Three Beautiful Things 07-24-2026: Update on Christy, Yakkin' at The Lounge, Hybrid Food

 1. Here's what I think -- if I'm wrong, I hope my mistaken point of view is harmless. The MRI and X-rays Christy had done on Thursday were necessary. They were painful. I think the procedures resulted in a setback. Today Christy was in pain and only with a lot of effort could she stand up after she'd been sitting. She's had a very difficult and painful time since she left radiology. 

Carol and Paul invited Christy and Riley to stay at their house so they could help her out, much as they did after Christy's second knee replacement. Christy and Riley headed over there early this evening. 

I'm available for anything Christy, Paul, and Carol need me to do. 

I'm relieved and very grateful that Christy is staying at Carol and Paul's for many reasons including help getting around, food preparation, care for Riley, and conversation -- to name a few. 

It's really a good thing that we all live in Kellogg. 

2. Around 3:30, Ed and I met at The Lounge on the eve of Ed's "Christmas in July" birthday and had a very good time yakkin' about all kinds of stuff, including his massive knowledge of upper leg injuries after his terrible accident nearly twenty-five years ago when he fell off the Tall Pine roof. He has a total understanding of what Christy is going through with thigh/hip pain and expressed serious empathy. 

In addition, I hadn't seen Seth for quite a while and I enjoyed talking about his job in Arizona, his remarkable Meta smart glasses, and how much we are enjoying this season's competitive fantasy baseball leagues. 

3. I got out the wok today, but I didn't exactly make a stir fry.

Instead, I heated up oil and acted like I was making a stir fry by cooking a couple of chicken tenders, white onion, celery, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower. 

On another burner, I fixed egg noodles. 

I added chicken broth to the food I'd sizzled in the wok, drained the noodles, added them to the broth and the sizzled food, and enjoyed a chicken noodle soup with soy sauce that turned out to be a stir fry and soup hybrid. 

It worked! 

Three Beautiful Things 07-23-2026: Hip?, Motherships, Soup

 1. I hope this is true. I think the doctors got enough information from Christy's MRI and x-rays to determine that it's her hip that's causing the pain. I'll leave it at that until this early diagnosis gets confirmed and until a treatment plan emerges. 

2. The details are boring, so I'll just say that I thought my outdated and well-used cell phone was crapping out, but, by late afternoon, things were working well again, leading me to think the problems lay with either the Google or the Microsoft mothership (or both?), not inside my aging phone. 

3. I had fun whipping up a simple bacon bean soup, combining pinto and white beans with onion, zucchini, celery, and carrots (and maybe another vegetable or two I don't remember). I seasoned it lightly and tried to let the flavor of the beans and the vegetables carry the flavor load. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-22-2026: Resurrection -- Twice, Weird Salad Timing, Beer and Motorcycles and Makin' Movies

1. I finished Part II of Is a River Alive? and throughout this chapter on industrial impacts upon rivers in Chennai, Tami Nadu, India I thought again and again about the Coeur d'Alene River running through Kellogg and about the harsh impact upon waterways in Appalachia of Mountaintop Removal Mining. 

Even more, I kept thinking about Harriet Potter, a sweet street dog whom Debbie's friend Hannah adopted when she lived in India. Hannah needed help with the process of transporting Harriet Potter from India to Portland, OR, and, without getting into the details of it all, I'll just say that Harriet Potter lived with us in Greenbelt, MD for a few days before I took her to Dulles where she flew off to Portland to reunite with Hannah and her other animals. 

Why Harriet Potter? When I read, in Part II, Yuvan Aves' description of detritivores, those creatures like millipedes and dung beetles, who transform, in Yuvan Aves' words, "the shit of life into something valuable", and when I read how these creatures became a metaphor for Yuvan Aves for those who transform suffering and adversity into something positive, I couldn't stop thinking of Harriet Potter.  

You see, Harriet Potter had a long scar down the surface of her spine, a scar from where someone poured hot oil on Harriet Porter. It's a burn scar. 

For me, Harriet Potter came to embody the detritivore ethic. She turned that hot oil cruelty into sweetness, making her irresistible for Hannah to take her in after Harriet Potter gave birth to a litter of puppies in the hallway outside Hannah's apartment door. Harriet Potter wouldn't let Hannah turn her back into the street. She kept returning to Hannah and I'm going to say that Harriet Potter knew that Hannah was the right person for her and the sort of person who would find a home for each of Harriet Potter's new born puppies -- which Hannah did. 

