Three Beautiful Things 11-03-2026: Election Day, Yarn and The Onion, Convivial Book Club Meeting

1.  It's unofficial at this point, but it looks like Shoshone County had about a 64% turnout at the polls today. Debbie and I were among this strong turnout. We went to the Elks Club where nearly all the chairs for voters to sit at were full. Things flowed beautifully. As new voters arrived, voters themselves were finishing up and we got our ballots right away and immediately seats opened up for us to do our civic duty. 

I enjoyed being a part of this larger than usual turnout -- I find it inspiring when people get out and vote. Always have. And, while I support voting by mail 100%, I do enjoy making the trek to the Elks and voting in person. 

2. Debbie and I piled into the Camry and bolted to Spokane for a very enjoyable late afternoon and evening. 

First, we made a stop at Paradise Fibers. Debbie shopped for some yarn and found some she was pleased with. 

Next, we parked near Auntie's Bookstore and walked to The Onion which, I think, is going to be our place to have a bite to eat either before or after our once a month book club meetings. The Onion is an easy place to patronize: the food is, in a positive way, middle of the road and delicious. The service is prompt and friendly. Debbie and I find it easy to converse with each other there. 

It's comfortable. 

I tried baked spaghetti tonight with a side garden salad and enjoyed it, but even more I enjoyed talking about a variety of subjects with Debbie. 

3. We strolled back to Auntie's for an enjoyable discussion of the book, Super Volcanoes. No one at the table was an expert in either volcanology or geology (which was fine), so we helped each other out by offering our questions, stories about volcano visits, insights, and opinions. 

Somehow tonight the social aspect of our club meeting seemed even more convivial than usual. I left feeling great about having discussed the book, but even more so I felt great about the spirit of our time together, happy that we all seemed to enjoy one another's company so much. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-02-2026: Coeur d'Alene Trip, Time Travel, Spicy Chicken Sandwich

 1. I drove Christy to CdA today and after she met with one of her medical professionals, where the news was encouraging, we went shopping. Christy went to buy cards at Hallmark and I sauntered into Safeway and purchased Debbie a six pack of Fremont's Imperial Oatmeal Stout, Dark Star. 

Then we went to Trader Joe's where I decided let it rip a bit and splurged on a bunch of dried fruit, nuts, crackers, ice cream, potstickers/gyozas and other fun food and bought some staples like soy sauce, Green Dragon sauce, crunchy peanut butter, celery, apples, and more. 

It was fun and I think we are set with Trader Joe's products for a few more weeks. Ha! 

2. In preparation for our November 3rd book club meeting at Auntie's Bookstore, I finished this month's book, Super Volcanoes. In the book's epilogue, the author, Robin George Andrews, tells his readers that the book they just read wasn't really about volcanoes, but about time travel. 

Indeed. 

Andrews' chapters on volcanoes in Hawaii, Yellowstone, Tanzania, beneath our oceans, on the moon, Mars, Venus, and other moons in our solar system take his readers back to the origins of our solar system itself and to a better, albeit incomplete, understanding of how Earth came to be and how its formation is far from complete. 

3. Debbie made a trip to the Post Office combined with a stop at Radio. 

She brought home a spicy mango teriyaki chicken sandwich on ciabatta bread with fries and I didn't know that this was just the sandwich I needed today. I loved the flavors, textures, and, most of all, the heat. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-01-2026: *Everything is Turberculosis*, Spokane String Quartet, Yakkin' at Whistle Punk Brewing

 1. On the way to hear this afternoon's Spokane String Quartet performance, Debbie and I listened to John Green's book, Everything is Tuberculosis. The subject matter is grim. It's yet another book -- and I enjoy this approach -- that sees all kinds of things like justice, government, food availability, income inequity, disease, and more through a single lens. Needless to say, the lens John Green looks through is the lens of tuberculosis. 

2. The concert nourished us. The program featured pieces by Haydn, Bridge, and Tchaikovsky and we experienced a wide range of expression and tempos. Whether the compositions invited us to dance, dream, contemplate, or feel happy, all of them involved exquisite conversations between the instruments which was fun to watch and listen to. 

