After our first week in the new house I am — and whoa, where did this come from — missing Lake Oswego?

Well, objectively, here’s what our old neighborhood had going for it:

1. It was a great place for walking dogs.

We have Marshall Park now, which is pretty primo dog-walking territory, but our Lake O digs were literally across the street from George Rogers Park, with its open field and duck-infested Willamette river beach. Caninirvana.

But I think the feeling I have right now is not so much missing Lake Oswego as a realization about what my life might feel like in five short months. At that time I will be a father in addition to a homeowner — which are good things, yo, that’s not the point. The point is, five or ten or twenty years after that, when I think back on the carefree, minimalist, jetset lifestyle Jenny and I had five or ten twenty years previous, the last place I’ll associate with that lifestyle will be our lovely but barely usable apartment in lovely but barely usable Lake Oswego.

So I’m feeling what, pre-emptive nostalgia? This is why I have so much trouble with displays of emotion

This weekend we moved from our Lake Oswego apartment into the new house. The event represents reversals in two of the major trends in my life. Briefly:

1. I will no longer change addresses every five months
2. My pile of possessions will grow, not shrink

Constant mobility, occasional poverty, and a tendency toward minimalism drove me, in the last 5 years, to pare my stuff into a tiny pile. Minus the furniture (which I share with Jenny and which was — all of it — Jenny’s coming into the relationship), everything I own would fit into the back of the Subaru. There’s a certain amount of overlap between things that are unequivocally “mine” and those that are “ours,” of course.

Jenny and I fit all our possessions into a 700 sq. ft. apartment, and it wasn’t a tight fit. Now we’ve expanded into three times the floor space. Our shared tendencies to prune and compact led to such comical displays as a neatly organized stack of boxes and storage containers in the far corner of the otherwise empty walk-in closet attached to the largest bedroom in the house — which will itself probably remain empty for several months (if not years).

It’s like when zoo animals are given larger enclosures, but continue to pace around in circles the size of their old cages.

Jenny and I ran new-homeowner errands this afternoon. We discussed what items from this move were to go to Goodwill or Craigslist, coupled with the twin conversation about what new stuff to buy to fill our absurdly empty house. Jenny was keen to replace (upgrade, rather) items already in our possession. I gained a key insight into our different perspectives on the world: Jenny likes to get rid of things, and I prefer not to buy them in the first place.

For what it’s worth, house-buying is (thus far) a scarier and more stressful prospect than parenthood. I wonder how I feel about that in five months.

Remember halogen floor lamps? You know, the kind that pointed at the ceiling (because of course it's the ceiling that needs to be well-lit). Remember how they'd get so hot they'd scorch your drywall? And sometimes they had a fancy French name, I think it was torchiere. I shudder to think how much electricity they ate up. For a while there (i.e. the 1990s) it seemed like every time I helped a friend move, we had to wrestle with one of those horrible torchieres. They were awkward to fit around all the other crap in the pickup. And usually someone had left it on, so it was really hot, and we'd have to wait until the very end to load it in. I actually, at one point in my life, owned two of those preposterous things.

Anyway, when was the last time you saw a torchiere? That's what I'm talking about.

You know what I mean.

Jenny hates this picture

So was it only a year ago we arrived in Xiamen? (Was it only a month ago [+4 days] that we arrived back in Portland?) Which part was (or is) the dream: the part where we lived in China or the part where we hadn’t ever lived in China?

One of my new coworkers (see previous post for more info) just returned from China. I was looking through his photos and feeling...God, I can only describe it as homesickness. Maybe not for China, so much, but certainly for Asia and, yeah, OK for Xiamen. Wow, how did that happen?

And clearly Portland life isn’t nearly as blog-worthy as Xiamen life. There’s your metaphor, Professor.

Like, for example, we found an apartment. In, um, Lake Oswego. Yeah, everyone has that reaction. But really, it’s better than you think. It’s like a small town. Kind of a snobby small town, but still. We are 500 yards from a river and 100 feet from a lake and Bismarck can swim in both of them.

And my commute (oh, yeah, I have this new job ...) is an eight mile bike ride through a forest.

And it’s exactly halfway between the places we work (Wilsonville and Lair Hill).

And they have a good farmer’s market. And bike shops.

And have you tried to find an apartment in Portland lately? Everything’s for sale and nothing’s for rent.

Hey, I don’t have to defend this decision.

So yeah, the new job. I’m a (actually “the”) web designer at Mercy Corps. This is so amazingly sweet and so utterly fortuitous.

Many cosmic events conspired to keep my jobless for a month yet simultaneously offered me several opportunities. I took a job with a software company like four weeks ago and yet the deal was bungled by the company wooing me ... I mean, they actually hired me but couldn’t finish the hiring process because of boneheaded bureaucracy (and whew did I dodge a bullet there when you think about it). And that opportunity kept me from snatching a really tempting tempting opportunity with a former employer...tempting because a) they offered me a lot of money and b) it would have meant really returning to where I was before we went to China, and you know what they say about going home again.

So working at Mercy Corps is really sweet for me on a cosmic level. The Mercy Corps vibe is good. “Good” in a Matthew 7:16 way, and “good” in a “generous employer” way. It’s like drinking a tall glass of milk.