It's been almost a year since we moved out of our trailer and we're feeling pretty settled into "the big house" as Stella calls it. The view here is good, the vibe is cozy and the combined effects of a cross country move, cancer, and parenting have taught us a great deal of appreciation for the space we have and the time we have in it.
This blog site was easy to keep up to date when we were living more adventurously. Putting a dramatic spin on things helped gloss over the difficulties of leaving all of our friends and family and trying to find our feet somewhere new. Lately there hasn't been much to tell and I'm real okay with that. I'm ready to settle in here for a bit until adventure starts throwing rocks at our bedroom window again.

So with that in mind, I'm gonna sign off. I've enjoying writing and it always warms my heart to think that people take the time to check in, but this was supposed to be a record of our attempt to have an adventure and it's stretched well beyond that.
Love from here.

tiff's gone for the weekend, leaving me ostensibly in charge. i can't say that i feel particularly in charge, more like a jockey hoping that the temperamental thoroughbred he's perched on makes it to the finish line without throwing him. (except that using a riding crop on a toddler is illegal). i've been trying to catch stella on my camera phone to keep tiffs maternal instinct in check. ( i keep picturing tiff at the airport, stomping her foot and saying "put me on the next plane to my baby!". )
it's been a while since just stella and i have hung out for a few days. as a two-year-old she is constantly engaged in a fully body exploration of her immediate surrounding accompanied by a steady and enthusiastic commentary on each facet of the experience. she's not shy about what she thinks. morning time is for "pushing buttons and hot coffee" (the computer) and afternoon is for "fixit bike-ride" (tinkering and biking). stella has her own sense of style and is generous with her opinions on fashion. nala d. dog, sasha rottenweiler and i are are looking nice this weekend in our hairbands and swim goggles.
we're enjoying the fall weather. opposite of kentucky, everything is getting greener as rain intermittently creeps in the same way drinking returns to recovered drunk; "i'll just have one a week, or maybe two or three...oh hell, gimme the bottle." but until we're caught in the full precipitating misery that is oregon winter, it gorgeous. (i.e. just a little tipsy)

Here's our new pad, an inviting old farmhouse on a hundred acre farm that backs up to the Mary's river and faces west. From the upstairs you can see the sun set over the coastal range at night. The fact that lawn service is included in the rental makes me think I'll wake up back in the trailer park and find out that it's just a dream. We are all enjoying the extra space, at least after a couple of days of trying to figure out exactly where Stella could be. I'd never realized how much easier child care was in a two room apartment.
I'm fresh back from Burning Man, which is never what I expect and always seems to pull the rug out from under me a little bit. The picture above is a steel sculpture called "Bliss Dance" and was my unquestioned favorite piece of art this year. This year, John and I spent most of our time rolling around on a pedal taxi and using a megaphone to create a radio station without a dial.
When I was a kid, I loved putting on costumes and playing the part. Burning man offers a similar chance to escape some day-to-day habits and ways of being. Or at least that's how I justify wearing fishnets and swinging around a cage at a dance club. If you are troubled by this sort of behavior, be comforted by the fact that I was sharing the cage with a psychiatrist and we've worked out how we feel about all of this. Trust us, we're doctors...
Tiff has finished 4 out of 7 weeks of radiation and continues to be casually courageous about it. We snuck in a whirlwind camping trip in the mountains this weekend between treatments and were rewarded with some phenomenal views of the Cascade range from atop Black Crater. The mixture of lava, snow and wildflowers was amazing and typical of the bizarre and beautiful landscapes in Oregon, a state seemingly designed by a drunk geologist.

