Trans/plant/portation

…or more precisely, eight and a half months. Back last January, when Susanne was being courted by the college that later hired her, I had a call from an administrator at the college who was interested in my resume. Originally, my journal post went something like this:

I got a call from the College that wants to bring Susanne on board next fall. The voice mail had the name of a person and said she was the head of advancement and then asked me to call back. Not knowing what the hell “advancement” meant (am I not advanced enough? I do walk on two legs, after all, and I haven’t dragged my knuckles on the floor in years), I figured she was a head hunter or some such. I called her back. I got her voice mail. It went like this:

“Hi, this is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of Advancement at XX College. Please leave the date and time you called, and your name and number, and I’ll call you at my earliest opportunity. Thank you. *cough*

Hi, this is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of [pause]

Hi, this is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of Advancement Services at XX College. Please leave the date and time you called, and I’ll call you at my earliest opportunity. Thanks.

This is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of Advancement Services at XX College. Please leave your name and number, and the time and date that you called. I will call you at my earliest opportunity. Thank you.”

I swear, she recorded the outgoing message SEVEN TIMES. I waited patiently, trying not to laugh in the phone’s microphone, because of course I had no idea at that point just when the beep would begin. And so I wondered:

1. how could she not realize she was saving 27 messages?
2. why has nobody told her yet?

Anyway, I did indeed leave my name, number, time and date of call. She called me back. She offered me a job as her assistant, basically, but I said we could talk in a few days since she only had about 10 minutes to go over things with me.

Really? Wow. I am kind of at a loss for words. I don’t even understand the job duties because she was so inarticulate. It has something to do with data reporting, SQL queries, and institutional endowment. Those are my words. Hers were more like, databases, project management, wow, and this college is cool.

Fast forward to today. Limping through the administration building looking for the ID office so I can go to the campus gym and library, I see a familiar name on one of the doors. It’s her! Rampant outgoing message leaver! I try to casually assess the woman sitting at the desk. She doesn’t look at all like I’d pictured — in my mind’s eye I saw a nervous woman with tight hair, a la Bree Van De Kamp. This woman was dressed like a college student in black stretch pants, a green sweater, and penny loafers. She had an office three times the size of my last cube, and for those former SSA colleagues paying attention, a name plate on her door. (Note to SSA: since you’ve already paid for it, feel free to send me my name plate whenever it finally arrives. You’ve got my address already!)

I couldn’t help myself. Could this earnest outgoing message leaving woman be interesting to talk to? Did she repeat everything she had to say 7 times? Could the number 7 be like, a divine number for her?

“Honey, I need you to go to the store. Could you go to the store for me? I need some things from the store, so how about you stop by there? Dear, this is really important, I need you to swing by the store. So if you could pick up a few items for me from the store, that would be great. Just please go to the store today. Hey, you know what would be great — stopping by the store today!”

Okay, somehow I’ve made this woman become my mother. Hmm.

Anyway, I poked my head in and introduced myself, and she remembered me from last winter. After the awkward, “no no, I haven’t found a job yet” moment, we chatted about Walla Walla and what is and isn’t in it. No knishes, bagels, whitefish or any other cuisine a good boy from New Jersey would crave in that 3 a.m. in the morning suddenly way. One, count it, one, liquor store. For 26,000 people. She was friendly and nice and putting a face to the answering machine message and phone calls did a lot to make her more human. And I was glad I met her, even if I still can’t envision myself working for her. And there is the issue of I continue not to have any idea what her job is, or what mine might have been.

Just another day in Wallyworld!

Susanne and I attended a potluck for members of her department at the College. We were tasked with providing the desserts, which indicated a few things, namely:

1. They must have known subconsciously to give this course to us, the cake-makers. We had not yet provided any confections to them.

2. They thought something like dessert was the easiest course to pass off, because most people just put oil and eggs into a bowl with mass market cake mix. Thus, they were trying to go easy on us.

