micheleandtom.com

Our new home has a surprising view considering our urban/industrial location. We overlook the Willamette River, the Fremont Bridge, and the mounted police training facility and stables.

When we moved into our new apartment, we figured we would enjoy the horses, but we’ve become absolutely riveted. The training that the horses and their riders go through is fascinating, to say the least.

Pictured above was “Fire Day”, where the trainers ignited flames in burn barrels and conducted mock protests with the horses in formation. They then lit a line of fuel on fire between the barrels and had the horses walk through the smoke and the small blaze. If you click on a photo, you can just make out the line of fire under the horses.

We first learned of the “protest training,” when I found that my recreational reading was being interrupted by rhythmic chanting coming outside. I thought maybe some gung-ho exercise class was on their way to the esplanade for a run. To investigate, I got off my ass and poked my head toward the window, only to discover instead that Portland’s finest were holding signs and screaming chants at horses with riders. They did the mock demonstration up right with banner signs, picket signs, people running toward the horses, megaphones, etc.

They throw every obstacle they can think of at these horses. We’ve observed them practice swinging their night stick within the peripheral vision of the horse, so their equine partner is not startled by the motion. They run the stick along the horse, they wave it slowly, increasing the speed over time. The horses do not flinch.

One day, they had various protest obstacles set up, and the mounted unit had to walk through the tight course in formation with picketers screaming. Another time, we even saw a horse and rider holding still while a trainer threw a yoga ball quite hard at the horse, repetitively, from every position around the steed. Interestingly enough, this was one of the few exercises where the horse wavered, but he never broke out of his stance.

We have enjoyed getting to know the 7 horses who live next door. We know which ones like to roll around in the dirt, we are forever commenting on the the black gelding and white gelding’s battle for herd supremacy, we smile when they argue over which one gets to bite and play with the orange caution cone in the riding ring, and there is nothing more engaging than seeing them at a full gallop, sans mounts, playing, nipping, and bucking.

We have the best view in Portland.

We are all agog in the Reeves/Offermann house over 2007 technology.

The Zs saved up their money, pooled it, and bought a Wii after the holidays. They have had a ball making a Mii (an avatar) for every member of the family and delight in luring unsuspecting visitors into a game of Mario Kart, no matter their age or previous experience with video games. Tom and I are ready to start practicing after the kids go to bed because they are kicking our asses.

(So far my mother, who now has a Mii, thanks to the girls, has managed to avoid the ski jumping event in Wii Fit, but it’s coming Mom, Ian can’t wait!)

And then our phones — who knew that we needed to be connected to the Internet 24/7!?! And we do, need to be connected. All.Day.Long. The funny things is, we hardly use it as a phone, which is a good thing, because in reality, they perform worst as phones.

Tom and Michele’s Handy Mobile Computer Moments:

1. Shopping at Whole Foods for tangerines for a recipe. Did they have them? Nope, fresh out. But, they had minneolas. What the hell are minneolas? Boom, look it up on the iPhone — they are a cross between a Duncan grapefruit and a Dancy tangerine.
2. Checking email to make sure you are in the right room when you show up for a meeting and it’s filled with Japanese bureaucrats on a tour — in other words, not your meeting.
3. Bar code scanning the toner at Office Max and running a price check at stores around the city to make sure you’re not getting fleeced.
4. Looking up Streetcar/Bus/Max schedules to get up-to-the-minute route info.
5. Killing time while waiting for said Streetcar/Bus/Max.
6. Obsessively chatting with each other.
7. Finding an alternative for risotto when the store is out of arborio rice. They did have carnaroli rice, so we google that and learn it’s supposed to be even better for the creamy rice dish. Who knew?

We have officially done it — used our Zipcar membership for the first time.

Although we attempt to utilize public transportation, or our feet, for nearly everything, this last Tuesday we just couldn’t do it. We had a 2:15 pm school pick up, after which we had to race to buy soccer cleats and shin guards for Zoe. Next, we flew across the river to a 3:30 pm doctor’s appointment for Zoe. At the end of that, we commandeered a bathroom where Zoe had to change into her soccer clothes. Back into the Zipcar we went and I dropped Zoe off at a Portland Streetcar stop where Tom and Zelda were waiting.

