Old people: they can be hardcore

Today on the way to Starbucks to get the NYT, I saw George at Mac's Card Room, a place that I have been informed is "less sketchy than you'd think." I can't really figure what his age is — he could be anywhere from 80 to a hard-lived 60. He's retired-ish, and I have it on good authority that he spends his days in a, well, "relaxed" state. Obviously, if he's at a bar at 10 in the morning. He was standing outside, but his van is hard to miss.

So George is hardcore.

But old people can be hardcore in other ways, too. Yesterday, as part of my preparation for Epic Summer 2008, I did what I would call an epic ride. The weather was stunning. 70 degrees, sunny. I got my bike at about 11 and headed out for Junction City, a good three-and-a-half miles away. When I got back towards home, I thought, I'm a fresh as a spring daisy, I should keep going to my usual ride, down to the airport and around the bay.

That's about a six mile ride in and of itself. So about four miles in I felt less-than-fresh. It was past noon, when I had received a call from Ray and I was about halfway there. But I was at the bridge, and all the good stuff was coming up. So I pressed on.

An unusual weather feature was that the wind was out of the east. Usually, it's out of the West and coming back from Hoquiam is a breeze. So it was not a good sign that I was already pooping out, with no money in my bag for a recharging lunch at the Sweet Shoppe.

I ended up going down to the airport, the bird watchers were already there, and started coming back. At the intersection on 7th Street, where the tempting but oh-so-unlikely-to-give-me-free-food Sweet Shoppe is, there was a stooped over old lady carrying a couple of bags dressed in a white pantsuit, green shirt and one of those old-lady hair covering scarfy-thingys. We nodded hello, I went on down the street, on my bike, rode around the Emerson and up back across the bridge and then down behind the pilings of the big bridge to cross over to the less-traveled east-west roads, and who do I see crossing the street ahead of me with her bags, but the old lady. Somehow she had streaked there while all bent over.

Now, I was winded, but this lady somehow made it about a mile in a few minutes. Stooped over and everything. I felt like such a hoser. But I also felt something a little more noble — I was impressed and hopeful and proud of her.

Rock on, lady. It's cool if you can move like that, and it's cool if you know how to teleport. And if you know how to teleport, will you teach me?

Girding for Epicnicity

So the planned trip to Frontier-cum-Rich-People's-Haven, and all the outdoorsy stuff I want to do then, has given me some impetus in going to the Zumba class at the Y today. I think I am the biggest spaz of all time in the class. I'm a little gawky for all the booty shaking, so I geek out, with jumping and big arm motions and whatever. I kind of can't help but make fun of myself in the name of getting a better workout. But Denise, Regina, Mark and all the gang from Tacoma aren't there to appreciate it. Two years later and I can't let go of my old Y.

Which reminds me, I spent a girls' weekend a few weeks ago with some of the gals from my old Y. We all drank a bunch of wine, "enjoyed" the blustery weather and ate at the Ocean Crest, which was really, really good. I shared an appetizer of lobster fingerlings on crostini and had a seafood alfredo-type pasta, which I totally couldn't finish. When Lindley tried to help me by taking a bite, I saw her go for noodles, and I said, "No! Take the lobster!" I mean, I'm value-minded. It about kills me to not be able to eat all the lobster. I eat that about once a decade.

But all that creamy pasta with underwater creatures composed almost wholly of cholesterol does terrible, awful things to the body. Especially when washed down with ungodly amounts of Pinot Noir. Not the sort of things that get one in shape to do what the mountain biking community call epic rides.

Not that I'm planning on an epic ride in Steamboat. Maybe half of one. But there are trails to be ridden, by horse, by bike, by foot. It's a shame not to hit as absolutely many as possible, especially if the reason is because they are kicking my tuchus.

So of course, the only option is shaping up. Forgoing my annoyance at the Hoquiam Y for not being what my old Y was — a community full of cool people with their arms open and, although the parking lot was often crowded, never quite as bad as the Hoquiam Y in terms of crowding in and out of the Y. I think it helped that the Morgan Family Y isn't afraid to use the gym for classes, so they weren't limited to 30 people. I also liked the fact that Denise, Mark and Regina taught classes that weren't trademarked. But there you are. Zumba was okay, I guess.

I am also getting healthy by eating well. For dinner the other night, Ray and I roasted a heap of veggies. We did beets with a little olive oil, salt and pepper — six of them — and yams, with orange juice, a little vegetable oil and some nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and something else. I didn't put cardamom in but that would have been awesome. I sprinkled a little brown sugar on it at the end. It was like a sweet potato pie but not as unhealthy. We also had asparagus and salmon. Talk about healthy. The beets had an interesting side effect. I now know what happens when Barbie goes to the bathroom. Anthocyanins. A miracle of nature. You're welcome. Eat about two whole beets and enjoy the show.

I expect once the (dreadful, awful, wretched, miserable, galling) weather stops being rainy, hail-y and bitterly chilly I'll get Ray to hit the Capitol Forest and do some trails. Prepare our quads and sensitive little heinies for what lies ahead. Which is epic, or near-epic, stuff.

So the road to epicnicity, it begins with pink pee and Zumba.

Dad comes for a visit

So dad had a work thing to do in Los Angeles and he managed to detour North for the weekend. Friday Ray and I picked him up and took him to Shanghai Garden with Beth and Chris. Then we took a tour through Uwajimaya to look at the geoducks and assorted odd produce.

We brought dad back to Grays Harbor, and the next day went to Quinault for lunch, a hike and a lovely drive.



The weather was sick. It was the first truly beautiful, warm spring day of the year, and it did not really come early enough but I was glad to get it. But not all was awesome in Quinault. The damage from December's storm is still pretty bad. There were enough trees knocked down that Ray got some sun. There were bald spots on the Quinault Loop trail and a lot of places where debris littered the woods. A whole big portion of the loop was closed by Gatton Creek. There are areas off to the east where no one is quite sure how the trails are. A waiter at the Lodge said there are 100 ruined acres over the ridge that are not being cleaned up in spite of the fact that the timber would be a boon in terms of income for the area. People aren't happy about it.



Dad tended to hog the camera — my camera — but I did manage to snap this of him at the Lodge. This is where FDR ate in 1937. I interviewed one of the people who sat next to him, Alice Esses, who at the time was a young teacher who had left her home in Oklahoma. FDR couldn't tell her enough how much he was doing to conserve soil in the Dust Bowl. The then-owner of the lodge would occasionally stop by to argue with FDR, who was voluble about wanting to make the area into a national park. Apparently the lodge owner thought it would kill business. 80 years later, the lodge wouldn't have much to offer visitors without the park nearby.

At night, we went to the Myrtle Street Jazz concert at the 7th Street because driving to the awesomest bar ever was just kind of a drive after going to Quinault. This way we got to see Ray in action as theatre board prez, introducing the two schools' musicians with a line he stole from me and which flopped. Sorry 'bout that, baby. Dad loved the Hoquiam Jazz Band and even called out their lead trombonist, Casey, to shake his hand and tell him he did a great job. Dad is a former trombonist for his high school band. Also performing were the Aberdeen Goldenaires and the all-girls "All That Jazz." One of the singers, a sophomore, was preggers and I thought she was pretty brave, but shaking someone's hand for not being afraid to go out in public is kind of silly. I particularly loved how, after Hoquiam band director Roger White said some of his kids did sports and they had to come to band practice at 7 a.m., Pat Wilhelms trumped it by saying her kids had to start practice at 6:50 a.m. And they didn't get the high school rivalry joke of mine Ray told. Is irony dead?



On Sunday we went to Seattle after running into my boss at Starbucks. We hit Olympia first, where dad got a snootfull of the hippie-redneck nexus that is the farmers market. Ray got Wagner's cinnamon bread and I got purple collards. We took a walk at Tumwater Falls. Very pretty place.



We then went to the Ballard Locks, pictured above. A bunch of little boats (well, the merrymakin' was a pretty dang big yacht, as was the M.Y. Happy Place) went through, and tied in as the water level raised them 20 feet. The Happy Place had some serious issues. I got the vibe that the guys in it didn't really know what they were doing. You could see the big Schnapps bottle inside the back end. They got yelled at by the locks guy. The Drifter was the coolest boat — wood trim, typical fishing vessel styling, a crew of young hipsters couldn't detract from the pretty blue boat. We got kind of wet, but it was fun, and the botanical gardens were pretty and smelled nice.



We ate at Ray's Boathouse. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We got caffeine at Pike Place in an art cafe. I should start painting bright, abstracted-but-not-completely graphic flowers and sell them for like $150 a pop. People seem to like them, judging from the red "sold" stickers on the tags at the place. We also saw a guy at the newsstand with a knotted, dread-locked beard (two locks) that hung past his waist. It must be kind of heavy.

Ray and I dropped dad off at the Sea-Tac Crest. Here are some reviews that make me feel like a bad person for putting my parents up there. This is Hugh and Janice's favorite place to stay if they'll be gone a week. It was definitely cheap, but my oh my, it is certainly a Roach Motel. It did not help that dad's neighbor got a 4 a.m. "wakeup call" from the staff about an underage girl in the lobby. Yikes.

We made it back home by about nine.

Weird restaurant

I just had to say, briefly, that Ray and I tried out a restaurant so eccentric it deserves its own post. I will call it "Numcat's Lair" to preserve its anonymity, since I may be tempted to cross into territory that will offend someone and I don't want any trouble here.

We'd been curious about this place, as once before we'd tried to just walk in (at about 6:45ish) and were turned away, even though there were customers and the restaurant was quite empty. First thing about the Numcat's Lair, you have to have a reservation.

