an unlikely friend

Later today, I will be keeping my friend Kelly company during his chemo treatment. I have met Kelly only once before - this past August, for about....oh.....maybe 8 minutes....

Here's the story. I was clearing mounds of unnecessary stuff out of my garage and putting anything remotely usable onto craigslist. One of those items was a Kitchenaide stand mixer. A beauty. But never, ever, ever used. I'm one of those for whom a Betty Crocker Brownie Mix is too much trouble. Shoot....half the time, I think toast is too much trouble! (my freezer is full of little boxes printed with the words "slit cover to vent before microwaving"...)

Being a night-owl, I placed the ad for the mixer online around 2:00 am at a pretty ridiculously low price. Being a night-owl, Kelly answered the ad around 2:15 am. Here was the email:

>>Oh, My, God.
>>
>>If you still have this, I want it. I will meet you anywhere, anytime,
>>with the bucks.

Now this is not your typical response from a craigslist-er. I mean...personality doesn't generally scream through the emails, you know? I instantly liked Kelly.

I emailed Kelly back, said it was hers, and we set a time for her to come pick it up. Only Kelly turned out to be a he, not a she.

Kelly breezed into my kitchen the next afternoon...bringing in with him some sort of light. A breezy, refreshing kind of shining. Tall, thin, a bit pale and clearly gay, Kelly was completely irresistible. I can't tell you what it was about him...he was just so there. When I asked him why he wanted the mixer, he said he baked scads and scads of cookies each week for the Seattle Gilda's Club and that his mixer had just given up the ghost.

Huh. Gilda's Club. Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer. That's what my sister was diagnosed with last fall.

Huh. Interesting....the people that fall across your path.

I will tell you more about Kelly and me later. But it is finally getting too late, even for me, so I need to go to bed. After all, I don't want to fall asleep this afternoon while keeping my unlikely friend Kelly company...

winter!

We don't get snow in Seattle. Not much and not often, anyway...
I know, I know. Everyone thinks since we are a mere 2 hours south of the Canadian border, it must be cold here, but the Puget Sound keeps us mild so our winter temps rarely slip below the 40s.

But we got snow tonight! It's the most snow I've seen here in 3 or 4 years. Last year we didn't even get a dusting. I've always loved snow and still do...probably mostly because I can work right here from home and don't have to brave the roads. Since we don't get snow to speak of, we don't have snow plows. What we do have is tons and tons of hills. Hills and packed, wet snow don't go very well together, especially when you mix in a gaggle of drivers who never drive in snow!

I'm going to go make cocoa, if I can find some in the pantry. We so rarely have weather worthy of a cup of hot chocolate.....

Happy Thanksgiving!

May your gravy be silky, your potatoes fluffy, your turkey moist, your pumpkin pie crust flaky ...and may you spend the day with those you love.

Happy Thanksgiving!

be a fly...

Want to be a fly on my shoulder?
Went to bed at 3:45 am last night. I am an incorrigible night owl.

What was I doing into the wee hours? Manually editing an Excel database for an upcoming email campaign. Ugh.

What used to look like this: David Smith

I turned into this:
David
Smith

This was not fun. At all. Well, actually, seeing how many I could get done before I went completely mad was a little bit fun. (There are 3127 names to do. I got 890 done last night.)

Got up this morning at 10:45:

• Fixed a cup of instant coffee, checked my email, deleted the 287 SPAM emails I got overnight, then answered about a dozen or so real emails.

• Started making a punch list for the computer tech guy I'm going to hire after Thanksgiving.

• Opened Dreamweaver to work for an hour or so on the December issue.

• Called my aunt to try to coordinate a drive down to Oregon tomorrow for Thanksgiving.

• Answered another half dozen emails. My favorite one to read and answer was from Kelly. I will tell you all about Kelly in a future blog. I'll give you a teaser though...I met him through craigslist.org of all things!
  

• Updated my main website with some changes I've been meaning to do.

• Put in a load of laundry - darks. (I mostly own "darks".....so slimming, you know....)
  

• Called my son's group home letting them know I'm taking him to dinner tonight.

• Opened the fridge and about keeled over. Some really baaaaaaaaad salmon in there I forgot about. (read "forgot" as "ignored till now")

• Took a shower and applied liberal doses of lotion. ("Chalk" and "my skin" become synonyms during the winter months...)

• Spent half an hour online trying to figure out Google Adsense. (read "trying" as "unable")
  

• Ate a banana, a granola bar and am washing it down slowly with a Diet Coke.
  

• Worked on the database again for about twenty minutes (I'm on 1116 now!).

• Hopped over to my blog, and decided maybe I should write something...so now I am writing something.

Whooooeee....what a ride!!!
I absolutely promise I won't put you through anything as dull as this ever again...

i'm a lousy blogger

It turns out, I'm no better at blogging than I was at waitressing, (see previous post) but for entirely different reasons. Blogging is the strangest thing...really. I don't see how so many people can do it. I mean...I write this stuff...but really have no idea if anyone reads it. And it's sort of strange to write for no reader. It's like a high tech diary. I wasn't good at diaries, either. I think I'm more of a talker. When they have talking blogs, (maybe they'll call them "togs"?) I'll be killer. Just you wait...

