Oregon is for Lovers!

I completely forgot about my favorite thing about Valentine's Day until this morning when my cousin posted about it on Facebook.

Valentine's Day is Oregon's birthday!

So I guess I should like Valentine's Day a lot more, because I absolutely LOVE Oregon! And what's not to love, am I right? Rain, you say. Ah, but did you know that roughly two-thirds of Oregon is high desert? There's something for everyone in Oregon. I happen to live on what I consider to be the transition zone between raininess and desert. It's perfect, if you ask me! Right now I'm looking at sunshine and mountains, can't get much better than that!

For your Oregon's Day pleasure, here are some fun facts about the Beaver State:

1) Oregon is the only state with a double-sided flag. We have a beaver on one side and the state seal on the other.

2) Heceta Head lighthouse near Florence is the most photographed lighthouse in the nation.

3) Our state nut is the hazelnut. Oregon is the only state with a state nut. Explains a lot, right? Incidentally, a lot of state nuts are grown near Corvallis.

4) The Oregon Caves are naturally carved within solid marble.

5) Haystack Rock in Canon Beach is the world's third largest coastal monolith. Who knew?

6) Oregon and New Jersey are the only two states where you can't pump your own gas. Because of this, I did not learn to pump my own gas until last year. Now I feel lazy when I go to the gas station.

7) The world's tallest barber pole is in Forest Grove (for all you Pacific alums out there!)

8) Oregon is home to the world's shortest river, D River, 121 feet long.

9) Oregon has more ghost towns than any other state. Yay?

10) Odd Oregon laws: in Myrtle Creek, it is illegal to box a kangaroo; in Portland, you cannot whistle underwater; it is illegal to buy or sell marijuana in Oregon, but you are permitted to smoke it in your own home; in Oregon, it is illegal to use canned corn as fish bait.

11) Oregon is the most romantic place in the world (What? It's a fact! Our birthday is flipping Valentine's Day!)

Happy 154th Birthday, Sweet Oregon!

Sources: http://www.legendsofamerica.com/or-facts.html, http://www.50states.com/facts/oregon.htm

Rule Breaker

So a little bit about me: I'm a rebel.

Oh yeah. You heard me. For starters, I'm a lefty. When all my friends were learning to write and color, they reached for those crayons with their right hands. I watched them and said, "No, forget that, I'm going to use the other hand." But guess what? Kindergarten rolled around, and it was time to get down with some serious scissor usage. Apparently I was the first lefty my tiny rural school had seen since 1957, because all of their lefty scissors had been purchased around that year. Read: those lefty scissors would not even cut air. So what did I do? I rejected that rusty box of lefty scissors and was all like, "Whatever, I'm using the righty scissors from now on." And I do still use righty scissors.

I'm such a rebel I became a Mormon. What? Not fitting within your "rebel" schema? Yeah, that's how much of a rebel I am.

I have a bachelor's degree in English and writing. Do you know what they drill into you in every writing class? They tell you to WRITE EVERY DAY! Well, not exactly. Usually they say it with more profanity than that. Writing professors love profanity. I also do not use profanity. Rebel.

So here I am on my honeymoon, writing on the beach. I'm pretty sure this journal was never seen again.

So, since every teacher I've ever had has told me to write every day, guess how often I write? I'll give you a hint, it's not every day. Not even close. Maybe there was a time when I used to write every day, out of necessity, just trying to get things done and handed in. But when that was all over and I was left to just write for me, I didn't quite know how to do it. And then I was married. (They told me not to get married in the middle of my graduate program. So I did. Rebel.) After Dave and I got married, I suddenly stopped writing. I stopped because I was happy.

For so long, writing was an escape for me. When I couldn't sleep, I would write, pouring stress and anxiety and anger and loneliness and confusion and anything else trapped inside me into poems, short stories, letters that were never sent, until I lay exhausted on the floor of my little college apartment. I don't want to say that getting married solved all my problems overnight, but it sure did make me happy. And I didn't know how to write from happy. At least, not without it sounding like the opening of The Sound of Music. I guess now I have to finally learn how to be a happy writer. I found this great list on Pinterest. If I had a studio or a room just for my writing, I would seriously paint this all over an entire wall:

Source: http://marccortez.com/category/writing/

My husband has been encouraging me to write for a long time now. He is wonderful beyond belief. He buys me books for Christmas. Swoon. Two years ago he bought me The Complete Works of Flannery O'Connor and the Writer's Market. I almost cried. A few weeks ago, he came home from work and set The Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market down on the kitchen table.

"We're going to write a children's book," he said, like he was telling me we were going to wash the dishes after dinner or something. Here's the thing about my husband: he is so not a rebel. If something is going on with someone in his family, they call him because they know he will give straight-up level-headed advice in the most loving way possible. So when he says we're going to write a children's book, or that I can be a real writer who, you know, writes stuff, I think I should believe him more. After all, if he were lying to me, that would make him a rebel, which he is not. He's my husband for a very wise reason.

So I guess I need to stop being a rebel, at least at this one thing in my life. I need to write. Do you know, this makes two days in a row for me? Could be the start of something big.

Selling Happy

 I’m not a newcomer to this whole blogging thing. My first attempt came during a summer course during my year in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Southern Oregon University. Basically, the blog was a requirement for an ed tech class we all had to take. But I wanted to keep it going, chronicle one of the most important years of my life and the lives of my 80 some cohort members. I had grand, sparkly, twirly plans about writing witticisms on the struggles of student teaching, our triumphs, our darkest hours, the unbreakable friendships we’d forge.

It lasted all of two posts. It turns out student teaching really is a struggle, and it really cuts into your blogging time.

My next attempt was perhaps more humble. I decided to do an experiment in gratitude, inspired by Henry B. Eyring’s conference talk about recognizing the hand of the Lord in our lives each day. I thought, what a better way to do this than to share with the online world the things I am most grateful for every day.

It lasted all of two weeks.

It isn’t that I’m not grateful for the amazing blessings in my life. It’s just that when I write about myself, I go back and read it and think, “Wow, Kelli. You sound totally lame.”

And Mormon. In my senior year of college, I took a poetry class from Lawson Inada, then poet laureate of Oregon. It was not so much a class as us getting together for 4 hours a week to talk about ourselves and maybe read some poems. One time, Lawson looked around the room and asked, “Is anybody in here like, a Mormon?” I slowly raised my hand, in that room full of atheists and recovering Catholics, and he beamed at me and cried out, “I knew it!”

That was the year I “became” LDS (or Mormon, but I prefer LDS. Teachers have a thing for acronyms), which we’ll get to later. After my conversion, I found that writing was more difficult. As a writer, I was trained to write things that were “real,” i.e. gritty, vulgar at times, bittersweet (if sweet at all). Not many happy endings. The best story I wrote ended with one cowboy going off to kill another cowboy’s cattle in an act of revenge.

I was taught, basically, that happy didn’t sell. Real people weren’t happy. Real people were fighting with their significant others, getting drunk, dropping F-bombs like raindrops in Portland, having elicit sex, killing their neighbor’s cattle, and generally giving up on life. Real readers wanted to read about real people.

Well, I happen to know that there are approximately 13 million real people out there who, if you ask around about them, seem to be pretty happy. Not perfect, just happy. I know I am. So that’s what this blog is about; telling real stories that are, on the whole, happy. We are going to sell some happy.

Hopefully, I’ll still be here after two weeks.