Different but Delicious

Last night I attended the Utah Festival Opera's production of Manon Lescaut. It seems I have the same interests as 70-year-old women. You've never seen so much white hair, so many floral skirts, or so many orthopedic shoes in your life.

Before the opera, we ate at Le Nonne and I had a dish I have never seen anywhere before. I haven't even encountered this recipe in my cookbook reading. It's pennette alla pera, which is penne with a gorgonzola cheese sauce and PEARS. So good! It makes sense--pears and gorgonzola are a great combination. I would never have considered combining them with pasta, though. Must learn how to re-create at home.

OREGON: Portland

We spent one full day and a night in Portland and then drove home via the Oregon Trail the following morning. The Columbia River area just outside of Portland is gorgeous, and I was happy to be seeing the Oregon Trail after all those hours in the 4th grade playing Oregon Trail, the greatest computer game ever crafted by human beings. I'm EXCELLENT at taking down a buffalo with only a keyboard spacebar and arrow keys.

We visited all the places you all suggested with more or less success (I have a very sad story about Voodoo Doughnut).

Near the Steel Bridge

At the Chinese Garden

At the Rose Garden

At the Japanese Garden

It was at the Japanese Garden that I learned the bad news about fish. AJ and I were standing at a waterfall looking at the giant koi in the pond at the bottom. She was admiring their interesting and unique coloring. I was bemoaning the creepiness of fish. And it occurred to me that the only thing that keeps fish from populating my nightmares is the fact that they have to stay in the water. They can't come up on land and get me with their nasty fish whiskers and their icky mouths and their slimy skin. And then AJ told me that there's a fish that comes ashore. It's not a catfish. It's a mudskipper. It's amphibious and it has elbows and it CREEPS me out. Bad and Wrong. Fish should not have elbows.

OREGON: Ashland

Our High Class Digs
Despite the ghetto sign, it was a perfectly nice motel.

Delightful Treats
Ashland is full of very fine independent restaurants, and I think every place we ate in Oregon had a menu note stating that the food was local whenever possible and that sustainable practices were supported. Yay, Oregon!

Lithia Park
This is a FANTASTIC park bordering the Shakespeare Theater complex. It was designed by John McLaren, who's most well-known for Golden Gate Park. We took a tour of part of the park with a number of older couples. I love hanging out with the elderly.

Lithium Water Fountains
Drinking three glasses of this water is equivalent to taking one Valium. I didn't get to test this claim, because almost as soon as the water touched my lips, I recalled that I hate mineral water.


OSF Elizabethan Theater
We attended Othello, which I saw at the Utah Shakespearean Festival just last month. I liked the first half of Othello in Ashland better, but Cedar City's production was better for the second half. The last half of Othello in Cedar City was riveting--the audience was completely invested in the story, the death scene was choreographed really well, and Corliss Preston playing Amelia was so consistently ON throughout the play that when she stepped up as the voice of protest in the second half, it was powerful. (Side note: I think I saw James Newcomb who plays Iago in Cedar City this summer at Lithia Park. I chose not to be a crazy theater stalker and ask him if he was him.) The second half of Othello in Ashland wasn't as emotionally effective. The three leads in Ashland were all excellent and the theater is great, though. The theater is an outdoor Globe replica but it's designed to eliminate outside noise.
(This photo is from Wikipedia, not from the performance we saw.)

Sorry, Eliana, I have nothing negative to report about Ashland.

OREGON

I'm fascinated by everything I see when I travel and end up with a lot of questions about whatever I'm seeing or doing. It's all very educational (which is why, by the way, if I ever have kids I'm not going to send them to school. We're going to live on a bus and travel around and learn through experience. We may also wear matching t-shirts and evangelically declaim against the eating of sugar so that we can be one of those families. That part will only work if we don't pay for our gas by selling pies along the way, making our bus a piemobile of sorts.).

Here are my most pressing questions from my trip to Oregon. If you know the answers to any of these, let me know. It will save me from having to ignore patrons at the reference desk while I look up the answers.