The reasons for the mandatory reservation was soon apparent. There is only one server and maybe two cooks (chef/sous chef or chef/prep cook, it's hard to say) in the place. That means they need airtight table times. But it means the Lair will never be more than half full. It has two, whole, massively decorated rooms with booths and tables. The booths had a Soviet kind of comfort to them.

So we got there at 5:30 and there was only one special left. What kind of restaurant only has a single special left that early on? We were curious. Also, how could the menu (expensive) support such a variety of meats and foodstuffs if a maximum of about 10 tables — mostly two-tops — could be filled each night? The mystery deepened.

Then the food arrived. I had ahi, which was cooked down to canned tuna quality. I was, frankly, shocked. Well done ahi is a culinary sin that is, in religious terms, mortal in nature. This isn't the sort of thing that bothers Ray, who had salmon that didn't seem to be too overdone. The ahi was sort of dry, as a result, and had been drenched in a lemon basil sauce that was composed with a great deal of garlic and olive oil to compensate. The vegetables served with were good, though the rice was old people's rice like you get in a lesser eating place — no grain sticks to other grains, and there's an overcooked orzo quality to it.

We had dessert. There were three options, two of which involved chocolate mousse. We got the mousse in a chocolate pyramid. Ray said, "This is so good," but I really wonder at his ability to taste. I just found out he's kind of colorblind, and the grainy, greasy texture of the mousse was pretty bad. Ray clarified: "It's sweet, you know, it has sugar in it." Well, true enough. Inside the pyramid (interesting, 80sish presentation) was not only the mousse, but some sort of bolus of ... cheesecake? Another poorly-constructed mousse? I wasn't sure. It was sour-ish. Tart is a word I'd use had it tasted good. It was just sour. I did something ridiculous, I have to say. Both of us had had bites of this bolus, but I wanted to spare Ray from eating any more of this awful stuff, so I ate it. I was like Tinkerbell taking Peter Pan's poison. It put a foul taste in my mouth water could not get out.

Oh, Numcat's Lair, that was one of the strangest meals I've eaten. It would just be mediocre-to-disappointing food that flauted good culinary sense if it hadn't been for the insane atmosphere.

I can't wait to go back.

Mom comes for a visit

So mom came for a visit for about the space of a weekend. We ate Estrella creamery cheese, took a drive on 105, prettiest road in the state that I've yet to be on, and mom got to eat fried razor clams Ray and I caught. We visited mostly because there wasn't a whole lot of time and because the weather was absolutely the pits. When mom left, she said the crummy hail/rain/cold was a "revelation" to her and helped her appreciate what I go through. Ha! We've passed the equinox! She still doesn't know the full extent of the mind-numbing tragedy that is a Northwest coastal winter.



We went to Westport, and we ate at this one place that has crazy bloody marys, obviously. I believe there is a bit of Slim Jim on it. In spite of the presentation, the consensus was that it was not the best bloody mary in the world. It's hard to find really good mixed drinks out there, I've found. Most places don't bother to use good ingredients, or they get too watery off the bat. It's just another factor that keeps me from going out and getting a drink.



As you can tell, the weather wasn't completely awful the whole time, thank goodness. This cranberry farm was really picturesque.

Also, on my latest Flickr downloading excursion, I learned there are three other people who put frosted mini-wheats in their hobbies. The mini-wheat revolution will come; you will be assimilated. In other mini-wheat news, I recently bought seven boxes of FMWs and stacked them with about another seven or eight boxes sitting on my kitchen floor. I have to buy them in bulk when they're on sale — I eat a lot of them, and I need to save the $$$ when I can — and in this particular case, they were on sale, I had a coupon for 70 cents off one box and another coupon for $10 off my "shopping order" if I bought seven or more boxes. Reader, I bought a bunch of them. I was worried that mom would take this abundance of FMWs as a possible sign of mental illness (she said she was a little concerned). I mean, one day it's a bunch of boxes of FMWs that won't fit on the fridge, the next it's stacks of junk you have to go sideways to get through, Collier brothers-style. Or cats everywhere. As if.

Up next: Dad's visit.

Recent art stuff of note

So last night Ray and I went to the Capitol Playhouse in Olympia to see "Sideshow," a musical that immediately captivated me with its catchy slogan: "Come look at the freaks." Oh, yeah.

Well, the quality of the productions at the Playhouse have been kind of scattershot. Although I enjoyed "Six Women on the Verge of Braindeath" as a Bloom-Countyesque time machine trip (it was written 20 years ago and it shows, referencing Jim and Tammy Faye quite a bit), Ray was disappointed in it. He also didn't really like "1940s Radio Hour," and who under the age of 70 would, with a title like that? I'm not one for revues, myself. Anyway, we both liked "Sweeney Todd," but who doesn't? And although the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold thing is hard for me to appreciate in this time of globalized slavery and sexual exploitation, the "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" was quite cute, if completely unrealistic.

Anyway, we liked the freaks. I thought the music was particularly good, with some of that Sondheimish rejection of verse chorus verse and a little heavy duty recitative-type sung dialogue, but catchy nonetheless. The actresses who play the lead freaks, the Siamese twins, had voices that sounded really good together, and there was a really good Egyptian-style set piece that was worth the price of admission. The costumer outdid himself with some of the outfits, especially some huge feathered headdresses. It's good to see quality local theater. It also reminded me of those head-conjoined twins, Dori and Reba (formerly Lori, but she changed her name to separate herself more from her sister and in deference to her favorite country singer, Reba McIntire), and that's always a good thing. They're some spunky ladies, Dori and Reba.

Let's see. What have I read lately. Oh, yes, "In Defense of Food," Michael Pollan's latest on how we should be organic locavores. I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm just saying he's not saying what he needs to, which is that although our western diet is killing us, the reason for we are able to produce so much is part of why this planet manages to, well, sustain isn't exactly the right word, unless you look at it like a life-support machine, 6 billion people. Farming in a sustainable fashion will not, adamantly not, support that many people. And for us to ramp down our production as a globe will be meaningful for the environment and us all eventually, it will mean there will be a lot of suffering in the meantime, and almost certainly not by the big agro-industrial companies, even if they have to give up making what Pollan thinks is the apotheosis of food product — "Go-gurt." Myself, I'm inclined to hate those fruit snacks that are basically gummi bears in fruit shapes that say they contain a serving of fruit in every package. They offend my soul.

In arts and religion news, the Methodist church across the street will hold a humorous service about the "greatest practical joke ever played on the devil" — Jesus' resurrection (drawing out Easter maybe?) and attendees are encouraged to wear "funny clothes" and last year the choir wore bathrobes, they have something else up their sleeve this time. This is not the sort of thing that would normally entice me to go to church (I have yet to find what would, although the gay, lesbian, trans etc. appreciation day at the Hoquiam Methodist church came close, except it started at like 9 or some ridiculously early hour) but the part of me that appreciates what this could be is feeling an internal sway.

The other night I went with Ray to a dinner where his friend and vice-pres of the 7th Street board, Mickey, was getting an award. She is such a cool person and totally deserved it. I have personally witnessed Ray deciding to dump work on her. Anyway, he had to give a speech and it was the best of the four, IMHO. The dinner was at the senior center and I guess we got what the seniors get. There was asparagus, roasted taters and meat and the wait staff was very good about keeping the coffee carafe refilled. I mean, they were on the coffee like white on rice. I can only imagine that the usual senior crowd chugs the stuff down as if the Yuban were the elixer of life. Not so much my table. I think I had the only cup of joe of everyone at my table. I used the creamer they provided and felt, because I had been reading Pollan, bad about all the corn syrup solids entering my body.

Next time I write I'll have to tell the tale of my mom's really brief visit to the Deen. Suffice to say everyone had a good time, she ate razor clams and the weather was (and remains) out of control. Rain, snow, hail, ice, fog ... in like a lion, still have a couple more days to turn lamb-like but I'm doubting it.

Good Books

Here are two AWESOME books I recently read:

"The Worst Hard Times," Timothy Egan. Dust Bowl poverty, depression, dust storms that kill people and stir up so much static electricity they kill all Melt White's watermelons. I can't say enough about the gruesomeness of this book.

"Restless" William Boyd. Woman gets involved in WWII spying for Brits. Her daughter has a lame parallel narrative in the 70s. In the end, it's a good book and a real gripping read.

reading now: "An Oral History of World War Z," Max Brooks. It's kind of an interesting take on global crisis management, as told through a fictional war on zombies. Awfully geeky, but that's me. Seriously, delete the word "zombie" and you have a very interesting, very entertaining book.

Been a long time since I rapped at ya

Hey there. Long time no blog. It's harder to do when you don't have your own internet connection and and you do have an actual life. Seriously. And it isn't like my inner life is so compelling that I have to share any of it. Actually it's pretty boring. I'll tell you, I spent a lot of mental energy on a really ridiculous thing about a month ago — frozen rasperries.

Y'all who are readers of this blog know that I have a thing for Frosted Mini-Wheats, and that the ONLY way to properly eat them is with berries and the ONLY berry that 1) stands up to the defrosting process without becoming a bad mushy and 2) perfectly complements the sweetness of the FMW crust with utterly sublime tartness is the raspberry. Frozen, to me, tastes better than fresh. Probably because I have gotten used to it. And the best frozen berry brand is the Safeway organics raspberry, which is a lot more expensive than the Grocery Outlet (a.k.a. Desperation Outlet) berries or the Top Food berries (which are local and I'd prefer to buy, but the lazy teens and riff raff employed in the PNW do NOT get rid of the bad berries, they put them in the sack. The Chilean people who pick the Safeway Organic berries — and I hate the idea of eating Chilean produce that's been petrochemicaled in 6,000 miles — are decent people who, in the tons of raspberries I have eaten from them, have maybe overlooked two bad berries. Now that is a track record. Chile, you should be proud of your berry pickers. Someday I will travel to your berry farms and kiss all your berry pickers.)

