So it is very cold, but I feel like it’s the harsh, bracing wind of progress.

Here are a couple of shots of Yoshi watching his favorite film.

Here is the latest in a series that I like to call “What the Hell is Going On with My Head?”

(standoff fish?)

Pictures from that cool little park at the end of Skidmore.

Here is Yoshi stepping on my face.

Also, I love the guy in the background who has basically the same expression as me.

This is Yoshi, watching me hold a bottle cap over his head. It’s like something out of Wegman. Only with a cat. And the cat is a total lunatic.

Life is hard, but I bought myself Jaffa Cakes to make up for it.

I’m not sure what exactly this sculpture that someone near Alberta had in their yard says about man’s inhumanity to man, but it’s certainly something.

I got a rather severe spider bite on my ass last week. Attributing the incident to pants that had been sitting in the back of the closet for some time, I took everything out and washed it. Unfortunately, there isn’t a conveniently-located dry cleaners, so my 1960s Brook’s Brothers suit is still sitting around for Yoshi to use to demonstrate his habit of sitting in the worst possible places.

The house has gotten really cold, and the furnace died again.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to have done with it and get some more powerful electric space heaters.

It was the day Kate, Sylvia, & I went out without Joaquin, who had to telecommute (totally unfair). I know it was near Lamalou-les-Bains, but in an even smaller town. Olargues, maybe?

Anyways, what I want to be clear about is that I mean this as a compliment. It is seriously cute in Silverton. The people are seriously friendly here. And almost everyone is extremely well groomed (which is actually more than I can say for some of the citizens of le tinytown francais, right?).

I still feel like an outsider as a resident, maybe because I’m still doing all of my grocery shopping in Portland on the weekends, and spend all my weeknights making project samples while streaming Battlestar Galactica. So whose fault is that. As a teacher, however, I feel very welcomed and appreciated, and since I’ve already sung my swan song for Molalla, I feel at liberty to say this was absolutely the right move for me to make professionally. (Whew.)

How the other move, the Steelhammer Rd part, fits in to everything is still tricky and weird. Maybe I should try to find a way to quantify things.

This week:

moonlight and deer foraging in the yard, +1 Silverton
two separate death matches with hornets in the living room, -1 Silverton

I guess that’s even steven for now.