No Feeling of Falling

Walking in LA

2011-01-14T11:40:00.003-05:00

I was up at 5:00 am yesterday, Central time, and fell asleep early last night.

I was up early this morning and decided to walk. LA is famous for the observation that nobody walks, but of course, that's not true. Lots of people are walking at 8:00am. Many of them, dressed in scrubs, or jeans and casual clothes, or uniforms, are walking to or from bus stops. Most of them are brown or black. The one white woman I saw was older, wearing a long denim skirt and a dirty sweatshirt and either had no access to or didn't much use shower and laundry. But that's not what we mean or what we see when we talk about people walking.

Moving to LA

2011-01-13T22:09:00.004-05:00

It's warm here. Of course it's warm here. I'm in Los Angeles, it's supposed to be warm.

Tomorrow I'll embark on an apartment hunt. In preparation for this, I've been watching a lot of real estate shows on HGTV. On HGTV I've learned a lot about looking for a place to live. I've learned you have to compromise. Which is good because I've been living in house. With bedrooms and a husband and dogs. Now I'll be living in an apartment, and talking to said husband and dogs by Skype.

HGTV also says that I can reasonably expect to spend a third of my income on rent.

They are joking. But it doesn't matter, because a third of my income doesn't get me a place that is qualitatively better than what I actually think I can afford to pay. To get a place that is qualitatively better--significantly more square feet, say, and nicely made, rather than the basic box, would cost me about my average income.

However, I have finally tried In-and-Out Burger. I see what everyone was talking about.

Gravity's Angel

2009-05-26T23:14:00.000-04:00

Saw Laurie Anderson in concert once years ago. Saw this album in a used book store today, and suddenly had to hear the song.

American Idol is an ARG

2009-05-24T12:12:00.004-04:00

It's really hard to explain what I do. I work in an industry so new, that even while several million people have actually been involved in ARGs, (or immersive fiction or interactive experiences, or whatever you want to call it) far more haven't. It's a little like explaining movies to people who have never seen a movie or TV. "It's like a cross between a book and a photograph. The photographs move." People would think they knew what you were talking about, but they wouldn't.

Actually, American Idol is a very primitive form of it. Because the viewer actually, in the most limited way, touches the outcome. Viewers vote. Those votes affect who wins. Much to the pleasure of the show is seeing if the state of Hawaii votes for the girl from Hawaii, even though she isn't the best one up there. Or if the teenaged girl vote really swings it for the cute guy.

It's an extraordinarily popular show, with live events in several cities across the U.S., which uses non-television technology (that is, phones) as an essential part of it's story telling mechanic. Next, American Idol needs to allow you could send you email address in and your favorite contestant would send you out an email before each competition talking about how they feel and who they think their competition is, and what rehearsals have been like.

Bad Unicorn Tattoos

2009-05-21T14:52:00.001-04:00

Gotta wonder who thought these were good ideas to print on their skin forever.

New Freezer! So Exciting!

2009-05-16T11:03:00.003-04:00

Bob, showing off the freezer Price is Right style.

Bob prepares the first test of the freezer. They said it would be cold in about five hours.

The Tobacco Hornworm Attacks

2009-05-14T09:59:00.003-04:00

Watering my tomatoes this morning, I found this. It's a tobacco hornworm, the caterpillar form of the hummingbird moth. I will be watching for more, and if I am infested I will have to buy some Bacillus thuringiensis and visit plague upon the little buggers.

It is cool looking, though. Bob and I were quite interested and looked it up and everything. It's tempting to try to make a horror movie out of the thing, except it won't move. It just clings to it's tomato stalk.

Lots of Tiny Green Tomatoes

2009-05-12T19:53:00.002-04:00

There will be tomatoes this year. (Assuming that the tomato plants are not crushed by shingles when we get a new roof.)

My Mother's Day Gift to Myself

2009-05-10T15:14:00.003-04:00

Sentimental, I know. But the tomato plants are covered in blossoms and tiny green tomatoes, the pepper plant is got some tiny peppers in it, and the basil is growing, and my refrigerator freezer is already filled with things like stock.

Tomatoes. Tomato sauce. Tomato chutney. I have high hopes for this freezer.

Shelly Gets Her Exercise

2009-05-07T14:16:00.002-04:00

This Feels Like Commentary

2009-05-06T11:35:00.004-04:00

You know, a comment on the absurdity of commercial television, the domestication of terrible historic events, and the way capitalism infects every aspect of American Life. But it's real. A Jello ad set in WWII Germany. Featuring Carol Channing. <From Steve Peters>

Egg-stra-ordinary

2009-05-03T20:10:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I bought a dozen eggs at the farmer's market, white brown and green. (When you crack them open they are all regular eggs inside.)

Today has been all about eggs. I had been thinking about fresh eggs versus store bought eggs (which are a minimum of 7-10 days old.) I'd heard so much about fresh eggs. About the rich color of their yolks. About how good they tasted. I've also been reading about everyday life in Victorian England. Today I made eggs, bacon (thick-sliced and slowly cooked) toast from English Toasting bread slathered with butter, and fresh squeezed orange juice. This isn't particularly English, but it does share with the Victorians a preference for heavy food not particularly distinguished by seasoning. It was a very fine breakfast.

Were the eggs better? I think they were. But I don't think they were astonishingly better.N or did they have the deep orange yolks Mario Batalli says make handmade pasta in Italy so much better than pasta here. But they were really pretty and it was a good breakfast.

I also made a lemon meringue pie. I doubt, after adding gelatin, sugar, and lemon juice, that I will be able to say much about the taste of the eggs in the lemon curd, but I suspect it will be good just the same.

Buy a Book for a Buck

2009-04-28T13:32:00.002-04:00

You can buy a bunch of books for a buck a piece from Small Beer Press. (They either gotta sell 'em or pay rent on warehouse space.) One of them is my short story collection, Mothers & Other Monsters. Right in time for Mother's Day!

Although I have to admit, I'd rather get Carol Emshwiller for Mother's Day. Hell, all of 'em look good.

Alan DeNiro, Skinny Dipping ... (pb) $1

Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog (pb) $1

Carol Emshwiller, The Mount (pb) $1

John Crowley, Endless Things (hc) $1

Angelica Gorodsicher, Kalpa Imperial (pb) $1

Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss (hc) $1

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners (hc) $1

Kelly Link, Trampoline (pb) $1

Laurie J. Marks, Water Logic (pb) $1

Maureen F. McHugh, Mothers & Other...(pb) $1

Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light (pb) $1

Sean Stewart, Mockingbird (pb) $1

Kate Wilhelm, Storyteller (pb) $1

Carts of Darkness

2009-04-22T22:09:00.000-04:00

Showcase.ca

"This isn’t one of those homeless-guys-are-just-like-us exercises in upper-middle class guilt trips. As it turns out, these guys are nothing like us."

Why Tomato Plants?

2009-04-20T10:43:00.005-04:00

Someone asked me in mock exasperation if I had named my tomato plants. So of course, I had to. The big Jubilee (yellow tomatoes) is Rasputin (hard to kill) and the Terrific (red beefsteak tomatoes) is Audry (from Little Shop of Horrors.) The four Roma tomato plants, bought to provide tomatoes for freezing, are the Rolling Stones (longevity) and Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood both have tiny green tomatoes. Charlie Watts is pictured above.

I thought the flat of Roma tomatoes had four tomato plants, but it actually had five, and being unable to just throw out the one I really didn't have room for, I put it in a pot and stuck it on a deck. Pictured below is Brian Jones, who is in a better place than the other Rolling Stones. (Okay, actually not. The plant is more spindly than the others, although still setting blossoms.)

I'm very invested in these damn plants--or at least what they stand for to me. I know what they represent and it is all unreasonable: control in economically uncertain times, the promise of some self reliance. They are my bomb shelter, my gun collection, my little utopia. It's absurd. Seven tomato plants aren't going to sustain much. As for control, they are subject to whims as arbitrary as the economic and social weather we're experiencing these days.

Their next threat is the replacement of our roof, sometime in the next couple of weeks. When roofers are stripping a roof, they have to toss the shingles somewhere, and it will only take one shingle to completely wipe out Keith Richards. So I had it written into the roofing contract that they won't toss shingles on my garden.

I haven't gotten a single tomato yet. It's only April and even in Texas, where the growing season starts early, it's too soon. But I'm already thinking about how I'll expand the garden next year. Garlic. Maybe some onion sets. More peppers (I only have one chili plant.) Assuming I do get tomatoes, by July I will be sick of them. Rather than expanding the garden next year, it will be interesting to see if I even have one. (Well, probably herbs, I've had herbs for years. Herbs are weeds and take very little care.)

I dream of solar panels. I think about how even if we paid off the house we'd still have to pay real estate taxes. We are becoming the problem that economists talk about--people who will not spend. If spending is down, the economy continues to stall.

Did you know that in Austin, it is legal to own chickens within the city limits? That would cover some of our protein needs. The eggs, not the chickens. Yesterday we were talking about what we would name chickens if we had them. We decided we would name them Soup, Parmesan, Cacciatore and Esmeralda. Bob always wanted a chicken named Esmeralda.

Cyberspace Saturates Reality

2009-04-14T22:01:00.002-04:00

William Gibson, when he described cyberspace in Neuromancer, envisioned it as "tactile lattices of data and logic" and Case, his data cowboy, soared through it like a superhero. Cyberspace was a consensual hallucination. A visualization of the data landscape. It sounded like a total blast. But cyberspace has not turned out to be anything like that. I'm in cyberspace typing this, you're in cyberspace reading it. William Gibson made a far scarier observation when he said that cyberspace was where you go when you are on the telephone.

It's true, when we talk on the telephone, we're together, at least in some way that my brain recognizes as together.

But more interesting to me is that Cyberspace was initially envisioned as a place you went into. It turns out it's not that at all. Cyberspace is the organization of your experience when you are using a linked interface. So when you're in your car, using your GPS, you're in cyberspace, right there on the freeway. Using you smartphone to check Twitter, you're in cyberspace. We don't go to cyberspace, it comes to us. It overlays our world and our experience. It changes our perception of space and time.

There's only going to be more of it.

Infused Vodka, Vim & Vigor

2009-04-11T17:27:00.002-04:00

It all started from a stray comment. Can you have 'vim' without 'vigor' I asked?

Jessica said, "I think vim is the more mental/emotional form of vigor, so I say yes."

Gwenda said, "I think it involves martinis."

Jessica replied, "Given the nature of vim, perhaps it should be some sort of aromatini. Vimaromatini."

I like martinis. I really like Vespers, which is a martini made with Lillet instead of vermouth. Now I can't actually drink a lot of martinis, because frankly I have no tolerance for alcohol. In fact, my lack of tolerance is probably why I like martinis. When I was in college, and we'd go out drinking, if I had more than two drinks I really wanted to go home and go to sleep. But it's hard to make two drinks last several hours. Especially when the bar is too loud to talk. So I got in the habit of ordering brandy, and then whiskey, because they didn't taste good. So they'd take me a long time to finish. Except, not surprisingly, I came to like the taste of alcohol. And to this day I prefer drinks that aren't sweet.

Since Bob and I are not really drinkers, we are very enamored of the accouterments of martinis. Bob, especially is a lover of ritual and exactitude, which makes him the perfect bartender. Therefore, he was more than game when I said that we had to invent a martini.

I don't dislike the long list of things that people call martinis these days. I actually like Cosmos (I think it's the cranberry which takes the edge off the sweet.) But really, they aren't a martini. A martini is liquor cut by an aperitif style wine. So for me, a Manhattan (whiskey and sweet vermouth) qualifies as a kind of martini. A Blueberry Martini (2 oz Cranberry vodka, 2 oz triple sec, 2 oz blueberry juice, 2 oz Sprite) does not.

How then, to make an aromatic martini?

Infused vodka. Infused vodka is actually a pretty old-fashioned thing. A lot of Russian vodka is still homebrew, and there's a long tradition of putting stuff in it to make it palatable. Pepper vodka. Citron vodka. Now it's trendy, of course, and in a liquor store you can buy raspberry , peach, pepper, cranberry, green apple, lemon, clementine, vanilla, chili pepper, cinnamon, coffee, chocolate, rose, buffalo grass, and that favorite of dieters, acai. But we wanted 'aromatic vodka.' I had heard, somewhere, about infusing vodka and I have rosemary growing in my garden, so I did a search on 'rosemary infused vodka and found a site call Infusions of Grandeur. The blog hasn't been updated since 2008, which is sad (although probably a good thing for the blog owners' livers) but it is still a font of information if you want to infuse vodka.

After much discussion, we decided on three infusions (of which two, the lemon grass--clear with chopped bits of lemongrass in it--and ginger--cloudy with grated ginger--are pictured above.) We are doing ginger, lemongrass, and pear. Why pear? Because fruit infusions are supposedly the easiest to do and if the ginger and the lemongrass suck, at least we'll have the pear. We used Smirnoff for the base vodka (Smirnoff consistently does as well as expensive vodkas in blind tastings but costs less.)

Gwenda lives too far away for an easy taste test, but Jessica will be invited for the attempt to make a Vimaromatini.

To celebrate the beginning of the experiment, Bob made martinis. His is the classic Gordon's gin and dry vermouth. Mine is vodka and Lillet. I have had a couple of sips and I am feeling it already, so if people are interested, I will post more later, when we taste. Now, I'm going to go do something brainless.

The Recession Garden

2009-04-06T14:04:00.005-04:00

Is there anything so utterly hopeful as planting a garden? I planted mine about a month ago (spring comes early in Austin--the last average frost date is Feb. 15.) Already it's been battered by hail and tonight, temperatures are dipping into the high 30's. And I am fretting. It's a small garden: eight vegetable plants (seven of them tomatoes) and about the same number of herbs.

