Marcel's Blog

Yep, just like the Jeffersons, we’re moving on up After bouncing around, living in apartments, and traveling the globe, we finally are in a place we can call home sweet home. By home I don’t just mean Portland, but a real piece of American suburbia- a house It’s been a long time coming but we finally took the plunge and bought a home. Not a townhome this time, but a real house with a yard and garage. Our house is a good step above a starter home, but by no means is it our dream home. Nevertheless it is much more than we ever expected to get out here on the west coast. We took a great deal of time and effort to find this special place. In the end we realized there can never be a perfect home so we had to compromise on a few minor things like price, neighborhood, and size. Ultimately we got pretty darn close to what we both wanted, and even more in some aspects.

As we were moving out of our apartment we took time to reflect on our lives up to that point from an unusual perspective. I calculated that in 35 years I have moved approximately 24 times, and Charlotte estimates she has moved about 20 times By moving I mean physically moving your belongings to another dwelling and having a new address where you receive mail. In addition to all this moving around I haven’t lived in a regular detached house since I was in high school. It’s always been apartments or townhomes. Not to knock our townhome in CO which fit our needs fine for a while, but a home doesn’t really feel like a home unless you have a yard and garage. Finally we can unpack all of the stuff we have been collecting over the years, get some pets, have a backyard BBQ, and do all of the things suburban’s like to do

In addition to our new home Charlotte has a new job This time it’s a permanent hire position which is what she has been looking for since we moved out to the Wild West. Although she really liked her previous two jobs at the “software giant” and the “chip leader” they were both contract positions. Her new job is much more low-key, but a permanent position with stability and room to grow. So far she really likes it and seems to be very happy there. Early next year I will be looking for a new job myself, but that is a blog for another time

With our recent house hunting duties and adjusting to our new jobs we haven’t had much time to enjoy the local Portland lifestyle of late. We did however get to spend some time with my Dad who was in Portland for a little over a month working on a contract job by PDX airport. We went out to eat at some great Portland restaurants, and took another tour of Hood River and Multnomah Falls. I think he really likes it here and seemed to have a great time. We hope to have more visitors in the years to come.

One thing Dad really noticed that we had gotten used to (here and Seattle) is all of the kamikaze pedestrians and bicyclists. Like us, he can’t believe the way Portlanders just stroll out into the middle of the street and expect all the cars to stop for them as if they are parting the Red Sea In much the same manner bicyclists fly down the street zipping in between cars just daring you to run them over. To make matters worse they rarely have lights on their bikes and typically wear black gothic looking clothes while it is already dark and rainy outside. If you are wondering if they ever get run over, well they do, quite often in fact Every now and then you hear about it on the news. The locals are always shown protesting about the terrible motorists who didn’t slam on the brakes fast enough to miss the jaywalker who was running across a busy street with his/her Starbucks coffee in hand. Sounds crazy and it is, but that is Portland for you, or as we like to say T-I-P (this is Portland)! Note: This is a reference to the movie “Blood Diamond” (T-I-A this is Africa), or for an alternate meaning just visit any local business establishment in Portland and you’ll see the unavoidable and usually highly decorated tip jar staring you in the face.

There is however a good side to the pedestrian and biker culture as well. I applaud the people who are wearing dresses or business suits while riding their bikes or walking from the light rail station to work in all types of weather. It’s very European and progressive, just like a lot of things out here. Unfortunately there are always a few (or in this case quite a few) bad apples that spoil it for everyone. The end result is lots of people getting hurt (or worse), which causes excess animosity between motorists and everyone else. Can’t we just all get along

In other news some of you may have heard about the crazy weather we had out here this month. It seems like November/December are the worst weather months for the PNW. We had another crazy windstorm that had 129mph wind gusts out on the Oregon coast. The weather guys coined the term “hurricane force winds” and amusingly had to explain “not to be confused with a hurricane because that is a tropical event”! I guess it’s just another local term they can add to their already weird collection of sayings like “freezing fog”, “sun breaks”, “snow levels" (listed at starting elevation), “100% humidity” and “showers followed by rain”. In fact there are all kinds of terms used to express precipitation; rain, drizzle, sleet, showers, sprinkles, downpour, mist, increasing moisture, etc. Then there are the detailed adjectives that go with the nouns like light, moderate, possible, probable, likely (this one’s popular), potential, intermittent, and my favorite 100% chance of rain. After a while you just don’t pay any attention to the weather because you realize that the temperature is usually going to be about what it was the day before, and in the winter time it is usually cloudy with possible rain at anytime. To qualify this point I’ll post a picture of our local forecast at the bottom of this paragraph for your viewing enjoyment. The exception to the typical weather is in Nov/Dec when we occasionally have these crazy storms blowing in from the Pacific. This time around a whole town named Vernonia was flooded underwater, more people were killed by falling trees among other things, all routes to the coast were blocked by debris, and I-5 was shut down because parts of it were underwater. If you want to read more about the storms here are the wikipedia articles about them, and the current local forecast, (story continues below picture).
2007 PNW Storms
2006 PNW Storms

As a metro area Portland did not get hit nearly as hard as Seattle. We are much further from the coast and somewhat shielded by the coast range of mountains. Believe it or not one of the houses we looked at during our home search backed up to open space with huge pine trees that were probably at least 150 ft tall. It was a lovely sight to see from the back porch and a really cool house, but after seeing all the news clips of falling trees smashing right into people’s living rooms that house was instantly disqualified. We have trees in our new neighborhood, but none that can take out our house, and as far as we can tell we are far enough above sea level to not worry about any floods. Unless the Greenland ice sheet melts, but then we ALL will have a lot to worry about

Speaking of Greenland brings to mind that Charlotte and I were finally able to attend a BootsNall.com party this year. Bootsnall is our favorite travel site where we each have a couple travel stories published. The forums there have been so much help to us while traveling, and the entire site is just awesome so we try to promote it whenever possible. They are based out of Portland and have a Holiday party here every year. This year it was downtown at the Lucky Labrador Brewery. Since most attendees have only communicated previously via the forum or email everyone wore a name tag with their name, forum user name, and last place visited. Charlotte and I listed Greece since it was our last International destination. As you can imagine that is already a good conversation starter. It wasn’t surprising that a lot of other people at the party have also been to Greece along with many other places. As we enjoyed the complimentary Lucky Lab Brews we heard great stories, and met some really cool people. We also got to talk travel without getting the deer-in-headlights look we are so accustomed to when Europe and 4 months come up in the same sentence. The highlight of our evening however was when Charlotte very unexpectedly won the grand prize for the evening, a 500 dollar travel voucher for an international flight to a destination of her choice Wow, I mean double WOW Neither one of us has really won anything before. THANKS BNA Then to follow that up Charlotte won a super-cool wine bottle opener the following week at her work Christmas Party. I’m still trying to get her to buy some lotto tickets for Christmas

2007 has been great but we have high hopes for an even better year in 2008. It will be an election year after all so we can all be guaranteed at least one positive change! Surely there will be other changes as well, but for us it will be a year of settling into our new home, making more new friends, and hopefully a few trips here and there. For now we are here, and from here in Oregon Charlotte and I would like to wish all of you out there a Very Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year