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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today I reviewed her list again. 

How many books are on it?

Fourteen! Not twenty. Not over twenty. Fourteen! 

It's weird how my memory can exaggerate things.  

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

Over twenty? 😕

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

Today: regular pinto and Great Northern white beans. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happily and solemnly. 

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

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

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

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

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

It was a lively time together. 

Bucky always ups the energy level in the room. 

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

I look forward to another get together on Saturday. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Ah! The small pleasures in life. 

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

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

I ordered two scoops in a dish. 

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

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

It worked. 

Majorly! 

Three Beautiful Things 07-14-2026: What? He's From Spokane?, Touring Goodreads, A Leafy Salad

 1. I often get news from the world of poker on my Facebook feed. I knew the World Series of Poker's Main Even was nearing the climactic moment, a week into the tournament, when the mammoth field of poker players gets whittled down to the final nine players. 

The news flashes posted on my page focused primarily on Will Givens, an extroverted presence at whatever table he plays and who puts his routines of meditation, talking to God, working out, and eating avocado toast and eggs ahead of arriving on time to the tournament, whether at the beginning of the day or after breaks during a day of play. 

Givens played himself deep into the tournament, so I kept an eye on live updates at pokernews.com to see if he'd survive and be part of the final nine. 

I also became interested in another controversial player and began to follow the play (and history) of Shaun Deeb. 

From a comment someone made on one of those poker posts in my Facebook feed, I learned that one of the players still alive in the Main Event, Lucas Jumalon, was from Spokane, a recent graduate of Ferris High School. 

So I began to look for updates on this 22-year-old Spokane native, especially after Givens and Deeb busted out of the tournament. 

WOW! 

Jumalon blasted his way to the top of the leaderboard and will begin play at the August 3rd final table with 194 million chips. The second-place player, Rami Hammoud, has 79 million chips. 

Jumalon has a mammoth chip lead. 

Insurmountable? 

Not necessarily. 

2. I hadn't looked at my Goodreads account for a long time and realized that I've read at least forty books since the last time I posted on my list of books read. 

I was more interested, though, in what Christy and Adrienne have posted on their lists of books read and, in doing so, I casually read other readers' comments/reviews about some of these books. 

Doing so further piqued my fascination with how different people read, what they are looking for in books, and what criteria they use to evaluate and comment on books. 

I have a lot of thoughts about ways people read going through my mind, joined by thoughts about how I read, and I realized I'm kind of an odd ball reader. 

One example: reviewers/commenters on Goodreads regularly draw comparisons. They might draw comparisons between the book they are writing about and other books the author has written and evaluate the book according to whether it's as good or is better than the other books. Readers often compare one book to another writer's book whose subject matter is similar or whose book covers a similar time period. For example, in writing about a Kristin Hannah book that took place in World War II (The Nightingale maybe?), one reviewer was disappointed that it wasn't as good as All the Light We Cannot See. That struck me as unfair.

For better or worse, I don't think about other books while I'm reading the one in my hand. I'm the same way with movies and plays. I think it does make me an odd ball that I'm not asking myself while reading Bleak House whether it's as good as Great Expectations and when I watched Steven Spielberg's Linclon, the thought of comparing it to movies of his that came before it never crossed my mind. 

Maybe I'm not true to this approach all the time, but I do know that if I have breakfast, say, at the Brooks Hotel and if someone asks me if it's as good as, say, The Breakfast Nook, I'm stumped. I just don't tend to think that way. 

3. I've written a few times lately that I have focused on fixing leafless salads.

Well, the taco salad I made over the weekend was definitely a lettuce salad.

Furthermore, I didn't use all the lettuce I had on hand when I made that salad. 

So, today, I made a huge Romain lettuce-based salad with a wide variety of vegetables. 

It's good. 

And I look forward to getting back to playing around with grain, noodle, and pasta salads. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-13-2026: Aging Slows Down House Cleaning, Taco Salad Deliberations, Summer Food Stories and Poems

 1. Because we were having family dinner at our house today, I needed to get at least the surfaces and the floors of the kitchen, living room, and bathroom cleaned. This kind of work goes very slowly for me as I've grown older and, true to form, it took me a few hours to complete tasks I used to be able to do in an hour. <Shrug> The key to this and other similar changes in my aging life is to accept them and work within the limitations of my ever-changing physical capabilities. 

2. Christy was the brains behind tonight's dinner. She wanted us to have a taco salad with tortilla chips and condiments along with watermelon. 

I volunteered to bring Christy's dinner plan into being.

I had some reservations about expanding upon the recipe I found to make a taco salad -- should I bake and shred some chicken thighs for the salad? Cook and cool some white rice? Include Kalamata olives? Cilantro? Since I made the salad on Sunday, should I wait to but the broken tortilla chips in the salad until today, Monday? 

To all of these questions, I responded "yes". 

It worked. 

I even received clearance from those present to make a taco salad again, should we ever decide to have another one for family dinner. 

3. We've been taking turns giving each other an assignment to complete as a way to focus our after-dinner conversation. 

For this evening, Christy assigned us to present a piece of writing about summer food or to just share a story.

I knew my approach to this assignment was out there a bit, but I think my reading of Victor Hernandez Cruz's poem, "Problem with Hurricanes" went over all right. 

Paul, Zoe, Carol, and Christy did a much better job completing the assignment.

They all talked about memories of food in the summer. Paul and his friend Rory pilfered leftovers from their church's refrigerator in Meridian. Zoe remembered food at our mother's house. Mom rewarded her for doing yard work with a Root Beer Float ice cream bar and let her eat radishes after Zoe had planted the seeds. Carol and Christy (who read a poem she'd written) both reminisced about summer food at our grandmothers' houses and food we ate during our vacation visits to Orofino. 

I'll just say that what stood out for me, while listening to them, was the memory of how much I enjoyed anything we ate or drank from the local Orofino Creamery, whether it was ice cream, half and half, milk, cream, or other delights. 

We had Butterfinger ice cream bars for dessert tonight. They were tasty and refreshing. That said, I would have loved to have served a dessert from the Orofino Creamery! 

Three Beautiful Things 07-12-2026: Walmart Run, Building a Taco Salad, Sunday's NYTime's Crossword

1. In order to really get going today, I needed to roar out to Walmart at 8:00 and pick up a curbside order so I could get to work making a taco salad for Monday's family dinner. I rewarded myself after completing this arduous pick up by purchasing a 16 oz latte at Silver Peak Espresso. 

2. I decided not to buy a taco seasoning packet and made one myself with the help of a recipe. I also decided to make a taco salad with two meats, ground beef and chicken thigh meat. I also added rice to the taco salad recipe I followed and further expanded the recipe to include Kalamata olives and cilantro. 

Oh! The black beans. The recipe called for using a can of black beans, but I quick soaked dry beans and then cooked them, continuing my return to fixing beans from scratch rather than using canned ones. I like how doing this takes me back to my formative years of cooking for myself when I was single and going to graduate school forty years ago. The bean cooking process remains the same! 

I'd never made a taco salad before today and hope what I built works. 

3.  As I think about how to end this blog post, it doesn't seem like I did much yesterday. Suddenly, a salient fact comes back to me. I completed the Sunday NYTimes crossword puzzle and that project took quite a bit of time! I enjoyed the effort and the satisfaction I felt when I completed it. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-11-2026: Solemn Memorial for Matthew Dahlberg, Love and Fatigue, Art History Book

 1. Sue Dahlberg's immediate family moved to Kellogg when we were in the eighth grade. 1967. We have been friends ever since. This past week, her 34-year-old nephew, Matthew, died from a cardiac event. He lived in the Dahlberg family home. He had taken care of Sue's dad and mom right up until they died. He also worked locally as a CNA. 

His selflessness, his devotion to serving others, was at the heart of the memorial that Stu, Ed, and I attended today in the church across the street from our house. Not one of us knew Matthew, but we all have been Sue's lifelong friends and Ed, in particular, has great friendships with Sue's daughters. 

The solemnness of this memorial service was deepened by the news that Matthew's two-year younger brother, Joshua, had been life flighted out of Kellogg (Friday night? Saturday morning? I didn't get that fact clear). He also has a heart condition. The demands of traveling from Miami, FL to Kellogg to mourn his brother was too much for his ailing heart. I'd have to think his broken heart as well. 

As I write this blog post at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 12th, I haven't heard any updates on Joshua's condition. 

I learned a lot about Matthew at the service. He was energetic and intellectual, an avid video game player, a veteran of the Singapore Armed Forces (he was born in Singapore and had dual citizenship), and a gentle soul who helped comfort those in medical need both in his grandparents' home and in the Silver Valley community. 

Grief combined with deep love and respect for Matthew made this a moving gathering of Matthew's family and friends and members of the local community. 

I'm really happy that Ed, Stu, and I could attend together. 