Where was I?

Oh, so the Safeway berries are more expensive, and they don't go on special all that often, so when they did in December I loaded up. They were $5 a bag and I bought $70 worth in a week. I saved about $6, which is a little more than one other bag. I think this is the Wayne White in me. I tell myself this whenever I make a somewhat silly purchase that has some logic to it. Anyway, I did this because I wanted to stock up for the next time it wasn't on special. Silly me, the week after that special ended another special kicked in that will last till the end of March. Anyway, this is the sort of goofy stuff I think about and obsess about when I'm not doing other things like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wageslavery/1801963011/

Clam digging! (Sorry, but if you're using someone else's Flickr account you can't just cut and paste the img src. And I'm not going to go through the rigamarole of downloading and uploading the photo)

To clam dig, my landlocked and citified friends, you really need a few things: A clam gun (a PVC tube with handles and a little airhole on top) and a stick. It is NICE to have waders, and it is REALLY NICE to have neoprene chest waders (like Ray's dad Ray lent to me). They are warm, and you can only clam in the winter. Also you need a mesh bag or cut up milk gallon jug or Costco-size bucket that once had laundry detergent in it (the mesh bag is the easiest, I would assume, but the old-timers often are out there in jeans and boots up to their hips in surf (cold, cold, cold surf) with their milk jug of clams and they're using an old-timey shovel (like a garden shovel but the shovel bit got bent 80 degrees or so) to dig. I'm kind of a yuppie clammer, if there is such a thing, considering how "Harbor" the activity is.

What you do is you go out an hour or two before low tide (usually right before sunset, when the moon and sun are kind of opposite) on a clam weekend on an approved beach (in the photo, it's Long Beach, but since November Ray and I usually go to Twin Harbors, which is only about 15-20 mi from Aberdeen). You take your sick (it helps if it has a square end) and you pop the end into the sand and if there is a clam nearby it will "show," which means it will go, "oh, crap! Something wants to eat me!" and start digging (these razor clams can go a foot a minute). When it digs it throws up a little bubble or dimple on the surface that is quite distinct. Sometimes you'll pound one spot and you'll see one show, and like some sort of sign has gone out to the clam community, another clam will start to dig, and then you'll have two clams to catch (why it's good to work in tandem with a partner).

Anyhow, if the clams had just stayed mum you wouldn't have known they were there at all. But they moved, so you put your PVC tube over the dimple, with a little bit more pipe over towards the seaside (clams favor digging seaward) and you shove that pipe down as far as it will go, and you twist and twist and get it at least 2/3 of the way down and you hope like crazy those sounds you hear are starfish in the way and you're not crunching the clams and making them hard to clean. Then you put your finger over the airhole and through the magic of suction and using your legs, remove the pipe from the ground, dump it out (or filter it through your fingers if a wave is coming in) and voila, chances are there's a clam there. Repeat as many times as it takes to get 15 clams (a limit, and if it seems small, you are used to those fried clam strips. Razor clams are really big.)

Then there is the joy of cleaning the clams. Ray's dad Ray was all too happy to do this for us in November, but since, I have had to cowgirl up and massacre the clams. I was a wuss to start, but that first clam didn't help none. He crapped sand as I picked him up, and boy did he wiggle. As it turned out, this was the last clam I'd ever touch that had the poop-fear reflex, so he probably didn't have any idea what was going on. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a clam brain anywhere, and I've gutted a lot of clams, so I dunno. They filter feed, he was filtering.

So Ray and I share the burden now. He cuts the clams out of their shells (harder to do when you've crunched the shells) and I take the writhing bodies and start cutting them up. First you snip off the "neck," which is the part with the dark, barnacle-y thing on it. Then you cut up the middle of the "seam," which is obvious when you see it, and through both valves of the neck (bivalves, natch). Then you cut out the guts and detach the "digger," which is also where the anus is. Then you cut through the digger/anus area to lay it flat. There is copious rinsing at every stage, by the way. And once you get to the clam butt you scrape all the dark poop out of it.

Here's something wacky -- the butt? It's the BEST part! The digger is so much more tender than the neck it is insane. I love to eat clam tuchus! So, just because it's butt, doesn't mean it will taste like butt. But make sure you scrape it pretty good all the same.

By the time Ray and I finish cleaning the clams it's usually at least 7 p.m. or so. So often we don't bother to "prep" them for cooking. As per Kathy Quigg's suggestion, we take the clams and dredge them through flour, then egg, then cracker crumbs (Ritz is good for baking, saltines for frying) and lay them out on sheets to freeze. Once they are frozen stiff they can be bagged and fried straight out of the bag. And fried is really the only way to eat them besides chowder or baked, which calls for the same preparation but in a 500 degree oven for a few minutes (cuts down on the grease).

So clamming takes up a lot of my off-hours mental energy.

I must seem like kind of a dipstick if these are things that preoccupy me, but I do, in fact, worry about the state of the world, how long it is till spring, if I can do the whole Sunday NYT crossword puzzle and when I'll get my window fixed from the big winter storm. Also, back when granddad died there was a fair bit of mental energy in the whole grief thing. So I'm not this food-crazed person.

Also taking up the occasional amount of mental energy: "Heroes" hate. I don't watch it, but I hear there's a character who has the ability to copy any action she sees. That was totally a power I dreamed up when I was a kid and have been holding it in reserve for a character when I became a famous YA writer. Now I look like the big copycat. But here's the thing — I thought about it in relation to ice skating, and I think the chick on the TV is watching action movies. Not like I didn't think of that, but the character I had in mind was really devious in a way. Also about to be used and abused by some shadow government.

So, maybe I'll try keeping you all updated more often than once a year? It's not a NY resolution or anything, so don't hold your breath.

The mAss Media

These are not the Donkey Basketball pictures you've been clamoring for, but since we were busy hazing new photo Louie Traub, we had to rely on the picture-taking-stylings of Doug Barker, managing editor and big-time laugher.



And then there's this:



Isn't that just precious of lil ole Anne?



We lost, even after I went all Bobby Knight. I blame the guy in charge of the scoreboard. He's an employee of the company we were playing against (I won't even dignify them with a name.) Sadly, the forces of evil cheated their way to victory. I tried, but I just didn't feel right about dragging people off their donkeys (although I could have).



That's Anne (our soccer-mom-in training, she brought the juice and Gushers), Louie (with the tongue out, this was his first newsroom bonding experience) and Jordan (our would-be Tookie Williams).

Been a long time

I've been fuming every morning for the past month about the early Daylight Savings Time — worried that I'm not going to be able to pull off getting out of bed on time for work and resentful to Congress for not personally considering my feelings.

And then I worked the weekend so I get to really ease into it. And it so far doesn't seem so bad.

Somewhere there's a metaphor for life in there. Or possibly just my life.

New Years Resolutions

Got any?

Here are mine:

• Stop saying "biznatch" so much. It's not so uncool it's cool — it's just uncool. And there is no added irony because of my intense whiteness. Yet so much fun to say. To wit: Biznatches be all up in my biznatch. (See, it is sort of like business. But it's biznatch)

• Use the Sonicare brush 3x/day. Stop using the leopard print manual brush. It is dead and useless. But it's leopard print! Okay, I'll save it for travel. And always brush before bed.

• Get the AP style for "O.K." changed. What the devil is "O.K." supposed to stand for? It's not, it's a word on its own. Also, continue fighting the AP overlords on the style for "Internet" and "Web site." So dorky. We don't write, "There are a lot of programs on Television" or "Circulation is down for all Newspapers except one."

• Become a crime-fighting ninja. (Hey, I'm trying to fight the Associated Press style manual — this is far more achievable, considering you can get throwing stars and nunchucks in tobacco shops.)

more important information

Read "The Echo Maker" by Richard Powers.

John Hodgeman (Hodgman?) is overrated. But I'm glad he's making a living and all. Pretend pretention has a place in this world.

"Consider the Lobster" is a much better essay than it has any right to be. But some of the other essays in DFW's book are a hodgepodge of footnotes. I wish he'd find a way to work his digressions INTO his essays, because in spite of the fact that he's a damn good writer, I think he could be better if he'd get over the footnote thing. Also, in his portrait of a talkshow radio host, he could very well have let the guy hang himself with his own rope, the footnotes were a little too pushing of a "take" that all readers (i.e. me) were picking up on really early.

I managed to do laundry today AND dishes AND garbage. I am letting the itty bitty spider build its web between my TV and cable box. For now. It's almost Christmas, after all. And I'm working The Eve. How saintly am I?

300 posts so far, plus big ups for vermouth

What the heck is vermouth anyway? Even when you put it in a martini there are people who get upset that they aren't drinking straight gin/vodka. Well, last night I had some vermouth as an apertif (I was curious how horrible it was, considering all the bad PR it gets, so I poured out a little, which led to a little more, which led to, oh, why not have an itty bitty glass — hey, that glass was a little bigger than I thought) and although it was sweet vermouth (whoops, got the wrong one at the liquor store) it was kind of herbally and I'm pretty easy to please in the alcohol department, and I have to say, don't playa hate on the vermouth.

There has to be a reason d'etre for sweet vermouth, though. I am not much of an apertif person.

I'm on the naughty list

Well, friends, it is Christmas of 2006 and once again I find myself on the naughty list. In hindsight, thinking back over the year gone by, I can understand why kindly old Mr. Kringle would choose to put me on his blacklist *again* but I thought I might as well explain why to people who only have seen me for brief spurts, where my image maintenance overdrive can compensate for my naturally malicious nature.

