Like Food? Read On

Good morning,

I missed you.

I’ve had a foray away from the computer, and therefore, you, but I figure you are there and we’re chatting.

Oh, it’s just me typing? Well darn. I figured this was a two-way street. So, tell me, how was your week?

I wanted to give you a tour of Portland Oregon, and I will--sort of. You can call this a “Traveling with Joyce or Jo,” whichever.

On Friday we drove from Junction City to Portland in the sunshine, but the following day we slogged through rain, and what do you do in the rain?

Eat!

Great, just what my husband and I needed the day after Thanksgiving where I gave honor to Julia Childs with an Ode to Butter.

I buttered the turkey before putting it in the oven. The stuffing called for butter. I buttered the broccoli and the mashed potatoes, and oh yes, the sweet potatoes were glazed with butter and brown sugar.

No butter in the pumpkin pie—no, but that dollop of whipping cream on top was close enough.

I’m buttered out.

But thank you, Julia Childs, for telling us to cook with butter. And now that we know fat is good for us, well, what can I say? Ask daughter number one; she will rave about how fat is not only necessary to our health and welfare but will satisfy hunger.

That first evening in Portland I wanted a steak and salad--had one, not a good one though. I took the recommendations of the motel receptionist, and we went four doors down, to Bill’s Steak House. Don’t do it.

Breakfast: “Let’s have lox, bagel, and cream cheese at Kornblatt’s,” I say to husband dear.

We’re off with our little dog Sweetpea in tow. 

The 23^rd Street area is my favorite place to be in Portland, quaint shops, good food, and it is very dog-friendly with water bowls outside the shops, and many well-behaved dogs leading their people down the street.  Sweetpea waited in the car during our breakfast/lunch though.

Begin your day right--with a dill pickle.

Leaving Kornblatt’s fortified, we spent the day slogging through the rain. Rain does not keep Portlander’s home—the streets and shops were crowded and finding a place to park was a challenge even for a scientist with a slide rule. (Remember those?)

On one rainy day, my kids and I had the best day at Disneyland for rain did keep people away and we ran from The Indiana Jones ride to Splash Mountain and back again about three times.  I splashing in the rain is one difference between Pacific Northwest people and Southern California People.

We found Finnegan’s Toy Store in downtown Portland that I had seen advertised as a sort they don’t make anymore. Not a big box store but with lots of stuff, educational, scientific and playful. 

  

Sculpture alongside the sidewalk. Oregon is the Beaver State after all. 

We got wet, carried the dog, who would balk when she either got too wet, or decided she had had enough. wore ourselves out, went to our motel.

Okay, time for more food.

I didn’t feel satisfied with food so far; I wanted something with pizzazz. So what did I suggest? A pizza! One cannot be un-cheered with a pizza. Of course, it needs to be a good pizza.

Enter Pizzeria Otto on Sandy, Blvd.

 

I tried to get a photo of the cook throwing a pizza dough—we were sitting at the bar, close to the pizza oven--when one of the other cooks told me that one really shouldn’t throw the dough, “It should be treated like a delicate flower.”

The pizza was cooked Neapolitan-style, soft dough, crispy at the edges, just right. An excellent Caesar salad with anchovies preceded it. We added a glass of Chianti, and I was satisfied.

The following day we drove back up Burnside Street to 22^nd Street and stopped at The Elephants Deli, a delicatessen reminiscent of an old European market with prepared food, food to order, sweets, all made in-house, along with kick-knacks to browse.

They were featuring their in-house-made fondue, the sample tasted excellent, so I bought a pint to take home.

Fondue Do’s and Don’t.

Do: Expertly stir your fondue fork in a figure-eight pattern, don’t just dip.

Don’t: Lose your baguette in the cheese—tradition dictates that if you do, you must kiss the person to your left. (This might be a do, or a don’t.)

Do: Pare with white wine. (Duh.)

We’re home; the sun is shining.

Where shall we go next?

Can You Believe It?

It’s Thanksgiving in two days, didn’t we just do that?

I am thankful, that’s not it. 

I believe in being thankful every day, it’s just that time is speeding up so fast I can’t keep track of it.
 

And being a tropical person at heart, I do not look forward to wintry days, but here I am in Oregon.

