Three Beautiful Things 02-11-2026: Getting Out Again, Lunch and Reels, Dream Pop Group Luna Takes Me Back to LCC

 1. Driving to Spokane yesterday, navigating the night driving just fine, and feeling so much better being out and about than I had felt at home inspired me, on the spur of the moment, early this afternoon, to drive to the Coeur d'Alene Casino and enjoy lunch and spin some reels for an hour or so and drive back home. I felt great the whole time. 

2. I ate a simple and very satisfying lunch: beef stew, garlic bread, and a half a garden salad. I then had a fun time playing a variety of machines (low stakes, as always) and managed to come home with a little more money in my wallet than I left with. I did what I can to protect myself and others against illness. I masked up and wore vinyl gloves while on the casino floor. 

It was all very relaxing and I had an easy drive home. 

3. With some intensity, I've been listening to classical music daily, usually for hours at a time, and I've been listening to a lecture series, doing my best to learn how to listen to and understand this magnificent music. 

Today, I took a day off. 

I returned to a LoFi subgenre sometimes called Dream Pop and listened to one of my favorite albums, Luna's Bewitched. The subjects of several of the songs are low energy slackers. They actually remind me of some of the guys I got to know, especially at LCC, in the classes I taught starting 35+ years ago. Nice guys. Mellow.  Non-committal. Wanting to get along, enjoy music, play hacky sack, toss frisbees, smoke weed, eat shrooms, go to shows, play around a little with ideas in class, but, all in all, pretty much coasting. They were chill. Those with dogs treated them very well. 

Sometimes some of these guys would drop out and then reappear again and, in many cases, something clicked. They'd become hungry for something more than chillin' and slackin' and started to add some seriousness to their lives.  

They taught me a lot, without knowing they did, about being young, male, and a bit at bay -- cagey enough to find ways to get by -- get food, fuel, weed, digs, cds, cassettes, into shows -- and I found myself not wanting to set them straight with proclamations about "when I was your age", but actually you know, I envied them a little bit. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-10-2026: Marshalling Energy, Unexpectedly Superb Conversations, The Concert

 1. Today, for about eight hours, I fervently hoped that I would feel energetic and well enough to drive to Gonzaga University to attend this evening's Gonzaga Symphony. I ate a huge breakfast. I rested. I napped. I did all I could to charge my inward batteries.

I succeeded. 

By about 4:00 or so I felt a surge of confidence that I could make the drive, be awake enough to enjoy the concert, and return home safely. 

My confidence was warranted and I arrived plenty early to the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, purchased a snack, drank a bottle of water, and found the seat I had purchased for this concert. 

2. My good fortune increased when the woman whose seat was next to mine asked me if I was connected to anyone playing in the Gonzaga Symphony.

I replied, "No. I just love music. How about you?"

She replied, "No. I play violin in the Spokane Symphony."

It was about ten or fifteen minutes before the concert began, and we had a superb conversation about the Spokane Symphony's program on Jan 31, books, theater, Shakespeare, music, movies, Slings and Arrows, and other stimulating and fascinating topics until the conductor strode to the podium. 

We visited more at the intermission, making this a most unexpectedly satisfying evening. I thoroughly enjoyed these two conversations completely focused on the arts and nothing else. 

We didn't learn a single thing about each other on a personal level, aside from learning about books we'd read, music we'd listened to, movies we'd seen, and a little bit about our professional lives -- mine as an instructor, hers as a musician. 

So rare. 

3. I loved the concert. 

The orchestra was, at least to me, huge, and most of the musicians were students, joined by some professional musicians to help fill out sections that needed them. 

I enjoyed the youth of this orchestra and enjoyed their verve and spiritedness as they played Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Saint-Saens. All three compositions, The Overture to Don Giovanni, Night on Bald Mountain, and Danse Bachanale, were energetic, fun to listen to (and must have been fun to play), and made the first half of the concert full of vitality and energy. 

The second half of the concert delivered not only profound vitality, but exquisite virtuosity. 

It featured one of the world's very finest violinists, Gil Shaham, as the violin soloist in Brahms' gorgeous Violin Concerto in D Major. 

I'd love to be able to describe Gil Shaham's command of the violin and his enthusiastic playing of Brahms' masterpiece, but I don't have words. 

All I can really say is this: over the week or so preceding this concert, I listened repeatedly to this concerto on Spotify. I wanted to gain some familiarity with it -- I'd never listened to it before -- and those many listenings paid off as I was able to follow the concerto fairly well and anticipate a bit of what lay ahead as the piece progressed. 

I felt especially profound job being in a concert hall, hearing this concerto live. 

I shook inside hearing Brahms' concerto filling the concert hall. The live orchestra in support of Gil Shaham's masterful performance made the whole experience rich, full, and gorgeous and I simply did not want this concerto to end. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-09-2026: I Live With a Mild Common Cold x 3

 Debbie read in my blog that I was living with a low level common cold and asked how I was doing. 

I answered:

1. No coughing. 

2. Infrequent sneezing and nose blowing. Breathing passages almost 100% clear.

3. Low energy. 

So, the most ambitious thing I did today was unload and load the dishwasher about three times, taking care of the dishes I used to prep food for the Super Bowl. 

Otherwise, I fed my cold, took a few naps, listened to music, worked puzzles, and read some articles. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-07-2026: Fatigue, Fixing Food for the Super Bowl, Seattle Wins and So Do I!

 1.I'm tired. I'm going to keep this one short. I've been living with a minor common cold the last couple of days: Some coughing, sneezing off and on, never quite reached sore throat level, but mostly I've been wanting to rest and sleep. 

2.I did my best to marshal enough energy to make a Greek Salad Layered Dip and chicken wings, both buffalo and naked, to take to our Super Bowl family dinner. I struggled in the kitchen with mismeasurements, dropped utensils, and a tired back, but I completed my assignments and Paul, Carol, and Christy all said they enjoyed what I made. I was anxious since I seemed to be sleepwalking while I cooked. 

3. I enjoyed what the others made: flourless crackers, spinach artichoke dip, buffalo chicken dip, vegetable plate, deviled eggs, and whatever else I've forgotten. 

It's been ten years since I've watched a Super Bowl. It, too, was a family gathering. Debbie and I watched Denver defeat Carolina with Molly and Hiram. 

So, even though I've lost interest in football, it was fun being with Christy, Paul, and Carol. I've always enjoyed strong defensive efforts by teams, and today, Seattle certainly scratched that itch. 

I also enjoyed winning the wager I laid down Wednesday and look forward to returning to Spokane Tribe Casino to pick up my $143.50! 

Three Beautiful Things 02-07-2026: Spokane Public Radio Appointment Listening, Preparing to Cook Tomorrow, A Sustaining Soup Tonight

1, On the weekends now, when I can, I have two appointment radio listening times, both on Spokane Public Radio's classical music station. 

On Saturday at noon, the station airs a program called "Concert of the Week" featuring a recorded version of a local classical performance from the previous week. 

Today, the featured concert was the symphony performance I attended a week ago at the Fox Theater.

Listening to it today moved me again. I enjoyed taking all of the music more deeply into myself. 

I also appreciated the power of having heard the concert live, in person. 

The music itself resonated in the Fox Theater powerfully, at times making me feel like I was in a cathedral. That particular experience couldn't, nor would I expect it to, be duplicated in our living room with the music coming over mediocre speakers. 

The other appointment listening for me comes on at 10:00 Sunday morning. It's Leonard Oakland's two  hour program called. "Morning Classical with Leonard Oakland". 

I was a student of Leonard's at Whitworth and during the two years I taught full time at Whitworth (nearly forty-four years ago) he was the chair of the English Dept and an important mentor to me. 

We were also friends. 

So, yes, I thoroughly enjoy Leonard's choices of music and enjoy his poetry moment. 

I also enjoy hearing his voice, experiencing his mind at work again, and having the double pleasure of enjoying him in the moment and being transported to my days in his company  at Whitworth decades ago. 

2.  I lost interest in football about ten years ago or so. I enjoy making an ah what the heck wager on the Super Bowl like I did on Wednesday, but each year I no longer plan on watching the game. 

But, Carol is in charge of Super Bowl Sunday's family dinner and she decided to assign us all Super Bowl snack food to bring and we'll have the game on with the option of watching it or not while we nosh away.  

She assigned me to bring chicken wings and a Greek dip, so I spent some time today making sure I have party wings on hand (I do) and then filling out an order at Walmart to include items I need to make the dip. 

It will be an easy food prep day tomorrow and I look forward to enjoying our food and seeing how I respond to being in the presence of a football game again. It's been quite a while! 

3. When I was checking out our party wing supply in the basement freezer, I looked at quarts of turkey stock/broth Debbie had made and decided I would make a soup with one of the quarts tonight. 

I decided that the broth would be the only meat in the soup and that I'd like the vegetables to be in larger chunks than I usually fix.

So, I thawed the turkey broth. I cooked chopped white onion and celery together and then added sliced mushrooms and before long I added the broth/stock, chopped russet potatoes, and pretty good sized chunks of carrots. 

I salt and peppered the soup, let it cook until the vegetables were tender, ladled myself a bowl, and decided I'd like the soy goodness of Bragg's Liquid Aminos as another seasoning. 

That worked. 

The soup worked. 

It warmed me as I live with a low grade cold. 

I've been eating a lot of soup lately and it's definitely feeding my body and my soul. 

That works, too. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-06-2026: Quick Stuffed Pepper Soup, An Hour at The Lounge, Debbie Called and Sent Me Pet Pictures

 1. I had one red pepper stuffed with cinnamon, cumin, and cloves seasoned ground lamb along with onion, garlic, roasted slivered almonds and basmati rice left over from Sunday's dinner and I made a terrific soup with it. It was simple. I sauteed chopped onion and celery and added some sliced mushrooms. I took the stuffing out of the stuffed pepper, put the stuffing on top of the onion, celery, and mushrooms and then chopped up the pepper and added it to the sauté pan. 

In a pot, I fixed chicken Better than Boullion and when it was all combined and nearly boiling and when the ingredients in the sauté pan were ready, I combined everything in the pot and let it slow cook for a while. 

I was especially happy with the wealth of flavor the cinnamon, cumin, and cloves gave this soup and loved how the vegetables and meat worked together. 

