My Thanksgiving Adventure

It’s been a busy month for me work-wise, for which I am grateful. Holiday advertising is in full swing, which means voiceovers — for which I am also grateful. And I just finished narrating one book and am starting into another* — again, grateful!

But I was sure looking forward to a day off at Thanksgiving. We’d be convening at my sister’s house in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range. It would be a complete change of scenery and pace, and I promised myself that I would not talk, not even THINK, about work for the whole darned day.

And that’s what happened. For awhile. A wonderful dinner, the pleasure of beloved family around me, the smell of the woodstove, the sound of rain misting down outside. A special treat this year was one of the guests, Wagner Soares, a professional bassist and music student from Brazil. He was part of a recent CD project for which my sister wrote some lyrics, and he is a gem of a human being: sensitive, talented, intelligent.

Before pie, we all suited up in rain gear and headed out on our traditional Thanksgiving Day hike. A mile or so into the forest, most of the group turned around, but I wasn’t done hiking — I’d been waiting for this for weeks! — so Wagner and I continued on alone. We chatted a little about general things, then about our respective work, and then Wagner asked: ”So what mics do you have?”

And it was all over.

We talked and talked: about mics and mixers, about Pro Tools and Logic and Apogee and frequency response and the pencil tool and getting your groove back when you have to stop for punch-ins. We discovered that we both have a tendency to enjoy the solitude of our work too much, so we’re both strict about getting out for daily walks. I told Wagner I’d once had to struggle through some Portuguese names in an audiobook, and he taught me basic pronunciation. Wagner tried to describe how he misses and doesn’t miss Brazil, and I taught him the English proverb “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Suddenly we looked around: it was almost dusk, and we were at the intersection of two logging roads I’d never seen before, with miles of forest around us.

“Should we take the right-hand fork?” Wagner asked. ”It looks like it might eventually loop back to the road.”

This, of course, would have been extremely unwise. You don’t want to follow an unknown route in the coast mountains, out of cell phone range, at dusk, in the rain. It wouldn’t have been a dire situation, but it could have gotten miserable pretty fast. We were also dressed in deer colors, and I didn’t have my trusty cougar alarm.

And yet, I considered it. I mean, we were just starting on the topic of Blue mics for the iPad!

But I dragged my attention back to our surroundings and told Wagner we needed to retrace our route. After all, I said, we’d still have the several miles back to tie up all our conversational threads. By the time we made it back to the house, we were wet, hungry, blessedly talked-out, and thoroughly enjoying our new friendship.

So yes, I did talk about work on my day off. A whole lot.

And for that, I am grateful.

In Which We Travel South, See Covered Wagons, and Discuss Pies

DH and I recently spent a couple of lovely days in Ashland. I try to get down several times a year, one trip per season (except winter, when I'd prefer not to play roulette with the Siskiyou Pass), and I'm always grateful that I live close enough to do this. For 60 whole hours, I was able to set aside the burden of grief over my father's recent passing and enjoy myself with theater and good people.

The Drive: was great all by itself. My husband is a gear-head and I'm an audiobook narrator. This means that on road trips (well, at other times, too), it's a match made in heaven. He drives, I read. On this drive, we started Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken. Our last two books were Alfred Lansing's riveting (if you will) Endurance and Doug Stanton's riveting (as it were) In Harm's Way, which we knew would be tough acts to follow. But we shouldn't have doubted Hillenbrand, and this story (subtitle, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, so there's your synopsis) is, well, riveting.

We also discovered a roadside gem that I can't believe we've missed for the 15 years it's been around: The Applegate Trail Interpretive Center. Exit 71 was always just the Sunny Valley General Store Pit Stop. Now we know it as also the home of a wonderful little museum of Oregon Trail history, complete with a collection of original covered wagons. But if you only visit it to experience the presentation of co-founder Dennis Gaustad, it will be worth it. I'll leave it at that.

The Plays: We saw August, Osage County and The Pirates of Penzance. Since I'm no longer an underpaid drama critic, I won't take the time to write scintillating yet incisive reviews. Instead, you get the nutshell. Osage: great play; unevenly acted; directed in such a way that it managed to miss most of dramatic beats, rises and falls. Penzance: so good it almost made me forget that this repertory company and the outdoor Elizabethan stage were made for Shakespeare, not Gilbert and Sullivan. We loved it.

The Meals: Delicious Asian fusion food at The Dragonfly Cafe with an old family friend, and coffee that was tasty but too weak at Noble Coffee with one of my favorite people from Bee Audio. At Pasta Piatti, we had dinner with two of the bestest producers a girl could ask for (thanks, Blackstone Audio!). If the conversation hadn't been so fun, I'd have been moaning over the eggplant parmigiana and crab cakes.

Pies: I'd brought a fall-harvest rhubarb pie to give to the aforementioned bestest-producer friends, which started the conversational topic of how to make pies, which led to the important point that it's the method, more than the recipe. So I'll end this post with my method. My approach is unconventional, but unless my friends and family are big fat liars, it makes delicious pies with flaky crusts!

Heather's Pie

1. Buy a pastry cloth board at Kitchen Krafts (formerly Maid of Scandinavia). I bought my first one from them 30 years ago, and they still make them.

