Caveat: The Oregon of our discontent

Monday morning, Cherry Grove, Oregon, 6:15 AM.

I suppose I should write something. After a week back home in Alaska, where a major snowstorm made life interesting, Arthur and I traveled to Oregon on Saturday, flying Klawock to Ketchikan to Seattle and driving a rental car down from Seattle to the exurbs west of Portland, where we always stay here.

Arthur has an appointment at the VA Hospital in Portland today. He gets all his VA care here, rather than Anchorage (which is where the VA would route us in “default” mode) because it’s easier to come here, having a nice, familiar place to stay and all that. The Portland region became Arthur’s “home” in the lower 48 because that was where the headquarters of the company he worked for was located.

Anyway, traveling with Arthur is quite difficult for me. He is exhaustingly restless when traveling – he never sits still at all, like a 6 year old on sugar: tapping his hands and feet, sighing melodramatically, shrugging and tossing his head. He is constantly anxious about stuff he feels that he’s misplaced. During the trip down: twice he panicked about having lost his walking stick (and one time he DID lose his walking stick but that time he didn’t notice, and a TSA person in Ketchikan had to help us recover it); once on the airplane he lost his ipod; once in the rental car he lost his oreos (the turned up on the floor of the car when we arrived at our destination). Each time he thinks he’s lost something, he fidgets and repeatedly opens every single zip pocket on his backpack repeatedly, for 20 or 30 minutes, before finally getting sufficiently upset to ask me where something is. Sigh. It’s stressful for me to be around, in a kind of derivative, ancilliary way.

Yesterday was a “day of rest” but it wasn’t a bad day. I worked on a jigsaw puzzle with Juli and we had a successful long-distance telephone conversation with my mom in Australia. Ann actually sounds remarkably good, and was producing coherent output – a huge improvement over how she was during her time in the hospital when I first got to Australia several weeks ago. I think the care facility, with its social interactions and reliable feeding and water-drinking schedules are really good for her.

Here is a picture looking out down the upper Tualatin valley here at Cherry Grove, in the eastern foothills of the Oregon coast range.

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