Beautiful

When I lived in Tulsa, I got to work for Melissa Ramirez.  She has a beautiful family.  Her kids, the Spectacular Sophia and the Extraordinary Elijah, are bright, witty, and fun - just like their parents!  I enjoyed seeing them both come through the office from time to time.

Elijah has overcome a lot in his (nearly) four years, and last week I was glued to their blog Pray For Eli as his dad, David, posted videos of him getting his brand new "special shoes" and learning to walk.  I watched the videos during lunch and it was all I could do to keep from jumping up to celebrate his victories in my cubicle!  If you want to get to know a beautiful family, visit that blog!  Even if you don't wander over to their blog, keep them in your prayers as Elijah masters walking.  After all, he has a dynamo of a big sister to keep up with!

Busy Busy

This last week was busy.  I finished this quilt for our friends the Herberts who had their first son, Daxton, this weekend.  Congratulations to them!

Because of my poor photography skills, I don't know if you can see that the fabrics include waves, palm trees, and starfish or that it's quilted all over with waves.  Those Herberts love the West Coast, and who can blame them?

Then Josh and I went on vacation.  Josh hadn't seen Central Oregon before so we visited Bend and Sisters.  We met a legit watch maker in Sisters from whom we will purchase all our wrist and/or pocket time pieces in the future.  The guy is an artist!  I don't remember his name.  But Josh got his card.

On the way home, we decided to track down some ghost towns, since Oregon has the most.  We bought a book at Powell's before leaving the city, but since they deal mostly in used books, the only one on ghost towns we could find was 40 years old.  Mistake!  Although, it is the same book my Grandpa used when he and Grandma went on a ghost town tour in the '70s (no lies).

Our journey was kind of a bust, because in the last 40 years one of the towns from the book had completely disappeared and two others had kind of bounced back (good for them, though!).  My unstable relationship with the camera was momentarily in good standing when I took this picture:

Too bad the only real abandoned building we saw was surrounded by barbed wire and "No Trespassing" signs.  Oh well, it was nice to have a break, and I certainly enjoyed five whole days in a row with Josh!

Fight (Almost)

I said I would blog about my adventures on TriMet, but nothing too extraordinary has happened.  Sometimes I see things that make me feel pretty good about humanity – like the spacey kid with his pants belted around his knees getting up to give his seat to the lady with crutches before being asked.  Sometimes I see things that are funny – like the dude with a case of beer just handing them out to everyone on the train and starting a party.  Sometimes, though, I see things that make me sad for humanity, but I don’t need to bring out those stories.  So instead I’ll tell one that started in that direction, but had a sort of comical twist.

I was sitting near the back of the train and heard a lady yelling.  It sounded like she thought she was in a fight, but I couldn’t tell if the other person was as into the fight as she was.  I imagine the other person was standing there, having inadvertently offended her, not knowing how to get out of an awkward situation with a crazy person.  I guess this because I only ever heard one voice.

Well, the Max driver got tired of the yelling and at the next stop got on the intercom to ask them to take the fight off the train.  The angry girl immediately jumped off and started yelling curse words mixed in with things like “How dare you look at me that way,” or “Who do you think you are?”  While she was having her fit trying to get the fight to follow her, the driver just closed the door and started on down the tracks leaving her with no one to accost.

Well done, driver.