happy inauguration day!

For the first time in my memory, we are inaugurating a president I am really proud of.  We seem to have elected the best man for the job, not just the lesser of two evils…  I am delighted that Cora’s first understanding of what a President is will be shaped by this man.

And thanks to Ben and Carrie for the onesie.

and so it begins again.

sigh.  The pile of boxes has returned to our life, the repetitive trips to goodwill to dump stuff we don’t need, the purchase of new sharpies and packing tape, and the obsessive scanning of craigslist for a new place to live.  Leslie and Kate and I counted up major household moves of our lifetimes the other night over creme brulee and tiramisu, and my number was 17.  Kate’s was 16 (not bad, actually, for a military kid), and Leslie’s was 12.  Mine is about to be 18.  And I hope that will be it for a few years.

The good news is, we are finally, officially moving back to Portland, which I am so pleased about… for a few months at least, it seems sort of utopic.  My parents are there, the holidays are around the corner, we’re about to have a baby, Henry seems to have bagged a job he is really excited about that comes with a paycheck and benefits and everything…  and Portland is full of green mountains and clean air and civically minded people and good beer and organic food… and a church that we love. And did I mention skiing?

Simultaneously, I’m really sad to leave Miami in all of its broken multicultural splendor.  As we were trying to decide where to settle in and start raising kids, doing the cost-benefit analysis, one reflection that came up was, well, at least in Miami Cora will never have the impression that the whole world is white and wears birkenstocks.  I will miss not hearing English at the grocery store and using my spanish at work on such a consistent basis… I’ll miss Pollo Tropical (the ubiquitous cuban fast-food chain) and the warmth and flamboyance with which all the Island People here approach life.  I’ll miss diagnosing people at work with Status Hispanicus (think status epilepticus, but with an ethnic cause…heh.) and the swanky Haitian ladies’ accents at work.  I’ll miss all my skinny gay miami beach boyfriends at work… they are a category unto themselves.  And, as previously noted, we are a little devastated to be running out on Kate and Omar’s church plant and all of the digging into the grit of miami that would have come with it.

But you can’t have your cake and eat it too.  So the packing has started, and the u-haul is reserved… we’ll ship my car and then make an epic trip across the country, mainly because I’d rather spend 2 weeks in the car seeing good friends and making some important gastronomical pitstops than spend 10 hours on a plane to get home.  We leave in 2 weeks.  Um, no, actually… in 8 days.  geez.

goldfish as transitional objects

Well, the tedious and somewhat overwhelming process of beginning to move cross-country has begun again.  It seems like just a few months ago that we were going through this in Portland, wondering what Miami would be like and if we would maybe just want to stay there forever.  Sadly, it turns out that wisdom (and the hand of God?) are taking us back to the soggy northwest.  Being pregnant complicates our otherwise footloose existence and necessitates Henry having a lucrative enough job for me to stay home or some sort of trustworthy child-care situation available for Cora… Miami is expensive, I refuse to do the Miami day-care thing, and my parents are conveniently located in a city that we are nuts about.  After several months of looking for jobs in both places and turning down an offer in San Antonio that just didn’t feel quite right, it has become apparent that the job he wants is available in Portland (albeit for less money than we can really live comfortably on).  Furthermore, I am pretty homesick for being a nurse outside of the medicare fraud system that seems to exist here in south florida… which is probably a story for another post.

In any case, we are beginning to collect boxes and get rid of extraneous junk, and I have returned to my obsessive relationship with Craigslist.  And we are facing the very sad prospect of saying goodbye to some great friends we have made here.  I met Kate and Omar in the ER at Children’s last fall when they brought Asher (their 2-month old) in for some troubling high-volume vomiting… luckily, Asher turned out to be fine, and after walking them to ultrasound it dawned on me that Omar was one of the pastors at our (rather large) church.  And Kate had a Patagonia diaper bag, which wasn’t something I thought existed in Miami.  We got talking, figured out that we lived in the same neighborhood, and decided to be friends.  And have been ever since.

The thing that makes it really difficult (aside from the fact that we have one of those rare and magical 4-way couple relationships where all of us get along like peas and carrots) is that they are just about to start the project of planting a new PCA church next to downtown Miami… this is something Miami desperately needs, and they are the perfect folks to do it.  And they need people to stick around and help them get the thing established, which is exactly the kind of thing we would love to do, but it seems like the aforementioned hand of God is taking us back to Portland.  I think we’re all sort of waiting for some sort of miraculous job offer to come down the pipe for Henry that would allow us to stay here, but it just isn’t happening.  …anyway, we are packing up the boxes and beginning the process of saying goodbye.

Part of the process was the purchase of 2 goldfish (a fat one and a skinny one) to give to Kate and Omar’s 2 boys.  We named them Jeff and Abbie (and yes, the fat one is Abbie) and Henry declared them to be “transitional objects,” which I thought was hysterical.  Below is Elisha’s reaction to the new fish, which I think will really confuse him for the next few weeks before we leave town.

cora elaine nelson

After much deliberation and brooding, we have finally arrived at the perfect name that doesn’t really involve too much compromise for either of us. We found out last week that baby nelson is definitely a girl, and have been debating ever since.

Cora means girl in greek, and Elaine means light, also in greek… Elaine is my mom and sister Maggie’s middle name, and a nice family tradition to carry on. We like Cora because it sounds sort of old-fashioned, but isn’t used much and is hopefully open to the kid’s interpretation. She should be able to be whatever kind of person she wants to be with this name. It also has the benefit of being easy to pronounce and spell, and I can’t think of any really heinous nicknames that could be derived from it. I even google-checked the name to make sure there aren’t any famous drag queens or criminals out there masquerading as Cora Elaine Nelson, and got nothing back, so I guess she’s free to make history with a clean slate, too.

Also, Henry finally felt her kick last night! Such an odd sensation… I’ve been feeling it now and then for a couple of weeks, but she was really squirming around last night and we were able to feel it from the outside. She seems to be a night-owl, and have a predilection for really loud Wilco.

hang onto your biscuits…

…. I’ve started a blog. I’ve actually started this blog under a couple of different names, and now have found one that will hopefully stick. The first one incorporated the name of (and was intended to be shared with) my spouse, who got all paranoid about his job as a psychologist and the possibility that his “clients” might decide to google him. I will henceforth refer to him as Henry (not his real name).

Anyway, the idea is to give me a place to rant and rave a little when I feel like it, and keep my scattered friends and family apprised of my life.

Above is a picture of me trying to touch a bird we saw in the everglades last week. He flew off before I had a chance to ruffle his feathers.