The Jack Noodle Journal

The Noodles have much to be thankful for this year. Our number one guy of course made the top of the list when the “what are you thankful for?” question made it around the Thanksgiving table.

We had a pretty good Thanksgiving holiday. We made it to two different events during the day and managed to keep our sanity. It was actually pretty easy this year for some reason. We went to my Ma’s house first and then went to the Fatherland, Beavercreek in the evening. K’s side, Mr. Baptist and Ms. Bee will be around for the Christmas time fun.

G Noodle was a super baby on his first Thanksgiving celebration. He loved seeing all the family. He especially takes a shine to the little kids.

I do pretty good with the tongue holding during the token holiday, puzzling, family and friends of the family, political talk. I just can’t figure it out this time. Are these parade rainers really giving Obama a hard time already? So why are they thinking he’s going to do a worse job than the old geezer and wing nut from Alaska would have? I think there should be a holiday rule that if you voted for Bush more than once, and can’t seem to see how his administration ran the country into the ground over the last eight years, you can’t have an opinion until four years from now.

Actually the best rule is no political talk with the family during the holidays. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Today we are cleaning up this mess of a house and then we are heading out for a movie tonight while the G Man hangs out with Grandma Mary and Grandpa Greg.

Good Monday morning to you! Almost noon here at the Noodle compound. Please bear with my disjointed typing style today. I am typing with one hand again as G Noodle is sleeping on my other arm, weighting it down, keeping it from the keyboard.

We had a fun weekend! We loaded up the car and headed up to Shelton for an overnighter. The crew was joining together to celebrate the lovely, beautiful, and charming Alicia’s birthday. A fun time was had by all! K made a pretty awesome gun birthday cake (she made the guns pouring chocolate into a mold). Oh yes. There are new photos up of the weekend festivities.

Yes, there was some good food. The crew stuck to a German theme. Everybody has been making such good food these days, I’m surprised my belly isn’t larger.

The Little Noodle had a fun time. He seemed to be more aware of his surroundings this trip to Shelton and that makes it more fun. It won’t be too much longer and he will be running all up and down that beach.

One night wasn’t enough. We should have stayed and relaxed at least one more night.

Coming home on Sunday night and chugging away at my telecommuting work sucked. I was way tired. Oh well. That’s the way it works now Noodle!

It was a nice weekend though. Now we are all primed and ready for Thanksgiving this week!

On Monday night I was concentrating deeply and trying to get in the zone with my load of shoe homeworks. This week I loaded up my hours on two days instead of spreading the work over four. That really seems to have worked out better. That’s a story for a different post though.

So I’m tooling away and K comes through the room in a flurry and starts to put her shoes on. I believe the time was 10:45 PM.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” I’ve been easy to startle lately.

“I was putting the G Man back in his car seat, I heard my wallet fall out into the parking lot and I totally forgot to pick it up!”

She headed out the door and drove back to the Hawthorne Fred Meyer she had been grocery shopping at earlier that evening. She had been so distracted by getting the crying G into the car that she had forgotten about picking up the wallet. It makes sense and is understandable. It is very easy to get disoriented when handling and maneuvering a baby!

I didn’t have a good feeling about her wallet still being there at 11 in the parking lot where it dropped earlier in the day. The Hawthorne Fred Meyer is a fine store and all but you must admit that there is some strange, sketchy stuff going on in the parking lot and in the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood surrounding the parking lot.

K came back a little bit later crestfallen, upset, bummed, saddened (what are some other good words to add here?). Sucks. Her wallet was gone. She had gone and asked customer service if anyone had turned a wallet in as well. Nothing. She was devastated. We both were. Besides having her drivers license, her bank card and some cash it, the wallet also had most of Gilby’s gift cards to places like Babies “R” Us and Baby Gap in it. There were also a couple of Fred Meyer cards with a bit of money on them.