3. They figured we’d all be too drunk after drinking Walla Walla wine to care if the dessert was passable or not.

Truthfully, Susanne volunteered us for dessert. But in her defense, she waited to see what others picked first, so somehow the desserts portion of the meal hung around during the selection process. Who would have expected that Dessert would be like the fat kid who doesn’t get called for kickball and is left standing there at the end pushing up his glasses looking miserable? But enough about me.

We showed up with an apple caramel cheesecake and a chocolate budino. I did not get a picture of the chocolate budino, unfortunately. I did, however, capture the cheesecake.

Caramel apple cheesecake

The potluck was nice, consisting of a cold quinoa salad, mixed greens, the standard but perennial favorite of cheese and crackers. There was also a vegetable enchilada casserole, Greek stew, shrimp pad thai, and a “hot dish,” which is verbiage for a Minnesotan casserole, which officially made it A Potluck from Around the World. They did indeed enjoy our offerings, and I think we achieved our goal of cementing a reputation for well cooked and baked delicacies. I know there’s a lot of “cementing” in front of us, but we’ve only just begun — we’re only 6 weeks into living here. There are a lot of good meals ahead of us.

Today Susanne and I went to our new favorite Colville Street Patisserie, and there we met two older ladies from town who struck up an interesting conversation about Social Security and disability. There’s something about a smaller town, perhaps, that lends itself to more intimate talk, for it is such that we discovered one of them receives an SSA disability check. Her friend said she’d remember my name because she lives in Everett, Washington. I suppose I have to get over there at some point and take a hokey picture next to the sign. When the woman from town said she got her first check three weeks after filing an application, I knew she must have a terminal condition. She was smiling, she was enjoying an eclair, and she said she was going to be happy for every day she has left. She’s taken in 37 foster children over the last 20 years, and we got into quite the discussion about how our country handles social services. It was an interesting mix of old-style conservatism (read: pull yourself up by your bootstraps) and an affection for children and their interests that smacked of veteran social worker. She clearly still wanted to make a difference, life by life. She certainly left an effect on me.

Let’s start with a poll. How would you pronounce the following word: Touchet. Would you say:

Too-SHAY, as in the French

TUH-shee, as in one’s derriere

TOUCH-it, if you were pretending not to understand French pronounciation

TOO-shee, just to put that option in the list (read, I have nothing witty to say about this)

If you picked the last choice, you win! The town of Touchet, Washington, is pronounced TOO-shee. Susanne and I wondered about “touch it” because we had driven through Havre, Montana, on the way into town, which the locals pronounce “HAVE-er. French, what’s that? No worries, they can call their villages whatever they like. Just don’t expect that out-of-towners will have any clue how to replicate the name.

Paper Mill

Driving on Route 12 through Touchet toward the setting sun, you will at some point intersect the very pretty Columbia River. Unfortunately for the river, near the port of Walla Walla sits a paper mill and a slaughterhouse. For olfactory reasons I refuse to slow down long enough to investigate which of these creates the smell I am about to describe, or if there is some awful marriage of odors that creates such a cesspool of particulate that hangs in the air on the roadway, waiting for people to drive through, like an ambush of molecules. For there I am, traveling at 60 mph, looking at the pretty river and the still-fascinating windmill towers lined up on the tops of the hills, and then it hits me. It’s like three tons of broccoli were allowed to slowly rot and decay, the green of the flowerettes turning yellow and then brown, liquefying in a mass of death and abandonment. Paper mill my ass. I call it the Bad Broccoli plant, because honestly, it doesn’t smell like turned lettuce or sausage or groundhog. It’s bad broccoli. We make sure to shut off the air conditioning, close the windows, and then we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

And yes, it’s the only road out of town in that direction. So perhaps I should call it the Bad Broccoli Plant of Inevitability.

Well, so I met with the orthopedic on Tuesday to discuss the results of my MRI. The emergency room doctor had said that the probable issue was a dislocated kneecap with accompanying effusion (swelling), and the physician’s assistant out here in W2 said it was a likely meniscus tear. Turns out . . . drumroll, please, that I . . .

