State o' the Nate

Kyle and Nate at Council Crest, originally uploaded by nateborr.

This picture of Kyle and me was taken two weekends ago by a kindly passerby at the park atop Council Crest, overlooking Portland. At least four mountains (Hood, Adams, St. Helens, Rainier) were visible from there but none made it into the background of this snapshot, even as the tiny white blobs that mountains show up as in such photos. Kyle and I hiked up there since it was the first outright gorgeous day of the year, sunny and warm. Since then it's been mostly cold and rainy with a fair amount of hail mixed in.

Despite blog silence my life has been humming interestingly (if mildly) along, weekdays at work interlaced with sitting in the audience at a couple of concerts or lectures, cooking large batches of reheatable food, and other activities that hanging out with the girlfriend is conducive to. I've also been tearing through a lot of short, smooth-readin' fiction (H.P. Lovecraft, Willa Cather, Kurt Vonnegut) that's easy to process on a bus. Other literary activities include attempting to work out the contents of a box of books that the parents tried to ship from Pittsburgh to here, but which apparently only exists as a fragment of label and/or postage somewhere within the bowels of the Postal Service. Nothing of sentimental value there, though, unless you count the Bible that Mike was issued in Sunday school (I don't).

Details on all this eventually, perhaps. At the moment I'm more-or-less freshly home from work and I should probably feed myself. Up until today at my job I got to singly occupy an executive-like office due to an overall lack of space; as of this morning, though, I've been relocated to a "war room" (read: "conference room no longer usable for conferences, since there's programmers in it") in part because there's an actual executive on the premises that needs an office now. The bus ride home was awfully slow, too, since the Morrison Bridge was closed for reasons I haven't attempted to learn yet. I could have hopped off downtown and walked home in less time, but I figured it's cold outside and I should just read Slaughterhouse-Five for an extra thirty or forty minutes. So it goes.