The tomato plants are so fragile, and yet so tenacious. Staked and tied against our spring winds. Every bit as miraculous, in their way, as the hummingbirds that my husband has coaxed to his feeder. (They are astonishing, nothing prepares me for their shocking smallness, the sheer absurdity of this thing, the length of my thumb, but muscular. Their feet are absurd semi-colons.)

Now I discover I have joined a movement. I have planted a Recession Garden. A Recession Garden is, among other things, an expression of anxiety about the current economic climate. The more I learn about the possible collapse of the banking system, the more anxious I become. And the more I learn about the economics of food production, the more difficult it becomes to know how to eat.

So I plant tomatoes. Me, and apparently 44 million households in the U.S., who are planting anywhere from a pot of basil on the windowsill to a full kitchen garden. I'm somewhere in the middle. Since I'm fretting about my garden (assuming we don't get a freeze tonight, the next big worry is opossums, which our local long term Texas gardener, my neighbor Bud, assures us will eat my tomatoes.) Seems an odd response to anxiety to do something that induces anxiety. It's not as if these seven tomato plants and lone chili plant are going to sustain us. Or even, frankly, save us much money. Still, being outside with my indomitable little plants is soothing. It's that nature thing. I always run my fingers through the thyme, maybe pinch the flowers off of the basil, and my fingers smell of herbs.

Those of you who have much later average last frost dates (in Cleveland, it was May 15, which meant that it wasn't really safe to put plants out until Memorial Day weekend) all I can say is, it's better than you remember.

Hail

2009-03-25T21:43:00.003-04:00

When we moved to Austin, Bob and I were warned about the hail. We saw cars with their tops dimpled like golf balls. Hail, we were told.

Hail is apparently mostly very local, and today it was local to us. It cracked the outer pane of the skylight in our kitchen and took out all but two of my fledgling tomato plants. I have been running out every day to gaze at my tomato plants, growing well with their neat row of stakes and I am more saddened by the lose of them than I am by the damage to the skylight. Although I am sure that repairing the skylight will be much more problematic than replanting tomato plants.

Our neighbors on the corner lost the back window of one of their cars. A car full of water and hailstones sounds more disheartening then my tomato plants.

Vegetable Karma

2009-02-02T17:11:00.006-05:00

I have found myself having conversations I recognize. I have bored my vegetarian friends with these same conversations for years. Only now I'm on the receiving end. I'm not even vegetarian.

A few weeks ago, I started changing my eating. Changing my eating habits, as they say in the diet and nutrition industry. I read an article about Mark Bittman's book Food Matters, where he talks about his own decision to be 'vegan until six.' He lists a number of reasons; his own health, the cruelty that industrialized livestock raising perpetrates on animals, the fact that we eat so much meat that to not factory raise animals is impossible. (He does the math and it turns out there isn't enough land in the world to pasture feed the beef and chicken that we eat or get eggs, milk, and butter from.) I worry about cruelty, but what really attracted me was his claim (which I have no reason to doubt) that he lost 35 pounds this way. Whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruits, try to avoid refined flour and sugar, and then in the evening, eat the way you're used to eating.

This had a lot of possible advantages for me. For one thing, it wouldn't much inflict my latest food weirdness on Bob. He would go to the office, design marvelous mechanisms all day, and come home to the kind of thing we usually eat for dinner, like Thai style chicken stir fry with noodles. And for me, I thought, no big deal. I tend to make a big pot of something at the beginning of the week and eat it for lunch, now that big pot would involve whole grains and beans.

Mark Bittman makes it clear that he is not vegan. This is a guide. He says if the cucumber in creamy dressing look good at the salad bar, he doesn't hesitate to pick them. I'm not vegan either. I still use Worcester sauce, oyster sauce and honey, and I don't know if my high fiber bread is vegan. I doubt it is. On Saturdays, when we meet friends for breakfast, there are no vegan options on the menu and that's fine with me. I have eggs and a short stack. With butter. But during the day I don't use butter, milk, cheese, or meat. I do use olive oil and canola oil. Peanut butter. It's not about calories. Although it turns out that if you go mostly vegan and avoid white flour and refined sugar, the calories tend to fall all by themselves.

I feel quite smug at the grocery store, loading up my cart with vegetables and fancy beans and quinoa and wheatberries. (Quinoa and wheatberries are just grains, like rice. Using them is a lot like using rice. They're fun to experiment with, and they're that thing that nutritionists and diet people are always going on about, 'whole grains.') But the cooking is different and it's a stretch. It also means that going out to lunch has become a little complicated, at least for the nonce. Because for now I'm trying to be fairly strict.

The biggest difference is in the way I look at food. The way I think about food prep. The way I think about eating. I'd like this experiment to have some lasting changes. I'd like it to make me eat healthier. I worry about the possibility of diabetes's. My dad died of heart disease. You know, all the usual things. Being fairly strict (although, as I said, not completely rulebound) forces me to find other ways of doing.

What I didn't expect was the way people would suddenly talk to me about food. People have explained to me that veganism is unhealthy (the actual truth; sometimes yes, mostly, no.) People have defensively explained their own relationship with meat. (I want to say, 'I may be having tofu and swiss chard for lunch but I'm making beef short ribs for dinner with company--I eat meat, too. Just about 1/3rd of what I used to eat.) I hear coming out of my mouth the same things vegetarians have been saying to me for years. "Everyone has to come to their own accommodation about eating." And, "Yes, a diet that's inflexible is probably a bad thing."

I know part of the problem, because it's always been my problem. When someone mentions that they are vegetarian, I am forced, again, to confront my own relationship with food and killing. I am uncomfortable with that relationship, so I project that onto the poor vegetarian. And while I am certain there are sanctimonious and judgmental vegetarians out there, everyone I know really doesn't seem to think less of me because I eat meat. I don't think less of people who eat more meat than me. Au contraire, I am more than a little defensive about standing in front of my fridge at noon thinking that the butter is off limits until 6:00 pm. I don't like the fact that my lunches are looking more and more like that stuff they serve at the co-op, even though, in fact, a lot of it tastes pretty good. (And the stuff that doesn't I don't make twice.) I am sensitive to the whole homeopathic, hemp-sandal, crystal gazing possibilities of 'alternative lifestyles.' And vegan is alternative.

I did find some places of true vegetarian intolerance. It turns out that what a certain kind of vegetarian really saves their judgment for is...other vegetarians. I went on a vegan bulletin board looking for recipes. The flame wars that start when someone says something like, 'I'm mostly vegan.' Half of the board erupts in an 'you're either against the exploitation of animals or you're not and if you drank milk, you're not!' while the other half launches into 'it's stupid that one bite of animal products means you're not a vegetarian, would anyone say that a non-vegetarian is now a vegetarian if they ate a vegetarian meal?' (Which would make eating your Raisin Bran at breakfast a radical act.)

The other weird thing about vegan is that many vegans are protesting what they see as the over-commodification of the world, the fast food, frozen dinner, junk food excesses of the American diet. They're not alone. Michael Pollan has written some really interesting books about the way agribusiness has altered our eating, to our detriment. (A hundred years ago, there were still many Americans who worried about getting enough food--now we are most likely to die of the effects of our excesses--heart attack, stroke, diabetes.) Corporations are in the business of finding our sweet spot--the places where we can be tricked into feeling that we need/want/have to have more. That sweet spot is, in humans, actually sweet. And fat-laden. Pollan suggests shopping the periphery of the store--the fruits, vegetables, fish, meat and dairy that line the outside ring of grocery--and skipping as much as possible, the central aisles, where food is usually processed. But, as he points out, there is still a lot of stuff that is processed and unhealthy even at the edge of the grocery--most of what passes for yogurt, which is coming more and more to resemble ice cream. So he also proposes that you try to buy only things your grandmother would recognize. And only things that have five or fewer ingredients--and you should know what those ingredients are, no calcium propionate, sodium nitrate, sodium nitrite, sulfites (sulfur dioxide, sodium bisulfite, potassium hydrogen sulfite etc.

First of all, neither of my grandmothers would have recognized tofu, but that reflects their ethnically European origins. Second of all, vegan recipes often seem full of animal product analogues--soy cheeses, soy milks, cashew cheese, Boca burgers, and wheat gluten 'chicken'. Here's the list of ingredients for Tofutti Mozzarella Soy-Cheese Slices (TM) Water, Partially Hydrognated Soy Bean Oil, Tofu, Soy Protein, Carrageenan, Maltodextrin, Vinegar, Calcium Phosphate, Potato Flakes, Salt, Guar and Carob Bean Gums, Nondairy Lactic Acid, Adipic Acid, Dairy Free Mozzarella Cheese Flavor (derived from vegetable source) Natural Color and Potassium Sorbate. It is, I would say, as processed and commercial a product as KFC. With the important distinction that no animal products were killed in the making. And this is an important distinction. But it's a scary list.

We all have rules about what we eat, about what is strange and what is not. Those rules are deeply embedded in our sense of who we are. When I lived in China, the thinks that were most fundamentally disorienting were language, of course, food, and manners. (We think our manners make sense, but honestly, they don't--but that's another post.) We are most comfortable when our food choices are reinforced by the people around us. Food choice is often a source of rebellion.

I'm going to keep doing this, at least for awhile. I've lost two pounds, which is part of it. I feel better--simple carbs make me sleepy and a little dull. And I feel better about my carbon footprint, and all that. I reserve the right to go out and get a hamburger for lunch if I want to. And to eat vegan for dinner if I want to. And frankly, I don't mind if you eat meat. Even for breakfast.

Dreamlike, Lovely

2009-02-01T14:31:00.001-05:00

From Blin at Juice the Blog.

Greenstone

2009-01-23T16:21:00.007-05:00

A few weeks ago I started thinking about a book I read when I was a teenager (barely) and had been first let lose in the adult stacks in the public library. I can remember best the feeling the book left me with--I checked it out several times. It was by a New Zealand writer named Sylvia Ashton-Warner. (Someone asked me if I meant Sylvia Townsend Warner, but the book I am thinking of was Greenstone, by Ashton Warner.) I can't describe the plot of the book, which is based on Ashton-Warner's own childhood, romanticized. But I remember specifics from it quite well, including it's use of a nursery rhyme:

By the side of a murmuring stream
An elegant gentleman sat.
On top of his head was his wig.
On top of his wig was his hat.
On top of his wig was his hat hat hat.
On top of his wig was his hat.

The father was an Englishman who had married badly for love, and was now crippled by arthritis. The mother was a teacher. The family was poor and huge.

The book was not very long. I remember it as evocative and exotic, but full of domesticity and troubled marriage happening just slightly off the page. I remember feeling it offered a glimpse into something adult that I might not quite be getting.

So I ordered a copy, used. Now it has come and I wonder how it will compare to my memories. If it will, in fact, be any good at all.

Wanna See a Picture of My Kid?

2009-01-22T10:34:00.002-05:00

One of Adam's friends, Phil Sierzega, does photo retouching as a hobby. This is a photo he took and retouched of Adam. I don't know what's retouched, 'cause it looks like Adam, but not only is it a good likeness, but the color is just gorgeous. I asked him if I could have a copy.

So just pretend I have whipped out my wallet and am thrusting a picture of my kid on you. Isn't he handsome? And he's smart, too.

When the World is Absurd

2009-01-18T13:54:00.004-05:00

When the world is absurd, be absurd back. This from Christopher Barzak's Meditations in an Emergency. This is the Playmobile Security Checkpoint Set. The product description from the manufacturer: The woman traveler stops by the security checkpoint. After placing her luggage on the screening machine, the airport employee checks her baggage. The traveler hands her spare change and watch to the security guard and proceeds through the metal detector. With no time to spare, she picks up her luggage and hurries to board her flight!

Sounds like fun!

But what genuinely warms the heart is the comments on the Amazon Page.

"I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital."

That's not the best. Remarkably sane responses to an insane world, I think.

Young People Books

2009-01-13T15:31:00.003-05:00

I just finished reading Couch, by Benjamin Parzybok, which, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. For people who haven't read it, it's an epic journey across two continents, a quest, in fact, to get a big orange couch to an elder council who will know what to do with it. Although ironic and at times absurd, it is never silly. And it's also touching. Along the way, the three young men who are moving the couch come to grips, in one way or another, with who they are, and even if they haven't actually solved the problem of who they are going to be, one gets the sense they can see it from here.

It's a young person's book. A hip, witty, enjoyable young person's book. Not a young adult book, although I can see myself really liking it when I was a young adult. But a book who's themes revolve around figuring out what's ahead. A book where parents matter only in the most peripheral way, significant others are part of the future, and friends matter most of all.

I don't know why I felt that so strongly when I read this book. I didn't try to impose my concerns on it so much as feel how strongly I couldn't find myself in it. While it's not the kind of book that excludes women readers (just the opposite, it's thoughtful and self-aware in a way that invites both genders, I think) it was none the less a deeply guy book. It's about guys in the company of guys. There was a thing floating around for awhile about the difference between 'men' and 'guys'. John Wayne was a man. Tom Hanks is a guy. In that particular parsing, the three main characters in this novel are clearly 'guys.' Nice guys. Good guys (well Eric can be less than a good guy.)

I tried to think about novels that aren't Young Person novels. James Joyce wrote one of the definitive young person novels--Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, for the record, I hated. And also wrote one of the definitive novels that are about middle-aged angst, Ulysses (which I loved, but that may be partly because I knew I had to love it or I wasn't smart.) When I was in college, there was a kind of genre in the canon of books about men--Mickelson's Ghost, Henderson the Rain King, the Rabbit books. I felt myself at arm's length from these books (not surprising for a 20 year old white girl.)

There are, of course, lots of books that I read and don't feel so distanced from. Lots of those books have absolutely nothing to do with my sensibilities or age. One of the joys of Karen Joy Fowler's books for me has been that I often felt that they were aimed at me. Even if I wasn't really a Jane Austin lover. (I liked Jane Austin, but not the passionate way so many people do.) A lot of those books are written by women, but a lot of them, The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy, or Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem, are, like Couch, books about guys, young guys, finding a way.

