Have you seen this van?

Lopsi, Logan and Penelope in Van, circa 1/2002

No? Well, unfortunately we haven't either. Which is a problem. It was on loan to Robyn, so he could move some things from his apartment to storage. Yesterday he came out of his apartment to drive it to Portland and pick up the rest of our glass bathroom tiles from Mimi, but the van was no longer in front of his apartment.

I know that's not the best picture of the van, but the one I used to have around of it's hatch back covered with bumper stickers and an Oregon plate, was a paper copy, not one I can get to now.

So Robyn called me, on my way in to Eugene for the usual million and one errands and Logan's dance class. I told him I'd track down the silence plate number, and call him back while he called the police.

I called insurance to see if they knew the tag number, since I couldn't remember it. They gave me the VIN and told me to call the Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV didn't need the VIN, but took my name and a couple other bits of information and told me the tag number. WPC 478. Woo Hoo.

So I called Robyn back and gave him all the information. Then Robyn called me back to say the police didn't want it reported stolen by him because he wasn't the owner. So I got the phone number and called it in while I was driving. (Yes, I use my cell phone while I drive. I wear a head set, because it makes me crazy to hold a phone to my ear and try to pay attention to driving. But I wasn't thrilled with having to write and read back information while driving. I also didn't think of stopping. I was too busy just dealing and not making myself miserable!)

Once I got through on the non emergency number the police were nice and helpful. They took the pertinant information. I described it as dark grey, with bumper stickers on the back, which would make it distinctive anywhere except Eugene Oregon! Then I had to go to the police station and fill out paperwork to complete the report. Okay, I was still half an hour out of town, but the only fixed appointment for the day was Logan's dance class, so that was doable.

The end result is that the van is officially reported as stolen to the police and to insurance. I've been entertained briefly by imagining what the black market value is for a sixteen year old Toyota van, with dents, goat pee, and quite a load of farm dirt. The stuff in the van is more likely to be covered by homeowners insurance (they already hate us anyway!) than by the auto insurance, but auto insurance listed the things on their report just in case. Two jackets, one Johns one Robyn's. Two sets of Doc Martins, one my non-boot set, one Robyn's boots. (That makes two pairs of them I've had done in this year! I haven't replaced the first, lost to smoke damage from the fire yet. But with cooler wetter weather I need to now.) A bed frame. Two end tables. John's sneakers. A box of miscellaneous stuff that has been in there since the fire, and which I just fished a note book I needed out of a few weeks ago. Who knows what else. We weren't' keeping track, life's been a little mixed up around here you know.

The van could be recovered. The police say many stolen vehicles are taken "just to get from point a to point b", and then ditched in some neighborhood, and reported in after they're noticed. It could have been taken for joy riding by local kids. I guess it would have fit a bunch of them.

For those of you asking the obvious questions, yes it was locked. But it was a sixteen year old Toyota van - not exactly tough to break in to. It had no alarms. I don't even think it had an air bag, but it could have. It wasn't worth much, even nine years ago when we got it from my Mom. It's been the vehicle of all work for the last couple years, although we did just spend a couple hundred dollars getting it fixed so it would start reliably. Ah well. Maybe it will turn up, but I'm not holding on to a lot of hope.

And for Ruzz, who suggested, in effect, simplifying things to cut down on stress. Yeah. I'd love to. However life doesn't seem to be cooperating.

Vote Early, Vote Often

I am vastly entertained by this shirt. I won't buy it because I don't want anything resembling the shrubbery's logo. But I do like the saying.

I've voted. Oregon votes by mail, so I filled out my ballot and dropped it off Wednesday, before we started the chaos of bathroom tile and computer problems. Wednesday was a normal day, more or less. We went to Kyle's. We bought some groceries. We came home while Logan napped for five whole minutes on the drive.

Thursday Mimi the tile designer and her brother Zoom arrived to take over the world tile our tub and shower area with John. They brought Skyler, and older and greyer version of Sunny-dog. On Thursday it started serious raining. On Thursday the computer went to the shop to deal with it's having overheated and panicked and eating a year of my email. So Logan and I trailed off to town to drop the computer off, and pick up grout (wrong color, we'll return it and get a different color in Eugene), and say hello to the folks at While Away. Then we headed off to meet Debbie and James for a play date. Logan and James played on the wet play ground. Then we shifted to the bad pizza restaurant that has a play area inside, and sat and ate bread sticks while they played some more. Around 3 Logan and I picked up subway sandwiches for the tiling team and headed home. They stopped briefly to eat, and pretty much kept on tiling until midnight. Logan and I gave up hanging out and watching and went to bed much earlier than that.

