I feel like today was a pretty darn good day for Bob. Today I met and had a short but interesting conversation with my garbage man. His name is Mike.

I was heading out the door to run a couple of errands in downtown Seattle and I noticed that the recycling truck was pulling up to pick up my neighbor’s (Sara and Tim) papers, tin cans, bottles, etc., so I thought I might as well bring my own containers in before I left. You see, if I don’t get them in before my mailman (Gordon) delivers the mail, it means he has to get out of his little truck and walk around the cans in order to put my mail in the mailbox. It might not mean all that much to have to do that, but I imagine that if he has to do that a lot on any given day that it all adds up to a day that’s not half as good as the one I had. The little things can add up and the little courtesies we show each other do make a difference.

Mike stuck up the conversation with that old standard that has opened communication between so many people over the years. “Pretty weather today, isn’t it?”

It was indeed a pretty day here in the great Northwest. We have now had two days in a row of sunshine and even though the temperature was in the sixties, we have enjoyed these days immensely. If you live along the Oregon or Washington coasts you come to appreciate sunshine. Of course, as I pointed out to Mike, if you are really and truly bothered by rain, then you probably should move.

From that beginning we were able to move into the beautiful green trees that abound in this neighborhood and then onto a subject I feel somewhat better versed in; food. Mike told me about smoking salmon on the grill using green maple leaves. I had never heard of such a thing but he assured me that they made for great grilled salmon. We then went on to discuss various other seafood combinations and he admitted to me that although he was not a “drinker”, he found it difficult to think about eating oysters without a cold beer to wash them down. This guy is a human being and what I have discovered over the years is that putting a name on a person helps you remember that important fact. In my opinion, once you know the name of the guy living next door to you, it is much harder to look out the window and wonder to yourself, what the heck is that guy doing out there? It seems to soften your question as to what is going on if you start thinking in terms of “I wonder what Tim is doing out there?”

You see what I mean? Doesn’t that sentence sound friendlier than the first one? Doesn’t it sound more human? That’s not just some unknown person out there doing something that you are wondering about, that’s your neighbor, Tim. When you put a name to a person, you automatically become more compassionate in your outlook and I think that is something we could all use.

I am sick to death of the Presidential race that is taking place right now and while I have issues with both parties and their candidates I believe in my heart that Obama would make a much better leader of our country. I have been telling my wife ever since I started this blog that I was not going to get political. That is not what I want this blog to be about but I can hold my tongue no more.

I read way too many news sites on the web and I know that most people feel that they all have a bias in one direction or another. That is probably true. I get the headlines from the Japanese Times and the New York Times in my email and I am addicted to checking the sites of US News and World Report, MSNBC and CNN. Every day for the last two weeks I have told myself that I was going to quit checking them and spend at least a day or two away from all of the increasingly sad news about our economy and everything else. As hard as it is for me to completely believe, I think that my being out of touch with the everyday events that are taking place in the world right now will probably not affect anything in a real way. I’m almost certain that the world will run without me.

This morning I stumbled on to a story in the New York Times written by Thomas Friedman and it really hit home with me. Maybe you won’t feel the same way but since it’s my blog, I can say whatever I want. Mr. Friedman has written several bestselling books, the most recent one being entitled Hot, Flat and Crowded. In this book he details his concerns about our energy future and how we need to be directing our attention away from fossil fuels as they are polluting the planet, running low and increasing our dependence on foreign nations who we disagree with on many, many issues. You may disagree with any of these reasons but I would be greatly surprised if you disagreed with all of them.

His article this morning however dealt with Sarah Palin and as much as I told myself I was not going to even open it up, I was drawn to it like an onlooker at a major traffic accident. I’m not very proud of that response, but I will be honest about it. He spoke to something that Gov. Palin had said during her debate with Sen. Biden last week. She said that paying taxes was not patriotic. At the time I let it fly right over my head because there is so much to try to listen to when she speaks that no one is going to catch it all. It flys out when she speaks like birdshot from a 20 gauge shotgun. In an attempt to bring something down she blasts away at any who would challenge the American Dream. She knows that a lot of the bbs will just fly off into the brush but she is confident that she will hit something and strike a chord with at least a couple people on her wavelength.

Sen. Biden had suggested it was patriotic to pay taxes and Gov. Palin told him that the average middle class “Joe Six Pack” like her and her husband were, did not think that paying taxes was patriotic. Mr. Friedman in his column this morning begged to differ. He said that his father always told him that paying taxes was how we were able to have firefighters available to come to our rescue when called upon. He said that the taxes we pay are what allow us to have police officers respond when crimes are committed in our communities. He said that since she supported the 700 billion dollar recovery package that politicians on both sides of the aisle felt was necessary and since she felt that we needed to continue our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan that it seemed odd that she would not think paying taxes was patriotic. I guess the fact that we everyday non-military, non-firefighting and non-law enforcement citizens should feel patriotic about doing our part by contributing financially to these causes just never crossed her mind.

