We spent Saturday night and part of Sunday at our friend Eric Witchey's place in Salem. Although we were too late for parallel play, we did arrive in time to make dinner.

Eric has a houseguest right now, Kat, who moved to the pacific northwest from New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. I guess she had been planning on moving out of there at some point, plus she had heard about the writing community in Oregon. Anyway, she has five cats (secluded in one room because Eric is allergic) and she needs to find homes for a few.

It's alwasy great to spend time with Eric. He doesn't get down to workshop as often lately. We made apple chicken with sweet potatoes and kale. The sauce was great! And if I haven't mentioned it here before, I will say it now: props to the menu mailer at Saving Dinner. Since Ximena and I subscribed to the menu mailer in October of '04, we eat out much much less and we're eating healthier, too. Each week we get a shopping list for six dinners to make during the following week. There's rarely a clunker, and we have several favorites that we go back to whenever we can. Menu mailer also has crockpot subscriptions, as well as vegetarian and low carb. I'm more comfortable in the kitchen now after a year of this. Two years ago I barely knew how to make anything, let alone an exciting something.

Anyhoo, back to the visit. Eric has been writing steadily. For fun after writing, he has his train set that he works on. It's this huge piece of work on four tables in his dinning room. He's creating a Rockwell village and a cemetary with the dead rising from their graves. He has little people, a house afire (that really smokes!), moutains, a tunnel, a mausoleum, and ROUS's (Rats Of Unusual Size). There's going to be many little scenes in this landscape--Ximena suggested the stoning scene from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. It's truly going to be a great, fun piece of creative work. Maybe even collaborative as more people suggest different, twisted scenes to depict. It's going to be worthy of pictures. And Eric hopes to have a train cam where internet users can run the train from their own computers.

We went on a Fred Meyer run while there to see if we could get him a little fog machine, but the foutain we had in mind (that could be dismantled and fog machine removed) was too expensive. However, now that he knows what he's looking for he can find it online or somewhere else. This would be for the mausolem, btw. The fog or mist will pour out and go down the hill the mausolem sits on.

Too much, twisted fun.