31 December 2006

Step 4: plan shopping and time-line

Once the menu is sketched (it can and likely will change somewhat over the coming week), we figure out the shoping list. We always get lots of stuff at Nordic House as well as Costco and your basic grocery store (Albertson's or Andronico's), but this year we had to figure out where to get our German stuff. Victoria used The Google (as our only President calls it) to figure out some options, but we didn't get any clear-cut answers, so we decided to take it to a higher authority: Katja, my German-born friend and colleague in the localization industry, who lives in San Jose.

Saturday around dinner time, I rang her up and asked, "Who's that German butcher you were telling me about?"

She chuckled and replied with certainty: "Dittmer's!" She also provided sage advice about the menu, and we had a lovely chat, and then she wished us a good "slide" into the new year: "Einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!"

So a trip to Dittmer's and Nordic House is in the plans for Tuesday. (I think it should be Nordic Huset, but I suppose that might confuse their neighbors. We'll try to get to Costco today, though, so we can get the giant hunks of salmon marinating for the graved laks. You only need three days for a good graved laks (aka gravlax), but I think a week is better.

At left is the shopping list so far. This year's list is deceptively brief and manageable-looking, but that's only because Jane is taking care of about a third of the stuff herself and has her own lists (which perhaps she'll publish here shortly), and because we're getting good at throwing smørgåsbords and have already been stocking up on a bunch of the basics. We also have probably forgotten a couple dozen things and will be making many a last-minute trip for forgotten items. Traditionally we end up borrowing obscure ingredients on Saturday from our next-door neighbors Jaryn and Pete, too. (Jaryn is the maker of the beloved deviled eggs; I have yet to try one because they're always demolished early on. This year she hinted she might dress them up in little dirndl skirts.)

Next we figure out the schedule of events. Lots of the items need to marinate, stew, soak, or otherwise get started well in advance, so first we fill in the must-start-soons. Then we fill in the other menu items, saving Friday and Saturday for the most perishable and/or most complicated or hard to store items. At lower left is the time-line thus far. This is subject to a lot of change, and by the end of the week it's unlikely to look anything like this. Perhaps we'll post before and after photos of the timeline about a week from now.

Our final act of planning was to taste the German schnapps items. It's become a tradition to serve one Norwegian akevit plus an akevit from the guest country. We asked Katja's advice about what would be the German answer to akevit. She in turn asked some friends, and on their advice, we tracked down some Doornkaat (a German gin) and Gilka Kaiser Kümmel (a German caraway liquor bearing vague resemblance to Scandinavia's akevit) at the Mountain View BevMo. We all thought the Doornkat gin was pretty harsh (Jane compared it to isopropyl alcohol and made ready to rub some on her arm in case any injections were imminent), but the Kümmel was interestingly sweet. A second sip of gin after tasting the Kümmel was quite pleasant, though, proving once again that taste is greatly dependent on context. We decided they'll do! They'll also both be better at the usual serving temperature, which is right out of the freezer.

Step 3: plan menu

&tLast night, Jane came over and we held our planning session. Naturally this requires cocktails (gin gimlets, in this case). While we're at it, here's a recipe for a better gimlet: pour a generous shot of Tanqueray or Bombay Dry gin per person into a shaker filled with crushed ice, squeeze in half a lime per person, and add a dashlet of Rose's lime juice per person. Strain into martini glasses and serve. No pictures, sorry.

The goal is to plan a menu with a reasonable distribution of the four food groups: sweet, starchy, savory, and alcoholic. We also try to balance offerings from the "host" and "guest" countries. Norway has always been the host country, and after the first year we cycled through the other Scandinavian countries as guest countries. Having completed the cycle, we decided to make a brief excursion to Germany. We're developing quite a collection of cookbooks, flags, and so on. After listing the obvious items (lutefisk, lefse, gløgg, gravedlaks, and flat breads), we start flipping through the cookbooks and picking out the rest of the menu.

If you want to be surprised by the offerings when you arrive, stop reading right now!

This is what we came up with:



The E's and J's indicate which household is taking primary responsibility for making the item, shopping for the ingredients, and so on, not in that order. It's a little misleading, though, because many of the things marked "E" are prepared not by Victoria and me but by all three of us here at our house. Jane will be moving in for the weekend on Friday evening, and we'll be doing a lot of cooking together.

How to throw a smørgåsbord in 10,000 easy steps

Next Sunday, Jane and Victoria and I are throwing the sixth annual-but-for-one-year smørgåsbord, this time featuring Germany as the guest country. We've decided to document the whole process here on the blog, complete with photos and recipes.

Step 1: send out invitations

We always email the invitations, modern women that we are. This year I made my second attempt to use evite for the process and once again gave up in frustration: the evite system for designing custom invitations was (a) too confining, (b) too buggy, and (c) too frustrating. I don't think I got as far as the part where you basically share the contact information for everyone you know with a company whose business is advertising. Of course they're required by law not to share contact info without permission blah blah blah, but if I recall correctly, theirs is an opt-out system where all your invitees are automatically subscribed to their spam unless they notice on their invitation an opportunity to opt-out. I've been on and off evite's spam list many times from getting invited to other people's events, and I don't want to do that to our friends, so email it is.

We pretty much invite everybody we know, so if we know you and you haven't gotten your invitation, you're invited, too, and we're sorry that we either screwed up your email address, don't have it, or somehow failed to include it.

This year's invitation began:
Jane, Erin, and Victoria
request the company of your pleasure for the sixth
traditional Norwegian post-Christmas open house, or
Jultide Smørgåsbord VI,
Sunday, 7 January 2007, 3-9pm
at [Erin's house]

Having Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and finally the dreaded Sweden as "guest countries" for Scandinavian variety worked out well in previous years. But since we can't find windsocks for the Faroe Islands or Samiland, we're declaring the first Scandinavian cycle complete. To mark this accomplishment, we're taking the bold step of inviting GERMANY to join Norway on the culinary stage. (I know, it's shocking, but Victoria is Swedish and German, Jane is German and Norwegian, and I'm Norwegian and German, and there are some really fabulous foods associated with Weinachtszeit.)

In keeping with tradition, we'll be featuring lutefisk (that truly revolting Norwegian fish concoction, the piece of cod that passes understanding) and lots of other traditional Norwegian and German Christmas favorites that are actually good---yummy, in fact. Most are beige. If you'd like to bring something, I'd suggest your favorite Norwegian or German delicacy, if you have such a thing or enjoy culinary research. Easier still, you're welcome to bring some cheap red wine to dump into the gløgg cauldron, or decent drinkable white wine or German beer, Norwegian akevit, or perhaps a good German gin, which our good friend Katja and her parents decided would best represent Germany's answer to akevit. Or just drop by.

Spouses, etc., are also invited. The house is not kid-proofed, and there will be lots of adult beverages, but if you're not worried about that, I'm sure the younger set will have a good time harrassing the two cats and slipping treats to the black lab. We're not sure how she feels about lutefisk, though, so nobody should count on her help there.

Suggested attire is good Lutheran dressy casual. (Norwegian sweaters and so on. Lederhosen and Loden are also acceptable.)

