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December 20, 2008 | 0 Comments

Oh, the weather outside is frightful

9:30 AM PST Friday — I look at the clock and realize it’s only been 5 and a half hours since I fell asleep. While my upper brain starts computing all the possibilities for the day: gym, grocery, Web work, Xmas gift shopping (online, of course), one stark image comes to mind and lizard brain pops up and shuts the whole mess down. Just the thought of the snow outside was apparently overwhelming.

10:17 AM PST Friday — My blurry vision is clear enough to let me see the time. I get immediately stressed out that the day is getting away from me. There’s so much to do today! Aren’t we having someone over for supper? I can’t ask Susanne, as she is sound asleep.

10:23 AM PST Friday — Oh come on, just get up already, says the Angel Ev over my shoulder. This would likely work better if Angel Ev could sport me a cup of coffee.

10:31 AM PST Friday — Clad in ripped jeans, navy pea coat, shirt and sweatervest (of course), and DC-branded baseball cap, I venture out to the stand-alone garage where our car is. For the first time in a while, it is not snowing. I lean hard on the garage door to open it, then from inside, I open the big door, the one the car goes through. I smile as I realize our neighbor has done a great job of keeping our “driveway” — which is seriously only 6 feet long — really clear and passable.

10:33 AM PST Friday — Not passable enough. I am stuck as I start turning the wheels to enter the alley behind our house.

10:34 AM PST Friday — I have shoveled all of the snow in a 3-foot radius around the car, paying attention to the tires. I get back in and . . . no go, the wheels spin helplessly. I think I may have just created ice patches from the friction of the rubber. Go me, creating ice. It’s like I’m God.

10:39 AM PST Friday — I have shoveled all of the snow in a 5-foot radius around the car, rocked on it a bit, being careful of the knee, and I am realizing I am not one inch closer to the grocery store. This was a Bad Idea.

 

Canada's best snow gear

Canada's best snow gear

 

 

11:09 AM PST Friday — Susanne comes outside in all of her Emergency Canadian Snow Gear, sponsored by Roots clothiers. She is armed with cardboard boxes that still say her last name on them from our move four months ago. Oh, our ill-fated relocation into this frosty circle of hell! If only Dante had lived to see cars. I think of The Inferno and I can hear, somewhere, Devil Ev laughing at me.

11:22 AM PST Friday — The cardboard boxes are failing us.

11:25 AM PST Friday — Someone who has come by to drop off his unwanted cardboard boxes — in this weather, are you crazy? — which the college defines as illegal dumping, is helping us push the car out of the newly formed ice patches. Illegal dumper has a 4-wheel-drive Outback. I want a 4-wheel-drive Outback. Right now, it’s the only thing I want and the only thing I have ever wanted. Oh, and gloves for my frozen fingers. Oh, and boots. I’m noticing my toes are cold.

11:32 AM PST Friday — The car is moving! The car is moving! I’m driving! It’s driving! I’m heading down the alleyway, I’m turning left! Wow, a left turn! Gosh this street of ours needs a plow, I think. I see the VW Jetta parked on the wrong side of the street — more illegal dumpers. Wow, am I sick of these illegal dumpers. It’s like living next to a drug dealer, with the constant activity and bad parking. Okay, it’s not like that at all, but whatever. Gosh, I seem to be sliding into their car. Darn, I need to stop the car so I don’t hit them, I think. 

And now I’m stuck. A string of curse words flows out of my mouth like the rotten broccoli smell at the paper mill in Wallula. I see the illegal dumpers walking back to their car, and I call them horrible names.

11:35 AM PST Friday — I have discovered I can drive backwards. Maybe if I drive this way I will somehow reverse time and then I’ll be back in the bed having never ventured out in the first place. I hear giggling off in the distance.

11:37 AM PST Friday — I am stuck again, backwards-lodged into a bank of snow representing the curb, I think, right out in front of our house. I can actually feel my blood pumping through my veins. That is not a good sign.

11:52 AM PST Friday — Susanne is out front with me now, trying to reestablish contact with the road via the same tired cardboard boxes. Poor boxes, this is not what they signed up for when they were born at the cardboard box factory. They thought they’d be holding pretty items from Pottery Barn and making people smile, but instead, they’ve got hot rubber, rock salt, and dirty snow all over them. I start to feel like I am just another misused cardboard box.

12:11 PM PST Friday — It is clear we can’t get the car out of this spot. We wonder if we should call AAA or knock on the door of our neighbor who has a Jeep and a winch. I start thinking about the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, and tell myself that there will be no winch mishaps. No winch mishaps. I do realize at this point that I can’t feel my big toes anymore.

