Hitting the Road

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Pamela

When we were in Grants Pass last month we went to this giant kitchen store. The kind of place you could wander around in for hours (if you’re a kitchen store type of person like me and a huge part of my extended family) and find tons of things you want. The kind of place you can’t leave unless you buy something.

I bought this strawberry corer because we didn’t have hours that day so I didn’t have enough time to do more damage.

It took these photos because of the instructions which if you can’t read say: Insert teeth of corer at stem and twist out.

Just in case you weren’t sure how it worked.

I am hitting the road tomorrow for California. The plan is to hang out with family, drink adult beverages, eat yummy food and do some swimming in the river.

I will offline until next week. Don’t do anything crazy while I’m gone.

Posted in doing it wrong, Orleans, pamily | 1 Comment

The Alarm: 68 Guns

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Pamela


A corner of Bob’s office.

Yesterday morning I had to catch an early flight that meant I had to get up before 5am. I have a psychological barrier for waking before 5am. 5am is fine but 4:45a sounds horrific.

I set my regular bedside alarm plus I set my cellphone alarm. Then when I got in bed I wondered why I worry so much about missing an alarm.

I don’t think I’ve ever slept through an alarm in my life.

I’ve never missed a plane or been seriously late to school or work because of oversleeping.

I’ve had a couple of incidents where I set the alarm incorrectly or power went off or something like that but I usually wake up myself with enough time to get wherever I have to be.

I suspect my paranoia about oversleeping keeps me from sleeping at all. I don’t think I put together 3 hours of sleep on Sunday night. I made to the airport just fine. (Goodness there are a lot of people running around at 5:30a.)

I spent the rest of the day in meetings trying to stay awake. My method was to be fidgety. I thought there were some voodoo tricks like pinching your earlobes or biting your pinky but those didn’t help. I’m not a caffeine person but at lunch I ordered the smallest possible Coke they would offer me. The server stared at me, then looked at her pad then looked back at me. “You threw me off for a second,” she said.

Because NO ONE in America orders the smallest Coke. I was afraid if I drank too much caffeine I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night and I didn’t want one of those gallon tumblers where most would be thrown away.

The Coke didn’t help much but since I never drink it, it was a delicious treat.

Shut out the light at 8:45p and slept like the dead. Woke up at 5:00 without an alarm.

Posted in doing it wrong, sleepless in Vancouver | 2 Comments

Wild Kingdom

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Pamela

It’s been animal kingdom in the backyard tonight.

Toes has been spending so much time back there I should start charging him rent. Every time I go out there I hear his whiny meows and he takes his time crawling out from a shady spot and stretching a bit before coming over and demanding attention. On Friday he got bitey when I wanted to stop.

Also tonight we had squirrely squirrels, Mr. Oranges and Bunny. Bunny lives next door but I think it has a crush on Mr. Oranges because it followed him around my yard and gave me the stink eye when I pet Oranges. Oranges was frisky tonight, too, and doing the bitey thing.

Then there was a dog running around.

I keep hoping I’ll look back there and see something exotic like a white stag or a capybara.

I lost one of my spare pairs of glasses. I have several cheapo pairs that I leave around the house in the kitchen or on the nightstand so I never have to look too far to find glasses. I misplace them all the time and normally I find them right away, usually under my butt. But this pair seemed to have wandered off.

I needed to use advanced search methods. The first thing I did was take apart the bed and while I was at it I vacuumed in all the nooks and crannies. Sure enough it was wedged down between the bedframe and the nightstand and tangled up in the cord for the alarm clock.

My sweetheart is gone for a couple of days and I have the house to myself. Usually when he’s gone, I sleep on my side of the bed out of habit. Last night I decided to sleep in the middle. I woke up in the middle of the night and I was almost horizontal and taking up pretty much the whole space.

Best not make that a habit.

Those are the updates. Thrill a minute around here.

Posted in doing it wrong | Tagged | 2 Comments

Garden Update

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Pamela





I still have plants that haven’t bloomed and I keep finding dahlias I’ve never seen before. I think I say that every year.

Yesterday I noticed that one of my tomatoes (the German lunchbox) was growing so crazy it was pushing its cage over. I propped it up with another cage. We’ll see how that works. I should probably whack back some of the floppy branches on these plants but I’m so greedy I don’t want to.

The cucumbers seem to be major failure. Again. I started about 12 seeds in the house and half sprouted. Then I put them in the ground and half shriveled up. So I started another batch of seeds in the house with similar results. I put them outside last weekend and they are aggressively turning yellow and sad. Next year I’m going to find turbo cucumber seeds and try that.

Posted in doing it wrong, garden | Tagged | 2 Comments

What Do You Have to Do To Get A Lamb Burger Around Here?

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Pamela

Pumpkin recipe booklet from the High Desert Museum. Or should that be High Dessert Museum? I’m going to give it a workout if my pumpkin patch works out. It’s not looking very promising at the moment.

Last week co-worker and I went to a lunch restaurant that we haven’t been to in a long time. They served a lamb burger that peeled your face off. They took the lamb burger off the menu and we stopped going there.

One of the food carts made a great lamb burger but then it closed.

We randomly checked the old restaurant last week and lamb burger was back on the menu. We phoned and asked specifically about the lamb burger and they said they were serving it.