1. Who made the Tree of Life statue near Saltair in western Utah?
2. Why does Elko exist?
3. If you plant a billion different breeds of roses next to one another do you end up with cross pollination problems?
4. What's Red Bull's connection to Portland?
5. How closely are Ponderosas and Redwoods related?
6. Why did the Chataqua women's groups die out?
7. How do you rake a Japanese garden without leaving footprints in the gravel?
8. What's the deal with the Shanghai Tunnels? When were the tunnels built? For what purpose? Are they called the Shanghai Tunnels because they're connected with Chinatown or because of the kidnappings they enabled?
9. Do catfish have feet?
10. When did US trains stop transporting passengers?
    

Why I'm Not Posting Tomorrow

Thursday morning I'm driving to Ashland, Oregon with a friend to see "Othello" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I've never been to Oregon, but I fully intend to adore Ashland for at least the following two reasons:

1. According to Wikipedia (and never you mind what anyone says about the veracity of its information, Wikipedia is a good and true friend to us all), Ashland, Oregon was (in part) named for Ashland, Kentucky. This is surprising indeed, because except for being my birthplace, Ashland, Kentucky doesn't have a lot going for it.

2. Ashland, Oregon is the setting for Lolly Winston's book Good Grief, which I like very much. Good Grief is a novel about a young widow who moves to Ashland, opens a bakery, and falls in love with a Shakespearean actor. Who doesn't want a bakery and a Shakespearean actor?

We're not leaving until Thursday, but I work late tomorrow night and I still haven't packed, asked my neighbor to pick up the mail, made hummus to snack on along the way, or cleaned my bathroom, so this might be all the blogging you get for the week. Expect a full Oregon report (whether or not you want one) when I return.

Actual Words from My Actual Mouth

Tuey! We don't put gravy in the toaster.


Apparently, some of us do.

Stereotypes

I went to a party at a friend's house this weekend. We played The Great Dalmuti (my favorite party game) with a big group of people and then watched the American Fork Steel Days fireworks on my friend's lawn (BEAUTIFUL night). After the fireworks, I was sitting around talking to some of my friend's friends and they were asking me what was universally true about librarians and, particularly, what was true about librarians at my library. All of my immediate thoughts were stereotypes. We like to read. We don't get married. (Actually, one of my co-workers just got engaged this weekend. We'll probably have to fire her. Getting engaged is Not Done in our department.) But some stereotypes are true. I caught myself with my finger to my lips, shushing a group of teenagers one day and realized that I was on the Slippery Librarian Slope. Can't be too much longer before I find myself living with 50 cats.

Tell Me Where to Go

I'm going to Portland next week. I've never been to Oregon before. Anybody have any recommendations?

Here's my recommendation for the night. When attending a BBQ, DO NOT eat the burger AND the fajita AND the salmon. You might want everyone cooking to feel appreciated, but eating that much food will just make you want to vomit and you'll end up blogging while lying on the floor and moaning, which is hard to do. Learn from my folly.

Potato Candy

I love community cookbooks. The kind that schools and churches sell as fundraisers. The kind that are full, if you're lucky, of terrible poetry and all kind of charts and gardening advice and cleaning tips and recipes for a Happy Home that include things like a spoonful of love and a pinch of patience. Community cookbooks are so fantastic. One of my favorite cookbooks from my personal collection is a cookbook of the Grossmont Hospital Auxiliary from 1975 that I picked up at a yard sale. Right after the guidelines on freezing prepared foods, it offers a Chart of Selected Communicable Diseases (an excerpt from the Home Nursing Textbook).

Anyway, tonight I was craving something sweet so I pulled out my Willing Workers Parsons Church of the Nazarene cookbook. My sister and I each have a copy of this cookbook and every time I look through it, I exclaim over one particular recipe--the potato candy. And then my sister assures me that potato candy is a treat. And then I exclaim some more, because it sounds foul. I decided to try it tonight, though. This is how you make potato candy: boil one potato and mash it with 2 lbs of confectioner's sugar. Roll out the potato/sugar mixture, spread it with peanut butter, roll it up like a jelly roll, slice it, and eat it. I boiled my potato. I pulled two packages of sugar out of my cupboard. And I couldn't do it. I could not add two POUNDS of sugar to a potato. It seemed wrong, wrong, wrong. So I cut up my potato, ate it with butter, and took myself on a walk, because just the idea of potato candy made my thighs feel like they were expanding.

