When you’re really pregnant, I mean maybe days away from the big event, your feet still look the same in shoes.

Buy Olympia’s office/warehouse space in Portland:

“Getting a swine flu shot,” dad says, “is turning out to be harder than getting you a Cabbage Patch Kid for Christmas in the 80s.”

Some Christians say that Christ mysteriously hovers around the bread and wine (if you’re not, say, Catholic or Lutheran or Episcopal or Eastern Orthodox) but doesn’t embody it. But if you are Catholic or the like, you probably believe that Christ actually hops into each loaf and bottle after being blessed, literally embodying the elements.

I went to a Lutheran high school and got in a fight with Mr. LeBow, my history teacher, in the middle of class one day about this. Why shouldn’t any true believer be allowed to take communion with any church body? That confused me to pieces. It’s because, according to Mr. LeBow, if I did I might be damning myself as an unconfirmed member of his church that believes Christ isn’t a symbol in the wine and bread, but the actual bloody wine and fleshy bread. When he said that my cheeks turned red hot. I was an outsider right then, at that school, when the whole reason I took Jesus in my heart is because I believe he wants everyone in his.

And I still believe that if Jesus is real, of course he can swoop over thousands of stale loaves, millions of tiny pale biscuits each Sunday and make them body. And even though I’m sure he prefers turning wine into blood he can do it to tiny plastic grape juice cups, too. It’s like every Sunday a million miles of his veins and skin covers the whole planet, turning us into something else entirely cooler and more hopeful than we realize.

Well done video on Nikki McClure:

*Thanks for sending Elle*

Drove through all kinds of weather to get to Portland Saturday. Once we arrived it was tame and gentle outside, quite right for hot chocolate, then even warm Halloween night.

Almost time to buy the 2010 Nikki McClure wall calendar…

Off to Portland for the weekend with high hopes of stopping at Sweet Pea for banana bread, brunch, something or another:

Being pregnant and considered “high risk” for catching swine flu and it, you know, killing me, my parents are so worried that I’ll contract the virus–the “high-knee” as my dad calls it–it’s become completely nutty. At dinner last night my dad changed his shirt after riding the bus, even though he had a coat on, washed his hands three times before the meal, and made everyone put a napkin over a loaf of bread before cutting.

It’s these sorts of antics that convince me I’m a goner. That irony will win, that of course the high-knee will be mine. Which makes me really, really want a blue knee high right now. Five weeks and counting.

Have you heard?

British singer Morrissey was hospitalized overnight after reportedly collapsing on stage during a concert, medical officials said Sunday…

Signs of life in Upper Queen Anne:

I dreamt D left last night– don’t know why, probably reacting to recent news that friends are sick or displaced.

I was in my old house, in the little pink bathroom, crouched below the sink. I put my toothbrush in this plastic cup with a circus dog face molded on the front and felt, more clearly than most times in waking life, a thick blanket of abandonment and futurlessness.

When I woke up and felt D’s back next to me it was warm, moving away from me and close again.

A kid working for Greenpeace tried to stop me on the street today by saying, “You like babies! Do you like baby seals?”

A little while later, a cop mumbled, out of the blue, “congrats, maam” as I walked by.

Signs that, in case I’m in denial some days, it’s clear to everyone that I am muy prego.

I thought Daylight Savings had to be this weekend, but it turns out we have a little bit longer until, presto, it’s dark in Seattle at 4:30. The fun begins Sunday, November 1 at 2 a.m.

Went to the Old, Weird America exhibit at the Frye this past weekend and completely loved it. The show originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston and is on its final stop, in Seattle through January. Better yet, the museum offers free admission.

(I almost wrote next, “Killer way to spend a rainy Saturday.” Who am I kidding? I’ve never called anything killer before, but it naturally came out of my head. Next I’ll be saying, “That slayed me.” But truthfully, the show kind on was, well, killer. Ouch.)