ACL tear on MRI scan

tore my ACL and my meniscus! So thoughtful of me to really go all the way and injure myself multiply in one fell swoop. Further, the fact that I’ve injured myself in two areas of the knee as seen on the MRI scan concerns the doc that there’s even more damage not evident until they see inside the knee during surgery. In any case, they can fix it. Because I tore clean through the ACL, it balled up in two places where it was attached to the bone, which is why it was immediately unstable — it was like trying to stand on two rubber balls stacked on top of each other. A totally torn ACL, however, tends to shrivel and dissolve inside the knee joint, leaving no remnant of itself, which explains why it’s actually been easier to walk, but sometimes feels unstable. The good news is I’m not in a lot of pain; the bad news is that now I’m asking more of all the remaining ligaments, tendons, muscles, and bones on that side, and I’m slowly wearing out my healthy knee on the other side.

We decided that I would work out in the pool at the local YMCA and on a stationary bicycle, dropping 10-20 pounds before having surgery in late November. And then I should be on the road to getting back to my old self! Except I’ll watch the crazy dance moves from my early 20s.

And now that I think of it, it’s really annoying that in all these years of avoiding skiing in order to protect my knees (seriously, does anyone give me more than 10 minutes before I go crashing down the side of a mountain), I still broke my knee! Sheesh!

The option we’re going to take is to use conditioned cadaver ligament for the replacement, since my other alternatives are to take ligaments from other parts of my body, which would limit me where we’ve taken it for this reconstruction. One of my friends worries that I’ll get ligament from a formerly “evil” person, and I have tried to tell her that I don’t think Cheney is officially dead yet. Let’s leave the Buffy subplots to the terrain of Joss Whedon’s mind, shall we?

Ice Burg take out

So we figured, when we first set foot out in the prairie, that good meat would be easy to find. We must have, after all, driven past a couple hundred ranches, cattle auction houses, loading bays, and I know we went past a slaughterhouse because the smell sticks with you for at least half a mile. Meat, I presumed, would be tasty, well marbled, and as fresh as possible in this version of the universe. And although I made these presumptions, I didn’t come out here thinking, “hey, let’s compare burgers!” I discovered that in a town of 26,000, things like having “the best burger in town” take on a level of import not possible in larger towns of say, 500,000, where people have so many options it would be pointless to try to compare them all. Unless you were an editor for DCist, that is.

Thus without further ado, I relay the following:

1. Fast Eddie’s Drive-In — as noted in an earlier post, there are a lot of drive-ins and drive-throughs here. Eddie’s is 50s drive-in all the way except that the waitresses don’t roll out on skates. Eddie’s has a lot of items on its menu, which is posted conveniently on a white board that our intrepid reviewer attempted to read at the wrong time of day, as the sun was beaming mercilessly into his eyes. Said reviewer, however, did think to presume that cheeseburgers would be available as an option for patrons, and just went ahead and ordered that. The burger was a little on the small side, but the price point was in league with this, so not a big deal. It was piping hot, almost too hot to eat, and the lettuce wasn’t as crispy as it should have been, because it would take titanium lettuce to stand up to those Mercurian temperatures. Seriously I — I mean, the reviewer — could have probably worked a little nuclear fusion on the surface of the meat it was hot enough. The chocolate malt shake, on the other hand, was oh so refreshingly chilled, just thin enough to get through the straw without sucking up a lung in the process, and had just the right amount of Whopper. They should, in the reviewer’s opinion, be reminiscent of Whoppers without overpowering the user.