In retrospect, here are the things I shouldn’t have done this year, limited to what items I can remember.

• It was wrong of me to throw that annoying rich girl in the pool, stolen the insecure guy’s teddy bear, made out with that sleazy bike messenger and to have stolen the frat boy’s wallet. It was also wrong of me to cheat on the immunity challenges. But then, the greater wrong was going on that reality show in the first place.

• Knocked over that liquor store. Even though I never got caught. How was I to know that Santa doesn’t need charging papers or any other official evidence to prove my naughtiness? Apparently he just knows.

• Gotten in that fight with the window washer. Let’s be frank, he was a total ass. He totally deserved that shove I gave him and, really, the 15-story drop he would have had if he weren’t wearing that OSHA-mandated harness. Goody-effing-two shoes. You know he’s on the nice list.

• Peed on the mechanical bull. I was too drunk to be scared, and apparently too drunk to be continent, too.

• Broken up K-Fed and Britney. Yes, yes, you all thought I was doing you a favor until you saw where Brit started hanging out with Paris Hilton and not wearing panties. Those two walking venereal diseases deserved each other, and my machinations (producing and encouraging the K-Fed single “Popozao”) were apparently undertaken in a fit of misapprehension. And I inflicted “Popozao” on everyone in the U.S. for about a minute, which felt like an eternity, and for which I truly deserve punishment.

• My program encouraging trade protections for the national drug business. All I wanted to do was encourage the use of meth and pot manufactured by American farmers and chemists, who are suffering with all the cheap stuff flooding in from Mexico taking away their market share. Trying to get organic certification for American icky-icky was pretty silly, considering you smoke it anyway, and that's bad for you.

• Beating the "Yummo!" out of Racheal Ray. Frankly, I hope she got on the naughty list for cutting me with her sudoku knife. That finger reattached just fine, thank you.

• Encouraging those endangered humpback whales to beach. Who knew that you could use whalesong to get on the naughty list?

• Imported a couple of foreign ladies for unpaid brothel work. But they had free room and board and, hey, they are in America, best country in the mothertrucking world!!!

• Dismembering that hitchhiker. It’s not like I killed him and I figured this would go down as an anatomy lesson. But noooooo. Not in Santa’s book.

• Keeping that library book that the librarian didn't check out.

Look, Santa, things go back to zero come January, right?

You ever wonder ...

What ambient Christmas music would sound like? Or what protools layering and digital rejiggering might do to seasonal music?

Wonder no more.

So gross. This year I was actually wondering if techno+carols could = stuff that does not annoy at the mall/airport/grocery store. I guess I was wrong. Besides, it must be hard to create a new way of envisioning a holiday "mood" that does not have those specific referants to the season — the sleighbells, I suppose, is what I mean there.

We are all condemned to hear that "Wonderful Christmastime" song for the rest of our lives. Or "Greensleeves." Or whatever holiday novelty song you are doomed to hear in your own personal hell. Along with that "I'm a bitch!" "empowerment" song. How did a song with the title "Bitch" end up being appropriate for soft rock stations? I ask as I'm listening to it in a very cozy, homey cafe.

Speaking of bitches, I finished MoDo's "Are Men Necessary?" and was kind of surprised to have her ending the asking with a big thing about Hillary Clinton. I'm not exactly sure what that was all about, but with all the things that actually have a chance of disappearing in the world and all the things that really don't have anything to contribute to the world at large, here is a list of nouns that "Are _____ necessary?" might apply to better.

Frogs (they're disappearing at a rapid clip. Maybe we better not justify their existence before they go)
Holiday songs
Individually wrapped cheese slices
365 of Racheal Ray's recipes in one place
undeveloped beachfront properties
cafes sans free wifi access (no! they aren't!!!)
Thomas Kinkade paintings
Thomas Kinkade "illuminators"
Thomas Kinkade-inspired "novels."
payday loan centers
unwaxed floss.

Amazing books!

Read "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country." Ken Kalfus. Very good. Disturbing.

Watch "Thank You for Smoking" and "Why We Fight" and think how much more interesting "Thank You For Smoking" would have been if it were set in the world of "Why We Fight," which posits that the military industrial complex seeks its own justification for existence through baloney wars.

I had some other ideas but I totally forgot what they are.

Also, I'm looking for a recipe for an appetizer that travels pretty well. I've been bringing the bacon bean bundles (sooooo much better than they sound) to the McMillans' Turkey Celebration for the past few years and they've been popular, but this year I've got an hour or two driving ahead of me and I need a backup.

More from Mexico

That's the girls in the golf cart. Carol was a bang-up driver.

I didn't mean it like that.



Sibling bonding at work, over fresh cocos frios.



This is an ancient Maya tradition or something. I got parallax from having to use the viewfinder (it was sunny out) and it came out with this odd look. But I kind of like it.



Mom and Cindy rockin' the shops.



Here we are, learning about the soccer-basketball-human-sacrifice game that swept the Maya nation back in the day. Better than BASEketball, I bet.

Back from Mexico

So Cancun is a really big, thrashed, overdeveloped city with all sorts of overdeveloped areas around it. Very cheesy. And the Isla is getting pretty darned developed and we were in the developedest hotel there. But it was really really nice and I didn't even care that I was the biggest gringa around.

The Carribean sea is so beautiful, I can't blame people for wanting to visit. And the fish are neat. I went snorkeling with Ed and Doug at El Garrafon — the cheap place, not the $50 a day place — and the fish were pretty spectacular. They're kind of used to people bringing little jugs of fish food out and using them to attract them, so they will swim up to you. And then Ed threw fish food at me and the fish were all over me. Ew. So. Gross. Big ole floppy yellow and black stripy fish with their fish mouths going glop glop glop at me and their unblinking eyes.

Here are a sample of the photos I took:



Doug is so relaxed. He got pretty badly burned, though. People, use your SPF 50s on the first day!



Ha ha. It was so funny that first day. The boat was called "Turista!" Like the illness! We were so naive.



Rob is so darn cool. He and Carol Jean made it all happen.



You can't climb the Mayan ruins anymore. Some people think this is a real loss. They are jerks who don't mind fat American asses trotting up and down the limestone, wearing it out and scratching their names into the walls because they can and they'd like to think they're as significant as some extinct culture. That is a symptom of the American Cultural Virus that, coincidentally, could be found on the bus back from Chichen Itza. It was showing a Wesley Snipes vehicle, "Unstoppable."

I made everyone get up at 5 a.m. to get to CI, by the way. I am a damn martinet when I'm put in charge. And the bus didn't leave from Cancun until 9. It's like that episode of the Dog Whisperer when the Great Dane who is naturally a follower is put in charge by his stupid owners. I'm naturally a follower. I can't help it.



Pasty person at Tulum! Watch out!

One of the things that surprised and gratified me on this trip were all the incredibly fit, young, attractive people who had all tanned to a deep brown and had their hair sunstreaked so they were the same color all over. They were Japanese, Brazilian, European (North and South), Israeli, and possibly Visigoth. And then there I was. Pasty and not terribly petite. I felt like the Wilmoth clan was the mid-way marker between these demi-gods of attractiveness and the fat old American people in loud clothes. Unfortunately, as the poem says, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Someday I will be a fat old American woman with her shorts all bunched up in her blazingly white, fat thighs. Wearing white Keds with scrunched down pink socks.

No, I feel a duty to try to maintain the center for as long as possible.

More photos next month, when I get my bandwidth back!

Is Cancun cheesy? Is it fun?

That is a question I will be exploring over the next week. So come back and do find out if Cancun is cheesy, fun, etc. and if the addition of my family there contributes to either quality.

On a side not, it's gray, dark and frigid here. It's the perfect time to get the heck out of Dodge. Well, I'm sure January might be better, actually, as it's sort of one of the really low points on the winter dark and wet spiral.

More book review stuff

Read "Night Watch" by Sarah Waters. There is a reason it was the favorite for the Booker Prize. And as to Meegan's concern that it would be too pat, too easily wrapped up? No, it isn't. The novel goes backwards in time, so you see the whole cast of miserable people finish miserable and start fairly miserable, too. Waters' power of description is incredible. There's a part where an ambulance driver in WWII-era London is driving through a bombed-out street and Waters compares the drift of debris to bubbles settling in stout, and there are other wonderful little pieces like that in her book.

I'm picking up the Booker winner, "The Inheritance of Loss" by Anita Desai's kid, today at the library, so I guess I'll get to see why it won now.

Also flipped through Simon Winchester's "Karakatoa" and thought it was a little too formulaic for my tastes. Plus I already get plate techtonics and don't think it's too mindblowing and in need of popular science description for the target audience of the book (i.e. wannabe nerds like me).

Another book I read, and this will be one you can't necessarily get a hold of, is "On the Harbor," a local history book by my publisher and this guy I used to know. And I have to say, the first time I heard "local history book" I figured it would be one of those squat, aspen-green covered things with a whole bunch of text squished together and narratives that were all intertwined with dreadful boring dates, because local history doesn't always have the best enthusiasts. But no. It's a really lovely book with photos, sidebars, graphics and all the other good stuff about newspapers. And honestly, I should have known better when I was thinking it because both John C. Hughes and Ryan Teague Beckwith have impeccable journalism taste and Ryan in particular was always interested in coming up with new ways to present information. And my God, Grays Harbor has a lurid, fascinating history, and the journalism instincts to find the "telling detail," and to present information bravely, trusting the reader, really make the stories accessible.

So the one story I read about three or four times last night was "Who Killed Laura Law?" It's a murder mystery from 1939 that has never been solved and probably never will be. It was a flash point between "Red" (serious instigator types) and "White" (more conservative) Communist factions in town and between the Commies and the local business tycoons. And it's probably because there was so much tension and suspicion and bad actors that the murder of this young mother wasn't solved.

