Sunday afternoon, December twoth: It’s good to be in a northern city again. Driving down streets with leaf litter, there’s a ragged, unkempt edge to Portland I don’t find so often in California, with its edged lawns, poodle-cut bushes, and palm trees. Portland has a stolid feel to it, even in its architecture, with homes built to stay warm and cozy in stormy weather.
It feels familiar to me, having grown up Minneapolis, but I suppose you find similar gray skies, leafy, forested streets, and thriving “indoors” culture in Hamburg or Halifax, too.
Saturday I dropped Mrs. Ombud off for her glassmaking class (she’s making beads as ornate as sci fi planets, to string on their own solar orbits) and I began touring dog parks and brewpubs. A healthy mix of caloric intake and expenditure, with a pilgrimage to Powell’s books thrown into the schedule. (Damages: over $100, filing in holes in the Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, and Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe) collections – with a sturdier copy of Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, so I can read it during my commute.)
Today the skies have opened. The rain is constant, at times gusting hard, at other times slowing to soft speckling, barely enough to keep the windshield wipers from squeaking.
Tonight the wind is supposed to pick up, and they are warning us to batten down the hatches and prepare for stormy weather. I figured I’d better run the dogs well today, as I don’t know how many chances they’ll have either Monday or during the drive back to the Bay Area. So we took them out for their dawn “constitutional” at little Creston park, and then later in the morning we found the off leash area of Mt. Tabor State Park and had a good gambol.
Edie got several full-out sprints in, treeing squirrels and jumping at the trunks, as if maybe some day she’ll figure out the secret of climbing. Ernie gets a few runs in, too, but he’s not the “mudder” our little black Labrador Edie is, and doesn’t seem to enjoy inclement weather as she does; he’s soon trotting along at my heel. Ernie’s over five years old now (times seven, that’s 35+), so he’s catching up to me. A pair of old guys happy to stroll, rather than charge through the woods. He looks up at me, a bit wet and bedraggled, with German shepherd concern that it might be time to call our free-spirited rambler Edie in, and herd our little mini-pack back to the car.
I may not log in again until we’re back home. It sounds like we’d better be ready for a very stormy drive back to Alameda. But that’s okay. I’m enjoying my stay, kind of refreshing to be back in a northern city. Beer, books, and weather by the bucketful, what’s not to like?
OmbudsBen 
I like the word ‘twoth’. I like being able to count ‘zeroth’, ‘oneth’, ‘twoth’.
Sometimes I like to think I’m different from the rest of the world. Sometimes I like to think I’m similar to the humans. Seeing you using that word let me do both at once.
I haven’t been to a real bookstore in ages. I think I’m due.
Funny, after writing that post that was the one thing I thought to go back and revise — twoth — and it’s the one thing you keyed on.
One never knows …
I almost felt bad keying on such a minor thing and not saying anything about the rest of the post. Then, I thought, whatever. Sometimes I read entire posts and say nothing at all. And, I really did like the word ‘twoth’. I’m still liking it. I’m also thinking about the game of charades that my sweetie and I played last night where she tried to communicate to me that I had to be the tooth fairy but I thought she was telling me to be a bunny rabbit.