The Office With A View

I feel blessed to live on the Oregon Coast. There is so much beauty in so many things. One of the special blessings I have is the opportunity to have a decent job allowing me to live here. To add icing to the cake, I work with some of the best people in the world.

The sprinkles on the icing on the cake have to be the location of my office. Where else can you have an office job and look out a window at some awesome sites? My office is on the second floor of a strip mall-sort-of-complex that is located right off of Hwy 101 at the corner where Hwy 101 (north/south coast hwy) meets up with Hwy 30 (East/West along the Oregon-side of the Columbia River.) My window faces Southeast towards the Coastal Range--I overlook the hwy and the Astoria Coast Guard Air Station.

This picture was taken a few weeks ago from inside my office as the sun was coming up. Click on the picture to see the full impact. I love the layers of the clouds, fog, sunlight and the contour of the terrain/trees in contrast with each other. You can see Saddle mountain (looks like a saddle) on the top right of the picture--clipped off by the clouds and partially protected by that tree. The building in the picture is the Air Station. This is one of the best views I've ever seen from my window at work.

Note: I like taking pictures at high resolutions and then cutting them out to make a panorama view. It gives a great spacious perspective. The main reason I cropped this one the way I did, was because the details were drowned by all the space around it (and there was a parking lot light sticking up just to the left of the picture.)

One unique thing about the coast is the opportunity to observe the US Coast Guard. We have the ships and we have the helicopters.

We watch the helicopters train almost everyday from our office. The USCG air station is at the Astoria Airport, so we get to observe a lot of different craft every once in a while (Navy, experimental, Air Shows, smaller commercial).

This picture was taken with the camera's optical zoom to the max and the lens looking through some zoomable binoculars--so its not the greatest, but when you compare the size of the building in this picture to the size of building in the picture above (also noting the camera zoom was at its max for that one) it worked out pretty well. You can even see the blur from the engines' exhaust. Those Jayhawks are amazing to watch.

This is a broad view of what my office looks like. I love all the plants. Out the window you can see Hwy 101, the Air Station and Saddle mountain is just behind the tree (near the flash reflecting in the window). I have my chair set so I can look north east and see part of Young's Bay. I see a lot of different kinds of birds. Quite frequently we will see bald eagles fly over or perch in the bay.

I love the plants in the office...they make it a warmer place to be in all day long. And notice the fish bowl. Actually almost all the plants, the fish and most of my decoration is compliments of the great people I work with. Additionally, they water the plants because they know how much I don't.

Here is my fish, an office-warming gift from our Accounts Receivable person. I named the Beta, "Kim." As in 'Seaweed' in Korean.

It was pretty much impossible to get a well-focused picture through the glass with the camera I used. This is Kim.