You're Doing It Wrong

Downtown Portland by the Park Blocks.

Bob and I finally updated our phones. Bob got an iPhone for his birthday.

I’ve been violently against texting, mostly because I see it as one more annoying thing to interrupt me, but I caved. Who would have guessed that the person annoying me with texts would be my husband?

He sent me a text that said: Long friction day.

Quickly followed by: Frolic.

Me: Don’t understand.

Him: Frickin.

Him: Spell check is too efficient.

My texting victory was when I responded to a text message while co-worker was talking to me. “Hang on a second.” Revenge at last!! He’s always texting or emailing when I’m trying to talk to him.

Downtown, Portland. This photo came out all blurry because I couldn’t be bothered to stop walking while I took it. This is my attempt to salvage with some arty Photoshop dial-twisting.

A couple of weeks ago I had one of those horrible days which, briefly summarized, involved major things being broken and no one showing much interest in helping me fix them.

I held it together for awhile but eventually I had a meltdown and did what anyone in my position would have done, I got a sleeve of Girl Scout Cookies and sat in front of my computer and looked at bathing suits.

I’ve written about trying to find a bathing suit before, (2007, 2004 and 2001), and it’s always an ordeal. Also, I didn’t realize until I looked for that URL that it had been 4 years since I got my last one so I guess it was time. I only wear a bathing suit about 3 times a year so they last forever.

I looked at a bunch and then, for me, impulsively bought one. If only technology disasters really could be cured by buying clothes. The bathing suit arrived and the bottoms were the wrong color.

At first I thought I must have screwed up my order but even the order sheet said “blue” and the bathing suit in the box was nothing resembling blue.

All my time and energy is in use right now. I don’t have the stamina to solve one more problem. I spent about ten minutes trying to decipher their return policy. They have at least 5 brands shipping from the same place and there are different rules and I’d have to call and I’m sure they have a phone tree and some halfwit would take my call and tell me how easy it will be to return if I just do these 10 steps. I haven’t even started and I hate it already. After 48 hours of indecision and me carrying the package back and forth to work (which of course was a box, why cram a bathing suit into an envelope when you can ship it in a box?) two times, I said screw it.

My bathing suit will not match.

This is a little notebook Bob found that he got from his Dad’s job a long, long time ago.

All week I’ve been thinking how nice it would be to have a weekend day with no rain and how I would really take advantage of such an opportunity to get out and do work in my yard.

Right this second it is not warm but it is sunny out there but I don’t have time so I figure Mother Nature will punish me by not having a dry weekend day until July. It’s supposed to starting raining, hailing, thundering and gusting later this afternoon perhaps by the time I finish typing this. So maybe it isn’t such a great opportunity.

Tonight is my soccer team’s first ever game in Major League Soccer. We’re playing last year’s champions on their home field but that’s no reason to panic. It’s live on Fox Soccer Channel so you can watch it with me. We’re getting together with some people and I’m cooking which is why I can’t garden right this second.

I always think the days when I’m going to unplug will be lazy but it turned out the opposite because yesterday I did all the stuff I never do because I’m on the computer.

Right after exercise I drove to the mall. The entire area around the mall is a haven for orange cones. I went to NE Portland which I don’t know well but any strategy I attempted to avoid orange cones just brought me to more orange cones. I didn’t even know there were that many orange cones in the whole world.

Once at the mall, I burned through almost all my gift cards. I got 5 pairs of pants, Sees Candy, vacuum cleaner bags, panties and bras.

When I got home I processed the last two pumpkins and I cleaned out a bunch of cupboards. I reorganized all the towels because it seems like anytime I want a nice bath towel, all I can find are the crap towels. I cleaned out a bunch of other linens, too, and the Tupperware cupboard.

I did 8 loads of laundry. I made dinner and baked a pumpkin bundt cake for tonight.

Then I was totally beat and staggered off to bed at 9:01pm. Then I woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back asleep and annoyed Bob. This morning he said, “What was going on, you were like a monkey.”

I like to put my feet on him when I’m trying to fall asleep and he kept moving away.

