Category: Life

House smells like varnish fumes and catbox. I am alone here, in the last blue of the evening, on what is, in a sense, my last night of bachelorhood (yes, I know about gender and whatnot in this, but I despise the word ‘bachelorette;’ it sounds not as robust as its male counterpart.). Somewhere in [...]

Strange how lumber stores don’t really stock wood, but they will talk to you for a quarter hour about how best to lacquer it. Apologetically, the clerk at Parr Lumber on Cornelius Pass admitted that, really, all they had was oak and fir. He called the affiliated cabinet outlet down the road and assured me [...]

I just finished another bout of wine writing that, coupled with the writing I do for a living, that is, all the time, all of it all of it, has left me wordless. Kind of like being out of breath. I wish I even had a photo to shove down your throat, but I’m not [...]

Walking down Lovejoy tonight with my good friend Brett towards Vigne, wine bar extraordinare (extraordinarily expensive anyway): There is a mongrel/mutt-ish dog attached to a bench at the streetcar stop, anomalous in the damp–where is its owner? It has that friendly, bereft dog look and I hold out a hand for it to sniff. Sniff, [...]

Columbia Hills Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. This is from yesterday. I still hate digital cameras.

I had to go to the Columbia River Gorge today for various non-vacation reasons, but it generally feels like a vacation there anyway. At one place I visited, there were guinea fowl chasing each other in dust and cottonpuff clouds. It was summertime hot in the car. The year’s first tank-top day ended in hail [...]

I knew I had deconstructivist tendencies, at least with the way I eat sandwiches. I like to eat sandwiches first as the melange of ingredients, and then one element at a time for the second half or so. I guess Walt Whitman would call this ‘prying through the strata.’ But, my, did I have a [...]

had a close friend in middle and high school that my mother used to term ‘contrary.’ My friend was, mom says, consistently compelled to reject anything generally approved of or embraced by people, not because she had a particular opinion one way or the other, but simply because she was contrary. I think I border [...]

Stemming from a discussion yesterday with David about grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, which we jointly believe to be one of the hallowed food combinations: There are some foodstuffs that, although their general disposition is unpleasant or worse, are required for the appropriate creation of such edibles, and their omission is a violation of [...]

Every year I think I remember from the previous year when the Oregon landscape started its transition from brown and smooshed to something verdant and fresh. Two days ago on my way home from work I noticed the sunlight, for the first time since last fall, looked stable and not winter-fragile. The sky looked less [...]