Bizzy Holiday Weekend

Friday kicked off Memorial Day Weekend with a bang, with a mad rush to bake a strawberry rhubarb pie in the space between work and "Iron Man." Lemme tell you, you don't need one hour and forty five minutes to bake that bad boy. I had to stop after an hour or so because of "Iron Man." I mean, you can't just leave a pie to bake and let the oven timer decide what the appropriate on-off time is. Like it would know. And I shiver to think of leaving a fresh pie in a hot oven as it cools, drying out. As it was, the pie came out perfect. (Well, I substituted cardamom for the cinnamon, which is pungent in a bergamot-citrus way, and the berries and rhubarb are pretty pungent to start with, and I used brown sugar only, which was fine. I told Ray I was freestylin' it, and my spontenaity both thrilled him and made him nervous. SOP, really.)

Perhaps some of that had to do with using Ray's grandmother's pie crust recipe, which calls for some sugar, some vinegar and some egg in it, which is totally not the Mark Bittman/Jeffrey Steingarten way (nor, more critically, the Janice McMillan way, creator of the most intensely delicious and tender pie crusts), but it leads to a crust that browns well and is very flaky (tender, not so much, but tender vs flaky is the ultimate pie crust tension battle situation). I was happy not to make the crust, and Ray is quite good at rolling it out. I even latticed that thing. The recipe called for 7x7 latticing, I went for 5x5 because it took a ruler to get the even spacing and that was a little wide for the pie and appropriate latticing.

So then, "Iron Man." I was something of a wreck because we left five minutes before it started, hit all (like, three) red lights on the way and there was a line at the ticket booth. We didn't miss previews, even.

"Iron Man" was pretty awesome. Robert Downey Jr. can act, and Gwyneth Paltrow wasn't totally annoying. I was the only person in the theater who guffawed at the obligatory Stan Lee cameo. I'm a dork. Also I liked the 'splosions.

The tight schedule was not finished, no. See, we had to see the 6:40 showing of "Iron Man" so we'd be able to get up early enough to go clamming. We had to be out the door at eight. Shockingly, we were in a position to eat breakfast and book to Grayland. The clamming was ... meh. The clams were tiny, for the most part, and kind of hard to find. I pulled up a clam that I thought was the biggest clam I'd ever caught, but to be honest, I was looking at a lot of clams in my bag that didn't stretch across my palm so much. Also, it got warm, and Ray and I were swimming in our waders, we were so hot. Our limits didn't get nearly met.

But the tight schedule mandated we get home around 10 a.m., which we did, because that Saturday Beth and Chris came out for the day. Clams were dinner, and we had to catch something! We all got to the house at about the same time, so we pitched the clams in a bucket with water and cornstarch. We chatted then went back to Westport where we walked around enjoying the weather. Then we went to the Westport Winery, which on its surface sounds crazy -- we're on the wrong side of the Cascades, and Grays Harbor is not known for its oenophilia, but I'll be darned if the wines aren't pretty good. The Elk River Riesling is about the best Riesling I've tried (I find their reds kind of harsh, and the Compass Rose White Merlot to be, as Chris put it, "the weirdest tasting wine ever," which means it has an appeal, too), and the raspberry chocolate wine tastes like candy in a glass, but also it's wine. Seriously.

So we had a wine tasting and got happy on 5 oz of wine. We are kind of lightweights. The place was packed; there were even cyclists there. Good luck making it the next 15 miles to Westport while slightly tipsy! (Yes, the winery is not exactly in Westport, it is in Markham, which does not have its own post office so it's technically also in Aberdeen, and South Aberdeen at that.)

We made it back and Ray and Beth gutted, ahem, dissected, the clams. She was totally fascinated. Chris and I cut up vegetables. Carrie and John came over and we all had more wine. I did a fast dredge-n-drop clam bake. I fried some of our frozen clams that were pre-prepped. Everything went over great except the pie, which everyone except Beth liked. She also does not like cake. I also found out Carrie only recently has taught herself to like pie, and she did like the strawberry rhubarb pie. Who does not like dessert? I have yet to find one that I can turn down! I even ate the chocolate pyramids with odd bolus at the lair of the Numcat!!

Beth and Chris left the next morning, and Ray's dad came down with Bonnie. We had lunch and took a hike at Johns River, where we discovered what would be a really nice mountain biking trail should it get cleared. There are also trails that are overgrown by grass. Ray's dad Ray waded out there in the damp grass, we saw elk (we'd looked there the day before with Beth and Chris but did not see elk), and generally got our pant legs soaked. It was nice. We also saw the bend in the river where Ray's dad's Ray's parents had a tiny home and garden, and where a bear, startled by some men, ran up while Ray's dad Ray was playing along the riverbank. Ray's dad Ray's mother was so alarmed and angry she ran after the bear, which she did not know was fleeing but rather thought was about to attack her son, with a "rake or hoe or some such," Ray's dad Ray said. She beat that bear with her gardening tool as it ran off.

It turns out Ray's dad Ray is something of a bad omen for bears. On the Johns River trail, we came to a point where he had come across a bear after he'd been hunting. It was absorbed in scratching the bark off a trunk, and the tree was still there and barkless. There wasn't enough room to pass, Ray's dad Ray said, so he fired his gun above the bear's head, causing it to spontaneously crap before it ran off into the woods.

After Ray's dad Ray and Bonnie left, we watched "Charlie Wilson's War." Well, Ray did. I fell asleep.

On Monday, we packed out to Ocean Shores, to look at an art show in various local galleries. There was an exhibit of fanciful "portraits" of great hookers of the west (like Klondike Kate, who lost a bunch of money to the guy who started the Pantages Theater in Tacoma, and the wife of Billy Gohl, a serial killer in Aberdeen, and other sundry hookers), a woman billed as the "top feather painter in the world," which means she paints on feathers, not finds feathers to be her favorite subject, and saw a bunch of books by locals in the galleries, including one that was an epic poem about the death of a boston terrier. No kidding. Sample verse "You used to sleep with the stuffed rabbit. Now I sleep with the stuffed rabbit." and "Oh, God! The pain hurts me. The pain comforts me." I may not be blessed with perfect recall here, but you get the sentiment. We rode our bikes, hiked the Weatherwax property, finally I get to understand what it is that makes the 4,000 seniors who live there year-round so ... volatile and apt to overthrow their government in democratic revolution. Well, it definitely looks nothing like anything else in Ocean Shores.

We got back in time for "Indiana Jones and the X Files Plot," and I have to say, when I take into consideration that it is supposed to be fifties-riffic, it works better. It's sad to see Harrison Ford mail it in, though I wonder if he doesn't just lack the energy to smirk at the crazy lines he's forced to read anymore. Maybe Callista Flockhart has worn him down? Or he found Shia LaBoeuf (sp?) as soul-killing as I did? Whatever, there were 'splosions. I was pretty sure the whole South America crystal skull thing was just in order to have more Nazis to fight -- I mean, after WWII, isn't that about where they went? -- but no, it was the Ruskies. It was good to see it in a theater, in any case.

Speaking of Nazis, I just finished the purportedly YA book "The Book Thief." It is super long, narrated by Death and takes place in Nazi Germany and is unrelentingly sad. It is also quite beautiful. I highly recommend it.