One more note: even thought I annoyed him at night, Bob gave me $9 worth of emusic that expires today. I picked a few songs and was down to $5 when I found Foreigner’s greatest hits. I didn’t have enough money so I saved it. I’m sure he’s going to look at his saved list and think, “What the hell?” because he’s not a Foreigner fan.

The Schnitzer from the park blocks.

Yesterday was like a feel-good technology commercial on the bus. After we’d boarded a elder Asian woman came to the door and said the route number of our bus and then the route number of another bus that has an overlapping but different route. The bus driver tried to clarify which bus we were and which bus she wanted but they went back and forth without much success.

Finally the bus driver said, “Someone, help.”

And the passengers at the front of the bus immediately began to help by speaking very loudly and repeating what the bus driver had been saying because you know, if a person doesn’t understand the language, volume helps.

[This reminds of the time Bob and I were coming home from a trip and we were going through security at the Munich airport. There were at least three major levels of security and this was the third one. There was this woman working in security who was shouting at me in German and making vague gestures that offered me no clue to what she wanted. Anything I tried just made her yell louder. I finally said, “You can yell as loud as you want, I still don’t understand.” I think she just liked hollering at people. Obviously we weren’t the first English speaking people to go through security at that airport.]

Finally the lady decided to get on our bus. She was a tiny adorable elder carrying a backpack at least half as big as she was.

Sorry, she repeated a few times, as she boarded, but you could tell she is one of those old people who isn’t embarrassed by anything.

She sat down next to the passenger across from me and immediately started a conversation using the half dozen words of English she knew. The passenger was a guy who was pretty funny. She said she was 77 and he told her she looked great. Then I think there might have been a misunderstanding because she said she had 48 grandkids and he said, wow, that must make Christmas tough.

She said she was Chinese and he figured out which flavor she spoke and then said, hey I want to try something.

He took out his iPhone and started translating questions which displayed in Chinese characters that she could read. She nodded and laughed. It was so cute.

Later she whipped out a phone to call her daughter and after talking for a minute handed the phone to her new friend. He said, yeah, just hanging out on the bus with your mom. She’s pretty cool.

Then he clarified that she was on her way to the correct bus stop and how long it would be before we got there.

Sometimes random moments with strangers can make your whole day.

Last Sunday I heard Bob let out a whoop in the kitchen and I ran in there and he was very proud to show me this pancake.

I’ve got a daffodil. It’s out front being rained on. Some of my neighbors have a lot of daffodils but mine always seem to take their time. I can see a few more on the verge. One of my favorite spring moments.

This evening I made the total Pacific Northwest amateur error. It wasn’t raining so I took my raincoat off and left it in the car.

I was only going into the market. I had a short list. I’d be out in a few minutes.

When I left: Monsooning. Sideways. Or is that what monsooning means?

I had to wring out my purse when I got home. I feel like I spent half my week walking around with wet pants. I’m in sweatpants now with fuzzy socks and soup re-heating on the stove so I’m happy.

I’ve had a computer intensive week so I’m going to unplug for 24 hours and see if I can revive my poor mouse arm.

Looking north on SW Broadway, Downtown Portland

I’m having trouble getting my act together. It’s gray and drippy and all I want to do is drink cocoa and stay in bed and listen to Air Supply.

I exercised and now I’m tackling my administrivia so I think I’m back in forward motion.

I’m going to bake bread this afternoon. I’ve never used this recipe and I just looked it over to make sure I time it right.

One of the steps is, “cover the bread with a clean kitchen towel as it cools.”

I love this instruction.

Who would cover their bread with a dirty towel?

Katie was in town last week and we met for dinner. We tried Little Bird for dinner and it was fantastic. When they brought these rosewater macarons with our check we spent about 5 minutes cooing over how adorable they were before we could eat them.

Last week we had a day with a high of 57 and I wanted to come home and throw all my winter stuff in the back of the closet. I also looked at bathing suits and tanktops online. It’s way too early to be so optimistic about warm weather and if I move the winter wardrobe I’ll just jinx it.

I have a friend in town that I haven’t seen in a long time. We’re going to dinner tonight and I was searching around online for some ideas for dinner. I found a no-star restaurant review from a guy who said his New Years Eve was ruined because the restaurant didn’t have valet parking.

That poor, poor man.

