Stephanie says

Hang left at the Rialto Bridge to our 800 year old hotel, modernized of course but I’d bet those fabulous marble floors are original judging from the wear pattern. The Venetian glass chandelier is beautiful. Drifting to sleep in the wee hours, windows ajar, sweet song of women walking past rises to my room, opera in high and clear voices. Hauntingly beautiful. So I'm a little fanciful. Yeah, and I guess its opera, its Italian, good enough for me. Molto bene.

Fall temperatures got me and Jim thinking it was time to fire up the hot tub. Too hot to hot tub during summer so we shut it down a couple months ago. Assessing drain and fill time I took a quick inspection - popped open the lid, expecting the green furze of algae. The water was clear except for a substantial amount of little droppings looking stuff littering the depths. Another look around and I spotted toads lurking on the lip of the tub, little bitty toads, maybe two inches in full extension. Ah hah, Sherlock, that’s toad turds at the bottom of the tub. Teeny toads with huge bowel movements, proportionally speaking. Toads, the amphibian equivalent of mice, flattening and squeezing themselves into incredibly tight spaces. Then having to void. I detected a toad politeness order in their world. When they do their business, they hop off the lip and swim around the pool dropping toad turds, eyes averted, into the calm depths of the calm tub waters while the non-swimmers swivel their eye...

I’ve been cooking merrily away in preparation for my daughter’s visit. (She recently moved into a studio apartment so is bringing whatever she can load into her wagon to store at Mom’s Freebie Storage.) We both love Apple Betty but I decided to make use of some other autumn fruits and made this Fall Fruit Crumble. It went together easily with one substitution, lemon zest instead of orange zest. I was sprinkling on the topping which seemed very buttery when I realized I’d forgotten to add the ½ cup flour. Gees, Louise. The topping went back into the food processor along with the flour. I forgot the sugar in pumpkin pie once so we topped it with big dollops of very sweet whipped cream and it was just fine. This recipe is very good and not too sweet. Fall Fruit Crumble 2 ripe pears, peeled, cored and sliced 1 apple, peeled, cored, and sliced 2 cups fresh cranberries, rinsed 1 teaspoon orange zest 1 tablespoon cornstarch ½ cup granulated sugar Topping (recipe foll...

“West with the night” by Beryl Markham, published 1942 This is a fascinating biography of growing up in British East Africa, now Kenya, at the turn of the 19th century. At age four, she and her father moved to a farm in 1906 where he trained and bred race horses. Ms. Markham carried on the family tradition before becoming a pilot in the 1930s. I’m reading along, enjoying her tomboy exploits on the Dark Continent, when I come across a reference to Lord Delamere. Now why do I know that name? The names keep dropping, “Blix” the Baron Bror von Blixen, Denys Finch Hatton, Isak Dinesen. Oh I get it, “Out of Africa”. I loved the movie and the book although the people didn’t seem real. Yet somehow the connections in this book made all these people alive to me. Gees, they’re all out there hunting big game and racing horses and they all know each other. Baron von Blixen was a great white hunter, who led safaris in search of big game. That got me to wondering if he and Gus Peret were acq...

Cooler autumn weather is perfect for making jams and jellies. I juiced green grapes from the arbor and made pectin-free jelly. My decades old candy thermometer broke in the recent move and the new one is very, very difficult to read. Standing over a bubbling pot of boiling jelly, angling my head this way and that to get a reading on the steamed up and clouded over glass is irritating. I will be buying a digital model. Yield: four half-pints from 4 cups juice. It’s too hot in season to make spattery peach jam. Regardless the size of the cooking pot, very hot splatters erupt out and burn unprotected skin on impact. I wear a red plaid flannel work shirt, rubber gloves and wield a long handled wooden spoon as personal protective equipment (PPE). 2-1/2 lbs frozen peach slices yield three half-pint jars and one sticky kitchen floor. And now for the taste results based on one toast slice spread with grape jelly and one toast slice spread with peach jam: The grape has a soft gel and ...

Moved hanging baskets from the porch into the sunwindow in an attempt to over-winter. Looks pretty good for day one...

The long awaited London vacation. I am normally a fearless flyer preferring small planes to jets. I take delight in the bumps and dips of flying into cloud updrafts and wind storms. I love the two-seaters, the six-seaters, the 32-seaters, but I hate flying over the ocean at night in a jet. What, if the plane goes down it’s better to see one’s impending doom as the ocean gets closer and closer while at least one passenger channels a hysterical Shelley Winters straight from one of those awful crash movies? It isn’t really that image that worries me, but sleepless with nothing but long hours to idle away I eventually contemplate my mortality. This is usually triggered by the screech of metal on metal, which jolts my body into a black surge of terror, and my mind runs rampant with the probability of metal stress in the aging jetliner where I’ve entrusted my life and limb. Was that sound from some component necessary to stay aloft, say a wing, searing off rivet by rivet? It all seem...

