This morning I walked to the mailbox to toss our stuff in so I took a different route for my walk and I got bit three times by a dog. I wasn't even in the dog's yard -- he ran out of his yard, fangs bared to come get me. Of course I started freaking out while trying to remember what to do when attacked by a dog and I was pretty sure you weren't supposed to start freaking out. It's hard to stand still (advice) when something is jumping on you and biting you and growling at you. Some little girl calls him back and takes him in the house and shuts the door. No "sorry," no "are you okay?" which makes me even more pissed. Since it's cold I had on several layers so none of the bites broke the skin and two of them didn't even make a red mark. There's a tiny red mark on my hand so I suppose I'll survive but I'm still feeling sorry for myself and vindictive towards these people and their mean dog Charlie.

THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MY BIRTHDAY
1. It rained all day. Bucket after bucket. We went for a walk in the morning but good thing because that was the last chance. The gutter on the front of the house is screwed up and creating a large gully in my flowerbed.
2. OMSI: We saw Attack of the Clones on IMAX at OMSI. It was so cool I thought I would cry.
3. MINT: We tried a new restaurant in North Portland industrial area (sorta?). I tried a Splash: tequilla, mandarin puree, lemon lime juice and a float of amaretto. I could imagine drinking a bucket of these. We tried a bunch of stuff, I wish I was better at names. I had a spicy soup with lobster broth and mussels and prawns that was fabulous and we shared a dessert of spiced apple flan. It was a fantastic birthday.

Well, starting in on 24 wasn't such a great idea. All I want to do is glue my butt to the couch and keep watching. I'm doling it out to myself. I watch an episode, then I do something from my list. I just answered back all my snail mail correspondence so now it's time for another episode.

I'm still coughing and gagging but I got a decent night's sleep and exercised this morning. I think I'm about 48 hours away from optimum health.

Bob gave me Collected Screenplays 1 by Ethan and Joel Coen for xmas printed by Faber and Faber Ltd in the UK -- one of our favorite publishers. The intro by Roderick Jaynes is hilarious (yes, I'm in on the joke). My favorite line is when he describes the explanation of Barton Fink as "crushingly tedious." You have to read the whole essay to get the full flavor.

Joe Strummer died. How tragic and unfair is that?

We're back from Cali and a fantastic time was had by all. I ate roughly 100 times my body weight in a matter of several days and my exercise program went out the window between the rush for writing class, the weather, and the travel. Once you let that momentum go, inertia rushes in. I think that's an oxymoron and probably defies principles of physics, but it happens to be true. I made the Cook's Illustrated shrimp Creole gumbo recipe and it rocked on 10 planets. Everyone thought so. I can't wait to make it again. I also made a big breakfast strata and brought up a basket of lunch meat and wurst from the German deli. Mom made 4 kinds of cookies, all my favorites and any time there was tasting to be done, I had to eat one of each. Let me just emphasize that no one went hungry.

The drive down was perfect weather: clear and sunny. The drive home consisted of grey, hard rain continuously from Happy Camp to Albany but no snow on the pass which was nice. We were prepared for the worst.

I'm recovering from a nasty cold. I have zero patience when other people complain about their colds, but man, a cold is so rotten. And I couldn't sleep because of all the gagging, phlegmy coughing so yesterday we bought a cough suppressant which had something in it that kept me awake. At least I wasn’t coughing. I managed to finish all the reading in the drawer and half of Lee Maracle’s book Will’s Garden. We’re still unpacking stuff and cleaning up, doing laundry, restocking the fridge, etc. We got the boxed set of 24 for xmas and I broke that open. I suspect I will be glued to the screen for some time.

Pam Newsletter 2002 is up.

It could probably use some editing and tweaking but I don't have the energy right now so this is what you get. Enjoy.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog -- sometimes when I'm feeling challenged by life and I want something to make me feel better I think about a bucket of chocolate chip cookie dough and a bottle of chardonney. Well, this led to a discussion with my co-worker and we thought about other cookie doughs and the logical wine pairing. An oatmeal and raisin cookie dough would probably call for a red, maybe a pinot noir. For snickerdoodle maybe a riesling. A sugar cookie perhaps a zinfandel. But what about a peanut butter cookie? We didn't come up for one with that. I'd lean towards a red but I'm anxious to hear what you'd recommend.