As I read Part II of Is a River Alive?, I realized that I didn't know the name of the city Hannah lived in, the place where Harriet Potter once roamed the streets. 

I texted Debbie. 

Holy Toldeo! 

Hannah and Harriet Potter lived in Chennai. 

So does Yuvan Aves. It is in Chennai where Yuvan Aves landed, having escaped as a teenager from the cruelty of the beatings and other forms of torture he suffered at the behest of the fists and weaponized objects of his stepfather. 

Somehow Yuvan Aves turned cruelty into sweetness, as did Harriet Potter. 

It feels mystical to me that I had such strong feelings about Harriet Potter as I read this chapter, only to learn just before finishing it that I was reading about the city of her birth, of her torture, and her rescue.

 I was reading about one and remembering another resurrection: Yuvan Aves' and Harriet Potter's. 

In Chennai.

2. I made a simple salad: rotini, a variety of vegetables, and pinto beans. In my bowl, I topped this salad with Trader Joe's Toasted Sesame Salad Dressing. 

It's weird. 

I got tired of lettuce salads and started experimenting with grains, beans, pasta, and who knows what else before news began to spread about the outbreak of cyclosporiasis.

Go figure.

3. Before I go to sleep at night, I read several pages of Josh Brolin's memoir. It's entitled From Under the Truck and if Josh Brolin wanted to show his readers that he has lived a rough and tumble life, he's succeeding! 

Three Beautiful Things 07-21-2026: Death Into Life, Korean Sushi, Pills

 1.  Back to Is a River Alive? 

The writer Robert Macfarlane's international explorations of rivers moved in Part II to the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. 

Macfarlane meets up with Yuvan Aves, a naturalist, natural world advocate, and fellow writer with whom he's been in correspondence for several years. 

From their opening conversation and with the help of a dictionary, I learned that a daemon is an attendant spirit, an inspiring force. 

Right away, upon meeting, Macfarlane asked Yuvan Aves this question: "What is your daemon, the creature with whom you feel the most affinity?"

Aves pondered this question and said three living beings come to mind. 

His first daemon fascinated me. 

It is the millipede. I'll quote Aves: "The millipede is a recaster of meaning and matter, you know. It turns the shit of life into something valuable; takes it in, absorbs its harm, transforms it. Turns death into life, waste into compost, endings into beginnings." 

The millipede is a detritivore -- so are red ghost crabs, cockroaches, maggots, and dung beetles. 

Aves calls these under-appreciated, much-despised group of species "cleaner-uppers". 

Aves is inspired by the millipede and the other detritivore to do all he can to convert suffering or adversity into something positive. 

Macfarlane goes on to detail that Yuvan Aves embodies this detritivore ethic. As a boy and early teen, until he ran away, Aves suffered regular beatings and other cruelty from his stepfather and, having escaped, and got miraculously enrolled in a residential high school. Over time as a teenager, he converted his trauma into becoming a compassionate and gracious young man. His story astonishes and moves me. He grew into a deeply caring young adult, quick to be of service to other people, rivers and other bodies of water, and to animals, snakes, insects, and other living beings. 

2. I didn't know it, but maybe you do! A kimbap is a Korean seaweed roll, very similar to sushi.

A few months ago I saw a package of kimbap among the frozen foods at Trader Joe's and tonight I prepared and ate them. Trader Joe's calls these morsels Korean tofu and vegetable seaweed rice rolls. 

I enjoyed them. 

I also think I could have done a better job heating them up on the stovetop. If I purchase Trader Joe's kimbap again, I'll try to remember what I bungled slightly today and do better next time. 

3. I picked up pills for Christy today that will sedate her for her rescheduled MRI that will happen first thing Thursday morning. Once she and her doctor and PTs know the results of the MRI, they'll be better able to tailor her physical therapy to the specific nature of her injury -- and the MRI results will also reveal whether she is, in fact, suffering from a rectus femoris tear. It's what her doctor thinks is causing Christy's pain and limited mobility. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-20-2026: Being Alive, Quinoa, Welcome Back Brenda Peterson

 1. The book Is a River Alive? has me rethinking what "being alive" means for a river that is not the same as what it means for a human. This is a brain scrambler. I'm so used to thinking of being alive as an individualistic concern. But how about if the world of nature is alive in ways that cannot be understood in a human being centered way, that is not individualistic but is relational. I'm far from having this concept nailed down, but this book is helping me think about rivers, the natural world of birds, animals, forests, and so on in expanded ways and I'm enjoying thinking about the idea of being alive with the natural world as the model for aliveness, not us, not humans. 

