An indie movie Christmas

Every year is a White Christmas for me no matter what the weather, since my name is White. But this Christmas was also what Doug Barker deemed an "indie movie Christmas" when I told him how it all went down.

It all started with bad weather.



This is the Saturday before Christmas. Ray and I decided the weather was too bad to drive around town, so we walked. It had already been snowy, but it was getting ridiculous. Sunday it would continue to be ridiculous, piling snow all over the place. The National Weather Service, by the eve of Christmas eve, was saying that the weather would be back to normal (rainy) come Friday everywhere, but that the Harbor and Seattle area would probably be decent by Christmas eve.

But we were going to Longview, which is closer to Portland and the beneficiary of a cold stream of air flowing from East Oregon down the Columbia River Gorge. So it was going to be a little snowier out there. But we didn't care, we didn't want to be trapped on the Harbor for Christmas so we headed out. We listened to a CD of Christmas songs, one of which was the Carol Bells by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. One of the few things I appreciate about TSO is that they make Christmas songs absolutely terrifying. Seriously, I cannot imagine why they did not spike this version with a little "Night on Bald Mountain." I think that's the piece I'm thinking of.

It looked like the Christmas angels were having a pillowfight by the time we got to I-5, so we pulled over and asked Ray's dad what it was like on his end on a hill in Longview. "Oh, it's really bad. It's like a blizzard. It's snowing so bad it's dark out here. I'd just turn around if I was you. Just go home." Kris' husband George, however, said he didn't think it was too bad, even though it was kind of snowing where he was. And the snow had tailed off by then so we pressed on.

Well, going down Kris' road it was obvious that we weren't going to be able to go up the hillside and we'd have to stay at her house, which is undergoing some pretty extensive renovating of the walls and was covered in drywall dust and smelled like primer. She and George were basically living out of suitcases in the three or four habitable rooms they had. Somehow, in her fairly small kitchen, she had managed to make a bajillion cookies. I'm not even kidding. They weren't the regular drop kind, either, they were all really elaborate sorts. Because a little home renovation will not stop Kris' compulsive Martha-Stewarting. It would take a much larger force, perhaps nature's own fury, to do that.

Speaking of nature's fury:



look at all that snow. Their house is at sea level.

So we go up to the house for crab louie that night and the roads are just so bad, but Kris, driving with chains, is a champ going up and coming down. So this bodes well for Christmas.

Except that on the way over for Christmas, Kris and George have a, ah, little argument about her driving early on and they pull a Chinese firedrill. And when it comes to who is the better driver in the snow, I'm going to have to give Kris the points on that.

We get up the hill and pull in and Kris starts making the tofurkey alternadinner she and George will eat. So Ray and his dad and I watch some of the Battle of Myrtle Street, a documentary about Aberdeen/Hoquiam football rivalry. It, ah, overreaches in some bits, especially when it intersperses clips from WWII soldiers storming stuff with assistant football coaches narrating how Myrtle Street (the boundary between the two towns, a completely anonymous-looking spot) is where the line is drawn, how you'd better be ready to do battle when you get to Myrtle Street. Because Myrtle Street is where champions are born. George takes this opportunity to call his son, who is in the Navy, to tell him about how the Germans have caught some Somali pirates. His conversation intermingles with the BOMS tape. There is a lot of war talk on this day of Jesus' birth, the promise to all mankind that we will be saved.

Dinner was lovely, early, though, so there would be daylight for driving back. There was pork loin, potato-leek gallette, stuffing, canned cranberry sauce and for dessert, a Yule log and a million cookies and the buttermilk fudge I'd made.

Then there are the Christmas presents. I got the water bottle I asked Ray for, yay! And then I got a lovely recipe book from my aunt Patti. But I looked through it and there was a picture of my recently-lost cousin Aaron with my now-gone grandparents and for a moment, I was like, oh, I'm okay, wow, that's good. Then suddenly I wasn't okay — I was bawling like a baby. Ray's dad, bless his Teutonic heart, continued to make awkward conversation about wrenches with George while I decompensated into tears. Oh, Aaron. I hope you had Christmas with GMR and BDW.

After the presents we headed back down the hill and George only nearly got us in an embankment once and the rear only slid out of control the one time, so it was all good. Luckily, he had Kris giving him helpful pointers about putting the SUV in low gear and going slower. It may have made my top 5 harrowing rides of all time, but I've lived in temperate climates my whole life.

Kris and George were out to Portland that same night, off to Vegas for a week, hopefully their snow will melt while they're gone so they can come back to normalcy. And Ray and I didn't want to take the risk that we'd be stuck driving back in worse weather the next day, so we headed back to Aberdeen, stopping for a brief check on his mom. I managed to soak my foot in melted slush getting across the street. The drive back took a lot of concentration, so no podcasts or anything. Just me occasionally singing a Christmas song.

We got back to the house and ate a salad for dinner then piled into bed and watched a couple of episodes of "Rumpole of the Bailey." I didn't get out of bed until absolutely necessary the next day.

The Gingerbread House

This is the gingerbread house that Ray got fed up with moments into icing the roof. He swore he just "didn't have a vision" and that he's "not creative." But I would beg to differ. If I really had a gingerbread house vision I wouldn't have gone for the Safeway kit. In fact, this year's kit you had to mix the icing yourself, one of the reasons I buy the kit in the first place. Who wants to mess with making the cementy stuff anyway?

I like that the snowman is slouched over, like he's too lazy to even try to be a snowman. Some day I'll go bananas and pull a Frank Lloyd Wright of gingerbread houses. But I'd have to be willing to come up with a vision and purchase bad-tasting-but-pretty candies to fulfill that vision. And buying yucky candies goes against my nature.

Fudging off

So this weekend I tried to make Ed's 15-step/recommendation buttermilk fudge recipe and it was a bust. Sticky and thick it was a filling-ripper. Other people have suggested I just mix up a "no fail" recipe that calls for processed ingredients, but I wanted to go another round with candy making, which has been described as the most complicated part of pastrymaking. And I can't even make a pie crust!

So I went back to the drawing board, Alton Brown style, and did the scientific research and asked Ed for some troubleshooting. We agreed I probably had too large a pot and too shallow a pool of candy for an accurate temp reading. But what the Internet said, which I did not know, was that you should not stir the sugar mixture to keep the sugar granules from sticking up together and forming long crystals. The reason fudge is so fudgey — chewy but easily detached from a larger chunk with teeth — is because the sugar does not all stick to each other.

The other thing I did was get a bowl of cold water for the "soft ball" test. I only had a vague idea what this was supposed to feel and look like — so I thought I would get some experience. Has Alton Brown done an episode where he goes through the stages of sugar? Signs point to maybe.

I started dropping hot syrup into water well before the thermometer had hit the "soft ball" stage and about three more syrup drops later, at the thermometer's "soft ball" stage, I got what I thought I was looking for — a ball that holds together but is still quite smushy. Dang if I didn't feel like I should be in a white coat with safety goggles. I wasn't dropping sugar. I was dropping science.

My question is who determined that there were "stages" of sugar, what exactly each stage was good for candy-making wise and how they learned that dropping in water was the trick to delineate said stages. It must be relatively recent because sugar was not an ingredient to experiment with until the past century or so. At least, that's the story I'm making up.

In order for fudge to get a good set, you have to beat ("aggressively stir," in Ed's words) the fudge. Because after turning into the perfect crystals the fudge needs those crystals stirred up or something. It makes the fudge set up, I guess. So I aggressively stirred the fudge and after a while put in some pecans and then, as I was thinking, is this going the way I need it to go? it got thick and matte and perfect.

Triumph in the kitchen. Next up, homemade puff pastry. Sike.

I have a new drug

It is Facebook. Find me. Friend me. Sadly or luckily, I cannot decide which, my crummy old computer is nigh incapable of keeping up with the tech, so there are some features that I can't really access which I think will either serve to drive me to FB at work or take Ray's computer. Seriously.

So this weekend was the weekend of the big snow; still no photos because I don't have the cable for my camera, that would require going to my apartment and I am very happily ensconced in Chez Kahler. But it was so wild and wooly that the NYT did NOT MAKE IT TO TOWN (and I had a minor panic fit because this was ACROSTIC week and you know I love me some Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon) and Ray's church cancelled service! So we had a whole weekend without either of our liturgies. Even though we were totes prepared for them — I woke up and there was Ray, all sweaty, saying he had just shoveled out the driveway. Man, the dude is motivated.

So we had the day to make buttermilk fudge following Uncle Ed's recipe, which came with something on the order of 14 bulleted points. And we STILL managed to mess it up. Possibly it got too hot, according to Ed's genius diagnosis when I emailed him today. We will have to make another batch with a smaller pot so the thermometer does not get dropped in it because someone has to hold it, hovering, above the boiling sugar. It came out super sticky and with an oily sheen, like the butter separated a bit. It didn't stir so much as it clung together and resisted all attempts to get the pecans in.

So the fudge was not fudgey, it was still pliable-ish and incredibly sticky but we portioned it out with great difficulty (it got less tacky overnight somehow, but still not fudgey). I took it to the least-picky group of eaters I knew — the office. Sure enough, the tin had a mere three pieces left in it at quitting time. Thank you journalists.

The facebook thing is like a drug. I'm friending people I haven't seen in 15 years. I have to get Ray hooked up on it.

Ray just asked: "What do you want for dinner?"

Me: "Do you want me to be honest or tell you what you want to hear?"

Ray: (chuckling) "I want you to be honest."

Me: (small voice) "I want Frosted Mini-Wheats."

