pedestrian saga

Friday I crawled home tense and broken and, feeling more Gollum than Merry, opted to stay in while Scott went out. In a few human moments I managed to savor up a pot of black beans and put them on to cook. Then a sip of red wine, the opening strains of Sousa’s “Liberty Bell” from the TV, and next thing I knew, it was four hours later, Scott was waking me out of a black sleep, and the house was soaked in the foul smell of burnt beans.

Sunday I returned to the stove and lived down the black beans incident with a pot of damn fine pasta alla puttanesca (”ho sauce” is my working translation), finally making a dent in the mountain of tomatoes gathered on the counter. It was spicy and sassy and good enough to jar and sell at market, I say!

I’d promised Mum a photo of my crazy new flamenco apron, which I donned on this occasion. Mum’s Bretonne-Sevillana sister Christine sent one each to me and my sister over the summer. Merci beaucoup, Christine! Grosses bises de Oregon!

Ten years ago I visited Christine during Semana Santa and fell totally in love with Sevilla. I’ve vowed one day to return for both Fiestas de Primavera and dance flamenco in full costume…

(Hi. I wrote the following at the end of June, shortly after returning from a 10-day tour of Indiana and Ohio with Scott. I saved this draft intending to continue writing about all our other adventures on the road in loving detail. With kick-ass prose! Words worthy of the experience, expressive of my deep gratitude to everyone I met along the way! And photos too! Welcome to my world of good intentions gone nowhere. The land where blog posts go to die. [RIP, reports on my 2004 L.A. Sewer Tour, my passionate 2005 reunion with The Passenger, last fall's landmark Hardesty Mountain climb...] Anyway, please enjoy this narrative fragment and check out my pretty extensive photo collection for other pieces of the story, like meeting my first niece for the first time, consummating my Troupe Taleeba fandom, and more.)

Last week Scott and I went on a tour of Indiana and Ohio, during which we had the pleasure of reuniting with familiar souls and getting acquainted with new folks too. (more…)

We were cookin’ today, 102 degrees Fahren-hot. Hoo, boyo! As soon as the clock struck 5:00, I unstuck my sweaty tush from the office chair and staggered away to join Scott for a slightly delirious ride over to the farm truck parked in a North Corvallis neighborhood to bring veg to the faithful. It was our first week as members of Gathering Together Farm’s community supported agriculture (CSA) program. That’s right, folks. We bought the farm!

And it’s a thing of beauty: We paid up front for a weekly box of farm-fresh veg, assembled for us and delivered every Tuesday evening, today through October, to a rendezvous conveniently located between work and home. Truly this program is a boon to two dedicated herbivores who nonetheless often struggle to eat enough veg (chips and salsa and pasta and s’mores, sure) and who experience streaks of laziness and indecision. No more feeling guilty or deprived when we sleep in and miss the Saturday farmers’ market (me). No more crippling indecision (among the market hordes) about what to buy when we actually do make it there (Scott). No more crippling indecision about what to make at all (me). It’s monster salad time, baby!

Yeah, I’m still a little delirious from the heat. Here’s my portrait of our inaugural plunder: new potatoes, white satin carrots, Walla Walla and baby onions, arugula, Swiss chard, zucchini, cilantro, snap peas, cucumber, Siletz tomatoes, and blueberries. Those are poblanos and jalapeños (from local grocer Richey’s) in the pan, soon to be quesadilla-fied and topped with guacamole.

These celebrations are dedicated to my sister, who’s overworked and underpaid and a hell of a lot more graceful about it than I could ever be. I would love nothing more than to invite her over tonight to relax by the fire and ease the stress of her seven-day workweek.

The celebrations reach back to lucky Friday the 13th, when Scott and I saw The Host at the Darkside. (more…)

On Friday I barfed three times, at ever-shrinking intervals, for no good reason. My appetite disappeared entirely, and I shrank into a pathetic heap on the sofa and in bed (alternatively, in between trips to the bathroom). I passed the day and the night seeking to remain as still as possible, slipping into a vampiric stupor, a vestige of my true self (me! the one obsessed with rich food—ice cream and fruit pies, nachos and fettuccine all’Alfredo, Chianti and Fat Tire, curried peas and precious roasted garlic!) I missed the apparently awesome vault by my favorite OSU gymnast, Mandi Rodriguez, at the last home meet of the season.