In the meantime... I started taking ballroom dancing lessons at our local Arthur Murray in June. I'm at the dance studio almost every day, when I'm not traveling. Dancing at Arthur Murray is magic. Here's how it works: There's a group class every night. The men all stand in a row and the women all stand in another row in front of them. The instructor shows us the steps we're going to do...and then we dance those steps with the man in front of us. "Rotate!" the teacher yells, and each woman moves to the next man down, and practices the steps again. "Rotate!" and again...In 10 minutes, everyone has danced with everyone...and we've also basically gotten that set of steps down, and the instructor teaches us something new.

Nothing particularly magical there, you say. Ah...but wait. There is magic. Everyone starts out not knowing something, and a few minutes later everyone knows something. That's pretty cool, I think. But the real magic lies in how close we are forced to be to someone we don't know, how much we touch and how often we laugh.

People don't touch, really. We touch our significant others some, if we're not single. We touch our small children, but touch our older children less. We touch at arrivals and departures, but not a whole lot in between. We don't touch co-workers and we don't touch bank tellers (shoot...most of the time we don't get out of the car at a bank anymore!) and we don't touch strangers.

Not that I'm advocating that we should. I'm just saying that when you have to, and you get over the initial fear/embarrassment/awkwardness/wariness....it is magic. People smile. People laugh. People warm to you and you warm back. (or is that sweat? The cha-cha can be pretty strenuous!) Suddenly, you are dancing. You are in someone's arms and you are twirling and turning and gliding. Hips come alive and ankles show off and it's all magic. It feels like nothing short of a celebration of health and vigor and life and of the music we usually hide too deeply in our muscles and hearts and souls...

I love dance.

remember patty melts?

I'm in Carlyle, Illinois teaching a workshop this weekend. We all went to a diner together for lunch today, and I had a patty melt. Remember patty melts? You don't see them on too many menus anymore...at least not in the Northwest. Had kinda forgotten about them...

I remember my first patty melt. It was 1973, I was 17, and I'd just started working as a waitress at Sambo's in Hillsboro, Oregon. (don't yell at me...I didn't name the place, I just poured coffee there!) I wore a 100% polyster white uniform with a skirt ending far too high on the thigh for a chubby girl...(don't yell at me about that, either!) I worked 2 nights a week and weekends and poured loads of 10 cent cups of coffee and served a thousand silver dollar pancakes and Hamburger Steak dinners with grilled onions.

I was an earnest, but lousy, waitress. Too flighty to remember to serve them their iceberg lettuce salads before their dinners came...too giggly to rack up the tips. And way too naive to know what to do with the hordes of drinkers who formed a line around the building every Friday and Saturday night at 2:15, right after the bars closed. They all wanted coffee now. And eggs now. And pancakes now. And they wanted it loudly. And they all loved to tease the smiling, nervous, harried blonde who blushed a furious magenta when she brought scrambled instead of over-easy.

After each brutal shift, we got a free meal. My very first meal at Sambo's was a patty melt because I thought the name was groovy. I thought it was named after a girl named Patty.
I'm not lying. It is true.

Doesn't matter...I loved that sandwich from the first bite, and not just because I loved the name. Slathered in Heinz, I thought it was an astounding combination of greasy, crunchy, savory, cheesy loveliness. I had a patty melt nearly every night that I worked that year...only occasionally flirting with a shrimp basket or a Chef's Salad w/ thousand island.

It's probably been over a decade since I had a patty melt....until lunch today. I gotta tell ya, it's still a damn fine sandwich...at least at Cruiser's in Carlyle...

surprises

I wonder if everyone else also thinks they live in the best part of the country? Seattle has clouds from mid-November through April. I don't mean partly cloudy, and I don't mean fluffy, cotton-candy cloudy....I mean gray-oppressive-depressing-deadening-gloom cloudy.

But I still think I live in the best part of the U.S. Maybe it's just rationalizing, since I don't really have the option of living anywhere else. My autistic son, Kevin, is in a group home 20 minutes from my house...so I'll be staying in the NW.

But maybe it's just that we don't have winter snow and ice, and we don't have summer humidity or high temps, we don't have hurricanes, we don't have thunder & lightening storms, we don't have earthquakes and we don't have cockroaches! We do have a volcano or two, but they're generally well behaved....

Or maybe it's because it is beautiful. Took a drive with my dad recently on one of our last sunny days of the year. Never were we further than 8 miles from my home...and what a day of wondrous surprises we had...

First we stumbled across, almost by accident, a new little park with a pier with amazing views. At the end of the pier we found a whole world of fisherman - a couple of dozen men of so many colors and nationalities all trying their best on a bright Sunday afternoon to nab a "keepable" King salmon at least 21 inches long. (we saw at least one succesful catch!)

A few minutes from the pier, we stopped in the parking lot of the old Cliffhouse restaurant just to take pictures of the breath-taking view of Mt. Rainier. Dad said he was hungry, but I told him the Cliffhouse was a fancy-shmancy place and we weren't dressed.


But Dad's 84, and he's sort of done with little rules like that, so he wandered toward the building anyway "just to check". Come to find out the Cliffhouse has a casual restaurant downstairs....with the same world class view! We had coffee and clam chowder and basked in Mt. Rainier and the Puget Sound.


Our last surprise was a a mountain dressed in lilac pink frosting....


At least on this day, I think you can forgive Dad and me for believing we were lucky to live in the best the country has to offer....