So, the two books I haven't been able to put down lately are "Night Watch" and "On the Harbor." Make of that what you will.

Book Review part Duh

Okay, "Carry Me Down" wasn't that great. Plus everytime I picked it up I thought of that song that goes, "Tie me kangaroo down, boys, tie me kangaroo down." And that was possibly more than you wanted or needed to know about the workings of my mind.

Next up: "Night Watch" by Sarah Waters, who previously introduced the lesbian Victorian circus novel to the stage with "Tipping the Velvet," which was a BBC production featuring the chick from "MI-5." I read the book and that was enough Victoriana for me. I expect "Night Watch," which appears to be nothing like the AWESOME-O Russian movie "Night Watch," to be about the same as "TtV" but WWII-ish. Which is to say, kind of awesome in crazy detail but not Russian "Night Watch" awesome, where people's heads blow up and there is an ensuing showdown between the forces of good and evil to be continued in "Day Watch."

So here's one of the beautiful views I am occasionally exposed to.



That's the beach at Westport. It won't look like this for long. Development will not be stopped. Money seeks its own level and development capitalizes on any authentic energy until it sucks it up, converting it to money. Perhaps it's an authentic neighborhood, or nature or something historic that gives an area its energy. That energy is so quickly converted to cash it'd make your head spin.

Dad went to the David Letterman show in NYC while he was at his pitchfest '06, No Print outlet Left Behind campaign and was really impressed with Xhibit (though he remembered his name as "Ingredient?") who appeared to be a humble rapper, giving props to his fans. My dad is so weird, people. A 60-y-o white man who loves to listen to rap and, last I checked, Imus. Basically anything shocking. Which explains why he thought the song had a positive message and not an ego-aggrandizing one, I guess.

Book Review time!

I finished a book! Two books! I'm feeling pretty good about that, so here's my personal, non-binding opinion of two Booker Prize nominees.

"Mothers Milk" Edward St. Aubyn. The names don't get Britisher than St. Aubyn (pron. "Sin Awbin"), and this book is pretty darn British, too. So although it contains a slimy psychiatrist elite academic sees-himself-as-a-third-person emotionally distanced father, it has its upside. Namely, the precocious older son of his who narrates the first quarter of the book. The beginning is a grim but hilarious piece of reminisence on birth, and it would be really too much to ask the rest of the book to be as good. And it can't be, but it's really darn good, even though it's a bit misogynistic with bad mother characters. This book still rocks, though.

"The Secret River." Kate Grenville. In the secret garden, the little lonely girl found a run down former monument to beauty and, uh, stuff (it's been a while). In the secret river, a transported Englishman finds a pack of aboriginals he can't understand, a bunch of jerks who are exploiting each other and has a wife who can't stop talking about going back to England, where their life was painted as even bleaker than in Australia. The book would have been better if people hadn't been quoted like this but rather in the usual way. I'm not sure what contemporary writers think they're doing with their free use of italics and punctuation.

I'm starting "Carry Me Down" (author? can't remember) and it's so far about a boy who knows when people are lying. Well, if "Blink" wasn't enough, here's the fictional version. And that's good enough for me. Because Malcom Gladwell may be full of himself (and he is!) but I still like just about everything he writes.

In other news, these guides are pretty good when it comes to helping me know something about going to the Cancun area: Moon handbooks, Rough Guide and Hidden Yucatan.

In incredibly shallow news: did anyone else notice how the Others have a really stringent planning code for their creepy suburb? There must be all sorts of homeowner association covenants governing the color and size of homes they can build. And boy are they hateful to outsiders. It's like Maumelle, Arkansas all over again. Because I definitely got the feeling some of the people in Maumelle would have loved to put a bunch of people that they considered outsiders into former dolphin holding tanks.

Organic FMW

So I got around to tasting the Organic Frosted Miniwheats that Kellogg's is pumping and I thought I'd give a report.

The first thing I noticed is that the box is significantly slimmer than the regular box. It holds 15 oz as compared to FMW's 19 and 24.3 oz boxes and costs more than, I'm pretty sure, either box. I bought it on sale — two for $6 — and that is typical of the sale price of both the other sizes on and off during the year. So it is a bit of a rip-off.

Of course, organic consumers purchase these products for their virtuousness (perhaps the slim box is a tip-off to the marketing — thinness is a virtue in our gluttonous society, but it also is a great way to try and make money by putting less product in packaging) so there is a bit of an expectation that in buying something rare(ish) and virtuous you have to pay a premium. True, there are fewer organic wheat fields than conventional wheat fields, and it's easier to grow organic wheat once a year (winter, less weeds competing for resources) than twice. And organic yields aren't quite up to conventional — which means pumped full of petro-chemical fertilizers. But organic yields are, in many cases, 90 percent of conventional, so there's not exactly a shortage, shall we say.

I also read that organic fields use blood bone-type fertilizer, so if you don't like the idea of dead animals touching your organic, possibly veg mouth, well, you have a choice to make. Because when you think about it, there are dead dinosaurs in those conventional fields. On the other hand, there is no gelatin in the sugar coating; it's straight organic cane sugar. It's not corn syrup like you get in the regular FMW.

So organic sugar isn't too tough to grow. Sugar isn't one of those crops that is destroying the ecosystem (yet! Brazil, if sugar protections are eliminated in this country, might become a major ethanol producer, using cane sugar instead of corn like here in the U.S. There is significantly more energy in cane gasoline than corn gas, so it would be the most desirable product on the market. And it is likely that the world's (read the First World's) hunger for energy would encourage growers to destroy the tropical dry forest (read: not the rain forest, cane doesn't need a lot of water to grow so it's low-impact on irrigation, at least) to plant cane fields (this was a Friedman column I actually bothered to read the other week), but I don't think more organic FMW would be nearly as damaging as cane gas) but it's not corn, which takes up an inappropriate amount of resources to grow.

But it is taste where the organic FMW failed. They are like those Post knockoffs. Little, tough, dense, insusceptible to milk. Thier color, a darker brown, is unappetizing unless, I guess, you're a German health nut. The sugar melts off right away, don't expect there to be any FMW worthy of waiting to eat till the end of your breakfast (or dinner) with the last bit of strawberry because that nice crust of sugar coating still remains. I wonder if this aggressively healthy taste and texture is part of the plan, or if the nice people at Kelloggs really tried to make it so these were as identical as possible to their cousins (which I noticed after I finished the organic box looked awfully yellow, like a donut or something).

I'm probably going to continue to buy regular FMW since I feel they taste better and are more appropriate to my budget, which has an outsized FMW expenditure level anyway. Also, I don't like the food-elite bull that the slim, green-topped boxes create. I am not to be marketed to in such an obvious way. If I didn't already know that the packaging cost more than the cereal inside (for the regular stuff and probably, I'm assuming, the organic stuff) and that UDSA organic isn't necessarily the highest standard of all for organics (plus it is the distance the wheat is shipped that also makes up part of the healthy earth equation — how many petrocalories did it take to get it from the farm to the bowl? Was it more than the regular stuff? This is something I feel I ought to know) I might be persuaded. But I'm not.

Yet.

YMCA

I finally gave in and joined. And I took a Jazzercise class for the first time. It's not easy. There are lots of dancy steps and things. But I'm just going to have to get over not going to the Morgan Family Y and having Tuff E Nuff and kickboxing. The thing about Jazzercise is it isn't what you think it is; it's got the same logo — which right now looks bad because it's too-recent-retro to be cool, just give it five more years and it will look very retro-forward — but it's not the leotard and legwarmer outfit you remember. It's hip-hoppy and salsa-y and, to In-Grid's "You Promised Me" it has some weird jazz hands action that makes you look like a goofy Paris mime (I think that may be the intent) for a few 8-counts.

I can't believe I did jazz hands.

On the upside, I met a 60-year-old lady who has been doing Jazzercise for eons, and she has an unlined face, a spring in her step and a great, healthy glow. And is thin and seems pain-free. There must be something to jazz hands.

It's not just Christmas

I saw a woman putting up Halloween decorations today. Halloween, people. A minor holiday (though in my mind it is the best of all the holidays because it involves candy, dressing up and scaring people and none of the family "must have most perfect Thanksgiving/Christmas ever" drama) to be sure, so why start decorating more than a month in advance?

Perhaps I should alert the media (snicker).

I also think I'm going to have to get a microwave at Satan-Mart (there are none at Sears) unless I hie myself to Olympia. Which maybe I should do because really, I want one of those teensy cute ones in a bright color (red? So it matches my kitchen rug and the picture I hung? Or yellow?) instead of a big ole white boring one. I can't remember the writer who compared shopping at the Wals-Mark, as some Arkies do call it, to soviet-style shopping, but yeah, that about sums it up. Not that I'm a big shopper or anything, I just have had some good shopping experiences but they've never been at a Wals-Mark.

Speaking of paying for stuff in an un-fun way, I read the fine print of the Comcast stuff. They are going to charge me a rental fee for the controller that talks to my (unnecessary and actually in-the-way-of-recording-one-show-while-watching-another-unless-I-get-a-TiVo-or-TiFaux) cable box. Don't say I should go without — I need my cylons and doctors in lust and plucky teenage detectives and Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Speaking of whom, he has the best-written website. You should go there: http://www.dogthebountyhunter.com (I forgot the html code. OMG, I am BRAINFARTING in the LIBRARY!) and mute your computer. Seriously, these folks embrace their own PR in a way that makes them the most meta of the po white you-know-what. And I say that with total love in my heart. I mean it. I cannot get enough of the A&E show, I will watch it even when the Kill Bill movies are on (like last night) or any other time. I love it. I love Beth and her amazing shirt torpedoes and Pamela Anderson Lee hairdos. I love Lelands little Hawaiian accent. I love Tim, the quiet shaman who wrings information out of all the street sources even though he barely says a word (made all the more amazing by the fact that he, like Dog, is not Hawaiian-born; breaking into island culture, where they have a word, "haole," for outsiders, is no mean feat). And I love the Dog, who is spiritual but so pragmatic, so matter-of-fact. They all remind me of my nightclubbing days in Arkansas and the bouncers I knew. It is amazing how that old dead Russian writer's saying that the cops and the criminals are two sides of the same coin can be reinterpreted through Da Kine Bail Bonds. Dog is the coin. Dude! He IS the COIN!

