Author Archives: Pamela

November is Here

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Pamela

View from San Diego beach house.

Today it is November first and with this post I can keep alive the idea of a blogpost every day (NaBloPoMo) which seems like a good idea since I’ve been averaging about 1-2 posts a week and could really use a kickstart.

However it’s a terrible idea because I am in the middle of a time that’s so busy I have to brush my teeth while folding laundry just to get it all done.

I did not even make my pitiful goal of 300 words per day last month and I still can’t decide whether to have a 200 words per day goal this month or to really push myself and try for 250.

Adding daily blog-posting would seem insane seeing as how once I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it, no matter how miserable and stressed out it makes me feel.

But then I could do phoned in posts like pick photos from my giant collection that correspond with the numeral date. e.g. Tomorrow I could post any photo I have that was taken on the second of any month.

We’ll see how ambitious and clever I am.

Posted in doing it wrong | Tagged | 1 Comment

Apples and Pumpkins

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Pamela

For the first time our backyard apple tree not only has tons of apples, it has tons of pretty ones (relatively). Last weekend I picked two giant bowls full and canned applesauce.

It really isn’t that much work but I timed it poorly so I was trying to cook dinner and keep track of my canning which involves lots of things boiling at the same time. It all worked out and now I can have a stash of applesauce.

I thought it would be funny to label it all 2005 so when we pull it out in February we can gasp and wonder how it had gotten lost in the cupboard for so long. The canning specialists tell you to eat it within a year but I’m here to tell you I’ve let stuff go way longer than that and no one died.

I have a recipe for slow cooker apple butter and I was thinking of doing a quick batch of that since I have tons of canning jars. But I already have 10 other projects going this weekend and canning would probably push me over the edge.

Check out these pumpkins Kent gave me. His are the two big pretty ones. The sad little one is mine. Babe the pig is there for perspective.

I gave him some seeds a few years ago and now he likes to grow them, too. He brought them to work and I walked over to pick them up. I put one in a backpack and carried the other one. Everybody smiles and says hi and makes chitchat with you when you’re carrying a pumpkin.

Some guy asked me for directions to a place that was completely in the opposite direction. I pointed in the direction he needed to be going and told him it was a hike. He shook his head and said I must have misunderstood and then very carefully enunciated the name of the place he was looking for. “Yup, it’s still the other way,” I said. He said he must have just overshot it and would backtrack. He’d overshot by about 12 blocks.

Posted in cooking, doing it wrong, garden | Tagged | 3 Comments

Three Tidbits

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Pamela

This was one of the first promising looking early pumpkins that then withered without explanation.

A couple of weeks ago a guy called the office. I answer the phone with the name of the business. He said, “Yeah? I had a missed call from this number.”

Me: Okay.

What is he expecting me to do with this information? I don’t know who he is. Sure, it’s only a 2 person office, but it doesn’t really feel like my problem to solve.

Him: (on the verge of dying of annoyance) What is this again?

I repeat the name of the business.

Him: (Derisive snort) Well?

I asked if he had business with us. Co-worker overheard me and called, “I dialed a wrong number earlier.” I tell greatly inconvenienced lunkhead this.

Him: (Another derisive snort and then hang up.)

I’ve already have the answer but do people really do that? If I see a missed call from a number I don’t recognize it would never occur to me to call it. If someone wants me, they’ll try again. I wish we’d kept his number because I would call it from a different phone every day and hang up.

One dinky Cinderella pumpkin. Barely worth the trouble to process it.

We got a notice from our bank inviting us to refinance. They’re getting itchy because our house is almost paid for. The profit margin on us is dwindling. They used to do this to me in person, too, but I asked them to put a note on my account not to try to sell me stuff when I go in. They still do sometimes.

This one was funny because it has a graph with what our payments would be if we refinance for 30 and 15 years and then how much we’d save on interest. Those boxes were blank with an asterisk that said, we wouldn’t actually save any money on interest.

Nice try!

