Trans/plant/portation

So last Friday I turned in my intent to enter the pie contest at the food co-op. I was a bit surprised at what I saw. Back when I lived in Syracuse, the co-op was nestled in a residential area in an old green arts and crafts-era neighborhood. It wasn’t enormous, certainly not the size of a supermarket, but it had about 1,000 square feet of space, and carried groceries, dairy, fresh made tofu, floating in a plastic container like edible styrofoam, and all manner of non-perishables and even some cleaning supplies, which is where I first learned the All One Insanity of Dr. Bronner. You could go insane (or blind) just trying to read the labels on that stuff. I volunteered there a few hours a month, not much, but really enjoyed my local milk in glass bottles. That was a splurge for me, though, so I only got the milk maybe once a month. So much for my graduate stipend. I still don’t know how I lived on $700 monthly checks.

Fast forward to 2008 and the Walla Walla co-op has just opened at a physical location. There is a front room in a converted house, across from a now-defunct grocery store, and they carry about as much as anyone could pack into 250 sq. ft. of space. So these people need some fundraising! At $5 for pie and $2.50 for senior citizens, they’re gonna need a lot more pie contests to make it work. Unless there’s other fundraising. I mean, of course there’s other fundraising. Their money making enterprises can’t be:

1. Annual Pie Contest

2. Bake Sale

3. Wet T-Shirt Contest

4. NEW Monthly Pie Contest

At any rate, dropping of my pies, which each seemed to weigh about 15 pounds (I think it was the 6 sweet potatoes that I had mashed up into them), I guessed that the contest was a lot more about building community than raising money.

one of the sweet potato pies

It was in the assisted living center portion of a grand Oddfellows House. At this point, I hear “Oddfellows” and I think buried scrolls and gold ala Nicholas Cage in National Treasure. Poor Masons. I wonder what George Mason himself would have made of that awful flick.

Anyway, these people are decked out. It was like MTV’s Pimp My Ride did a special there one day, because the walkers and the scooters everyone was using were swanky. I think one of them might have been an amphibious vehicle to boot. Several residents saw me huffing my way through the building — I can only image what I must have looked like, a bit fat guy with two heavy, sticky pies on each hand, waiting for the elevator. I invited a few curious folks to come to the contest. The administrators of the building pumped in swing music the whole time, and I thought that if these folks were like my father, they probably enjoyed the tunes. It was, actually, the happiest assisted living center I’ve ever seen.

Something like 20 pies were in the contest. Three or four apple pies, cherry pie, banana-coffee pie (affectionately named “Banaoffee,” which I turned over again and again in my brain, trying to figure out what language it was in), citrus pie, individually peeled concord grape pie, apple-raspberry pie, and many others. By the time the contest opened to the public, the judges had already made their selection, which, we were informed, used a point system and was “very impressive.”

pie contest volunteers

 I walked in at the same time as a woman who I met in September at the HIV fundraiser. That woman is a fantastic cook. Thus the pies she was carrying in with her daughter I figured would be very good indeed. Turns out her 13-year-old made the pies, which were citrus pies.

She said she was upset because it was supposed to be a lemon pie, but they hadn’t had enough lemons, so she had to use lime and orange as well.

“Well, sometimes those changes make your pie come out even better,” I said.

“That’s what I told her,” said her mother.

I put down my pies and saw the table sag ever so slightly under their weight. I was then marked as Pie #2. The citrus pie was Pie #3. I left and went back home (less than a block away), and waited for the judges to do their thing. Some friends who were visiting us that weekend walked over with us to enjoy some pie. We were allowed to taste from 5 pies, which made quite a pile of confection on our paper plates. I should have strategized with Susanne so we got a wider variety of pie, but we all ran off like bugs to the light, looking at pie after pie.  We sat back down with our selections and waited about an hour to hear the results. We also could vote for “the people’s favorite,” so I went for the citrus pie, which was in fact very tasty.

The winners this year were:

First Place: Peach Custard Pie (darn! that’s the pie I was thinking about making before I decided on sweet potato pie)

Second Place: Marionberry Pie (DC readers of this blog may find such a thing suspicious, as it calls into question whether there was any cocaine in the pie)

Third Place: Apple Raspberry Pie

So, this intrepid pie-baker lives to fight another day. And the nice part is, the girl won for people’s choice with her very tasty citrus pie. It was also nice to see some friends at the event, all stuffing ourselves on pie. As in the picture below.