2. Ice Burg Drive-In — this is more a leisurely paced drive-through than a drive-in per se, as they will tell you to pull up to the window once you’ve ordered and they’re ready for you. So you can’t do your best Fred Flintstone impersonation with the food hanging off your window. The cheese on this burger was the best cheese all around, but honestly people, most Americans order cheeseburgers because we want extra lipids and flavor, and we figure, if you’re going to eat something as bad for you as a burger, you might as well throw those last shreds of caution to the wind and slap some cheese on it. We don’t order cheeseburgers thinking we’re going to get the best gruyere this side of the Atlantic (or Pacific, or wherever). The bun was way too big for the meat patty, making this reviewer chip away at the outer ring of bread, throwing it to the birds who had lined up for just such an opportunity. (This reviewer does not pretend to be original, see.) The vanilla shake was very, very thick, almost impossible to suck up the straw. In fact, after running into a grocery store and coming back into the car after 20 minutes, the shake was still too thick to drink. The taste was spot-on, but hello, one needs to be able to physically ingest the thing in order to ascertain its flavor.

3. Coffee Connection Cafe — There’s nothing here that even remotely suggests burgers, not in the name, anyway. This is a diner with three separate areas — a coffeehouse room, a room with computers one can rent, and a line of diner booths with a counter and stools. Free WiFi all throughout. And they have a much-touted bison burger. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “bison burger?!? But aren’t buffalo extinct?” Well, bison and buffalo are not the same, in fact. There are no buffalo in the North American continent. Actual buffalo, like water buffalo, are in Asia. According to Wikipedia, anyway. Bison are going strong in the West here. And bison meat is sweeter, leaner, and faster-cooking than cattle meat. Thus it is that we tried the bison burger here, and it is a good find/good eat. Thick on the bun, with a nice choice of cheeses (see earlier paragraph for instant contradiction), its only drawback is the automatic relish they secretly tuck under the meat. Relish? Relish is for middle-aged New Yorker men to get on their hotdogs so they can tell their wives that they had vegetables that day. Relish is not something for a nuanced meat like bison to have to contend with. So tell them to please, hold the relish. The shakes are fine for a diner that obviously doesn’t make many of them. Eddie’s shakes win this three-way contest hands down. But the Cafe Connection has the best burger so far.

Next up, MRI results, construction on the recycling center next door, and Everett Gets a Tooth.

Corner Market in Seattle

“Interesting” is one of those words that can mean pretty much anything, but usually means nothing. Used as a conversational nudge, it means, “go on, I’m listening.” Said drawn out in the beginning, like, “iiiiiiiinteresting,” it means you just found something odd. Said after a pause, like, “that’s . . . interesting,” means you just found something really odd. Looking at the actual Webster’s definition, however, it simply means “holding the attention : arousing interest.”

So judge for yourself when I describe the following as arousing my interest:

1. The fellow who comes by the recycling center several times a day to scrounge through the materials to see if there’s anything he wants. So-marked treasures are piled into his wagon, which is attached to his 1950s bicycle. The most “interesting” thing about him is his outfit — always a dusty pair of overalls with no shirt underneath, so one can easily see just how filthy he is. I actually get concerned about him because he seems so duly dedicated and driftless. I wonder where he sleeps at night. 

The ceiling in question

2. The ceiling in the smallest bedroom of our Liar House is made of plaster. Okay, not so interesting. But when the plaster was in its infancy and still wet, someone drew all over it. There’s a tic-tac-toe board and a set of Olympic rings, the words “California,” Walla Walla,” and “Paula,” as if someone were documenting her own travel to this isolated village. Was it inscribed in a year of the Olympic games? We do know from a previous resident that it was there in 2002, but earlier than that, we have no idea.

3. There’s a small photo in our basement, a knock off of some cheap Olin Mills portrait. Four women of varying ages, all blonde, smiling a little too much like they hailed from Stepford, Massachusetts. No idea when that was left here, why it’s in the basement, of all places, if it’s a joke or placed ironically.

4. Tuesday is lawn moving day, which I presume will end shortly — probably when the college shuts off the automatic lawn sprinklers. Our band-playing neighbors next door have a large trampoline in the backyard. When the mowing guy comes by, he doesn’t drive up in one of those long-bed pickup trucks with a green “Landscaping” painted on the side. He arrives by street in his riding lawnmower, as if he pops up from the ground like our watering system, or possibly like a mechanized, humongous hedgehog. I’ve never actually seen him not sitting in the mower. Thus his strategy for moving the trampoline, which obviously blocks a big swath of lawn, is to ram it, head on, move where it recently had been, and then ram it from the other side. So the sound of this is amusing and a bit worrisome: mowmowmowmowBANGmowmowmowmowBANGBANGmowmowmowmowmow.