I bougt my mom a bottle of tarragon-infused vinegar from Pier 1 in the late 80s. She kept it on the counter as a decorative display for maybe a decade without ever opening it. It’s all shock and awe to me that you can actually make tarragon vinegar that looks this fresh and aromatic:

photo Misty Martinez

and knowing Misty at Lemon Spring tastes even better.

That’s it. I’m headed home to make a batch and next week I’m dousing it over a mound of crispy yukon golds straight from the broiler.

*I’m taking a vacation day Friday, more Weatherspoon Monday!

A few years ago, I peeled a star anise into shreds by the same Indiana river

I used to dream as a kid would swallow me up in a bath of chocolate milk.

Sitting down to dinner tonight, I fixed a salad, plucked mint from its stem

while you set the knives together so they touched at the tip.

If family is a bridge from myself to my mother’s mother, let’s be bridge builders in reverse

so all-of-a-sudden the water moves backwards, turns to spiced milk at the bed where we meet for a stiff drink.

Coffee break:

From McSweeney’s: The Door to Hell: Paris, France? Shaken, Not Stirred: Monaco? Tell me more.

I drew this a couple of years ago, imagining how I’d feel when I had a baby someday. But at the time it seemed silly, grandiose.

I’m less than eight weeks away from having a son, and coming across the drawing again I’m surprised at how well it matches the optimism and anticipation I feel just before meeting this person my body made out of feathers and threads.

D just missed a huge dust storm in Eastern Washington while he was driving from Seattle to Idaho Sunday. Cliff Mass explains conditions for the storm. Reminds me that we live in the Wild West!:

Extraordinary winds struck eastern Washington on Sunday, with 30-40 mph winds being commonplace, with gusts reaching nearly 60 mph around Wenatchee and vicinity. The result a major duststorm that closed down I90 for a while and resulted in numerous multicar accidents, sending 11 people to the hospital. Visibilities had dropped to less than five feet at times and the powerful winds knocked down many of the apples still on the trees near Wenatchee. It was reported that the ground at some orchards had turned red with apples.

Image via NASA MODIS satellites

Eight weeks till:

Reading Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. She used a word in one of the collection’s early stories that melted into my head and keeps repeating: homefulness

On Friday nights in high school I’d drive to the Lutheran seminary in my hometown and listen to R.E.M. tapes with my friends. We’d sit around a big, empty courtyard near half a dozen little fountains lit by yellow spotlights.

Voices talking somewhere in the house, late spring and you’re drifting off to sleep with your teeth in your mouth.

A big lake sat next to the grounds near half-empty dormitories. “That’s where the lonely seminarians live,” my high school boyfriend would say.

A security guard on hourly rounds walks by and we stop the tape until he passes. Sit still in the middle of everything, surrounded by fountain and dorm lights and all that water.

October is officially here. That means it’s time for a winding, back road drive from Seattle to Carnation during pumpkin season at Jubilee Farm. There are a ton of U-Pick pumpkin patches, hay mazes, and farm stands selling gourds and squash in a stone’s throw from downtown Seattle, but I’ve been a regular at Jubilee for years. It’s the sort of farm where you want to help clean carrots and pour cider just because. Plus, the hourly pumpkin throw is cooler than cool.

Here’s pumpkin cowboy Miles Ellenwood at Jubilee last year:

My friend Kristen has spent the last many months helping to organize Run Vera Run, a 5 k run/walk on 10/11 to benefit the Vera Project, Seattle’s all-ages music and art venue. You should do this!

Run Vera Run includes:

A lovely loop around Seward Park, starting and ending at the main lawn at the base of the park.

The Official Run Vera Run Warmup: Before you run for Vera, warm yourself up with Vera co-founder Shannon Stewart, aka Inga the Ringa. Fresh off the streets of Budapest, Inga will bring you twenty minutes of the latest European aerobics fitness crazes (minus the smoking of course).