12:22 PM PST Friday — Susanne heads to school for meetings with students, and I head inside to call AAA. It’s busy.

12:48 PM PST Friday — AAA is busy. I see online that there are snowstorms all over the country. Someone needs to call Santa and tell him he can have his Arctic wind back.

1:15 PM PST Friday — I head back outside and shovel my way to our neighbors’ house, to talk about his mighty fine winch. He says he’ll finish lunch and then we can get cracking. Hopefully that light at the end of the tunnel is the sun, and not an oncoming train. If I see anything that looks remotely like “Canada Pacific,” I’m hauling ass out of here.

1:32 PM PST Friday — Ken and Denise come over with the Jeep, hook the winch up to the frame of my car, and pull while I put it in drive and try to get some momentum. The car slides, then the wheels spin, albeit 3 feet forward of the last place they spun. Angel Ev shouts, “Yay, we’re making ice again!” and claps his hands wildly. Devil Ev chuckles as the tires fail to find any traction. I have the sudden thought that I had a 4-wheel-drive car for 7 years and never needed it like I do right at this moment. Great.

1:34 PM PST Friday — Ken gets my car winched to within about 5 feet of his. We unhook the line and he gets ready to start the process all over again. I wonder if now that I’m in a new spot, if I can’t get something going…

1:35 PM PST Friday — I’M MOVING! THE CAR IS MOVING! THANK THE BABY JESUS! I’m turning! Still rolling! I see now that I have to handle the car a lot more sternly, instead of being Mr. Gentle.

1:38 PM PST Friday — I shut the garage door, the car safely inside, and stick my tongue out to catch a couple of snowflakes. Denise is going to the store later and I can go with her. I thank her and silently give the town one more curse, just for good measure.

1:40 PM PST Friday — I stand over the tea kettle, heating up water and wondering where the day went. And whoa, I need a shower.

December 18, 2008 | 0 Comments

Wintry Walla Walla

As the snow is still falling, it’s tough for the one-kneed bandit to get out there and take proper pictures, but I’ll try a little later today. For now, there are these from when the snow first started falling. Enjoy.

December 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

Cookies of perpetual indulgence

We throw a party every year to bake and exchange holiday cookies of no particular affiliation, although there do seem to be a preponderance of Christmas trees in the mix with each year’s collection. I started the annual cookie exchange in 2003, when I was living in a 1-bedroom 3rd floor walk up, which incidentally was the only place I’ve lived that had kitchen appliances younger than me. Unbeknownst to me, Susanne was hosting her own cookie party, not surprising since we both own KitchenAid Artisan 5.5 quart mixers that we have given names. Obviously baking is more important to us than your average bear. No, I do not think that makes us weird.

What was a fun little get-together has evolved into a tag-team extravaganza of confection. We held our first cookie exchange in Wallyworld last weekend and 30 guests came by with all manner of sweet goodness: there were butter cookies, gingerbread cookies, fudge, pumpkin-chocolate-chip cookies, spice-raisin cookies, shortbread cookies, nutty cookies, fruity cookies, and some high-end store bought cookies. 

To cut some of this unending sweetness, Susanne and I made a few savory delights — her well known (in DC) stuffed mushroom caps, spinach dip, and as a joke, I made mini-wieners with Pillsbury dough crescent rolls snugly wrapped around each one. Susanne could not believe her eyes, but I said, “you wait and see, people will love them.” She continued to look absolutely horrified. 

I ran out to the store, buying last-minute things and getting some cider so we could mull it with some spices on the stove. It had started snowing. Walla Walla, although it gets about three times the amount of snow, on average, that DC does, does not own a single plow. So driving gets pretty treacherous. I put on my grippiest shoes, prayed my remaining ACL would hold out on any ice, and hopped in the car. And then drove very slowly to the grocery store. Anti-lock brakes are great, but the jittery dashboard alarm that the road is slick annoyed the hell out of me. I know it’s slippery, car, I’ve been driving for 20 years. You were just manufactured in June. Don’t tell me how to drive. 

After this altercation with our vehicle, I slipped into the grocery, grabbing what I needed, and then heading for the cash registers. In Walla Walla, there aren’t long lines for anything, really, but they’re still painfully slow. People here like to commiserate. It did, after all, take us 2.5 hours to buy a new dryer at Home Depot our second week here because the appliance salesman spent so much time chatting us up. By the end I knew his full name, favorite hobby (hot air ballooning), preferred church (Adventist), favorite restaurant (26 Brix), and had met his current girlfriend and her two children.