It's a funny reaction to a good book. If I have anything to really say about it, it's ignore my nattering. Good read.

Wanna Be in LA

2009-01-09T22:12:00.002-05:00

For much of my life, if I heard a weird but good song that wasn't in rotation on my radio station, I was pretty much screwed. We all were. Somebody would play a song at a party and that was it, I wouldn't hear it for another five years. But now, between shazam and google and Youtube, if I hear a song and miss the name of the band, hell, I can just plug the refrain in our even hold Bob's phone up to the speaker and there it is. The video is no great shakes but the song is fun.

Kids these days, they don't know how easy they've got it.

Anyway, this song had me cruisin' at 75 miles an hour tonight, gliding around traffic and basically driving like someone who was begging for ticket.

I do not, however, have any desire to be in LA.

Urban Gardening

2008-12-31T17:01:00.002-05:00

My Farm in San Francisco will come to your house and install a vegetable garden in one day. They bring their own topsoil and compost, so even suboptimal soil in urban plots can still support vegetables. The cost: $500 to $1,800 for the installation, $50 to $250 per week for maintenance. The service includes a weekly visit for weeding, irrigation, and pest control. The people who live at the site of the garden can work on it themselves or can just let the farmer who comes once a week do all the work (and the farmer will leave a box of fresh vegetables on the porch.) Similar services are available in Portland and Seattle.

Right now, grass is the biggest single crop grown in the U.S., and there is something charming about turning some of that into crops we actually eat. The vegetables plunked in the box on your doorstep, by definition, are unprocessed. There was no packaging, no shipment, no gasoline for trucks, no illegal labor doing the picking, and since things grow year round in San Francisco, the vegetables come year round. Although I suspect that means that in winter you get things a lot of Americans don't eat, like parsnips and rutabagas and squash. The vegetables would be fresh. And as a person who once spent $40 for a tomato, I can admire the impulse to spend serious money on vegetables. (Although I had hoped to pay a lot less.)

I'm an indifferent gardener, gung ho in spring, bored by summer, overrun by weeds by mid-season. At the moment I plant things like rosemary and thyme which require no maintenance at all. I don't spend $50 to $250 a week on vegetables, so My Farm would be admirable but not budget concious for me. Still, I like it a lot better than hiring a gardener.

How Did I Miss This?

2008-12-29T10:31:00.004-05:00

Burger King recently launched a fragrance. Flame cost $3.99 a spray bottle and apparently smells of smoke and flame broiled meat. Alas, it sold out and is currently going for $100 in the Buy It Now category on Ebay.

The body spray was not available at Burger Kings. It was available at Flame Meets Desire, a website featuring romantic images--roses, candles, someone pouring a glass of Freixenet, a sparkling cava that I like but which is essentially cheap champagne, and most terrifying of all, the Burger King guy (weird fiberglass head on male model body) lying on a fur in front of the fire, a fur draped strategically across his pelvis, beckoning. It was also available in an exclusive deal at Ricky's, the New York City drugstore.

I am willing to be convinced that food could be a fragrance. My husband is drawn to the kitchen by the scent of onions and garlic sauteing. Walking through a store, I find the smell of birthday cake draws me to the bakery. Flame broiled meat does seem like a possible aphrodisiac, redolent (if you'll pardon the pun) with suggestiveness. But fast food? It's a terrifying world.

10,000 Hours

2008-12-28T18:16:00.003-05:00

I was reading some chapters from Malcom Gladwell’s Outlier. Gladwell cites research that indicates that more than talent, what it takes to become truly competent at a complex skill like, say, concert violin, is practice. Researchers couldn’t find evidence of people who became symphony orchestra level competent who hadn’t put in horrendous amounts of practice, no matter how talented. In fact, the magic number seems to be about 10,000 hours of practice.

This is, apparently, a necessary but not sufficient thing. That is, you won’t attain true competency without the 10,000 hours of practice, but you can put in the ten thousand and not attain competency. Although apparently, that’s pretty rare. He has a lot of complex and interesting things to say about this phenomena and the book is a really fun read. What it got me thinking about, of course, is my area of interest, fiction writing.

In fiction writing, there seems to be a sense that on average it takes about ten years to get published. This turns out to be pretty accurate in my case. I got really serious about writing when I was nineteen. I published my first story when I was 29. Last night I was lying in bed thinking about my writing habits and I figure I wrote about twenty hours a week, much of that time. Most of it on weekends. I didn’t have a real job. I didn’t have a serious relationship. I didn’t even have a couch. I had a series of temp jobs and a typewriter. Eventually, a computer. When I crunch the numbers, it comes out somewhere around 10,000 hours. That, for me, was just to get competent.

There are other ways that writing people say this. I was told that everyone has 100,000 words of crap in them that they have to write first. I explain to my students that in my case this was not true. I had about a million words of crap. But probably, what I had was 10,000 hours.

There are lots of exceptions to this, people who publish at seventeen. But my sense is that publishing too early is not actually a good thing. I’ve had people at Clarion who published fairly early in their practice of writing (which is different than their age) and it often seems to me that they wrote a story that was something of a fluke. They have the sense, rightly, that there was something about the story, a kind of gimmick, that got it published. They are often looking for more of the same, trying to find the twist, the idea, the ‘thing’ that makes the story publishable. Flukes are a hard way to sustain a career. I think that an early publication and years of failing to follow up can actually be soul destroying.

This also explains to me why some of my older students, who have so many things I think are important to being a writer—something to say, a strong sense of story and a large depth of reading—still struggle. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. They also need 10,000 hours of practice to get to the point where they are competent to solve the hundred little problems a page that a piece of fiction demands of the writer. Things like, how much to explain, how much to explain in the narrative, how much from the character, how to get the character out of the kitchen and to the scene of the fire. For a competent writer, the way they do these things is intuitive. I don’t tend to think about how much of the narrative is from the narrator and how much from the character. I’m not even aware that I’m making those decisions. Neither is the unpracticed writer. The difference is that after years of practice, I have a set of unconscious skills that tell me what is more likely to be successful. I know when it ‘feels right.’ For me, only after 10,000 hours could I actually start to think about a lot of the decisions I made to solve those problems. Before that, like learning to ride a bicycle, if I thought too much, I fell off. The prose got stiff, overly self-conscious, mannered in a bad way.

I’m wondering now what a second 10,000 hours does. And a third. Does it make a difference that I started writing seriously at nineteen? Would I be able to start writing seriously now, at fifty, and at sixty produce something competent? I think so, although I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure it, and I, would be different than what I will produce at sixty now. The practice shapes me as much as I shape the practice.

What does it take to lose competency? At some point, most of us begin to decline. Can that 10,000 hours of practice be wasted, lost, misplaced? Certainly by things like a stroke. What does disuse do?

It is a strange life, the life of someone, a programmer, a physician, a pilot, whose job depends on just this kind of practice. A race between getting in the hours and the lose of capacity.

10,000 hours. Had I known what it would take, I don’t know that I’d have ever made it.

I'm Goo-ified

2008-12-26T20:28:00.004-05:00

Never the most prolific of bloggers, I am bound to become even worse now. For Christmas, Bob got me a video game called The World of Goo. If you are old enough to remember Lemmings, let me just say that World of Goo is funnier and quirkier and more charming. It's a puzzle game. It does not involve shooting zombies.

It's from a small independent gaming company, and it's winning tons of awards. It's addicting.

Bob and I Make Christmas Cookies

2008-12-21T18:36:00.007-05:00

First, I would like to say, we are still happily married. Second, the cookies are fabulous.

We made different styles of cookies, as befits our personalities. Bob saw a cookie press and got excited--when he was a kid, his mother would use a cookie press to make cookies that he and his brother would decorate. A cookie press, if you don't know what it is, is basically a caulking gun for cookie dough, with a circular cut out at the end, so the dough shapes stars or Christmas trees or hearts. The dough is a gorgeous sweet butter cookie dough. We bought sugar and sprinkles and icing and Bob extruded dozens of cookies.

I am making Christmas cookies for a cookie exchange. (I'm hoping at least one other exchanger will post photos, and if they do, I will add a link.) Several weeks ago I saw a recipe for peanut butter caramel cookies and wanted to try it, despite the intimidating 'making caramel from scratch' factor. So I did, and I think they came out well.

The engineer uses cool tools to perfectly recreate a memory (when he tasted the first one he stood with his head slightly back and his eyes closed going, "Ummm, ummmm, ummm!" so I think he succeeded.)

The writer/cook seeks to create something that I imagine, hoping it will taste unexpected and good. The peanut butter cookies are pretty good.

We're both pretty happy. And not hungry for dinner.

(More cookies that might possibly be in the cookie exchange.)

I Believe in Father Christmas

2008-12-16T16:31:00.002-05:00

I have a sad preference for melancholy Christmas songs. And I have always loved this song in that stupid way that happens when you hear a version of a song before you have any critical faculties at all. And although I am not a U2 fan, this is a lovely cover.

Lest We Forget

2008-12-12T18:56:00.002-05:00

"Of course, everything, in every novel, is artifice."

Quoted, pretty much out of context, from an interesting essay on James Wood. I have somehow managed to stay pretty clear of Wood, and had no idea he was the designated critique of this 'generation.'

Clarity

2008-12-11T16:18:00.004-05:00

I just got new glasses. Regular glasses and sunglasses. It has been awhile since I got glasses--I tend not to get them until I'm having trouble.

When I was a kid, I got very nearsighted before anybody figured out I needed glasses. (Not as nearsighted as my sister. When they finally hauled her to the optometrist, he said, 'Read the third line on the chart please?' and she said, 'What chart?') I remember walking out of the optometrist's office and suddenly, all the trees ended instead of fuzzing off into the sky like smoke.

After my exam, the women at the optometrist's office asked me what kind of glasses I wanted, and I said I'm turning fifty in February and I hate it. I want glasses that don't say '50.'

The trees are sharply defined again. I can read highway signs at night. My new glasses are very cool. Jen from my writer's group suggested that they would be cooler if they shot lasers and that is undeniably true. But apparently our insurance doesn't give us $50 off frames that shoot lasers. Probably just as well.

(Special thanks to Karen Shah who first told me about Bella Vision, the cool place where I got my glasses.)

Cooking Lesson

2008-12-05T15:13:00.005-05:00

I'm making Christmas cookies. (We're having people over for dinner tomorrow, and although I plan to have a dessert, I think that people who pass on dessert might not mind a little Christmas cookie or two with their coffee. And besides, it's Christmas! They're cookies!)

Tomorrow night's dinner is Italian. I started baking--Bob's favorite ginger snaps, which are an old German recipe that uses ginger, cinnamon and black pepper, little sparkling lemon cookies. I was still looking at cookie recipes and came across a recipe for amaretti, the crisp little almond cookies of Italy. Last night, I realized I had forgotten an ingredient for the lemon cookies I was making, so while i was at the store I figured I'd buy the almonds and the glaceed cherries for the amaretti. I found almonds of course. But I couldn't find the glaceed cherries. Glaceed cherries are those cherries that go in fruitcakes. They come in red and green and don't bear much resemblance to anything natural, like, you know, a cherry. I don't much like them, but on top of a little almond cookie, they're probably pretty good. It's December. It's fruitcake season.

I can't find the fruitcake stuff. My first thought is that maybe people in Texas don't make fruitcakes. I don't think fruitcakes are very Latin American, and a lot of our sweets tend in that direction. But seriously, Texas is really kind of part of the south, and the south is really serious about it's fruitcake. Usually soaked in bourbon for six weeks. (I figure this is because a lot of people, me included, don't like fruitcake.) I ask in the bakery and the girl says she's sure they have them and sets off with me in tow to find them. I protest I can look but she says she works in the bakery section and people will ask her to it's good to know. It takes us three store employees to finally find the fruitcake section, but we finally do and there we find the red cherries, the green cherries, the candied pineapple. The employee who knows where to look casually mentions that it used to be a lot bigger.

I keep assuring people that I am not making fruitcake. 'Cookies' I say. 'I making cookies. Not fruitcake.' I don't know why I am worried that someone will think I am making fruitcake. It's not like fruitcake is only made by deviants. Even in Texas. But there are all those fruitcake jokes, about the fruitcake that circulates endlessly, re-gifted over and over.

This morning I get up and look at the recipe and it calls for blanched whole almonds. The store had whole almonds and blanched slivered almonds and I got whole almonds. Which are not blanched. I can tell because the almonds in the picture are almost white, and mine are brown because they still have the skin on them. I think about going back to the store. I am still wearing my pajamas and I don't really want to go to the store.

I am intrepid in the kitchen. I make weird stuff all the time. From scratch. Maybe I can blanch almonds. I check the internet and it says that if I soak my almonds in boiling water for one minute, 'the skins will slip right off.' But don't soak them for more than a minute because then they won't be crisp.

Yeah. Boiling water. I can boil water. I boil water. I soak my almonds for exactly one minute. I need two and a quarter cups of almonds. Skinned. It turns out that's a lot of almonds. It takes me an hour to skin two and quarter cups of almonds. For one thing, the skins don't 'slip right off.' They resist. I think a lot about when I was growing up and my mother got the idea that we should harvest the walnuts from our walnut tree. (We usually left them to the squirrels.) That was the year I found out that walnut husks were used by the pioneers as a dye. And that it also dyes the skin of your hands. At least almond skins don't make my hands turn brown.

The dead almond skins collect in my sink.

The cookies are really crunchy and good. They really taste of almond. I'm pretty sure they would taste just as almondy if I had bought blanched almonds. There are things that you can do, but don't really need to. Blanching almonds is one of those things. If you find yourself with two cups of whole almonds when you need blanched, go to the store. Buy the blanched.

wtf?

