Monday, September 29, 2008

Head’s Up: New Year New-osity from an Old-School Newbie

(update: photos from the hike are posted under “photos.” There are plenty of them so use the monthly archive to see them all.  Collect them!  Trade them with your friends!)

This is the good life my friends… I’m sitting on the couch, my feet are up on the padded hassock, I’m in my throwback Warriors t-shirt, I’ve got a belly full of apple treats and now I get to blog from the top of, shall we say, my “lap.” Feels millenial, peoples.  Feels like a new day is upon me, and I don’t just mean Tuesday sneaking round the corner waiting to give me a wedgie when I’m looking at my shoe.  I mean it’s a new year, jewish-wise, and that’s a climactic time in the ol’ hebraic calendar.  It’s a time to take stock, to make amends, to renew appreciation and to reconnect with traditions that seem to have some beneficial effect on me.  Let’s take a moment and review what’s so new about this particular little slice of the time pie, such that I have something to think about during services:

* HIKE through the forest last saturday with Kel and little whatzizname, who fell asleep approximately .5 miles into the four mile Bear Valley Trail that runs from the HQ of Pt Reyes (a park comprising a mere 71 thousand acres with 150 miles of trails) out to Arch Rock.  The photos are pretty great and I’ll post them later but for now I can report that it is highly salubrious to take a vigorous hike through the dense verdure of the forests, along the slim trickle of a crystal creek that bounces back the green of the canopy above it, the air full of pine tar and laurel spice and oak dust; sound muffled by redwood boughs and spanish moss and the meandering of the stream itself.  There was one short section in the sun, at a meadow where we lunched; the lilies there burst through the loam with irrational exuberance and their petals actually shimmered in the sunlight.  Then back again into the forest, and along the broad path till the valley grew broader and higher and eventually the trail just ended at a jutting fist of a cliff thrust abruptly out into the pacific, 100 feet tall, surf pummeling its foot so far below me that I could only smell it.  From shaded to glaring, from forest perfume to salt and fresh wind; from a view of gentle obscurantism to 270 degree horizons… it was breathtaking to arrive at the destination, but the whole trip was worth every step.  Of which there were several, believe you me. 

* SUPPER at a local restaurant for Kel’s birthday.  We haven’t had a parents’ night out since my birthday, back in april.  This time we really cut loose at Aziza, yet another of the good things about our neighborhood.  Let me divulge a smidgen: we started with cocktails and mixed appetizers, which don’t sound that amazing as I read my notes but were incredibly fresh and flavorful.  The greens on the mixed plate were purselaine - an archaic veggie that was shockingly delish.  And I don’t mean to suggest that the cocktails were anything but extraordinary.  Kelly really enjoyed her vodka with rhubarb, fennel, vanilla and black pepper, but I think my gin with lavender and orange-blossom honey was even better.  Main dishes were chicken breasts with sicilian couscous (much like israeli couscous but substituting vendetta for compulsory military service), a baked (and sugar-sweet) cioppolini onion, and slivered dates; Kel got lamb chops with figs and fried chard, and we shared a big bowl of ginger glazed veggies that were perfectly cooked.  (With the meal Kel got a glass of brico blina barbera ‘05 and I had a bottle of Saison Dupont belgian farm ale.) Dessert was the typical: fresh-baked hazelnut madelines, cinnamon ice cream and goat cheese sorbet, with some kind of chopped fruity product (mango?  sharlaine melon?  I stopped asking) - everything tasted great, especially together, and especially especially with the big glass of Obsello absinthe we shared.  We were home by 8:45 to relieve the babysitters, my two lovely nieces - WHO REFUSED HALF THE MONEY WE OFFERED THEM.  Two teen-aged girls for two and a half hours, and they wouldn’t take two twenties?  THAT is a good way to end the kind of evening that sharpens one’s appreciation for the good things in life.

* NEW MUSEUM: with that great “new museum” smell.  We walked all the way to the new Academy of Sciences building, three blocks down and two over, sauntered in with a printout of the receipt my mom sent us when she got us a membership (thanks mom!) in no time flat, and spent three hours gaping at dino bones, jellyfish, a four-story living rain forest (with birds and butterflies, but no pesky flesh-eating centipedes), and innumerable other coolnesses.  We can go anytime now.  It is an incredible resource, right here in our zip code.  New things burgeon, and I am the burgee, with responsibility for appreciating them - not just for their newness alone, though that is one good thing to appreciate about things that are new. 

