September?

How the hell did that happen?  September?  Already?  I have a lot of catching up to do...  Items sorted by weight for your convenience.

Large:

The teenager has decided that she would rather live with her other aunt for the second two years of high school.  I have a plethora of opinions about this ~ some positive, some negative.  Really, this one deserved it's own blog post but was shortchanged at the counter.  Suffice it to say, we are child-free again.  YAY!
There's a chance I'll write more of this drama later, just to get it out of my system.

My own kid came down to pdx for Labor Day weekend.  Yes, she brought her man, and a spare (a young friend of theirs who wanted to check out Portland), but it was still great to see her.  It's just so much better having her here on the West Coast where we can actually drive and see each other.  Or take the train.  She is coming down again soon - not this coming weekend, but the following - and we are going to a Quilt Show together!  I'm happy about that!

Medium:

We have a new boss at my work and there is a lot of uncertainty around how things will be moving forward. (As an aside, the new boss is the Chairman of the department.  In fact, he is a man but the more correct term these days is simply, Chair.  But, if I say we have a new Chair at my work it sounds like furniture.)  I so wanted to get out of here before there was any serious shuffling or rearrangement of faculty and staff.  Mostly out of laziness, and that phenomenon called "Short-timer's Syndrome."  I've only got a little over a year and a half to go before my planned departure from this place of employment.  I wanted it to be easy, dammit!  I wanted cruise control.

My daughter's father emailed me recently and asked if I still owned a property we had lived on in far north-eastern California.  Yes, I do still own it.  It's paid for and the taxes are ridiculously low so I have kept it all these years.  He asked if I would mind if he went to check it out.  No, of course not.  Then he emailed me and asked what I would want if he were to camp out there for a while.  I said he could stay as long as he wanted and if he wanted to actually live there he could just pay the property taxes.  What I didn't say, but will should the occasion arise, is that if he wants to live there he can just have the property.  I'll sign it over to him.  It's worth virtually nothing, there's virtually nothing there, it's hard to get to, there's no economy, hell, there's no electricity.  It's way off the grid.  Yes, I'll give it to him.  It feels like the right thing to do.

Small:

We took the vintage travel trailer out last weekend.  It was the Oregon Coast Pride event weekend and we decided to spend the weekend at the beach.  Had a pretty good time, too.  The weather was absolutely to be expected for the Oregon coast: cool, gray, damp.  Nice, really.  Waved at the Dykes on Bikes ~ all 20 of them (ok, it might have been just a dozen), danced at the Inferno party, spent money on good causes and supported the local economy.  And had fun!

We are planning to take the trailer out one more time before it's all rain, all the time.  We are meeting up with some other vintage trailer owners at a campground near Bend in October.  I think it will be fun to see what other people are doing with their trailers, although T wants everything to be perfect, and come on, life and vintage trailers just aren't.

Sorry I don't have pictures of the cute little box on wheels.  I'll work on that...


That's it, women.  It's been a bit of a slog lately, but I'm keeping my head above water.