Monthly Archives: October 2004

I never liked the Charlie Brown special about The Great Pumpkin. In fact, I’m not sure I ever really liked any of the Charlie Brown specials. I watched them. There was an endless futility to that world: the humiliation of the ugly Christmas tree, Charlie Brown falling on his ass every time because Lucy snatched the football back, the Great Pumpkin that never showed up. I’m sure that’s not what I was supposed to get out of it, but that’s the taste that remains all these 100 years later.

Meanwhile, the weather is fantastic here. We’ve had crap weather on Halloween every year since I’ve been here. Bob and I only bought a few bags of candy (only our favorites). I think we need to get more stuff.

This started out as a story about how a recipe I used didn’t work. The Oregonian ran a recipe for “Perfect Apple Pie” which I had to try. I’d give you a link but I don’t see it on the archive. You can check here if you want to look yourself.

The recipe calls for 9 cups of apples (about 9 apples) to be sliced and mixed with the sugar and spices up to 12 hours in advance so that they soften and relax and you cram more apple into the pie. The crust part is a vinegar crust that says it makes 3 crusts and you can freeze the rest.

I did the apple part yesterday morning and I didn’t measure the apples, I sliced 9 apples, stirred them up and put them aside. Last night I made the crust and first I didn’t have enough shortening so I made up the rest with butter. I guess given the measurements I should have figured out that 1 crust equals one top or one bottom but not both a top and a bottom. But it didn’t seem logical to me to give a crust recipe for a two crust pie that made three crusts. The problem was apparent when I rolled out a fraction of my dough and had to work it into a paper thin sheet to make it fit in the pie pan.

I learned long ago not to let pie making frighten me so I made it work and then started to pile my vat of sliced apples into the pan. I guess I was supposed to use 9 Hobbit apples. My pie was loaded and I still had tons of apples left. I had figured out that the dough was screwed up and I didn’t want to freeze one pie crust and I didn’t have enough for two complete pies so I got an idea.

Erin told me a story about making a pie in a situation where not many pie making tools were available. (“So I figured a vodka bottle will work as a rolling pin …”.) She didn’t have a pie pan so she used a corningware. I pulled out my smallest dish. Rolled more dough and dumped my remaining apples in there. Made tops for both my pies and voila! Pie and mini-pie.

Now the part that doesn’t work is why my pictures always look so crappy on my website. I tried to use my new Photoshop skills and save for the web for faster downloading and use a trick to try to make my pies look magical: I don’t think I succeeded:

Tuesday we had clients meet at the office at 9am so it was critical that I be on time. I left the house at 8:00 – an hour is certainly enough time to drive 11.5 miles except there was an accident on I-5 SB at the I-84 interchange and there was only one lane open so I didn’t roll through the door until 9:05am. Tuesday is yoga day so I didn’t get home until after 9pm. I ended up skipping breakfast because of the morning snafu and dinner because of class.

Wednesday I got an early start because I took my car in for service and then I skipped dinner again because I did a workshop in the evening. I didn’t intend to skip dinner I just forgot to bring extra food with me and I didn’t want to stop for food. It’s a Pam thing – I don’t like fast food and didn’t want to deal with working out an alternative. Missing a meal didn’t seem like a big tragedy and I found a few carrot sticks leftover from lunch to take the place of an actual meal. I didn’t get home until almost 10pm last night.

Two long days in a row and lots of skipped meals. I can’t believe I’m now the kind of person who can skip meals. There was a day when I couldn’t go two hours without shoving food in my mouth. (Except for the time I was sleeping.)

This used to be an actual issue or could you call it a condition? with me and I used to attend a group with other people with eating issues. Lots of people have problems with eating in the middle of the night. This is one problem I have never had.

It would never occur to me, upon waking in the night, to go and find something to eat. I don’t even like to eat very late. Back in my days as a hipster, late-night club crawler (okay, so I was never “hip”). I occasionally hung out with people who wanted to stop at Denny’s or this other place downtown that I can’t remember the same of: Gorky’s? (I’m talking about Los Angeles). I never wanted to eat then.

In the morning I was fine with staggering over to Café 50’s (Sherman Oaks) and getting the hangover plate of greasy potatoes, runny eggs and buttery toast. But eating right late at night. Not for me.

