Yes, I’m late this year. May has been an incredibly busy month, and so I’ve missed the usual anniversary date of this past Friday this year. It’s certainly been a wild year so far. Part of me is glad to be less than a month away from the halfway point of the calendar year, but another part of me expects that also means summer will just come and go again, and soon enough we’ll be at the end of the year.
August will mark ten years in Portland, and so I would like to see more of Oregon over the summer this year. I’ve still only been out to the coast once, and I’ve never really done the gorge properly. Wine country is something I keep debating if I do solo or with a friend, or maybe I wait until the parents finally make it over here one year for a vacation.
Going home for the holidays at the end of last year and seeing how much had changed since I last got out there in 2021 only further proved that neither time nor change are slowing down. I think I get now how the city so easily forgets it owns the streetcar system here; it is incredibly easy to fall into a routine and just run on cruise control year after year. The trains we ordered all the way back in 2018 are finally in revenue service, platforms have new signage, and platform ticket machine and cash fares have both been eliminated, but the streetcar system arguably hasn’t seen major change since the opening of the Tilikum Crossing in 2015, completing the eastside loop and transforming the CL Line to the A and B-Loops. Hopefully the extension to Montgomery Park will open in 2030 as originally forecast, but getting funding for it is going to be rough with the current political climate.
I arguably haven’t made any major changes in my life for some time either. January will mark ten years at Kroger. July will be two full years in my current apartment, although I swear it does feel like three full years already. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t changed buildings since 2016. April 17th marked five years with Jiji, which was also poorly timed as the start of my annual Seattle trip…
All that said, there are certainly things I’d like to do, but I also don’t feel like there is anything I need to do right now. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the routine I’m in, but it is one I’m overall happy with, even if I do still casually look for opportunities other than Kroger. A better salary definitely would be welcome, especially now knowing my brother makes more than me (but he also works for a major bank.)
So what does all that mean for the blog as it turns 14? In short, business as usual. I’m not expecting to have anything to talk about in detail any time soon (thankfully there is no Cheesecake Factory near the convention center here.) Bluesky and Mastodon will continue to be the primary home of my random thoughts. This will likely continue to mainly be a mirror of my Instagram, just still a lot easier to search historically.
But you never know what can happen. Eventually I’ll probably go into detail on my thoughts on the Brookville fleet and how it compares to the hopes that were had in 2018 when the three cars were ordered, but I want to give them more time. It has been brutal seeing them struggle to be as reliable as the now 24 year-old Škodas, and the city is now paying a not insignificant amount of money to have a team from Brookville on hand 24/7 (there’s now a house being rented), but I do have to give Brookville credit for making a reasonable effort to fix all of the issues the cars have had. A lot of them are issues I don’t think we should be having, but again, that’s a story for another post.
For now, here’s to planning for business as usual, but just like a lot can happen in a year, a lot can happen in half of one.