2. Before dinner, I enjoyed a relaxing session with Ed at the Lounge. He'll be a volunteer official at the Elks' Idaho State Hoop Shoot in Wallace tomorrow and has a fun Super Bowl party planned with Darren, Erica, and other family in Post Falls. 

I found out today that our family dinner will be at least loosely connected to the Super Bowl and so we are all bringing snacky foods to munch on and we'll at least keep an eye on the football game. 

3. Debbie and I talked some more today. It was a great visit just chatting about comings and goings in Valley Cottage and I enjoyed reporting how much I enjoyed the Northwest Passages event I attended last night in place of the phantom symphony. 

Debbie sleeps in a room in Adrienne's basement and two animals, the cat Hazel and the dog Huckleberry like to join Debbie. Tonight Hazel, the cat was with Debbie until Huck entered the room. 

Debbie took a picture of each of them and texted them to me. 

They are lovely animals. 

I loved seeing those pictures.    

Three Beautiful Things 02-05-2026: I Came to the Symphony Five Days Early, I Stayed for Tonight's Event, Wow! What a Stimulating Accident!

1. I do not do well with the last minute. If I can, I'll arrive at movies early, finish my cooking for family dinner early, come to the airport really early, and so on. In that spirit, I arrived at Gonzaga University around 6:15 for tonight's 7:30 Gonzaga Symphony performance. 

When I arrived, the scene around the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center puzzled me. 

The parking lots were nearly full. 

More people than I expected were strolling into the building.

Once in the lobby, the number of people hanging out and the number of people walking into the performance hall to be seated gob smacked me. 

I took out my phone. 

I opened my Google Wallet. 

I checked my ticket. 

I laughed at myself. 

I arrived for the symphony concert several days early. 

The Gonzaga Symphony will play on February 10. 

My sometimes confused -- maybe addled? -- mind was at it again. 

2. I asked a person wearing an official looking pair of slacks, vest, and name tag on a lanyard what was happening this evening. 

"It's a book event," she answered and when I joked that I had come early for the symphony, she chuckled and said, "Well, why don't you go over there and buy a ten dollar ticket and attend. It's supposed to be very good."

So I did.

Then I realized what I'd stumbled into. 

Tonight was the next in the Spokesman Review's series of conversations with authors called Northwest Passages. 

I attended two Northwest Passages events in 2025, I'd seen publicity for tonight's event, but I'd forgotten <clears throat> that it was tonight. 

So, I purchased a bottle of water, found a seat, and prepared to listen to Spokane writer Jess Walter interview David Guterson, the author of Snow Falling on Cedars, about his new novel Evelyn in Transit. 

3. I can't remember <clears throat> ever having my sometimes scrambled mind work in my favor so well. 

I loved this event.

Jess Walter interviewed David Guterson with wit, intelligence, insight, and generosity. 

He led Guterson to talk about his book as if they were members of the ideal book club.

Guterson discussed his lifelong engagement with the eternal questions of life: What is the meaning of life? What is a well-lived life? How do we make our way as flawed persons in a fallen world? I understood his low-key, humble, unassuming ponderings to be spiritual, existential, and ongoing. He asks questions of himself and the world we live in not looking for answers, but as a way of continuing to search, to dig, to remain open to possibilities, self-revision, and surprise. And he works to keep it light. Guterson discussed that he is careful to compliment the seriousness of his writing with humor, hoping that his readers will never think he is imposing either certainty or a way of seeing the world upon them, but is opening the way for readers to join him in his searching, through the stories he tells. 

To my utter delight, Guterson and Walters discussed the inseparable relationship between the characters and worlds they imagine and bring to life and the music of their language, how the music of their language, that is, their writing style, changes to meet the demands of the characters they develop and the worlds these characters inhabit. 

If you'd like to read a summary of Guterson's novel, a quick online search can take care of that. 

Before too long, this program will be available on YouTube along with most of the other Northwest Passages programs, including when Kenton Bird discussed the book about Tom Foley he co-wrote with John C. Pierce. That event is here:  Northwest Passages: Kenton Bird, author of "Tom Foley, The Man In The Middle"

Three Beautiful Things 02-04-2026: A Fortunate Comeback, Reservations, Preparing for the Gonzaga Symphony

 1. Three times a year, Ed and I head over to the Spokane Tribe Casino to put down modest wagers on the Super Bowl, March Madness, and both of the NCAA basketball championship tournaments. I won a wager in 2025 by betting on UConn's women's team. 

Sometimes others who like to wager and play machines join us. One year it was Buff and Darren. Today, it was Jake. 

I had a very relaxing, fun, and even a delicious day today. Once I laid a bet on the Seahawks to win on Sunday, I scrambled over to the coffee stand and ordered a terrific latte and a most pleasing thick slice of banana bread with nuts. 

Then I hit the machines and they humbled me. After a while, I'd spent the money I brought to play with. 

I hadn't heard from Jake or Ed and figured they must have been doing better and I decided to take a chance. I decided to go from playing to gambling. I withdrew some added bank from an ATM machine. 

My luck reversed. 

After a while I got a text from Ed that he and Jake were in the sports bar area.

I figured it was time for lunch. 

And guess what! I dug myself out of the hole I'd been in and was now actually ahead.

My decision to throw a little caution to the wind, luckily, panned out.

My smashburger, fries, and zero alcohol Heineken beer all tasted especially good in light of my comeback and good fortune! 

2. Speaking of casinos, today, the guys and I who join up twice a year for two or three nights at the Wildhorse Resort and Casino in Pendleton were able to nail down dates for this spring's trip. That casino has become a very busy place and we couldn't get rooms in late March or early April. But we learned rooms were available at the end of April and so we will make our trip then. 

Right now the resort has one tower hotel and are in the process of building a second. 

Good thing! 

It looks like there is plenty of demand to make having two hotels a worthwhile development. 

3. I didn't just wager, play machines, and book myself a Wildhorse room today. 

I also bought a ticket to hear the Gonzaga Symphony play on campus on Thursday, Feb. 5th. 

The concert will close with legendary violinist Gil Shaham as the featured soloist joining the symphony for a performance of Brahm's Violin Concerto in D Major. 

As I've mentioned before, I started listening to classical music in the 8th grade by repeatedly listening to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in my upstairs bedroom. I also loved listening, on that same album, to his American in Paris. 

So from way back then, in about1968, to the fall and winter of 2025 into 2026, I had paid little attention to Johannes Brahms. 

Therefore, this evening, I've begun to do my best to familiarize myself with Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major in preparation (maybe anticipation is a better word) for (of) the concert at Gonzaga. 

I'll listen to this concerto some more at home before I leave for Spokane and I'll listen to it some more while I drive over. 

It's a stirring concerto and the other compositions are also full of vitality. 

I'll hear: 

Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni

Mussorgsky Night on Bald Mountain (You might remember this piece from the movie Fantasia.) 

Saint-Saens Danse Bacchanale 

Three Beautiful Things 02-03-2026: Dental Cleaning, Talked with Debbie, Slowing Down

 1.  Without a trace of irony or sarcasm in my voice, let me say that I started the day on a high note. I strolled down the street to the dentist's office. Today's cleaning went beautifully. There were no problems with my teeth. I had the pleasure of having my mouth feel sparkly and fresh. 

2. Debbie called and I had an uncomplicated tax question for her and she updated me on how the first three weeks of February are shaping up for her and Adrienne's family. We shot the breeze about this and that, very enjoyably. This morning that started off so positively got even better, thanks to this phone call.

3. I slowed down my listening to The Great Course I'm taking to learn much more about listening to and understanding classical music. I listened again to Prof. Greenberg's first lecture on Beethoven's 5th Symphony. I might go back and listen to this lecture yet again. The lecture I'm trying to absorb focuses on the first movement of the Beethoven's Fifth. 

Beethoven composed the first movement in sonata form and as Greenberg presents his analysis of this most famous first movement, he draws upon terminology that he explained in a previous lecture. It's all new to me, words like exposition, development, recapitulation, cadence, and others. I'm trying to become more familiar with these terms and gain a deeper appreciation for how Beethoven follows the demands of the sonata form and how he bends the form, improvises, and composes music being more faithful to his own self-expression than to the form itself. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-02-2026: It's a CD Set!, Big News in the World of Wordle, I Created a Fun and Tasty Soup

 1. Upon closer inspection today, I discovered that the discs I bought from Better World Books were not DVDs. They are CDs. Ha! Now I can listen to the lectures about understanding music by either clicking on my audible app or putting a cd into my Blu-ray player. I guess I'll keep the CDs around in case audible buys the farm one day. 

2. I decided quite a while ago when playing Wordle not to use words that had already been solutions. Every morning, I created a tab that opened up a website featuring a list of all past Wordle answers. I vetted all my guesses using this list. 

Today, word came across the ticker tape of the World Wide Web that, starting today, Wordle will start reusing past solutions to be solutions again. I assume recycled solutions will pop up irregularly. 

No problem. I'll enjoy playing this version of Wordle just as much as when the game didn't repeat answers. 

I just need to always keep in mind that sloving on the sixth guess is a win and continue in my mission not to judge myself if I don't solve the puzzle quickly and need as many six tries. 

3. I had leftover chicken soup in the fridge that had no chicken pieces. Last night, I didn't have enough filling for six peppers, so I stuffed the sixth pepper with some of the surplus basmati rice I cooked. 

I decided to make a soup combining the chicken soup, leftover rice I put in a container last night, and the steamed red pepper, sliced, that was filled with plain rice. I put the pepper's rice in the soup, too. 

I seasoned the soup with liquid aminos.

It worked and made me think I might invent a soup using the one stuffed pepper I still have, one stuffed with the lamb mixture I made for family dinner last night. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-01-2025: Fixing Lamb Stuffed Bell Peppers, A Delicious Family Dinner, Gonzaga Symphony on Thursday

1. Last Sunday, Christy's plan (hope?) was to serve shepherd's pie at family dinner. Its featured meat is lamb. When she found ground lamb at one of the stores, she concluded it was too expensive and so she bought ground beef and we had cottage pie. 

Debbie bought a pound of ground lamb several months ago and I have repeatedly seen it in our freezer. Had I known Christy could have used it last week, I would have donated it to the family dinner fund (ha ha -- there isn't such a thing). 