I stood in the line of two people (me and another person) for 12 minutes. At this point all the friendly has evaporated from my body and the three-foot radius of space around me. I am thus very consistently a rather terse, unhappy customer by the time I actually reach the cashier, but my politeness stops me from spilling over into rudeness, which is fortunate, because that would be such a difference from Chatty Cathy Cashier that it would rip the fabric of the universe, and then where would we be? Looking at the gates of hell or the 7th dimension or something, at Checkout 1 of the Safeway on Tientin Street? Not good.

Then it was off to get home, get the food prepped, and hop in the shower and find some festive outfit. I was happy, damn it, happy for the holiday party!

I showered too quickly. I left soap on my backside and realized, only after I’d gotten dressed, that this made it hard to walk. Apparently friction keeps our legs from doing the Monty Python silly walk, and I had just minimized my friction. But with 30 minutes until the party, I didn’t have time to remedy my situation. So it was that I realized that inside slipperiness is just as bad, if not worse, than outside slipperiness, like ice. At least I didn’t have a butt alarm telling me that it would be hard to keep my legs together. Actually, that’s not really how I meant that to sound. Oh, bother.

The party went off without a hitch, and two people actually squealed with delight when they saw the mini-wieners. Somehow this post has gotten off track with all the talk about butts and wieners. Sorry about that. I have pictures somewhere, of all the cookies, and when I locate the camera cord (Susanne tells me it’s in the cabinet of no return), I’ll update this post.

December 11, 2008 | 1 Comment

Scissorhands of the instant haircut

Barbershops and hair salons, more than other locally owned businesses, seem to reflect the immediate community around them. Walking into one convenience store or another, things aren’t so different from town to town, although I acknowledge that the suburban WaWa in Maryland isn’t the same as the below street level no name mart of DC. But one cramped store or another, if you need bandages for your ouchie, you can get them anywhere. And you’ll probably get a similar indifferent quality of service at either, whether high school students with pimples or embittered older city clerks are the ones selling them to you.

Not so the barbershop. The barbershop, in my limited experience, is really about who lives in that neighborhood. There was one near my job in Baltimore that was like a scene out of Tim Story’s movie, with all the yammering and disagreement over the local sports team, in this case, the Ravens (go Ravens!). A line of tall mirrors all along the walls that were accidentally feminine and reminiscent of a beauty salon. Three customer chairs for the hair and beard trimming that were reasonably new and very nondescript. No actual decorating of any kind and I can’t even recall what color the walls were painted or even if they were painted. 

Barbershops seem to never have a name, other than to use the name of the owner, like Alex’s Barbershop, as in the preceding example. They relieve themselves of the cutesy but horrifically bad establishment names that plague the hair salon industry, like Kidz Cutz (which sounds like an alternative to abandoning your kids in Nebraska), Happy Beauty Salon (conveniently located next to the Happy Buddha all you can eat Chinese buffet), Shear Pleasure (only if you come out of there with something you like, right?), and She Bangz, which seriously has got to be one of the worst names I’ve ever heard of for a salon. But hey, there are more. 

 

Outside the barbershop in Walla Walla

Outside the barbershop in Walla Walla

Now I’ve gotten some pretty bad haircuts in my day, and by bad I mean torturously uneven, with a harsh line carved into the back of my neck so that people behind me can earnestly relive 1986, some bad dye jobs, you name it. Thus I have some trepidation about going to just any old place. I hesitated and procrastinated going anyplace once we moved to Walla Walla — I even went to a supercuts in Alexandria, Virginia, while I was traveling because I hadn’t gone to the barbershop in town, and I knew that at some point I was going to have to break down and just try it. In my defense, I did attempt to go once, but it was a Tuesday or something and god knows only half the stores are open on Monday and Tuesday around here. I nearly picked up my own clippers to cut my hair myself, but good sense won out in the end.

My fast-growing but thinning hair needs a cut every 4 weeks or so, so I trudged on in to Sung’s Barbershop here in town, not having any faith at all that I wasn’t going to look like a stuck sheep upon my exit. Having a friend named Sang I was prepared for meeting someone with the present perfect tense of the name. Hey, Sang’s a nice guy. Sung is not a nice guy. Sung is a taciturn woman with a scarce smile and an obvious sense of skepticism. I appreciated all of that. 

