Before...After

Before the kid, I didn't get much done in a given day.  I did get good at certain video games, though.

After the kid, this is what B and I can do in about three hours with our niece watching Plan C:

1. Relocate plants, including planting a Japanese maple.
2. Clean up the entire back yard.
3. Clean up mold in basement.
4. Hang a new dowel in my closet.
5. Eat lunch.

It makes you...efficient.

Portlandia

I am just saying:

1. If you take your bike on the train, you're not actually riding your bike.  You're taking the train and using up a bunch of space the rest of us could use to stand on the train...you dick.
2. I wish I could drink cheaper beer, but I'm a sophisticated gentleman now.  
3. My company has enough juice* that we have a real-deal water cooler now, not just the crappy weird hippy filter that one of my three bosses bought off of the part-time senior developer.
4. Water towers are synonymous with neighborhood the way we do it in NoPo.
5. Another note on public transportation: the way you do it is serious headphones and a book.  Then just get all secluded in a corner and you're good to go until you arrive at your stop.
6. You know what they don't tell you about having a kid?  It's the fact that they become completely hilarious by the time they're about 19 months old.  Like, far funnier than any funny person you've ever known.
7. That said, Steve Martin is still pretty fucking funny.  He was on Austin City Limits playing the banjo like a champ and cracking wise.
8. I got Yen in a suitcase from the Yakuza.

* In the gangster-as-of-the-late-90s sense.

Overlooking

We're having the annual false spring in Oregon.  It's in the mid-50s during the day, sunny and blue, with confused plants and elated confused people everywhere.  It was rainy enough in January that I'm tolerating it so far, but the precip better return within a week or so or I'm going to start...uh...well, silently grumbling.  So I guess there isn't much at stake, really.

Anyway, we took advantage of said false spring to go on our first real successful walk in the neighborhood since we moved here in November.  Plan C was highly resistant to her stroller for a while there, but she seems to have grown out of that phase (happily.)  We live in the Overlook neighborhood.  We found a really neat park about a mile south of the south overlooking Swan Island, which is the industrial park / train yards of north Portland, as well as the Willamette.  Here are four pics of the occasion:

I have a thing for water towers.  There are a lot of really neat ones around here.

Plan C.  This is how she rolls (i.e. with a bunny hat.)

Swan Island, St. Johns Bridge in the distance.

A bunch of locks hung on the chain link screen deal on the Concord Ave. pedestrian bridge.