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Back home now. Cleaning, hosting company, having fun. Here’s a hasty little video I put together from the trip. There’s B-roll, tight shots, sweeping vistas of beautiful country. Pretty much it is a (bit short of being a) masterpiece of iMovie production quality.
But full of lovely memories.
The reason we’re in Portland is to take part in a writing retreat. We just tacked on a few days of sight-seeing beforehand. The retreat started today, and so there won’t be much here but placeholders and filler for the next few days. This is supposed to be an intensive writing retreat, so my energies are elsewhere.
Here is a time lapse I took of Mt. Saint Helens the other day from the last viewpoint on the road up that range. This is sitting on a retaining wall about four miles from the volcano, looking into the crater.
Yes, it is brief. Worked great at first, but then the camera stopped taking all of the pictures I’d asked of it. Had I known, at that viewpoint, how cool this would eventually look I would have shot it over and over and over again.
I shot it using the now apparently unsupported Gorillacam (free) app.
The retreat continues tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll make some nice progress on this particular project. Wish me luck.
“Hurry, so we can ride before the rain.”
Didn’t quite work out that way. On the other hand, the silver lining of those drunken, soggy, incontinent clouds, is that I think I discovered the secret. Somehow it seemed easier to go up hills with three pounds of water in my shoes.
I think the weight helped push the pedals.
So we rode 17.19 miles. The temperature when we got home was a brilliant 73 — we saw a guy in a hoodie, in Alabama in July — so that was grand. For a time it was hard to see. The rain was actually refreshing and cool. It was patently dumb, so I called an end to the ride. The Yankee said “It will stop by the time we get home.” It did. She is very smart.
But by then we were home. And we resolved that this better be a pause, and the heavens better populate our fine community with feral cats and dogs learning about gravity, or else we would kick ourselves for packing it in.
It rained more.
We made shrimp and crab cakes from Whitey’s in Florida, and corn and tomato salad from Ajax Diner in Mississippi as this week’s experiment from the Off the Eaten Path book. Both tasty, but I think there’s only so many ways a corn and tomato side can turn out. Now, the shrimp and crab cakes were almost divine. Not bad for two people who’ve never made them before.
How long did it say to fry them? I asked this after taking over, because the oil was popping and burning my now very upset, in pain co-chef. On one of the last crab cakes a bit of oil jumped out of the skillet and headed directly to my face. My flinching to the left — and truly, it was only a flinch — meant the dollop of hot burning sulfurous dripping sauce landed on the bridge of my nose, rather than in my left eye. Next time I’m breaking out the shop goggles.
Shop goggles, I say. I probably have some from my high school in a box somewhere. Everyone hated the shop goggles, but we were teenagers:we hated everything that had to do with safety and responsibility and sanity. It is amazing all of those people graduated with ten fingers.
I believe our teachers — fine, fine gentlemen — would have built a XX Days Without An Accident sign if only their students wouldn’t have interpreted it as a challenge. I’d tell you stories, but OSHA’s statute of limitations has not yet expired, and I graduated from high school 16 years ago.
Anyway, I am now the only person in North America to have eaten crab cakes with a dollop of aloe vera on just the bridge of his nose. If we’d made them earlier in the day I could have been the only person in North America to have eaten crab cakes with a dollop of aloe vera on just the bridge of his nose and wet socks, a feat that may never be duplicated.
We’re aiming high around here; it is the weekend.
Oh, need a tune stuck in your head?
Don’t even pretend to be upset. You’re sharing that with everyone in your office come Monday.
The good people at the grocery store must think we are trouble, or in trouble. It doesn’t take long before we are playfully picking on one another there. I fuss about the bill, the size of the box, why we are there two days in a row. And on and on. Today, the cashier a nice older lady who just liked to be out working and around people, did not exactly know what to make of us.
She should have seen us pondering the bananas, or looking for the quinoa.
Not sure what that is, but there are precisely two options for the grain, just down the aisle from an entire United Nations of rice selections. Perhaps it is the failed supply that could not go into Grape Nuts. There was a cereal I always wanted to try.
