Bridal Shower Gift

More classics from the Party Book



What more can I add? I had to look up excelsior and turns out it's something called "wood wool" or what you'd probably call packing material.

Here's the biggest tomato

Clarion West Write-A-Thon Week 1 Progress Report

(My spellcheck wants to correct it to: write-a-ton. ha!)

Info about the Write-a-Thon here and Clarion West Writeathon Page.

My goal is 3000 words a week and 2 story submissions during the six weeks as in sending something finished to a market. Week one really ended yesterday and this is my progress as of then.

Word count: 3655
Stories submitted: 0 (not to panic, still lots of time)

If you still want to contribute, it's not too late. My donation page is here or there's an address to send checks at the URL above or you can contact me and I'll help you out.

I have an incredibly busy week coming up and won't make it home before 7pm except for the night I don't make it home before 9pm.

I'm scanning some stuff from the party book for short posts. The whole book is so awesome, it's tough to choose.

Father's Day Weekend Wrap Up



Klamath River looking downriver from Ishi Pishi Road.

I had this thing open on the desktop all day yesterday and couldn't get it together to finish and post. I wasn't in the mood to do anything yesterday. Even watch TV.

I woke up at 6am and couldn't get back to sleep. Why do I always wake up at 6 on my day off? I got up and made a cup of tea and started to read and then my eyes felt a bit droopy. I woke up at 9am. Among the most brilliant naps of all time.

I finally dragged my butt out of bed and took care of a few errands. I made granola and watered the yard. I have a tomato bigger than a golf ball out there. Photo and endless nattering about it to follow.



Me and the fraidy cat reading Asimov's. Shy Boy was a feral cat who is partly domesticated. Whenever I arrive he hides and runs away if he sees me. Until he randomly decides it's safe to crawl in my lap and bug me.

My inbox is completely out of control. Everything in there is something I need to do and for every 5 I clear out, 5 new ones arrive. Actually the whole house seems like a bunch of things I need to do or problem solving activities.



Vandals hit the Panamnik Building. They broke a window in the post office and then tore this sign all apart. Dad thought he could fix it but they did a good job of destroying it. It was an exciting weekend. Someone got shot four times in the leg. "Oh, so it wasn't an accident?" I said. Someone else drove off the road.

The trip to California was a big hit. We managed to do a little bit of everything. Thursday night falafel feed. Meredith and Aunt Janet made about 3000 falafels and there were plenty of leftovers. When the crew gets there in August there will be falafel for everyone.



Giant chestnut tree at Grandma's place falls apart during a wind storm. Apparently it made a lot of noise when the limb, which is bigger than a lot of trees, came down.

Erin and I went down to Grandma's place and took a long walk that included picking cherries. We filled our pockets.



Brush Dance

The brush dance starts at sundown and goes all night and the last dance is early in the morning. I went for a couple of hours when it started and then went back with Mom and Erin in the morning.



Old Timer's Parade

After the dance we went back home to make Dad a father's day breakfast and then we went to the Old Timer's parade. I hate parades except for this one. And the Bigfoot parade in Willow Creek.



Bigfoot Parade from 2005

After the parade was the Old Timer's picnic. All the fried chicken, deviled eggs and potato salad you can eat. Then there was a softball game.

Excellent trip.



The beautiful Sinead in her dance dress. Those girls dance all night in a dress that weighs about 40 pounds.

We've just returned from the farmer's market. The weather is perfect plus there's some sort of festival going on at the park so there were millions of people, strollers and dogs and I had enough rather quickly.

I'm trying to get organized here. It seems like everything I try to do involves something that is broken, lost or not working right. I had two simple projects. One involved two nails and one involved two screws and those took about an hour and I made a ding in the wall. Oh well, I'm sure I have many other fine qualities.

Also today: catching up on my beg-a-thon goal. I'll update that tomorrow.

Look at this stinker dog.

Party at MKWC. I called my Mom from Grants Pass and said I was on the way. She said there was a falafel feed and I said, I know, I read it on Facebook. The first person I saw when I went into the building said, "Are you Erin's sister?" Then he was embarrassed like, "what was I thinking?" And I laughed and said, "Yes, I'm Erin's sister." Then I ran into Nancy and she said, "I knew you were coming, I read it on Facebook."

I normally don't comment on current events but WTF? Farrah and Michael Jackson? And while we were at happy hour the apparent hoax about Jeff Goldblum came in.

What the hell? I haven't been an MJ fan for years but Off the Wall was a huge part of my life during high school. (Go Chargers gymnastics team!) I gotta download that puppy from itunes.