I urge you all to consider donating to his legal defense fund at P.O. Box 130781, The Woodlands, TX, 77393-0781 (here's why he needs a defense fund) (I think this is how to hyperlink)

Anyway, there's a Dog special on A&E where the Chapmans speak. I look forward to totally agreeing with everything Beth says.

Joke's on me

So the day I moved into my funky fresh apartment was a scorcher. Like 90 degrees in an area that almost never sees that much heat. Sweaty and gross, I was deeply looking forward to a shower.

Imagine my surprise when the hot water never got hot. On a labor day weekend.

Now, water being what it is, cold water is just too cold to bathe in unless you're Finnish. So I sulked and decided to pat myself off with a washcloth. By chance, I was in the kitchen with the cloth in my left hand, causing me to turn on the hot tap with my right — it's cold, right? No, it was hot.

I have a Romantic Language-ish tap. The hot is labeled "C" and the cold, "H." In Spanish I suppose you could extend that to caldo y hielo (hot and ice) but it's not as appropriate as caldo y frio, and in French isn't it chaud and froi (fwah? Why can't all foreign languages be as easy as Spanish to spell?)? So, ha ha. Funny. A great relief to learn that before sleeping in my clean-sheeted bed.

I also learned that although there is cable of every permutation (HD, digital, regular, enhanced) in my building there is no internet. I am dying, people. I may have to break down and get the dreaded DSL. The library doesn't let me blog past 8:30 p.m. and I just discovered they play "rockabye and goodnight" come 8:15 p.m., which is about as PNW as anything I've ever come across.

Found a great place to rollerblade in Westport. Why isn't there an English word for "malecón?" Boardwalk doesn't cut it — a malecon need not be made of boards and goes alongside the sea, not into it. If you think of the English term that fits, let me know.

I will drop pics of the insanely beautiful drive to Westport I took; it's the kind of drive that makes you feel like God has blessed you with his own hand to see the cows and the sea all in the same viewspace. I'm sure they have these moments and particular ken of vistae in urban America or even Kansas, but I feel like I live in the best place in the whole world in the PNW.

Man, that lullaby stuff is distracting. Oh, it's "Simple Gifts." What kind of message is that sending? Tis a gift to have free library access? Yes, indeedy.

I have more randomness — including a disparaging discourse on the way BBC actors (especially the older ones) kiss. Ew! Just watch their faces go totally slack as they lean in toward each other. It's enough to make you want to "get sick," as the Limeys would say, all over yourself. Or just feel sorry for the whole of BBC-watching Britannia, with such a model of passion-free "snogging," as they might say. All Brits who read this be aware that you have some very hot snoggers among you who I'd name if "Simple Gifts" weren't playing and the librarian wasn't lurking around me, but BBC needs to hold an older actor not disgusting kiss workshop.

Maybe I'm too American, demanding titillation. Well, I gots the cable now, so there I go.

Moving day(s)

It came and went on what had to be the hottest two days ever in the harbor. It hit over 90 Friday before Labor Day and got about there on Saturday, which was when future-movers Carrie, John and Michael decided to put in a little sweat investment (moving studio furnishings to studio apartment) for a large sweat dividend later on (all will eventually be moving into houses of their own within the next few months).

John is a champion big truck backer-upper. He credits his mirrors for helping him get in a space with mere inches on either side.

Carrie and I moved the small stuff while Michael and John moved the big stuff, cashing in our estrogen cards. The thing is, the big stuff (two bookcases and the futon) was too big for the elevator while the small stuff wasn't.

They wouldn't even let me pay for dinner. Which was the extremely reasonable price of $33 including, I think, three beers.

Right now my apartment looks a little like a U-haul barfed in it. I got it tidy enough for Hugh and Jan to come over while I attempted to fix Hugh's computer. Let me say that it was far, far beyond my ability to fix. But I got him to learn how to do regular maintenance and never to respond to a prompt that he doesn't know exactly what it means. And I got a burger at Billy's out of it.

My arms and shoulders are tired of lifting things. More than the furniture, it's the stuff. The seemingly endless parade of marching with boxes of books or armloads of hanging clothes or bags of food that need to be moved. Then there is the stuff I needed to get to be complete — a garbage can, a dish scrubber (oh, man am I going to miss that dishwasher at Mike's. I mean it) a toilet brush, hooks for the closet and bathroom door. I really never want to move again at this point.

I guess I should get cable and internet service started. Funny, but there's a part of me that has grown accustomed to relying on the library and netflix and other people for entertainment. Of course, if I want to find out which sexy doctor (one of brains, the other with animals both big and small) Meredith Grey picks, I'll have to spring for it fairly soon. Man I watch some embarrassing television.

More Aberdeen OMG

Today in the library I was given an air assault by a serial farter. Big, trumpety wet ones, too. What is the matter with people!

I will get my apartment key next week and then I have to find willing/able movers on labor day weekend. I don't think that's going to work out, for some reason.

I am loving the heck out of Aberdeen so far. I described it in an email today as a honeymoon stage situation, where everything is new and all the articles are good and the personality quirks haven't gotten to either of us yet (except the gassiness of the library patrons. Seriously, people!) and we have yet to argue about anything. And that's kind of where I am right now.

My new place will be on the fourth floor of an older building, facing the bay. It's very cool. It's also a little bit smaller than my old space, so I'm ruminating on either getting rid of stuff or putting a bookcase in the small, narrow kitchen.

Another reason to love Aberdeen: Good electronics mojo. For the first time I don't have to get up and adjust the connection between the cable and the TV; the cable that sends the signals from the VCR, that is. Maybe it's because I put the VCR next to the TV instead of under. I have no idea. It's very nice to not have to decide if I want to get up and fix it or see if I can wait it out.

Because I have no cable, I am relying on Netflix, the DVD rental place of champions. Right now I'm watching "Rome," which is all the stuff they SHOULD tell you in seventh grade Latin classes. Actually, I'm pretty sure Florence mostly did (there's some pretty raunchy stuff (there is, where I'm at in the series, a completely gratuitous lesbian subplot, and that seems to be the way the BBC and HBO people like it) and hard-core suggested violence in the series), as you kind of can't avoid it when people like Herodotus wrote most of the history of the place and you had historic exemplars like Caligula ruling you. But it's fun to be reminded without the middle school atmosphere and grueling tests.

I still miss TV, but I'm doing okay without complete access to it, I guess.

Blogging difficulty

It's hard to blog when you don't have your own internet access. Getting to the library is a pain, but it is nothing compared to the agony I feel at not being able to check out more than three items at a time until I get a real residential address. There are books out there, people. Books that need to be read. By me.

I had my first actual story published yesterday (I don't count the Fair story because, well, everybody has to write about the fair). It was about the local gospel mission looking to raise money to fix itself up. You would not believe the amount of stuff to be stored in their building. The tour I took just made this anti-clutterbug freak out a little, to the point where the woman giving me a tour commented how overwhelmed I looked (today, at the women's facility nearby, which isn't quite as packed but also has lots of stuff in it). At any rate, I heard today that I got an ovation for the story from a local group that was getting a presentation about the mission's fundraising. Best of all, my editor/publisher was there.

I feel markedly unproductive compared to some of my coworkers, notable Steven F., who puts out copy like it was going out of style. He had three stories on the fair on his day to go and managed to crank out four or some ridiculous number today. I know I've only been there a week, but sheesh, I feel like a slug.

But I don't like to talk too much about work on my blog. It's inside baseball to you guys.

Instead, to the tragedy of forwarded mail. Apparently it takes two weeks for the Post office to collect, then, in one big bunch, forward your mail. And I have a Netflix DVD in there, so this is a money-wasting proposition for me. Especially since I won't have cable until next month. I also have a bank statement and a $50+ discrepancy between my checkbook and Quicken registers that is making me bonkers. I never have that big a discrepancy. And with all my free time I've had, what with no TV, I still can't parse where I have messed up. I am a little anal-retentive, so this is causing me a little distress. Not as much as the frozen enchiladas in green sauce I had the other night (they were much more like tamales, in my estimation, and the salt just about knocked me out), but some none the less.

I also found another NPR low-talker that enrages me. Public Radio International, anyway: Sarah Fishko. An occassional commentator for "On The Media," her low, un-enunciated to the extreme voice tends to forget that there are such things as consonents and vowels that are not pronounced as schwas. My iTunes will only turn up so loud, Sarah. You have to do some of the work here for me. I have an auditory processing learning disability, for pete's sake. It's very hard to go from the joys of enthusiastic but appropriate Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone to "the fish. Ko." (and yes, Meegan, I do feel an extra affection for Ann Taylor knowing that she makes her clothes in such a way that they fit me well and I can get them cheap at the Supermall).

Any more gripes? Anyone who got an email from my mom saying that I "razz"ed her about her weight should be aware that that is not totally true. I was supportive. Up to a point. People, I can only give you loving care and tender words that you poop on for so long before I start trying another tack. Negativity is the enemy of fitness, physical or mental.