2. Today I discovered an unopened package of Trader Joe's Tri-Color Quinoa in a cupboard and visions of a leafless salad with pinto beans danced in my head. So I made just that and plan to augment it later with a wider variety of vegetables and add more beans if it seems right. I made a dressing of olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, and a touch of honey. It all worked, but I will be looking for ways to improve it. 

3. Today I reread Brenda Peterson's essay from about thirty-five years ago entitled, "Living by Water." It appears in her book of the same title. As I read it again after all these years, I remembered how Peterson drew upon the Tao de Ching to elaborate upon the wonder of water, how it is at once gentle and nourishing as well as powerful and destructive. Central to her short essay, too, is the connectedness of all things. 

I've been sorting out, trying to remember what all I read back in my late thirties and early forties that makes what I'm reading now in Is a River Alive? seem familiar. 

Returning to Brenda Peterson's essays has turned out to be a good start in my efforts to remember back and recall what I've read and thought about over the decades regarding the natural world. 

(Hmmm. . . I'm wondering if Brenda Peterson's essay introduced me to the Tao, and, more specifically, Stephen Mitchell's translation of it. It's very possible.)

Three Beautiful Things 07-19-2026: Beans, Road Trip to Harrison and Memory Lane, Classroom in the Camry with a Casino Break

 1. Those Great Northern white beans I cooked Saturday? I added about half of them to the sausage soup I made. Terrific. White beans have a creamy texture and I liked how they complimented the soup's spicy sausage and its host of vegetables. 

2. Early this afternoon, I hit the road.  

As I closed in on the Rose Lake exit, I decided to take it and drive down Hiway 3 and enjoy the views of the Chain Lakes and the other scenic features of this drive.

As I neared the turnoff for Harrison, I decided to take it and go to the Harrison Creamery and Fudge Factory.  It was packed and might have been the happiest place on earth! (Well, almost as happy as Spain's locker room after their World Cup victory.) Lots of children had huge smiles as generous adults (parents? aunts? uncles? grandparents?) fulfilled their wishes for scoops in a bowl or on a cone. 

The youngsters working the counter maintained their cool and filled every order with good cheer while efficiently moving things along. 

As I stepped outside to enjoy my strawberry milk shake, I realized that I enjoy the Harrison Creamery for the scene, for the multitudes of adults, teens, and children happy to be eating ice cream and grateful for the large, shady deck adjacent to the shop. 

It reminded me of some of my favorite sessions at breweries back when I could drink craft beer. I enjoyed really busy breweries and brewpubs in Eugene, Portland, Spokane, Coeur d'Alene/Hayden, Maryland, Washington, DC, New York, and across the USA as Debbie and I went on our dog friendly brewery tour in 2021 with Gibbs. These places were full of happy people enjoying the beers' great flavors, people who were often happy to engage in conversations that always turned out to be fascinating. 

3. I left Harrison, returned to Hiway 3. and then hopped on to Hiway 5 in St. Maries. My driving today was made all the more enjoyable as I listened to Great Course lectures on 19th century Russian classical music and then to lectures on the early days of modern classical music featuring fascinating material on Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg. 

I interrupted my classroom in the Camry by waltzing into the CdA Casino for a fun session of spinning reels and left the casino with exactly the same amount of money in my wallet I walked in with. 

That was fun. 

In Coeur d'Alene, I fueled the Camry and stopped in Pilgrim's long enough to buy some dry bulk garbanzo and cranberry beans and some spicy buffalo wings cheddar cheese along with a couple other things, returned to being a pupil in the car, and headed back to Kellogg. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-18-2026: Iffy Memory, Beans, Happy Anniversary to Carol and Paul!

1. I spent time today over at goodreads.com updating my list of books I've read.

It was fun having so many memories come back about the books themselves and what I was doing when I both purchased and when I read these books. 

One kind of odd thing happened, though, and further proved to me that my memory is a wild and iffy aspect of my psyche. 

Just the other day, I mentioned to someone the fact that I read the list of books that Leah Sottile posted two years ago on her Substack, books she considered glaring omissions from the NYTimes list of the best 100 books of the 21st century. 

I read all the books Leah Sottile listed and I mentioned this accomplishment to someone not long ago and referred to the over twenty books that were on her list. 

OVER TWENTY? How and why did I think her list was that long?

Today I reviewed her list again. 

How many books are on it?

Fourteen! Not twenty. Not over twenty. Fourteen! 