Here’s where my hand wringing comes in again. All we have been hearing on the news, TV and internet is how horrible our nation’s financial crisis is. Even though K and I are both working it’s easy to freak out about money in the current global climate. I was troubled at how the simple losing of the wallet threw a giant wrench in the machine making us feel like the whole train was about to burst off of the tracks. We are fine this month, but what about next? What happens when this financial crisis they are all talking about finally really hits us? We are walking this funky tight rope of paycheck to paycheck that gives me worry.

I know. “I aint gots no money” posts are lame. I’ll stop. Our situation isn’t unique.

So… The next morning Gilby and I load up the stroller and walk over to the Hawthorne Fred Meyer. G had it in his head that he was going to find Mama’s wallet! My thinking was that maybe whomever found the wallet gutted it’s contents and threw it in the bushes maybe leaving K’s driver’s license.

We walked the parking lot and kept our eyes peeled for the wallet or what could be discarded guts of the wallet. We didn’t find the wallet. Lots of trash though.

We headed into the store, bought a couple of supplies and strolled over to the customer service counter to ask one last time if anyone had found a wallet.

“Yes someone did turn in a wallet! What’s the name on the license?”

Hooray! We told them K’s name and got her wallet back! Mission accomplished! The wallet was totally intact and everything seemed to be there. Someone must have found it, gave it to a cashier and they didn’t give it to the customer service desk until closing or the next morning.

Now I’m feeling bad for thinking so poorly of my fellow Portlanders. Why did I so quickly assume that the wallet had been stolen, never to be seen again? We are all in the same boat. We’re all struggling to make ends meet. Of course we’d all realize this when we found a wallet in a parking lot and make every effort to get it back to it’s owner.

I’m pretty excited to see David Fincher’s movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button“. Watch the trailer. It looks like a strange one doesn’t it? Say whatever you want, I still think Brad Pitt is dreamy.

I must have been a tad emotional last week. The second time I watched that Benjamin Button trailer, I was getting all teary eyed and weepy. I also got sad at the end of last week’s episode of “My Name is Earl”. Something about Earl saving Joy from the killer bee was touching.

See kids, even a tough guy like me can have a week of fragility.

I started up the Brown League last week! Yep. The League is made up of designers, artists, web producers, multimedia and other creatives interested in green design and sustainable development. We’re brown though. Green, but Brown. The Brown League. See, brown is also another Earth color. All the cool kids are picking a different color because Green is played out.

For some reason I was like, “If only there was some way to get people in Portland together to work on these sustainable endeavors! I need to start my league and get going on projects that make a difference! How am I ever going to get people in Portland to be part of my design cause?” Yeah, man, where was my head last week? I was really out of it.

I realized how stupid I was being finally. I live in Portland. There is something happening in the green, sustainable movement every five minutes. Millions of Portlanders are already down, and way ahead of me and my ramblings.

There is a lot of stuff going on in Portland. You could spend hours on the internet going through it all. A good spot to start that I had forgotten about is the City of Portland Office of Sustainable Development. It looks like there’s a big deal starting up in January called the Portland + Oregon Sustainability Institute.

I think the Brown League should definitely get together with these PDX Lounge folks. Hmm… Good stuff there.

Yes, so if one had an ample amount of energy, one could really get involved in Portland.

I have been listening to and have been inspired by the “Icon-o-Cast” podcast from the design firm “Lunar” down in San Francisco. Their Digging Deeper series of talks are really good. Lunar also has a pretty awesome designer’s field guide to sustainability PDF on their website that has a lot of useful information. I haven’t read it all yet but plan to.

Oh yeah. The NPR show “Studio 360″ had a pretty good show called “Creative Minds Go Green“. It’s worth a listen.

Finally, What’s the deal with this “E2” show on PBS? Do we get that show on OPB? It looks really classy. Maybe I’l watch it here now on the internets.

Gosh, I need to freaking write more. Perhaps I will have to schedule a certain time during the day and only do writing during that time. So where would that fit on the schedule? Maybe I should stay up later or get up earlier. Enough of that though! I do so hate when I write about writing here in the journal. Boring.