Instead, I decided as tonight's host that I would make something with the lamb and decided Mediterranean stuffed bell peppers would be good. 

I thawed out the frozen lamb.

I chopped a white onion and minced four garlic cloves and cooked them for about five minutes. 

I added the lamb and cooked the aromatics and the lamb together until the lamb browned. 

I finished cooking a pot of basmati rice and soon I added ground cloves, cinnamon, and cumin along with two chopped tomatoes and tomato paste and golden raisins and toasted almond slivers to the lamb, onion, and garlic mixture. 

After the lamb cooked for about five more minutes, enhanced by the above ingredients, I added the rice to the stuffing. 

I cut the tops off the peppers and pulled out the seed and other stuff inside and then stuffed the peppers with the meat, aromatics, tomatoes, and other ingredients.

I placed the stuffed peppers in the bottom of the Dutch oven, poured water in the bottom, and put it in the oven, lid on, for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees. 

2. Christy brought a delicious Carpaccio for an appetizer and Carol made a Greek salad to go with the stuffed peppers. Our focus was Mediterranean and we succeeded through our shared effort to produce a very good meal. 

After tweeking our family schedule for the next couple of months a bit, we enjoyed talking about books and learned news about some people around the Silver Valley. I couldn't stop myself from saying a few things about last night's concert. Paul talked about plans for the fall production at the theater (I don't know if the fall play is public knowledge so, for now, I'll hold it in confidence). 

I hadn't made stuffed peppers before and was happy my idea to make them in a Mediterranean style worked out. I wanted classical music to play during our time together, but I didn't want to have on surging symphonies or blazing concert. 

Instead, I put on a playlist of Mozart's piano sonatas, and this music provided a tranquil and virtuosic backdrop for our time together this evening. 

3. At 10:00 this morning, Leonard Oakland hosted his two hour classical music program. At some point, he announced that the Gonzaga Symphony will be playing at the university on Thursday evening. The program will feature violinist Gil Shaham, unknown to me until Leonard's announcement about the concert, and now I know he his highly regarded and is a Grammy award winner. 

I'll be there Thursday as long as nothing comes up to prevent me from going. 

I'm especially stoked that Gil Shaham will be featured as the soloist for Brahm's Violin Concerto in D Major. The rest of the program looks great: Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Saint-Saens. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-31-2026: Soulful Soups and Spirits, Jess Walter on the Music of Language, A Concert of Contrasts

1. When I need to drive into downtown Spokane, I have a much easier and enjoyable time if I arrive while it's still light. I had a ticket to tonight's scintillating Spokane Symphony concert and I arrived in the vicinity of the Fox Theater well in advance of the concert -- in daylight. 

I easily found parking on Jefferson near the Railroad Alley and, as I expected, in order to pay for my parking, I needed to use my phone, follow online instructions, and type in credit card information. 

The late afternoon light helped me succeed. 

My spot was just a couple of blocks from the theater and just a block from Soulful Soups and Spirits where I would eat a light dinner. 

The last time I visited S. 111 Madison, I was with Patrick and Meagan and we enjoyed drinking cider together at what was then the One Tree Cider tasting room -- now relocated to its production warehouse just east of Division/Ruby at 125 E. Ermina. 

I very much enjoyed the bowl of tomato basil soup accompanied by a house salad I ordered. Unfortunately, I arrived between when Soulful Soup ran out of bread and when their next batch would be coming out of the oven and be cooled off enough to slice. 

No problem. 

I'll try their bread next time and I'll treat myself to a different soup and, over time, try as many of their soups as I can. 

2. Even though I went to the lecture on Thursday for this concert, I wanted to hear whatever the conductor had to say in his pre-concert lecture tonight. 

Spokane writer Jess Walter was going to be narrating the guide to the orchestra as the concert's finale and he and Conductor James Rowe had a fun and insightful conversation about the similarities between music and language, whether spoken or written. 

I've spent a bit of time on this blog writing some of my thoughts about the musical nature of language and the terrific comments Jess Walter made helped reassure me that my comments were at least in the ballpark! 

3. In his Great Course lectures, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, Professor Robert Greenberg frequently returns to the point that many, if not most, classical composers structure their work around contrasts, whether contrasts in tempo, feeling, key signature, instrumentation, or other elements of a musical piece. 

I thought tonight's program featured very enjoyable contrasts between the different compositions. 

William Walton's opening piece featured a full orchestra playing lush and full-throated reimaginings of melodies originally composed by J. S. Bach.

The Fox Theater then started to feel like a church or a cathedral as the Spokane Chorale sang the Thomas Tallis piece that became the foundation for two small orchestras, one in the balcony, as they played Ralph Vaughan Williams' deeply emotional and spiritual reworking of Tallis' melody into his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Without a break, the smaller orchestra moved right into Paul Hindemith's mournful Trauermusik, a composition Hindemith wrote in six hours the day after the death of King George V for the BBC Orchestra to play the next day to express the grief of the nation. The Spokane Chorale then immediately deepened the sense of us being in a house of worship by singing Bach's "Vor deinen Thron tret' ich hiermit" or "I humbly come to your throne,/O God! and humbly beg you:/Do not turn your gracious face away/from me the poor sinner."

When the chorale ended its performance, the house lights went out and I felt like I was in a Compline service. The hall was absolutely silent and we all entered into a meditative, even prayerful, state and after a bit it became appropriate to applaud this moving series of soulful compositions. 

Then another contrast took shape as the second half of the program was much lighter.

It opened with Grace Williams' Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes and the concert came to a fun and a stirring end as the orchestra played Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to Orchestra and we heard Jess Walter reading his reworking of the original narration, making it a Pacific Northwest guide. It was great fun as each section of the orchestra came to represent a different part of the northwest. 

If you'd like to hear this concert, it will be replayed on KSFC-FM radio next Saturday, Feb. 7 at noon. You can stream KSFC by going to spokanepublicradio.org and clicking on the All Streams box and picking SPR Classical. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-30-2026: Preparing for Family Dinner, Cool Old Man Status (Maybe), A Simple Chicken Soup

1. I am hosting family dinner on Sunday and going to hear the Spokane Symphony on Saturday, so just to get a little bit ahead of myself, I started cleaning the house and doing laundry today. I am very slow at this, but I vacuumed the living room and used the little green machine thing to spot clean some spots on the rug. 

2.I realized today that now I'm one of those old men I used to talk to in bars when I was a young man. I'd leave the bar, whether alone or with others, and comment, saying something like, "That old guy was pretty cool." 

Ed and I met at The Lounge around 4 this afternoon and had some back and forth with a man and a woman who usually come into The Lounge later in the evening when the clientele is younger -- well, younger than Ed and me. 

Ed made them laugh and things were fun between us. The guy said to the woman that they'd have to come in more often around 3 or 4 o'clock and I wondered if maybe they stepped outside and said something like, "Those old guys were pretty cool."

3. All I had to do when I got home to make a delicious dinner that was light and warmed me was heat vegetable and sesame oil in the Dutch oven, toss in chopped celery and carrots, a half a white onion in rings, and about four chicken breast tenders. Later I added sliced mushroom and when these items had cooked up I added three potatoes sliced, some broccoli, corn kernels, and a quart of chicken broth.  

I salted and peppered the soup, cooked everything until tender, avoiding mushiness, and ladled myself two bowls of this soup and added Braggs liquid ammino to each bowl. 

Simple and satisfying.  

Three Beautiful Things 01-29-2026: Debbie Called, I Loved a Lecture in Spokane, My Better World Books Order Surprised Me --Blissfully

1. Not long after I returned home this afternoon from Spokane, Debbie called. She and Adrienne's family have weathered the heavy snow and frigid temperatures in Valley Cottage, NY well. School was only closed one day this week. Debbie witnessed snow plows working the street they live on regularly. They didn't lose their power. This was all good news. 

Last week, Patrick had flown on business to Portland from Cincinnati and his flight out of Portland last Friday was delayed because of the snow and ice in Cincinnati. Debbie wasn't sure exactly when he arrived back in Cincinnati, but he's home now. 

Meagan sent out two pictures from their Cincinnati apartment. The main water line to their apartment building broke this morning and, in one picture, Patrick is melting snow so they can flush their toilet.  They can look down on the Ohio River from their apartment, and the other picture is of sheets of ice floating down the mighty Ohio. 

2. I guess it's obvious that I enjoy public lectures.

After all, I'm spending a couple or three hours a day listening to a series of forty-eight lectures on classical music. 

At noon today, for the second time this month, I drove to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and attended the Spokane Symphony's music director and conductor's lecture on the concert the Symphony will play this weekend. 

As with James Lowe's lecture I attended a couple of weeks ago, I loved his presentation today. 

This weekend's program is called Stolen Melodies and features how composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Paul Hindemith, and Grace Williams reworked pieces written by earlier composers and transformed them into works of their own. 

The concert will close with Spokane writer Jess Walters giving his own take on the narration to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. 

By playing recorded excerpts from these works and commenting on them and by going on a couple of enjoyable digressions, the first dealing with modern musicians playing centuries old works on period instruments and the second on Welsh language, James Lowe prepared us splendidly for the program coming up this weekend. 

3. Just as I was getting ready to leave this morning for Spokane, two packages arrived from Better World Books. 

Gibbs rarely pees in the house, but for some reason he did so last week just one time and dampened the book I bought at Booktraders, so I ordered a replacement. 

I made another order and didn't quite understand what I ordered but was pumped to discover what I paid for. 

This lecture series about classical music I'm listening to has a coursebook to accompany it.

I thought this coursebook was in six volumes since what I ordered was in six parts. 

But, no, the coursebook is a single volume. 

The other five parts are DVDs of the lectures! 

Just for the record, taken together, before sales tax and a minimal shipping cost, the book and DVD cost $8.20. 

And they are in pristine shape. I think they are brand new. 

Now I have the lectures to listen to on audible, the lectures outlined and highlighted in the coursebook, and I have them on a bunch of DVDs to watch on our television when I want to. 

I entered a whole new world of ignorance is bliss today. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-28-2026: I Have Spokane Symphony Plans, Closing Gaps, Laughing at Mittens and Tabitha and the NYC Alley Cats

 1. The Spokane Symphony's program this weekend includes a composition I wrote about a while back. It's one of the pieces that always moves me to stop whatever I'm doing and stare, soul-struck into the the great beyond. It's Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis". I first heard it in January of 1996. I was with a woman with whom I would be a classical music traveler for just over a year and both of us were visibly moved when the Eugene Mozart Players closed that concert with this Vaughan Williams masterpiece. 

