daytrippin' at cape disappointment

overlook @ Beard's HollowAnother weekend and we decided it was time for another daytrip. So Sunday, we got up earlier than usual and headed west to Cape Disappointment.

Such a misleading name! It's a gorgeous state park, covering a fairly sizeable area of the southwestern tip of Washington, which makes it a great place to spend a whole day. There are two lighthouses -- each accessible only by a half mile hike -- and trails and beach fronts and overlooks and even a Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center. Even if you didn't set foot out of your vehicle (which would be a shame), the drive alone is beautiful.

I packed us each a bento, which we got to enjoy high atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific. That is something I will never tire of, being able to eat my lunch right there, watching the ocean. The ocean, you guys! That will never stop being amazing to me.

We had to leave earlier than we would've liked to get back in time for our neighborhood potluck (so fun!), but I there might have to be a weekend in Astoria in our near future so we can spend more of the day there.

(more pictures of our trip to come when I get a chance to upload them)

Sunday's picnic, Sal -- blue bunny & moons:

• Mediterranean grilled chicken
• orzo salad (orzo, tomatoes, kalamata olives, feta, mint)
• celery and carrot sticks
• apple slices and honey peanut butter for dipping

Sunday's picnic, Brittney -- black strawberry:

• Mediterranean grilled chicken
• tabbouleh
• celery and carrot ticks
• apple slices and honey peanut butter for dipping

today's breakfast, matryoshka:

• mini blueberry pancakes
• peach slices

today's lunch, French bistro:

• Mediterranean grilled chicken
• tabbouleh
• celery and carrot sticks
• peach and apricots slices

sure of you

I have a lifelong friend. Literally, lifelong. As in, the only people who have known me longer are my family.

I first met her in kindergarten. She has only a vague recollection of knowing each other then, but I remember our first meeting very clearly, in the basement playground (where we were sent for recess when the weather was too bad to be let outside). We became the sort of best friends that can only happen in kindergarten, which is to say playing together at recess, except when we didn't.

I moved to a different school at the end of that year, the first of what would be several moves to several different schools. She moved, too, so that we were ships in the night until we finally crossed paths again in fifth grade when we both landed at the same school for the first semester. Then it was another move for me, and another move back, ensuring that in the seven years of elementary school, we never had a complete school year together.

The summer before our freshman year, the year when it really, really helps to have a familiar face amongst the scary crowds of upperclassman, she moved far, far away, all the way to the other side of the state. Somehow, we managed to maintain our friendship with only letters and the occasional visit when she was in town. Other friendships fell away and new ones started up, and we weren't always so consistent in our correspondence, but by some divine blessing, we stayed in touch.

The same summer I happened to be working as a nanny, she moved to the same town where I was working. We were the only people our age we knew there, and by then we had the benefits of drivers' licenses and actual things to do, which meant a summer of adventures and hilarity, the kind of inside jokes that become a secret language. But the summer ended, and I had to leave her behind to a new school for her senior year, and I have rarely felt so badly for leaving someone behind as I did then.

In the years that followed, we had years together and years apart. We went to the same college and she helped me get a job where she worked. I later had a chance to return the favor. We commiserated over classes and relationships and job woes and all the other travails of being in those difficult stages of adulthood when you still feel like life is just going to pass you by.

But life most definitely did not pass us by.  Marriages, houses, careers, families.... And always, the constant move, from this apartment to that one, this college town to that one, this state to that one. Moving has been a constant for us both, but throughout it all, this friendship has been the constant, the important thing that remained no matter where we were in relation to each other or anything else.

Earlier this week, her daughter started kindergarten. A difficult time for any parent, yet my friend has steered through this transition with the wise and gentle grace that makes her such an inspiration. As we talked about it recently, we both laughed and marveled at how long our friendship has lasted, despite everything. She said that despite all the bittersweetness of sending her beloved daughter off for the first day of school, one of the thoughts that consoled her was that perhaps her own daughter would be meeting her lifelong friend. She could not, she said, hope for anything more blessed than that.

A few days ago, a care package arrived on my doorstep. Inside, there were all the necessary tools of the first day of kindergarten: markers and crayons, colored pencils and watercolors, glue in my favorite color and a pretty notebook with page after page of tantalizing lined paper just begging for my most innermost thoughts to fill them up.

"Happy Friend-iversary!" the card said. Signed, my lifelong friend.

