Disjointed

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Pamela

Sheesh, I have been having the strangest dreams lately. Almost every night I wake up at about 3am wondering what the hell that was all about. For example, twice now I’ve dreamed that I was going to compete a gymnastics routine on the balance beam, with little concern that I haven’t even stood on a balance beam in over 30 years. Or I wake up in the morning nauseated by some bizarre thing I was eating in my dream. Once I was carving off thick slices of butter and chomping away.

I had to post this photo because what the hell am I doing with my feet?

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New York City

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Pamela

There’s not a lot to tell about this trip. It was pretty straight-forward NYC stuff with tons of walking around. We hit almost all the high points and had a terrific time.

Guess where this is.

Portland has a big food cart scene and recently a cart like this showed up. My thought was that they didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t understand their market. You really need a niche and you need to be good to succeed in place with something like 450 carts.

Then I saw these everywhere you look in NYC. They may know better than I do. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will.

Here I am on Mars.

At the Natural History Museum we went to the space exhibit. There was a bit about foods to take and foods to avoid in space. Things to avoid: foods that make lots of crumbs, stinky foods. Foods that are good in space: meat, vegetables, recycled urine.

Yes, it really said that. We did not agree that that sounded good. Also the sample food: chicken and pineapple salad looked nasty. Annie still wants to go to space. I still do not.

We discovered Steve’s Ice Cream. And it became our feverishly looked-forward-to snack each evening. We loved the Blackberry Honey and Salty Caramel. We also tried: Strawberry Ricotta and Sunday Morning. Here, Annie and I go through every single tub in the freezer to decide on a flavor.

Coney Island for 4th of July. Insane in the most perfect way. We loved it.

Not New York. There was a dumpster fire in Northwest Portland when Annie and I were waiting for the street car. The flames climbed up a utility pole. Exciting.

There is a brief photostream at flickr if you’re interested in more photos: NYC Trip 2012.

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Baking Disaster #742

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Pamela

Yesterday I made a charred strawberry-rhubarb pie. No that’s not a typo from some creative (and most likely ill-advised) chard pie – I burned the top crust.

It wasn’t completely ruined but close. I thought about posting a picture but decided I didn’t want that floating around in the world.

I have completely lost my baking mojo. The last three loaves of bread were disasters. Now this pie. The crust was also among my worst efforts but we’re all used to that by now.

I think the main problem is that I am always rushing and/or trying to do ten things at once. There is no solution. If there was, I’d have figured it out by now.

Yesterday I had a short window to get the pie done and I tried to hurry and why not turn the broiler on for a second to get the top nicely browned while I finish sweeping the floor? Never do this.

While I was rushing around making my pie my cellphone rang. I’m not a big phone person and get few calls and most of the ones I get are wrong numbers. This call was a wrong number. The caller had a heavy accent and sounded like she was traveling in a tunnel with all the windows down so I could hardly understand her. She asked for Maya and I told her she had the wrong number. Then she went on and on wanting to make sure Maya wasn’t there and was I sure and maybe someone else there knew her because that’s the number she gave them. I was starting to think she was punking me but I’m not sure what the joke was.

NYC photostream still not ready. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

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Forget How To Sit Still

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Pamela

I am so far behind, it’s not even funny. Maybe I’ll get caught up this week.

But unlikely.

Just got back from an epic, fabulous trip to NYC. Photos and adventures to come. (Maybe)

This is the post that’s been sitting in draft for 2 weeks.

This is my purse.

I hate it. I’ve had it for three years + and I hate it. I saw a woman at the grocery store with this purse and I ran up and asked her if she liked it and she said, “Not really.”

I’ve been thinking about replacing it but it takes me forever to find a purse. (I’ve written about it more than once but this is all I can find right now.) And it does hold my crap so what’s the hurry?

I feel bad even writing this because it worked really great on the trip. Plus it looks nice in the photo. But now that I’m home I still hate it.

Here’s another travel tidbit. When I went to Atlanta in May, on the flight home, I had terrible jumpy legs. I’d say that they were unbearable, except I beared it, so it was almost unbearable.

I was worried about this trip so I searched it because there is nothing that the Internet has never heard of and sure enough, jumpy legs on a flight. Here were the helpful instructions: drink plenty of water, stand up and walk around every 20 minutes.

Have these people ever been on an airplane? What if everybody wanted to get up and walk around every 20 minutes? I got a few jumps but mostly no problem this trip so we’ll call the problem solved for now.

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Well, what if there is no tomorrow?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Pamela


 
Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

I’ve had this post partially finished and saved in draft for days but haven’t had time to finish. The weekend got away from me and I’m behind on everything. My yard is out of control. The rain is destroying my will to live. I made *another* loaf of fail bread. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
 
It’s the same post every week.
 
I’m going to queue it up to post itself over and over and save myself from the existential despair of discovering that I am living some sort of twisted and ultimately unsatisfying version of Groundhog’s Day.
 

 
Here’s some news: I saw two movies in one week and neither one was The Avengers (which I’ve seen 3x and I would cheerfully go see it again tomorrow, if you asked).
 
First: Rock of Ages.
 
When I saw the trailer for this movie, I wanted my 3 minutes back. I thought it looked dreadful. I did not think I wanted to see Tom Cruise in that role.
 