After skipping all these meals I’ve been waiting for the burst of hunger to make up for what I missed and it didn’t hit until 11:30am. Now I’m starving for a big plate of everything.

Sometimes the Internet is so aggravating. I haven’t read any Raymond Carver in a long time and I recently re-read Cathedral and was curious if there was any sort of discussion on it. I plug my query into my search engine. First I had to weed through a bazillion sites trying to sell me Carver books. Then I had to skip through the half bazillion sites of “free essays” which were not free and isn’t it great that cheating is now easier than ever? (sarcasm) Who writes these “free essays” anyway? I grew tired of the search long before I found anything interesting.

I recently read the following quote attributed to Thomas Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

I was going to write this down on a little card and tape it above my desk except I can’t help wondering: how did he know how close to success they were when they gave up?

This morning I did chores like grocery shopping and laundry and gardening. The rest of the day I played, including getting a massage (I still smell minty-gingery fresh) and saw TWO movies. I decided that this will be a movie binge weekend.

First I went and saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I’m tempted to say, why isn’t this movie huge — except I probably know why. Sure it would appeal to me, because it has this retro, old-fashioned romance thing going along with this futuristic, sci-fi invasion thing. How many people would go for this cross-over?

The funny part was the trailers. You know how the trailers generally seem to be aimed at a target audience — so if you’re seeing an artsy-fartsy movie you see artsy-fartsy trailers and if you see some shoot-em-up action flick then the trailers are big action films?

Well for Sky Captain the trailers were for: the SpongeBob SquarePants movie, The Incredibles (both animated films), The Aviator which is the movie about Howard Hughes, and the Lemony Snicket movie, which looks like the first Tim Burton movie made without Tim Burton.

This evening I went to the Kiggins and saw The Bourne Supremacy which I HIGHLY recommend. But two comments. First, how did dreamy Karl Urban turn into the bad guy? Second, what is up with the seats at the Kiggins? They look padded. There is padding-like material on them — but it was like sitting in a metal folding chair for 1 hour and 48 minutes. I could feel the outline of my scapula for about 1 hour and 31 minutes. Is this some sort of old lady thing? That I can feel my bones? Sometimes I can feel my sitbones, too. Or do I need to eat more?

Tonight Bob and I went to Powell’s Hawthorne to see Neal Pollack.

Last year we got the Never Mind the Pollacks CD in our xmas loot from Steve and Denise. When we drove to Tacoma for Wintergrass Bob brought it and we threw it in the cd player and we laughed our asses off. I think it’s safe to say that only a tiny portion of my readers (if any) would share our amusement. This isn’t humor for the masses.

On CD Neal comes across cranky and bitter and not especially friendly. Bob and I had to meet at Powells b/c I was coming from downtown and Bob was coming from Vancouver. Bob said if there was a line at the bookstore, he’d wait and get us a seat. This is funny for two reasons because, (a) of course there was no line and (b) Bob never gets there before me.

We ate dinner at this fantastic hole in the wall French place that I don’t remember the name of but we’ve eaten there before and it’s out of this world. It’s worth driving over there just for that. We didn’t get to Powell’s until 7:15pm (the reading started at 7:30pm) and there were about 20 chairs set up and about 15 people there.

We sat. Neal was already there. No entourage. Not even a special place to stand before the thing started. More people came and they set up more chairs. I’d like to give you a feel for what sort of audience Neal draws but there was no common denominator other than we were all human and knew where the bookstore was and had heard of Neal.

He’s promoting the paperback of this rock and roll novel. The CD and rock band tie in (the Neal Pollack Invasion) were just a gimmick for the book and he didn’t recommend following this strategy. He read from the book and then played from his CD and then read some other stuff. He writes for Vanity Fair. He was hilarious. Way funnier and cooler than you’d guess if you’d only heard the CD. Also since it was a small reading, you felt more like you were hanging out with the guy, rather than attending a function. I’ve had this experience with other writers at Hawthorne Powell’s.

After the reading we bought the book and had him sign that and our CD. I told Neal that I had also written a rock and roll novel about 80’s hair bands on the Sunset Strip and I think he was a tad impressed. He said he’d neglected that era in his book. Then he asked me if it was published and said: “No, it’s in a box in the garage.”

He inscribed my book: “For Pamela: This book is also in a box in the garage. Neal Pollack.”