Ray: (silence punctuated by an eye roll)

The news from a one-stoplight county

Maybe there's a stoplight I don't know about in Madison County, Ark., and maybe I'm overestimating the stoplight count (I'm pretty sure there's one because I've heard Madison County inhabitants mock Newton County ceaselessly for thier lack thereof). But one thing is for sure, there is no paper more amusing and disturbing than the Madison County Record.

My aunt Patti was kind enough not only to send me a gift this Xmas, but one that had been packed safely with the Record. I must blog it.

The very first thing that caught my eye was what we in the business call a "house ad," which tells the good people of Madison County that they can fax any document "anywhere there is another fax machine" for under $4. Which is still a rip-off price, for one thing, and so quaint in that most people nowadays just send email documents to each other.

Other ads are equally as hilarious, like the ad for Huntsville on the Square, which is one of those multi-sponsored ads by local stores. "SHOP NANA'S Blings n' Things," is a hilarious name. Another store is called "Faux Ever Yours." One place doesn't seem to have a name; its ad is this text: "Huntsville's 'Hippest' Little Boutique ... 'Hip' styles at 'Hipper' prices," superimposed over a gray peace sign. Scare quotes are in a lot of ads, so they are in good company. A to Z Pawn also has an ad.

Then there are the small-town dispatches. Debra Harmon of Forum/Alabam notes that her Thanksgiving was planned around her daughter-in-law's knee surgery, so they went to her folks' place in Russellville.

"We thought it would be best if we traveled to them in our travel trailer," Harmon writes. "While there during our five-day stay, we found the travel trailer of our dreams at the [business name redacted]. We now have much more room and convenience. Our family, [sic] Travis, Tolina, Trent, Butch and I [sic] enjoyed doing some holiday shopping as well."

Janet Little Musteen of Kingston writes, "The first responders and fire department had no calls this week. That must mean that everyone had a safe Thanksgiving."

Well, hold the phone Janet Little Musteen. This was a TG of death, violence and apparently a standoff with a sniper squad at the trailer park. You can read this story here. But the short version is she asked him to "heat up" TG dinner because she had been running around all day (he apparently didn't have anything else to do) and when she sat down to eat it, it was cold. So they had a bad fight, mixed with alcohol, and then he shot her in the face with a shotgun loaded with birdshot. (An aside: Who heats up TG dinner on TG? Did they have a pre-TG TG and that is why their daughter was at her grandmother's? Why weren't they with her there? Or was this like a Hungryman turkey dinner? And if so, how sad is that? It really makes one's mind work.)

Of course, no one heard the shot, so he called the cops to tell them, then threatened to shoot anyone who tried to take him in. This is where things get nuts. To directly quote:

"Hissom called the Madison County Sheriff's Office at 6:41 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening, telling dispatcher Lola Hampel that he had shot his wife in the face (with birdshot from the shotgun) and that he was armed and he would "take out the first officer that comes in the door" of their mobile home on 845 Edgewood Place, Lot 1. The residence is located just south of Countryside Retirement Center and west of Brashears Funeral Home.

"Huntsville Police Lt. Mike Livermore made contact with Hissom from the communications center at the Madison County Sheriff's Office.

"Meanwhile members of the Huntsville Police Department, Madison County Sheriff's Department, Washington County Sheriff's Department K-9 unit, Arkansas Highway Patrol, Arkansas State Police and Arkansas Game & Fish arrived at the scene. A sniper team was also established.

Also, members of Madison County EMS and Air Evac Lifeteam of Springfield, Mo., were awaiting retrieval of the victim at the parking lot of Economy Drug."

If it were my story, I would have made all this stuff about the snipers and whatnot go in the lede. But I can tell by all his bylines, the fact that he is the editor and the fact that he probably is doing all the pagination that Kyle Mooty is one busy guy. The weekly paper grind is hard to explain to the daily journalist, who also rightly feels put-upon, but trust me, weeklies are way harder for less money.

Obviously, this is a disturbing story. Here's another disturbing story. And I am calling shenanigans on the assertion made in the lede by the motel owners. Kyle Mooty reported, I decided.

I've noticed that there is kind of a theme going on with stories that lead off the MCR. A man kills his wife when she complains about a dinner he hasn't exactly been slaving over, a local guy with the middle name of "Caption" is extradited from California after being charged with rape (see the picture, it's priceless) and a woman's body is sent to the state crime lab because there are questions about her death. Also, her live-in bf is taken in on outstanding warrants. Lots of violence toward women of late, no?

It's too bad I don't have the impetus to input the letters to the editor. They are wackadoodle. If you are ever in Madison County, say, writing about its covered bridges for National Geographic or putting your high-end Italian auto through its paces on the pig trail, I highly recommend you pick up a copy. For me, it was like Christmas came even before I opened my present.

Weather outside is ... you can guess

Something I wanted to do today was upload a picture of the gingerbread house Ray and I made. Mostly me, because while Ray helped raise the walls and mix the icing (it was a kit, no baking involved), he did one side of the roof with icing and just gave up. He said he got frustrated with his lack of creativity and told me that he could not have had the "vision" for the outcome. Which is funny, because I just kind of go nuts and don't really have a vision.

But I don't have a cord for my camera. It is at my apartment, I can see it on the bookshelf. I could walk the three blocks, but you know what? The weather is snowy and windy and crazy. It is really kind of inhospitable for walking. And I especially know this because Ray and I went walking right before the snow really picked up.

We hit the town, walking down to the post office, to the library, to Waugh's, where Ray could get a new shirt, and to Kitchen Links, where we looked for a candy thermometer. But they had had a run on the things and the best we could do was a little clip for the top of the pot that would hold the cord of a digital plug-in above the metal rim of a pot.

Yes, we want to attempt Uncle Ed's melt-in-yer-mouth buttermilk fudge. If only we had the recipe.

Ain't no party like a banjo party

It is snowing outside, people. And it is kind of sticking. To roofs, trees, grass and cars if not sidewalks and streets. It may stick around in crusty, frozen form as cold Arctic air from Canada drops in to say howdy, but this is kind of a pleasant surprise. We don't get much in the way of snow in these parts.

Perhaps clamming in the snow is called for tonight?

If we do go clamming, we can use those clams to make clam fritters because Ray got a mixer yesterday. Not that he didn't have a hand mixer, but he didn't have a grinder, and he realized his mixer was a little on the inadequate-for-a-foodie side so we had to go to a mall for one of those Kitchen Aid jobbies. Not just any mall, though, one in Olympia. We had another mission — get out of the Harbor.

We first hit downtown Oly for Xmas shopping. Got my brother his gifties, finally. I can't say what they were because he might read this. Ray got toys for his cousin's kids at this amazing toys store, possibly the best one I have ever been in. I sat at the "game table" doing little logic puzzles from this game which was way more fun than you would have expected from a game that takes the shape of a chocolate box.

After bumming around downtown Oly, especially checking out the galleries (we saw one painting, of a young, attractive Native American woman in a deerskin-type non-covering dress-blanket of some sort reclining against a young, attractive Native American man with no shirt on. Tribe was uncertain, and there was no background. But the title of the painting, "The Lovers," totally cracked me up. I hope that as soon as the mascot wars are over and there are no Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta fans stop the tomahawk chop, that all that attention and effort will be focused on the new-agey sexualization and fetishization of Native Americans. If you can explain to me why these or these or this aren't something more than plain tacky I will listen. Maybe.) Oh, hai there bluecorn comics, wow, that was some good information, thank you!)

The same gallery also had very expensive watercolors of cats and some pictures of wilderness that looked like they were done by sixth graders with colored pencils. But a grown-up had done them. A grown-up who clearly didn't even know the rules of perspective, composition and drawing from life before breaking them. And here I am thinking my robot art looks bad because I can't get the weight of the lines right and I want to draw curved where robots are rectangular. Why must *I* feel shame in this world? How come some people come with so much shame and self-criticism while others clearly have none?

This was a "classy" gallery, too.

So we ate at Lemon Grass in Olympia and it was so, so much better than anything we ever could have gotten in Aberdeen. The green curry was divine. Ray got the apple curry.

Thus fortified, we hit the mall. I nearly decompensated just doing the parking lot. We drove for a good ten minutes before finding a spot and of course there were jerks in the parking lot. I was glad to put it all behind us.

We were in and out of the mall relatively quickly. By some stroke of fortune, we were parked near the entrance where the Santaland was, and we saw the Victorian carolers and the loooooong line of kids waiting to see Santa. One little girl with red ribbons in her hair and a black velvet dress and white tights was doing an excited dance wherein she kind of punched the babydoll she was carrying. It sounds scary, but it was totes cute. As we walked away from the Santaland, I heard a kid go, "no, No, NO!" Ah, Christmas at the mall.

We were pretty much in and out with the light chrome-colored mixer (we both had different opinions about ideal colors — I liked the "green apple" and the Martha Stewart blue (not on website, it's a Macy's special. It's kind of Tiffany blue.) because I'm a funtime girl and Ray liked the white and black ones because he's mister "let's not get crazy, now." The chrome was a third for both of us. Compromise, that's what it's all about people.) We got the grinder so we can grind up clams for fritters.

So we left Olympia and headed back to the Harbor and got ready for the Festival of Lights in Montesano. An earlier post will show that the Banjo band has been pressuring me to become one of them, and to come out to the FOL and go to a post-FOL party at Bob Carter's house and museum.

