Author Archives: tim

12 Aug

The ride home

Well, so the past couple weeks have gone by quickly. I have one more batch of photos, which includes pictures of our Mt. Hood excursion (we didn’t hike to the top of it) and my trip to the coast with Frank. We moved out last Friday and drove to Idaho, where we stayed a night with my good friend Ben Young (who has his own business — we’re so proud.) Then we google-mapped our way home and it turned out that the Wyoming/Nebraska route (I 80, pretty much) was faster than the Montana/South Dakota route (I 90). So we went that way.

I got to step foot in Utah (which I hadn’t done yet), and then we suffered some major boredom through two 400+-mile states. Here are the highlights:

  • Sidney, Nebraska is the world headquarters of Cabela’s. Got to see that.
  • It was really exciting to get to Omaha, cuz it had trees.
  • I’ve never been so happy to make it to Des Moines before sunrise.

We stayed in Kearney, Nebraska our second night; we got in late to the KOA, so I night-registered, which involves filling out a form and putting money inside. In the morning, I went to the front desk to check out and get my change. The guy at the desk asked if I had a KOA card, and I said no. He said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t need a receipt, I’ll give you the discount rate.”

Later Eileen and I were talking about how Midwestern it was of him. You run a campground in a small town in Nebraska; some couple comes through late at night on a road trip; you’ll probably never see them again, and even if they tell their friends how nice the owners of the Kearney KOA were, the fact is that travelers like this late-night patron probably don’t plan on which KOA they’ll be stopping at. But you give him a discount anyway.

In Iowa, between Cedar Rapids and Dubuque, the bugs hitting our windshield were unreal. It was like driving through a light rain. And then once we hit Platteville, Wisconsin my allergies started acting up big time. And when we got out of the car in Madison, the humidity was staggering. Did you know that you sweat more at 11:30 pm on a summer night in Wisconsin than you do at noon on a 95-degree day in Portland?

11 Aug

The dream at summer’s end.

My brain just processed the entire summer in a single dream.

I was at my cousin Mike’s “house,” which was huge, and was housing everyone in my extended family. We went body rafting down a river. Head first. And then we got ready for the wedding: my sister Jamie was getting married to a guy named Scottie, who was the younger brother of a girl she went to high school with. When I voiced my misgivings about Jamie marrying someone while she was already married, it was calmly explained to me that she had actually divorced Rick already and would continue living with Rick and the kids, but she would be married to Scottie.

The guy that was going to be officiating the ceremony wasn’t alright with this, so they asked me to do it. I said okay.

How is this representative of the whole summer, you ask?

The summer began with my officiating my brother’s wedding. Scottie is the older brother of one of my brother’s high school friends who was at the wedding. My cousin Mike was at the wedding and provided a steady source of laughter. Later in the summer, I was in Colorado with the family, body rafting down a river. In Portland, a good friend of mine informed me of an unconventional family situation, in which he and a friend (not his wife or girlfriend) were thinking about raising a kid together. In Idaho, my friend Ben told me about a crazy, dysfunctional wedding he attened this past year.

10 Aug

Summer Descent

** I started this post on July 31st **

Yesterday, when I woke up, I said to Eileen, “Amets Txurruka,” and she replied, “posturography.” Honest to God. Those were the first words we said to each other.

Let me explain.

Every summer, Eileen and I watch the Tour de France with the fervor of a Nascar fan, and we often play this little game where in I mention a name of a cyclist and Eileen replies with the name of a different cyclist. Many of them have foreign names that are a lot of fun to say, like Haimar Zubeldia and Yaroslav Popovych. Even the English-speaking guys have fun names, like Levi and Cadel. Cadel? Have you ever heard that name before? I love it.

We go back and forth until one of us can no longer name anyone else. Then the game is over and a winner is declared.

Well, this summer, my pattern has been to wake up and start watching the Tour; Eileen goes off to work; I write or read news on the internet or go hiking with my friends; and then when Eileen gets home, she watches the rebroadcast of the Tour, and I often watch with her. So, bottom line: my Tour-watching this year was off the charts. So I had a lot of cyclists’ names running through my head.

Meanwhile, Eileen was immersed in her Audiological jargon for eight hours a day. So last night, she was dreaming of how one might solve the dilemma of having a patient undergoing Rotational Chair Testing while wearing wired goggles or electrodes. I’m sure you can all see how such a sitution might be a predicament. What happens to the wires when the chair starts spinning?

Posturography is also a diagnostic test for balance disorders, so when she woke up, Eileen had such things on her mind.

On my mind was still the Tour de France, which recently ended. Amets Txurruka, whose name kinda sounds like a balance disorder, won the Most Combatative Rider award.

So there you have it. The summer experiences of Tim and Eileen summed up in one small, three-word dialogue.