Trans/plant/portation

Nobody I know spends much time talking or thinking about garbage. Sure, there’s the nice abstract “I’m against landfills/I’m so green I’m Kermit” comment that comes up now and again, mostly when people have drunk a bit of locally produced wine and someone brings up Hummers, disposable diapers, or plastic shopping bags. And then there are the avid composters, which out here are more common than say, in northeast DC, where one has, on average, enough space to compost as a couple of used coffee filters and some uneaten toast crust. Although on a side note let’s recall that there have been not one, but two, compost fires in Walla Walla in the last three years, as the sun really starts cranking out the gamma rays midsummer, so while we may have space aplenty, we still need to consider safety. You hear that, compost-people?

But garbage needs its due consideration beyond knowing when one’s household garbage pick-up day is. What can’t go into the garbage? What should be recycled? What needs to be taken directly to a landfill, and how should one dispose of unused medication?

I’m not saying I know the answers to all of these (I do know that you fill up the medicine bottle with water, let the pills dissolve, and then throw it in the trash once it’s become a solid mass), but neither do my neighbors. And not even my neighbors—I’m speaking more of the endless stream of people who drive up to the recycling center across the alley from us, looking confused at the locked gate. These people intentionally put cardboard, old cans, and 13 gazillion empty wine bottles into their car, only to find the center closed. This is because the recycling center at the college is only open from 8 in the morning until noon, Monday through Friday. Certainly this is for the general public’s convenience, because who is busy then?

I presume people don’t know about garbage (and its more popular cousin, recyclables) because this is where they do something that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever:

They see the locked, 6-foot, chain link fence, and they walk across the alley to our house, and throw their recycling in our personal bin.

This makes me lose my mind. I find it soon after, little bits of gravel and dust clinging to it as it cowers in a corner next to the non-functional air conditioner, but I lose it nonetheless.

And not only do they dump their recycling, they dump their illegal recycling. This tells me a couple of things:

1. They’re not reading the instructions on the recycling bin

2. They’re not reading the instructions on the bin because they either can’t be bothered, or they know they’re doing something wrong.

I began trying to dissuade these cardboard interlopers and trespassers in much the way I used to try to keep deer out of my vegetable garden in New York. I put down dog hair. Okay, I didn’t put dog hair on the gravel, but I’ve tried moving the bins. And when that didn’t work, I put the car right next to the bins, sacrificing space to swing the door open, and making it so that on Wednesdays, the day before pick up, I’d come nose-to-stench with the garbage bucket each time I left the house or came home. Still, they contorted themselves around the private car in the private driveway to the private recycling bin, across the alley from the space declaring itself available (if not open) for their discardement. Faced with other people’s castoff glass, which is fine to recycle at the center but not in the weekly city pickup, I’m faced with a choice I don’t want. I can pick out their glass and take their recycling to the center, 40 feet from my kitchen, or I can leave it in the bin and get chastised by the recycling crew.

All of my determent failed last week, and the bin nearly didn’t close from all of the crap stuffed inside. I fumed. Susanne fumed. I picked up my mind again, brushing it off and promising it better, brighter days. Grabbing a marker from my office upstairs, I formulated two signs, one for each bin.

FOR USE BY

RESIDENTS OF

37 MERRIAM

ONLY

Maybe that would get through to them.

Unfortunately, I put these signs on the bins the day before trash and recycling pickup, so this morning, I was met with a scrawled note from the recycling  pickup staff, telling me NO GLASS.

It’s not me, I cried to nobody. I take my glass to the recycling center! I am abiding your rules! I just don’t want to touch other people’s crap! Please don’t make me touch other people’s crap!

A squirrel on the front lawn looked at me quizzically. I hissed at it.

Hopefully the signs in big, bold letters will work for us.

If not, I’m buying locks next week. Or I’ll fit the bins with an exploding Jack in the Box. That’ll show ’em.

I grew up in a place blandly referred to as “Central New Jersey,” an area of only a few counties, caught between aging farmland and boomer-driven suburbia, outposts that crept away from the two behemoth cities, matching the invisible demarcation of property values affected by those urban centers. Lower prices here, put up a development. Lower prices further away, put up a development there. So in the late 1960s, that line was Mercer County, home to the state capitol and a rather well known Ivy League university. I went to elementary school in that town, the once was national headquarters for politicians, before they moved it to its final resting place of Washington, DC.

The nuns taught me to love the sinner and hate the sin, to separate bad behavior from the innate goodness in people, and even though these messages were fraught with many contradictions and a near-constant failure of memory on the part of their congregants, I tried to buy the principles. I asked many questions, and got a lot of non-answers, such as:

“What do you mean there’s always been God? How could there be no beginning?” This was met with a “It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

“How can there be three beings but only one being?”

“It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

And on, and on. There was that point my senior year in high school during which I finally figured out the grand logic, much to the chagrin of my erudite instructor, but for many years, I attempted to content myself in the not knowing.

But I did get older, and I expected better answers than I’d received from lazy-minded or otherwise resistant grownups. I could tell that there were competing schools of thought on all kinds of philosophies, although I didn’t really know how to boil them down.

As I approached 18, I asked my Mom how she voted, generally speaking. She looked at me with a curious expression, somewhere between disheartened and cautious, as if she were talking about a close friend who had The Consumption.

“We vote Republican in this house,” she told me, a little above a whisper. Maybe it was a stage whisper, though that would have been silly as we were the only two home at the time.

“Why is that,” I asked, not really surprised at her answer.

It was, she explained, because my father was a small business owner, and he steadfastly believed that the GOP was more small business friendly. And this may have been true at the time. But what interests me is that I didn’t, in all my years of grooming to be a conservative, feel a burning hatred in my heart for the Democratic Party, even if I may have laughed at a liberals joke here and there. But hey, there were a lot of inappropriate jokes in the 1980s, many revolving around who blew up where and how in the Challenger accident.

I made it to college, spending the first few weeks either not believing my good fortune, or decrying my random roommate assignment, a privileged kid who actually told my mother, to her face, on Moving In Day that Syracuse had been their choice because of its reputation as a party school. I sought the refuge of new friends, minimizing the time in my own dorm room.

One of those friends was in a new club called the Campus Crusade for Christ. She had convinced me that they were a better way of understanding God and spirituality, that there was a fantastic benefit of not having to find meaning through the priest-God conduit. I figured I would check it out.

