Trans/plant/portation

We are the proud owners of snow chains. Susanne and I strapped them to the front tires yesterday morning, one $40 purchase closer to being able to get out of our back alleyway and onto the snowy street, which is only 8 snowy streets away from the highway out of town. Turns out we had to shovel the alley all the way out to the street because it was too high for the undercarriage of the SUV. We’re not talking low-riding NASCAR racer here — we’re talking Honda CR-V with a clearance of more than 7 inches. This was not DC snow. Apparently it’s also not Walla Walla snow but since this is our first winter, to us it’s now a package deal in our minds.

Thirty minutes later we had shoveled our way out, and the chains did their job giving the car some traction. Then it was off! To where, we didn’t know. We were just excited to be out of the house! So we went where any red-blooded North Americans would go — we drove to Macy’s and did some last-minute shopping. Nice bargains at the only department store in town, I must say.

Back home, we decided to part out front on the street. The math went like this — if it snowed badly overnight, we’d only have to dig off the car, but if we put the car back in the garage, we’d have to shovel out the whole alley again. So we parked on the street.

This morning, I heard a rumbling like a train was rolling down our street. Unfamiliar with such noise, I looked out the kitchen window. It was . . . wait for it . . . a PLOW! In the alley! Twelve days after the snow first started accumulating, and notably, 30 MINUTES before we were leaving Walla Walla, the plow dug out the alley. Gee, thanks a lot, jackass. Where were you on December 15?

We drove on up to Spokane and it was like a drive into an Agnes Martin painting of white on white. The road was white. The hills were white. The scrubland plants were covered in snow, rendered invisible. The fog was white. The sky — take a guess. There were two rut lines in the road, and so I followed  those to keep on track. I’ve never seen white like that.

Agnes Martin painting

I think the only place more remote would be the River of No Return in Idaho. Or so it would seem. But come to think of it, there are probably people there. There are not all that many people up here in Spokane. 

As we came into the city limits, the snow started falling again. Forecasts call for a few to several inches to fall today and tonight. We will cross our fingers that our flight takes off on time — and hopefully, with us on it this time.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!”