Awesome trip. Got back this afternoon and I've been unloading and cleaning up.

Hung out in the garden long enough to bring in the first wave of the raspberry crop.

I'm not sure if I'm going to make a pie or use them in a topping for ice cream.



I'm not sure what we're doing dinner this week but I bet there will be peas.

We're off to a dinner. More at some point in the future.

View downriver from the access road to Dolans Bar, Klamath River, Orleans, California

BEG-A-THON!

I'm on my way out town (as soon as I bathe, pack, make lunch, put away laundry, burn some CDs for the car, go to Trader Joes, the bank, Toyota, and Edelweiss German Deli) for a long weekend and I almost completely forgot to post about the Clarion West Writeathon that starts on Sunday.

I sent out a notice but if you didn't get one and feel bad that no one asked you for money, here's your big chance to sponsor me for a very good cause. And if you already donated: super huge thank you!

Last summer I attended the workshop. You can read all my adventures here.

The organization that puts on the workshop is Clarion West (non-profit - tons of people donate all kinds of time and energy to make this happen).

My goals for the 6 weeks are to write 3000 words a week and to submit two stories for publication. I've been a big fat chicken about submitting so two stories in six weeks might not sound like much but it's a lot for me. Charlene challenged me to double the words but it's summer dang it. I already work hard, I don't want to spend all my spare summer moments hunched over the keyboard.

I'm asking for sponsorship during the event. I'm going to match donations for the first $200 so if I can get 20 people to sponsor me for $10 (only $10!) I will make my goal of donating $400. And I think I'm close.

If you've ever had a dream of donating money to nerds, this is your big chance. Here's my donation page. If you want to avoid Paypal there are alternate instructions here and if you don't like me there's a huge long list of other writers you can sponsor. Any and all donations are welcome. Even $1. Seriously. This organization thrives on micro-donations. And if you have no money, then nice thoughts are perfectly acceptable.

I'll post weekly reports on what I've been doing.

Huge thanks to everybody everywhere for everything. Have a good weekend.

And They Were All Bees

We have this giant green bush in our front yard and today it was a giant vibrating house of bees. I tried to take a photo but it just looked like a big green bush so I tried this close up. Regular bees don't scare me but I am absurdly terrified of wasps.

I've needed to put the cages on the tomatoes. I normally don't wait this long. One of the plants is getting really bushy. But I was afraid to go into the shed where they are stored because of all the wasps.

I finally bought some sort of earth-destroying spray in a giant yellow can and I went out there early this morning and with trembling hands, shot a high-powered stream of poison foam onto their nest building project. Wow, there is a great opportunity for an inappropriate joke. I think I'm going to let it pass.

Then I screamed like a girl and ran away and went back a couple hours later to find their twitching bodies on the floor of the shed.

I got the cages out and mangled the beautiful tomato plants to get them stuffed in.

The smallest tomato is the one that was growing in the walls of water. The walls didn't contribute much this year.

The greens part of the garden isn't too impressive. Everything is either bolting or getting eaten by what my hippie gardening book calls maggots. I guess it's going to happen to us all someday.

I did pick a boatload of peas today and served them with Prosciutto and pasta. And I put the cucumbers, round two out in the garden.

Every quarter Bob and a group of his colleagues have a party to celebrate the end of the quarter. This time it was at our house so on Friday I decided to go see Star Trek.



I was never a big Star Trek person although I did watch several seasons of The Next Generation and I could probably do a post about that if I can get myself up for it one of these days.

Since the moment the new Star Trek was announced I've been getting headaches from rolling my eyes. I couldn't understand why this had to be remade. I read a lot of sci-fi nerd news online and I would ignore the Star Trek movie as much as I could.

A long time ago there was this movie called Pacific Heights. I'm going to tie this point back to Star Trek so stay with me. The movie stared Melanie Griffiths when she wasn't nearly as annoying and Matthew Modine and they were a cute couple who rented an apartment to Michael Keaton who turned into the crazy psycho tenant from hell.

Michael Keaton played this role so effectively that I completely loathed him and transfered all my bad feelings about his character to him personally. No Michael Keaton movies for me.

But then a couple of years later, I finally got around to seeing Batman — the 1989 version that stared Michael Keaton — there's probably a way I can tie all this endless rebooting of old ideas into new movies again and again in right here but I'm too lazy to do it — and I forgave Michael Keaton. That poor tortured Batman needed a hug.

Returning to the more recent past, I was a huge Heroes fan for about one season and then I thought the show went to complete doodie. And I hated Sylar. I really hated Sylar and when I found out that Sylar was going to be Spock it just confirmed all the reasons why I thought the Star Trek movie was a terrible idea.