It's weird how my memory can exaggerate things.  

I'm constantly on memory exaggeration watch, whether I'm checking my own memory or stories I hear others tell from theirs. 

Over twenty? 😕

2. It's so easy and so inexplicably satisfying. I am very happy that after too long of an absence I have returned to fixing beans from dry to cooked. 

Today: regular pinto and Great Northern white beans. 

I put about half of the white beans I cooked in the leftover sausage soup I made yesterday. 

3.  At 5:30, Molly, Zoe, Saphire, Carol, Paul, Cosette, Bucky Buchanan, Taylor, and I congregated on Carol and Paul's patio to celebrate Carol and Paul's 40th wedding anniversary. 

Molly, Zoe, Cosette, and Taylor combined their imaginative and culinary forces to prepare a grilled ribeye steak and grilled shrimp (on skewers) dinner with green beans. We opened with an artfully arranged and delicious charcuterie board that included cheeses, fruit, olives, asparagus, crackers, meat, nuts, and more. (I can't remember what those delicious food items on a skewer were.) We topped off our meal with a delicious lemon raspberry mousse -- it might have been called something else, but I'm in the ballpark. 

Before dessert, we watched a video made up of short videos. Cosette put out a call for friends and family to make a short video congratulating Carol and Paul on their milestone anniversary. The whole video was enjoyable and I especially loved seeing and hearing Debbie play the guitar and sing her hilarious rewritten version of Tom T. Hall's "I Love."

Three Beautiful Things 07-17-2026: Seeing Nature as Thou (Not It), Sausage Soup, Eating Hunted Game

 1. As I continue to read Robert Macfarlane's book, Is a River Alive?, my mind turns to Martin Buber. Buber distinguishes between I/Thou and I/It relationships between people. the I/It relationship turns people into things. A person gets objectified, robbed of basic humanity. The I/Thou relationship embodies respect, empathy, and recognition of another's intrinsic value. The I/It relationship uses others for personal gain. The I/Thou relationship is one of openness, listening, and mutual respect. 

Simply put, Macfarlane asserts that overall, we've turned the human relationship to the natural world into an I/It relationship. The natural world is a resource. Rivers, trees, fish, etc. are objects for our use and only have value as we humans determine what their value is. 

I haven't even reached page 100 of this book -- and Macfarlane never uses Buber's Thou/It contrast -- but already it's very clear that Macfarlane is urging his readers to see the natural world as a world we can listen to, empathize with, and treat not as a collection of objects, but as subjects possessing intrinsic value that exists before we humans assign value to it. 

In the reading I've done over the years about oceans, whales, eels, mountain lions, beavers, salmon, forests, rivers, mountains, and more, I've encountered Macfarlane's central thesis about the natural world before. 

But, the other reading I've done has not taken me to the places in the world, like the cloud-forests of northern Ecuador, Macfarlane is taking his readers and Macfarlane is making his case with language and by making connections that are unique to his experience and his style of writing. 

2. Because I can keep our house comfortable when the temperatures outside are so hot, I can enjoy hot coffee and hot soup. I made another sausage soup today and enjoyed it thoroughly. 

3. Reading Is a River Alive? in July of 2026 has transported me back to a book of essays I read some time after its publication in June of 1990. It's by Brenda Peterson and is entitled Living by Water: True Stories of Nature and Spirit. These essays unquestionably explore Peterson's understanding of the I/Thou dimensions of the human/world of nature relationship. 

I need to reread one essay of Peterson's that has stuck with me over the past thirty-five years. 

It's entitled "Growing Up Game". In it, Brenda Petersone recounts, with affection, her father's life as a hunter and how she grew up on game. As I just suggested, I'm going to reread the essay. But, as I remember, the thrust of this essay is how Peterson came to understand that hunting game doesn't necessarily mean objectifying the animal, of seeing the moose or elk or deer as an "It". 

In fact, as I remember, Peterson sees her experience of growing up dining on game as a spiritual one in addition to being a very satisfying experience for her physical senses and a source of nutrition for her body. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-16-2026: Eggs, Nature, Birthday Burgers

1. I have fun cooking two eggs many mornings. The transplant pros tell me that the safest way for me to prepare and eat eggs is to scramble them. Or make omelets. So, today I made a rice and zucchini scramble. I am forever grateful to Jeff Harrison. He introduced me to the rice omelet at the 5th Ave Brails Restaurant (formerly the Keystone Cafe) in Eugene. While I haven't yet replicated the omelet whipped up at Brails, I've had a blast experimenting with rice and scrambled eggs ever since. Every experiment, all safe ones, nothing outlandish, has worked! 