Speaking of not accepting or understanding one's body and its potential, in this month's issue of Vanity Fair (sorry, no link to the story) there is a really deluded article about plastic surgery by Alex Kucinsky (sp? of the NYT). It's deluded because although it purports to be her talking about how she was such an addict to it (and hence not deluded anymore) there's this veneer of rich-white-person priviledge just oozing out of every sentence. Like it was cool to go for weekly microdermabrasion and laser treatments, but getting fat sucked out of her butt was really transgressive or not part and parcel of the same ridiculous, expensive trap of the Beauty Myth of the fountain of youth. And then she moans how she had to work from home for a couple of days after an (illegal!) injection of Restylane made her lip swell up. See, without "Reno 911" I end up buying magazines that disturb me (don't even get me started on "Real Simple." That is the apogee of American consumer faux-minimalism cognitive dissonance, and for a teensy example, it has a recipe for a "rustic peach tart" that includes a frozen pie crust!! This is supposed to be about the good life, food porn! Why the pre-made pie crust? And I'm not even going into why they offer up $500 "storage solution" bookshelves when they're allegedly promoting a simple lifestyle). I need cable. I need Jon Stewart and Louis Black. I need little, plucky Veronica Mars. I need those crazy Cylons. TV makes so much more sense than magazines, you have to be the stupidest snob ever to read magazines and ditch the TV.

Where was I going with this? Oh, I was trying to be positive.

Went to a sandwich shop in a year-round farmer's market today. I can get fresh-baked pies for $10 with farm-grown rhubarb, strawberries and other NW berries. I cannot be positive enough about carbs. Luscious, sweet carbs.

Also, the Hoquiam library is a gorgeous old building courtesy of Andrew Carnegie, tiny Scots-born robber baron. It is packed with Elton Bennet screens, and artist I really dig who hails from Hoquiam.

At any rate, more pics and grumbles (and maybe some nice things to say) later.

Aberdeen, OMG

So things are different here. I'm sitting in the library, using the WiFi, minding my own business, and some joker burps. Big, long, rowdy burping. Twice. Now he's farting. Oh the humanity.

The library isn't quite the promised land of quick hold gets that the Andrews-Strpinis family promised. I am 82nd in line for "Fiasco," and I can't quite seem to get holds on anything else. One hold at a time? Software bug? I don't know.

In other weirdness news, I washed a load in Michael's house's washer (where I'm staying until my apt. is ready to be moved into) and found a pair of panties from the previous owner.

This town has some openess issues.

And Tacoma was so nice when I left it. My landlord didn't prorate me for the week I stayed there this month, and didn't even bother to do a walkthrough. When I told her I couldn't get the scunge off the stove inserts, she waved it off and told me not to worry about it. Sigh. That makes three topics I'm too biased to write fairly about: the YMCA, Les Schwab tires (a Northwest chain, they lent me a tire when I bought chains in LaGrande, Ore. on my trip up and the guy who helped me put them on (without the $10 they usually charge to put chains on for a customer) noticed they were about to go) and any property owned by John Peranzi.

So there you go.

Unspeakable cruelty for your amusement

Pop on a pig in Pike Place Market.



Mom enjoying the ride on the Walla Walla.

And the cruelest picture:



Mom and Dad eating at Salumi. So gnarly to post eating pictures of your parents. I am a bad daughter.

Mom and Dad come for a visit

Well, the stupidest thing that happened is I didn't get a picture of them with Hugh and Janice. I suppose we were having such a nice time at dinner that it never came up.

But anyway. Mom and dad were good enough to sleep on an air mattress in my teensy apartment, and Friday morning we piled out to Bremerton to catch a ferry to Seattle.



Here's dad waiting. He and mom were so nervous about getting tickets. Silly parents! You just walk on as a passenger going east! It was a lovely day for a ferry ride, and mom decided when she gets old she'd just like to ride a ferry all the time. They are nice boats.

We ate at Salumi, which was just as good as everyone says. Mom hit up all the bookstores in Pioneer Square minus Elliott Bay Books, which is so big and so full of good books I was nervous we'd lose her for good if she went there. We missed out on the Underground Tour because mom was overheated and had to stand too long for her sandwich. I thought this would mean she was completely out of shape but a few days later I took her to the Supermall and she wore me totally out in the commercial hiking endurance test.



We also went to Ocean Shores, part of the figuring out where Callie is going to live come her move thing. It was cold, windy and there was a lot of trash on the beach. Plus you can park there. When I tell folks I'm moving to Aberdeen, they get all excited about being near the beach. They tell me, on occassion, that I can now learn to surf. Well, I have done a Polar Bear jump and I'm pretty sure the water isn't any warmer in the Pacific than Puget Sound. Growing up on the east coast and having grandparents from Florida has spoiled me completely for any other beach. I am not sure I can even mentally handle the idea of surfing in the Pacific Northwest. I feel so cold ... so ... cold.

I will put up more pics as I find them. I have a humdinger of dad on the pig at Pike Place Market somewhere.

The gift of a motto, courtesy "Miami Vice"

I have begun the Ultimate Purge of my apartment, which will culminate tonight in an orgy of clip-reducing. I have, seriously, about three bags and boxes full of clips I need to cut out, sort through and organize. Also some award plaques and stuff. Funnily, about two years ago I bought an organization system for them, which lies empty in the closet as well. Better late than never, and maybe this time I can keep it updated weekly (yeah, right). Already I have gotten shed of a bunch of junk that's been needing to be gotten shed of.

One of the pieces of paper I need to purge is a press invite to Miami Vice (if anyone wants to go tomorrow I've got a pass!) which is so hilariously written I feel the need to share key elements of it.

First, we start off with the sentence, "Ricardo Tubbs (Academy Award [and here they use the circled r but I think that's bogus] winner Jamie Foxx) is urbane and dead smart." Not that urbane and smart are synonyms or anything. "He lives with Bronx-born intel analyst Trudy, played by British actress Naomie Harris, as they work undercover transporting drug loads into South Florida to identify a group responsible for three murders." Okay, Bronx-born intel analyst played by a Briton (but I'll buy that she's in Fla., although I think that's a lot of unnecessary backstory for "Trudy"). That is hilarious. And they're doing this dangerous work to ... identify a group responsible for THREE LOUSY MURDERS??? Maybe they should use their analysis skills and taste for danger to, I don't know, find Al-freaking-Qaeda? When is the last time the cops cared enough about drug killings that they invested like that in a case? Since when is a drug-related killing really that difficult to solve, come to think of it?

Anyway, Michael Mann's people continue thusly: "Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) is charismatic and flirtatious [which are not synonyms or anything] until — while undercover working with the supplier of the South Florida group [wait, isn't that who Tubbs and Trudy are working with? They are shipping drug loads, right? So they're working together already? What?] — he gets romantically entangled with Isabella, the Chinese-Cuban [ROTFLMAO] wife of an arms and drug trafficker. Isabella is played by Gong Li." What? Gong Li? "Raise the Red Lantern," "Shanghai Triad," "Ju Dou" Gong Li? Playing a Chinese-Cuban? She is the most classically Chinese beauty in the world which, I have to say, has a great deal to do with her popularity.

I also love how the whole of the backstory is laid out in ridiculous, willing suspension of disbelief-killing prose. But then we come to the film's philosophy. To wit:

"The best undercover identity is oneself with the volume turned up and restraint unplugged."

This may become my new motto.

"The intensity of this case pushes Crockett and Tubbs out onto the edge where identity and fabrication become blurred, where cop and player become one [this sounds suspiciously like the interpretation of a Gender Studies 101 student] — especially for Crockett in his romance with Isabella and for Tubbs in the provocation of an assault on those he loves." First of all, thanks for getting super literal, I needed that. And second of all, thanks for introducing the idea that Tubbs has more than one person who he either attacks or provokes to get attacked. Were these people his mixed-race lesbian couple of aged aunts who raised him with seven other babies of assorted other races and accent provinences when his parents died in a car crash during a freak snowstorm in Tampa? I don't think there was enough goofy-ass backstory provided.

At any rate, remember: The best undercover identity is oneself with the volume turned up and restraint unplugged. Especially if you are an undercover cop, because Lord knows people attracted to cop work are never the slightest bit upstanding or legalistic or pragmatic or any other personality trait that might not be appropriate while doing undercover work to turn up the volume on.

Seriously, how can this movie not rock.

Last day at the Gateway rockin' the spot

Well, wouldn't you knw that my last day at the paper the biggest story in my two years of working the city hall beat came down. The city administrator got the announcement of his sacking sent out over the email. And I had a 9:30 a.m. meeting with a guy from Aberdeen who seems oddly amenable to the idea of me crashing in his (as yet unlived-in) house. So Kalyn and I were forced to collaborate. Poor kid has to take over the city beat with the Lifestyles and the education beats for at least the next couple of weeks. And isn't this the best time for stuff to be hitting the ceiling. She already had an emotional moment after talking to above-mentioned administrator; I told her (and I ended up telling him) my first day doing the city beat, and talking to that administrator, I just wept my little eyes out, but everything got a lot better quickly. That's right, people. I pulled a Mary Tyler Moore in the newsroom before. And he's not so bad. In fact, he told me I failed to meet his exceedingly low expectations to become one of his favorite reporters, and, yes, he's got us all ordinally ranked and I'm not number one (or two) but I'd rather not be any source's favorite reporter they dealt with ever. Except maybe some of my feature-y sources.

At any rate, my last day went down with some spot news. And, as I rushed to get comments and interviews, I realized, "hell yeah, I love this adrenaline deadline shiznit!" Which bodes well for the Daily World. Spot news, baby. I rock ALL the spots, call all the shots.

