Why I'm campaigning for Kerry

During Adlai Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign, a woman at a rally called to him, "You have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson replied "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

Welcome to 2004. If you want to see the last of Bush and the cronies he fronts for, it's not going to be enough just to vote for John Kerry. You'll need to bring someone else along with you. Maybe it's a well-intentioned neighbor who gets "too busy" to go to the polls, or a newcomer to the state who hasn't registered yet. Get off your butt and get out the vote.

I'm not just voting for Kerry, I'm campaigning. My expectations of Kerry are modest and reasonable: I don't expect him to agree with me on every issue. I don't expect him to end the war, create millions of jobs, rescue social security, institute universal healthcare, legalize gay marriage, or save the environment. I do expect him to turn the ship of state slowly in those directions. Most importantly, I have every confidence that his administration will foster an environment in which we can discuss and work on these issues without the likelihood of being labeled anti-Christian, extreme, or wimpy, or--if we keep sounding off--getting labeled a "terrorist" and swept off to a prison where we will be held indefinitely without access to legal representation.

Whining about Kerry not being liberal enough for you? Get off it. It's not going to be Kerry's job, as president, to change America. It's ours. His job, leadership, is to return us to an environment in which we can do our work as citizens without fear.

Walla Wallas

Cookbook author Maida Heatter writes today in Salon about onion sandwiches. The article includes a recipe from James Beard. Heatter notes "Before Beard became famous for his cooking classes and cookbooks, he ran a catering business that specialized in hors d'oeuvres--and he told me once that onion sandwiches were his most popular item. He'd sold millions of them, he said. That may be, but I later learned that his recipe for them varied from publication to publication."

I have a better recipe, a non-hors d'oeuvres version, than the one she provides. It came from my late uncle Bob Anderson who demonstrated it one summer when he was visiting me in Seattle during Walla Walla season. Here it is:

• Black Russian rye bread (such as Bremner Brothers)
• buttter
• Walla Walla onion, peeled and sliced thinly
• Dijon mustard
• sugar
• lemon juice

Cover the bottom slice of bread with butter and the top slice with Dijon. Place sliced onions on the buttered slice, sprinkle the onions lightly with sugar (about 1/2 tsp. for a small sandwich, and 1 tsp for a large sandwich) and then dampen the sugar with lemon juice (1/2 to 1 tsp.) and top with the Dijon-spread slice.

Caution: It's essential to make this with very fresh, in-season sweet onions. Regular yellow or white onions will taste bitter, and older sweet onions will make you think that Heatter, Beard, Uncle Bob and I are all crazy.

Good news in the polls

The Seattle Times reports today that Mark Sidran is gaining on Deborah Senn in the Washington State Attorney General's race, great news for anyone who watched Senn ride roughshod over the state healthcare system during her notorious tenure as the state Insurance Commissioner. Her name recognition is higher than Sidran's, but for all the wrong reasons.

I find that Sidran is a sharp, principled guy who can stand up and take it if (gasp) someone doesn't agree with him. I don't agree with all of his actions as Seattle's city attorney, but I respect them. I could go on at length...but Al Franken says it so much more entertainingly.

Summer's end

Summer means fried clams and chocolate malts. So yesterday I walked down to Gordo's on Seaview for lunch. Seaview Avenue looks like the main street of a small, Northern California coastal town; the sort of town where the private investigator in a 70s movie drives to question an obscure and reluctant witness. Restaurants, boatyards, and marinas line the water side of the shore road, and an assortment of shacks, beach cottages, and 60s-era commerical buildlings (stucco with bulbous brown-tinted windows) line the other side. No cross streets--a railroad runs behind the buildings.
Gordo's take-out is in one of the shacks, with wooden picnic tables on the front and side. Judging from the pop-art font on the signage (listing every item on the menu) Gordo's has been there a good long while. While the food is hardly health food, the portions are modest, and inexpensive. My little bag of clams and a medium-size malted came to under $5, and the clams were as close in taste (though not texture) as you get to Cape Cod style fried clams on the West Coast. The malted had a subtle cocoa taste--not sickeningly sweet like most of the soft ice cream that turns up at more commercial places.
Next to Gordo's parking lot is Abbondanza, an outdoor lot filled with concrete garden art surrounded by a chain-link fence. The art ranges from the tacky to the chic. They have dark gray Japanese lanterns, elegant green leaping fish designed as fountains, cross-legged Hindu gods, huge Buddha faces, elegant Greco-Roman pedestals, elaborate English planters, and New Age wall plaques of suns and moon. I saw bunnies and, I think, some gnomes and gargoyles in there as well. And some statues of the Virgin Mary. And some Grecian nudes. Every September Abbondanza has a huge 50-percent-off sale, advertised on with posters on phone poles all over North Seattle. Otherwise, it's rarely open. It's definitely where the private investigator would be snooping around, looking for the mysterious witness. Then he'd go next door to Gordo's and get some clams.

Blogging fantasy

In the early days of the internet, you'd stumble onto sites that were so esoteric as to be incomprehensible. Today, most sites fall into a readily recognizable pattern. Yawn. Well, here's one that will have you pondering. Check out a couple of blog listings; scroll all the way down to the bottom of a page. Not sure what's behind this, but someone's sure gone to a lot of trouble to create it. And, yes, The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out is listed.

Firefox

Mozilla's new Firefox browser gives me access to more blogger composition features and shortcuts. Very cool. Very very cool. Soon I'll be abusing things like font sizes, bold, italics, and lists. And colors.

Spoiling the kitties

A few new products for our feline friends:

Beastie Bands are ultra-lightweight stretch material cat collars with velcro closures. They are the perfect first collar for kittens. (Kaylee demonstrates.)

You simply cut the collar material to adjust the length (so the poor kitten isn't running around with extra collar flapping). And there's a small grommet so you can attach a little tag. We made "trainer" tags for the kittens on the machine at the pet supply supermarket. These are just tiny metal tags--the big plastic reflector tags the adult cats wear would have been ridiculous.

The Self-Warming Cat Cushion from Petsmart actually requires a cat to supply the power. This faux-fur plush pad has a lining made out of reflective material (a space blanket?) that reflects back the cat's heat. Our cats love it. Completely washable.

The big find was the Berber Deluxe Slumber Ball from Drs. Foster and Smith. The 26" medium size slumber ball is an immense ball of ultra-light fiberfill covered in synthetic berber fleece. A big cat like Sheba climbs on and sinks slowly into the middle, purring furiously. Show 'em, Sheba:

The kittens like it too but since they don't weigh enough to compress the ball, they tend to slide slowly off while sleeping. I'm trying to imagine what the large (32") slumber ball would be like--perhaps if our next cat is a mountain lion...These are completely washable, but you'd have to have a big washing machine.

Last but not least--we came across tiny round faux-fur throw rugs at Fred Meyers called Faux Katti. Despite the name, these are not in the pet department, but in the rug aisle. They have non-skid backing, so you can put them on the floor or the desk and the cats won't go surfing all over the room on them. We had been putting fleece throws on our desks for the cats to hang out on, but the rugs are much better. The cats think so, too.

Farewell to Fremont

Twenty years ago, the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont was a hillside community of old clapboard houses anchored by a commercial crossroads of cafes, vintage junk stores, and artisans' shops. The inhabitants were aging hippies, youthful artists, and everyone in between. I used to go there to hang out for hours over big breakfasts (late in the morning), cheap teriyaki (late at night), and gooey pastries and coffee (all afternoon).

Flash forward. A behemoth natural foods boutique supermarket now stands at the heart of the Fremont universe, next to a condo/office building encircled with gleaming metal trim that resembles high-end barbed wire. A famous software company inhabits a sprawling complex across the street. Many of the people on the street sport the company's security badges. Vintage is gone; reproduction vintage abounds.

If you are in the low-ceilinged, crowded underground parking garage beneath the natural foods shrine (where I was at noon today) you might get the sense that something is wrong in Fremont. Take a deep breath. The air smells of rotting produce and garbage--organic, I'm sure, but decidely unpleasant. Watch out for the pricey sports cars and immense SUVs circling the garage in a hunt for spaces. They are driven by attractive young women wearing up-to-the millisecond fashion or graying, middle-aged ex-hippies wearing expensive dress casual. Everyone is wearing an expression of impatience and disgust as they wait for you to scurry across the road—or don't wait, and zoom right at you. This is not a friendly place.

I'm here for my first lunch with a group of area professionals who gather once a month at a restaurant in the middle of Fremont. I walk in to a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled quasi-Asian bistro. The noise level there is comparable to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The waitress points out the professional group, crammed together at four tables without a seat to spare. This is not a place I want to be. I walk out and head back to the parking garage, where I patiently extricate myself from the cramped spot, waiting while the driver of the SUV in front of me indulges herself in a meditative trance in the middle of the exit lane. Then I work my way, block by block, out of Fremont, each intersection gridlocked by a truck or a van trying to get into a parking space or around another commercial vehicle. Perhaps a Bostonian could feel at home here.

Eventually, I'm on Leary Way, headed back home to Ballard. I park on Ballard Avenue, go into Burk's Cafe, order a gumbo with tasso and an iced coffee, and sit in the cool restaurant watching people stroll by on the quiet cobblestone street outside. A Beau Jocque zydeco CD plays in the background. I recognize several of the people lunching in the courtyard. One of the kids from my drumming class comes in and we chat about what they covered in the Tuesday class I missed. The restaurant packs up my leftovers for me, and I head back to the car.

On the way home, I stop at Limback Lumber to pick up a piece of plywood I'll be using to winterize Betaille's outdoor cat shelter. The salesman recognizes me; he goes back and cuts the plywood to the exact size I need. I recognize two of the five contractors who come in while I'm there.

Like a few other older businesses on Leary Way, Stone Way, and Elliot Avenue, Limback maintains a large reader board atop their building. On my way out, I look up and check out the latest.

"Ballard's a-changing," it says. "But we aren't."