In the gospel Matt (nobody who knows him calls him Matthew) one of the disciples asks Jesus what they're supposed to take with them to spread the word. I'm gonna paraphrase a bit, but the Big J tells him "takes your shoes, a walking stick, and your faith." Often the right thing to take is nothing. When we headed cross-country last year we went from an 1800 sq ft house into a 74 sq ft trailer (disregarding the shameful tipi incident) Over the course of 8 months we went from back-patting ourselves about our nomadic ways to drinking heavily in a trailer park. Our desperation lead us to Justin and Lina's ranch for troubled gypsies and our plans to be here for a month or two turned into seven. This place has been the first fertile ground our kentucky-blown seed has fallen on and we've started to take root in Oregon thanks to their family. If we hadn't been in the trailer, we couldn't have ended up here and here was where we needed to be for a while.
(photo: mary's peak summit, highest peak in the coastal range, with sarah and sebastion)

Tiffany and I are fundamentally uncomfortable with doing things normally. It keeps things around here lively (using a rickshaw to take stella to the playground or the shameful tipi incident for example) and makes for interesting conversations like "I'd live in a school bus if it had a deck and a hot tub." or "What if we lived in a pontoon boat and kayaked to shore for work?" The exception to our quest for novel approaches to housing is a particular farmhouse on our regular bike loop that we always always covet a little. It looks like the setting we would choose if we had to direct an autobiography about ourselves. And although I can't realistically cast a young Paul Newman as myself, it looks like we can at least get the house thanks to the rental section on craigslist. We move next week and for the first time in a long time we'll have room for guests, so come on; there's beer in the fridge and the toilet actually works. (cheers to all of guests this summer who slept in a tent on the porch and didn't mind me running the sewage pump while they showered)
(photo: the world's greatest campsite in northern washington)
After sarah and sebastion left, we headed up to Van Couver BC to intersect with my parents on their way to alaska. Van Couver is pretty amazing with the thousand acre Stanley Park in the city and incredible infrastructure for bikes, pedestrians, and public transit. Nonetheless, Tiffany and I independently arrived at the conclusion that Van Couver is strangely like Miami. Lots of small dogs and big hooters. (eerily big; at some point there's enough saline in there that just walking around qualifies as playing in the ocean)
stella with mild nose trauma but undaunted (unbridled even) spirit after a nosedive out of a restaurant chair

my good friend amy told me that if i didn't get up to speed on this blog that i was going to have to join facebook, so i'm typing as fast as i can. i tried facebook once, and i couldn't handle the pressure. (i was also a little disappointed in myself when i found out that ALL of my ex-girlfriends are now vegan yoga-nazis)

when tiffany and i got married we decided that our one rule was "keep it simple", and by the time it rolled around we had shuttle buses, bagpipe players, and the event had turned into a three day nuptialooza. likewise, this summer we decided to "just take it easy" and have some people out to visit. consequently, we had 6 weeks straight of guests and manic travel plans that took us from crater lake to canada. being around friends and family for so long was a real joy and seemed to put life back on track after being temporarily derailed by cancer. we also got to see and do things that we would have never done if not infected with the enthusiasm of good company.

(picture above: austin and john making snow-based cocktails at crater lake)
a highlight of the summer was a flight over crater lake, piloted by our friend rob. i'd never been in a plane that small, it felt like "herbie IV, herbie learns to fly".

looking down on crater lake from 11,000 feet or so.

Summer has finally hit in Oregon. The clouds that have filled the Willamette valley for six months have been replaced by 14 hours of sunlight and ridiculously amazing views of mountains on both horizons. Everyone is outside and the ER has been full of native oregonians wondering why their skin has been turning brown.
We have been gleefully inundated with visiting family and friends. Right now Tiffany's mother and grandmother are here and I've had the rare pleasure of spending time with four generations of a family. There's a genuine enthusiasm for life that runs through her family and watching Stella get to explore the beaches and forests with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother leaves me quietly overjoyed.
Tiffany's grandmother is a rare breed of woman. I met her several years ago when she came to Lexington to visit Tiffany. I had gotten a chocolate bar out of the cabinet and asked her if she'd like some chocolate. She said "yes, thank you" and then took the bar and put it in her purse. Yesterday we were all looking out over the ocean on a trail and she turned around to realize that Tiffany and her mother had already moved onto the next viewpoint. She turned around and jogged to catch up to them. I am amazed by her energy. She hasn't put up a fuss about being shuttled around in a oversized and overdecorated van and always seems to have an interesting story to tell. I recognized her sense of adventure in TIffany when Tiffany and I rented one of those fringe-roofed, four-wheeled, two person, bicycle tourist contraptions to explore Portland's riverfront. Thanks to some traffic detours around a festival we ended up accidentally merging onto a highway with out a bike lane and had to retreat offroad down a steep hill to get back to the bike lane with Stella bouncing around in the front basket.
The reflection off of the lens of the lighthouse at Yaquina bay, an hour west of Corvallis

