Daily Archives: March 12, 2011

Right before I left town, instead of packing, I went to go see Kurt Timmermeister do a reading at Omnivore. I got there super early so after visiting the pet store next door and buying a couple of road treats for Schnitzel, I wandered in about a half hour before the reading was going to start.

No one was there except the woman working the store and one other guy. It was at that moment that I realized I had no idea what Kurt Timmermeister looked like. We have a mutual friends who I know from the ‘80s in ways completely unrelated to cheese so I knew it would be a great time to introduce myself, but I also didn’t want to be that idiot asking every white dude who walked in, “Are you Kurt?”

Compounding this was the fact that though there was a large pile of books, they were standing in front of them so I couldn’t subtley go up and look at the author photo. Kurt clearly wasn’t forced to have his cover on the photo like me.

I even thought about snapping a surreptitious photo and texting it to our mutual friend but then the book worker asked him a question and used his name, so I knew I’d be ok.

In fact, we had a good 10 minutes to get acquainted before anyone else arrived. I was going to buy his book no matter what, but I can say now that Kurt is a super smart and sweet guy. We talked Seattle and about our mutual friend’s new store, about Vashon Island, about his book publishing experiences and tour. Pretty much everything except cheese, really.

Yesterday I finally got a chance to crack his book. I can tell already that it’s a book I will need to force myself to read slowly because it’s so exciting for a behind-the-food book fetishist like me. I haven’t even gotten to the cows yet and I am enthralled. I will do a full review when I finish but for now I will give you one paragraph that thrilled me:

”Little by little I came to be unable to eat at my own restaurant at all I told no one, especially not customers. It was a humiliating position to be in. I couldn’t see the possibility of changing the restaurant into a more health-conscious business – the financial pressures were too great. The guy who sold hot baked goods from a tiny storefront had been replaced with a restaurateur disgusted by eating at his own establishment. My relationship with food had been shaken…”

Don’t you want to read more? Here’s a link for buying

I was exhausted last night. I never sleep well on my first night of vacation (which we spent at a hotel) and our first night at our rental place on the Oregon coast was filled with trying to adjust the heat (down)* and adjust to sleeping on a smaller bed than we are used to.** So, when the property manager called us on the house’s landline at 12:30, we were both dead asleep.

I am a coastal boy at heart though, so when the property manager said a tsunami was heading straight for us, I fully admit panicking a little, assuming we had minutes, not hours. Either way, by the time I woke up enough to comprehend the warning, I knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep, even if my first suggestion was, “Ok, the wave is supposed to hit at 7? Let’s pack, go back to bed, and set the alarm for 5.”

Instead, like many of you, we sat glued to the (well, one of the four) TV for the next few hours, watching those horrible Japan videos over and over and some very good local news from Portland. At around 4:30 the reverse 911 call told us to get up and get out and at 5 the tsunami sirens went off with recorded “evacuate immediately” messages. Cop cars roamed the streets looking to wake folks up. Both Laurie and I went back and packed a few more items into the car. After being lulled by hours of TV, the sirens gave us another hit of adrenaline and off we went to find the tsunami shelter.

If we were locals, we probably never would have left. Or we at least would have gone back to sleep for a bit.

Indeed, the noticeable absence of lights and rush from the neighbors gave me pause at I packed the car at 4:45, but who was I – with no real, local knowledge of the area and decidedly in the tsunami inundation zone – to argue with the official warnings? It is my firm belief that tourists and non-locals should not cause hassles for the local volunteers and first responders by being stupid, so we left. But really we could have driven a quarter mile up the hill and waited it out with no danger to anyone. Of course the shelter — the local elementary school — did have bathrooms and coffee, and that was nice.

We drove back about 4 hours later, right before the official all-clear. By then Schnitzie couldn’t stop barking at the people walking their cats on leashes*** and half the parking lot had cleared out. We were cold and tired. When we got back , everything was just like we left it and – in the day light — less scary.

The waves were still a little big and ominous though, I was drifting in and out of sleep, still worried about being back just enough to start me awake every couple of minutes. Finally, someone on TV said that the tsunami warning was back down to an advisory and I drifted off to three hours of solid sleep.

So yeah, I’m fine. Laurie’s fine. Schnitzel’s fine. Not much really happened here.

Japan’s not fine though. Those were some pretty scary scenes…

*Central heating set at 68 degrees? I doubt there are a week of days where our apartment reaches 68. Central heat makes me think I’m in a convection oven.
**Everything else about this place is better than our apartment. We just sprung for a King bed a couple of years ago and it’s hard to go back.
*** no judgment