I wish I could say that I share in Mr. Friedman’s surprise at this thinking in Gov. Palin but this race has left me in a no shock state. I don’t think, and I certainly hope I am not wrong on this, that I can be surprised by these candidates any more.

The problem is that many of these candidates do not think things through. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin want to let us know that they are here to speak for the average working class guy and gal and that they are going to watch out for us. They are going to take care of the terrorists and they are going to fix the economy and during the last debate I even heard Sen. McCain say that fixing Social Security was easy. It would seem to me that if it is indeed so easy, that over the course of his many years in Congress he might have fixed it by now, but maybe he is saving that trick for some sort of grand finale. I’m not sure that there is very much thinking going on in the Republican camp at all these days except how they can turn this election around and get elected and to that end we have seen Sen. McCain move further and further away from all of the principles I used to respect in him.

When Gov. Palin says that the average “Joe Six Pack” doesn’t think paying taxes is patriotic she is wrong. What “Joe Six Pack” thinks is unpatriotic is paying more than his share of the taxes. He knows that someone has to pay for the services that are provided by our state, local and federal governments. Sen. McCain talks on and on and on about how Sen. Obama wants to raise taxes but Sen. Obama’s tax plan has been clear and public knowledge for months. He is opposed to the tax cuts that George W. Bush put in place for the upper class of tax payers and Sen. McCain wants to make them permanent and larger.

Sen. Obama wants to raise taxes on those who earn more than $250,000.00 a year. I don’t think that includes too many “Joe Six Packs” and I know it does not include Sen. Palin and her husband because they have just released their tax records and they are not in that category.

Once again, when Gov. Palin says that the average middle class folks out there do not think it is patriotic to pay taxes she is really not thinking things through. We have to pay for all of the programs that she and Sen. McCain feel strongly about, but I am not sure how she thinks that is going to happen. I believe that Americans do feel patriotic about paying taxes but they certainly do not feel patriotic about paying all of the taxes while corporate CEOs and people who earn more than $250,000.00 a year pay little or none. That’s certainly not patriotic. We need to have people in office who are thinkers, not people in office who wave the flag and shout about how great we are but offer no solutions that make any sense. I think we need people who are smart. I want the next President to be smarter than I am. I do NOT want a President who would be fun to sit down and drink a beer with. My neighbor Tim is a great guy to sit down and drink a beer with and after checking with him I have discovered that he wants the job of President less than I do. I think that’s a good thing.

When Sarah Palin took the stage for her debate with Joe Biden last week, we were able to clearly hear her ask Sen. Biden if he minded if she called him Joe. At first blush it seemed like a friendly way to break the ice and perhaps enter into a clear and honest sharing of different ideas and different philosophies in regard to the future of our nation. As I stated earlier, I think it’s a good thing to get to know your neighbors. We never know when we will need their help or they ours. But after they had exchanged a few rounds of answers and differed on a number of topics it became more than apparent that the wily Gov. Palin had a purpose in her friendly greeting and by getting permission to call him Joe, she had placed herself in a position to come back with some snappy lines that she had no doubt practiced all week. “Say it ain’t so Joe”.

That response is just the kind of quick zinger that can be very useful when you are struggling to change the momentum of a political race. Other campaigns have been turned around with less.

When I asked Mike his name this morning I wanted to make him all the more human in my eyes because my tax dollars help make sure that valuable services like garbage collection happen and that valuable people like him have jobs that can help them put food on the table. I enjoyed talking with him and I thanked him for what he does because I really do appreciate it and I am not running for public office.

When I share my name and the names of my wife and children with my neighbors and ask them theirs’ it’s because I want them to know that I am human. Joe and Mike and John and Gordon and Tim and Sara and Sarah are all human beings. They are real people with real feelings and no matter how much we may differ in our view of the world, we need to be civil. No matter who wins this Presidential race, I will be very glad when it’s over because even though both candidates do not want to talk too much about it, we have a great deal of work to do in order to regain the respect of our fellow American citizens as well as the citizens of the world. The worldwide financial crises that is blossoming around us as we speak, only helps to point out just how interconnected we all are. When any one of us suffers, we all suffer and when we treat someone as anything less than a human, we become less human ourselves.