It holds musical, spiritual, and nostalgic value for me. 

Not only will the Spokane Symphony play Williams' stirring fantasia, they will also play the tune Thomas Tallis composed, the theme Williams borrowed from to create his own piece. 

I planned to go to The Fox on Sunday and attend the matinee performance.

I accidentally bought a ticket, however, for the Saturday night concert.

My plan was to avoid driving back to Kellogg in the late evening, but I'm going brace myself, enjoy the concert, and make the drive I had hoped to avoid. 

(By the way, on Thursday, January 29th, I'll drive to Spokane in the morning and attend the lecture about this concert being given at the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture at noon.)

2. It hit me hard today, as I listened to Prof. Greenberg lecture on two musical forms, the symphony and the concerto, that I really haven't focused much of my listening to classical music on either Franz Haydn or Wolfgang Mozart. In the last handful of lectures I've listened to, Greenberg has rhapsodized about both of these giants of the Classical Period and has worked to explain the unique genius of both artists. 

I am on the verge of ecstasy that I decided to listen to the 48 lectures of this Great Course. I'm just over halfway through the course and am especially stoked that my inexplicable neglect of Haydn and Mozart is becoming a thing of the past. 

3. I am grateful for Artificial Intelligence making it possible for their creators to bring Tabitha and Mitten's adventures to life at Tabby Topics and for making it possible for me to keep up with the ongoing storylines over at NYC Alley Cats. 

I watch them on Facebook. 

They make me laugh -- and when they pop up, so do the cat podcasters. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-27-2026: Listening with Memory and High School Algebra, Walking for a Little Cash, An Example: Music Expressing for Me What My Words Cannot

1. Teaching English composition required me to do my best to teach students how to read attentively and critically. Much of the writing I assigned grew out of books and essays I assigned the students to read. 

I tried to encourage the students to read with memory, to do their best to keep in mind what they had read in the book or essay under study and how the writer moved us to whatever place we were at in later stages of the book. 

Now I am finding that the more I can listen to a symphony or sonata or any other form of music with memory, the more I can appreciate patterns, departures and returns, contrasts, tempo changes, changes in mood, and other aspects of the piece. 

I find this very difficult. 

I tend to listen to music with a strong focus on what's happening in the moment I'm in while listening.

As a result, as I listen to Professor Greenberg tell me to remember a passage of music from the opening of the composition we are currently studying, it's not there for me. 

I don't remember it, even if I heard it just a few minutes ago. 

I'm trying to listen to music similar to how I read. I am trying to be involved in the moment while at the same time listening with memory, remembering what has come before. 

Listening to these lectures has also reminded me of my experience taking algebra my first two years in high school. 

When I watched my teachers work out algebra problems on the blackboard, it all made sense to me, but I could never do it well on my own. 

Likewise, when Professor Goldberg plays a piece of music and calls out when one feature of the composition's form ends and another feature begins, it makes perfect sense to me. But on my own, as I listen to classical music on the radio or on Spotify, I cannot make those determinations. 

I'm hoping in time and with more experience I will be able to do this. 

I hope listening with some analytical ability to great music won't be another algebra experience for me! 

2. The weather turned a bit warmer today. I'd bought a five dollar scratch off lottery ticket at Yoke's the other day. I scratched away and won fifteen dollars. 

Nice weather. A few bucks to go pick up. I took my first outdoor walk in months today up to the Gondolier to redeem my ticket.

I needed that walk. 

It felt good and I look forward to the possibility that it will help me sleep better tonight. 

3. I wrote a few days ago that instrumental (and probably choral) music often expresses how I see, think, and feel about things better than my own words can. 

Year of Wonder, the book of daily classical music pieces Christy gave me for Christmas/my birthday featured a composition on January 15 that illustrates what I mean.

Its title is "Quartet for the End of Time", written by French composer Olivier Messiaen, and the book's author, Clemency Burton-Hill, has us listen to its fifth movement entitled, "Praise be to the eternity of Jesus."

When France fell to Germany in 1940, the thirty-one year old Messiaen, serving as a medical auxillary, not a combatant, was captured and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A in Germany. 

He befriended a clarinet player as well as a cellist and a violinist. 

With the help of a sympathetic prison guard, he acquired manuscript paper and pencils and wrote the "Quartet for the End of Time" for piano, clarinet, cello, and violin. 

The prison had a terribly out of tune piano and the musicians secured a clarinet, cello, and violin, unkempt and third hand. 

The musicians performed "Quartet for the End of Time" in freezing conditions on compromised instruments to an audience of prisoners and guards. 

Here's how Burton-Hill described the performance in her January 15th essay on "Quartet for the End of Time":

Playing battered, makeshift and out-of-tune instruments, the musicians premiered the work on the evening of 15 January 1941, outdoors. There was rain falling and snow on the ground. Reports vary on how many fellow prisoners of war were in the audience that evening but it seems somewhere between 150 and 400 French, German, Polish, and Czech men from all strata of society huddled together in their threadbare uniforms, on which was stitched 'K.G.' or 'Kriegsgefangene', meaning prisoner of war. One audience member later recalled, 'We were all brothers.'

 I don't have adequate words to express what I think and feel about the forceful capture of persons, separating them from family members, displacing them to prisons (or camps) (or detention centers), and subjecting them to misery, whether we are talking about what happened in the 1940s or is happening in 2025-26. 

This fifth movement expresses my thoughts and feelings far better than any words I possess. 

If you'd like to listen to it, go here.  

If you'd like to listen to the entire composition, go here. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-26-2026: Tubing and Jethro Tull and J. S. Bach, Dance Music Written for Listening Not Dancing, A Brothy Potato Soup

1. Both years I went to North Idaho College, my experience with the world of music increased substantially thanks to John Soini, especially when we were trailer mates our sophomore year. 

Now, before going to college, I'd had one experience with Jethro Tull my senior year at Kellogg High School. I might have this upcoming story wrong, but I'll write what I remember fifty-four years later. 

Cara invited me to join her and a bunch of other people to go tubing on a hill somewhere in the Cataldo area. 

It was a blast and afterward the party moved (as I remember) to Mary McReynold's house in Kellogg for hot chocolate.  I'm thinking Mary (or one of her siblings) must have had a copy of Jethro Tull's masterful LP, Aqualung. 

Mary (or someone) played it that night. I loved what I heard on that album, but I didn't do anything about it. 

Jethro Tull resided on the fringes of my music listening. 

Then, about seven or eight months later, John Soini introduced me to Jethro Tull's powerful double LP, Living in the Past and it transported me into a whole new world of music enjoyment, as did repeated listenings of Aqualung and Thick as a Brick. 

This Jethro Tull awakening came back to me today as I spent a few hours listening to more of the lectures contained in the Great Course I'm "taking" entitled How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. 

So what does this Great Course have to do with Jethro Tull and, more specifically, Living in the Past?

One track on Living in the Past was "Bouree", a J. S. Bach composition that Ian Anderson (the front man for Jethro Tull) played on his flute. 

It immediately wonderstruck me, but until now, thanks to these lectures, I hadn't realized or thought about some things that are now very important to me. 

The most recent lectures I've listened to have focused on the role of dance music forms in helping shape the compositions of music written in the Baroque period all the way to the present. 

Now I know that these composers took the basic forms, tempos, and rhythms of these dances (like the bouree) and transformed them into more complex pieces, not to accompany actual dancing, but to enhance their compositions and for our listening pleasure. 

2. So, starting fifty-four years ago when I first heard Ian Anderson play Bach's "Bouree", I didn't think of it as having grown out of music originally written to accompany the dance called the bouree. 

Consequently, I wouldn't have thought of what I've learned in the last few days: Bach's "Bouree" couldn't be danced to. It's too complicated as are the minuets, rondos, gigues, and other forms of dances that constitute entire movements composed by Bach, Mozart, Hadyn, Beethoven, and many others within sonatas, symphonies, concerti, and other larger forms of composition. 

Now I get it. 

I'm learning more about the compositional structure of the minuet, the rondo, and other forms and so my ability to anticipate what will be coming in a piece of music is improving as is my feeling of satisfaction when the music meets those expectations. 

It's reminding me very much of the deep pleasure I experienced over forty years ago in graduate school when I studied sonnets, Shakespeare's and others, more deeply and began to understand how the different sonnet forms enabled the poets to create both emotional and intellectual impacts through meter, rhyme schemes, and overall structure of the poem.

I'm doing just what I wanted to do when I retired. I'm reading, listening, watching, learning, exploring not as a part of a job, not for a salary, but for my own enjoyment and maybe even growth and for anyone else's enjoyment who might like reading what I write in this blog. 

3. In the first several months or so of my recovery from the kidney transplant, I had to be careful about eating too much potassium, careful about eating potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, and other foods rich in potassium. 

Gradually, after about a year, I began to experiment with eating more of these foods and the potassium levels in my blood stayed in range. 

So, today, when I felt a yearning for some kind of potato soup, I didn't hesitate to work on making one. 

In a Dutch oven, I fried bacon and after about five minutes added celery and onion and, a little later, sliced mushrooms to the bacon. 

When these ingredients had cooked about as much as I wanted them to, I added sliced russet potatoes and chopped carrots along with a quart of water. I brought this soup to a boil, turned down the heat, added salt, pepper, and Bragg liquid amino and soon everything cooked through, but didn't get mushy. 

This soup satisfied my desire for potato soup, a brothy one, not a creamy one. 

As much as I thoroughly enjoy a dairy-based potato soup, I wanted a lighter soup tonight. 

I'm pretty stoked that I have more of this soup to enjoy tomorrow. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-25-2026: Leonard Oakland's Morning Classical Radio Show, Music More Than My Words Right Now, Smashing Family Dinner

 1. I wrote myself a note last night to be sure to tune into KSFC at Spokane Public Radio at 10 a.m. to listen to Leonard Oakland's Morning Classical program. His decision to read William Carlos Williams' mighty poem "By the road to the contagious hospital" worked perfectly for me, not only with its promise that the winter season will not last forever, but maybe it also hints that our winters of human discontent won't last forever either, giving me some hope that the brutal beginning of 2026 won't be everlasting. 