The only Norwegian you'll need to know is "Nei, takk!" (rhymes with "rye rock"): "No thanks! No lutefisk for me! Please no!!!" The German for that is, "Nein, danke!"

*** PLEASE REPLY so we know how much lutefisk not to make. ***

Step 2: Collect RSVPs

Since we don't use evite or a similar service, we have to request that people RSVP by reply email.

Now, I don't want to offend my/our readership here, but I have to say, our community is shockingly bad at this. In past years we've had only about a 50% reply rate. Most of the people who reply do so accurately--that is to say, they really do or do not show up in accordance with their promises, and they do let us know about others they're bringing along (the spouses, etc.--we only attempt to send one invitation per household, because even that's hard enough). And then there's the other 50%. Some come, some don't, some reply weeks after the event. Granted, if the invitation arrives while you're out of town and you're not one of those who checks email from away, this is very understandable, but 50% non-reply? Come on!

Note to the good 50%: well done. Thank you. We look forward to seeing you. Many of you write charming, witty replies, and these we especially enjoy, although we usually get too bogged down to reply to your replies.

Note to the other 50%: We're still glad to see you, but what's up with this?

Anyway, our system is to keep a spreadsheet with columns for who, yes, no, and maybe. Names go under who, a number goes under Yes, No, or Maybe, and sometimes a number goes under Yes and another number under No for tag-alongs whose availability is as-yet undetermined. Given the 50% non-reply rate, we usually take the number of yeses, plus half the number of maybes, and add about a dozen to estimate how many people's worth of paper bowls and non-biodegradable cups, forks, and so on that we need. Although our invitation pleads for a reply so that we can estimate the amount of lutefisk not needed, in fact it's about the disposable dishware and flatware.

As for the lutefisk, we always make exactly one hunk of it (we buy ours frozen at Nordic House in Oakland), and we always have about a third left over, cold and soupy looking in the bowl. This year we'll find out for the first time whether cold leftover lutefisk is too disgusting even for a black labrador retriever to eat. (The cats have never been interested. Lutefisk is nominally a fish product. Go figure.)

29 December 2006

Never try to show off in the kitchen

Every so often I get a little too big for my britches and try to make something basic into something fancy, just to show off. Case in point, last summer I needed to make something to take to a potluck picnic. Everybody loves meatloaf, but few of my generation seem to know how to make it, which is in itself a bit of weirdness that would qualify for its own blog post someday, so I decided I would make a meatloaf. I didn't want them all to think I was a lame cook, though, so I decided to make a tri-colored spiral meatloaf. I got ground turkey, ground pork, and ground lamb, and I seasoned each differently. The lamb was Greekish, with lemon zest and oregano. The turkey was Middle Eastern, with cumin, garlic, and so on. I can't remember what the pork one was supposed to be. All of them had salt and pepper, of course. I spread first the pork, then the turkey, then the lamb in a big rectangle, jelly roll style, then rolled then up into a spiral, whacked off hunks the size of my loaf pans, and baked.

What a lame meatloaf. The color differences were too indistinct for the spiral to be noticeable, unless you were really looking for it, and the flavorings sort of blurred together too, so the result was a weird dark-beige-on-light-beige spiral with a horrible muddle of herbs and spices. Only the lamb had a respectable amount of fat in it, so the overall loaf was dry, too.



(Note to food stylists: if you're going to put an artichoke on the plate before photographing, use a raw one. Cooked artichokes are delicious but ugly.)

Next time I made meatloaf, I used the recipe God gave us: fatty hamburger, salt and pepper, a bit of oregano. Since I'm gluten intolerant, I used minced shiitakes instead of milk-moistened breadcrumbs, but I hardly think that qualifies as a massive departure from the sacred meatloaf recipe passed down through generations. I mooshed it all together with my bare hands, globbed it into a loaf pan, baked, and served with ketchup. It was way better.

New-fashioneds

It's time to update the old-fashioned. An old-fashioned is, of course, a marriage of bourbon, bitters, water, sugar, and some fruit--usually a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry. Updating the recipe to take advantage of kumquat season, we get a new-fashioned: bourbon, a few dashes of bitters, several squeezed kumquats, and a kumquat garnish. Shake it with lots of crushed ice, strain into a sugar-rimmed martini glass, and you get a cold drink with just enough water from the melting of the ice. Garnish with an artistically carved bit of kumquat.

28 November 2006

Doggie downers and puppy uppers

Dogs get depressed, too, and they're a lot like we are when it happens.

Last night, Candy seemed kind of sad. Not quite herself. Mopey. I don't think it's because our parents left Sunday morning, because she had seemed fine all day Sunday and most of Monday. But when it was time to take her out for one last pee, give her a bedtime snack, and tuck her in, she seemed detached. Usually she's cuddly, licks my face a lot (which seems to have cured my rosacea, by the way), and butts her forehead up against me just like cats do when they're being cuddly. Last night she just sort of lay there and looked at me. I cuddled, scritched, and kissed, and she just waited for it to be over.

It was weird, and it got to me. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. I felt randomly guilty about something, but I didn't know what. Victoria swore up and down that I hadn't done anything to upset her or our impromptu dinner guests. The cats seemed normal. I felt like I'd accomplished a lot during my long workday, so it certainly wasn't work guilt. I tossed and turned for a while, harrassed V and the cats for a while, turned the light back on and read for a while, tossed and turned some more, and finally got to sleep a while later when Candy came upstairs and flopped down on her bedroom pillow.

This morning she still seemed listless, so I took an extra morning break from work (I work from home most of the time) to play with her. Even though I was trying to engage her with her favorite toys, she stood with her tail between her legs and looked like she was afraid I was going to clean and medicate her ears again (a weekly ritual that we all hate, related to her grass allergies; even her weekly allergy shots are easier for her).

So my theories at this point are:
  • The Prednisone she's been taking for a week to treat a swollen ear flap (probably due to allergies) is a doggie downer.
  • She's missing Mom and Dad and her kid sister, Flicka.
  • She's missing her work.
Although it sounds the weirdest, I decided the last one was most likely.

Victoria and I have both taken Prednisone at one time or another, and neither of us remembered getting bummed out by it. Our cat Gjetost has taken it for months at a stretch (to treat a weird seasonal lumpy tongue thing that we guess is being caused by allergies) and it hasn't ever bummed her out; in fact, it makes her friskier and burlier. So we decided it probably wasn't the drugs.

What about her family? Well, you'd think their departure might bother her a bit, but after a week of having a puppy romp all over her and steal her toys, I think she was ready for a break, and sure enough, she seemed better rested and happier on Sunday than she had for several days. She probably agrees with our Grampa Vang, who repeated the maxim, "Guests and fish start to smell after three days."

