1. Before the advent of the blog, people relied on readerboards and painted signs displayed on their highway-facing fields to broadcast their thoughts to an uncaring world.

2. If you have an uneasy feeling you are going to get a ticket, you probably will.

3. Burger King’s Santa Fe Chicken Baguette is surprisingly good.

4. Getting a ticket in a traffic safety corridor is both No Fun and overpriced.

5. Everyone in Madras drives a big truck, and no one in Madras can drive.

6. If you get a ticket between Rhododendron and Sandy, you have to drive to Oregon City for the court date.

Don’t you feel edified?

No, I shall not discuss creepy holiday people - nor shall I decry overmuch the general phenomenon of Holiday Creep - the Santa decorations before All Hallow’s, et cetera… rather I would like to explore one symptom.

I was at my fine grocer’s establishment last evening - Haggen, to be exact - and what should I see but row upon row of bundled Christmas trees, stretching away towards the Haggen deli doors. “FIRST CHRISTMAS TREES ARRIVE… Tuesday, November 25th”, a sign informed. And in my mind the question formed, “WHO BUYS A CHRISTMAS TREE BEFORE THANKSGIVING?”

Oh, do not retreat, fair reader, at the sight of all capitals. This is not a rant. Rather, I have decided to try to accept and embrace people’s desire to celebrate early, and I have thus resolved to think of reasons people might buy a Christmas tree before Thanksgiving.

1. The Company A retail store, for instance, eager to convince its customers that they should start spending for Christmas now, might buy a tree from a grocery store eager to convince its customers that they should start buying for Christmas.

2.The Lonesome Someone who has no one with whom to spend Thanksgiving might decide to put up a Christmas tree to pretend Thanksgiving has already come and gone. Likewise, he will start stocking up on champagne and party hats right before Christmas, and start shopping for perfume for the special someone he does not have before January has even arrived.

3. The Pretentious The lady of the house, determined that her relatives from St. Paul who only come for Thanksgiving, shall see the imported icicles, the blown-glass Mt. St. Helens ornaments, the one-of-a-kind folk-art star handmade in the Pearl district, and the antique glass balls adorned with all the care of Fabergé, purchases a tree on Tuesday, trims it with care and child labor, and positions it so that all those giving thanks must also pay homage.

4.The Junkie Oh, how he has waited for this time of year! He plagued the Haggen garden staff, called every grocer’s in town, wrote letters to the management of every store under 16 different names! And at last, they are here! He buys three, one for every room in his apartment, and a small one for the bathroom. He takes them home and carefully puts them in water—just the right temperature, with the little nutrient package. He lies down on the shag rug in the living room, rolls under the fragrant boughs, and sniffs…. He was arrested once for indecent exposure and trespassing at a Christmas tree farm. He considers it a badge of honour.

Happy Thanksgiving.

pickle
poodle
Hottentot
Tater-tot
plop
quibble
querulous
peevish
arcuate
frizzy
fizzy
crepuscular
bombastic
telephony
onomatopoeia
piffle
kerfuffle
Giganotosaurus

I was poking around snopes.com today, seeing what new scams had appeared to snap at the heels of the unwary and what strange tales were unaccountably true, when I found this, a commentary given by former New York mayor Ed Koch on anti-Semitism. I was totally blown away, because he starts out talking about anti-Semitism and ended up talking about anti-Zionism. Has this equivalence, without a word of explanation or justification, been around for a long time? It almost makes me laugh, the idea that my having Jewish friends, supporting freedom of religion and opposing the enforcement of a state creed makes me necessarily a partisan for a far-distant country I have never visited, whose laws I have never read, and which seems to be on the road to becoming a good illustration to a book of Nietszche quotations. (Or, for that matter, that because I think NPR’s coverage is considered, fair, and insightful, I am anti-Semitic.) Quite similar, really, to the idea that because I love the land of America and the principles on which it was founded a long time ago, I must ignore those principles in order to slavishly follow the putative president whenever he waves a flag. Judaism is a religion; the Jews are a (in fact, the) diaspora; Israel is a country. Did I miss a memo?

So last night I was about to go to bed, and I went to my bathroom to insure a good night’s sleep. What should I discover but that the toilet (installed in 1974) was plugged? It didn’t look very serious, and about two thirds of the time in our (built in 1997) apartment another flush would solve the problem - so flush I did. As usual, I pulled the things on the floor (pantyhose, dress shoes, and a box full of as-yet-unpacked bathroom oddments) away from the toilet just in case that overflowy thing wasn’t just in movies and one very fuzzy memory from my early childhood. Of course, the inexorable march of the toilet water did continue well past the level of a normal toilet, and I backed, hands crammed with stuff, towards the door, only to discover it wedged closed. With an animal growl I managed to unwedge the bath mat that was blocking the door and kick it outside as I dropped my other burdens and hollered frantically for Matt.

Luckily, Matt must have watched movies or had memories where the overflowing of the toilet was not just an inevitable expression of modern man’s ineptitude and frailty, because he splashed into the bathroom (the water by this point lapping at the hall carpet) and cranked the water off at the wall.

