Catching Up 1: I, me, mine

It's been so long since I've really posted anything here that I thought I'd begin with a quick "okay, since this is a personal blog I should probably add some personal information." 

Okay, no. I'm just a fucking egotist, so it's all about meeeeee!!!.

Kidding aside, well. Here's the basics.

I'm just a couple or three months away from my 69th birthday so, yeah, fuck, I'm old.

Throw in the whole "multiple joint replacements and Parkinson's" things and I'm not exactly heading into old age physically robust. That kinda sucks, given that I've tried to do all the "right things"; exercised, watched my diet, kept active and intellectually curious and engaged.

It seems pretty ungrateful for me to have taken at-least-decent care of my mind and body for them to decide now that I'm old to turn on me. C'mon, guys! All this time and finally you just give me the I'm-gonna-stop-making-dopamine finger?

Ingrates.

The other ugly reality is that I'm about two years into the post-second-marriage phase of my life, and that sucks on multiple levels.

On the obvious, social one, it's lonely. I've gone from being part of a family; wife, kids, a cat, loving and living together in a cute little house I had spent twenty years loving and working to make cuter and better.

So that whole two decades now feels like a lost sunk cost. All those years and work and love and caring...vanished as though they had never been.

 
On the physical level, well, I'm alone in a small apartment.

That turns back to the social-suck, because for twenty years my best friend, my companion at home and abroad, the person I liked and cared for the most, who shared our adventures together and apart was Mojo. She was my "working week and my Sunday rest".

And now she's gone. Not just physically, but emotionally; she's made it clear that she doesn't want anything to do with me. Not even the slightest, most casual contact. That hurts, a lot. I'd hoped we could at least remain friends, but Mojo has made it clear that she will not tolerate that.

Ouch. 

And the hard truth is that no other friends, as dear as they may be, can replace a best-friend spouse. For one thing, they have their own lives to live. I'm a third wheel, at best, emotionally, and distant physically; it's not like I or they can just stroll around corner or up the road to say hello and pass the time.

I do try; try and get out, try and go to places to meet with friends, or people I share something with.

I've even tried one of those on-line matching things, and met some good people there.

But, still, the bottom line is, well, what I've just detailed. 

 
What remains?

Well, the essence of my heart and mind. Me, who I am, for better or worse.

Retired now for almost four years I'm finding a lot of pleasure in having the time to myself, to exercise, or travel (locally, for the most part - I have time but not money), or just read or screen (and thank you, the shade of Ted Turner, for the TCM old-movie channel!).

I've been keeping my hand in the soils game until this last year. It's been good to use the skills I spent much of my life honing, and the income didn't hurt, either.

The last engineer I know who still called me in for that contract work is sliding into a different track in the geotechnical business and one that doesn't really require a field guy, though, so it looks increasingly likely that this will be the first real year of "retirement", the last soils work I will ever put my name to.

That's fine. I had a good run, did some good work, and I'm ready to hang 'em up. 

My children are almost man-and-woman-grown, and are a lot of fun for it. The big dude who is the Former Peep is in his third year at university here in Portland, studying geology, of all things. Missy is downstate, planning to be some form of botanist or agronomist. I try and see them as often as their time permits...which isn't the same as living with them.

That's probably the hardest part of post-divorce parenting, not being physically close, missing those little daily collisions, the small change of domestic life. Instead I've become the cliche' "divorced dad", seeing his kids every so often, unaware of and uninformed by the day-to-day happenings that make up their lives.

Still, they're good people and I love them to pieces. 

I still enjoy a lot of the activities I did in the Before Times.

Writing? Sure; not here much, though I'm thinking I want to change that, but quite a bit over at my soccer site. 

Soccer; indeed, it's been an intriguing year for pro footy here in Portland. The Timbers, having struggled through several difficult seasons, finally canned the manager that proved incapable of solving the troubles therein and are using the current World Cup hiatus to hire a replacement. The Thorns are playing surprisingly well, having also shed their gaffer at the end of the previous season.

Reading and thinking about the world around us has become a huge time- and energy-suck, given how appallingly ridiculous and idiotic (and dangerous) the current MAGA Regime has become. I agree with those whose loathing of Trump comes as much for the degree to which his freakishly bloated public presence doesn't permit me and anyone else who bothers to pay attention to public life to ignore his ignorance, stupidity, venality, and cupidity.