Shots before the rain this morning.

The Arbor Café was a small restaurant around the corner from the Statesman Journal serving nouveau northwest cuisine for dinner and creative menus for breakfast and lunch. Its décor was mismatched tables and chairs, dark-green paint, white trim, trelliswork and vining plants. Diners ordered at the front counter for breakfast and lunch, at one’s table for dinner. A glass-fronted case with a top shelf displayed their glory of desserts: spectacular layer cakes prominently offered on the top shelf; a bevy of more cake slices, pasties, puddings and a variety of desserts cooled below. Somedays we SJ’ers went there for our morning coffee run. The tempting aroma of baking garlic croutons was so enticing I often considered ordering a bowl, hold the salad or soup. Usually I got the filo apricot Danish, an ambrosial treat along with a great cup of joe. Sometimes I’d get budino, a rice pudding with little bits of chocolate baked on the bottom. I regularly ate lunch or dinner there. One afte...

I decide to do a little plumbing job today. The main hose bib leaks a lot of water and being frugal (okay, parsimonious), today is the time to replace it. I make a trip to town to my favorite hardware store, the staff ever patient and indeed seemingly fond of my photos detailing the issue of the day (such an effective visual when I don’t know the names for stuff), and buy a new fixture. I have an absolute horror of going under the house, a deeply seated sense of claustrophobia instilled from an incident when my older and bigger brother decided it would be great fun to keep me captive inside a cardboard box. Through sheer terror, massive adrenaline surge, and rage I burst through the top where Michael perched, knocking the little bastard onto the ground, whirling off a few punches to compensate. I’d crawled under this house before to fix a fault in the phone wiring. My cousin and housemate Jeanne sat outside the crawl space opening, prepared to drag me out by my feet if I lost my san...

It is dark and dank in this place. And scary. The smell of pigeon shit and fusty soil are stuck in my nasal passages as I crouch, a loaded AK47 grasped in my right hand. Heavy mud caked on my overalls weighs me down as I inch along toward safety. Flashes of gunfire light up the night sky behind me, followed abruptly by the cacophony of automatic weapons discharging. In that brief instant of light I can see I’m on the right path. My heart beats rapidly, fear makes my breathing hard. I hear a whisper. “Susan. Keep coming this way. Keep down.” Thank God, it’s Kevin. Kevin, my fearless and athletic lover, leads me through a maze of crumbling buildings away from our enemies. I stay at his heels as we slither through oozing mud, bird crap, and who knows what else, to a nearby two-story house, our reconnaissance point. I send a silent pray of thankfulness to the heavens when we reach the interior unscathed. A wave of light from another burst of gunfire exposes the strained and pal...

Elise and Susan worked as title clerks at an auto dealership. Their office, located in a corner of the showroom floor, provided close contact with customers and the salesmen. In slack moments salesmen hung out around their counter telling jokes and stories. They routinely solved the daily newspaper crossword and word jumble puzzle through group effort and much laughter. At first Susan was uneasy working with the salesmen, they had such a bad reputation; sleazy folk, right next to the carnies and roadies of this world. She discovered those guys had the gift of glib, some left-brain anomaly that transforms into humor. Elise, freckled nose and blond hair cut in a pageboy, had children around Susan’s age and had been married eons. She and Susan clicked right at the get-go. Elise moved out west from Memphis years before and still retained the air of a reticent and very proper Southern lady. She hated to draw attention to herself, particularly negative attention. Her husband ofte...

We drove eleven slow, slow miles up a winding and rutted logging road hewn out of a Douglas Fir forest. Afternoon light dappled through a tree canopy illuminating oxalis and fern on the shady forest floor. An autumnal splash of orange and yellow Vine Maple leaves provided contrast to the pallet of green in the thick forest. The air was heavenly with the singular fragrance of Port Orford cedar. I was indeed in the land of my childhood. My cousins, Jeanne, Betsy, and Gayle, and I were on an impromptu road trip to the Rogue River by way of Powers, hometown of my late grandmother. We’d stopped at Jack’s Fountain for pie. I spent plenty of time in that shabby diner over the years. It looked the same as it had for decades, sprung vinyl seats in the booths, mismatched chairs. They are deservedly known for good pie however. We’d just about finished when the door opened and in walked Danny Dement. I'm pretty sure I never met him until right then although he was a schoolmate of my c...

I've got a small digital weather station. It's got a picture of whats happening outside, (right now it shows rain clouds,) as well as the time, humidity,and temperature. I could easily live without the weather picture but I want the clock. My problem is that the manual has gone missing. Try as I might I cannot adjust the time. The usual method of: push mode, push +/- keys does not affect a single thing. I've spent some time trying various buttons, there are only four, but the time will not change. I figure if I'm gonna have this gadget out where I can see it, the time should be correct. Call me mildly anal retentive if you will... I came up with the obvious solution, plug in the batteries at noon. HAH. It worked. Good until the new batteries required.