3. After hearing such a stirring concert, Debbie and I glided south on Monroe from the Fox Theater to Railroad Alley, site of Whistle Punk Brewing. Debbie enjoyed drinking Mexican Stout and I was really happy that Whistle Punk had non-alcoholic Fremont IPA on hand. 

Debbie and I talked about music, both string quartet music and conversation inspired by the house music, much of it focused the songs from our youth. 

We were at a table, but Debbie went up to the bar a couple of times to do business and struck up conversations with two guys about fifty years younger than us who had skiing and music on their minds and by the time their conversations drew to a close, Debbie had passed on to these guys where they could go online to hear Debbie's cds as well as those by Babes with Axes.  

I hope the dudes give Debbie's music a try.  

Three Beautiful Things 10-31-2026: Earth and Moon Formation, Halloween Stickers, Two Teams Go Against the Grain

1. One aspect of the Science/Nature book club I enjoy a lot has been reading about the formation of Earth and of the moon. Both chapters I read today in Super Volcanoes, one about volcanoes in the ocean and the other diving into the relationship between volcanoes and the moon, not only illuminated the long, long, long, long history of our planet and the moon, but continued to tell the story of how Earth is very much a work in progress. The formation of the planet we live on is far from finished. 

2. Because Debbie works with children so much, she knows that children enjoy stickers. 

So instead of Snickers, I (with the scream barking help of Gibbs!) handed out a sheet of stickers to the approximately fifty trick or treaters who came to our door. I told each of them that this would give them something to play with while they ate their candy. 

Every trick or treater seemed very happy with the stickers and when I told the older trick or treaters who looked like middle or high schoolers that they could pretend like they were third graders again, they all laughed. 

Quite a few wanted to pet Gibbs as he quit barking once I opened the door. 

Gibbs submitted. 

It was a good Halloween night at our place tonight. 

3. Here are two ideas many agree with in the world of sports.

1. To win at baseball, a team has to spend a lot of money on high-priced players and hit a lot of home runs. 

2. It takes several years for an expansion team in any sport to develop into playoff team, let alone win a championship. 

The Milwaukee Brewers demolished the first idea this week by winning the World Series. 

The Golden State Valkyries shattered the second by winning the WNBA championship in their second year of existence. 

I didn't watch any games. I read about them and found both of their achievements a source of joy and satisfaction. 

Three Beautiful Things 10-30-2026: History of the Earth, Yakkin' at The Lounge, No Brain Fog

 1. I continued to slowly make my way deeper into the book Super Volcanoes. This book challenges me and that is exactly why I'm so happy to participate in the Science/Nature book club at Auntie's Bookstore. Yes, I'm having a lot of trouble absorbing all the geological and volcanological facts and processes this book covers and explains. The vast time periods in which geological and volcanological developments transpire boggle my mind and my imagination is too feeble to really think in terms of millions of years. 

I am, however, understanding the main thrust of the book. Volcanoes and volcanic activity is wondrous. Robin George Andrews helps his readers see that our planet is far from being finished as a formative entity. The ongoing activity of tectonic plates moving, of magma continuing to flow and escape beneath the earth's surface, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions all illustrate how Earth is not a static, fully formed planet, but is always changing. 

If you've been to Yellowstone National Park, you've seen this continuing activity -- and you are seeing the continuing shaking, belching, boiling, and turbulent ejections that are a continuation of activity that began eons ago. 

2. I met up with Ed at The Lounge around 3:45 and Debbie joined a table of her Kellogg friends. Ed was deep into storytelling and reminiscing with Keri and Mitch Alexander. I listened, talked with Cas when he had a second or two about baseball and other things. 

A salient fact came up in yakkin' with Ed, Keri, and Mitch. 

Yes, I was a three-year letterman in basketball at Kellogg High School, but if you look at my three years of being a Wildcat with cold objectivity, by almost any measure, my basketball "career" at KHS was a disaster. 

So, when the conversation at the bar turned to skiing/snowboarding, Keri asked me if I ever skied. 

I hoped Ed, Keri, and Mitch would immediately realize that I was being ironic and shooting for a big laugh when I dryly answered, "No. I was too busy being an All-State basketball player."

3. Christy had an appointment with her financial advisor today. Over the course of her medical problems, especially in the last four or five months, Christy has experienced some brain fog.

