Saturday, January 22, 2005

vacation photos and then some

Hey there my friends, I don’t know about you but sometimes it seems there are enough words in the world already and today seems like one of those days to me.  I have a few little essays and things sketched out for the site but right now I feel more like letting the words go off and get into trouble on their own, while I just look at the pretty colors and remember a great vacation that I took less than a month ago.  Dang how time flies.  These shots were all taken in DC, and there’s a bit more description of them on the photoblog. 

If a picture is worth 1000 words, I just saved you four grand.  You can thank me later.

Oh what the hell, I’ve had a couple adventures recently and I’ll bring you along on them as well, in a pictorial sort of way because I’m just feeling like that right now. 

First, an adventure in colors: you know that we just finished painting our bedroom.  I have described the color, but that’s never going to do it justice.  Under the halogen light tonight it looks like this:

....but when we wake up at dawn and the matutinal light streams in from the east, it looks more like this:

We also painted the room next door, our office, nearly a year ago.  At that time I didn’t have a digital camera so I couldn’t let you know that those colors are more along these lines:

This means that, when I stand out in the hallway in the morning, I see all three shades together like this:

- which turns out to be a very harmonious combination, notwithstanding your goddamn opinion, which had better agree with ours because like hell are we going to repaint any of this anytime soon.  I have a life, you know. 

Speaking of which, today was the second adventure: an adventure in drinking beer, as some locals call it.  The inestimable and deepsouled Sawni sent me gift certificates for a local outpost of an excellent Oregon brewery, which is located in the heart of one of my favorite and least-visited districts, North Beach.  We went and cashed in today. 

One reason I rarely go to North Beach is that the parking is horrendous.  However, within five minutes of my first drive-by, we’d found a convenient and legal spot opening up right off Washington Square (which, though Washington hisself could not allegedly tell a lie, is more like a rectangle bisected by a street that turns it into an irregular pentagon and a triangle).  Here’s the place, right at the corner in that big brick building, with the green awning:

But wouldn’t you know it, a traditional-sounding place in an old building in an old neighborhood, and they went and make everything stainless steel and strobe lights and euroglitzy.  Or did they?  Naw, they really didn’t.  These guys are pretty authentic, in their brew and their decor.  Here’s a little slice of the interior, with the olde gas-lamp electrolier and the stained glass:

Now you may be wondering, Dan has found convenient parking on a beautiful day in a really nice part of North Beach, and is sitting in a homey, cozy brewpub with like 20 beers on tap, waiting for a big bowl of gumbo and a glass fof I2PA - the Imperial India Pale Ale, a wine-strong beer with lots of flavor and a vigorous but not overbearing effervescence.  How do I feel?  I feel a lot like this guy does:

See, he’s in a pretty good mood, but he knows something’s missing - something important.  That’s right, it’s his beer.  Oh, here it is now, and see what a difference it makes:

Now there’s a happy lush.  Kel and I each ate a very enjoyable and satisfying meal and then took a stroll through the neighborhood.  We were looking for the ethnic arts gallery where we recently bought our Ghanean sentry sculputre, but instead wound up on Grant street at a cool rambling asian arts emporium where we saw some japanese transom panels that would look great over the bed we intend to get sometime soon.  The place was a fascinating warren of tiny corridors and steep staircases and dim lights; it smelled of mystery and wormwood.  But I thought it would be tacky to take pictures there so tough noogies to you. 

On our way back to the car we stopped off at Caffe’ Trieste, an ancient and deeply authentic espresso house, where I got one of the best espressos I’ve ever had in my life and Kel said the same about her non-fat latte’ - we both feel like giving up coffee for a while now because they did such an amazing job that anything else would be a letdown.  I took this photo of their facilities:

So for those of you who typically destroy your living rooms, Caffe Treiste respectfully requests that you work it out of your system next door at Fior D’Italia, where the crappers are easier to clean and better-lit. 

Final notes: on the good side, we saw Hero and Harold and Kumar, both of which we enjoyed very much in their own ways.  On the down side, we returned to our Sunday yoga class today after our instructor had taken about a month off in Spain, and he ended class by telling us that it was his last one - he’d do some special 2-hour extravaganzas every so often but the weekly asana freakout was over.  Such is life - some things begin, some things end, and some things just keep going on even though you only get to spend a few minutes enjoying them every long while.  I’ve decided to be okay with that.  And thus, this word-free post concludes.  Good thing I didn’t decide to get loquacious on your asses.