It’s been too long since Kim and I got out in the snow, but we finally made it up to Timberline Lodge for some snowshoeing fun. Strangely, it was 42 degrees up there at 6000ft, so the snow was melting a lot. As we hiked up higher it got colder, and once the clouds cleared the view was awesome. We even got glances of Mt Jefferson to the south. Ubuntu loved the snow as usual.
We got some sweet new trees planted in our sidewalk strips this past weekend through Friends of Trees. Kim found out about the program a last year when they had signs up for other trees they had planted. They organize tree plantings in neighborhoods and give you deeply discounted and subsidized trees. It’s a great deal, it’s great for your property, great for the environment, and a great way to meet your neighbors.
I realized most of the benefits, but I didn’t think it would be as much fun to meet the neighbors. It’s hard to get to know many people when you move into a neighborhood without some sort of activity, and this an activity that brings neighbors together since everyone helps each other plant their trees. We started helping a neighbor down the street, and then we moved up the street to our house and had 10 or so people putting our trees in.
We got 4 trees, two tricolor beeches, a strawberry marina and a Japanese snowbell. I can’t wait to see them grow!
We hosted Thanksgiving again this year, with the difference from laster year being that more people came. Dinner ended up being an even dozen people, and most of them were staying with us too! It was really cool that we could fit so many people in our house and that everyone got along and had enough space to sleep. My grandma even made it down.
Kim did an amazing job planning all the food, and we spent a few days prepping food prior to the big day. We didn’t have any meat at dinner which was awesome. I was very happy that my family was so accepting of not having turkey. Instead we had seitan sausages as the ‘meat’ course. Kim made a few kinds of gravy too, including a wild mushroom gravy that had chanterelles that we picked a few weeks ago.
We even had Tofu Phil from Small Planet Tofu with us for dinner. He runs a tofu company in Newport, WA of all places, and happened to be in Portland for Thanksgiving so we invited him and his girlfriend to dine with us.
I think everyone had a good time the day of, and even over the next few days. We played card cames, Taboo and Rock Band in between neighborhood walks and plenty of leftovers. And after everyone left there wasn’t even much to clean up since everyone chipped in to help with everything. Thanks for coming!
I’ve been helping with a couple non-profit websites for more than a few years now, and I’ve been bad in that I haven’t mentioned them or even linked to them. Oops. Perhaps part of why I haven’t done much with these sites is that I rarely have to do anything to them. That was my original goal in setting them up so that the people running the organization could modify the information on the sites however they wanted without having to wait for me. To do this I set the sites up running Drupal and WordPress, two great site management technologies both written in PHP.
The first is Espaanglisch, which is a great English teaching volunteer program near Trujillo, Peru for lower income students of all ages. I taught there for a month in 2007 when Kim and I lived in Huanchaco, and I helped the guy running the program, David, build a website so that he could attract more volunteers. Learning English really is a great way to open up a ton of employment opportunities for these children. I recently found out how important the website has been to helping David attract volunteers when it stopped functioning for a few weeks because of DNS issues. Fortunately the DNS issues resolved themselves. If you want to travel and volunteer in South America, this is a great place as you’ll feel immediately appreciated and you can even learn to surf in your off hours.
Some other friends of ours name Becka and Michael have been doing a lot of work in Uganda, Africa for years helping to protect the Kibale National Forest. Their most recent project, the New Nature Foundation, aims to help protect the forest by improving the lives of and educating the people who live around it. They’ve made great strides, as can be seen in their latest reports showing they’ve reduced the number of people gathering wood inside the national park from over 30% to around 10%. They done this in a number of interesting and innovative ways including teaching the locals to build more efficient stoves, and growing their own wood from fast growing trees that they plant themselves. The project is ongoing and always accepting donations.
I’m grateful to be able to help these dedicated people in some small way with what expertise I have, and I hope they continue to thrive.
This was my third dodgeball season, and I’ve definitely gotten better. Before starting I wouldn’t have thought there was much to the sport, but there are some serious dodgeballers out there – including some who seem to take it more serious than they should. I just go to have fun, and this season was that.
I played on a team named Wii Not Fit for the second time with Lucy, and we had a decent season. We won most of our games, but I don’t think we played some of the harder teams. Fine with me. We lost our first game in the tournament today. Actually our first game was against a team that forfeited so we didn’t get to play them.
Now that my marathon training is over, this is my main physical activity every week, and since I’ve started to fall out of marathon shape I’ve noticed that it’s more physical than I had thought since I’m actually sore after some recent games!
Kim really went all out for planning birthday this year, so it was a really good one. Last week she planned a little surprise party, and yes, I was surprised. I thought we were just going to Hopworks for happy hour, but when I got there I kept seeing people I knew and at first I just thought it was a coincidence. Then I realized there too many people to be a coincidence and that Kim had organized a gathering. After happy hour we all came back to our house to sit around our fire pit, play Rock Band and board games.
This weekend Kim planned a trip to Breitenbush Hot Springs. We did a native american sweat lodge on Thursday. That was an intense experience. I thought it would be more like a sauna, but I didn’t expect it to be so physically uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable because there were so many people crammed into such a small, dark, hot place for around 3 hours. The physical discomfort wasn’t all bad. In fact, I think that’s a large part of the experience since being uncomfortable forces you to be very present and in the moment.
We camped a few miles from the hot springs in the national forest since that was free, then returned Friday for a day of soaking in the hot waters. We soaked all morning, and then went for a hike to look for mushrooms in the afternoon. We had dinner at the lodge both nights, and the food is very good. It’s buffet style, so we ate a very light lunch so that we could eat more at dinner and because being stuffed while you’re in the hot pools wouldn’t be very goo.
All in all it was a very relaxing couple of days and a great birthday week. We should celebrate birthdays for a week more often :-)
Where did August and September go? I know where a lot of it went – marathon training. And now I’m done with that for a while and will get a big chunk of time in my life back. As of yesterday I’ve run a marathon. And boy do I hurt today. In training the farthest I ran was 20 miles. Turns out the last few miles of a marathon are the hardest. Who’d have thought? Seriously, after mile 23 I had to really focus just to keep my legs moving. I did it though, and it feels pretty good to have done it.
My parents and my brother came to Portland for the weekend, Kim took the day off work, and I saw them cheering me on a few times while I was running. Fortunately they only saw me when I was doing pretty well, which was around mile 20 and at the very end when only the adrenaline from the crowd and knowing I’d soon be done kept me going. I started out strong, got a little worried when I had to stop and tape some blisters around mile 6, picked up the pace from there all the way through mile 20 or so, and then started to hurt around mile 22.
I really don’t think I’ve felt quite like I felt past mile 23 before. Fortunately I had learned from my training runs how not to get too dehydrated or starving, but my muscles just wanted to shut down after a while despite being hydrated and eating enough liquid gold (honey and molasses). Every mile felt much longer than the one before, and I did in fact slow down quite a bit, but I persevered and crossed the finish line running. Once there I ate everything in site. Oh yeah, my time was 4 hours and 31 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes faster than I though I was going to do it, so I’m pretty pleased.
Everyone asks if I’ll do it again, and I’m definitely holding off on answering that for now. Certainly not anytime in the next few months. I’ll be glad to have such large chunks of time back for other stuff for a while.