Amen.

[FOLLOW-UP NOTE: In summer 2006 Limback took down their reader board, leaving me to wonder if change had caught up with them at last. Fortunately, it was just temporary while the building was re-roofed. -- MT]

Pears everywhere

It's hard to walk across our patio without being hit on the head by a big, falling pear.

Whomp! Guess I need to get out there and pick them.

I'm never quite sure what to do with pears, other than slice them and eat them with cheese or poach them in wine. You can't really put them on cereal, pear cake isn't as interesting as apple cake, and I'm not into making elaborate tarts and stuff just to get a few pear slices on top. Pear jam? Pear sauce? Brandied pears?

Tonight I researched pear soup and came up with a surprising number of recipes. Some of them date back to European medieval cookery.

Categories include:
• Sweet, chilled pear soup: usually with other fruits, pureed, seasoned with aniseed, and often served for dessert.
• Savory squash and pear soup. All sorts of squashes, sweet potatoes or yams join pears and onions.
• Pear soup with melted brie: involves chicken broth and sounds pretty good.
• The weird ones: pear soup with broccoli, etc...
• My favorite: roasted eggplant, red pepper and pear soup. The recipe, credited to the Mistral Restaurant in California, makes 3-1/2 gallons of the stuff and involves 14 pears.

Turns out you can stuff pears with cheese (blue cheese, cream cheese, ricotta cheese) and bake or grill them.

And I did manage to come up with a recipe for brandied pears:

Scald and peel the fruit; make a syrup of half a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit; drop in the pears, and, when done, put in jars. Boil syrup a little longer, and allow it to cool; then add one pint of brandy to each quart of syrup, and pour over the pears.

Bon apetit!

Thud.

Bad beginnings

I work up around 7:45 this morning to see the white cat slinking guilty off the bed. Sure enough, she had barfed on the blanket. I whisked the blanket onto the floor, rolled over, and tried to sleep for 15 more minutes while the kittens rocketed around the bedroom in pursuit of the white cat. The white cat took refuge on a high shelf, then began moving items on the shelf off the edge and onto the floor to alert me to her predicament. As she worked her way over to a glass candle holder, I got up and got her off the shelf. Confident I was ready to get up and feed them, the three felines thundered downstairs.

I showered, dressed and sat down to work at the computer. At 11:30 I remembered I'd invited someone to lunch. It was not someone I wanted to have lunch with, so the cooking (Mark Bittman's version of salad Nicoise, from How to Cook Everything) was more fun than the actual meal. After the guest left, I remembered the blanket upstairs, took that down to the laundry room, and ran a load of wash before sitting back down to work. At 3:45 I went for a walk. My neighbor Henry was out working in his yard, as usual, and I remarked on his ancient metal trash cans--they really have attained collectible status! As I got back from my walk, my husband called with his daily report and we discussed how to keep the more enterprising kitten from flying, leaping, and slithering out the door at every opportunity. Then it was back to work, which is pretty much tying up lots of odds and ends this week while my boss is on vacation.

This evening I wind up the final phase of our anti-flea campaign, spraying cat tree Number 4 (which is outdoors drying off from being carpet shampooed yesterday) with Adams Inverted Carpet Spray. I haven't found any fleas on the cats for several days, but I want to be vigilant while the weather is still good and I can take the cat trees outdoors to be sprayed.

The kittens are now taking Frontline (the genuine veterinary version), but before they were old enough for that treatment, they managed to infest the house. Fortunately, we have hardwood floors and leather furniture, so I've been able to address the flea problem by washing the cat beds every couple of days and taking each of the cat trees outdoors for washing and spraying. Adams Inverted Carpet Spray (I just love that name) is supposed to be effective for more than 200 days, so we should be safe until next spring.

Adieu, Julia

ABC News has a wonderful obituary for Julia Child.

I met her in 1980 when the Meriden Record-Journal assigned me to write about a local chef (from Wallingford, Connecticut) who'd been asked to cook lunch for Julia Child while she rehearsed for a show at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. I arrived at the theater and was given the brush-off by a snotty young theater employee who left me to cool my heels in the darkened lobby. Suddenly a door flew open and very tall woman peered into the lobby--it could only be Julia Child. I identified myself and explained I was there not to bother her but to write about the local chef. "Marvelous!" she whooped, putting her arm around me and ushering me into the theater. She had a kitchen set up on-stage, and her husband was sitting on a stool, reading the newspaper. Child hustled me backstage to a corner where the local guy and his assistant were freneticly attempting to prepare an elaborate lunch for America's most famous chef on a small table using a couple of electric frying pans.

"Oh, it's going to be wonderful," Child assured all of us. And it was.

Here's a story about all the folks visiting the Julia Child kitchen exhibit (her actual Cambridge, Mass., kitchen) at the Smithsonian to pay tribute to her.

San Jose airport, revisited

Stuck in the San Jose airport tonight and not sure when the plane, scheduled to take off 11 minutes ago, will arrive. I'm connected to the internet using the Wayport WiFi service ($6.95 a day), and wondering why airline terminals are filled with people with laptops but pretty much devoid of electrical outlets for recharging them. I remember writing about this problem 12 years ago for my Mac user group newsletter; it's appalling there's been no noticeable improvement in the interim. I suspect that people who commute more often than I do simply carry a spare battery (about $100 for most laptops) with them.

The 5 p.m. to Phoenix is now boarding (more than 2 hours late) so that doesn't bode well for our flight.

Now they moved us to another gate....

Yet more alarms at night

When I babysit, my favorite story to read to kids is James Thurber's "The Night the Bed Fell," in which the visit of hypochondriacal cousin Briggs sets off a chain reaction of nocturnal disasters in the already volatile Thurber household.

We've had a couple nights like that here this week. Monday night someone exploded fireworks on a barge anchored in Shilshole Bay a few blocks below our house, terrifying the cat who sleeps at the head of our bed so that she pounced, snarling, across my pillow on her way out of the bedroom.

Last night I was awoken by the crash of pottery down in the living room. Sheba, the deaf white cat, spends the night racing between various first floor windows, "guarding" the house from racoons, possums, and neighborhood cats. Something on the front porch scared her badly enough that she leaped onto the fireplace mantel, displacing a Mission-style yellow vase that shattered on the hearth below. I went downstairs and found Sheba, purring in terror, under the coffee table. All the racket had awoken the kittens, who sleep in the basement, and they were meowing and scratching at the door of their room. Betaille, the cat from the head of the bed (who had been hiding under the bed in case of more fireworks) came tearing down the stairs to be let out the front door. By the time I got Betaille out and Sheba comforted, and went back to bed, the fun had just started. Alaska Airlines, which has a flight path directly over our street, seemed to be staging an invasion of Sea-Tac airport. Then the seagulls started up, and the train went by, and the newspaper delivery person, who must be earning money to afford a new muffler, roared down the street thwacking newspapers onto the porches. My husband began snoring softly, with overtones that sounded like a phone ringing far, far away, though not quite far enough.

I knew better than to complain. A bleary sleeper is no match for those who are abroad in the night. In the Thurber essay "A Succession of Maids," Mrs. Thurber wakes in the wee hours to hear Gertie, the family's housekeeper, coming in from a night on the town, crashing into chairs and tables as she makes her way to her room. "What are you doing?" Mrs. Thurber shouts inanely. "Dusting," replies Gertie.

Geek lifestyle

Popular Science writer Larry Smith spent the first 10 days of 2004 using no technology less than 50 years old. Ironically, much of his article is still about chasing technology. Only instead of checking out the latest iPod, he's visiting old technology shops buying typewriters and black and white TVs. I think he missed the point that there weren't enough geeks around for there to be a geek lifestyle in 1954. Had he been a genuine 1954 geek, he'd have been putting together a ham radio operation, or building a Heathkit stereo or television.

Smith's article holds few surprises--quite the opposite of "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon," Paul Di Filippo's mind-blowing, and wildly amusing SF story about quasi-sentient 21st-century household objects that gang up on their owners. You can find this gem online (scifi.com), and in The Year's Best Science Fiction, 21st Annual Collection.

Life with kittens: Insect phase

The kittens have entered their insect phase: They have long legs, spring like spiders, and are definitely pests. This morning I opened the front door to let Sheba out and, like most adult cats, she paused on the threshold to ruminate about life. Meanwhile Kaylee, the smaller kitten, launched from the staircase, crossed the livingroom in three sproiings and flew right over Sheba out onto the porch. Kaylee was temporarily stunned when she landed, enabling me to grab her--which is why I'm writing this rather than crawling around in the neighbors' shrubbery cooing "here, kitty, kitty, kitty."

Zoe is still busy collecting and shredding credit card receipts. MBNA called this morning, trying to upgrade me to something, and asked if I was "the primary card user." Zoe trotted by with a receipt and I considered letting the sales rep talk with her.

I set up the Panic Mouse and let them play with that while I was working. But eventually Kaylee came in and got interested in the cursor on the screen. I decided to amuse her by playing a QuickTime movie, and Googled "kitten movie." To my surprise, the third result I clicked on was the kitten movie I'd made of Kaylee and Zoe, so Kaylee ended up watching her younger self rip apart our diningroom curtains and wrestle with Zoe. I grabbed the new digital video camera and quickly taped her pawing at her own screen image...yes, this is getting ridiculous.

Cats' past lives

On my bulletin board is a copy of the famous New Yorker cartoon showing a couple and their horrified guest as they come upon the family cat savagely attacking an upholstered chair. The resigned owner explains cheerfully "We believe that in a former life she was an editor."

I'm sitting here watching our kitten Zoe as she selects a credit card receipt from the bowl on my file cabinet and carries it off to the livingroom to be shredded. When she finishes with a receipt, the ink is invisible and the paper is perforated to limpness with thousands of tiny pinpoints of claw marks. Then she comes back and carefully selects another. I check the name of the store as she goes by to make sure it's nothing I need to save.

