6 posts from November 2009

This morning Emma got her first haircut!  We've been meaning to do it for a bit now since her hair is so curly that we have to comb and brush it like crazy after every shower.  If her hair isn't constantly maintained she ends up looking like Tarzan or Sasquatch.  So we just trimmed a couple inches off the ends to even things up.  Emma was all excited about it, though.

Then this afternoon we went on a hike at North Bank Ranch.  We went a couple miles up the Middle Fork of Jackson Creek.  Surprisingly we didn't see any deer or turkey, but we had the place to ourselves.  It started out sunny and about 55, but steadily got more and more cloudy.  The rain is imminent.  And there's fresh snow on the mountains.  None down here yet and it can stay that way for all I care!

I get my stitches out on Monday which hopefully won't be too painful.  Dohnele made a pumpkin pie cheesecake last night which was so good that it didn't even last 24 hours!

We cannot wait for Thanksgiving!!!  Just a couple days at work and then we're off to Spokane!  We're bringing up the pumpkin pie cheesecake and a sour cream pumpkin pie along with a delicious apple-cranberry sauce and all the fixins for a bacon-almond quinoa dish.

I also found out this week that I'll be going to Portland for a work meeting on December 2nd and 3rd!  It's a five-year workforce development committee.  They're putting us up at the Benson Hotel and I'm bringing Dohnele and Emma so that after meetings we can go out to dinner and go shopping and stuff.  Good times!

Here's some more shots of Emma's artistry.  She loves drawing something nearly every day and the easel that she has does triple duty as a marker board, chalk board and drawing board.

We went to Eugene yesterday which was a lot of fun.  We're finally getting a print framed that we've had rolled up in a tube for exactly a year now.  Since it's 59 inches wide, only two places in Roseburg have been willing to take the project on and both wanted to charge over $400.  We went to a really nice place in Eugene that was willing to charge only $150 for everything short of the frame!  So we; re looking forward to that.  It'll be done at the end of the month.

We also got together with Todd and Casey which is always fun.  We brought up some wine and just did a big pizza and salad dinner at their place.  Emma and Gavin played well with each other for a change - probably because they were both tired.

And now the big news...  This past Monday I was supposed to be working in the office all day.  Unfortunately the computer servers were down.  I waited for a couple hours before I said "screw it" and took off to do some field work.  I needed to retrieve some stream temperature monitors since summer is definitely over.  Since stream flows are up a bit I had brought my machete to poke around in the creeks so that I could more easily retrieve the data loggers.  On my very short hike (100 feet) between the creek and the road I took a step that I didn't quite stick and so I started to fall backwards.  In instinct I jammed my machete into the ground to arrest my fall.  I do that all the time and it works great!  But for whatever reason, this time around my  hand slipped off the handle and slid down the blade and saw of my machete.  With a blade on one side and a saw on the other side, I cut my thumb and pointer finger real good.  I ran the last 30 feet to the truck, washed the gaping wound, bandaged it up with bandages from the truck's first aid kit and sped to the ER where I got 13 stitches.  Now my right hand looks like a mummy.  The bandages came off a day or so ago for a change (that's when I got the pictures) and they can come off for good tomorrow if I want.  I'll probably keep it bandaged until I get the stitches out in a week just because the stitches make me look like Frankenstein.  It's amazing how  under appreciated those fingers are, but fortunately Dohnele is taking great care of me and babying me excessively which I love!

We spent the better part of today dealing with dental/vision/health insurance since it's Open Season; figuring out what plans offer and for how much and where the plan is accepted.  We decided to downgrade our dental insurance a bit since there's not much difference in the plans and it'll save us $40 every month.  We thought about getting vision insurance since it was cheap, but found out that it really only covers glasses and contacts (which none of us have) and our health insurance (which we decided to not change) already covers any eyeball surgery should it become necessary.

It's been a really fun week!  A week ago Sunday I picked up a rig from work and drove it home.  I had a nine hour drive in front of me on Monday and I didn't want to waste time in the office, so I just brought the rig home with me.  On Monday morning I took off.  I had been checking the webcams at Santiam Pass and it looked clear and dry.  I wanted to go the more direct route across Oregon as opposed to the longer way - even though the longer way was freeway.