One reason I've blogged so little here is that grotesque presence, looming over us all like the giant stone head in the movie Zardoz, makes it damn near impossible to write about anything without having the orange (well, sort of; his face makeup seems to be more like that brownish shoe polish color "cordovan" recently) sonofabitch constantly poking his fucking nose into the story. Corpse at every funeral, by God...

I'm still hanging in at kendo, despite getting older and slower every week. I still enjoy it, and hope to postpone the day that I become too old and slow to represent my dojo honorably. I've picked up a related "sword" art, iaido, which is pure fun; a sort of "internal chanbara movie" thing, cosplaying samurai. Plus it's a way of trying to master myself; it's all about perfecting a series of forms. You're not fighting an opponent outside yourself but, rather, mastering your mind and body, a kind of meditation in motion. 

One thing retirement has gifted me is time to resume an old pastime, birdwatching, and I've been getting out as much as possible to scope the local patches. I'm not yet thinking of doing the sort of "big trip" sorts of adventures I did after my first divorce., but perhaps in a bit...

 
So I guess the final sum is that, while there's a lot about the last couple of years on me that I'd undo if I could, I'm still here. Still trying to live as full a life as I can. Still hoping that I can make of that something worth others remembering me fondly when I'm gone.

While all around me...

...well, that's for the next part of this.

 
(Next: Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?) 

Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Decoration Day 2024

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott  in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44. 

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time. 

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun. 

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having. 

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead.

As always today: this.

Home Improvement, the series...

 I don't really have a topic today.

Retirement is interesting in a sort of not-very-interesting way. You tend to find yourself puttering about doing lots of little things that you put off in your previous life that, while often useful and entertaining (ir irking), aren't such of a muchness in terms of "hey, wow, how about this cool thing I did!"

Case in point: downspouts.

This is the south - back - side of the Little House.

FWIW, it's a sort of real oddity.

Back in 1922 when this crib was tossed together I think it was an open porch. There's signs that the back stairs to the then-half-basement were a sort of "storm cellar" kind of hatchway, and my guess is that the area next to that was not enclosed.

Some time in the next hundred years the owners enclosed it...in a very weird way. We think that it was as the same time that the goofy bastards ripped out all the interior closets and built what was a "room of closets" which is the most useless thing I (but, obviously, not they) could imagine.

We ripped open the thing to make the Girl's room, the account of which is at the link above, and very strange we found it.

Anyway...

Years ago we bought a couple of rain barrels at the Portland Nursery down on SE Glisan and installed them at the front and back east corners.

The front barrel still works just fine.

The back one? Not so much. It overflows, and the stormwater has an annoying habit of washing out the soil near the back corner of the house. So after a couple of bad winters it was time to replace the barrel with a downspout.

Off to the local hardware store I went to pick up the various bits needed for the upgrade...only to find that the local store had nothing like what I needed. C'mon, local hardware store! You want me to Shop Local, you gotta make it so I can Get What I Need Local!

Off to the not-local Home Depot, then, to feed the corporate beast and pick up all the pieces so I could slap the sucker up in fifteen minutes like any half-ass decent roofing crew.

And hour later, in the midst of my third full-on profane rant, it occurred to me that the reason that the roofers could slap these suckers up in fifteen minutes is because they're a crew, and have one guy who can hold the pieces in place while another guy nails the straps in.

Well...it's up now; not a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but it should work to keep the dirt around the foundation, which is the point. Yay, retired me.

I then took advantage of the cool morning and did some serious landscaping, largely whacking away at the annoying gardening efforts of our birds and squirrels whose passion it is to scurry across the street with nuts off the big black walnut tree and bury the fuckers over here. They're everywhere, and that reminds me someone buried a nut behind the air conditioning unit that I need to clamber over and dig out.

Bastards.

 Oh. This is the other "home improvement project" thing from this past week. Fencepost along the east side, between us and the nice gal who moved in this past year.

The original fence builder didn't bring the concrete footings high enough to protect the posts from damp rot, so after twenty or thirty years or so they're falling over. We really need to replace the whole thing but, barring that, have to swap out the ones that are actually rotted through and here you are.

As for the Rest of The World..?

Just like we've been for the past half-dozen years, We the non-insane People sit here, mesmerized like a mouse before a cobra, watching the Worst People in the Nation Fuck Around, desperately hoping that our "fellow citizens" don't make us Find Out whilst knowing full well that most of those gomers are clueless, credulous nitwits who eat up the public press' Both Sides Bullshit. 

Half of them believe that the GQP's culture war nonsense has some validity, or, at least, doesn't reveal them as the shrieking lunatics they are.