Live music by local band The Maldives

A graffiti wall painted live on-site by local artists

Complimentary massage for participants by Dr. Kristi Smith

Prizes, food and refreshments, including coffee by Caffe Vita

If I wasn’t so very pregnant I’d be the first one to sign up. Watch out for me next year!

Who knows how this study can really be accurate, but it’s interesting if nothing else. A group of researchers at Kansas State University released a map of national vices, charting which parts of the country are the most and least steeped in each of the seven deadly sins.

Looks like Seattle is leading the way in greed (thank you Microsoft), envy (thank you gentrification), and pride (thank you moderate climate, excellent coffee and very tall mountains).

Women in their 50s in Columbia are earning a living making arty maternity dresses that grow with you, courtesy of Marisol Rodriguez:

In Skin, her limited-edition line of stylish, expandable clothing for pregnant women, she applies origami to organic cotton to break the hide-the-bulge mold of most maternity wear.

How do I place my order?

Favorite finds from my lunch break (from L to R): dental sample kit, Bakelite bangles and turtle pin, Bakelite adding machine with mint buttons, watch circle from the 50s

When you’re pregnant you think about all of the women in the world who are pregnant at the very same time. You wonder how many women are due on the same day you are, how their pregnancies are going, and if they’re in the Third World how that might mean sporadic or non-existent medical care. Then you think about how crazy it is to live in the States–it’s not Canada, but still–to live here and to see the doctor every month, to hear your baby’s heart.

The sound of it is like eating Cream of Wheat on the first snowy morning or jumping into a pile of towels straight from the dryer. And you want every pregnant women everywhere to hear her baby’s heart, too.

I was surprised to read this on the Design Observer, but it seems like that may begin to be possible thanks to a new hand-cranked Freeplay fetal heart monitor:

…a fetal heart rate monitor whose robust form and hyper-simple interface are combined with sophisticated Doppler ultrasound technology that allows rural healthcare workers to track the cardiac response of babies in the womb and during birth. One minute of cranking by hand generates enough battery life for 10 minutes of use. A numerical display indicates the fetal heart rate, while an audio component amplifies the actual sound — a double indication of whether or not the baby is in distress.

Read all about it here.

Have you seen the Worst Case Scenarios Basic Survival Guides? How to survive nuclear fallout, how to catch a fish without a rod, that sort of thing. They’re fun and sort-of useful, maybe like watching Man vs. Wild.

I was leafing through Foxfire 4 on Sunday night with its hand-drawn illustrations straight out of Appalachia about how to make your own bread knive, berry basket. I love how earnest and slow food the Foxfire books are. How back-to-school. Maybe if I collected the whole series of 12 Johnny Appleseed would come a-knockin’.

We made a mobile for baby this weekend, foraged for leaves at the Arboretum and went to the art supply store to buy fishing line and dowel rods and paper-thin pieces of plywood.

Then we went home, traced the leaves and cut them out of the plywood, drilled holes near the stems and cut out the shape of a tree with an exacto knife for the center. We colored the leaves with pastels, laced thread through the h0les, and tied them to the dowel rods, then balanced the pieces. It was the first time since college we’ve ever made anything together. Besides this baby I mean. We’re both stubborn, horrible in the kitchen together, impossible at team games. But yesterday we were golden.

Found these letters in the window of an antique shop in Georgetown, which of course reminded me of Hearts of Space, the best music show on the planet.

The only cities/towns in the States I’d live in besides Seattle:

Cincinnati, OH; Providence, RI; (weirdly) Pittsburgh, PA; Bloomington, IN; Savannah, GA; Astoria, Queens; New Haven, CT; Ithaca, NY: Portland, OR; Portland, ME; SF, CA; Flagstaff, AZ

Outside, it looks like blueberry pie smashed on Nathalie’s dad’s rich face in that party crashing scene from Girls Just Want to Have Fun:

I couldn’t sleep one night last year and all of a sudden this very worn rug came into my head. I couldn’t place where I’d seen it, thought about it until light broke. Then I went to Vashon Island a couple of months ago and there it was. In this old general store. I almost looked past it.

