Kimberly KG

On election night last year, Matt and I went out to dinner. I didn’t want to spend the whole night staring at the TV stressing about what might happen. The texts I kept getting over dinner told me things weren’t going as I had hoped. Shortly after I got home, I got a call from one of the neighbors saying I needed to come over. I spent the rest of the evening with that neighbor sobbing in my arms while her husband stared numbly at his phone across the room and everyone else shouted over each other about all the people that were going to be hurt by the outcome. Community building was on my mind as I walked back across the street late that night.

It’s been a long year.

It’s so much worse than I thought it would be.

Along with three of my neighbors tonight I went to see Vice President Kamala Harris speak in Portland as part of her book tour. My neighbor, the one I held last year, was there to hold my hand when I got overwhelmed. The woman on the other side of me (I hadn’t met her before today) offered me a tissue. Harris encouraged everyone to remember that we’re in this together and to help those being targeted/harmed in our community. Community building is the path forward.

I took a photo of the blue sky from the backyard today (we’re fully into grey sky season, it was unexpected) and then it was so nice outside tonight that I went out to take a picture again. I tried to have it framed the same way, but I’m an imperfect human.

While I was out there tonight, there was an unnerving screech in the trees overhead. Merlin didn’t recognize what it was so I sent the audio clip to my sister and her boyfriend (professional birders, both of them) and even they couldn’t agree. They sent me back outside to play the different songs to see if I got a response. The idea of calling an unknown screeching thing to me in the dark is uncomfortable.

I’m fairly convinced it was a barred owl even though nothing came to attack me.

(Please ignore the plants growing in the gutter. It wasn’t that long ago that they got cleaned, but we’re due again.)

Playing with the new Google Photos remix capability for some seasonal silliness.

I was struggling to carry a conversation while out running errands with these colors around every corner today.

Watched: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere 🍿

I enjoyed this movie. Jeremy Allen White is amazing. Jeremy Strong is too. This made me wish I could talk to my dad though. One morning in the eighties over breakfast my dad mentioned that he had had dinner with Bruce Springsteen the night before and yet it was halfway through dinner before my dad realized who he was! My dad was a proud member of the IATSE union for a LONG time and I assume that he had helped with spotlights at a Springsteen show and somehow dinner was involved in that?! I wish I could ask!

I get out of my chair for 1 minute and see what happens?! I got kicked out of my own office.

I was on a Zoom call last night with a bunch of women. The majority of them are at/near retirement age and many of them have YouTube channels with hundreds or maybe even thousands of followers. Most of them also have huge numbers of Instagram followers. The topic of social media came up and someone said “I don’t know what Threads is.” The only response she got was, “It’s Facebook’s answer to Twitter.” I took myself off mute as I tried to think of how to say something about the Fediverse or the Open Web in a way that would land with that audience. The conversation moved on to the difficulty of blocking assholes and trolls if you have an audience of any size before I made up my mind so I just muted myself again.

This seems like a problem.

I would have been really surprised if anyone there mentioned Mastodon, but I was hopeful Bluesky would come up. It did not. Someone did mention not wanting to support Facebook/Meta at all.

In search of “autumnal delights” (Ally’s phrasing) we set off yesterday morning for the Fruit Loop, which is a collection of farms, farm-stands, and stores in and around Hood River. The Columbia River Gorge is absolutely stunning year round, but autumn is my favorite time to visit.

We purchased a LOT of apples, a couple pumpkins and a small variety of other locally made goods. It was sprinkling on and off which meant that rainbows kept coming and going. It’s just gorgeous out there. I was driving so I didn’t get to take pictures of all the fall leaves, but Ally helped me out some.

Ally took these photos on the drive.