It's official

I'm leaving the Gateway for the Aberdeen Daily World.

I don't know what the hell I'm thinking either. Oh, wait. Daily paper, more money, I'll still be independent, managers who get my writing ... it'll be hard leaving my Tacoma community, but it's about time to move onward and upward.

In the meantime, I've kind of given myself an extremely rigid deadline for finding a place to live and move into. Oops. And I'm stressing to get all my work stuff done. Oops.

In better news, I get to judge a chocolate baking contest at the Key Peninsula Fair tomorrow.

Also, I made a delicious bread pudding. Here's what went into it:

Almost a whole loaf of banana bread (largish loaf) that had dried up a bit.
three egg yolks
one egg
two cups milk
one cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
vanilla
nutmeg

cut the bread up and put it in a glass casserole. Buttering the casserole is optional.

mix all the other ingredients, minus the vanilla and nutmeg, until blended. Then mix in the vanilla and nutmeg. Pour the custard over the bread. Let sit 30 minutes, then bake at 350 for 45 minutes covered, 15 mins uncovered.

The recipes called for bananas to be sliced up and layered with the bread, but that just seemed unnecessary to me. Also for a rum sauce to be made (rum, water, brown sugar and butter cooked together). If I could have changed anything I might have added an extra 1/2 cup of cream and milk mixed to extend the custard a bit.

But dang, it was good. Also I had two pieces of cake today (it was for my going away and said "Good Luck Lois At The Daily Planet," which is funny because I keep calling the DW the DP, and because I've always been a little obsessed with superheroes as journalists) and a pack of Reese's cups and a margarita and chips, so after tomorrow it's all salad and whole grains for a while. I'm a little strung-out on the sugar.

I want to get a place to live with a functioning oven so I can make banana bread and banana bread pudding. Yum.

Tacoma celebrates freedom with fights

So I went down to the Freedom Fair on Ruston on the Fourth of July during the day. What a crowd. I was simultaneously sorry I didn't bring a camera and glad I wouldn't have to worry about losing it in the crush of people.

As a Philly girl and civics nerd, I am perpetually disappointed by Freedom Fairs that do not feature a Benjamin Franklin reenactor or, in any case, pay tribute to our forefathers and their incredible wisdom and bravery in creating both the Declaration of Independence, the best breakup letter ever written, and the Constitution. Most celebrations are not unlike the Freedom Fair, gauche fair food for miles and stupid trinkets for sale like rip-off beanie babies and Ren Faire-style clothes. Freedom to stuff our faces and bloat out and buy clutter and shake our fat bellies like we're seductive, that's what the FF was all about.

And there were fat bellies. To the FF's credit, there was markedly less camel toe than at the Gig Harbor Maritime Gig. At least on this side of the bridge women are more inclined to wear clothes that fit. Not that they are necessarily good clothes. I saw one enormous woman in an unfortunate skin-tight tank top with an very very skinny T-back that showed an expansive tattoo of birds and flowers and skulls across her upper haunches, for example, and a man with a shirt that said, "If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong," which I just found unnecessarily arrogant and abrasive.

Perhaps the oddest shirt I saw was not being worn but was for sale, printed with an old tinotype of a Native American with a shotgun that said "The Original Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492." I just wondered if the vendor had any idea how that sentiment went along with 7/4.

Tacoma gets some pretty crappy vendors. The air show was pretty cool, though it got loud when the fighter planes came out from McChord and I turned around for home. The most interesting set up was a drum circle with additional drums so anyone can join in. Tacoma is not exactly Seattle when it comes to drum circle enthusiasm. Which is kind of cute when you see a couple of hippie types playing while little kids who are not theirs join in. But it seemed that the drum circle instigators were aware that Tacoma is not, indeed, a Seattle-esque city because they had a sign on some nice posterboard with multi-colored shiny paste-on letters that said, "TACOMA IS A PRAYING CITY." That cracked me up. Another sign, in marker this time, said, "STAY in SCHOOL," a message I found to be at odds with the typical drum circler lifestyle.

The plan was to go to the McMillans for their annual Fourth blowout. I was a little sweaty from walking about six miles, but I figured I was okay, I whipped up a Mrs. Cole's Congealed Salad (aka white trash salad: mix one container cottage cheese with one container Cool Whip, a drained can of crushed pineapple, a big handful of walnuts or pecans and a package of red Jell-o and keep cool) and headed out for the Key Peninsula in remarkably light traffic.

Well, that insured that I missed the riots that broke out later. And CNN, the Discovery Channel and USA Today have all called Freedom Fair one of the best tourist draws for family activity in the U.S. What. Ever. Seriously, scroll down on that first link.

"Police got reports about 9 p.m. of fights involving 150 to 200 people near Jack Hyde Park. Surrounding the fights were a couple of thousand people," reported the TNT. I figure they had had enough Andean music. How many times can a person listen to "El Condor Pasa" and "Llorando Se Fue," anyhow? Criminy that stuff was playing when I got there and when I left more than an hour later at Hyde Park. And I say this as a fan of Andean tunes.

Hugh's was calm until Cameron started setting off fireworks and one of the festival balls blew up in the container after failing to pop into the air. Good times.

So today I went to the library to return some books and as I was walking back heard a commotion from Wright Park. Apparently it was Out at the Park day, which I never would have known was going on if I relied on the entertainment section of my local daily.

Again, missing my camera. All the local drag queens were there, most of them looking hott. There's this one older DQ who wears a trashy take off on a poodle skirt and lace collared shirt ensemble, I have seen him before. But not the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who give away condoms and popsicles. They were awesome, with their habits and fake eyelashes tipped with beads. I also liked the Dockyard Dames booth, a roller derby team I briefly considered joining but didn't want to drive to Lakewood for. But there were more social service booths than anything and they're kind of boring.

No fights, though.

I swear as I left I heard a guy say, "The best thing is people can't tell when I'm drunk because I have Cerebral Palsy," but I could have been wrong because, well, he had Cerebral Palsy.

I've about had it with NPR low talkers

I listen to the NPR podcasts while doing my morning Sudoku and I've about had it with:

MEE-shell Norris
Sarah Fishko
Joanne Silberner
Scott Simon (except when he laughs and then he's loud)
That chick with the thick, plummy Irish-y accent on "On The Media." Blow your nose, you horrible woman. (I don't think she works there any more, but man I hate her voice)
Melissa Block
Lakshmi Singh
Bob Boilen

The worst thing about low-talking is not just that these horrible people let their voices trail off into nothing at the end of a sentence, but that their mumblemouth ways get grafted onto the people they are interviewing! Especially when they are interviewing the naturally quiet, such as museum curators, artists, musicians and librarians, who get a lot more NPR time than most professions. More horrifying, Scott Simon and MEE-shell Norris are about the worst of all, and they're hosts! The only thing Simon does with any volume or distinction is laugh at dumb jokes, often his own. And when I hear Michelle Norris mumble her way through and interview, her voice sliding down as if it were slipping away underwater, I feel like she's playing hide and seek with the listener. I can only crank up the volume so much on my Mac. It is the opposite of soothing. Melissa Block is her voice clone. Joanne Silberner sounds like she needs to blow her nose, too.

I guess they can't all be Liane Hansen. I don't know why she's religated to the Puzzle Patrol with Will Shortz, who has a fine voice himself for announcing.

Other good voices:

Brooke Gladstone
Bob Garfield
Sylvia Poggioli
Jim Zarroli
Don Gonyea
Ann Taylor
Steve Inskeep
Daniel Schorr, even if he has old-man-screamy voice on occasion and is kind of nuts

I just couldn't hold it in any longer. Norris and Simon are horrible talkers who drag their interviewees down into the sonic netherworld with them — their questions trail off into nothingness and their interviewees kind of tend to talk way the hell down at the unintelligible range with them. This is a shame. I demand they be dosed with caffeine. Otherwise people should quit emailing their stories so they don't make the podcast. They sound like they're jockeying for positions on the Ketchup Advisory Board. Maybe I'm just saying this because of my auditory processing disability.

In other inadequately functioning sense organ news, I finished reading my first large print book. It was unintentional; I put a hold on Robert Baer's "See No Evil" (after watching "Syriana," which was good, but not satisfying or particularly coherent) and apparently the library only carries this book oldie-style. You really feel like you're zipping right through since there aren't more than 200 words per page. Also, large print books are refreshingly free of a dust jacket, making them easy to handle. However, I have to hold the book about as far as my arms will stretch to approximate a text size approaching normal. Someone should work on developing a readable large print font. That sounds silly but I'm serious — at a certain size all the round bits look alike. You know those fifth grade girls with the bubble writing? It's like that. Or maybe that's just because I can see.

R.I.P. Shelby

Shelby was a good dog. He was kind of hyper as a young dog and eccentric as an old dog, but he was good. He wasn't patient unless you count how he'd beg for scraps — or how he'd lie down and rest all day next to you when you were feeling puny. He wasn't smart unless you count that time he dug a whole big bar of dark chocolate out of a bag on the floor and hid it behind dad's computer to snack on when he felt like it (thank goodness I busted him before he managed to eat more than a sliver of it). He was loyal except that if he ever got loose he'd really make a break for it and you had to catch him fast. He always cleaned up if you dropped food you were cooking on the floor unless it was onion or celery or some other vegetable. He was a good dog.

Shelby had a stroke yesterday, and that was pretty much it for him. The vet put him down and Doug and mom were there. He'd been having fits, and apparently he'd had some weird, sad behaviors the weeks and months before he died, so this was something of a blessing, especially with Mom and Dad planning to go out of town today (postponed a little). He didn't die alone, it wasn't painful, he lived a very long life (over 100 in dog years). And now he has gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

I'll miss that little booger.