Overheard

Yesterday my sister and I were hanging out on the couch in her family room. All the little marmots had wandered off to do their various marmot tasks, except for the Right Honorable Marmot who is still so new that he mostly spends his days lying in his bassinet and looking like a root vegetable. Tuey, on the other hand, always has very important work to do. He takes his plastic puppy on walks, he runs water through a funnel, he sweeps, he clears the art table off (onto the floor). He keeps himself very busy. Yesterday he had wandered into the bathroom and when Marmot Dad followed him in a few minutes later, my sister and I heard Marmot Dad say

Oh no, Tuey. That's not your job. That's Daddy's job. (pause) And that didn't even need plunging.

Apparently Tuey also does a little plumbing in his spare time.

Loving Blackberries

I went to the Salt Lake City Farmers' Market on Saturday. Heaven! I love, love, love a good farmers' market. I bought a basil plant, beets, squash, a loaf of bread, apricots, and blackberries.

These are my pretty, pretty blackberries.

In the evening (after first stopping at the Scottish Festival in Payson, where one of the Festival rules was that all swords were to remained sheathed throughout the Festival. Really. I found it in writing), I made a blackberry and apricot free form tart with a cornmeal crust. Delicious.


I always think of this poem when I eat blackberries.

MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS
by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Bad Birthday Karma

So, I'm not very good at remembering birthdays. I always intend to be, but I'm not. This was brought home to me today when the Ceramic Genius came to the library. We were chatting about how she stays home now (she's having a baby any day) and needs projects to entertain herself. And then she mentioned that she got a sewing machine on her birthday. On Tuesday. Two days ago. It's fairly bad that I forgot her birthday (which I absolutely did) even though I just saw her and talked to her about her birthday on Saturday. It's worse that I called her on her birthday and forgot her birthday. We talked about cloth diapers and a trip to England and a number of non-birthday related topics. Bad Birthday Karma. Very Bad. I'm going to start working on a lovely handmade gift for the next person I know with a birthday. I'm thinking I should knit a sweater out of my own hair or something. And then I'll probably go back to my regular birthday habits and send people birthday cards three months late. If they're lucky.

Wishes for Library Patrons

Lucille Clifton has a poem entitled "Wishes for Sons" (don't read the poem if you embarrass easily). It wishes a number of uncomfortable circumstances regarding, um, shall we say feminine troubles on her sons. Tonight I was thinking that I'd like to write a poem entitled "Wishes for Library Patrons" that would detail some punishments for a variety of patrons.

Here's the short list of patrons who would be included (I'll leave out their specific punishments in an effort not to indulge too many mean thoughts):

Patrons who decide right at closing time that they need to get library cards for their 2 tiny children (who should be home in bed!) right now even though they're not checking out any books and could fill out the paperwork and get the cards on their next trip to the library instead of holding up 12 staff members who want to go home.

Patrons (don't care that they're children) who pull the fire alarm, interrupting my lunch, forcing me to help evacuate the building, and giving me a headache (the fire alarm system is very good--very loud).

Patrons who ignore the blaring fire alarm sirens and staff instructions not to enter the building (it's illegal and staff are trying to CLEAR the building) because they want to drop off their books inside. Nevermind that there are drop boxes outside that could be used just as easily.

Patrons who have to be told not to use cell phones in well-marked quiet areas who, upon being told to stop using their phones, say, "I know" and continue talking.

Patrons who come to the library dressed like Samurai on roller blades (that guy just really bugs me no matter what he's doing).

I have wishes for them. Evil wishes.

Health

Today I attended the city health fair to have my BMI calculated and my blood pressure taken and my glucose and cholesterol checked. My blood pressure was a little high. The nurse asked if I was relaxed. I said yes, because I do that when asked any question. But then I thought, No, I'm not relaxed! I just came from the reference desk, I have nightmares about my lawn, and being the RS pres. gives me a headache.