Leonard played several wonderful pieces during his two hour show. I was particularly happy to be introduced to Dvorak's String Quintet in E Flat. I love Dvorak's compositions and was uplifted by the effect of adding a second viola to the traditional string quartet and the music he wrote for this ensemble to play. 

2. It's the weirdest thing. 

From the time Christy gave me the book Year of Wonder, I had it by my side, next to the chair I sit in in the living room. While it was next to me, I was opening the book daily, reading the piece Clemency Burton-Hill wrote for that day, and going to Spotify and listening to the musical piece she wrote about. Her book has a prose and classical music offering for each day of the year. 

Well, I moved the book just ten feet away as a way of decluttering the living room before I hosted family dinner two weeks ago. 

From that point forward, because the book wasn't where I was used to having it, I failed for two weeks to read and listen to the daily entries. 

Today, after Leonard Oakland's show, I finally woke up to the fact that this book, while not being next to me, was very close by and I spent the afternoon getting caught up.

I've read a lot of words over the course of this brutal January. I've listened to quite a few as well. 

I realized today that if I were to express what's going on inside of me, the music I listened to lays it out much better than my words can. 

I need to go back, listen some more, pay more attention to how the music affects me, and then I'll think about posting some examples of the music that so pointedly reflects my inward life. 

3. We had a dynamite family dinner tonight at Christy's. Christy made a cottage pie (a shepherd's pie is made with lamb, a cottage pie with ground beef) and to compliment this main dish, Paul brought pickled appetizers, Carol brought corn as a vegetable side dish, I contributed fruity cole slaw, and Christy contributed dinner rolls. We had a brownie with ice cream for dessert. 

Christy's cottage pie was superb and the other foods she assigned us to bring worked harmoniously with the pie. 

We talked about all kind of thing tonight: Carol and Paul's recent visit to Moscow, the Seahawks going to the Super Bowl, the Zags, 70s rhythm and blues music -- which inspired us to watch a video of the Manhattans performing "Kiss and Say Goodbye" -- and other topics.  

It was a great evening, good for our spirits as well as our appetites. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-24-2026: A Correction, "Concert of the Week", Cole Slaw for Family Dinner

 1. A correction from my blog post yesterday: A suite is a collection of instrumental movements, but I stated a suite is a collection of dances. Often, maybe even usually they are. But not always. A suite might extract its component parts from ballet (e.g. The Nutcracker Suite), operas, or original compositions. 

You can see my way of learning. I have a long history of learning as I get things not quite right and correct myself. 

2. I was very grateful today for Spokane Public Radio. Every Saturday at noon, the station features a program entitled, "Concert of the Week". Each week one can hear a performance recently given locally or not too far away. 

I'd been looking forward to today's presentation for the last several days. I went a lecture a week ago Thursday looking at the program the Spokane Symphony played last weekend. I didn't go to the Symphony's performance, but it was on Spokane Public Radio today. 

It was thrilling. 

Bernstein's Symphonic Dances, a suite of songs from West Side Story, touched upon a wide range of emotions, ranging from energetic jubilation to tragic grief. 

I had never heard anything quite like Paul Creston's Fantasy for Trombone and thoroughly enjoyed its energy, drive, various rhythms, and the space it gave the trombone soloist, the Spokane Symphony's principle trombonist, John Church to showcase his virtuosity and play trombone passages that introduced me to whole new ways of hearing what could be played on a trombone. 

Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances occupied the entirety of the second half of the program. I loved its hugeness, its variety of directions, and, as with Bernstein, its evocation of a variety of emotions ranging from disillusionment to nostalgia to expressions of spirituality. 

I want to increase my familiarity with this Rachmaninoff composition. I want to listen to it more, read more about it. It was more than I could absorb today, listening to it for the first time.

3. For tomorrow night's family dinner, Christy assigned me to make cole slaw. I made it this afternoon in the hope that it will benefit from sitting overnight in the fridge, giving its variety of flavors a chance to mature. I usually prefer cabbage salad or cole slaw with a vinegar dressing, but I decided to veer away from my usual pattern and made a creamy cole slaw. 

I have my fingers crossed that Christy, Carol, and Paul will enjoy it tomorrow evening. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-23-2026: The Suite, Bach's Cello Suites, Yakkin' at The Lounge

 1. By listening to the lectures that comprise the music course I downloaded into my audible library I'm learning a ton about music forms: the concerto, oratorio, fugue, cantata, and more, with many more to come. I've listened to twenty of these forty-five minute lectures and still have twenty-eight to go. 

Right now, I'm in the midst of learning about dance music from, let's say, the 18th century. It's what's known as the Classical period of classical music and unlike the previous period, the Baroque, Classical composers like Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven and others put much more emphasis on recognizable and memorable melodies in their compositions, whatever form their music took. 

During this period in Europe, dancing was very popular and composers had several dance forms to work with and integrated these dances into the larger structure of their compositions. 

One of these larger forms is the suite. Spokane Symphony music director James Lowe talked about the suite in the lecture of his I attended about nine days ago. I learned that the suite is a compilation of different dances, each different dance a movement within the suite. 

So, for example, this past weekend, the Spokane Symphony performed Leonard Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story". It's a suite made up of the several dances in Bernstein's musical and features the different sounds and rhythms of the cultures portrayed in this musical. 

2. So, now let me move back in time from the 20th to the early 18th century, from Leonard Bernstein to J. S. Bach. 

I last visited London forty years ago. 

It was my third trip there and I had learned that I enjoyed going to classical music concerts as well as theatrical plays that I didn't know much about. 

I enjoyed being out of my element and being surprised. 

One evening I attended a performance of Bach's Cello Suites. 

I'd never listened to them before. 

I was out of my depth that evening, but the music made a very positive impression on me. 

About twelve years later, Rita Hennessey and I, as part of our team-taught course in Philosophy and English Composition agreed to include in our course a series of six films entitled, Inspired by Bach. 

Each film featured Yo-Yo Ma playing one of the six suites that make up the Cello Suites. 

Each film also focused on how the film's suite could be enjoyed in relation to another art form. The films focused, in order, on nature and garden design, architecture, dance, film making, Japanese Kabuki dance, and ice skating. 

These films and Yo-Yo Ma's discussions with each of the six directors significantly expanded my enjoyment of the Cello Suites. 

But a key element of the Cello Suites hadn't yet sunk in. 

It hadn't sunk in a few years later when Debbie and I went to St. Mary's Episcopal Church to a performance of the Cello Suites by a University of Oregon professor. 

So what was missing? 

What do I know now that I didn't know then?

I didn't realize that each suite consisted of six movements, a prelude and then five dances. I wasn't paying attention to how Bach composed a different prelude for each suite and then presented different music for each of the repeated dances. 

Here are the names of the six movements of each of the six Cello Suites:

1. Prelude

2. Allemande

3. Courante

4. Sarabande

5. A mixture of dances

6. Gigue

The Great Course lectures are teaching me the specifics about each of these dances as musical forms. 

I know that as I learn more about these musical forms and as I listen to these Cello Suites more often, my appreciation and enjoyment of them will expand.

And, who knows, maybe I'll discover that a cellist from somewhere will give a concert somewhere not too far away and I'll be able to hear Bach's Cello Suites performed again. 

3. If you read through all of that and are still with met, I thank you. 

My day wasn't all suites and minuets and musical textures. 

Ed and I met up at The Lounge this afternoon. Before Ed got there, I yakked with Harley and Candy for a while about the Elks Taco Feed and the pleasures of the Elks sponsored hoop shoot that is about to move from the local to the district level. 

As a way of being able to laugh about his treatment for prostate cancer, Ed likes to make jokes about the hormone pills he takes, the hot flashes he experiences, especially at night, and likes to act like the therapy has made him want facials and other luxuries usually associated with women. 

He gets a lot of mileage out of these jokes and I think they've helped him maintain a positive attitude throughout his treatment and I'd like to think his positive outlook has helped his treatments be so successful. He's come through all of this doing very well. 

Ed regaled us with a few of those jokes at The Lounge this afternoon! 

Three Beautiful Things 01-22-2026: Medicare Annual Wellness Exam, Apple Fritter and Lemon Almond Scone, Spokane Symphony and Sha Na Na

 1. Today was my annual Medicare exam, which means I saw my primary care person for the first time since January of 2025.  I think the fact that I have seen Dr. Bieber and the different pros at the transplant clinic so many times over the last year helped this exam go quickly and smoothly. I had plenty of data on hand measuring how I've been doing and could report on it and, as a bonus, I crushed the memory test and the clock drawing exercise. 

2. I enjoy treating myself to a pastry or two and a latte after I've had any kind of medical examination or test and today I indulged in an apple fritter and a lemon almond scone at Beach Bum Bakery and brought them home to enjoy with a homemade latte. 

Wow!

3. There is no way that I can write out what I learned today listening to a few more lectures, each 45 minutes long, about how to enjoy and understand great music, but suffice it to say I will listen to Baroque music, especially J. S. Bach, with a keener ear and I'm getting a far better understanding of the Classical Era of concert music than I've ever had before. 

I don't know if others who love music have strong preferences regarding different eras of music, but I don't. These lectures are helping me better understand why I have been almost instinctively moved by classical music of all eras, an experience that began in the fall of 1972 at NIC when I secured inexpensive student tickets from our choir director, Rick Frost, from time to time and went to Spokane to hear the Spokane Symphony. 

During that fall of 1972 I heard the symphony live at the Fox Theater and I also heard Sha Na Na at the Coliseum one nights and Santana another and so began my epicurean love of nearly all music. 

What I've really enjoyed about getting older is that some uninformed prejudices against some kinds of music have melted away and I really enjoy music now that I disdained, with unearned smugness, when I was younger. 

Like disco. 

Let that sink in! 

Three Beautiful Things 01-21-2026: Everything I Want in Life!, My Uptown Kellogg Pleasures, Stir Fried Beef

 1. It's funny. Almost everything I want in life is right there on those few blocks that comprise the Garland District. Art. A movie theater. A bookstore. A bakery. A diner. An ice cream shop. If I frequented the Garland District more than once or twice a year, I'd no doubt find more. 