It’s the same as easy-to-forget TV shows like Dolphin’s Cove or Brooklyn Bridge. Everybody remembers stuff they can’t find on YouTube. Which is good way to check and see if you’re alive or a ghost of a ghost.

The shipping guy left at my job. I’m the image librarian. The marketing person. And for now I’m the shipping guy, too. Which means I convey e-mail messages like this:

The labels that stick on envelopes should be printed black + 2 Pantone colors (matching your supplied sample logo) 1000 sheets of 68 x 102mm 8-up sheet (1,537 this time plus future mailings). Then black addresses on the logo label for this 1,537. One label stick on one envelope. Sticker paper sample and blueline will be sent to client in Paris for the 8-up label for approval. All additional catalogues and invitations sent directly to NYC and London will also need to be placed in envelopes and stickered with blank mailing labels.

It may sound nutty, but there’s something surprisingly gratifying in writing bullet-point messages about quantity and carton weight, sending PDFs of destination addresses, requesting quotes, that sort of thing. It’s the part of me that wants to be a tax preparer, the part that aced algebra in high school and logic in college.

In general I consider myself to be floaty verbal communicator. Somebody who thinks about vintage birds sailing on a string of balloons or pickled beats with licorice arms and legs dancing in the streets.

But this shipping stuff, I could really do this. Because it’s like every day is a post-it note, and you cross it off. You go home, wash your hands, make dinner, roll up your sleeves, tie on a bib, and dig in.

I was living in a big, old wooden house in the middle of Indiana on 9/11. My friend Karin, who I’d been in NYC with the summer before, came over. We sat cold, surrounded by farm roads, and watched the towers come down in replay after replay.

The TV in my house didn’t have an antenna, so we mostly watched snow, then saw rough outlines of buildings falling. It all seemed more fantastical than real, like a horrible Jenga cube or icicle falling off a gutter.

Off to eat linguine and shrimp, but I wanted to show you my new “home office” first:

Apparently in Australia, they take their mushrooms very seriously.

Ever heard of the mushroom tunnel? Didn’t think so.

Had a true, long weekend, and I fell into it face-first. Long sleeps, mini-naps, re-arranging bookshelves, watching Netflix and eating chili.

Which made coming back into the world today especially difficult. Honestly, it’s left me without clear thoughts or ideas. For me, borders between the work week and weekend are more defined than ever these days.

I’m waiting for the double-cure. White wine and red. Clean hands in gloves. Babies in arms. Jesus and Mary.

Four more from California:

L to R: Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack in Bernal Heights, Palm Tree at Indian Springs; Exterior of Ritual Coffee on Valencia, Living Room at Chateau de Vie

I heard this old lady say, “I’ll die the day my gobbley neck scrapes the sidewalk. That’s when my pillowey ass is more likely than ever to betray me.”

Penguin’s digital fiction project “We Tell Stories” is a collection of tales based on six classic works by six different authors presented digitally in six different ways. Kindle I can take or leave, but the idea of reading such an imaginative, visually interesting series on screen is actually pretty appealing. Check it out.

Recently, I was in California:

L to R: Bi-Rite grocery on 18th and Guerrero, Indian Springs, Hotel Rex lobby, Tartine Bakery

Friday night:

Ate steak frites at Cafe Lago; gave wife birthday gifts–charm bracelet and Seahawks v. Bears tickets; Ate cake; Looked at Italy photos; Asked wife to hide keys to balcony so I didn’t jump off, almost caused scene.

Saturday night:

Had burger and fries at the Red Mill (noticing a theme in diet); went to bed.

