College trip, spudnuts, 18 years

Four hours later I started googling diabetes. That's how terrible I felt.

I took Isabel to look at colleges in the Pacific Northwest last week and she found two to which she will definitely apply and would happily go. I’m glad I’m not the one applying to college in 2014 because I’d never get in. I’m not being falsely modest. Three words: high school calculus. 

It was a beautiful trip and I’m already sentimental about our time together. How many more trips will there be for Isabel and me? There was fierce heat, lots of driving, lots of talking, lots of listening to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was on the “suggested reading” list issued by my school every summer when I was growing up and therefore of less than zero interest to me. I'm glad I got over that, because it's gripping and wonderful and I highly recommend the audio version for a long drive.

In terms of food, the Spudnut Shop in Richland, Washington was the highlight for me, not because the spudnuts were so fabulous (they weren't), but because I've had a thing about spudnuts for 25 years. Do you know about spudnuts? They're donuts made with potato flour and there was once a chain of spudnut shops across the United States. Only a few dozen remain. You may be wondering what makes a spudnut special and I would say: nothing! Nothing at all. Maybe they're marginally lighter and fluffier than an ordinary donut. Maybe. Marginally. But the name and concept caught my fancy when I was young and impressionable and now I get excited whenever there's a chance to visit a spudnut shop, so when we found ourselves 40 miles from Richland, we made the detour.

You don't need to go.

This place was a total . . . let’s just say it was cluttered and "real." The donuts were pale inside, pillowy, and yummy, but not significantly better than what you'll find at your local supermarket. I'm still glad we made the pilgrimage. It gave me a momentary thrill and now I can cross it off the list.

We ate some other tasty things on our sojourn: the strawberry birthday cake ice cream, wonderfully rich and jammy, at Salt and Straw in Portland. The cream-filled donut from Voodoo in Eugene, which might have been Isabel's favorite food of the trip. A humongous tub of buttered popcorn at the movie theater where we saw Maleficent. How bad for you is movie theater popcorn? I can't bring myself to look. 

The day after we got home, Isabel flew off to visit Mark’s family in New England. Since then, Mark and I have been on our own. Half the time I'm blue and filled with dread of the coming empty nest, half the time we're having fun. So much more fun than usual. It turns out that constantly nagging people to start their homework, feed the chickens, and put their dirty socks in the hamper is stressful. Who'd have thought. We celebrated our 18th anniversary this past weekend by going to see Venus in Fur (**) and Life Itself  (***), then dining at Tommaso’s, a dated and lovable Italian restaurant in North Beach. We ate clams and veal saltimbocca and Mark drank a cup off coffee with the meal and I drank a glass of wine and felt very happy and very lucky.