Three A Bit More Beautiful Things 08-01 and -02-2026: Christy's Out of Sepsis, Attention to Christy's Hip, Self-Therapy

 I'm writing this blog post on Sunday evening, August 2. I visited Christy for about four hours today and will once again combine two days, Saturday and Sunday, into one post. As always, if I've missed the mark to some degree in any of this summation, it's not by much and what I've written is in the ballpark. 

1. I learned this morning that sepsis is not a diagnosis but a constellation of symptoms resulting from the immune system's overwhelming response to an infection. On Friday, Christy's extreme tiredness, dropping blood pressure, perspiring, and disorientation were symptoms not merely of sepsis, but of septic shock. 

Christy came out of septic shock Friday and now has come out of sepsis. Her blood pressure is better, her heart rate is in range, her oxygen levels are in range, and she's not confused. I might have left out an improvement or two but you get the picture. 

What a relief. 

Still in question: where is the infection that triggered her body to respond the way it did?

It appears not to be in the tiny amount of liquid aspirated from her hip. 

I also might be that the antibiotics she's had infused into her system knocked out the infection and the source will remain unknown. This is not uncommon. 

2. Today, the medical professionals focused much more of their attention on Christy's ailing right hip and painful upper right leg. If all goes well on Monday, the orthopedic doctor she has an appointment to see on Wednesday will visit Christy in her room at Kootenai Health. Until the doctor talks with Christy, I'm going to hold off on writing about her hip and I don't know what kind of treatment lies ahead. (Oh! Before I arrived to see Christy this morning, a hospital orthopedic doctor had been in to see her, but I'm not very clear about what he had to say and the hospital doctor who visited Christy later on said his notes weren't available yet. So I'm putting that doctor's visit aside.)  

I do know, however, that while I was in Christy's room, two therapists visited her around noon, asked a bunch of great questions, washed her hair, helped clean her up in other ways, helped her get out of bed and into a wheelchair, apprised the nursing staff of how Christy ought to be helped physically while in the hospital, and were encouraged by how well Christy responded to the very limited kind of movements they helped guide and physically support her through. 

One of the pros was an Occupational Therapist and the other a Physical Therapist. 

Christy will be visited by therapy pros again on Monday and it looks to me like a larger plan for her treatment upon being discharged (don't know when that will be) is beginning to take shape. 

3. I've done a little self-therapy myself, mostly with food and caffeine. On Saturday it helped relax me after I left the hospital to eat tortilla chips, make myself a strawberry milkshake, eat a small bar of dark chocolate with almonds, and to put Trader Joe's eggplant, tomato, and onion on a piece of Indian flatbread and top that product with olive tapenade and crumbled feta cheese. 

I have enjoyed relaxing at the hospital at the Big Blue coffee counter with a 16 oz latte and a chocolate muffin both yesterday and today. I thought it was a very good sign today that Christy asked me to bring her a 16 oz vanilla latte which she said really hit spot. Christy's appetite hasn't been strong and I'm really glad the vanilla latte gave her pleasure. 

Three Barely Beautiful Things 07-31-08-01-2026: A Recap: Christy Goes to ER, ICU, A Hospital Room

 It's Saturday, August 1. For Christy, Carol, Paul, and me, Friday, July 31 and Saturday, August 1 have melded together into a day of their own, so I'm going to write about a twenty-four hour period beginning early in the afternoon on Friday. 

I've done my best to be accurate in this blog post. If I've erred in any way, please rest assured my mistakes are in the ballpark of truth! A lot's been going on and it's easy to get trip up on details and get some things confused. 

1. The good news and the beautiful thing is that Christy made it through the day on Friday and on into Saturday. 

It wasn't easy. 

She began feeling weird around mid-morning on Friday and by early afternoon she was sometimes awake, falling suddenly asleep, and not always conscious. 

Local EMTs took her to the local hospital where the Emergency Room pros worked to hydrate her and began working up a series of tests to see what might be going on. 

Her blood pressure had crashed, was very low, and by about 6:00 Christy traveled by ambulance to Kootenai Health. She was admitted into their ICU. 

2. Friday evening. More tests. 

EKG tested fine. 

A scan revealed no blood clots.

It became clear that Christy was in septic shock. 

I went to the CdA hospital this morning (Saturday) to listen in on an 8:30 summation of Christy's situation. 

Because the medication to bring her blood pressure back up worked, Christy would soon be transferred out of ICU. 

What was the source of the sepsis? The MRI from Thursday, July 23rd had revealed some build up of liquid in her right hip. 

This morning, to see if it was the source of the sepsis, a small team aspirated Christy's hip. 

Results forthcoming. 

3. If you are reading this thinking, "I thought Christy was doing better this week", you are correct. 

Both of her PT sessions were successes.

She is building strength in her legs. She gained more mobility with a walker and was getting up from being seated much better. 

Her emergency Friday and today didn't have anything to do with those successes. 

An infection got loose in her system.

It's being treated and studied. 

When I left Kootenai Health early this afternoon, Christy was both tired and conversational. She was alert, as she had been this morning, and was getting better. 

I have no idea how long she'll be in the hospital. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-30-2026: Stronger, Handsome, Awe

 1. Christy continues to strengthen her leg muscles day to day as she exercises them.  She had a good PT session today. She's more mobile and she worked on stairs and more on how to get out of bed. 

