Consider this post my attempt to park the bike and watch the water.
I am nearly two thirds through NaNo month, and I have logged 100k words on the site. This was my 7th NaNo reaching fifty thousand words. I have written entire novels of 75k during NaNo in past years, usually beginning with a short story and then forging on.
The day before yesterday, I attended Portland Book Festival 2023. I heard two discussions, toured both floors of booths, talked to a couple of editors, met an interesting woman, and didn’t get very wet in the rain.
1:50am. The power blinked off and back on a few minutes ago. We were already awakened by the gale blowing harsh music through the eaves. It must be November.
We’re wondering about the pelicans. There are a dozen fishing just offshore. In the past twenty years, we’ve often had pelicans around for months. The confusing bit is that it’s November. Pelicans should be long gone by now. There’s something else too.
At this point, what I did: I learned how to do things. I had experiences. Some sad. Some pure glory.
…and future plans.
My husband and I both grew up with Velveeta, which is not really cheese at all. I remember my father loving blues and sharp cheddars, but my brother and I were fed toasted cheese sandwiches made with horrible pre-sliced white bread, Velveeta, and margarine. That “cheese product” melts like glue. I am embarrassed to admit how much we each loved these sandwiches when we were little.
We grew out of that. Our sons, as far as we know, never tasted Velveeta.
Tillamook cheese was a major step up in adulthood, and we bought the large five-pound blocks of Tillamook cheese, usually “medium” sharp. The special black wax white cheddar is not too bad. But no, we do not buy Tillamook cheese anymore. We use Dubliner as our basic cheese, but there are three or four others in my cheese drawer at the moment.
Last year we considered ordering an entire wheel of Stilton or even of organic Rogue River Blue as a gift to ourselves, but backed off at the last moment. The cost is equivalent to a large grocery cart from Whole Foods.
This morning I have been reading recipes for koiugn amann pastries and tortelli [darn that auto-correct fixing what ain’t broke] with a sweet/salty filling and soups with lentils and sweet potatoes and caramelized onions. One of the recipes called for an Italian hard cheese I had never heard of, Grana Padano, and that is how I found myself looking at wheels of blue cheese.
Do we want to spend over a hundred dollars for five pounds of cheese?
We might.
There are worse things than buying expensive foods. What passes for a “good meal out” often disappoints. There are plenty of foods from our childhood we hope never to taste again: Hi-C, KoolAide, French’s mustard, Wonderbread, Hostess “bi-products” (Gary’s name for Twinkies and the rest of the line), canned (dyed black) olives, canned stew, canned chili, canned baked beans (all the canned main dishes that saved time), sweet salad dressing (yes, Catalina dressing, I am talking about you), tinned ground pepper, fake maple syrup and fake vanilla (yes, the flavors are different, Mom), instant potatoes, and Jello.
My grandmother baked everything from scratch. My own mother learned to bake her weekly four loaves and everything else, but was eager to adopt all the modern conveniences in the 50s and 60s. I am a throwback. Real olives and real vanilla and real maple syrup were revelatory. While I was still eating meat I learned to roast a beautiful chicken stuffed with sliced lemon and onion, beef bourguignon with red wine, chili verde with pork shoulder.
I like playing with flavors and I love to both bake and cook. A friend sat at our table and asked me with suspicion what was in the dish I set before him. I told him and he was a bit put off, but then he asked for seconds so I guess the combination was not a failure, though I can’t recall now what I put on his plate.
My combinations are not always successful, but experimentation is how I found mango slices on spinach and cheese tortellini and grated parmesan over the top, cumin in most soups, and good french tarragon-dijon mustard on toasted cheese sandwiches made with two kinds of cheese.
Food is good.
Though I wrote this blog post instead of focusing on the novel, I have over 23,000 words this morning.
Three layers of vanilla sponge with strawberry jam and a lot of strawberry buttercream flavored with jam and powdered organic freeze-dried strawberries!
She liked the cake, though she was not expecting pink frosting—and to think how hard I worked to make it both pink and tasting of strawberries! (I cropped her from the photo to preserve her privacy, but my granddaughters, both of them as well as my grandson, are delightful!) She likes the white chocolate 8s best, I think. It was a flying visit, and we were pleased to see family.
This morning I have 17k words for NaNo, though I wrote barely 200 words on the birthday.
My husband is one of those older men who have routines. One of Gary’s involves our walks on the beach, another is burning debris. He generally goes out very early in the morning to burn junk mail, rose clippings, and other papers and wood trash he can’t recycle—going to recycling is another of his routines. If the wind is blowing onshore, he can’t burn, but during an offshore breeze, he will dash out to get his job done.
The other day, a member of the crew putting a new roof on the house next door ran up to him and began yelling. “You should be composting—global warming—CO2!” Gary thought he was kidding at first, and then realized that he was being confronted by an angry young man waving a shovel. Gary listened and then walked away when he was through.