This barbershop, or rather, barber’s shop, was unlike any other I have ever had the fortune to enter. There was a  beat-up, used-to-be-white sofa on one wall, and which only gave access to patrons on one half, because the other half was already occupied by a dozing sharpei. One wall was covered in baseball caps and below them, seemingly random pictures that I supposed had specific meaning or value to Sung. A piece of torn, white cardboard announced the pricing structure: Haircuts, $12 Seniors, $9 Beard Trim $5. Wow, I can get a senior for $9? That’s a bargain.

A small, dirty mirror allowed customers to see a 3 square inch area of their heads while she was clipping away, and the lone chair was a relic from the 1940s. I wonder how many people have had a haircut in that chair. Must be thousands. There were lots of pictures of the Walla Walla valley, old pictures of the valley ridges before the windmills moved in, sending who knows how many kilowatts to California. It was kind of Old West meets baseball fanatic.

In a town of 29,000, of course it stands to reason that the person already in the chair getting his haircut was one of the 16 I’ve met since moving here. He stood up at the end of his cut and shook my hand. She gesticulated that I should sit down. This was no suburban Supercuts, nor was it a DC/Baltimore chat shop. I told her how I like it cut, not using any parlance like “high and tight,” and she cut it exactly as I asked, in 6.2 minutes. I was really happy with it, which of course I couldn’t show her because I was certain it would unravel the time/space continuum in the store, or something. I gave her a generous tip and headed out, relived that I have a place to go when Susanne starts making comments about how long my hair is getting. I just have to remember not to go there on Monday or Tuesday.

December 9, 2008 | 1 Comment

Morning cats are free

Saturday brought with it a flurry of activity, starting with barrel tasting weekend. Susanne offered to be the designated driver and we piled into the car — Susanne, me, and two other folks from the college. The first vineyard, Dusty Valley (an appropriate name for around here) has a couple of strong wines, including a pinot noir. No barrel tasting, though. We went to two more vineyards, heading to Pepper Bridge where we sampled a merlot that will be bottled next year. The sun set on the rolling hills strewn with grapes, unseasonably warm for December. We drove back into town and found some church stairs from which to watch the holiday parade.

 

2007 barrel of wine

2007 barrel of wine

Now then, I am not unfamiliar with small-town parades. My hometown of Hightstown has a few parades a year, including a don’t-call-it-pagan winter parade.

But Walla Walla, as I know all to well at this point, is not anything like New Jersey. I don’t think I’ve met even one Italian at this point, three and a half months into living here. It was a small parade. It was as small as a parade can be and still have some semblance of a parade. I mean, you need more than a few slowly moving vehicles, right?

The tininess of the parade was distinctly at odds with its name, officially called the “Macy’s Festival of Lights Parade.” Wow. Small town America meets international capitalist licensing and sponsorship! Yes, there is a Macy’s in town. It is in fact, the only department store in Walla Walla. There are at least half a dozen auto supply stores, two of them are Schuck’s Auto Supply, as it happens. I wonder about that. Are they separate competing franchises? Or held by one owner who didn’t want to have to commute too far between them? Seriously, what are they, the Starbucks of car parts? My favorite new Schuck’s joke, because I need the laughs, goes like this:

Customer to clerk: Why are you named Schuck’s?

Clerk: So when we’re out of something, we can say, “Schuck’s, we don’t have that.”

Okay, so that can’t be why that’s their name, because that’s Bad Marketing.

And I digress.

The parade started on time, which was very impressive, since practically nothing and nobody is punctual around these parts. There was a Mini Cooper brigade, which consisted of the 8 Mini Coopers in town getting together and driving slowly through the parade route. Too bad we drive a Honda.

There were many trucks decked out with white lights, a few floats with square dancers on them, not looking anything like the folks I’ve seen at New York City and DC’s pride parades. In other words, they most definitely did not look like this:

 

Gay dancing cowboys on a float

Gay dancing cowboys on a float

I don’t think Walla Walla, or any part of eastern Washington, is ready for that, but then again, I’ve never seen Spokane’s pride parade.

The only actual disconcerting thing in the parade was the Santa. I know Santa is the anchor in these things, in the last car before the police end pace car. But Santa was facing backwards. Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t Mr. Kringle be more forward-looking than that? What’s with the symbolism, people? Further, I know it’s slow-going because it’s a parade, but uh, that’s not good for preventing motion sickness. The last thing you need at one of these is to traumatize a bunch of kids because Santa decided the best green for his red suit was his split pea soup lunch. Dare I say more?

No, I daren’t.

