After ringing in the new year, I felt a shift in my life. I decided – sometime back in the fall of 2018 – that 2020 would be the year I would attempt to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s hovered like a carrot as I researched gear, gave my job the longest notice ever, and put hundreds of hiking miles on my legs. It started with explanations of “Not next year, but in 2020…” then the switch to “Next year…” and now I am counting down by months. It’ll be weeks, then days bef

Art and its appreciation is an ever-evolving interest of mine, so when it comes to the work and life of a prolific artist like Claude Monet, I still feel a very novice level of understanding. He’s one of the omnipresent impressionist greats, of course, but I still feel like my knowledge is surface level. Like that of wandering through a museum and only reading the placards. Gift shop recognition. What you see is what you get. This past summer I was lucky enough to be in one o

My day job is in the staffing industry, not exactly a hotbed of arts and culture, so it rarely warrants a mention on the blog. But we do have an interesting client or two, one of those being Travel Oregon. Last year they gave us some beautiful poster prints from their recent ad campaign. My favorite is on the wall within view of my desk – a small car with a roof rack towering with camping gear passing through a farm scene, enormous green and gray mountains in the background.

Okay, more like, “Phil and Ruby, we’re unfortunately still in Kansas.” Phil and Ruby were the two German Short-Haired Pointers that I was helping my friend Shonna transport from Marin County, California, to their owners in Harding, New Jersey. We had a week to get across the country with our precious, adorable, sometimes-stressful cargo, and I’d chosen for us a fairly straight line to get from A to B. We had hotels booked in Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Nashville, and Sh

In November, 2018, I took one of the best trips of my life. Now let me tell you how it ended. After a miserable layover in Shanghai, a day at the world famous Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and over ten days of flying, busing, and driving all over New Zealand I found myself with a major head cold and a growing fear of going back to “real life.” After a semi-late night out dancing in Auckland, my friend Lucas and I packed up the rental car and headed North, to the Bay of Islan

A few weeks ago I took advantage of an unusually sunny Sunday – a merciful break from the mid-winter gray of the Pacific NW. I headed from Portland toward the coast, set on doing a favorite hike but open to wherever the day took me. I hiked my hike in the astounding 55 degree sunshine, but it took me less time than I anticipated. With a few hours of sunlight still ahead of me, I decided to make a day of it. I drove north on Highway 101, toward my favorite spot on the Oregon C

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about connection, and ways to improve my own. Particularly with people in person. I work mostly from home, and can sometimes get too good at my own routine, my own rhythm of communication through social media, email, and texting. When it comes time to actually have a natural conversation, with immediate, unedited and meme-less responses, it can get more stressful than I’d like. As the weather goes from Fall to Winter, this question feels more i

When we stepped out of the train into the metro station, we were met with the same scene as in every other metro station in Shanghai: Escalators. (Without realizing it, escalators had become the thing that will always represent Shanghai in my mind.) But when we emerged into the humid, hazy early afternoon, our surroundings were noticeably different from what I’d become used to. It was noisy, sure, with heavy clangs from a construction project, but gone were the skyscrapers an

I was hunched over a circle of stones with a box of matches in one hand and an old torn up national park map in the other. I lit match after match after match, touching them to the crinkled map pieces already in the center of a small firewood teepee. It was windy and with the temperature dropping toward a predicted low of 24 degrees, I was getting more and more frustrated in my attempts. Shivering, I jammed in more paper and lit (or broke) another set of matches. But I couldn

“I’m at the bar. You’ll see me if you get here.” It was the last WhatsApp message I sent as I took my seat alone at a wine cellar turned eatery, Restaurant Ca La Montse, in Barcelona, Spain. I was in Barcelona at my first MFA residency and had just come from a reading where I’d gorged myself on free tapas and Estrella Damms, so I wasn’t particularly hungry. I did, however, want to meet up with my friend who was passing through. So, a bit drunk and fairly certain of how to get