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News From Tualatin

Wow, that was a quick month!

We had originally scheduled ourselves to be here only two weeks … just enough to receive our furniture and put the stuff together … before returning to Colorado.  I’m so glad we changed our communal mind.  If  “home is where the heart is,” Oregon is probably more like home now than Colorado.

Ben is such a cutie.  One of the tasks we have done here is to put “safety latches” on all the cabinet doors … Ben’s scooting around and pulling himself up and getting into things pretty good, now.  We all went on a walk to the park next to Morgan and Aaron’s “old” house with Ben the other day, and it was fun to watch him play there.  He really enjoyed steering the wheel on the play structure, and now seems to like swinging a lot (he didn’t used to like it much.)  He also seems to have a real fondness for wood chips.  But, more than anything, Ben loves cars, trucks, busses, “diggers,” etc.  The bigger and louder, the better.

The local historical society ran a steam locomotive down from Tigard (north of us) to Salem (south of us) one evening a week ago.  All those songs about “hear that lonely whistle blow?”  They aren’t kidding … if you’ve never heard a steam whistle singing in the distance, you’ve really missed a treat (although I'm weird enough to really like diesel horns, too!).  The loco made it’s return trip when Ben was down here, and we were able to run out and see it go by on the tracks about a block from our house.  Cool!

Living here has taken some getting used to.  One thing I notice is that the wind doesn’t blow very much;  why would that be?  Very few crickets (more’s the pity) or bugs of any kind (yay!)  It’s  been hot, and pay attention when people tell you “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”  Take it from a guy who was raised where the humidity routinely is in the single digits that hot days where the humidity is routinely in the triple digits seem hotter.

Some of the triple-digit humidity here is in the form of rivers.  Now let us be clear on this … these are real rivers.  With water in them all the time, not like in Colorado.  On the other hand, whereas, in Colorado, any running water tends to be intermittent, paltry and fast, the rivers here are substantial, full-time, and slow.  In most places, it hardly seems like the rivers are moving at all.  But where there’s an obstruction, or where there’s something afloat on the flow, you can see that that is a misconception … the water’s just clipping along placidly.

The rivers in Portland play the same role as the mountains in Colorado Springs, to a degree.  The entire town orients to them, the streets are laid out to suit them, and the civic consciousness is founded on them.  But in Colorado Springs, practically wherever you are, you can look up and see the mountains, whereas here, you pretty much have to be at the river to see the river.  Unlike the mountains, which in Colorado Springs are always to the west, the rivers here are all over the damn place – north, south, east, west, you name it.  They’re always downhill, though.  Our condo is just a couple of blocks uphill from a beautiful stretch of the Tualatin River

We’re going to just miss Bens’ first birthday (WOW! already!?), but we had a Ben / Aaron early-birthday party here last weekend for them to practice up.  We’ve had a fantastic time here on this visit … watching Ben change every day, and seeing Morgan grow into her role as a mom is delightful.  Aaron is a great dad … it’s fantastic to see Ben perk up when he hears Aaron come home from work each day.  They’re really buds.  Aaron is a great guy, and we’re lucky to have him in our family.

Well, we’re off to CSC tomorrow, and we’ll be back to Tualatin in November for “the holidays.”  It’ll be great fun to be here with the Kunzes for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

More later!

Love you guys!

Mike and Karen Riley