Our Week in Photos

Now that the jet lag has concluded its solo and returned to its seat in the orchestra pit of accumulated sleep damage, I am cautiously settling back into "everyday life." For me that's a fairly routine thing of a celebratory breakfast, followed by a brief moment where I organize a few (but not all) responsibilities at the computer, and then either go to the gym or go running. (Today it's the gym, for Coop's "chest and tri's" workout.) Then I pass through a grocery store for dinner inspiration, and indulge fretfully in some afternoon dithering, before we cook and taking a walk together. The bulk of Achewood is produced well after dinner, when Lauren is downstairs relaxing. She actually works all day, for the City of Portland (hold your laughter, it is too a real city), managing their residential and commercial deconstruction programs. She's become quite the muckety-muck in that position, actually, and has a hard hat and steel-toed boots for when she has to go to sites and string a noncompliant jerk up in a festoon of policy.

Fatherly duties this week included drafting a plan for financial independence with Hayden, and going out to lunch with him twice. The woman who owns the farm that Hayden manages was thrown from a particularly incorrigible young Mustang named Happy, and she is laid-by hard with a half-rack of busted ribs, so I drove a few bags of groceries out for her family and took H to Shari's, as is our customary date. Only, Shari's restaurants seem to have all gone out of business while I was in Italy, so no more chewy hash browns for us. We went to a different place that was the same.

This weekend we're having a handful of friends over for Oktuberhonk, which is a party we invented. (It was important to me that the title not have stupid umlauts, which people of my generation tend to think are an absolute scream to place atop every vaguely goofy Germanic word.) We will dress in some manner of Teutonic harvest attire, heat slow, heavy foods, and try to get rid of the alcohol which remains from the wedding. Our friend Heather has these special drinking horns, made of actual horns, which she and Lauren like to use. Heather's big thing is that she is part Wolgadeutsche, and when she found out we both were a bit of that as well, she beamed and held out her arms like an auntie who has just learned of a favored niece's new pregnancy. Then the drinking horns made an appearance.

If you like the idea of an Oktuberhonk and want to throw your own, I strongly support this, and encourage you to use the Announcing Pig logo which I created (see photos), although I strongly discourage you from using my address. The only things you need to make it a proper Oktuberhonk are (1) heavy foods, (2) costumes, and (3) an exuberant friend with idiosyncratic drinking apparatus.