So, just in case her brain turned into pea soup at this meeting, I accompanied her and, for the most part, sat back and listened to her and her advisor talk. 

My impression was that Christy was understanding what her advisor told her. In addition, I thought Christy got solid answers to the questions she had about the account they were discussing. 

It was another sign, to me, at least, that Christy's recovery is moving forward positively, not quickly necessarily, but positively. 

This coming week, Christy will be very busy with medical appointments in Coeur d' Alene and a blood draw in Kellogg. Hopefully, these checkups and examinations will help Christy continue to get a clearer understanding of her condition and what to expect moving forward. 

Three Beautiful Things 10-29-2026: Volcanoes, Hash, Pasta Dinner

 1. It took me quite a while to work my way through the first chapter of Super Volcanoes. It focused on volcanoes and eruption activity in Hawaii and it took me a while to become familiar with volcanological names and with the names of the scientists Robin George Andrews writes about. The details of the volcanic history and activity fascinated me. 

Next up: a chapter on Yellowstone. 

2. While I was at the Michael Connelly event, Debbie visited Christy and Christy gave Debbie a container of meatloaf and potatoes. I ate about half of it when I returned home Wednesday night and this morning, I used the rest of the meatloaf and potato to make a kind of hash with onion, mushrooms, meatloaf, potato chunks, and eggs. 

It worked. 

3. Debbie subbed today at Pinehurst Elementary for the second day in a row. It was Halloween Day at the school, an annual blow out of candy and other activities that get the children understandably wound up. 

Debbie arrived home tired. 

She asked me to make whatever I could figure out for dinner. 

We had some ground Italian sausage on hand. And some ground chuck. And cans of fire roasted cans of diced tomatoes. Onion. Mushrooms. Seasonings.  I found a packet of fusilli. 

There you have it. 

I made us a pasta dinner. 

It worked, too!  

Three Beautiful Things 10-28-2026: Happy Birthday Pert, Dental Exam, Michael Connelly at the Bing

1. If he were still alive, today would have been Raymond Harold "Pert" Woolum's 96th birthday. This year marks thirty years since he died a few months shy of his 66th birthday. 

One of the fun aspects of having moved back to Kellogg is to experience how alive Dad continues to be for people around town who knew him. I am not the boisterous man Dad was. I don't charge a room with electricity and charisma when I enter it nor am I as funny as Dad was. Therefore, people who knew Dad and find out I'm Pert's kid always seem surprised. "Jesus Christ! No shit? You're Pert's kid?" 

Some people think I look like my Dad and that often spurs people to tell a Pert story or just shake their heads and laugh and say, "God I loved your Dad! I sure miss that fat one-eyed son of a bitch." (Dad often referred to himself this way -- I think it was a paraphrase of a line from the John Wayne movie, True Grit.)

If there's a Silver Valley area in heaven, more and more of Dad's friends have joined him there over the last several years: Donnie Rinaldi, Ted and Jerry Turnbow, Chicken Legs, Don Knott, and many more. I'm hoping the song "In Heaven There Is No Beer" was wrong and that Dad is still popping open cold crisp cans of Heidelberg and loving his reunions with his many friends as they leave life here and join him in the next realm. 

2. I started my day in a dentist chair and was very happy to be under the care of Kathy Mercato. She x-rayed my mouth, cleaned my teeth, and talked with me about the challenges of our dental health as we age.

I'm very aware of these challenges and was a little bit nervous when the dentist looked at the x-rays, hoping that a bunch of new problems hadn't popped up over the last year or so since last he examined me. 

A bunch didn't pop up. 

One did. 

It's early detection of some decay under a crown. 

I'll return in December to deal with this problem early and, I hope, be done with such things for another year. 

3. Debbie agreed to sub today and tomorrow at Pinehurst Elementary. 

When she returned home, I leapt into the Camry and rocketed through rain and wind and some low visibility to the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane for another Northwest Passages event. 

This evening's featured writer was Michael Connelly.

Tonight's interviewer, Donna Wares, asked questions that led Connelly to talk about his history as a newspaper reporter, most often on the crime beat, and how that work led to him working as a full-time writer of crime novels. 