The FOL was pretty crazy. I thought it was a little ole parade, but there were something like 70+ floats and parking was insane. The Retired Senior Volunteer Police were out in force, making sure the rowdies didn't go out of control. We drove over and it was snow-showering, emphasis on the showering, and we feared the worst — two plus hours of standing out in the cold rain — but Montesano was really lucky to have missed that precipitation. There were a few minutes of snow, but that was it, thank heavens.

So we stood in the cold, our fingers and toes gradually losing feeling, bouncing up and down to generate heat, while some crazy floats passed us by. There were a lot of ATVs with Christmas lights. There was a "Mambo Schoolbus," a bus pimped out with so many lights all over, even the rims, yo. I could totally imagine my school bus drivers of yore driving it — Jackie, Zebra Lady ... Joe could have totally picked up more women driving that thing (he had a penchant for calling out, "you need a ride?" to fine ladies walking down the street. This worked ONCE and I don't think he got a phone number out of it).

Pictures are worth 1,000 words, but dang it I left the camera at home. Stormy Glick brought his reindeer out of his exotic animal farm and Santa led it down the street. There was a motorcycle pulling a functioning carousel (small scale, obvs, with lit up deer as the horses and stuffed animals riding them) that was all lit up and pretty. There was a guy on a ... I couldn't find a picture of this, but I kind of want one ... it's a toy horse made for even a big old dude to ride and your feet are off the ground. There are wheels on the bottom. You pull on the head or something and it kind of propels it forward. You can steer with the head. There do not appear to be brakes on it. Whatever this adult hobbyhorse is called, it is a fascinating creation that made the kids freak out.

There was also a Santa on a toilet in the plumbing company's float. A live man, dressed as Santa, on the pot. Pants up, but still, on a toilet. When the kids saw that they went bananas.

The Banjo band came by, playing Christmas songs. I can't imagine how their fingers didn't fall off from the cold, and neither did they, really. Apparently the tuba player had it worst, what with all that brass and silver conducting the cold straight to his hands and mouth. A flag-pole situation might have been near developing.

Finally, around two hours after we got there, there were fireworks to symbolize the end of the parade. That was enough, we were back to the car and to Bob and Cathy's place, where we went straight for the hot cider.

Ray and I and some of the folks from the banjo band, including a fellow named John who plays first chair violin with the Seattle Symphony (not too shabby!) got a tour of the museum, and Bob got the player piano going with a rag. It was from a roll recorded by George Gershwin, it was basically Gershwin playing. John got teary-eyed at that, he was so overcome.

The food was great. There was delicious clam chowder, chili, some kind of round sourdough bread that had been split into lots of sections that had been loaded with butter and cheese and then baked until it all ran together and a whole table full of desserts. Seriously, there were about ten dessert servings per person. These people love their desserts.

Some chatting was done, petting of the Carters' many many dogs was done, and then it was banjo playing time. Andy and Linda, who is the most bestest banjo player I've ever heard live, put me right in between them and we all rocked out with "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leafed Clover," "Ma," "Down Yonder," "Chinatown," "Just Because" and maybe a Christmas song. A fellow with a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar sang a funny song about how it's a sin to tell a lie. He wants the band to learn it, but he was playing it in the key of A, which made everyone shake their heads. They will do it in C, thank you very much.

I'll catch up now that I can start going to the banjo band sessions late. Apparently they're having another party Tuesday night before, during and after playing, and I'll be getting some of the banjo band's program books.

Ain't no party like a banjo party 'cause a banjo party don't stop. Seriously. We didn't make it home till after 11 p.m., which is kind of late for our old selves. We saw it was snowing when we got into town, but we didn't expect it to continue until, well, it's still going strong. Almost puts me in a mind not to go out and get my NYT. Oh, what am I saying! I know I have to have that crossword.

Elk Stroganoff

There were still plenty of NYTs at the grocery store. Yay.

Today I don't know what we would have done regularly, but Ray got $20 to see High School Musical at the High School from his accompaniast, also the grandmother of the male lead not-so-coincidentally. So obviously, we had to see the matinee. This was particularly special because it had a cast of non-Aberdeen school guys, because the need to have guys overwhelmed the population of drama-lovers at the school.

The kids were terrific, but there are a couple of structural problems with "High School Musical." First, the character of Sharpay is a snooty drama club president who never wears black and wants to play the lead against her brother's lead. In a romantic musical which presumably will require some level of macking. Ew. Also, who ever heard of a snooty drama clubber? The leads also met during a kids' karaoke night, which female lead Gabriela Montez describes as "romantic." She's a brain, allegedly.

Also, Disney obviously did not spend a lot on the lyricists. "I'm soaring, I'm flying," "reach for the stars," there are a few cliches that were not covered but I'm sure that was just for lack of trying. Well, I'm probably just crabby and old. Yeah, I'm definitely a no-fun old crab. Young people, you will be like me some day, a wet blanket.

The kids, however, were really good singers and dancers who can put on a show. Ellen's grandson was a surprisingly good dancer for such a lanky kid. We saw him in the "receiving line" after the show giving his great-grandmother an autograph. Awww.

We saw little Kallie Distler at the show. She, very surprisingly, remembered who I was and said hello. So cute and sweet.

So okay, the big thing tonight was the elk stroganoff for dinner, with a side of canned peas (yum) and acorn squash mashed with brown sugar and cinnamon and butter. There are a lot more recipes for elk stroganoff on the Internet than you could imagine. Ray was excited to have a recipe, but I said we had something better — a method.

What we did was take the elk steaks, sliver them and toss them with flour, salt and pepper, fry an onion and sliced mushrooms, add the elk, let it brown up, then add a can of beef broth and about 1/2 a can of tomato paste, a bunch of nutmeg and a big pinch of thyme. I let the broth bubble out a lot, added a bunch of sour cream and some good glugs of sherry and then, when it was all incorporated and hot, served it over egg noodles. It was really good. Maybe next time I would change the broth situation so there isn't so much sodium, but I like elk. I'm going to have to learn to hunt, I guess. It seems like it's more of a lifestyle than clamming, and the equipment is a lot more involved, too. But there you go. Besides, the world needs more liberal arts graduates who hunt.

The Dump

I'm really pushing it -- it's nearly noon and I have not yet acquired my Sunday NYT. There are 2 places in town to get it and I'm basically looking at missing out not only on a crossword but the acrostic. I am living dangerously.

So the dump was awesome. Along with the regular household hazardous waste, Ray loaded a 55-gallon drum that still had a little diesel sloshing around the bottom. He inherited a lot of old boat thingies when he bought his grandparents' house, and since neither of us are boat people, nor do either of us drive diesel, he decided to load one of the two drums up for disposal. He was a little nervous that the waste people would not want it.

But they did. The guys at the dump were superexcited, even moreso when they learned there was a quart of 20-year-old diesel in the bottom (even though gas isn't $4/gal anymore)

Last night we also hit the Harbor Art Guild gallery (yes, the HAG) for its grand opening. Really nice. We ate dinner at Stiffy's and I had one Manhattan that basically got me a little drunk. There was a precious little Yorkie there that was not at all yippie, and a group of regulars having conversation bawdy enough to make Ray uncomfortable. (Sample conversation: Man on cell with wife: "Where are you? ... Having fun dancing? What? ... Well, I don't care when you come home but you'd better be home when you (get it?)!")

We also saw Driftwood's "Nunsensations: The Nuns hit Vegas" or something. Buzzkill accomplished. It turned out that the show was also maybe a little too raunchy for Ray's taste, especially because his favorite grocery bagger was in the audience (she's youngish and a little bit, uh, delayed). I think it's patronizing to withhold raunchy jokes from any portion of the populace except kids whom you'd have to explain it to. Let them learn about it from their peers, on the streets, in completely unhelpful, scary and fact-free ways, just like I did. But Nunsense is not really that raunchy (there was a near-reference to something that starts with the word "blow" and a loudly proclaimed "BULLS--T!" from a puppet). What was actually offensive was a joke about "Mexifornia" and one about an outsourced (to Pakistan) catholic help line: "I said I was suicidal and he asked if I knew how to drive a truck." Bah dum-DUMB. The show has been selling out -- to the point that people are sitting in the aisles! I guess it is for the cast, who danced and sang their little hearts out and had better material in last year's "Mashuggah-nuns." Seriously, that is what it is called. And yes, it was completely meshuga.

In other news, there is elk steak defrosting on the counter for dinner. Is it tender enough for stroganoff? I really need to google up on cooking game meat. Now that the depression is a-coming, I may be forced to hunt to survive. And between myself and Ray, I believe that the Nunsense/Stiffy's (yes, that's the name of the bar, what to expect, huh?) incident, I think Ray is altogether too innocent to kill an animal like a deer or elk. But me? I'd blow its brains out and rub blood on my face while blathering crude words of Anglo-Saxon origin, apparently. I'm just that feral.

Banjo mafia

They make you offers you can't resist. Like free lessons and party invitations. All I gotta do is make sure I remember them in kind, right?

So it looks like Ray and I will be jamming with the banjo band next Saturday instead of clamming (we can do that some other day that weekend anyway, and Ray pointed out that we have plenty of clams in the freezer, even though I pointed out that clamming is not really about keeping inventory).

So I have finished "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz and it was spectacular. Highly recommended. It mentioned Arawn on page 2, and I was a nut for the Prydain Chronicles in fourth grade, so I was sucked in immediately. It is about a Dominican ubernerd and his family, and to say more would be to say too much. Read it.

