Category: family

rDay Eighty-Eight: Exit 270

Kim and Charlie invited me with them for a morning Father’s Day hike along Ladd Creek Canyon Road (or is it Ladd Canyon Creek Road?), accessible via Exit 270 from I-84.  That road turns out to be the boundary line for a hunting area.  Inside the hunting area, at least for the several hundred feet we walked into some of its trails, the grounds are littered with shotgun shell casings, plastic bits and all manner of trash, with even many trees showing “gunshot wounds”.  On the other side of the road (where the creek flows), it is utterly pristine.  You can guess where we concentrated our activities.

 

 

rDay Eighty-Three

Secured a signature this morning on a five-page development contract proposal that I worked up Sunday (plus my requested advance payment!) early this morning, so the day is off to a decent start.  And, of course, Tuesday is pretty much always a shopping day for Kim, so that happened.  But at least I did snag a circa -’57 Chev restomod pickup in a driver’s seat, over the shoulder, no look shot.

 

 

rDay Seventy-Eight: Ivi Leaves for Corvallis

While waiting for her ride for a four-day weekend to see Marina graduate from OSU, Ivi bakes peach muffins to supplement her take-along lunch.  At the last moment, she and Dad sprint to the store for more essentials, returning just in time for Kim and Charlie’s conclusion of their morning outing.  Soon Ivi is off on her six-hour sojourn.

 

 

rDay Seventy-Six

Customary shopping day with my lovely spouse.  While Kim exercises her finely-honed shopping skills, I distract myself by viewing the store ceiling and later snagging a relatively rare Saturn Sky (a rebadged, slightly tweaked and prettier Pontiac Solstice, but otherwise mostly unremarkable).  And, of course, photographing items for later research.

 

 

rDay Fifty-Five: Tuesday, A Scheduled Shopping Day

Today we do some light shopping and price comparing, checking out a “slammed” (auto slang for radical lowering to achieve the optimal “stance”) pickup and an unusual trailer from North Carolina in the parking lot, drop by a local plant nursery (a seemingly habitual act by KAE) where I see a nice welded-sculpture bird-water-thing, and return home, where the front door is reassuringly guarded by the Terror Beast.  One sentence.

 

Graduation Weekend – Friday

Going

An early morning departure gets us into Portland before noon, but parking spaces are in short supply on the Lewis & Clark campus.  

 

 

Arrival at L&C Holmes Hall

Finally we make contact with Ivi, who is putting the finishing touches on her custom/self-made dress.  We join Ivi and her visiting friend, Marina (also graduating from OSU in a few weeks), in the dorm where they have made a stab at packing it all up.

 

 

Honors Convocation

After we eat the sandwiches found in our cooler, Ivi heads off to prepare for the afternoon honors awardees’ event at the Agnes Flanagan Chapel.   Later on, the rest of us join the audience there for the proceedings.  This is to be the beginning of my weekend-long exercise in the arcane specialty of photography of subjects’ backs.

 

 

Hotel

Pretty much exhausted, we check into our nearby hotel.  Nik revs up a computer to take an online test, and we are soon all asleep.