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.