Friday morning tiling began again, before Logan and I were even awake. We made toast and tea and took some over for Mimi and Zoom, who do eat in the morning, unlike John. The bathtub area was more blue/green than not by then. Logan and I went back in to town to fetch the computer home, and got back in time to be underfoot for Mimi and Zoom packing up, and figuring out what would have to be brought or shipped to finish the job.

Then John and Logan and I headed off to Logan's dance class in Eugene, which she fell asleep ten minutes before we arrived at. So soundly asleep that we couldn't wake her at the class, so we went on to another errand, then got her there for the second half of dance class when she woke up. We managed to fit in picking up pet food, and wood stove tools, and then head home again completely exhausted. I don't know how Logan and I got exhausted, we weren't doing the tiling, or cutting glass in the rain, or any of that, but we were anyway.

Today, Saturday, Logan and I will head out to a pumpkin decorating birthday party for a friend of hers, while John stays to work on tiling or on window and baseboard finishing. We're all still exhausted, the seven months of living in an efficiency apartment sized space, while trying to do all our normal stuff, participate in rebuilding our house, and deal with what has been dropped by the insurance and or rebuilding company is really beginning to tell. Logan thought it was very important to go to this birthday party, and it's easier to go than to argue with her. Tomorrow, which was going to be a work at home day again, John will go to work at the lab in the morning, and then we'll go to Lorane for a second day to celebrate Kyle and Ellen's twenty-fifth anniversary, and Ellen's sixtieth birthday. Grocery shopping looks like it will get skipped for the second week in a row. We'll eat more lentil soup and beans and rice.

If you're waiting for something from us, don't hold your breath. Or remind us again. We are loosing track of things left and right, and pretty much split in ten or twenty directions. A lot of things are being let go because we just can't figure anything else to do. I'm now thinking we might get to move back in to the house before Thanksgiving, but I don't know for sure. Until we're moved in, we can't finish the inventory that must be done to get payment from the insurance company. There just isn't time or a place to examine the things that still have to be listed individually. John has done a lot of it, both the listing, and then matching up to try to figure out what the replacement cost is. It costs him days off his chemist job, which is also hitting its busy time of year. Everything is stretched as thin as possible, and things, or maybe people, are going to simply start breaking. It's not fun.

I'll post pictures of the tiling in progress sometime soon. And of the closer-to-finished kitchen counters. I have to find out whether Zoom's threats were real or humorous before I post his picture on the web. And whether Mimi cares if I put up twenty pictures of her back. I think I got her face in some, but I haven't checked. We've done the "break in" steps for the wood stove, so I'll see about lighting a fire in it and taking a picture with it going too, and our kid shield, which is less extensive than the kid fence, but we think will provide some safety and some loud scary noises if it's messed with too much.

So how's life in your neck of the woods?

Email Problems

If you're waiting for email from me, it may be a long wait. The computer reset itself without warning today, and ate a bunch of email. We had multiple email programs running, of course. For John it meant that he's got some potentially duplicate messages in his coffee directory. For me, somehow, the program concluded that the most recent email was from my sister, wishing me a Happy Birthday, from October 11, 2003. More recent email exists in the mail boxes for mailing lists, but not in my in box, where most general correspondence was. So if you wrote to me in the past year. . .

Thirty Seven,

Joana and I both turned thirty seven today. Thank you mom for the card, email and phone calls that I missed. Thank you Wilma for the card and phone call I missed. Thank you Cheryl for the phone call I missed. Thank you Alan and Peg for the phone call I actually got!
Logan and I went to Minimusicians, then to a doctor's appointment for her, and then went and got a balloon for each of us, and some flowers for Joana, so she'd be fussed over at some point on campus, I hope. We had lunch with Joana and Robyn, and then had a treat, with a candle for me and Joana at the pastry shop.


photo by the guy selling paper subscriptions!


photo by miss Logan


photo I took of lined up leaves


same leaves, new picture

Got it!

I found out why some people aren't seeing the pictures here. I'm looking at things on a wider monitor. So bigger pictures show without problems. On my mother's monitor the computer puts in blank space until it gets far enough down to fit the whole picture. Thanks for filling me in mom.

So I'm going to try two things. I pointed John at Ruzz's Photolog page (which often has really amazing pictures! It's a pond at dusk today,) and told him I wanted to be able to make a picture a link to a bigger picture, like Ruzz does. John told me a whole bunch of things, and then had me copy a bit of code from one of his Chocolate Alchemy pages. And in the end told me if I set up my post he'd fit the code in properly and make sure it worked right. So maybe I won't break things and have to ask Ruzz to fix them. :-)

Secondly, I'm going to try one more increment smaller on the picture today, to see if that size shows okay at my mom's or at Joana's. But if the link to bigger pictures works, I can post pictures at the size I've been using regularly, and let you look at the larger version if you want to. And the larger versions are two different sizes, so I'm interested to hear how they fit on your monitor folks.