* NEW PROGRAMMING: Survivor and Amazing Race are both back on the air.  Shut up.  This is good for me.  Even as the cycle of programming repeats itself, it has moved forward with a new menagerie of freaks and jerks and disasters-waiting-to-happen.  I learn something from every season of Survivor about how to handle myself in a crisis - or not.  And Amazing Race is just shamefully addictive.  The cycles and circuits of the networks replicate those of the heavens upon which they are loosely based.  I’m looking forward to 26 or so hours of sitting on my butt in front of the tube.  It’s comforting, just as is the eternal repetition of the seasons.  I count that in the “plus” column.

* NEW MAGAZINE: I got Kel a subscription to Cooks Illustrated.  I was hoping for a Rachael Ray pictorial but I didn’t even get Paula Deen - it’s the Consumer Reports of food: they take a recipe and tweak it every possible way till it’s at it’s best.  They review premium bacons and have a guide to buying and using mushrooms.  Pictures are clinical and simple, designed to help you get more out of the kitchen.  They don’t try to save you money but often do; they don’t try to make things easier - just better.  It’s a fun rag and we’ve got a year’s worth coming our way.  It promises to help us find more value and benefit in what we do all the time anyway - cooking and eating.  Kel’s already got some recipes picked out for trials.  And a year that starts with new recipes and better techniques, is a year that starts out on the right track.

On a related note, for Rosh Hashona on Monday night I baked an excellent apple cake (mix four yolks with sugar, then flour; fold in beaten whites and layer with thin slices of apple) and we had it after a supper of baked chicken (not perfect, though that’s not the recipe’s fault) and brussels sprouts a la juif, which made up for any perfection deficit suffered by any other part of the meal. 

* NEW UNDERWEAR: a major restocking.  Details on demand, with SASE and reciprocation.  Generous only need apply.  But it’s a truism that, with a new pair of boxers under your slacks, every old thing seems new again - and that goes double for the new year. 

Services resume tomorrow morning so I’d best get some rest.  I’ll get to some more essay-like stuff real soon, and I’ll post those pix from the hike too.  Meantime, shana tovah to each and every one of you, and let’s take our cue from the way things have been going for me lately and appreciate some newness.  It doesn’t last forever, you know, so you’d best enjoy while you have the chance.

Friday, September 26, 2008

not depressed, just busy

I’ve wanted for days just to slam a little essay up here about an old train car.  It’s all written up with a photo and everything.  Bastardsuckers won’t give a man a break and I expect today’ll be no different, going into tonight.  Today’s remedial expenses day - repairs to the washing machine and a new clutch for the old soob.  I expect it’ll be ugly but I am expecting ugliness more and more these days.  In a desperate attempt to derail the ugly express I’m going to have a grown-up supper tonight at a very nice place in my ‘hood; mom is invited but Zach is not.  And yes, I’ll have the debate on TiVo so I can hop right back into the ugly as soon as the mojito-and-harissa buzz wears off.  Tomorrow: Pt Reyes estuary hike.  Sunday: Academy of Sciences opening weekend.  Blog post: not sure when it’ll happen.  SO:

In lieu of the essay I wanted to share, here’s a bit of the chucklehut realpolitik: About a year ago I was in a long security line in an airport, behind a very establishment-looking white guy, late middle age, business casual with nice matching carryons.  He was clearly on his way to a business meeting and we wound up in conversation.  Turns out he sold computer equipment that helped federal banks track the flow of money around the country, and we started talking about the economy a bit.  We agreed that things were bad and getting worse.  I went so far as to suggest that if things weren’t cleaned up soon we might be facing a depression.  He laughed at this, assuring me that a depression was impossible, that the system was too redundant to allow that kind of hole to get punched in the bottom of the money bucket.  The overall tone made me think that he thought I was a fool, or at best, hilariously underinformed. 

Come this morning and it turns out that a run on my bank has resulted in the largest federal bank seizure in history, on the heels of several others enormous seizures that are leaving our economy looking like an epileptic in a strobelite factory.  While a private buyer was found for my bank overnight, the next bank that succumbs to atrophy might not be so lucky.  Money is starting to be worth its actual value, and there is less and less of it when you cut out the people whose personal wealth significantly relied on leveraged derivatives (or “levrivatives,” a term I urge you all to use as if it was in steady rotation in the Financial Times).  The depression is not upon us, but I can smell it on the weather wind.  It may be that fed intervention will help us avoid longer breadlines and dustbowl-type dislocations of population.  However, if I was to run into that bank computer sales guy in line at the airport again, I bet he’d be a little less amused by my nightmare scenario.  The line from paranoia to realism is sometimes drawn by historical realities, of the sort through which I seem to be living today. 

Get beautiful, people.  Chuckles needs inspiration.  And a little more blogging time. 

