Blessed by the Job Fairy
Work’s happening. Tomorrow I’ll start a job at a call center in Milwaukie, a few miles south of home. This is an improvement over the food packing jobs I was doing in Gresham, many more miles from home: I got a little sick of driving 30-plus miles a day to work minimum wage. I prefer commutes that are either A) a straight shot on a bus line or B) my one-mile commute in Hermiston, a town of 12,000 in Northeast Oregon’s sagebrush country. (On some weekends, if I didn’t have to drive to cover an event, I could walk to work. I especially liked that.)
At least the Gresham jobs let me drive up I-84 each morning (against traffic) and see the beginning of the Columbia River Gorge, plus Mt. Hood if the skies were clear. The hills that mark the gorge’s west end have a parting-of-the-curtains feel, appropriate for landscape as dramatic as the Gorge. It’s one of several reasons I’m glad I live where I live. The Milwaukie job takes me through a corridor that’s nice in its own way, the stretch of 99E between Eastmoreland Golf Course and Crystal Springs Rhododendron Gardens to the east and Westmoreland Park to the west. The road’s closely framed by trees, trees, trees, plus square-headed street lamps unique, I think, to that road. It’s a road that’s almost comfortable, and that (for me) is a rare feeling.
At least the Gresham jobs let me drive up I-84 each morning (against traffic) and see the beginning of the Columbia River Gorge, plus Mt. Hood if the skies were clear. The hills that mark the gorge’s west end have a parting-of-the-curtains feel, appropriate for landscape as dramatic as the Gorge. It’s one of several reasons I’m glad I live where I live. The Milwaukie job takes me through a corridor that’s nice in its own way, the stretch of 99E between Eastmoreland Golf Course and Crystal Springs Rhododendron Gardens to the east and Westmoreland Park to the west. The road’s closely framed by trees, trees, trees, plus square-headed street lamps unique, I think, to that road. It’s a road that’s almost comfortable, and that (for me) is a rare feeling.