When I'm gushing about how great Portland is, I always talk about the food here -- not just the wonderful restaurants, but the extensive availability of delicious, natural, and fresh local meat and produce. And the fact that the city has a Whole Foods, Wild Oats, Zupan's, New Seasons, and a huge farmers' market in which to shop for them helps, too.

But oh, I love the restaurants here, and I've been telling everyone that this town is up there with New York and San Francisco as a dining town. And damn if Gourmet isn't hip to it, too, putting Higgins and Paley's Place on their list of the top 50 restaurants in the U.S. I'm telling you, this town is a great place to eat. And amazingly, the people aren't fat here 'cause they can walk everywhere.

Thank you, Ann.

In November 1990, I was 14 years old. That's too young to vote, but for a girl who had talked politics with her parents from the age of 4 (the 1980 presidential elections, when my father informed me that we wanted Reagan to win because "Republicans are better") it was definitely old enough to care about elections. It was a fascinating election season for Texas, featuring Republican Clayton "relax and enjoy it" Williams and Democrat Ann "silver foot in his mouth" Richards.

On Election Night, my mother took us to La Zona Rosa, then still a bar with food, to watch the returns come in with other Austin women. It was thrilling to watch this funny, smart, white-haired lady take the lead, and we soon headed down to the Town Lake Hyatt to see her give her victory speech. It was exciting and packed with awesome Texas women, and I was so very, very happy that we'd moved to Austin a year earlier, where I could see this happening.

In 1994 I cast my first vote for her; she lost to George W. Bush in part because her campaign didn't take him seriously enough. Little did I know I'd be voting against Bush for another ten years back when Democrats had a monopoly on Texas state office and our budget had a huge surplus.

Ann Richards is a true Texas heroine. Her politics and her life resonate with me on so many levels, and I gasped when I awoke to the headlines this morning. I wish I were in Austin today to properly celebrate and mourn, and I hope those of you who are there will do so for me.

It's nice, I guess, when the people at the Paris airport know your flight will be so late into Houston that you have no hope of making your connecting flight to Portland, so they go ahead and rebook you on one that leaves four hours later, getting you home after a total of twenty hours of traveling. It's much nicer when the people at the Houston airport give you a hotel comp and let you fly out the next morning.

Before I left for my trip, I put in my schedule request for this week at Mary's, and last night thought, "Gee, I wonder if I said I'd be available on September 4th?" Why, yes, yes I did, not accounting for this additional delay in Houston nor for my general desire to spend the day of my return doing laundry, opening mail, and handwashing my new delicates. So I'm heading into work at 4:30 this afternoon; thankfully I'll get off early enough to go buy groceries and then settle in to watch old Daily Shows.

All of my efforts to enjoy sleaze in Paris were for naught--the dick behind the desk at the Erotic Museum closed an hour early and the "strip" clubs we passed all looked like ripoffs. Though I did hear one woman talking to a group of men, saying "Five Euro each? You have Five Euro each?" I have no idea what she was negotiating--a twenty-euro blowjob for the bachelor?