This is the new variety Baby Pam, which doesn’t seem to want to turn orange. I’m so sad about my pumpkin crop. A friend brought me some Cinderella pumpkins he grew from seeds I gave him. I’m going to pick them up after lunch.

This past weekend I had the time so I put the garden (mostly) to bed.

One reason I was putting it off is the birds have been loving the sunflowers. Every morning on the weekends I would see all kinds of activity out there. We had several days of cold rain and the sunflowers looked like refugees from a Tim Burton movie.

The cucumbers which have sent out all kinds of vines and nothing else finally started producing about 2 weeks ago. I’ve eaten two and put 4 in the fridge. Gee, thanks for nothing. I took out two of the tomatoes and optimistically left two in in case they want to keep going.

I dug up everything else and I now have about two pounds of beets in the fridge. We’re going to have something beety this weekend.

Posted in garden | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Children of the Corn

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Pamela

I really just want to use photoshop to entertain myself all day long. This is me and my sister, I think 1972. Dresses from Oma.

Posted in doing it wrong, goofy face | 3 Comments

The World Expects Way Too Much Remembering

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Pamela

I can’t find my photos of my cucumber plants so we’ll do hedge whacking instead. Look how nice and sunny it was that day. That red line in the bottom left is a new extension cord. I accidentally whacked the old one. Flames shot out. It was pretty exciting.

Has anybody calculated how far away are we from needing to hire people to manage our privacy and security preferences?

This stuff wears me out. These sites that want you to create a login just to look at something. Nope. Not doing it. Too many logins. Too many rules. You couldn’t use the same password for everything even if you wanted to.

This makes me so cranky.

I’m tired of customer service surveys, too. That’s gone way too far

For customer service surveys my time is billed at $60 an hour, one hour minimum.

I just went to download something free and they wanted my credit card. Nope. Can’t have it. (It’s a legitimate company, not some scammy thing but I’m still not giving to them just so they can have it on file and then one of their dopey CEOs can go to happy hour at Hooters and leave his laptop in the car to get stolen.)

At the office, we changed companies for computer protection and I keep getting these emails from the old company reminding me that Your! Virus! Protection! Has! Expired! Your! Computer! Is! Not! Protected!

Except that it is, by another program. So I went to unsubscribe from the emails which was an Alice in the Rabbithole clusterfukian adventure in time-wasting. Everything I did just opened a new window and went in a big circle until I was back where I started only with a million windows open.

So then I started up the chat help with “Steve.” [Aside: I actually enjoy doing chat help for purely entertainment value.] Steve was a robot and he kept opening more windows for me to tell me what to do. And explaining how I just do this, then this, then this and then click on the button that says this and I won’t get those annoying updates.

First of all, I shouldn’t have to click more than once to unsubscribe to anything. And second, my computer wouldn’t do this, this or this nor did it have a this button.

So I wrote a toasty complaint email which I’m sure was sent directly to the CEO where it was printed on gold-plated toilet paper for his morning constitutional. Then I made a filter to send the messages straight to trash.

I almost forgot to take the “after” photo so the sun was down when I ran back out there. I took it from this angle to hide how crookedy it is. I’m too short to get the top very well and also my arms get tired.

One of my financial institutions sent me a long thing about my privacy settings which mostly said, “Hard cheese, not much you can do about us sharing your info,” except there were two things that you could ask them to leave you out. But of course you had to call. So I called and it wasn’t automated it was a person. And then we had to go through about 10 rounds of account number, social security number, describe one of your last three transactions. I got all cranky about that. Is there really a lot of fraudulent canceling of sharing information going around?

So then she said we could set up security questions so it wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass next time.

And all her suggestions were for favorite things. I don’t have favorite things. And anything that’s my favorite now is going to be long forgotten by the time I have to remember it. Then we decided on first car. But then later after I got off the phone I realized I gave the wrong car. So hopefully I’ll remain permanently confused about my first car.