2008-12-03T21:15:00.002-05:00

This is really scary. Or really funny. Depending on how much irony is involved.

http://tinyurl.com/6xvcpt

Survey Says...

2008-11-25T20:08:00.001-05:00

Some time ago--a year? Longer?--I took some online questionnaire that was supposed to tell me something about myself. I don't remember what. I don't remember anything except one question.

If you had to be one, would you prefer to be cold or hungry?

I can't answer it. I don't know.

Okay, It IS a Nice Monitor

2008-11-20T13:16:00.002-05:00

Bob didn't actually get the hint that he ought to do something really nice, you know, surprise me or something, to avoid much snarkiness about monitors. (Although if he wants to make that up to me, he could start thinking now.) Unless you include taking me to Fry's to get computer speakers.

I feel the same way about computer equipment that I do about mops and vacuum cleaners. I need the stuff, but unless there is something spectacular about it, it isn't very exciting. There isn't much spectacular about computer speakers, but like a mop, now I have them.

(snark snark snark)

The Internet as Passive Aggressive Tool

2008-11-19T11:21:00.004-05:00

This is my new computer. It is sitting next to my desk where I am typing this on my laptop, which is old, much abused, beginning to cook (the fan works, the sucker is just old) and has always had a screen so dark that people commented on it. The new computer is a scratch and dent but according to the specs, it should do everything but toast my English muffin in the morning.

At the moment, it is doing nothing. Because I ordered the computer one day. But I ordered the monitor the NEXT day.

Did I foresee this, this sitting around waiting forlornly for the new monitor? Yes, I did. So why didn't I order the monitor at the same time? It's Bob's fault.

Really.

Years ago I told Bob that if he ever got a bigger, better monitor than me, it would jeopardize our marriage. And for a year or two, all was fine. But then he upgraded his system and got a flat screen monitor while I continued with my old CRT. Those were rocky times in the household. We weathered the storm and our marriage survived, if not stronger, well, pretty much adequate to the daily tasks of sitting in separate offices IMing each other because we couldn't be bothered to actually get up and walk next door.

He has had a couple of flat screens since then. I used laptops. A laptop is easier to take to a coffee shop than a desktop, and much easier to cart through airports. On the other hand, my job often required me to have multiple documents open at the same time--spreadsheets, design docs, text docs, all integrated. On a little laptop screen, they are really never all open at the same time. I thought covetously of having TWO monitors. And hauled the damn laptop through airport security. (It got to the point where the TSA guy checking my ticket and ID on Monday morning recognized me.)

When it came time to buy this computer, I decided I was traveling less. I could keep the laptop in reserve for travel. And I would buy a better monitor than Bob.

Bob has a 22 inch monitor. And being an engineer, he thoroughly researched and it's the best damn moderately priced 22 inch available. I have a small desk. A 24 inch is just going to be too big. And I can't really justify buying a $1000 monitor. I look at graphics a lot, but I don't create them. Still I resisted for a full twenty four hours, hoping against hope that I would figure out a way to get a BETTER monitor than Bob.

I didn't. I bought the exact same monitor Bob has. And I admit, I am secretly seething. (At least for some definition of 'secret' that involves posting on the internet. Let's say perhaps I am passive-aggressively 'secretly seething'.) More importantly, I am sitting here while my awesome new computer remains inaccessible, quietly sitting next to my desk, exuding newness, speed, computing power and a moderately impressive video card.

I'm not really blaming Bob. I know it is my own folly in trying to one-up an engineer in matters of geekitude. It's my own fault.

Not Bob's.

Not at all.

You hear that Bob?

nov16twothousandeight

2008-11-18T10:35:00.003-05:00

nov16twothousandeight from Stewardess Lollipop on Vimeo.

My kid is the hipster looking dude with the neat coat and the (ick) cigarette in this extraordinarily cool video shot by friends of his. And him.

From Juice the Blog

Liquid Gold

2008-11-17T19:37:00.002-05:00

Skimmed, strained, poured into containers, stacked in the freezer.

Taking Stock

2008-11-17T14:41:00.002-05:00

I figure two gallons and a half of stock costs me about $15 and about six hours of time. Not all of that time is spent messing with the stock--it simmers for four hours or more. But I'm telling you it's hard to get much done the way the house smells while it's cooking.

Is it good stock? Of course. I make it with chicken wings and thighs (and backs if I've saved some from cooking chicken myself) a couple of beef shanks (the marrow from the bones gives it additional body) carrots, onions and celery, black peppercorns, and tomato paste. It is to the box 'o stock as a really good hamburger is to McDonald's. I make it nearly salt free so I can control the amount of salt in whatever I use it in.

And yet, most of the time, I don't know that it makes enough difference to a dish to justify all the fussing, the straining, the pouring, the cleaning of the stock pot. I don't make my own tomato sauce for spaghetti. I can, but frankly, most of the time, my pasta sauce comes out of a jar. I don't make my own pasta most of the time. Again, I can, but it's just Bob and me. Granted, I will have this stock through the holidays. It will moisten my Thanksgiving stuffing, flavor may ox tail ragu for a Christmas party, make my weekly soup richer and better. But I could make a freeze tomato sauce, too.

I just like to make this stuff. I like the way it smells. I like the way I feel when I use my stock in something. I like the way the poor dogs mope around the house, driven to distraction my the scent. I like the way the house will smell when Bob comes home tonight. I just like it.

Cooking as Solace

2008-11-12T10:51:00.004-05:00

Roast Chicken and Winter Vegetables

2 whole chicken legs (legs and thighs)
2 whole chicken breasts with skin and bone, split
1 cup Extra Virgin olive oil
salt
pepper
four sprigs of rosemary (more if you like rosemary) chopped
2 cups of parsnips, cut in large batonnet (2” by ¾” by ½” roughly)
2 cups butternut squash, peeled and chopped.
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cups crimini or shitake onions

Cooking a meal for company starts early, often the day before. For this dish, which serves four, I marinate my chicken in ½ cup of olive oil, kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, and half the chopped rosemary. I can be pretty profligate with the chopped rosemary. In Austin, where I live, rosemary is not some dainty herb, it’s a bush by my side gate that I brush when I open the gate, releasing that piney scent.

I have checked on the internet this morning, blogs of my friends, not even email yet, when I read that a friend has died, just the day before. She is a writer and a mother and a teacher. She has had a chronic form of cancer for years. She has a novel coming out. I like her a great deal, although I did not get to spend very much time with her. We were busy people, living on the opposite side of town. Rosemary is for remembrance. Is it better that she had the novel coming out, that she had finished it? It has to be, doesn’t it? As I get older I am less and less convinced of the sacredness of art. It seems small consolation to me. Better than nothing, I suppose. Because of course, part of what I grieve for is the writing I won’t read. The writing already lost to chemo treatments. And now the writing just lost to death.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

I throw the parsnips and the squash in cold water and bring it to a boil, boiling just four minutes and draining. They aren’t done, but they’re started enough that they’ll finish in the oven. I am making up this recipe. I don’t know when I learned enough to know I should parboil the vegetables but it is a comfort to fall into the rhythm of this dish. To think of the tasks along a line that project manager call ‘critical path.’ The critical path is the event or chain of events that take the longest. The length of prep and cooking time for this dish is a minimum of seven hours. I don’t do anything most of that time, but I want the chicken to marinate in the olive oil for at least six hours. Over night would be good, then the salt would be drawing the moisture out of the chicken parts and the oil would be sealing that process like a second skin and eventually the moisture would reabsorb carrying the essential oils of the rosemary and the pepper.

Things take time. Novels take time. Raising children takes time. I don’t know what a life is supposed to be shaped like. When I was young, I was tough and actually worried that there was something wrong with me that I didn’t really grieve. Of course, the people in my life who died were grandparents. I didn’t dislike my grandparents, but they were ancient (my grandfather married late and I was a late child so my grandparents were in their seventies when I was born.) I wasn’t tough so much as self-absorbed. People who died didn’t have a whole lot of space in my interior life, the interior life that eventually drove me, terrified, to New York City. I had an interior narrative and frankly, people like grandparents were spear carriers, their drama already done. I assumed that old people didn’t care about stuff anymore. That being old meant that they knew they were finished. I assumed that when someone who was old died, it was different. They were old. That people were sad, but it was expected and therefore, nobody missed them that much. I couldn’t articulate this, but frankly, everyone knew my grandparents were going to die. They were in their 80’s for god’s sake. I didn’t miss them. They weren’t that kind of grandparents.

I have a beautiful La Crueset roaster, but for this dish, I just use a big ugly metal roaster that my sister gave to me. It’s no longer flat on the bottom (it’s been plunked across two burners at too many Christmas’s to make gravy, the metal warping in the uneven heat.)

I arrange my marinated chicken in the middle of the roaster, leaving a couple of inches around the edge. Put the parboiled squash and parsnips, mushrooms, and chopped onions in a bowl and put in the other ½ cup olive oil, salt, pepper, and the remaining chopped rosemary.

Then I call someone to make sure that she’s heard about the death. When I don’t get her I send an email. I find a message from the deceased’s husband thanking me for the brief note I sent him and asking me to make sure a couple of people have heard. I am touched and astounded. I cannot imagine writing notes to people the day after my husband dies. I imagine feeding the dogs in a haze of disbelief and fury and terror. I call another friend and not only has she heard but she sent me an email, which I missed.

It’s what people do after death. We call each other, like touching someone briefly on the back of the hand. ‘I heard,’ we say. ‘I don’t have many details.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘How are the kids?’ ‘I have company coming,’ I tell Sarah. ‘I’m throwing a dinner party.’ ‘Oh good,’ she says, ‘you’ll make people happy.’

No one who is coming for dinner tonight knew the woman who died. They are in Austin for a conference and things are going extraordinarily well. I have plates with goat cheese and a French double cream, and a plate with tiny curls of prosciutto. I have a bottle of sparkling wine, because I think sparkling wine is fun. I pile the vegetables around the chicken and put it in the oven along with the potatoes. I finish the salad of tart greens with prosciutto, parmesan cheese, and toasted pine nuts tossed with a warm balsamic vinaigrette.

My house fills with excited, tired, hungry people. It is dark outside, the windows reflect the lamps back in. The table is set. I cook the chicken half an hour, don’t feel it is done, cook for fifteen minutes more and then run it under the broiler to crisp the skin.

I imagine the family of my friend. Her husband, also a friend. The two boys. This strange day where they eat in a strange way. The aftermath of the tsunami. Dinner in the gutted out ruins. Grief is so self-absorbing. So selfish. So lonely. So unavoidable.

The house smells of comfort. Of solace. I pile the chicken in the middle of a platter and pile the vegetables around it. I start to take it to the dining table and Mike, one of my guests, reaches across the breakfast bar. ‘Let me take that,’ he says. ‘It smells wonderful.’

(This chicken is good just the way it is, but if I wasn’t serving a salad dressed with balsamic vinegar, I would have taken store bought balsamic vinegar, reduced two cups to one, added a tablespoon of brown sugar to the syrup, and dribbled it across the whole dish to just raise it to something a little more.)

Company & Sunday Dinner

2008-11-11T19:19:00.003-05:00

This Sunday, I had company over from out of town. Although it is still in the 70's in the day in Austin, the temperature drops at night. It gets dark by six.

So I made comfort food--roast chicken with winter vegetables (parsnips, butternut squash, pumpkin, mushrooms and onions with rosemary.) Roasted potatoes, and a salad of tart greens with prosciutto and parmesan and warm balsamic vinaigrette. Okay, it was comfort food ala Northern Italy (the chicken was marinated in olive oil and with chopped rosemary from my own plants.)

The company was wonderful. The group from the ELI Foundation was smart, interesting and lively. There is something glittering about a dinner party in winter, when the world outside is dark and the light focuses everybody on the table and the company.

The leftover chicken and winter vegetables went in a pot with chicken stock and some good tomato paste the next morning and I'll be eating ice box chicken soup for the rest of the week, which is a nice way to remember a wonderful evening.

Who Doesn't Love...

2008-11-07T10:41:00.001-05:00

...puppy cam?

(From A Million Words)

Pigeons on the grass, alas

2008-11-03T13:00:00.008-05:00

Last week I was down in Zilker Park at the Barton Springs Pool. It was 72 degrees. The area has wireless, believe it or not. All afternoon I sat with the sound of the steady splash of people swimming laps in the spring.

They sell pigeon and duck food. The pigeons are fat and tame, and crowded fearlessly closer and closer until finally they ate out of my hand. They pressed their smooth breasts against the curves of my fingers and only pinched a bit.

I make a Pretentious Pumpkin Pie

2008-10-25T22:48:00.005-04:00

I’ve been watching my little bit of retirement fund as it is affected by the economic winds shaking the stock market and thinking dark thoughts about economic apocalypse. Or at least about a depression. I’ve been thinking a lot about rain barrels and gardens and having two bedrooms and how I could take in a couple of boarders. Not really seriously (although I do plan to garden next spring since I’m not going to be traveling as much as I have been.) This is the only explanation I have for why, when I was at the grocery and saw Sugar Pie pumpkins I bought one with plans to make a pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin is a pretty weird thing to put in a dessert. Not that pumpkin isn’t, botanically speaking, a fruit. But so are tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumbers and we don’t make dessert pies out of cucumbers. Pumpkin pie is a triumph of sugar over vegetableness. (There are tomato desserts—tomato sorbets, tomato pies. They are also, obviously, a triumph of sugar, this time over acid.) Pumpkin is a squash, like Acorn or Hubbard. It’s pretty good as a vegetable, and it makes a killer soup. In fact the stuff in the can, labeled pumpkin, is actually not pumpkin but a different squash, one that is actually more pumpkin colored than actual cooked pumpkin. But it tastes just like pumpkin and also makes great soup.