So, without the plethora of gay-related dancing floats, without a series of politicians doing their bit for public relations (who cares about 29,000 votes, anyway *cough, cough, FRANKEN cough*), and with no high school marching bands, we had representatives from most of the churches in town, from a couple of businesses (10% off your next 5 gallons of paint at Gary’s!), and cutest of all, from the local chapter of the Humane Society. There were many dogs wearing sweaters that said, “Adopt Me,” and they drew a lot of “aww”s from the crowd. They also handed out candy canes with stickers on them, which fortunately for me, I did not read until the next day. 

Marketed on the stickers was an upcoming adoption drive for December 20. December 20, as many of you probably don’t know, will be a bargain basement day for pet adoption in lovely Walla Walla. Dogs will only cost $40 (regularly $80-$120) and cats the low, low price of $10! And only between 10 and noon, cats are free.

Seriously, I think it’s a good thing, even if I am a little weirded out by making animals seem like they’re for sale at Filene’s. But we can’t really get a dog until I can walk him or her everyday. And I can’t do that until there’s allograft material for me, and wow, the world is a weird place, isn’t it? I refuse to bargain for a dog on the death of some person. I just would like a friggin dog, and to go bowling, and try the foxtrot again, or even to carry a 10-pound bag of flour from Costco without feeling like I’m playing russian roulette with my remaining knee ligaments.

December 8, 2008 | 5 Comments

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind

My surgery has been postponed indefinitely because there isn’t currently any donor tissue to use to reconstruct my ACL. In a weird twist to my attempts to “buy local,” I seem to be subject to an inaccessibility of allograft material, which is a localized issue. Apparently if we were still living in DC I would have had the surgery by now.

But not having the surgery just yet provides some unexpected benefits, like I’ve trimmed our Christmas tree, we can go ahead with a cookie exchange party, which will help us meet some new people, and I got to go to the annual holiday farmer’s market (the regular weekly market closed at the end of October and won’t reopen until April).

Still, it’s strange to think that I’m waiting, basically, for someone to pass away not so I can have their heart, but so I can go bowling again. It’s strangely offensive, or trite, or . . . something distasteful. That said, it is the best surgical option for me. And as I myself am an organ donor, I suppose I may pass something on, too. I just don’t have a response for people who try to make jokes about all of this (except maybe for the “buy local” one). Organ donation just isn’t funny. I mean, it’s kind of ridiculously unfunny.

So in the meantime, I bake. Baking, as we all know, sure can be funny. For Thanksgiving, I produced an apple pie, about two and a half dozen sweet potato biscuits, and a pumpkin swirl cheesecake. Thanks to my Mom, James Turner, and Junior’s bakery in Brooklyn, respectively, for the recipes.

 

Pumpkin swirl cheesecake

Pumpkin swirl cheesecake

The cheesecake, it should be noted, was not made without some trauma to me and the people in the room whilst it was being prepared. I was making the cake with my almost 12-year-old niece, Beth, when I was showing her my trick for cracking eggs. She asked, rightly so, if I wanted her to break the egg into the bowl or into something else, then putting that into the bowl. Because my egg-cracking tip minimizes the chance that broken shell will get into the recipe, I said it was fine to break it into the bowl.

Bad idea, Everett. Bad, bad idea. For while my 38 years of experience with store-bought eggs has so far produced wonderful incredible edibleness, this was about to go off the rails for me. She cracked and cracked the egg, and said, “it won’t open.” I took the egg from her, and in the nanosecond before I released the yolk, I saw the problem.

Humans, however, need something more than a nanosecond for their reflexes to kick in. I could only manage a slow-motion, “noooooooooo,” as I dropped it into $8 worth of cream cheese, vanilla, and whipping cream.

It was blood red. Worse, it had a half-inch large dead baby chick in it. And the redness of it against the pure white cream cheese mix made it only look more incredibly disgusting.

Suddenly there were people all crowding around the bowl trying to get a glimpse of the grotesque concoction. Kind of like when someone tastes something spoiled and screams and then begs you to taste it, too. Or like eating lunch in the Social Security Administration cafeteria. Kind of like that.

Susanne’s older brother, true to older brother form, suggested we just dump out the egg and continue on with the cake making. We did not of course, listen to him. This was made easier because of precedent–we are in the habit of not listening to his crazy man ideas. Instead I took a drive 12 miles to the grocery store and got more cream cheese, which was conveniently on sale. Then I wondered if the grocery store had some conspiracy to screw up people’s cheesecakes with fertilized chicken eggs so we would have to double our purchases of the cream cheese. Now that the Republicans are out of the White House, what will we do for conspiracy theories? Egg producers may take a lot of heat. 