Pie eaters

Clearly, Susanne is pissed we didn’t win!

not the bike in question

We’ve all had that friend, colleague, or acquaintance who posted or forwarded useless emails to everyone on their friends list or at work. Exploding mugs of water in the microwave, rats that are on the loose and sure to crawl up the toilet bowl while we’re doing our business, endless streams of pictures of misstyped signs that we’re supposed to find funny — and sure, sometimes they’re funny. But mostly I, at least, grit my teeth and feel badly for the poor soul who thought I needed to read this.

The college here in town has a community interest list, which has all manner of important, interesting, and completely vapid email. One item tonight was too funny not to share, so feel free to have a chuckle, even though laughing will involve either a sense of schadenfreude or a hope that the matter involved will somehow be resolved. This post comes about a month after a series of emails to the college community about a wounded raccoon that one campus member decided to take in, foster, and then release. I almost thought there would be a “Raccoon Watch” to relay the ongoing, evolving medical condition of the rodent. The closest I ever came to a live raccoon was last year in DC, when one was blocking our path to our front door, but my memory is a little fuzzy, as Susanne was pushing me in front of her, making me her living shield from the thing as it growled at us. Do not mess with raccoons when they’re trying to find dinner in their private Dumpsters, knawhatImean?

So, without further adieu, the email in question. Note the subject line.

Subject: If you borrowed a blue bike with bent handle bars, please return it!

I really NEED it. I can’t get to work without it and I’m a pretty worthless human being 

if I can’t work. Please don’t make me miserable.

 

And if you were planning to keep it, I regret to inform you that it’s a worthless peace 
of shit. But I do really need it to get around and get stuff done, and if I had the money 
to afford another bike, believe me, I would have replaced this one long ago.

Soooo… just leaving it back at XXX Alder St. works.

And just in case you’re not sure whether you have my bike:

It’s a REALLY OLD kind of METALLIC BLUE SCHWINN, it has bent handle bars and a really 
CONTORTED looking basket, kind of resembles a SHOPPING CART.

So concerned was I that my pie wouldn’t be allowed under the rules of the Daily Market’s second annual pie contest that I emailed the contest organizers with my question. My email was forwarded to the grand poobah of the pies, apparently, as follows:

Hi Robynne,
Do sweet potatoes qualify as a fruit?
Lina

P.S. We had a cat named Sweet Potato Pie when I was a kid because my 
sister and I couldn't decide what to call it and the neighbors suggested 
Sweet Potato Pie. But I've never tried the pie and I'd love to!

I seem to have hit a sweet spot with my choice of pie, pun intended. I mean, she’d love to try it? It reminds her of her childhood cat? Who’da thunk it?

But I didn’t want to get too excited. Perhaps I’d have to switch up to an apple pie after all. I’d have to wait for a response from Robynne. On a side note, are there like, 39 ways to spell Robin or what? There are almost more than for Catherine.

Fortunately for me, Robynne responded quickly. 

I think sweet potato pie is fine. basically we wanted to stay away from
cream pies. I love sweet potato pie and it's Obama's favorite so it's
timely!

Now with this response, I wasn’t as sure what to think. I mean, clearly she loves that Obama was elected? Should his favorite pie mean that it will be her favorite pie? Now that I think of it, through this whole long entire primary and general campaign season, I think the one tidbit I hadn’t discerned in all of the interviews, debate watching, articles, talking heads, and conversation with friends, was Obama’s favorite pie. Where on earth did she learn this little factoid?

Susanne, for her part, is fact-checking the pie preference of our President-elect. Googling Obama’s favorite pie, she found that his favorite is in fact:

PECAN PIE. This because he asked an aide for it to go for his usual dinner of salmon, broccoli, and brown rice. According to his daughters, he’s not a big fan of the sweet, but instead prefers pumpkin pie. Either way, pecan pie sounds just awful after a salmon dinner. To me, anyway.

So where has this idea that sweet potato pie is his favorite? I will ask the Robynne character when I see her.