The hubby and I switched kids right there on the street corner, with Tom taking Zoe to her first soccer practice since returning to the US (she loved it). Zelda and I were entrusted with returning our lovely Zipcar, which occurred without mishap.

After soccer practice, we had a Blazer game to go to, so Tom and Zoe hotfooted it to Hot Lips Pizza, where she changed out of her soccer gear, and then they caught the Max to the Rose Garden. Meanwhile, Zelda and I walked over the Broadway Bridge to the arena — something I would have never done if I had a car.

Anyway, our first experience with Zipcar was fabulous. We drove a Prius and it was really fun to maneuver around town. It had separate little buttons to start the car and to put the car in park. The gear shift was a kind of video game joy stick thingy in the dash.

We had about a page of instructions on the newfangled stuff, but it was all well explained and we returned it on time (which is something you worry about since they charge you an arm and a leg if you’re even the slightest bit late).

One of the interesting things we’ve noticed about participating in a car share versus owning our own car is that it really quantifies, by the hour, the cost of operating a vehicle. And I mean the whole cost, not just the gas! Having the real cost of driving spelled out for us really motivates us to try and avoid it as much as possible!

Tom didn’t get an iPhone after they first came out because he knew we were going to be making some life changes, so it didn’t make sense to sign up for the two year commitment. Yes, that means my poor husband read about it, pined for it, checked out friends’ phones…it’s a sad tale.

I know with the subtle foreshadowing, you will never guess what Tommy’s first order of business was upon our arrival back in the US. Yes, that’s right, buying an iPhone. He loves it in every way. Me, not so much, especially after I spent the entire Christmas holiday mocking his iPhone because, with the AT&T network, it was entirely useless as a phone. We had to drive at least 15 minutes from my parents’ place to get a signal, and forget about any data.

Prior to our holiday by the sea, I was on the fence…Should I get a Droid and the fabu Verizon network? Should I wait for the Google phone rumored to be coming out in January (which it just did)? Or, should I join my husband as an iPhonophile?

After our ill-fated trip to the coast with zero coverage, i decided the iPhone was out. I told Tom, “at least one of us needs an actual telephone.” So, I went with the Verizon network and bought the Droid, because I didn’t feel like waiting for the Google phone to be available on Verizon. How do we feel about our choices? We are both happy. My turn-by-turn GPS navigation is better and Tom envies my automatically updated gmail. I, in turn, am jealous of Tom’s sync with iTunes and the zillion apps that are useful and well written.

While it’s impossible to completely suppress a superior smirk toward the other if our phone has performed a task better, I think that we are, for the most part, behaving in an incredibly adult manner in light of our little phone-on phone-competition. Except, of course, when the GPS on Tom’s phone keeps locating our apartment on the wrong side of the river…

During our 14 months in Argentina, we downsized quite a bit by living in a smallish apartment and by not owning a car — we just used public transportation and taxis for everything. It was lovely, for the most part. We could clean quickly, we consumed less crap because we didn’t have room for anything, and were generally a lot happier without a lot of stuff.

As a result of our experiences, we would like to extend our downsizing and use of public transportation to our life in Portland. So, what specifically does that mean for us?

Housing. We have decided to start out renting a condo in NW Portland that puts us within several blocks of multiple transportation options. The unit we settled on, while bigger than our 950 SF Argentine apartment, is still significantly smaller than our old house!

Transportation. We are within 3-5 blocks of multiple Zipcars, the Portland Streetcar, the Max, and TriMet buses.

School. The girls will go to a school we can travel to via Portland Streetcar.

We put our resolve to the test during our first week in Portland. It poured rain (hovered around freezing the first day) the entire time the four of us trudged around the city wearing zillions of layers (we still feel like it’s summer), armed only with our umbrellas and some TriMet travel passes. Even though we had signed up for Zipcar, we took pride in the fact that we didn’t use it once as we looked for apartments, went to doctor’s appointments, met up with family, got glasses repaired, paid for a parking permit for the movers, shopped for birthday presents, etc. etc.

Can we make it through a Portland winter without running out to buy a car? Let the experiment begin!!