2. I enjoyed reading more of Is a River Alive? today. It's got my mind focused on how we might treat rivers and the whole world of nature differently if we regard nature subjectively along with objectively. Robert Macfarlane invites his readers into this exploration of the damage done in the natural world when nature is treated as comprising countless objects that are resources and his exploration into how we can also think of rivers and the world of nature as subjects to be regarded as alive and to be listened to. 

When I closed the book today, Macfarlane and three other people concerned with the health of the worlds' rivers were embarking on trek into the Ecuadorian cloud-forests. I'll learn more about what he and his companions observe when I return to the book. 

I'm grateful, by the way, that Auntie's Bookstore sponsors the Science/Nature book club I attend. Regarding Is a River Alive, I've read essays and books off and on over the past thirty-five to forty years about how humans, ranging from deep ecologists to industrialists, view the natural world and how those views shape the ways we both care for and damage, say, the oceans, rivers, forests, lakes, wetlands, etc. 

Thanks to this book club, I'm back to reading another book about this subject. 

Happily and solemnly. 

3. Carol and Paul will be celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary starting on Saturday and all three of their daughters, Molly, Zoe, and Cosette, have arrived in Kellogg to put on a party of Saturday. 

Today, we all participated in a different celebration: Zoe's birthday. 

Zoe's birthday was Wednesday, but this evening we had dinner together and enjoyed one another's company. 

Christy and I arrived about 5:30 and only had to bring ourselves. 

Soon we dove right into the dinner Zoe requested: grilled hamburgers, pasta salad, watermelon slices, and a dessert of angel food cake with whipped cream and raspberries. 

It was a lively time together. 

Bucky always ups the energy level in the room. 

It was fun being with Zoe, Molly, and Cosette again -- being able to see them all at once happens less and less as we all get older and our lives go in their different directions. 

I look forward to another get together on Saturday. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-15-2026: Lyrical Language and Rivers, An Uplifting Trip to Spokane, Small and Mighty Pleasures

 1. My reading life dropped off over the last week -- just had a lot going on. Today, however, I started reading our August selection for the book club at Auntie's, Is a River Alive? I read the book's prologue twice, not only to make sure I understood it, but also to enjoy the prose poetry of Robert Macfarlane's lyrical writing style, especially his attention to the sounds of words and to the almost metric rhythm of many of his sentences. Macfarlane is not alone as a lyrical writer about nature, but it's a great pleasure to read a writer like him who makes precise observations and raises compelling philosophical and ethical questions and demonstrates how such observations and inquiries can be expressed with devotion to the beauty of our language. 

2. Around 6:15 or so, I arrived in downtown Spokane and made my way to the Montvale Event Center for another Northwest Passages presentation. This evening's program featured Kendra Langford Shaw being interviewed by the Spokesman Review's Nick Gibson. They discussed Shaw's debut novel, The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos. 

The whole evening buoyed me. Gibson and Shaw's conversation was animated by good cheer and intelligent discussion. The questions Gibson asked drew out Shaw's joyful personality, her mighty intelligence, and her lively imagination. We learned about her large family's life in Alaska and later on a Montana ranch (farm?) and how these formative years and beyond informed Shaw's novel. She also told us about her work as a member of the city council in Billings, MT and why she wishes more storytellers would run for and win offices in local government. 

Just a reminder: Debbie and I decided that we would go to every Northwest Passages presentation we could, whether we'd heard of the writer or not. Was this ever a great idea! We were both unfamiliar with Willy Vlautin and Craig Johnson and thoroughly enjoyed the interviews with them -- and now I'm hooked on Willy Vlautin. I'd never heard of Kendra Langford Shaw and came into tonight's program totally ignorant about her story and the story of her novel. 

I sure made the right decision to drive over to Spokane this evening. 

And I bought Langford's book and am eager to read it. 

3. Ah! The small pleasures in life. 

A can of Athletic Brewing's terrific non-alcoholic Easy IPA at the event this evening. 

On my way back to Kellogg, I stopped in at Pete and Belle's 1330 N. Argonne Rd, for ice cream. 

I ordered two scoops in a dish. 

1. Exhausted Parent: Bourbon-spiked espresso ice cream swirled with bittersweet chocolate chunks. 

2. Heaps of Love: Oreos, brownies, cookie dough, pecan, caramel, and chocolate ripples all packed into vanilla ice cream. 

It worked. 

Majorly!