Life in Portland Area

Click on the back button of your browser or click here to see the previous page of this series.

Click on any of the little pictures to see it full size (as big as it goes).

This is Kara at her desk. She is our receptionist and answers the phone most of the time. She also does some of the paperwork for billing and such.
This is Cimbre at her desk. She does the paperwork for most of the moves and especially the international moves.
This is Scott. He runs the local office (Active is owned by Crown Moving of Seattle, so the owners come from Seattle). Just before the start of the year we had a meeting at 7AM with all the drivers where the owner gave us copies of the company policy book and talked to us about the results of an audit they had recently. We are to start keeping daily driving logs. He mentioned that if a driver drives after working more than sixty hours in a week, the company would get fined a few hundred dollars, while the driver would get fined a few thousand dollars. We will have to see if that keeps them from dispatching us over sixty hours during the summer (I think every driver worked over sixty hours through most of the summer last summer).
This is Michelle of the 'back office'. Her cubicle is right outside of Scott's. I haven't had much to do with her and so am not real familiar with what she does.
On January 5, 2004, we were pretty busy and three of us were sent out on two American International pick ups. The second was way out in the hinterlands beyond Forest Grove, OR. We tried to get chains at Les Schwab (a major tire chain in the area) as the shipper had warned us that things were pretty slick up their way, but Les Schwab didn't have any chains for our truck. We decided to see how things looked anyway. Here is Strassel Road, just off of SR 6 on our way. We were on Strassel road for about two miles.
We turned off of Strassel Road onto Timber Road (what an odd name for this area). It was gently uphill and unpaved in places. We went on it for about two miles and very pretty.
No wait, here is a hint as to why this was called Timber Road. Those are tree stumps with snow accumulated in clumbs on the top.
Here is the turn off for Ridge Road. We were only about a fifth of a mile from the house, so we walked the last bit first to see what it looked like (it was a dead end). It was really slippery with places where there was just ice (snow which had melted and frozen again). It was also quite cold out with temperatures about 15 degrees. This picture was taken just before we were leaving (so the sun was closer to setting).
The shippers were leaving for China in three days so really wanted for the move to go and offered to shuttle us back to our truck as we didn't think we could make it up Ridage Road (with or without chains). I slipped and dropped my camera just before taking this picture and the colors are all funny.
This is the picture with 'revised' colors (a little more true to the actual colors).
We brought the packing material back to the house in the shipper's Suburban (picture shows Goeff and Kevin carrying the packing material into the house). We packed up the shipment and then loaded it into the Suburban and shuttled it back to the truck (just took three trips).
Kevin (shown here) loaded the boxes into the truck as we carried them to him. We finally got turned around and left just before dark (4:45PM). We had arrived at Ridge Road about noon, so it was longer than usual, but not too bad. On the way back a short in the truck wiring caused us to lose our tail, brake, and 'box' lights. A sheriff headed home stopped us and insisted we take the next exit or else (no ticket, though). We were delayed about two and a half until a mechanic could fix the lights. That made for a really long day which was OK, I guess, as the next day was really quiet with only three dispatched (and I wasn't one of them). However, that was good as the weather was really bad on Tuesday with lots of snow and freezing rain and no one really worked anyway.
It turned out the freezing rain was really bad. Here is Karyn's back yard. We're afraid that the willow tree is in bad condition (there is at least one broken limb). You can't see it in this picture, but there was a coating of over one inch of ice on flat surfaces.... Anyway, there was no work for Karyn or I (and no school for Alex) on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday so we stayed home. However, as I am paid hourly that means only about fourteen hours from Monday and whatever I am able to work on Friday.