We were riding the Portland Streetcar the other day and a woman behind me was having a LOUD conversation on her cell phone, the volume of which led me to have a re-entry moment where I lamented how much harder it is to tune people out when they are speaking one’s mother tongue.

As she blathered on, I couldn’t stop listening. A funny thing happened though — I soon became riveted by her conversation, which provided a perfect snapshot of the hurdles that exist for those seeking employment in the United States.

She was telling her friend the story of applying for a marketing job in the radio industry, and even with all of her experience, still not making the cut to count herself amongst the top ten applicants. She asked the station manager why and he said, “we have former radio station directors from major markets with decades of experience applying for this job.”

After a sigh, she continued to say to her friend, “this is what we’re up against.”

Then, her story proceeded to get worse.

It turns out that this poor woman fell for a scam in her job hunt that goes something like this: thieves posted job openings for American Airlines on Craigslist. They then set up meet and greets with respondents who revealed their home addresses, and proceed to rob these job seekers’ homes when they were on the way to the phony American Airlines job interviews.

My fellow passenger sent off all of her personal information to these scam artists, but then managed to avoid the robbery/phony interview because she heard about the con on television.

She said she now lives in fear of home invasion, and has a hard time answering Craigslist ads, which are often blind, thereby encumbering her job search even more.

Thank God my stop came up at that point in her phone conversation…I couldn’t handle any more bad news!

1. All of the amazing people we’ve met in Argentina — Argentines, Australians, Malaysians, Brits, Canadians, Irish, Americans, Brazilians, Colombians, Venezuelans, Chinese, parents at school, the Zs Spanish tutor Maria, their tennis teacher Cesar, and lastly, the wonderful cab driver who returned Zelda’s school blazer after she left it in the back of a cab one day.
2. Radiant floor heating.
3. The Zs school.
4. Living in such a child-friendly city. Really, Buenos Aires has a million things for kids to do, and showing up with your little ones in tow never phases anyone. LOVE IT!
5. Coffee, tea and medialunas.
6. The central boiler hot water in our current apartment building — it is scalding hot with awesome water pressure and we.never.run.out! This will, of course, present a problem when we return to the States and the girls have to begin rationing their shower time.
7. All of the vendors around our apartment, including the verdulería family from Bolivia, the Deli guys who laugh at Tom’s lomito munich order every week, and the Persicco ice cream guy who doggedly tried to converse with Tom in Spanish every time he visits.
8. Our doormen (although one of them has fallen in our regard since he forced us to buy the less-than-stellar CD of his band)!
9. For the Zs: their friends, buying junkfood at the kiosko on field day, the fact that we give them a few Oreos in their lunch once a week “because all of the other kids have them every day!” (That will come to a halt when we return to the US!)
10. Traveling in this beautiful beautiful country.
11. The adventure that is gadding about Buenos Aires on the colectivo (city bus)! We will especially miss the 64, which is our closest bus…I swear it goes everywhere. We’ve been all over the city, by cab, and invariably we look up and there it is, the 64. I ADORE that bus.
12. Zoe and Tom: attending chess tournaments on the outskirts of the city with Gil and Sebastian
13. The fact that no one complains about noise in apartment living. Granted, that means we hear our neighbors at ridiculous hours engaged in ridiculously loud activities, but on the flip side, no one bitches about our loud music, running little person feet, us screaming at the kids, you know — life.
14. Spring, fall and winter in Buenos Aires. (Summer, not so much!)

There’s going to be a lot of waxing around here for the next few posts…forewarned is forearmed!

Why the need to expound on our pondering? Because our 14 month family mid-life crisis sabbatical is coming to an end. I know, boo hoo for us — everyone feels really sympathetic! *smile*

Of course, the end of the free time means that we must resume the mantle of adult responsibility and actually earn some money. THAT is a bummer.

10 more days in Argentina. It’s all going by so fast, and we have a zillion little ends to tie up…end-of-school dinners, play parties for Zelda, chess tournaments for Zoe, goodbyes to tutors and teachers, farewells to all of the wonderful wonderful people that we’ve met, cleaning the apartment, donating stuff to the Z’s school, figuring out what we’re packing and what we aren’t, making cards, going through paperwork… .

