CurtainQuest

Finally, a solution to the never-ending problem of wanting to keep sunlight out of your living room while also planning a roadtrip in your home state by leaning over the back of your couch.

Presenting the curtain map. It rolls down – and up – AND does double duty as a map of Oregon.

Interior designer and brother-in-law Chad Crawford gets the credit for this cutting edge approach to window shading. Available at yard sales where people are selling old rolldown maps from schools.

I want the best

Got my new insurance coverage details. Doesn't provide laughter at all and there's a copay for the worse medicines. Great.

Gooses and deers

Frosty one around these parts today. Ungulates and waterfowl hunkered down next to the writer shack.

When leaving it off is just not enough

Rombach's Pizzeria is pleased to announce our new recipe: Garlic Haters Pizza.

It's not just pizza with no garlic. After you order Garlic Haters our staff is trained to say, "f@&% garlic," and then you say, "yeah."

I can't believe nobody besides vampires has ever thought of this.

Free beef at the dump

Let's see . . . household trash goes over here. Metal goes in the metal pile. Bloated dead cows? Uhmmm . . . just drop them by the bulldozer I guess.

I hear this is a precautionary wolf measure. Don't want to leave free beef laying around woof country.

(pssst, wolves . . . there's free cows up at the dump.)

Some bird with a crooked neck

I think this is a plumber bird. It's got a P-trap neck. It can get clogged with little fish or crawdads if you're not careful. And DO NOT put cleaning products down the beak. That causes all sorts of trouble.

This heron flapped in on a foggy morn and stopped to survey the little irrigation streams from the cottonwood snags over on the neighbor's patch.

For being so unlikely looking these thangs sure is graceful.

Stinging thing on sulu

Winter in the writing shack involves firing the woodstove in the mornings, which heats up the flying things apparently nesting in the walls. Then I get winged ouchy bugs zooming around the office, which offers a nice diversion from working on things to take a break and clear the area with a rolled up magazine. Any tendencies toward Buddhist practice goes away when there's a wasp in my air space.

The backdrop there is a sulu from Fiji, hanging over my window. It took some googling around and asking my friend Sara to even remember the word 'sulu,' which is a clear sign I need to stop wintering in a climate that requires a woodstove, which heats up the bees.

Get thee back to the tropics, Rombach.