Kimberly KG

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.

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.

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

“The thing is… she’s short!”

It was so unexpected, I laughed out loud.

I was at lunch with my son. The first week of the term just ended so I was asking him about school. He was in the middle of telling me about a young woman he worked with over the summer that’s also doing a physics and math double major with a nuclear engineering minor. When they met she apparently (jokingly, I assume!) said that he was her nemesis! They are both at the same point along their degree which is surprising given the winding path Sam has taken to land here.

It turns out they have 3 different classes together this term, two of which are scheduled just 10 minutes apart. According to Google Maps, it’s a 15 minute walk.

Ah! I could see where this was going. She told him she couldn’t keep doing that walk with him!

My beautiful child is 6'4". This poor woman is somewhere around 12 to 14 inches shorter. I’m sure the image I have in my head of her jogging to keep up with his long stride is quite exaggerated, but it makes me laugh every time I picture it. He was walking slower to make it easier for her!

He’s planning to offer to speed walk ahead starting tomorrow so he can save them both seats near the front and she doesn’t have to show up out of breath. Hopefully this will convince her that he’s not out to get her. Ha!

I had other plans for today, but I woke up with a notification about this on my phone so I figured I’d go take some pictures around my “war ravaged Portland”.

On my way down town, I stopped by to see Portlanders doing/watching what seems to be everyone’s favorite sport.

I parked near the south waterfront which has been the site of many protests. (Protesting is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, in case you were wondering.)

I then wandered over to Pioneer Courthouse square which is another place people like to gather.

I then decided to go to the site of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Portland. If you don’t live in Portland, the story you heard about Portland might have been that these destroyed the city. The reality was far from that. They took place in a 3 block park in front of the Multnomah County justice center and the main lasting damage was the smell from the tear gas used by police.

While I was sitting there enjoying the park, a woman walking by stopped to comment on how lovely it was and how she had promised herself to get outside every day to celebrate our beautiful city.

Some more photos I took while walking through downtown.

The line in front of the Apple store:

About these big protests at the ICE facility that supposedly justify the authorization of “full force” by the military?

This shot includes the full site of the ICE protests.

There were 2 people in lounge chairs on the closer block in the above photo, but this is the rest of everyone protesting.

The line in front of the Apple store (above) has more people.

As for any nearby property damage, this is what I saw.

As I was waiting at the light to leave this area, I did see 12-15 unmarked SUVs with dark windows where the two people in the front seat were all wearing something covering the majority of their faces pulling into the ICE parking lot.

There ARE lots of other protests happening all around town. They involve mostly white or gray haired individuals, many of them sitting on mobility devices, decrying authoritarianism. Is Trump sending the military with authorization for full-force after those people? I suspect many more people would be out there if they didn’t have to work in order to support themselves and their families.

Is this what a war ravaged city looks like?

Week one of the new job is done. I haven’t met everyone on the new team yet, but the things I was impressed with in the interviews (mostly culture related) seem to be holding true. Adjusting my schedule to overlap with everyone in their different timezones is going more slowly than I’d like (getting over covid is probably related), but next week should be easier.

It’s a full stack engineering team with embedded QA. My limited front-end experience should make this more fun! Ha!

My husband and I were rear-ended this evening. It was not bad at all and it was at a terrible intersection so we drove nearly a quarter mile to find a safe parking lot to pull into. The young woman that hit us followed us all the way there. I looked at her as I put my mask on and my first thought was “she needs a hug.” I asked if I could give her a hug and she fully started sobbing.

It was hard to understand everything she was saying through her tears, but it seems she’s had a whole lot of bad luck recently.

We tried to calm her down. We tried to get her to reach out to someone that she knew. We tried to reassure her everything was going to be ok. In the end, I think the only thing we managed to do was to help her with the route to the house she was supposed to be delivering a DoorDash order to. I can’t help but wonder if I should have done more.

I really hope that young woman had a safe place to go home to tonight and good people that will answer when she calls.

I don’t really want to talk about the “big news” in the US, except to say that blaming/threatening the “radical left” when the shooter hasn’t been found doesn’t seem like the best course of action. Nor do I think that would make things better (by my definition of better) at any time.

Instead I’m going to post a picture of this little project I made to give away at a stitching event I’m going to with my sister this weekend.

Many years ago, I was tasked with defining a new architecture for getting pricing data into all stores globally for a ~$50B company. As you’d imagine, they were pretty concerned about making sure this was done well so I had to get buy-in for my design from many, many teams. The first bunch of meetings I lead went well, but at some point I started feeling like I was repeating myself (I was, but not to those people!) and so I started omitting crucial details. Fortunately, one of my teammates was good about making sure any gaps in my explanations were filled.

I was reminded of this yesterday.

Last night was the final session of the latest core (woodworking) tools class I’ve been helping to run. The main tool we cover in that session is the table saw. It’s the tool that most* students are particularly worried about and the tool that most shop attendants are nervous about when it comes to newer woodworkers. The instructor I was working with for the class is usually very consistent. Usually. Last night though, he was highly focused on the final part of the process for making a rip cut on the table saw while glossing over other important details. It turns out he was recently helping a new woodworker that kept getting kickback because she wasn’t clearing the wood after the cut was finished. Fortunately, we’ve led this class together enough times that I felt quite comfortable filling the gaps.

Being consistent is hard. It’s good to have people you can trust to help.

*Last night, one of the students was having so much fun. “Wee, this cuts like butter!” I’m glad she was having fun. I reminded her (in different words) that wood isn’t the only thing those tools cut like butter. A little bit of anxiety is a good thing sometimes. (SawStops are good too.)