Monday, September 22, 2008

Weekend Warp-Up: The TwoFer

This is, indeed, a “warp-up” of the weekend (I just tried spelling that without a hyphen and didn’t like the imagery of a bellicose dogbaby, so there you have it, hypenated and don’t you give me any guff) because we’ll be traveling at the speed of BLOG from Weekend A (13-14) to Weekend B (20-21)!  Strap on your tinfoil helmet, this one’s going to spin your virtual head! 

Two weekends ago we engaged in the following delights:

* TRIP TO INNER OUTER RICHMOND: Kelly was at work all day on Saturday so Z and I got down and partied like to guys loose on the town: We visited the Irish Bakery and then hit the playground.  The bakery was as satisfying as ever - we got two blueberry scones and a snowball, which in this case (stop giggling) is a bready muffin cut in half and then re-glued with raspberry filling, coated in frosting and then rolled in coconut.  Actually, the scones were better and we were on a pretty serious butter rush as we headed off to our next errand, the produce market.  I really like my local produce market and this time I’ve decided to show you why:

All this was purchased with $26 and change, including: three or four zukes, about five carrots, a parsnip, a jicama, two red peppers, three asian pears, a big basket of strawberries, a bundle of scallions, two yellow onions, a can of coconut milk, two 17.5-oz. cans of coconut water (which I am loving these days), a really good mango, a big sack of mushrooms, three nice yellow plantains, six nice even yellower bananas, a bottle of water (zach was thirsty), and an enormous red cabbage, the enormity whereof I can establish by reference to the above photograph which is entirely to scale and clearly demonstrates that the cabbage is significantly larger than my three-and-a-HALF-year-old son’s HEAD.  Moral: Yay Richmond Produce. 

* TASTY DESSERT: That night I finally slapped together the Mango and Sticky Rice dessert I’ve been loving for years from the little Thai place up the street.  The really great thing about this dessert is how it’s very tasty, but a close second is how I was able to mess it up and substitute in other ingredients a LOT and still got a very delicious after-dinner starch-and-sugar bomb.  Instead of soaking the glutinous rice for 12 hours, I did 3 hours and 45 minutes.  Instead of using palm sugar (which just sounds dirty to me, what can I say) I used granulamated white sugar.  Instead of tapioca starch I used corm starch.  And, craziest of all, instead of using cheesecloth and a bamboo steamer in a wok to cook the rice, I used cheesecloth on a lattice of dessert forks in a stainless steel vegetable steamer.  AND IT STILL TASTED PRETTY DARN GOOD.  It “serves six,” per the optimistic prediction in the cookbook.  It *actually* serves two, over the course of about three hours of steady munching.  Having a really good mango also helps.  As to which, let’s say it again: Yay Richmond Produce!

* HAROLD AND KUMAR: I enjoyed H&K Go To White Castle so I was eagerly waiting for more than a month for the opportunity to view their second opus, Escape from Guantanamo, with my lovely wife.  We were prepared for jokes about all aspects of biology, perversion, and substance abuse.  What I did not expect was to find it all so entirely unfunny.  In the first movie, it was hilarious.  This time, I just kept on remembering other movies that were funnier, like “Airplane!” and “Go!” and “H&KGTWK.” We watched it silently for 20 minutes, agreed to give it 10 minutes more, and then turned it off at the half hour mark.  Upshot: we tied up one-third of our Netflix queue for six weeks for nothing.  Thus endeth a triumphant saturday night. 

* TRIP TO EXPLORATORIUM: this happened on sunday morning, and enabled Zach to play with sit-upon gyroscopes, the parabolic whisper-sender, lots of buttons and pulleys, a fair number of small metal balls THAT BOUNCE, columns of air, and tiny pieces of dry ice that somehow recapitulate cloud formation by spinning around in delicate spirals of cloudy mist.  We spent many hours of gape-faced delight in the shadowey precincts of the museum and might have seen half of what was there - and that doesn’t even include the tactile dome, which is still too much for Z’s tender sensabilities.  Also, the outer grounds of the Exploratorium are being rehabilitated - the big dome is under scaffolding but the lake has been re-shored and looks fantastic.  It was a gorgeous day and we all enjoyed the living crap out of it.  And that, my friends, is a term of art. 

Now let’s hop into the TIME ACCELLERATOR and hop forward several days.  On THURSDAY I met with an old friend and helped him record a promo for a book his publishing house is distributing; we finished the evening with several beers at an old steinhaus in the financial district.  Mark drank Spaten from a giant glass boot and I made friends with the looming, glowering Prussian hardass who was running the house (or “haus").  FRIDAY I learned of a potential opportunity to do some writing for cash money, so we’ll see if that pans out but by my telling you about it hereandnow I pretty much guarantee myself disappointment.  Verily I embrace the unknown, even as I expect it to make fun of me.  Along which lines, we were also advised on FRIDAY that we’d better come up with a thousand dollars because we need a new clutch in the subaru and no kidding seriously.  It is good that those magic monkeys keep on crapping hundred dollar bills in our front yard.  It is bad that we need to feed them thousand dollar bills to make it happen but sometimes you have to make some sacrifices for your money-pooping monkeys. 

