No, Thursday's Out....

A friend contributed a recipe to a Portland-themed cookbook, but if you follow that recipe, the resulting concoction doesn’t have quite the oomph of the version he serves. Pressed on this point, he said he’d purposely left out one ingredient. Does this seem odd to you? It seems odd to me. Maybe he just didn’t want to share His Special Dish, but couldn’t say as much. That’s all I can come up with. This made me think of my Aunt Fran, who jealously guarded her special cheesecake recipe. She was of that vintage when women could refuse to share a recipe on the grounds that the dish was Theirs. (I believe this goes with that weird thing where a woman might get upset if someone at a gathering wore an identical dress. Because her dress was Hers. This also seems odd.) I never used The Joy of Cooking until I met Rick, who had a copy, and then, lo and behold, one cheesecake in the Joy was exactly Aunt Fran’s cheesecake. HA. Problem solved. Also, hilarious that she thought a Joy of Cooking rec...

I’ve been watching Call My Agent, on Netflix. It's a French comedy series about a talent agency in Paris, complete with subtitles, hooray! It has been just my speed, as I’m recuperating from an elective surgery (nothing life-threatening, just deferred maintenance, thanks COVID for making my age mates and me defer maintenance, etc., I complained about this in a recent post already). It’s done now, and Better Late Than Never, right? I had mildly hoped that I might catch some of the French even without the subtitles, because I took French in junior high, and then our daughter went to a French immersion school for a few years, and … I don’t know, I was just hoping some of the dialogue would enter effortlessly into my brain.   And some did, words or phrases. ( D’accord.   J’ai peur .) Then last night, a whole sentence: Mieux vaut tard que jamais . BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! Just like my deferred maintenance! And there arose a vision of Mrs. Kimball, with her unlikely red hair. M...

I decided to count up the people I know who had COVID, and I tried to define “people I know” in some sort of reasonable way. For instance, I excluded people I KNOW OF from afar, eg, celebrities that almost everybody knows OF. I did not count Tom Hanks. But I did count the whole cluster of people around my friend B – which included her husband, her husband’s best friend, and her husband’s best friend’s wife, even though I have not met those last three people.   They all got it at the same time, and B gave me a hair-raising story about it (husband’s best friend died, age 58). So I counted people I was in reality acquainted with, or people they shared an outbreak with. I was trying to avoid hearsay, that whole “my friend’s cousin’s daughter’s boyfriend had it” sort of thing. By those rules, my total: 17. Of those seventeen:   one died, one was hospitalized, one had a breakthrough case, and two had (one still battles) long COVID. Ages ranged from 21 to 97.   Other than ...

A few days ago, the Oregon Medical Examiner released the names and home addresses of the 96 people who died as a result of the late-June heat dome. According to the OPB article on this: “ The Medical Examiner had sought not to release the information, citing the confidentiality of death investigations. But the attorney general found that the public interest in the cases and the need to understand policy failures that contributed to the deaths justified releasing the records. ” The article included a map with little red pins marking the home address of each victim (leaving out those who lived in their cars, yet another tragedy). But it doesn’t have that map anymore, so you can’t go click on the pins now. I don’t know why the map disappeared. Actually, whole sections of the article disappeared between the original posting and the revised edition, four hours later. Still, if you want to say their names, you can still open up a .pdf listing every name and address (and the race and et...

It’s 64 degrees out and cloudy, which makes me wildly happy. Yesterday’s ominously orange hazy-sunlight is nowhere to be seen, and there aren’t any wildfires raging close to town. It’s perfect weather for getting something done, but I’m not sure what. For a while now, I’ve felt suspended. I can’t quite explain the feeling, nor come up with one big reason for it. It’s a combination of things. First, it’s August. It’s possible I have always felt suspended in August, anticipating the Back to School season, even when I wasn’t in school myself. Except I always was, one way or another. The year I graduated, I started teaching dance through the community college. The next year, I began a thirty year stint doing high school theater.   The day my own kid left for college, I auditioned for a fall term madrigal group.   As soon as I retired, I signed up for classes at PSU. My dance studio always went on vacation in August. My choir, pre-pandemic, had a calendar that mimicked the school...