Peonies

Ok, so I could use a class in flower arranging...

Senior Moments

I may be having a few too many 'senior moments' lately. Tonight I made meatloaf for dinner and forgot to put in the breadcrumbs. It tasted like baked hamburgers. Not good. And I've had enough other cooking disasters over the past few months - mostly forgetting an ingredient sort of thing - that Mark is beginning to wonder. Tonight he asked me if I thought senility was setting in, and if so, did he need to take away my spatula?

How embarrassing.

I tried to make oyster soup a few weeks ago with canned oysters that turned out to be canned mushrooms instead. Perhaps I should have my reading glasses on when perusing the cupboards desperately trying to come up with something to make for dinner in order to avoid the loathsome chore of grocery shopping. You'd think I've have noticed the lack of oyster smell when I opened the cans but you'd be wrong. I'd gotten pretty far into the process before I noticed that the lumps I was stirring weren't acting like oysters and curling up on the edges from the heat.

I made an apple pie some time ago that I didn't get baked long enough and the apples were still crisp and the bottom crust a little gooey. Do you know how much trouble it is to make an apple pie and then have to throw it away? That one still rankles.

And my shoo-fly pies always end up boiling over.

Maybe it IS time to hand over my spatula.

The Gum Wall

I was excited to hear on the news that Seattle's 'Gum Wall' has made the pages of National Geographic. We're famous for the most wonderful stuff: the grunge musice scene, the 1960s era Space Needle and now the Gum Wall. And since I thought I had posted a picture of it, from one of our walks a few months ago, I also thought I should put the news on my blog as an 'update' of sorts.

Turns out I didn't actually post a picture of it. I was going to. Thought about it... and then decided it wasn't that newsworthy. What did I know? If the editorial board at National Geographic thinks it is a world monument, who am I to shortchange it?

Now I didn't know about the gum wall myself until some young relations came from the mid-west to visit my co-worker - who reported that the gum wall was their number one sightseeing goal in the area. It was news to me. But of course, as we go wandering through our city all the time on various explorations, we just HAD to go find it one day.

It is located under the belly of Pike's Place Market at the head of Post Alley right in there among the garbage bins and bar back doors and, evidently, a theater in which the owner was tired of scraping gum off the backs and undersides of his theater seats. People have been contributing great gobs of old already-been-chewed gum to it for years. There is even a vendor in the market upstairs who advertises gum for sale "for the Gum Wall."

So there you have it - picture attached - Seattle's famous Gum Wall. The only mystery left is why National Geographic cares...

At loose ends

Mark has had to run off to New Orleans for a conference for almost a week (and was quite disappointed to find that he is not, in fact, on the 'do not fly' list after all his subversive postings on the internet or for whatever other reasons he imagined, right up to the point of departure, that something would come up at the last minute and he wouldn't really have to go.) And I don't quite know what to do with myself. I always get a little creeped out when he is out of town, since I don't know anyone closer than 150 miles from me - not someone I could call on in an emergency without excruciating embarrassment, anyway. So I am at loose ends - which, now that I have written it out twice seems like a very odd expression...

And that's just the sort of thing that happens when you are a bit out of your element - odd notions come to you and you drift off into tangents you might not otherwise pursue. I had a peculiar day:

• Looked up 'at loose ends' on the internet, of course - who didn't know that was something I couldn't resist? ('Etymology: based on the idea of a string or rope with ends that are not neatly tied together' - is what I found. Not very entertaining, frankly.)
• Channel surfed - and then actually flipped to the Spanish-language channel because I wondered what 'Arnold' the Terminator would sound like in Spanish translation. (Not impressive.)
• Excessively talked to the cats, in an effort to get them to understand that no, 'Dad' is not coming home today to feed them and they can just stop gazing out the front window and eat what I gave them...
• Found myself chain-eating cookies - nervous? Upset? In need of more sugar?
• Looked up Mark's New Orlean's hotel on Google Maps 'street view' so I could share his experience.

And of course there were the important 'work' things I found to do - cleaning up the ash from the bottom of the barbecue grill, for example, and vacuuming the fireplace air intake grid. Rearranged the spices. (Rotating the canned goods stock sort-of-thing. You know. I'm sure you've done the same at some point.) Made sure there was extra toilet paper in both bathrooms...

This morning I got out the edging tool to clean up the 'edging' of one of the gardens (disturbing more earthworms than I had a right to) and then filled in that garden with more bark dust. (I have gardens with more space devoted to bare ground and bark dust than to thick lush plantings and am beginning to wonder if I will ever get it all filled in to look the way gardens look in magazines. But I digress... which seems to be the problem here.) I also strung twine on the fences for the peas to climb on and weeded the rest of the vegetable garden. And - hooray - the pumpkins are finally coming up!

Of course I took some time to peer at peony buds, deadhead geraniums, and stress about my dogwoods not producing the showy flowers I was hoping for.

I wasn't real successful with taking a nap because Frik kept walking on top of me in his effort to communicate his concern that Dad wasn't home to feed him lunch OR dinner.

I watched the 'outtakes' and extra features at the end of the Boston Legal DVD of the last episode. I went out for the mail and read the entire 'message from the mayor' that was included in my city water bill envelope. (School will be out soon so watch out for kids on bikes, was the gist.) I freshened my garbage disposal with ice and lemon juice. I tried to work out in my head how much my Roth IRA has increased in value minus my contributions (hopeless, actually, but worth a few minutes of concentrated brow wrinkling.) I tried out the 'pore-cleaning' strips on my nose. Baked some chicken pieces in an effort to choke off the cookie-eating binge. (I wouldn't say it was entirely successful but it did lure Frik and Maddie away from the front window for a while.) Scheduled the repair on my newly recalled Maytag dishwasher.

And now I am rambling along writing a blog posting... Sorry! I'm really at loose ends. (But here is my dogwood - in bloom.)