But, everyone kept saying the movie was good and here I was at the movies and so I picked Star Trek and I thought is was FREAKING AWESOME. And Spock was so adorable and tortured. I wanted to take him home and bake him cookies and read him a story.

I wasn't sure about the movie at first. I'd be too ashamed to write a scene (inconsequential spoiler) where a pregnant woman is labor right at the exact time the space ship is being evacuated from an attack by a terrible badass. Seriously? But fifteen minutes later I was biting my nails and sitting at the edge of my seat thinking: I can't wait to see it again. *And* Karl "Eomer" Urban! (The wiki says his name is "Karl-Heinz" - If he would just come over and vacuum my house in his underwear I could die a happy woman.)

On that note, I guess it's time to wrap this up. I have a super busy week coming up with some long days and then on Thursday I am rolling out of town to California for a long Internet-free weekend. Posting may be light. We'll see.

Party Book



A couple of months ago I went to a book swap at Camille's and I found this gem. I don't like to collect things, especially things with recipes because I already have too many, but every once in awhile I find an old cookbook with awesome graphics and goofy recipes that I have to take home with me.

This one is copyright 1961 and not only is the party book fun but inside there were clipped magazine recipes and a carefully printed letter on lined newsprint from a youngster that is hilarious. I should have scanned it but I didn't think of it.



The party book has ideas for all kinds of gatherings, Arbor Day parties, gender specific birthday parties, Mother's Day. It's the book that gave me the idea for getting into molded foods.



Speaking of molded foods, in yesterday's Oregonian there's a recipe for a molded food with strawberries, unflavored gelatin and whipped cream. I'd like to link the recipe but I can't find it right now. The recipe says to use ramekins but I'm going to use some of my fancy molds. I'll take pictures.

I'm trying to cut back on my recipe clipping because it's getting ridiculous. Well, it's been ridiculous for quite some time. But look at these recipes for grilled bread. Every summer I vow to master the grill and every summer it's one of those things I never manage to get to. I'm going to clip it anyway because grilled bread would be delicious.

I spent my entire weekend chained to the computer working on a new story. It has a hunting scene and this is the hunting camp I was visualizing. It's at the trailhead to Salmon Summit in the Six Rivers National Forest.

I drive to the office once or twice a week and the Tribe validates my parking. Today there was a new kid and he asked me for .95¢. No, I said. The validation covers it.

No, he said. It only covers two hours, ten dollars.

I think you're wrong, I said. I should mention that he was a painfully charming ESL person.

No, he insisted. I'm not wrong.

I gave him a dollar because someone was waiting and it seemed petty to dither about $1. But give me the receipt, I said. I'm going to call over in the morning.

They gave you two hour validation, he said again.

They, my ass, I was the one with the validation stamp. I validated for four hours. That's what I told him.

Oh, he said. It was too late. He'd already rung me up and taken my dollar.

You were right, he said as I drove away.

The three magic words that made my day.

The Black Balloon

This morning I woke up early, way earlier than I wanted to get up. But since I was awake, I opened the blinds and made a cup of tea and settled in for a half hour of reading before I started my day.

There was something weird with the light and I turned around and saw this black balloon bobbing outside the bedroom window.

Since I watch way too much TV, my first thought was, "Omigod, we've been targeted by the black balloon killer."

I got up for a better look and thought maybe all our neighbors had black balloons. Maybe we were supposed to be honoring fallen Vancouverites for some sort of special occasion.




Only our house had a black balloon but it was windy so it seemed like a strange task that someone would put a balloon outside our window so I guess it escaped from a party somewhere and ended up in our yard.

In this shot you can see it's attached to another phallic balloon. I don't know what was going on in our neighborhood last night but I guess we missed something.

I shut the blinds. I said, "I don't want that balloon looking at us."



I've had this recipe sitting on my kitchen counter for a couple weeks. I had some beet greens that needed attention and this looked like fun. But then by the time I rounded up the hominy the beet greens were long gone.

This morning I went to the farmer's market for beets and cilantro. So now I had everything I needed and then the recipe disappeared. At least we have the internet. The soup was good but a tad bland but a scoop of spicy salsa verde, also from the farmer's market made it perfect.

The photo shows my farmer's market flowers and my recipe folder. That isn't my recipe file — just the stuff I've clipped in the past several weeks. I always clip way more than I make. It's like the book section. Every time I read it I mark about three books to read but since I'm currently reading about one book every 2 months, I'll never be able to keep up.

On the way home from the market we saw huge black billowing smoke coming from the train station.