Thanks technology. You’re awesome when you aren’t killing me softly with your logins and passwords.

Posted in doing it wrong | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Rose City ‘Til I Die

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Pamela

Yesterday I did the most rockstar thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I flew to Vancouver, BC for the day for a soccer game.

You could see the BC Place, the stadium, in this photo if you had incredible vision and a better photo.

Ticket partner used miles for one ticket and we split the cost of the second so then the price seemed “affordable.”

We bought our game seats through the supporters section but we didn’t travel by bus or train. There were only about 10 other people on the flight up who were on their way to the game.

The trip up went smoothly. We found another fan on the Skytrain and then as we were walking toward the stadium a few more fans founds us.

I was hoping that more and more fans would join us and when we got to the stadium we would have a giant group that could all do a big synchronized song and dance number.

As it turned out, the supporters had already been let in. I think it’s a league rule to prevent violence, which as far as I know isn’t really a problem in Major League Soccer.

So when we got to the stadium, we went right in and the place was empty except for 500 Timbers fans packed into two sections, some poor security guy whose ears were turning red and Groundskeeper Willie raking the turf.

I’ve never sat with Timbers Army. They are intense.

As always, we cheered our faces off from the time we got into the stadium, until the time they let us out, 20 minutes after the match ended. I didn’t realize how many songs I didn’t know the words to. I know them now.

My favorite, a new one for this game, to the tune of She’ll be coming ’round the mountain:

“Please don’t burn your town down when we win.”

This poor Grandfather tooks his grandson to the game and had the sad luck to sit in front of the Timbers Army.

It was a little concerned that I would find the supporters section too much, but nope. It was perfectly awesome.

The Whitecaps are the other expansion team to MLS this season and they’ve had a rough go of it. This was their first game in the newly renovated BC Place. It is a gorgeous stadium and they had a big turnout.

Sadly (for them) we denied them and won the game 1-0.

After the game I got to see my friend Pritpaul from my writing workshop, who I haven’t seen since we left.

And then we headed back to the airport.

A perfectly fabulous day. Gorgeous weather. Great city. Awesome stadium. Fun fans. Terrific game. Catching up with a beloved friend.

Is there anything that could make this day greater?

Maybe: having the guys from our team wander into our airport gate and say hello and ask if we enjoyed the game?

THAT HAPPENED!

Three times I had to get up and dash across the concourse because my head popped off and bounced away from the excitement.

I won’t bore you with all the details because I know you already stopped reading, except for Hannah and I’ll send her an email later. Not because she’s a Timbers fan, but because she’s a Fan Girl fan. Fortunately, the only person I know who is as big a Timbers fan as I am was there. So we’ve spent the last 24 hours going over it in minute detail:

Me: So then he took out his earbud and said, “What? Oh. Thanks.”
Ticket partner: Right. Then he went and sat down.
Me: I can’t believe he talked to us!

GREATEST DAY EVER.

Posted in TIMBERS! | Tagged , | 4 Comments

First Time For Everything

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Pamela

Someone asked me if I’d ever heard of green tomato pie.

I had not.

It didn’t take long to pull up some recipes and yesterday I tried it.

It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t my favorite.

I think if it were the zombie apocalypse and there was no fruit to be had but someone managed to find a sack of green tomatoes, that this pie would be a welcome treat.

But if you’d spent the past few weeks eating peach and berry pies, it was just okay.

My real thought is, you could probably saute kitchen sponges in butter, season with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and sugar and bake in a fatty crust and come out with something halfway decent.

Earlier in the week I did a writing retreat at Edgefield. Lots of good photos here, but make sure you’re looking at the Oregon one.

How the whole thing came about is a long story that I don’t want to go into.

But I had some work leave and I wanted to set aside some time to concentrate on a writing project and I did a little homework and found out that Edgefield has a twin room for $50 a night. So I booked it.

Overall, it was awesome. I was really happy while I was out there.