2. I returned home worn out with sweet fatigue. 

Having had reunions with Liz and Jane on consecutive days, having met Jane's sister, Joan and Liz's husband Mike, and having attended Matthew's memorial combined to drain me in a most welcomed way.

So I worked puzzles and fell asleep working on each one and it took me from some time this afternoon until about ten in the evening to write yesterday's blog post because I kept falling asleep. 

It's all familiar. 

Maybe you know what I'm talking about when I say these two things can be true at the same time. 

1. I love people whether longtime friends in the Silver Valley and Eugene and Seattle, in particular, new friends, students when I was teaching, people at church back at St. Mary's, family, book club members and many others. 

2. Interacting with people wears me out. 

Plenty of things I love wear me out: reading, cooking, driving long distances, shopping, etc. It's just how I'm wired. 

Today, being worn out hit me pretty hard and I welcomed having a whole afternoon to rest, sleep, diddle around with puzzles and blogging, and graze in the kitchen, not making a full-blown meal. 

3. Every day or two, on Facebook Reels, a reel created by art historian Matthew Olivier will pop up. He offers analysis and interpretations of paintings and has opted to put his words into the "mouth" of a fictional British AI character, giving me, at least, the feeling that I'm being guided by a tweedy British professor. 

Today, I discovered that Olivier has a book coming out in October: The Art of Reading Art: Understanding what Makes Great Art Great. 

I've been longing to find just such a book and thanks to the magic and manipulative powers of the World Wide Web, this one popped up in my Facebook feed and I pre-ordered it today from bookshop.org and am eager for it to arrive in early October. 

  

Three Beautiful Things 07-10-2026: Remembering Jams in 2019, Friday Jam in Dalton Gardens, *Carpe Diem* Now and Then

 1. Twice in July of 2019, I went up the North Fork of the CdA River to listen to the Ole Mountain Opry, an affiliation of acoustic musicians and singers who played spirituals, country, folk, acoustic pop songs. and more. The musicians sometimes soloed, other times played in duets, trios, quartets, and maybe even quintets and sextets. The first performance I attended was at Country Lane River Resort (now Hook's Landing) and the second was behind the Prichard Tavern. 

I loved them. They reminded me of my favorite outings in Eugene when I attended the weekly Bluegrass Jam at Sam Bond's (and for a while at Hop Valley a few blocks away and earlier in the evening) and the Irish Jam at Sam Bond's. 

At Country Lane, Steve Allen, a banjo player, evidently determined I was more than a casual listener to the music, and he struck up a conversation with me and told me that some of these musicians participated in a Friday jam at the Silver Lake Mall in CdA. 

That month, I went to a Friday jam, enjoyed it a lot, but attending these jams got lost in the scattered, incoherent, ill-planned mess of my life. 

On Thursday evening, just last night, Liz informed me that the Friday jams now happen at Christ Church on the corner of N. 4th and Hanley in Dalton Gardens. 

Liz's husband, Mike, is a regular and acts as what I would call the stage manager of the jam, getting things set up, helping musicians with their mics and chairs, when needed, etc. 

I told Liz Thurs. night that I'd be at tonight's jam. Joan and Jane said they'd also come. 

It was a terrific jam. 

2. I love listening to musicians for whom playing and singing is an avocation. 

I love listening to amateurs who give amateurism a good name because they are not amateurish. 

I don't need live performances to be almost sterile in their perfection. 

I don't know if any performer tonight was flawless, but they were all dedicated, earnest, generous, skilled, happy to be making music, and uplifting to me. 

I heard several performers play familiar songs with their own style, their own vocal range, their own energy; I never once thought about the original. I focused on the performance in front of me, appreciating what each performer brought to popular songs like "Sixteen Tons", "Amarillo by Morning", "Sweet Baby James", "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?", "Paradise", or "You Fill Up My Senses", to name a few. 

I heard sentimental songs, very funny songs, songs glorifying Jesus and praising the Lord, lonely songs, songs of longing, joy, endurance, and self-delusion. 

This is my carpe diem. It's how I seize the day. I go to jams. I read. I go to the symphony. I listen to string quartets. This Wednesday I'll go to the Montvale Event Center to listen to an author I've never heard of, Kendra Langford Shaw, be interviewed about a book I know nothing about, The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos. I go to symphony lectures, exhibits at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and watch videos on my computer created with AI featuring cats dancing to hip hop music. 

3. I like seizing the day with people, too. For the second consecutive day, Liz, Jane, Joan, and I, with the wonderful addition of Liz's husband, Mike, enjoyed dinner together. We went from the Friday jam to Capone's in Hayden and to tell stories, talk about maladies, bemoan grievous occurrences and losses in our lives, rejoice in blessings, and recall those halcyon days when we were nineteen years old and were discovering the intoxicating joy of having friends we could be ourselves with, experiencing our worldviews expanding, and starting in earnest the lifelong effort to shape ourselves and resist, as best we could,  those who would shape us. 

 

Three Beautiful Things 07-09-2026: Cockroach Castle Reunion at Daft Badger, Heavenly Mediterranean Wrap, Crossword Relaxation

 1. During one of the very happiest periods of my life in the spring of 1973, while a student at NIC, I spent a ton of invigorating time with a circle of friends, friends with whom I felt more free than I had ever felt in my young life, maybe my entire life. Most of our time together occurred at an apartment near campus in a building we called the Cockroach Castle (since razed). 

At 1:00 this afternoon, at Daft Badger, I met up with two of Castle friends, Liz and Jane, and Jane's twin sister, Joan. 

Jane and I have seen each other several times since we found each other on Facebook quite a while ago.

Liz and I had not seen each other for fifty-two years. 

We packed a lot of premium yakking into our lunch -- we talked about the present, grieved the loss of Bruce and John, wondered what had happened to other people we knew back then, and marveled at what a glorious time we had at the Castle. 

That short period of time established the direction of my life in ways I revel in to this day. The impact was more far-reaching and liberating than I could have known when I was nineteen, but I see it blessings clearly today.  I'm a bit secretive about what I experienced, not knowing who would really understand. 

Jane and Liz understand, though, and what a joy it was, at least in spirit, to be together back in the Castle again. 

2. I really had to block out of my mind today that Daft Badger brews such awesome beer. It's great living with a successful kidney transplant, but my discussions with the kidney pros have convinced me to leave alcohol alone.

That said, this week's food special was gloriously delicious. I'll quote the Daft Badgers own description of it: "The Chicken Souvlaki Wrap is loaded with Mediterranean chicken, hummus, tzatziki, crisp greens, cucumber, onion, tomato slaw, and feta, all wrapped up in a warm tortilla." 

I ordered an old favorite, the Arugula Salad, as my side and this food elevated the experience of being with Jane, Liz, and Joan from merely heavenly into a stratospheric realm of heavenly I had not previously imagined! 

No beer.

No problem.

Not with a Chicken Souvlaki Wrap so generously presented that I ate half in the pub and the other half later that evening at home -- with my awesome brown rice and vegetable salad, topped with Kamala olives and feta cheese. 

3. No War and Peace today. 

When I returned home and after I enjoyed my Mediterranean wrap and salad, I relaxed with the very challenging Friday New York Times crossword puzzle and with help, as always, from the dictionary, managed to finish it over about an hour and a half. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-08-2026: Fiction and Nonfiction, How We Read, Brown Rice Day

 1. My perspective on fiction and nonfiction changed mightily when I read an essay by Northrup Frye in which he explained that nonfiction tells us what happened and fiction tells us what happens. 

I'm enjoying how Leo Tolstoy combines nonfiction and fiction in War and Peace. In the war sections of the book (at least so far), he draws upon what actually happened in a series of battles between the French and the combined forces of Russia and Austria.

More compelling, though, is when he moves his attention to what's happening in the hearts and minds of two of his central characters, among others, when they are subjected to the violence of war. 

We see what happens when two young, inexperienced, naive soldiers are in battle and confront the very real possibility of death. One of the characters, Andrei, thinks about how being in battle has the potential to make him a hero. Another, Nikolai, hero worships the Russian emperor Alexander and so what happens to him in battle is that he loves the emperor so much that he considers it an honor to possibly die for him. (This short summary leaves out a lot more of what happens to these characters under the stress of warfare.)

Tolstoy doesn't pass judgment on these (or other) characters. In fact, he writes about their inner lives and describes what happens in a way that I experience as objective and committed to the truth of what these characters are about, free of commentary or evaluation. 

2. When I took breaks from reading War and Peace today, I thought about the book club I attend. 

It turns out that on the whole, I've become as interested in what I'm learning about how and why people read as I am about their comments about the books themselves. 

Now, no one says right out "this is how I read" or "this is why I read", but their comments about the book always reveal how they read and often reveal why they read. 

I'm learning from this group (and from video clips I see online in which readers evaluate and recommend books) that many readers read books with expectations. 

A common comment readers make goes something like this: "I expected the book to be more of a (fill in the blank)" or "I didn't expect the book to (fill in the blank)", "I was disappointed because I thought this book was going to (fill in the blank)". 

