Monthly Archives: July 2012

Pumpkin Patch

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Pamela

This is the pumpkin patch out front.

After a couple of disappointing years I have high hopes for this group.

There is something snacking on the leaves.

I don’t understand why the snails and/or slugs aren’t more discouraged. I’ve done nothing to make them feel welcome.

I think this year is going to be a dud for tomatoes. I’m thinking about wrapping the cages with plastic wrap to coax them along.

One of these days I’ll write a real post. Stay tuned.

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Dahlia Update

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Pamela

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Comfortably Numb

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Pamela

I’m trying to coordinate a trip to California to see my family. This is a photo of me and my cousin Jennifer just a few years ago on Waikiki. She’s one of the people I’m trying to see.

Did I really neglect to share my dental emergency right before vacation?

If you can’t whine about your dental emergency on your blog, where can you whine about it? (Answer: Everywhere else. But still.)

My last day in the office before vacation I had planned to the last minute. I was cranking through getting everything done. Plus, it was the last semi-final of the Eurocup so I came in early so I could take a long lunch to watch the game and still get all my work done. Extra plus, I skipped breakfast so I could order a bacon cheeseburger at the sportsbar where I was going to watch the game.

But … I had a fairly new filling and the night before I was brushing my teeth and I ran my brush across this tooth and then Bob had to peel me from the ceiling. I thought it would be a good idea to see if my dentist could take a peek. Maybe the new filling needed an adjustment. I didn’t want a broken tooth on vacation.

Cut to:

Me at the endodondist prepping for an emergency root canal, missing my game, missing my bacon cheeseburger, my stomach growling sadly while I stared at the ceiling. And if you know anything about root canals, you know that they fry your dental benefit to kingdom come in the first 3 seconds so all my vacation money ready for spending handed over to surfer endodondist.

“Hi! How’s your day going so far?” he asked when he came to examine me.

Me: Uh, I was hoping my day would go exactly like this.

The good news: my tooth felt better and gave me no trouble on vacation. And I got a pocketful of drugs for my troubles.

The bad news: I had to have soup and rush back to the office and try to finish my work since the root canal took longer than a soccer game. Additional bad news, my soccer team lost which I found out later when I watched it on my DVR.

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Garden Report

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Pamela

Here’s the garden patch way back in the spring.

Here’s the garden patch once I finally got off my butt and threw a few things in there.

Here it is now although now means a couple of days ago. I picked all the peas in the lower right and yanked the plants.

Earlier I did a lot of tough love on the sunflowers but not tough enough. It’s so hard for me to pull stuff out. I like to give everything a chance. But between the apples and the sunflowers the tomatoes are awfully crowded.

A couple of the tomato plants are tall and have lots of yellow flowers but I don’t even see a tiny green tomato yet.

I’ve still got some greens although stuff is bolting. I have a volunteer squash of some kind. The raspberries have finally slowed down. I need to find my notebook and see if it’s time to start clearing out dead wood yet.

The potatoes are going like crazy. This represents only a partial harvest. I still have at least three other potato areas that need digging plus I think I spotted a plant hiding in the raspberries.

I love digging potatoes. It’s like magic. You pull up a tired looking green plant. You stick your shovel carefully into the dirt and turn it over. Magic: potatoes. I made a potato salad today and ate about a pound for lunch.

I started the lemon cucumbers on the windowsill. Yes, kind of late. My cucumbers have been sorry for the last three years so it’s just a formality at this point.

I planted these guys yesterday and now they’re wilting in the fairly mild heat. Toughen up my pretties!

I started pumpkins on the windowsill, too. They’ve been in the ground at least three weeks. I also have some volunteer pumpkins that are doing fantastic. This vine has three little yellow balls and it’s shooting across the yard.

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Super Weak Post Material

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Pamela

I’ve had this backpack about four years? I could probably search the archives but I’m not in the mood right now.

I like the backpack but the hardware has been falling off.

I’m an old lady who uses it to drag my purse, yogurt/granola and reading materials back and forth to work. Sometimes I throw a laptop in there and take it on an airplane with me. It really doesn’t know hard labor.

It has two compartments and the zipper handles on the upper compartment both broke off. (Photo shows the lower compartment.)

I knew there had to be some great idea of something to use as zipper handles.

I thought maybe some heavy duty ribbon and I tried a wimpy ribbon as a test and it was worthless.

Then, I got an idea.

Keychains! Which we have a million of around here. The REM one is a little flimsy so I might look for a stronger metal loop. But the Boba Fett is badass.