The pumpkin sat, picturesquely, in my kitchen for a couple of days, while I contemplated the folly of what I had done. Maybe it really wasn’t my depression fantasies/anxieties. Maybe it was instead a snobbish obsession with preparing foods ‘from scratch.’ A disdain for ‘processed’ foods. ‘From scratch’ is always better, right? ‘Processed’ is bad. Unless the process is making cheese, or wine. Or even sugar. Give me sugar beets and tell me to make sugar and I’m pretty much up a creek. Well, here I was, about to process a pumpkin. It certainly looked cool, there on the counter, in its unmistakable pumpkiness.

Eventually the pumpkin shamed me and I roasted it. The options were pretty much roasted or steamed or boiled, and one of the many advantages of canned pumpkin is that it has a lot less water in it than fresh pumpkin. Roasting, I thought, would deepen and caramelize the flavor a little and would reduce liquid rather than add it. I wouldn’t be making pumpkin pie, I’d be making ‘roasted pumpkin pie.’ ‘Roasted pumpkin pie’ had to be better. On a menu in a restaurant, I might order pumpkin pie. But I would certainly be impressed by Roasted Pumpkin Pie.

Besides, I tried peeling a pumpkin once and it was very very hard.

I cut the pumpkin in half, cleaned out the seeds, and baked it in the oven on 350 degrees for about forty minutes (maybe longer) until it was soft and the edges had started to brown. Then I took it out of the oven and let it cool, glaring at the Golden Retriever who is currently on prednisone and has an appetite that drives him to counter surf. He wandered around the kitchen, lifting his nose to counter level when he thought I wasn’t looking.

I scooped out the pumpkin flesh and plunked it in the food processor and pureed the stuff.It took a surprisingly long time.And there was quite a bit of it. Maybe two pumpkin pie’s worth? Hard to tell, because I don’t usually measure pumpkin. I open the can and plop the whole contents in a bowl with beaten eggs.

I made sure that it was out of reach of the dogs and wandered off to read about using fresh pumpkin.

There was a surprising amount of material on how to get the water out. You can kind of simmer the stuff for awhile. Or you could take the glob, wrap it in cheesecloth and let it drain, the way you make soft cheese. (Which, come to think of it, might be why it’s called ‘cheese cloth.’) Of course the stuff that drains out of it is pumpkin juice and you are draining away some flavor.

I did a little of both. I cooked the stuff for awhile, but I was eventually afraid of burning it and by this time I had sunk enough time and effort into this damn stuff that thought of ruining it was intolerable. I wrapped it in cheesecloth, squeezed liquid out of it (into a bowl) and then let it sit and drain awhile.

I took all the squeezed out pumpkin juice and stirred it into the dog’s food. I happen to know that dogs like pumpkin. One of the things you can do with an overweight dog is replace a third of his food measure for measure with canned pumpkin. Pumpkin is a vegetable, remember? Low in calories, high in fiber. And it’s got a ton of beta carotene, so it’s probably good for their night vision or something. They don’t care, they just really like it. The dog liked the pumpkin juice, too.

I finally stuck the pumpkin puree in the fridge and put off making pumpkin pie until the next day.

The next day I made the pumpkin pie. I have a kitchen scale so I pulled a can of pumpkin out of the pantry (I am not kidding, I bought a pumpkin when I already had canned pumpkin in the pantry) and found out that a can of pumpkin is 15 oz. So I measured out 15 oz of my pumpkin puree, which was quite pretty in a baby food sort of way. There was a lot more left. I replaced a third of the dog's food with homemade pumpkin puree. He liked it fine. Of course, he eats sticks in the back yard.

I made the pie pretty much according to the directions on the can except—having read a couple of articles on making a better pumpkin pie (all right, cheating, but I had invested a great deal of time in this thing and I thought I should pull out all the stops)—I replaced a fourth of a cup of the sugar with a fourth of a cup of real maple syrup.

It was a little paler than pumpkin pie usually is. It was a good pumpkin pie. It was a pretentious pumpkin pie. The maple syrup was a great tip. It came out light and custardy.

But it was hardly a great pumpkin pie. In fact, other than the maple syrup, it was probably like a lot of other perfectly good pumpkin pies I have made before.

But hey, it’s nice to know that if the economy goes to hell and we are forced to live off of a garden, I could make a scratch pumpkin pie.

Just as soon as I figure out how to make Crisco from scratch.

Uncle Sam & The Giant Pool of Money (A Mystery)

2008-10-21T12:07:00.005-04:00

I'm not stupid about money. Among other things, I did a lot a stints as a temp in banks. Which sounds superficial, except one of those stints included nine months as the residential mortgage customer service person. I was the person you called if you had a question about your mortgage. If you wanted to know if we had received your payment. If you wanted to know how to get your late spouse's name off your mortgage because they were dead and you wanted to remarry and it felt weird. If you were in foreclosure and you wanted to know what happens next. When I'm on the road, I read The Wall Street Journal. No cover to cover, but still.

But like most people I didn't understand what it was that Wall Street was doing that got us in such freakin' trouble. Venturesome pointed me to the This American Life broadcast The Giant Pool of Money.

It's fascinating. It brings a lot of clarity to a complex issue. You don't have to know anything about the stock market or really anything about mortgages.

It's nice to know. This American Life has always been one of the coolest things ever. And this is one of the coolest things they've ever done.

I am Moved

2008-07-29T20:26:00.003-04:00

Along with the rest of LA, San Diego and as far away as Las Vegas.

Earthquakes, when they are not life-threatening, are interesting. I lived in an earthquake area in China, in a four story concrete building of the kind that typically pancake during severe earthquakes, but luckily, never experienced so much as a shimmy.

So today was my first earthquake. It didn't actually fit any of the descriptions of earthquakes I've heard. It was rolling. Things just kind of shook, and there was a bang somewhere in the middle of it. More interesting was that about half of the audience went outside, and about half of the audience stayed at their desks. I would have thought that the office reaction would neatly divide along the lines of those who had earthquake experience and those who did not. (I went outside.) But it did not.

Immediately afterward, all the Californians were trying to guess what it was on the Richter scale. That is apparently typical. The news says it was between 5.4 and 5.8.

The lights in the office didn't even flicker.

We Are Part of a Trend

2008-07-10T10:57:00.000-04:00

Census data shows:

Texas cities showed rapid growth: Houston added the most people, with 38,932 new residents; San Antonio, Fort Worth and Austin were among the top 10 in numerical increases; and McKinney, Denton and Killeen were among the top 10 in percentage increases.
Cleveland had the largest numerical decline in population over the latest year, losing 5,067 residents, followed by Columbus, Ga.; Baton Rouge, La.; Philadelphia and Baltimore. Cleveland also had the second greatest rate of loss over seven years, losing 8.3 percent of its population to stand at 438,042.

Shelly Attempts Ferocious

2008-06-06T18:07:00.003-04:00

Since Hudson got some video time, it's only fair that I include Adam's video of Shelly. Shelly attempts ferocious.

She is not entirely successful. But hey, it's really Shelly's world and she just puts up with the rest of us.

Hudson Fetches

2008-06-05T13:28:00.003-04:00

Adam made this very short video of Hudson. Adam makes great short videos. Hudson really loves balls.

Busy

2008-06-02T20:48:00.002-04:00

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile. Wiscon was great! (Of course.) My health is great.

In the last three weeks of May I spent three nights in my own bed, and not one full day in Austin. So, I'm just behind.

It was great to see all of you (you know who you are) at Wiscon--even if I didn't get to spend enough time.

Pictures for Bob

2008-05-17T01:27:00.003-04:00

The weather has cleared and when Cat Valente and I went down to the actual town of Taos (we stay up in the mountains at a ski lodge in the empty off-season ski valley we stopped for a bit at the Rio Grande gorge. The mountains are about fifteen miles away, I'd guess. We are below the snow line.

Bob asked that I take lots of pictures. I don't take very good pictures. But with a digital camera I can take lots and maybe post a few of the better ones.

I wish he was here.

Taos Snow

2008-05-15T10:26:00.002-04:00

I know that the blog is beginning to be reminiscent of that Saturday Night Live skit, "Francisco Franco is still dead," but it's still snowing. I'm cooking dinner tomorrow so I'm a little miffed because I like watching the snow, but I'm not so pleased with driving to the grocery in it. Luckily, despite living in Austin, I still have a Cleveland car--an all wheel drive Subaru Outback.

On Sunday morning I will leave here, and drive west, dropping 10,000 feet into the desert and ending up at work on Monday in Pasadena, California. I have to think that we were not evolved to make these kind of major climate and pressure changes. But then, an airplane is even more abrupt.

Weird to have a life where locations are starting to feel like many rooms. Open this door and walk into snow. Open that one and sun and sea coast. Very science fictional.

2008-05-14T16:59:00.002-04:00

It's snowing again today in Taos.

It's awfully fun to be spending a week in a beautiful place have intense discussions about the presentation of social marginalization and the dangers of appropriation in stories and a host of other topics that seem about as exciting as the tax code to most friends and family. I wonder, do accountants go to conferences where they have intense discussions about what the ramifications are of the way things are reported on balance sheets (think Enron) and does it send them into such paroxysms of passion and delight?

And that's before the wine and dinner. Because frankly, a glass of wine at 10,000 feet pretty much smacks me in the back of the head and renders me unfit for much more than, 'so, how's the wife and kids?'

Tonight is Margarita night at the Rio Hondo Writer's Workshop. A yearly traditions. And a Margarita at sea level is a pleasant experience. A Margarita at 10,000 feet, possibly a transcendent one.

Snow In the Mountains

2008-05-13T23:09:00.004-04:00

We're staying in a lodge in the mountains. In May, at 10,000 feet, there is still snow on the mountains this year.

And in fact, it snowed today.

I don't see much snow these days, unless you count flying over the mountains into Los Angeles. I am delighted. For Cat Valente (residing in Cleveland) and Alan DeNiro and Kristin Livdahl (Minneapolis) it is probably not as delightful. But ski lodges are good at providing comfort in snow.

Muleshoe

2008-05-13T22:53:00.002-04:00

I drove to Taos, New Mexico from Austin, Texas using Bob's GPS Navigator. When digital watches got big, I found that unlike the hands on my Timex, a digital watch always told me precisely what time it was. But what it didn't show was what time it would be and what time it used to be. Time was a radius of a dial in my head. A GPS is like that. It showed me precisely where I was. But I had programmed it to give me directions to Taos. I knew I was going to stop for the night in Clovis because I made this drive last year. I drove up through the Texas Panhandle, around Lubbock. I got hungry. When I got to Muleshoe, I knew exactly where I was but I didn't know if Clovis was half and hour away or an hour and a half away.

So I decided to stop for dinner in Muleshoe.

I ended up at Pizza Hut. I don't particularly like Pizza Hut, but frankly, in Muleshoe, I wasn't sure if I wouldn't drive all the way through town and back into the empty panhandle. Muleshoe is not large. I had a really indifferent plate of pasta and then took this picture from the parking lot. As far as I can tell, Muleshoe is basically a cluster of buildings on the highway.

Clovis, while not a giant metropolis, is a decent sized town. It turned out to be 27 miles away. I'd have probably had a better dinner there, but I would never have gotten the great photo of a Muleshoe grain elevator.

Taos Bound

2008-05-10T20:59:00.002-04:00

I have a photo of Muleshoe, Texas, where I ate at the Pizza Hut, but I'm too lazy to wade through luggage to find the cord that lets me download it from my camera. So just let me say that to get to Taos, which I consider just this side of Paradise, I had to drive through the Texas Panhandle. Which does not look like the mountains in Taos (pictured above.)

Tonight I am in Clovis, NW. Tomorrow I will be in those mountains where I will hang with writers and have a wonderful week.

And I just found out that although Clarion and Clarion West have closed their application process for this year, Taos Toolbox has not. Walter Jon Williams and Kelly Link are teaching this year.

There's a Nebula in the House!

2008-04-27T12:13:00.003-04:00

Karen Fowler is staying at my house and last night she won the Nebula* for 'Best Short Story'. There was much rejoicing!

*Disclaimer: The Nebula is not actually at the house because if you take a Nebula on a plane in your luggage they sometimes come apart. So the Nebula is being mailed to Santa Cruz and did not leave with Karen last night.

And this Nebula pictured above is not actually Karen's Nebula. I found it on the Internet and do not know who received this one.

BoingBoing

2008-04-24T16:07:00.003-04:00

Small Beer Press is releasing Mothers & Other Monsters under a creative commons license, which is cool enough.

But Bob is really happy because I've been BoingBoing'd!

Dog Archeolgy

2008-04-11T12:39:00.003-04:00

When Hudson is bored, sometimes he goes under the deck and scoots around in the low space on his belly doing dog archeology. Bob sent me this photo of his latest find.

It Seems It Never Rains in Southern California

2008-04-10T11:10:00.003-04:00

I basically live in LA these days, toiling on the edges of the film and game industries. Actually I live in Pasadena. But it's real close to LA. I go home to husband and dogs on the weekend.

I live in a studio apartment only half a mile from work, and walk to work ever morning, which is exactly not the LA experience. But other than that, it feels like LA. And frankly, I am completely unable to wrap my head around the sprawling, sun-drenched anarchic thing that is greater LA. I lived in New York, one of the other defining metropoli of the U.S. when I was in my twenties and although it was not always easy, I felt I could 'get' New York City. Maybe it is age. Possibly it is that memory has glossed over the first year in New York when I was pretty miserable.

There is much to like about this place. The Asian food is extraordinary. The weather is a permanent vacation for a midwesterner.

Still I feel utterly out of step.

Stuff

2008-03-25T11:47:00.000-04:00

The LA Times on the new Batman movie promotion.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

2008-03-21T13:38:00.003-04:00

I know that over the last few years my hearing has decreased a bit. Either that or the entire planet is mumbling. But I'm married to a drummer, so I always felt as if my hearing was pretty good, comparatively speaking.

