What We've Been Up To

Home sweet home!

You may or may not have noticed, but there has been very little blogging since our return seven (!) months ago. That really boils down to two reasons: 1) I can hardly be torn away from working, which contrary to all natural laws, I really, really like; and 2) we aren't doing anything interesting.

Despite these rather compelling reasons, I figured it's about time I recorded something about our uneventful lives back at home. I have a lot to catch up on, so it's a rather long one - I'm afraid I just don't have the motivation to break it into multiple posts as I probably should.


Travel memories on the wall.

Thanks to those who complained of blog withdrawal symptoms - that's nice to hear. And I understand to a certain extent, because I often suffer from travel withdrawal symptoms! We had such fun over there, and I'm so glad we kept a record of it so we can re-live it, too! And I promise to keep the blog faithfully next time we get on the road again.

Travel Plans

Fortunately, there will be some travel goodness to post in the not-so-distant future. Our first planned journey is a road trip to Minnesota this May. My grandma, and one of my aunts, and my two cousins live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and it's been a really long time since I've visited. And David has never been to that part of the country, so he's very excited to check it out.

We're going to take the opportunity to see what we can of the Great American West on the way over. The general itinerary is a week or so to get there, a week or two in Minnesota, and a week or so to get back. We haven't mapped our our exact route yet, but we're planning to hit some traditional attractions like Yellowstone and maybe Jackson Hole and maybe even Mount Rushmore, as well as any notable religious sights we can find to make the trip tax-deductible!

Farther afield, I'm really hoping time and funding will allow a trip to Japan this autumn. I've been wanting to go there for a long time, but it was even less handy from Europe than from Oregon. But now there's a direct flight from Portland to Tokyo, and we're ready to use it! They do some nice things with maple leaves in Zen gardens over there, so I think autumn would be ideal. Failing that, maybe we can make it over next spring for some cherry blossoms.

Moving Plans

In home news, the current lease on our apartment ends in early July, after which we might move to Central Oregon. We've been doing a lot of pondering where to put down some proverbial roots, with the three consistent finalists being the Portland area, the Seattle area, or the Bend area. England and Germany are tempting also, but for now it's nice to be in the home county. We may reassess that in 5 or 10 years!

Among the America options, Bend usually comes out on top for both of us. Beautiful scenery, wonderful weather, less people, something a little different from where we've always lived but still in Oregon... good stuff. And David's friend who's in the mortgage business recently came back from a trip to Bend raving about all the cheap, brand-new houses to be hand over there. Oh boy!

I have, however, just discovered that Bend doesn't have a Burgerville, which is a problem. What's the deal with that?? The closest one is in Albany, which is a 2.5-hour drive! Granted, that's closer than it had been the last three years, but still. Rough.

Now it's been years since either of us has actually seen Bend, so before we get too hasty we'll take a short trip sometime soon to check it out and see if we still love it. If we do, we might start out in an apartment in July and see how it is to live there before looking into buying a house. I don't even want to think about moving all my books again, but a house would be really nice.

The Here and Now


Our apartment is on the middle level towards the right.

In the meantime, we are really happy where we are. We miss England and Europe very much, but for now it is really good to be home and relax for awhile. We like our apartment, we like each other, and we like our daily activities, so life is very good.

I really couldn't be happier with my job. I don't think anyone would have ever described me as a workaholic before, but now it's nearly impossible to tear me away from the computer. But it's easy to be motivated when it involves my favorite subjects (currently religion, history, art, travel, photography), when I know that the more I work, the more money I make (and I really want that house!), and there are always new and different things to do.


My office, behind the couch.

To indicate the variety of forms "webmastering" can take, in the last few months I've:

- researched and written a lot of stuff about churches/temples/synagogues/museums
- learned a new web programming language (PHP, which I'm gradually converting all of Sacred Destinations to - see Assisi for a completed example)
- experimented more with web design (giving ReligionFacts a makeover in the process)
- figured out how to fix our less-than-great photos in Photoshop, and
- learned more about marketing and advertising than I ever thought I'd know.

And back in November, I launched a third website, although it's really an extension of an old one. It's called Sacred Destinations Photography and its main purpose is to sell our best travel photos. I had already sold a handful of photos through enquiries to Sacred Destinations, but it was a bit of a hassle to arrangement payment and download for each one. The site took a long time to design and some money to set up (for database software and hosting space), but now it's mostly automated so I'm hoping it will save time in dealing with photo requests and make us some extra income.



I haven't promoted it much yet (more photos to upload first) but it's been moderately successful so far. Our photos have been published in various interesting places, including a photo of a museum artifact in A History of Britain, photos from Martin Luther's house for a book on the development of the German language, and photos of historic Spanish synagogues for Jewish Living Magazine.

But the very best one was the cover of Oxford Today, the university magazine. The publisher wanted to use the photo even before she knew I was an alumna, which made it even better. It's a detail of a stained glass window in the University Church in Oxford - you can see the cover under "Trinity 2008" here. I was so proud.