This brings me to the mind-losing portion of this post. I was planning on the knee surgery on December 3, but lo and behold, as it is postponed indefinitely, I now have no calendar for anything — not rehab, not getting a job, not bowling — and so my sanity has begun to trickle away. Dear readers, hopefully it will not adversely affect this poor little blog too badly.

In the meantime, I snapped this apple pie picture shortly before the pie was no more. Enjoy.

 

Almost gone apple pie

Almost gone apple pie

 

 

Next up: Santa comes to Walla Walla.

December 4, 2008 | 0 Comments

Overheard at the coffeehouse

I’m inclined to spend time writing in coffeehouses, because my extroverted brain needs something to tune out; I can’t just concentrate in a quiet space. There’s definitely a breaking point — thinking back to when the gaggle of toddlers was running around one coffee joint in town, that was definitely too much chaos for me. But if there is some good music piping in, some “ambiance” in the room, and a hearty level of caffeine, I’m good to go. 

I say “tune out,” but that means that none of the conversations can be that strange, interesting, or far-fetched, or my semi-conscious brain will fast-track it to the front of my mind. Thus it is that some comments cause a lot of distraction and a bit of amusement. Some of the more notable remarks:

1. Techniques that enhance one’s masturabatory moments. Talk about some TMI, people. It should be noted that this conversation took place while all of the conversationalists were texting on their cell phones and PDAs. Ha. PDAs. Public Displays of Abhorrence.

2. “I mean, I can only listen to Bruce Springsteen for so long.” The discussion then drifted to a tips ‘n tricks of how to take notes on one’s daily existential insights, for use in future lyric-writing, so your band, Walla Walla, and then the rest of the world can benefit from your brilliance. As long as we don’t have to listen for more than a few minutes, okay?

3. “I’m just wondering where this rash is gonna spread next.” No, really, someone said that. In public.

4. “I can’t figure out how to turn off my speakerphone.” Aren’t 19-year-olds the tech generation? Have we made technology so intuitive now that people no longer can do their own troubleshooting? This 38-year-old hasn’t been using computers his entire life, remember. No, I did not get up and turn off her speakerphone for her.

5. “Dude, getting your paper online is so retarded.” Dude, what are you thinking? You’re like, stupid and in college!

I may have to start wearing headphones.

December 3, 2008 | 0 Comments

And away we go! And . . . away we go! Away we go!

 

Witch Hazel -- away she goes!

Witch Hazel -- away she goes!

 

 

The logic behind spending the night in a hotel near the Portland airport was obvious — we would be near the airport for our flight the next day. For while Susanne and I consider ourselves to be above average intelligence, we surely enjoy a good obvious moment. Sometimes what is right in front of one’s face proves elusive anyway, after all, despite the best intentions. Or road map.

Here is where our careful planning went wrong. More precisely, my careful planning. For while I traced our route from home to Powell’s bookstore, and from Powell’s to the nearest Burgerville, and from there to our airport hotel, I did not plan the route to the actual airport for the next morning. I figured, lazily, “it’s an airport hotel! How far will we have to go!”

Far, it seems, when one winds up driving around in circles. We could actually hear planes landing and taking off while we drove around a dark warehouse district. It would make sense for warehouses to set up near a hub of transportation, it’s true, but can’t these folks plant an airport sign or two?

We started off with a wakeup call at 5 a.m. that wouldn’t stop ringing until we’d picked up both phones in the room. Not sure if that’s brilliant or sadistic. We were operating on the premise that our flight was leaving at 6:45. Now I know the adage, since 9/11, that you’re supposed to leave two hours at the airport to get on your domestic flight, but come on, really?

Yes, Ev. Really.

So we’re driving around clueless at 5:48, knowing we’re right next to the darn airport. 

I come to a T intersection. There’s no street sign. We don’t know which way to go. So we try both options. I thought Susanne would know how to get there. She thought I would know how to get there. To say we were annoyed would be to grossly understate the situation.

I pull into a Howard Johnson’s, hoping I’m still in the city of Portland and haven’t somehow made my way down to Eugene. I hop inside and ask the concierge for the directions to the airport, in a way that clearly identifies me as a harried, stressed out, idiot of a person who is also not from this area. I brace for his answer, thinking the directions will look something like this:

orifice-c-equation

He tells me to take a right out of the parking lot, go down three lights, and make a left.

That’s it?

