Let me introduce myself...

...I'm a man of little enough wealth and taste, well...that's open to interpretation.

Visiting my friend Maia's blog (which is sadly, quieter even than my own, but worth the while to visit for her gorgeous photographs...) I realized that one thing I haven't done is take the time to update my c.v. So if I'm going to start writing here again, I should begin with who and where I am at this time, the People's Republic of Portland in the province of Cascadia, near the end of the year 2019.

I turned 62 this past October, so I've officially entered the "terminal phase" or "descending branch" of the ballistic arc my parents fired me onto back in the autumn of 1957. That's...suboptimal, but at least I lasted longer than my birth-brother Sputnik I, who lived fast and died young.

I'm still who I tell you I am on the cover page here: inquisitive, judgmental, analytical, hard-working. And still husband and father, scientist, retired Army sergeant, and social and political liberal.

I'm no longer a teacher, though. That's unfortunate, because I enjoyed it to some extent. But the time-suck was too huge and the pay too grim. "Adjunct" is community-college-speak for "wage-slave", and I no longer have the patience to do the work it requires for the paycheck it returns.

Physically? I continue to get older and slower. I finally had my left hip replaced this past winter, so that helps, but my "...back's bad and my legs are queer". I'm eaten up with osteoarthritis, and everything, especially on cold mornings, creaks and groans (and makes unpleasant grinding or cracking noises, which is worse). I've got a couple of knee replacements in my future given I live that long.

I'm still a toiler in the vineyard of soils engineering and geology, still where I have been for the past couple of years. It's fine. It's a job, no better than many I've had, but better than some. I work with some good people, some slackers, some yobs. Sometimes my work is fascinating, sometimes drab, sometimes difficult. For every fun landslide there's a day spent with my heels up watching a bunch of chucklefucks pave a parking lot. It's a glamor profession.

Outside of work, I still follow soccer in Portland, both the Timbers on the men's side and the Thorns on the women's. I lost my gig writing for Stumptown Footy, though - and there's a special sort of humiliation getting canned from your non-paying side gig! - and moved over the another blog (called Riveting!, in case you enjoy being bored out of your skull about soccer...) where I do the same thing for the same pay.

What can I say? I like soccer, I like to write about it, I'm often mistaken but never wrong...that's kind of the point of blogging, right?

Outside of that, it's reading; history, science fiction and other fun junk-novels. I get enough heartache from the news, so my taste in literary entertainment is pretty light. I should really put up a post about several authors I've run across lately that are a lot of fun. So between that and beginning to work out again - the hips made that kind of chancy - my idle hours are taken up pretty well.

Family? Well...

Mojo is now in her second year as School Secretary of our kiddos' elementary school. She's the beloved "Miss Mojo" of a wild rumpus of kiddies. This Halloween it was pretty adorable to open the door on a bunch of fun-sized elves and superheroes and Pokemon who immediately started screaming "MISS (Mojo's name)! MISS MOJO!" until she came over and greeted them and gave them their treats. She's still smart and sarcastic and still uninterested in politics and soccer. How we find anything to talk about I have no idea, but I love her like fresh meat loves salt.

The Boy is in his third year of high school, and has entered the Monosyllabic Phase. He's still struggling with his tendency to slack off; he really doesn't like to work - something I recall from my immediately-post-pubescent-period - and until now has done as well as he's done by pure mental throw-weight. He's taking a bunch of AP classes this year, though, and has found that he can't slide on through on pure headspace alone. His response has been somewhat gratifyingly diligent, though, so we'll see. There's a lot of promise there. But at 16? It's still mostly promise.

The Girl...well, I should start by saying that one of her funny things is that she absolutely hates it that I talk about her here. She's got a fanatic obsession that some sort of creepy stalker is going to chase her down through this blog, as if I try and boost my clicks by chasing down creepy stalkers. So I won't say much other than that she's a middle school kid with all that entails. She's gone from sweet little miss to salty little devil over the past year or so. My favorite story from that evolution came the other day, when I was digging through the spice drawer and came across this:

Daughter: "Seriously?"
Father: "What the..? I didn't think we still even had this."
Daughter: "So what is "authentic Asian taste", anyway?"
Father: "Hell if I know. Have you tasted yourself lately?"
Daughter:
Daughter: (licks back of hand) "Salty. With a hint of bitterness."
Father:
Daughter"
Father:
Daughter: "What? You asked!"

She's a gifted artist and something of a dramat - though she's all about the tech side and has no ambition to shine on the stage rather than behind it. Weirdly, her love for musical theater has revived my old affection for the genre, and we've enjoyed several shows including Wicked (which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would given my indifference to the source) and In The Heights.

The Damn Cat is being a damn cat. I don't want to pen him up indoors, but I wish to hell he'd stop killing little birds. Knock it off, you furry bastard.

Oh...and, oddly, the other thing I've taken up lately is...archery.

We have a very odd little, very Portland, sort of place here called "Trackers", and one of the things they do is run bow-making and archery classes for kids. And they also run an indoor range, and a friend and I have taken to turning up there every week and killing targets. It's a hell of a lot of fun for five bucks.

Being me, of course, I can't settle for just plunking away at a paper printed with concentric circles. The fun part is the challenge of hitting some small noisy thing, like a plastic bottle or a cardboard cup. The other day all I could find was a plastic seltzer bottle, so I shoved that in the hay bales and proceeded to twang away at it. Thing is, I didn't want to try and hit it standing up, like you'd shoot can's with a rifle. I wanted to hit it end-on and, more particularly, opening-end on, so I'd have to put an arrow through the 1-inch wide pour hole.

Took me probably a dozen flights to finally hit it.

But when I did?

GodDAMN that was satisfying.

So that's me writ small; I still can't do things the simple, easy, or sensible way.

But I'll keep firing away until I hit the fucking thing.

And there I am.

See you again in a bit.