So that left her work, and here's my theory. She needed to stop taking her daily arthritis medication (Rimadyl) while she's taking the Prednisone, so I haven't been throwing her retrieving dummies for her, because I don't want her to mess up her knee when she can't take her usual pain pills (she has two ruptured anterior cruciate ligaments, which is quite similar to my own ruptured posterior cruciate ligament, only one of which has been repaired). (Are you getting the feeling yet that this dog runs up some expensive veterinary bills? She does. She's like me that way. Unlike me, she's worth every penny.) Also, during my folks visit, we kept getting busy during the daytime and taking her for her walks after dark, when we pretty much have to wear reflective clothing and keep her on a leash, which means she gets less exercise. (Also like me, Candy wears a lot of black, which we musicians sometimes call "our safety colors," especially when we're leaving concert halls late at night and have to dodge one patron's car after another in a desperate attempt to get to our own cars before being run over by tired, elderly people with failing vision.)

Temple Grandin writes in her fascinating book Animals In Translation that dogs of working breeds have their jobs to do, and they want to do them. If they don't get to do their normal jobs, they'll either invent new jobs of their own (like when sheepdogs start herding their people and cars around) or they'll get neurotic. Makes sense.

Candy's job is to retrieve, and boy does she love that job. Labrador retrievers were bred to dive into the icy waters off Newfoundland after fish and to flush and retrieve game birds from fields, lakes, and so on. Candy spent her working years (before the knee injuries) hunting and fishing with Dad, and to hear him talk, nothing made her happier. I'll take his word for it. Since retiring from hunting, she has kept up an active career retrieving training dummies, tennis balls, socks, sticks, pine cones, and anything else she can find and talk me into throwing. When we step out the front door for any reason, she stares excitedly up at the training dummy in the eaves, where we store her toys between play sessions. She jumps at them, barks at them and us, and generally does everything she can to persuade us to get down a toy and play with her. Then she scrambles down the stairs faster than any other time, and she literally can't wait for me to throw the darned thing for her. Once I finally do, she tears after it faster than I can believe and catches it, often before it's bounced a second time.

Sometimes she has braking problems or the dummy takes a funny bounce and she has to do a sudden swerve, and this is both amazing to watch and hazardous for her messed up knee. Hence my caution in not taking her retrieving since she's started the Prednisone and in turn the Rimadyl-ban.

Today her depression had me so depressed that I finally decided we would both be better off with a little knee pain than staying depressed, so we went out, I took down a dummy, and she was instantly back to her old self. She jumped around with such great excitement that she was a foot off the ground. She bounced down the stairs so fast I thought she might ski part of the way. She retrieved like a champ, and although I tried to keep my throws mellow enough to reduce the odds of injury, she still did her astounding braking and swerving maneuvers, and tomorrow she's probably going to be a bit sore. But she also perked right up, was back to herself all afternoon, and when we went out for our late afternoon walk, she once again would not hear of my going down those stairs without one of her toys in my hand.

She's persuasive. I grabbed a toy, and we did our entire walk (the backwards short loop, for those of you who know) as a retrieving and freedogging session. It was 4:30 when we left, so there was just enough traffic to make it a bit stressful for me, but Candy was delighted. She's been hanging out with me ever since, helping with dinner (catching bits of dropped ham and cleaning out my egg-mixing bowl) and dishes (cleaning up a bacon grease mess I made on the floor) and now blogging (she's lying in her office chair and giving moral support). Norton and Gjetost have also been helping me write.

So there you have it. Doggie downers: not working. Puppy uppers: working. Just like us.

20 November 2006

No good deed goes unpunished--especially when it's a screw-up

Or, How not to be a multiculturalist

In my work in software localization, I frequently exchange emails with colleagues around in the world in which we announce to each other that we'll be "OOTO" (out of the office) for various public holidays. Since lots of holidays here are unfamiliar there and vice versa, some of us have adopted a custom of not only announcing our upcoming absences but also giving a brief description of the holiday.

For example, my colleague and good friend Kyoko in Japan recently explained:

Our office will be closed next Monday, 9th October.

Taiiku-no-hi(Health-Sports Day)

October 10 is Taiiku-no-hi. It is to commemorate the opening of the Tokyo Olympics on October 10, 1964, and since 1966 it has been a national holiday. Its purpose is to familiarize with sports and nurture physical and mental health. Sports flourish in autumn because the weather is good, but, especially on taiiku-no-hi, numerous school and regional athletic meets and sports tourneys are held.

Another time she wrote:
Our office will be closed tomorrow, 3rd November.

Culture Day

Day for celebrating love of freedom and equality, and promoting culture. (Commemorates the promulgation, on November3, 1946, of the Constitution. Prior to 1945, this day was celebrated as the birth day of the Emperor Meiji.)

On Culture Day we do not have special food and drink. these days are just national holidays, so people go to sight seeing trip on these days.
Those who know me well will not be surprised to learn that when I send these kinds of notes, I attempt to make them amusing as well as informative. Here are a few of the descriptions I've sent in the past:
I just wanted to let you know that Monday is a holiday for us in the US. It's Labor Day. I've never really understood what it's for. I think it's something about labor unions, but what it means mostly is barbecues, picnics, little trips to the lake, and "white sales" where the department stores have big sales on bedsheets, pillowcases, towels, and so on. (I have no idea what linens have to do with labor unions!)
Labor Day is of course a celebration of the oft-punished fights that labor unions have made to give us, among other things, the eight-hour work day and the five-day work week—no minor accomplishment. Most people recognize that today's labor unions are far from perfect, but as a member of both management (in the corporate world) and labor (as a two-card-carrying member of two musicians' locals), I think I can agree with my dad's analysis: there is plenty of blame to go around. Usually corporations bring their labor problems on themselves by showing too little human regard for the employees who keep them in business, and labor unions in turn bring problems on themselves through excess and corruption. These are typically exacerbated by a failure on each side to communicate reasonably and openly with the other. Someday I'll write here about some interesting examples of this kind of thing that I've observed during my career.

The next year I offered a slightly improved description:
Labor Day is ostensibly about honoring labor unions, but it is really about barbecuing and buying discounted bed linens. It is also the official end of the season in which white shoes are considered acceptable—-between Memorial Day and Labor Day is the rule. I don't know anybody who has white shoes anymore—-except for athletic shoes, which don't count. All the same, I'm happy to take a day off to barbecue.
Apparently this holiday is of some interest to me, because the next year I got still more explicit:
The holiday is Labor Day. Originally Labor Day was intended to celebrate the sacrifices and achievements made by labor unions and labor organizers. American productivity and prosperity have been due to plain hard work, of course, but it is perhaps more notable now to celebrate the ways organized labor changed working conditions, especially for blue-collar labor. Thanks to labor unions, we now take a five-day work week, vacation, minimum wage, overtime pay, basic benefits, and an expectation of safe working conditions for granted.

