A White Christmas -- no dreaming required

A very merry Christmas to all of our readers.

Today it is snowing here in the Portland area, the first white Christmas here since 1990, according to local TV news station KGW (channel 8).

Speaking of KGW, local news anchor Wayne Havrelly stopped by operation headquarters yesterday with a camera crew to do a piece on Red Cross volunteers remaining here over the holiday. When they met us, that morphed into a piece on responding in Odyssey, and we ended up with a couple of minutes of local fame as the piece ran on both the 6pm and 11pm newscasts yesterday. We're hoping the clip will show up in digital form on the KGW web site, but, if not, we captured it on tape (albeit a bit fuzzy with rabbit ears here in the loading dock) and will try to get it digitized to put it here on the blog. Stay tuned.

Updated to add: Well, it took until March 30, 2009, but we finally managed to get the video transferred from VHS to digital format:




There are less than a dozen of us left, and Louise and I are basically just waiting around until the Materials Support folks close out their databases so we can take down the server and the satellite dish. I am hoping they will wrap up tomorrow and we can pack the rest of the gear on Thursday. That would make for a Friday shipment. With a bit of luck the steering pump will be in and we can get over to Raz Transportation to have it installed this week, too -- otherwise, I expect it will have to wait until the 2nd. In any case, we should be done with the Red Cross by this weekend, which will make for a total this year of nine weeks (and 3,500 miles) on deployment.

Tonight we have dinner reservations at the Stockpot Broiler, one of the few local establishments open for the holiday. It will be a quiet affair, just the two of us -- the "office" dinner was Saturday, when we were treated to a nice dinner at the Hall Street Grill courtesy of the local chapter.

We here aboard Odyssey hope that, whatever you celebrate at this time of year, your holiday is as peaceful, happy, and rewarding for you as it has been for us.