Yesterday was what friend Wonko calls the “Summer of 2003 Super Happy Fun Beach Trip of Love”, which he has every right to name, as he is the organizing force thereof. Four cars full of folk headed for the coast. I did not wish to get the Magic Shoe full of sand, as I rather depend on it every day. Luckily, friends rallied round with a fine array of walking staves, canes, and crutches, and I managed to get around just fine—and if slightly more vigorous than my usual style of walking, well, I could use the exercise. At least one of the rigorous ways of walking resembled poling a raft, but I was the raft.

The ocean was cold, as usual, but the sky was clear and tall and the sun was generously warm. I “iced” my purple toe in the waves, frolicked a bit, and drew in the sand with my walking stick. I got tired and went to sleep on a blanket on the sand—I didn’t even get burned! I had never napped on the beach before, that I can remember. It is even better than sleeping in a house with the ocean susurrating through the windows to sleep on the beach, hide your face from the sun and lose yourself in the wave sounds.

We drove back by way of Tillamook, and I indulged in a huge ice cream cone at the Cheese Factory. Upon return to Aloha, we indulged in a huge bout of kitten-baiting, before splitting up and returning home.

Maybe I’m the only one that finds Starbucks amazing. You walk into a Starbucks in Portland, Ashland, or Seattle, and you are no longer in that town, you are in Starbucks. It’s like every Starbucks storefront is a dimensional portal.

In some ways that eery similarity is a symptom of the most remarkable thing (to me) about Starbucks. They’re so consistent. Apart from those few Starbucks (Beaverton Town Square comes to mind) that smell objectionable (Sister Sledge, who has friends with babies, says it smells like baby poop, and I am inclined to agree.), every Starbucks is the same. Same menu of drinks, same specials, different pastries from day to day but all chosen from the same set. Hell, if I ever spend as much time in a different Starbucks as I do on the Macadam one, I’ll probably discover the same struggling indie rock guitarists and actresses work at each. It’s really a marvelous business model. Maybe for other things as well, but especially for coffee - back when there were Mom-n-pop coffee shops, I had bad mochas and so forth a lot - it was hard to depend on them, which is anything but relaxing.

Which brings me to my other point. A lot of people call Starbucks “the Microsoft of the coffee world” and such nonsense (perhaps it’s a geographical argument?). It’s simply not. Starbucks produces good product, consistent product, a pleasant atmosphere, and has (in my experience) marvelous customer service (“Oh, I’m so sorry the Chocolate Orange bits and the brownie bits got mixed together. Would you like a free frappuccino of a different flavor and three infinite-time infinite-price free drink coupons?”). They aren’t monopolistic through dirty business practice, they aren’t foisting a bad product on the public, they aren’t trying to exploit [Hillsboro told Wal-Mart to go fish yesterday! No Wal-Mart in Washington Co.!|text|low income areas]. They are quasi-monopolistic because they do what they do so well. So they can have my $40/month, and welcome.

Sometimes I feel like my life is filling up with what P.K. Dick called kipple — clutter, useless junk, but not just the items themselves, the windrows they form, but the force of entropy multiplying them, forcing them on you, choking you in a sea of useless, discarded, and ultimately inescapable rubbish.

I don’t think it helps that my boss is a pack-rat. I go to work, and I’m surrounded by articles he’s clipped, correspondence he’s kept, and little trinkets he thought were interesting dating back to my elementary school years. Currently, at work, we’re trying to organize this stuff. I find it very frustrating. Not only that I have to do this for someone else (I was told by my {"Clean your room!“} parents all my {”Clean your room!“} life eventually emerging from the kipple was my {”Clean your room!"} OWN moral obligation and duty.) but that I come home from having done this for 4 hours or more a day, and I walk into the same mass of kipple, multiplying, spreading, striving against the checking influence of my husband, teeming, defiant; that I left in order to go to work in the morning. I figured out a long time ago that work is selling your life for money. Now it appears that it’s selling the little organizational impulse I have for money, too, and soon I will drown in a pile of sketches I must keep, books I’ll read later, coupons I’ve clipped, awards I’ve won, gifts I’ve received, and toys I’ve loved.

The shoe:

I promised you pie, and here there be pie!

Once upon a time there was a princess who had the misfortune of getting baptized the day after the fairy Lucinea’s 350th birthday. Lucinea, who was supposed to be the 9th faerye godmother, had had a very raucous party, and so instead was a sort of godmother-doorstop, and didn’t bestow any faerie gift at all. And the other fairyes, who knew Lucinea always gave out the grace package, thought up other presents, like, “she shall play the hautboys like a duck in mating season”, and “She shall have an excellent memory for trivia and faces.” And so the little princess grew up, tragically, without any grace whatsoever.

Her parents were patient and sympathetic, but they reached the bourne of their patience around her 21st birthday. Tripping over a boot-scraper, she lunged for a nearby rope to catch herself. She didn’t catch it, but did tug it free, thus loosing the Royal Chandelier, which fell heavily on one end of the Royal Banquet Table, which flipped upwards, divesting itself of the Royal Breakfast, the Royal Ham from which lodged firmly on her father’s Royal Crown. As she dusted herself off and hastened to help, she put two of the Royal Teeth out with her elbow, and broke the arm off the Royal Throne, which had been in the family for 162 generations. Her father flew into a Royal Rage, and her mother agreed that it really was time that she learned what life outside the palace was like, and so she found herself on the Royal Highway with a Royal Knapsack on her back.

