7 Year Anniversary

Today is my 7 year anniversary of living in Portland, OR.

I love this town. Here's why. Portland transforms normal.

1. Vegan restaurants are normal, and I even seek them out on occasion.
2. It's normal to agonize and argue about which coffee shop to go to : Heart, Crema, or Stumptown?
3. Stores for raw dog food, and making your own raw dog food.
4. 90% of my friends are in a band.
5. On my way home from work I usually see 2-5 grown men riding their skateboards or longboards down the road, while listening to their ipods, while texting on their iphones.
6. I no longer notice people carrying furniture around as they move from their community housing situation on Belmont to another on Hawthorne.
7. Ship Ahoy. Night Light. Slingshot Lounge.
8. Nostrana.
9. Streets made for cars, dedicated to bicycles.
10. Used/vintage scares me to death (germs!), but tonight I decided to buy more plates at a thrift shop.
11. When I set up our account with the water bureau, the woman cheerfully suggested I follow her advice to save on the water bill: if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down.
12. I feel guilty using paper napkins, paper towels, toilet paper (just kidding... kind of).
13. When you get in a fender bender in Portland, prepare to meet the other driver with a smile, wave and laugh it off, and move on with your life. This has happened to me 4 times since I've lived here.
14. Walking around old cemeteries is a super rad Sunday afternoon activity.
15. Living in a basement of a century old basement that includes sharing a bathroom with 18 other people and signing a mold/mildew waiver is even less awesome than it sounds. But the rent was so cheap and the location was so good- maybe we could live there again......

A Story

We have a nightly ritual in our house. When the boys get home and dinner gets on the table, we sit down together and we eat and we talk.

The conversation is usually a check-in of sorts about everybody's day. It usually includes some things like this:
"I argued with my staff for a while, then I got in trouble for it, so I argued about being in trouble!"
or
"I beat another level in my Pokemon game, and now I'm an expert Pokemon trainer!"

But the conversation can also be sweet, insightful, empathetic, and clever.

Tonight, the new boy, J, told us a story about ceramics class. He described the process of creating a new piece: how he felt like his creation took on a life of its own, and his hands molded and painted and glazed it into something more than what was in his head at the beginning. How he felt like an artist, and was proud of his art.

We sat, we listened. It was really quite lovely.