I also read "The Abstinence Teacher" by Tom Perotta, and it was pretty good. I didn't get the main story of opposites attracting, but the rest of it rang pretty true. Perotta also shares my skepticism of the way the word "choices" is deployed in education, if you read through the lines. There is a "mean girl" aspect to "you made your choice," a very narrow black-and-white deal, that while necessary with some kids for boundary-setting purposes, does not exactly make anyone, kids or adults, feel like nuance or even fair dealing is coming into play. All I know is when people start saying something about a choice you made, it is a lecture, not a conversation. It is a fact-finding mission, not a discussion to achieve understanding. And you're in the role of toddler, which is exactly how adults, or children who may often have to act as the adults in their family, want to be talked to, let me tell you.

Also, in prison, "choice" is a big, big word. I've been in prison a lot (for work, silly!), and I am consistently impressed with how much it has in common with school. Budding sociologists might want to pursue this line of inquiry, comparing choice in educational pedagogy with correctional rehabilitation methods. It might be a rich, rich vein to mine. Especially if you compare high school graduation rates (WA is 67 percent in 2001 is the first googleable abstract I can find, but it is in comparison to a reported 82 percent) and recidivism rates (60 percent of dudes, 50 percent of dudettes according to here but anecdotal evidence suggests these 5-year rates are in actuality higher).

Anyway, I choose my choice. When I'm not wandering blindly in the thicket of life, being distracted by stuff.

There were slash fires on the top of the hills that were clearcut by the highway tonight. That the wood could burn makes me a little relieved that maybe the hill is dry enough that we have a few more months before the soils loosen enough for the inevitable landslide. We were on our way to a party that had Swedish meatballs. And Pelligrino sodas in little bitty bottles. I love Arranciata. It was a hoot, and I may have come up with a depression-proof business idea that is, in a word, "Bartertown," with the help of an ex-journalist. His wife told Ray, "journalists are crazy." Yes, like foxes. Luckily we are short on follow-through. We'd rather write 15 inches then move on to something new. That's just who we are.

In other news: I get to go to the dump tomorrow. I may not even try to get out of it.

Turkey day

Well, this was a Thanksgiving with a shadow. My family experienced a very sad loss, one that I am having trouble accepting. It just doesn't seem right.

So it was a little surreal this Thanksgiving, when one of the things I always feel thankful for, that I come from a family blessed with bright, vivacious people who are generally safe and happy, ended up not being the case.

Life was chugging on persistently, however. Ray and I faced perhaps our greatest relationship test ever: assembling an Ikea wardrobe so that I'll have a closet upstairs in his house for when I eventually trickle all my stuff over. The first day we put it together (TG) was pretty smooth sailing. The next day, when the back of the shelf did not go in the slots in the sides, well, there was some frustration. However, the application of a hammer to the particleboard fixed everything, even though I got a little overzealous and started kind of randomly banging on the wood, causing Ray to shout, "What are you doing?" Just feeling the Thor inside, buddy, that's all.

We went to the McMillans' for dinner on TG. Sheri and Lance were put in charge and holy guacamole did they outdo themselves with the turkey. I am no fan of the big bird, it's cottony and tasteless and generally worthless unless in a sandwich, but this was a smoked and roasted triumph of flavor and juiciness. Also, it was one of those farm-raised organic specialty turkeys. Janice made some fantastic brussels sprouts (I know, shocker to me, too, but I ate two servings). The sweet potatoes, the stuffing, the roasted asparagus, the handmade rolls, all were delicious. The only dishes I passed up were the Splendaed cranberry relish and the creamed pearl onions. Peas, mashed potatoes, cranberry log all found a spot on my plate or sitting a little on top of some other food. Of course there was pumpkin pie for dessert. Janice used a very complicated crust recipe that called for freezing, baking with weights, baking without, ad infinitum, and the crust came out burned looking (but not tasting, it was really very good). She was irked, because she is the pie crust queen. As her grandson says, "Why mess with perfection?"

For work I had to write a story recapping last year's dreadful storm. I swear I have some low-lying PTSD from the thing, I was getting chills just talking about windspeeds with some weather guys. They were saying that the wind was not as fast as people recall it being, which kind of put my back up a bit, because it was more than fast enough. It put my window out, for pete's sake, and there were a couple of points where I wondered if the building was strong enough to not tip over. I mean, this was a really scary storm, and it lasted for 36 hours, during part of which I was driving around covering the blamed thing seeing all the destruction that was in process of being wreaked. As a reporter, I struggled to find a balanced, objective voice that managed to capture the "OMG the sky is falling!" feeling I had. I think eventually sheer exhaustion (I hadn't slept, you can refer to that post to recapture the dramz) managed to sedate my language.

I am still working on that Banjo song for all my loved ones. I hear homemade gifts are really in this year. Just call me a cheap recessionista if you don't like my song stylings. I've been hampered by carpal tunnel/nerve damage in my right index finger and thumb, the "pickholders," if you will.

Also, because I have not been terribly motivated to work out, I have finished "The Dirt On Clean," about bathing habits of the Western World through the ages. When the author says we've really gotten away from our own scents as human beings I think she may need to spend a little time amongst the stinky to realize this is not a bad thing. Trip to the library will cure that longing for a less-bathed America. I also read, oh man this is embarrassing, "The Host," Stephenie Meyers' follow up to her Twilight vampire teen abstinence books. Although I read a lot less into the abstinence thing than the "will her demon lover love her or kill her?" as a kind of DV metaphor. The girl protagonist really feels inferior in every way to her vampire boyfriend (who is booooorrrring), and he makes odd comments about how he could do violence to her, and acts all controlling at points. He has no sense of humor, either. The other thing that bugged me about those books was the crass consumerism — the vampires are ridiculously wealthy so they only wear (designer) clothes once — oh, they're so intent on preventing human misery they don't kill people but sweatshops are fine in vampire political economic theory (and they don't sleep and live forever and do everything very fast so they could be reading up on all this), they kill top predators like bears and lions because it's more "sporting" for their dinner, even though there are plenty of deer, they drive a lot of expensive cars very fast, they just seem like very uncaring characters for a cast of vampires who are supposed to be so humane. I guess the lesson is that vampires are vampires no matter how you slice them.

So with all that in mind, plus the fact that I was compelled to read those Twilight books, I checked out "The Host" and although it was much better, there was the acceptance of casual violence to a woman (because she's taken over by an alien, so it's acceptable when her not-ex slaps her or some other guy trys to kill her). And at the end there was a bunch of disturbing stuff about like three girls in a row who were in their late 20s but looked a lot younger (one who was actually a lot younger) or something and their pairing up with significantly older guys. Weird. Hey, they were in a desert compound, trying to escape notice by civilization, this is what happens out there, young gals marry/pair up with much, much older guys. Or something. There was more to the book, obviously, but all that has been said in other, more comprehensive reviews. I don't bother with the comprehensivity any more, just the bits I think about that other people haven't.

Up next: The wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I think this is a book I need at this point, it's being literary and all.

I'd Twitter the reviews, but really I have to use a little more than 140 characters.

Not good enough for crackheads

So my car got prowled the other night. It was disconcerting to get in to go to work and find my console and ashtray/change drawer open, my visors down and stuff from my glovebox on the floor. My car was messy enough that I didn't really notice right away, and once I started going through my stuff I realized nothing was taken. My old New Yorkers, my atlas, my sunglasses were all still there. The crackheads didn't want any of it.

The only thing missing was a grocery sack from the night before with two 24-oz boxes of FMWs. Apparently even THEY weren't good enough for Harbor crackheads, because they left them out on the street where I didn't see them. Steve found them and brought them in. He and Apt. mgr Mike still apparently think I "forgot" the FMWs (they clearly don't know me) when going inside after a grueling workout and an armload of heavy (think gallon of milk and big things of cottage cheese, because I love my dairy), and that I wasn't prowled. But I was.

The cop I talked to said it was more "cost effective" to do what I do — leave a door unlocked and nothing valuable inside — because no window will get busted. And I guess it was, but sheesh, it's a little disconcerting that my car really, truly had nothing of value to local crackheads.

Healing clams

Well, I had a very big week at work. As you can tell from the comments, there is maybe some big time controversy.

So naturally I turned to the beach to work off some of the stuff that had been building over the week. Thursday night Ray and I loaded up his car with the clam guns, waders, stick and some lights and went straight to Ocean Shores Friday after work. It was a first for us, since we usually head to Grayland, and I worry that we got massively spoiled on our outing.

Although it was pitch black, we had headlamps on and a lantern. Not that they would have been helpful without the tell-tale clam shows (blurps of sand/holes in the beach). And there were clam shows all over the place. We got our limits (15) in almost as many minutes, less than half the time it takes to just get out there. It was crazy. I just threw myself on the beach in a frenzy of clam-gunning over little shows. I was so frenzied I ended up busting about a quarter of the clams I went after. I hate that crunching sound their shells make when you dig wrong.

The clamming was so superb that we went again tonight, even though we spent an hour cleaning the things last night and you'd have thought that would have prompted us to take a break.

We left shortly after coming back from a field trip. Yeah, that's right. The 7th Street crew took a van of peeps down to Astoria, where the Liberty Theater is. The 660-seat theater manages to be the anchor of a thriving downtown (THREE bookstores! Three!!!) in a town of 10,000 souls. People show up and regularly sell out the place (note — it would be a little harder to achieve that in the 1,100-seat 7th Street Theatre), and the thing makes money and draws enough donations to do a $9-million repair and restoration job. Seriously, the 7th Street wants in on that sort of action. And you can tell in the parts that have been done just how gorgeous the place is, and in the tour we got, we can see just how much work went into it, because we saw the part that is in the final phase of phixing, and it's kind of a wreck (of course, it's a construction site so YMMV).