Sunday:

Got up, went to church; Went to Bluwater (wanted a burger and fries) but Sue wanted pizza. I ordered a half-sausage and half-cheese with half the normal amount of sauce. It comes out will full sauce, tomatoes on all parts. By the time Sue got done taking the tomatoes and sauce off she ends up picking through the thing and barely eating it. Oh, and I had a mai tai with extra cherries. You know, maraschino cherries instead of fruit. The waitress asked if I wanted grenadine in it, too. I said sure, I want the grenadine AND the cherries. So I’m halfway through my drink and see a black speck in the bottom, spend ten minutes trying to get it out. The waitress noticed, and instead of getting me a full new mai tai she gives me half a drink in a tumbler without the speck in it. Which was good enough for me.

Then we walked Greenlake and noticed how many dogs looke like their owners.

I love him.

from a Marc Jacobs ad?

I love her.

I went to SFMoma in San Francisco last week and, out of everything, found a sure favorite detail from Joseph Cornell’s photo repro “For Sale” circa 1957:

When I was small I found three dead fish under the tree next to my window and felt spectacularly unsafe and alarmed. Some boogeyman fisherman crept to the tree the night before. Then he took out a protractor and compass and did the most complicated geography to somehow get the fish to lay perfectly straight.

The creepieest line-dead fish ever, because they were mathematically dead. I never left my window open at night after finding the fish, for years and years and years.

I’ve spent so many Sunday nights taking the same little walk with D. The route is the same–up the hill, past the bodega, the pub, the bar, the doughnut place, the rummage shop. Down the hill, past the tree that smells like moth balls and the crazy guy that cooks with too much garlic’s kitchen window. He’s got old tikki torches and tin cans growing weeds all around his door, which makes me swear I really live in Athens, GA and not Seattle, WA.

I come upstairs after, belly growing week by week, and wash my face, pluck my eyebrows, put on pajamas and settle in. It’s the most personal, universal, everyday end-of-the-weekend routine.

I’m officially on vacation and off-line for the next week.

See you back on Weatherspoon Monday, August 24.

I’ve always wanted to feel more than I sometimes naturally do in certain settings, like by feeling more the situation will be heightened enough to become memorable. Which I’m realizing is total crap.

Some people I care about are losing their jobs today, and I’m sitting here near the end of a day that feels more like November than August listening to Elliott Smith. Baby’s kicking, E. Smith sings, “I’m never going to know you now but I’m going to love you anyhow.”

You don’t realize how much time you spend with co-workers, how big a part of your life they are, until they leave town or something. And then there’s this huge space that’s not actual intimacy lost, but commonality. Shared Mondays, bus rides, pet and kid updates, the sort of things people say around the office that they don’t say other places. Like, “That job is a total clusterfuck.” Nobody else says clusterfuck. And that’s over-sad.

When you’re pregnant you have twice as much blood and water, a holy mixture, swishing around your body. And now I have mosquito bites all over my arms and shoulders to prove it.

So when I lay in bed I imagine that my whole pregnant body looks infrared to mosquitoes, or that I’m ecto-green under the sheets. And for the last few mornings I’ve woken up covered in fresh bites after some lucky mosquito has had a very large meal.

I was up and down all night last night, and just before dawn I imagined charting out each bite. I started associating them one by one with particularly consuming or important parts of recent life, color-coding the bites into general categories like work, pregnancy, God, family.

I was about to get up and sketch the whole thing when I heard a buzz in my ear. Then I sort of lost it, woke up D and croaked, “A mosquito is eating me alive. DO SOMETHING!” I can’t see without my contacts, so he turned on the light and I burrowed into the sheets. He found the mosquito on the wall–this little thing gorged with my blood that had done so much damage–smashed it dead.

And then I was asleep, like that.

