Category: All (-ish)

Fuller’s Coffee Shop


Fuller’s is a coffee shop located near where I work.  They make their own bread and jam and probably a lot of other things.  The waitresses are of the “hon” variety.  Everyone sits at the counter, because there are no booths.  They don’t take credit cards, their menus are laminated standard diner fare and you can buy rolls of mints and candy bars at the counter.  They open at six AM, god love ’em.  They are old-school all the way, the Pearl District before it was the Pearl District.  Fuller’s is a restaurant that delights me.

Somewhere along the way, someone created an iconic drawing of people sitting at the counter.  The original hangs on the wall of the restaurant, and the drawing has migrated to shirts, including the shirts the staff wears.  Today, walking by after they had closed, I caught one of the employees sitting at the counter, wearing the shirt picturing people sitting at the counter.  Beautiful.

More fun from the Parade Magazine

If you don’t want to make any chair a cozy one, perhaps instead you need a magic pancake pan?
I think my favorite part of the ad says “You can make: French Toast, Grilled Cheese, Eggs Over Easy, Crepes and more!”

Then, there was a short article on a new film about the Bible.  Read this excerpt and guess what my favorite part is:


Did you guess this:  “Adds Roma Downey, 52, who plays Mary, ‘We wanted the audience to think, ‘I know these people.'”
Well, Roma Downey, I can’t say I knew Mary, but I can say that she sure as hell wasn’t FIFTY-TWO YEARS OLD when she gave birth to Jesus.

Seriously, is anyone in Hollywood sane?

Where were these nine years ago?

When I wanted to start keeping a five-year diary (one page per day, four lines per year, five years on each page) I looked everywhere for one, including Powell’s and the Internet.  Nothing really worked, so I made my own.  What does Powell’s have today on their shelves? More than five different kinds.
 
This one looked promising.
 
I know someone who would like this one.

I’ve still got the rest of 2013 and all of 2014 to finish my current diary, but I’m tempted to buy one of these and hold it in reserve, just in case the drought returns at the end of 2014.

House and lot.


I’ve had my eye on this house since I moved to the neighborhood because it’s right by downtown Kenton, plus it’s a tiny house on a huge lot.  It looked like old people lived there and I worried they would die or move before I could buy it from them.  I could do a lot with a lot that size, even with that big tree plopped in an inauspicious place.

Sadly, the house went on the market in September and sold pretty quickly.  And there are suspicious signs that the huge lot will soon be no more and there will be a tiny house on a tiny lot and a huge new infill house on what was once the rest of the lot.

Phooey.

Postcard from Germany

I had planned to write an essay about why postcrossing.com is so incredibly cool.  Then I would post this essay before I got my first postcard.  But life intervened and my first postcard has arrived.  So here is the short version of why postcrossing.com is so incredibly cool.

You go to postcrossing.com and you register by picking a username, giving the site your address and perhaps uploading a picture.  Then you tell the site that you want to send a postcard. The site kicks out an address from somewhere in the world and also gives you a code to put on your postcard.  You read the profile, pick out a postcard you think the person would like, write, address, stamp and add the code.  Then you mail it and wait.  Because the waiting is the hardest part, Postcrossing lets you send up to five postcards at a time.  When the person receives your postcard, they will upload your code and add a quick message to you via the site.  This will be delivered by a cheery email that says “Hurray!  Your postcard has been received.” Then, the site puts you next on the list to receive a postcard from a random person somewhere on the globe.

It’s the best combination of  postal service mail and email/website I’ve ever seen.

Here’s my first card, from the Black Forest region of Germany.

The best part was getting it.  The second best part was that Matt read it aloud to me in German-accented English.

Should you want to participate in this wonderful invention, just go to postcrossing.com.  And then eagerly await as your mail becomes so much more exiting.

Essay: Lost essays.

Here’s to the essays that never made it onto paper. Or into a Word document.  Here’s to the stray thoughts that formulated themselves into outlines, sentences, even some full paragraphs.  Here’s to the ideas that were bandied about between friends, but occurred at times it was too inconvenient to pull out paper and pencil or sit down in front of the computer and write.

Making a point of writing one essay per week means many more of those thoughts, sentences and paragraphs do make it into essay forms, but
not nearly all of them.  It is not unusual for me to be declaiming about a topic and say, “I’m going to write an essay about this!” which for me is a way of saying, “I’m going to take my ball and go home.” Essays often seem like the best way to have the last word on a topic.  It’s also a way to say that the topic at hand is important, it deserves to have ideas parsed, sentences written, and paragraphs formed and edited.
So here’s to essay topics that were once close at hand, and their moment has passed.  Let’s take a moment to recognize:
MPAA ratings, the primary system and the Electoral College.
Why we are stuck with them forever.
This was the first topic I put on my “Essay Ideas” document in my computer.  It was during, you guessed it, the primary race, when I was frustrated once again, at being disenfranchised by the late date of our primary.  Both the MPAA ratings system and the Electoral College have bugged me for years, the former because it’s so arbitrary and has a bigger problem with sexuality (especially female sexuality) than it does with violence, the latter because it is a disenfranchising force enshrined in our Constitution.  All three of them will never, ever change because the amount of momentum required to reform them is nearly impossible to muster.
Anna v. O’Brien.  Watching the first season of Downtown Abby
got me thinking about the personality differences between the housemaid and the lady’s maid.  Then I started comparing their personalities to my own. I came out more on the O’Brien side and that pretty much killed any interest I had in shaping that topic into an essay.
Intimate Theater and NWCTC.  About the time I began writing essays, NPR had a story about intimate theater.  They were reporting about really cutting edge
stuff like one person sitting in the back of a cab with the actor and experiencing the performance that way.  It got me thinking about one of the reasons I love Northwest Classical Theatre Company so much, namely because the audience is so close to the actors.  And that’s all I have to say about that.
Nora Ephron.  I was deep in the midst of writing other things when Nora Ephron died, which meant she was added to the “idea” list, but I lost the momentum of the shock of her death. But Nora Ephron was a seminal figure in my adolescence and she deserves a full-form essay.  I’ll leave her on the list and hope someday I get around to giving her a proper tribute.
With that, I bid those topics, and many others who didn’t even make it to list, goodbye for now.  Thank you, ideas, for infiltrating my head and thank you for giving me something to think about.