Then I found this website. It allows you to test and download ultrasonic ringtones. Adolescents and children hear a lot better than people over thirty, at least a lot of them do. That means they can hear sounds in higher frequencies. Some stores are using ultrasonic sounds to keep teenagers out. And apparently, some teenagers are using ultrasonic ringtones so that they can hear their phones ring but the adults in their lives--teachers, parents--can't.

The website has a series of tones you can test, starting at one that almost everybody can hear, and moving through tones that lots of people can hear, and then on up the scale to stuff the dog can hear.

I can hear 8, 10, and 12 kHz just fine thank you. But when I hit 14.4 kHz, for all I knew the file wasn't working. On repeated tries I've found that sometimes I might hear something, but it might just be that I know other people are hearing it. One of my office mates, Steve, had his teenaged daughter at the office. She could hear all the way up to 18.8 kHz or 19.9 kHz. I find it all very strange. I can't wait to try it on the dog.

Star-- er, I Mean, Food-Crosssed

2008-03-09T20:55:00.004-04:00

I work in LA, so Bob has never actually met any of the people I work with. I fly out to California every week now. There's not a lot of reason for people I work with to come to Austin. Except, maybe, the SXSW Interactive conference.

Steve Peters is coming for a panel tomorrow, flying in tonight. I'm leaving for LA tomorrow morning--leaving the house at 6:45 am. (My commute sucks.) But that means that we have a few hours overlap and Steve can come and meet Bob and Hudson. (Steve is a fellow fan of golden retrievers.)

So I had to cook. Pork tenderloin in a garlic honey glaze, potatoes roasted in duck fat, and roasted green beans. For desert, a Tres Leches cake, a Mexican cake that is soaked in condensed milk, evaporated milk, and whole milk or cream. It sounds like a soggy mess, but it's more like cake that comes pre-ice creamed.

But then I get an email from Steve. His plane is delayed. He's not getting in until too late to come see us.

I'm sorry Steve. So is Bob (although Bob is grateful because I don't cook nearly as much as I used to and he got a fairly good meal out of the deal.) Here's hoping you get here sometime. I hope to cook for you when you do.

The Doggy ER

2008-03-05T18:44:00.005-05:00

On Saturday, we were tossing the ball and Hudson managed to bite his tongue. We had a house full of guests. The band was jamming. A couple of us non-musicians were supposed to go get bbq. So we waited while Hudson wanted to continue to play.

After twenty minutes he was still bleeding. It wasn't excessive, and frankly, he really didn't care, but it was, you know, gross. Having Hudson is like having an adolescent jock around the house, ever so often you're going to have to make a trip to the ER. So I put an old sheet in the back of the Subaru and my friend Linda and I took off for the doggy ER.

Did you know that there's really not much point in suturing a tongue? It turns out that the sutures bleed. But tongues heal pretty quick, and while we were at the doggy ER, he stopped bleeding. He started up again, but then he stopped again. What they gave me was soft canned food, antibiotics, and doggy downers. They called them pain pills. But it was clear that Hudson was not particularly concerned about pain. The vet explained to me that if he got excited, his heart would pump more, and he could start bleeding again, which while not even remotely life threatening was, as I said before, gross. (The back of my car looked, at this point, a little like something out of an episode of CSI.)

Doggy downers did not actually have much visible effect on Hudson, but after everyone had left, I coaxed him up onto the ottoman and chair where I was sitting. He's a little worried that if he gets up there he'll get in trouble, but he is always willing to be convinced. Usually he plops down and then plays, 'I'm gonna bite your hand.' He's soft mouthed so 'I'm gonna bite your hand' is mostly a way to interact. But Saturday night he got on that comfy chair sprawled next to me and zonked.

It was charming. Someday he's going to be a big lap dog. But not for awhile. I suspect there might be a trip or two more to the doggy ER before we get to the stage where he can lie still and have his ears scratched. At least, not without doggy downers. I'm not in a hurry or anything. But it was sweet.

A Postmodern Comment on Daily Life

2008-03-01T14:33:00.002-05:00

It is amazing how a simple edit can take a banal comic like Garfield and make it something quite moving and fascinating.

(From Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks)

Gold Star

2008-02-21T22:34:00.004-05:00

Hudson went to Doggy Day Care today!

He's full of energy and, I think, a little bored. We have a doggy day care place near us. He went today and got a report card! And he got stickers on his report card! And a gold star!

We are, of course, enchanted. And we're hoping he sleeps well tonight.

Frozen in Grand Central

2008-02-03T23:11:00.001-05:00

This is all over the web but if you haven't seen it, it's wonderful. Improve Everywhere had over 200 people freeze in place on cue in Grand Central Station in New York.

This is one of over 70 different missions Improv Everywhere has executed over the past six years in New York City. Others include the No Pants Subway Ride, the Best Buy uniform prank, and the famous U2 Rooftop Hoax, to name a few. Visit the website to see tons of photos and video of all of our work, including behind the scenes information on how this video was made.

And the blog entry about it is also really fun.

I read it first, as I do so often, on Mysdirection.

Counter Surfing

2008-02-03T17:50:00.001-05:00

I'm making chocolate chip cookies for a Superbowl party at friend's tonight. I put two sticks of butter on the counter to come to room temperature, then Bob and I ran a couple of errands.

When we got back there was only one stick of butter on the counter. One, forlorn stick of butter. I walked all around the house, checked behind the couch, I can't even find the waxed paper wrapper. Shelly is eight inches tall. I realize I cannot say for certain what happened to that stick of butter, but I cannot but help but point the finger.

Shelly Stylin'

2008-01-30T15:26:00.001-05:00

Late last week, the world's most annoying dachshund attacked the new boy in the mistaken belief that he had a dog treat and she didn't. In fact, he did not have a dog treat, but he thought that finally she wanted to play. They tangled, him joyfully play bowing and wrestling with her, her showing her teeth and screaming like a banshee. I pulled them apart, saw no signs of actual harm and forgot about it.

Sunday Bob noticed that she had a golf ball sized lump on the side of her neck. He had scraped her (there was barely a nick) but it had gotten infected and abscessed. So they shaved the side of her neck, put her under, opened it up, cleaned it out, stuck a tube in it to drain (which i have taken great pains not to get in the photo above because she looks like FrankenDachshund on the other side.)

Problem, she couldn't wear an e collar (one of those cone thingies they put on dogs and cats) because the surgery was in her neck, where the collar would sit. But she couldn't be allowed to scratch the tube out, either. So they suggested we put socks on her. Bob wrapped her back feet in bandages and voila, Shelly Sox. Monday she was groggy from surgery, but Tuesday morning she was feisty and quite irritated. She would take a step and sit down aggrieved and irritated. But by today, although she bites at them now and then, she is actually quite comfortable in her new footwear. And the tube, which is scheduled to come out tomorrow, is still in place.

I think it might catch on.

The Jock

2008-01-27T12:32:00.001-05:00

We are a distinctly non-jock family. Irony of ironies, Hudson is a total jock. Well, maybe not so ironic. Not many dogs are into the Internet and cult science fiction films. He and I walked two miles on Friday and I went out in the back yard in threw the tennis ball for awhile three different times and on Saturday, my arm was sore and Hudson was full of energy.

By today, he is pretty much beside himself. I had forgotten how much energy young dogs have.

All the walking is going to be good for me. But today I plan to paint the back bedroom. Which means I'm not going to be all gung ho about long walks and tennis ball sessions. Enter Jigsaw. Lawrence Persons also has a rescued Golden Retriever. Lawrence is the one who told me about the rescue. Jigsaw is a young, red, high energy male. And he's coming over today at two for a play date with Hudson. I hope they hit it off.

I hope they wear each other out.

My Sister, Instigator (Another Dog Post)

2008-01-24T11:53:00.000-05:00

Years ago, when my nephew's boy (he starts college in the fall) was a toddler, my sister and I bought a Fisher Price lawn mower that made the horrendous popping noise. It was so annoying that his parent would let him play with it for awhile, and then would put it up because it was driving them crazy.

Yesterday UPS arrived with a package for Hudson Yeager. Inside were vitamins, Omega 3 oil for his coat, toys and A Ball. The Ball was an instant hit. It's softball-sized, too tough to chew through (he destroys tennis balls) and it's just too big and heavy for Shelly the World's Most Annoying Dachshund to want it.

Hudson loves his ball. Hudson tosses the ball to us. All the time. When Bob is on the computer. When we're watching TV. When I'm in the kitchen. I went to the bathroom and while I was there, the ball kept thumping against the door.

Auntie Pat has a lot to answer for.

Oh To Be White, Rich & Thin

2008-01-23T15:30:00.000-05:00

(My Wednesday post on Eat Our Brains)

Bob hates reality TV. What he really hates is the elimination at the end of so many reality shows, where someone is ritually exiled from the group, their torch is put out, the supermodel tells them they’re ‘out’, they are fired, or they are told to pack their knives and go. Which may explain part of the appeal of the show that has snagged Bob. Folding laundry one night, searching the TV for something to distract him, he came across The Real Housewives of Orange County. And now he’s a fan.

The Real Housewives follows six white, upper-class straight women who live in Orange County. They depict the Orange County lifestyle, which according to the show is gated communities of McMansions, Republicanism, rampant materialism and boob jobs. Cameras follow them around to catch them at their most entertaining worst. We are there when one of them goes to a consultation with a plastic surgeon to get her breast implants removed because her doctor says her DD’s are the cause of her back issues and her husband complains that he doesn’t want her to go too small.

Part of it is the unsparing but uninsightful eye of the camera. We see what the women do and what they say, but other than superficial commentary from the women themselves, we never get any real insight into why, for example, Vicki is so driven and controlling in her business and with her children, or why she drinks so hard at parties. (“They say I did a ‘woo-woo’ shot with the bartender,” she says, “but I don’t remember it.” A pause. “I don’t!” And then we see her on film, doing a shot with the bartender and shrieking ‘woo-woo!’ with him.) There is an old saying that people who marry for money earn every dime. The same might be said for these women, who may not have married for money, per se, but who certainly pay a price for their devotion to what they call ‘the OC lifestyle.’ Many have been married a couple of times, several have difficult issues with children, all of them have issues with their bodies.

Bob finds the show to be as compelling as a car wreck. He can’t stop being fascinated. At the same time he’s forever appalled by the fake hair, the botox, the excessive make-up, the clothes, the giant houses, the money, the waste of it all. Still, much as the camera works to catch them at their most stereotypical (Quinn, 52, dating a 26 year old or Tamra, who at 40 has just become a realtor, showing a house that comes with a Ferrari, Jeana, the ex Playmate, complaining that her husband only married her for her looks and the sex and when she gained weight, there was nothing holding their marriage together any more) and there are plenty of ‘do they realize what they look like’ moments, there are also moments when they become people it’s hard not to care about. Particularly in their dealings with their children, sometimes troubled, sometimes materialistic, sometimes touching, but usually as complex, flawed and human as any parent, anywhere.

There is a long strain in America of wanting to see evidence that the rich are not better, but that they are shallow, vain, materialistic and that we, the middle class, actually live more fulfilling lives. It’s a staple of movies and television. It’s part of our fixation with Brittany. We like to think that being rich means being out of balance. The Real Housewives of Orange County caters to that. It’s a cartoon of bleached hair and tans. It works to catch every shallow moment. There’s few moments of poignancy. It’s mostly fast food television, simplistic, superficial. It’s the opposite of The Sopranos, a fiction that dramatized the complexity of the emotional lives of people who could have been portrayed as just as tasteless and excessive. Of course, part of the problem is that The Real Housewives isn’t fiction. Heisenberg’s recognition that observation alters the object observed is really happening here. People are working for the camera and those moment of feeling probably happen off camera, in private, behind closed doors. Even if it sometimes seems as if these people have no shame, that they will say and do almost anything on TV, it’s true that their secret selves, mostly hidden even from them, are probably completely hidden from us.

The season ended last night. I suspect we’ll be there next season, watching to see if Vicki ends up at Hazelton.

Where Are You From, Hudson?

2008-01-22T16:55:00.000-05:00

Hudson is doing great. Settling in. He's an easy, well-mannered boy. He shows signs of some training--he knows sit and down, he retrieves and drops what he has retrieved. He's a two year old male Golden with some training who had not been neutered. Who was found wandering a highway, skinny, no collar. The woman who found him posted flyers and called vets offices, and looked for any sign someone was looking for him, but after two months had to concede that no one appeared to be.

Is someone missing him? Who would take the time to train him but not look for him? I look at what I know. Training, especially on retrieve and drop, but not neutered. Was someone training him for hunting? He doesn't mind when Bob plays the drums, until Bob hits the high hat, which he clearly dislikes. He scuttles then, paws flying, to come back to me. Was he gunshy? Even so, did he get loose? Did someone dump him?

He's worth some money, even as just a pet. Hard to believe that someone just dropped him off.

I only know that he's afraid of being left again. He loves to go out in the yard. He's deadly fascinated by squirrels. But he wants Bob or me to go out with him, and he keeps looking back. Don't leave me. When we walk, he's skittish. He wants very badly to go, but sounds make him start a little.

Hard to believe someone is not missing him. Mourning him.

Sweet goober. What's your story?

Where Do You Sleep?

2008-01-21T11:34:00.000-05:00

A post by Entelein on LiveJournal was so comfortable that it made me want to know where do you sleep?

Post a photo and put a link in the comments if you want. Except for Karen at Pen in Hand, who could, if she were so inclined, sketch where she sleeps.

The Goober

2008-01-20T13:21:00.002-05:00

When Tracey from rescue was first telling me about Hudson, she said, 'He's what we call a goober.' And, well, she was right. We went for a walk this morning--not far, the poor boy just had his balls lopped off on Friday. But this morning he was so full of energy, running around the house, skidding the rugs across the hardwood, that I figured if I didn't burn a little off, he'd drive everyone, including himself, crazy. So off we went.

