OK -- I'm back.....

....after a four month hiatus. Someone told me that blogs have a life span (Mr. Jim), and I started to think mine had reached the end of its.

But maybe not.... I have a few more stories. Let's give it another whirl and see how this goes. I'll start out with something innocuous like:

All the pretty flowers. and. the weather.

You can't go wrong on weather. (In fact, I've discovered large areas of our country where that's an acceptable topic of conversation 85% of the time.)

After that I'll move on to my latest attempts to board the Trimet buses with my eensy-weensy foldup bike. You know, the Brompton? The one that's advertised in all its positions on the side of the TriMet buses?

But wait: first I just want to say -- Number 1, Hi. Number 2, I can't believe my good fortune of living in a city that so bursts at the seams with flowers every spring. I mean I just can't take it all in. I can hardly continue down the street because I want to stop and stare at each scene for about four hours. Too bad it's not warm enough to stay in any one spot for long. That's the thing in Oregon. The flowers come out, but we're not ready. I want to throw myself on the petal-strewn grass under the plum trees, but the ground is usually wet and even when it's not, I'd freeze to death in five minutes.

So other than in the visual sense, we can't really wallow in spring around here. Temperature-wise, we go from winter directly to summer, and that doesn't happen till the fourth of July. And by then it's getting dark earlier again, and it cools way down. Those long sultry summer nights you read about in novels, we don't have those. We have a few glorious warm and occasionally dry days during the spring, but only to string us along, keep us all from slitting our wrists till summer comes.

I'm not complaining, I'm just telling the truth -- do we want scores of people moving to Oregon when they see my gorgeous pictures? I think not. People get fooled all the time, and move here. Then they hate it for the other 295 days. We don't need that. Only people who love to be damp all the time can come.

Meanwhile, for those of us that already live here, there's a way to cope -- a way to wallow in the spring without dying of hypothermia. You know what I'm going to say, so let's say it together:

RIDE...................YOUR............... BIKE.

Or walk. Either one will allow you to actually EXPERIENCE the outdoors. You climb into a car every time you leave your house, you'll experience: the inside of a car. Not as nice.