Even better, the name of the road just outside the parking lot is Airport Way.

I could hear giggling from somewhere. I’m not sure it’s real or not. Or if it’s coming from me.

We make our way to the airport, find the extended parking, and scramble to the shuttle, grabbing our bags and coats. I press blindly at the car lock thingie on my keychain, locking it up as I run to the shuttle.

We made it! Susanne pulls out our itinerary. Our flight’s at 6:30. Not 6:45. 6:30 is in 20 minutes.

We didn’t make it. The Northwest computer laughs at us as we try to check in. The Northwest rep at the counter is really helpful though, and books us on a nonstop flight, getting us into Detroit about half an hour earlier than we would have with our original itinerary. Which, for $200 in changing flights fees . . . is nice?

We settle into the airport for some breakfast, since now we’ll have time for that instead of $3 trail mix and Sierra Mist on the plane. Portland airport has free Wi-Fi. How cool! We pass the time reading useless email and playing Facebook games. Ten minutes before boarding Susanne goes to get an iced tea, and I stress out again as folks are called to board and I don’t see her. Then, unlike in a romantic dream sequence, I see her walking down the corridor, carrying her tea, seeing the queue for the gate, and frowning. Apparently it is Training Day at Starbucks, and we all know how that movie ends. We get on the plane, promptly fall asleep with our necks in such a contorted position that we can not look directly ahead for the rest of the day, and wake up 3.7 hours later in the frigid tundra known as Michigan.

And away we go, on the hour-plus ride to my in-laws. They already knew the way there, fortunately for us.

December 3, 2008 | 0 Comments

City block of books

Because we’re frugal people, Susanne and I booked our Thanksgiving flights in and out of Portland. Okay, so “frugal” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Flights in and out of Walla Walla’s regional airport, after all, run about $500 more than in and out of Portland. So throw in gas and a one-night hotel stay, and we’re still netting a savings. It’s a no-brainer, really.

But Portland holds other interest for us as well. The first two recommendations we had were to go to Powell’s City Block of Books, and Burgerville. Not necessarily in that order. Although as it turns out, that is the order in which we drove. If I’d gotten $5 for each trip over the Morrison Street bridge — I guess I’d have $10. Okay, chalk that up to another money-making idea that won’t work.

 

Burgerville in SE

Burgerville in SE

Powell’s was pretty amazing. Books were arranged in that special way that only book nerds can manage — color-coded rooms housed major categories like social science, science fiction, etc. I think usability specialists would have a critique along the lines that the colors don’t actually have any intuitive connection to the organization, but maybe only Edward Tufte would care. If you know who Ed Tufte is, you can pay me $5. Hey, I’m looking for income wherever I can get it, and why should I have to send you money just because you can google the guy?

I limped through the orange section’s five aisles of cookbooks. Cookbooks by region. I discovered that fully a third of the Spanish cookbooks are unusable because there are so many fish and shellfish recipes, which Susanne can’t eat. I know it’s got a long coastline, but heck, does Spain think it’s the new Japan? Cookbooks for weddings. Okay, that’s the last thing anyone needs — you’re getting married and you think you should cook your own food? Don’t professional caterers have their own menus? Who’s buying these cookbooks, exactly? Celebrity cookbooks. “Celebrity” here means Food TV celebrities. Who cares? I can watch their shows for free and make what they make. Give me a real celebrity cookbook. Publish Kenny Roger’s cookbook. I want to see blackened, vodka chicken with jackass hangover sauce. I would make that chicken.

Susanne went upstairs to the politics section, looking for books to purchase so she can review them for future classes. So productive, that one. She bought nearly $300 worth, gleeful to be spending from her college allotment. She chatted up the cashier on how nice it is to spend someone else’s money. And of course the cashier quite agreed, growing dollar signs in her pupils that I found disturbing. I looked up at the chalkboard behind her head and saw that Powell’s takes a number of currencies — yen, euros, pounds — and has an updated exchange rate posted (hence the chalk). Let me get this straight — you happen to be in Portland, Oregon, and you see the sign and say hey, let me just pull out these 13,000 yen so I can get a copy of Toni Morrison’s latest! Thank goodness I walk around all day with foreign currency!

After taking our five sagging bags back to the car, we motored on over to Burgerville. There are multiple locations in the city, which I thought was something akin to there being multiple Lebanese Tavernas in the Washington, DC metro region. So I was thinking nice burger place. And then we drove up to the place in a section of town that looked a lot like west Baltimore. Let’s just say that there are a lot of air conditioner repairmen in SE Portland.