Our soccer team had a business luncheon and even though the price-per-plate was ridiculous, I told co-worker we should go because when would we ever get to go to an inaugural season soccer team business luncheon?

I thought it would produce a great story but not really. If you’ve ever been to a business luncheon, then just picture that: suits and ties, sweaty pitchers of ice water, polite clapping, chicken entrée. Only at this one, the topic everyone was rah-rah about was Portland Timbers.

Part of the deal was that you’d get a player or coaching staff at your table. A lot of the tables were sponsored by companies so I figured the bigger name players would go to those tables.

We lucked out because our player was Scot Thompson who was a big shot Timbers player for years and just retired. He’s working for the team as a community ambassador which means he does stuff with kids and sits at tables with fans eating chicken luncheon. The rest of the players were introduced as part of the luncheon but Scot sat down with us at the beginning. One of the people at our table said, “Ooh, we got someone GOOD.”

He was super chatty and had all kinds of inside scoop and told us what was happening with some of our favorite Div 2 team players that moved on. We had good people at our table, too. I was kind of worried there would be that loud mouthed guy who knows everything monopolizing the conversation.

It was worth it. First MLS game in Colorado March 19. I will be glued to the TV.

All photos : downtown Portland.

I don’t have any good stories to tell, I just don’t want the story about my caveman photo to be at the top.

There’s a waterpark north of here called Great Wolf Lodge and I heard a commercial for it last week and it was like a parody of a radio commercial.

A bunch of chiming voices in a ridiculous chorus.

In the process of seeing if I could find it online using “terrible radio commercial” I pulled up what is apparently a terrible commercial for an Indian casino with such horribly racist comments it’s taken me a moment to catch my breath. What is wrong with people?

We saw Tracy Kidder for our lecture series last week. I enjoyed it but I’ve never read one of his books so I’m not sure I got the full meal deal.

Cadbury eggs are in the stores. I sprinted across the holiday promotional aisles on Friday so I could load up my cart. That’s a lot of sugar in one treat, even for me. But I still love them.

I can’t find the link right now and I can’t remember the exact details. Last week my food site was talking about dumbest questions about food which isn’t really what I want to talk about.

What I wanted to mention is that somehow everyone got fixated on lentils and tons of people mentioned that they’d never heard of lentils until deep into their lives.

I can’t believe there was a time when I didn’t eat lentils. But it doesn’t seem like a food Mom would have made. I bet I started eating them when I was a vegetarian way back in the 90’s. I still love them but my husband is not a huge fan so I mostly make them when he’s not going to be around.

Wow. I really failed at turning that into a post.

Sorry.

Today I finalized a story which is way different than just finishing and that used up about 99% of my brain juice so I’m just coasting until bedtime.

If you’re looking for Yamhill near PGE park. Follow the signs.

For the past several years, every time our vacuum cleaner has needed new bags, I always put off buying them.

Our vacuum is an inexpensive Kenmore canister Sears special. We’ve had it forever and really put it through the paces. I keep expecting it to fall apart. It’s all scuffed and pieces falling off. Duct taped. Every other time I take it out of the closet it seems to groan and not want to do its job. And I fiddle with it and jiggle all the cables. And it works.

I’m probably totally jinxing us by writing this.

That thing just keeps sucking. I’m not sure how old it is, but it’s already put in many good years of service.

I worry that the vacuum will die while I have a cupboard full of bags. I ate throwing away perfectly good stuff so I’d save the bags and then every time I cleaned out that closet I get all fretful about keeping stuff I don’t need or throwing away something that could be used. And then trying to donate it somewhere.

As if this entire exercise is a good use of my time.

This is on the sign for the Portland lightrail and it cracks me up every time I see it. We are Portlandia.

Our crevice tool splintered awhile back. It makes a high pitched whistle and does a terrible job of picking up the crud in my crevices. I really miss it. I looked around in a few stores, thinking that there must be bags of crevice tools available but I didn’t have much luck and didn’t feel like researching it further for the same reasons I hesitate to buy vacuum bags.

We need vacuum bags now. I’ve been putting off the purchase mission. But I’m getting low on See’s Candy and need to go to the mall anyway.

I have my priorities straight.