Whenever I'm on my own for dinner, as I was last night, I like to head down the street to the always-good Colosso Restaurant. I get a seat at the bar and order up some tapas and some Portuguese or Spanish wine. And I watch in wonderment as the lovely and talented Molly the bartender makes up concoction after concoction in her highly skilled way.

The key tool in her operation is a large manual juice squeezer -- the kind with the tall neck and the handle on the side, which brings a metal cup down and squeezes the fruit onto a metal grater. Every night, orange after lime after lemon meets its fate under our gal's swift and sure right hand. Fun to watch, fun to drink.

At our house, we got an amateur version of this appliance as a Christmas gift a few years back. And although it takes some effort and cleanup, we give it a pretty good workout. Nothing better than some fresh-squeezed juice, any time of day. Life is good.

After dinner, I had a little conversation with a couple of schoolteachers from Scappoose. Life for them is less than good at this time. I bought them a drink with some of the dough I saved when Measure 28 went down. They'll survive, but it won't be pretty.