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes Piglet?"
"Nothing" said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. I just wanted to be sure of you."
                    -- A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

___________________________________________________________

lunch, Lunchbot Duo:

• sausages
• cucumbers
• green beans
• tomato
• apricot
• pluot slices
• Babybel cheese
• cashews and dried cherries

whose slender roots entwine altars that piety neglects

Oh the adventures we have had! So many to tell you!

Like Wednesday night's neighborhood game night, hosted at our house. Or Friday night catching up and watching stuff with ProcrastiGirl. And yesterday, Sal rode in the Bridge Pedal, which is a bike ride that covers 35 miles and ten of the city bridges (including the St. Johns Bridge). (Which means Sal logged almost 55 miles, since it was 9+ miles to the starting point and then the same distance home.) And afterward, we did up a big ol' batch of stir fry on the patio, because life is ridiculously good.

Saturday, while we took our time over the brunch Sal made, talking about what to do with the day, we decided we were long overdue for a driveabout. We were getting a late start, so we needed a closer destination than, say, the coast. We decided on Vernonia, since we haven't explored much of the Coast Range that lies between Hwy 26 and Hwy 30.

We often pack a picnic for a driveabout, but didn't have much in the fridge that wouldn't take some prep time, so we decided instead just to grab a few snacks and our water bottles and go. Daylight was burning, after all. (You'll note I didn't say "sunlight", as it was overcast almost all day. But still temperate and nice, so no complaints here.)

Vernonia is situated in a little valley in the forested hills of the Coast Range. (Which sort of makes it a mountain town if you consider the Coast Range mountains. We don't, but the rest of Oregon does, so.) We took the Scappoose-Vernonia Highway from Hwy 30, a two-lane highway winding through deep, dark (I mean dark) forest and up and over the hills/mountains.

the Nehalem River at Hawkins ParkIt's a nice little town, a bit bigger than I imagined, with a slightly-larger-than-a-pond lake at one end and the perennially-flooding Nehalem River running through the middle. We stopped at Hawkins Park, which sits right alongside the river. They've built an ingenious little dam there to create a nice swimming hole (in lieu of a city pool, presumably), complete with a concrete embankment so you don't have to walk in dirt to get to the water, a ladder over the side down into the deep end, a wooden lifeguard stand, and a charming bank of lockers. They even used a water diversion to one side to create a wading pool for little ones. It wasn't warm enough to draw swimmers while we there, not even brave ones, but it wasn't hard to imagine what it must be like on hot summer days.

Setting for a creepy horror flick? Do we commit the mortal sin of slasher films and go investigate the creepy abandoned building? Yes, yes we do.We headed to the lake next, where there's a nice paved walking path that skirts the perimeter. About a quarter of the way around, there's an abandoned building off the path about a hundred feet. According to the placard on the walking path, it's an old fuel house for a now vanished cedar mill. (The "lake", as it turns out, is the old mill pond.)  It stored cedar chips to stoke the mill furnaces. It now has trees growing inside it. I love the poetry of that. Of course we had to look inside. And if I had woken up that morning with the intent to have an adventure, I couldn't have planned a more perfect discovery of treasure.

inside, a marvelous surpriseThe interior was like something out of a story. All four concrete walls completely intact, seven trees growing around the interior's perimeter, with sword ferns and bracken ferns and vine maples spreading out in the corners. The walls are decorated with colorful graffiti in more imaginative style than mere tagging, collectively creating the effect of a mural. And every sound echoes so that you speak softly and sparingly. A row of concrete platforms running down the center look like old stone seats from some ancient pagan ritual site, one that's so old that no one knows for certain just who built it or what they built it for, and combined with the simple peaked roof gables and the light slanting in through the trees, it has the look of a cathedral.

We still had some time before we needed to head home, so instead of our snacks, I suggested the restaurant that had caught my eye as we drove through town. It was really the word "brewery" that caught my eye, because Sal loves few things more than trying a new beer in a new town wherever we go, and I have had long experience looking for the signs of such things.

The Blue House Cafe, Espresso Bar, & Brewery, as it turns out, was just as much of a treasure as the mill ruin had been.The interior is charmingly decorated, all yellow and cobalt blue, with delightful touches here and there (like the beaded curtain made of wine corks and the blue painted nail heads throughout) and an ingenious outdoor seating area. It's a quaint restaurant serving time-tested family recipies and run by people who obviously care very much about what they do.

Their menu is largely Mediterranean and everything sounded wonderful, although that's one of the toughest cuisines for me personally since there are usually several key ingredients I just can eat. (Feta, kalamata olives, lamb, gorgonzola, pepperoncinis...I could go on, but it's just depressing.) Which means scanning for something innocuous or that doesn't have too many ingredients to ask them to hold, all the while wishing I could eat more than my frustrating palate allows.

