This Mold House - The Journey Begins!

The thing about working on an old house is, sometimes, as hard as you imagine it might be to do something, when you finally get around to figuring out how to do it, you wish it was only as hard to do as you thought it was going to be, not as hard as it turned out to be. If you get my drift.

Seriously, we're making good progress on the house, and yes we've encountered unexpected difficulties (such as the digested remains of termite lunch that were formerly, in their wooden state, a structural part of the upstairs floor) but all in all, despite the pain and suffering and bruised knuckles, we're starting to turn this place into our home. Plus it smells a lot better already.

And, as promised, I'll try to keep you if not up-to-date with photos, at least somewhat informed as to what we've managed to accomplish so far. So we'll start at the beginning -- Click here for some photos from the very first weekend we spent working on the house!

Home, Home, and Deranged ...

As a wise man once said, "Why throw your money away on rent, when you can throw your money away on fixing up your VERY OWN HOUSE?"

The lovely Colyn and I have been happy renters in our cozy little cottage, spending our hard-earned time and money traveling and throwing great parties (hey, I just call 'em as I see 'em), and we've been content to go on like that for ... well, forever, really. I've owned a house before (or co-owned a house before) and frankly, there's a lot to be said for NOT owning a house. Like, when the roof starts leaking (as our rental house did, last winter) you just call your friendly landlord and he ignores the problem, but you don't care, because it's not your house. Works for me, anyway.

But I must admit, there were times I'd wake up on a Saturday morning and go, "I feel like building something today." Nothing practical or useful, I'm sure, maybe just nail a couple of board together ... and while we have a nominal garage-slash-workshop, it's really more of a garage-slash-bunch-of-boxes-and-tools-all-over-the-place-plus-it-leaks-when-it-rains. Also, frankly, I'm getting tired of peeling off the stickers the city keeps putting on the window of my Travelall, "This Abandoned Vehicle Will Be Towed in 48 Hours." The irony is, the Travelall is the one vehicle I parked on the street that is running. So the joke's on them.

Seriously, as much as we love our rental house, it has, in an ironically good way, helped us decide what we want and don't want in a house. And all the things we want -- a larger yard that we can garden, a larger garage to do more real "hands-on" project stuff, a front porch to lounge on in the summer, plenty of room to have even more great parties, a basement for ... well, a basement is just cool.

We weren't even looking around very seriously when we happened across the house that we ultimately and just recently bought, it was just one of those serendipitous things. If you believe in fate, call it fate; anyway, the long and short of it is, we're the new owners of a 1940's-vintage "farm"-style house, and we're very much looking forward to making it our home.

And very realistically, this house is definitely what you might call, a "fixer-upper." Emphasis on the "fixer" part. But we are of hardy stock and where other people see leaky pipes, spider webs, cracked plaster, and six layers of painted wallpaper that need to be removed, we see ... OUR NEW HOME!

And we're not afraid to get our hands dirty, so there's that. Stay tuned for much, much, MUCH more in the days, weeks, and even years to come!

Hula-ba-Luau 2008!

Greetings, all! Sorry for taking six months between updates, but, as they say, I've been lazy.

Actually that's not quite true, I have been lazy, true, but also we've kept our plates rather full this last year, happily so, and with any luck we'll share some words and pictures in the coming months to fill you in on what's happening.

But in the meantime, we did have a heck of a party a few weeks, our (hopefully) first annual Hula-ba-Luau Staycation Celebration. And what a time was had by all ... at least, we hope a good time was had by all. Either that, or you all had a rotten time and lied to us about it so as not to hurt our feelings, which at least goes to show we do know how to pick our friends!

You can watch Onnie do the AMAZING FIRE DANCE by clicking on the video player window above, and see more pictures in the Photo Gallery.

Click here to go to the photo gallery for our Hula-ba-Luau Party!