I grew up in Oregon and loved the snow. As a kid,  I would awaken in the night and look out the window to see it had snowed, but then we lived up a long sweeping road, and us kids would ride our sleds for miles down the long  incline. Of course, that meant hiking back up the hill, but that didn’t matter. Hot chocolate was waiting at home in a warm house.

Then I spent some 20 years in California, guess I grew soft.

I raved and exclaimed, and praised last spring for we had moved into a home new to us, and with that came flowers someone else had planted, and I didn’t know existed.  I felt that someone had daily presented a bouquet to me. And that will come again. 

So I will enjoy the winter, and snuggle in and write and read, and if it snows I will note the silence of it, and smell the freshness of the air, and watch the sparkles in the air that are minuscule ice crystals.  

Walter Rauschenbusch, American writer, 1861, wrote the following. I added the pictures.

A Thanksgiving Day Prayer

 For the wide sky and the blessed sun, 

For the salt sea and the running water, 

For the everlasting hills And the never-resting winds, For trees and the common grass underfoot. 

We thank you for our senses By which we hear the songs of birds, And see the splendor of the summer fields,

  

And taste of the autumn fruits, 

And rejoice in the feel of the snow,

 And smell the breath of the spring. 

Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty.

-- Walter Rauschenbusch

Have a joyful thankful celebration,
Jo

Make a Little Magic--or a lot

"To affect the quality of the day is the highest of the arts."

-- Henry David Thoreau

--

Have you read #Seth Godin’s blog?

He has reached his 7,000th blog post.

There are no ads, never have been. No guest posts. No one can buy a slot or a referral. All Amazon affiliate revenue is donated to BuildOn and to Acumen.

Seth writes every word.

The secret to writing a daily blog, he says, is to write every day. And to queue it up and blog it. There is no other secret.

The blog contains more than 2,700,000 words, delivering the equivalent of more than thirty full-length books. The blog doesn't exist to get you to buy a book, Seth says. Sometimes, he thinks he writes books to get people to read this blog.

Seth hasn’t missed a blog post in many, many years--the discipline of sharing something daily is priceless. Sometimes there are typos, he says.  I hope that they're rare and I try to fix them.

“Over time, the blog adds up. People remember a blog post a year later. Or they begin a practice, take an action, make a connection, something that grows over time. The blog resonates with people in so many fields, it's thrilling to see how it can provoke positive action.”

From his Nov 10^th post :

Everyone else is irrational

Everyone else makes bad decisions, is shortsighted, prejudiced, subject to whims, temper tantrums, outbursts and short-term thinking.

Once you see it that way, it's easier to remember...

that we're everyone too.—Seth Godin

This made me think of my daughter’s comment this week. She has been commuting for over an hour to work for over a month, and began to listen to the radio. “I hadn’t listened for a long time,” she said. However with the long drive she turned it on.

You know how it is—you take a break from something—like soda or news, and it doesn’t taste good anymore. “It’s all fear based,” said my daughter. “You listen to conservative radio, it’s fear. You listen to liberal radio, and that’s fear based too. Has the world lost it’s common sense? Did it ever have any?”

“Look closer to home,” I said. “The people we know are wonderful.”

And then there are those who promote positive thought on #Instagram, #Twitter, and #Pinterest. They still believe in believing, and tell those reaching for their dreams to never give up. 

Any to the contrary? Ignore them.

From Caz makepeace--ytravelblog.com

“I've never quite understood it when people cry at concerts or at places like Disneyland. Well maybe at concerts, when I touched Lenny Kravitz's leg as he electrified the stage as a 17 year old, I nearly cried from joy! “But tears at Disneyland - I mean none of it's real.  “And then yesterday, I walked into Hogsmeade at Universal Orlando Resort and the tears began to prick. And then when I walked into Hogwart's and then as I walked into Diagon Alley. “What was wrong with me? “Simply,  I was overcome by the magic.” One young woman had the courage to sit down in a café, let her imagination run wild, and write it all down. You, too, can bring on the magic. Oh, here’s a great creative absurdity to dump into your head:  “There’s a #Twinkie in my Vodka.” A company in San Diego is making vodka out of old stale twinkies. Have no fear though, those the charcoal filtration takes out any flavor. Hee hee.