It was not for me. It was really, really not for me. Now I’d gone from getting no answers to having answers all over the place—explanations for everything under the sun. If some question didn’t have a ready made answer, it was only for the fact that nobody had thought of the question yet. All of these answers were supposed to arm us when we went out as missionaries to convert other people to the Walk with Christ. I was beyond uncomfortable. I pulled away from the group.

One of the things that troubled me the most was that even though I was reading the Bible more than ever before, we as a group were listening to it less and less, and giving more credence to the CCC leader. And it wasn’t long before he started delving into politics. Which politicians we should vote for, which party stances for righteous, and which were the devil’s own design.

There was no more split between behavior and personhood. People themselves were good or evil, saved or under the control of satan. For me, this had gone off the rails.

But here we are, a score of years later, and many, many people buy these messages part and parcel. I am left scratching my head. Is the anti-regulation push good for small business? Not if it means the banks collapse under their own greed and the credit market tightens past the extreme most business owners can handle. But we don’t put those things together, we limit any cause and effect conversation to what bad people are doing to us. The illegals. The gay agenda. The terrorist Muslims. We stick awful names on communities to make them seem even more hell-bent on the destruction of society, even though the vast majority of undocumented workers have been here for decades and in jobs that other people won’t take, even though people under the GLBT umbrella can’t agree on what movies to list in their film festivals, much less have an actual agenda, and even though the people committing terrorist acts aren’t actually Muslims, but opportunists who are ripping off a few passages from the Quran. Let’s paint the world in hate-colored glasses, and we can see whatever we want.

There’s a Tea Party group in Walla Walla now, and they have an earnest, if not grammatically challenged Web page, filled with lots of anger-inspiring invective, as invective is designed to do. The contradictions are many, but this one is the best:

The government is distant and does not care about you.

The government is too big and too into your business.

They also spend a lot of screen space on rhetorically assuming that because the US Constitution says we have inalienable rights, that this means we have the right to “own the fruits of our individual labors.” This vague, intentionally archaic language could mean, really, any of the following:

We get to keep the Ford trucks we produce as car assembly line workers. No wonder the Big 3 are in trouble.

We own the children we have birthed ourselves, into time eternal. This almost seems pro-choice to me.

If we are landscapers, we now own the lawns we’ve groomed and the plants on them. It’s like 40 acres and a mule, all over again.

I could go on, but I’d rather see more examples in the comments.

Here’s the thing: if none of my income went to taxes, I would have no government, right? Unless they’re thinking about taxing businesses more. But I don’t suppose that’s the case. I’d just have to hope that if I have a medical emergency, I won’t need an ambulance, that if my house catches fire, I can put it out with my own hand-held extinguisher. Or that when my kid wants to go to college, some bank will give her a loan, after all those years of home schooling, since there’s no more public education. Maybe when my mother loses all of her marbles we’ll just drive her to downtown Omaha and tell her to hope for the best.

I think the political landscape has gone off the rails, or if it hasn’t, that it sure looks like it has, and I wish my Dad’s brand of conservatism were back. At least he didn’t drive around with bumperstickers on his car saying “Up Yours, Obama.”

There’s nothing like reading the newspaper of a quiet farming town to make one feel like their own tiny city is a bustling metropolis of activity. The rag in Dayton, Washington, for example, seems to have composed its crime section from the entirety of phone calls to its police office. The headlines read like some bizarre melding of David Lynch and Dave Barry:

Lotion Squirted on Car, No Suspects

Dead Skunk Still Lying on Patit Rd

Cow on Wrong Side of Fence

If I lived in Dayton, I’d be tempted to pull my own pranks and then call them in as complaints.

“Hey, those crazy kids dumped a mess of cow manure on the mayor’s truck again.” *click* And a few days afterward, I could scour the paper to see if I’d made the crime section.

My other idea is to replicate some of the news bits over here in Walla Walla, picking up as many of the details as possible so the police force won’t suspect a copycat. But maybe it would be like all of those television crime dramas, and I’d be foiled either by confessing to the drone of some low, ominous cello, or I’d like, use the wrong brand of lotion.

“We left out that the lotion used in Dayton was Avon Skin So Soft,” the detective would growl at me. “You used Aveda rosemary mint, so we knew you were just trying to fool us. The question is . . . why.”

Okay, who am I kidding? This county doesn’t have enough money to drive the plow it owns to clear 30 inches of snow from five main roads in town, they’re not going to do some molecular analysis of skin lotion.

But hey, good cops would know to use their noses.

My ruminations aside, I have learned a few lessons this week, one of which of course is not to commit crime. Okay, perhaps I learned that lesson at 7, when I stole a remarkably cute stuffed animal from a Hallmark store and my mother caught me in the parking lot and made me take it inside to tell the proprietor that I was a thief. Three or four bats of my big brown eyes and she crumbled, saying I could have the little orange donkey if I wanted it. My mother was outraged. How was I going to learn this important life lesson if I could just flirt with older women and get away with anything? And thus it was that I determined that the life lesson was to flirt with older women to get away with most anything.

It’s Friday and I’m rambling. My point is, I’ve learned a few things this week. Specifically:

1. No matter how much it annoys one, one should not attempt to remove overly long nose hair with needlenosed pliers or superiorly sharpened scissors.

2. No espresso drinks after 2PM.

3. Be careful when teaching one’s friends’ children cute little sayings. For example, teaching a child of 22 months to say, “Oh, snap!” may in fact result in the child enunciating “Oh, shit!” (Apologies to my friends’ children’s playmates’ parents.)

4. Be aware that the older the man, the more dedicated he is to his science fiction hobby, and the far less he is to his own personal hygiene. This is especially useful to remember when attempting to look for books at a local organization book sale.

5. Lots of food tastes great going down but makes one miserable later. It’s helpful to know which foods are on one’s own list, so that when out in public one can at least plan for sudden moments of abdominal pain and wincing.

M.P.H. Highest degree earned. GS-level. Annual compensation. Party affiliation. Years to retirement. Number of overpriced caffeinated beverages consumed before noon. Washington, DC has specific metrics for success, for valuing one’s life, productivity, and family.

It was shortly after a friend moved from DC to Seattle, that Susanne received a call from him. He’d just come home from a party.

“You won’t believe it out here,” he said, almost breathless with excitement. “When someone asks, ‘what do you do,’ they don’t mean, ‘what is your occupation?’ They want to know your hobbies!”

