Orion had a rough night of it two nights ago. Jenny and I do ... OK ... in this heat but he just wasn’t having any of it. Anyway he “slept” in our bed, if by “sleeping” you mean “alternately dozing and awaking and then jumping up and down and expecting Mom and Dad to play with him.”

Last night he made it through the night. (Well, until about 4:30 am which is when he always wakes up.

No, we don’t have A/C, although yesterday we discussed getting a window unit for Orion’s room. I am not above that.

On July 29, 2008, we were wondering if summer would ever arrive in Oregon ... I recall riding the Soma up Hessler Drive and taking a picture of the brooding rainclouds over Mt. Hood.

Anyway, one of the super-fun things about having grown up with Nebraska weather (“Florida summers, Alaska winters!”) but living with Oregon weather is watching the locals fold after two days in stuff that I used to endure for weeks on end. Right now I’m remembering June to July, 1995, when I was working in Arkansas City, Kansas. There were 6 or 7 (I forget) straight weeks of weather above 95°F ... with 80% humidity ... and no nightly temperature drop (last night it got down to 72°F) ... and mosquitos ... From that perspective, Oregon gets about 8 months of weather that would qualify in Nebraska as “Spring,” 1 to 2 (noncontiguous) months of “Summer,” about 5 months of something like “Fall,” and a few weeks of “Winter” every other year or so.

The short bursts of extreme weather in Oregon are perfect. A week of 90°+ heat is just enough to remind me what “summer” feels like, but not enough to make me hate the sun. I couldn’t (and didn’t) cope with that always–74°–and–sunny stuff they get in California. I like my seasons, thank you, preferably in small polite doses. Without mosquitos.

This much snow, right now, interbedded as it is with slippery slippery ice, would shut down any city, even the ones that own snow plows.

I am getting pretty good at this “working from home” thing. Just now I SSH’d via VPN into my work machine (which I have trained to turn itself on and off every day) and committed a bunch of files to the SVN repository that I neglected last week. I had a fine through-the-looking-glass moment when my remote box dropped me into vi for a commit message — vi in a Coda terminal window, running remotely on a desktop machine. A text editor on a desktop box running inside a terminal inside a text editor inside another desktop box. This was the WIRED magazine crap I used to dream about ca. 1994.

Driving in this stuff is like skiing. You don’t so much steer as suggest a direction to your car.

I feel especially bad for Jenny in this. Inasmuch as I am not a homebody or an indoorsy person at least I have the experience of being stormbound in a 10' x 15' hut in Alaska for a week as training. Jenny and Orion are used to being out — running, running errands, swimming, shopping — from 9am to 5pm every day.

Lately I don’t regret buying such a big house after all. Or a TV. Or the kinetic trainer Jenny bought me for Christmas (in direct contravention of our mutual “no gifts” agreement.

The rains have started.

I like this. This is why I moved to Oregon. I moved here for the cool and gray and damp and peaceful. And the seafood. Everything is better in Oregon in the “winter:” the beaches are empty, the trails are empty, you can go snowshoeing, less traffic when I ride my bike. All the wimpy people who dislike moistness are indoors now, at Powell’s or McMenamin’s. Which are also better in the “winter.”

It is, however, very dark. People here are pale. And let’s not kid ourselves: it starts raining in October and it doesn’t stop until about July. June if we’re lucky.

The really great thing about having grown up in Nebraska is that I have extremely wide latitudes for what I consider “bad weather.” Nebraska gets Florida summers and Alaska winters. The lousiest winter days in Oregon (sleety snow/rain driven hard from the southwest) are about like a typical March morning in Nebraska.

Oregon gets like five or six days in the summer where the mercury tops 90 degrees. But it’s a dry heat.

In 13 years in Oregon, I’ve never lived in a place with air conditioning, or insulation, or double-paned windows. Or bug screens.

Oregon shorts Fall a little bit though.

We’re entering the pre-move period, familiar from a year ago, when we are no longer excited about leaving but rather just want the whole damn thing to be over with already.

Leaving Xiamen is not like leaving Portland (only in reverse). For example, I am not often struck by emotions of bittesweetness: “I sure will miss this...” Which is funny considering the likelihood of our ever returning to Xiamen is pretty low So when I think “this might be the last time I walk through Shiting Lu,” it really is the last time I will walk through Shiting Lu. On the other hand, yeah there are things I actually will miss from our year here. Off the top of my head: Huweishan park, the noodle bar, our maid Yalian, travel to Hong Kong, learning Chinese, the romance of living the expat life. But the hassle of moving (read: “the hassle of moving Bismarck”) and my psycho-crazy last week at work kind of swamp both the bitter and sweet.

Xiamen is putting on its best face for us before we leave. We had a couple of farewell events this weekend: a doggy play date at Dongdu Park with all of Bismarck’s dog-friends, and a surprise party at a fantastic wine bar owned by a Malaysian couple. The weather is brilliant. Saturday was fiercely hot, clear and sunny in a manner unprecedented in our year in Xiamen. The air had a startling clarity, such that you could make out the second mountain range on the mainland (about 30 miles away), something that has occurred only once previously in my memory.

In the clear air, distances seemed shorter (or rather, more like my sense of distance and scale from back in America). I had noticed the reverse of this phenomenon shortly after we moved here. Huweishan (the hill just behind our apartment) seemed impossibly tall when viewed from the lake; my sense of scale was that it must be at least as tall as the West Hills in Portland (500' to 700'), and correspondingly farther away. In fact, it’s only a little more than 300 feet at its tallest. To my eyes (accustomed to clear American air), the thick air makes even relatively small, nearby landmarks seem larger and farther away than they actually are.

The weather today has cleared, the first break of warm weather since the Marathon, almost two weeks ago. This after a couple days of heavy rain. (Jenny said, this morning: “Xiamen has two seasons too cold and f*ing hot.” With the better weather I notice my attitude lifting substantially. Such a thing happened (every winter!) in Oregon, with its long, dark, wet, cold winters, but never to such a degree. Which makes me wonder (as does every phenomenological anomaly): WHY?

I was talking about this with a coworker from Vancouver (BC) who noticed the same thing. I said I think it has something to do with the pollution. Xiamen has had 6 months of dark, gray, chilly weather but it‘s been a) bone dry and b) the partial result of a constant pallor of airborne filth. My coworker used this phrase to describe it, I think perfectly: “dark and dirty.” Pacific Northwest winters are dark, sure, but that darkness has a kind of ancestral swamp feeling to it; it puts me to mind of Druids with antler headgear sacrificing virgins to the Sun God, or something. It‘s the primeval darkness of waiting, of potentiality, of dreams and visions. The darkness here has a Blade Runner feel to it. The darkness at the end of the world, light erased, not merely held back.

Moreover, Pacific Northwestern culture (and Northern European Culture) internalizes this seasonality. Thus the bookstores and brewpubs. Having these islands of refuge where we ritually celebrate Darkness makes it worth enjoying. This is half of why I prefer Oregon winters to Oregon summers. (The other half is that Oregon winters are about 20 degrees warmer than Nebraska winters, so you can keep riding bicycles without losing toes.) There is no local equivalent to bookstores and brewpubs; the closest analogues are tea houses, most of which are conducted out of doors anyway. Xiamen really deserves to be a tropical culture, but the climate just isn‘t cooperating.

Anyway, thank God for the sun.