I admit it. For the last several years, I've been reading books in my own little world with almost no interaction with anyone who is also reading the books I've been reading. 

I've been out of touch with other readers and so listening to other readers talk about how they read has led me to examine how I read. 

I might write more at another time about how I read, but I do know that I don't read with expectations. I focus more on trying to understand what the writer is inviting me to understand. This inquiry leads me to also think about the book's structure, the writer's writing style, and these elements of the book contribute to the writer's purpose and what I'm being invited to experience and understand.  

For example, I'm reading Josh Brolin's memoir From Under the Truck as my bedtime reading. 

Brolin wrote this book, at least in the early parts of it, in a fragmented, nonlinear style, jumping back and forth between vignettes from his boyhood/teenage years and his adult years. 

From the get go, even before I started reading this book, I did not expect it necessarily to read like other memoirs I've read. I didn't expect anything. My approach to reading has left me receptive to being intrigued by his approach to memoir writing.  I'm reading it without judgment, trusting that as I get deeper into it, I might arrive at a better understanding of why he wrote this book this way. I'm enjoying each fragment, each short story. The question for me goes something like this: "Why did Brolin write the book this way? What did he gain by taking this approach?"

And, of course, I might not figure it out and I'll be left feeling intrigued and possibly puzzled. 

Can I live with that? Accept that? 

You bet. 

3. I fixed a pot of brown rice and combined part of what I cooked with a variety of vegetables, olives, and feta cheese to make salad I'm enjoying a lot. I also used some of this rice in a different way, combining it with leftover chili. I melted a slice of sharp cheddar cheese on a tortilla, scooped the chili and rice on to it, folded it over and had a simple and delicious dinner. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-07-2026: Book Club at Auntie's, A Welcome Book Club Surprise, Chili Omelet at Home

 1. I'll begin with this month's meeting of the Science/Nature Book Club at Auntie's Bookstore in downtown Spokane. 

I wrote some of my experience with this month's book, Our Moon, in this blog. It had to do with the Wallace Stevens poem "The Snowman" and the idea of nothing, which led me to the Tao de Ching and its exploration of being/non-being. 

I admit it. 

I kept my mouth shut at today's meeting about my experience with this book. I didn't know how to keep my comments brief. I didn't know how to share my experience without reading the Stevens poem and the chapter from the Tao that were on my mind all through the book. 

So I listened to what others liked about the book, the few mild criticisms people shared, and, to be honest, couldn't help but think how much my experience reading Our Moon felt like it was coming from left field, that it was weird. 

I didn't feel like being different so I decided to blend in and that turned out to be fine with me. 

2. Just as our meeting was getting started, a woman who had not been at the April, May, or June meetings (the three I've attended) walked in and a jolt of excitement shot around the table as people greeted her and welcomed her back. 

At first, she didn't look familiar to me, but when she made a comment about the book early in our discussion, I recognized her voice.

Do any of you reading this remember when, back in February, I went to the Gonzaga Symphony and I wrote about a member of the Spokane Symphony randomly sitting next to me and how much I enjoyed our conversations before the concert and at intermission?

That's who came to the meeting. 

When our club's discussion wrapped up, she and I briefly chatted, confirming that we had sat next to each other at that concert, and agreed that the upcoming symphony season looks very exciting. 

3. If you flash back to my blog post for June 12th, you might remember that I met high school classmates at Nosworthy's in Coeur d'Alene and went kind of nuts because I enjoyed my first ever chili omelet so much. 

I made a batch of chili for dinner Monday and this morning I decided to see if I could make a chili omelet that might be at least decent. 

First, though, I had to read up a little bit on how to make an omelet and the instructions sunk in.

I heated up a half cup of chili. Then after beating two eggs and pouring them into the cast iron skilled, I cooked the eggs as instructed, tried to determine the right moment to put the chili on one half of the egg circle, took the plunge, and, as best I could, folded the egg circle in half.

I have some work to do on making an omelet that is pleasing to the eye.

But, I'm happy to say that while my homely omelet wasn't much for looks, it tasted good and provided the nourishment I needed to slowly read more of War and Peace and not eat again until I ordered a pre-book club cheeseburger and fries at the Park Inn across from the south side of Providence Sacred Heart. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-06-2026: Bean Pleasure, Steak and Chili, Little Library at the Gazebo

 1. I once had a fairly long period of time in my life starting a little over 40 years ago when I regularly soaked and cooked beans of several varieties and turned them into refried beans, soups, chili, enchiladas, and other dishes I enjoyed a lot. 

When I made baked beans for our 4th of July dinner, I used a combination of canned beans and dry beans, soaked and cooked.

An old thrill came back. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed working with dry beans and I'm ready to return to an old and nearly forgotten pleasure. 

2. When I fixed those baked beans, I ended up with a container of cooked/canned beans I didn't need for the baked ones.

Today, I decided to make chili and I thought of my dad. 

Had he been in the kitchen today and had he seen me cut up a ribeye steak into chunks for chili, he would have growled, "That's a good way to ruin a good steak."

Respectfully, I disagree. I also disagreed when he claimed that Aunt Lila "ruined a good steak" when she used sirloin steak to make Swiss steak. 

My answer to Dad: "It's a good way to improve a batch of Swiss steak or a pot of chili."

And it was. 

I cooked up a simple chili, not an award winning creative one, seasoned with cumin, paprika, and chili powder and every bite I took that had a chunk of ribeye steak in it was heavenly. 

By the way, so was the bacon I included in this chili. 

Now my question is: can I manage to fix myself something like a chili omelet? Or will it be more like a chili scramble?

Either way, chili + eggs = awesome in my funny little world of enjoying food! 

3. The first copy I bought a few months ago of Jess Walter's book Beautiful Ruins got wet and the water moderately warped the second half of the book. 

It's probably dumb, but I prefer reading undamaged books.  

So I ordered a new copy of Beautiful Ruins from Better World Books. 

It arrived today. 

I needed a few things from Yoke's and before going to the store, I drove to the Kellogg City Park's gazebo because Christy knew that it used to have a little library (a place where a person can donate and also take books home for free). 

The gazebo's little library is there, so I donated the moderately damaged Beautiful Ruins and noted that the little library was almost empty. Right now, Debbie and I have decided to keep books in the house. Several weeks ago, I unloaded the several boxes I had packed to donate to Better World Books and returned them to our shelves. 

Now, however, if I decide to move a book (or books) along, I'll make a donation at the little library at the gazebo. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-05-2026: Domestic Duties, Reading, Enhanced Hamburger Soup

 1. An urge started to build inside me to go to Montana today, but then I looked at the kitchen, the floors in our house, laundry that needed to be done, and I pushed back the urge and took care of domestic chores. 

2. I paced myself and spiffed things up for a while, then read another section of War and Peace, and then went back to sweeping, picking up, and cleaning counters, and . I tucked a nap or two in there, too. 

3. I still had leftover hamburger soup from a few days ago. I also have leftover beans that I didn't use when I cooked baked beans. I added a bunch of those beans to my soup and it made it an even better soup! 

Three Beautiful Things 07-04-2026: Slow Baked Baked Beans, Holiday Family Dinner, Slowly Reading Surreal War Scenes

1. Friday evening, I used the quick soak method and then cooked a batch of Great Northern white beans. I combined the white beans with cans of kidney and black beans. The red, white, and black beans yielded up four cups of bean liquid and into this liquid I whisked molasses, brown sugar, salt, pepper, ginger, and dry mustard. I placed chopped white onion on the bottom of a well-oiled Dutch oven, poured the beans over the onions, added the four cups of liquid, and then topped it all with chopped bacon. 

I set the oven at 250 degrees and began the 7-8 hour process of slow cooking these beans. 

I was ready to go to bed around 11:00 or so. I turned off the oven with the beans inside, figuring they would continue to cook somewhat even as the oven't heat diminished. 

First thing I did this morning was check the beans, turn the oven back on, and let them continue to slowly cook, checking on them every ninety minutes or so. 

I wanted the beans to be less liquid-y, so, early in the afternoon, I removed the lid and slowly and surely the beans thickened and when they were at the consistency I desired, I turned off the oven and set the beans on the stove to cool. 

About an hour or so before going over to the Roberts' for dinner, I slowly reheated the beans on the stovetop and transferred them into a bowl and put a lid on it. 

Friday evening, when I added the brown sugar/molasses mixture to the beans, I thought the beans tasted way too sweet. 

By the time the beans had slow cooked for many hours, the sweetness mellowed out considerably, so much so that at dinner last night, I wanted the presence of molasses in these beans to be more pronounced. 

But, Christy and Tracy both said they liked the beans. Carol accepted my offer when I asked her if she wanted some leftover beans. Christy also accepted my offer of leftover beans in spirit, but said her fridge didn't have room for a container of beans. (I just heard from Christy. She and Tracy want some of my beans for their Sunday dinner! 💪)

I've got to create more opportunities to fix baked beans and see if I can more masterfully create the flavor in reality that I imagine as I dream about how I'd like the baked beans to taste. 

