Holy Cow, Voting Was Hard This Year

Oregon has been a vote by mail state for longer than I’ve lived here and I love it. It’s so much easier doing all the research at home and then, instead of compiling a list of who to vote for and trekking to the polls on a specific day, to then actually vote. Vote by mail is one of the best things about our state.

I was extra glad this year because many things we voted on were complex and weighty matters. And the two alternative newspapers who put out voter guides split on a number of key issues. In the end I used both voter guides, the voter pamphlet, other accessory reading, and a few queries to people asking, “Do you have an opinion about this race?”

It was rough, but I did it!

Remembering Julie Powell

I was very sad to hear that Julie Powell is no longer with us. Back in the mid-aughts as I was sailing very close to my thirties, I was working in a job I was trying desperately to leave. The job provided me with gobs of time with nothing to do—a setup that isn’t good for my mental health. Aside from spending several hours a day looking for a better job, I also occupied my time by reading blogs. There was the Weight Watchers triathlon woman, the lose the buddha lady, there was Poundy and her hilarious Weight Watchers cards, there was the advice lady who was also a freelance editor,* and there was also Julie Powell.

*You will note by the lack of links in that above list how those things that kept me entertained for hours are no longer findable at least not with a quick 5-second search.

Julie Powell was also not having a great start at a career, and to distract herself she decided to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s original edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And she blogged about it.

I clued into this project after it was over but before the book and movie came out, and I found the original blog and started at the beginning. She was a solid writer—blogging really showed the world how many good writers were out there not being paid to write—and her humor and exasperation at this thing she had assigned to herself resonated with me, a person who often assigned (and still assigns) to myself projects that can become overwhelming.

It was fun to watch the blog entries start with a small smattering of comments that then became a torrent once the press caught wind of her work. Aside from reading every post, I read every comment too, at least until the comments got to be too many and, as goes with the internet, weren’t always supportive. I got to know some of the regular commenters too.

After reading the blog, I read the book. It was good, but did not, of course, include the encyclopedic details the blog did. I saw the movie and enjoyed it because Nora Ephron does good work, as do Amy Adams (Julie Powell) and Meryl Streep (Julia Child.)

I know she published a second memoir, but I did not read it, and after that, I lost track of her. I’m sorry another Julie Powell project in the future won’t bring us back together. But I’m thankful she helped me pass the time in my own boring job.

It is a Lucky Day!

The library newsletter included news of a very welcome development: the return of the Lucky Day books!

Before the pandemic, I got a lot of my reading from the Lucky Day pile. It was a fun to put something on hold, go into the library, find the book, and cancel the hold where I had been 127 on 30 copies. Lucky Day went away with the pandemic because if the libraries weren’t open, no one could come in and grab the Lucky Day books, and I welcome its return.

WinCo Grocery Carts Now Plastic

The old steel rattle of the standard WinCo shopping cart has been replaced by a quieter plastic model.

There’s still a little bit of metal, but the vast majority of the cart is made of a nonrenewable material we haven’t yet figured out how to dispose of properly.

I’m betting they cost a fraction of what the previous carts did. It’s a win for WinCo’s finances and probably a loss for the environment.

Gilmore Girls, Time to Set Some Limits

Not much is appealing right now, and so the Gilmore Girls has become the major project. And with each forty-three minute episode of the Gilmore Girls comes an episode of the Gilmore Guys podcast. And the Guys are not brief in their comments. Some of the episodes are as long as three hours.

The extended length of the podcast is both a blessing and a curse. It means I must go do chores, or other such things, but also that every episode carves at least two hours out of my day. My other podcasts are starting to stack up, and it was time I weighed my intense desire to be done with this show with the fact that if I keep going at the clip I am going I will be done by July, but other podcasts I keep up with will be horribly backlogged.

So I’ve made a limit of three episodes a week. This way I won’t finish until the week of October 10, but at least I will have a little bit more balance in my life.

Wordle Fun Combo of Words

I’m not very good at Wordle in the same way I’m not good at Scrabble. When given a blank slate, I can remember no words at all. And even when I have some letters, it’s very hard for me to mentally sub in other letters and find words. Hence, I have things to help me, like always starting with the same two words and having letters in front of me to move around.

Today, I was tickled that my favorite brand of hair dye as a teenager got me to the correct word.

The Omicron Surge

Covid is a thing now. It’s part of life. But with the Omicron variant these three graphs really brought to life how much more contagious it is. Look at those spikes!

And these!

This one was particularly shocking. Number 6 is Omicron. Such a big jump!

From the future I can report that two of my family members got sick during the Omicron surge. They were both vaccinated and both recovered.

New Favorite Podcast: You’re Wrong About

My coworker mentioned this post. She first found the episode about crack babies. I was hooked on once I listened to the episode about Shannon Faulkner and the Citadel, a case I followed very closely in the 90s. I’ve got a mindless task at work going on, so I took a deep dive. And decided to start listening at the beginning.

I like that Mike and Sara are a bit younger than me. They often talk about things in the 80s and 90s that are very clear memories for me, so it’s fun to learn all the things I didn’t know, and to hear their take on the topic, having not really lived through it. It turns out that I found this podcast just as Mike is departing, but I’ve got a huge back catalog to listen through.