Has anyone else noticed that when the Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic a few weeks ago it was the head story on NPR, the Huffington Post and CNN, for days, but yesterday’s crash of a Yemeni plane killing 153 people is almost being treated as a minor story?
It’s updated on the seattletimes.com after something about Gas Works fireworks and a reminder that amnesty for parking tickets ends today.
Having deep-dug, primary, pregnant dreams these last weeks.
I’ve been dreaming about math, running marathons, writing essays for the S.A.T., sketching water and wind-flow plans for imaginary three-story houses.
Big, meaty dreams that should wear me out but somehow end up being restful in an unusual way. What could they mean? That I’m growing a to-be brainy, limber architect or tweedy professor or mountain man?
On especially slow days at a former job I’d arrange geography bees for my co-workers, printing maps with random unidentified countries. We’d sit at our desks and see who could locate Madagascar or Zimbabwe the fastest.
Puget Sound geography has ridiculously fewer bodies of water and islands to identify than, say, the world. And I’m ashamed to say I can’t name a lot of the areas reachable from Seattle by ferry, and I’d bet I’m not alone.
But today, that’s going to change. I’ve modified the map below, adding colors and lines. Numbers match names. Time to cram before I mail you a pop quiz!
1=Orcas Island 2=Deer Harbor 3=West Sound 4=Shaw Island 5=Friday Harbor 6=Lopez Island
For some reason my dad really wants to see this movie from the 90s called something like All in the Family, a straight to video sequel to that shoot-your-eye-out Christmas movie.
He had the day off today so we met for lunch. “I found that movie at Barnes and Noble for five dollars,” he said as we walked to Mae Phim, sliding a disk out of his pocket.
“Dad, what did you do with the case?” The disk was already scratched and smudged. “Oh, it was too bulky, so I threw it out,” he shrugged.
I work with DVDs every day at my job, and a real fear is scratching up a museum’s only disk of cover art. It’s never happened, mostly because I’ve learned like a lot of us to be careful to keep disks in their sleeves.
We kept walking, and I started to hear a weird jingling. “Dad, did you just put the DVD back in the same pocket as loose change?” He looked at me sheepishly and asked, “Are you going to put this on your blog?”
So dad, this one’s for you and your very scratched Ralphie movie. And no, I’m not going to try to watch it with you for all the tea in China.
Valencia St., SF
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of Orangette. Heaping thanks go to my dear friend Misty for saving us all from the lip-smacking, finger-licking diaries of la la land foodie bloggers. I want to read about food! How to make it better. Anecdotally, seriously. The way Misty writes about it.
Misty recently started posting on Lemon Spring, and I’m pretty sure I have to stop reading it in the afternoon, before dinner, when my stomach feels like it’s carved out of my body. Lima beans with parsley, pumpkin and green onion? Tofu slabs with succotash salsa? I know what I’m making for Sunday dinner.
I just borrowed a friend’s old, beaten up Breakfast of Champions in paperback and loved reading it so much more than I would have if it was brand new. It’s from the 60s, yellowed-out and held together with a rubber band. Its delicate state is living proof that a handful of someones navigated the copy before me. Which is comforting, like listening to pop radio or wearing an old western.
Graphic designer and illustrator M.S. Corley re-imagined the Harry Potter series to wild acclaim, I think for similar reasons. The aesthetic is classic, not-just-for-kids, and would look as handsome spread across a teenager’s floor as they would stacked on a cedar bookshelf in a house featured in Dwell.
Cover design by M.S. Corley
I put two limes in a wire basket above my refridgerat0r last week. A few days later I noticed a few fruit flies hovering around the limes, so I threw them away.
Sure, I know how to reproduce, but not like these guys. The day after I threw the limes out my kitchen was swimming in fruit flies. They were centered around the sink, so I acted fast. I put a shallow skin of balsamic vinegar in a little cup, covered it with saran wrap and poked holes with a push pin on top. Left the house for a few hours and returned to find dozens of fruit flies dead in the vinegar without a trace of a living fly anywhere.
Then I opened the blinds and saw a fresh horde–hundreds of tiny bugs on the glass near the rosemary in my window box. And that’s when I lost it, started smacking the glass blindly with an old newspaper, making countless blots. And this morning, they were back, the defiant little gits.
