beetiger

bard_bloom, projectmothra, and I took a trip to the West Coast over the past week and a half. If I were being really meticulous, I'd do a full travelogue, but I've been home a day and a half and seem to be moving into the "better something than nothing" camp concerning documenting, so here you go.

First stop was Portland, to visit with heron61, amberite, teaotter, and Winterbeast, who probably has an LJ but I don't know it. Highlights included the zoo, the Chinese Garden, the Forestry Museum, Powell's Books, and Voodoo Donut. Also, lots of time with heron61 and family/extended family. It was good to get to know them all a little better, and I think all of the Blooms might have left with a crush on amberite. ;)

Then we took the Amtrak to Seattle, which was a surprisingly pleasant trip. They check luggage now, and we had a nice table where projectmothra spent most of the ride doing a workbook he'd picked up at Powell's.

Our hosts in Seattle were shaterri, quarrel and fuschichou, who were all generous and lovely, hanging out and cooking for us and all of that. We also got to spend lots of time with aprivatefox and mufi, who managed to take a good bit of time off to spend with us, as well as making projectmothra some puzzles and letting us get discounts on attractions. I also got a nice amount of time with tracerj and with lediva, who was co-vacationing with us and staying Chez Tracer at the Lapinian Embassy. Highlights of this part of the trip included going berry picking down by the slough, visiting the Experimental Music Project/SF Hall of Fame, drinking bizarre martinis, going to Archie McPhee, wandering the Pike Place Market, eating Japanese tapas, spending a day at PAX, a big dim sum gathering, and eating shaterri's cooking. Hmm. There's a lot of eating in there. No wonder I gained weight this trip. ;)

In any case, everyone was awesome. Thanks for hosting, and thanks for being good friends.

*******************************
Today was projectmothra's first day of kindergarten, a half day. He was very nervous about it last night --about making friends mostly, which hits my own buttons in a huge way. But he was excited by this morning, and I think he had a good time, though I'm not sure that the reports that lunchtime for kindergarten is only 2 minutes, or that there are two kids named Ari with no last names at all in his class, are quite right. I need to get a class list somehow so I can do birthday invites over the next week. I'm going to invite the whole class as it's too early in the year for him to know who he'll be friendly with. OTOH, the party falls during the Columbus Day weekend which often cuts attendance, so I think it will work out okay. The place we're having it can hold 40 if for some reason huge numbers of kids accept.

I've ended up doing some interesting casual eating in NYC in the last few days, at places I didn't know about until the day (or minute) I was trying to go to them, and thought I'd share.

1)Empanadas Cafe, 56-27 Van Doren St., Corona Park. Crowded little lunch counter with a mixed Hispanic and police and emergency worker crowd, serving 28 kinds of empanadas in 3 styles: corn, whole grain, and white, at about $1.25 each. All made to order, so there were tons of people waiting around crammed in to the space, but we snagged a little table in the corner, one of 2 in the store. It took about 10 minutes to get the food, and it was fresh out of the fryer, very flavorful, and each kind I tried was very different from the others, not generic. They also had little dixie cups of homemade ice cream frozen on to popsicle sticks. I had a lovely, icy, tamarind. Apparently very famous, though I had not heard of it until I started poking around Chowhound trying to find a cheap but interesting place to eat near the Museum.

2)Soy, 102 Suffolk Street. I got to the Complaints Choir rehearsal a bit early last night, found a parking spot right across from the rehearsal space, and after nearly failing my dinner roll and going to a Burger King up the block, saw this across the street. Japanese "mama-style" home-cooking, mostly based in soy, though she had a beef curry and a spicy tuna bowl on the menu too. Tiny place again, counter plus about four tables. There were homemade bookmarks for giveaway, little toys to play with on the counter, and a sketchbook in which patrons were encouraged to draw, full of little art and poems about how people loved the place. While I was there, it was empty save for two take-out customers. The lady at the counter was slow and quiet, but the "Treasure Pockets" I had were triple soy-licious: fried inari pockets stuffed with a pressed mix of seasoned tofu, studded with whole soybeans, served with rice and some pickles and cabbage. When I walked by later in the evening, it looked busy.

3) Sugar Sweet Sunshine, 126 Rivington St. Even after being told it was there by some members of the choir who were squeeing about it being right nearby, I walked by this place by mistake the first time. It's okay --my detour took my the extra block to Babeland, which was fun, and the fine ladies there pointed me back to the cupcakes. At ten p.m. on a Tuesday, there was a line of people nearly out the door, trying to buy designer, yet homey, cupcakes from pierced and tattooed young people. The cupcakes had names like "Oooey Gooey", "Sassy Red Velvet", and "Bob", who was vanilla with chocolate almond butter cream. The guy ahead of me in line bought 25 cupcakes, ate one while waiting, and told me that he was taking them all home to eat in his pajamas, even though he didn't really like cupcakes very much. I got mine to go and brought them home to share with bard_bloom. Damned good cupcakes, with buttercream that was rich but neither heavy nor overly sweet. Never going to do a trip to Babeland or DeMask without stopping there also again.