The big problem with my health screening, though, came about at the Glucose Station. I sat down and the Blood Taker told me I was the first woman she'd seen all day. Interesting. The woman started prepping my arm to take blood. I thought this was very odd as the person at the next table was just getting her finger pricked. I figured, though, that if someone had given the Blood Taker Woman the equipment to suck blood out of my arm, she was probably qualified to do so. She took a whole big vial of my blood and then it went down like this:

Blood Taker: Oh, do you have your receipt for payment?

MBC: Was I supposed to pay for this? (I was pretty certain all my services were supposed to be free.)

Blood Taker: Oh yes. Go over and pay at the cashier's office.

MBC: What should I tell them I'm paying for?

This is the point at which a nurse heard us talking and jumped in. She looked at my paperwork. She crossed something out. She shook her head.

Nurse: You don't have to pay for anything. We're just using your blood to test your cholesterol and glucose. (Turning to the Blood Taker) There's only a charge for the prostate screening. (pause) She doesn't have a prostate.

That's right I don't have a prostate! And I'm glad too. And I promise never to mention prostates on the blog again.

Miscommunication?

There's a young, Hispanic man attending the computer classes I'm teaching this month. After our last class, he came to give me back his headphones and then said something to me that I didn't understand. I asked him to repeat himself, and I still didn't understand (oh, MBC and her communication woes at the library), so I just smiled and nodded like I do with Tuey when he tells me earnest, tiny boy stories that I don't understand. I DID understand the next few things the man said and they were as follows:

Computer Patron: So, when do you get off work?

MBC: Oh, not for another hour or so.

Computer Patron: Hmmm. Well, when do you come in to work?

MBC: Oh, it varies.

I'm concerned now that the first thing the man asked was, "Would you like to move to South America with me and be my bride?"

And then I smiled and nodded.

I did once have a library patron at the jail invite me to Jamaica. I don't think we were going to get married, though. I think I was just invited to vacation with him.

4th of July

I have nothing to report about the 4th of July. I chose not to celebrate in any way shape or form this year. No parades, no picnics, no fireworks. I was tired from my trips and I had lots of chick lit to read and during part of the day my landlord and his family were over doing yard work and I had to hide out inside and imagine them thinking to themselves, "Why is this girl trying to kill our lawn?" (Because I HATE the lawn and think it should be xeriscaped!) Max's dad invited me over to their house when they were setting off fireworks, but I stayed home because I was very busy wearing purple yoga pants and eating lime and peanut coleslaw and didn't have time to watch Max inhaling carcinogens. I did go visit the Marmot House on the 4th, where we all ignored the holiday together. I plan to compensate for my holiday apathy by going all out on Arbor Day.

Love This

Hip hop's not really my thing, but I LOVE this performance from So You Think You Can Dance. I just saw it today when I was catching up on my reality TV.

Anaheim Highlights

Photos courtesy of my co-worker (whom I have not assigned a blogonym; if she'd like to jump in and give herself one, that would be great). I didn't take my camera.

This is the pier at Newport Beach. Previously Mentioned Co-Worker and I took the bus down to Newport for dinner one night (paying homage to The O.C. and all). We ate at a restaurant on the water and then made our way down to the pier. Taking the bus took longer than we expected, so we didn't get to stay as long as we would have liked. Taking the bus also involved chatting with a number of crazy people. They were surprisingly helpful crazy people. They really knew their bus routes.

This is a very fine meal I ate. Most of our other meals (except in Newport) were less fine. Anaheim is very fond of the chain restaurant.

This is Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, one of my very favorite books. He was a speaker at the conference and gave a very interesting interview. We also heard Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, speak. Very good.

Monday night we went to a baseball game with our library director. The Anaheim Angels and the Oakland As played. I ate my bratwurst, I ate my cracker jacks, I watched my drunk sports fans. I feel I had a full baseball experience. It was a little snoozy. I have some great ideas for livening up the game. Not to give away all my ideas, but think about this: monkeys on the field.

Too Too Tired

Am back from California.
Am tired.
Will post about my trips tomorrow.

Just one gem from California.

Walking to the Convention Center one morning with 3 co-workers:

Co-Worker 1: I can't believe how many naked ladies there are around here!

MBC & Co-Workers 2 & 3: Stunned Silence (We were not seeing nudity of any kind.)

THESE are Naked Ladies (AKA amaryllis belladonna). And they were everywhere.