Her sister Kaylee cares nothing for finances, but appears to be planning an assault on the bookcase. Lightweight and powerful, Kaylee is able to go halfway up the flat surface of a door before losing momentum.

Hot

Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot.

The fan on my iMac was running unusually loudly this afternoon. I realized it, too, was hot. It's now 9 p.m. and 88 degrees in our livingroom, even with both the front and back doors open and a fan running. The upstairs, a converted attic, is unspeakable. The basement TV room is about 78.

Perfect weather to listen to a ballgame on the radio. The Mariners are leading Anaheim 3-2 in the 7th...

Perhaps it looked good on paper?

Everytime I battle my way into one of the ladiesrooms in the Southwest terminal of the San Jose airport, I expect to encounter a group of architecture students taking notes on the utter idiocy of the bathroom design. It must be a textbook example of how not to design a public restroom.

The doorless entrances are twisting, narrow corridors that put luggage-toting women entering the room on a collision-course with women who have washed their hands and trying to find the paper towel dispensers. The two towel dispensers are positioned at the far ends of the long counter lined with sinks. Anyone who has used one of the five sinks and needs a towel must back away from the sink, hands dripping, leave her luggage blocking access to the sink, and clamber over the luggage of every other woman at the counter before colliding with the incoming stream of travelers entering next to the towels. Dripping, leaping and exhausted, the handwashers look like Pacific salmon heading upstream.

The toilet stalls are obviously the work of the same clueless designer. They can accommodate a toilet, you, and your luggage—but whoever designed them did not take into account the fact that the user would need to open the door to get herself and her luggage in and out of the stall. (Perhaps they though she'd heave the bag over the top, or push the bag in and vault over it?) I admit that I take the risk and leave my luggage outside the stall door. My bag is large, and my reasoning is that anyone trying to make off with it would get stuck in the bottleneck at the towel dispensers long enough for me to flush, get out, and reclaim my bag.

The looks on the faces of women as they try to get into those stalls range from grim determination (frequent fliers, they've been there before) to horror and panic--that usually from women who must try to figure out how to squeeze in with both their luggage and their squirming kids.

The restroom entrances are dog-leg bends without any doors, so the exterior signage for "Men" and "Women" must be posted elsewhere (such as high above the doors). Since the restrooms for "Men" and "Women" are right next to each other, it can be tricky to differentiate between the two. At least that's my explanation for what I witnessed a few weeks ago. I was sitting in a Southwest waiting area, facing the restrooms, and noticed a male business traveler clearly looking for the facilities. In his hurry, he turned one entryway too soon. There were shrieks from a herd of female towel-seekers; he emerged red-faced and hurried down the concourse, headed in the direction of the International terminal where, one hopes, they have normal restrooms.

Music for the Mariners

I went to my annual Mariners' game last night—seats behind third base for a Red Sox game were my gift to my mother for her 86th birthday. (And, yes, seats in a decent section are worth $120 each.)

It was about as good as baseball gets. Both teams are having lousy seasons, characterized by weak hitting in the bottom of the order for both. But it was a tight game, with lots of runners on base and full counts. It went extra innings, displayed a total of 10 pitchers (!), and included stolen bases, errors, hit batters, brilliant line drives, sacrifices, bunts, home runs, and a grand slam. About all we were missing was a manager yelling at an umpire and stomping on his hat--but they probably don't do that on the West Coast.

Pitching ranged from excellent (Boston's Arroyo went 7 innings, allowed only 1 run, and got Ichiro to strike out looking in the 6th) to wild (Seattle's Villone and the Sox's Foulke, who each hit a batter). I'd never seen the Mariner's reliever Mike Myers pitch before--his pitch appears to be underhand, quite fast, and, with two out and a runner on second in the top of the 11th, saved the game by befuddling Johnny Damon into flying out.

Safeco Stadium is a great stadium, well lit without glare, outdoors yet sheltered, and very "retro" in its feel. The fans were for the most part well-behaved. Though I think it's rude to depart in the 7th inning just because your team is losing at that point. And, as it turned out, it was stupid as well.

Initially I was appalled by the snippets of loud rock and pop music (not organ versions, but the actual tracks) that blast over the loudspeaker after every play. I fantasized that if I were Paul Allen I'd pay to have an evening in which the only music would be the traditional ballpark organ (the Mariners have a good organist). But I had to admit that the DJ programming the tracks was pretty damn sharp. After a runner was caught between first and second, he (she?) played The Clash ("Should I Stay or Should I Go?"); as the coaches huddled to discuss yanking a beseiged pitched, it was the Dave Clark Five's "Do You Love Me?"

If you've lost touch with baseball, this season with the Mariners could be the time to get back in the groove. Safeco Field is probably one of the best fields in baseball (terrific food, including the suishi bar featuring the Ichiro Roll, and Hebrew National hot dogs). And, if you haven't seen the brilliant fielding and selfless batting of Ichiro Suzuki, you haven't seen baseball as an art form.

A nice place to follow the games is on the Major League Baseball section of the well-designed Sports Networks site, where you can see plenty of game info absolutely free: Previews, Matchups, Lineups, a wonderful narrative Log, a Wrap, and the Box Score.

For tickets, try the official Mariners site, which will lead you to TicketMaster, or, for good seats, go to the Mariners section of Stub Hub where you can pick up tickets that season ticket holders are selling. The closer you get to game day, the cheaper the ticket prices.

10 good things this weekend

1. Free lunch. I had lunch at a local breakfast/sandwich place, family owned. When I went to pay, the fellow at the register asked me how long I'd been a customer. "Twenty years," I said. He smiled and said "I thought so," and said that many years ago, when he'd been working on the kitchen weekends and learning the business from his uncle, he'd seen me jump up from breakfast and bus tables to help a swamped waitress. Now he owns the place--and he wouldn't let me pay for my lunch!

2. Free beret. Every summer a 60-something woman who lives a few blocks from us has a huge yard sale. It's very cool, and a little scary, because it's obvious she has a house just overflowing with items: Vases, boxes, candleholders, baskets, rugs, kitchen items, etc. The sale is on tables all over her backyard, amidst a garden with beautiful flowers, shrubs, and vines. At the back of the garden is a shabby chic garden shed with strange metal items hung all over the exterior and all sorts of treasures inside. It's clear she'll never get rid of it all, no matter how many yard sales she has. I bought a hooked rug, and then noticed a purple sequined beret. She went in the garden shed, got me a mirror, and we agreed the beret was just right. And she insisted on giving it to me! I felt like I was being officially initiated into the cult of Crazy Old Bats. It could be worse. I could become one of those uptight old gals with astroturf on the porch stair, black wrought-iron railings, plastic ducks on the lawn, and plastic pots with bright red geraniums and bright purple lobelia.

3. Kittens. The kittens, now named Zoe and Kaylee (after the characters in Firefly) are 11 weeks old. They have the sweetest dispositions, and want to curl up in your lap and get petted.

4. Salad. I bought two enormous bags of gourmet salad greens at the Cash and Carry for a party we had Thursday. Now we are living on leftover greens. They're so delicious you don't even need to put salad dressing on them--just a few drops of vinegar.

5. Quail eggs. Ken brought us a half-dozen quail eggs Thursday. I can hardly wait to make French toast.

6. Karam's garlic sauce. While planning a huge salad for a potluck this evening (those salad greens!) I remembered Karam's garlic sauce. Fortunately, the QFC still carries it. Outrageous stuff. I used it, tempered half and half with vinaigrette, as the dressing for a Greek salad.

7. The storage locker. Every time I visit our storage locker and imagine all the stuff in there (30 boxes of Stanglware, a trunk full of vintage comics, the original boxes for all our computer gear, a dozen framed paintings we don't want on our walls, and extra pieces of our vinyl flooring, marmoleum, and Corian) cluttering up the garage instead, I want to get down on my knees and bless the person who invented storage lockers.

8. My husband. Who let me weasel out of going to the potluck this evening.

9. SF collections. So I can read without getting so wrapped up in a full-length novel that I stay up until 2 a.m.

10. Sheba, our deaf white cat. She has stopped attacking the next door neighbors' cat. The means we can now let her outside without hearing the bloodcurdling screams of her victim--and the victim's owners.

Need DayDoubler for OS X

A useful Mac utility called DayDoubler was mentioned in the MailBITS section of a 1994 issue of TidBITS. Does anyone know if it's now available for Mac OS X? I didn't try it at the time, but I think I could use it now. Here's the description of the original version:

DayDoubler is a new product from Connectrix that gives you those extra hours in each day that we've been asking for. Using sophisticated time mapping and compression techniques to double the number of hours in the day, DayDoubler gives you access to 48 hours each day. With the shareware hack MaxDay, you can easily stretch your day to 60, 72, or even 96 hours! Connectrix warns that at the higher numbers DayDoubler becomes less stable and that you run the risk of a temporal crash in which everything from the beginning of time to the present would come crashing down around you, sucking you into a black hole.

Should this occur, be sure to reboot with the shift key down.

I tried contacting the fellow who reviewed the product for TidBITS, but mail to his halycon.com email address bounced.

Turquoise moth (test)

Every night there is a small bright turquoise moth in our bathroom, visiting our cat, who seems very excited to see it. I searched the internet for information on turquoise moths, but all the information was about mottled, pale turquoise moths. This one is plain, bright, turquoise--verging on a blue-green.

Any ideas?

The revolt of the machines

I'll bet there's a "law" of some sort describing the tendency of household appliances to malfunction in groups of threes. I've always referred to it as "the revolt of the machines," and it seems to happen every couple of years. It's happening right now: First it was the coffeemaker (flooding); then the toaster oven (powering on and off at will); and finally the ancient fax machine (choking when I tried to fax a multi-page fax).

It was only after replacing the fax machine and discovering the problem was not with the old machine but with my employer's fancy fax server (it was accepting the first page of our faxed expense reports, then cutting off the connection) that I came to the chilling realization: Somewhere in the house, there is a third appliance getting ready to fail.