I’m the eternal over-achiever so naturally I didn’t finish everything that I wanted to do and every second I wasn’t working I felt guilty. But I did get a lot of work done and was happy with my progress.

I would do a retreat again, but I’d probably shop around and try a different place.

There were lots of great things about Edgefield. Excellent food. Great places to walk around. The soaking pool.

They have a movie theater onsite and since I never go to the movies anymore, I thought I’d treat myself to Captain America with my pizza and beer after my long day of work.

Turns out the movie was cancelled and it was a history thing: 13,000 years of Salmon in the Columbia River.

At first I was bummed but then I realized this is exactly the sort of dork thing my husband would drag me to that I would end up loving and I could still have my pizza and beer.

And it was good. And also, packed. Yes, there are tons of people who will leave their house on a Tuesday night to go to Edgefield and listen to a talk about salmon bones.

Posted in doing it wrong | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Paella!

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Pamela

I was too busy watching the cooking to take many photos and half the photos I took I had the camera setting goofed up. Here’s a blurry photo of our host. I found out last night his name isn’t really Pete.

Yesterday we went to a paella party at a farm a few exits north of our house.

Paella Pete is a regular at the farmer’s market and we’ve taken home his food on many occasions for a simple and delicious dinner.

This was was our first time at the event so we weren’t sure what to expect.

Paella cooking. Fettuccine in the background. That’s just one of many jugs of cream he added.

It was fantastic. He’s so passionate about what he does. He taught us how he makes his paella. He showed us what spices he uses and told how he does the chorizo. If I learned anything it’s that I’m way too timid with spices.

I couldn’t believe how much garlic he put in there. I’m heavy handed with garlic but nothing like this. I woke up last night feeling like I’d become the garlic. I exercised this morning and sweated up nice garlicky fumes.

The food was fantastic. The company great. There was flamenco music and dancing. And it was the perfect summer night, warm and clear.

I woke up at 3:30am to rain. Not a refreshing cheerful sprinkly rain that’s nice after a warm day. It was a cold thudding summer is finished rain

Posted in cooking | 3 Comments

Auction Fever

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Pamela

Wednesday night there was an auction at the game. You could bid on each player’s jersey. If you won, you got to go on the field after the game to get the jersey off his back and get your picture taken.

Even the entry bid was rich for me. It’s not like we’d have to go hungry, but I have a lot of grown-up responsibility things I need to do with my money in the next couple of months.

But I’d just had two beers, a bacon cheeseburger and a basket of fries so I felt like anything could happen.

I decided to bid. I figured it was just the low bid and I’d probably lose and if no one else bid, I’d get the jersey and my Kalif moment.

The thing is, once my name was on that piece of paper, that jersey was mine. I was obsessed with it. I went back to the auction table before the game started and at the half just to see how the bidding was going. In my head I kept bumping up the number I would be willing to go to so I could win. You know, with this money that I don’t really have for pure folly.

Of course at three minutes before the auction ended they texted me that my bid had been beat. I would have to double my bid in order to win. So then I thought of other players that I like (honestly, I like all of them) and wondered if I should run up there and see if their jerseys were still available.

Except I was watching the game and why was I desperately trying to throw my money at something, anything, so I could go home a winner. I managed to reel myself in.

As we were leaving I bragged about how much money I’d saved.

They had a Make-A-Wish kid at the game and it is a fantastic and heart-twisting story.

Posted in TIMBERS! | Tagged | 3 Comments

Portable Cakes

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Pamela

A couple of weeks ago I was walking around downtown and I saw Saint Cupcake had moved and is now located right by the office. What wonderful terrible news. I went up there for lunch and tried a pumpkin spice muffin (“Dot or full-sized?” she asked. “Full sized,” I said.) and luckily they have some savory stuff and I tried a ham and cheese brioche and I grabbed an alder-smoked chocolate chip cookie to share with Bob. I can’t wait to work my way through the entire cupcake menu.

Posted in doing it wrong | 2 Comments