Hobbies. Northwest hobbies happen largely outside. Hiking. Snowshoeing. Rafting or kayaking. They certainly have a lot of nouny verbs out here, that’s for sure. People, on average, seem willing and able not to string their identity and their vocation together, at least the way many folks do back on the east coast. “What do you do” there is met with, “I’m a contractor,” or “I’m at Census,” or “I’m an analyst,” which also wins the in-blog post prize for most vague job title ever, even worse than “project manager.” And these job titles are not transferrable outside the Beltway. Nobody in Walla Walla understands or gives a fig what I used to in DC, and I can try explaining it in a 25-50 word paragraph. It still isn’t comprehensible to normal people.

Out here, the vineyards and wheat fields and fish lifespan dictate that seasons still matter. Time isn’t gauged in project lifecycle terminology, it’s measured in the tiny center of the wheat chaff, or when the viticulturist-inclined farmer thinks it’s safe to remove the protective plastic sleeve from the 1- and 2-year-old grape vines. Or at the start and stop of the wine tourism season in Walla Walla, and the unofficial start and end dates of the summer, when people flock to western Idaho for good camping weather. There isn’t enough industry here to vie with the earth’s own grand calendar, to make people forget that once upon a time, it mattered to your livelihood that it was autumn or spring. Washington, DC only has one perpetual election season, after all. Even though the city is built on old farmland.

Spring, meanwhile, seems to have hit a little early, with the trees budding already and some very early greenness appearing in the wheat fields. Maybe soon the daffodils will come up, Stravinsky-like, with swooping wind instruments and a thunderous percussion. The ducks at the pond will start teaching very little babies to swim and jump into the water, only taking on flying in the mid-summer. People will talk about loving spring in the desert again. Bright’s chocolatiers will sell more ice cream than they have in months. Strolling down Main Street to get some will involve hearing a lot more people in the wine tasting rooms, and seeing many more cars from Seattle, but you still can’t call them traffic. You’ll be able to spot the visitors because as they walk they’ll talk about how quaint everything is. DC tourists marvel at the architecture and the monuments, but they usually still feel a bit wary, as if violence could break out next to them at any moment. Here in Walla Walla, it’s a pickpocket’s dream, because nobody, even the residents, ever has their guard up. And we’re only 3 miles from a maximum security prison.

A few years ago the soccer coach of the men’s team at the small liberal arts college here flippantly and quickly agreed to take the team to the prison for a game. It wasn’t until the bus of them rolled into the prison yard, the razor-lined gate locking behind them that he felt any degree of panic. There they were, 20 of them, on a dirt field, locked in with something like 100 hardened inmates. Guards with automatic rifles stood at a few towers. Maybe they were excited to watch a match, or maybe they were worried about how this could go horribly wrong. Or both.

The college team started playing what I can only imagine was the most surreal game of their lives. I’m not sure who refereed the game, or even if there were refs on the field. Kick, run, kick, run, collide. The prisoners had come to play. The college team practiced together every day, knew their teammates’ tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. Kick, pass, advance, the clock ticking up the minutes played. The score started getting lopsided, favoring the college. The coach started worrying about them running up the score, something Bill Belichick has never done in his life. Second half, still scoring. He wanted to pull his hair out. At least slow down, men. Don’t, no, don’t score again! Oh geez! Soccer games are not supposed to have scores of 20-2, or anything near that number.

Game finished, finally, and everyone was ragged, exhausted. The prison players high-fived the other team. Good game, good game, they said, walking in orderly lines. The college athletes piled back onto the bus, riding for five minutes and a series of circumstances away from the prison. I wonder how they look back on the experience, which measuring devices they use to interpret what that game was about.

It was with a cavalier attitude that I called up the Census in a city near me, last week, and offered generously to join their organization, should they need me. Some employee with a name straight out of a 1950s-era reading primer, like Bill or Johnny, cheerfully informed me that there was a test in a few days near me and the exam was all that was separating me from what would surely be a stellar career with the agency. So I agreed to meet up at “the Y,” even though under many other circumstances I would have presumed some kind of gay intimacy would be involved in such an encounter. But I figured this would be a G-rated rendezvous. Johnny boy told me to show up about 15 minutes before the start of the test so I could fill out some forms, which, having already worked with and for the Federal Government, did not surprise me in the least, so I calculated that I needed to arrive at 2:45.

The same flippant approach I had on the phone was with me as I left the house, at 2:43. The Y was around the corner from where I live, and I knew a route to get there that didn’t involve even a single traffic light. I walked in to the gym, my gym, and failed to see any signs directing me to the test, so I asked the receptionist where it was.

“Oh, you must mean the Y W CA, she said,” putting such an emphasis on the “W” that she raised her voice half an octave, like she were speaking of the black sheep in her family. Oh, YWCA, tsk tsk tsk. Such a promising CA until all of that nasty business happened. YMCA and I are just still torn up about it.

She asked me if I knew where it was. I shook my head.

“Well, do you know where the ishchaly is,” she asked, suddenly speaking a foreign language.

I shook my head. “The what?”

“The ishchaly,” she said. Now she looked at me like I was utterly hopeless. I went to the wrong building and I didn’t even know where the damn Ischaly was? A look crossed her face that suggested she was wondering if she should intentionally misdirect me. She gave me a street name, Birch, and from that I could figure out where this unruly child of a building was.

Three blocks and 90 seconds later, I was at the YWCA, next to a building marked, “Ice Chalet.” This reconfirmed my belief that people just don’t give a darn about French pronunciation here in the Pac Northwest.

I looked at my watch which read 2:47, and giggled.

About 15 people were seated around tables in a large room just inside the front door. The tables were set up in a large rectangle so that we could all see each other. Against the windows the Census Bureau employee was setting up all of her supplies for the exam. She seemed more than mildly frustrated. Her hair tied back in a bun, it was starting to escape, in some vaguely direct correlation to her increasing anxiety.

“I’m just not sure why everyone is here so early,” she muttered, and I saw that she had several cat scratches on her forearms. I briefly concerned myself with how many cats she had back at home.

Three people stood around her as she sorted through manilla folders and government-issue pens. Though they didn’t realize it, they had the appearance of zombies, standing aimlessly, rocking slowly on their feet, waiting for her to notice them so they could hear her screams and eat her brains.

“Okay folks,” she asked them, pencils clattering to the floor, “can you just sit down and I’ll get to you. The test doesn’t start until 3:30.”

We told her we’d all been instructed to get here a little before 3. There was some nervous laughter around the room.