Those are just the top four interesting people and things in this corner of town. Perhaps next week I’ll move off campus with a few more mysteries.

Meanwhile, it’s clear I need to get out more often.

A few weeks ago Susanne and I ventured to a large banking institution to open a joint checking and savings account. I mean, we are married, after all, I suppose it’s time we join our moneys — even though, ahem, I have no income to speak of at the moment. I haven’t gotten desperate enough yet to start selling brownies and Shrinky-Dinks in front of the house, even though that pulled in a nice $2.85 for me weekly in the late 70s. I spent a lot of time making those Shrinky-Dinks, thank you very much, mostly traced from SuperMag and Scooby-Doo comics. There were also the little “shell people” I would craft after visits to the Jersey Shore, with googely eyes crazy glued to the tops to give them that little extra something. Those were my seasonal wares and were always gone by late September, so you had to get there quickly before they were snatched up, pipe cleaners and all.

So in the Bank of [insert country name here] we set up our accounts, and then had the banal joy of selecting debit card designs from a wonderful panoply of choices that would really say something about us as individuals. Oh, the variety was stunning — any particular baseball team we wanted, a full spectrum of national not-for-profit causes and organizations, scenic vistas of various regions across the country, the list was just endless, really. I imagine it would be akin to a Soviet-era Russian standing in the middle of Wegmans trying to select just one kind of potato chip. It blew our minds, really.

There were those that we could rule out quickly — nothing anti-choice or overly religious. Nothing with an animated character, lest German businesspeople scoff at us like they do in that American Express commercial (talk about advertising by snobbery!). Nothing falsely or extremely patriotic — because also, I am not one for breaking the Flag Code of the United States. The flag is the flag, and it’s not supposed to be represented except as a flag, for the love of Pete. And if you don’t believe me, here is the text from the U.S. Code:

 

§176. Respect for flag

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor.

• (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
• (b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
• (c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
• (d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.
• (e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.
• (f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.
• (g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.
• (h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
• (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.
• (j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.
• The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

 

Cougars logo

Hydrangeas in Seattle

DC building on a sunny day

So Susanne, for better or worse, has moved into a veritable community of faculty and staff, and of course, students. As I mentioned in the last post, we’ve gone to one staffer’s house for dinner, and we’ve also been over to another faculty member’s house for a chocolate tasting event which was, shall we say, very Walla Walla. To clarify–in DC, such an event would include a chocolate waterfall, set up next to a Melting Pot-like tray of pineapple, marshmallows, strawberries, cheesecake, and the like; a table of Brazilian and Peruvian or fill in your exotic country of choice dark chocolates, some European chocolate for comparison, and 6 people from the Commerce Department who would espouse on the history of chocolate, whether they actually knew anything about it or not. Out here, well, it was a bunch of folks sitting around a dining room table which barely had enough room for us and all of our host’s houseplants, eating little taster-sized chocolates that she got from a friend. Way more down to earth and simplified. And, I suppose, much less pretentious.

Walla Walla petunias

The ready-made crowd is nice, but I feel the need to meet some people on my own, as if meeting everyone through Susanne would doom me to a life apart from any decision-making I could do. Which I know isn’t true. But it appeared to me to be healthier to find avenues of my own toward friendship and comraderie. So I ventured down to the local, lonely Democratic headquarters for the county.

Boy, were they happy to see me! So happy! Happy happy joy joy! I thought I might get a Busby Berkeley musical number upon my entrance. Now just for kicks I may have to visit the GOP HQ to see what that experience is like. It also helps that it’s next door to the only Chinese lunch buffet in town. (And the all-you-can-eat buffet, by the way, is $6.49 — eat that, Baltimore former coworkers! So if you want to meet up next Friday, let me know.)

