Getaway

Psst. Did you know you can go to the beach in Richmond? Yes, that Richmond. The one with the illegal dumping problem and the murder problem and all the warehouses and self-storage palaces.

We spent an afternoon on the sand with a backpack full of periodicals and books and ripe summer fruit, looking out at the Golden Gate bridge and watching kids wrestling a giant driftwood log in the surf. I went in up to my knees, and have yet to die of mercury poisoning or a staph infection, and even the parking is free.

Miller-Knox. Check it out.

Bounty/Time Bomb

As of last night I have 63 pears in my closet. 63 pears that will all achieve ripeness simultaneously. I live alone, with very little free cupboard, freezer or counter space, and am responisble for feeding only myself and, occasionally, the Yankee Fan, who has very strong policies regarding the consumption of cooked fruit. And I have 63 pears.

The thing is, I have a hard time passing up free materials. Self-contained items aren’t so much of a problem; I’ve gritted my teeth and sailed by plenty of books and small appliances and delightful knick knacks. The problem is when potential rears its ugly-now-but-think-how-pretty-I-could-be head. The potential for demolishing and rebuilding an unflattering polyester dress, the potential for turning an crusty chair into a tiered planter (more on that soon), the potential for making a bunch of wastebaskets out of banner scraps from work. I face the triple threat of being really cheap, really into recycling, and really prone to procrastinating by crafting, and I usually lose.

So, the pears. In the front yard of my building, there is a pear tree. Since moving in this spring, I’d been watching its wee baby pears fatten up. A few days ago, I noticed some pears lying on the lawn, still green and hard. Was the tree ill? Underwatered? Harassed by neighborhood hoodlums? According to the internet, no. Apparently, you have to pick pears before the seem edible (but after they ooze juice upon being sliced) and squirrel them away in a cool dark place to ripen. And one of the signs that it’s harvest time is dropped fruit. So harvest I did. I felt so satisfied and pioneer-style, carefully laying out my ranks of pears, standing them at attention inside fruit-fly deflecting pillowcases.

Now what? I have a lot of pounds of free pears and unlike a polyester dress, they can’t just hang out in the closet for 3 years until I get around to using them for something. To be honest, I don’t actually like pears that much. But they were free. And about to go to waste, because who the hell besides pear farmers knows that you’re supposed to pick pears when they’re nasty and hard. I’m hoping my oven can sustain an even, low temperature well enough for some serious drying. Perhaps I could even set up a pear-leather stand on the stoop and raise enough money to buy the full-size food processor I’ve been dreaming of lately.

In the meantime, if you know a good pear recipe, pass it along.

The Spicy Smell of Success

When I went all crazy planting a vegetable garden in pots this spring, I was more than a little afraid that all the crops would fail miserably, not to mention publicly, since my “garden” is really a strip of dirt along the front wall of my building. The dill did succumb to mildew a couple weeks ago, and the zucchini contracted some kind of tragic disease and withered leaf by leaf, but other than that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

My jalapeno plant, which I selected based on its delightfully lame name (Much Nacho) has been the biggest thrill. It currently sports 9, count ‘em, 9 glossy, green beauties of varying length, and there are still many more flowers just starting to bloom.

I’m already planning a harvest feast in my head: 100% homegrown salsa (I’ve got the tomatoes and cilantro, plus Davis-grown onions and garlic from my dad), some black beans stewed up with fresh epazote, mojitos starring the mint that has rebounded from an earlier caterpillar attack…We’ll sit on the ever-more-brown front lawn in the shade of the maple tree and watch the parade of neighborhood dogs and crazies until the sun goes down. It might not quite be country living, but it’s close enough for me.

Love is New York

This was my fourth trip to New York, and I know I’ll be back soon, so aside from an ironclad determination to be engulfed by giant waves of steel at the MOMA, I felt pleasantly unobliged to go to 20 museums in a day or to do anything in particular really. It worked out well, at least by my standards.
A few highlights:

1. I stuck my feet in 3 new bodies of water (the Hudson, Long Island Sound and Esophus Creek)

2. I saw some large, dead horseshoe crabs.

3. I bowled my best game ever.

4. JB and I went to the Peter Pan Bakery in Greenpoint where we purchased an obscene quantity of doughnuts, drank an egg cream, and watched old Polish men gossip. I was tempted to order a cup of Sanka just because it was available, but cooler heads prevailed.

5. I saw baby swans, baby robins, and teenage ospreys.

6. At a souvenir/crap shop in Phoenicia (in the heart o’ the Catskills) the Yankee Fan and I got the best mugs ever for only a dollar each. His says “Roommate You’re the Best” and had a clip art of a key. Mine says “Love is New York” and has a lot of colorful hearts.

7. I ordered and ate a completely spherical and very messy pastry from a Polish bakery without every really figuring out or worrying about what it was.

8. I did not get lost even a little bit. Except when I was going from the train station to JB’s apartment but that doesn’t count because it was very early in the morning.

9. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with a cute boy.

