Last Days on NE 23rd Avenue

Today marks two weeks until we finally move out of our house and hand the keys to the man who bought it from us.  While we’re relieved to have sold our home at last, there are mixed feelings about leaving the neighborhood.  We’ll be leaving so many good friends among our neighbors: The Moores, the Lapours, Sarah, Jerome, and Everton,  Chris, Jen and their kids.  This has been a great community to live in and we’ll always appreciate the people that shared our streets. In recent years, our kids have together scratched a great deal of colored chalk on these sidewalks.

Stole this pic from Kathy's blog. The grumpy kid is ours.

We bought this house just over 10 years ago, in May 2001, with just our one cat (Peet, 11 now and still very healthy despite his dangerous road-crossing, neighborhood-prowling lifestyle).  The house needed cosmetic fixing, but over the years, we seriously remodeled the place. We expanded the second floor and added another bathroom between 2004 and 2005. We updated the downstairs bathroom in 2006 and both the kitchen and the garage in 2008.  I sometimes wonder what it would be like to finish the basement into a living area. I also regret that I never put as much effort into landscaping as I should have. The little problems with the place will not be ours to worry about much longer; we’ll have new projects and challenges.

We thought we’d be moving into a new home at this point, but that’s not the case. We are still shopping. We’re hopeful, but cautious and realistic about a complicated home purchase we’re trying to complete. It could be a while. In the meantime, we’ll be renting, and looking, and waiting…

Something to love about Portland

They show movies in the parks. I was excited to hear they were going to show Wall-E in Alberta Park, just a block away.  I expected it would be a small scale projection. In fact, they had a surprisingly large theater-sized inflated screen 15 feet high!  We got there well before the show and the kids caught a magician-juggler fellow doing his thing up close. We soon realized it was a long time to wait until dark and that keeping the kids up late for a movie they’d seen many times was not worth the crankiness.

Zaeda running through Alberta Park. Picture taken by Oliver.

Another thing to love about Portland

 Here we are at our regular anniversary spot in the Rose Garden arena with a couple hundred other people. It was such a warm pleasant night. As always, we packed in food, wine, and a blanket. This year they had a mask-making activity table swarming with kids. Oliver and Zaeda joined the mix and soon had their own custom masks.

What a morning!

This was last Wednesday. Jenny had to be at work early, so I got the kids ready. The night before, Zaeda had discovered on old pair of Converse shoes that had been Oliver’s. They fit her just fine. She liked them so much she took them to bed with her. In the morning, they were the only shoes she’d wear.

They were laced and it took forever to get them on her. Once they were on, she danced around and soon was tugging them off. This went on all morning.

Oliver meanwhile had decided that his pirate costume from last Halloween, which had been bundled up under the futon, was exactly the thing he had to wear to school that morning. Under it, he decided to wear a tank top over a t-shirt. I was running out of time to fight them on their wardrobe choices so I just took a picture. Move it along, Blackbread!

The funny part was the way my kids marched proudly into their respective classrooms that morning, Zaeda stomping around and pointing and exclaiming “My shoes!” to everyone and Oliver posing grandly in front of his little friends and shouting “Aye, Me Hearties!”