Well the election is now almost a week behind us. I don’t think I commented on it too much here due to the whole not writing enough thing I was just talking about.

I thought the Obama win was very inspirational! Even if you didn’t vote for him, it was hard to not get teary eyed when the family walked on stage at that massive Grant Park rally. I thought it was amazing. What a great moment in history to have watched unfold.

I didn’t realize how really bummed out I had been with the state of the nation until feeling elated, hopeful, joyful, excited, happy and moved on Tuesday night. Sure there’s a long, hard road ahead, and everything won’t be magically fixed by the beginning of next year, but it’s good to feel like we might have a chance to do something great as a nation again.

Not to be too sappy.

Last week I really felt like doing something. The Obama win stirred me up enough to feel like I needed to take action. I don’t know what exactly. I’m not talking about running for an office or going down and volunteering at a soup kitchen. Not the sort of “what can you do for your country” something.

You know, it’s kind of funny now reading this, I’m fired up but not in a political betterment of society way I guess.

I feel like getting some sort of project going. Maybe some sort of art project. Do some reading? Do some writing? Do some drawing? Do some video? Do some photographing? Do some computing?

Something.

I will be interested in seeing if the green economy that was talked about during the campaign takes off and where it goes. I have been interested in sustainable design and green stuff for many years now. It would be cool to get some sort of project going in that direction. I need to reread some of my books and continue to do some research to see if there’s a place for me.

I was thinking about it last night and I decided that I wasn’t really into this “green” stuff in terms of hugging trees, hippies or even saving the planet. I’m more interested in the design problems being presented and the new explorations that are going to be done redesigning these products and systems. There’s going to be a lot of smart people working together on new design challenges. I’m interested in the innovations that will be conceived that also create a healthier planet for us to live on. Good design.

Oh yep. See, I know, I know. I need to get the new Friedman book.

Hmm. Yeah I should really do something. I need to get going on something though before my inspiration fades and I’m sleepy again.

Hey Gilby, Here is a photo of you joining your parents going out on election night 2008 casting their ballots to elect President Obama.

I am sick again. This is surprising to me because I am rarely sick. Maybe I am going to have to stop saying that now. My throat is on fire and I have this painful cough that is pouring gasoline on the throat fire. I feel very achy.

I blame the little one of course. We hear tale that babies his age can have up to 10 colds during a cold season! Great.

We went to Ikea on Saturday. I was in the market for better home office furniture. The crappy yellow 70’s office chair and kitchen table isn’t cutting it. I’m starting to get some serious pains in my wrists and hands and I think it’s from my improperly positioned chair I’m sitting in. I spend a lot of hours sitting so a proper chair is very important. I test drove all of the office chairs at Ikea and ended up getting the Markus. It’s a pretty awesome chair. I found it to be the most comfortable in the store. I’ve already clocked 4 hours in it and think it will be just fine. It definitely looks quite a bit bigger at home than it did in the store though. Doesn’t go with other furniture so much.

I also went in this weekend and had all of my golden locks shaved off. Yeah, this is it. This is my haircut. My hair no longer works any other way but shaved. I had been trying to grow my hair out a bit. The sides got nice long and stringy but the top really didn’t do much of anything. I was hoping for a mad scientist do.

Oh well. The old noggin feels marvelous with a shaved mane!

I have been really feeling the need to do some writing lately but haven’t. I was going to celebrate National Novel Writing Month by writing a post every single day in November. Didn’t happen.

I’m also really in the mood to read a book. I have so many that I have already started but never finished to choose from. Hmm… What to read. I wonder if I would enjoy having a Kindle? I wonder if I would read more then? Probably not. Apparently Oprah really loves hers. $359 though? Ouch! Why did I think it was cheaper? I could buy and not read a lot of used paperbacks for that much.

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s the cold talking, but doesn’t it feel like everything is kind of hovering around on hold until after Tuesday?