2. I was uptown today giving a project I'm into some attention and, fair or not, I thought how fun it would be to be able to go to a jam-packed used bookstore, sit among the stacks of books, read pages of book I'd be buying about classical music, and then walk a short ways and have some homemade ice cream. 

But, hey, we have the Elks. We have The Lounge. We have the Beach Bum Bakery. We have the Uphill Grill. And there's more. 

So, believe me, I might dream, but I'm not complaining. 

3. With a tip of the hat to those of you who read my blog post yesterday and viscerally rejected the idea of eating eggplant and tofu, tonight I stir fried chopped tri-tip with mushrooms and onions and rice left over from last night. 

I made it nice and spicy with Green Dragon Hot Sauce and a bit salty with soy sauce. 

Gibbs liked bits and pieces of my dinner, too.

Three Beautiful Things 01-20-2026: Sibling Outing to the Garland District, Lunch at Ferguson's, Murals and Used Books and Ice Cream

 1. Christy, Carol, and I do our best to clear out one day a month and go on an outing together. 

In 2026, we are going to Spokane for each of our outings and hang out and explore a bit some Spokane neighborhood or area. 

If I remember correctly, we went on three smashing sibling outings in 2025 in Spokane: we visited the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Browne's Addition, the Jundt Art Museum on the Gonzaga campus, and the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum in Opportunity. We also enjoyed meals at Frank's Diner, Indigenous Eats, and The Mango Tree. 

Today we piled into Christy's Outback and cruised up Monroe Street to Garland Avenue and the Garland District. 

Starting at Monroe Street and extending several blocks east on Garland, on both sides of the street, are a variety of businesses housed in building that have been around for decades, giving the Garland District a charm we all enjoyed. 

This unassuming and inviting district has not been gentrified. 

We liked that. 

2.  Just south of Garland Avenue is the Garland Art Gallery, on open air exhibit featuring about thirty murals. We were going to begin our visit strolling in the alley, but decided we'd rather eat lunch first and so we dropped into the venerable Garland Avenue diner, Ferguson's.

Ferguson's had to be refurbished after a fire about fifteen years ago, but it was not gentrified. Instead, the interior maintains the looks of mid-20th century diner with a linoleum floor, a dining counter with stools, and booths and tables smartly placed along the walls and windows facing the street. 

Ferguson Cafe is kind of a gallery/museum too with pictures and other artifacts on the walls portraying the history of the cafe and of the way scenes from three different movies were shot here: Vision Quest, Why Would I Lie, and Benny and Joon.

I had dined at Ferguson's when I worked at Whitworth over 40 years ago and Kathy, Mary, and I had dinner there in 2019 one night before playing trivia at the Bon Bon Bar located inside the Garland Theater building. 

I enjoyed the food on those visits and to my delight I very much enjoyed my jalapeno burger and fries with a cup of delicious everyday black diner coffee. 

3. After lunch we strolled through the open-air art gallery and over to Book Traders, one of those great used bookstores with thousands of books packed efficiently into a narrow long building, filling shelves and boxes on the floor and stacked in piles in some spots on the floor. 

I bolted straight to the music section and found a book titled, Listen to the Music. It's crammed with essays about orchestral works composed by Bach, Vivaldi, Brahms, Beethoven, and many many more. While Christy and Carol browsed, I found a chair and started reading the book's essay on Brahm's Fourth Symphony, learned all kinds of things in a short amount of time, and closed the book and bought it when it was time to leave. 

Time to leave, yes, but not time to leave the Garland District. 

If you've been on Garland Avenue any time over the last several decades, you know there's a building on this street constructed in the shape of a milk bottle. 

It's Mary Lou's Milk Bottle, yet another wonderful space standing up to the inevitable encroachment of franchise eateries and gentrification in US cities. 

Mary Lou's makes their own ice cream and I devoured a heavenly single scoop of salted caramel ice cream in a dish. 

It was the perfect way to wrap up our visit to the Garland District. 

One more thing: our father, Raymond Harold "Pert" Woolum divided his high school education between John Rogers High School on E. Wellesley in the Bemiss neighborhood not far from Hilyard. 

So we drove by his alma mater (Class of '48) to see how it's been renovated and to pay a kind of homage to our dad. 

Then we returned to Kellogg. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-19-2026: "Deteriorata" at the Cockroach Castle, Learning More About Classical Music, Tofu and Eggplant -- Yeah I Know!

 1. Liz posts a lot of great stuff on her Facebook page and she came through again by presenting the poem, "Desiderata". 

The poem immediately brought to my mind the National Lampoon parody entitled, "Deteriorata". 

Two Kellogg guys, Robert Larsen and Bruce Alldredge, rented an apartment in a wobbly building close to the North Idaho College campus, a place they nicknamed Cockroach Castle. 

In the spring term of 1973, I hung out a lot with Bruce and Robert and before long was also hanging out with Liz and Jane in and around the Castle along with other friends. 

The Castle was my cultural hub that semester. We listened to all kinds of music, read (Bruce and Robert also wrote) poetry, pontificated freely with one another about Richard Nixon, religion, and a wide range of other topics we had passionate and ill-informed (ha ha -- so what!) opinions about. 

We also read National Lampoon.

And it was by way of Bruce and Robert that I first heard "Deteriorata" read aloud and it completely killed me off and contained lines that we quoted to one another (Rotate your tires) and that never failed to make us laugh. 

So, when I saw Liz's post of "Desiderata", I messaged Liz and Jane and wondered if they remembered the parody poem. 

They did. 

And that led to all three of us being transported back 53 years and taking some time to revel in how much we loved the Castle, Bruce's van, The Purple Pig, and the wonderful times we had together for those few months until the semester ended. 

As a nineteen year old, being with these friends at the Cockroach Castle was the first time in my, albeit, young life that I felt absolutely uninhibited with peers. 

These were the most accepting and open people I'd ever known and I thrived on our times together, whether at the apartment, shooting stick at the Fort Ground Tavern, dancing to Free's "All Right Now" as we closed down the Steinhaus, or buying a dollar pitcher of Lucky Lager beer for each hand at the Rathskeller to celebrate the Knicks' NBA Championship victory over the Lakers. 

I know now that I came out of high school feeling confused and insecure and it was great to pontificate, party, read poems, and be someone I'd never been before and revel in the accepting embrace of my friends at the Castle.  

2. I spent much of today doing my best not only to understand, but to absorb all that Professor Greenberg had to say over the course of four lectures about opera, oratorio, and the cantata. I can't even being to write it all out in this blog post, but I will say that learning more about the oratorio and then listening to a thrilling excerpt from Handel's Messiah and finding out the role of the cantata in Lutheran worship and hearing excerpts from Bach's Cantata 140 moved me, made my belly shake like a bowl full of jelly. 

3. I returned to two foods I love today by preparing a tofu and eggplant stir fry over white rice and seasoned with soy sauce and Sichuan chili crisp  It worked. The sodium of the soy sauce and the heat of the chili crisp played off of each other just the way I hoped they would. And I have more of this simple food in a container to eat again in the next day or two. 

Yeah == I know you probably can't imagine eating tofu and eggplant. All I can say is that they float my boat......

Three Beautiful Things 01-18-2026: Leonard Oakland on the Wireless, Intro to Opera, Magnificent Family Dinner

1. If I weren't so scatterbrained and, at the same time, single focused, I would have figured out a long time ago that I can listen to Leonard Oakland's Sunday morning classical music program from 10-12 on Spokane Public Radio's classic music station, KSFC. I would have figured out there's more to the world of classical music on the radio than SiriusXM's Symphony Hall.

Leonard was an English professor for decades at Whitworth. I took a course from him and I looked to him for guidance and inspiration when I taught at Whitworth. 

Today I finally got my head on straight, figured out how to stream KSFC, and listened to Leonard's show. I loved hearing his voice again, experiencing his mind at work, listening to his comments about the music he played, and relishing his music selections. I also deeply enjoyed when he took a short break from playing music and read Billy Collin's superb poem, "Forgetfulness". 

I must, now, whenever possible, and that should be almost all the time, listen to Leonard Oakland's program on Sundays. I cherish the thought. 

2. I put on Lecture 11 of the Great Courses series I'm listening to. It, along with Lecture 12, focuses on opera in the Baroque period. It was during this period that opera was invented.  I got the gist of the lecture, but I fell asleep during it (I like to nap) and so I'll go back and listen again. Professor Greenberg shares his unbridled enthusiasm for opera, repeatedly arguing that it is the most complete form of musical expression, combining instrumental and choral music with dramatic storytelling and theatrical spectacle, bringing together sophisticated music and stagecraft in service to rich and powerful human emotion. 

3. We had a terrific pasta and meatball dinner tonight at Carol and Paul's house. We began with Christy's perfect appetizer, Carpaccio.  Alongside the penne, sauce, and meatballs Carol prepared for dinner, we enjoyed the green salad I brought and the fresh homemade bread Carol baked. I honestly wanted to sit for hours and eat countless helpings of everything. I love pasta meals like this. 

I really can't even begin to list all the different things we talked about tonight, but subjects ranged from the Seahawks and the Zags to The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was fun bouncing all over the place and we topped off the evening with a piece of the yellow cake with vanilla frosting that Carol baked. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-17-2026: Being Unnoticed, A Day of Serious Listening and Learning, Debbie Played It Smart

 1. When it comes to volunteering, it makes me very happy to find ways to help out when I can be pretty much unnoticed. The Elks food pantry makes this possible for me -- at least it did again today. 

2. I decided to devote much of today to listening to the Great Course on learning how to listen to and understand great music. When I was going to college at Whitworth and the U of Oregon, I always enjoyed learning about the Protestant Reformation and what practices of the Roman Catholic Church that movement was protesting and what, over many years, the movement did to reform not only doctrine and church governance, but the experience of worship and the ways it urged individuals to search their conscience and not rely on the Church to do that for them. 

That short paragraph I just wrote doesn't account for how messy the Reformation was nor does it account for Protestant abuses that I find historically repulsive and find disturbing as I see them continue into the present. 

BUT, what I hadn't thought a lot about before today was the Roman Catholic influence on music, what its purpose is, what the Church regarded as appropriate and what wasn't, nor had I thought a lot about how Protestant reforms affected the composing and producing of music. 

