Month: April 2014

The first two years of college journals.

For a few weeks, I thought they were gone forever, but they were tucked away in my Aunt’s basement, behind sacks of romance novels.  They were great to read.

And I think the cigarette manufacturers wasted their advertising dollars on me.  Apparently, they just needed to get the boys I liked to smoke.

From 22 January, 1995. Sunday.
I smoked my last cigarette for the weekend.  I can still taste the tar and nicotine on the back of my throat and on my teeth.  It tastes like the kisses of K.–or so long ago the kisses of T.  I became addicted to smoking this summer when I sat in truck stops and Shari’s late at night with TM and K and breathed in the smell of the pipe, or sat on the front porch of the house sittin’ house and smelled the smoke from the Lucky Strikes.  I guess now I ‘m the only one around to smoke, so I do and remember the kisses.

Requiem: Rubber Scraper

Received for Christmas one year from my Aunt Carol (“It will not melt up to one thousand degrees! One Thousand Degrees!” she said more than once) there is also a larger green one.  It’s been a handy fellow, not melting at all and very good for scraping the last bits out of the peanut butter jar.

Sadly, the silicone has given up the ghost.

Postcard from Taiwan & California

This is from A-Chien who lives in Kaohsiung and is 37 years old.  A-Chein especially likes this tower.
I’m going to start taking pictures of the super awesome stamps that come with some of the postcards.  This had four different stamps, all different.  So cool.
This is from Lori, who works at the Chandelier Tree and is a non-drinking bartender.  When I registered the card, I wrote her that I was once a vegetarian meat seller.

Trimet employs white-out to eliminate racist statement. Probably not ironically.

“No Blacks.” Someone had graffitied, in answer to the statement, “What makes this place great.”
Then the word “no” was covered in white-out.
I don’t really know if it was a Trimet employee who used the whiteout, or a random passerby with whiteout in their backpack.  Either way, I snickered.

Tabloid format and recipes? No go!

Here I am on the train, reading my paper.

And here I am reading the recipe for Greek-Style Souffleed Omelet.

And here I am having to turn and read over the fold.
In the old, pre-tabloid days, printing a recipe over the fold was no big deal because you could just open the paper and cut the recipe, right over the fold.  But now two parts of the recipe are on two different pieces of the newspaper. Which means taping things together.  Grrr.

Unique apartments.

These are near my house and I love them both.  I worry that they will be torn down for something fancier, so thought I would snap a few pictures just in case.
Here’s the street side of this complex.  I love the swinging modern silhouette of the building and the fact that the garages are underneath, with the apartments hanging over.  Some of the garage doors still work, and some are permanently sealed shut.

Front entrance.  There is a pretty shrubbery outside of every door and a garden area on the other side of the parking lot.  I’ve never seen inside these units, but I imagine they are all one-bedroom jobbers.

This fourplex is right next door.  I like how it looks like it has been added onto over the years.  There’s even a random bay-type window in one unit.  And the corners of the building have art deco glass.  A few of these units have been vacant for some time, and it’s a hot rental market here, so this is building I’m most worried about.

Postcards from Germany, Hawaii & Indonesia

This is a picture of the Herkules Monument which is a town landmark.

Here’s one from Hawaii, picked out by my co-worker’s daughter especially for me.  She knows my Channing Tatum/hunky men preference.

This is from Ines, who included a quote from the Little Prince. “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”