UPDATE: Susanne found the reference. In a stump speech on October 18 in St. Louis, Obama said his favorite pie is sweet potato pie. His second favorite is pecan pie. You heard it here . . . not first, probably.

Last Friday I made pie, a tester pie in advance of this Saturday’s pie contest. I tried out a sweet potato coconut pie, something I’ve never made before. But I worried about making apple pie, as I said in my post last week. My original recipe called for the potatoes to be sliced, boiled, then layered in the bottom of the pie pan, but I think for this next go-round I’ll mash them and spread them in the bottom, and spice them up a little, rather than having them be plain. My tester pie came out looking like this:

The crust was just a Pillsbury roll and bake crust, which I wasn’t planning on using for the real event, because as Susanne put it, “pie tasting judges know the difference between store bought and the real deal.” Well, I have to have the real deal, right? 

When I first heard about this contest, I looked for the rules for the pies and the procedures for entering the contest because hello, 9 years of working with or for the Federal Government, and I am a rule-following machine. Okay, I’m rather not a rule-following machine, but I do understand that not following the rules can come back to haunt me. But this, after all, is Walla Walla, Washington, home of the 90-minute-to-entree restaurant service. Thus it is that it’s now only today that the rules have been posted on the Daily Market’s Web site. And they state:

2.  Pie crust must be homemade. Bottom crust required, top crust is optional. 

3.  Pies may only be fruit-based. For health reasons, no cream pies or meat pies allowed. 

Well now, I guess I have questions about rules 2 and 3. First of all, I understand Susanne’s point about the crust, but how exactly is it that they’ll know I’ve used a store-bought crust? It would only be about the taste of it, right? It’s not like there’s a pie crust goblin that would pop up and give me away. Cripes, if there is a Pie Crust Goblin, I hope someone alerts me to this before Saturday! All that said, of course I’m going to make my own crust. I do have my mother’s recipe, after all. I might lose my mind with finicky pie crust, but I’ll muddle through somehow. I just have to remember I volunteered for this — damn this town for having so little to do that entering a pie contest seems interesting!

Okay, okay, it will be fun. I’ll be up against I have no idea whom — I might have to dial down the competitiveness if my challengers are bunch of grandmothers. Or maybe I’ll have to dial it up! I remember some of those women from my mixed bowling league a few years ago, and they were killers. They’d slowly walk down the approach, practically dropping the balls through the floor, and then whammo — strike. It wasn’t until they turned around with a wicked grin on their faces that you’d see they knew what they were doing all along. So if I’m baking against a bunch of master piemakers, I better bring my A game.

Now then, rule number three flummoxes me. Do sweet potatoes count as fruit or not? Last year’s winner was a walnut pie. A walnut pie. How the hell is that a fruit? Second place was an onion pie. Also nothing like a fruit as far as I know. So is this new rulemaking for the second annual contest? What’s the beef with non-fruit pies? Are there so many vegetarians in this town that the very idea of a meat pie causes the judges to resign and flee over to the Town of Touchet for their pie contest instead? I suppose I should call over to the coordinator and ask her if sweet potatoes are allowed or not. So all of my preparation is for naught if she says no sweet potatoes. If only they’d posted the rules way back last week. Tsk, tsk.

I will certainly keep everyone abreast of the latest developments regarding the Pie Off 2008.

Dregs of mocha in a mug

I was going to start this post with the following sentence:

“Sitting around brunch this morning…”

But a few things occurred to me to make me rethink the thought. Namely:

1. “Brunch” does not occur at 10AM. People call that breakfast. Brunch is a leisurely activity partaken in the immediacy of noon, at the absolute earliest. Heck, in DC, brunch is still going on at 3PM. Emphasis on post meridian. Thus this event this morning, emphasis on morning, was not actually brunch, because we were groaning at 9:17 that we had to get moving. Thank goodness nothing in Walla Walla is more than 8 minutes from anything else.

2. This so-called brunch was hosted by a veteran of the herbivore movement. Now then, I was a vegetarian from 1995-2000, and I learned very, very early that the whole idea of fake meat using soy products is the grossest possible way to be a veggie. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather just not eat a sausage than eat a sausage that in no way tastes like sausage. My mouth gets angry at me for the deception, I think.