We settled on the zataar flatbread, one with feta (for him), one without (for me). No idea what zataar was, but it was an adventure and that means you have to try things without knowing everything that's in them. He ordered their porter, I ordered a lemonade. Sal said the beer was decent, though nothing to write home about. The lemonade looked more like iced tea when it came, but I wasn't feeling particularly picky so I took a sip anyway. It was indeed iced tea, but so good I was glad for the accidental mix-up. It was infused with fresh mint and sweetened with brown sugar, so it had a delicious, crisp summery flavor that was most refreshing.

PLEASE SAL FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THIS FOR ME I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER AND EVER AMENOur order arrived and with the first bite, I was in love. The flatbread was handmade and still warm, the zataar (a blend made of thyme, sumac, sea salt, and sesame seeds all ground together very finely) was mixed with olive oil and spread on the toasted flatbread, then topped with fresh tomato, cucumber, and onion. It was, in a word, heavenly. It may possibly have supplanted bruschetta as my favorite summertime treat. I'm still thinking about that meal two days later, and thinking a day trip to Vernonia may just have to be on our regular excursion list from now on.

You always take a chance on a driveabout that your search for adventure will end up being an uneventful day's drive in the car to nowhere in particular. You'll take your chances with the doubtful looking roadside cafe and it'll turn into a bust as often as naught. You'll point to a place on the map and arrive to find nothing much of interest. You'll have car trouble that is funny in retrospect, but anything but enjoyable at the time.

Still, even the least eventful driveabouts have their special moments: the hilarity that becomes a future in-joke, the music that imprints the moment just so, the odd sign or bizarre sight that makes you both go, "Did you just see...?" If they didn't, we wouldn't keep taking them. But every once in awhile, the search for a bit of adventure will turn up a little bit of mystery and a little bit of magic alongside those memories, and then you're hooked for life.

see the full set of pictures here

lunch, Paris slimline:

• stir fry (chicken, collard greens, baby bok choi, green beans, onion, garlic, broccoli, and a special sauce blend) with jasmine rice and crushed cashews for garnish
• cucumbers and carrots in rice wine vinegar
• a few bites of zucchini-sweet potato bread, courtesy of the neighbor who brought it for game night lst week
• blueberries (from our bushes!) and cherries

title taken from "Among the Ruins of a Convent in the Apennines" by William Wordsworth

celebration and mourning

Mother Nature seems to be making up for the lack of spring and summer by making every day of August so heartachingly beautiful that you feel like your heart might burst from its perfection. Every day for the last two weeks has been comfortably warm but not hot, still and fragrant and clear blue sky, and if the extended forecasts are to be believed, we're set to continue like this for the next two weeks or more.

August is also the time for two important birthdays: Sister's and the Fabulous Miss M's. They're not actually until tomorrow and Wednesday, respectively, but Saturday was the celebration for Miss M's, so that was the centerpiece of our weekend.

One of the perks of having a chef for a godfather is that you get beautiful and delicious cakes for your birthday. One of the (many, many) perks of having Sal for a godfather is that he will make your beautiful and delicious cake extra beautiful and extra delicious, even when you are turning four years old and your only requirements are that it be pink and girly.

His original plan involved fairies and flowers and lots of pink and purple, since those are Miss M's current favorite things. But reality collided with good intentions, and a fourteen hour day necessitated a quick reworking of those plans. He arrived home from work Friday night with enough layers for two round cakes (vanilla flavored "with a kiss of cocoa), a ginormous bowl of chocolate Italian buttercream, a smaller container of plain Italian butter cream, and a blob of handmade molding chocolate. The chocolate was for the roses and leaves he was determined to sculpt, but he wasn't sure what to do for the rest. I suggested tinting the plain icing pink, and doing it up in pink and chocolate brown for a more sophisticated take on girly.

It takes a surprising amount of skill to make a cake look clean and deceptively simple. It takes a significant amount of skill to do so without disguising your mistakes with a heavy slathering of icing to even things out.  I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to the level of Sal's skill. Except to also point out that the chocolate roses and leaves were sculpted by hand, and the wording was done with straight tempered* chocolate. Oh, and to note, yet again, that Sal normally has the handwriting of a serial killer, but put a pastry bag in his hand and suddenly he's got the penmanship of an 19th century Victorian aristocrat.