After that tour we looked at the nearby Hotel Elliott, which is also gorgeous. This is what could have sort of have been the way a group of developers were thinking when they bought and began renovations at the Morck Hotel in Aberdeen, now an eyesore and decaying structure in a downtown full of the same.

Then we had lunch, then we drove back and it was clam time again.

The clamming was possibly even more spectacular than last night's. Our clamming was facilitated by a nice guy from Elma who had gotten his limit but was savoring his clam experience as he rarely gets to do it too much these days due to taking care of a sick relative. I'd pull one out and he'd say, "Here's four more. Get yer limit right here." He also said all the good clams were coming out, but mostly Ray was the one catching those. He got some big old beauts.

We let them soak in a bucket while we fixed up some from yesterday for dinner tonight. Betsy told us on the trip that the recipe we liked — dip cleaned clams in flour, egg and bashed-up Ritz crackers, lay on cookie sheet, cook five mins at 500 in preheated oven, turn and bake another five minutes — was Rich D of KDUX's recipe. He allegedly has a "world famous clam recipe," but the link from Fishgraysharbor.com was dead. So I couldn't vouch anything.

We had clams, plain steamed broccoli (Ray never has/seems to need lemon. I will have to do something about that), beets from the other night and Ray's amazing oatmeal rolls. Those rolls were so delicious it almost assuaged from the pang I felt upon eating beets — I have learned that President-elect Obama is not such a fan of the purple awesomeness. Just give the real things, not the canned things, a try, dude. Or maybe it is to my advantage that he rails on beets because then there will be more left for me when all the followers decide to hate beets because Obama does. Or maybe the American beet industry could go off the rails, I don't know.

In other news, I bought the banjo. It is mine.

This means nobody's getting Christmas presents. Well, maybe I'll write a song. How would you like that?

On the spectrum?

So last week we saw my Aunt Patti and her main squeeze Klaus. They were in Seattle for a conference, and even went down to the Westport winery but didn't know I was in Aberdeen. We ate at an amazing place Jason had told them about -- the Sunflour bakery. Wow-ee, it was insane. I had a smoked salmon scramble that blew my mind. Patti had french toast with caramel peach sauce. Klaus had eggs benedict with avocado. Ray had a Denver omelet. It was all delish.

During the dinner Patti said something that makes a lot of sense: My dad is ADHD. At least a little on the spectrum. When he gets locked into the computer and can't look up, that's "hyperattention," something ADHD people can get, or something, I couldn't really be bothered to learn all that much because holy Ritalin, I am on the ADHD spectrum too! It explained a lot, like why I'm so easily distracted by passing animals and classic cars and stuff. But dad is really on the ADHD tip, you can tell because he joined Twitter a month ago and only put in one tweet as you can see here. I joined to read (what I didn't know) what was his one tweet. So now I have a twitter feed here.

It also explains why I write about thirteen topics into one blog post, I guess. (this was once a part of my previous blog post but I thought Patti deserves a little more of a pole position than the bottom of a post, if you know what I mean. She's more important than crummy sushi). Not that I have an actual diagnosis or anything, that would require going to the doctor. But Patti said it's incredibly easy to "have" ADHD anyway. She managed to get a doctor to almost prescribe her pills for it after she decided to experiment and see how easy it would be to get the diagnosis. I think that's playing with fire, myself, what with all the weird stuff that could end up in your medical file. I mean, forget the foreign service or running for president after that (yes, Patti should keep all her options open).

Patti said that if I find something interesting, it should be able to grip my attention, even if I have ADD tendencies. That's interesting because I swear I have about a decade's worth of learning about land use and AYP and "concrete is not cement" etc. in my head and I paid more attention to it than times tables because I guess, to keep my job I didn't have much of a choice. Yet my own stuff doesn't flow out of me or grab me the way passive entertainment (i.e. "The Office") or interactive experience (i.e. "Logger's Playday") does. I find this somewhat, oh, boat-rocking since I like to think of myself as creative and independent minded. Really, though, I'm just a hack and my ADD tendencies probably confirm this. I like to work for the money, honey, is what I mean. And not hustlin', but through honest, corporate labor. With health insurance.

Ray is such a sweetie pie, he has cleared out a space in his garage for my car to go. I helped him, choosing to throw away stuff he was waffling on (like a broken buoy, for serious. He does not seem to be a packrat, but all his grandfather's boating stuff is just stuff Ray will never, ever use. He has no boat to repair and, just going by his personality, he never will.) I also have a garage door opener. I am worried he will use this as an excuse to hassle me to wash my car (perish the thought!). But I will accept the hassle and maybe wash the old girl since I should accommodate him in the way that he's accommodating me.

I'm also doing my part, making pot roast for dinner and having whipped up a batch of banana pudding for dinner. Ray is obsessed with banana pudding. I believe he was seriously deprived of Jell-o-based and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup-based recipes when he was a kid. I need to find my recipe for Coulibiac (includes canned salmon, something of an anathema to any Northwesterner) from grandmommy to convert him fully to Southern style cooking.

The worst sushi in the world

For Ray's birthday, I took him to the one place in the Harbor that has sushi (well, maybe there is sushi out in Seabrook or at the Ocean Crest on occasion, but I'm talking a place that bills itself as a sushi place). I used to think sushi was like pizza, there was no bad of it, that is, except for the kind that might take your life or just be off, but I think the sushi we ate was among the most appalling foodstuffs we could have eaten because it wasn't the kids that could kill you, or even give you heinous food poisoning. That I would have accepted. No, this was just the laziest, most pathetic, most irrationally bad sushi we could have ever encountered. Gordon Ramsay would have torched this alleged sushi-chef's tuches, that's for sure. I'm trying to be semi-anonymous but it's hard when there's only one joint in town that matches the description. I'm sure the teriyaki and yakisoba is better. I mean, the place is open, right?

How bad was it? You ask. Well, I say, have you ever eaten Hamachi (yellowfin) that tasted like cod liver oil that has been sitting in the back of grandma's cabinet for a couple of years, what with no one actually buying cod liver oil anymore now that fish oil comes in capsules? No, you say. Well, that is how bad the Hamachi was. If you aren't aware, the flavor of the fish should be smooth and clean and in no way repulsive. The wasabi, I think, left me with sores inside my mouth. The rice was probably a day old and completely unseasoned. The fish was, Hamachi aside, reasonable tasting. But, this dreadful yellowfin madness aside, sushi and sashimi are about achieving the sublime. The Aberdeen sushi place was an abject failure on this front.

One of the ways sushi and sashimi are supposed to get all sublime all in your grill is the presentation. I found the presentation lacking, but then, it's hard for any food to look good under ancient fluorescent lights that are only intermittently on. I'm not going to knock the sushi place for having a Soviet/developing world atmosphere, because that's kind of common on the Harbor. Usually I like it because it means the place is authentic and cheap, just like me.

The mistake was corrected by a DQ Pumpkin Pie Blizzard. Holy diabetes, Batman, they are awesome.

The reason I rail against the sushi place is that last night I had a sublime sushi dinner in Tacoma at Fujiya. It's a restaurant I didn't know even existed when I was down there. Ray and I were in town for the Martin Short show (more on that in a minute), and he was quite insistent we go to Fujiyama even though he is not the biggest Japanese food fan (so why take him for a sushi dinner? His choice out of the two I gave him and also I get to take him out of his "comfort zone" for his birthday. It's just something we've established over the two birthdays of his we've been together). He wanted me to get my sushi swerve back on. He really pulled me back from the brink.

I had an awesome sushi dinner, and the waitress (who was totally gorgeous and VERY professional) even pointed out all the sushis I had for dinner. "That's Hamachi, or yellowfin," she said, pointing to a yellowy-white sliver of fish that was nothing like the gray underbelly cut I ate the week before. "It's my favorite."

That yellowfin saved yellowfin for me. I even gave Ray a bite. "That's what it's supposed to taste like," I said. He couldn't disagree that it was delightful. The maguro was buttery and umami-riffic. And the service was insane. The chefs at Fujiya have a neat trick for staying entertained and keeping you happy — they make little dishes that get passed to your table "just because." It's nothing you've ordered, but it's really cool to have these little plates come to the table. We got two little pieces of spicy tuna wrapped in nori and tempura-fried and a little warm "salad" of octopus bits and taro in a sweetish sauce. The octopus was just melt-in-your-mouth. We got a scoop of green tea ice cream and a scoop of coconut ice cream before we left, and let me just say, these were WAY bigger scoops than you normally get at Japanese restaurants and the coconut ice cream in particular was to die for.

So then we went to the Pantages for the Martin Short show. He called it his "I should have saved" tour. Bwa ha ha ha. Saw former boss George in the foyer. He seemed happy. Said there were seven people in the newsroom at the Gateway. That's more than when I left, and considering that the economy has been brutal to papers and McClatchy has all kinds of layoffs makes me wonder how the paper is managing it. Maybe he's counting Hugh?

But anyway, there were a couple of drunk lady hecklers. What did they think this was, a Ren Faire bawdy juggler show? The opening act was a folk singer who sang some depressing songs, including one about a wedding called something like, "Let's get on with the illusion." Geez, we're not living in the fifties anymore, you can aim a little higher in life nowadays. It kind of inspired me to use my banjo skills to write songs, but about stuff I'd want to hear about: Robot overlords, Ultimate Frisbee, why aerobics instructors have to have perfect hair while they lead class at the GH YMCA and, uh, you know, anything that happens underwater. Like a seamonkey celebration parade, or a bottom-feeder get together at the local underwater bar. I guess if I wanted to write a love song it would be abou two little emo kids finding love, but their bangs get in the way if they make out.