So now that I’ve cleared all that up, I’ll begin again.

Sitting around a breakfast of plastic bacon, fine pastries, the remnants of my pie from last night, and some rather delicious cornbread, we were talking about people on the campus and the funny buildings they’ve acquired over the years. Readers of this blog will recall that Susanne and I call our house the Liar House, because it looks cute on the outside but inside is actually the Amityville Horror. So it came, really, as no surprise, to hear that one of the administrative buildings on campus used to be a mortuary.

The Liar House

Here’s the funny/not so funny aspect to it: most of the people in the building are emeritus faculty. So waht is it saying that they’re in the old mortuary? I mean, is that the message we want to send older faculty who’ve dedicated themselves to the institution? “Hey, if you pass away in your office, we’ve kept the formaldehyde in the basement! So no worries!”

Then there’s the former hospital that is now a dormitory for the students. Everything gets recycled in this town. Even the recycling center used to be someone’s house. So why couldn’t they have turned the house into student living, and used the hospital as the recycling center? I have no earthly idea. But someone, somewhere made the decision. I’ve been trying to figure out how someone gets the idea that

hospital : dormitory or mortuary : retired professor offices

but I got nothing. This is the campus, after all, that takes care of a pet goat, so it could just be that there are algorithms here that I do not comprehend. Maybe it’ll take more time living here, and by February I’ll be like, “oh is that a broken down pickup truck parked outside in the alley? well, now it’s a compost pile!”

Susanne and I went to see an evening of cabaret with Tomson Highway, a Cree musician, playwright, novelist, and songwriter. It was not a Gershwin medley — these were songs from two musicals he’s written, namely, Rose and The Incredible Adventures of Mary Jane Mosquito. The latter is a children’s play, in case that wasn’t already abundantly clear. We all piled into a small auditorium, about 40 of us, and were subjected to Tomson’s wacky presentation style, which was this entertaining mix of Victor Borge wit and Elton John effete manner. Unfortunately, the music itself was a little on the simplistic side — interesting enough chord progressions but then that was about it. There were times when he would jam during a vamp portion of a song and I could see that he could play really well, but those weren’t things he’d written into the songs. He was joined by a singer, also from the Cree Nation north of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and a sax player from Walla Walla who did a very good job on an instrument that is not anywhere near my favorite. I’m more of a woodwinds and strings fella, but that’s another story. 

Tomson Highway

There was a portion of his cabaret where he talked about the Cree’s notion of “the trickster,” a spiritual being with no gender who is like a lightning bolt of divine magic from God. The trickster is behind your laughter, lightening you up from the moment, an ephemeral gift from God. Or in Tomson’s language, he’s bumping your butt. Which made us laugh. Which made Tomson point out that he was bumping our butts again. Which made us laugh again. You can see where this is going. It was a butt-bumping laughfest for a while there.

Another moment of hysteria, when I thought I would just lose it — he remarked that this next song was a good song, because you know, he wrote it. Not to blow his own horn, you know, because he doesn’t play the horn. And don’t think he’s going to blow the piano tonight. Though that might be interesting.

I will point out here that the idiom is “toot” your own horn, not blow it. Perhaps those Cree have their own take on such things. Certainly it made for a funnier story. I did go home humming a few tunes about mosquitoes who take the train to find new friends. Groove Armada it was not, but it was a nice event. And, I suppose, very Wallyworld.

Peach custard pie

I was made aware this evening of an upcoming pie contest to raise money for our local food cooperative. It didn’t take long for my mind to start hypothesizing pie contents that would be sure-fire champions. After five minutes of dedicated thinking, I realized a few things:

1. I guess I’m going to enter the contest — let’s just say the universe seems to have decided this for me, since it was a done deal the second I heard the contest existed.

2. I have no idea how to strategize my approach to pie baking for the purposes of winning a contest.

3. It shouldn’t be about the winning. It should be about the baking and the fundraising and the community spirit.

4. Oh heck, of course it’s about the winning! Just for bragging rights.

5. Oh crap, I think I’m a carpetbagger. Thinking I can roll into town and twelve weeks later, walk away with pie baking bragging rights as if nobody else in town knows how to bake a pie.