If you know Gary, you probably know he is a pretty even-tempered and completely non-confrontational man. He did tell another young man who was harassing me on the beach to “back off” last summer. He was determined and calm and the guy did back off, but generally Gary avoids trouble on principle. This incident troubled him more the more he thought about it.
He has been uneasy for two days since. He didn’t want to walk by the house after eight the next morning. And then . . .
And then this morning he found out who it was that had yelled at him. A former student of mine. I wrote that boy a letter of recommendation that helped him get in to Reed. Since then his mother blocked me on Facebook. I had written a post on my old blog that addressed the cost (actual dollars) for women trying to maintain the beauty expected of them. Cosmetics and hair care do not come cheap. She accused me of “hatin on folks.” (Yes, she spelled it that way.) It was one of those bizarre exchanges that has made me grateful I left that platform.
My computer won’t open that young man’s recommendation. It’s just as well. I recall him as a very intelligent student, creative but entitled. Anyway, apparently he graduated from Reed in order to invest energy in harassing 70-year-old men, and now Gary is chuckling about this and I am allowed to tell the tale. There is a great deal more, of course, which comes from living in a small community for 40 years and teaching entire generations of teenagers.
Had he come over and simply talked to Gary, my husband would have apologized and explained that we do have a compost heap, that we have been largely vegetarian for decades (wild seafood a few times each month) and that we absolutely support Greta and efforts to curb greenhouse gasses. The only packed foods I buy are small jars of avocado oil mayonnaise and the occasional bag of honey-dijon chips. We do drink bottled water when we can find it in glass, but that would not have mattered, I guess. We wrestle with long-cherished desires to visit sites in Europe, but flying . . . Barcelona and Crete have been on my wishlist since I was ten or eleven. But we respect that flying has a terrible impact on the environment. Gary points out that the young man wouldn’t have cared since “it was never about me [Gary], it was always about him.”
The sky is blue and I have a sinus infection so we missed our walk this morning. Yesterday, I made stock from vegetable trimmings (a weekly routine of mine) and I mean to make soup later this afternoon (another routine). I have completed 5644 words since yesterday morning for my NaNo challenge. If my head didn’t hurt, I’d be feeling pretty great about now. In fact I do.
We went away for the weekend.
Such a simple thing to do though rare for us because for all of our marriage until recently, we had the animals to consider. There were dogs, usually five or six of them. There were the cats, only one at a time. Zora bit. Leakey pined. This recent trip was easy too because the friends we stayed with took us to an island without internet, a quiet place. And they spoiled us completely. Fed us and entertained us and managed our travel. The silence was dream-like and I dreamt so clearly and with such authenticity that that I was certain it was real.
Perhaps that was because the silence and beauty overwhelmed imagination.
Backing up, late afternoon on Thursday my new computer arrived. I can never get Apple to accept a password or change it or manage it at all, but my Time Machine transferred all data. The next challenge was passwords because my old computer knew them all and this new one does not, but must be taught. [Eventually Apple allowed me to change my password, after at least nine years of receiving the message “This action cannot be completed at this time”, but then I had to reteach the new computer website passwords again.] I opened the newer version of Pages and searched for features hidden in different places. But already this new Pages is old, and I have been prompted to download the newest version, free, but another adjustment.
I was perfectly content with how things worked with my old version. On the plus side, this new laptop weighs two and a half pounds less that my last. The trade-off is that it is smaller and no quicker, but the battery is spry. As I type this, I have been on the internet, Pages, and email for over two hours and used 13% of the battery. I did not even remember to turn down the backlighting of keys.
In any event, I left my new laptop at home and we have only a flip-phone, nothing smart at all, so for three days we avoided news and I was spared word-processing. I walked beaches with such a foreign assortment of pebbles and gravel and stones that I hardly knew what to look for. On our beach, the rocks lining the beach are basalt with occasional sandstone or agates, shells, feathers, and trash. We gather trash. I confess I gathered trash on the beaches in the San Juans too. Impossible to ignore the habit. Plastic and styrofoam, but no beach toys.
I am overwhelmed by the hospitality we received over the weekend.
I brought back a fistful of what I term “pinkies”—tiny pinkish pebbles. I found as many as I already had found, though what I already had was collected over months and years in a narrow stretch of beach. On the island, I found agates the size of a five-year-old’s fist and one in the shape of a heart. I found a beautiful granite egg.
Monday morning I completed my NaNo officially, but I was not done at 52k words. I wanted at least 8k more, preferably 70k, which has been my minimal goal with novels in the past two years.
Today and for the foreseeable future I will be struggling with Apple. Everything was fine on this new laptop, at first. There were the normal struggles to locate information and actions that I was used to finding in another place, but I could access my files, the internet, and email. Now I cannot access my email—the old messages show, but I cannot send or receive new messages. This has something to do with the iCloud and two-part authentication, a level of security I do not even want.
I am near throwing this little laptop through a window. Of course we have double panes . . .
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 