2.  We had a great dinner at Carol and Paul's house on the patio. In the Spirit of '76 (I guess) we enjoyed slow cooked bbq brisket on a bun, grilled in the husks corn on the cob, potato salad, slow cooked baked beans, fresh fruit salad, and, for dessert, slab cherry pie with cherry ice cream. 

We had a full table of people at the table.  In addition to the usual family dinner attendees (Paul, Carol, Christy, and I), today we were joined by Paul and Carol's student (and local thespian) Lucille, Paul's mother, Pat, the Barnes family (Taylor, Cosette, Saphire, and Bucky), and Christy's guest this weekend, Tracy. 

3. Slow cooked brisket.

Slow cooked baked beans. 

My slow reading of War and Peace slowly progresses. 

I read an anonymous writer's comment today that the battle scenes of Volume 1, Part 2 featured Leo Tolstoy's mastery of "gritty realism". 

The thing is, though, whether the war story is Catch-22, The Things They Carried, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, or any of the many more novels, movies, or poems about war, gritty realism always gives way to the realm of surrealism. 

Surrealism features what's going on in the unconscious mind, often dreams or nightmares, and the touchstones for perceiving reality we rely on in everyday life give way to the logic of dreams. The battle scenes in this section of War and Peace are surreal, nightmarish. None of our usual ways of functioning seem to apply: moral codes disappear, compassion gives way to callousness, enemies who taunt and joke with each other during a truce then turn around and kill each other, some characters see the violence and bloodshed of the battlefield as self-serving opportunities that can burnish their reputations, give them the chance to considered heroic in ways they dream of. 

Because the scenes of battle tend toward surrealism, they are difficult sometimes to follow. In much the same way that our dreams are fragmented and put apparently disconnected things into connection with each other, the same happens in battle and it can be confounding and even fatiguing to read.

But worth it! 

Three Beautiful Things 07-03-2026: Birthday Breakfast, Slow Cooking Beans, Battlefield Chaos

1. As a way to kick off the celebration of Carol's birthday, Christy, Carol, and I ate breakfast at the Brooks Hotel in Wallace. I don't really know the story of the Brooks Hotel, but I did hear the word "remodel" and I thought I heard "new owners", but whatever the story, it's a handsome, well-appointed cafe and we all enjoyed our orders a lot. I ordered a half order of biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were so light and the gravy so well made that I could have eaten a full order and probably not been uncomfortably full. 

2. Carol assigned me to bring baked beans to our 4th of July family dinner. The baked bean recipe I decided to use was easy to assemble and the pot of beans stays in the oven for 7-8 hours. I started the oven baking tonight and after about three hours or so, turned off the heat and left the beans in the oven. I'll get back to more oven baking in the morning. 

3.  As the second part of Volume 1 of War and Peace moves forward, combat breaks out and, on purpose, Tolstoy writes about it and describes it confusingly. Yes. I struggled to picture exactly what was going. I realized that Tolstoy was creating in my mind as a reader something approximating the chaos and confusion of these battles between the French and the Russians and Austrians. Taken together, the booms, smoke, cannon balls shaking the ground, the bursts of rifle fire, adrenaline, the sight of wounded soldiers, and more make it nearly impossible to know what's going on, which side has an advantage, and what to do next. 

It's chaotic, confusing, frightening. 

It's not a heroic or romantic picture.  

Three Beautiful Things 07-02-2026: Rereading, Bean by Bean, The Balm of Aging

 1. Back in my teaching days, I used to (futilely?) encourage students to read the essays or books I assigned both forward and backward. I also encouraged students to reread what I assigned. 

I understood then and understand now the difficulty of doing this. I know when I read, the impulse I always feel strongly is to move forward, enjoy the book, contemplate it, and move on to a new one. 

I have found, however, that when reading War and Peace, I have to turn the encouragement I gave my students onto myself. 

I need to reread, as it turns out, large chunks of what I've read once in order to keep characters straight (even as I take notes) and to get the storylines straight. 

Today I went back and reread about fifty pages of war effort storytelling, with focus on two characters I had met in the early chapters of the book. 

Tolstoy introduced Nikolai Bolkonsky and Andrei Rostov in the early chapters of War and Peace in aristocratic social settings. Silly settings. 

But in Part 2 of Volume 1, these two young socialites are no longer attending soirees. They are part of the Russian/Austrian war effort in conflict with Napoleon's French troops. 

I'm learning how they respond to this new world outside the cocoon of elite Russian society, elite society which is, by the way, available to them in the war effort among some of the military bureaucrats. 

2. Over ten years ago, maybe even fifteen, Adrienne gave me a cookbook of bean recipes entitled Bean by Bean. I opened this terrific cookbook today in search of its baked bean recipe and I think I'll use it to guide my effort to bring tasty baked beans to our 4th of July family dinner. 

3. Out of the blue this evening, Jeff Steve called and we had a terrific conversation about a lot of different things including how for both of us aging has meant being relieved of suffering from the past, suffering, in my case, that dominated my life at one time and that I, for one, thought would be with me forever and that I have no contact with today. What a relief. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-01-2026: Dictionaries Arrive in the Mail, I Need to Do Some Rereading, Sweet and Spicy Hamburger Soup

1. If for some reason I have to have a book quickly and can't get to a bookstore that day, I'll order it from Amazon. I don't remember the last time this happened. 

My online book buying sources are Better World Books and Bookshop, both dedicated to good causes. I also like to order online from Auntie's Bookstore and pick the books up in their store. Last month, I went to the store itself and purchased the thick Russian novels that will be the "big books" part of my summer (and maybe into the fall) reading project. 

Today the two books I recently ordered from bookshop.org arrived. 

I ordered American Heritage's hard cover desk dictionary because I have grown weary of looking up words on my phone while reading. I like having the feel of the dictionary in my hands, but, ha ha!, so far the words I've needed to look up while reading War and Peace didn't make the desk dictionary cut, so I had to go online anyway!  

Oh, well...

The other book that arrived is also a dictionary, one that Bridgit posted about on Facebook several times in the past.

It's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of words invented by its author, John Koenig. Koenig, having noted that we have all kinds of experiences in life that we do not have words for, creates words for these experiences. 

He presents each word, an explanation of what his invented word means, an etymology of what Greek, Latin, or other words he drew upon to create these words, and how to pronounce it. 

Here's an example that caught my attention because I just finished reading the book Our Moon which is about the infinite spatial reach of the universe. 

The word:  galagog

John Koenig's definition:  n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare. 

Etymology: From galaxy a gravitationally bound system of millions of stars + agog, awestruck.

Pronounced "gal-uh-gawg." 

2. The second part of Volume 1 of War and Peace moves to the conduct of war, first in Austria. I got about fifteen chapters into this part of Volume 1 and I've decided that since I'm not under any time pressure to finish this book and since I don't have a paper due on it next week (ha ha), that I'm going to reread what I read today. Names of characters and names of places are unfamiliar to me and I think rereading these chapters, with the help of some summaries posted onliine, will help clarify things and get details more securely planted in my mind (which is not as sharp as it was when I was younger). 

3. Spicy and sweet soup! That's what I like these days! Tonight I improvised and created a hamburger soup of white onion, zucchini, celery, mushrooms, and to make it sweet, included a generous amount of corn kernels and carrots. I gave the soup a quiet bite of spiciness with a moderate amount of red pepper flakes. I salted it, peppered it, and added a small amount of Braggs Liquid Aminos. 

I'm a lucky guy. 

I still have leftover bean and rice salad in the fridge along with at least another bowl of this pleasing hamburger soup. 

Eating mostly salads and soups at home is working for me in a big way! 

Three Beautiful Things 06-30-2026: I'm Hooked on *War and Peace*, Reading Without a Calendar, Trader Joe's and Quiet Patriotism

 1. Leo Tolstoy divided War and Peace into four volumes and an epilogue. Each volume has 3, 4, or 5 parts and the epilogue has 2 parts.

Today I finished the first part of Volume I. It's very early in the book, but as I see it so far, Tolstoy gradually and masterfully opens his story wider and wider, moving the story from family to family and place to place. The novel begins in Petersburg, moves to Moscow, and Volume ends in a country estate called Bald Hills. 

At some point, it will move to war. 

I'm hooked. 

The drumbeat of the coming war is out of sight and cannot be heard, but it's very much on the minds of the aristocrats Tolstoy introduces in this first part of Volume 1 and as the characters discuss their points of view about Napoleon, Tsar (or Emperor) Alexander, and about Russia's place in the western world, I find myself wondering how much they really know, how much of their talk is misinformed, how much certain characters are bloviators more than reliable commentators, and how this war is going to affect these protected, elite, and privileged aristocrats. 

I might be totally wrong about where this book is going, but I thought I'd write out what I'm wondering and see, later on, if my questions are legitimate. 

