Year end review 2020-Part 9: 2nd half of October

October-2nd half

Soon after we returned from our trip, our granddaughter celebrated her 4th birthday. We still weren’t able to visit her and her brother in person, but we spent a little time on Facetime.








While we were on our trip, Christy started making arrangements to move to Portland, Oregon. She was going to do the whole thing herself by hitching a U-haul trailer to her car, but that idea worried me so I asked her to wait until Vladi and I got home so that we could help her with the move. She agreed. She wanted to move to Portland to get a fresh start in a place where she felt she could afford to live on her own. She also liked the idea of being closer to her brother, who has lived in Portland for several years.
At the same time that she was planning this, my friend Janeen’s daughter, Deonna, was also making plans to move. Coincidentally, she was moving closer to her brother as well. She was moving to Idaho with her partner and their kids.

On the second to last weekend of October, we decided to throw a party to wish both girls goodbye and good luck. Vladi’s birthday is at the end of October as well, so we were celebrating that too. And it just so happened that the L.A. Dodgers were on their way to winning the World Series, and there are a lot of Dodger fans in our crowd so we had to set up a TV to watch the second to last game. We had the party on our patio so that there was plenty of fresh air circulating around us because we still had to be careful about the virus.



This is what the party looked like. The Dodgers went on to win the World Series two days later.

And here are the guests of honor. Christy is hugging Alex and Athan (Deonna’s boys), next is Vladi, then Deonna is holding her youngest, Brayden, and Kenny is her partner.

The following couple of days were spent packing the moving truck and getting ready to leave.



We had decided to drive separately, allowing Christy to go ahead of us in her car. She would be able to get there more quickly, with only one stop while we would need to make two.

The trip went smoothly and when we arrived, Ben came over to help us unload the truck. Vladi and I rented a car for the rest of our stay and did a little exploring around Portland.

First, we went to Union Station because we had decided to take a train ride home and we wanted to make sure we knew where to go to get on the train. We also upgraded our tickets from a roomette (which was very small) to a bedroom (which was still pretty small, but a little more comfortable.)



With that accomplished, we took a walk around downtown Portland. It was one of the places where protests following the George Floyd killing were most violent. Five months had passed and the damage was still very much in evidence.



I took these pictures across the street from the Apple store. Their broken glass windows were boarded over and the boards were covered with messages of pain and sympathy and demand for change. The Louis Vuitton store was similarly arrayed.



I didn’t take pictures of all the damaged buildings that we saw but what we saw was sobering. Ben told me that a lot of the buildings were still boarded up in anticipation of the unrest that was expected in the coming week. And what was coming up? The presidential election. It made my heart ache.

We did this walking tour on October 31st.

Even though the next day was November 1, and it should begin Part 10 of my story, it really fits better at the end of Part 9. Christy, Ben, Vladi and I took a beautiful hike at Powell Butte Nature Park. It was a gorgeous day and the most fun part of it was getting some great photos with my kids.



We started out with our masks on and Vladi took a few standard photos. As we saw fewer and fewer other people on the trail, we felt it was safe to ditch the masks and then Christy took charge of our “photo shoot.” We found several spots with good backgrounds and a place where she could lean her camera against something. And she directed us to “strike a pose!”

Christy and Ben are really good at this sort of thing. Vladi and I got into the spirit but our poses were a little awkward. We had so much fun, though, it didn’t really matter.

We’ve been asked by a couple of people when the album is going to drop. Don’t my kids look like rock stars?



We were leaning against this old fence and right after we got this picture, the top rail that I was leaning against gave way and I fell backwards flat on my back. Vladi and the kids were very concerned but I started laughing so uncontrollably at the how ridiculous I felt that they quickly realized that I was okay. Fortunately there were no sharp rocks or pieces of wood where I landed and the ground was pretty soft (you can see how grassy it was). But it was quite some time before I could stop laughing. We had a really fun time with my kids.

The next day Vladi and I left for home.