7 December 2024
Greetings from Portland, where it’s hard to believe 2025 will mark ten years of living here come August. I’ve been very slowly getting to see more of Oregon through a combination of outreach events for Kumoricon, the local Japanese pop culture convention that I staff, and riding random bus routes on TriMet that one of my friends who drives for them has for the day. A lot has changed in Portland in ten years and there’s still much of Oregon that I haven’t seen, but I suspect I’ll touch on that more in the 2025 card.
In things that haven’t changed, I’m still at Kroger and we’re still maybe merging with Albertsons. It’s been a very interesting year having a merger in limbo that Kroger for the majority of the year was expecting to just close without a legal battle. As you’ve probably heard in plenty of news reporting, that is the exact opposite of what happened. On the upside, my team got to remain work from home and I now go in to the office once a quarter, if that.
Staying work from home is an especially good thing this year because the reason these are going out the earliest they ever have been (or at least given to the postal service) is because I’ll be back home for the holidays, and hopefully without COVID being an issue this time (last time I was back was 2021). I’ll be working remotely the first week I’m in NJ, but then it will be two weeks of actual vacation, something I can’t recall the last time I actually did. “Vacation” for me usually means time off to work an outreach booth at an event for Kumoricon, like the annual trip up to Seattle for Sakura-Con.
Downtown Portland finally seems to be back to pre-COVID in terms of foot traffic and tourism, but the vast majority of office space is vacant, and that probably is not something that will change for a long time, if ever. Portland will have a completely restructured city government in 2025, something we’ve needed for a very long time now, but it remains to be seen if the new city government will be able to fix some of the long-standing issues we have that have led to businesses – and people in general – leaving the city.
Overall, 2024 has been a fairly uneventful year. While I still have a membership to the Japanese Garden here, most of my weekends have actually been spent at the Oregon Zoo, which I finally got a membership to as well. It’s quite a bit larger, which means more to see, and easier to get to since the light rail goes directly to it – in fact, the station for it is the deepest transit station in North America. Yes, deeper even than the New York Subway. You know I always have to throw a transit mention in these cards somehow.I haven’t outgrown the one-bedroom apartment I moved to, and Jiji is still enjoying the bird channel the balcony offers. Thanks in part to some neighbors who moved out earlier in the year, I now have a decent sized balcony garden with rosemary, basil, chive, oregano, thyme, and some decorative foliage.
I think that about wraps it up for 2024. If 2025 ends up being an equally quiet year, I think that would be fine with me. I still swear each year goes by faster than the last.
Jiji and I hope you have a festive holiday season, and a happy new year.