And then I went to making dinner, a faux chicken Kiev dish consisting of pounded chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese and broccoli, garlic bread, and spiced lentils for a side because I made 67 cups accidentally last Friday and I have just got to find a way to use them up. For being half-Lebanese I have no insight into making lentils interesting to eat.

As I made dinner, pounding the chicken hard enough that the windows rattled in the room next to me, I mused the pie possibilities. Old-fashioned apple pie. Simple to make and I do it well, but wouldn’t the judges’ expectations be too high for it to be impressive? Apple pie with my mother’s crumble top. Always a hit, but again, perhaps too generic. Granola pie. Definitely out-of-the-box thinking, but I might not want to make something with corn syrup if it’s for a food co-op. And would a “granola” pie be offensive to people usually referred to as “crunchy?” It’s one thing not to win a contest, I reckoned, but it’s another to alienate people! This is a small town, after all! I mean, of course it’s small, it hosts a PIE CONTEST.

Okay, so maybe I should go for a pie that is unexpected but not ridiculous in any way. Something rather old-fashioned, something that I could expect nobody else would make. And since it’s fall, berry pies are probably out. Perhaps a pumpkin custard pie with a meringue top. Or a brown sugar and grits pie. But maybe that’s too southern for them. For me, small town = The South, even though I know the only “southeast” around here is our location in the state. Susanne wondered if the local stores even sold grits. I can’t imagine a grocery store not stocking grits — it’s just a poor man’s polenta, I told her. But she may have a point, and now I have to check the next time I drop by. I’ve got a week to decide on a pie — actually two pies, since you have to make it twice.

I wonder if getting excited about a pie contest means I’m acclimating to my new environment, or if I’m just bored out of my skull and looking for just about anything to do. I still haven’t joined a band, for instance, and everyone and their brother is in a band here, with all manner of names like “Trixie and the Catnips,” or some such. So if I’ve held off that demon, perhaps a pie contest is no big deal.

Where else could you get 5 slices of pie for $5? That’s exciting all on its own merits.

For better or worse, Susanne is teaching a class this semester on the elections. This sounded like a great idea, I’m sure, before we as a country traveled through the last 18 months of the primary and then general election. I was asking Susanne if she’d brought any of the Democratic Party voting materials I’ve gotten in the mail to her class, and she rightly informed me that she couldn’t do so before November 4, unless she had some things from the GOP side of the fence. So I offered to drop by our local Republican headquarters and gather some “collateral” for her. I think she thought I was joking. The woman ought to know me by now, right?

WW County Republicans Logo

Twenty minutes later, I saunter in. All is quiet. Unlike the Walla Walla Democratic HQ there are no piles of yard signs, crowds of people buying “Hope” t-shirts and jerseys (seriously, I saw a veritable crowd two weeks ago), or lots of happy chatter. There was one older lady walking my way. She was wearing a t-shirt, all right, which I presume was not for sale (feel free to make a joke here about how many Republicans would sell you the shirt off their backs), and which read:

Just Another

Gun-Toting

Religion-Clinging

Bitter

AMERICAN

What a lovely message it was. I wanted to ask why the shirt didn’t work in the apathy portion of Obama’s quote about people in Pennsylvania, but I figured it was because it doesn’t make for a nice image, like toting guns or clinging to one’s religion. Instead of inquiring into her fashion’s political message, I just said hello. She gave me a big grin and asked how she could help me.

I realized only then that I’d walked into the enemy camp. What the hell was I thinking? I better come up with something believable, I mean seriously, the woman totes guns.

“You’re not uh, toting a gun now, are you,” I ask with a smile.

She laughed (good sign?) and said no, but she did have license to conceal, as did several members of her family. So great, she could be lying and is just ready to shoot me dead the minute she realizes who she’s talking to. Okay, she’s probably not going to shoot me dead and she probably doesn’t have an actual gun on her. So I say I’m looking for some McCain/Palin brochures and the like.

And then I was shocked by her response.

“Well really, we don’t have any anymore.” Wow. I think of the stacks of yard signs, bumper stickers, tri-fold brochures, and holograms of live-action Obamas giving speeches on the stump, like Princess Leia in Star Wars, only in full color and not with quite the same sense of life-and-death urgency. Fine, they don’t have any holograms over there at the Dems HQ. But by the 2012 election, they will. It’ll be the next big thing in gubernatorial races — like asking for money online was when Howard Dean stuck his virtual hand out to the nation.