What's Next?

“To affect the quality of the day is the highest of the arts.”

-- Henry David Thoreau

How many of us are really living the life we dreamed when we were six years old, or even twelve, maybe twenty-one?

Aren’t we running too fast, over-scheduling ourselves, feeling that we have no time?

What’s next?

Nothing in society teaches us to live in the now—everything is “What’s next?”

When we enter grade school, we feel the pressure to do well so we can get into college. When we get to college we are asked, “What’s next? What is our major? What job will we have?

We look for the ideal mate to make our lives fulfilled and joyful. We wait for children. We wait for them to sleep through the night. We have an eye on their education, their college.

Remember when you were a kid and you laid on the grass and felt the cool dampness of it?

You were lying on a living pallet, and as you lie there with the sunshine a blanket of warm on your skin, you looked into the sky and watched a whiff of white gas gather itself into a cloud.

Can’t you smell the grass, feel the sun?

Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

 Recently I reread a book I had read about 20 years ago and loved the author all over again. It was Dorothy Gilman, and her book was A New Kind of Country.

She was a lady alone, her boys were in college, and for $10,500 she bought a house and ten acres in Nova Scotia. She went there to find a new kind of country, one in which she could “Front only the essentials.”

During a Christmas visit back to New York, at a dinner party, the host turns to her and says, “It’s high time you told us about your move to Nova Scotia. Which I certainly envy you doing.”

“Yes,” his wife says, “I’m so curious. Tell us, for instance, what you do every day.”

Dorothy was about t reply when the friend who accompanied her to the party, said, “Oh, I can tell you that. She gets up at dawn, chops wood, milks the cows, builds fires, does a little writing, eats fish, and goes to bed at sunset. Now tell me, she continues. “what you’ve heard about the Johnsons’ divorce.”

 

 

I, too, feel I must be working all day, to read a book during the day is somehow frivolous, so I squeeze in a little reading before I fall asleep at night.  I’m caught up with the need to be doing “important” stuff,  too.

 

In his book, Medicine Power, Brad Steiger quotes a one-hundred-year-old medicine man named Thomas Largewhiskers. “I don’t know what you learned from books, but the most important thing I learned from my grandfathers was that there is a part of the mind that we don’t really know about and it is that part that is most important in whether we become sick or remain well.”

 

Oh, It’s Halloween—go scare yourself silly.

 

Comment:

So true! I remember well the oak tree up the 'D' hill by Grandma Willett's , climbing the hill, lying in the weeds to look up at the clouds to see what the might be......and look out over the area below extending to the river. There was a retired horse in that pasture named, Captain, whom I had asked the owner if I could climb on/sit and pretend as well as stand on while he grazed. Almost the same mentality as drinking out of a hose, 'eating' the mud pies, riding in the back of a pickup.......M.

Traveling With Joyce

To the grocery store on a rainy day. 

I looked up at chattering overhead...

Daughter, grandson, and I drove to Albany, their first visit, my second. We wanted to see the carving in the basement. And there was the senior carver, Larry, telling us about carousels, and that this one has been carved in the old tradition, by hand, even with the carving tools being sharpened with a leather strap.

And he told us that many people work on each animal--this is on purpose to keep one person from claiming possession. Within the hollow belly of an animal is a time capsule of all the people who worked on it.

Do you know the difference between a Carousel and a Merry-go-round?


A carousel is fixed, usually in a building or a Pavilion. a merry-go-round is movable, such as those in traveling amusement parks.

And then driving home down I-5

Monday came and with it a celebration of the leaves. A footbridge leads from the parking lot on one side of the Willamette River to a park on the other side. Many people come and go across the bridge walking or with bikes, and some leading dogs. Sweetpea proudly pranced across it as though she was a charger.

A walk through the Park.

Back on our home street, I hear this from the tree, "Hey man, I was sleeping, you know, when suddenly something cold hit me, and I woke up with one limb red as a lobster."

A block from our house I sit under a spreading walnut tree,

Home, I am met by our Magnolia tree, and I think,  Hum, all these Magnolia leaves will soon be on the ground, our ground... 

But, come spring

our Pegasus Magnolia tree will awaken with buds in her hair.