No, Thursday's Out....

 Staying in an AirBnb for a wonderful wedding weekend. Clearly the place meant for me.

Lift Every Voice Oregon has an initiative petition on gun safety going. They need a bundle of signatures to get it on the ballot. You can sign from home. 

You may recall that I donated blood recently, in honor of a friend, and the phlebotomist and I had a little weep together. Well, yesterday, I got a note from the Red Cross telling me where my blood went.  It went to California. San Francisco, in fact. This follow-up service is new to me, and I haven’t gotten my head around it. Presumably, they send follow-ups because they can, and because donors like knowing the details, knowing that their very own personal blood went to a very specific place, and didn’t just get tossed into a giant vat. But I had honestly kindof closed the book on that particular bag of blood. We had broken up amicably, at my instigation, and I hadn’t expected to hear about who it was seeing now.  Not that I know who, of course, but still, it’s enjoying a lovely mid-May down there, and I’m drying out my boots over the register, in the wettest Oregon spring in 80 years. I’m weirdly jealous. In other updates, Oregon Humanities is doing Dear Stranger ag...

My father grew up within an extended clan around Boston, but he left for college, and fought in WWII upon graduation, and eventually landed a job in Seattle, so he rarely saw the extended group after that. One time in later life, though, he went to an East Coast family event, where a much younger cousin said, “I remember you!” My dad was pleased, but the guy wasn’t finished.   “You taught me how to throw rocks at ducks!” This was a conversation-stopper. Dad accessed the memory bank, and could not recall this happening. He wanted it not to be true. (And honestly, it doesn’t seem likely; my father had facets, but it’s hard to imagine him as that kid.) He wanted the guy to be remembering some other older cousin.   But there was nothing to be done. The guy remembered it, and Dad didn’t. He moped around for a while afterward, until it became a funny story. I play Trivia twice a month. This is going to tie in, albeit loosely. I lose at Trivia, and it’s fun. I have a great ...

The people who lived down the alley in Casa Irresponsible moved away, and a nice young family bought the place and began fixing it up.   Last week, there was a Bouncy Castle on the front lawn, the antithesis of what the Irresponsibles used to strew about, so things are on the upswing. Maybe it's going to be Casa Bouncy now.  My favorite café and place-where-I’ve-hung-my-paintings-twice, Bread & Ink, has reopened for dinner four nights a week, so I took myself up there and ordered a feast and a drink, and talked to the waiter for ages. Same waiters! Great drink, great dinner! The tables still wobble!  Some changes, though: the walls used to be burnt orange, and now they are a genteel grey. The floor was fifty years old, and now it’s new. The owners sold the place, but to their son, hooray, hence the same waiters and relatively unchanged menu. There were exquisite photos on the wall, and I had the nerve to ask if they were making a list of folks who wanted to h...