Okay -- PamNewsletter STILL isn't done. I keep saying I'm going to finish it tonight and never seem to get to it. Tonight I can't find the pictures I picked out. I'm afraid I stuck them in a book and probably returned it to the library or stuck it in my bookshelves which means I'll never find it. I am drinking wine from my Strider goblet from Fellowship of the Ring last year. Saw Two Towers on Wednesday (I keep wanting to call it "Episode 2") and it was completely awesome. I liked it so much that I was half way through watching it and I was already excited about seeing it again. Really.

I think this is my record since I started this -- two weeks and no blog. It was one of those weeks where all kinds of things went wrong at more or less the same time. I've had a small leak in the window in my room (the one that those rocket scientists at Home Despot installed for me) on and off ever since it was installed but it was minor and stopped right away so I never felt any urgency about dealing with it. Of course this week it's raining like crazy and I woke up and the window was leaking and I put a towel on the window sill and I could wring it out a half hour later. So now I'm concerned and I tried to fix it myself and found something in the shop that said you could use it to seal things and I found something called a caulking gun but after wrestling with it for 15 minutes the stuff game out in giant non-spreadable gobs and I had to give up. St. Alan of Alan and Crystal was kind enough to come over at 9am to get on a ladder in the rain and look at it and came up with a temporary fix.

I got home that night and there had been a power surge and the VCR was fried. That didn't stop me from plugging in the VCR and trying again every half hour, just in case it randomly became unfried. I was taping TAKEN which I thought I would watch after I finished my class but with no VCR I was screwed. I don't know what we're going to do -- we had the same VCR for over 10 years and now seem to go through one a year. I just dropped a big pile of cash on a new vacuum and it's the holidays so I'm not in the mood to buy another VCR at the moment.

I turned in my final project for my class on Saturday Dec 14. I didn't think I could get it done since I only had 48 pages on Dec 7 and the minimum would be around 90 but I was extremely motivated and managed to get to 86. It's not pretty but it has a beginning, a middle and an end and it's just a first draft so I'm happy. But meanwhile I basically abandoned the rest of my life while I was working on it so I have a lot to do right now. I spent yesterday being a total slacker -- read my book: Leslie Marmon Silko, Garden in the Dunes and went to see Harry Potter. I caught up on about 1/2 of the emails I had lounging around collecting electronic dust in my email box. I still have plenty of other projects sitting around here that need attention.

I forgot the main thing I wanted to blog about which is the inane and endless commercials we have to sit through when we go to the movies. I swear there are 20 minutes of commercials and trailers which should not be allowed. What I learned from these commercials is that apparently the world is waiting for a Volvo SUV -- like there's a big shortage of oversized cars available to the Amercian consumer and in this commercial, when you drive in your shiny silver Volvo SUV you get to see mythical things like Loch Ness and unicorns and Elvis. The Dad didn't get to see anything or did I miss that part. What does that mean? The even more annoying commercial is for Diet Coke and has all these too-pretty yuppie geeks skipping around saying stuff like "flirt" "giggle" "canoodle" which sound stupid even when pretty people are saying it and the slogan is "do what feels great" and then the commercial glaringly omits things that feel great like eating a bucket of chocolate chip cookie dough and drinking a bottle of chardonnay.

Nice weekend. We kept Thanksgiving dinner simple. Priscilla came over. We had salmon and pumpkin pie (yes, punky) and some other things. It was all delicious.

I spent most of the weekend hunched over the computer working on my project for my writing class. The idea is to have a first draft by the end of class (Dec 14) and I was a little misdirected when I started so I had to backtrack and scrap about 10 pages and before that I was tweaking with the outline forever so I was already way behind but I cranked all weekend and I'm on page 51 which might be only halfway but I feel pretty good about it -- not that it's brilliant writing. It's very first drafty - but I feel like I'm moving forward. I started my writing the minute I got up (at 6am) and I didn't stop to eat or make a hot drink or any other distraction until after Noon each day. Yesterday I didn't even eat until 3:30pm. Not wildly fun but the method works for me. By the afternoon I was fried and tried to do things that didn't involve computers or reading.

We saw two movies: Frida which was fabulous -- I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I thought the story was more of a bummer and it was going to a long tortured artist movie with her throwing crockery at her self-absorbed husband. She was tortured and things were thrown but really, it was good. We also saw Solaris which I didn't hate. I'm not sure what I think about it. It was an interesting movie and which dealt with some heavy topics but I'm not sure the ending worked for me. I also watched my tape of Skinwalkers which was fabulous.

I'm going to try to crank out a quick Holiday Newletter this week -- we'll see if I can cram in the time.