So I drove up to Eugene and from there I drove up the McKenzie Highway which connects with the Central Oregon Highway.  I'd never been on either of these roads and it was gorgeous!  The weather cooperated nicely and the views were amazing.  Santiam Pass yielded teriffic views of Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington and the Three Sisters.  I'd never been to Bend before and it turned out to be a pretty neat place.  Between Bend and Burns there was nothing but rolling hills of sagebrush and juniper.  It really reminded me of Utah and was really neat in a remote, desolate sorta way.
After Burns the highway started following the Malheur River as it wound through some neat canyon country.  Finally the highway popped out in Ontario where my conference was.  The conference itself was interesting.  Granted, I was meeting with a dozen others who all had huge egos, but overall the meeting was good, we got a lot accomplished and I volunteered for a bunch of other stuff.  Hopefully I'll be sitting in on another state committee concerned with five-year personnel planning.  I'm also going to be in charge of a statewide website for human resources.  The highlight of the trip was hanging out with the associate state director for the BLM and other committee member who are all focused on furthering their careers.
I did get a chance to go on a hike one evening.  It was a good break from all the meetings.  Myself and a forester from Eugene drove a few miles out of town and hiked up Henry Gulch into the foothills of Tub Mountain.  It was so nice to be hiking in an area like Utah and Colorado; wide, open, beautiful terrain.  Really loved it!
The last day was a half day of meetings followed by a field trip to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City.  Afterwards, most everyone drove back to Ontario to spend another night.  However, I'd been looking at forecasts and weather satellites which made it look like a big weather front was moving in, so I decided to take off right for home.  Plus, since I was starting in a different spot, I could drive back a different route.
I headed out of Baker City on the Whitney Highway.  I followed that through the Blue Mountains, over Dixie Summit and down into the John Day River Valley where I got onto the Ochoco Highway.  This route is a bit more north than the road I took over a few days earlier and so it was more mountainous.  It was super windy and you could literally see the weather front moving in from the west.  I saw a ton of deer and some really neat canyons before the sun finally set.  After that I drove up and over Ochoco Pass, where it started to rain, and down into Prineville.  I gassed up in Redmond and then reconnected with the Central Oregon Highway.  It cleared up a bit and I was worried that would mean ice up on Santiam Pass, but as soon as I got west of Sisters, it started pouring down rain.  It stayed rainy all the way to the top of the Pass and all the way down the other side.  The next morning, after getting home, I checked the Pass webcams and saw where there were vehicle accidents and almost a foot of fresh snow on the Pass, so it looks like I timed it perfectly!

Now that I'm back and it's the weekend, I spent the day with Dohnele and Emma doing yardwork.  We ripped up a rhodedendron and some other plants that were dead when we bought the place.  We raked some leaves, planted some wildflowers and mulched a strip of ground along the street near the mailboxes.

It's raining again, so we're going to spend the rest of the day curled up by the fire watching movies!

Dohnele cooked a soup yesterday; three types of mushrooms in a sherry-shallot broth.  Tonight we're making a chocolate red wine cake which sounds reeeeaaaallllyyyy good! 

This parade is sooo awesome!  This is the third year we've gone and we've never been disappointed!  This year was probably the best we've seen - even though Dohnele and I didn't dress up this year.  It didn't hurt that this year there was a zombie Michael Jackson rendition of "Thriller" which was VERY entertaining!

As always there are literally thousands of people that show up.  And even though the parade is technically for the kids, just as many adults show up.  The best part is that everyone just has fun.

After the parade we went to Harry and David in Medford where they were giving away free pumpkins!  I got dropped off at a Halloween party that an old co-worker was hosting while Dohnele and Cindy went shopping and trick-or-treating at the Mall.

It was good to catch up with friends and gossip from Medford.  We stayed the night at the Rogue Regency which was really nice.  Cindy and Juleah took off this morning, we did a Costco run and then drove home.  Beautiful day in Medford (sunny and 65), but it was and still is dark and cloudy over Douglas County.

My big news came in the middle of last week; that state committee that I was trying to get on...  Well, I got the position!!!  My supervisor, another manager and the District Manager all came over to congratulate me.  Apparently the vote was unanimous in my favor!  That said, I leave tomorrow for Ontario (located in eastern Oregon) for my first week-long meeting.  These meetings happen every three months in different locations around Oregon and Washington.  I'm driving to this meeting; it'll take most of the day to get there and instead of going over on the interstate, I'm going to drive over Santiam Pass, through Bend, Oregon and right through the middle of the state.  There was snow on the passes a few days ago, but it's all cleared up now.