The cake was well received by the birthday girl, who asked to view the cake repeatedly while it was still in the box, well before it was actually brought out and served. The pink feather boa from Aunt Bitty was also a big hit, particularly since Miss M and her young guests spent the better part of the party playing dress up in their finest princess couture. (The biggest fashion hit of the day, however, belonged to one her friends, who put together a pink dress with a set of swim goggles, a dozen bracelets, orange flip flops, and a beaded Mardi Gras necklace that featured miniature plastic beer mugs. Wish I'd gotten a picture of that one.)

Since we'd spent our Saturday partying, it was time to be grownups yesterday and do some straightening and other such chores around the house. Sal tackled the apple tree in the backyard, which we finally conceded this spring would have to come down. We've known for a few years that it was inevitable, but this year, when the roots on the upper slope had actually come loose from the soil, we knew it was time.

Still, we hate that it has to go. It provides such a lovely green canopy over our patio, and is perfect for stringing lights through for our famous backyard parties. Not to mention the thick privacy screen from the attic window, so that when you're up there in the summer and you look out the window to see nothing but heavy green foliage and bright green apples, it feels like you're up in a tree house.

It's the also the last of the apple trees that were originally planted on our lot and the one next to it. The people who built our house, you see, had an apple orchard. Yes, that story from the Cathedral Park Chronicles is based on real history. When we moved into the house, the orchard next door was long since gone, replaced by the apartment building that's there now, but there were five apple trees in the back yard that remained from that orchard. We had to cut down four of them because they were diseased and in danger of falling on the house or the neighbor's. It killed us to do it, but we saved the healthiest one, and hoped we'd have it for years to come, even if it was too late to give it the care it needed to make the apples edible.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. And although we were fortunate enough to enjoy it for nine years, and we'll keep parts of the trunk to use in the yard the same way we did with the cherry tree that had to come down, it was hard to watch it come down bit by bit yesterday. We'll have to have an arborist to come in to finish the work, but I'll schedule it for a day when I'm not at home, so I don't have to watch.

Instead, I'll be at the nursery, looking for a new tree to plant. Not to take its place, but to honor its memory.

lunch, pink Natural Lunch:

• Parmesan breaded chicken
• rosemary roasted potatoes
• carrots
• peas
• cherries

meh and bleh with a side of feh

So I guess the economy isn't going to blow up or whatever, we'll just all live like serfs for the indefinite future, so that's a relief. Wouldn't want our royal masters to forego their gold-plated spitoons and other such necessities of life. I think Jon Stewart put it best when he said of the Republicans' threats to Democrats: "You buy the keg, and we won't burn your house down." Yay, democracy.

Craptacular political news aside, I'm in a foul mood all on my own. Sal's been suffering from some kind of throat/head cold thing for several days, and I think I've managed to contract it finally. Go me. Few things suck more than being sick during the summer, except perhaps being sick when you simply have too many things to get done that you can't take time off to rest and recuperate. Feh, I say.

It's probably no surprise that my lunch looks so bleh today. It's actually very yummy, and reasonably healthy, but I totally failed on the aesthetics. Although maybe I get points for the color coordination.

lunch, bento colors purple:

• egg scramble with caramelized onions and green peppers in a sundried tomato wrap
• dill and onion roasted potatoes
• carrot sticks
• cherries and nectarine halves

party all the time, party all the time, party all the ti-ime

And now you'll have that song in your head all day. You're welcome.

We had an inadvertent weekend of parties, hootenannies, and shindigs. As in, we didn't really plan it that way, it just sort of happened.

Witness: Friday was my company picnic and yesterday was a house warming* followed by the monthly neighborhood Happy Hour potluck. As if we're all trying to cram a full summer into the considerably shortened season we've been stuck with this year.  It's surprisingly exhausting kicking back and having fun, but doubly so when you're making up for lost time by tripling up on the festivities.

I know, right? These are just tough problems to have....

*One of Sal's coworkers was celebrating being back in their newly-renovated home. They had had a fire in their basement that caused extensive smoke damage to the rest of the house and necessitated basically gutting it and rebuilding the inside, as well as having everything that could be salvaged cleaned and restored. It took 14(!) months, but their house looks terrific and you would never know that it had been the site of such a terrible event. Since their house had already been warmed quite enough by the fire, thankyouverymuch, the party was actually a "house chilling".

lunch, blue bunny & moons:

• Tuscan roasted turkey breast, with a bit of romaine lettuce to eat it with
• carrots and cucumbers
• rosemary roasted potatoes
• cantaloupe and cherries
• garlic dill cheese curds
• cashews and dark chocolate-covered raisins