She went on to explain that volunteers had been taking all of the collateral out on them in their canvassing. But really, McCain pulled his campaign out of Washington a long time ago when it was evident he wasn’t going to pick up our 11 electoral votes. At any rate, the table was pretty bare. There were a few things that the locals had cobbled together so that the single picture of John and Sarah, looking happy and victorious, wasn’t so lonesome at the back of the plastic folding table. I looked down and saw a strip of paper with some typing on it. It read something like:

The problem with Obama’s candidacy is that it’s socialist. He has been supported by the New Left, which wants to make the US a socialist state. Their first goal is universal health care. That’s just another term for socialized medicine. It hasn’t worked for Russia, the UK, France, or Canada, so why would it work for us?

I was mesmerized. The leaps in logic. The blatant untruths. The fear mongering that what, we’ll go straight to the dogs if we have an alternative to our private system that currently leaves 46 million Americans uninsured? I wasn’t going to argue the point, but I wished I could have taken the strip of paper out the door with me.

The woman and I chatted about the initiatives on the ballot, which include funding for transportation infrastructure changes in Seattle, a right to die law similar to Oregon’s, and increased training for long-term care providers. She asked another woman who she said was a staffer of Dino Rossi’s (the fellow running against the Democratic incumbent for governor), to come on out and talk with me. It was an interesting conversation, and we could have been discussing bowling on ESPN for how good-natured we all were. I certainly wouldn’t suggest Republicans are bad people. But I do wonder what it takes for people in the same country to have such a distinctively different opinion of the world than I do. And I’d been hoping that it wasn’t about building a foundation of lies and misstatements, like universal health care = socialism. But hey, maybe it is. Maybe they think all of us Democrats are blind, or liars, too. Maybe we’re actually closer than we think we are, but hot button issues like reproductive rights, gay rights, the role of government, are just so divisive we can’t make time for the things we do agree on. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, the only fights I remember seeing were on the softball field or in the hockey stadium. Life got more complicated somewhere along the way, sometime, I guess, when I first started stepping out of the mushy mainstream part of society, when I first started saying I was going to be my own person even if it meant a little gayness here, a little sex change there. But I love my country, flaws and all. So I suppose it’s no big deal to walk into GOP-land. I could just flash my Washington State University Visa card and then duck out while everyone is reflexively shouting, “Cougars!”

There is a Safeway grocery store at R Street and 17th Street NW that the locals call the “Soviet Safeway,” specifically because it typically has near-empty shelves, next to no variety of goods (why do we need 67 kinds of potato chips, anyway), and startlingly bad service. (Side note about the service there: it’s never going to get any better as long as it’s staffed by disaffected hipster youth who are more interested in writing bad poetry about their job than in ringing up customers, but somehow my side note has become an inside joke, for those of you who’ve heard the poetry at Mothertongue.)

At any rate, there is a distant cousin of the Soviet Safeway here in Walla Walla. If you want a can of pinto beans, for example, your options will be the following:

1. dented Safeway brand of pinto beans with no clear expiration date for 99 cents

2. undented can of Goya red kidney beans for $1.59

3. undented can of Progresso pinto beans for $2.79

In other words, it’s all about tradeoffs. How much do you really want pinto beans, buddy, the shelves seem to ask. I could go for the dented can of beans, paying the price point I’m most comfortable with (we’re talking BEANS here), but running the risk that they’re spoiled, or worse, that they look fine but we’ll all get dysentery after the meal. I could go for the kidney beans because aren’t we being too picky to act like they’re all that different from pinto beans? Or I could throw financial caution to the wind and blow nearly three bucks for the “fancy” beans, but will anyone care or notice? Will they eat whatever the meal is and say to themselves, “well thank God he splurged on the Progresso, or I’d have to have refused this dreck.” 

The very fact that I have to put this put decision-making time into so pithy a purchase is slightly maddening. But then again, I’ve got time on my hands.

