Trans/plant/portation

Peach custard pie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WW County Republicans Logo

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

Just Another

Gun-Toting

Religion-Clinging

Bitter

AMERICAN

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

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

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

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

And then I was shocked by her response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. undented can of Progresso pinto beans for $2.79

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

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

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

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

The Bi-Mart

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

voting sticker

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

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

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

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

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

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

…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!

Random assessment of things I’ve noticed since leaving W2 and visiting the DC Metro area:

1. It takes a hellishly long time to get out of the eastern half of Washington State, as if a stubborn forcefield is slowing us down, some kind of invisible quicksand we’ve found ourselves in. No, maybe it’s more like when you were a kid at the beach and you stood in the surf and sunk a quarter inch further into the sand with each crested wave. And then thinking that walking out of it when you were buried up to mid-calf would still be easy, but surprisingly wasn’t. It’s kind of like that.

Cute and fresh pumpkin

2. Being away for 8 weeks and coming back isn’t really like returning after 8 years, but enough has changed to make me feel like I’ve lost track of the goings on here. New construction, new coffeeshop (Peregrine has replaced the thieving Murky Coffee on 7th SE), new headlines about people I don’t remember.

3. I’m getting good at rushing through the introductions so I can find out how everyone REALLY is.

4. Space is so much tighter here than in the west, but for this Easterner, tight space = comforting, and loose space = lonesome. I am trying to rewire my brain, but it’s challenging (see #1 for description of challenging).

5. I really miss my friends. I am trying not to see Walla Walla as a space in which I lack friends, income, the joys of a good job, the feeling of being successful and attached to the larger world, but without any friends, income, or job, this is difficult. Lea said to me yesterday that the universe gently suggests to us to take a break when we need one, and when we ignore the gentle suggestions, it pretty much forces us to take that break. I don’t disagree with her. I’m going to do my best to insert a structure into my day, but to give my knee the rehabilitation that it needs, get into my writing whether I’m any good at it or not, be there for Susanne as she adjusts to her new work environment, and see where all of that takes me. Being back in DC for a time has been good so far at helping me see how much stress I’ve lived with while I’ve lived here the past 11 years, and to see that W2 might really be a way to get some decompression from all of that.

6. Getting such decompression requires that I adjust my values from where they’ve been — focus more on family and relationships, and less on the tropes of DC success, which haven’t actually made me happy.

7. I love trees. Driving under canopies, driving through stocky rolling hills knowing I’m never more than 20 miles from a river, lake, or ocean. Hearing crickets at night. I want to find some terrain near where we now live that I can identify with. And I want to find new sounds that are native to W2, or that will make me feel like I’ve come home after a trip away.

8. I love watching Susanne get really into a conversation with someone. She sometimes holds back in the beginning, listening and making her judgments, and then several minutes in she starts the back and forth volley of ideas. I wonder if that’s how she plays tennis.

Eastern Market building

9. People outside DC really don’t understand the comraderie between people who work together to make things happen here. How “mavericks” don’t necessarily make things better, and how “outsiders” need to spend so much time getting to know people here — becoming insiders, essentially — that they don’t actually change the fundamental way the system works. I wish we’d all stop pretending that people who know how to make law and enact policy are bad people be definition. They’re people who are good at their jobs, and there’s nothing wrong with effectively governing a nation.

10. I really wish I’d have gotten to be here for the next inaugural walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe I’ll watch it like a football game that you mute so you don’t have to hear the insipid reporting on the play by play.

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.

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.