Food is just an excuse to stuff your face. Cram in the goods and let the juice run down your chin. Mustard on your shirt and crumbs in your beard. Put it away. Eat and eat and eat. Stuff yourself to the gills and forget. Forget. Forget what you wanted to forget and forget what? I can’t remember what I wanted to forget.

Food is just an excuse to sit down and share some laughs and some stories with old friends and family. Break bread and partake of community fellowship. Invite a person who lives by themselves to come and share a meal with you. Pass the chicken and who wants seconds? Don’t forget to save room for pie.

Food is just an excuse to get out of the house. Maybe you’ve been alone all week and maybe you’re bored and maybe it’s no one’s business but your own. Stop by the local diner and grab a ham and cheese on rye or a reuben or maybe just a plain cheeseburger. On second thought give me the works. You got any dill relish?

Food is just the excuse we use to butt into other people’s business. Let me help you friend. Let me show you how. Let me educate you about why the food you eat is wrong and what I want you to eat is right. Stop that. Don’t eat that stuff. Don’t you know that’ll kill you? You don’t want to ruin your health do you? What about the freakin’ planet?

Food is the exchange we use when we want to bargain for position in the world. You will act like the great democracy we are or you will not get the food we have way too much of. Stop building the same kind of bombs we have and straighten up. Your people are starving and if you don’t act like us we will not only not talk to you, but we will not give you the food that your people, who have no say in how your country runs, need in order to stay alive. Don’t tell me that’s murder. You’re the one who wouldn’t behave.

Food is what we need to stay alive. Food is what we need to grease the wheels of conversation. Food is what we need to soak up the drink that greases those wheels even more. Food will make us sleepy and food can make us sick and food will get us through. God, I hate food.

I thank God for my life and the lives of my family and friends everyday and I always thank God for the sustenance, the food and drink that keeps me alive and drives the engine in my head. Break bread with me brothers and sisters. We cannot live by bread alone but we cannot live without it either. Amen.

My wife and I had a wonderful time this last weekend in Portland at WordCamp. For a ten dollar registration fee we were treated to several general sessions that ranged from building a blog in ten days to a preview of the new and upcoming version of WordPress. For those of you who are not in the know, this is the software that we used to construct our blogs. In addition to these wonderful presentations we had three different opportunities during the day to choose between three different topics in mini, one hour sessions. These sessions dealt with more specific topics that revolved around WordPress and blogging in general, but while all of these lectures were wonderful there was even more.

We all got a WordCamp T-shirt; they served bagels and coffee for breakfast, pizza for lunch and Mediterranean food for dinner. This was way more value than ten dollars per person but the icing on the cake was the two kegs of beer they tapped around four o’clock. Give me a break. I don’t know how we could possibly have gotten more for ten dollars anywhere else in the universe. Hurrah for the organizers and a tip of the hat to all involved. It was a great time and a fantastic value.

I won’t go into a lot of detail on the WordCamp food and drink except to say that they had my favorite flavor of beer….cold. The food was delicious and filling for a price that could not be beat. We left a little early as we were filled with information that we are both still trying to digest. The best part was actually meeting and talking with fellow bloggers. I won’t call you all out by name but I have been sharing comments with a few of you and I greatly appreciate the conversations and exchanges we had.

Having lived on the coast of Oregon for a couple of years, I have a great appreciation for the state in general. I love that you can’t pump your own gas. I love that they have no sales tax and I love that they vote by mail. This is an extremely civilized state. Moving away was sad for many reasons but living in Seattle is a blast. It is just a plain and simple blast. We love the city and there are a thousand things to do at any given moment. When we decided we were leaving the small town we lived in on the coast we had harbored secret hopes that we might end up in Portland. My wife was changing jobs and conducting a nationwide search for a position that had challenges as well as the potential for growth, and while we had come to love the west coast in general and Oregon in particular, we were trying to look at all of our options. Portland seemed like it would be wonderful. Lots of stuff to do and still in the state we loved. Small town living had been a real education for us and we can honestly say that while we had made some great friends with some fantastic people, the general level of opportunity and the frustratingly small town view of many of the citizens had grown old quickly. In fact, it seemed as though most of the population itself was doing little more than growing old and older in a physical as well as an attitudinal sense. It was time to move on.

Portland is the home of Powell’s which is perhaps the greatest of all used book stores. Portland also lays claim to having more breweries than any other city in the world. That’s right, the world. Not the country or the state; we’re talking about the whole planet. Having had the pleasure of visiting the city several times since we moved to Oregon, we both thought it would be great to move there. However, fate dealt us a different hand and my wife never even got called for one interview there. Seattle is where we found ourselves and we are glad to be here.