I’m not even mentioning all of the shyte we have to get done on the US end, but I won’t go into that…at least not now!

Suffice to say that the knowledge of our departure looms large and we have much to think about. More later.

Taking a Dive. Being 43 years old and from the United States means that I was raised without any tradition of watching soccer as a sporting event. American football, basketball, baseball, boxing, skiing, Winter & Summer Olympics…all a yes. Soccer, almost never. (I had heard of Pelé and that was it.)

Perhaps this is why I have such a strong negative reaction to the rampant dive taking that takes place in the sport. Now, I know that a penalty kick can be a game changer, thus there is an incredible incentive to try to induce such a call, but I consider it to be flagrant cheating. Truly, I have a hard time getting past the feeling that they’re acting like a bunch of sissies.

I also am consumed with the question of how a team can tell if one of their compatriots is actually injured, you know, for real? I currently picture players using complicated baseball-like signals, that change every game, to indicate to the coaches whether they are hurt or faking.

Short Games. The length of a soccer match (its compact nature) is to be lauded. The contests last only a few minutes more than regulation — I believe this is something from which American sport could borrow. These days, I feel like watching a baseball game requires an investment of my entire day.

The “Boring” Thing. We were at an end-of-year school dinner the other night and Tom was talking with some Argentine dads. Said fathers were discussing American sporting events that they had attended. In general, they believed baseball to be boring, which we found ironic, since “boring” is the most oft used adjective to describe soccer by Americans. Baseball and soccer actually have a lot in common — they are both competitions that are decided by low scores and require their fan base to have an understanding of the history and the art of the sport to appreciate the game.

We first experienced this phenomenon after taking some English relatives to a pro baseball game, in which we saw a suicide squeeze, an in-the-park home run, and a triple play…ALL IN ONE GAME!! Tom and I were going crazy, but my relatives didn’t get it at all. You just can’t explain…

Marta, Best Female Footballer. I’ve done my fair share of grousing on this blog about the dismal state of women’s soccer in Argentina. In Brazil, it’s like a whole other world. (Golly, you would think it was a different country…) They have a strong professional women’s league in the Portugese-speaking nation, and the female football players get mucho respect from the men. Currently, the world’s top woman player is Marta, from Brazil. She is amazing (we caught her on TV in a Brazilian league match when we were at Iguazu falls). She also plays professionally in the US. Catch a clip of her below. (Be patient, there are some great moments in the video.)

The opposing team’s fans at the soccer game we attended on Sunday (Boca vs. Gimnasio) were relegated to two sections on one side of the stadium behind a goal at the very top tier of seating. Hardly a premium location. But, it was packed, and while they were a small group, yowza, they really generated some noise.

We were sitting below them and to the left, and had a great view of what we called “The Berlin Wall,” which marked the separation between the home fans and the visiting fans with iron bars, plexiglass, rolled barbed wire, and multiple policemen.

As you can see in this photo, the game was not a sell out, but still, there was no one rooting for Boca that you could spot anywhere near the Gimnasio fans.

At the end of the game, we foreigners on the various soccer tours had to wait for 20 minutes or so while the stadium was emptied in sections — the opposing team’s group leaving first.

When it was our turn to depart, they whisked us out of the stadium and to our van, parked maybe 40 yards away. We weren’t home free though! Once we had wended our way through the fan-filled tiny streets of Boca onto the freeway, we had a final “intense soccer fan” moment.

Our transport merged onto the autopista behind some beaten down colectivo buses that were being followed by an official police van that had its lights blazing and was stuffed to the gills with officers outfitted in full riot gear. ALL of the policemen were glaring daggers at our van, and we couldn’t figure out why. Finally, as we went to pass the bus/police caravan, our driver had an epiphany about the lawmen’s stink eye — the buses were filled with partying Gimnasio fans (literally hanging out of windows and doors) and we were about to drive by in a van labeled “BOCA EXPERIENCE” with a bunch of clueless foreigners.

Our conductor lunged and tore the sign from the windshield/dash just as we pulled within visual range of partying Gimnasio passengers. Whew.

A far cry from the mellow west coast American fandom to which I’ve grown accustomed.