But in truth, most people rarely give a second thought to the origin of this holiday and instead treat it as any other three-day weekend— a chance to have a barbecue, visit distant relatives, or catch up on household chores. Department stores traditionally have a Labor Day White Sale, in which bed and bath linens are discounted, but nobody knows why. Labor Day also marks the end of the season in which polite ladies and gentlemen are allowed to wear white shoes: tradition dictates that white shoes are worn between Memorial Day and Labor Day only. (I believe exceptions are made for tennis, croquet, and other activities for which white attire is expected.)
Speaking of barbecues, here was one year's take on the 4th of July:
next Friday, the 4th of July, is a holiday for the US team. If you're interested, here are my thoughts on the holiday:

We usually call it "the 4th of July," but its official name is Independence Day. This holiday celebrates the North American colonists' signing of a Declaration of Independence from England in 1776. The Declaration was an uppity letter to the King of England that said, in effect, "You aren't being fair, so we're not playing anymore." Their key complaint was about "taxation without representation": having to pay huge taxes but not having voting rights. They argued that this was so unfair that, having been snubbed in every effort to change the situation, the colonies had a right to secede from England. It was a novel argument that if your government oppresses you, you have a human right to overthrow it. Naturally, it took a big war to settle the matter, and the United States of America as we know it today didn't actually get underway until 1788, when our Constitution was ratified. An interesting point, though, is that even after seceding from England over a disagreement about basic human rights, the writers of the Constitution forgot to include provisions for basic human rights! So, right away, they had to make ten amendments to their document, which are called the Bill of Rights. This makes me feel better about how often we have to amend our [software localization] documents! :-)

For no particular reason that I know of, it is traditional to celebrate the 4th of July with fireworks and barbecues.
On re-reading that today, I'm wondering why it is that the US doesn't see anything wrong with perpetuating taxation without representation in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and so on.

Anyway, this year I went all out and decided to summarize all the upcoming US holidays:
Thanksgiving is the North American holiday where we celebrate and give thanks for the harvest by eating outrageous amounts of roast turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams or sweet potatoes, pumpkin pies, and all sorts of other fattening but delicious fall vegetables on Thursday. On Friday we either lie around feeling fat or else march to the shopping malls in search of big discounts in the "black Friday" Christmas shopping frenzy. My father insists that (American) football is also a big part of the Thanksgiving tradition, but I have no idea what he's talking about.

The history behind the holiday is even more controversial than the question of football, and Wikipedia gives a decent summary of the issues.

In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated a month earlier, closer to the actual harvest but with less emphasis on extreme consumption of its bounties and more emphasis on doing something over the long weekend.

Our offices are closed from 25dec-1jan for the winter holidays, which include Christmas, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Childermas, Hanukkah, Rosh Chodesh, Asara B'Tevet, and New Year's Day (some of which fall outside these dates).

What many of these holidays have in common are special foods, the fast Asara b'Tevet being a notable exception. Solstice and New Year are about the sun, and Rosh Chodesh is about the moon. Christmas is both a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus and subsuming many ancient indigenous seasonal rites, and a secular holiday prompting the year's biggest consumer spending. (As of this moment, Wikipedia's entry for Christmas displays a curious segment declaiming, "SANTA IS THE MAN.") Childermas is a minor related holiday. Hanukkah is a lesser Jewish holiday that commemorates Maccabees resisting Greek assimilation (or as they say, "it's another one of those 'they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat' holidays;" in this case, potato pancakes). Kwanzaa is a modern secular celebration of African-American heritage marking its 40th anniversary this year.
So we reach the denouement of our story, where my attempted good deed turns out to be a total screw-up.

In my fervor to describe all these holidays in an equally-tongue-in-cheek fashion, where no religion's holiday gets preferential descriptive treatment, I managed to come off as disdainful to all of them. One of my colleagues kindly pointed this out, to which I replied, "Disdain? I don't disdain any of them—just football!"

He then mentioned that others might consider "reconnecting with family" to be important.

Well, of course! Duh! And particularly among the more conservative in my audience, my failure to mention this, coupled with my failure to make overt mention of the importance of any of these holidays to me and mine, had to be offensive or at least annoying, particularly to my colleagues in the American South. The South is a region of the United States that has its own cultural identity and celebrates it to a much greater degree than any other part of the country (to wit, the Culture Shock international book series has a title devoted to the South, with special chapters on how Atlanta is still different). Among its values are a strong devotion to family, church, and local community (and the many overlaps among these). So, my casual disregard of the above would be an especially good example of me putting my "damn Yankee" foot right in my mouth and halfway down my throat.

I hastened to send a postscript:
Leave it to me to forget the most obvious point! All of these holidays are REALLY about reconnecting with family and friends. I get a little fixated on the food aspect of that, because in MY family the planning, preparing, and eating of special seasonal and cultural foods are the glue that pulls us all together.
Which is of course quite true, and it's also true that I happen to love the holidays that apply to me—especially because of the food traditions—and I've been inclined to adopt a few more that don't, again because of the food. I don't know a lot of goyim who celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, but I do, due in no small part to my love of latkes, charoset, matzoh (and -kugel and -brie), gefilte fish, and of course horseradish. I just didn't want to write any of that, because I didn't think my own religious affiliation was appropriate workplace comment.

The beautiful irony here is that I, the earnest multiculturalist who labored to describe a whole bunch of holidays in an ecumenical and egalitarian way so as not to offend anyone, managed to offend just about everyone. So my attempted good deed was actually a screw-up, and I got the punishment I deserved.

For what it's worth, three West Coast colleagues who value home and family no less than I do all thought it was amusing and took no offense to the general tone, and the Southern colleague could not have been kinder in his pointing out my gaffe. He's pretty used to me and my foibles.

Another Southern colleague who's actually a transplant shared this:
I recently saw a magazine page with a mother holding a big platter of turkey etc. On her head was a crown of thorns a la Christ.
Certainly an apt feminist response to the reality of many of these holidays, where mothers have traditionally been expected to spend a hot and tiring day in the kitchen while their menfolk relax and watch football on TV.

Indeed, for many oppressed classes, there are no real holidays. In the UK, they call them "bank holidays," which I think is an interesting reflection of the fact that they are a break from commerce—not necessarily a break for all in the public. It's also not lost on me that the word "holiday" derives from "holy day." Although our so-called public holidays are supposedly secular, in fact not even our language is.

19 November 2006

The darker side of gigging

Dementors are the guards of the wizard prison of Azkaban. Their origin is unknown, and it is also unclear how anyone reached agreement with them to carry out this role, as they are speechless, sightless and psychopathic. They feed on positive human emotions – happiness, hope, excitement. Their mere presence sucks every happy feeling or memory from any human present, leaving only cold dark despair in its place. The worst experiences of the victim’s life will flood through them as everything positive is stripped away. This effect causes the vast majority of Azkaban inmates to go insane in a very short length of time. Any wizard exposed to a Dementor for long enough is also likely to lose their powers. --Dementors were created by J.K. Rowling in The Prisoner of Azkaban, but I don't remember whence I lifted this description (sorry)
I met a dementor on a carpool—someone who was so negative, unhappy, nothing-is-my-fault, self-absorbed, and whining that it sucked my own good mood right out of me. I had to take desperate measures to withdraw from further carpooling. 

I waited a very, very long time before posting this, so that the Dementor of the gig wouldn't recognize him- or herself if s/he chanced upon this blog around the time of the gig.

Montclairberry Slurpee


Here's a shot of the family product, a Montclairberry-vodka infusion. We also make a rum variety. The backstory on this fabulous stuff, which we freeze and serve slushy, is in a post from long, long ago.

