No, Thursday's Out....

Until just recently, some Portland's bus benches were sporting a COVID-tide public service ad that said:: ISOLATION IS HARD - BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO FACE IT ALONE. I think you do.  Have to face it alone.  I think that's what "isolation" means. But I appreciate what the mental health types who came up with this slogan were trying to get across, and I hope the isolated called the phone number provided, and found a connection. That's the important thing. I would rewrite the slogan if I were chosen for the job, but that's not going to happen, so I didn't spend much time crafting an alternative. Along the same lines, the Oregon Health Authority put out some fairly explicit advice about safe sex in the time of COVID, timed to coincide with the reopening of our public colleges next week. The accompanying infographic is unrelentingly chipper, witness this picture touting the health advantages (social-distance-wise) of using your phone to make sexual connection...

Got a new box of heartworm medication for the dog , and guess what? It’s ivermectin! Somehow, Big Dog has kept this a secret, and has cleverly misdirected the folks who are inclined to use veterinary remedies, sending them off to raid the ivermectin supplies for Big Horse. Swift move, there, Big Dog.   Replaced a light bulb and noticed that the box of new bulbs says they will last 13 years* (the asterisk is theirs). Found the matching asterisk on the bottom of the box, which clarifies that the bulb lasts 13 years if you use it three hours a day. I absolutely do not believe this, but I am not going to run an experiment. I’d be pushing 80 before I proved them wrong, and we likely won’t even have light bulbs by then.   The alternative brand claims to last ONE year* if you use it four hours a day. I’m not sure that’s a selling point, but it may be TRUE. If we value truth in advertising,   we should applaud modest claims. The lightbulbs were weird off-brands, because (fo...

Way back in 2001, on the first Monday after 9/11, my colleagues and I had a meeting to discuss an unwieldy project that was floundering, and we decided to fire the project manager. Just like that. I think we got it done before lunch. We were not ordinarily a decisive bunch. But we were Fed Up. It wasn't a bad move. But man, it was quick. A friend of mine observed, at the time, that the hallmarks of PTSD include irritability and impulsivity, impatience, jumpiness, edginess .... and that the entire country was going to be showing signs of PTSD for a while. She thought we'd been displaying some PTSD behavior, firing the project manager so abruptly. Once she listed the signs, I could see them all around. I see them around now, too, at the confluence of the current wave of the pandemic, and the commemoration of 9/11. Portland had its annual Labor Day Weekend fireworks along the waterfront, but my neighborhood thought it was gunshots. There was a low-flying jet this weekend, poss...

We’ve got doctors out there like Kimberly Manning (@gradydoctor), tirelessly listening to the concerns of the vaccine-hesitant, and oftentimes getting them past those concerns, with great respect and gentleness.  We’ve got people out there like the Dean of my cathedral, making the case for getting the vaccine as an act of caring for others, as we ought. (I commend to you 40 satifsying seconds , starting here). And then we’ve got Wendy Molyneux, offering either catharsis for the annoyed, or evidence that ONE person still cares enough to argue with the vaccine-obdurate.  I doubt even Wendy M can change the obdurate. But I am all for catharsis, and I liked her image of soft pretzels, so I’m sharing this  gloriously obscene and even more satisfying selection, for those who might want to vent. I haven’t written much about COVID since May, when I discovered I didn’t understand the math around what vaccine efficacy actually measures. A medical friend sent me an article about i...

Ah, I see now how this works, this whole family history thing – it’s a rabbit hole. Makes sense. In the interests of fairness, I will tell of my maternal grandparents and their reaction to my mom marrying outside of the Christian faith. My mom wasn’t very religious, but her parents got more and more religious throughout their lives, more and more involved with their evangelical church. Grampa George and Grandma Onda were nicknamed by infant me as Pappy and Gramma. (Once our daughter came along, Gramma asked to be called Gee, because (she said) that was what Welsh people used instead of Great Grandma. And she was clear on her origin story:  Welsh coal miners, then Pennsylvania coal miners, then to California for the Gold Rush. I wear a ring of gold mined in Sutter Creek, California.) When my brother and I were in high school, Gramma and Pappy broadened their already extensive church doings to include involvement with the Campus Crusade for Christ (which felt to me as if they had fin...

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...