Scott came to the rescue with a bottle of nuclear pink pepperminty slime-dicine, and yesterday I managed to choke down (and keep down) a few glasses of Cran-Raspberry, a small bowl of granola, and six stale water crackers. Still bereft of all epicurean desires, I pulled Twentieth Century Eightball off my bookshelf and burrowed into the sofa to enjoy the misanthropic pornography of Daniel Clowes. Late in the afternoon, I got the crazy notion to do something useful and decided to cut the grass. So when Scott wasn’t looking, I hauled our new old reel mower out of the shed and set to work. Maddy ran wide circles around me as I staggered across the back lawn, stopping to catch my breath and steady myself after each pass. Not the bliss of before.

The good news is that I ate a full plate of peas and pasta for supper (though sadly recoiled at Scott’s objectively wonderful garlic sauté) and Inland Empire is playing at 3:00 and 6:40 today. Depending on how lunch goes, I may just be ready to take it on.

November
Has tied me
To an old dead tree
Get word to April
To rescue me
November’s cold chain
Made of wet boots and rain
And shiny black ravens
On chimney smoke lanes
November seems odd
You’re my firing squad
November

“This is a song with a lot of weather in it, and I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for weather.” -Tom Waits, November 2004 (listen from 04:55)

So! Moving right along.

Yesterday was cold and dry, and I tried to spend the daylight hours outside. Scott and I headed downtown to the last outdoor farmers market of the season. I bought a pair of poblano peppers because they’re so damn cute and quite tasty in quesadillas. At one of the apple stands, Scott picked out a bunch of Stayman Winesaps and Mutsus, and I cleaned up on pippins. Time again to try my hand at dumplings.

Back home we turned the dogs out to romp and rummage and turned our attentions to the garden. During the week some mad winds had blown the tin roof off our little porch shelter thing and stripped the remaining foliage off our two maples. So while Scott hit the roofs, collecting and stowing the tin sheets and scooping out the gutters on the house, I raked the maple leaves into a gorgeous pile by our new compost bin behind the greenhouse. (Okay, okay. It’s not as idyllic as it sounds or appears. That photo shows the garden in summer before we bought it. The greenhouse currently sits empty, as we haven’t actually moved in to it yet, and the plants are rather soggy and brown these days. But I’m really proud of our leaf pile.)

Gordon snacked on some gutter gunk before I chased him inside. Maddy obsessed over cat tracks in the bushes until I chased her inside too. She smelled, quite pleasantly, of mint and rosemary!

I took a break from raking and climbed up the rickety ladder, stretched out on my back on top of our house, spied into the neighbors’ gardens, felt a little lighter.

Late last month, I had really let the Man get me down, and all the petty voices in my head, and my left eye had developed a twitch. Mum and Aunt Mary swept in, scooped me up out of that nasty bog of angst, and took me camping at Crater Lake National Park. (more…)

I may have died and gone to heaven, for I’ve found Devi in a little strip mall a few mere blocks from our new home!

Paneer! Gulab jamun! And Bollywood! Yes, kids, dreams really do come true.

Meanwhile, before I go and gorge myself on all the goodies Devi has to offer, it’s perhaps time again to indulge in some tasty bites of Bombay TV, all thanks to lovely L. Claude. Bollywood, here I come!

Dennis tagged me with this e-mail quiz something like four months ago. I found it had also made the rounds in the blogosphere (a meme, the kids call it) and thought I’d respond to him here, both because I’m desperate to keep Pedestrian Saga a-hobblin’ along and because I love links. (Maybe my overdue answers will even give the good professor some hope that this truant pupil will eventually surface to make up that other quiz!) (more…)

Sunny and 91 degrees here at 8:00 this evening in the Heart of the Valley. There’s nothing for it: It’s cherry pie a la mode for dinner, a glass of wine to rinse it down (and the Ramones anthology streaming out of iTunes, to keep me awake). Now if only I had some yummy Twin Peaks on hand! With my own Gordon Cole and Madeleine Ferguson sacked out on the floor, I’d curl up and study the best moments of the series over seconds. As consolation, perhaps it’s time to wander over to that one link Dennis posted last month. Oh, yes… very promising indeed…