Well, we were informed, we were going to take this test at 3:30. And someone in the Richland Census office was going to get an earful from Stacy the Overworked Coordinator. After a long day of no thanks, all she gets are feral cats.

More people trickled in, all before 3. We learned that the fella who’d given us all the wrong start time was named Scott. Bad, bad Scott.

I looked at my fellow Walla Wallans who’d showed up for this exam. There were a lot of retirement-age men and women, some young 20s folks, a few 30-somethings like myself. One woman sat down who looked like she was in the midst of a bad affair with crystal meth. I’m not sure if she really even knew where she was, but she’d thought to bring her ID to qualify for the application.

An older man, in the midst of filling out the Census job form, raised his hand and asked, “What if my supervisory experience is old?”

“It doesn’t matter how old it was,” said Stacy, sorting through the test forms and answer sheets.

“What if it was 50 years ago? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” His sudden laughter shot around the room like semi-automatic fire. I jumped out of my chair a little.

3:10 and we all had our I-9s and job applications to complete. The woman to my right slowly screwed her pencil into her own little sharpener. She wanted to know if she could have extra scratch paper for all the math problems on the test. Clearly no one had informed her that this was not the GRE subject test in math. She was one of those chitchatters who at least waited for eye contact before beginning their monologues. I know how to look at my hands really well, so I was safe, for the most part. The person on the other side of her was not so lucky.

The form asked if I had registered for the Selective Service. Damn it. I checked the no box, and filled in the explanations box two pages over. Hopefully Stacy wouldn’t ask me in front of everyone what “transgender” meant.

One man, near a corner of the room, tried to pick his nose on the down low. Gotta have clean nasal passages to deal with the stress of such a rigorous test as this.

A younger, cockier man said he had a question, which Stacy deferred. “I just need a little more time to get ready,” she said, laughing nervously. “I just don’t know why Scott would tell everyone to come so early, hee hee.”

Scott is trying to drive you crazy, Stacy, that’s why. Maybe you stuck Scott with one of your feral cats, and he wants payback. I’ll never know.

She passed out the test, telling us to check that our answer sheets and test booklets have the same code, A, B, C, or D. The guy who people realized 50 years ago shouldn’t supervise anyone looked alarmed suddenly. His codes didn’t match. Stop the presses! Stacy came over and said, no, sir, this code right here. He’d been trying to match up the Census form numbers. I was just impressed a 70-year-old could read 4 point font. But I wasn’t so sure he was what the Census had in mind for a long form interviewer. Nor was the woman on my right, a.k.a. Nervous Nellie.

“Everyone has these new Passports now,” she said to her table-mate. “I haven’t been out of the country in so long, I’m not sure they’d give me a passport.”

Someone needed to tell her that if prior foreign travel was the prerequisite for getting a passport, nobody would have a passport.

At 4:10 Stacy let us begin the test. Twenty-eight questions.

Seriously? Twenty-eight questions? All this for 28 questions?

The exam was broken into 5 areas, including 6 questions on math. I hoped Nervous Nellie’s 5 pages of scrap paper were enough. One math question was really tricky: add 3.17, 12.6, and 258. Ooh, those tricky, tricky decimal points! I need some scrap paper for this!

Another question asked us to match up people’s names in two columns. This reminded me of some bad database errors I’d worked on in 2004 for the National Institutes of Health. And because I’d worked with Census before, on standards for data collection, I started wondering if I wasn’t having a mini-Slumdog Millionaire moment where every test question could be answered via some prior experience I’ve had with the government. Only instead of winning 30 million rupees I’d get a $11.75 per hour job wandering around Walla Walla county, trying not to get shot for being a temporary Fed. So it was really like the same situation, totally.

I finished the test first, which doesn’t mean I was the smartest in the room, but next to “Don’t let that guy supervise anyone, ” Nervous Nellie, and Meth Face, I wasn’t surprised to be at the head of the pack. No sooner did I think that, however, than Meth Face put down her pencil. And then seemed to eye it longingly, as if it were a thick, juicy ribeye.

Stacy called 15 minutes remaining. Unlike the actual GRE, one was not permitted to leave if one finished early. So I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. At 4:35 Stacy called 5 minutes left. The last 10 had already been the longest of my life. But no way was I going to leave only to have to come back for a retest, people watching what it is.

Finally, she called the end of the test. Nervous Nellie immediately began chattering away. She turned to her weary desk-mate.

“Did you see him finish so early? So early! Just wham! Put his pencil down and took a nap! I wanted to just copy his answers but we have different test numbers.”

Those clever Census people, two steps ahead of a woman with her own pencil sharpener.

Stacy collected all of the exams and told us she just had a couple of things left to tell us. She read straight off of the Census guide for oh, four sentences or so, but then began embellishing.

“Remember, Census Bureau staff have to make a lot of follow up calls. If you don’t hear from us by March, you might not be hearing from us. We can’t call everyone back who applies for a job with us. But if we do call, be nice. If you make us laugh, we’ll be very grateful. So here’s something you could say, but don’t all say it or they’ll know I coached you.”

It took me a moment to comprehend that she was babbling, and then I heard her suggestion for making someone laugh on the phone.

“What did the one snowman say to the other snowman? ‘Smells like carrots.'” A few people chuckled obligingly. There is no way in hell I am going to tell this joke to the Census if they call me, I thought.

A man across the room raised his hand, indicating he had a question. What the hell could it be now? I just wanted to get out of here already. I had slumped down so far in my chair only the top 2 inches of my ass was actually still on the seat. Maybe I could just slither across the floor and into my car.

“Yes,” Stacy asked the man with the raised hand.

“They could also say, ‘all I see is black.'” Silence. And then he mumbled under his breath, “you know, because they have coal for eyes, see.”

I considered stabbing my ears out with my number 2 pencil.

Finally, we were dismissed. I did my best not to look disrespectful, but I was happy to breathe some non-YWCA air.

Thirty minutes later, I was on the road, headed to the bowling alley in Tri-Cities for my weekly league night. A few frames into the first game, my cell phone rang.

It was Stacy. I hadn’t checked a box indicating that I had my own transportation. I briefly considered telling her a joke, then decided against it. I thanked her for calling and answered her question, and then thought about carrots and coal.

My life working for the Federal Government as an IT person wasn’t far removed from your average Dilbert comic strip.

Web Developer: Hey Ev, please take a look at this one screenshot and tell us what we should change with this very complex information system.

Me: Uhhhhh, just from one screenshot?

WD: It’s all we could do on the color printer.

Me: Why?