16 November 2006

Another brush with fame (among well-read news junkies, at least)

David Brooks was on my shuttle from Dulles to Raleigh on Monday morning, a few rows ahead of me. I saw him stand up to escape down the aisle and that's about it. I attempted to catch up to him in the airport to say that, although I often disagree with much of his thinking, I respect it and appreciate his writing, and ever since he would seem to have turned on Bush, I have more respect for his thinking. Not that it would have meant much to him, of course.

He was wearing a pink oxford and his glasses (and other things), and it looked like he had shaven recently. Respectable, in other words.

I was wearing microfiber camping pants, a t-shirt, a denim shirt, sneakers, and my leather jacket, and I looked like I hadn't shaven, eaten, slept, or had water nor a coherent thought for at least ten hours (because, of course, I hadn't, having flown red-eye from SF). Like hell, in other words.

While trotting from baggage to the rental car bus, I pondered the cost of fame. If David Brooks had looked as beaten up and downtrodden as I did on that shuttle, at least a few people would have recognized and thought ill of him, and it probably would have made gossip columns or at least a few blogs. If I'd caught up to him and spoken to him and he'd received my comments with any kind of grace, despite my appearance and probable incoherence, it would have been to his great credit.

I looked like hell, and nobody cared.

My politics are better and I'm sure I make way less money, but his life might be harder, and I'm not sure I'd trade with him. Anonymity has its privileges.

David Brooks, if you should google yourself and land here: I enjoy your columns. I often disagree with you, but you don't make it easy. Further quibbling with your recent writing is less interesting than the preceding points.

And you look better in pink than I ever will. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

08 November 2006

Montana update from Dad

Dad replies with a note on voter initiatives in Montana:
We had several initiatives on our ballot, also. There were several more but the Montana Supreme Court threw out the ones that had been foisted on us by some whacko neo-cons, because of widespread fraud in the signature-gathering process. One of the initiatives that happily passed was an increase in the Montana minimum wage--a buck higher than the current Federal minimum. That won by about 80-20. A sticking point in that one was that it calls for annual adjustments in the minimum wage based on the Consumer Price Index. The Republicans who managed to kill a minimum wage increase in the last legislative session will have lots of time to contemplate the sins of killing good legislation, because they could have gotten it pushed through without the CPI thing and bragged about how they helped working class Montanans. Now all they have is egg on their face and if the restaurant industry, who really fought the wage increase, thinks about it, they should remember who they got to this point.

Glad to hear you're going to stay in the U.S.

My post-election day screed

Victoria and I had taken yesterday off to volunteer for the local Dems to get out the vote. Sadly, the local Dems were too poorly organized to take us up on our offer, so our big effort consisted of getting out our own votes. Candy walked us (about a mile downhill) to the polling place to turn in our absentee ballots yesterday afternoon. You'd think we could have filled them out and mailed them weeks ago, but as I've written many times before, it's hard work being a good citizen in California.

First, we've got these bizarre relics of misguided populism called voter initiatives, aka propositions, meant to give the power back to the people but actually used either to catch hot potatoes thrown wimpy politicians or to ram crackpot lunacy down our throats, because who wants to buy politicians when you can buy your very own laws? My original policy was to vote No on all propositions, because it's the wrong way to make law, but because there are the two kinds--actual decent laws that politicians won't pass, usually because they involve taxes, and awful laws that are cleverly written to confuse the dickens out of even the smartest and best-educated voters--I've shifted to a new policy of researching which ones are which.

This year we had about a dozen of them, and it took me about four hours to figure it all out. I'm not sure if I got the right answer on two of them, but I did manage to be on the losing side of the most egregious one, basically exiling sex offenders from urban areas, so that those rural law enforcement agencies will have something to do with all their abundant resources. Never mind that sex offenders are such a trivially small part of the population that it would be cheaper and probably more effective to build them a nice resort in Oahu. We also resisted the urges to make cigarettes and gas more expensive, because although we love regressive taxes, we apparently don't buy what economists have been saying for years, that if cigarettes and gas were more expensive, a few more people would decide that emphysema and SUVs aren't worth it. (I don't get it. An ugly rumor must have gotten out that economists are French or something.)

On the other hand, we did win six of our seven possible new taxes, told the parental notification zealots to start weaving their handbaskets, and told a New York real estate magnate where to shove his eminent domain ploy.

Second, there's the judicial elections. I still don't have a method for these. Our ballots list dozens of sitting judges on whose retention we get to vote yes or no. An hour of googling plus conversations with three progressive-minded lawyers left me no better informed on the matter. Many of us therefore adopt a "First do no harm" strategy of skipping most of them. There has got to be a better way to staff the courts.

Anyway, back to our walk to the polling place, we were pleased to run into three neighbors, all of whom made subtle indications that it was time to have Dubya taken out and fed to the hogs. We tried to get a ballot for Candy (an Oakland citizen, with tags to prove it) but were turned down. Her spirits picked up on the long schlepp back uphill, though, when she found not one but two tennis balls. About an hour later we were home, drenched in sweat and well spattered with dog slobber. Democracy is aerobic when you live in Montclair.

At the end of Oakland East Bay Symphony rehearsal last night, the conductor's parting words were, "Well, let's go home and see if we need to move out of the country tomorrow." With the House regained and the Senate close, I'm happy to report that I no longer feel the need to spend today researching Canadian immigration law.

I don't even mind that we reelected our Governator. Sadly, it was probably the right outcome--the alternative was an uninspired crook, and the actor was never as bad as we'd feared. Lately he's actually been good. Let's hope it wasn't a cynical ploy to get reelected so he'd get four more years to scurry back to the right. For the first time in my life I cast a protest vote for the Green guy, joining a proud 2.3% minority, since I knew there wasn't the least chance of my vote actually making a difference in the outcome.

In goofier moments for Left Coast pride, both Berkeley and San Francisco resoundingly passed measures to impeach Bush and Cheney, and our own Jerry Brown has added another title to his resume, making him Governor Mayor Attorney General Moonbeam.

I'm starting to believe in our republic again. I think I'll go buy a flagpole, so I can hoist the stars and stripes for the first time in many years.

02 October 2006

Evidence that I don't deserve my beautiful kitchen

I like cooking and do a lot more of it than most people in my generation or the several generations before and after mine. However, at lunch time or when I've got nanoseconds before I need to run out the door to a gig, I cut corners. 

Unfortunately, I've been cutting corners more than usual lately. In the last week, I played a set with Symphony Silicon Valley, the fledgling reconstitution of the late San Jose Symphony currently comprised of more people than services, and I had suppers comprised of more Coke Zero than food. 

For lunch today, I proved to myself that seven-year-old just-add-water instant chili packets taste like cardboard. If you add a dash of green Tabasco, it tastes like cardboard with a dash of green Tabasco. Anybody who's surprised by this has been eating better than I have lately. 

29 September 2006

Let's learn law with the DTWOF!

Alison Bechdel brilliantly defines habeas corpus in terms a grade-schooler could understand. If only Dubya were as smart as grade-schoolers. 
DTWOF #458: Below the Law
And speaking of Alison Bechdel, her new graphic memoir is one of the most brilliant pieces of new literature I have ever read. Run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore and buy Fun Home. Listen to NPR's story about it (and her) here.