So Martin Short is pretty much exactly the same person he's always been except he's a little older and his picture looks like he's had some work done (which he denied, saying "No one says, 'ooh, who's the 35-year-old,' they say, 'Who's the 58-year-old whose face caught on fire?' " so maybe he just had some photoshopping? Or his eyes are just really that big and twinkly?) and maybe his weird dance with the knees stuck together is one tenth of a second slower. But his mind is still fast, and he's just so hilarious. I love his mixture of kitschy old-timey Hollywood bombast and the kooky creative stuff. Some stuff, like the video of him being Hillary Clinton, didn't work so good (even though, dang, when made up he looks a LOT like her). But the Jiminy Glick stuff (with Drew Carey cast dude Ryan Stiles, also of the Whose Line is it Anyway series of shows I find pretty unfunny) was awesome. And he was Ed Grimley for a minute, even though Ray has no idea who that is. Best joke of the night, when a theater lady came out to give him a champagne — "Asti Spumante with three Sweet N Lows, just how I like it! (sip) I like my women like I like my champagne — compliments of the theater!"

On the ride home I kept Ray awake by playing "This American Life"'s podcast of part two of their look into the financial crisis of '08. Sadly, I did not make more than 30 minutes into it before I just nodded out. This is in spite of heroic amounts of green tea we had consumed earlier.

Halloween Rorschach test

Seriously, if this was the number one costume in America (especially for lantern-jawed brunettes like myself) you wouldn't have guessed it for Aberdeen where, for the second year in a row that I have been here to notice, the most popular costume is the Scream mask. In fact, I may have heard one or two chortles at the obvious Palin costume all night, and I certainly got no comments on it. The Harbor people may think I intend to dress like a Realtor every day.

I know what you're thinking — why is an actual journalist going in a costume that could be considered partisan? Well, number one as I said, I have the lantern jaw, I had the hairspray and the jacket, this was inexpensive and easy, and number two, I was so hyped up, thinking, ooh, this will be like a Rorschach test, with people either thinking I was terrifying or, uh, you know, sexy since some folks now call Halloween, well, something else you can click to on your own, and part Palin's appeal is, apparently, her looks. But it didn't seem to matter because not many people seemed to realize the costume, as I said. Maybe my hair isn't high enough.

A quick note on high hair. It is said that in the South, they say "the higher the hair the closer to God." Well, I now know why. It is because to get your hair even this little bit poufed up you need to empty a lot of hairspray on it. I went to town. My bathroom filled with the reek of Suave hairspray, which is partly made up of alcohol, which evaporates, and which you breathe in. I am not one to equate a headrush with a religious experience, but some are, so more power to them. I also was overcome by the urge to have bigger hair. Bigger! BIGGER! Tall as the Eiffel Tower, tall as those big Malaysian towers, tall as Mt. Everest. Man has always had the urge to slip the surly bonds of earth, and if you can't get your license may as well let your hair do the soaring. So there I was in the bathroom, hotboxed by hairspray, and it seemed like a good idea. Go upward, my follicles! Achieve the dream of mankind!

So Halloween. I got three bags of candy, but Ray deduced those would not be sufficient and picked up another three bags. I'm not sure who had the more accurate estimate of candy consumption, because towards the end, I was pushing it on the kids. Have some diabetes on me, y'all.

You know the trick-or-treaters that I tolerate but think, "really, people, get it together" about? The adults with the babies who take candy for "them." I tolerate these people because if they have a baby then, well, why not allow them a simple indulgence of chocolatey goodness? They have merited it even if they're trying to disguise their intentions.

You know who I find confounding, though? The people who came to Ray's door wanting a treat for their baby. I was all, "Ha ha, yeah, 'the baby,' I know what that means, it's cool. Nobody gives itty bitty babies with pacifiers and bottles candy." And these folks were like, "No, he really loves candy. It's for him." So I take a look in the stroller — yeah, too young for a bag of candy. I believe in LOLspeak my expression would have been titled, "Parenting. UR doin it wrong."

I answered the door with the banjo in my hand for a couple of little princesses who demanded a tune, so I played a really bad rendition of "Pollywollydoodle." It is hard to play on the spot like that.

I was also a total goof in the gender department once this year, too (last year there was a gender-inobvious teenage guy, about which I felt kinda guilty. Puberty is so cruel). This year at least I totally insulted the mother of a kid too young to be made completely insecure by my total inability to tell that the tot with longish curly hair was not a girl. I said "she," or "her," like three times, and the mom was like, uh, "him." And after the last time, when I continued to doubt this kid's alleged gender, "HE'S A HE!!!" I was possibly the most obtuse Realtor on the block.

So my main duty was being nice to kids and making sure they didn't take more than their fair share. Which does not guarantee that I'll address those greedy kids in a necessarily developmentally-appropriate way. I didn't realize what a total meanie I was when I asked the Batman of the first grade trying to palm the whole bowl, "Uh, no, only one. Can you count?" (to my credit I had said, "Take one, no, just one," about three times. And am I seriously supposed to coddle other people's kids?) Until Ray imitated me.

Best accessory of the night went to a little girl dressed as a princess who had a dachsund puppy (!!!!) dressed up almost identically with a rhinestone collar and pink cape thingy. It made it hard for her to maneuver her stash bag and grab candy, but heck, I wouldn't want to put the puppeh down either.

Most dramatic entrance goes to the little toddler who fell down as I opened the door. She looked like Cindy Lou Who with her little mini pig ears. And she was completely frozen in shock and fear and overstimulation from the fall. I put her upright and she just gawped. So did the little pink leopard girl. I know, you go up to strangers and they give you candy. It IS insane and mind-blowing. (But, hey, word on the street is that the family at 8th and Broadway, with the faux graveyard, give out regular-sized candy bars, so prepare to have your mind blown more!)

Maybe next year I won't screw up any kids' gender identity. Maybe I won't be kind of a hard case to kids who are obviously kind of young and possibly dazzled by candy. No matter how old I get there is always room for improvement.

Oh, Canada!

So way back in August, during the beginning of the Olympics, even, Ray and I went to Vancouver in lovely British Columbia for a convention for lawyers. He did the continuing education, I did nothing but have no responsibilities. For almost an entire weekend. Lovely.

Unlike the soggy Harbor, which only recently has begun to favor us with dry weather, Vancouver was sunny, dry and warm. In other words, it was perfect for rollerblading (or "inline skating," as the trademark people would have it) every single day. And also walking, and we were near just about everything, so as you can tell, there was kind of a perfect storm brewing to mess my feet up. I'd start the day with a five-mile rollerblade around Stanley Park (we were right there, you can see from this picture how close we were:



That's from our awesome room. The trees behind the boats = Stanley Park.

There are a lot of things about the Westin that I found interesting besides the view. For example, they pump in scent at the lobby, so you enter and bam, in your face, their signature smell, which mostly smelled really clean but also it could be overpowering.

The other thing interesting about the Westin is they let child abusers stay there. Well, let me come back to that interpretation, Beth the former social worker who is now a nurse, I told her about how for the weekend this kid upstairs from us just screamed his lungs out the whole time we were there. It was either like this family had figured out our schedule and didn't leave unless we left or, more likely, they never left the room once because this kid was embarrassing. Or they were abusers. Back to Beth, who I asked if abused kids were more likely to be screaming their heads off or quivering with fear quietly, she said quiet. I asked if indulged brats screech their heads off all the time, she said yeah. Maybe we just hate spoiled brats, I dunno.

So this kid was flipping out one evening and I couldn't take it any more. So I whipped out the banjo and played a very loud rendition (and the banjo is already a very loud instrument) of "Wild Irish Rose," which is a really obnoxious song about a guy wanting to deflower his WIR. Ray was totally snickering. He was encouraging me. Then I heard some knocks from an adult above us (well excuuuuse me!) but the kid. Didn't. Scream. The rest of the trip. Maybe the banjo put the fear of God in him, maybe mommie dearest flipped out and drowned him in the Heavenly Bath.

But other things happened on this trip, like the bike ride to Granville Island:



It was pretty darn long riding to get there on our rented comfort hybrids. I actually got the appeal of the CH for the first time, though, because my shoulders and neck felt very awesome, even as my legs were thinking the upright position was not great for getting power into the bike pedals.

There at Granville Island, the coolest thing there was a studio with what appeared to be a sexy lady robot in the window. There was a sign saying please do not photograph, so like a good girl (and bad journalist) I did not. But here's the artist's website. And here's a look at some of his works. Obviously, if you Google "Cory Fuhr" you can see some better, and better-resolutioned, pics.

I did take pics of food stuffs, though.









I know! Marzipan ladybugs! Those Canadians are so precious! And follow me for the visual evidence that Canadians are truly really, really nice people who just don't wish ill on others.



If you can't read it, it says, Voodoo Dolls, 1 for $6, 2 for $10 (crossed out), 1 for $5 (crossed out), 1 for $3 — special! They can't even sell voodoo dolls there for a profit, people are just so flippin' nice, even in the big city.

The voodoo doll pic was taken in Chinatown. There was some sort of street market going on there. We watched some two-man street dance teams battle to see whose moves were the illest. The "Soul Felons" took on the "Felons of Soul." My favorite team, however, was named "Rice Noodle." I took video, but my OSX version Panther does not want to recognize my videos coming out my camera. I think I may need to download from a stick or get an upgrade on my system (bleah!).

