Three Beautiful Things 07-26-2026: Pain Subsides, Food Prep, Barack Obama and Eloise

 1. Christy's pain subsided some today. That's encouraging. 

2. I had fun in the kitchen today doing some preparation for Monday's family dinner at Carol and Paul's. I want the food to surprise Christy, Carol, and Paul, so I'll write about this preparation more after we've had dinner. 

3. One of my very favorite places to visit in Washington, D. C. is the National Portrait Gallery and today Adrienne took Eloise there. Debbie sent out a terrific picture of Eloise next to the portrait of Barack Obama in the museum's awesome "America's Presidents" permanent exhibition. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-25-2026: A Break, Dog Food, Another Omelet

 1. I'm taking a break from updating Christy's situation. I'll return to posting about Christy when we have a clearer understanding of what's going on and what's next in her treatment. 

2. I delivered an order of dog food over to Carol and Paul's house. I hope Riley will appreciate that! 

3. I fried some bacon, cooked some mushrooms, and then beat two eggs and cooked an egg circle. At the right moment, I put the bacon and mushrooms on top of the circle, added some halved cherry tomatoes and pickled jalapeno peppers and folded one half of the circle over the other. 

It was a decent dinner omelet. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On another burner, I fixed egg noodles. 

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

It worked! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I texted Debbie. 

Holy Toldeo! 

Hannah and Harriet Potter lived in Chennai. 

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

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

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

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

In Chennai.

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

It's weird. 

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

Go figure.

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

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

 1.  Back to Is a River Alive? 

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

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

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

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

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

His first daemon fascinated me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I enjoyed them. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Early this afternoon, I hit the road.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was fun. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today I reviewed her list again. 

How many books are on it?

Fourteen! Not twenty. Not over twenty. Fourteen! 

It's weird how my memory can exaggerate things.  

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

Over twenty? 😕

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

Today: regular pinto and Great Northern white beans. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happily and solemnly. 

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

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

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

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

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

It was a lively time together. 

Bucky always ups the energy level in the room. 

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

I look forward to another get together on Saturday. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Ah! The small pleasures in life. 

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

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

I ordered two scoops in a dish. 

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

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

It worked. 

Majorly! 

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.