While ironing in the laundry room tonight I heard a tell-tale screeching from the washing machine. It sounds as though a belt or some such is in dire distress. Oh no! That machine has got to hold out until the gas company runs a line to our house in the next month or so and I can get a washer/dryer set with a gas dryer.

Maybe the cheap clock radio would like to sacrifice itself?

Why Senn stinks (hint: look at her record)

Attorney General candidate Deborah Senn says all the right things about being the consumer's friend in government, but try turning down her blaring audio and taking a look at her record as state Insurance Commissioner. She managed to chase most major health insurance providers right out of the state of Washington and virtually eliminated any competition among the few surviving institutions. For consumers in many parts of the state, there isn't even a choice of healthcare insurance plans any more--it's one-size-fits-all, and the fit is tight and skimpy.

Seattle Times columnist Bruce Ramsey does a great job of analyzing Senn's modus operandi on today's editorial page. I urge you to read it if you plan to vote for an Attorney General candidate this year.

Professional Cats

Isn't it time you put your cat to work?

Hot...on the trail

My mother brought me the July 5 issue of The Nation because she thought I'd like the cover (that's an essay in itself--my mom's criteria for judging things) and I started to leaf through it. "Sex and the Stepford Wife" by Katha Pollitt is a real treat. Pollitt is up there with Calvin Trillin as one of the most stylish polemicists around, and this essay is an absolute gem. Her light touch softens you up, as she describes the shop windows in upper West Side Manhattan ("where the standard femine garb has for decades been Hot Sicilian Widow") sudden being filled with "frilly getups straight out of a Stepford shoppe."

Then Pollitt goes in for the kill. "Women have learned to describe evereything they do, no matter how apparently conformist, submissive, self-destructive or humiliating, as a personal choice that cannot be criticized because person choice is what feminism is all about. Women have become incredibly clever at explaining these choices in ways that barely mention social pressures or male desires."

While I agree with her, I also feel strongly that she's seeing things through an upper West Side, or at least an East Coast, lens. Out here in Seattle there is no Hot Sicilian Widow look on the hiking trails or at the home improvement stores—but there are plenty of women, and far more than you'd have found there 40 years ago.

BTW, have you checked out the game all the Democrats are playing? Sign up (free) to play Republican Survivor.

Getting (rid of) your goat

My friend Barclay sent me this excerpt from a recent posting on eBay:

Featured by my auction house is a ART DECO World War II STANGL Goat Ram Unicorn looking vase . THe history of this vase is that it was in my grandmother's house since the War, and my father says he always remembered seeing it around. Now this is what happened. When my father married my mother, the mother in law, Evelyn, gave the green goat to my mother, Hilda. But Hilda always hated the green goat but knew since it was her husband's mother that she was stuck with it because every time Evvie came to visit she was asking where she was placing the green goat unicorn in the house. So Hilda always had to have it displayed in some fashion around the house, and it served as like a migratory goat all over my mother's house since she could not throw it out.

So you are asking why is it on Ebay?

Well, now that Evvie is up in New Jersey, and now she is in an assisted living facility, my mother is now free and in the clear to get rid of the goat. She is cleaning out the house of all the stuff she could not stand but which she did not want to offend Evvie. WE ARE IN THE CLEAR!!! EVVIE WON'T FIND OUT!!

I think most of us have a green goat or two of our own around the place. Mine is a rooster. Specifically, a Restoration Hardware silverplated rooster cocktail shaker someone gave us as a wedding gift. A few years ago, I was rummaging around in the basement, preparing for a yard sale, and found the cocktail shaker, still in its original box. "Do we want to keep this?" I asked Brady. "What is it?" he asked. I explained, and for a moment we both tried our damndest to imagine that Bertie Wooster might come over for dinner and we'd need it to make martinis. No luck.

The silver rooster cocktail shaker was sitting happily on the table at the yard sale when my sister-in-law's car pulled up. A few moments later I noticed she had picked up the shaker and was waving it around under my husband's nose. Since there was no gin it it, and it didn't seem, from her tone, that she was planning to buy it, I figured we were about to find out where the rooster had come from.

Rats! Back it went into the house, and into our little china cabinet--where it has yet to be used for anything. Though my current plans are to migrate it gradually back down into the basement.

Waring Ice Cream Parlor instructions

Here, by popular request, are the slightly edited and abridged basic operating instructions for the circa 1972 Waring Ice Cream Parlor ice cream machine. The Mysterious Traveler urges anyone in need of the original instructions with the full set of recipes to contact Waring.

INSTRUCTIONS

What you need:

Four trays of ordinary ice cubes
One 26-oz box of ordinary table salt
Two cups of cold water
Ice cream mix of your choice

What to do:

Place the ice bucket onto the motor and base assembly and rotate the bucket until it drops down over the raised stop lugs on the base and sits firmly.

Pour ice cream mix into the cream can. For most desserts, the liquid level will be below the "fill line" stamped into the can wall. This is so the mixture will have room to expand. Some desserts, like sherbets, expand less so the liquid mix can be above the fill line when you start.

Stir mixture, then insert the dasher into the cream can so that the rounded ball end of the dasher's shaft sits in the matching indentation in the cream can.

Place the transparent plastic can lid over the top end of the dasher and snap it into place over the rim of the cream can.

Place the loaded cream can into the ice bucket, making sure that the drive socket indentation in the bottom of the can engages with the drive shaft protruding from the bottom of the ice bucket.

Sit the socket located on the underside of the support arm onto the hexagonal tip of the dasher shaft that extends up through the can lid. Grasp both ends of the support arm and rotate it until the ends drop into the cutouts in the rim of the ice bucket. Press down lightly on the ends of the support arm and rotate the support arm\ counterclockwise until it is securely locked into place.

Processing:

You are ready to fill the space between the cream can and the ice bucket with ice, salt and water, which will lower the temperature of the contents of the cream can.

Start by plugging in the Ice Cream Parlor. The cream can and cover should now rotate counterclockwise while the dasher remains stationary.

With the motor running, pour 1 cup of cold water into the ice bucket. Follow with a layer of ice cubes, one cube deep. The sprinkle 6 level tablespoons of salt evenly over the layer of ice cubes. Continue layering ice cubes and salt, layer by layer, until the ice bucket is full. Add any remaining salt, and then slowly pour the remaining cup of water evening over the top layer.

The processing time and volume of the finished product will be influenced by factors including:
1. Initial temperature of the mix being processed
2. Variations in the composition of mix ingredients
3. Amount of salt, ice and water used

Processing time will take between 20 and 50 minutes. As the mixture freezes, thickens, and expands, the motor will begin the labor and slow down. It will come to a near or complete stall and that indicates that processing is completed. The Waring Ice Cream Parlor should never be allowed to operate more than 50 minutes before unplugging.

When processing is completed, but sure to unplug the Ice Cream Parlor. Remove the ice bucket from the base assembly. Remove the support arm from the ice bucket by pushing down gently on both ends, rotating clockwise and lifting off. Wipe any ice or salt from the can lid, and lift the can out of the ice bucket with lid and dasher in place.

The processed mixture can be served immediately, or put in the freezer to harden. Use a wooden spoon or plastic or rubber spatula to remove the mixture. If you wish to harden the mixture, stir it to blend hard and soft portions. You can harden it in the cream can, or spoon it into plastic freezer containers, allowing 1/2 inch for expansion. Pack mixture down to exclude air pockets, and place waxed paper or plastic wrap over the mouth of the container before putting a lid in place.

Place covered can or containers in the freezer for 1-2 hours. It may be necessary to temporarily lower the freezer temperature to get the mixture to set firmly.

Tips:
More salt (up to a full box) = faster processing and coarser texture
Less salt (down to 1/2 box) = slower processing and finer texture

Notes:
Be sure to wash the cream can, dasher, can lid and support arm in hot soapy water before and after each use. Parts are not dishwasher safe.

Mysterious Traveler on hiatus through June 18

In memory of my dad.

Once upon a time, there were three aliens...

When I was a little girl growing up in the D.C. suburbs, my dad and his friends would sit around late at night in the summer, drinking martinis and gin and tonics, and talking about their work.

One of my dad's friends, George Hoover, was studying UFOs. He'd given my dad a copy of a report called "The Blue Book," which I found in a box of files and enjoyed reading. The Blue Book was a photocopy of a book about UFOs that had been annotated. Apparently George and other folks suspected that the annotations were written by aliens commenting on the validity of various passages in the book.

It made for fascinating reading! One evening George, who was also investigating ESP and psychic phenomena, told my dad that the next time he visited us, he was going to walk right through the wall of our new family room. "I wouldn't do that," my dad said. "That's where I put all the wiring."

My folks have moved several times since Virginia, and I suspect my mom dumped the Blue Book somewhere along the way. This page on About.com has a summary of the Blue Book project that is very much the way I remember hearing about it during the 1960s.

Which type of blogger are you?

My hat is off to kpaul at Kuro5hin who classifies the types of bloggers. Read it and blush!

Fear

Someone mentions a book you should read, and a few hours later someone else, from quite a different area of your life, recommends the same book. That happened to me last week. So I ordered the book, Gift of Fear: Survival Signs that Protect Us from Violence, from Amazon, and it arrived yesterday. I'm halfway through it, and impressed--though, like many self-help guides, it's one point followed by numerous anecdotal illustrations. The author, Gavin De Becker, has a point that's a good one (that we need to listen to our fear) and his anecdotes are full of the unexpected, such as why ignoring threats is often the best way to handle them and why it's important to disengage from a threatening situation at the first opportunity. De Becker is not a journalist, but a security specialist, so he brings actual depth to the book.

Though many of the Amazon reviewers were so wrapped up in their own political agendas they could barely spare a few words for the book itself, rest assured this is not one of those "men are evil stalkers, women are saintly victims" screeds. In fact, the best anecdote in the book was the story of how a travel agency owner (male) was approached by a prospective business partner (male) who turned out to be a pest, a stalker, and a filer of groundless lawsuits.

