Kimberly KG

The Sandia mountains, as visible from Sandia Park, New Mexico. I love that mountain.

I wrote that last post much later than I should have, but I tried to write it as I had intended. Unfortunately, this post involves the death of a young person. Please skip this if you want or need to.

As I mentioned, Ally has gotten really close to all her shipmates. We have been hearing all kinds of fun stories about them and were excited to meet them this summer. Unfortunately, one of them died early Sunday morning.

The whole time she’s been on the ship and throughout the month she was home, Ally has been telling fun stories about Troy. Troy knew pretty early in childhood that he wanted to be a pirate. I understand he was fourteen when he decided he wanted to work on the Lynx. He dressed as a pirate whether he was on the ship or not. This was his life. He appreciated good rum and good root beer. Ally said Troy would often interrupt her when they were working together to point out a fun bird or a cloud that looked like a dragon. Ally had us mail her tricorn hat to her so she could complete her own outfit to be able to go out dressed appropriately with him. He was well known and well loved on the island.

Troy was tragically hit by a car and killed early Sunday morning while walking back to the ship. The driver left the scene.

The sailing community and the local community have all rallied around the crew of the Lynx and are being so kind. This is unfortunately not the first time Ally has lost a close friend that was near her age. I’m so grateful she has lovely people to lean on through this.

Troy had so much whimsy, love and life left to give. The knowledge that he was living the life he dreamed of has helped them cope with his loss. There’s a lesson in there, I guess.

Last November, I wrote about Ally’s Fun Adventure where she was asked to help a tall ship off the east coast of the US with a transit and got on a plane the next day. I’ve alluded to this a couple times, but not shared what has happened since.

She originally volunteered for 2 weeks, which would cover the transit from Virginia down to Georgia and then another week or so with local sails near St. Simons Island. By the time they finished the transit and got to Georgia, she had been offered a full time job. This isn’t surprising; this happens pretty regularly when people get to know her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. The atmosphere on the Lynx was different than the Lady Washington and she had been working on plans of her own in Oregon when this all came about. She committed to staying for a month more which had her coming home just a couple days before Christmas. Over that month though, she got to know everyone and also learned that the Lynx would be participating in Sail 250.

Sail 250 is an event to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of America, with tall ships coming from around the world to participate. The Lynx will lead the Eagle into New York harbor on the 4th of July. The opportunity to see so many ships and meet so many fellow sailors is pretty exciting. Ally decided to go back to the ship after Christmas and committed to staying on through the summer season. We are super excited for her to have this experience. We’ll be flying out to New York to see her and the ships ourselves.

She left in early February. They have been doing a bunch of maintenance getting the ship ready for another season. She fixed the flag you’ll see in one of the photos, but she’s also doing a huge amount of sanding, painting, varnishing and oiling. It’s a lot of work but she’s been having a great time working and having fun adventures with the other sailors.

I should have written this post when I originally meant to, about the time she left Oregon.

I’m now quite adept at postponing the process of making actual plans for things I want to do until they become impossible or prohibitively expensive. It’s gotten to a point where I rather want someone to celebrate with me every time I leave the house for something that isn’t mandatory. This wasn’t always the case and I don’t like it.

However, plans have finally been made. Matt and I will be going to New York in July and PyCon next month in California. Today, for no real reason, I drove myself to a small town at the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula.

This has all been so much more challenging than I would like, but I’m working on it. Sheesh.

When I asked for a dinner suggestion the person at the front desk of this hotel said, “There’s an Applebee’s and some fast food. This is a retirement community and everything shuts down early so everything else is closed.” Hmm. I managed to find a local cafe, but it turns out they were hosting karaoke. The age of the diners and singers suggested she was right about the retirement community comment. I’ve never seen sober people have so much fun doing karaoke in my life. One man had a train whistle and a harmonica and got the whole restaurant to join him in singing “City of New Orleans”. I’m glad I got out of my house today.

Ally has been asking me to make her a sling bag for a long while. She’s particular about her tastes though and I didn’t want to make her a bag that she wouldn’t use. I finally asked her to choose a pattern from the many she had sent me and then we looked at what vinyl we could use from my stash before heading to the fabric store to buy the rest. We were both super excited about the fabrics she picked out. Unfortunately, I had to order the hardware and it didn’t get her until the day before she left. (I guess I still need to write about that, she’s back on the ship!)

You know that feeling when you want something to be perfect and you’re not sure you’re up to the task? I started panicking about every detail. What if the mix of fabrics is not right? What if I screw up the curves? What if what if what if?

It took me a lot longer to work through that and finish the bag than I would have liked.

However, it’s done and I’m so happy with how it turned out! Matt designed and cut the label on the laser cutter. It definitely elevates the whole project. The bag arrived safely in Georgia this week and Ally loves it! Mission success! Some of her shipmates would like one now too! Ha!