A brand new shiny year, and a bunch of old cars

When we last left our hero, he was doing the Christmas Countdown. And doing a lousy job at it, I must say, and I hope you'll forgive me for both the paucity of content updates to our site and for the distance between said pauce updates. I have several good excuses, not the least of which was the planning of, taking of, documenting of, and coming back home from, our honeymoon overseas -- we spent just over two weeks in Paris and London (a week-ish in each city), and frankly it was a blast. We took several thousand photographs -- not several hundred, several thousand -- and I'm working to get those edited and assembled into some sort of travelogue that I'll post as soon as possible. So stay tuned!

But we've been busy with lots of other things too, including a trip to the annual Portland Swap Meet. It's the largest vintage/antique auto show on the west coast, and it just happened to take place starting the Friday of the week we returned from our trip. Because we had that Friday off, we decided to go a bit early (normally my dad and I go on Saturday, I don't skip work for this usually). It's a good thing we did, too, because we ended up picking up some stuff that I'm sure would've been gone by Saturday if we'd waited. What kind of stuff did we get? You'll have to check out the Photo section to see!

Click the antique car picture to see our photos from the Great Annual Portland Auto Swap Meet!

My Wonderful Groom

Hello All, it's Colyn. I just want to take a moment to thank my absolutely wonderful husband for the wedding of a lifetime. It wouldn't have been what it was without him. Of course, as the groom, he was a required component of the day, but as the talented, handy, creative, inspired, PATIENT man that he is, well ... he made some major dreams come true. All those months he asked me to elope, and -- even though I came close to consenting a couple of times -- I asked that we have some small ceremony where at least a few key people could be there to share the moment. And that's what we had. A wonderful marriage day! I appreciate to the tip of my toes all his hard work and talents. And, like I said, lots of patience.

I want to thank you all for supporting us and for sharing our joy. But I want to thank Onnie for making it all worthwile. Isn't he the greatest?

(Sorry girls ... this fabulous man is taken.)

Dumm dumm da dumm ...

It's Onnie checking in with you, and YIKES it's October already! Not that I'm not ready to get married to the most gorgeous woman on the planet (no offense to you other lovely ladies out there), but I'm one of those guys who always thinks he's forgetting something. Like keys, wallet, suit and tie, pants, that sorta thing.

But we made our Official Check List and everything's going according to plan, such as it is. We've updated the Wedding link on your left there with some more pertinent and maybe even useful updates on travel, lodging, food, drink, and the Big Day, so check it out and we'll be seeing you soon!

To market, to market ...

Not every day of our lives is spent traveling to exotic places and/or Seattle -- but then when you live in a place like Portland, even an hour on a Wednesday afternoon can be an experience in tastes, sights, and sounds, such as the weekly Farmers' Market in the Park Blocks. Which just happens to be only a few blocks from the PSU campus, where Colyn and I work; we check out the market pretty much every week on our lunch break, and brought along our camera this time to share with you just a bit of what it's like.

So check out the pictures in the Photo gallery, and bring your appetite!

Portland to Astoria Memorial Ride 2007

Every year since my mom's passing in 1997, my dad, Javier, has ridden his bicycle from his house in Portland, all the way to the South Jetty at the mouth of the Columbia River, on (or on the weekend nearest) the day she died, September 10th. This year the ride was on Saturday, September 8th, and it turned out to be a lovely day.

It's a one-day ride, over 100 miles, and it's quite a feat -- I always follow in whatever vehicle I happen to have running, usually a Travelall, and we rendezvous at the beach and have a memorial to my mom at one of her favorite places. This year, my sister and my nephew joined in, driving separately, and Fletcher (age 15) rode his bicycle with my dad for the last twenty miles or so. And even twenty miles on a bike at the coast, in the wind, in the traffic, is a feat in itself.

It's always something of a melancholy experience, but not in a dreary or dismal way ... just makes me think of how good life really is, and how a little love goes a very long way in making it all worthwhile.

And there are some cool pictures of the day in our photo gallery, including some video of real-life sea lions at play!