Why were people recommending this book to me? The first recommendation came because of my puzzlement over how to disengage from a casual friend who had tried to make me feel responsible for helping her rehabilitate her screwed-up husband; the second recommendation was from the Seattle police officer who met with our local neighborhood group and was fielding questions about how to protect young children from predators.

In the past (my undergraduate degree is in psychology) I'd read quite a bit about why some people develop into sociopaths. But since I never pursued a career in therapy, I find I'm now less interested in understanding sociopaths than I am in avoiding them. I wish I'd had the avoidance skills 30 years ago, and could have back all the time I wasted trying to deal with these creeps politely.

If you find yourself dealing with a "friend" or colleague who "feels wrong" (you feel sick when they call, you feel like your energy is sucked out of you when you talk with them, you find yourself somehow obligated to do things for them), the De Becker book is a must-read.

Peach ice cream and why I blog

As you've noticed, I'm not running a discussion forum here. (Having belonged to a BBS for many years, and lived through my share of flamethrowing, just the reading phrase "discussion forum" can evoke the gag response.)

I guess I'm in it for one-on-one exchanges, trading information and inspiration on the broadest electronic market possible, via Google. Tonight I logged into my gmail account and found just the sort of message I live for: A woman in Central Texas was writing because she wants to make ice cream with the local seasonal peaches, but can't find the instruction book for her circa 1970 Waring Ice Cream Parlor. I'd blogged about using my vintage Waring, she'd Googled and found the blog entry. I dashed downstairs to my pantry, got the booklet, and typed out the key instructions. Somewhere in Central Texas, someone will be enjoying peach ice cream! And, come to think of it, maybe I'll whip up a batch this weekend, too. The peaches they had at the Ballard Market a couple weeks ago--not freestones, but the clingy, messy kind--had spectacular flavor for desserts.

EDITOR'S NOTE: You can find the full Waring Ice Cream Parlor instructions here.

Little Stripe and Big Stripe

Meet the Stripe Sisters.

Site feed

I've added a site feed link (see list at right). Please send mail to Mysterious Traveler to let me know if you have success (or problems) using the site feed.

Pacific Northwest Blogs

I've joined a blog ring called Pacific Northwest Blogs. Wonder if there are blog rings for cat owners, gardeners, etc.?

So, what happened?

Here's the follow up to the "Breaking up" post a few folks have commented on:

As might have been anticipated (or recommended) by anyone reading the "Breaking up" post, I had a half-hour meeting with a good therapist before getting in touch with the soon-to-be-former friend. He had some good suggestions, observations and predictions. Among the predictions: That she might contact people, asking them not to tell me she'd been in touch, and give a self-serving and misleading account of our conversation.

Bingo.

The break up conversation itself was very low-key. I told her that the past year of unfolding revelations about her husband's repeated dishonesty in their marriage had made me so uncomfortable around him, and her, that I didn't want to continue the friendship. She said "fine, have a nice life," and "bye." I was greatly relieved, until a few hours later someone came to me asking if it was true that I'd broken up the friendship because her husband was having job difficulties. Of course, she'd asked the person not to say that she'd contacted them with this information.

Huh?

We discussed how to set her straight for about two minutes, and then it slowly dawned that neither of us had any obligation to get back to her about it.

It was a lovely, lovely feeling.

I've probably used up a large chunk of my allotted karma for June, but it feels like a good investment.

Breaking up

"You're going to break up with her?" my husband said in surprise.

I'm in the odd and uncomfortable position of disentangling myself from a friendship. It was probably always a friendship more enthusiastic on her side than mine, but I had a great time doing things with her. She likes museums, nice restaurants, and exploring new cities, is an energetic and resourceful traveler, and has enough money to stay at charming bed and breakfasts. Taken two or three days at a time, her tics--the little moues of displeasure if service was not sufficiently deferential, the condescending manner towards people she perceived to be of a lesser social position--were easy to overlook. She was extremely generous with gifts, but I assumed that was part of her marketing profession--the instinct to make people feel in her debt so they'd do what she wanted. It made me feel uncomfortable, but only mildly so.

So, what happened to upset this balance?

She got married to a loser. In the five years that I've known her, she'd dated a number of men, all of whom she found in some way wanting. Then, two years ago, she disappeared off the radar for a few month and reappeared, engaged to one of the biggest zeros I've ever met. Charmless, neurotic, hypochondriacal and boring (I'd once sat through at two-hour dinner with this man during which he'd never once smiled and had contributed fewer than 10 words), he nevertheless had the one characteristic missing from all her previous relationships: He worshipped her, and would do anything she wanted.

Despite her extensive efforts, their wedding was flat and charmless. Her parents and friends were clearly not impressed by him. He didn't seem to have any friends. His family seemed pleasant but oddly nervous, perhaps unable to believe that he was getting married to such an attractive woman.

I went through the wedding festivities sort of numb. Several months earlier, I'd considered telling her he didn't seem right to me, but if you tell someone that and they then go ahead and marry the person, it's rather uncomfortable.

Shortly after the wedding, she found out he'd lied to her in oh-so-many ways. Turns out he didn't have any money, any vacation property, or any retirement savings--but he did have a huge pile of debts and an abysmal credit history. He'd been employed steadily for more than a decade, so the mystery, which has never been solved, is what he spent all his earnings on.

As all this unfolded, I was the recipient of panicked phone calls, and gave her what I thought was good advice about the need to see therapists, financial planners, even private investigators. But the months have gone by, and the upshot of it is that she's decided to treat him like a helpless invalid and enlist her friends to entertain him, comfort him, help him get a new job (he hates the current one) and listen to her talk about what a sweet man he is.

Stop this train; I want to join the stampede getting off.

If this were some temporary phase--like a family illness, or a divorce--that she were going through, I like to think that I'd weather the unpleasantness and stick by her. But this is clearly a permanent way of life she has chosen. Some of her friends have already opted out, and she's becoming increasingly clingy to those of us who are left.

Of course, I've tried hinting that I'm busy with my own life, but she's not the type who takes (or even recognizes) a hint. She keeps calling on a near-daily basis and proposing get-togethers. How can I get up the courage to tell her I have no interest in helping her rehabilitate the leech she married, that he makes my skin crawl, and that she's become an incredible bore since she got into this mess? I think of all the wonderful friends I don't have time to call or get together with because I'm busy fending off her calls and worming out of her invitations, and it makes me want to scream.

Stabbed by a Label?

Some months ago, National Public Radio's Morning Edition show did a segment on the changes in clothing labels ("100% rayon--do not machine wash" etc.). A light went on for me as they described how manufacturers can, and do, save 1 or 2 cents on the manufacturing cost of each individual garment by having the sewn-in labels printed on stiff material with sharp edges instead of on soft, silky material. Listening to the show, I realized I had recently stopped ordering clothes from one of my favorite mail-order houses because I associated wearing their shirts with a literal pain in the neck. Since none of my clothes are designer garments with resale potential (!), I got out the embroidery scissors and removed the labels from t-shirts, nightgowns, blouses--anything likely to be next to my skin. New clothes get a one-month grace period (in case they might have to be returned for a manufacturing defect) and then--snip! What an improvement, plus no one is every sidling over to tuck in a label at the back of my neck.

Removing stiff tags does a lot to improve towels, too. If you think you might someday want to see the style number or color code of the towels, leave one tag attached on the bathmat or a wash cloth.

Your kitty needs his/her 15 minutes of fame

Get out the Digital Elph and start clicking so your feline can be part of the Infinite Cat Project.

"Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty..."

Too early Thursday morning

This morning I went to a 7:30 donor's breakfast for the Puget Sound Revels, held at St. Mark's Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Getting there involved a short, unpleasant look at the I-5 bridge traffic, which I ducked under via Roosevelt, reminding myself to be very, very grateful that my office is in my house.

Not being a morning person, I was pretty startled to have a chorus of folks who obviously are early risers belting out English folksongs while I nibbled on a scone. The company was good, though, and so were the bumperstickers I saw in the St. Mark's lot on my way out, including "Bush on Mars in 2004." (For more such statements, see this site.)

Such humor, from a few months back, seems so quaint. Today the upcoming election is looking less like a political contest than a grotesque encounter between a traditional politician (Kerry) and a slime-covered creature from the black lagoon. How do you even began to get a strategic grip on something as putrid as the Bush presidency? No wonder Kerry acts rather puzzled.

I confess I'm waiting for the political cartoonist (David Horsey, perhaps?) who dares portray a pileup of members of the current administration, hooded and naked, with a couple of Iraqi citizens standing grinning behind them. It would be no less revolting than hearing Rumsfeld boast to reporters about his way of dealing with the public outrage about prisoner abuse ("I've stopped reading the papers," he chortled).

New England Clam Chowder Recipe for the West Coast

Tonight's scheduled rant about people who spontaneously call me during the workday to pointlessly yak and yak and yak (forcing me to work into the evening to make up the lost work time their interruptions cost me) is postponed.

Instead, here's a great clam chowder recipe, which includes info from the The New England Clam Shack Cookbook and Mark Bittner's How to Cook Everything (both available on Amazon) as well as from the Shady Rest West kitchen.