So many intellectual, spiritual, philosophical, and ecclesiastical developments that began to emerge in the 16th century matured in 17th century and beyond thanks to the Enlightenment or The Age of Reason. This blending of the spiritual, scientific, and rational, this trust in the authority of reason (almost always with God right in the middle of it all) helped a creative and precise and deeply pious mind and imagination of someone like J. S. Bach flourish and helped give us the exuberant creations of the Baroque Period, not only in music, but in other arts and sciences, too. 

What I just wrote falls far short of elaborating upon all I learned and thought about today, but, hey!, this is a blog not a seminar paper! 

3. I'm not quite sure how severe the winter weather was today along the route Debbie drives when she goes from the Diazes in Woodbridge, VA to Adrienne's house in Valley Cottage, NY. 

What I do know is that a day or two ago Debbie saw the winter weather coming today and drove up to Adrienne's yesterday and so didn't have to make her way north in the winter weather today. 

I am relieved she made things easier for herself by driving yesterday and that she has settled in at Adrienne's where she'll hold down Adrienne's fort and look after Jack while Adrienne travels to Virginia with Ellie next week on a business trip. Thankfully, Ellie will stay with the Diazes during the day while Adrienne is busy with work. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-16-2026: Debbie's Check Arrived! Three Month Later!, I Loved Eating a German Chocolate Scone, Taco Night at the Elks Club!

1. Debbie submitted the paperwork back in October to receive her Idaho state pension money in a single payment. Now, keep in mind, when Debbie bought her new Corolla in New Jersey, it took a few months for something in the machinery of auto titles, registration, and license plates to get unstuck and for her to have them in hand. 

Similarly, something, a typo?, an error in code entry?, Thai curry stains on the paperwork?, something got the processing of the paperwork for Debbie's pension money held up.

Today, however, three months after she put in her request, Debbie's pension check arrived and I mailed it to her in Valley Cottage, New York (where she arrived today). 

Luckily, on Wednesday, the process of extending the life of her expired driver's license only took a part of a day.

Everything's cool on that front. 

Everything's cool with the car. 

I have the Corolla's title in Kellogg. 

Debbie has the registration and license plates with the car. 

And everything's cool with her pension check. 

It's in the mail. 

This is all a relief. 

2. When I went uptown to mail Debbie her check, I also stopped in at the Beach Bum Bakery. Rebekah recently introduced a German chocolate scone into her bakery case. At family dinner Sunday, we had a discussion about the divinity of German chocolate cakes and BOOM! now a German chocolate product was available for me right uptown. 

Back home, after a quick check on the food pantry and shopping at Yoke's, I sat down and as slowly as I could, I blissed out on the chocolate and coconut splendor of this German chocolate scone. 

I am developing quite a list of products I love at Beach Bum Bakery and I hope this scone will continue to be available from time to time. (What else do I love? New York bagels. French bread, chocolate chip cookies, ginger molasses cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, rye bread, apple fritters, sunshine muffins, rustic sourdough bread, and I know there's more. I also haven't even had a chance to sample many of Rebekah's wonderful creations. I will continue to do so.) 

3. I don't know if it was the first time ever, but I am pretty sure toght's Taco Night at the Kellogg Elks was the first one held there in the last 8-9 years since Debbie and I moved here. 

The turnout was excellent and Tamie and her volunteer helpers set up an excellent taco bar with hard shells, soft shells, ground beef, refried beans, Mexican rice, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, olive, sour cream, chips, and salsa. (I might have missed something.) Margaritas were for sale. It was really helpful having a volunteer ready to serve the shells and the other items to go in them and it worked out great for each diner to select their own toppings. 

Since my transplant, I've decided not to risk the harm alcohol might do in combination with some of my medications. Being dry opened the door for me to have Coca Cola with my tacos and I realized tonight, if I hadn't realized it before, that Coca Cola is my very favorite beverage to drink with tacos (and burgers, too). 

A bunch of us swarmed across the street to The Lounge for some more social time and we did just what we used to watch the old people do when we were younger: we headed out the door and home before the clock had a chance to strike seven o'clock! 

Three Beautiful Things 01-15-2026: My Trip to Spokane Today: Listening to a Great Course on Music, Spokane Symphony Lecture, Bloodwork at Sacred Heart

 1. I was eager to blast off from Kellogg this morning and rocket over to Spokane. I had decided over the last several days that I didn't think I could drive and listen to Lonesome Dove at the same time because the book has required a lot of my concentration. 

I wondered, though, how I'd do driving while listening to my audible copy of a series of lectures from the Great Courses series entitled, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition. The lecturer is Robert Greenberg, a superbly credentialed professor, a scholar in multiple areas of music history and musicology. 

As I pulled out of the driveway this morning and made my way to I-90 and eased my way onto the Interstate, I discovered listening to these lectures in the car was going to work splendidly. 

And so, on my way to Spokane and on the return trip to Kellogg, I learned much more than I had ever known about some basic vocabulary for talking about concert music, the role of music in ancient Greek and Roman cultures, and, as I pulled into the driveway upon arriving back home, I was nearing the end of Greenberg's discourse on medieval music. 

2. Debbie and I are members of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (also known as MAC) and when I read a recent newsletter describing what's happening there in January, I read that today the Music Director of the Spokane Symphony. James Lowe was giving a noontime lecture on the Symphony's program being performed Saturday and Sunday. 

James Lowe will be conducting this program and it will feature Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, Paul Creston's Fantasy for Trombone, and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. 

I needed to go to Spokane for a specialty blood draw at Sacred Heart. I could drop in any time during the day, so I had decided I would attend the lecture and then have the bloodwork done. 

The lecture stirred me up emotionally and stimulated me intellectually. 

I thoroughly enjoyed how James Lowe explained what these composers had created in these masterpieces and how he played excerpts from Bernstein and Rachmaninoff with images of the scores of those excerpts on a screen for us to both listen to the music and see it written out. 

The Creston composition will feature the Spokane Symphony's principal trombone player, John Church, as soloist. I think the plan had been for Church to play some excerpts from the Fantasy for Trombone today, but he arrived a bit late, hadn't had a chance to properly warm up, so couldn't play. He did, however, tell us about his history with this piece and why he loves it so much and told us about his instrument and explained how he creates vibrato on the trombone. 

If I decide to go to see the Spokane Symphony perform Saturday evening, I'll be writing a bit about it. 

It all depends on how I feel on Saturday about driving from Spokane to Kellogg in the January darkness and possible fog. 

3. One of the things I enjoy about all these blood draws is working with phlebotomists I'm familiar with. Today Angela drew my blood. I've been working with her off and on since May of 2024. Back then, Sacred Heart ran a lab in the same building as the transplant clinic. The hospital closed that lab a year ago and now I go across the street from the clinic to the hospital itself. 

No problem. 

Angela is friendly and efficient -- so much so I was able to check in, have my blood drawn, and return to the parking payment kiosk in under 30 minutes, so my parking was free! Ha! 

Seeing Angela reminded me of when I was going for blood draws weekly, a time I enjoy thinking back upon because things were going so well. 

And they continue to to well. 

The tests today will provide information as to whether my body is showing signs of rejecting my new kidney. 

These tests had great results three months ago and also at intervals before that. 

I hope the good news continues. I'll know in the next 7-10 days for so. 

These specialty test results always come back slower than my other tests. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-14-2026: Winning Wednesday with Ed and Jake, What! My ID is Expired?, Renewing My Driver's License in Wallace

1. Ed and I rendezvoused with Jake at the Rose Lake Conoco station where I parked the Camry and we packed into Jake's new Toyota Tacoma and blasted off to Winning Wednesday at the CdA Casino. 

We had a great time. I came out a little bit ahead on the machines. I enjoyed eating Buffalo Wings and a garden salad for lunch. It was a lot of fun being with Jake and Ed throughout the morning and early afternoon. 

I hope we'll join up and do this more often. 

2. I had one odd and fortuitous experience at the casino. 

As a club member, I always swipe my card in one of the kiosks and check my player points and see what modest benefits the casino has granted me. 

Today, however, when I swiped my card, I got a message telling me that my ID was expired. 

That message didn't make any sense to me, so I hotfooted it over to the Player Club counter and asked about it. 

A very enjoyably sassy woman working next to the woman helping me overheard my question and said, "Ah! Someone's just had a birthday!" 

I was still puzzled about the expired ID message and thought maybe nowadays my player card ID had to be renewed every year around my birthday. 

So I handed the woman helping me my driver's license. 

She said, "Do you have your temporary license papers?"

I didn't know what she meant and she told me my driver's license expired on my birthday. 

Oh. My. God.

I didn't even think about my driver's license on or around December 27th and said something lame and elderly sounding about how I thought it expired in 2026.

No harm done. I just couldn't use the kiosk. 

But the first thing I thought of was that Debbie's license had also expired, hers six days before mine. 

I texted her. 

She contacted the state DMV in Boise and they worked with her to transmit paperwork to and from Virginia and she got  an and can renew when she returns to Kellogg. 

3. So, upon arriving in Kellogg, I stopped in at the house to check the mail and make sure all was in order and then I headed up to the Sheriff's office in Wallace. 

I hadn't been there since the Dec. 26th shooting.

The security measures in the aftermath of the shooting are temporary. There were about five people ahead of me, a person being served, who could be in the lobby where licenses were issued, and four of us waiting our turn in a chilly little area just outside the lobby. Only one person at a time could be in the lobby -- but, the lone employee at the counter didn't like seeing us in the cold little room and told us we could all come in. Kindness trumped the rules. 

I arrived at the office figuring it might be a slightly inconvenient wait, so I was in the right frame of mind to patiently wait my turn. 

The woman working the counter was lovely and made the short process of renewing my license most enjoyable. 

So, thanks to a CdA Casino kiosk message, Debbie and I are set -- me for four years, Debbie with a one year extension, but her plan is to renew her license as soon as possible when she returns to Kellogg.  

Three Beautiful Things 01-13-2026: Nurse Jenn Updates My Post-Transplant Treatment Plan, I Find Hidden Notes, Newt Is Growing Up

1. Today Nurse Jenn from the Transplant Clinic messaged me. All my test results from Friday's labs are in and she told me that my numbers looked stable and that I should only make one change in in my pillbox. We've been fiddling around, in a good way, with my dosage of the magnesium supplement I take, seeing if we could lower it and if I could, in turn, increase my magnesium levels through the food I eat. 