I spent too much of every summer in high school watching MTV when I should have been reading. The things I loved more than anything were buzz clips, little promos that showed a few seconds of “alternative” videos. And prime-time MTV really played videos then. Good ones, too, meaty singles like Morrissey’s “The More You Ignore Me,” Radiohead’s “Creep, ” Smashing Pumpkin’s “Today”. But my very favorite was J.Buckley’s “Last Goodbye”:

I walked home from yoga in the rain, passed under a red bird feeder next to a brick building with wooden shudders, and thought about my parents, visiting the muggy midwest, bloating up after a family barbeque. Then I went home and had a steak and tomato salad, equally hearty but a lot more earthy.

Is that people start putting up pictures of themselves that look a lot like this.

The brother of the woman that was drunk and high and drove down the highway for miles outside of New York City on the wrong side of the road said she wasn’t an alcoholic, and I believe him. She crashed and killed herself, and her and her brother’s kids, and the people they hit, all in a second.

Maybe it’s just that it was July, and she had all these kids in the car, and it was rainy, the kind of day that felt like everybody should be cleaning bathrooms, or napping, or making coffee. But not driving in traffic and worrying about a lump in her leg. So let’s just say she started drinking scotch until everything smelled like Mr. Clean, smoked a joint from a little sardine tin rolled in a sock in her dresser drawer, and kept moving. Everybody keeps saying she had a stroke, then drank, or that something spectacularly medical happened. Diabetes, heart attack, stroke, and aneurysm have all been ruled out, says a county coroner.

But me? I think there’s something annually reckless about late July, because we’re on the cusp of everything falling.

Today on Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reviewed Greg Grandin’s new book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. I can’t believe I’d never heard about the overly ambitious, culturally unaware, ecologically disastrous, over-the-top antics of Henry Ford, especially his failed all-American town called Fordlandia reconstructed deep in the jungle of Brazil. The book highlights the culture clashes that ensued between Ford workers living on a Main St. built 18 hours from anything resembling civilization:

Things went bad over simple stuff, like serving food. “Ford had very particular understandings about what a proper diet should be,” Grandin says. “He tried to impose brown rice and whole-wheat bread and canned peaches and oatmeal — and that itself created discontent.”

But when a Ford engineer changed the way food was served — from wait service to cafeteria-style service — the workers rebelled. Angry workers destroyed the mess hall, pushed trucks into the river and nearly ruined the whole operation. It cost tens of thousands of dollars of damage, Grandin says.

But Ford didn’t just want to tame men; he wanted to tame the jungle itself — and therein was his next failure.

It’s like the jungle itself inevitably made people really wild, made it impossible to live in an assembly-line fashion.

Listen to Corrigan’s whole review here. If you think about it, the failings of Fordlandia actually make modern-day Detroit all the weightier.

I just posted about this over at marquandblog.com, but it’s such a cool project I want to post on Weatherspoon as well. There’s an artist from Los Angeles called Robert Fontenot. After hearing that LACMA was deaccessioning more than 100 costume and textile collection items he bought up about half of them and is wonderfully re-imagining the objects. From Turkish textile to wastebasket, coat to kite, and skirt to dog bed, he’s about half-way through the project. You can follow along on Fontenot’s blog, here.

By the way, I have little desire to live in LA, except that I’m pretty sure that everything LACMA does is brilliant. Their ask a curator series, blog, and Twitter page are all addictive. My company just produced a book for a LACMA show up now called Your Bright Future profiling contemporary Korean artists, and the whole exhibit looks so interactive and interesting that I’m tempted to pop on Virgin Air this weekend and fly to LA just to go to the museum.

It’s the hottest 29 July ever recorded in Seattle–reached 102 degrees a while ago. Can’t believe I’m pregnant.

I’m ignoring the heatwave in Seattle, even though I’m pretty sure my swollen feet and snotty nose aren’t. To cope, I’m listening to a lot more radio stories this week.

I’m usually uninspired by Bob Mondello’s film reviews, but I loved today’s piece on All Things Considered called Food On Film: The Famished And The Fabulous. I think I’ve seen all of the movies he mentions at least once. Have a listen.