The one thing that struck me about Vancouver the first time I visited in, oh, 1999, and still holds true is the tremendously anonymous vibe the city sends out. There are areas that are quite interesting, to be sure, but this is a city of more than an adequate amount of shiny blue-green glass and concrete buildings with brushed metal accents. Is this some sort of hard core city code?

Naturally although Ray and I did plenty together I pretty much had my days to myself and hence the sushi binge.



That day I also went to the Vancouver Art Museum for an exhibit of grown-up comix, manga and anime. There were Chris Ware panels next to Alison Bechdel's. There were some really disturbing panels from Manga that make me wonder if Japan is the place where feminism goes to die. It seems like even the ones created by women draw on appalling stereotypes and objectification and whatnot. It's not like American comics don't have their issues, but I want to see the Japanese Chris Ware or Alison Bechdel, I want to know if that's possible in the land of Hello Kitty and Pepsi White Yogurt soda and those cafes with the waitresses who wait hand and foot on otaku (and otherwise) guys.

At some point we went to a Greek restaurant for dinner and were treated to this:



Get down! The cropping obviously does not do the Pink Power Ranger much good, but check out the original on my Flickr page.

So I realize I've been dropping a lot of food pics on you. It reminds me of my friend Sara Gray. She moved to Argentina a few months ago and her blog seriously makes it seem like she and Eric are eating their way across the country.

But seriously, with all the exercise I was getting, the food was necessary. I wore my feet out so bad the last day Ray had to rub them while we watched the Olympics. We watched a lot of Olympics, like everyone at the time, I suppose. They were particularly compelling on the flat screen TV that pulled out of the wall and adjusted to wherever you were sitting.

That was Vancouver, obviously a little late. I will have more updates of all the things I have been doing or thinking (well, not all, most of that is pretty mundane).

Oh, and I'll leave you with a shout-out:



Even the graffiti is sweet and cute and funny in Canada! And so are the doughnuts!

Mamma Mia

When I saw that a movie had been made of the ABBA-song-filled musical "Mamma Mia," I knew that it was only a matter of time before I saw it. There was just that air of inevitability about the whole project. And not that I wanted to see it or anything, but it was a task that fate would put in my way, so to speak, whether via going or via Netflix.

Forces conspired against me to see it. Ray loves musicals anyway, and once he heard me say I figured it was inevitable, he decided to make it inevitable. It helped that a couple of coworkers really liked it, one calling it "the feel-good movie of the year." But I think it was the hand of fate working itself through Ray that made the Mamma Mia movie trip happen more expeditiously than inexoriably, not Ray's own agency, though he definitely seemed to use agency as he scanned for movietimes.

So we settled into our seats at the cineplex, both of us shivering like crazy in the air-conditioned darkness. Clearly the air conditioning was cranked up for the key demographic of this movie, menopausal women, who indeed flanked us at every turn and did not seem to be cold at all. They also laughed at EVERYTHING except the sheer ridiculousness of Mamma Mia, which is what I laughed at.

Is there an actor in this movie who has not seen better times? Maybe Stellan Skarsgaard (or however you spell it), an actor I'd never heard of before, who is barely memorable as potential dad #3 and got to hang out in Greece for six weeks and get paid. Also, the blond scandinavian Skarsgaard was supposed to have had a Greek great-aunt. Shure. The other actor who made out like a bandit was the guy who plays the afroed bartender who comes on to Christine Baranski. He had the dazzled, "I'm finally in a movie!" look, with a hint of "This is only the beginning, and next movie maybe I won't have to be towel-diapered!"

The towel diapering was in a scene that made me wonder if the island of Kalikairi was actually a stand-in for Mykonos, so robustly dancing were the scantily-clad men.

This movie was not very post-colonial in that the main characters were all Northern European or American or anything but Greek. The greeks were all basically background color and if they were anything to the main characters they were the help. It takes Meryl Streep and her ladyfriends singing "Dancing Queen" to liberate the Greek island gals from their drab lives of hanging laundry and plucking chickens and holding ladders for handimen. The Greek women all follow their leaders, the white women of exuberant menopausality, the second-wave feminists of the '70s who have embraced Spice Girl-style "Girl Power" of the '90s in their late 50s, to the island's dock, where they do a little dance and prove how wackily independent they are by jumping in the ocean. Nothing says "good times" like jumping fully clothed into a body of water.

I also leaned over to Ray to let him know something all men should know: When women who haven't seen each other in a while and hung out in a tight group back in the day get together, they rarely have a chant or whatever that they have to start screaming out when they see each other. Yet that happened twice with two different groups of women in the movie. Egregious!

Look, it's a downer to say that grown ups should act like grown ups, but this was "High School Musical: The Pregnancy, the later years, etc."

It's also a downer to say that musicals should have to restrain themselves, especially ones that are as big a mess at this one. I mean, the single mom who doesn't need a man sings "Money Money Money"? The last song of the bachelorette party is the one-night-stand-barnstormer "Voullez Vous?" and the bride to be tells her man to dance with her mom? And she starts dancing with all the guys who could be her dad? Weird. It was like these messages slipped in amongst the "Middle aged women can be hyper" randomness.

Nothing wrong with hyper middle aged ladies. I'll probably be one someday. But it leaves me scratching my head, wondering why my mom, who is a serious cultural snob, liked Mamma Mia. She'll say that she can have fun, too, but she tends to over-intellectualize stuff, and I don't see her joining the Red Hat people anytime soon.

Something about this movie really hit the m-woman demo. I was completely unsurprised to see Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks had produced this thing, as they also did "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," another menopausal-people smash of cornball jokes and feel-good vibes and an over-the-hill (not by my standards, by society's) bride. Maybe there are subliminal messages? Maybe the future-meno-me heard and responded to them through the ads? I don't know.

Not that there is nothing to be gotten from Mamma Mia; Colin Firth's character is revealed as gay (a British prig with only dogs for companions — could they have telegraphed it any clearer?) and he picks up a much younger hot Greek guy for a little Socratic method/Spartan training/Colonial opression/pick your euphamism. When they dance shirtless together in a waterfall, you could hear the audience filing the visuals away for future reference. I don't care how homophobic you are, you WILL be turned on by shirtless Colin Firth and background character of sexual propness!

I warn you, the Mamma Mia hand of fate will have its way with you. We are all fate's playthings. She has chosen to mock us with cornball Swedes since they spawned the only hit ever to come out of the Eurovision song contest. Surrender.

Steamboat Springs

So it's been a couple weeks since I went to Colorado. I'm still getting back into the swing of things, really.

From the last post, the only really significant thing I remember about the timber show is that the numbers one and two logrolling positions were duked out by a dude and a dude who lost an arm in Iraq. Guess who the crowd got behind? And unlike climbing or choke-setting, the logrolling is a one-on-one deal where the two dudes stand on opposite ends of the same log, and they run against each other and try to knock the other off. So I secretly rooted for the dude with two arms because I felt sorry for him. I think he took the number one slot, but obviously, I had other things to think about. Legendary coach Gordy somebody was there. Kris said he was missing fingers from logging accidents, but they could have been curled under from where I sat. Still, that's pretty awesome, I guess.

So we left for Portland early in the morning and made it to Denver on time where we met up with Doug and then to the Hertz guy, who confused the heck out of us. Seriously, the kinds of options they give you for your ride are convoluted, impossible to understand and probably designed to make you the loser no matter what you choose. At any rate, we got a Subaru Outback, which was a pleasant car to drive, and we took it out to Steamboat Springs, passing a sign in Silverthorne for "Master Bait and Tackle" on the almost-200 mile drive. No kidding, but no pic.

Mom and Dad had already arrived a few days before, and we arrived in time for beer and chips on the porch. Ray and I went downstairs, Doug got "the Marrakesh Room," which was the front door entryway (which no one uses), which had an air mattress and Carol's art all over. She is going through a glow in the dark phase, which sounds completely nuts and tacky, but her stuff is really cute and works with interesting and funky ideas. Like she has flowers in the light, paisleys in the blacklight and butterflies in the dark, and all in one painting. Yet she made the comment that she cannot call herself an artist (I believe it was, "Callie can call herself a banjo player, but I can't call myself an artist." I mean, I may not play well, but I do identify as a banjo player).

The next morning was Sunday, so I had to get my NYT X-word. On the way back from Safeway, Ray and I saw a bunch of people lined up on the street. Turned out they were waiting for a cattle drive down the center of Lincoln Street. The Pilot said there were about 100 head, which is far better than cattle drives past that Rob recalled, where there were more wranglers (apparently you can pay for the privilege) than cows. Like a 40 to 9 ratio. Anyway, Ray had his camera but I don't have any shots so here is some on the scene reportage and photos. They don't have any awesome pics of Ray and me in front of the herd, or this one bovine jumping on the back of another, it was so, uh, impatient.

We ended up going back out to downtown because dad wanted a cowboy hat. He looked all over for the cowboy hat that met his price point (i.e. supacheap) at F.M. Light. He was floundering through the 35-45 dollar ones when I brought him one from the $4.98 area. He had, shockingly, not seen any of these hats and was thrilled. He said he liked the look of them the most of all the hats, but let's be honest, my dad's favorite shirt for years was a green lumberjack plaid flannel he picked up off the street while in a moving car that was missing a button. The freeness of that shirt definitely made it more attractive to him. Anyway, here's the hat:



Also at the F.M. Light, and something I sorta regret not buying (it was almost $8, though) was Bear Soap. It smelled really good, not gamey or musky at all, and was allegedly made from the melted fat of local bears that had been killed in some fashion — not the bear ranch, I'm sure. As you can see, my shots all ended up blurry. My camera stopped opening its lenscap all the way when turned on, too. I am miffed. This thing needs to last.