10 August 2006

I'm sick of the so-called "gay marriage" topic

First and most important, let us consider who has made it a topic: the people opposed to it. The people putting it on ballots, platforms, and advertising are people hoping to use it as a wedge issue to divide progressives. The rest of us have generally preferred to focus on things of much greater importance, like this disastrous mess of a war in Iraq. Naturally these types of topics aren't as much fun for those people, since the politicians they've bought are for the most part the ones who got us into this mess in the first place.

Next we have a terminology problem. First, "gay" leaves out a lot of the people affected--lesbians, bis, trans, whatevers, and all the other kinds of non-traditional families. Second, "marriage" is missing the point: it's not about a lacy veil and a march down the aisle of a flower-bedecked church, it's about basic fairness in all manner of tax, inheritance, insurance, medical decision-making and hospital visitation rights, child custody laws, and so on.

Herewith my proposal.

Recognize that there are two separate issues: marriage and civil union.

Marriage is a religious institution with moral standing. Allow religious organizations the freedom to define for themselves what marriage is and who is eligible to participate. Allow people the freedom to choose for themselves whether to participate in religious organizations, to choose to join them or not, and to choose which other organizations' marriages they will respect and honor. Marriage confers only those privileges and responsibilities defined by the organization. The means to dissolve or annul marriages or to disallow dissolution or annulment is also assigned to the marriage-granting institution to define and regulate. Marriage has no legal standing.

Civil union is a legal institution with legal standing. Allow the states and nation to define what civil union is and let a reading of the Constitution make clear that all are equally eligible to participate. Civil union confers legal and financial privileges and responsibilities and binds its members as legally and financially responsible for each other. The means to dissolve or annul civil unions or to disallow dissolution or annulment is also assigned to the state to define and regulate. Civil union has no moral standing.

Legal dependency is just that: legal dependency. My legal dependents are my natural-born or legally adopted children and anyone else for whom I take legal responsibility.

Keep church and state separate. Keep marriage and civil union separate.

If you want both marriage and civil union, get both. If you want one but not the other, get one.

I am free to persuade my church to marry me to my female partner, and if I succeed, we shall be married in the eyes of my church and our fellow congregants. If you don't go to my church or respect my church, you are free to consider me unmarried. You don't have to send me a wedding present or say congratulations, and you don't have to send me a sympathy card if someday I am bereaved. If we have sexual relations, you are free to consider them adulterous, scandalous, promiscuous, fornicatory, and all other manner of immoral; I shall not.

However, if my partner and I have joined in civil union, whether or not we have been married, and I get in a car wreck, and you work at the hospital treating me, you must respect my partner's input as you would any legal spouse's. If you employ me, you must offer my partner and our dependents--be they our naturally-born or legally-adopted children, or our senile parents[-in-law], or our disabled siblings, or even the refugees on whom we have taken pity and for whom we have taken legal responsibility--same insurance benefits you offer to any legal partners and dependents. If you have rental property, you must consider our lease application on its merits. If you are a tax collector, you must offer us the same dizzying array of loopholes, gotchas, deductions, and messy choices as all the straight couples get--you must ding us or discount us the same as any other civilly-united couple filing jointly or separately.

I'm sick of this topic and wouldn't mind never having to debate or write on it again. For those who want more, here's some interesting reading from reasonable people: http://www.beyondmarriage.org/.

01 August 2006

It's always the easy stuff that gets you

It's a truism that when you're writing, it'll always be the bonehead easy stuff you get wrong. Anything tricky, after all, you'll look up and confirm. The stuff you think you've always known will be where you make your errors, and of course you never bother checking the stuff you know.

Turns out I know bupkes about Superman. I think I've seen part of a movie and a few partial episodes of the TV show, and I thought I'd read a few of the comic books, but then I realized those were Spiderman... in fact, I think the TV episodes I saw were Spiderman, too, so maybe my Superman knowledge is worse than pathetic.

My boss is a Superman expert, and he set me straight on my astonishingly dense series of errors from last night:
  • George Reeves was the first; Christopher Reeve (no S) was the second
  • They're not related
  • Superman actually started in animated films in the 40s
  • ...oh hell, let's hear it from the expert, shall we?
As Dr. Potter writes,
The first time Superman appeared in the movies was in a series of excellent animated features by the Fleischer Studios in the early 1940's. To this day, these animated films are considered classics by professionals in the field.

The first person to play Superman in the movies was Kirk Alyn, who played the character in two serials (as they were called in those days) in the 1940's. Unfortunately, these were rather cheesy films, low budget and to make matters worse, whenever Superman had to fly, they reverted to animation! So, for example, Kirk would run behind a rock and an animated Superman would take off into the sky. This didn't fool anyone at the time, not even little kids.

George Reeves first donned the cape in a movie called "Superman and the Mole Men". Due the success of this film, they decided to create a TV series called "Adventures of Superman" starring George as the Man of Steel. This TV show aired from 1952 to 1958. In the movie as well as the TV show, for the first time, they actually had a real person (George, of course) up on wires and appearing to fly. No animation! Of course, the special effects were extremely crude by today's standards. Indeed, recently Warner Brothers (who now owns DC Comics, who in turn own the rights to Superman) has issued the first 4 seasons of "Adventures of Superman" on DVD and thanks to the digital remastering, it is very easy to *see* the wires holding George up! It was this version of Superman that I grew up with as a little boy. And of course, the story goes that Reeves committed suicide because he was so depressed over being typecast as Superman and couldn't find any other work as an actor.

Then, as you know, Christopher Reeve became the Man of Tomorrow in 1978 in a very high budget, much publicized, and extremely successful movie. Chris appeared as Superman in 4 movies, the third of which was pretty disappointing and the fourth of which was so bad that we would all like to forget it ever happened!

And now, finally after all these years, "Superman Returns" with Brandon Routh.
So there you have it: I know bupkes about Superman. I do know a good song when I hear one, though, and I think you should hear it, too.

31 July 2006

So often he does it better

My blog posts on the heat are topped by a Jon Carroll column. I don't mind when he does it better; I'm just glad I get to read him. He's right on, once again.

Another "he" who done good: my boss wrote a song that's worth checking out. You may recall from earlier posts that I work for some big ol' software company, so this is a fellow software geek we're talking about, but his song has something to say and says it well.

If you're from my generation, you might be as clueless as I was, so here's a tip on the background: the original Superman was George Reeves, father of Christopher Reeves, the guy who was famous as a movie hunk and then more famous as a spinal cord injury activist. George Reeves died under mysterious circumstances (murder? suicide? see the movie!). If anyone knows the truth and can prove it, they're not talking, but for at least one little boy in Iowa who needed his hero, the alleged suicide came as a real blow.

It's so amazing when people step way outside their usual comfort zones to do something that matters to them.

In other news, Ayse thinks my blog needs a new title. Obviously she's right, but what would it be? Use that comment link, people!

I've just learned that if you read this blog with Windows Internet Explorer, you've never seen all the stuff in the right column.