She prompted him to talk about his work habits as a writer and how other writers, like Raymond Chandler, have influenced his work. 

Michael Connely also talked about his work on the Netflix and Amazon productions of his novels, with special emphasis on the Bosch franchise and the series The Lincoln Lawyer. 

I was most fascinated by what he had to say about the book he was promoting tonight: The Hollow. 

It's another Bosch book and takes its readers back to the harshness of Bosch's life as a child and teenager and tells the story of Bosch deciding to look into a case that's been cold for over sixty years involving the death in 1965 of a fellow orphan, Charlie Lamb, found beaten to death in MacClaren, the orphanage where they both lived. 

The Bing Crosby Theater holds about 750 people and the house was full.

While Michael Connelly wasn't greeted with Beatlemania-like screams of ecstasy the way Rick Riordan was at Ferris High School by his young readers, Connelly's more seasoned readers filled the room with appreciative and joyous energy. 

Three Beautiful Things 10-27-2026: Adjusting, Home Cooking, Rays Keep My Wager Alive

 1. Things started to settle down a bit today after our four-night stay in Cincinnati. I took a couple of naps, hoping to get back into the Pacific Daylight swing of things again. Changing time zones has been more difficult for me than ever before. 

2. I heartily welcomed eating food cooked at home again. Yes, it's fun to eat pizza and buffet food on a river cruise and Mexican food and Bow Tie Cafe croissants and bagels, but nothing surpasses the way we cook at home. It's customized to how we like things. We combine ingredients I never see combined in eateries. Moreover, it's comfortable. 

3. It looked like my wager on the Rays was DOA after they lost their third straight game to the Brewers, but, in extra innings, the Rays came back and beat the Brewers tonight. 

The Rays are alive. 

So is my wager! 

Three Beautiful Things 10-26-2026: Bow Tie Cafe Again, Departure, Back Home In Kellogg

 1.  During our family reunion time over the weekend, in celebration of Patrick and Meagan's Sunday wedding, our central gathering place was the Bow Tie Cafe, where we could get coffee drinks and breakfast food like bagels, breakfast sandwiches, burritos, avocado toast, and more. 

We got together for our last breakfast blowout this morning and yakked, shared dreams for future get togethers, and continued to enjoy one another's company. 

2. We all had afternoon or early evening flights out of Cincinnati today, so we put our heads together, figured out transportation details, and hung out at Meagan and Patrick's apartment until it was time to go. Debbie and I piled into Adrienne's rental vehicle and Adrienne blasted us and her kids to the airport. 

It was kind of a dream come true for us. 

We both are averse to doing things at the last minute and riding with Adrienne meant we were at the airport about four hours before our flight. 

We bade Adrienne, Jack, and Eloise farewell and relaxed with some fast food, a bit of conversation, and charging our devices. Before long we were flying to Salt Lake City. 

3. At the Salt Lake City airport, we arrived at the boarding gate during boarding, so we slipped onto the plane and into our seats almost immediately and, before we knew it, we landed in Spokane. 

I spent time in the air listening again to lectures on the Romantic period of classical music and enjoyed it very much. I also enjoyed watching most of the Game 5 of the WNBA playoffs. 

Once on the ground, we shuttled to where the Camry was parked and successfully rocketed through the dark and rain back to Kellogg where we will take some time to recover from the way changing time zones throws our sleep and energy out of whack. 

Three Beautiful Things 1-25-2026: Wedding, Party, Memories

 1. The wedding ceremony went smoothly. We waited just a few minutes after five o'clock to start -- that gave the sun time to duck behind some surrounding buildings -- and about ten minutes or so later, I pronounced Meagan and Patrick wife and husband.  

2. The twenty of us who were on Patrick and Meagan's lower balcony paraded a short distance for a dinner party at El Barril, a local Mexican restaurant where spirits were high and the spirit of celebration was alive! 

3.  After dinner, I relaxed for a while at Patrick and Meagan's apartment after everyone else had left. Patrick and I spent some. time piecing together details of our the 1998 cross country trip from Eugene to Hendersonville, NC and back. Our reminiscing grew out of memories of the 1997 trip Adrienne, Molly, and Patrick took to Chicagoland when Debbie and I got married in Coeur d' Alene on Christmas Eve.