2. I keep thinking. as I progress in reading this book how glad I am that I'm not reading it for a class. 

Well, that's not totally true. I'd love to be reading this under the direction and guidance of a professor of Russian literature. 

What I'm glad about, though, is that my reading is not at all guided by the calendar. I don't have to have some number of pages read by some deadline, I am not reading this book with exams or paper writing in mind, and what and how I read this book will not be graded. 

All those years that I was employed as an instructor, I spent an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about working with students with no calendar and no grades. The fantasies were folly, of course, but the first thing I thought about when i retired was that I had some number of years ahead of me to read for the sake of knowledge, enjoyment, and relaxation. No syllabus. No grades. It's been blissful. 

3. I focused my shopping trip to Trader Joe's late this afternoon on buying ingredients for soups and leafless salads and on having frozen chicken tenders and raw shrimp on hand for stir fries. I bought two treats for myself, too: a pack of dark chocolate and almond bars and a quart of Cookie Butter ice cream. 

As the checker scanned my groceries, she asked me what I was going to do on the Fourth of July. 

"Hide." 

Then I corrected myself. "Well, I'm having dinner with family, but then I think I'll go home and wrap myself in an American flag and hide in the basement." 

She replied, "That sounds good." (The customer is always right!)

As I started to walk away at the end of our transaction she smiled warmly and said, "Well, have a good Fourth -- and enjoy your hiding."

"You, too," I replied. "And I will." 

Okay. 

I confess. 

I exaggerated. 

I won't be on the cold cement floor of the basement in the fetal position with Old Glory as my cocoon. 

But I hope my point was clear. 

I'm a quiet patriot. 

After our family dinner, I'll be committed to keeping Gibbs and Copper company in case the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air bother them for the first time ever. 

And I'll quietly contemplate the USA coming into being. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-29-2026: Copper Undergoes Laceration Repair, Death Exposes Greed, Black Bean and Brown Rice Salad

 1. Even before fixing myself a latte, the first thing I did this morning was call the Kellogg Medical Pet Center to see if I could get Copper in to have his wound examined.

A 9:00 slot was available.

I did not expect that! 

Dr. Cook immediately sized up the nature of Copper's injury and said ideally the thing to do would be to sedate Copper, remove the flap of skin that had been hanging from where I accidentally injured him, and then stitch the wound. I had been trying to put that flap of skin back over the wound, trying to keep it in place with my amateur placement of the gauze, holding it in place by wrapping a self-sticking wrap around Copper's neck like a collar. 

Dr. Cook presented me with the option of continuing to do that, but I immediately concluded it would be best for Copper for me to say yes to Dr. Cook's "stitch him up" proposal. 

Then another stroke of luck: a cancellation opened up time this afternoon for the surgery. 

So, I left Copper at the vet and returned at 5:00 to pick him up and found out the surgery was a success and, once home, Copper took a small leap atop a towel in his favorite open suitcase and rested, as ordered, for the evening. 

2. In the very early pages of War and Peace, Tolstoy makes it clear that the aged and stroke stricken Count Bezukhov is going to die. 

The drama in this part of the story is not if he will die, no, the drama is in the jockeying, plotting, secret conversations, resentments, and other activity and feelings carried out by his survivors. 

Dickens, Trollope, and many other 19th century novelists brilliantly write whole segments of some of their novels around the sniping, greed, hypocrisy, and self-seeking, often exercised under the guise of grieving, acted out by family members and others who want to cash in on the death of one with wealth. 

Tolstoy takes us into the souls of these characters as they grub for a share of old Bezukhov's death. I'm eager to see how it all pans out. '

Reading the development of this subplot made me laugh, cringe, boo, hiss, sigh, and long for someone with a sense of common decency to step in get the parties to settle their conflicts. Will this happen? I'm going to stay tuned and find out. 

3. As I've mentioned, I've been hungry lately for other than lettuce focused salads. 

Tonight, I cooked brown rice and combined it with black beans and built a salad around the beans and rice. I chopped celery, green onion, radishes, and red pepper in a bowl and mixed in Kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, and cilantro, and put it all together with the beans and rice. I completed this salad by adding a couple generous splashes of salsa and topping it with broken corn tortilla chips. 

I loved this salad and have a good helping or two left over.

I realized as I finished the helping I ate for diner that I forgot to include fresh squeezed lemon juice. 

I remedied that error by squeezing half a lemon over the leftover salad. 

I tasted it. 

The lemon made a huge positive difference. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-28-2026: Steak Soup, Tolstoy Learns from Jane Austen, It's the Ted Mack Amateur Hour as I Tend to Copper's Wound

1. When I open the freezer in the basement and see our small and thick ribeye steaks, I don't think about grilling them or frying them in a cast iron pan or baking them. I don't think about eating one of them with a baked potato nor do I think about having a steak fry for family dinner. 

I look at these steaks and I see soup or stew.

So, today, having thawed a ribeye, I cut the thick steak into two thinner ones and, in a Dutch oven, I fried bacon pieces with cubes of steak alone with white onion, mushrooms, and chopped celery seasoned with salt and pepper. 

While these ingredients cooked away, I turned a tablespoon and a half of Vegetable Better than Bullion paste into a quart of broth, added it to the pot along with with four chopped carrots and about half a bag of corn. 

I let this emerging soup bubble until the carrots were cooked through -- the other ingredients were in good shape -- and I added Montreal Steak seasoning and oregano to the soup. 

I also added egg noodles. For me, this was the perfect finishing touch, or, if you are a Russian aristocrat in War and Peace, it was le coup de grace. 

I enjoy cooking for Debbie and doing it when it's my turn to fix family dinner. 

That said, I enjoy the freedom of cooking for myself. I can more freely try out seasonings, use noodles instead of potatoes in stew/soup (like tonight), and feel more confident about cooking without a recipe. 

2. Here's the kind of irony I enjoy. 

Well, let me ask you, have you ever been in a social situation with someone who talks and talks and talks, never seems to notice that no one else his participating because this person is dominating the conversation, and then this same conversation dominating person says, "You know, I really like Barnaby, but he sure talks a lot." 

That's irony! 

Irony often reveals lack of self-knowledge. In the case of the non-stop talker complaining about a non-stop talker, it's not hypocristy, it's just being clueless about one's own behavior. 

Leo Tolstoy employs irony masterfully in the early chapters of War and Peace. These chapters focus on the manners, concerns, and preoccupations of the Petersburg and Moscow aristocracy. Tolstoy's use of irony exposes false confidence, shallow knowledge, little true self-understanding, and more. 

Repeatedly, these instances of irony had me flashing back to novels I've read by Jane Austen.

I wondered, did Tolstoy admire Jane Austen?

I looked into if a bit and the answer was a resounding YES. He loved Austen. 

I think she taught him a lot about moments of withering irony in a story and how they can make a reader laugh or feel fear and how these moments always succeed in revealing more about the character than the character realizes is being revealed about her (or him). 

3. Today, I became an amateur (maybe amateurish) veterinarian as a follow up to having been an amateur (no, amateurish) cat groomer. 

Friday evening, while working to remove a plug of matted fur from Copper's fur, I wounded him, just below and to the left of his chin.  

I kept an eye on the wound all day Saturday and tried with materials we had on hand to cover the wound, but I didn't have the right stuff. 

This morning I bought gauze pads, a roll of self-adhesive wrap, and cotton rounds. 

I had better success cleaning the wound with the cotton rounds and water.  I was able to clip fur around the wound, cover it with a gauze pad, and hold it in place by wrapping the self-adhesive material loosely around his neck. 

Copper has been unbothered by this whole situation. 

My attempt to clean the wound and clumsily cover it haven't fazed him. 

He definitely is not in pain.

And once my gauze/neck wraps were in place, he left them alone. 

For all of this, I've been most grateful. 

Update: It's now Monday morning. I've been to the vet. He'll perform a minor surgery and stitch the wound. I'll have Copper back home by 3 or 4 this afternoon. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-27-2026: Getting Rooted in *War and Peace*, Ed and I at The Lounge, Ahhh! Hot Chocolate!

 ** I should have noted this yesterday, but yesterday's post was my 7200th here at kellogg bloggin'. Has this blog entered War and Peace territory? 🤣🤣🤣

1. I have a notebook at my side when I read so I can jot things down to remember. My notebook is getting a real workout as I start reading War and Peace. The names of the Tolstoy's Russian characters are unfamiliar to me and the relationships within and between families is complex enough that I need to write down their names, a few character traits, and their place in this world Tolstoy is creating. 

It's slow work. I'm thirty pages into War and Peace and it's taken me about three hours or so to get this far because I've read, reread, taken notes, read endnotes, and read translations into English when characters speak in French. French, by the way, was spoken prominently in Russian elite circles. It was the language of diplomacy, aristocratic culture, and European civilization. 