So at this point I had to sop up the water - pretty much clean, but still, it came from the toilet! - with dirty towels and the mop. To my mortification, I discovered that while the water was clean, the hall carpet has probably never been shampooed since 1974. It stained the towels, and a paper towel pressed to the wet spot came up brown. Now, now, don’t think of it that way. I smelled it - it was dust. A truly monumental amount of dust.

On the upside, the toilet had cleared, so I turned that back on at the wall and flushed a time or two for good measure. So then I mopped with Lysol, washed my feet in the tub to get the presumed germs off, padded across the Lysolly floor, jumped over the wet part of the carpet, still soaking through paper towels and hopefully air-drying, and washed the Lysol off my feet in MATT’s bathtub. “You know,” I remarked to Matt, “Not only am I tired and cranky, but I had to go to the bathroom BEFORE this all happened.”

The joys of home ownership…

The omnipresence of that voluminous-orbed ruminant, the deer, at my new place of employment has me pondering the following word:

Have you ever paused to ruminate on ruminate? The rich image of digesting thoughts with your pearly whites? Some thoughts are chewy, some go down without a fight, and some leave a queer aftertaste. Most of the Boy-King George W. give me heart-burn. Some thoughts are like scallops—they bounce obstinately about your mental dentition for a time before the savour and texture compels you to expel them…

But it is SNOWING! Flakes as big as a silver dollar! Splashing in the puddles and throwing a frosty pall over the leaves and barkdust. Somewhere out in the woods the deer are snuffling back to a soggy sleep, and the wild black cats are sniffing the air and primly examining their chilly paws. Grad students are venturing outside with guilty childishness to raise their hands to the skies and laugh at themselves and at each other. The snow is coming down thick and white, and winter is falling!

So this morning I awoke under the indistinct impression that I was a cardboard box, was trapped in a cardboard box, or was charged with the constant surveillance of a very important cardboard box. Those of you who think this has something to do with the recent moving ordeal are probably correct. As I calmed down and stopped hitting my husband for interfering with my important anxiety, I realized that at least part of my problem was that my neck was bound up and my brain was stabbing its way merrily to migraine.

So Matt managed to convince me to crawl to the bathroom for Tylenol, and thence to the kitchen for breakfast, to make sure the Tylenol reached my stomach in good time, whilst he showered. I ate breakfast feebly, wrapped in two blankets and a bathrobe, and feebly crept back to the bedroom, where the sound of water attested that Matt was showering. I knew I would need to wait for him to finish and ask him how long to wait for the hot water (as the habitual first showerer, this is not something of which I hold detailed knowledge.) I sat myself down to wait. It was cold and I lacked back support. I crawled over to the space between the wall and the bed, wrapped a blanket around my feet and over the heating vent, and wrapped the other around my head. This way, I could lean against the bed. The goal was twofold - to await Matt’s emergence from shower (hence the placement a mere 5 or 6 feet from the door of the master bath) and to not fall asleep (the last thing Matt wants in the morning is to wake me up twice - hence the placement against, not atop, the bed.)

So there I sat, swaddled like a matryoshka, the heating vent sighing into comfortable life under my feet, the shower susurrating…

I woke up over a half hour later, to discover that Matthew had gotten out of his shower, walked by me without noticing I was there, ate his breakfast, got dressed, and finally awoke me accidentally by sitting down on the bed to tie his shoes and thereby joggling my head. When pressed upon where he thought I had gone and so forth, he maintained that he believed I had gone to sleep on the couch in the basement. Hmmph!

The same French word is used for:
the core of the earth
the core of an electrical wire
the pit of a fruit
the nucleus of an atom
the kernel/nucleus of a word (linguistically speaking)
a computer kernel
and the nucleus of a cell

Et le mot? Noyau.

One night several months ago, Matt was driving me home from the MAX stop. As we slowed to a halt at the intersection with Cornell, I was enjoying the swath of stars visible above the apartment complexes, when suddenly, I saw a meteor. It burned an arc through the darkness that was fully 15 degrees of the globe of night. It was huge, bright, sudden, and intoxicating, and it was an unmistakable emerald green. I felt my heart stop as Nature and I examined each other, as when a dragonfly hovers nearby, crystalline and alien.

“Matt!” I finally gurgled.

“Hmm?” he was engrossed in traffic.

“Shooting star! Huge! Green! There!” I am so eloquent. “Did you see?” He had not. I pondered the black stretch of sky and the faint glow on my vision, and suddenly I thought, Big meteor. Green. My heart leapt—half from the buoyancy of fangirl laughter, and half from the hormonal madness with which I am afflicted.

“You know, Matt,” I said softly, half-ashamed, “if we went and found where that meteor fell in the fields of Hillsboro, and there was a darling little baby boy gurgling out of the crater? I would keep him and keep it secret, no matter how many cars he could lift.”

Matt looked at me dubiously but affectionately, and said, “Yes, dear, I know.”