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Disjointed

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Pamela

Sheesh, I have been having the strangest dreams lately. Almost every night I wake up at about 3am wondering what the hell that was all about. For example, twice now I’ve dreamed that I was going to compete a gymnastics routine on the balance beam, with little concern that I haven’t even stood on a balance beam in over 30 years. Or I wake up in the morning nauseated by some bizarre thing I was eating in my dream. Once I was carving off thick slices of butter and chomping away.

I had to post this photo because what the hell am I doing with my feet?

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New York City

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Pamela

There’s not a lot to tell about this trip. It was pretty straight-forward NYC stuff with tons of walking around. We hit almost all the high points and had a terrific time.

Guess where this is.

Portland has a big food cart scene and recently a cart like this showed up. My thought was that they didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t understand their market. You really need a niche and you need to be good to succeed in place with something like 450 carts.

Then I saw these everywhere you look in NYC. They may know better than I do. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will.

Here I am on Mars.

At the Natural History Museum we went to the space exhibit. There was a bit about foods to take and foods to avoid in space. Things to avoid: foods that make lots of crumbs, stinky foods. Foods that are good in space: meat, vegetables, recycled urine.

Yes, it really said that. We did not agree that that sounded good. Also the sample food: chicken and pineapple salad looked nasty. Annie still wants to go to space. I still do not.

We discovered Steve’s Ice Cream. And it became our feverishly looked-forward-to snack each evening. We loved the Blackberry Honey and Salty Caramel. We also tried: Strawberry Ricotta and Sunday Morning. Here, Annie and I go through every single tub in the freezer to decide on a flavor.

Coney Island for 4th of July. Insane in the most perfect way. We loved it.

Not New York. There was a dumpster fire in Northwest Portland when Annie and I were waiting for the street car. The flames climbed up a utility pole. Exciting.

There is a brief photostream at flickr if you’re interested in more photos: NYC Trip 2012.

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Baking Disaster #742

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Pamela

Yesterday I made a charred strawberry-rhubarb pie. No that’s not a typo from some creative (and most likely ill-advised) chard pie – I burned the top crust.

It wasn’t completely ruined but close. I thought about posting a picture but decided I didn’t want that floating around in the world.

I have completely lost my baking mojo. The last three loaves of bread were disasters. Now this pie. The crust was also among my worst efforts but we’re all used to that by now.

I think the main problem is that I am always rushing and/or trying to do ten things at once. There is no solution. If there was, I’d have figured it out by now.

Yesterday I had a short window to get the pie done and I tried to hurry and why not turn the broiler on for a second to get the top nicely browned while I finish sweeping the floor? Never do this.

While I was rushing around making my pie my cellphone rang. I’m not a big phone person and get few calls and most of the ones I get are wrong numbers. This call was a wrong number. The caller had a heavy accent and sounded like she was traveling in a tunnel with all the windows down so I could hardly understand her. She asked for Maya and I told her she had the wrong number. Then she went on and on wanting to make sure Maya wasn’t there and was I sure and maybe someone else there knew her because that’s the number she gave them. I was starting to think she was punking me but I’m not sure what the joke was.

NYC photostream still not ready. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

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Forget How To Sit Still

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Pamela

I am so far behind, it’s not even funny. Maybe I’ll get caught up this week.

But unlikely.

Just got back from an epic, fabulous trip to NYC. Photos and adventures to come. (Maybe)

This is the post that’s been sitting in draft for 2 weeks.

This is my purse.

I hate it. I’ve had it for three years + and I hate it. I saw a woman at the grocery store with this purse and I ran up and asked her if she liked it and she said, “Not really.”

I’ve been thinking about replacing it but it takes me forever to find a purse. (I’ve written about it more than once but this is all I can find right now.) And it does hold my crap so what’s the hurry?

I feel bad even writing this because it worked really great on the trip. Plus it looks nice in the photo. But now that I’m home I still hate it.

Here’s another travel tidbit. When I went to Atlanta in May, on the flight home, I had terrible jumpy legs. I’d say that they were unbearable, except I beared it, so it was almost unbearable.

I was worried about this trip so I searched it because there is nothing that the Internet has never heard of and sure enough, jumpy legs on a flight. Here were the helpful instructions: drink plenty of water, stand up and walk around every 20 minutes.

Have these people ever been on an airplane? What if everybody wanted to get up and walk around every 20 minutes? I got a few jumps but mostly no problem this trip so we’ll call the problem solved for now.

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