Today, Dr. Poudyal decided I should take two more pills a day than I have been.

She also decided that I could have labs drawn once every three months, a significant change after many weeks of weekly, bi-weekly, and, more recently, monthly labs. 

I'll have labs drawn in February in advance of my February 19th appointment with Dr. Bieber. He comes to Smelterville that day. 

Then I won't have bloodwork done again until May in advance of my May 11th appointment when I see the transplant team on the second anniversary of the transplant. 

I'm also having more specialized labs drawn at Sacred Heart every three months, labs that cannot be done at Kootenai. I'll go to Spokane for one these batteries of tests this week on Thursday the 15th and will have them done again in early May one the same day I have the standard labs done that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. 

I will be very happy if the rhythm of my post-transplant treatment and monitoring becomes defined by bloodwork every three months with office visits scheduled as needed.  

2. Once I put that small pile of notes, written on carefully cut rectangles (around 5" x 4") scraps of papers in a basket with other things I put out of sight for family dinner, for a couple of days I might as well have dropped them into a twenty foot deep empty well. Not only were they put away, they were hidden and I'm terrible at finding hidden things. 

Today, though, I felt like I'd scored a tie breaking World Cup goal when I found them. They are back out in the open again, a reference to consult for words that have not been Wordle solutions, reminders of things I need to get done, and listing daily tasks like feeding Gibbs and Copper, taking my pills every 12 hours, and other things that, as important as they are, I am skillfully and expertly capable of forgetting. 

3. In the first part of Lonesome Dove we see, through the perception of a greenhorn named Newt, two herds of horses, one going north, the other south, collide into one another and create a stir of chaos and confusion before sunrise that makes useless every means Newt has of knowing what's happening in front of him. It's a coming-of-age event in Newt's life, one that challenges his romantic imaginings of what it would be like to round up horses (or cattle) and move them across the north Mexico terrain into the south of Texas. This one event does not form Newt into a full adult, but it's an early start of that process. 

Larry McMurtry's sharp attention to sensory detail and his plain spoken and poetic language in this passage is consistent with what makes his prose style as arresting to me as the novel's story.

Three Beautiful Things 01-12-2026: Filers and Pilers, Lost Notes That Were in a Pile, Pie Eye and the Widow Coles' Underwear

 1. Filers and pilers. Kenton sent me an article telling me about two kinds of people. People like me who are pilers and others who, I guess, can remember what's out of sight, who are not plagued by out of sight, out of mind. They are filers. Kenton and I are pilers. I heard from another friend, Liz, who is a filer and had to come up with a way to deal with her husband's things when they were selling a house. He's a piler. She bought a good-sized basket and piled his things in the basket and put the basket on top of the freezer. Once the viewing ended, her husband could unpile the pile in the basket and repile his piles in the house. Liz said (possibly tongue in cheek) that it saved their marriage! 

2. I write myself notes. A couple or three weeks ago, I saw that there were still pills in a couple or three morning slots in my pillbox. I'd forgotten to take them. So I wrote myself a note in all caps telling myself to take my pills first thing in the morning, before feeding Gibbs and Copper or doing anything else. It makes sense to me that I was more concerned about feeding Gibbs and Copper than I was about taking my pills, but I couldn't let that happen anymore -- and the note worked. I haven't missed a dosage since I wrote it. 

I have notes about groceries, what to be sure to do before I leave the house and what to take, notes that are lists of words that haven't been solutions yet over at Wordle, and a host of other reminders and guides to help me make it through each day. 

Well, those notes were in a pile right by the chair I sit in to write this blog, work puzzles, read, and other things and right now, having moved that pile of notes before family dinner, I have no idea where they are. All I know is that they aren't in plain sight. They are out of my mind. 

Now I need to either find them or do my best to remember what I'd written and recreate them. 

3. The developing story lines in the first part of Lonesome Dove are very good, but as I listen to Will Patton read this novel, I'm really impressed by the lyrical qualities of Larry McMurtry's language, the ways he imagines great miniature stories within the scope of the book's dominant plot, and how funny the book is. When I was reading it to myself, much of the humor went by me, but one of the rewards for listening to the book is that, for me, the humor comes through much more vividly, to my great pleasure. 

One example is when a storm kicks up and Pie Eye helps the widow Coles retrieve sheets and other things that blew off her clothesline and suddenly realizes he's holding her undergarments in his hand. I'll leave it at that, except to say that it's a moment, thanks to McMurtry's deft storytelling, that made me laugh out loud. 

There have been many others. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-11-2026: Family/Birthday Dinner, Gifts and Cherry Pie, A Quirk of Mine Came into Play Today

1. Today was a big day. 

Paul, Carol, and I collaborated to fix tonight's family dinner, a birthday dinner for Christy whose actual birthday was Friday. 

I was the host. Christy requested a pot roast dinner, so Friday I purchased a chuck roast at Costco and this morning I took it out of the refrigerator, let it warm up a bit, and then went to work. 

I began by heating up vegetable oil in our larger Dutch oven and then I seared the top and bottom of the  roast.

I took the roast out of the pot and cooked six cloves of crushed garlic for a minute and then poured a quart of beef broth over the garlic and deglazed the pot's surface. 

I returned the roast to the Dutch oven, covered the meat with Worcestershire sauce put a couple sprigs of rosemary on the roast meat, and added chopped up onion, carrots, red potatoes, and mushrooms.

I cooked the roast all afternoon, first at 300 degrees and later raised the temperature to 350. After about three hours, I determined that the vegetables were cooked and still firm, so I removed them. By about 5:15 or so, the meat was falling apart.  I placed the meat on a cutting board and heated up the vegetables. 

By 6:00 we joined each other at the table and enjoyed our dinner, deliciously enhanced by the green salad Carol made. She served it with Roquefort dressing made from a recipe that is at least sixty years old and came from Sig and Bunny's Sunshine Inn. 

2. Conversation flew all over the place. Books. Movies. Gonzaga basketball. Paul went to see the Zags play last Thursday night and his observations and insights were fascinating. 

Before long, Christy opened gifts from Paul and Carol and from Debbie and me and we ate slices of the superb cherry pie made, at Christy's request. 

3. Let me tell you briefly about a quirk I have. If I put things away, I lose track of them and often forget I have them. As a result, my papers, books, bills, electronics, pills, and a host of other things are out in the open, covering different tables and other surfaces in the house. It's the same way in the kitchen. I often forget I even have certain goods because they are put away.

I curb this quirk a bit when Debbie and I are in the house together, but she's been gone the last three months, so gradually I've not put away more and more things, on purpose, so that I can see them and always know where they are. 

Well, since I hosted family dinner tonight, I spent much of the day clearing off surfaces, putting things of mine out of sight, and now, starting tomorrow, I'm going to have to find those things again and get the process underway to put them back out in the open so I'll know I have them and can easily access them. This quirk of mine  dictated my relationship with papers, file folders, teaching notes, memos, and other tools of my trade as an instructor. I have no explanation for why I have this oddball relationship with the material world. 

 

Three Beautiful Things 01-10-2026: Talking with Debbie, Flitting Around Town, One More Lab Result Came In

 1. The best thing about this electronic wireless instant communication world we live in is that Debbie and I can have the kind of conversations about a wide variety of things on our minds that are unique to our twenty-eight year long relationship. 

We talked today. 

2. I hopped around town a bit after talking with Debbie. I paid bills. I stocked up on things I need as the host for Sunday's family/Christy's birthday (Jan 9) dinner.  I checked on how the Kellogg Elks food pantry looked today and dropped off some things. 

3. The dosage of most of my medicines stays stable, but the one medication the doctors adjust most often is Tacrolimus, one of the two immunosuppressants I take. Each time I have labs drawn, a test is done to measure the Tacrolimus level in my blood. 

That test goes to a Mayo clinic and so the results come back more slowly than the tests measured at the Kootenai lab. 

I got the Tacrolimus results today. 

When I was tested in December, Dr. Poudyal lightened my dosage slightly and today I saw that the level of Tacrolimus in my blood came down some. 

Enough? Too much? 

I'll find out this coming week, but I'm going stick my neck out and predict I will not be assigned a new dosage. 

I enjoy playing transplant nephrologist, always trying to predict what the pros will say when they read my test results or when I visit them in person. 

(By the way, the trick is to have enough Tacrolimus in my blood that it protects my new kidney against my immune system's natural inclination to reject this foreign presence in my body. But, at the same time, we don't want to over suppress my immune system. It's got to be able to do its job protecting me from infections, illnesses, diseases, etc.) 

Three Beautiful Things 01-09-2026: My Labs Are Stable, Burgers at the Elks, Yakkin' at The Lounge

 1. I asserted whatever strength of will I might still possess and slowly rose out of bed greeted this new day at 6:30 and at 7:30, I vaulted into the Camry and rocketed to CdA. Before I fueled the car and shopped at Costco, picked up a few things at Trader Joe's, got a haircut at Supercuts, knocked down a double cappuccino at Starbuck's, and ate a sausage, egg, and hash browns breakfast at Breakfast Nook, I sauntered into the lab I go to at Kootenai Clinic and Deborah, my phlebotomist today, drew vials of blood from my arm and I stepped away and produced a urine sample. 

Upon returning home from CdA, all but one of the lab results were available in my patient portal. 

The results were solid, stable, sturdy. 

It's a relief every month when I see no red flags in my results. 

I hope the pros see the same thing. 

2. Tonight was burger night at the Elks and I joined Ed, Nancy, Cindy, Tim, Jake, and Carol Lee at a table. It buzzed with stories, explanations, updates, and laughter. 

Maybe it was knowing my lab results looked good, maybe it was the company, maybe it was the citrusy and faintly vanilla sweetness of the can of Coca Cola I drank, but whatever the reason, my burger tonight was awesome, as were my fries, and I relished eating such a delicious and simple meal. 

3. The members of our table skipped across the street and piled into The Lounge and the good times continued. I couldn't begin to document everything we yakked about, but subjects ranged from secret ballots when we vote to the Grand Ole Opry to Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers to Evel Knievel to wind damage at the Pinehurst golf course and I probably talked too much about how much I'm enjoying Copper and Gibbs day after day, night after night.