Westmoreland Asays

For Christmas I received a gift card and pass to the Columbia Sportswear employee store. It expired at the end of March, so I was motivated to go as soon as I could. I also imagined it would be fun to travel there without a car and, after Meg suggested I take Aaron with me to look for some clothes or shoes for him, I had assembled my small team. After a week of rain and snow showers--the kids' school was even delayed for two hours on Thursday because Angry Birds Space debuted Superintendent Chalmers woke up with an inch of snow on his Mercedes parked in front of his West Hills fortress--the sun finally showed its face and made our journey all the more pleasurable. Armed with a water bottle, albuterol, and a stack of free chalupa coupons (thanks Trail Blazers!), we left port around 11:00 on our two-wheel steeds. The Springwater Trail lies about one mile from our house, so we were soon competing with hipsters and weekend warriors with squeaky bike chains for space on the bus...

A few weeks ago Meg asked me if I would let her sell this photo at the Llewellyn Auction, a fundraiser for our kids' school. I took this picture a few months ago during a lunar eclipse , and even though I wasn't able to capture the moon in all of its splendor, I had fun taking some long-exposure shots of the crisp, foggy morning. She had the photo printed on a large canvas and handed it over to the auction committee. During the auction I was in charge of all the technical details for processing people and their purchases and didn't have time to stalk my photo to see how many bids it was receiving.. I didn't think my photo would draw much interest (Meg bought a nicely framed photo of a rose that nobody else bid on at last year's auction), but eventually the person who bought it found out I was the photographer and told me how much she liked the photo (and paid $54 for it--the same price that Meg's monthly cookie delivery service yielded). While discussing...

Why the "Y" Aaron? Aaron's class has a field trip to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to listen to the Oregon Symphony. I probed his level of excitement (high) the morning of and asked if he had heard the symphony perform before. He thoughtfully considered the question for a few seconds before replying in the negative. I countered by refreshing his memory of our nearly annual trip to Waterfront Park to listen to the symphony at the end of summer . His rebuttal: "Oh, I wasn't really listening to the music then." Aaron's a bad liar, for which I'm grateful.