But I’m ready. I’ve got fly paper, fresh vinegar cups, a stack of old New York Times, and a big bottle of Windex. And since our TV doesn’t get basic cable anymore I don’t have any distractions.
I’m too write to tired anything today.
President Barack Obama tours the Centre Pompidou modern art museum in Paris with his family June 6, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
Restrooms in ritzy department stores aren’t just filled with rows of stalls and sinks. The best have actual sitting rooms with names like the Powder Room, Ladies Quarters, or simply the Women’s Lounge.
The downtown Seattle Macy’s restroom has a grand lounge. Next to the vintage stalls and sinks there’s a circular room filled with a string of arm chairs. Some days almost every spot is occupied with old women, sitting with both feet on the floor, nodding off or knitting.
I was in the Nordstrom restroom over my lunch break on Friday. Walking towards the exit I noticed a sign that said “Mother’s Lounge” next to a doorway. I peaked inside—the room was quiet and dark with a changing table and purple velvet couch. I’m four or five months away from motherhood, which I figure is close enough to earn access to the mother’s lounge. So I went in and sat deliberately and quietly with both feet on the floor.
I closed my eyes and opened them slowly, wishing for motherhood to feel much more like the Macy’s grand lounge–a big circle of a room full of grandmas passing baby from knee to knee.
I don’t know who these people are or where I found this image, but I’m pretty in love with it. Can anyone help me identify? They might be crafters somehow connected to Etsy…
In Seattle you need a fan to sleep well for less than a week a year, so the past two stuffy nights are making me wonder if we’re in for a hot summer or maybe just a false start. But for whatever grand reason I wore a tank top and jeans out the door at 8 last night and walked with D to the new custard place on 13th and Pike. Everybody was in the park, kids in the fountain. I mean the place was really alive. Basketball, baseball, soccer and kickball and kung fu all at once.
I got a cherry sundae, D got a rootbeer float, and we sat in the bleachers and watched a bunch of guys with beer bellies play kickball. The sky was pink, what we could see of downtown was pink, Mount Rainier was pink. It was so Tampa, so Phoenix.
The park was a watermelon, a slip-and-slide, a popsicle, sidewalk chalk–all the best reasons for summer to exist. And the fact that the sun can leave so fast around here made my ice cream, which really tasted the same as Dairy Queen, like frozen manna or something.
I piled every movie I’ve ever watched that was a waste of time in a grain silo in southern Oregon, near the California border. The stack reached the very top. Then, as another exercise, I put all of the books I’ve ever read in a neat pile next to the movies and hung my head. The book stack wasn’t even half as high.
I’ve decided to organize a work party this weekend. All of my friends and family are invited. I’m going to buy a very tall ladder and unstack Beverly Hills Cop, Kindergarten Cop, all of the Police Academies, and so on. I’ll pass each movie down, hand by hand.
And we’re building a huge arch with the cases, unrolling all the tape on the VHS spools and making a giant pool, a figure 8. Then we’re all going swimming.
Just posted summer reading picks from my co-workers at Marquand Books. There’s so many good food/cookbook and travel/non-fiction picks I have to share the list:
Food:
Sara: Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine, Bryant Terry (Da Capo)
Keryn: Simply Delicioso: A Collection of Everyday Recipes with a Latin Twist, Ingrid Hoffmann (Clarkson Potter)
Marissa: Under the Table: Saucy Tales from Culinary School, Katherine Darling (Atria)
Keryn: A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, Anthony Bourdain (Harper Perennial)
Zach: Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods, Eugenia Bone (Random House)
Non-Fiction/Travel:
Jeff: New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City, Andrei Codrescu (Algonquin Books)
Zach: Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, James Elkins (Routledge)
Jeremy: Emergency, This Book Will Save Your Life, Neil Strauss (Harper)
Keryn: Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure, Sarah Macdonald (Broadway)
Marissa: 90 Classic Books for People in a Hurry, Henrik Lange (Nicotext)
Adrian: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Geoff Dyer (Vintage)
Keryn: My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere, Susan Orlean (Random House)
John: Pictures from Here, Sunil Gupta (Chris Boot)
My friend Michelle took this photo Sunday evening. She was in town from LA for SIFF, where a short she produced called Short Term 12 got the grand jury prize late Sunday night, best in show. D and I tagged along to the awards ceremony and ate sweet potato lasagna at midnight to celebrate her victory. Check out the trailer here.