Hudson is my first boy dog. So I am not yet accustomed to the need to pee on every tree, bush, sign post and upright unmoving object. He was dry long before he ran out of things to mark. He'd lunge ahead, coming up short on the leash, then halt and sniff, and sniff, and sniff. The neighborhood and world are utterly new. He starts at sounds, lifts his ears, wags his tail at people leaving their house to get into their cars. His tongue lolls. Like me! He says. Like me likemelimeme! Ilikeyou! Itsallsofun! I'msohappy!

But even at his most gooberish, he's got good manners. He will sit, although he can barely contain himself when he does. He doesn't surf counters. He doesn't bark. (He actually starts a little when Shelly erupts at something outside on the street. I told him it's okay, we've had her for years and we haven't gotten used to it, either.) He's a little prone to jumping on you when you come in the door, but is aware he isn't supposed to and can be quickly dissuaded. So then he just dances. He follows Bob and I from room to room and stands outside the bathroom patiently. He doesn't scratch. He's perfectly housebroken. And he prefers to walk on my right, which makes me think he's had some training.

The only problem so far is that he would really like something to chew on. We bought Nylabones--the super hard, good for dogs kind. But Shelly cannot bear that he actually have something. We bought two bones but of course, she wants the one he has. And when he has it, she suddenly attacks him. He drops down to play, but he's six times her size and she isn't playing. We pull him away, she keeps attacking until one of us picks her up.

Luckily, he just thinks she's playing. Likemelikemelikeme! But it means that all the toys are kept locked up, at least for now.

It's strange to have a new dog. He's adorable, my handsome new boy, but we aren't quite his and he's not quite ours. He doesn't know us yet. We don't know him, yet. He's a bit of a stranger in our midst, although a good-natured, well-meaning one. I plan to start obedience classes with him when I can. It will be good for both of us, I think.

So Far So Good

2008-01-19T11:00:00.001-05:00

Hudson has even charmed Shelly. So far. We're waiting to see what happens when she realizes that he isn't going anywhere.

Hudson

2008-01-14T21:27:00.001-05:00

This is Hudson. Hudson was found along a highway and after flyers were posted and ads placed in the paper and no one claimed him, he ended up in rescue.

We have been asked if we would foster with intention to adopt--it gives us all a chance to get to know each other. So on Friday (after going to the vet on Thursday to get 'snipped') Hudson comes here.

The rescue folks say Hudson is between a year and two years. They describe him as rambunctious, friendly, good with kids and babies (the woman who found him has an 18 month old.) He's a bit of a doofus. He loves tennis balls, walks in the park, and probably pina coladas.

Bob and I can't wait.

Restaurant As Amusement Park

2008-01-09T16:03:00.000-05:00

(I posted this on Eat Our Brains this morning, got on an airplane, flew to LA, and when I checked Eat Our Brains it was not functioning. So it a fit of post airport frenzy--I mean, I went to the trouble of posting this morning before I left for LA so I would make my Wednesday deadline even though I was on the road--I am posting it here as well.)

There’s a commercial for a service that allegedly protects against identity theft. In it a guy sings about why he is wearing a pirate costume serving tourists in a restaurant. (It’s because he was bankrupted when his identity was stolen.) When I think of restaurants that set out to entertain, that’s the first image that comes to mind. The theme restaurant. Mariachi guys serenading over bad fajitas. Chuck E Cheese, where your kids will be distracted enough you might get a moment to just sit and watch them spend your money on games, or it’s adult incarnation, Damon’s, where you can play a quiz using the electronic quiz thingy on your table and play, not only against the other geniuses in your particular restaurant, but against people all over the country eating at Damon’s and ignoring their food just like you are. And although Damon’s food is not horrible, it isn’t exactly a crime to ignore it, either.

There’s been a kind of an upsurge of food as fun for people who might even like to eat. Probably the bottom feeder of this is The Melting Pot, which is fondue. Fondue is a license to officially play with your food. But it isn’t particularly great food. I mean, any time you let the customers cook for themselves, the point is really not cooking technique. I like fondue, but mostly I like it sitting around with friends, getting drunk and threatening each other with the little forks—in other words, I like fondue the way it was done in the fifties, when everyone got a fondue set as a wedding present. The idea of opening a restaurant where I let non-professionals anywhere near hot oil for cooking seems rather scary to me.

My kid, Adam, is a meat eater. He, like me, would really like to be a vegetarian. But the fact is, if we were vegetarians, we’d have to give up meat. I’ve tried. I’ve failed. Now I cook with duck fat and constrain myself to a kind of low level sniping at vegetarians who I resent because I consider them morally superior to me. Texas is a meat lovers paradise and Adam is a fan of BBQ. But I found a restaurant recently that pretty much nailed the food as amusement thing, the Brazilian Steakhouse. I’ve actually eaten steak in Brazil and it’s very good. Brazil happens to be geographically sitting next to Argentina, where cattle is king. But when I was in Brazil, I never ate at anything like Fogo de Chao. First of all, the entire wait staff is wearing gaucho attire—shirts, short pants, black shiny gaucho boots. I said to Adam that at least they weren’t wearing pirate costumes and he gave me a withering glance. He was right, this wasn’t exactly an improvement.

There are Brazilian gauchos, but gauchos and gaucho cuisine—beef roasted over a fire and a drink called mate—are really Argentinian. I don’t know why Fogo de Chao isn’t an Argentinian steakhouse. But I am quibbling. And Brazil is a big country with a number of different cuisines, including Bahian—which figures big in Jorge Amado’s luscious novel, Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands. Maybe in the south, where the jungle gives way pampas, there are Brazilian steakhouses.

The menu is meat. Fifteen kinds of meat. You are seated. They take your drink order (and they have an extensive wine list which, since the majority of the meat is beef, is probably better on reds than whites.) You go to the salad bar which has, in addition to lettuce and cucumber and tomatoes and stuff, thin slices of prosciutto type ham, cold asparagus, and fresh mozzarella balls. When you’ve had your salad, you have a little coaster sized cardboard sign on your table. It is red on one side and green on the other. You flip it to green.

The guys in the dorky pants instantly start appearing with huge skewers of prime rib, sirloin, filet mignon, sausage, pork loin, ribs, leg of lamb, lamb chops, bacon wrapped tenderloin, and for the faint of heart, chicken breasts. They put the point of the skewer on a plate at your table and start slicing meat. You grab the edge with your little tongs, they slice it off, and depart. In a minute and a half I had a lamb chop, a slice of medium rare leg of lamb, some tenderloin wrapped in bacon, and sliced prime rib. I flipped my card back to red. None of the slices or portions were large, but there were a lot of these guys flitting around in an anxiety of service and I could see how my plate would probably disappear under a mound of meat if I didn’t stop things. I ate through my samples, flipped the card over, and the gauchos descended.

It was amazing. And more importantly, the food was good. Was it profound food? Well, no. It was competently roasted meat. The sides—mashed potatoes, fried polenta, and fried bananas—we fine but not particularly interesting either in preparation or strangeness. They weren’t Brazilian. Or Argentinian. But real gauchos basically ate strips of beef that they dangled over a fire, they didn’t have sides. And I don’t usually have meals that devolve into an orgy of proteins. It wasn’t food as example of the chef’s skills, it was food as theater. Servers hovered. I took a sip of my wine, they refilled my glass. We took a couple of the light, buttery little rolls, the bread basket was whisked away and replaced with fresh rolls.

We had a great time.

I’m thinking that next I’d like to try even more theatrical experiences. There’s eating in the dark—that is, eating in pitch darkness where the servers are either blind or they wear night vision goggles. The idea is that without sight, you really taste and smell your food. Or maybe eating at wd-50 in Chicago, Wylie Defresne’s restaurant. Defresne is a molecular gastronomie guy who makes things like “Carrot-Coconut Sunny-side Up”. That’s what’s pictured below, and here’s a hint, it isn’t actually an egg. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Dog Rescue People Like Us

2008-01-06T19:15:00.000-05:00

We had our dog rescue home visit today, and the dog rescue person was very pleased with us. Shelly only attacked Tripper twice and he was such a big sweetie of a Golden that he didn't really seem to mind. So she will forward our names to the dog-person matchmaking committee and in three to four weeks we'll probably get to meet a Golden or two.

Three to four weeks. (sigh)

The Gathering by Anne Enright

2008-01-04T13:10:00.000-05:00

I'm reading The Gathering, by Anne Enright. It won the Man Booker Prize for 2007. It's described as 'bleak'. Lots of reviews say 'bleak.' In fact, every review seems to say bleak.

There is something wonderful about death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest. And the girls will be picked up from school, and dropped off again in the morning. Your eldest daughter can remember her inhaler, and your youngest will take her gym kit with her, and it is just as you suspected -- most of the stuff you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy even to love you, even that, let alone find their own shoes under their own bed; people who turn and accuse you -- scream at you sometimes -- when they can find only one shoe.

Oh the pleasure of that, the pleasure of self-pity and the way it can give the illusion of release, that it is all right not to worry about the thousand tiny things of the day.

A good friend, a smart man, a writer, once told me that he had noticed that a lot of very smart women writers with apparently quite good lives wrote a kind of depressed fiction. This book is filled up to the brim with that. I am one of those women who write depressed fiction and I am actually trying to broaden my palate a little, and yet, what is it that made my friend feel that this was some sort of writerly pathology? Some sort of malady of the spirit that befell women?

I find that few books have fit me, have fit my psyche, my view of the world as well as The Gathering. Which isn't to say that it maps in well onto my life, either my day to day life or my inner life. The narrator of The Gathering, sleepless and grieving, is in the midst of dealing with her brother's death, and it has put her outside of her own life in a very precise way. But I find in this book a sensibility I resonate to. Sympathetic vibration, the way a struck tuning fork will set it's mate vibrating in sympathy.

I suppose there are people who find this sympathy, this vibration of voice with Dom Delillo, David Foster Wallace, or even Hunter S. Thompson. But much of literature has seemed to me admirable without feeling sympathetic. Not written to my frequency. There is a central conceit to The Gathering, that a single event can spiral outward through a whole life, shaping and more importantly, explaining everything, that I usually don't care for. Enright seems to be very smart about this. She compromises, and backsteps, and places doubts about the experience. But normally, that there even existed this central event would just put my teeth on edge--it's a hangover from Freud and the sort of pop culture belief that pathology arises out of childhood. Do childhood events sometimes damage? Yes but the whole experience of growing up is so chaotic that terrible events sometimes leave little scar, and the most apparently insignificant event can sometimes have devestating consequences. But I am so convinced by the voice that I do not care.

Rescue Me

2008-01-03T11:53:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I woke up and realized that I needed another dog. We have a dog--Shelly the World's Most Annoying Dog, a miniature dachshund who's bark has been metered at 129 decibels. Oh and it's a very shrill 129 decibels. Despite this, I felt strongly I needed another dog. A big dog. A thumpable dog. I thought a lot about what kind of dog I wanted. I didn't want to replace my late Golden Retriever because frankly some things are not replaceable. So maybe a different dog. I wanted a smart dog so I thought maybe a standard poodle. I looked at websites for standard poodles and tried to convince myself that if the dog's coat wasn't trimmed to look like topiary it would be okay. I looked at Labradoodles. I looked at lots and lots of dogs.

I finally admitted that I really like Golden Retrievers.

Lawrence Persons had recommended a local rescue group called Gold Ribbon Rescue. I went and filled out an application. I'm a pretty respectable kind of person. I figured it would be no big deal.

Now I have just the smallest sense of what people who adopt children go through.

The application was rather long. It asked what my work hours were. How long I was out of the house each day. If I owned my dwelling and if not, for information to contact my landlord. It asked if I had a vet and could they contact him. Did I have a fenced in yard. Does anyone in the house have asthma. How would I exercise the dog? Did I realize that Goldens are pretty big dogs? What pets did I already have?

Dog Breed rescues are all volunteer operations. They exist to place unwanted dogs with people who want them. They specialize. There are dachshund rescues, doberman rescues, poodle rescues, dalmatian rescues. They often have arrangements with the local animal shelters so that if a dog that looks like it's their breed--a labrador, a collie, or a shih tzu--shows up at a shelter, the shelter calls them and they come and get it. They evaluate the dog for health and temperament. They often have an arrangement with a vet to get services at a discount rate. They check for heartworm (and often find it and then treat for it, an expensive proposition). They foster it with a volunteer. And then they place it.

On December 30, 2007, Gold Ribbon Rescue had 33 dogs in foster care.

This, I figured, would be a slam dunk. I mean, they've got a lot of dogs. I'm a good pet owner. I'll have this dog in a couple of days. I actually applied several weeks ago. After a week, I got a phone call. It was my phone interview. I liked the woman who called me. She had a long list of questions--many of them the same ones that I had answered. But it was a little nerve wracking. Did we have a dog door? No, I said, but we were planning to have one put in. A dog door isn't a good thing. It won't disqualify you, but it does suggest that you don't pay close attention to when your dog goes in and out. She told me she would just put 'no' that I didn't have a dog door.

It turns out I have two things in my favor. 1. I work at home, at least most of the time. 2. We don't have small children. Most people don't work at home. And although small children will not disqualify you from getting a dog, it is assumed that you will pay more attention to your children than to the dog. Which as Adam can tell you, is not true of me.

I did pass my phone interview with flying colors. But next is the in house interview.

A volunteer comes to the house. They bring their Golden Retriever to see how we (and they stress all people and pets should be home) respond. I've heard people who are adopting children talk about when the social worker comes and now I think I understand. I'm worried that my dog food won't be good enough. I'm even more worried about Shelly. Shelly doesn't like other dogs. She liked Smith, the old dog, but that was because she was 4 months old when we brought her home and considered Smith to be her dog. In my mind I see the volunteer come with their perfectly socialized happy Golden. I see Shelly hunker under a chair, hair standing on end.