New England Clam Chowder for the West Coast

3 cups of cooked, frozen, West Coast clams (little clams) from a good seafood shop
3 cups water
1/4 to 1/2 lb. bacon, finely diced
2 Tbs butter
3/4 cup finely chopped sweet onion
1 to 3 Tbsp. flour
2 ribs celery
2 8 oz. bottles of Snow's clam juice
4 to 6 cups of diced potatoes (thin-skinned, waxy types hold up best)
1/4 tsp. finely ground thyme
2 tsp. salt
several grinds of pepper
1 cup half and half
1 cup light cream


Thaw frozen clams by heating gently in a soup pot with three cups of water and two tsp. salt. After clams thaw, let them sit in the broth.
In a large pot, sautee the diced bacon on very low heat until the fat is golden. If the bacon is fairly lean, add up to 2 Tbsp. of butter before adding the chopped onion. Then sautee onion gently until soft.
Add the flour to the bacon and onion and mix thoroughly, quickly adding the two bottles of clam juice and bringing it all back to a simmer as the flour thickens the broth. Drain off the clam broth from the clams (it will have reduced to about 2 cups) and add that as well. After the thickness is stabilized (this is not a particularly thick chowder) add the thyme, whole celery ribs, and diced potatoes and cook on low for 15 minutes, until the potatoes are just done.
Remove the celery ribs and add the clams, half and half, and cream. Add more salt, if needed, and several grinds of pepper.

At this point, you can either cook for another five minutes and serve, or you can can cool it slowly and then refrigerate. If you refrigerate, serve in the next 48 hours, adding whole milk or more half and half if the chowder seems too thick.

You can add butter just before serving, if you like. Accompany with saltines or, if you can get them, oyster crackers.

Warning label: This recipe is not kosher, it is not vegetarian, it contains carbohydrates, and it contains saturated fat.

Tips from the World-Class Shopper

If Dallas had internet cafes, I'd have been regaling you with tales of Euless Arbor Daze, the Brave Combo 25th anniversary party at the Sons of Hermann Hall, and The Pioneer restaurant near Grand Prairie. But that was last weekend...

Today I'm shopping online, and I just wanted to remind folks that before you click "buy" on your favorite site, check one of the discount sites for a code that might get you a discount or free shipping. One way to find the discounts is to google the name of the store where you're shopping ("Eddie Bauer" "Nordstrom") and the word "discount."

Or you can search for the store on a site like Daily eDeals or ShoppersResource.com. Today, both had the code I needed for free standard shipping on my order. Worth bookmarking.

Betaille enjoys herself

Though Socks, the cat we lost last week, has been on our minds, I'm writing about Betaille. She's our 14-year-old Himalayan-Abyssinian, and one beautiful and intelligent cat. Betaille loves the outdoors, and she knows how to enjoy it. Having miraculously survived some years in a more urban neighborhood, she appreciates her "retirement" on a quiet, dead-end street in Sunset Hill, the far western end of Ballard above Shilshole marina. She heads outside at dawn. On crisp days, she installs herself on a little raised platform beneath our back stairs. Last fall I put up a large window that partially encloses her platform, sheltering her from the wind and rain but providing light and a nice view of the back garden. Now that the weather is warm, she heads immediately for her cedar park bench, where she stretches out and enjoys a view through the open gate from the backyard to the front yard and the house across the street. All day long she luxuriates there, watching the comings and goings of the neighbors (yet many of them tell me they've never seen her). By afternoon, when the sun gets hot, she enjoys the shade from the pear tree. There's a fountain on the back patio with fresh water, and when she wants food, she hops up the stairs and looks in the glass door to the kitchen until someone passes by, sees her, and feeds her. What a life!

In the evening, Betaille goes out and socializes with the other cats in the neighborhood. Her latest friend is another longhaired cat, all black, who Brady reports comes to visit her in the back yard. Cat curfew on our street is 10:30 p.m. Now that the nights are warm, Betaille hates to come in that early. She dances around at the foot of the stairs, looking back at the bushes were her friends lurk, and only repeated nagging, and a little tapping on a can of catfood, lure her into the house for the night.

The Friday Five

1. What do you do for a living?
I write about music, write marketing copy for a membership website, manage an egreetings website, plus edit and produce an online newsletter. In other words, I spend 50-plus hours a week sitting in front of a computer in my home office, plus fly down to California once a week for meetings at the company headquarters.

2. What do you like most about your job?
I discover new music, work with bright, talented, task-oriented people, and have a good deal of autonomy when it comes to structuring my work, solving problems, and making changes.

3. What do you like least about your job?
Long hours, especially evening work.

4. When you have a bad day at work it's usually because _____...
I'm called in at the last minute to help out on someone else's project.

5. What other career(s) are you interested in?
Reviewing (arts, music, books, culture, technology); feature writing. Pretty much anything that involves fulltime writing for a reputable publication or website that takes writing seriously and has professional assignment editors and copy editors.

Farewell, Socks

Socks
1993-2004

Passover

I've reached that point where I've got so many tasks overdue that even the sense of urgency goes away. So, with the emails still dinging, and a chicken roasting, I've decided to blog.

Tonight is the first night of Passover. My family didn't celebrate Passover while I was growing up, but after my parents retired to Florida and became involved with the local temple, I got to attend seders at the home of their friends Janet and Lou. Lou had grown up in Boston in a household where Yiddish was spoken (he didn't learn English until he entered school) and at a time when nearly all Jews were Orthodox Jews. Janet and Lou hosted large Passover dinners, inviting friends from all over Florida and up North. The crowd for a typical Passover meal at their place included Holocaust survivors, professional gamblers, black sheep 30-somethings still looking for a real job, and everybody's spoiled grandchildren. By the time we arrived at 6 p.m., Lou and the men would be well into the Slivovitz and Janet was racing back and forth from the kitchen to the Florida room (where tables were set end-to-end for 20 people, plus Elijah). A hired maid, a Florida local who probably never heard of Passover before, was trying to help.

The Passover ritual, carried out before the meal, can last for a couple hours. The adults review the Jews' exodus from slavery in Egypt, give thanks for the protection of G-d, and involve the children in the story using songs and games. Since all you get to eat during the ritual is a little bit of matzoh cracker with various dips, and you consume a few glasses of wine, things can get a bit exuberant by the time the (well-cooked) dinner makes it to the table.

Concerns about the done-ness of the brisket fly through the air along with thanks to G-d; it's the quintessence of Jewish community life. One of my favorite episodes at Lou and Janets involved a tiny lizard that plummeted from the chandelier and, as guests shrieked, skittered down the table through various ceremonial foods until I was able to capture it in a napkin and usher it out the sliding glass doors into the humid night.

Since my first Passover seder at Janet and Lou's some 15 or so years ago, I've been to seders for big crowds; to a feminist seder at which the one male guest was a Christian from North Carolina; and to a couple of seders with just the two of us. Tonight it was just us and my mom. After experiencing Passover with Lou and Janet, it would be unthinkable for me to fail to celebrate Passover. And, in essence, that means that their seders accomplished their purpose--ensuring that the tradition would continue to be passed along.

Garden tips

Just got back from the monthly meeting of the Sunset Hill Community Association. The SHCA is possibly Seattle's oldest continuously active neighborhood group. It was founded in 1922 by 10 residents organizing around the installation of a waterline in the area. ("Sunset Hill" is bounded by 24th Ave. NW on the east, Shilshole Bay on the west, the Ballard Locks on the south, and NW 85th St. on the North.)

Founded to urbanize the area (and quite successful at it), the association is now headed in the other direction, attempting to hold off the inexorable onslaught of wall-to-wall condominiums headed our way from downtown Ballard.

We met tonight in the original clubhouse at 30th NW and NW 66th, built in 1927 and currently undergoing interior renovation. After endorsing a slate for next year's officers and trustees (one of whom turns out to be a neighbor from our old place in Wallingford, who also moved west), we heard a panel of master gardeners.

Here are a couple of hot gardening tips from them, plus a tip from me:
1. Kelp
Use kelp, available in mixable powder or pre-mixed liquid form, on plants before or after planting. You can't use too much kelp!
2. Corn Gluten
Prevent weed seeds from sprouting by sprinkling corn gluten on gravel paths and lawns walkways every six weeks. (Don't sprinkle it where you want plant or grass seeds to sprout, but it's OK to sprinkle on plants and lawns that are already past the seed stage to prevent weeds.)
3. Chicken Grit
My tip: To improve garden drainage and prevent water from pooling on top of new compost, apply plenty of chicken grit along with your compost or potting soil when planting. (Chicken grit is sharp shale, and will make soil nice and loose. Avoid using fine-grain sand, which is round, rather than sharp, and can turn your soil into a form of concrete.)

One master garden had a tip for sprouting sweet peas, which I'm not going to include because sweet peas are mildly poisonous for cats and I don't want to encourage people to plant them. You can find numorous sites on the web with lengthy and hair-raising lists of plants "poisonous" to cats. I believe it was Cat Watch, Cornell Veterinary college's feline health newsletter (subscription only, contents not available online), that had an article a while back on the issue and pointed out that only a few plants are actually deadly. (Leading the deadly list are the Easter lily, Tiger lily, and Asiatic lily, and the very common day lily. Apparently just getting pollen from these plants on the nose is enough to kill a small kitten, and many kittens die from kidney damage within a couple days of contact with Easter bouquets.) Other plants, like the potato, are merely irritating. Sheba, our deaf white cat, is a "chewer," and she went around drooling for a couple days after nibbling on a potato leaf in our neighbor's garden—more annoying for us than for her, apparently.

test test test

Images?






It appears I've figured out how to place graphics into my blogspot posts! Watch for more interesting images in coming days...

Friday Five, again

From the Friday Five (see link at right) again...

If you...

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
Farinata

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
Used mysteries

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Mystery

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?
Writing

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Traditional (bluegrass, Appalachian)

The smell of socks in the morning

The latest issue of the excellent Netsurfer Digest points out the sure-to-be-controversial site Pick Up Your Own Damn Socks. [This site is now defunct--MT] Likely to be more popular with those who pick up socks--their own and those of others--than with those who are scratching their heads over why anyone would bother either to pick up socks or to write about it.

The East Side Camellia Mystery

Twenty years ago, when I had just moved to Seattle and was temping as a secretary at Metro, I spotted an ad in The Weekly for editors and writers for a new magazine. Desperate for a writing gig, I answered it. An aspiring publisher had a concept for a national magazine, similar to Psychology Today but focused on law and true crime. The job market must have been truly grim in those days because he was able to pull together a strong group of professionals for the first, and only, issue. It included an experienced graphic designer, a veteran copy editor recently laid off from the Tacoma daily, a professional photographer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-reporter from the Seattle Times, now working as a private investigator. The magazine never got past the first issue, but that issue had a big impact on my career, enabling me to get a job in communications and re-start my professional life.

