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.