My daughter Ally recently finished her bachelor’s degree focused on archaeology. While in school, she helped with a project for the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center (MHIC) in Maxville, Oregon. Maxville started as a logging company town in 1923 and was abandoned after about 20 years. Maxville was unique in that the logging company didn’t just hire white loggers. Black people made up about a tenth of the population of Maxville. Oregon was explicit about excluding Black people from living here from the start. It wasn’t until 1926 that the last of these laws were repealed. (This certainly didn’t put an end to racism in Oregon, unfortunately.)

Since 2007, the daughter of one of the Black loggers has been working to bring the story of Maxville to life.

Due to Jim Crow laws, Maxville was segregated. The homes in the Black neighborhood were brought in on the railroad and then removed while the homes in the white neighborhood were more permanent. The archaeology project involved surveying and remote sensing to confirm where the neighborhoods were and then excavating in both white and Black neighborhoods.

At a gala for MHIC a couple weeks ago, Ally’s college advisor gave a presentation about their project. Ally joined him to staff a table before the presentations began.

I was lost in conversation with someone at my table when I saw Ally’s advisor hurrying over. He wanted to make sure I saw Ally talking with former Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski about the project. I would have missed this if Mark hadn’t gotten my attention! This project has been a highlight of Ally’s education and I’m glad she’s getting a chance to share her excitement with others. Photo taken by Mark Tveskov.

If you’re curious, more information about MHIC can be found here and here.

Edited to credit the photograph to Mark Tveskov.

It was a lovely day to stand up to nonsense. There were between 40,000 and 50,000 people at the main protest in Portland today, according to the police department. They also reported that they had made zero protest related arrests.

This was just one of several protests around the metro area. I saw a lot of people that love this country (and blowup costumes). No haters here.

Quite a while ago, Matt and I bought a top, lift and fence for a router table, but we wanted to make the table ourselves. It took way longer to get started on it than I expected (definitely my fault), but the actual build was fairly easy to pull off. We left a couple things unfinished so we could decide what would work best, but I’m anxious to finally get to use this. I have several projects I’ve been sitting on in anticipation.

On Saturday Ally asked me if our basement living room was going to be the same temperature for the next several months. She didn’t appreciate my answer when I told her that no, it would get colder.

Later that day we got apple cider donuts and some pumpkin pancake mix. “We are not immune to autumnal delights.”

Hopefully that makes up for having to bury yourself in blankets to watch TV?!

I suppose one of these years we should look into better heating solutions for the basement.

Every Fall I try to pretend it’s still summer just a little bit too long. My thick sweater kept me cozy right up until it started pouring rain just as I started walking to get dinner between meetings.

I feel like a wet dog and can’t get home to change for several more hours. I even looked at my rain jacket right before leaving and decided I’d be fine without it.

Dumb Kim.

One of the biggest struggles in engineering at most large companies I’ve worked for is visibility across teams/orgs. Two jobs back, I was at one such company and the project I was supporting had a crazy number of teams involved. I used the blog in my personal Confluence space to start sharing weekly updates for each of the teams I led. In addition to the obvious status related things, I always included a data section and a gratitude section. These were my favorite. I’d dig through data from different systems to find stats that were interesting or surprising. I almost always learned something in the process. As for gratitude, taking time at the end of each week to think of and highlight all the things to be grateful for is just a rather nice practice.

I didn’t think to grab a copy of any of these when I left that company and a handful of times I’ve regretted it. Today though, I learned that all my posts still exist! I had a brief chance to look through them and be reminded just how many projects we were juggling! I’m glad the posts are still there though. I’d like to use them as a template for something in the future.

I usually included some silly thing at the end of each post, like this XKCD comic. (The early days of the pandemic were pretty wild.)

The drama (not sure if that’s the best word) of Trump’s attacks on Portland is weighing on me. I feel like the people at the state level (our state and now California) are doing what they should in terms of pushing back, but it’s ridiculous that this is how they need to be spending their time.

I made a (federated) magazine on Flipboard to keep track of how this evolves.

A lot of the response though has been pretty funny.

• Emergency Naked Bike Ride
• We knit at dawn!
• Grab ’em by the Couch