And what more can I say about that?

Other than is anyone surprised by any of this GQP fucktardry?

The “conservative” ideal has always been dictatorship. Whether it’s the dictatorship of a king, or of a mullah or pope or some other heirophant, or of a party as it was in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or as in our current problem, the only way you’re going to get We the People to go along is with one hand on the whip. Propaganda only gets you so far.

And the only way you can get these sorts of people off your neck is…well, do the math. If they’re willing to rule you with force, how willing will they be to respect your miserable little “vote”?

I know I keep banging this drum. But all these Tales of Trump Terror have a moral, and it’s not “let’s debate whether gay people should exist”.

It’s the same one that ended in a pillar of fire over Dresden.

I don’t like that. I don’t want that. But if it has to be that or a New Gilded Age?

Then fiat justitia ruat caelum.

But that's enough of that.

I've got to go off and find something to finish off the downspout. So let's just hope that Empty G doesn't manage to seize the Department of the Interior in the meantime, right?

RTFM

Speaking of the Army I Knew...

So I retired from the rascal about twenty years ago - back in '05, IIRC.

By that time I had twenty years in - twenty-three, to be exact. I wanted to make 1SG - I cared less about the top spot (I had no interest in nagging troops about their haircuts or boots and area beautification...) but I'd always wanted to be a First Shirt.

But.

I also had a new wife and a one-year-old and there were guerrilla wars going on in Southwest Asia and the wife - who is a treasure and a darling and has always been there for me in all other paths of life - had just suffered through the death of our firstborn.

She told me that she couldn't live through a year-and-a-half deployment.

So I pulled the pin.

Anyway, point is that at the time, and all through the time since then, I was fully employed, well-paid, and, frankly, over time lost track of the whole "retirement pay" thing.

Until I retired from my day job.

Then I got to thinking, y'know, it'd be a nice little tickler to have a couple of hundred bucks a month or so to buy a beer now and then or to pay the gas bill. So I yarded out my old Army orders file and looked for my "20-year-letter" etc. to see about asking Sammy for some jack.

And right there on the first page of the retirement packet it read in black-and-white;

"Current policy requires the retiree submits retirement application about 9 months but not less than 90 days prior to 60th date of birth..."

Which was...ummm...five years ago.

Duh!

So, important safety tip:

Read The. Fucking. Manual. 

I called the nice people at Ft. Knox, who said that, yes, I was a fucking idiot and that, yes, I could still apply.

That is all. Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Whisper of the axe

 

Well, the news was bad.

My Bride's position will be cut. We just don't know how hard.

Mind you, she was just one of the three out of ten people who got the axe today. She described it as "Body after body goes into the principal's office, shuts the door, comes out sad."

It's worth noting that the heaviest cuts fell on the most junior, lowly-paid staff. Which is pretty infuriating when you think that the body of one Assistant Deputy Superintendant For Paperclip Procurement would probably keep four of those people at work in the trenches where they will be doing some good.

But that's the way outfits like public schools work, and the deal we made.

The real problem now is that we don't know how hard this will hit us.

If she gets knocked back to 0.8 or 0.6FTE? It'll be hard but we can probably make it for another five years until my Social Security kicks in.

But if it's 0.2FTE? Fuck, we're hosed.

So the bottom line is that I may have had the world's shortest retirement.

That sucks. But what can you do? We can't bargain or appeal; the District will do what it will do, and we wil have to suffer what we must.

UPDATE 2/3/22: Well...the bad news is...less bad than we feared.

The Bride's position is being reduced to 0.5FTE. That lets her keep our major medical - which means losing vision and dental; a shoutout to the "best health care system in the world", what, eyes and teeth aren't "heahtcare" you sorry fucks? - and she might have another 0.1-0.25FTE as a "float".

That's bad. But it's not "the worst", it's not the 0.2FTE that would sink us.

So while it's bad we all have the Plague...at least we won't have the Plague AND be living out of our cars.

Some things I liked about 2022

This is a blatant rip-off of the post John Scalzi did over at Whatever.

If you're gonna steal, steal from people who you know do good work.

Right?

Anyway, I've never done one of these "year-in-review" sorts of posts before. Mostly because I've been looking forward rather than back; work-life tends to make you do that. You're pushing to stay ahead of the bill-collectors and corporate reviews and colonoscopies (okay, well, maybe not colonoscopies; those, like the occasional sudden sneeze, just sort of catch you) and all the other trouble in the world.

But this last year was different.

