Bear with me.

I am late to the party, apparently.  And technologically retarded.  A bazillion other people have already figured out this blogging thing, while I am stumped by words and phrases like “cloud” and “plugin” and “pingback.”  What the hell is a “pingback”?  But I’m going to give it a try, so I hope that you will be patient.

So we’re in Portland.  Well, not really in Portland, but in a lovely tree-filled place 15 minutes outside of Portland called Lake Oswego.  We’re momentarily jobless, but who wouldn’t want to hire us?  We’re not worried.  Maj has learned to knit, and Kallan has been crafting little animals out of those weird plastic beads that you place in a careful pattern and then iron to melt them together.

Etsy, here we come!

A quick status report:

All human family members arrived intact and have been reasonably well-behaved in their new state of residence.  Mostly.  Really.

Persie the obsequious Labrador spent about two days crawling about the new house as though she expected the ceiling to cave in on her at any moment.  She has since made a full recovery, but refuses to stay off of the couches.  She is in a constant state of annoyance that someone has turned the world’s thermostat down.

Jack the Lakeland Terrier is still Jack.  We removed most of the baby-proofing latches that filled this house (don’t worry, landlord – we have put them all safely in a bag and will re-install them when we leave if you desire), but we left the locks on the garbage cupboards.  Jack found the new lower garbage containers impossible to resist.  And there was that horrible moment while out walking Jack and introducing ourselves to our new neighbors.  What I mistook for extreme interest in an 8 year old girl’s friendship was in fact extreme interest in the hamster she was holding.  Tragedy (very) narrowly averted.

Delilah the turtle celebrated our arrival in Oregon with a coming out party of sorts.  She’s been trying to mate with her fish friend Snack (who was, as the name suggests, supposed to have been turtle food by now).  Delilah has been revealed for the lusty boy she is, but Kallan prefers to just call her “confused” rather than change her name to whatever the masculine version of Delilah would be.

Little, the larger shiny green tree frog, is fine.  Big, the smaller one-eyed paranoid tree frog, is not so fine.  The long drive up in a warmed styrofoam picnic cooler did not sit well.  We’ve been force-feeding him for the past few days, but he’s looking wrinkly and hollow.  Frogs are not supposed to look wrinkly and hollow, so I have been preparing Maj for the likely demise of Big.

The house is good.  Lots of deferred maintenance (sorry, landlord), which is driving Mark nuts.  Some of the more pressing issues have been dealt with by a very competent handyman from our property management company named Bud.  I love that he is named Bud.  But the house is good.  It’s a friendly house with a huge back yard and trees that reach right up into the sky.

Great neighborhood.  Lots of kids and dogs and friendly faces.  A huge change from our house in Vallejo, and a very welcome one.  It’s as though we have moved to a different planet.  It makes me mourn for the time we wasted in Vallejo trying to make things work.

And speaking of mourning, the sale of the house in Vallejo has just been a nightmare.  I will spare you all the details (as I wish I had been spared them these last months), but we are currently in a short sale escrow awaiting approval from the bank for a sales price that made me cry when I heard it.  So we will be renting for a while until we win the lottery or until some long-lost relative with whom I reconnect through this blog falls in love with my wit, writes me into his or her will, and then quickly and painlessly dies.

It could happen.

Hoping you’ll follow me as I find my way in this blog and in life.  Although when I put it that way, you’d have to be an idiot to follow me when I clearly don’t know where I am going.  You may want to bring breadcrumbs to strew along the trail.

Kris