There was another factor (or two) that slowed me down. They are adorable, but so curious. Using a rotary cutter and having a cat leap from the ironing board to your shoulder is disconcerting. Being in the act of using a sewing machine with the needle bobbing up and down is not the best time to figure out you have a curious cat 2 inches from the needle.

The pattern was made by Kandou Patterns. The vinyl, zipper and hardware are products from Zipper Valley.

For whatever reason, I usually upload these photos to my Shows collection and call it good, but I want to highlight the last two musicals I’ve seen.

The Notebook was included in the regular season tickets for Broadway in Portland and it is the favorite this year for both Matt and I. The way they handled the different timelines was really fun.

Les Misérables was not part of the regular season, but Ally and I both really wanted to see it. With Ally being out of town, I didn’t plan to get tickets. Then my neighbor asked if I was going after she had gotten a single ticket and I managed to buy a single ticket for the seat right next to her! I’m so glad! The actors, their voices, the sets, the lighting, the music, everything was amazing!

I was trying to pay attention to the meeting, I promise.

First there was one.

Then two.

Then three.

The bird left just as happy as it arrived.

A young man on my team at work shared recently that he was waiting to hear if his mom had cancer. Not surprisingly, the fear was evident in his face and his voice. Gratefully, the doctors gave her an “all clear” not too much later. While we talked, I couldn’t help but think about how young he looked. He IS young.

I was his age when I found out my mom had cancer. I didn’t feel young at the time; I very much felt like a fully grown adult who mostly had things figured out. I definitely didn’t. I have wished for more years with my mom a million or so times, but it hit me pretty hard this week how young I really was.

I don’t usually post much about my work. I also haven’t been posting here as much as I’d like. Those two things are related.

I joined this company in September to manage a team of engineers. That team has a nice variety of experience levels, backgrounds, interests and skills. They cover the full stack and QA. It’s a good group of people. It is bigger than a 2 pizza team but not too bad. The most obvious challenge the team faces is timezones. We are spread from the west coast of North America to Bosnia. I do 1:1s with folks starting at 7 a.m. for me and team meetings at 8. The people outside of North America log off for the day when those are done. It was a struggle to get going with this schedule, but it’s been working. Living somewhere near the middle would be better. Oregon is not that.

In early November there was a plan to shuffle some folks around so I was expecting to add four more engineers to my team starting in January. This is now way more than a 2 pizza team, but still the same set of time zones.

In the middle of December I got an email announcing that I would be managing a team of engineers in India due to some broader org changes. On paper, this made sense. That team is responsible for a core capability and my other team was so far the only consumer.

You know where it doesn’t make sense? Timezones! Those lovely humans are thirteen and a half hours ahead of me most of the year. I can’t be the kind of manager I want to be for a group of people that the only time we can overlap is for a short window of time in the early morning or late at night.

I’m pushing for them to get a manager that lives a whole lot closer. I’m worried people might question my work ethic, but I’m willing to take that risk. I want them to get a manager that can help them grow just as much as I want my evenings back.

Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿

Various clubs around the area, including the astronomy club, were offered tickets to an advanced screening of this movie. I was really excited to see this and I enjoyed it as much as I hoped I would.

Everyone was warned not to record any part of the movie and then people kept standing in the doorway with some little device that they used to scan people, presumably making sure no one was recording? That was a little weird. Separately, this was my first time going to a movie at the Lloyd Center Regal theater. I don’t know of another IMAX theater in Portland with seats that are so comfortable.

Watched: Kiki’s Delivery Service 🍿

Thanks to @manton for the pointer, we saw Kiki’s Delivery Service in 4K IMAX. I’ve seen the dubbed (non 4K IMAX) version a huge number of times, but we watched this one with subtitles. They extended some of the scenes and changed the nature of others a little bit, but it’s still just delightful. One of my favorites.

Having firelight be the theme for day 3 of the 12 Days of Winter Wonder was convenient after the power went out at 1 a.m. and didn’t come back until 8 this evening.

This is a work in progress, but it looks cute with the candle light. Would I recommend stitching by candle light? I would not.

Day 2 of the 12 Days of Winter Wonder is cozy.

When Ally moved home earlier this year, she came with two cats. (She shares custody of them with her best friend.) Neptune more moved into my lap than into our home, however. While Neptune sleeps in my lap, his brother Beau is often snuggled near my feet under the blanket I drape over myself. When I think of “cozy”, I can’t help but think of the hours spent each day with fuzzballs keeping my warm.

I thought it might be fun to participate with the 12 Days of Winter Wonder photo challenge. Portland hasn’t been below freezing once this fall, so of course the first prompt would be frost.

This photo represents a happier part of a stressful winter day.

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.)