What does this have to do with camellias? One of the features for the magazine was a whimsical back-of-the-book column. For the demo issue, it was written by the reporter/private eye, and it was about a case he'd undertaken. It took place in early spring, camellia season. An East Side psychiatrist was finding camellia blossoms arranged on his front lawn in the middle of the night--but only when he returned from an out-of-town trip. Suspecting this might be the work of an obsessed ex-patient, and failing in his own attempts to catch the prankster in the act, he called in the professionals. When he next left town, they set up a stakeout from the upstairs of an empty house across the street. After a couple of nights of watching his house, the investigators were ready to give up. Over coffee at a nearby Denny's one of them remarked that she'd sat there all night, and all she'd seen was the shrink's cat, going back and forth, and back and forth. The light went on! Returning to the client's house, they found a tell-tale grouping of camellia blossoms in the front yard, carefully assembled by the feline. To make matters even more amusing, the client initially refused to accept their explanation. Eventually he had to agree. It seemed that he had rescued the cat, it was tremendously attached to him, and, for whatever reason, dealt with his absences by creating floral arrangements.

Our enormous pink camellia bush is in bloom. Today I came across one of our cats, batting tentatively at a fallen blossom, and that story came back to me. I can't remember the name of the writer, or the name of the magazine. But I'll never forget the East Side camellia mystery.

Go ahead, ask me

It's been a frustrating, relentless work week. Nothing bad has happened, per se, but the succession of long, pressure-filled days has been like a steady buzz of static eroding my patience and interfering with my perception of whatever pleasantness may be going on around me.

A few of the people I usually try to avoid have called this week, as well as a few I now plan to avoid in the future. While talking with them, I usually retreat into a cringing vagueness because I dread questions like:

"You're going to New York on the 23rd? Oh, why don't you reschedule for May so I can go along?"

(Because if I'd wanted to go to New York with you, I'd have asked you in the first place.)

"I've taken down some enormous paintings that seemed a bit outdated. It occured to me that if you painted your livingroom orange and got rid of some of your furniture, they'd look great at your place. I'm too busy to move them, so when can you come pick them up?"

(Right about the time hell freezes over and you get frostbite.)

"I know you use a Mac, but my PC has crashed and I can't seem to reload Windows. Do you know anybody who knows a lot about PCs who could fix it for me right away?"

(Yes. And they are listed in the phone book under "Computer Repair.")

OK, rant mode off. I am still awash in waves of incredulity about these bozos.

Eight years ago I herniated a disc and one of the therapies the neurologists tried was a seven-day course of anti-inflammatory steriods. It didn't help my back at all, but it was fantastic for my mental health! While taking the steriods, I actually said all the things I now only imagine saying to people. Things like:

"What's your point?"
"You're hallucinating."
"Why would I want to do that?"
"Beats me. It's your problem."
"Not interested."
"Paint your own livingroom orange."

After a few days, my husband (who'd been the surprised and amused recipient of a few of these highly uncharacteristic drug-induced responses) remarked "Well, now you know how I handle pushy people."

I suppose if I'd stayed on the steroids my responses would eventually have been accompanied by bursts of fire from an attack weapon. In hopes of maintaining my new-found talents, I went to a therapist. She played the jerk and I used my "buzz off" lines to diffuse her, but, as the drugs wore off, the delightfully icy calm I'd experienced gave way to my usual fantasies of flight.

I think I'm ready for more steriods.

Coming attractions

March 27 - Four years at my current (rather wonderful) job
April 7-13 - Passover
April 23-25 - Arbor Daze Festival, Euless Texas (performers include Alex Chilton and The Boxtops)
May 28-31 - Northwest Folklife Festival
June 25 - 9th wedding anniversary (with the right husband)
July 25 - Mom's 85th
July 16 - Brady's 50th!
July 31 - Nina and Mike's wedding (Brady officiates, I get to be one of the huppa holders)
August 14 - Nephew Luke's bar mitzvah

Friday Five, Sunday night

From Friday Five

1. What was the last song you heard?
"When You're Good to Mama" from Chicago (on my iPod)

2. What were the last two movies you saw?
The Big Lebowski (DVD) and The Return of the King

3. What were the last three things you purchased?
Groceries, books, and breakfast.

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
Write a book review that's late, clean ancient items out of the refrigerator, remove the mulch from the garden beds, and have dinner with my mother.

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?
A clerk at the Ballard Market; my mother; my father; various staff at the nursing home where my dad is.

The Kissing Hand

My friend Nina was in town this weekend and after breakfast this morning we went to the Portlock store near the Locks in Ballard to buy salmon. The shop wasn't open yet, so we wandered over to Epilogue, the used bookstore just down the street.

Nina, who teaches elementary school, headed for the children's books section, where a book cover immediately caught my eye. The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn shows a mother and baby raccoon in the dark, silhouetted against a full moon. I picked it up and started reading about a young raccoon who is anxious about his first "night" at school. His resourceful mother comes up with a solution that allows him to bring the comfort of home and family along with him. The book, which Publisher's Weekly described--inaccurately, in my opinion--as "sugary," poses a problem, reveals a solution, and ends with a nice twist. The sophisticated illustrations of the raccoons' nocturnal environment, by Ruth Harper and Nancy Leak, hint that there is more to this than just a fuzzy raccoon tale.

The Kissing Hand has a 5-star Amazon rating, and the Amazon reader reviews are worth a book themselves. One mother wrote of using it after 9/11 to calm her child, who had become upset whenever the father (a police officer) went off to work. College students reported receiving it from their parents, and liking it. Another reader had given it to an 80-year-old aunt. Apparently this is a book for all ages.

Something fishy

I walked out onto our front porch at 11 p.m. to collect all the cats for the night and was reminded that we live just three blocks uphill from a huge body of salt water: Low tide.

According to the local tide charts it is indeed a relatively low tide (two feet), though not as low as the tides the past few nights. Looking through the charts (graphic versions) I see patterns I'd had no idea existed (other than the pattern of two low tides per day that I'd grown up knowing about at Cape Cod).

The strong smell apparently is a result of the combination of a low tide with onshore winds--or lack of the usual offshore wind. Now I'll have to go look for wind charts...

44 questions

Something fun from Mystical Forest:

1. WHAT COLOR ARE YOUR KITCHEN PLATES? Blue
2. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW? Pale Gray for Guilt by John D. MacDonald
3. WHAT'S ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? No idea. I use an optical mouse.
4. WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE BOARD GAME? Scrabble
5. FAVORITE MAGAZINE? The New Yorker
6. FAVORITE SMELL? Tea; also like the smell on the fur of a cat that just came in from the snow.
7. LEAST FAVORITE SMELL? Gardenias
8. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING? My feet are cold.
9. FAVORITE COLOR? Black
10. LEAST FAVORITE COLOR? Tangerine
11. HOW MANY RINGS BEFORE YOU ANSWER THE PHONE? Varies
12. FUTURE CHILD'S NAME: n/a
13. WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT IN LIFE? Happiness
14. FAVORITE SOUND? Waves on the shore
15. CHOCOLATE OR VANILLA? Chocolate
16. DO YOU LIKE TO DRIVE FAST? No
17. DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? No
18. STORMS: COOL OR SCARY? Cool
19. WHAT TYPE WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? I plead the fifth. Too embarrassing.
20. IF YOU COULD MEET ONE PERSON DEAD OR ALIVE WHO WOULD IT BE? Mark Morris
21. FAVORITE ALCOHOLIC DRINK? Kir with syrup by Hediard
22. WHAT IS YOUR SIGN? YOUR BIRTHDAY? Sagitarius
23. DO YOU EAT THE STEMS OF BROCCOLI? Yes. Peeled and steamed
24. IF YOU COULD HAVE ANY JOB WHAT WOULD IT BE? Mystery writer
25. YOU COULD HAVE ANY HAIR COLOR WHAT WOULD IT BE? The color I have, plus dramatic silver streaks.
26. YOU EVER BEEN IN LOVE? Yes
27. IS THE GLASS HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY? Half full
28. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE? I Vitelloni (Fellini)
29. DO YOU TYPE WITH YOUR FINGERS ON THE RIGHT KEYS? Yes
30. WHAT'S UNDER YOUR BED? Two plush cat beds
31. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE NUMBER? 8
32. FAVORITE SPORT TO WATCH? Baseball
33. BIGGEST FEAR? Suffocating
34. THERE IS NO QUESTION 34 - PLEASE PROVIDE A RANDOM ANSWER Fried clams and a chocolate frappe
35. PERSON YOU SENT THIS TO WHO IS MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? My husband
36. PERSON YOU SENT THIS TO WHO IS LEAST LIKELY TO ? n/a
37. FAVORITE CD? Blue by Joni Mitchell
38. FAVORITE TV SHOWS: Hmmmmm. Futurama and Firefly
39. KETCHUP OR MUSTARD? Mustard
40. BURGERS OR HOT DOGS? Burgers
41. FAVORITE SOFT DRINK? RC
42. THE BEST PLACE YOU HAVE EVER BEEN? Sidmouth International Folk Festival
43. SCREENSAVER IS ON YOUR COMPUTER RIGHT NOW? My own .Mac screensaver
44. BURGER KING OR McDONALDS? Burger King

Seen on the road

Bumper sticker spotted on an older truck in Ballard last night:

"Saddam--Weapon of Mass Distraction"

Googling reveals the history of this quote. See The Word Spy site.

Best of Breed: CatMan cat trees

Editor's Note, Jan. 29, 2005: They're back!