I went on a movie date with my cousin and we saw this. It is totally off-the-rails crazy and also completely genius. Tom Cruise is amazing. If you enjoy 80’s hair band music, you should run to the nearest theater. If you hate 80’s hair band music, you might be happier if you stayed home.
 
The other movie I saw with my sweetie: Moonrise Kingdom
 
Wes Anderson is in danger of becoming a parody of himself but I loved loved loved it. This movie is brilliant. I loved all the acting. The kids, Bill Murray, Francis McDormand, Bruce Willis. Tilda Swinton plays a cold bitch — but it’s a different flavor of cold bitch than you’ve ever seen her do before. Bob already downloaded the soundtrack for me. I can’t quote my favorite line because it’s a spoiler so here’s one:
 
Watch out for turtles. They’ll bite you if you stick your finger in their mouths.

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Greatest Football Supporters

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Pamela

Fan Appreciation Day at Jeld-Wen Field.

These are our seats as seen from the pitch.

Ticket partner and I approached this thing all wrong. There are something like 14,000 season ticket holders which we didn’t compute in any intelligent way.

We arrived at the field early. There were maybe 30 people in line.

Rather get free hotdogs inside we went for our usual pre-game pizza and beer at a place next to the field.

We finished right at the time the gates were opening and at that point the line wrapped halfway around the stadium. D’oh!

Here I am on the player bench. I just realized I should have photoshopped this photo with the one above but too late now.

By the time we got inside there were already long lines formed at all the stations.

There was an autograph station, photo station with a group of players at the log, another photo station with a group of players at one of the capo stands and then players on the field with mobs around them.

Corner kick!

We picked the line for the locker room tour, a place I have been dreaming of visiting since my very first game. Of course the dream would involve the players actually being in there but this was still pretty good.

Unfortunately, no photos in the locker room. Also no touching things. There’s a meeting room that looks like an employee lunch room, workout area, rehab facilities, the actual locker room with all their stuff. Perkins had a bunch of slabs by his locker. Then a climate controlled boot room. Then we came out of the tunnel and my little fangirl head exploded.

During the event the players were herded off the field and to duty at one of the stations. Ticket partner took my photo with Kalif! as he was being dragged off to the log station. I don’t have favorite players, I love them all, but if I did, Kalif would be one of them.

By the time we got out of the locker room the event was half over. We wandered around on the field for awhile and finally decided we didn’t want to wait in another line so we took off. Now we know how it works for next year.

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The Berry Invasion Has Begun

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Pamela

Last Sunday I was all excited because I found a few berries and it looked like a few more would be getting ripe soon.

This weekend was another one where all the time got away from me and there I was doing my 30 minute gardener routine. I saw some berries out of the corner of my eye and I ran out there before dinner to see how many I could pick.

I quickly filled up my bowl and had to run back for the second container. That’s all from one week. There’s a ton more out there.

I need to start planning berry goodies.

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Thoughtful People

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Pamela

So AARP was super nice to send me this. You know, in case I wanted to reinstate my membership which was purely because of a joke on my spouse. I’m not even 50 yet. And I’m not sure I’d join even then.

But, who wouldn’t want a free trunk organizer? My trunk is a disorganized mess. Just kidding. What is all this stuff that older people are keeping in their trunks? Right now mine has a bunch of spilled bark dust and a yoga mat.

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FAN APPRECIATION DAY!

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Pamela

Just got back from Fan Appreciation Day at Jeld-Wen Field home of the Portland Timbers. More photos to come. Here I am next to the players bench. The coach stands in front of the bench here. I said a bunch of bad words and kicked it in his honor.

Also, this is happening. I think I’ll do a lap around the block on the way home from work tomorrow and turnover the magic number. This is my second time turning 100K in my own car and I remember doing it once in a car with my family. I remember us driving around and all watching the odometer and shouting: 99997! 99998! 99999! Very sweet memory. I wish we could do it together tomorrow.

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Walking in Place

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Pamela

Kira these are the raspberries. I found a few ripe ones today.

Since the beginning of the year I keep thinking I have one more big project to finish and then I’ll have a weekend where I can take it easy and catch up on all these loose ends that are getting looser by the minute.

This weekend didn’t work out with extra time either.

If I owe you a phone call or note or said I’d do something for you — maybe next weekend. I have one more big project to finish.

I haven’t even had time to watch all my soccer. One game a day is all I’ve managed to cram in. And none of the games I’ve seen so far has blown my socks off. Who should we root for in England v. France tomorrow?

Every time there’s a once in a lifetime astronomy event, I never pay much attention because it’s cloudy here 385 days a year. There was that venus across the sun thing happening and it was not cloudy so I went and did the homework to see how I could go about viewing it. The instructions said to go some place where they’re projecting it and watch it there.

I’m thinking: watch it projected or wait until tomorrow and look at it on the Internet, what’s the difference?

I also tried just looking at the sun even though the directions said not to. It just looked bright and hurt my eyes.

I baked another loaf of total fail bread. The crust is like crumpled concrete. The inside is dense and tasteless. I can’t understand what I’m doing wrong. I need to get out all my bread notes and see if I can troubleshoot it. Baking bread used to be my super power.

I can hardly keep my eyes open so I’m going to bed.

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