Tiffany and I have been wondering if Stella will lack the sense of family and connection that we both associate with a southern upbringing (I never considered myself southern until I moved out here, but everyone here thinks an accent means you live on a plantation and eat okra) A lot of the experiences particular to our geographic upbringing have informed our notions of "normal" in a way that seems uncommon here. I think about going to the state fair and listening to a guy with a megaphone attract crowds with an offer of "a free flying-weasel window-sticker and a chance to talk to a real-life Budweiser girl." At age seven, I wasn't sure exactly what a Budweiser girl was or why she was wearing a swimsuit, but to her credit I have always had a deep and undying love for beer. Tiffany contributes the example of her cousin's friend named "Mater", short for "Tomato", short for "Tomato-head" for a congenital heart defect that made his face turn red when he got excited. Even at work the differences here are fairly astonishing. So far, after a year in the ER here, I have only had one patient drunkenly threaten me for somehow insulting his manly dignity by sewing up his scalp. His address: Winchester, Kentucky. No kiddin'.

Understanding how ancient fishes evolved from sea to land is easy in Oregon where there is little difference between the two environments. Spring has been wetter than a mermaid's beachtowel this year. It's been wet enough that I've heard people that were born and raised here say things like, "hmm, little dampish these days". I still suspect that native Oregonians are born with gills. We've been spending time in the coastal range which gets about 100 inches of rain per year. (That's the equivalent of two wet feet of rain per day.)
The further north you travel along oregon's coast, the wetter it gets, but the beaches become amazing collections of surf-splashed eroded lava rock formations and tree-lined cliffs along the shore. We took some surfing lessons at cannon beach and after 3 days of trying, we can now get into our wetsuits without falling over.
For you parents-to-be, try to build the strength and composure you'll need by strapping a rabid ferret to your back and walking around town as if it were totally normal. If you've got a friend willing to talk jibberish through a megaphone at you, you'll be all set for toddler-times.
Haystack rock at cannon beach is covered by enormous starfish and a slow circling cloud of seagulls. Nala caught a nasty case of barnacles there.

SIT!

The New River Gorge is known as "the Grand Canyon of the east", which is unfair and unreasonable as a label. After all, our universe is "just a little one". Sometimes the scale of two things makes comparisons between them a bit tricky. What I'm getting at is that the New River Gorge in West Virginia is beautiful in a way that is singular and incomparable.
I worked there as a river guide when I was 18 and quickly adopted the other boaters' superstitious nature about what portends a good day on the river. Some people would never put a boat into the river backwards. Some would never take a boat with a certain number. Others, seemingly, never paddled a raft while sober.
The Gorge had a healthy population of iridescent blue damsel-flies that seemed drawn to our blue boats and yellow paddles. The combination of colors seemed to suggest romance to these miniature barnstormers. Either that, or they had an unnatural zest for piggy-back rides. In either case, they were frequently flitting about and often distractedly erratic in their flight patterns. Over the course of the summer, I figured out that if a damsel-fly landed on my paddle, we were guaranteed a good ride from there on out. Similarly, if a butterfly flew down the middle of the raft, we could run any line through any rapid with a level of confidence that only an 18 year old could muster.
I always wonder if it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but even if it was, why pass up a good excuse to have an awesome day? Signs and wonders are upon us; why not make the most of them? What we don't know about the universe makes what we do know negligible in comparison. Logic is a small dark cave where people hide from experience.
Spring is aggressively in effect in Oregon and you have to be careful where you walk or something will bloom at you. I was out inspecting some of the new arrivals in the yard yesterday when I heard a soft but widespread buzzing and noticed that the few whizzing sentries that normally surround the beehives had been replaced with a growing and frantic cloud of bees. The noise was hard to describe, like a bunch of Gregorian bees chanting, a deep and unprecedented BUZZ. The cloud briefly expanded and then fell into a tiny tornado that rose into a swirling column of bees stretching slowly towards the treetops and shimmering in the late afternoon sun. The column began to lean towards a particular tree as the bottom of the swarm left the ground and, like a giant buzzing slinky, the entire swarm regathered on the highest branch and compacted itself into a writhing ball.
I can't wait to figure out what it means.