The new owner of Catman writes

As the new owner of Catman Furniture (as of November 2003), I'd like to assure you that all Catman products are still available at many locations in and around Seattle, including Railey's, Bark (Ballard), Bridges Pets (Lake Stevens), Cats Exclusive Vet. Center (Shoreline), Eastside Dog (Redmond), Chirp & Co. (Tacoma), and Green Cottage (Fircrest and Gig Harbor). I can also be contacted directly through my
website, www.catmanfurniture.com, for retail orders and custom designs. All Catman products are made to the same exacting quality standards as they ever were, and highly in demand because of this. I hope that when you do need to replace your cat trees, you will contact me.

More bad news. Not only has Innotek discontinued the Puppy Trainer (previously known as the Cat Locator), but CatMan Cat Trees are being discontinued.

Editor's Note, Jan. 29, 2005: They're back!

The new owner of Catman writes

As the new owner of Catman Furniture (as of November 2003), I'd like to assure you that all Catman products are still available at many locations in and around Seattle, including Railey's, Bark (Ballard), Bridges Pets (Lake Stevens), Cats Exclusive Vet. Center (Shoreline), Eastside Dog (Redmond), Chirp & Co. (Tacoma), and Green Cottage (Fircrest and Gig Harbor). I can also be contacted directly through my
website, www.catmanfurniture.com, for retail orders and custom designs. All Catman products are made to the same exacting quality standards as they ever were, and highly in demand because of this. I hope that when you do need to replace your cat trees, you will contact me.

The original CatMan is a character from a small town near Tacoma, Washington, who made the toughest cat trees known to beast. A 10-year-old CatMan tree used by four aggressive felines looks better than most pet store cat trees after six months of use by one kitty.

The CatMan secret? Tough-as-nails sisal fabric wrapped around the posts (no wound rope, thank you), top-quality carpet in neutral colors, and superb workmanship. You got the impression that his product testing was conducted by a mountain lion. Expect to pay $150 for a waist-high CatMan cat tree and $250 for one of the six-foot deluxe models with multiple platforms. The CatMan wholesale catalog must have had 30 or more models, all of them obviously designed with cats, rather than people, in mind.

We have four CatMan cat trees in our house and they look great, even in a fancy livingroom or diningroom. The highlight of my CatMan experience was the custom cat tree he made for me some 10 years ago that has a plain wood, rather than carpeted, base. I needed it to outwit a cat, now deceased, that had been trained by a previous owner to use carpet scraps as litter boxes.

There are still some original CatMan cat trees for sale at the better pet supply stores in the Puget Sound area. Crown Hill Pet Supply on Holman Road in North Seattle has a few of the smaller slanted scratching posts and the waist-high cat trees (ask them to show you what's in their storage area, too). I plan to go out this weekend looking for one of the really huge cat trees, since these are apparently the last of this extraordinary line.

Thanks, ÇatMan, and enjoy your well-earned retirement.

The Valentine's Day Test

When it comes to Valentine's Day, there is no way a man, or a woman, can succeed in meeting any of the bizarre expectations--of romance, or of sex--set by Western culture. So the day boils down to a test of how well, how graciously and how creatively we handle failure.

My husband's approach is proactive: He sends an expensive, traditional dozen roses from an old-fashioned florist in his old neighborhood. The creative part is that he beats the crowd and sends them the day before, thereby giving me an extra day to be appreciative and sparing him a humiliating last-minute day-of dash to the supermarket for a bouquet of anything. I take the humorous approach, giving him what I hope is an amusing card and a fancy red tin filled not with chocolates but with his favorite low-cal bubblegum.

My friend Chris, recently separated from a longtime girlfriend, is dating a woman who has really put her stake in the ground about Valentine's Day. She won't have any of it. They went out the night before, and she refused to see him until 12:01 a.m. the day following. This works when you're dating, but as a longterm strategy?

As a source of stress for the single (the married get their stress from wedding anniversaries) Valentine's Day provides some of my favorite stories. I particularly liked one from an adventurous, recently divorced friend who picked up a package of lacy stockings at Nordstrom as part of her plan to entertain a new boyfriend on Valentine's Day. He was indeed entertained, but apparently more so than my friend. She went into shock a week later when she got her Nordies bill and realized that the stockings--now hors de combat--had cost her a cool $48.

Cat humor

People often send me links to humorous film clips about cats; most are forgettable, but here's a clip, by animator Jim McNeill, that really resonates.

It was a dark and stormy night. A cat meowed...

...and meowed, and meowed.

We are having problems with Socks, our 11-year-old longhaired tabby. Around 3 a.m. every night, he starts meowing. Little triplets of meows.

Socks has been meowing in the middle of the night for years, but usually there is only one episode, and it ends after you call out his name a few times.

Now, he has meowing fits about once an hour, and gallumphs madly around the upstairs (where we sleep). The other night I looked down the hall and saw him fly by a couple feet off the ground.

Socks, who was born in the woods to a feral mother and rescued by a rather clueless family, has always been a timid, nervous cat. He's not bright, but he has the "flight" response down to a "t." He fled the family (our neighbors) and after a few months of scrounging around moved in with us when he was about six months old. I couldn't touch him by daylight, but at night he'd creep up to the head of the bed and let me pet him.

Now he's quite a cuddler, and spends most of the afternoons sleeping on my desk or in my lap (he's part Ragdoll). But let there be the slightest noise, and he's off, with a horrible clatter of claws on the hardwood floor. You can't catch him, you can't pill him--you can't even find him. He is like a SF creature, able to flatten himself to a micron to get under sofas. Hours later, sure the UPS guy must be gone from the porch, he drags himself out from under a slipcover.

At our old place, Socks had been a real outdoors animal, living in the overgrown field beside our house. After we moved here, he got into the habit of going out only at night (with Betaille) or during the day when I was in the yard. Suddenly, about a month ago, he refused to go out at all. And the nocturnal meowing started.

My current plan is to grab him after he wakes us up, lug him down to the garage, and lock him in there for the night (where we can't hear him). The problem is, you can grab Socks only once, and I don't fancy nightly races around the house. Perhaps the solution is earplugs.

And what's under your desk?

My inkjet printer sits on a shelf under my desk. It ran out of paper this morning, and I reached down to get more paper from the package I keep right next to it. And grabbed something warm and furry, that seemed to slither around my wrist. Tarantula?

For whatever reason, our big black cat, Smokey, had decided to stand on the shelf amidst all the printer cables, and just happened to be down there as I went for the paper. He was nearly invisible in the darkness under the desk. Shudder.

Meet the Deaniacs

It's the name they've given themselves. The Deaniacs. They were there in force at our neighborhood caucus, marching up to any poor soul lacking a Dean button and, without even introducing themselves, putting their intense little faces up to ours and telling us how pathetic our candidates are and how anyone failing to support their candidate is ignorant, selfish, pitiable, and might as well be a Republican.

The best offense, in their downloaded-from-the-web playbook, is a good offense--and boy, were they offensive.

There are plenty of good reasons to support Dean, but I can now say from firsthand experience that the company sure isn't one of them. (Of course, not all of the Dean supporters were carrying on like Deaniacs. Some of them, in fact, looked mildly embarrassed by their bedfellows' tactics, and when the appropriate time came to speak out in the princinct caucus meetings, were quite eloquent and convincing.)

I caught a few minutes of Ariana Huffington's comments on today's "Left, Right, and Center" radio program and she described Iowa Democrats as horrified by the brusque, arrogant behavior of the Deaniacs. She then goes on to attribute Dean's poor showing there to the Deaniacs treatment of the natives, though I suspect that's an oversimplification.

Our precinct awarded two delegates to Dean, one to Kerry, and one to Kucinich. I'm the Kerry delegate to the May 1 caucus (the next level up in the Washington Democrats' system).

Three signs of Spring

Went out to get the mail this afternoon and there were three minature irises in bloom beside the mailbox. Later, when I let Smokey the cat out the back door, he jumped up on the narrow deck that runs along the back fence, went to his traditional summer spot beside the statue of the Hindu deity, and curled up in the sun for a nap. Finally, I looked out the window of my office and there in the neighbors' apple tree, instead of the usual crows, was a robin.

A couple hours later it was gray and rainy again, but now there's no turning back.

The campaign trail runs through Seattle

The Kerry campaign celebrated a five-state primary victory in Seattle tonight, and I was there at the downtown Sheraton with my mom and several hundred others ranging from the wildly pro-Kerry to the definitely-leaning-in-that-direction.

Kerry's campaign had manned the phones Monday night to invite folks to Tuesday's rally at the Sheraton, something they probably regretted 24 hours later as the event overflowed from the grand ballroom into two other event rooms and hordes clogged the vast hotel lobby.

It was a nice opportunity to get a look at the crowd, a mix of mellowed-out old radicals, prosperous-looking yuppies, well-heeled gen-X-ers, and folks from various unions. It was not nearly as ethnically diverse as I'm used to seeing in Seattle, which led me to suspect that Dean is likely attracting the more artsy, diverse and hip contingent.

Prominent Democrats in Washington state have flocked to support Kerry in recent days. (Everyone loves a winner.) The festivities opened with an introduction by Governor Gary Locke, who, bless his soul, gave us a economic analysis of Bush's malfeasance before bringing on the candidate to the beat of Hendrix's "Fire." (I'm wondering, is this the campaign theme or a nod to Seattle's musical heritage?)

Kerry came across calm, upbeat, and intelligent, making a speech that ran down a list of campaign themes. Support for veterans and unions got a lukewarm response; education, jobs, and healthcare a more enthusiastic reception; and the crowd went just wild for environmental protection, the restoration of first amendment rights, tax reform, and crackdowns on corporate greed. Yup, this was Seattle, not Spokane.

Kerry invited us on a journey to rediscover America, and most in the pragmatic audience looked like they were packed and ready to go. I may be better aligned with Dean on the issues, but I'll be at my neighborhood caucus Saturday at 10, casting my vote for John Kerry. The man's a winner, and that's just what we'll need in November.