WD: Our office manager is making budget cutbacks.

Me: Ah. (Stares at printout close to face) Well, it looks like you’re calling the system three different things.

WD: Just pretend they’re all the same.

Me: Okaaaaay. Which is the actual name?

WD: EKS.

Me: Can we spell out the name for new users?

WD: Just new users?

Me: No, spell out the name at the top here, so that even new users will know what system they’re working in.

WD: Oh, I don’t think we can do that.

Me: Why not?

WD: Because it’s an image.

Me: You could just put text there.

WD: Oh, but then it might look a little different on people’s screens.

Me: Well, not very different.

WD: The communications director wants it to look the same on everyone’s computers.

Me: That’s not actually possible, you know.

WD: Don’t tell her that.

Me: Okay, okay. How about we just change the color of this black font?

WD: Okay, why?

Me: Because against this dark blue background, it’s a little hard to read, is all.

WD: Well, but it matches a paper brochure.

Me: I’ve never seen a paper brochure for this.

WD: It came out in 1987.

Me: Uh. So we need to match it why?

(Pause)

WD and Me in unison: Communications Director.

Me: I don’t think I have any recommendations, then.

WD: Okay, great! Thanks!

Coming back to visit DC has been unexpectedly revealing; I almost instantly reverted back to my aggressive-is-defensive driving skill set, weaving and bobbling a tiny Hyundai Accent on the BW Parkway on the drive in from the airport. I feel like I’m getting out of a clown car every time I park, and like I’m entering a parallel Universe of Small Things each time I climb inside, folding into myself like an origami swan. Or maybe it’s like a beam of light being crushed into nothingness, since the interior is small enough to be black hole-sized.

I cavorted through the streets of the city, not stopping to take in the things I’ve seen many times, like the Washington Monument, Union Station, the semi-empty used car lot on Bladensburg Road. But I could feel the energy from them, remembering who I’ve been before, and enjoying their proximity once again. I certainly have a fondness for the Colville Street Patisserie in Walla Walla, as I’ve remarked before, but I don’t feel any sense of being when I’m walking down Main Street like I do on the grimy marble curbs of the District, and I’m not sure yet why that is.

I lunched with some of my old Social Security coworkers in a tavern yesterday that was all Baltimore: framed posters of Ravens glory, hard-looking women with over-styled hair, “limited” drink refills, and a certain filmy substance on all of the wood surfaces that gave you the impression they cared as much about you here as if you were a guest in their homes. I was back. We chatted about things, and although I wanted to hear how they were doing, they kept asking me about Walla Walla, so I coughed up all the funny stories I could recall. It helped that I was in a company of people who presumed, first and foremost, that I have competence; sitting around on my ass at home has almost erased my sense that I am good at some things other than sitting on my ass and memorizing lines from NCIS, just in case I have the opportunity to throw them into conversation. I was hoping for but didn’t get pictures of new spouses or children, but we caught up nonetheless. With them having to get back to work, a concept with which I was suddenly reminded, I hopped back on the freeway and battled the self-important traffic of the Baltimore-Washington corridor, feeling a little sleepy from my chicken salad and kaiser roll. My “limited” drink refill apparently equated to no refill at all, and I needed a nap. I could have taken in the cityscape, the Potomac, the Pentagon, as I sped back to my host’s house in Arlington, spitting distance from where I used to live, but instead I got a song from Ladytron stuck in my head that used to play during my long commutes home. Apparently my brain saw it fit to replay for me.

I say that I lived in DC for 11 years, but really, about half of that time I lived just across the River Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. The southern part of the city was littered with G.I. Bill-era condominiums, depressing in their seemingly unending beige-ness, save the small rectangular swatches of orange, avocado green, or chocolate brown that were strategically affixed to the outside plaster walls. Row upon row of chunky modern buildings stymied many a newcomer who was driving in for some party or other, and who would likely mention, at some point in the evening and against their better judgment, that the roads were confusing. This was really a standby phrase for, “This place sucks,” or “How the hell can you live here,” two questions I heard with some frequency from the people who were closer to me.

Commuting didn’t seem that hard, after all, it was only a bus, generally on time, to the Pentagon Metro station, and then either a 40-minute ride if you took the Blue Line or a 25-minute ride if you caught the Yellow Line, to the Foggy Bottom Metro station, which then gave way to a 10-minute walk. Of course you could forgo the Blue Line train and hope the next one coming was a Yellow Line, but most folks had the same stratergy, and it was challenging to get oneself on the car, as the platform would have swelled with Blue Line eschewing people.

Okay, okay, commuting sucked. At some point Metro installed display screens in all of the stations that broadcast when the next trains would be arriving and which lines they were on. It took away some of the confusion, and a modicum of the stress. Now one didn’t have to hurl themselves into a train car so much as stand right on the edge of the track and sneak their way onto the car. This did draw the risk that the driver, seeing people too close to the precipice, would honk the horn, which meant that one was startled and had to cling onto the next neurotic to avoid accidentally falling onto the tracks. And it did occur to me that though I feared not making a train, I never actually saw anyone who wanted on a train not make it, unless they hadn’t reached the platform by the time the train had pulled in. Those drivers didn’t wait around for the sun to rise.

So living in Virginia, I didn’t really feel any less of a city person, because Arlington was about as urban as DC. With some major differences.

DC didn’t have chain restaurants. Not a one that I could think of. Now then, for purposes of this discussion, we’re not talking $5 Foot Long Subway or Wendy’s, although both of them serve things that sometimes resemble food. We’re talking sit down, has a menu you can hold, has waitstaff service restaurant. There are no Ruby Tuesday’s in the District of Columbia. There is a TGIFriday’s, in the aforementioned Foggy Bottom (which is one of the most fun to say places ever, right after Virginville, PA), but other than that, the only real chain entities are the ones that specifically cater to large groups, like Buco di Beppi and The Cheesecake Factory, the latter of which is so close to the Maryland border that it barely counts as “in” the District. For the most part, DC has independent, one-of-a-kind restaurants, which I’ve always loved about the place.

Not all the residents feel this way, however. I was shocked when I heard a friend ask if, when we were planning a dinner date, please, could we maybe possibly go to the Olive Garden in Virginia? The what? The place with the never ending bowl of limp overdressed salad and spongy baguettes? Where you can practically still see the tin foil on the entrees from where they peeled off the top of the frozen dinner? Surely they were jesting.