just some pictures

My friend and neighbor, Ronja, has the good fortune to be raised in a bilingual home. (mostly good fortune anyway, being reprimanded in German is a little scary for anybody) Ronja frequently stops by to give us an update on the goings on around the farm. She is a skilled and enthusiastic conversationalist and if inquisitiveness was a sport, she would be sponsored by Nike. She has taught me an important but subtle point about grammar. (For the record, I don't put much stock in grammar, it's just another example of majority rule) She often uses "them" where I would use "they". For example, she might say "I saw the dogs in the yard, them are digging holes." Initially I found this endearingly wrong, but I've realized that I am the one in error. "Them" is a much more specific and intimate pronoun than "they". When she says "them" she means "them, you know, the dogs" whereas "they" is a much more aloof and distant sort of thing. Or as Tiffany says, "they" adds 50 feet to whoever you're talking about.
Stella is in some kind of rapid mutation phase of toddlerhood. Her potbelly has slowly whittled away, apparently used as a fuel for her volatile opposition to all parenting. We can be happily osmonding along as a family when one of us makes the fatal mistake of suggesting that Stella do something (even if she is already doing it with apparent enjoyment) and then we are locked into a deadly contest of wills. The other day I offered her a spoon and it was like I had accidentally stepped into a cagematch with a rabid badger. She has also decided that 530 is a damn fine time to get up in the morning. I told Tiffany last night that if they made home vasectomy kits, I would have used five of them this week.
I love toddlers but them are ridiculous little tyrants sometimes. Maybe Stella's middle name should have been Bonaparte instead of Firefly.

(Dr Short, Dr Sewalls, and Dr Pope making rounds)

late night tangential beer rant
My friend Troy has the habit of accidentally changing my life with random pieces of conversation. He was a year ahead of me in residency and while I was an intern working through the endless ankle sprains and noses full of Legos, I watched the second year residents with a mixture of awe and envy as they sorted through a constant stream of disease and recklessness gone awry. On an afternoon particularly ripe with chaos and it's aftermath of chart-work, I watched Troy idly eating french fries and looking around. when I asked him the secret of his fast fed zen state he answered, "There's always time to eat and there's always time to dictate." This may sound inconsequential but it has helped me in the ER over and over again. When the world is falling down you can only put the pieces back up one at a time and you sure can't do it well when you're hungry. (Troy is also the person that said "Why don't you go to Belize?", but that's a whole different story.)
It seems like when I talk to other doctors, we inevitably talk about what we would do if we weren't doctors. I always wonder if pastors do the same thing. A couple of years ago, though, Troy put the question to rest for me when he said "I'll never know as much about anything as I know about medicine, how would I not be a doctor in some way?" Maybe that's the whole point of the current soul-crushing approach to medical education; it melds your own identity with that of the profession so thoroughly that there's no separating it back out later on.
These last couple of months, watching my wife be a "cancer patient", has filled my brain-bucket to the brim with thoughts about what it is to be a doctor in this country. Western medicine is so proudly focused on a cause-and-effect model of healthcare. "Well sir, you have pneumonia because this bacteria grew in your lungs and this here chemical happens to make bacteria do the hokey-pokey til they waste away and die, so take it for a week and give me 500$." This narrow view and the solutions it creates can certainly be a miracle; Tiff wouldn't be alive without the wizardry of anesthesiology and modern surgery. That being said, I've also seen lives saved by compassion, hope, and placebos.
As doctors, we have actively participated in creating the abysmal state of health in this country. By allowing the profession to be turned into an industry, we have given up the right to use our intuition and compassion as we see fit in favor of guidelines and "standards of care". By allowing ourselves to only be paid for the treatment of disease we have crippled our ability to promote good health. By allowing insurance and pharmaceutical companies to insert themselves between ourselves and the patients we treat, we have severed the most important relationship in medicine.
In lieu of a real solution, I think it's time to listen to the advice of another of my ER mentors, the good doctor Sewalls, "Work's over, time to go home and give it to the wifey." (To be fair, this advice was accompanied by a dance that looks like riding a mechanical bull without using your hands)