I've also got big plans to sell contributors' photos on my website for a commission, but that could be a full-time job in itself and I just don't have time to deal with it yet. And as if all that wasn't enough, I've got all kinds of ideas swimming around in my head for more websites! I wish I had time to try them all out, but hopefully I will live long enough to get around to most of them eventually. In the meantime, I am keeping plenty busy with the first three!

Of course, like any job it does have downsides. Captioning and editing hundreds of photos can become very tedious, there are always too many e-mails to answer, the to-do list is endless and occasionally overwhelming, there's no health insurance (we bought some directly from Kaiser for a not-horrible rate), and I have to pay employer taxes as well as employee taxes. But these are hardly anything to complain about given the benefits, and I feel extraordinarily lucky.

I've actually always been pretty lucky in jobs, come to think about it. Well, except for that summer in college I cleaned rich people's houses. And the other summer I got up at 4:00 AM to boil bagels. And most of you know about the llamas. But still.

As for David, he is possibly even more thrilled with his job: house husband extraordinaire! Since we got back, he has applied to various jobs and put on the suit for an interview with an accounting employment agency, but nothing has come his way so far. That's unusual for him, but not surprising in this lovely economic climate of ours.

And now our long road trip is just over a month away and we may be moving out of the area a couple months after that, so we've decided not to worry too much about it for now. Thankfully, especially given the aforementioned economy, my websites are still doing well enough to support both of us comfortably. Paying a mortgage and supporting our travel habit will likely require two incomes, but hopefully David will be able to find something good in Bend (or wherever we end up) later in the summer. He's also pondering various self-employment ideas, so the future is open and exciting for him, too.


David in his office/computer repair shop.

In the meantime, David is doing a fantastic job of taking care of just about everything so I can focus on my work. He recently gave my computer a complete upgrade and now he's working on the Herculean task of our 2008 taxes, which are complicated to say the least. (Since we spent nearly the entire year on a "business trip," there are a lot of expenses to compile!) And he does the vast majority of the cleaning, the cooking, and the shopping so I can work - all without complaining. I'm not kidding. Quite a catch, this one.

In his spare time, David has fashioned his own desk and cat tower (see below) out of wood, done some golfing, joined a few hunting and hiking trips at the beach with his friends, fixed the computers of virtually every member of our families, and become an expert on such gadgets as speaker cables and flashlights. Good times!

The Cat

As you know, neither of us has much interest in reproducing. Instead, we have one spoiled little kitty that makes us very happy. Her name is Emma. We got her and her sister Sydney as kittens shortly after we got married.

They stayed with my parents while we were in Europe, during which time Sydney took quite a liking to Dad (and vice versa). She's also gotten a little weird in the head, and we fear a small apartment may not be large enough to contain her personality. So we've left Syd with Dad for now, but we picked up Emma shortly after we got settled in our apartment.

Emma has been a wonderful addition to our little family. She is very sweet and spunky, she mostly behaves, and she seems to know exactly what poses the humans find impossibly cute. She has David so wrapped around her paw that he built her a wooden tower, which she loves. And now I will inflict cat photos on you - dog people can use the scroll bar.








Seattle Trip

We have made one small trip since our return, which I neglected to mention on the blog. Last September, we went to a mini-reunion of the Hayes family, which was so fun. It involved a dinner in downtown Seattle followed by a brunch in a suburb the next morning, with a slightly different group.

David and I stayed one night at a fantastic hotel near Pike Place called Hotel 1000. We got upgraded to their Executive Suite for free upon arrival! That never happens to us. It was huge and gorgeous. We had a couple hours to walk around before dinner, so we visited Pike Place and took some city photos.


Fill-from-ceiling tub in our hotel room. Needless to say, it was pretty wonderful.


Greg Kinnear in the lobby of our hotel!






Mrs. Beesley's is a cherished tradition from my childhood trips up to Grandma's house. It has really yummy hot dogs and many flavors of milkshakes! Look for it about halfway between Portland and Seattle off I-5. You won't regret it.

Other Highlights of Home

And finally, here are some random nice memories of being back home, which I might have mentioned in the blog if I had been blogging.

1. Seeing family and friends again. And there are still many friends we have not seen yet! I'm especially thinking of my fantastic former co-workers. To any of those who may still be reading, I'm very sorry and I hope we can remedy that before too long! I've been so involved with my little work-at-home world, and I'm lazy by nature about scheduling things, that the months have flown by.

2. It's not like we didn't eat well overseas (you saw the pictures), but re-introduction to beloved American culinary delights has been quite a highlight. I think we may be single-handedly supporting the ongoing success of the Hillsboro and Beaverton Burgervilles. Whole Foods, Safeway, Chipotle, Red Robin, McMenamins and Rose's Deli are also doing well from us. It's good to be home. The new-found appreciation we had for the American supermarket back in August has still not faded, and it's nice to have a kitchen to cook in again.