Doug found a friend:



We also saw a Ranch Rodeo.



That's Kool and the Gang.



That's what they call a "cowpuncher." I think. Anyway, the Ranch Rodeo does not include buckin' broncos or bulls nor barrel riding nor nothing like that. Instead, there are four bovines representing four tasks the teams must accomplish in less than 5 minutes, all of which are typical of those tasks found on a ranch. This is the calf "branding," where a calf must be roped, felled and "branded" with tempera paint. There also is a steer that needs to be penned in a little pen, a steer that needs to be roped and have three legs tied together for at least 20 seconds and a "wild cow" that needs to be milked. Obviously, that's not a cowboy task, that last one, but it's darn entertaining to watch these cowpunchers try to milk a cow that clearly does not want to be milked.

There were some fraught moments, more than a couple cowboys got stepped on by animals (ouch) and the cowboy above had to get the calf ready to "brand" by flipping it over on to himself. As a sidenote, I saw a PETA photo not too long after of a split-second of a calf getting roped, when the rope was at its chokiest. It was pretty awful. But upon reflection, I had to conclude that this was a task of ranching, and part of the agreement the cows entered into when they decided to give up their wildness to be granted sure-fire reproductive success. This is part of the great genetic bargain, and I am sure the cows would much prefer a little roping to surefire extinction, which is what would occur if beef were never to be sold or et again anywhere.

Later, Ray began to feel a funny feeling in his nose and throat, a premonition of the sickness to come, and it would eventually hit him hard.

On the second day, we got bikes from the Bike and Ski Kare place. Dad and Doug hit the Yampa River trail, while Ray and I headed to the Spring Creek Trail. Huh. The bike trail map we consulted said it was only 4 miles. Obviously it was longer. Also, it climbed. A lot. I was sucking wind pretty bad, totally unadjusted to the altitude (almost 7,000 feet to start with a 1,200-foot climb). I had to stop quite a bit and got lapped by some geezers. Way to make me feel not hardcore at all. And although Ray had a sore throat, he was super perky and just blazed through the woods.



See, he's gloating.

Luckily the ride down was downhill, and we cut back a different way to hit downtown. We ate at the Old Town Pub, where in spite of the old-West/party time atmosphere the BLT had aioli. It was delicious, by the way. We met up with Dad and Doug, who were eating at the Cantina. Doug had checked his bike back in by then — biking is not his thing. Exercise is not really his thing. Dad was using Rob's bike so he put it in his trunk, and Ray and I biked back to Rob and Carol's. Not so easy now that they live way out in "Heretic Park," as they call it, instead of downtown.

Mom tried to get me and Doug into the photo-organizing spirit (she brought, like, three huge tubs) but the only thing I ended up bringing back home was the results of an IQ test I took when I was 15 that got me into the mentally gifted program at Central High School. There are numbers on it, like "Similarities, 18 , Arithmetic, 16, Vocabulary, 18, Object Assembly, 17," etc., and it struck me they were a lot like D&D attribute scores. I got 12s on "P. Arrangement" and Coding, but everything else, in the D&D universe, would have given me some sort of advantageous points on saving throws. I don't really know what it all means, and Google isn't helping. My final score was 139; a mark I'm sure I surpassed in later years but have since long left behind with creeping adult inflexibility.

Oh well, I'm less of a jerk now that I know I don't know nothing.

Then on Tuesday, Ray and I rode the bikes back to return them and somehow ended up getting our car and going to Fish Creek Falls with my family for a brief hike.



It was devilishly hot. We Northwesterners were pretty uncomfortable. After the hike, Doug and Ray and I kicked around a bit in an attempt to wait out the hot day with "WALL*E." Ray said he was feeling icky, so he backed out of the movie. I thought he was just decompensating from all the family time. But no, he was really sick. And boy did I feel bad when I realized he had not been able to enjoy being by himself downtown because he felt so bad he tried to sleep under a tree, then in the car. I took him back to Rob and Carol's, in complete agony, I'm sure, and got him fruit and a glass of orange juice.

"Wall*E" wasn't bad. The whole meanness to fat people thing wasn't cool, though, nor the "plain dude gets hot chick" vibe that you see all the time in sitcoms that was replicated robotically. I wish there was a TV show in which everyone was plain. I'm so tired of hot people. Also, I couldn't understand how people could live on a ship forever. Don't they have limited energy resources in space?

Ray's illness was greatly tempered by some magic Puffs with Vicks in them. Look for them come winter. They are brilliant. My allergic nose was soothed greatly by huffing them.

Ray slept like crazy and seemed a little better the next day. So we did something mellow. Because we had to prepare for the Great Horseback Caper. Which mom backed out of because she felt sick! Ay caramba!

We started with the Trantham place in Yampa, which Rob has been working on. (Well, I'm getting the days all mixed up, but go with me here)

I took a picture of the Antlers, though.



It's just a neat-looking little place.

Then, on to the horsies!



This is at the Elk River Guest Ranch, north of Clark. We all got on horses.



This is sensitive cowboy Tim, our guide. He was totally precious, and because dad was all the way in the back, I, the only extrovert in the front three, had to keep the conversation up. Don't think Tim is sensitive? Well, he said every horse has its own personality, and then he gave brief but very telling psychological sketches of the horses we were riding. His horse, whose name escapes me, likes to mess with people, and will get kind of sassy if not kept in line. My horse, Black Jack, was "the grumpy old man, who wakes up and is like, 'Gotta get to work.'" Ray's horse, whose name escapes me, is the "injured athlete," Dad's horse Al is Doug's horse's sidekick, and Doug's horse, Nacho, is a "lady's man."

Still don't think Tim's sensitive? His favorite wildflower is called "Fairy Trumpet," or "Faerie Trumpet," depending on how you care to spell it. No Mules Ears or Lupine for him. No, but seriously, we loved him.



It was so pretty. If a lot of these pictures ended up washed out and blurry, it's because someone didn't check to make sure the camera's settings hadn't slipped from auto to "P," whatever that does. Le sigh.

Thursday Ray said he felt better (translation: he felt stoic). So we went to Rocky Mountain National Park, which was great because the deal with national parks is always that although you're outside you're really not putting in THAT much hiking effort in a go. This is not Colonel Bob. Though it is higher.



12,000 feet, baby. Although you start at 11K so no biggie, except for all the panting. There was a herd of elk nearby enough to practically touch. The views were astounding. The wind was whipping. The sun was like a UV bomb. There was an interpretive sign that called the pica the "farmer of the tundra." I saw a pica up close. I saw a marmot up close. Then, just as we were getting to Estes Park, Ray practically hit a marmot. I saw some Russian or Estonian or something kids feeding chipmunks by hand, and managed to coax some near to me by pretending I had food. No, I'm sure this water-vomiting will go away soon.

We did a couple of hikes and stopped for a few views, then hit Estes Park for ice cream.



Who knew the Ren Faire squad had penetrated this cozy mountain town?

On the way back through the park, we saw an elk by the side of the road. There were two other elk on the other side of the road, and all three had huge racks. They kind of all panicked after a certain level of crowd built and got together and swam across this little lake. On the way through Granby Lake, Carol had told us to take pictures because it was predicted that in 15 years there wouldn't be a tree left standing due to pine beetle infestation. The damage was just way too depressing to photograph, though. I was really shocked at how hard the pine beetle had hit NW Colorado. The ski mountain even had streaks of red that should have been green. And as dry and hot as it is in Colorado, it wouldn't take much for it to all light up and be awful. Drought has been stressing the trees for years, and they're just not able to fight off the bugs (which are always there) any more. The links to global warming are obvious to the intuitive mind (like my own). Let's stop recreating the atmosphere of the Carboniferous era, plz?

Friday, after mom and dad left, we canoed on Steamboat Lake.

Then we went tubing. Dun dun DUN!



That's the mighty Yampa River, swollen with water from a record snowfall. I didn't take my camera into the water, obviously.

It all started out smoothly and calmly. But for Doug and Ray, there would be trials ahead. Doug foolishly listened to some kids and leaned back on a fall. Kerplunk! He was in the rushing water, struggling to get up to his tube, which was trapped in a "hole." He yelled at the kids to get it out, which, at some risk to their persons, they did. "God, don't let this kid be killed getting Doug's tube unstuck from the hole," I said.

Then Ray took a fall and his glasses started coming off and his hat came off and ... oh, he was going down on the slippery rocks. I saw the whole thing and it was pretty awful. By the time I floated up to him he was back on track, though, and the rest of the way was mellow. Seriously, it took some guts after his dumping to get back in the tube again.

Saturday in Denver we had lunch with Doug at Red Lobster (easy to access from freeway, they have coconut shrimp. Doug got a Food Network award winning recipe of some kind of fish in a macadamia/white chocolate sauce. It was gross) then dropped him off at the airport and then we saw urban stuff:



This is at the 16th Street Mall. We had been to the Botanic Gardens earlier. They're lovely. The cloud forest room was particularly pleasant, drenched with water and moisture and cool.

At the end of the mall, of which very few shops appealed to me (Walgreens, for example), was Tattered Cover. It was the most beautiful surprise. It was like Powell's, which I haven't been to in forever. But it was unexpected and much more intimate than Powell's.

We beat it from there to the airport and made it back to Longview late at night.

I'm still recovering.