Andrea providing perspective for the scrape in the tree.


This is the chunk of bark taken out of a tree that led me to wonder what exactly might be living behind Grotto Falls. What exactly would rip off bark at my shoulder height. A big cat? A bear? A falls maintenance person marking the tree for some unknown reason. Does Bigfoot come this far south?



If it had been warmer we could have had a shower!


The rocks under the water were very slippery, so as I tried to take pictures, Andrea and I were both trying to make sure our footing was steady, and constantly fish Logan and Aidan out from their attempts to get even closer to the water. And the water hitting the rocks created a decent spray effect too, so we were all misty from being close to the falls, without going in to it.

Tell me how this works people. :-)

More of Grotto Falls

Happy Friday Everyone. Two more Grotto Falls pictures. And there's another one that I will post, but not today. These are an in between size, since some folks couldn't even see the big one from Tuesday.

We're gearing up for a busy weekend with a work party on Sunday. Tomorrow we go to Eugene to pick up electrical fixtures, so that they're here when the electrician supposedly comes next week. Sunday Steve and Joana and Robyn come to spend the day cutting and hammering and sanding bits of wood for windowsills and the little decorative floor boards that hold the linoleum down against the edge of the wall.

As for today, Logan and I will be heading for Eugene shortly with bikes and rain gear to try bicycling in the rain. Then with luck she'll get a nap before the dance class, so she's not exhausted during class. If I'm really lucky that will mean a little more knitting time for me.


Grotto Creek cascading over the edge


like a narrow compact rain shower

Have a good weekend folks!

Grotto Falls

I found the name of the falls in the last picture. And I decided I'd better post something else even with no comments, because I know my mother will be waiting, even if no one else is. But a comment will frequently speed things up.


From a slight distance, the blue and red
bit is Andrea, Aidan and Logan.


cave painting


The snacking hikers.

For those of you without DSL, how bad was the wait for the bigger picture to load? I like the detail in it, but I don't want to make you sit on line for an hour while you wait to see what I've posted this time. I don't think I'd post them all that big, just some. Yes, we're still on dial up too, but we're on line a lot right now, so I don't notice.

Water Falling

This is from another two mom two kid hike a month or maybe a bit more ago that Andrea and I (and Logan and Aidan) went on. This falls, which I've currently forgotten the name of, was in front of a cave that cut back in to the rock. There was a little graffiti, done using some of the clay that was right there. And having a good amount of bark scraped off a tree as we walked in to the falls, we didn't venture back in to see if anything was living in the cave. It was mostly overhang, with rock going up above us quite a ways. And the last of the walk back in to the cave was all on rock. I wish I knew more about the geology.

Thank you mom for the comments and encouragement on the first set of pictures. And Thank you Poet for the two comments. I'll see if I can dig out another picture or two from this hike for tomorrow. Maybe even one that shows how rocky the area was. I was facinated. :-) If there are any comments on this one, that is. :-)

From the summer dance class

This is an assortment of pictures I took of Logan and her dance teacher Hannah, on the last day of her eight week summer dance class. In the one picture that showed other kids in the class particularly, I blurred them, since I didn't even try to explain to parents that I was going to put my kids picture on a web page.

Hannah, has more patience than I can easily imagine, which she demonstrated by giving the same instructions, smiling and being genuinely friendly and pleasant as a group of small children do six or eight different things at a time, as well as sometimes trying to follow Hannah's instructions. I've enjoyed watching the classes, and enjoyed the series I took from Hannah too. The adult class didn't happen this term, but maybe in the spring I'll get to take another. Logan's class is going strong, and will get to perform briefly on stage in December, along with the other children's classes.

I included more stretching than actual flower dance, because of what photos I got and what other kids were in them. Logan went so far as to begin teaching John the Flower Dance at home. I suspect she'll do the same with the Magic Flute dance from this term.


All dressed up for the final day of class.


Starting to stretch, Hello Toes!


Do what Hannah does.


Cradle your leg and rock it.


Still stretching.


Now the other leg.


Looking at pictures that no one else can see.


Flower's leaves opening.


Full bloom.


Back down to the seed position.


All Done.

Comments

Comments on the pictures will get you more pictures. :-)

Photo Catchup

Modeling sun glasses at Kyle's.


Helping make cupcates for Logan's birthday.


Opening a birthday present from Grandma Wilma, on her birthday.


Baby Apple modeling the new shoes from Grandma Wilma.


Modeling their new Wilma-sewn clothing.


Testing out the new half bike on the 24th with Robyn.


Peaty-cat helping to make me post a picture of myself again.