Ode to the Omelet

Because the omelet, it has really saved my ass this week.  We have been functioning in the kitchen with one (tiny) frying pan, a sauce pan, a spatula, two forks, one knife, one spoon (we lost a spoon in the empty apartment, let this stand testament to my amazing gift for losing things).  Oh, and two bowls.  And for more meals than I care to admit, we have eaten omelets.

My mom made them on Sundays when I was a kid, adding cut-up hunks of spam and torn slices of Kraft American cheese.  As a vegetable-eating adult, I began to branch out, adding peppers and onions, asparagus, spinach, different types of cheeses, different types of protein.  Whatever is in your kitchen, really, you can throw into a skillet with an egg and it’s pretty darn hard to beat that meal.

So thank you, omelet, and thank you French people, who I assume invented this miraculous food.  Let’s just add that to the list of excellent things that have come out of France, like kissing with your tongue, the Statue of Liberty, and Carla Bruni.

This week has gone by very quickly.  We painted the living room and went to a concert.  We read a lot.  I read a wonderful collection of short stories by a writer named Kevin Wilson- he’s from Tennessee, people!  He teaches at Sewanee I think, and the book is “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.”  It was so good.

We went to a  50 family yard sale, but I didn’t find much besides a picnic basket and coat hangers and some hand towels.  We tried to carry a dining room table a mile back to our apartment in over 90 degree heat.  We received a call from Amtrak only this morning saying our boxes have arrived, so now we have to make arrangements to pick those up.

Our building manager Lon provides most of our amusement now that we have no t.v. and only random internet access.  True story:  last week I was looking out the kitchen window on the side of the building to see Lon bound through the landscaped garden running along the lower wall, jump down two ledges, also flower beds, and then down onto the pavement, where his momentum carried him straight into a large brick pillar.  Smack.  He looked like Chris Farley pretending to be a ninja in that movie where Chris Farley is a ninja.

I still haven’t told my dad I moved to Seattle.  I really need to get on that.  Every day I think:  today I’ll call and tell dad that I live on the other side of the country.  But then I get hungry and make myself an omelet.  The truth is, I’m scared.

Sometimes at night I lie on the air mattress and wonder where our stuff is.  Whereas we zipped across the sky in a flying chariot, seeing not much more of the landscape than the crumpled hills of Utah that look like Sharpei skin, our boxes of belonging have been chug-chug-chugging along across the great expanse of America.  I think about my Racoon named “Mr. Racoon,” the only stuffed animal I have from my childhood (also the state animal of Tennessee), and wonder, “Is Mr. Racoon in Minnesota right now?  Is he going to travel through either of the Dakotas?  Is he passing beside a river?”  It’s weird, to think of how my stuff has now been in states I may never even visit.

My stuff is better-travelled than I am.

My dreams have been out-of-control.  I dream a lot about monsters, packing things, and empty houses.  Sometimes I have dreams that I forgot about a house I used to live in, and then I go back there and all this old stuff is there that I forgot about, and it’s all decaying.  And I just feel so guilty.  I look forward to my dreams settling down, hopefully as I settle down.

Here’s a picture:

Sunset over Elliott Bay