Just a few more pictures from the eastern adventure. Here's the world's cutest mad scientist, Dr Frankenpampers.
No woman can resist the manly splendor of a well-fitting cumberbund.
I'll never reaize my childhood dream of becoming a kangaroo and bounding through the outback with only a pouch-full of possessions, but these toddler containment devices are a close approximation. Bounding in sand is a bit trickier than I'd hoped, though.
Two strange things from Kentucky.

This past month of travel has been a strange enchilada; the melted cheese of good company mingled with the chili peppers of stress. (always striving for the world's dumbest analogy, that's my mission) Tiff continues to amaze me with her ability to keep on truckin' as far as cancer goes and Stella has earned the travel toddler of the year award for her unending enthusiasm for new places. (Every time we pull the van up to somebody's house, she shouts "home!".) I think that over the past 4 weeks we've seen everyone we know east of the Mississippi and I'm ready to ship all of them to Oregon. I'm still not remotely ready to move back to Kentucky, the land of the chunky, cigarette-smoking, street-sloths (I like to think of them as a cross between monkeys and tugboats) and the backward politicians they vote for. For the record, if I didn't love Kentucky so much, I wouldn't be so fed up with way it's been treated, but I'm awfully tired of seeing the place ruined by a combination of apathy and greed.

Atlanta: Thank god we don't have health insurance. Being uninsured, we were able to use the free market to select the surgeon we wanted instead of being locked into a "provider network". This lead us to Dr. Bill Barber in Atlanta, and I can't say enough good things about him. His combination of compassion and skill makes him the rarest sort of doctor these days and his abilities likely saved Tiffany from needing radiation treatments. I'm a lot happier to pay his bill than I am to pay an insurance payment. (Blue Cross canceled Tiffany's insurance application just for having had a mammogram, even before the results came back). When we called from Oregon to schedule the surgery, the southern drawl and easy friendliness of the office staff warmed our hearts and our entire experience with the Piedmont hospital was that of compassion and concern. We were also thankful for Tiffany's parents' lake-house as a place to recover. It felt like a much better space to get well than in a hospital I am very glad to have married into such a caring family. We had planned this month-long trip before we ever suspected that Tiff had cancer, but it sure turned out to be a great time for it.

Florida: Phase two of recovery was some active re-creation at the beach with the family Sewalls. Florida is always a strange mix of tourons and natural beauty but when it wants to be pretty, it sure can. The emerald waters and sun-bleached sands soothed my soul. Stella enjoyed the surf and did her best impression of a sandpiper, charging in and out of the surf and shrieking at the waves. Good mojo to the Sewalls family: Travis and Andra for feeding us, Harper for reminding me how much fun sandcastles are, and Conley for the best advice I've ever gotten on dancing- "Just spell you name with your feet!". Cheers to Tiff for having a mastectomy and heading to the beach to hang out in a bikini for a week. Someday I hope to deserve the wife and friends I've got, but I'm not wearing a Speedo, even if I do get cancer.

Alabama: I know two awesome people from Alabama. That's about all I can say for the place.
Kentucky: We spent most of our time at Gainesway farm, a magical place inhabited by the King of Trees. Gainesway is a 1600 acre horse farm that has become an arboretum under the guiding hand of my good friend Ryan. There's no place like it. Ryan and I were both married there (not to each other, thankfully. Neither of us looks good in a dress) and when I think of Kentucky I think of the rolling pastures and verdant splendor of Gainesway farm. The week was largely spent planning an Alice in Wonderland themed party with our friends from Lexington. Seeing all the people we've missed in Lexington was a cold beer for my soul's afternoon of lawn-mowing.