Let's take stock. Do you see nothing besides the title and recent posts? If so, you're using a crappy, lousy, horrible, inferior browser, and you should move on. Over there--->> on the right, you should see a little picture of me, a list of photo collections found within, a link to archives of old posts, a wee sudoku, and some links to other blogs I read. If you don't see that, your browser sucks.

Internet Explorer is about the lamest and most pathetic web browser I've ever attempted to use. I'll restrain myself from the urge to level a blast at all of Windows and focus my wrath on IE: it's lousy, and if it's the only web browser you've ever used, you're in for a huge surprise. Almost all the alternatives out there are better. I myself like OmniWeb, and Safari and Firefox are my backup browsers. None of them are perfect, but all of them are better. The first two are the exclusive privilege of Mac users, but those of you who haven't yet seen the light on the whole Mac vs. Whatever question could at least do yourselves the favor of trying Firefox. ("Firewho?" I hear you ask. Use Google, it's not hard to find it.) Download it and use it for two days. You might move on to something else, but you'll never go back to IE.

For those of you who do have Macs, give OmniWeb a try. It has its little problems, but I have yet to find a browser that doesn't. What OmniWeb does well, it does so well that you'll want to use it all the time, and you won't mind having to keep Safari and Firefox around for the bits and pieces it doesn't handle as well.

24 July 2006

You know it's hot when...

...two cats and a dog all do their dead-horse impressions within feet of each other in what they've decided is the coolest room in the house.

...your black lab is too tired to get up and ask for a bite of your hot dog. 

...your cat decides that the granite countertop is a good place to lounge. 

...you work in the dark because you don't want your 100 watt light bulb heating up the room. 

Wicked hot

It's been wicked hot here since Friday. Usually on the few days a year that this area gets hot, we get coastal fog by nightfall to cool it all back down again, and those days are usually at least in August if not September or October. July in SF is famously the coldest winter Mark Twain ever spent. Usually we joke about July coming, better get out the wool sweaters. Not this month! It got up to 94 inside, 99 outside, and cooled only to 89 at night, three nights in a row and counting. I know that doesn't sound so bad to people in many areas, but what you have to realize is that we don't have air conditioners around here, so when it does get this hot, there's very little we can do about it. I was glad the July opera was over, because it was 105-115 in the tunnel suburbs.

Actually, office buildings and the wealthy people in their McMansions have air conditioning, and the power draw usually causes brownouts or rolling blackouts when we get heat waves. The utilities then beg us all to "Flex our power" and only run appliances after sunset and before sunup. They rarely mention that the wealthy should turn down their air conditioners. We sweltering hoi polloi are supposed to wash our dishes by hand and do laundry after bedtime so that the McMansions can stay cool. Right. I think instead of having rolling blackouts, they should just throttle the amount of electricity available to each home as needed, and each home can allocate its share as desired. Maybe if the McMansioners realized that their air conditioning and refrigerators were mutually exclusive choices, they'd set the AC higher than 65. And just think, the general population might finally figure out the relationships between volts, watts, and amps!

While I'm ranting, why is it that the people who think AC needs to be set at 65 are also the people who think furnaces need to be set at 75? And how come the people with the flags on their SUVs are also the people who can't be bothered to vote?)

Heat waves make me cranky.

Anyway, Saturday we woke up hot and miserable, and it didn't take me long to declare it a desperate time calling for desperate measures and mix up a batch of Danish Marys, which helped. At 3pm it was all I could do to force myself outside and light the grill to roast a chicken. Fortunately, it tasted pretty good. We were dousing ourselves in cold water several times an hour, and by the end of the day we'd gone through a gallon of iced tea and all the ice in our freezer, which is saying something when you have an ice machine.

We tried to take Candy for an afternoon walk but only got about two houses away before we had to give up--it was just too hot to move, and since she'd pooped, we just turned around and promised her a proper walk after dark. After dark it was still too hot, though, so none of us got any significant exercise Saturday.

Yesterday we woke up hot and miserable for the third day in a row and went out to buy fans. I've lived here since 1994 and never needed anything more than a wimpy little oscillating tabletop fan that I'd brought from Chicago. I don't remember even using that fan since moving to Montclair for anything but ventilating rooms with fresh paint or tile lacquer, and after the kitchen project, it was so gunky and bedraggled, I finally threw it away. However, all three critters had been doing their dead horse impressions since Friday and it was starting to worry me, so we went and bought two high-power fans for them. They've been roaring on high ever since.

We also got a sprinkler for Candy, and when we got home we stripped down a layer and took her out to play in it. V and I loved it, but Candy had to be dragged and stood there with this look of despair or at least resignation. I swear, though, she appreciated when she went back inside to flop on her pillow all wet with the fan blowing on her. She looked perky and alert for the first time in days. We also felt much better and went out with the newspaper and our wet clothes to the back deck. We decided a bucket of icy water was a nice place to keep our feet. Norton begged to come out, so I dunked his paws in the icy water several times, too. He didn't appreciate that at all, but I swear it did him some good. Gjetost, meanwhile, had retreated to the coolest, darkest corner of the house: my office, behind the milkcrates under my desk. Once we realized she was missing, it took us quite a panicky ten minutes or so to find her!

We made a cold dinner and sat down to watch a movie at 8. By the end of the movie, V pointed out that cool air was coming in, so we took Candy on her walk and felt gleeful. You know it's hot out when 85 feels like a cool breeze. She had fun growling at a couple raccoons.

Now's about the time I realized our refrigerator/freezer needed to be turned down--it was 50 in the fridge and 25 in the freezer, so that helped explain why we'd emptied the ice supply two days in a row. Poor thing just wasn't keeping up.

Here we are, day four, and it's 83 inside and 87 outside already at 10:30am. Not good.

Over the winter, we had 100-year-record rainfall, and now our supposedly coldest month is the hottest I've been through since moving to California. It's beyond me how anyone can deny that global warming is happening.

In better news, that record rainfall seems to be promising a bumper crop of Montclairberries. Before it got quite so blisteringly hot, I harvested the first big load, and we started macerating three bucketsful of the family product--one rum, two vodka. Montclairberry Slurpees are in our future.

22 July 2006

Whoops!

Sorry about that broken link to the Deck: Before and After, Jr. photo collection. It's fixed now.

It's bloody hot here--too hot to think clearly or accomplish anything. I need to cobble together some kind of swamp-cooler for the baking kitties.

17 July 2006

Scope-creep happens

After Jon and George and Russ and the guys finished my kitchen, way back in the fall of 2004, George tore out the rotten, ugly, hideous, cheap-ass deck-facsimile that had been his route for supply-hauling and so on for the five months he'd been slaving on my kitchen, and he built me a beautiful redwood and copper deck.

This would be the ultimate scope creep. We'd gone from redoing a kitchen, widening an opening, and redoing dining room, music studio, and entry floors, to doing all that plus tearing out, upgrading, and lighting a deck and major outdoor staircase.


