Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
One of the last pictures I took of Ellie in the dog park at Irving Park before we had to leave my beloved if war-ravaged Portland. So thankful for our many years in that wonderful city and the Irvington neighborhood we called home.
📷: Sony A6500 | Sony-Zeiss 24mm f/1.8
🗓️: March 11, 2018
Templeton in our backyard in Portland, I was playing around with the macro lens. I have a number of pictures of him but I wish I had an order of magnitude more, the charming little fellow changed my life.
📷: Canon 20D | Canon 100mm macro
🗓️: July 30, 2006
Our last Christmas in Portland was a white one, a growing fear my job search was going to take us away from Oregon heavy on my mind as I wandered our frozen neighborhood. The dragon sculpture at Irvington School was covered in frost, some of its tiles have positive messages and I focused in on this one. If we were going to have to leave the place I never wanted to leave, I was grateful for our time there no matter where we ended up. Two months later I accepted the job offer that brought us to the desert and six years later I’m still deeply grateful for where we were and where we are.
📷: Sony A6500 | Sony 16-70mm f/4
🗓️: December 26, 2017
I’ll be posting more frequently the next few months and I feel I ought to explain why.
Last year after we adopted Bear I was caught off guard by how intensely homesick I suddenly felt for Portland (this is Ellie and I playing in the snow in our backyard a decade ago). It’s not that I hadn’t missed Oregon before — you can’t love a place as much as I loved the Northwest and not miss it when you leave — rather I missed it in the same way I’d miss the desert if I could snap my fingers and give us our old lives back. But I’ve never had a problem mourning the beautiful things I’ve lost as long as it doesn’t keep me from loving the beautiful things I have and have gained. And if you’ve followed me long you know how much I love the Sonoran Desert.
Something else was going on.
A big part of it was I had been having trouble sleeping, leaving me physically and mentally exhausted. Bear was more of a challenge to integrate into our lives than Ellie had been. Sam died around the same time, not that any of their death’s have been easy but I always knew his would be hard. There was pandemic fatigue, the school shooting in Uvalde, the stress of a car commute after so many years taking the train, an especially challenging project. To top it off I got sick twice and had to miss a week of work each time, burning off a huge chunk of my time off, time I usually spend letting my mind spin down. And even though I try to live in the moment and am keenly aware of how good my life is and how many people are genuinely suffering each day of their lives, I still reached a point where I couldn’t keep going and needed to find a way to retire.
Thankfully my boss offered an option to take a leave of absence instead and I took him up on it. Tomorrow I start my four month break and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to step away and recharge. I may not get to play with Bear in the snow as I did Ellie, but he is about to start going on a lot more desert hikes. Looking forward to doing more photography and editing old pictures, my backlog goes back many years (including this one!).
I’m sure this will end well.
I’ve posted similar shots of Ellie before, sitting beside the dragon at Irvington School in December 2017. Originally I meant to post it to mark the four year anniversary of leaving our beloved Portland, and when that date passed the anniversary of our arrival here in the desert, but I was pretty tired after work each night and the posts went unwritten. I was in the middle of writing it yesterday under the better-late-than-never philosophy when my wife came in and said the black lab being fostered up in Cave Creek she had her eye on was still up for adoption, and he was cat friendly, and we could meet him that afternoon …
… and we pick up 6 year old Bear in an hour to bring him home. Rather than nattering on and never getting this up I’ll just say how grateful I am for every moment I got to spend with the goofball above and how much I’m looking forward to getting to know the newest member of the family.
Congratulations to Helio Castroneves for winning his 4th Indy 500. I loved him from the start as a rookie but all those pictures are on film waiting for a rainy day to be scanned, this was the last time I saw him, at Portland International Raceway in 2001. Our paths diverged so I never got to see him race in person again but so happy to see the success he’s had during those years, don’t think you’ll find anyone who wasn’t thrilled to see him join the rare club of 4 time winners.
Twenty years ago a feral cat gave birth under the house of one of my wife’s friends, the mother soon disappeared so the family raised the kittens until they were old enough to adopt out. We were offered one of the last of the litter and named our tiny tuxedo Scout. I’m close to all our pets but even so Scout and I had a deep bond, sadly cancer took her from us after 12 years but I’m thankful for every day we spent together. I’ve been having off-and-on trouble sleeping lately but it was never as hard as when I came back from a long hiking trip, she’d wake me up throughout the night either to reassure her that I was well and truly home or to tell me I was never to leave her side again, I’m not sure which.
She was four in this picture, sitting beside her favorite catnip plant on the back porch.
A cackling goose spreads its wings in a crowded group at Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden in Portland, Oregon in December 2006.
A squirrel peaks out from the neighbor’s bushes in the spring of 2007. Although Oregon has native tree squirrels in our urban Portland neighborhood you’d only find species introduced long ago, like eastern grays and eastern foxes. Our dog Ellie never paid them much heed but they were endlessly entertaining to all six cats over the years, with Emma and Trixie probably their biggest fans.
Boolie 