What I've read so far takes place in Petersburg, a city only a hundred years old at the time of this story (the start of the 19th century).  It's named after Tsar Peter the Great and in its architecture and other cultural ways, the city reflects Peter the Great's ambitions to make Russia a European power, to undo its previous isolation from Europe, and to refine its reputation and image as a barbaric country. 

(I'm having flashbacks to the course I took in 1974 in Russian history at Whitworth and to the carefully curated image the USSR worked to convey through their remarkable pavilion at Expo 74.)

I enjoyed this slow concentrated effort to get myself firmly rooted in this book and I'm expecting that as these characters' stories develop, as they become more familiar to me, my reading pace will pick up. 

2. Ed called me mid-afternoon and wondered if I'd like to get together for a beer at The Lounge. 

I did want to and not only looked forward to getting caught up on what's been going on with Ed, but looked forward to drinking a couple of Bud Zeros combined with Bloody Mary mix. 

We had a good time and enjoyed Cas joining us from time to time for stories and good laughs. 

3. First thing this morning, I picked up a curbside order at Walmart. It included a small box of hot chocolate packets. I've been yearning for hot chocolate, but have regularly forgotten to put it on my grocery lists over the last several weeks. 

Tonight, I made myself a cup to enjoy while I worked on and completed the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

I was a little bit concerned that the hot chocolate might keep me from sleeping, but it didn't.

In fact, when I went to bed and returned to reading Every Day I Read, I only lasted a few pages before I conked out. 

Correction: When I first posted about Every Day I Read, I thought the title was Every Day Read and interpreted as a command. I got the title wrong. Now I have it right!

  Every Day I Read

Three Beautiful Things 06-26-2026: Blood, Sweat & Tears Again, Starting *War and Peace*, Bed Time Meditations by Hwang Bo-Reum

 1. I enjoyed the responses that came my way in the wake of David Clayton-Thomas' death and my thoughts about Blood, Sweat & Tears' second, self-titled, album. Rich Brock posted his appreciation for the song "Sometimes in Winter" and I was 100 percent with him. I thought a lot about that track while remembering my love for this album, but because Steven Katz wrote it and sang it, mentioning it didn't fit with my focus on David Clayton-Thomas and BS&T cover tunes. 

I'll just say that in high school I used to get all dew-eyed and dreamy whenever I listened to "Sometimes in Winter". 

2. It was a banner day today in my reading life. I started Leo Tolstoy's thick masterpiece War and Peace. I enjoyed how getting started reading this book transported me back to my thousands of year as a student. I needed to prepare to read it. One of the translators wrote the Introduction to this Vantage Classics edition and I read it and especially enjoyed its last several paragraphs that covered his approach to translation. 

I also, for some reason, enjoyed how slowly I'll have to read. Characters speak in French sometimes and the translations of the French are at the bottom of the page. This edition is also generously footnoted, mostly with historical explanations of figures and events Tolstoy refers to that are connected to the early 19th century's Napoleonic Wars. So I'm having to stop, read translations at the bottom of the page or read footnotes (really endnotes) found in the back of the book. 

Keeping characters with sometimes complicated Russian names straight will challenge me, slow me down. I'll take notes and frequently need to refer to the list of characters published in this edition for reference. 

With all that said, I found the early pages of War and Peace compelling, already psychologically fascinating. 

I look forward to moving forward, however slowly -- and, for unhurried me, slow is good. So is the work War and Peace will require. 

3. A while back, Debbie talked quite a bit about how much she enjoyed the Korean author Hwang Bo-Reum's book of short meditations entitled, Every Day Read.

I read that title as a mandate. Hey! Every single day! Read something! 

I couldn't sleep when I went to bed Friday night and so I started reading Hwang Bo-Reum's very short reflections on different aspects of reading. Here are a few examples: "Read Small Books", "You Don't Always Have to Finish It", "Visiting the Library". 

I read over half the book before I nodded off. 

I enjoy the simplicity and wisdom of her chapters, and it was the perfect book to read in bed, even though it didn't really help me fall asleep. It stimulated me and kept me awake! 

Oh, well. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-25-2026: *The Lucky and the Left* -- It's Not *Portlandia*, RIP David Clayton-Thomas, The Noir World of Portland

 1. I knew when I returned to Willy Vlautin's book The Lucky and the Left late this morning that, aside from eating, resting my eyes, and letting Gibbs out and back in the house, I wouldn't do anything else until I finished it. 

I was right. 

Brief  background: Along with writing novels, Willy Vlautin works as a house painter and is the songwriter and lead guitarist of the Portland retro country soul band (the band's description) The Delines. He played a similar role for several years in another band, Richmond Fontaine. 

The Lucky and the Left is a Portland novel that is not taking place in the world of Portlandia, not a story about characters living in service to the slogan "Keep Portland Weird", not a story about downtown post- George Floyd confrontations between law enforcement, demonstrators, and Proud Boys in Portland, nor is it about anything else that commonly stereotypes Portland. 

No, Willy Vlautin writes about the fading working class world of Portland, about people hanging on by a thread, with much of the story taking place in St. John and neighboring areas of North Portland. It's about house painters, a stripper, waitresses, the aisles of Safeway and Fred Meyer (not Whole Foods and Market of Choice), broken families, cans of Olde English 40s, diners, and dive bars. 

In this world of brokenness, family violence, hard work, and adolescent anger, the novel centers around a relationship that develops between Eddie, a house painter, and Russell, Eddie's eight-year-old next door neighbor and Eddie's dog, Earl. 

I'll leave it at that. If you should happen to read this book, you'll want to know as little as possible about what transpires and experience this world and these characters without spoilers. 

Physical violence didn't dominate this novel, but when it occurred, I'll just say it was difficult for me to bear.

2. Today I read the news of the death of David Clayton-Thomas, known primarily for his work as the lead singer for Blood, Sweat &Tears.

Clayton-Thomas first appeared with Blood, Sweat & Tears on the band's second album, titled simply Blood, Sweat & Tears. 

When I bought and listened to this album in the summer of 1969 (it was released in 1968), its blending of rock, blues, jazz, gospel, and, briefly, classical music gave me a deep pleasure I'd never felt before. 

In junior high, I had bought at least one Al Hirt album (Honey in the Horn) and had collected several Herb Alpert albums and so I'd already developed a love for trumpet driven music, but nothing I'd heard prepared me for the instrumentation of Blood, Sweat & Tears in support of the incredible vocal range and stylings of David Clayton-Thomas. 

Now, fifty-eight years after the release of Blood, Sweat & Tears, two of its features stand out to me, two things I never could have said about this album when I was fifteen years old. 

First, the album opened and closed with "Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie". These two tracks were adaptations of French composer Erik Satie's 1888 composition for piano entitled, "Trois Gymnopedies."

Those classical music tracks transported me, at fifteen years old, into a dreamy world of beauty and wonder. I know now, that along with George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris", these two tracks became my gateway into classical music, a love I pursued more purposefully in my college years as I attended the Spokane Symphony for the first time, listened to classical albums in the library with headphones at North Idaho College, and began to purchase and play classical music albums. 

This impact of Blood, Sweat & Tears came back to me today. I had Symphony Hall on the radio as I read The Left and the Lucky and the great classical guitarist Christopher Parkening came on the air playing Erik Satie's "Trois Gymnopedes". Listening to him delivered me back to the other worldly experience Satie gave me, via BS&T in 1969 and also took me back to when used to listen to Parkening play Bach on the guitar on an LP I bought on a whim, never having heard of Parkening, at the Whitworth College bookstore. 

Secondly, I didn't think much about this when I was fifteen years old, but now I know that David Clayton-Thomas was a brilliant interpreter of songs other artists had recorded. At fifteen, I didn't know that, say, when The Turtles recorded Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" or when Vanilla Fudge recorded The Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" that this was known as one artist covering a song first done by another. 

Now, all these decades later, I've come to love listening to cover versions of songs and three of Clayton-Thomas's covers stand out to me on the Blood, Sweat & Tears album. 

In no particular order, here they are, three songs that Clayton-Thomas and BS&T borrowed from other musical traditions and genres and made their own.

"You've Made Me So Very Happy" was first recorded by Motown's Brenda Holloway in 1967 and Clayton-Thomas and the band manage to pay homage to the Motown sound while also transforming this song into a work of their own. 

"And When I Die" was written by the great singer-songwriter Laura Nyro when she was 17 and was recorded in 1966 by Peter, Paul and Mary. Later on, Nyro recorded the song herself. Both versions are beautiful. Mary Travers takes the vocal lead in the first version and Laura Nyro sings the song solo in her version. I listened just now to the it recorded live at the Manhattan folk club, The Bottom Line. 

The Blood, Sweat & Tears version brings a new power to this song with the instrumental arrangement and David Clayton-Thomas, like Peter, Paul &Mary and Laura Nyro, sings it with soulful power while taking it out of the folk and acoustic blues realm and into a realm of jazz and blues that has its own power. It's unforgettable. 

