A Weekend in Bend

Deschutes Brewery Pub

When I arrived in Bend, Oregon, I expected to run into characters from Tawna Fenske’s romantic comedies around every corner. I peered into the open kitchen at the Deschutes Brewery looking for the chef from Eat, Play, Lust. When I passed the bobcat enclosure in the lobby of the High Desert Museum I started looking for the planetarium that put the frisky in Frisky Business. I looked for Marine for Hire‘s Sam chopping wood alongside the houses nestled among the trees along the road to Mt. Bachelor. After discovering Crux Fermentation Project nestled between a train track and a freeway, I expected to see Believe it or Not‘s strip mall with a psychic leaning against a male stripper joint – oh wait, that one was set in Portland. And they are all fictional stories. The little town of Bend, however, is very real, and it is not what I expected.

Small Mercies Giveaway Winner

When I got home from a weekend trip to Bend and found two review copies of Small Mercies by Eddie Joyce waiting in my stack of mail, I decided to try out Rafflecopter and run a giveaway here on the blog. And now we have a winner!

Enchantment Lake

I never read Nancy Drew until my daughter got a haircut a couple of years ago that prompted people to say she looked like the famous sleuth. But that doesn’t mean I never went through the girl detective phase as a kid. I actually did it more than once. Linda Craig’s curiously crime-ridden ranch filled my first and second grade years. Trixie Belden’s curiously crime-ridden quaint bedroom community took up a stretch of fifth. In third grade there was also a bunch of kid detectives with a house trailer hideout in a junk yard, but I think they were all boys. In any case, I’m not new to girl detective books, even though it has been a long time since I immersed myself in one.

In the Details

The devil is in the details. Or the guardian. Whatevs.

February on the Crooked Road

In case you missed them, here are the top 5 posts in February:

Doe Bay Tradition: I posted a photo of my relatives who drove from Arizona to Washington during the Depression. They stayed at the Doe Bay Resort, where my family has camped during the past couple summers for their justifiably famous music festival.

Enter the Monkey King: People love photo posts. I can see it in the overall traffic to the site since I started posting them, and they consistently rank among the most popular posts. This photo is my daughter’s Halloween costume from a couple years ago. I doubt I ever manage such a cool costume again, but I do plan to work on my photography skills this year.

Don Quixote at Pacific Northwest Ballet Makes Me Penitent: I don’t usually enjoy story ballets, but when I do, it’s Don Quixote at Pacific Northwest Ballet.

A Five Star Dilemma: To me, the answer depends on what star rankings are actually supposed to accomplish. I’m still not sure what that is, but I’m glad other people are thinking about it, too.

The Truth About Rejection: A reblog of a thoughtful and heartening post from my friend and neighbor, the artist Marisa Vitiello. Unfortunately, I have not managed to translate that inspiration into action yet.

Top Countries:

There’s been a shift since the last time I looked. In January, Crooked Road readers came from the U.S., Australia, and Germany. In February the top three were

• The United States
• Canada
• France

There was at least one visitor from 32 countries. That kind of blows my mind.

How did you get here?

• Facebook – I think a lot of these views are coming from people who clicked on the links my friends and family shared on Facebook. I’ve never understood why a blog (where you can like and comment on each post) would a Facebook page, but some of my favorite blogs do. Is it for off-topic conversations? An alternative to using a blog reader? Should I have a Crooked Road page on Facebook? Someone enlighten me.
• Google searches – Yay! After years of completely ignoring SEO, I am finally starting to win at the Google!
• Twitter – I love my Tweeps!

Google has gotten quite adept at hiding search terms, so much so that every single search term visible in my stats was unique. I could make out a couple of themes, though:

• 2 searches included “Choose your own adventure,” which means they were looking for Tawna Fenske’s interactive romantic comedy, Getting Dumped, and found my series of posts about it.
• 2 were related to Halldor Laxness, 1 to the band Sólstafir, and 1 to Icelandair, thus reinforcing my commitment to write about all things Icelandic.

Some search terms were interesting:

• duration of semele – When I write reviews for magazines, I always remember to include the “if you go” information with details about parking, pricing, and performance duration. I guess I should extend the same courtesy to blog readers in the future. Yay! I learned from my stats!
• Icelandair midweek madness – This sounds like a sale and I’m pissed I missed it.
• Family cruz WordPress – Someone found my review of When the de La Cruz Family Danced when they were looking for author Donna Miscolta’s blog. Here you go.

Featured Followers:

I’m trying to be more social in 2015. So I’ve started looking at the part of my stats page that shows who follows me. (I’m pretty sure it only includes other bloggers who have followed my page using the WordPress Reader. If you subscribe by email, I think you stay anonymous.)

I’ve chosen three followers to highlight here, and I hope you’ll go check out their blogs. A new Crooked Road follower this February was K.L. Register of The Ninth Life. It’s a pretty nice looking page. Register describes herself as a fun-loving farm girl, chemist, and dentist who hates the taste of macaroni and cheese, which I think is a pretty kick-ass bio, even though I love mac’n’cheese myself.

Then I thought I should find out who some of those long-unrecognized follower folks might be, and found exploding apple juice, whose author claims 4 out of 5 dentists recommend his blog, which consists of short original fiction. The last post, appropriately titled The Worlds End, is dated 2012. I suspect that his long-term Crooked Road followership reflects a failure to log in to WordPress rather than a continued interest in reading my blog. But who knows, maybe if a bunch of people check out his defunct blog the sudden flurry of email notifications will inspire him to start writing again, or something.

I also checked out My Passenger Diaries because this travel blog recently included posts about Seattle. I first came to Seattle as a tourist, but it was a very long time ago. Now I get such a kick seeing my home town with an outsider’s eyes. You might like it, too.

 

 

 

Ambassador Kate DiCamillo at Seattle Public Library

Kate DiCamillo has a Southern accent. I did not expect this because I do not hear it in the lyrical rhythms of her wide-eyed fiction. Both the accent and the wonder are explained by her childhood in Florida, where she experienced a number of unusual theme parks, and was particularly impressed by the vision of hidden worlds granted by glass-bottomed boats. It was on one of these boats that she heard a lady in a plastic rainbonnet say

Oh my. This world.

And knew exactly what she meant.

China Dolls

I have been a fan of Lisa See since On Gold Mountain, so I was excited to receive a review copy of China Dolls before the book came out last year. Of course my enthusiasm failed to translate into a prompt reading and review of the book, but what can you do? See’s career took off with On Gold Mountain, the fictionalized history of her own pioneering mixed-race Chinese-American family. Her novels, generally historical fiction either set in China or dealing with Chinese-Americans, tend to focus on forgotten or ignored bits of history from a feminine point of view. In these historical and cultural contexts, she explores themes of ethnic and female identity, and relationships among women. China Dolls is a story about Asian women in American show business in the early part of the 20^th century.

Auspicious Bird

That is not a statue on the rock. Cranes really do stand around posing for watercolors in Japanese gardens.