Going West

 Our second full weekend in Portland has been full of activity!  Friday:  I definitely miss being able to take classes at Twin Cities Trapeze. While Portland doesn't have a flying trapeze rig (the closest is in Seattle), there are a few circus schools that teach other apparatus. I found an option that does 1:1 lesson in Lyra with an open garage door wall, so I decided to check it out.  Man it was hard. The combination of a new apparatus, lack of safety lines (you are only a few feet off the ground and they can't do hands on spotting with covid) & rusty tricks meant a hard but cool session. I definitely still prefer flying trapeze - who doesn't love the extra adrenaline and story telling factor - but am glad I had the opportunity to try something new.  Saturday:  Before the bear spray incident, we had a great time driving out to Mt. Hood. We first hiked to Mirror Lake. It was surprisingly tiny, but had a beautiful reflection and view of the mountain....

Yesterday was a day of very good very bad luck.  While we were out in Glacier National Park earlier this year, we purchased bear spray as the area has quite a few grizzly bears. Luckily we didn't need to use it, but decided to keep it as we knew we would be spending time hiking out in Oregon and Idaho.  Saturday we decided to hike around Mt Hood. I brought a different backpack on this trip - one that has size pockets but no waist belt. So I ended up putting the bear spray there and thought everything would be ok since the safety was firmly in place.  Fast forward to the end of our hike when we are getting out of the car. I grab my backpack to head inside and hear a hissing/rushing sound coming from the backseat. Confused, I turn to look and find the source of the sound. Next thing I hear is George yelling "Get out now!" and we scramble out of the car. Almost immediately after, I start to feel my eyes burning and we are both coughing. And that's when I realize that I j...

Our first Airbnb spot is in Portland - about 3 miles north of downtown. Our hosts Scott & Tamara live next door and work in a pottery studio on the main floor of our apartment space. As a result, we get some pretty cool pottery items in the apartment and a very cute space.  They have 3 pets - Bjorn (dog), Coco (black cat) and Pepino (grey cat). Pepino is super friendly - he'll jump up on our laps while we are working or eating outside.

It's our first weekend, so we finally got out to explore! Friday:  I ventured out solo to Washington to check out Lacamas Regional Park. They have a spot called the Camas Potholes which is an area down by the river with huge holes in the rock. Overall my impression kept being - "wow, this place is so lush and green!" Saturday: We decided to head towards the coast to offset a hot weekend. We landed on checking out Haystack Rock for some cool views and a bit of ocean/beach time. The water was quite chilly, but clear enough that we were able to spot the large crab that ran into my leg on the beach.  🦀 Sunday: We took an hour long drive out to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. It was a hot one today - with temps reaching 100 degrees! So we decided to start with some  paddle boarding down the Columbia River. The views were pretty amazing - so many layers of mountains. And George had one intentional and one accidental swim in the middle.  On the way back we s...

2020...what a year full of change.  My last day in the office with Target was Feb 28, 2020. It's been 166 days since then filled with a lot of time working from home with George in our 739 square foot one bedroom apartment. Looking back at our grand plans for getting a small space to save money and to simply utilize the 5 work from home spaces or 2 lounges if we ever decided to work from home on the same day seem comically misguided.  But we got creative and made do with what we had. We initially tried both working in our main room - George at his normal desk and me at my flimsy Amazon desk. Unfortunately we just had too many video conference calls to make it work well. Whenever my coworker Peter couldn't hear George in the background, he asked where he was. Ha!  Our second approach involved turning our closet into a "second room" (note the big air quotes). It took some shifting to combine our clothes into 1/2 the closet, but we did manage to fit a desk in there. Each...