10. The Yankee Fan’s mom bought us 5 boxes of vegetarian sushi to eat on the airplane and offered to do my laundry.

Victory Harvest

Yesterday I harvested the first ripe tomato from my wee garden.  It was small and yellow, and it was tasty.  Since I consumed it immediately, I have no photographic evidence of its existence.  This is a scientific rendering of what it looked like.  You’ll see I’ve included an equally scientific rendering of a ruler to give a sense of scale.

The most important thing about this tomato, and the reason I really should have documented before devouring, is that with this savory fruitlet, I won Tomato Race ‘07.  The Yankee Fan and I purchased and planted tomato plants in our respective gardens about a month and a half ago, and we’ve been competing to see who would be the first to acheive ripeness.  It wasn’t really a scientifically matched competition, since I planted in pots and he planted in the ground, and we planted totally different varieties, but I don’t care.  Because victory’s doubly sweet when you can actually eat it.

Pottery Fairy

I haven’t written anything in a while because I’ve been very busy doing a whole lot of not-especially-interesting things. The dramatic high point of Thursday night was when I was watching some ancient X-Files episode where there’s something with tentacles living in the sewer system of Fort Myers, Florida, and I was really tired but I couldn’t go to bed because I was waiting for Lemon Bundt Cake #2 to finishing baking (note to self, don’t make enough batter for two bundt cakes that take a really long time to bake when you only have one bundt pan), and then I fell asleep, and then when the timer rang it startled me so badly that I actually fell off the couch.
But something mysterious happened overnight. My porch was visited by the pottery fairy. I went out to get the newspaper this morning, and sitting on the two chairs I keep outside were three ceramic vessels (one vase, one teapot, one bowl/pot kind of thing). They are nicely glazed, mildly hippie-ish in style, obviously handmade by someone with some skills, but not a professional artisan. No note or signatures of any kind (and I did check inside the teapot).
TOTAL MYSTERY!
I have a variety of theories.
1) They were left by a crazy person, which needless to say are in plentiful supply in Oakland
2) My next door neighbor has a secret admirer who is a potter. Her door is on the other side of the building, but her address is the same as mine but with an “A” at the end.
3) I have a secret admirer who is a potter.

I’m hoping it’s not number 1, mostly because I’d rather not have crazies, even benign, pottery-dispensing crazies, on my porch. I’m hoping it’s not number two because it would be really sad if potential true love betwixt neighbor and mystery person was thwarted by something as banal as bad address reading. So by default I’m rooting for number 3. It has been a long time (like since junior high) since I’ve had a secret admirer (at least that I know of). But who would the potential candidates be? I don’t think I know any pottery types. Unless it’s my nutty upstairs British neighbor..He does always seem to be wearing tie-dye. And yesterday afternoon he spent an unecessary amount of time asking me about my garden and informed me that he has seen my silhouette in the evenings when I’m sitting at my sewing machine in the kitchen and how it was so nice to see somebody not sitting in front of a computer. Because he’s an old-fashioned guy, you know. eh….yeah…
Regardless, I’m not sure what to do with the goods. I don’t want to mess with them in case they belong/are intended for someone else, but I don’t really want them sitting on my chairs. What’s the appropriate waiting period for disposal of anonymous pottery?
Maybe when I get home they’ll just be gone.

It’s a Good Thing

I spend a goodly amount of time being obsessively aggravated by trivial things that are out of my control. For example, many of my waking hours grind by in close proximity to someone who has the tendency to say “somewheres” instead of “somewhere,” “anywheres” instead of “anywhere,” and so on and so forth. In addition, when describing a conversation that has taken place, this person invariably and liberally peppers the narrative with “and so I says to her, I says…” And no, this person does NOT have any regional or generational excuse for such diction. We’re talking about a 20-something suburban CA native, not a charmingly toothless backwoods codger. Needless to say, the more I think about those gratuitous esses and “says”es, the more annoyed I become, and the more I notice them, and therefore think about them more and become more annoyed and…Yes, I could probably expend my mental energy in more productive ways. Like fuming about the obnoxious microwaving habits of my coworkers.
Eh. Sometimes I worry that I have too many mean, mean thoughts, and that some internal organ or other is slowly turning into a lump of coal as a result. So this week I’ve been trying to focus on some things that, while equally trivial, are pleasant.
Here are a few:
1) My power bill went down by 11 percent this month! So what if that’s only $2.00. Al Gore would still be proud.
2) In contrast to the frequent disappearances as my old apartment, my newspaper has not once been stolen from my walkway at the new abode, even when I haven’t been home to retrieve it until the evening and it was practically in the middle of the sidewalk!
3) The biggest fruit on my biggest tomato plant is surpassed gumball size!
4) Upon close inspection, it turns out that the sailor-hat-wearing stuffed duck the Yankee Fan brought me from Boston derives his odd and delighful facial expression from crazy inward-sweeping eyelashes.

See, life is good.

