Walnut Bread

2 cups walnut pieces, toasted
2 1/2 t yeast
1/4 cup honey
3 3/4 C flour
1 1/3 cups water
2 T olive oil
1 1/2 t salt

Mix all ingredients together. Knead it for 10 minutes. Let it rise to double (1 hour or so) in a clean bowl covered with plastic wrap. Shape it into a ball and bake on parchment on a cookie sheet at 400 for 40 minutes. If the crust gets dark too fast, turn the oven down.

Today the man without a nose came into the library. A regular. His face below his eyes is flat, a little concave even, and his mouth is somewhere between where a nose and mouth usually go. It opens in a small "o" big enough, perhaps, for two pinky fingers. He wanted help getting on the internet. I showed him how. He wanted to look up flickr where someone had posted a photo of him and a poem.

I couldn't read much of the poem from over his shoulder, but I got the impression it was "tres cool, tres hip, tres pc" and didn't much care for the person whose face was on the internet open for all the world to comment on. I hoped he wouldn't notice you could click on the "comments" link and read them. He did. He stayed for two fifteen minute sessions before getting frustrated with the mouse.

Anyway, I might have written that poem and even felt righteous about it. And maybe by posting this blog I am like the poet. I don't know. But it made me think.

In 2008 I took a little trip...

Summer, for librarians, is somewhat akin to Fall for winemakers. Our harvest comes in and it's ripe for the picking, but we only have 2 short months to gather it all up. After 10 weeks of of programming and half a year of preparation, it was time to take down the 25 foot library dragon, each of it's scales naming a child in the summer reading club and his or her age (Melanie, 6 1/2 Ryan, 8 3/4) and time to pack up for a visit to the fam.

My mom picked me up from the airport with chicken salad, crackers and cut up cantaloupe all prepared and stored in disposable tupperware containers. Luckily, she didn't tell me until several days later that the chicken was precooked chunks that came in a can from Costco. We headed straight up to Camas, Washington to visit Gypsy, Shaun, Willem, and Nels. The boys were much more appreciative of my newly learned pirate songs than were my storytimers at the library. Willem immediately donned the pirate patch, hat, and face before I was even allowed to begin the first shanty. I stole all of the songs from a librarian blogger.

The next morning we visited Fort Vancouver. The day was rainy and sunny and cold and warm all mixed up and so was my mood, so it's a bit of a blur in my memory. We saw (well, heard, really) a cannon being shot, pet some furs -- mink, bear, beaver, peered down a well...

and checked out some really cool ovens. Unfortunately, they seem to have been used for preparing sea biscuits. Something I'm glad I was not around to eat.

Mom wanted to know why the wood poles that made up the fence surrounding the fort on one side were sharpened like pencils and why on the other side they were cut at an angle. No one knew. Turns out they didn't even know what the real fence would have looked like. Everything was a reproduction, but apparently there were a few details missing.

My mom and I returned to Bend, OR the next day. We went for a hike and then to lunch at Black Butte Ranch, where we ate a delicious sea food chowder. Chunks of good sea food doused in a buerre blanc, I think. (i.e. butter, cream, wine, seafood. Yum.) Mom then proceeded to water the plants in the restaurant (this is her job) and I sat out on the lawn and read. The view wasn't bad.


I visited the Bend Farmer's Market and found some peaches to reproduce a peach cobbler I had made on a previous visit.


The reproduction was so successful we ate one cobbler for breakfast and the other for lunch.

Along with some hand-made tortellini filled with mushrooms, shallots, wine, and cream. Yes, they are made from aproximately 1" x 1" squares of hand-rolled pasta. Yes, I will never make them again.


It was back to the library the next day. I called an officer in when neither I nor another, much louder librarian could wake a sleeping patron up. He seemed to be breathing okay, so we held off on the ambulance. When the officer arrived, the sleeping man's girlfriend told the officer not to bother him since he was just sleeping off a 1/2 gallon bottle of Vodka. A 7-foot tall man who walks around very very slowly and somewhat creepily, walked back and forth and back and forth to stare into a woman's purse. The next day the green man ( a man so covered in tattoos he is green) pushed and spit on one of our staff members. His friend then spit on him and they both left.

Home, sweet home.