I don’t want to be rich, I just want to live in a house with a really big dining room that fits a table like this:

If you haven’t, please watch I Like Killing Flies, the 2004 documentary on Shopsin’s, the famous NYC diner beefed up by loud-mouthed, warm-hearted, made-in-Manhattan owner/opinionator Kenny Shopsin.

Here’s the man himself making mac and cheese pancakes for the NYT:

As if Kenny isn’t cool enough, check out his graphic designer daughter’s on-line store, Novitas Aetatem. Can somebody buy me the bacon scarf, please?

Warm water and butterscotch cake. My father in law fell asleep on the couch until his daughter told him how much her chiffon wedding cake costs.

My parents were a day away from buying a house on Quail Canyon Drive. This was northern Indiana. No quails or canyons naturally existed for hundreds of miles, mind you. The house is lassoed in blue below.

A few years later, when I was a senior in high school we almost bought this other place on Sweet Blossom Court. My dad had an official handshake with Herb, the subdivision’s builder, as an unwritten expression of the deal. When my parents pulled the offer later, dad got a very tart letter explaining that the arrangement was legally banished. Including the handshake with Herb. This other place is in yellow below.

I found these almost-homes on Google maps, even though I had no good reason to go looking for them and I’m glad we never ended up in either place. My real street had a real name that had to do with trees, which we really had.

Except that it’s still new to me–seeing the tip tops of places I’ve been inside of, known the smell of–whenever I want.

Bad: How Ricki Lake can be the earthy, intervention-free birth advocate we see in The Business of Being Born one minute, and the US Weekly bikini body, host of VHI’s Charm School the next.

Worse: How I justify watching Charm School like once a week on average, because it’s 3 p.m., and I’m at the gym, and the tv’s giving me three options–sports, Wolf Blitzer, or Go Ricki.

I love Jasmine Park from Pike/Pine’s new blog, Face Like a Blessing. It’s such a simple and humanizing idea, photographing interesting, memorable faces.

It’s a boy!

Please tell me you have some good name suggestions, I’m plumb out of ideas.

Cliff Mass explains that last night, Seattle did dishes and walked dogs under the highest clouds in the world:

These are ice clouds that form on dust, probably produced by meteors. Such clouds often have a silvery or bluish color, and a ragged look. So on the next few clear nights take a look during twilight and see if you can spot them.

I’ll be on the look out for more noctilucent clouds tonight.

This Thursday, my dear friend Gala Bent is in a group show at the SAM Gallery. An example of her work–all of which I’m pretty sure is a purple heart perched on a lamp stand, only truer–is featured on the flyer:

Summer Introductions: Seattle Art Museum Gallery

Opening: Thursday, July 16th, 5-7pm / Hours: Tuesday through Friday 10:30 am to 5 pm
Our annual Summer Introductions show features eight artists who are new to SAM Gallery. This summer’s artists are Gala Bent, Mary Margaret Briggs, Andrée B. Carter, Garek J. Druss, Grant Hottle, Jason Larsen, Andrea Schwartz-Feit and Liz Tran.

Located east of the Seattle Art Museum at Third Avenue and University Street in downtown Seattle.

Here’s one way to spend Friday afternoon. Head for the ferry from downtown Seattle at noon, to Vashon by 1. Lunch at the Monkey Tree, beach-combing, coffee, lavender farm. Back in the city by five.

I can’t go back to the midwestern house I grew up in, but I can go to my parent’s condo for dinner every week in Wallingford. Which is sort-of the same, only without the our-house smell, and without my well-preserved old room, and without a yard.

I’m certain my mother has read more about my pregnancy than I have. Being a mother, she’s also very aware of anything that might not be good for the baby. Like booze, for example. But the thing is, I tell her, when you cook with booze for an hour or so, the alcohol cooks out and the flavor sticks around.

“But you can never be too careful,” mom says.

She went to the store after work recently and bought ingredients to make spinach lasagna for our Tuesday dinner. Everything was assembled and saran-wrapped in time for the 10:00 news. But before she could sit down, the story goes, she gasped.