There's a lovely chrysalis attached to the frame of the sliding glass doors on to my deck. Reference pictures I can can find online, together with information on diet, relative to the plants I have sitting on said deck (parsley and dill), leads me to believe that it's an Eastern Black Swallowtail.

Here, look for yourself!

It's 5 am, and I've done everything I can sensibly do on the 'zine between now and when the copy shop opens. I hope it's okay if I catch a nap for an hour or two. Reading webcomics and drinking beer while scribbling incoherent things in the margins of the master copy just doesn't seem right, but it's the only other option I can think of right now.

Catch you all in a bit. Thanks.

I no longer have a blank page. I have nearly 8000 words on paper. Time to begin thinking about composition and layout. And possibly cutting a few words.

Please sponsor! It's for a good cause, and it lets me know you're out there listening.

Huh. Apparently some time between this morning and now, the two-way stop at the corner near my house became a four-way stop. This is a good thing -- we've been asking for it for quite some time now -- but somehow I would have expected to see some construction or something, and I got confused when I saw people on the formerly through-street waiting.

I've pushed the papers into a pile on my desk, and now I'm getting some of the practical things set up to give myself this chunk of focused time. Official start time for the 24hz is 11:00 am today -- that gives me time tomorrow morning to go to Staples after dropping projectmothra off at camp and then go to Staples (which for this project I'm going to pretend is a Kinko's, just 'cause) to make physical copies of the 'zine and still finish in the 24-hour window.

I'm doing this for fun, for personal exploration, and because dammit I want to have something in particular that I can definitively say I did in 2008. But I'm also doing it for charity. Anyone who makes a donation between now and midnight tonight will get a numbered copy of the 'zine, produced in the 24 hour window, and their name listed in some sort of "sponsor" spot somewhere in the 'zine.

The charity is the fund which the Unitarian Universalists have set up to help the folks affected by the shootings in the Knoxville congregation. Much as I've found the incident personally upsetting. I have been proud of the response of my community to this tragedy, and I invite you to be part of my project, and of their healing, by making a donation of any amount. Seriously, be generous if you have the money and feel inspired, but if not, even a dollar or two is fine. This is about participation as much as anything else, and I want all of you to be a part of it.

You can donate one of three ways:
1)Go directly to the Knoxville fund webpage, make a credit card donation, and send me the receipt.

2) Use this Paypal button:

I'll collect anything that comes through this way.

3)Put a check or concealed cash in the mail to me, and let me know you did it. I trust you.

The topic of the 'zine is making stuff. I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope I'll enjoy it. See you as the day progresses.

ETA: Feel free to post elsewhere about this/send folks here!

Here are a mix of reviews for recent BPAL scents, plus of small collection of samples from other niche perfumers via Lucky Scent.

( Blah blah blah. Some things smell good and some don't. You know. )

The samples of Hay Moon, Licwiglunga, Aeronwen, Clemence, Mead Moon, Molecule 01, Escentric 02, and mb03 are available for you to purchase. $3.50 each or $25 if you take the whole set, plus $2 shipping in the US.

Lovely weekend in Boston. Though it wasn't perhaps the smartest idea to try to combine "preschooler gets to see favorite aunt's cool new apartment" and "seventh anniversary celebration" into the same weekend of visiting, we did pretty well.

I gave platelets for the first time today. It took a long time on the machine --90 minutes for a single unit -- so I got to read all of Benjamin Nugent's "American Nerd". I eat a ton of dairy, so I didn't have any of the buzzing/weird taste issues some donors get. I feel more tired than I usually do from whole blood donation, and a wee bit overemotional, but otherwise okay. Including traveling, the whole production took over 3 hours, so it's rather a time investment. I'll probably go again next week, provided the fatigue is gone by tomorrow.

Although I'm overall still in a deacquisition mode, I seem to have acquired a variety of things in the last few days. I collected a skirt featuring every animal print in the world in a hippie-clothes-store in Cambridge (it's very me, and was on sale for $9.99), a faux-artifact in the form of a carved omega-shaped boomerang that is going to go on the wall in my workshop (it's for charity!), some perfume samples that aren't from BPAL (reviews in the next not-too-long), and a shirt from torsopants (peer pressure).

Two more of my son's stuffed animals got married this evening. He seems rather interested in pairing his menagerie off. Bizarre.

Another member of my family, my brother's wife this time, joined Facebook, and within a few weeks, asked me about lediva and polyamory. I've been vaguely trying to come out in a low-key way to my family for years, and somehow the method that seems to be working is entirely passive. They're just too curious not to ask when they see it in print, I guess.

Merriam-Webster has once again added words to the dictionary. This is in fact, their job, so no surprise here. New entries include edamame, air quotes, fanboy, pescatarian, racino, and norovirus. But the "new" word (coined in 1954) they are featuring most is "mondegreen", a term for a misheard song lyric. The derivation is a mishearing of a lyric in a Scottish ballad, "laid him on the green", as "Lady Mondegreen".

In any case, the folks at M-W are having a mondegreen contest. I don't think there's a prize or anything, but if you've got a favorite that you want to share, go on over there. I need to ask bard_bloom which piece of the Messiah sounds to him like "and then He soundproofed me" again.