They were dead serious. After that first terrifying request, I was more jaded to the rest, but faithfully, I would honor my friends’ wishes because I was sure they’d honor mine when I wanted to partake of Ella’s wood fired pizza, pick through a still-hot plate of real paella at my favorite tapas bar, or break through steamed crabs at Eat First in Chinatown. Hindsight shows that I was the more flexible among most of my friends, but I always thought it was amazing that with such good, affordable options in the city they wanted to hop into my SUV and get some pre-cooked crap at Ruby’s or worse, Old Country Buffet. After eating there a couple of times, I begged not to have to go there anymore. That stuff was just toxic to me. I think I’ve had nightmares about their pink-frosted sponge cake and overcooked buffalo wings.

Here in Walla Walla, we don’t have any chain restaurants. In the next town over there’s an Applebee’s, which I’ve never been to, and probably never will, even if I wind up living here for 20 years. (Note to the universe: that is not your cue to get me to live here for 20 years, okay? Thank you.)

But nobody, and I mean nobody, has suggested I eat there, or said anything approximating a request to go there for some patty melt action. I’m just disappointed that if we have to have a chain restaurant, it couldn’t be a Friendly’s. I feel like Wallyworld would benefit hugely from the massive pile of fried clam strips and overflowing peanut butter cup sundae. Okay, maybe not in the same meal. But they don’t know what they’re missing.

So I’m wondering why the urban crowd and not the rural folks want these establishments as a dining option. Maybe the cityfolk were once suburbanites. Thus they find some level of comfort in say, thinking they know what to expect in terms of the culinary fare. Or being on what they consider the pedestal of city glitterati entitles them to “slum it” with the 4-person family set at the local bedroom community’s Chili’s. After all, nothing says “mall experience” more than a little P.F. Chang’s. And the only mall in DC is the blocks-long lawn between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol. I’ve actually seen tweens grumble to their parents, all of them tourists, upset that the District mall isn’t what they had in mind. Those are shopping malls, children. This is why your teachers want you to have reading comprehension.

Walla Wallans are an adaptable, resourceful lot. You want Indian cuisine? Make friends with Shampa and her family and get an invite for dal and lamb curry. (I can attest it is very good.) Or buy a cookbook and spend some money ordering ingredients online. Or, go to Trader Joe’s 4 hours away and buy 63 of the vacuum packed lentil and chick pea side dishes for use over the long winter, because spicy lentils are like summer fruit around here.

If you want Thai, well, there are two, count em, two, Thai restaurants. One was just redesigned after the landlord and divorcing owners had a falling out, but after all the brou ha ha, there appears to be nothing different about the new place, even with the new owner. I hear they replaced the chairs. Red vinyl, make way for . . . black vinyl!

The other Thai restaurant is in the next town over. An extreme amount of kitch went into the decor, which showcases a couple of kinds of linoleum flooring, some discolored tableclothes set protectively under plexiglass, a whole host of plastic sculpture designed to inform patrons about the wonders of Thailand, and many mismatched Asian-inspired drawings on the wall. It is owned and run by a white man and his Thai bride, the former of whom runs the front of the house, and the latter of whom does the cooking. When they’re having a bad night together her food gets increasingly spicy, which is perhaps her strategy for getting out of the restaurant business. A culinary cry for help, as it were. But really this tendency means two things:

1. get there early

2. really early, as they close at 8PM.

Another saying around town is “Never eat Chinese food in Walla Walla if you can help it.” No really, that’s a saying around town. While Susanne’s brother was a fan of a local Chinese restaurant, we didn’t find it particularly inspiring. I hate when food only can remind you of better food you’re not currently eating. That’s this place. Milk toast, mediocre, not gut-or-anus-clenching bad, but just kind of bland and not worth the money you just spent on it. There’s also an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, but I’ve already admitted to my buffet misgivings. By the way, Walla Walla does have an American/Italian all-you-can-eat buffet; one day when we didn’t realize what it was (we were thinking they had pizza), we walked in and were astounded to see a warning sign at the front door, which read:

THIS ESTABLISHMENT USES SULFIDES FOR PRESERVATIVES. ASK YOUR WAITER FOR INFORMATION IF YOU HAVE ALLERGIES.

Oh, waiter, can you tell me which of these buffet items will kill me?

We turned around and left. And craving pizza.

Last year Susanne and I went to observe the local Holiday parade—oh heck, it’s Walla Walla, we don’t need to pretend to be PC. Or rather, calling it a “holiday parade” is really a misnomer, because in fact it’s a Christmas parade. Yes, Christmas. As in, not Kwanzaa, not solstice, not any of the Jewish High Holidays, and certainly, most definitely, how could you even suggest it, anything Arabic. Last year, at least, the floats were about two thirds Christian church groups and denominations, one third the Elks Club and dog rescues. So for those of you doing the math, yes, there were six floats. Okay, there were a few more, but the whole event was over in 10 minutes. And each float was really intense, with lots of waving, small children—the one who got my “Best Waver” award was tween girl who gesticulated somewhere between Queen Elizabeth II and Maddona’s “strike a pose” vogue choreography. Seriously, the girl had it down. This year there were more floats, no MiniCooper brigade, although there were a slew of 60s and 70s-era muscle cars, lots more church groups, and a few fire trucks decked out in white lights, with Santa atop the ladder, which was pretty freaking cool, if you ask me. I was on a ladder truck once. I was 4, with my preschool class, and it was so exciting I nearly peed all over the vehicle. Something about a red, plastic firefighter’s helmet was just too much for me. Maybe that’s why I went into computers.

Anyway, there’s nothing really wrong with church groups per se, just that one gets  a little tired, whilst standing on the sidewalk in the 6pm pitch darkness, fending off folks who are walking with the floats and handing out scripture, lest one’s soul take a detour to that fire and brimstone place at the end of one’s life. That’s presumptive. To my mind, if I am interested in your church, I’ll check it out all on my own. My grandmother moved a lot with her farmer/carpenter husband, and she practically interviewed the pastors of competing churches in each new town to see which one would best reflect her family’s viewpoint. Obviously not a shrinking violet, my grandmother, and I want to applaud her initiative to basically make churches compete against each other. I’d like to see a sack race, actually, with a Ryrie Study Bible at the goal line, maybe.