“I used vodka sauce for the lasagna,” she told me over the phone. She started imaging the baby drowning in a saucy, eye rubbing mess. So it was back to the store, then up until midnight making another lasagna with plain red sauce. She never baked the vodka lasagna.

I can see my dad plopping this perfectly good casserole in a trash bag, then holding the hot plastic at an arm’s reach and grumbling all the way to the trash bin.

Even so, I think my mother has a good shot at being a better mother than I’m ever going to be. Because she thinks of everything, in case. Even if it’s ridiculous.

Seems like I was asleep more than awake for the first few months of my pregnancy, so my regular reading pattern slipped. But a very cool thing happened last week, one that hasn’t for a long while. I started reading Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) and I couldn’t stop turning the page.

I don’t really want to tell you what the book is about, or why it’s worth you reading, because all you need to know is that this is the sort of book that you don’t have to make time to read. You’ll think about it before going to bed at night (especially if you grew up in the 80s, when dads seemed much more grown up than 2009 dads) and you’ll want to hold off on making dinner to read another chapter.

Whenever I finish a paperback I slam it on the ground really hard. Just to say that what’s done is done. But sometimes, and in the case of Black Swan Green this will certainly be true, it’s because I really loved reading it, being in a certain world for a little while, and now the holiday’s over.

Mount Rainier has been out lately, and seeing it so often has got to be the best by-product of spending summer in Seattle. Driving to the airport last night I waited for the one turn on I-5 when the mountain appears out of nowhere and takes up the whole sky.

The first time I ever saw the mountain was around this turn towards driving towards Sea-Tac, and it was more of a monster than a trusted friend. I screamed. Everybody in the car did. It was a huge baked alaska, oozing toasty marshmallow and runny ice cream towards the car.

I flew over Rainier at night once, and the whole thing was like a glitter ball, silver-spooned and firey. That’s when it turned into something supernatural–the real and honest truth that God’s got to exist. I’m pretty sure the mountain started floating with the plane and turned more Everest than Everest, a petrified forest and a candied anti-Hades all at once.

I took this fuzzy photo last night from my phone and wanted to post it, just to show you hard evidence. There’s still light in the sky in Seattle on July 1 at 10:20 p.m.

We just bought a car from a guy named Carlos. He has a son named Nacho and owns a taco truck. His brother Carlos was there, too. He owns a hotdog stand. And their dad Carlos Sr. was in the car. We met to take a test drive of their Toyota yesterday in the parking lot of Dick’s burgers on Broadway.

I hopped in and saw a half-eaten hot dog on top of a newspaper in the back seat. Which I actually found refreshing. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m bone dry from a weekend of haggling with used car dealers in sad white show rooms. So this, this meeting of the Carlos men and Nacho was genius. Real material.

The car must sound horrible when you read about it, so greasy, all of this imaginary carnival food caked inside. But the embarrassing part is that the car is actually a lot cleaner than our old car. I’ve promptly scheduled a full interior soaping of the Carlos car for Friday in case.

By the way, I’ve been listening to Ani DiFranco on a co-worker’s playlist, all nostalgia. I still can’t get over her line, “Some crazy f-er just carved a sculpture out of butter and propped it up in the middle of the bonanza breakfast bar.” Very fitting for tonight, when we’re picking our new car up at Carlos’ place before dinner.

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.

My walk from work to the Hill:

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.

It’s official!

photo courtesy of Wright Eats

Food Trucks: Maximus Minimus–BBQ Pork truck shaped like a pig! Marination Mobile–Korean/Hawaiian deliciousness

SoDo: Hudson

Captiol Hill: The Lookout (formerly Artemis) Anchovies and Olives

West Seattle: Fresh Bistro

Fremont: Sinners and Saints

Seward Park: Flying Squirrel Pizza

Belltown: Bedlam Coffee