"Should we go look?" I asked Bob. "YES," he said. So drove down there and it was the recycling center. No one seemed alarmed so after about three minutes of admiring the stinky fire we turned around and then the world's longest freight train had to go by on another track and we had to sit there for about 15 minutes and since I wanted to get home, I wasn't amused.

I finished the first draft of my story this afternoon. It isn't pretty and there's a scene that goes on way too long but at least I have something to work with. We've just finished our roasted garlic cilantro broth beet greens and hominy soup and it's time for some mindless TV before bed.

Where's the "make your scones look pretty" photo tutorial?

Has That Been Proven?

Sometimes I worry about my inability to deal with things.

This morning I planned to go offsite for writing. I packed up my Clarion West bag and headed for the local coffee shop. It was jam-packed to the rafters with soccer moms and golf dads and loud like a high school gymnasium. I stood at the door and told myself to buck-up but there was not even a desperation seat available.

I got back in the car and headed home because no one was there. Not like I didn't have a decent writing space. But then I decided to try another spot and in the midst of this revelation I got caught up in some bizarre traffic hell in the middle of my own backwoods piece of suburbia. Where were all these cars coming from? To give myself a teeny out, I am hormonal.

I went home. I hadn't eaten anything or had my tea because I was looking forward to a tall Chai and a baked treat, something I rarely have for breakfast because I usually eat boring healthy things like fruit and yogurt. But now that I was home I didn't want boring healthy stuff so I dug around in the freezer for the last Trader Joe's Mac & Cheese because that sounded really good. Only it wasn't there because someone else had eaten it.

So now I was all in a snit again so I decided to bake scones. Then I ate three. I showed them.

Now I was all ploddy with scones and grumpy and this entire day for writing seemed like a wash. But I sat down at the computer anyway and Kira was online and we rallied for a writing date and I stayed in the chair until 6pm when I finally stopped for dinner. So a potentially crap day, totally salvaged.



Yesterday a ginormous storm zoomed through town. I kinda knew something was coming but it was weird sitting in the backyard and seeing the trees suddenly bend over sideways. The photo in no way captures the chaos.

I have been terrified of thunder and lightening storms, as in trembling under the comforter weeping, until fairly recently in my adult life. There were numerous times when some clear headed individual would take me aside and tell me how ridiculous my fear was and try to explain to me what thunder is all about. I didn't care if it was unicorns bumping into candy canes. I still thought it was scary.

I'm not sure what changed that but now I kind of like them as long as I'm not in the middle of a field standing next to a tree made of metal. We didn't get hit too bad at my house but the wind was crazy and we had one good rumble that went on and on while I looked out the window. After it was over I went into the backyard and found rose petals strewn everywhere and two of my tomatoes keeled over on their sides. I talked to them like they were injured family, "Hang on!" and I re-staked them and I think they're going to make it. I'll put them in cages later this weekend.

It was nice having such a long warm, dry streak but it's also nice having the yard watered by itself.

Sorry for the Inconvenience

Photo courtesy of arrangingmatches

I actually like our office but I'm still going to complain about it.

One of the elevators in our building is out again. I swear this place is held together with chewing gum. According to our tenant info packet it was built less than twenty years ago which isn't such a long time. But it feels like Logan's Run meaning like it was someone's idea of what would look futuristic but now, less than twenty years later, that curved hallway with the slick white walls looks drab and silly. Maybe I've got it wrong because there's something else here in the supporting materials about art deco.

Regardless I'm certain the elevators were salvaged from some ancient heap of debris and on a good day fulfill the bare minimum requirements for elevator safety. The elevator doors either close on you hard enough to make you yelp, or they stay open forever so that you and the strangers who are hoping to get down to the lobby in one piece get to share this endless awkward moment where you start to wonder if you're being punkd.

The sent us a notice recently about the building maintenance costs going down. At the same time the soap in the restroom started to come out of the dispenser like slightly sudsy dishwater and the paper towels seemed to become flimsier. I wonder where else they're cutting back.

Bánh Mì

I finally tried a bánh mì. I think I heard about it in the NYT but then I asked Matt (the guy in the photo - for some reason I don't have very many classic Matt photos on my page) and he made it sound like this sandwich would change my life. I had it in mind except nowhere I go to eat has them. The food cart page said I could get one at Huongs so I ran over there at lunch today to check it out.

That sandwich peeled my face off. I don't even know if it's a "good one" as judged by those in the know but it was tough not to hoover it in three bites. And it was only $3. How do they make money?

Madison

Apparently I'm never going to manage to do a good blogpost or finish another book ever again.