Life outside the palace was hard. You had to do things besides read, write, and play the hautboys. One day, trudging off to the paper mines to work, the Princess passed through a big, empty, dusty street, with one broom lying in it. Of course, she stubbed her toe on the broom. As she was hopping around in pain, the world’s smallest witch popped out from under the broom and began to lay into the Princess in no uncertain terms. Before the Princess could bring her Royal Courtesy to bear, the witch squealed, “I curse your foot, and the toe you stubbed with, too! Be lame forever, unless you find the Golden Crutch!” and disappeared with a dusty puff.

Immediately, the Princess felt a throbbing in her foot, and looked down to see that one of her sturdy toes was purply glowing. She tried to walk off for help, but the pain was unbearable. She hopped off like a Dufflepod. Soon, her energy was spent, and she twisted her left foot so she could walk on the heel. She went questing for the Golden Crutch.

Now she was not only clumsy, but slow, and her great quest brought her to the village two days over within 2 weeks. She saw a golden sign: “Curses dealte with, Paines banish&#232d.” Why not?

Within stood a lady with a kindly smile and magic spectacles that looked through to your bones. “She’s just broken it, dear, nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about? Shall I be both clumsy and lame?”

“No! I have just the thing. The Magic Shoe!”

The Princess looked dubiously at the proffered footwear, which looked like a tea cosy that had run away from home to become a piece of armor. “Magic Shoe? The witch said I needed the Golden Crutch.”

“Pfft. What do witches know?”

“You must be a very powerful sorceress!”

“I’m a nurse practitioner. Shoo!”

And so off stumped the Princess in her ugly Magic Shoe, no longer lame and trying very hard not to be clumsy.

I am very sorry for not blogging today. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow…I promise you lower tax—wait, that doesn’t work…umm, bread and circus—hrm. Inhumane. I know! Tomorrow, I shall give you all PIE!

I have come to appreciate the little things in life—striding around the apartment in a foul mood looking for one’s hairbrush; wearing boots; driving stick shift. This perspective and philosophy dates from last night, when I, blithely walking through my apartment, brought my left foot up against our vacuum cleaner with the force of an asteroid hitting the Antarctic ice sheet. Unfortunately, while the rock is harder than the ice sheet, and has the advantage of snow, my toes are far softer than the vacuum cleaner and snow was nowhere to be seen.

So I spent the remainder of last night tucked up with a movie and a piece of pizza, and today I hobble about in slip-on shoes, wincing whenever decorum or safety insists I cease hopping from place to place on my good foot. My bad foot is rather interesting. My pinkie and “ring” toes are like wee fat sausages, and bend slowly and painfully, tho’ under their own power. The rest of my foot is stiff and tense from protecting its invalids. Currently I am trying to figure out whether they’re sprained or broken, and whether to consult a physician.

Of course, I’ve never had a broken bone - the worst injury I’ve ever sustained required 5 stitches - and if I do turn out to have a broken bone, I shudder to think I shall have to acknowledge that I broke a bone by stubbing my toe. Rasserframmit.

My feet hurt, I smell like lemons, and there’s shortening residue under my fingernails, but there is a lemon meringue pie in the fridge and an apple pie in the oven. I believe this is the first time I have made two pies of different types on the same day. I am flushed with victory and with being close to a 450° oven. Whoo!

If any of you have been keeping up with current wonko events over on my brother site, wonko.com, then you may know that poor Wonko and his pie sidekick, Brunslo, have recently had to cancel the epic Pie Journey. Brunslo, it transpires, will only be in our fair burg for the space of a single day.

It further transpiring that I feel pity for these boon companions, bereft of adventure and baked goods, I have decided to make them a pie. It daring to transpire still more that Brunslo shall not enter the metrop until darkest nighttime tomorrow, I am pondering the advisability of producing not one, but TWO PIES.

Pie pan counts having dropped alarmingly (1 MIA, 1 doing service around a connubial blueberry pie), it may audaciously insist on transpiring that I shall buy not only a third, but a fourth pie pan! But, honey! objects my husband, That will bring the total to FOUR pie pans! That’s MADNESS! That’s right, I’m so pie-crazy, my husband says I’ve gone too far! Film at 11.

So, your task, should you choose to accept it, is to NAME THAT PIE! I have made the following before: apple, pumpkin, peach, blueberry, rhubarb, and stawberry rhubarb. The rules are: it has to be in Betty Crocker if I have never made it (psst: almost everything’s in B.C.), I can’t be allergic to it (nuts), and the filling has to be in season (unlike rhubarb). Brunslo as the guest of honor gets a weighted vote. I will completely subjectively examine the ballots and make pie accordingly. Go forth and feel the joy that is democracy!

Update:Polls closed due to grocery trip. Making one apple (it’s my strong suit, I think) and one citrus-based pie. I bought fixings for lemon meringue and for key lime, so we shall see which one wins the cage match in the kitchen.