Then we got there, ordered the burger and drinks and five minutes later the server returned to tell us there were no lamb burgers.

The server was very apologetic. I would say even too apologetic. We’re not the kind of people to fly into a rage about a dumb burger but she apologized a million times and blamed herself, she should have asked the chef, etc.

Meanwhile we ordered something else and got on with our lives. Except she forgot our drinks . The thing is *we* were embarrassed about bringing it up after the excessive burger apologies. We mentioned it to the busboy who then brought us the wrong drinks. And then she came over to tell us the drinks were on her because of the burger mistake and we clarified what we’d actually ordered and then she just brought one. And never came to our table again until it was time to pay.

It was like this minor thing that didn’t have to be a big deal turned into a weird awkwardville exercise. I don’t think we’ll be going back any time soon which means we still haven’t got our lamb burger fix.

Posted in doing it wrong | 4 Comments

Clarion West Write-A-Thon Wrap Up

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Pamela

In honor of the Timbers match tonight, these are sunflowers in my garden. (Here’s the link if you want to get the reference.

Week #6 words: 3099
Stories submitted: 0

Total words written for the entire WAT: 25,020
Total stories submitted: 2

I exceeded my goals.

And, now that I’ve signed the contract, I can announce that I sold one of the stories I submitted.

Yay, the 19 month sales-free drought is finished. (Yes, technically I sold 2 reprints of one of my stories during that time. But, come on, does Limahl call his Mom every time “Too Shy” makes into another 80’s compilation?)

My story “Lottie Versus The Moon Hopper” was accepted into the anthology Future Lovecraft to be published by Innsmouth Free Press at the end of the year. Don’t worry, I’ll announce it a million times when it comes out.

Huge thanks to everyone involved with the write-a-thon, especially my sponsors. I will send you all personal love notes thanking you soon.

It’s never too late to donate. There’s info here and my donation page is here.

Posted in Clarion West | 4 Comments

Future Pumpkins

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Pamela

Whenever I’m running around I always think of a ton of things I want to post about. Then when I’m sitting here I can’t remember. I also have tons of notes but then when I sit here I don’t understand them.

Like this one: “white space”

I have no idea.

Also, I finally posted my photos from the Portland Timbers v. Seattle Sounders game.

Posted in garden, TIMBERS! | Tagged | 1 Comment

You Can’t Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Eat Your Meat

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Pamela

This is the tomato plant that I grew from a seed and knocked all the leaves off when I planted it in the garden. It’s about 4 feet tall and has a half dozen green tomatoes on it.

It is the smallest of my tomato plants. I have two that are as tall as I am with huge branches flopping out the sides of the cage. They are sagging with green tomatoes. The early girl has a few that have gone shiny and yellow-ish. I think I’m going to be eating home grown tomatoes very soon.

I’m convinced that the early settlers stayed alive by eating greens. But you never hear about that. You never find pioneer tested recipes for turnip and beet greens. I don’t even try that hard and I have giant piles of greens that we can’t even begin to keep up with. Especially since I represent about 90% of the greens consumption in my household. The Dining section had an article about all the plant tidbits that most people throw away that you can eat. More garden stuff for the plate.

Last weekend I finally got around to picking some beets to roast. They were soft-ball size with big healthy tops. I saved all the greens plus I yanked up some kale.

The first thing I do with my greens is soak them in water so all the slugs and snails rise to the surface. I know, gross. Better to find them now than later. Then I sauté in olive oil and garlic. Even though the greens shrink when cooked there was a giant bowl which I still haven’t finished. (They taste great with a little ume plum vinegar sprinkled on them.)

The other night I ate about 4 pounds of vegetables for one meal. I didn’t set out to eat that much I just kept finding more stuff in the fridge and thinking, “I want some of this, too.” My digestive system still hasn’t figured out what happened.

Posted in garden | Tagged | 3 Comments

New Library

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Pamela

Self Portrait

Our new public library finally opened and it’s awesome. We visited the second day it was open so it was still crazy but I’m looking forward to spending more time hanging out there.

Photos here.

Posted in doing it wrong | 1 Comment

Dumb Phone

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Pamela

Ancestor memorial in Grants Pass, Or

On our drive down to Grants Pass we passed an old falling down barn that had painted on it: hauntedbarn.com

I said: I wonder what hauntedbarn.com is.

Bob said: iPhone

I don’t have a phone that can do fancy tricks. I’m chained to the Internet enough already. I don’t want to carry it around with me. I’ve never even played with Bob’s phone.

But I was stuck in the car for a few hours and I wanted to see what hauntedbarn.com was all about.

I did not have an easy time with iPhone. First we’re in the car. Second, you need the world’s tiniest fingers. I kept typing a wrong letter and then I’d try to fix it and type more wrong letters and then I’d try to fix that and next thing you know, iPhone was trying to pull up: haymtd.com

“I can’t believe people like this,” I said as I tapped on that stupid phone.

I got mad and gave up but then I wanted to know what hauntedbarn.com was so I tried some more. I was not going to be defeated by an iPhone.

I finally pulled it up and it was a domain for sale. Damn you hauntedbarn.com

Posted in doing it wrong | 1 Comment