At first, they didn’t know what to do with me. I have hours and hours of free time right now. Should he canvass for us or do some phone bank work? Or be at the phones here? Immediately clear to me was that each person does in fact make a difference. As someone said to me last weekend, one person is the difference between a phone ringing endlessly at the HQ because nobody’s there to answer it, or a person to pick it up and respond.

I didn’t think the canvassing would work too well given the state of my knee rehabilitation, so I have opted for the phone bank. Oh boy. Can’t wait until I get my massively long list of numbers to call, so people can curse at me and hang up on me. But I’m sure I’ll make some new friends there — and they’ll be Democrats. Which means, I’m not sure.

Last Saturday Susanne and I went to a fundraiser event for the local HIV non-profit education and healthcare provider, Blue Mountain Heart to Heart. The idea is that over the course of a specific week, Walla2 residents host dinners at their homes and people come over to donate and eat, and then at the end of the week, the organization hosts another party with desserts to announce how much money was raised, and thank everyone for their work and donations. It’s along the lines of what Food & Friends does in DC to raise money, although for that effort folks go out to participating restaurants who donate a portion of the proceeds of their take for that night. So here I guess Heart to Heart gets more percentage of the donation, since the dinner hosts don’t hold anything back, but the number overall is a lot smaller. At any rate, we met a lot of nice people, and now I have a date for the first debate on September 26 — at Becky and Bob’s house. (I am not making this up.) Which brings me to another question — who the hell schedules a debate on a Friday? Do they think we’re going to watch on a tavern TV with the NBA pre-season games playing on the next screen over? That’ll be the day.

Anyway, the DC Democratic HQ and the bleeding-heart liberals’ fundraising event aside, how else to meet people in Walla Walla? Well, I have a couple more route here. One was supposed to be bowling. I mean, seriously, I love bowlers. They want activity but not too much activity. They want teammates but not too much competition. They typically enjoy beer and other light refreshment. They’re definitely on the dorky side, and generally not very pretentious. My kind of people! I think I have to wait until January, though, because Mr. Knee here had to get overexcited at the Billie Jean song at his wedding, and he’s still not ready to fling the strikes down the lane. So that means…

I hope to meet people at the orthopedic’s office tomorrow! Hurt people here I come!

It appears that it is not illegal in the State of Washington to produce or purchase unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk. Of course, they also have medical marijuana up here, but that’s another story. This story is about yogurt, hence the bacteria.

I suppose if one is going to be situated in a small town — call it a city if you like, but really, if we’re talking fewer than six digits of people, we’re talking town. Anyway, if this small town is in the corner of a state bordered by people nostalic for the Wild West and people nostalgic for fascism, one needs to begin playing to one’s strengths, in this case, baking and cooking. Not that these are the only things that one does, but when one begins referring to oneself in the third person (and people don’t bring up Suede of Project Runway), baking and cooking are the easiest strengths to highlight. So bear with one. Erm, me.

Susanne and I were invited to a farm share dinner, which was nice because we used to do those occasionally in DC. We asked what we could contribute and were delighted to be told: DESSERT. So I thought about making cheesecake, as I have in years past, when I’ve made delights like these:

Caramel toffee cheesecake

A caramel toffee cheesecake with the traditional graham cracker crust. There’s also the chocolate mousse cheesecake with an Oreo crust, and finally, the brownie and chocolate swirl cheesecake with a vanilla sponge cake crust.

None of these, however, did I make for the farm share dinner. I made this, a chocolate fudge cake with a masala chai-infused ganache.

Hopefully it went some distance toward making some friends! 

Chocolate cheesecake

chocolate fudge cake

Meanwhile, I made my first foray into growing bacteria in milk, or rather, I made some yogurt last week. Baking the cake was a motivator, so I poured 8 cups of raw milk into a nice large pot and made it not raw anymore by bringing it slowly to 180 degrees. I wound up with three batches setting overnight — a vanilla batch, a plain batch, and a small batch with local organic honey. It turned out really well! Now I need some recipes using yogurt because 8 cups of yogurt is a LOT of yogurt to get through in its two-week life span.