Basket

I’ve been pretty into the lines of strawberry baskets lately. I drew this the other day on the computer. And I’m thinking it would look pretty cool as an embroidery project. I do have many raggedy spools of black thread and a rarely-used embroidery hoop…

A Hike Through the Piney, Whiny Woods

Thursday evening is usually a night when I Accomplish Things.  When I say “accomplish,” of course, I speak loosely.  Sometimes accomplishing means finishing a pile of sewing projects, prepping things for an elaborate Friday dinner, drawing a new bird picture, cleaning the kitchen and watching a movie but managing to do something productive whilst watching.  Other times, well, I get around to putting away all the slightly sticky plastic bags that I’ve been religiously rinsing and air-drying for future reuse.  Tonight is somewhere in the middle; the sink is ever-so-clean, the worms are fed, and the laundry is duffle-bagged in anticipation of a bumpin’ Friday night laundromat trip, but I haven’t gotten around to the more aggravating items on my to-do list.

10% of the problem is that I went to work at 6:30a.m. and am therefore a little low on energy.  The other 90% is that I’m pining for the Yankee Fan, who is currently in Red Sox territory, visiting family members.  I’d be the first to say that this pining is absurd.  He only left yesterday night and will be back on Sunday, and we almost never kick it on Thursdays anyway (it’s Accomplishing Night after all).  The rational part of me is excited to have a weekend of endless productivity potential.  I can get up early, and sew, and get angry at the sewing machine, and figure it out, and work on my fledgling InDesign skills, and get going on the art project I’ve been noodling around with in my head before the sun sets on Saturday.  I can spend hours cooking and freezing stuff.  I could make 100 pupusas!

But instead I’m drifting around my apartment, putting away stray pens and hairbands, pondering if I should even bother eating anything for dinner since it’s almost 9:30.  I even have a stack of purse parts by the loveseat, waiting forlornly to be cut out while I watch Netflix’s latest offering (which is in turn waiting forlornly to have its envelope torn open).

On the one hand, it annoys me to be laid low so easily.  I feel like (as I’ve often told the YF) a dumb, needy, girly girl, which isn’t how I’d like to think of myself.  On the other hand, when I step back, it’s kind of a sweet realization.  I feel lucky that right now I care about someone so much that it really, really sucks to not have the option (rarely exercised, but comforting in theory) to bike spontaneously and recklessly through nighttime Oakland to fling my arms around him.

Eh.  Sunday’s not too far away.  I’m sure I’ll be back to my mean old self soon.

So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, mew mew

The first time I went over to the Yankee Fan’s house, back in August of ‘05, it was a memorable day. He gave me homegrown heirloom tomatoes in a paper bag with my name written on it. We accidentally go locked out of the house and he nearly fell to his death trying to scale the carport and break in through the second story window. And I fell madly in love. With his cat.
Since then, the three of us have spent many quality hours together cuddling, lying around, overeating or whining about when and what dinner will be (it’s mostly me and the cat on that last one).
Here’s the problem though. The cat is not actually the Yankee Fan’s cat. It’s his roommate’s cat. She’s the mom. He’s the doting, permissive uncle who always dishes out a little extra kibble on the sly. And the roommate just got a job in another city. And the cat’s going with her. In two weeks.
Pathetic though it may seem, considering the cat is not mine, and it’s not like I’ve known him since kittenhood or anything, I’m totally heartbroken. I’ve known enough cats in my days to realize he’s one of the irreplaceable ones. First of all, he is, as the Yankee Fan has remarked, ridiculously tactile. He’ll tolerate and even appear to enjoy, the most obnoxious man-handling. Hold him in two hands high above your head? He’ll take it as an opportunity to stretch out to maximum length. Hold him upside down resting on your forearms? Same deal. Drag him under the covers and cry into his soft grey flank? He’ll stay there and purr and lick your fingers until you feel better. Or at least until he’s done removing any residue that might be lingering from the sandwich you ate 4 hours ago.

He’s also endlessly, pathetically, hilariously food-obsessed. Very little is safe from his busy paws and sharp little fangs.

At his lowest point, we’ve seen him licking the inside of the kitchen sink and dragging raw asparagus trimmings out of the compost tub. He came close to drinking my birthday cake batter, he disemboweled a bag of baker’s yeast, and he’ll gnaw/suck on a discarded corn cob like it’s manna from heaven. But his very favorite food is bread. Leave a baguette, or a challah, or a loaf of million-grain hippie bread within his reach, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to come downstairs in the morning to find the wrapper viciously shredded and a fist-size chunk of the contents gnawed away. A couple weeks ago he carried off an entire hot dog bun in his jaws. Take that Dr. Atkins!
In celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the Yankee Fan and I brought him home a leftover corn tortilla from our dinner at Juan’s Place. The instant it emerged from my pocket, his yellow eyes lit up, the purr started to rumble, and he hopped up expectantly on his cat tree/dining platform. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have given him more than a shred or two, but it’s hard to say no when you’re not sure how many more times you’ll get to sneak the world’s sweetest cat a bellyfull of carbs.