On the Friday evening before WordCamp started, we met with one of the great friends we made in Oregon, who happened to be in the city for the weekend, and had a delightful dinner at a Newport Seafood Grill. We were tickled that he was in town and he met us at our hotel where we walked a few blocks for dinner. I ordered a glass of Oregon Pinot Gris and an appetizer plate of California Roll sushi. California Roll sushi is the baby stuff. If you have never eaten sushi before and think you might like to try it, begin here. It has a very mild fish in it and lots of rice that you can soak with soy sauce or perhaps some pickled ginger or a dab of wasabi if you are really feeling adventurous. The rolls were great and before my dinner order came I decided to change horses, so I ordered an Australian Shiraz. Shiraz is the name they use in Australia for the Syrah grape and the wine has a bit of a spicy finish that stands up well with stronger tasting foods. I had ordered gumbo and it came with the standard dollop of white rice in the center of the bowl. It was crammed with oysters, prawns and sausage. I love gumbo and while this was not as good as the stuff I make (it’s not braggin’ if it’s the truth) it was pretty good. Just a little bit spicy. Not really too much, just a bit. I like spice but often times dishes that are supposed to be spicy come with way too much heat and you can’t even tell if it has any flavor or not. I think poor cooks use too much heat to cover up for a lack of skill. This stuff hit the spot and the Shiraz bellied up right next to it, holding its own in the battle of flavors that was happening on my tongue. We had a wonderful time catching up with our friend over dinner and decided it would be a waste to try to stuff dessert on top of it, so we didn’t.

We were unaware that they were going to be serving bagels at WordCamp the next morning so we stopped at the little restaurant on the ground floor of our hotel and grabbed some coffee and cereal before we headed over there. I had oatmeal and my wife chose raisin bran with bananas. She was disappointed they did not have non-fat milk. My breakfast came with what looked like a crop circle in my bowl of oatmeal. When I see that I know they made it in the microwave. There is just no way you can put traditionally cooked oatmeal in a bowl and have it look like that. It has to have been cooked in the bowl and that means the microwave. It also usually means instant oatmeal which to my taste is just not the same. We were in a hurry so I didn’t think much about it. I got about half of the oatmeal down and half of my cup of mediocre coffee. It was time to roll.

I have already described the food they served in camp and I wouldn’t diss it even if it was terrible, but it was not. Thanks again to all who helped put this conference on.

As I said before, we cut out a little early as we had absorbed about all we thought we could and were frankly tired. There was an avalanche of information and we were both trying to soak it up as fast as we could. I was feeling a bit overloaded but I thought that my wife was completely wrapped up in the whole scene. When she looked at me just before dinner was announced and said she was tired and wanted to head back to the hotel, you could have knocked me over with a feather. She was flushed with the heat of the moment and stuffed with information. It was time to cut out.

After slouching back to our hotel room we changed clothes and took a deep breath before girding our loins and heading up to the bar/restaurant on the top floor. We found a small table outside on the roof overlooking the Portland skyline and had a quiet drink. Off to the north we spotted Mt. St. Helens with its flattened top and the glass towers of the convention center loomed before us as we looked over the city to the south. The sun eventually slipped behind the mountains to the west and with the air chilling we moved to a table in the bar and ordered some light appetizers. I got the buffalo hot wings and my beautiful wife chose the chicken quesadillas with onions, green peppers and tomatoes. She liked them and I found the wings good enough to choke down but certainly not the hot wings I have found in other locales. The bartender brought them to me with the sauce on the side because he was afraid they would be too hot for me. While the sauce was, as usual with most of these dishes, too heavy on the heat and too light on the flavor, it made eating them with the dressing problematic. You could dip them in the hot sauce and then again in the dressing but you always ended up with too much of one and not enough of the other. Not a big deal. Just a little annoying.

Later I sat at the bar and watched the light fade in the west as the beautiful lights of Portland started to come alive. All in all the food had been, while not terrible, not fantastic either. I sipped some Oktoberfest beer from the Widmer Brothers of Portland and found it as mediocre as the rest of the Portland food. I have eaten great food in this city so I know it is out there. I just happened on this visit to not really hit on anything wonderful. But then again, that was not the reason I came. My wife and I both came for the conference and it was great. I didn’t make an effort to search out fantastic food while I was there and I did not have any jump up at me. Such is life. May your travels lead you to fantastic people, events and hopefully fantastic food.

There is nothing to be gained from pouring on the heat in your life and ignoring the flavor. Trying to cram too much into the moment can leave you with all of the first and none of the last.