3. As a subset of the above, a special shout-out to Kashi frozen waffles. Have you tried these things? They are marketed as healthy stuff (and they are), but they are some of the most delicious things ever. Chewy and crispy. And they make the kitchen smell like vanilla as they toast.

I missed these terribly while we were gone and I've been having them just about every morning since we got back! I especially recommend the original Seven-Grain and Heart-to-Heart Oat varieties, served crispy with pure maple syrup. Kashi also makes some really nice shredded wheat cereal that we both love.

4. Watching the Olympics. I may have already mentioned this in an earlier blog, but the Olympics were on when we arrived home and we watched the last few days in the living room of our new apartment. We had the requisite new HD-TV but no furniture, so we sat in green canvas lawn chairs from G.I. Joe's (pardon me, Joe's) and used an upturned cardboard box as a coffee table. It was awesome. Michael Phelps is a pretty good swimmer.

5. Other selected American television has been a nice highlight of being home as well. We kept up with some of our favorite shows during our trip, but watched them on a tiny laptop screen propped up awkwardly on a hotel bed. Now we get to watch them on a nice TV sitting on a real couch!

Our current favorite is probably Lost, which has somehow managed to break the typical pattern and still be good and unique after several seasons. We are also fans of The Mentalist (left), which is surprisingly cheerful and funny for another crime-solving show.

I have also really been enjoying Gilmore Girls these days. It was on TV from 2000 to 2007 and I'd never watched any of it before, but I've been renting it on DVD from Netflix. It's a light comedy about a single mother in her mid-30s, her super-smart teenage daughter who eventually goes to Yale, and all their wacky friends and family.

An episode or two of the Girls makes such a relaxing break from work when I'm starting to get burned out - I settle in my little recliner, sometimes get a cat on my lap, and enjoy the world of a small town in Connecticut where everyone is smart, eccentric and funny and makes references to literature and popular culture in passing conversation and nothing too horrible ever happens. It's fantastic. I'm very sad that I'm up to Season 6 already.

6. The presidential election. It was pretty cool arriving home just in time to vote in the most exciting election I can remember. The timing also meant that we were first introduced to the candidates from a European perspective, which was interesting. The campaign was big news over there, and Obama spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin before we came home. Incidentally, of all the people we talked to and the newspapers we read, I can't remember one hoping that McCain would win - click the photos below for some examples!


Me voting. Not staged at all.

I hear it's not polite to talk about politics, but I would like to record for posterity that I am a big Obama fan. In a nutshell, it's because he's young, thoughtful and open-minded, he has a worldview that actually goes beyond America, he's intelligent and well-spoken, and I agree with most of his opinions. And while McCain certainly seems to be a good guy (except for some of his later campaign tactics), he is not the guy to lead the country. And don't even get me started on Palin.

So it was really exciting to watch the election results in November and the inauguration in January. It was a great way to celebrate coming back to America, and I think it helped me appreciate some of the excitement people felt about the Kennedys - a young and attractive president who inspires hope and a beautiful young family in the White House.

Of course, Obama entered office as such a beloved superstar that he pretty much has nowhere to go but down from here, but so far I've not been disappointed with my choice. Here's hoping he manages to build some roads and some wind turbines and get David a job.

7. A white Christmas - or white Christmastime, at least. Since I remember many winters with no snow at all, it was really nice of Oregon to welcome us to our first Christmas back home with the pretty white stuff.


Snowy view from our apartment.


We saw The Nutcracker on December 21, and walking around Portland in the snow was magical.

8. The Honda Ridgeline. I'm still not sure about its appearance, but this is one quality vehicle David picked out. He still loves it, and I am more and more impressed with it. It is so pleasant to ride in, it has amazing traction technology (David tried hard to spin out in snow and gravel and mostly failed), and it just seems to be well-designed all over.


David heading out to try out the truck's traction control back in December.

Unfortunately, a few days ago it was injured in a small accident. David was driving into Portland when traffic came to sudden halt before the tunnel; his excellent brakes stopped him in time, but a girl in an old Honda Civic rear-ended him. It was at a slow speed and both she and David were completely unharmed, thankfully, but David's bumper is scratched and has a little crack. He has really been babying the truck so it was very sad to have it damaged. The driver is from Mississippi and has no insurance, but so far she's been very apologetic and willing to pay for its repair (estimated at $800+). She met David at the Honda shop yesterday when he dropped it off; he should have it back good as new on Thursday.

The upside is that it revealed another nifty design feature on the truck. After the accident, the side panel behind the wheel was all wonky and looked horrible. But David pushed on it a bit and it snapped right back into place with no apparent damage! Yes, new cars are half made of plastic, but sometimes that has its advantages!

There. Now that I've gotten this long-overdue update out of the way, I'll try to post random unimportant things occasionally until our next trip, when I'll definitely blog more regularly. Thanks for sticking with us despite months of silence!