. Yeah I’m curious to see how some people turned out. But I don’t know if I’m curious enough to go. If there even IS a reunion!