2. Rub together 1-1/2 cups softened (that's right, softened) butter with 2 cups flour and 1 teaspoon each salt and sugar until it's all about the texture of oatmeal. Gradually add cold water, maybe a tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork until the whole thing will stay together if gently squeezed into a ball. It's tempting at this point to squish and squeeze it like it's modeling clay. You'll get to do that in Step 9 -- for now, don't overwork it.

3. Prepare 4+ cups of fruit. (We're just talking fruit here; don't mix in flour or sugar or anything.) Clean, pit, peel, slice or cut as needed.

4. Set your flour, sugar canisters out on your workspace. (Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and/or allspice, too, if they'd go well with whatever fruit you're using.)

5. Divide your gently-compressed pastry ball into two gently-compressed pastry balls. Spread a handful of flour around on the pastry cloth and roll out the first ball, lightly flouring and flipping the widening circle of crust frequently as you roll it. This keeps it from sticking and allows you to get it rolled out without too much pressure.

6. Lift the edge of the crust to fold it in half, then fold again to create a quarter-circle packet. Lay this in the bottom of the pie dish and unfold, centering it so it hangs over the rim of the dish.

7. Spread a handful or two of flour on the bottom of the crust, and then a handful or two of sugar. (Use more or less of each depending on how soupy your fruit gets and how tart it is. More flour and sugar for rhubarb; less for apples; etc. Trust your instincts!) Sprinkle with spices if desired.

8. Spread a third of the fruit over this. Then repeat layers of flour/sugar and fruit, ending with one last sprinkling of flour and sugar.

9. Roll out the top crust, fold it in quarters, and unfold it on top of the pie. Trim or cut-and-paste the crust so that it hangs fairly evenly over the edge of the bottom crust. Now here's where you get to play with clay: squeeze and press the edges together to make however decorative an edge you can manage. Make a few slashes in the top with a knife, and you're ready to bake it.

10. Place the pie on a baking tin to catch any drips, and bake it for 15 minutes at 400˚, then turn the oven down to 350˚ and continue baking another 30-45 minutes. This is one of my secrets to a flaky but not over-browned crust. The pie will be done when it's bubbling up through the crust. If the crust does start to brown before the interior is done, cover it with foil.

And now I'll leave you to eat your pie and contemplate nice fall getaways for yourselves. Until next post,

-Heather

Greetings From the Teeny Demographic

First of all: yes, I am still alive. I resurrected myself on this long-neglected blog because I found it mentioned on several "Blogs I Follow" lists, most notably Dog Eared Copy (I am not worthy). Time to earn my place on those lists.

So I updated a few things in the profile, added a few new blog-follows (run, don't walk, to Hyperbole and a Half . . . and then run over to Hanna Olsen's blog); and I will now try to think of a clever topic with which to re-establish my presence.

I know! I'll launch a new random feature: Essential Vocabulary. Today's list, with hints:

lmgtfy -- If you don't know this word, you could maybe Google it.*

Selon Moi -- You don't know what this means? So, then, why do you subscribe to my blog, again? (Kidding.) (But not really.) Selon moi, anyone who speaks English should know at least some French, as it's responsible for a third of our English vocabulary, and that ain't just on account of the Norman Conquest. (Latin's even better, but I know that's a pipe dream, even for me.) Hey, even if you don't know French, as an English speaker you automatically know at least 15,000 French words. But sadly, that group does not include selon moi, so you might need to resort to lmgtfy.

Descartes -- As in: Descartes walks into a bar. "What'll it be?" says the bartender.

"Hmmm, a gin and tonic, I think," says Descartes.

"You want peanuts with that?" the bartender says.

"Oh, I think not," says Descartes -- and then he disappears.

Grok -- If you grok "grok," then you are probably in a very special category of 7% of Facebook and Twitter users -- in other words, you are 55 or older. Despite all the press about our demographic's being the fastest-growing segment of FB and Twitter users, I found a recent set of pie charts that indicates we are perhaps a much more, um, exclusive club.

Troglodyte -- People who don't grok this word in English might know it by its French name, troglodyte. My friend and favorite voiceover partner Mark Lewis* definitely groks it -- enough to have coined an adjective out of it -- troglodytic -- which he used to describe himself by way of explaining in a Facebook message why he's not on Twitter. I, in turn, apologized for my troglodytic delay in replying to his message, since I log on to Facebook maybe once a month. I do glance at my professional FB page more often, but my personal FB site is kind of like one of those big parties back in high school that I usually avoided, preferring to (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) read Robert Heinlein.

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*Credits: Mark Lewis gave me not just troglodytic but also the Descartes joke. (Thanks, Mark. I just hyperlinked your name to your site to show my gratitude.) And my daughter Whitney (who inherited her snarky genes from me) introduced me rather snarkily to lmgtfy.com. My writing students are indirectly responsible for the facts about English and French vocabulary, since I couldn't help them prep for the vocab part of the SAT without first teaching them Greek and Latin roots, which conferred on me, selon moi, the moral obligation to give them a nutshell history of the English language.

And with that, I am

Yours Snarkily,

Heather