Which of course brings us to SATURDAY.  This was a day, once again, on which Kel had to work, so I relaxed in the morning by cleaning, doing laundry, and exercising the boy at the local playground again.  This time we skipped the Irish Bakery in favor of the HOUSE OF BAGELS, where I got an excellent sprinkle cookie but Z showed me up by selecting an exceptional black-and-white, oh man it was good.  Yes I had to help him finish it.  Because I said so. 

Then we returned home to RECONFIGURE REALITY.  With Z safely in the nurturing hold of animated television programming, I disconnected the information processing center in our study and moved everything to our bedroom.  The little desk, the rolling cabinet of important documents, the little halogen light; the printer and the speakers and the whole goddamn computer all came into what has been now for years a room that has been free of such equipment.  When we first moved to the apartment we had two housemates, officially (though one never really lived there) - so everything we owned was in our bedroom, on clumsy metal shelves and stacked-up milk crates.  For more than a decade we’ve been free of that clutter in our bedroom but that era ended on Saturday.  What once was our “study” is now Jesse’s room.  What once was our “bedroom” is now our multi-purpose space.  (I’ll let you figure that one out on your own time.) I’m just saying, it was a big job and now that it’s over I can say three things: 1) we are more ready for Jesse to come home than ever; 2) the computer stuff looks a LOT better in our bedroom this time than it did when we first moved in, and 3) our computer is unusually noisy.  It sort of hoovers up with a sudden loud fan noise at unexpected junctures all through the night.  We’ve got to turn it off when we go to bed, in a final gesture now each day that yes, our life is different - and it’s about to get a whole lot differenter. 

APPLEWALK: Saturday evening we spent a few relaxing hours visiting friends in the East Bay, and took a late-evening stroll among the shady lanes and hidden stairways that lattice their neighborhood, plucking ripe juicy apples off of trees and marveling at their honey sweetness.  The ride home was easy and fun, and I slept like a log on opiates.  Good ones. 

SUNDAY: Not much happened on Sunday, unless you count taking a drive up to Tomales for a picnic with the Holt families (we all adopted from Korea) at Heart’s Desire beach, which is a pretty little stretch of sand on the edge of a long narrow bay that juts in from the Pacific like a stab wound into the flank of west Marin county.  (In fact, Tomales Bay is formed by the San Andreas Fault where it comes out of California and runs into the Pacific Ocean, but it only makes you nervous when you think of it, so we didn’t.) We ate well (Kel’s chocolate-chip banana bread was particularly popular) and even got to take a friends’ kayak out to the next beach over, to see the reconstructed Miwok bark houses ("rMbh’s").  Oh don’t play coy with me you know exactly what I’m talking about.  But just to prove it to you:

Us, heading into the water.

Was Zach enjoying the boatly goodness?  YOU BE THE JUDGE:

Into the breach:

Onto my breeches, in that I was not wearing a bathing suit and my heavy cotton shorts were by now thick and juicy with ocean water that was pooling at my most personal juncture:

Those photos were taken by a skilled otherdad with a good eye for action.  The remaining photos were taken by me via cellphone and make up for their lack of resolution with their lack of dramatic content:

From inside a rMbh, watching our friends pulling onto the beach in their kayak:

A study of the rMbh phenomenon:

A view of the neighboring beach, whereat the rMbh’s are found:

Good stuff, maynard.  But I have yet a few more images to help clarify this experience for you.  As you know, the ocean is a place of pounding waves and dangerous depths.  And here I am, ultraDad, risking the precious life of my son and, to a certain extent, wife, by lashing them to a craft of untested seaworthiness and loosing them upon the trident-lashed whitecaps.  I, mock Posiedon?  Let me clarify for you just how dangerous this seafaring adventure really was.  Here is a photo of the crashing surf at Heart’s Desire beach:

And, for scale, a child in the surf:

You saw how big this child is with reference to the cabbage, above.  So now you can see, the cabbage must be, like, four stories tall, because this kid is towering over the obviously dangerously heavy surf.  Luckily, he slept like a champ on the way home (the Narcolepsy Pro-Am Doze-Off champ) and ignored his supper and fell asleep after I left his room, which is a huge step forward for us.  I finished the second Flashman book later that night, and wrapped up a lingering sudoku.  Your congratulations are appreciated. 

Now it’s monday.  Your warpup (down, cujo!) is now concluded.  Replace your tin hat on the spindle by the exit and have a healthy lunch.  You can’t go on all week eating that junk.  You know what I’m talking about.