Christy also saw her doctor this afternoon. Carol accompanied her and they both understand Christy's leg/hip situation better. Stay tuned.  When the time is right, and Christy has even more clarity on her situation, I'll provide more details. For now, suffice it to say things are better today than they were a week ago. 

2. Gibbs saw the groomer today and I thought when he got home that he had even more of a strut in his step than usual. 

3. As I get closer to finishing Is a River Alive?, two things are becoming clearer to me about my experience with rivers. 

First, from the time I was a youngster, I've seen something different from human aliveness in rivers. I can't call it a personality because what I've seen is unique to waterways and I'm not sure I know a word for it. 

I can say that this aliveness has awed me and the second thing that is becoming clearer to me is that out of this awe, I have, for the most part, stayed out of and off of rivers. I've only floated on a river about three times in my life. I have never fished a river. I was never one of the Silver Valley people who jumped off bridges into the North Fork of the CdA River. I have rarely gone swimming in any river. The awe I've felt has also triggered the illness I feel when rivers get degraded -- and this feeling goes all the way back to my earliest memories when the CdA River ran gray through the city of Kellogg.  

Three Beautiful Things 07-29-2026: Progress, Haircut, Rivers

 1. Christy, Carol, and Paul invited me over for a dish of ice cream at 6:30. For the first time in over two weeks or so, I saw Christy rise gingerly from her chair and, using the walker, walk out to the dining table and back to her chair. I learned she'd been able to do this throughout the day. Progress! 

2. I'd like to think I looked better coming out of Supercuts than when I walked in today. 

3. Reading Is a River Alive? has triggered a battery of questions, questions similar to the ones Rita and I raised with our students in the 1990s when we team taught philosophy and English composition. How do we arrive at the knowledge we think we have? What is the nature of reality? Given what we think we know and what we determine is reality, how do we determine what's right and wrong? Three pillars of philosophy: epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. 

Not one of these pillars of philosophy is named in Is a River Alive?, but all three are at work in the book's discussions and stories about what we think we know about rivers, what the reality of a river might be (or realities), and how we determine how to care for rivers and how we decide to degrade them. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-28-2026: Encouraging, Discouraging, Fry Pan Dinner

 1. Today Christy reported that her physical therapy session was encouraging. Positive. Great news! 

2. In the book Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane has explored the degradation of rivers and forests brought about by mining in Ecuador and the damage to urban rivers by heavy industry in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India (birthplace of Harriet Potter). In the third part of his book, which I moved more deeply into today, he explores the way hydroelectric projects in Quebec threaten the life of the Mutehekau Shipu River. I will probably finish this book by Friday, giving me time to think about its content and admire the beauty of Macfarlane's prose, sometimes written as poetry. 

3. In a large pan, I browned ground turkey and added rice, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, and mushrooms. I enjoyed the flavor of the meat and vegetables so much, i didn't add any seasoning. 

Three Beautiful Things 07-27-2026: Kalamata Olive Hummus, Mediterranean Wraps, A Stable Day

 1. I wrote yesterday that I didn't want to get into what I did on Sunday to start getting food ready for this evening's family dinner. I like to surprise Carol, Paul, and Christy. 

On Sunday, I made a small batch of Kalamata olive hummus topped with diced sweet red pepper. I'd never heard of olive hummus, but when the recipe popped up during a search, it sounded fun and delicious. And simple. All I had to do was combine chickpeas, Kalamata olives, olive oil, and tahini in the blender and mix it all together. I didn't have any garlic on hand. I could have added that. 

2. Why did I make hummus? 

Back on July 9th, Liz, Jane, Joan, and I enjoyed a Cockroach Castle reunion at Daft Badger and I ordered a Chicken Souvlaki Wrap and I wanted to try to approximate it at home. 

I didn't succeed. Why not? Well, I relied on my faulty memory and thought that the Daft Badger special was called simply a Mediterranean Wrap. I didn't look back at my blog entry about the wrap, so, from the get go, I was not preparing a Chicken Souvlaki Wrap. 

Next time. 

What I did make worked pretty well and here's what comprised this sandwich. 

I warmed up a burrito sized flour tortilla -- actually three of them. Carol wanted her dinner not to include the flour tortilla. No problem. 

I began by spreading Kalamata olive hummus on each tortilla. 

Earlier in the day, I made and chopped up a batch of Greek yogurt with lemon juice chicken. 

I topped the hummus with chopped Greek yogurt chicken. 

I had an unused purple cabbage on hand and topped the chicken with chopped cabbage rather than buy romaine lettuce. 

Earlier, I had also made a simple tomato slaw: sliced cherry tomatoes, diced cucumber, and chopped red onion dressed with a small amount of red wine vinegar and olive oil. The slaw topped the cabbage. 

I didn't add olives because of the olive hummus.

I did, however, add chopped artichoke hearts and the last ingredient was crumbled feta cheese. 

I had watched a YouTube video that instructed me how to roll up a wrap and I did an adequate job. 

I combined all the leftover ingredients I mentioned above in a bowl along with white rice and that became Carol's flour tortilla-free dinner. 

We started our family dinner with a fun cheese: Smoked Gouda with Bacon. Carol made her always delicious Norwegian crisp seed crackers to eat with the cheese. 

I purchased a pint of really fun Black Raspberry and Chocolate Chip Gelato for dessert. 

3. Christy's condition was stable today. It's an improvement that she can rise out of a chair or from bed and stand, doing both with the support of the walker. She can get around by sitting on the walker's seat and scooting herself around (the walker has four wheels). 

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!