Germy

In a couple of weeks, I will mark the 9 year mark in my hot, steamy, passionate love affair with coffee. Past ruminations on this blog have included snippets from my time working as a coffee roaster/barista, and I recently suffered through an experience which forced me to wrestle with my relationship with coffee.  This summer I've been taking part in numerous and wildly varied clinical research studies. The reason behind this is two-fold: first, compensation can be quite good, but also my academic curiosity and ability to see what it's like on the other side of the consent form, I believe, is going to be valuable moving forward with my career.  This morning I arrived home this morning at 2:30am after spending 36 hours in a sleep deprivation study, which not only included two constant-posture sessions (meaning I was unable to leave my hospital bed for 8 hours, and then another 12 hour span) but also rendered me caffeine free the whole time. Halfway through

I am enamored with contemplation, which is just a fancy word for daydreaming, but these days I feel compelled to find a highfalutin label for everything -- so I'm sticking with contemplation. When I was a child, I often liked to imagine that I was the first person to set foot on a particular piece of land. I don't mean that I thought I was discovering new continents, but I was a pragmatic enough of a kid to think that perhaps, just maybe, nobody in the history of the earth had stood exactly where I was standing. Usually when I was off building forts in the urban forests that still are found all over Portland, I would imagine these things. And, I guess in the way that one cannot ever stand in the same river twice, I am right (thinking of the earth in orbit, and our solar system's movement in the galaxy, and then our galaxy's movement in the larger universe, we are always somewhere unique in space) but, again as a practical child, I was thinking as far back as t

There are so  many food blogs out there right now.  It seems that there is a never ending appetite for food based television. Increasingly, people are taking their diet into their own hands and realizing that they really do need good, wholesome food. So, if there are so many others with admittedly more skill, experience and talent than I in regards to culinary capability, why do this at all? The simple (and only necessary) answer is that I enjoy it. And, if some other people may benefit or find inspiration, that is just gravy, delicious, thick gravy. Every time I consider what meal I should document and use for a blog entry, I definitely try and keep the cost, effort and required preparation and cooking time within the same parameters that I would for a "normal" meal. That said, meals vary wildly in these aspects in our household and it is hard not to try and come up with something special -- something worth writing about. Most of the ingredients that I've fea

Salmon has long been my favored fish. I remember, as a child, visiting the  fishery at the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River  from which two things have stuck in my mind: the sturgeon which look like modern day dinosaurs, and the salmon migrating back up the river, to spawn and die. Seeing the fish leap, fight and put forth such a tremendous effort, flailing on a fish ladder has stayed with me. Thinking back to the times of the Native Americans, and the people that lived around what is now the Portland, OR area during the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I can't help but think that I could have seen the value of the mighty salmon fish, unlike the people of the expedition, but I would've probably eaten Rover anyway. This, from the PBS interview with Dayton Duncon , discussing the expedition: The Columbia river system is like the... Let me start again. Back up a second. Lewis and Clark and their expedition ate their way across the West. They'd had buffalo,