For one thing, I finally stopped being a wage-slave and having to strain to look forward.

Being a geologist-for-hire was a huge part of who I am - who I was - for thirty years. I did science for a living and put in a lot of long, hard days outside doing it. Shit, if you go to this website my front-page bio even says that: "...analytical by training and doggedly hard-working by necessity..." That was me.

Now?

Well...I'm still who I was then. Still analytical, still liberal, still...well, actually more judgemental, but that may have to do with the appalling tidal wave of reactionary shitheels that you can't swing a cat without smacking or so it seems.

But I've already gone into that. This is supposed to be about things I LIKED in 2022.

So. 

Retirement. 

I've liked being retired. At least so far.

I liked the lab work, soils testing, the sort of bench-chemistry-index-testing science we learn in school.

I liked the analysis, the puzzle-solving, the looking at the ground and the soil and the landforms and trying to figure out what was going on.

But because the bulk of my work was dirt-nanny stuff? Nagging asshole contractors to do what they low-bid and are trying to slime out of? That's the daily bread of most of earthwork engineers, and sweet baby Jesus how it sucks. Sucks the fun right out of all the other stuff.

So. NOT having to do that? I like that. And it makes up some for no longer having the disasters and lab and analysis to do.

So retirement? I liked that.

The Portland Japanese Garden

As you can probably tell from the photo essays, I love the Garden; the peaceful order, the quietly tended "nature". The colors, the light, the shape and the weight of it.

Membership in the Garden lets me get in early, when the City around it is still and the pathways are empty. I get to stroll and think, watch and reflect, and I like that a lot.

And speaking of Japan...

Anime and Manga

For some reason this past year I've been sinking deeper into the world of Japanese graphic art, whether in written form as manga - 漫画 - or animeアニメ . 

The Girl shares my enjoyment of the animated form; over the last year together we've enjoyed the big-screen versions of a couple of Studio Ghibli classics - The Cat Returns and Howl's Moving Castle - along with perhaps the most visually gorgeous film I've ever seen, Belle.

The story? Oh, just the old "beauty and the beast" chestnut. Fun enough, and the story of Suzu, the "belle" of the title, her friends and family, is genuinely sweet and moving. But that's not the main reason to watch.

It's the graphics.

Amazing.

My taste in the dead-tree forms runs all over the place, from dystopian futurism like Ghost In The Shell to sweetly adorable yuri romances. I think I've mentioned my fondness for the goofy adventure/military/fantasy Gate: Where The JSDF Fought. 

Rory Mercury?

Yow.

My favorite from 2022, though?

Sweat and Soap.

It's a weird, weird, deeply weird premise; the female lead, Asako, has "hyperhidrosis" - meaning she sweats more than she thinks is "normal" - while the male lead, Koutarou, has an incredible sense of smell which he normally uses in his job as soap designer but which leads him to Asako...who smells delicious! At least to him.

I picked it up purely out of curiosity; the storyline seemed odd but the artist (Yamada Kintetsu) has a nice clean style and I'm a sucker for that.

But that didn't catch me. 

What caught me was how it turns out to be a true, sweet, and moving love story.

True in the sense that these fictional people are deeply flawed, as are we all, and that they meet and become a couple in a very weird way...but one that finds goodness and joy even in their own and each others' flaws.

It's just gentle and kind and very, very romantic.

And speaking of romance...

First Night With The Duke

I follow a shockingly large number of comics at the "Webtoon" site, but this was far and away the most delightful; a goofy, funny, exciting, bizarre little story about an ordinary Korean girl who wakes up inside the romance novel she's reading but not (as is the usual form of these "isekai" (異世界) stories) as the heroine or the villainess.

She's just "Ripley", a minor character at the party scene where Zeronis - the titular Duke and a classic manga "dark and dangerous" hero - is supposed to meet the heroine and fall for her.

Instead Ripley gets plowed and ends up in bed with the Duke, who becomes obsessed with her instead of the woman he's supposed to fall for.

Oh, it's waaaayyyy more complex than that. There's fake deaths, and mad suitors and actual love and it was just big crazy fun. I'm sorry it's over, and I'm hoping that maybe the author will release an English language version, because I'd love to re-read it; it was my Top Romance Story of 2022.

And speaking of even more romance...

Everything Everywhere All At Once

I've been a Michelle Yeoh fanboi ever since her Hong Kong action days. But she, and this wildly inventive film, were perhaps the best thing I've seen at the movies not just in 2022 but for many years.

