Ever since a week after the international students arrived, I have been sick with stomach problems. I had spent too many nights hovered over the toilet, ejecting my dinner. I was starting to get worried why I was all of a sudden very ill for many weaks and not able to keep food down. But my symptoms were odd, I was sick off and on, with no apparent reasoning behind my apparent food poisoning until today! One of the international students (who is a self-proclaimed expert on everything) was washing the dishes while I was in the kitchen and I caught him putting dishes away that he did NOT rinse off with water.

(For the non-geek the tile is Objective C code. Roughly translated it means I'm now in a Maintenance mode of life.)

More than a year ago I wrote how my life has decidedly been in a survival mode; I was doing what I could just to keep my head above the metaphorical water. I'm not altogether sure what I mean by “it could be worse, I could be in Maintenance Mode” because I am now in that mode, and I consider it an improvement. It's an improvement, but by no means where I would like to be. In truth, I feel like we (my wife and I) are hovering on that fine line between Maintenance and Survival, and that is a precarious position to be in for sure.

For my birthday, I decided it was about time to have some Swedish girl once again attack my head with scissors. This time I had to pay 300 :- which is getting closer to $50 due to the decline strength of our dollar. Now you all know why my hair is usually long. My friends decided that I should go for a younger look, so I gave in and let them tell the hair dresser what to give me. Well, I guess it was a good decision because when I was done my friend said something along the lines of what a huge difference (she said it all in Swedish, but you don't need to know the details of everything she said) at anyrate, her words were very strong and it caused everyone in the salon to laugh and I think they were more surprised that I actually understood exactly what she said.... to make a long story short, she turned red and was quite embarrassed. The hair dresser also mentioned to me that I looked like a hunk, I think she was impressed with her own work.

Yesterday Holly and I had a little treat: Linda and Berle drove up from California just to see us and take us out to dinner. It was a sweet if not extravagant gesture. For no other reason than they wanted to see our pale, pasty, Oregon faces, they drove up; the extravagance is highlighted when the had every intention of leaving this morning. It's kind of neat to have family that is willing to drive hundreds of miles just to take you out to eat and leave the next day. To honor the occasion we took them out to Thompson Brewery & Public House and ate outside. It was a good evening, a good meal (3 plates of fish and chips, Holly wimped out with an American gyro, a couple of pints of good beer, and again Holly wimps out and had a glass of wine).

I've never enjoyed working on a birthday. Perhaps its a fault of parents everywhere who make a big deal of a child on his birthday, but for some reason I have always felt like my birthday was supposed to be something special and was supposed to be acknowledged (preferably by not going to work or school). In any event I went to work, and not one person wished me happy birthday (though I don't know how many ever knew in the first place, and I did not draw attention to myself). All was not lost for a good friend decorated our MUSH with a birthday banner, balloons, a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey poster, and birthday popper things (for those confused souls out there our MUSH is just a text-based virtual world where my fiends and I gather to chat; its very geeky and you probably aren't missing much if you aren't already there).

As I write this I am officially 29 (or as I like to write it “5² + 2²â€ or “--30”). The only difference I can tell between 29 and 28 is 29 is closer to 30 and 30 seems a bit too old for me. As you might notice my birthday falls on a Monday, and given that I still commute to Portland every day I don't have much time today to celebrate the slow decay of a body past its prime. Thus we had a celebration of sorts yesterday involving three of my favourite things, pizza, Frisbee, and games.

Sunday morning started like most other weekend mornings, except we both decided to sleep in and see what time it was when we awoke. Rather than force ourselves to get out of bed in order to sit through what usually amounts to a disappointing sermon we opted to play things by ear, and my ear was listening to the dulcet tones of the choir from The Church of the Inner Spring (I think Holly was attending a sermon at Bedside Baptist, so we couldn't easily compare notes). For my birthday I gave Holly a massage, and I still don't know how that happened, but as payment we played Epic Dungeoneer : Call of the Lichlord and I think she even let me win.

Holly and I had promised to buy an aebleskiver pan for JD and Erica (good friends of ours) as a wedding present. Some weeks (probably months) back I had a craving for some aebleskivers while they were over and that one batch I made had them hooked; thus it seemed to us we could make a fantastic wedding gift out of an unusual pan. Rather than just mail order a pan online we thought it would be more fun to take JD and Erica to Junction City's Scandinavian Festival where the local drug store has a booth and sells the pans right there.

The trip itself was uneventful as most short road trips are. However, since Saturday was Norwegian day I put Lumsk into the CD player and assailed my poor passengers with Norwegian Folk Metal. I can't say it got anyone in the mood as the festival looks at traditional Scandinavian music, dance, crafts, and foods, but I did my best. By some strange force of forgetfulness I didn't know where to turn off when I got into Junction City and before I knew it I was through the city and looking for a means to turn around and head back. It's common knowledge that when a man gets lost while driving a car all the other passengers will form opinions of where they need to go next and what turns to make; I had three passengers and sometimes three opinions. Somehow we managed to find the backside of the festival, then I was in search of some shade covered parking.

We decided to segregate our vacation into stages (three stages, if you have been keeping up). The third stage was our actual anniversary, and for that we got away from everyone, including our little kitties. Thursday, the anniversary of the wedding rehearsal (if anyone were fool enough to celebrate that agonizing day), we drove back from California, unpacked, and spent a night in our own bed. Friday we packed light, one duffle bag which Holly managed to stuff so full it weighed something on the order of a metric ton (well, fifty pounds anyway). By comparison I could have packed all I needed in the pockets of my shorts (cargo shorts but still, only 6 pockets).

The doc came back with a solid, but unwanted answer: my father-in-law has pneumonia. It's in his lower left lobe of his lung, which if I'm not terribly mistaken was the same place I had it many years ago (more than 10 so I've stopped counting; I refuse to accept I'm getting that old already). On doctor's orders he is supposed to be down for 10-14 days; this translated into two low-key days, which suited me just fine; this also meant we were not to go to the coast, which had the rest of the family a little bummed. We had also entertained the idea of inviting some of Holly's old school chums over for a BBQ, but since the friends in question all had little kids (one under a year old) we figured exposure to pneumonia wouldn't be good social form.

“Big” is a funny word; its a comparative word, although its cousins “Bigger” and “Biggest” are most known for their comparison. Nevertheless you can't have “Big” on its own because without some thing small to compare it to it'll go unknown. You'll forgive me, then, if I say we had a “Big” weekend at the Ranch, for our “Big” might very well be “Small” or “Moderate” or even “Normal”.

The Drive

The big drive down to The Ranch was blessedly shorter than our usual trip to California, but only by about an hour. It took us nine hours to drive from our house to The Ranch, a driving distance of about 430 miles. Traffic was actually light most of the way, and we didn't get into any construction until we got onto Highway 101 (I guess it was jealous that I-5 was getting all the construction attention). We split the driving duties, but not by choice, per se.