But really, it’s just a little too exclusionary for me. People should feel excitement to see a town’s parade, not feel alienated by it. I’m sure it’s not their intention; it’s just a reflection of the fact that for 36,000 residents, Walla Walla has a lot of churches. DC certainly had its houses of prayer as well—drive down 16th Street NW into Maryland (which is also the President’s ground escape route, by the way) and you will count more than 25 churches and synagogues, as well as other buildings for less mainstream-in-America faiths, like Baha’i, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Walla Walla, a small group of Quakers meets in the faculty lounge of a Whitman College building because there aren’t enough of them to warrant building a Friend’s House. There is a synagogue on Alder Street, at which I’ve never seen a person coming or going. Maybe the congregants take secret tunnels in and out of it.

My intention isn’t to gripe about Christians. I was raised Catholic (I can hear the booing and hissing), and it imparted a lot of valuable lessons and beliefs I hold dear to this day. Don’t break your chalk in anger. Always put the period inside the quote marks, always, always, ALWAYS. No talking during announcements. You will never know everything, so don’t even try. Turn the other cheek, always, always, always. The good in life that you do counts, so do some good, you rug rat. Forgive the sinner, hate the sin.

This last life lesson was highlighted my senior year of parochial high school, in religion class. Religion class for seniors was all about how to have “The Catholic Marriage,” which, now that I think of it, was also a bit presumptive, if not at least unintentionally pressuring us to get married right away. We were mostly 17, after all. At any rate, our teacher, Sister Doretta, who I gather had never actually participated in Catholic Marriage, was leading discussion that spring, which must have been tough. I mean, I felt no need to continue the last month of class—I’d already selected my college and was marking big red Xs on my calendar as a personal countdown to getting to leave New Jersey. So it was only with one ear that I heard her talk about one tiny little paragraph at the end of the workbook (don’t even ask what our workbook practices were about) on homosexuality. And then she had my attention, because the official stance didn’t make sense to me.

17-year-old Me: Wait a minute, Sr. Doretta. It’s not being gay, it’s the behavior the Church opposes?

Sr. Doretta: Yes, exactly.

17YOM: Okay, okay. So you can be gay, you just can’t do anything?

Sr. Doretta: Well, right. It’s the sin, not the person.

17YOM: Wait, wait, wait. They could be gay, as long as they’re celibate?

Sr. Doretta: (sounding exasperated) Yes, child.

17YOM: Well, then they might as well be clergy!

Out of the mouths of babes. I wonder what she told the other sisters in the nunnery at supper that night.

Sr. Doretta: So this smart ass in class today figured out that gay people can be clergy.

Sr. Barbara: (finishing a sip of water from a crystalline challis) Oh, dear.

Sr. Cornelius: Let me guess. (chews slowly) The Maroon kid.

Sr. Doretta: You are a wise woman, Sister Cornelius.

Sr. Cornelius: (cutting into her roast lamb) Please. I’ve got that character for homeroom. Always talking during announcements.

If there were a float of nuns at the Walla Walla parade, I’d have to burst into laughter. Maybe I just like my religious figures to come with a jaundiced eye, instead of a 4-color, glossy cardstock notice that I too could be a fervent follower of Christ. Maybe I prefer being a fatass follower instead. Maybe, just maybe, I think my work for the Lord is by making sure I witness to everyone that they should always always always put the period inside the quote marks.

As it is, I’m glad people can be spiritual however they want, as long as they respect my ability to do that as well. As for the Walla Walla Christmas parade, I greatly enjoyed the guy riding his snowmobile on skateboards, and the grandfather who pulled his granddaughter behind his tractor that had so recently been used for field work that it left little bits of wheat behind in the street.

I was a bit concerned for the people who kept dashing across the street, looking for a better view, but I quickly realized they were more than capable of clearing the road before the vehicles traveling 8 miles an hour got anywhere near them. Every so often someone driving a pickup truck would get to the end of a side street, totally befuddled that there was some kind of event going on, and then you could see a light appear over their head as they realized that they had in fact, driven around a detour sign. So that’s what that orange thing was, they’d appear to think, scratching their heads.

The parade this year was much longer, and we were chilled to the bone by the end of it, having only moved enough to keep up with the bystanders who insisted on creeping into the road. These people needed the New York City police barricades, lest they begin attacking the parade floats like joyous zombies. If the parade had gone on much longer the trucks would have only had about 4 feet of street left, the rate we were all crouching in on them.

We walked back home, our legs frozen but still willing to ambulate so that we could reach warmth. Susanne poured a few chocolate martinis and I drew a fire, and I realized I am a fervent follower of Holidays. What a nice distraction from awful weather.

I had a bet with Susanne, over no amount of money, that after she neglected to see a dentist for 8 years she’d have at least one or two cavities in her mouth. She disagreed, which is how I suppose I came to the prospect of “betting” her on the issue. I’d been tardy in seeing a dentist for just a couple of years, and lo and behold, I had three cavities to fill. So come on, her mouth must have been worse, right?

Xrays were taken, results analyzed and nope, the good doctor was nary any issues with her enamel. She patted me on the back to show both comfort and a certain degree of smugness, which if our fortunes had been reversed, I would also have communicated nonverbally to her. And so I trudged into the dentist’s office, contrite and humbled.

Teeth for me have a checkerboard history. I wore braces from 5th to 8th grade, and while I’m glad I avoided having them when I was in high school, I’m not sure middle school kids are any better. Train tracks, silver streak, motor mouth, they had a litany of names that I dodged about as well as the red balls in gym class. Thank goodness my income has never been based on dodgeball capability. I was used to the repeated trips to the orthodontist, who had blanketed the walls with smiling, cartoonized teeth so that we’d have something to stare at while he twisted our train tracks to painful levels. I couldn’t even bite into a French fry for the next four hours, it was so excruciating. And still, I would return, driven by my mother who read Women’s World out in the lounge while she allowed a guy who looked like Telly Savalis to perform sadism on her child. At the end of three years of rubber bands shooting off like errant fireworks in the middle of World History, the retainers that came undone and jabbed me in the face while I was sleeping, and the lesson learned the hard way that eating salt water taffy was way off limits, he looked at me, my face in his hands and pronounced that well, I still had a little bit of a cross bite, but nobody would notice.

I sucked it up and thanked him. I THANKED him for making me the target of other people’s orthodontia-ism, because my 13-year-old self was a cowering wuss. My 39-year-old self, well, let’s just say that if he tried to leave me with anything less than utterly perfect dentition, I’d be doing my own “almost perfect” surgery on his Yul Brenner face.