I imagine the volunteer eying Shelly while we make chipper small talk. I imagine Shelly eying the Golden with loathing. I imagine Bob and I desperately attempting to pretend everything is normal, rather like when your Uncle Oscar gets falling down drunk at a wedding and starts talking about his bitch of an ex-wife, while everyone smiles and hopes the groom doesn't punch him.

And then I imagine Shelly launching herself at the friendly, startled Golden.

Sunday. The house visit is on Sunday. I'll let you know how it goes.

15 Years

2008-01-02T10:55:00.000-05:00

15 years ago today, the Mayor of Blue Ash said at ten minutes of 11:00, 'Are you expecting anyone else?' The wedding was scheduled for 11:00, but the handful of people we had invited were there, so by 11:00 we were married. I was terrified, unsure of what I had committed myself to, half convinced I had made an awful mistake.

I had not. Happy Anniversary, Bob! I love you, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Strandbeest

2007-12-26T13:51:00.001-05:00

"I don't like standard beauty – there is no beauty without strangeness." Karl Lagerfeld

Warren Spector sent a couple of us this link, to a speech given by a Dutch artist Theo Jansen, about his sculptures

“Eventually these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches. Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution,” the narrator says. “I want put these forms of life on the beaches and they should survive, over there, on their own, in the future,” Jansen explains. He calls the sculptures “Strandbeests” or in English, Beach Creatures. They are made out of conduit, hinged and light. They are moved by wind, and their motion, a kind of many-lagged walking, feels biological. Not necessarily animal. They are somewhat insectile, with their many legs all moving in series. But they aren’t creepy. They are compelling. You watch because you want to know what they are. How they work. Our brain perceives them as organic, as animals.

Are they alive? Jansen says he is several years from getting them to the point where they can ‘survive’ on their own. He says their biggest enemy right now is storms, which drive them off the beach, or into the water, and break them. He is busily figuring out a way that they can ‘detect’ storms and survive them, the way they now ‘detect’ the surf.

I don’t think they are alive. I’m not sure viruses are alive. But the sculptures don’t reproduce, they don’t heal themselves. But it’s not that they are handmade is what keeps me from identifying them as ‘alive.’ Which leads me to wonder, why aren’t the people who are so up in arms about The Golden Compass getting all twisted about this guy? The movie The Golden Compass is about as anti-church as a shoe store. But this guy, he’s claiming to create life. And obviously, he’s not really worried about whether his beasts have soul, or if there is some spiritualist/materialist dualism he’s compromising here. More importantly, he’s raising questions about what’s alive, what it means to create life, who creates life and what life is, that could, down the line, make things very dicey for religions that believe in souls. It’s very possible that if someone does create a complex, self-replicating molecule, like DNA, that can encode information, like DNA, then the results of that could get very complex indeed. I mean, once you’ve done it, making it complex is just a matter of iterating.

What he has done is beautiful. It feels organic, even if it isn't. The amazing thing about these sculptures is how they are as robotic as Tinker Toys, all pipes and hinges, and yet, there is something essential about them that says, 'this is how something alive could move' and just a clearly says, 'something alive is in some important way, a mechanism.'

Boys in the House

2007-12-25T14:41:00.001-05:00

It's a house full of boys. Boys of varying ages. Boys who got toys for Christmas. Boys eating pancakes. Boys getting serious about coffee (Jason, on the right, has a job at Starbucks and so his coffee fascination, always high, is now even higher.) Boys playing with dachshunds. Boys playing music (Adam made a cool MP3 mix that he's going to give me. Bob got a Buffalo Springfield box set.) It's actually only three boys (including the one at the back of the photo) but it's amazing how three boys can fill a house with boyness.

Tomorrow me and the boys will decamp for the spending of gift cards and roaming around the city. But today, the house is full of boys.

Everybody Needs a Good Gig

2007-12-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Sometimes people ask me what I'm doing these days.

Sometimes I'm doing this with the people talked about here.

In The Air

2007-12-17T21:59:00.000-05:00

I don't wear a watch.

...on a plane and when the clouds part I see a town, a triangle of highways scratched in a dry land. In the triangle, a grid of streets. Clouds again, then a break and a line of tall white turbines in a wind farm turning amazingly fast for their size.

West Texas? New Mexico? Arizona? I know precisely where I am. Seat 29F. But otherwise, I am adrift. Without time or location, alone among strangers. I don't know how long I have been flying, how much longer I will fly. I am cocooned in the harsh thrum of jet engines.

We came out of the savannas of Africa, tens of thousands of years ago, making a map in our heads that we measured with our feet and our eyes, walking in the company of kin. We are nomads by biology. But we weren't made for this.

Frequently Flying

2007-12-14T11:05:00.000-05:00

This is the family cemetery in Swan Pond where my mother's family is buried. The family has been using the same funeral home since 1905. The cemetery (the Hampton-Lickliter cemetery) is outside Barbourville up Swan Pond Hollow, then up a gravel road to a flat place by some fields about halfway up the mountain. The weather was funereal, but it stopped raining a little before we got there and started raining as we left, which was more than anyone could ask for.

Bob had never been to any place quite like Barbourville and so was not accustomed to having almost every conversation start with, 'And your grandfather was?' and the careful sorting of genealogy that follows. The other place I have lived where this happens is China. And there it is also something that doesn't happen in the cities but still happens in rural China. Or at least did the many years ago I was there. (Not with me, since everyone knew that MY grandfather probably wasn't from around there.)

Flew back from Lexington last night. Today I go back to the airport to pick up Christopher Rowe and Gwenda Bond who are flying in for Turkey City tomorrow. Christopher and Gwenda tried to extract themselves from staying with me when they heard about the funeral, but frankly, I was so looking forward to seeing them I insisted they come. Tomorrow, we will all go mano a mano at Turkey City, the workshop that requires real toughness. (Twelve stories, twelve authors, twelve hours, or something like that. I keep feeling as if it is some sort of reality TV show and we are all going to be eliminated by critique.)

Monday I fly to California for work. Then Friday, Adam and Jason fly in and the holidays start.

Evelyn McHugh 1915 - 2007

2007-12-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

My mother died peacefully yesterday afternoon.

She was 92--born in 1915 in a hollow in Kentucky, she had a memory of the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918--her father brought the entire family through with vegetable soup. She remembered the introduction of cars to her small town in Kentucky. She rode the back of a plow horse to school with her older brother and little sister. She was born in a time where airplanes of were exotic, but traveled to Paris, London, Switzerland, Brazil, Egypt, the Caribbean and China. She had a brother and brother-in-law both serve in the Pacific theater in World War Two.

She had first showed signs of dementia when she was 77 but was still pretty healthy until she broke her hip this fall. On Friday, Hospice was brought in because her dementia had progressed to the point where she no longer spoke nor ate. This week Bob and I will be going to Kentucky for the service where she will be buried in a tiny family cemetery on top of a mountain in Swan Pond.

I have missed her for many years. I am glad that at the end she could be made comfortable and unafraid.

Sweeney Todd is coming (The Sweeney Variations)

2007-12-09T15:48:00.000-05:00

The movie version of Sweeney Todd is coming (Dec. 21 in selected cities and then Jan. 11 in wide release.) I love Sweeney Todd. I really like Johnny Depp. But I wasn't sure I liked the idea of Depp as Sweeney. I thought Sweeney required a certain kind of voice. But advance discussion is good. And this YouTube comparison makes me think that Depp is going to be all right. I don't think he should do it on Broadway where he would be required to sing it six times a week. But miked and mixed for a movie, he has a creepy intimacy that seems very effective.

No Escape Form All Those Tubes

2007-12-08T18:35:00.001-05:00

This article discusses four airlines and their plans to make the internet available on planes.

I hate to work on planes--the seats are small, the trays are small, my laptop is too big for them, and every time I try to do anything on an airplane involving my laptop, the person in front of me reclines their seat. But I am pretty addicted to the internet so I can't see how I will resist the siren call of checking my email from 32,000 feet.

The Year in Sentences

2007-12-08T14:27:00.000-05:00

Meme: Post the first line of your first journal entry of each month for 2007 (via Greg Van Eekhout)

(Looking back, all I can say is why the hell do you read this blog.)

January Last night, lying in bed, it occurred to me that 'girl' means female, but 'woman' means 'human adult female.'

February My sister has been in town for the last week and I've also been doing some freelance work.

March Is there anything better than a grilled cheese sandwich and the knowledge that one's taxes are done?

April So the Vet says the test results from Shelly are weird.

May Okay, it's really not. It's really a mash-up. But it's fun. (Link to Star Trek done as lolcatz)

June Post Card From Lubbock

July Off to Boston on the 5th for Readercon.

August I am sorry for my protracted silence.

September When did the tooth fairy become a guy in drag?

October Last December we had just moved and I was broke.

November When we moved into this house, we found that the oven door didn't quite close which meant that the oven had a draft so the temperature was uneven and baking anything was chancy, at best.

December When I was a kid, once I got one of those 'big books' for kids that had stories, puzzles, nonfiction, all sorts of stuff in it.

Meyer Lemons

2007-12-07T15:30:00.000-05:00

In cooking, as in so much of life, I am confronted with my own inadequacies. I am messy, wasteful, self-indulgent. Before I went to Jamaica, I was in Central Market and they had Meyer lemons. We don't do many varieties of lemons in the US. Or for that matter, limes or bananas. You can get Valencia oranges, navel oranges, blood oranges, Seville oranges. But for lemons, we mostly got the one. But once in awhile you'll see Meyer lemons. They're less tart than regular lemons, and for that reason not everyone likes them. But I like them a lot. So even though I was leaving the country in a couple of days, I bought some lemons.

Then I worked, packed, did laundry, and, well, didn't use the lemons. I got back from Jamaica and the Meyer lemons were very very ripe, but had not spilled over into rotten.

Today I made a lemon meringue pie from the Meyer lemons. I like lemon meringue pie a lot. But the really fun thing is, Bob likes it a whole lot. Sometime in the next couple of hours there is a very good chance he will check my blog, and then he'll find out he's having Meyer lemon meringue pie tonight.

Hey Bob! Can't wait until you get home!

What I Did in Jamaica

2007-12-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

I'm writing a short story about AI. Which is fairly ludicrous because I can't even program TIVO. But that's why they call it fiction.

At this moment, I actually kind of like my story. So here's the opening.

At 3:17 EST, the lights at DM Kensington Medical did the wave. Starting at the east end of the building, the lights went out, and after just a couple of seconds, came back on. The darkness went down the hall. Staff looked up. It was a local version of a rolling blackout, a kind of weird utility-weather event. In it’s wake, IV alarms went off, monitors re-set. Everything critical was on back-up but not everything was critical, some of it was just important, and some of it wasn’t even important, unless you consider coffee a life-or-death substance. Which for a resident, might be true. It was not life-threatening in the immediate sense, but it wasn’t trivial and it interrupted pharmacists counting meds, a CT Scan, a couple of X-rays, and it derailed a couple of consultations. The line of darkness washed across the buildings, leapt the parking lot, split into two parts and then washed north and south simultaneously across a complex of medical offices.

At 3:21, the same thing happened at UH Southpoint Medical. UH Southpoint was in Tennessee and Kensington was in Texas. At 3:25 it rolled through Seattle Kellerman, although there is started in the north and went south. The three hospitals were all part of the Benevola Health Network. Their physical plant—thermostats, lights, hot water and air filtration—were all handled by BHP DMS, a software system. Specifically by a subroutine called SAMEDI. SAMEDI was not an acronym. It was the name of a Haitian Voodoo loa, a possession spirit. A lot of the subroutines in BHP DMS were named for Haitian loa. The system that monitored lab results and watched for emergent epidemiological trends (a fancy way of saying something that noticed if there were signs of say, an upsurge in cases of West Nile virus, or an outbreak of food poisoning symptoms across several local ERs) was called LEGBA, after the guardian of the crossroads, the trickster who managed traffic between life and the spiritworld. Someone had undoubtedly been very pleased with themselves.

The problem line lit up in BHP DMS IT.

“Sydney, phone,” Damien said.

“You get it.”

“You’re the least Aspergers person in the department. It’s that having two X chromosomes thing.” Actually, the only people in the department who were clinically Aspergers were probably Dale, who was a hardware guy, and their boss, Tony.

“In the kingdom of the blind,” Sydney said. “The one-eyed girl is king.”

“The difference between see/not see is a lot bigger than the difference between one eye and two eyes,” Damien said.

Is This Not a Great Cover?

2007-12-06T08:40:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, once I got one of those 'big books' for kids that had stories, puzzles, nonfiction, all sorts of stuff in it. I loved it beyond words.

Now I'm in one. Well sort of. This one only has stories in it, but it's still cool. (Image stolen from Nathan Balingrud's livejournal.)

Away

2007-11-28T07:06:00.001-05:00

I'm sorry, but I'm away from the blog at the moment. I'm on my way here. If you leave a message I'll probably get back to you in a week.

Unless your message is mean-spirited and envious because I'm in Jamaica. Then I'll ignore you.

Snickerdoodle Recipe

2007-11-27T21:47:00.000-05:00

Snickerdoodles are a kind of sugar cookie. They're easy to make, chewy, light, cinnamon sugar things.

I made them because I had everything I needed in the house. My recipe is from the Pillsbury Kitchens Family Cookbook 1979 edition.

1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
2 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon

Heat oven to 400 degrees F. In large bowl, combine first 4 ingredients; blend well. Stir in flour, cream of tartar, soda and salt; blend well. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Combine 2 tablespoons sugar and cinnamon; roll balls in sugar mixture. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 400 degrees F. for 8 to 10 minutes or until set. Immediately remove from cookie sheet.

They're simple.

Snickerdoodles

2007-11-25T22:11:00.000-05:00

On Thanksgiving I cook for friends and family.

But sometimes, on a chilly fall evening, I just do something for Bob and me.