Now there are other options for grocery shopping in Walla Walla. There’s the “fancy Safeway,” across town, which really means it’s another 10 minutes of driving time. There’s the Super 1 Foods, that has pretty good produce at pretty high prices, and there’s the Albertson’s that has a strange mix of obscure and high end products (like our favorite tomato paste in a tube) and sudden gaps in product areas, like no flour, for example. There is also the Seventh Day Adventist grocery store, Andy’s, that sells no meat or meat products. Having spent a good ten weeks now trying to figure out which store to visit for which kind of item, I have developed a complicated algorithm, factoring likelihood of finding the item, distance to travel (even between stores), probability of liking the price point, and freshness factor, when that is in play (read, dry pasta gets a null value here). I think I should patent this formula.

But let’s all guess here, on the following — what do we think is for sale at this location?

The Bi-Mart

Bi-valves? Bicuspids? Anything bifurcated? Bisexuals? Or maybe it’s for bisexual shoppers only, like that bookstore in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that will give any customer who says they’re a lesbian a 10 percent discount. (No, you don’t have to be a lesbian, you just have to say you are. Hey, it’s 10 percent!) Anyway, I could go inside and find out, I suppose, but I’d like to collect some guesses first.

voting sticker

Except that in Washington State, I didn’t even get a sticker. And I realized a few things with this no-precinct voting process:

1. It’s the one time of year I like to stand in line. I mean sure, I don’t want to stand in line for hours, but a few minutes whilst I make my way to the front of the M-S line or whatever it is that year, nodding knowingly to my voting neighbors, performing our collective civic duty — that’s absolutely fine. Only to be let down dramatically in a few hours, but I wouldn’t be a Democrat if I wasn’t pessimistic, right? I suppose in Eastern Washington I would more likely be in line with Republicans, but perhaps not this exact neighborhood, next to the college. But I really enjoy seeing who lines up to vote — young parents with their children in strollers, couples dressed for work who made voting part of that day’s commute, older folks who look so excited for their candidate. I realize this is colored by years of voting in the DC metro area, but I saw these people in upstate New York, too. And I suppose they’ll line up a week from Tuesday. I’ll just have already voted with my paper ballot.

2. Early voting kind of sucks. So I voted earlier this week when I got back into town. I went back and forth on some of the statewide initiatives, especially the right to die initiative. But I filled in all my ovals circa my 1987 SAT exam, put it in a bright pink security envelope (which makes me think they know nothing about security — “yoo hoo, security over here, people! nice bright pink security!!”), and then in the mailing envelope, and then I took a trip to the post office since I had to sort of “see it off” personally. If people are stealing Obama lawn signs out here — and they are — I’m not leaving my vote sitting in my mailbox. But here’s what really nags at me for voting 10 days ahead: it’s over. Of course the campaign continues, poll numbers shift and evolve at every second, it seems, but I’ve done my business now and there’s nothing else I can do. Voting on election day lets me have my say at the proper end of the process — I’ve heard everything, seen everything, political news junkie that I am, and I’m responding, and my response will be counted in the precinct results and talked about by the likes of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and all the others. But voting by mail is odd that way. I either get to wait to the last minute like before, or I get to have my vote counted ON election day, just not both. Washington’s Governor race was settled by about 130 votes last time, and those two personalities are battling it out again this year. So I want my vote in there by the time November 4 arrives. I put myself on the sidelines, understanding of course that I wasn’t going to change my opinion before the big day, anyway.

3. That mailing envelope I referred to earlier? No bulk postage on it, so I had to affix a stamp. Okay, I actually got a lot of pleasure out of writing “affix” just there, but back to the main point, I was kind of shocked I had to pay for my own postage. Isn’t that a kind of poll tax? I found out that I could have walked it directly to the election office, but I didn’t know that from any of the voting print materials, so I feel a little misled here. Surely the State of Washington can pony up another $120,000 so that everyone can send in their ballots without putting a stamp on the envelope. I mean, if Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes can do it, our government can. They’re even going to make someone a millionaire in the process! Sheesh.

This year’s election has set a record for early voting, for people newly registered, for online fundraising, and a whole host of other trends. I just wonder: if I feel like I’ve lost something with this no in-person process, I wonder if others are feeling it too, and I wonder how people younger than me, for whom this is their first or second election, will know if they’re even missing anything at all.

Edited to add: But don’t take my word for all of this, even the Washington Post agrees with me.