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?