My new life

Now that the dust of my illness is settling, the details of my Portland life are coming into focus. Here’s how it’s shaping up:

We’re temporarily staying at TJ & Michelle Arko’s house while we look for a house to rent/buy. The Arkos are clinging to the caveman ways as they have neither internet access nor cable TV! This explains my lack of blogging in the last week; it also means that my Tivo is completely out of commission. Watching our regular shows has become an exercise in creativity as we hunt down locations to see each show. ABC kind of comes in over the antenna so we watched LOST and (part of) Alias on a dinky TV at the Arkos’. Part of Alias because we turned it off halfway through, I’m done with that show, they’ve officially ruined it by turning it into a sad copy of The X-Files. Let me know if it gets better again, and MAYBE I’ll check out the DVDs... doubtful. We went to Dave’s house on Sunday afternoon to watch Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica on his Tivo. Sunday night was Micah’s for Arrested Development. I’ve got Scott downloading Enterprise and SG1 for me through bit torrent. We really need to talk the Arkos into getting cable!

Here’s how my weekdays are going; I wake up at [gulp] 7am, Kara and I leave together at 7:30am. She drops me off at Billy’s bungalow at 7:45 and then continues on to work. Billy and I talk and drink coffee for 15 minutes and then walk to the bus stop. The bus takes about 30 minutes to get us to the office, sometimes Billy and I talk but lately we read our books. Work goes from 8:45am-5pm, lunch around noon. There is an awesome “food court” of vendor trailers one block away from here. Every type of food that you can imagine... however, so far the quality of the food has been less than impressive. The last few days I haven’t had cash, so I’ve gotten sandwiches at Subway. At 5:15pm we take the bus back and read again. We’re back at Billy’s bung by 5:45pm and I’m free for fun!

Billy and Dave go lap swimming on Mondays, I was going to join them last night but my cough isn’t entirely gone yet. Kara and I played Rummikub at Billy’s while we waited for them to return. Once they did, we went to Costco with them and had a romantic Valentines dinner of hotdogs and pizza. Drove back to TJ & Michelle’s, talked to them for a while and read for a while. In bed and asleep by 10pm, I expect to be able to stay up a bit later than that soon, but my body is still adjusting to this early morning wakeup...