So dentists and I aren’t exactly the best of friends, but the one I found in Walla Walla does a nice job and tries very hard to be as pain-free as possible. When Susanne and I were relocating to Walla Walla, I felt a filling fall out of one of my upper molars. Well, I didn’t feel it fall out so much as I felt it go crunch crunch as I was attempting to chew something. And we still had four days to go before we pulled into town. So my first phone call was to a dentist who had been recommended by one of Susanne’s colleagues. They didn’t seem to understand the urgency of my situation when I called them.

“She’s booked until late October,” said the receptionist, as dryly as the desert air outside.

“But I have a hole in my tooth,” I said. To me, this meant “what else can you do for me? Another dentist in your office? A recommendation for another practice?

To her, however, this meant, “I AM STUPID. PLEASE CONDESCEND TO ME.”

“She’s…booked…until late October. Do you want to make an appointment for then?”

And I thought people in the health care industry wanted to be helpful. Silly me. I made the appointment, even though it was August 22. In the meantime I’d look for another dentist.

Meantime didn’t happen. The next week, lazy about continuing to eat on only one side of my mouth, I broke the tooth in half. Pain soon followed. I held in my hand what had until only very recently been stuck in my head, and saw red. Not my blood, just red anger. I called the receptionist back.

“I need a dentist and I need one now! My tooth just fell out of my head!”

“Why don’t you try Dr. So-and-so?”

Really? Did I move to a higher level of reception service or was I just not saying the right password the last time around? I thought I heard giggling and the exchange of money on her end of the line.

I called the other dentist’s office expecting not much more than nothing. But when they heard of my plight they told me to come right in. Now. I hopped in the car and realized, for the first time of many, that nothing in Walla Walla is more than 5 minutes away from anywhere else in Walla Walla. This apparently is a tradeoff for the fact that Walla Walla itself is extremely far from anything else, except Milton-Freewater, across the Oregon border.

And so my relationship with this dentist began. She gave me a temporary crown, and a week later, a real one to replace the good chunk I’d lost.

Fast forward to this morning, to get two cavities fixed and filled. She stuck some anesthetic in between my teeth and gums, and I was reminded of the woman on Intervention last night who had a problem with fentanyl lollipops. Now that woman had some dental issues, sadly. The taste of this stuff was strange, kind of fruity, kind of like cheap bubble gum.

“Wha is that flava,” I asked, identifying that I sounded like a lush after a bender.

“It’s called Walterberry,” she said, smiling as she put on her magnifying glasses, “it’s the best of the worst flavors they make.”

I wanted to ask why not procure the best of the best flavors they made, but that required too much diction, so I let it go.

Thirty minutes later, I didn’t feel the lower half of my face. But heck, who needs to feel 100 percent of their face 100 percent of the time? I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and now it was after noon. Maybe I could deal with soft food or something to drink. The hygienist, after all, had sucked out a good portion of my saliva, so I was on my way to either a crisp headache or becoming a human-sized prune, neither of which seemed like a good option.

My favorite coffee house beckoned. It was, of course, only 5 minutes away. This turns out not to have been enough time for the numbing medication to wear off, so I wound up wearing most of my tea and only realized I still had food in my mouth by placing my hand in between my cheek and teeth, and moving it to the back of my tongue where I could then swallow it. It was like manual eating, and certainly the aesthetic appeal of this can not be underestimated. I may have just discovered the next diet. Eat all of one’s food with one’s hands deep in one’s own mouth and double check to make sure there aren’t big chunks just sitting on one’s tongue. Do all of this in public. I can see the book title: Redefining Eating.

Election Day came and went, and the Walla Walla County’s Web site put up the results of the vote the next day. After looking at the statewide referendum and initiative results, I skimmed down to the city council tallies, and as expected, I did not win the Position 3 race. Technically unopposed, each of the three people running for the open slots on the council won by more than 95 percent of the votes cast. But I did note something interesting: Positions 1 and 2 received more than 97 percent, but Position 3 only got 96.35 percent. What was going on here? Were people getting fatigued—after all, they’d voted for two statewide contests, a state representative, a school board member, port commissioner, and depending on the ballot, other local offices, before getting to the city council seats. I could infer that some of the lost votes. Surely there wasn’t something qualitatively different about the guy running for the third slot, was there? Or did I really get 1 percent of the vote with my 3-week-long Facebook-focused write in campaign?

Seriously?

I had to know.

I emailed the county elections board, not without a fair amount of irony, because several months ago I’d applied for the job of county elections supervisor (hey, I’m grasping at the employment straws here, what can I say). I figured they wouldn’t remember me, or even if they did, that they’d respond to me anyway. I presume the conversation would go something like this:

County Employee #1: Hey Glenda, get a load of this?

Glenda: What, Ralph?

Ralph: That nutjob Everett guy wants to know how many votes he got yesterday.

Glenda: Isn’t that the guy who tried to get your job, Ralph?

Ralph: Sure is. Apparently he had some jerky write-in thing going.

Glenda: Wow, he really is crazy. I bet he named himself after the city of Everett.

Ralph: If he did, he should have stayed west side, then. What a loser!

After having such a conversation, they collected themselves and replied to my email, saying that the county is only required to tally write-in votes if the person on the ticket didn’t get a majority of the votes. Since we can go ahead and say that 96.35 percent is a majority of the votes cast, I don’t think I’ll ever know how many votes I really got, but I’m betting it was more than 20, and certainly more than Mickey Mouse and Yoda combined. I am a little reminded of Richard Pryor’s “None of the Above” campaign in Brewster’s Millions, which, when I first saw it, made absolutely no sense to my 12-year-old brain. Why on earth would anyone cast a vote for no one?

But I’m glad that I started a dialogue, at least among some Walla Wallans, about their local government and how it seems to work (or not, as the case may be). Nobody I talked to seemed to know what these councilmen-elect stand for, what their goals are, how they feel about things like repairing the 25 percent defective water infrastructure in the city.

Along the way, the woman running to retain her seat in the state legislature, Laura Grant, intimated to me that should I want to run “for real” next time, I should let her know. So I think I’ll try to put my toes in the water and see how things really work around here. And sheesh, find some stimulus money for the pipe and road rebuilding, people. That’s got to be better than raising water rates by 50 percent.

In the meantime, I’ve been working of putting several recipes into a cookbook for some holiday presents to our family. This started out as a small idea and has grown rapidly, the point that many more people want a copy of the cookbook than we can afford to produce. So starting next week, I’m going to open a new page on this blog dedicated to our cooking and baking, and links to other foodie blogs we like. I hope you all enjoy it.