Maybe that’ll be my new career — yogurt maker for the stars. I just need some flavor ideas that are novel and hip, and I’m in business.

I think I’ve mentioned before that there is a whole different concept of space out here west of the Ye Ole Mississippi. That is, space has space here. There’s no bragging about one’s luxury 800 sq. ft. apartment. No sucking in your gut to pass a person with a grocery cart in the aisle of your local market. No squeezing by the jackass in the H2 on 9th Street Northeast when you’re just trying to get home after an annoying day at work, and they’re trying to break the land speed record for an oversized SUV.

Out here, they don’t know what to do with all the space. Small plots of land grow wheat. Drive-in movie theaters are not an extinct species like they are back east. Abandoned buildings sit and slowly crumble for years because there’s no hurry to use their old footprints for the next gentrification effort. Actually, they wouldn’t know a gentrifying neighborhood if it bit them on their collective butts, even though we all know that gentrifying neighborhoods go out of their way to get all bitey and nasty.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a bus, come to think of it. There are a couple of those trolleys on tires that roam around the downtown, especially on the weekends, when downtown looks particularly picturesque.

Small glimpse of a beautiful car

Adding to the picturesqueness of this weekend was a classic car show that occupied most of Main Street by the farmer’s market. All of the angle parking was taken up with about 100 cars from the 1950s through the 1970s, yet there was still plenty of street parking for the folks who came to see the cars. That wouldn’t have happened on even a Wednesday morning in DC. That’s how much space they have.

Everything that we’re used to on the East Coast has its component over here, but the counterpart here comes with a “drive-thru” option, in case you’re too damn lazy to get out of your car. There are, in no apparent order:

Drive-through pharmacies

Drive-through espresso shops

Drive-through supermarkets

Drive-through auto parts stores

Still to discover are drive-through furniture stores, but they can’t be far behind.

In case you don’t have a problem with commitment and instead prefer to drive-in and hang around for a while, there are plenty of drive-in restaurants, and I’m not just talking about A&W. Fast Eddie’s here in Walla Walla was presented to us after I was whining that I wanted a malt. They had 20 flavors of milkshakes and malts on the menu — and by “menu,” I mean oversized white board that doubled as a sun-blocking device while you’re sitting in your car with the food on your window, like Fred Flintstone in the show opener. While I wouldn’t actually call them fast per se, for it took about 15 minutes to get a burger, hot wings, and two shakes (my craving was contagious, apparently), the food was tasty and the eating-in-the-car novel, at least for now. There weren’t serving on roller skates, but at the Sonic in Richland, they are.

For Jody -- a 1965 Mustang

We drove down into Pendleton, Oregon, to see what was there and to check out a restaurant we learned about last week. We picked the wrong time of day for the eatery, since it wouldn’t open for a few hours, but we got to see the town a bit. Pendleton is pretty well known for its wool blankets and other fabrics, at least say Susanne and my mother. And I am not about to disagree with either one of them! Pendleton also hosts a rodeo Round Up every year in September. We found a quilting shop, a caramel popcorn shop, used bookstore, and loads of western wear stores. I may have to pick up a cowboy hat at some point. Not sure if black or white is more my style, though.

Since Raphael’s was closed, we ate at the Hamley Steakhouse, which tells a lot of the history of Hamley & Co., which was very tasty and very cowboy. We actually sat right next to the old bank counter front of the First National Bank, which was held up by Butch Cassidy and the Kid — that was pretty cool. I don’t think of Oregon as the old west, but I suppose it was here. Silly northeasterner, am I. Susanne put back most of a plate of baby back ribs and I went for a medium-rare gaucho-style rib eye steak. Definitely recommended if you find yourself in Pendleton. Though I’d stay away on Sundays, since most everything else is closed.

Hey, they like to enjoy the space around here, okay?

Classic Car show in Walla Walla