Kimberly KG

There’s an atmospheric river going through Portland this week. It seemed like the day never started on Monday. Somehow the sun forgot to come out.

I learned we were under a high wind watch as well as a flood watch at just about the same time a huge tree fell in the neighbor’s yard. I’m really hoping this isn’t the start of another windy wet winter. I’m still not over the stress from the big storms two years ago.

I’ll be sleeping in the basement until this is over.

Ally is still on the ship off the coast of Georgia so we definitely missed her for Thanksgiving. Sam came up for the long weekend and Matt’s parents came for Thanksgiving dinner. This term for Sam is rather strenuous so he spent most of the weekend either doing homework or sleeping. It’s great to have him home even if I’m just sitting next to him trying not to make noise. Ha!

As usual, I tried to recreate my mom’s apple pie. As usual, it was pretty far removed from the magic she used to create. I realized that this was actually just fine and somehow that let me enjoy the process a little more. It was my best pie yet.

One bit of excitement was getting to meet Sam’s girlfriend, Alex. Sam has a pretty solid track record for choosing good friends so it was no surprise that he’s chosen a lovely person to date as well.

Last weekend, I went to visit my sister so we could celebrate her birthday and Guy Fawkes Day together. She lives in Clarkston, Washington which sits alongside Lewiston, ID at the confluence of the Snake and the Clearwater Rivers.

My nephew, as you’d expect, enjoyed the fire.

It was great to spend a little time with my sister and get to know her boyfriend a little better. While I was visiting, we helped shuttle one of her friends so that he could spend the day on one of the nearby rivers. This gave us an opportunity to go exploring. We spent some of that time trying to take photos that we actually liked of the fall colors. Her new iPhone did a better job than my not so new Pixel 8 Pro. Trying to get the colors in photos to match what you actually see continues to frustrate me.

I put my favorite photos in a collection. Some of them don’t seem terrible.

As I’ve mentioned before, the drive through the Columbia River Gorge to get there and back is amazing. It’s hard to comprehend just how much water is moving through there.

I mentioned my daughter having an adventure and then I haven’t had a chance to post about it!

This past Monday morning Ally got a text from a friend asking if there was any way she could be in Norfolk, Virginia within the next 36 hours. The tall ship Lynx was scheduled to sail from Virginia down to Georgia for the winter and needed some additional crew. I dropped Ally off at the airport at 8 o’clock that night (after driving 6 hours home from my sister’s house). When she got on the plane, she didn’t even know how she was going to get from the airport out to the ship. By the time she landed in Atlanta after her first flight, a friend of someone on the ship was arranged to meet Ally at the airport and give her a lift.

She’s having a great time. She’s mostly working at night which means she gets to see the Milky Way and amazing sunrises. So far the ship has made it down to Charleston, South Carolina where they docked ahead of a storm.

Aside: I learned of the existence of the word “noctilucent” from the auto-generated description for that last photo.

This is all possible because in the Summer of 2021 Ally signed up for a program called Two Weeks Before the Mast on the Lady Washington. The Lady Washington was built as a replica of one of the first two tall ships that sailed to the Pacific Northwest in 1787. Ally was really excited about it, but when the day came to leave she was so nervous she was in tears. I think she didn’t feel like she knew what was expected of her and if she was up for it. She went anyway. After a week and a half on the ship, they asked her to stay on longer as a paid crew member. My son (he was 16 at the time) went up and joined her for part of the summer too.

Both Ally and Sam have been back a few times.

After mentioning all this to her college advisor Mark, he ended up joining her for two weeks aboard the Lady which led to the two of them traveling up to Canada to meet with members of the Nuu-chah-nulth community to discuss the possibility of doing archaeology at the site where the original Lady Washington stopped for a while in the late 1700s.

Not letting her fear stop her from trying something new has led to such amazing adventures.

All photos in this post were taken by Ally.

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.