Day 2 at the new house was FAR better than the first. I caught up on lots of address changing and checked on my money situation. My student loan was approved and disbursement will be next week. Gavin the gabber took a day off from his telephoning, and I finally got out for a short bike ride to the nearest grocery store where I opened a bank ( Read more... )

Probably the biggest holdup on my decision to go to graduate school has been the uncertainty of how I would pay for it. I have lived in fear of the debt, and in the knowledge that our economy is going to continue in a generally downward trend for the rest of my days and beyond. But this experience of moving has been....moving. I am surprised and ( Read more... )

After three relatively easy days of driving I made it here to PDX. I'm moved in (more or less----well, more like less) to Brian's house in West Linn already, the Uhaul is set to be returned tomorrow.
( a few thoughts on the drive )

Just a couple hours after Suzanne left, the cat woke up and figured out that she is trapped. I have kept the windows open for her entire lifetime and now they are closed but for a too skinny crack. She's been meowing around the room and keeping me awake since then, so I finally got up. Made egg salad with the hard boiled eggs, cilantro and green ( Read more... )

I'm going to pick up my Uhaul in a few minutes. My pickup's motor has begun to smoke and nobody thinks it will make it over all those mountains between here and Oregon--with a load. So the pickup is getting a ride to Oregon. Which I'm not sure is a good idea because I'm not sure I'm going to pay for the rebuild. But we shall see. Since I've ( Read more... )

I awoke before dawn from a dream. In the dream I drove my little truck down a steep dirt slope to the river, thinking that there was a less steep way to drive back out. Once down there I found that I could not drive back out with my mere two wheel drive; all the routes back up to the road were steep enough to roll me over endwise. After each ( Read more... )

In the last two years I have transitioned my music collection to my computer. Digital music has changed the way that I listen. The ability to play random songs from a host of artists means I have become familiar with quite a few artists that I might have never discovered, even though I had their music in my collection. I sent the core nugget of ( Read more... )

Yesterday I was telling a friend about my difficulty finding an inexpensive way to relocate me and my stuff to PDX, and she offered to store some stuff in her shed until the fall. She might even drive up to Portland to visit in the fall--and bring my stuff. WOW--what an offer. Even if she doesn't bring it up to me, it is wonderful just to have a ( Read more... )

The young woman that I was going to live with in Portland has bailed out, isn't going to NCNM and isn't moving to PDX, and I just sent a money order yesterday. So I'm homeless again and none of these leads I've followed lately have gone anywhere. ARHGGH ( Read more... )

I told the man at the post office to wiggle his toes. He had been telling a prior patron that he had pulled a tendon that wrapped around the bottom of his foot, and having just studied anatomy I was guessing at the name of it. "Peroneus?" I said. He didn't know. He'd had his knee scoped twice and the damage to his foot was apparently from ( Read more... )