"Back in the saddle again....."  not that I was gone or out of it but  I did the equivalent of falling off the horse in that I had written a couple of long blog posts, entries, whatever you call them, and my cat Weeble jumped on my keyboard and did away with them.  And I mean away. I used to represent the town I live in on our county-wide waste district and one of the things recycling education is supposed to teach is that there is no "away" where trash is concerned.  Well, I am here to tell you that when working on a remote server that there most certainly is an away and my blog fell into it -- in pieces. I am now attempting to pick them up.

Meanwhile,  I have now been in Oregon for nearly 4 weeks waiting for my daughter's baby to arrive. The due date is tomorrow and he (and yes, we do know the gender because the evidence on the ultrasound seems irrefutable)  shows no signs of dropping in -- so we shall see.  The whole fam-damily is here and my husband has been putting down a hardwood floor in most of the kids'  house,  so I am taking a Sunday afternoon to catch up here  while he is locked up in the master bedroom sanding.  He had said that he would do his best to get the floor done before the baby showed up. Showed up? As if labor was like that. Never mind that it is called labor for a reason. I have never been so tired in my life as I was after "giving birth"! Giving? Try slaving.

But no one is reading this to find out about arrival of said grandson.  We are all tired of waiting for him, that's all. Especially my daughter, she is SO tired of being pregnant that I think I can safely say that this will be the one and only in this generation,  just as she was in hers.  So here I remain in the Columbia Gorge area and when I look out the office window in this house there is Mount Hood. If I walk outside and around the corner and look north I see Mount Adams over in the back country of Washington. It is spectacular country here and Portland is a terrific city.  Only problem seems to be that right now the unemployment in and around the city is some of  the worst in the country.  Oregon seems to be like Vermont, meaning good luck finding  a native.  Virtually everyone I meet is a transplant. We had a young woman working for us a few years ago in Vermont who said " I would probably think Vermont was a most beautiful place -- if I hadn't grown up in Oregon." I see what she meant. And lots of people move here if they are into skiing, wind surfing, kiting, kayaking, hiking, mountain biking, etc, etc, etc . Most people don't come here because it is a good place to loaf.  Although I reckon one could do just that if they had gobs of money.  All the yuppie sports require lots of yuppie gear -- it's not like playing catch in the back yard. I was in an outdoor shop in Portland the other day in which the consignment area was filled with what looked like  good, new stuff.  I bought what had been a $140 jacket for $15 and it looks and feels like new. Now of course just because it had cost $140 doesn't mean it was worth that but that's what somebody paid for it. So yes, it seems to me that if you move here to do the yuppie sports you had best have plenty of dinero.

And in the summer the Columbia River Gorge is teeming with wind surfers and kiters. I have been told that in summer the prevailing winds are from the west and the current of the river runs from the east  and that combination whips up terrific winds and swells for the surfers.  I think it was Meriwether Lewis who wrote  that the salmon were so thick here in 1803 that the river looked like you could cross it by walking on the backs of the fish. These days you could do it on wind surfers. Well, they are good for the economy. I have an acquaintance back east who takes his vacation here every summer, flies out with his wind gear, rents a house and is on the river every day. And there are worse things folks could be doing.

So that is my current story. We are just about to load everything up and publish our first on-line issue of tMR then will follow with another in the spring. And that will clean up everything that was in our pipeline. I  still have a bunch of submissions back in Vermont that will be answered when I get there -- looks like December 15th -- and then we will be ready to, and here I use a loathsome phrase one finds in government, media and almost anywhere else these days -- "go forward". I had a whole three paragraphs of a ranting blog about this figure of speech and that was one of the ones that my cat sent to the cyber-void.  Maybe it was just as well. Next time around I can rant about poor grammar and figures of speech. But that's it for now.