Maybe at an early age it was the Seinfeldian paradox that interested me. You open the box, there’s no grapes, no nuts. What gives?
Maybe it was the notion of breakfast on the beach, or the punctual milk man. Perhaps it was the poor man’s Sally Kellerman, or the guy who was the first person in his circle to hear Michael Bolton AND got the Grape Nuts jingle.
So, yeah. At the store again. We’re making dinner from a recipe book tomorrow night and that requires the precise amount of vegetables and seafood treats, and also a spice called Old Bay, which seems like something that should be discovered in your great uncle’s medicine cabinet. (I was informed we had the Old Bay. Good, I thought, I’m not spending $2.26 on that.
Grape Nuts is still around, but struggling. Wikipedia blames the many owners of Post. I think it was this spot:
It is an SNL bit with no soundtrack, a bad idea with a microwave, and a repudiation of every suburban Aspen thing the entertainment industry would dare imagine about the rest of the country.
You can imagine how that conversation started.
“We’ll need flannel, frost on the windows, a woman undisturbed by a studio in her kitchen and quiet kids who know when to shut up and just eat their cereal or they will go to school hungry!”
That was shot in 1993, and it comes off like everyone in the frame is over-medicated before it became the raison de-pharm. And it was all downhill from there. Microwave your milk? Again, Mom?
Anyway. It was raining when we were ready to leave the grocery store. We’d packed along the save the earth bags and then forgot them in the car. I’d offered to fetch them, but felines and canines were demonstrating terminal velocity in the parking lot. The nice, clean cut young man who helpful packed our plastic bags and secretly loathes the chore of it offered to carry them out. I laughed and said, Good for you. I didn’t think you’d offer to get rained on. But no need, sir.
These people have no use for conversation with you. They seem surprised that you’d try. Their dynamic is groceries? Outside? Are you sure?
One guy chatted me up last fall, one of the guys who would not take no for an answer. He was one of those types of people you meet and, later, you have a tinge of relief that door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen are no longer working your neighborhood. He would be this man. He wished to talk football. And also washing dishes.
He would have been marvelous at selling the first six volumes of the set, but you’d have trouble maintaining the pretense of needing books H through Z.
We need rain. We are in a severe drought. And it has looked all day as if it would rain. Really, I don’t recall a summer with more of a threat of rain, but less actual precipitation. One eye spent most of the day watching the radar, studying little blips moving in every direction, wondering if the famous Southern boomers would develop from nowhere.
Finally, after hours of this, I grew frustrated with waiting for the rain and hit the bike. My plan was to make a big loop around the neighborhood. It gives me two entrances toward home and one area with stores that can be a refuge if necessary. This was a bad ride, even by my considerably low standards. Cramped my calf, burned up my quads and couldn’t hold a pace. I did only 12 miles and the rain was the only thing I paced. I am surprised and disappointed by how poorly I feel on the bike after just a week off. But i’ll lower the saddle a bit again tomorrow and see how that feels.
Mostly, I have to remind myself, I am not these guys:
Tour all weekend, the 1989 Iron Bowl tomorrow, the Women’s World Cup final on Sunday. Great weekend of sports. Also there will be riding and crabcakes and coding. Oh, yes, we’re doing work this weekend! I’ll be coding and staring at magazines and spreadsheets until my eyes hurt.
Much like riding the bike, or visiting the grocery store, this doesn’t take long.
The Americans had played down to 10 on their side for almost 60 minutes. The referees were calling an atrocious game, and while the U.S. had proven they could handle the 11 Brazilians, the officiating was too much to overcome. Until this unbelievable cross from Megan Rapinoe …
Abby Wambach, who’s been on a long odyssey for a World Cup goal, now has the latest score ever in a World Cup game. That sent the USA and Brazil to penalty kicks.
The American ladies won 5-3 on the PKs, advancing to meet France in the semifinals. Controversial game with an amazing finish, one of the more remarkable you’ll see on any level of the sport.