Now, all these years later, I think the gutsiest cover on this album is of the iconic Billie Holliday's song "God Bless the Child". A part of me says, whoa, bro, leave Billie alone! But I'm glad Blood, Sweat & Tears didn't leave this song alone. To me, they open the song in church and then it begins to swing a bit and the great feel David Clayton-Thomas has for this song takes it over. But, the goose bump moment comes for me at 3:10 with the jazzy breakout of piano, trombone, trumpet, and saxophone solos. Then back comes Clayton-Thomas and someone brought a harmonica to church and as the song winds down, we are back in the pews again and guys take us out of this song with the same kind of worshipful sound they played to bring us in. 

Really. The more I think about it, this album might have had more impact on my future love of multiple genres of music than any other, especially when I was in my teens. 

RIP David Clayton-Thomas (1941-2026). 

3. Back in April, not knowing a thing about Willy Vlautin, Debbie and I went to the Bing in Spokane to hear him interviewed by Jess Walter. 

The interview is archived with the other Northwest Passages presentations on YouTube.

I listened to this interview again tonight, having finished The Left and the Lucky. 

The interview reminded me that Willy Vlautin set out to give this story a noir feel. He wanted to create a world in the shadows of Portland, a world of brokenness, instability, potential and realized violence, and of cigarettes and alcohol. He also wanted to leaven this noir world with decency. He succeeded. All of these dark elements co-exist with certain characters who are good -- as the novel develops, I wondered: will the darkness or the decency prevail? 

I found out. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-24-2026: Spontaneous Trip to Worley, I Visit the House of Happiness, Reading Willy Vlautin

1. I needed to take care of some of my life's loose ends and spent time this morning tidying up the kitchen, filing papers, looking for and finding a document I thought I'd lost, putting clothes away -- that sort of thing. 

Around 1:00 or so, I decided I needed to get out of the house. I hadn't been to Winning Wednesday for a while at the CdA Casino. I made a spur of the moment decision to head that way. 

I drove to CdA, fueled up at Costco, and headed down to Worley. 

Spinning reels was not a disaster nor did I come out ahead. 

I hadn't eaten all day when I arrived, and after spinning reels for about an hour or so, I went to the Red Tail Bar and Grill and enjoyed a mushroom Swiss cheeseburger with fries. 

Lately, I've been enjoying jalapeno peppers with different food items and wished this burger had peppers on it, so I asked for hot sauce and I dressed my sandwich with catsup, yellow mustard, and one of the hot sauces my server brought out. 

Great move! 

I guess I'm going through a spicy burger/spicy food phase in my dotage. 

2. I left the casino around 6:00 or so and in CdA I stopped by the house of happiness, Panhandle Ice Cream. 

The women serving ice cream and even making the occasional espresso drink managed the throng wanting ice cream with grace, friendliness, and genuine smiles. Their calm, focused, cheerful, efficient manner impressed me! 

I ordered a single scoop of Salted Caramel Brown Butter Cookie ice cream in a dish and I loved it. 

3. I stepped away from the happy bunch of people coming in and out and found a table a ways away from the door and the smiling adults and children talking and laughing over ice cream just outside the shop. 

I sat at a table with ice cream and a book. 

I continued reading Willy Vlautin's latest novel, The Left and the Lucky. I started it last night. 

Right away, in very few pages and by employing spare language and vivid details (Rollos, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Lean Cuisine, shopping at Fred Meyer and more), Vlautin establishes the world of this story. He introduces us to a stressed single mom who works a night shift, has moved her family in with her frail mother, finds out her fifteen-year-old son's girlfriends is pregnant, and has a second grade undersized son who wets the bed, rarely speaks, and gets bullied by his older brother. 

I know the story is set in Portland and, as of now, I think it takes place in the St. Johns neighborhood. 

I'll correct this observation later if it turns out to be inaccurate. 

This book is quite a change from Lonesome Dove and Our Moon, but not a huge change from the Willy Vlautin book I finished not long ago, The Horse. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-23-2026: Earth and Moon, Moon and Science and Money, Evacuation Project Essentially Finished

 1. Today I finished reading Our Moon. The last two chapters focused on the Apollo program and beyond. These chapters looked at how the rocks the astronauts brought back to Earth have helped scientists better understand the geological history of the moon, which, in turn, informs our understanding of the geological history of Earth. 

Rebecca Boyd also focused on the impact seeing Earth from outer space had on the astronauts and the kind of perspectives seeing pictures of Earth from so far away could potentially have on us here at home, with emphasis on how borderless Earth looks from afar and how nearly unimaginably miniscule Earth is in relation to the vastness of the space it occupies. 

2. But for entrepreneurs, wealthy people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the moon is not valuable for the geologic history it helps us understand nor does it have the spiritual value it has held for millennia for cultures worldwide.  

No, it's a place to colonize, mine, and exploit. 

The merging of science and scientific discovery with the development of wealth always complicates things. 

The moon is no exception. 

3. If we were to be given a READY evacuation order, after today, we are ready. If we were given a SET order, we could have the car loaded in under ten minutes and then we'd be ready to GO. 

I have a couple of small things still to attend to -- things we'd be fine without -- but, on the whole, this project I've been slowly working on is in very good shape. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-22-2026: Time Boggles My Mind, Family Calendar in Place, Next Day Pleasures

 1. As I read more of Our Moon, it's mind boggling (but completely understandable) to me that for approximately 299,550 of the about 300,000 years that humans have existed, it was widely assumed and accepted that Earth was the center of the universe. I have been trying to imagine a 300,000 year timeline and trying to picture how miniscule the about 450 year old age of modern science is on that timeline. I'd love to come up with an analogy along the lines of "a drop in the ocean", but I don't have one just yet. 

What incredible breakthrough it was, thanks largely to the telescope, when scientists and others began to see the universe's incomprehensible vastness and how overwhelmingly true it is that Earth is not at the center. Punishing backlash ensued, especially early on, because this knowledge of the universe called so many age-old understandings, both religious and scholarly, of the Earth's place in the universe into question. 

2. Debbie, Adrienne, Jack, and Eloise have a lot going on in New York, Carol, Paul, and Christy have a lot going on here in Kellogg, and, well, I have a Book Club meeting on July 7th, so Christy spearheaded the creation of a family Google calendar so we can all know what each other is doing. 

It took me a while to get the hang of how this shared calendar works, but with Christy's help, I figured it out and I'm happy that I can refer to it and know when everything from a used book sale to garden tours to Paul and Carol staying at the Davenport Hotel for their 40th wedding anniversary to what's happening in Valley Cottage and more is happening. 

3. I took pleasure today in being able to extend Sunday evening's family dinner another day. The seafood pasta Christy fixed aged really well and I very much enjoyed eating it cold; Christy's garlic bread was also very tasty on the second day as was the pastaless Italian salad I prepared. Yes, I would have enjoyed a next day helping of apple crisp with caramel ice cream, but no problem. Being able to eat the leftovers I had on hand uplifted me. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-21-2026: 100 Percent Containment, Emptiness As a Good Thing, Movie Soundtracks After Family Dinner

 1. As I write this post at 9:30 on Monday morning, I just read an update on the Gold Run Fire, between Elizabeth Park and Big Creek. The fire is 100% contained. The operation is winding down and many crew members along with equipment can return to their home units. Monitoring will continue and Avista crews can now enter the burn site and repair damaged poles and wires. 

2. Now, about Sunday. 

I took a break from the moon today. I did, however, continue to think about emptiness and how necessary it is. I thought about how when we empty ourselves of ego, fixed ideas, the intrusions of the past, and other ways we fill our inner life, then we can be receptive to what the present moment brings us. 

I agree with Hugh's comment to me that my life is full of friends, family, acquaintances, and blessings, but, paradoxically this cup of mine that runneth over must also be emptied to make room for the blessings, experiences, new things to learn, new ideas, and so on that will, no doubt, come my way today. 

It's a paradox for sure. We don't want our lives to feel empty, but, as the Tao de Ching calls to our attention, we need the emptiness of the cup or of the newly built house in order to fill our cups (mine is filled with a latte right now!) or bring our houses to life.

By the way, we have common ways of talking about the perils of fullness when we say someone is "full of crap" or another is so "full of herself (or himself)". 

Right?

3. Our family dinner this evening definitely had our cups running over with delicious food and lively conversation. 

Christy hosted and created tonight's dinner. She asked Paul what he'd like as a Father's Day dinner. He requested a seafood pasta dinner and so Christy fixed a superb linguine with shrimp, clams, and scallops main course accompanied with Italian garlic bread and I brought a leafless, pastaless Italian salad blending zucchini noodles, marinated artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, green onion, both red and orange sweet peppers, cilantro, and Parmesan cheese. I dressed the salad with the artichoke marinade and olive brine. (That worked for me -- hope it worked for the others!)

Carol baked an apple crisp for dessert and I got to recommend ice cream to go with it. Carol, understandably, didn't find any turtle ice cream in town, but I recommended caramel swirl as a Plan B and she brought both a salted caramel swirl and a cold brew coffee and caramel ice cream.

