Spendy bread

My preferred bread is whole wheat sourdough, and there's a local kind (well, from Cottage Grove, 19 miles south) that tastes just like what I make, when I go to the trouble, and it has the right shape and slicing and such to make it generally more convenient than homemade bread. It costs about $7 a loaf, which seems like a lot, but I like it.

However, the bakery isn't entirely reliable. They usually restock at Market of Choice on Tuesdays, but not this week, and the shelf at Capella was also empty then. I went back today, and Capella had a sign saying the bakery would be closed for "two to three weeks," whatever that means. They didn't have any good alternatives, so I went to Market of Choice, which had several options. When I tried the Bread Stop bakery's whole wheat sourdough, it tasted like it had way, way, way too much salt, so I'm not trying that again. I did find a loaf made by Hideaway Bakery, a very small bakery not far from my house, and it had lots of other grains besides the whole wheat. But guess what it cost? It wasn't labelled so I didn't learn the price until I was paying for it. This was a $12 loaf of bread! That's about a dollar per slice! Something tells me I'll be eating plain sourdough in a week or so, since it's much too warm to bake my own right now...

Book completed

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, by Jenny Odell. This is a very interesting book; she explores our relationship with time. The first chapters are well researched and a necessary foundation for the rest - she looks at the history of our cultural habit of trying to maximize our use of time, both for work and recreation, and also how this plays out differently for people of different status and with different obligations or limitations. In the rest of the book, she explores different approaches to quality time. Throughout, there's an ongoing story of visiting different places in the Bay Area, which was fun for me because I've been to many of them (the Stanford Mall, the parklands between Palo Alto and the ocean, the huge cemetery in North Oakland). She shares interesting insights from philosophers who have given their attention to time, especially Henri Bergson, and also from indigenous writers. I was already familiar with Robin Wall Kimmerer, but it turns out there's also an Australian indigenous academic whose book I hope to read soon: Tyson Yunkapunta. I expect that I'll be reading this book again and getting even more out of it.

Day 1231: Friday fun

This afternoon, I had the vague idea that at 5:30 pm I'd go to Z's office for the First Friday art walk, as they were hosting some of the art, and then make it home with ample time to see the Friday movie, which was going to be either Edge of Tomorrow or Return to Oz. Then I got an email from SDH, the head of our psychology department and also my friend - she was part of the activities of that research group that had included me this week, and she was telling all of us that she'd reserved a big table at McMenamin's for 5:30 pm, as a last activity for them all before they head home. Fun! So I went to that instead.

I sat at one end of the big table, and the people near me on the left were two young Italian women named Marta and Elisa; on the other side of them was Paul S. On the right were Paul's son SS, SDH, and the Israeli woman, Tehira. Further down were more Italians, a German, a local faculty member, and SS's wife, whom I suppose is also an SS. The fact that I've known SDH for so long was very useful every time the conversation flagged, because I'd just ask her a question. She's very chatty, and the conversation would again become lively. "Will your string quartet be performing this year?" "Does your brother still live in Taiwan?" etc. Elisa is spending a year in the US, but Marta flies home to Italy on Monday and then heads to Sicily for a vacation in the town of Trapani; she showed me photos and has her recreational reading all picked out. She's also planning a vacation in Jordan next year.

They were all reluctant to say goodbye after their week together - they've been meeting in Eugene for years, most of them - so when J. called to remind me that the movie was starting (Edge of Tomorrow, not to be confused with the soap opera Edge of Night, though I did so), I was still sitting there with them. Eventually we all got up and went outside, with SDH making a quip about decision-making researchers having a hard time making a decision, and then I went home.

I was 40 minutes late for the movie, but... it's very much like Groundhog's Day, with the man's day repeating endlessly every time he dies (in a war of humanity against invading aliens), and with a sentence or two of backstory from J, I felt I hadn't missed a thing. Turns out it was a major action movie starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, and we quite enjoyed it.