She's, well, everything all at once; mom, wife, diva, artist, businesswoman, savior of the world...while all the time being the same struggling everyday person just trying to get through one more day that we all are.

It's action and adventure and comedy but y'know what?

It's really a love story.

Yeoh is a woman who is tired. She's tired of herself, her husband, her daughter, her dumpy little laundromat that is her whole life. She's tired of struggling through every day just to find another just like it. And she is terrified to find that there's worse; the actual no-shit end of the world - worlds! - that only she - tired and beat up and struggling - can save.

And she does. Because deep down, she loves herself, her husband, her daughter...she loves the whole world enough to fight to save them all.

It's an epic performance in a terrific flick. 

It won't win Best Picture and she won't win Best Actress. 

It's too weird, and she's not diva enough.

But they should.

The Portland Thorns

God but this was a fun season. Winning the title was pretty awesome; I liked that, duh. But getting to write and think about the team and the league and the game was a hell of a lot of fun, too.

And we might just be getting a new owner and a new front office, after a pretty rugged couple of years from the old regime, and I'm liking that.

Oh, and I love this photo; it's from the post-match celebration. The player in the circle is Olivia Moultrie, who's still in high school and 1) can't drink, and 2) is clearly embarrassed at the grownups. Yeah, Livvy, grups can be pretty cringe-y.

Mary Bennett

One of the most fun things I've read - as a no-pictures-just-words book - this year has been the three volumes of the "Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett" series, beginning with the first Pride and Prejudice-based story of the middle Bennett sister finding work as a spy for the Regency government and continuing with the next two.

The fun part about these is that the author doesn't try to heroine-up her protagonist by making her more witty or clever or smart or attractive. Yes, she's the "heroine"...but she's also the same socially awkward, pedantic, prosy middle Bennett sister we meet in Jane Austin's novel.

Cowley makes that plausible; being drab, plodding, and detail-oriented might make you a crashing bore at an afternoon tea but a damn good undercover agent.

Mary is more than just that, though. Crowley shows us how her exposure to the bigger world outside of Longbourne helps Mary grow. She learns that she has actual skills, that she doesn't have to push herself forward to show them to others. Indeed, as a confidential agent she has to learn to conceal what she knows and does!

By the third book - where she has to "learn" to kiss to sweeten up a possible source or beguile an enemy agent - she's become genuinely thoughtful and even a bit wise. Does she still manage to find a way to work a moralizing quote into a romantic moment?

She's Mary Bennett! Of course she does!

But this Mary can have a romantic moment, and even enjoy it fully and intelligently.

There's supposed to be two more of these coming; I can't wait.

What else?

I still like this furry butthead. He's a good cat. Or, as my Bride describes him, he's "good at being a cat".

And I still love my family, my home, and my hometown.

So all in all, it was a pretty decent year. There were a lot of things I liked.

Tomorrow I want to talk about the next year, though.

Wait, wait..!

I can't go on without recommending...

 Lore Olympus

Rachel Smythe's post-modern take on the ancient Hades-Persephone tale.

It's funny, clever, sexy, all with the wonderful graphics that pulled me in the first time.

Plus it's an absolutely heartwarming love story.

(Can you tell I'm a sucker for a love story?)

Anyway...go, read it. It's tons of fun.

The engineer will see you now.

 I sent this to my corporate today:

"Here’s my thoughts at the moment.

My point in retiring is to step away from the need to punch the clock every week; I’m ready to start doing geology/engineering geology on projects that I enjoy and challenge me rather than worrying about getting in X hours a week and fretting about not making my billable target.

AND I’d like to be able to schedule out my work/life balance (as corporate likes to call it!) further out that day-to-day and even week-to-week, so I’m not getting a call Tuesday that I have to be on a drill rig in K Falls on Wednesday when I’ve got a romantic getaway planned for that day, or some volunteer work for Habitat or DOGAMI.

So what I’d like to do is help out with things that you can use my actual value for – tough stuff, local/regional knowledge, experience – more like a consultant than an employee. You have a big proposal and want research on local geology? Call me, and I’ll get on it. You have a big project next month? Let’s get that scheduled!

Now…I understand if that’s too big an ask. It’s kind of a weird setup. But that’s why I’m putting it out as an option, the option that I’m excited about."

My immediate boss - the chief engineer in Portland - said nothing. I think he may have thrown a plate of spaghetti against the wall, tho; he's that kinda guy.

His superior - the West regional chief engineer - agreed to my terms.

So. 

Now, after thirty years, I'm going through the door into the next part of my life.