Christy assigned us to each bring a song or a track from a movie soundtrack that we like and to explain how the music connects with the movie. Here's what each of us played for the others:

I played the theme from the 1988 Italian movie Cinema Paradiso. 

Carol played Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" from Wayne's World.

Paul played Cat Stevens singing "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" from Harold and Maude.

Christy played the wedding version of the nuns singing, with orchestral accompaniment, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" from The Sound of Music. 

It was fun talking about movies and music in addition to other topics (yes, including the moon!). 

Three Beautiful Things 06-20-2026: Organize, Nothingness and Emptiness, Existentialism in My Life

 1. Three boxes arrived today with dog food, toothpaste, toothbrushes, a portable litter box, bottled water, a travel soap dish, and flashlight. A few more things will arrive tomorrow. Then all I have to do is decide how to organize things and I'll wrap up this project. 

2. Rebecca Boyle opens her book Our Moon, with a description of the moon's nothingness: no air, no life, no color, and so on. We humans, however, project much upon this nothingness: our dreams, hopes, ambitions, curiosity, imagination, and so on. 

As I read more deeply into this book, I keep thinking about Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man". It in the poem's speaker looks upon a bleak winter landscape of "pine trees crusted with snow" and "junipers shagged with ice" and concludes that "being nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." 

Boyle's book opens with the "nothing that is" the moonscape, but as the book develops and she examines the creation of the moon, the rocks astronauts brought back, the role of the moon in shaping our sense of time, the moon's role in ancient religions as an embodiment of divinity, and a host of other things, she examines the "nothing that is not there". 

Thinking about "The Snow Man" and the moon transported my thinking to Chapter 11 of the Tao de Ching, which is a meditation upon emptiness:

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move. 

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside 

that holds whatever we want. 

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable. 

We work with being, 

but not being is what we use. 

In short, the nothing that is there and the nothing that is not there.  

3. Ever since I was introduced to existentialism in the fall of 1973, just a few months after the Zinc Plant accident I've mentioned (many times) before, I've restlessly entertained the possibility that we humans come into the world empty, as being nothing, undefined.  This is the core tenet of existentialism. Existence precedes essence. We are not essentially anything.  

The Tao de Ching is helpful here. We are, in other words, like the hole in the wheel, the emptiness of the cup, or the inner space of the newly built house. The existentialist asserts that we are frighteningly free. We bear an enormous responsibility to make meaning out of our lives, to meaningfully turn emptiness into purpose, a responsibility that can lead to feelings of anxiety, dread, even nausea. We resist this freedom. Rather than make meaning ourselves, we let forces and influences outside of ourselves create meaning for us. We surrender our freedom and responsibility to dictate who we are and what life's meaning is. 

I'm not sure when I started reading Our Moon that I expected a book about the moon to lead me to thinking so much about these ideas about what it means to be a human being, but, as they say, here I am! 

 

Three Beautiful Things 06-19-2026: Home Work, Lunar Effects, Sausage Soup

 1. After a curbside pickup of groceries at Walmart, I stayed home today and worked on getting things in order around the house: laundry, kitchen cleanup, refining my preparation in case of an evacuation, and more. It doesn't make for a riveting blog post (zzz), but working on these tasks matters a lot! 

2. I'm learning more and more about the moon's impact on our lives here on earth as I slowly read Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle. The moon and the tides, over a nearly incomprehensible amount of time, slowly and incrementally affected how certain marine creatures evolved into land creatures. I bring this up because I read and hear people comment about what's natural and unnatural, usually asserting that natural means unchanging and to deviate from some sense of what is original, say, in humans, is unnatural (and immoral). 

But the reading I've been doing as a member of the Science and Nature book club and other reading I've done in the past (I'm thinking of Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist), convinces me that what is natural is change, is mutability, is flexibility and that what is unnatural is the idea of permanence in nature.  Humans, plants, animals, climate, bodies of water, the speed of Earth's rotation, the distance between Earth and the moon have all changed over the eons and the ways that this constant change, however gradual or quick, come about are complex and I'm learning more about the moon's influence upon life on Earth.

3. As I set my mind to fixing myself some dinner tonight, I suddenly remembered that there were two sausages in the fridge. I'd been thinking about making a bacon, bean, and vegetable soup, but I put that idea aside and began to imagine a sausage soup. 

It didn't really tax my imagination much. I sauteed white onion and celery along with the sausage and soon added zucchini, mushroom, frozen corn, and frozen green beans to the mix and poured what I had left in a box of beef broth over it all and cooked it slowly for a while. 

At first, I didn't season the soup. I wanted to see if the combination of these ingredients, especially the sausage, would be tasty enough and they were. 

All the same, I'd been reading about evolution and the importance of the emergence of amino acids to how living beings developed and so, with that on my mind, I added some Bragg Amino Liquid to the soup. It tasted great with the Amino Liquid and without and led me to hope that I'll remember in the future to fix myself a pot of sausage soup again. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-18-2026: Gold Run Fire Update, Evacuation Prep Continues, Rotini Salad

 1. Thursday's news from the Gold Run Fire between Big Creek and Elizabeth Park was good.

Most, not all, evacuated residents of Big Creek and Elizabeth Park could return home. 

The fire did not grow, at least not significantly. 

Firefighters completed a fire line around the entire perimeter of the fire. 

It's about 20-22% contained. 

Crews continue the hard work of securing and strengthening fire lines and monitoring hot spots. 

2. If some time in the future, law enforcement orders us to evacuate our home, I'll already have in the trunk a first aid kit, blankets, pillows, dried fruit, granola bars, almonds, and bottled water. Today I ordered a portable litter pan for Copper, food for Gibbs, bathroom stuff beyond what we use every day, an extra flashlight, and a few other things that we'll also keep in the trunk. 

I'm going to strategically place in the house other things like three days' worth of clothes, electronics, cords, portable phone charger, and important documents, making it so we can put our hands on them immediately if we need to make a quick exit. 

3. Having decided to fix myself salads not using lettuce, I gave Carol and Paul a head of lettuce thinking their rabbit Bunz would enjoy it, but Bunz might share with Carol and Paul. 

I made a rotini salad today that included black beans along with fresh vegetables. I dressed the salad with basil pesto, a new thing for me, and, oh yes, it worked. 

Three Beautiful Things 06-17-2026: Evacuation Preparation, Learning from Science, All is Change

 1. I started the mostly simple task today of preparing to evacuate our house if we receive such an order ever.  I've made a master list of things to pack and Debbie and I, communicating across the vast USA, have been discussing items we always want in the trunk of the car, ranging from dried fruit and nuts and granola bars to blankets, pillows, and sweatshirts.

A fire update:  as of 10:00 a.m. on June 18th: the evacuation notice for Big Creek and Elizabeth Park is still in effect and being evaluated. 

The fire is about 20% contained. Wednesday was a cooler day. That helped. Thursday looks to be warmer and the fire crews will be looking for increased activity within the fire's perimeter. 

Approximately 247 are assigned to the Gold Run Fire. 

2. I'm reading our next book club selection, Our Moon. I'm being strhetched by this book, as I was by previous books, because I am not well-informed about the details of history as seen through the lens of different branches of science.  The previous books we read expanded my knowledge and understanding of evolution (I didn't understand everything I read) and Our Moon is expanding my knowledge and understanding of different explanations regarding how the Earth and moon came into being and how their gravitational forces affect each other and how planet Earth is also affected by the gravitational pull of the sun and other planets. 

I know I'm not understanding everything I read in this book, but I sure enjoy going outside the areas of study that shaped my professional and continue to inform my personal life.  Not being well read in the world of science and having a lot to learn about the world of nature made joining this book club a great idea. 

3. Although I don't have a studied understanding of science, I'm enjoying the overlap I see between scientific study and my experience with literature and world religion.  Right now, I'm thinking particularly of Shakespeare (and when I think of Shakespeare my mind also goes to Buddha and to the Tao de Ching).

Science, Shakespeare, Buddha, and the Tao are all primarily concerned with mutability, that is, the everchanging nature of reality. 

Scientific study examines the objective evidence of how the moon's orbit fluctuates, how its gravitational force effects tidal changes and has an impact on Earth's climate, among other things. For Shakespeare, the moon was a central metaphor for mutability because night after night, the moon appeared different than it had the night before. Moonlight also served as a metaphor for how dimly we actually understand things, as if when it comes to perception and understanding, we live in a world more dimly lit by the moon than the more brilliant light of the sun. 

Buddhism is grounded in the precept that all is impermanent, subject to constant change. 

Likewise, the Tao teaches that everything is in a state of flux. 

Just one example of the centrality of mutability in the world of science: the theory of evolution is an explanation of species adapting to change, surviving, not by remaining static or original, but by changing in order to continue living in the everchanging world. 

The book Our Moon has the associative region of my mind cooking with gas.