We were not expecting Burgerville to be a fast-food chain. It had the basic McDonald’s layout of front door, back door, drive through, and order counter. We sat down to a cheeseburger, a cheesebaconburger, a medium pile of sweet potato fries, and a Black Forest shake.

 

our Burgerville lunch

our Burgerville lunch

And it was very tasty. Indeed. It was just a bit empty, which made it depressing, especially in the midst of the closed-down auto parts shops and pockmarked street just outside. But still, a nearly perfect shake, even if I had to struggle to suck it up a bit, due to the chopped cherries in it. Bigger straw, please. It’s not like a bigger straw is going to make people think you’re trying to be Wendy’s, after all.

Next time we go to Portland we’ll have to find some other treasures. It looked like a fun city. Feel free to leave your recommendations here, and we’ll take them under advisement.

 

November 24, 2008 | 0 Comments

On the road again

So we’re on our way to Michigan for the Thanksgiving holiday, which means we have to:

Drive through 80 miles of scrubland

Venture all too near the Bad Broccoli Paper Mill

Hack through the underbrush with worn machetes

Use the force to convince otherwise insistent State Troopers that no, they do not want to give us a ticket

Venture dangerously over the dotted middle line to pass slow moving trucks carrying evil potato missiles that threaten to launch themselves at our windshield, which hurtling around the curving Interstate 84 as we drive parallel to the Columbia River

Okay, only some of those things happened. But those potatoes looked menacing. They were from Oregon, so they had something to prove to the potatoes from Idaho. It’s a potato thing, you wouldn’t understand.

The drive was beautiful, with intermittent cirrus clouds drawn wispily across the sky. About an hour west-southwest of Walla Walla we first spotted Mt. Hood, all white-cloaked and almost invisible in the haze. In 38 years on planet Earth, I have never seen anything that tall that still had it’s feet on the ground. The Columbia glimmered back at us, sometimes higher than the road we were on, sometimes choppy with waves pushed by a strong wind, sometimes calm, almost looking like polished metal. I had wondered if the scrub brush and tumbleweeds would slowly give way to what I thought the Pacific Northwest more typically looked like, but I was sorely mistaken. It was like spring in upstate New York — blink and winter’s gone, replaced by tulips and greening lawns. It was just like that — we were in the desert, and in the space on 10 miles, it seemed, we were surrounded by tall conifers and nearly-bare trees, the fading colors of their leaves scattered on the ground like a carpet.

We drove past a few dams, a waterfall that didn’t send its stream all the way down, as if it was too tired to do so, and made our way into Portland, which after spending only a few hours there, seemed like a mix of Seattle style and Baltimore pacing, with several upscale areas to set it apart as its own space. 

Powell’s City Block of Books was pretty amazing: fewer books on five floors than one would think were actually there, but very well organized, unlike the stacks at the Strand in NYC. I am still getting used to the nonverbal nature of Northwesterners. If they’re in your way, do not say, “excuse me.” Lighting oneself on fire would probably be preferable to them. No, you should just stand there, breathing lightly, so as not to take any air they had expected would fill their own lungs. They will move when they see fit. To their credit, most of them give way after 10 second or so. What, are you in a hurry? Tsk tsk, must be from the East Coast.

Susanne went wild in the store, in her calm and intellectual way, of course. Many books piled into the cart, almost as if by magic. Most of them were for school use, but we did walk out with a cookbook on making meals from one’s local farmer’s market (it follows the seasons in a way that seems helpful), the new book by Toni Morrison, and a true crime tome from Ann Rule (I’m kind of addicted to the things).

We stopped next at the highly recommended Burgerville, and I hadn’t realized it was a local fast food chain. It seemed styled in the 1980s, yet was attempting to be retro to the 1950s, so it was kind of a plastic-y, neonized atmosphere, but with a glowing jukebox pumping out Oh Donna. Strange. The burgers were good for fast food, certainly beating out the Ice Burg in W2, but still not quite as good as the bison burger in town. The black forest milkshake however, well that was rather like heaven in a 12 ounce disposable cup. If heaven ever deigned to occur in such a circumstance.

We are now camped out near the airport so we can get on our very early flight tomorrow morning. Because remember, leaving Walla Walla is like walking to England with 20 pound weights strapped to your ankles. There’s a whole lot of ocean in the middle. We will leave at 7 tomorrow morning and touch down in Michigan at 4 in the afternoon, having practically seen no daylight. But there’s a turkey at the end of our tunnel.

Have a great holiday, everyone.

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