I found this little guy hanging out by the river early one particularly cold morning.  Although it’s not terribly uncommon to see the occasional seagull in Portland, keep in mind that there’s 80 or so miles and a whole mountain range between us and the nearest ocean.  If the storms along the coast get pretty bad, though, a few will wander inland, fighting with pigeons for food scraps and trash.

He wasn’t too certain about me, inching closer to him with one arm outstretched.  When he thought I was close enough he gave me a little glare, so I snapped my photo, and he flapped his wings and flew off, his business with me done.

And I replied something along the lines of, “To do that I would have to send you back in time to visit your 2008 self to deliver the explicit message that you should listen to the issues I’m raising every week in our security and compliance meetings and do something other that stubbornly harumphing and crossing your arms. We weren’t compliant at all last year and the changes we’ve implemented since then probably wont’ hold up to close scrutiny, which, again: it’s because you’re stubborn.” Again, I’m paraphrasing.

So then they were all, “So we can’t get what we need to present to the auditing agency?” and I was all, “You know very well that we weren’t compliant and didn’t have a formal record keeping system for everything that we would need back then,” and then they were all, “Okay, look dude, we can’t come out and explicitly ask you to do this in any sort of formal way, so can you take what we do have and ake-may it-ay ook-lay ike-lay e-way ere-way ompliant-cay uring-day at-thay ear-yay?” and when they persisted in trying to force me to fudge things so they could stay out of trouble, I eventually said, “Well, good luck with that,” and handed in my notice. So I quit my job at the beginning of 2010. It was ridiculously scary. And this is the part where most people say, “but it all worked out okay,” but it didn’t. I didn’t have a plan. I had some good ideas, but coming up with a plan once your canoe has already gone over the edge of the waterfall doesn’t do you a lot of good. I ended up being without any source of income for six months, burned through most of my savings, dire financial straits, blah blah blah, and now I’ve devoted several more paragraphs to this topic than I had intended, because as the title implies 2010 had its share of good times, starting off with Sarah moving here at the beginning of the year so that she was only a commuter train ride away instead of a two-hour flight distant, and without her being so supportive and so rad all year and can honestly say I don’t know what I would have done this last year but I imagine I would be even more of a mess. I got to see some of my far flung imaginary friends again, and I’m grateful for that whenever that happens. I got to pay visits to San Francisco, and Seattle, and cities all along the Oregon coast, and Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia and we all know any year that features anything Canadian can be all that bad. One of my best friends got married. I made a whirlwind trip to Montana, which nearly resulted in me dying but you know, whatever. I did some other stuff too but I imagine everyone is pretty bored at this point so I’ll just shut up now and give all y’alls the year in pictures.

I find I am rather fond of this Instagram app. If you’re an iPhone user (it seems the service is currently only available on this platform), do please add me, my username is the same as my first name. For those of you who either can’t get the app or would just as soon not join another photo sharing service, I cross post everything on Instagram to my Flickr feed.

I’ll be making some long overdue changes to this site soon.  Gotta keep up with the times, right?

Unfortunately I had this idea late on Friday and proceeded to be rather busy on Saturday, so this first Friday Flickr is happening on a Sunday (I know, right? I guess I should probably get that New Year’s Eve recap post up soon too).

To start with, this photo that I took in the command center of my newly constructed secret underground headquarters.

Kidding!  Saturday was a free day at OMSI, and we went so that we could bathe ourselves in SCIENCE! for an afternoon.  They had this nifty “Science on a Sphere” display, which cycled through a number of cool presentations about the planets.  I also took this very cool one of Mars:

….and that’s what I got for today.  Please be sure to join me next week when I will probably miss my self-imposed Friday deadline again.

I took a (very brief) road trip to Montana the other day, and discovered that just like in the Pacific Northwest they are still getting rain as late as July.  I spent about twelve hours total there, which is a whole different story, but for now really I just wanted to show you a few pictures I took while driving home during the day.

And also to tell you this: Montana rest stops have some of the friendliest rodents around.  We pulled over just prior to crossing back through Idaho to stretch our legs, and I noted what looked like thirty or more chipmunks or squirrels running riot all over the lawn near the restrooms.  I wondered aloud whether it was mating season, but soon realized that these rodents had just keyed into a crucial secret of survival: if you hang out near where humans are passing by and are cute and fuzzy, humans will go crazy over you and shower you with food for your time.

I got a little closer to try and get a picture of one, and as I bent down with my phone to get a closer shot, the little bugger turned and ran right at me.  I backed up a step or too, trying to keep my feet away from him while trying to keep my phone close enough for a decent shot.  Thinking that surely I must be holding out some form of foodstuff for him, the little guy sat straight up and looked at me to let me know he was ready to receive his due.

Almost made me wish I had a cracker for him.

A few weekends back we got up extra early on Saturday and went down to the waterfront to check out the Portland Doggie Dash, an organized run for dogs and their owners.

A few of my photos turned out to be worth sharing.  Suspiciously they all seem to be of corgis.  Hmmm…

As you were.

I took this one at a tourist shop on Government Avenue in Victoria, BC.  I believe the name of the store was literally “I Love Canada, Eh?”.  No, I’m serious.  Anyway, I liked the way this photo turned out.

I realize some designer was trying to get a little cute with some of the ideograms on the sign and make them look like a man and a woman, but don’t you think the end result is more than a little…well…suggestive?

Anyone else ready for it to go ahead and be spring already?