Monday, August 16, 2010

Changes


My how life can get busy. Seems like things all tend to happen at once! Over the past three months, Alex graduated from UCSC, I finished my nursing pre-requisites (and sadly was faced with the fact that it will be a few years until I can start nursing school proper, thanks to budget cuts) and we both quit our jobs in preparation for our big move to Portland.



Amazing how life changes isn't it? Change is bound to happen though. I suppose it isnt so much life's changes that surprise me, I think the astonishing thing is how life changes us.


Our new elected hometown is changing me already. Portland is a weird and wonderful place. That picture up there? Its an automated fortune teller that someone installed on the side of a building in a sort of seedy part of town. It is odd, and amazing, and so typical Portland. The whole city is infected with a do-it-yourself spirit and quirky back to basics/sustainable tendencies. The town is crawling with food carts, obsessed with microbreweries (Alex is like a kid in a candy store, or rather a grown up in a beer themed amusement park when walking the streets) and there is basically a farmers market everyday. Thats right folk, the local food moment is alive and well in wet, rainy Portland. People there love to recycle, take public transit, and reuse stuff in magical and unsuspected ways. And people MAKE things in Portland, build them, craft them, shape them.



Apparently Portland is turning me into a bit of a hippy. I use this term lightly of course, I am wearing jeans from old navy right now and I am pretty sure that the hippy crowd will kick you out for that offense alone. What I am trying to say is that my focus on sustanablity and reducing my personal carbon footprint has been deepend by the time that I have spent driving up and down the North West coast of California and Oregon over the past few months. It is hard not to think about the importance of our resources when you are surrounded by people that better understand their link to the earth and its gifts better than you do yourself. So be prepared people, things are changing around here. Look forward to recipes featuring locally grown food, canning, recycling ideas, home made bread, and other general harebrained things of that sustainable sort.

And of course many token photos of myself dwarfed by a gigantic pint of local brew! Portland here we come.