The deck was awful. It was beyond awful; it was scary and hateful. When I bought the house, it was one of the declared "preexisting conditions." There was already a bounty on its everhating head: $6K. Yeah, right, $6K. I started talking to contractors and heard numbers more like $30K, and I decided I could ignore the rotting, hideous deck for a while. But five years had gone by, and Jon and George and Russ and the guys had been tromping up and down on my deck and cursing at my deck and cutting tiles on my deck and stacking old appliances on my deck and heaping debris on my deck for five months more, and it had become apparent that this deck was not only ugly and hideous but a potential liability.

George and I had shared morning coffee nearly every morning for five years, and afternoon beers and whatnot for many of those days, so by now we were family. Since the kitchen was finished and he was ready for a new project, George offered to redo my deck, showed me some sketches, and offered a reasonable estimate of materials, times, rates, and so on. We reached agreement over martinis one night (or rather, I was drinking a martini, and he was having a vodka-vermouth-olive concoction). I took care of the boring legal details, he took my deck books and sketches home to think about, and we were off.

George decided to view this holistically as a project not only of construction but of art, of mind and body, and of moral struggle, so he decided not to involve any cut-rate (not to mention illegal) day laborers. He decided to do all the work himself, including digging out the hillside as needed to have a single door-level deck and remove the steps and level change; including digging holes for piers and mixing and hauling concrete for piers; including constructing a whole new, higher, stronger retaining wall running a larger portion of the perimeter. We decided to take Before and After George pictures to go with the Before and After deck pictures, since he planned to improve his own physique along with my deck. The Before pictures are in the photo collection, but we forgot to take the Afters, unfortunately.


I helped with a bit of the shovelwork, but nothing significant, and the design process was collaborative, involving many sessions of us staring at what was done so far and discussing how next to proceed, but on the whole, this deck was a work of George Lawson art.

Did I mention that George is an artist?

Google him, and you will find a long (electronic) paper trail of his ongoing career as an artist. Eventually you'll land at his site and see his newest paintings, which were inspired by the enthusiastic reception that a painting of his received at my kitchen-warming (Smørgåsbord V: Norway and Sweden) in January 2005. I've hung two of his works, tangram dancers and turtles, in my music studio, and you'll see these in my Before:After, Jr: The Deck photo collection.

His new work is exciting. I want the Japanese firemen.

It was also a remarkable act of friendship. We grew closer, as his work grew depressing as the weather grew colder, and my software job grew depressing (because we were going through a rough spell at work). Many is the time we slurped nasty protein shakes for lunch together, dug holes together, and commiserated over our miserables states of employ. Our conversational arch over the four months (or so) that it took to redo the deck covered the nature and purpose of art, daily politics, the disastrous 2004 elections, food, life, love, and everything else that mattered then and still matters now.

We watched the series of presidential and vice-presidential debates together, always over the requisite food and drink. One dark night, George W. Bush the Despicable won reelection. As Ohio's electoral votes stood between us and doomsday, George even persuaded me to give him a haircut, and I can at least say for myself that his head looked better for the next six weeks or so than my nation did.

Back to art, my house has a George Lawson original on the west side. It's still waiting for its crowning glory, a promised redwood sculpture, perhaps of a napping cat, to be perched on the curiously unfinished-looking post at the bottom of the staircase. It's also waiting for a signature. When these are installed, we'll mix martinis and vodka concoctions and dedicate not just a beautiful work of construction and art but another wonderful branch of my family. I'll always have an extra chop on the grill for George.

12 July 2006

V's new baby

V got a shiny new silver baby!

You found me!

I moved my blog to blogspot, because I was fed up with all the glitches and gotchas of trying to keep this thing together on my comcast homepage. A URL that's easier to remember is a nice bonus for the switch: http://erinvang.blogspot.com/. (Don't click that; you're already here.)

Here are feed options, for those who know how to use them:

Please let me know if you notice links not working, etc., particularly with the photo albums, which are still on the dreaded comcast.net.

Cheese kitty likes olives

Victoria and I were having martinis (Beefeater, of course), and fortunately I happened to have my camera within arm's reach when Gjetost the Cheese Kitty started trying to finish my martini. I think she was after the olive more than the remaining gin vapors, but you never know.


And because I can, here's a video of her exploits.

03 July 2006

Why are you reading this? 

My site-traffic widget reports that my readership is smallish but much larger than I'd expect, which is to say greater than the six readers or so that could be accounted for by my family, and there's even a fair amount of return traffic from people who live places where I don't know people, so some people must be finding something interesting here. What is it? Use that comment link, please. 

01 July 2006

Airline kharma

My airline kharma has been interesting lately. I passed the 50K butt miles mark sometime in May, meaning I've already passed my usual annual mileage, so my upgrade status is coming along nicely. For many of my recent segments endured during nine consecutive weeks of business travel, I've been getting upgraded to business a lot. On Monday it all came crashing down: not only did I not get upgraded, but I got stuck in a window seat trapped in by two middle-aged mainland Chinese tourists who insisted on sleeping nearly all the way across the continent. My impression is that they'd arrived in SFO from China and were continuing to the east coast in what would have to be the marathon journey from hell, poor folks, so I couldn't bring myself to wake them. Finally I climbed over them, traveling by armrest (they're stronger than you'd expect!) to escape for a pee and to get another bottlet of wine.

Later, when I was nibbling on my leftover wildly-hot barbecue rib shreds (I'd deboned before leaving home and was basically extruding the gloppy meat out of a ziploc snack baggie into my mouth, like so much incendiary space food), then unwinding and nibbling through a sweaty braid of traditional string cheese, and washing all this down with my bottlet of airplane cabernet while working on the NYTimes Sunday crossword, I reflected on how I'd observed with some curiosity the unfamiliar and often strange-looking picnics I'd seen people eating on my flights around China last fall and wondered how these folks could possibly be any less puzzled by my meal. Even to me it was a strange one.

Anyway, back to that airline kharma, I'd had a three-hour nap before the plane even got off the ground in SF, because Washington, DC had all those rain storms, and everything in and out of Dulles was all out of whack. I finally landed around 9pm. My 10pm shuttle to RDU was delayed to 10:38, boarded at 10:30, and actually left around midnight, so it was 1:30am by the time I got to my hotel. What's really weird is that I'd hoped to catch the 7:15 shuttle on standby if my long haul had arrived on time (I booked the later one because it brought the fare down $400 and made it possible for me to book United instead of one of the icky airlines), and THAT flight was delayed to 11:45 and who knows when it finally left. Very weird!

Summer afternoon/evening flights from down here are always dodgy, so when my meeting schedule changed on me for the umpteenth time and I had to rebook to the last RDU-IAD shuttle, which has a 45 min connection to the SFO flight and often a terminal change to make that extra aerobic, I warned Victoria that we should probably get used to the idea that I wouldn't make it home until Saturday or Sunday. (I have a 7pm opera rehearsal Sunday, but nothing else scheduled.) Sure enough, when my meetings finished up around 4:30 (wildly successful! yay!), I had text messages waiting on my phone that my 7:35 flight was departing "on time" at 8:40. Huh? How is that on-time? I then spent about 10 minutes trying to get updated flight stati over the web to no avail, gave up and phoned, learned that I'd have a -20 minute connection, checked out my options for Sat-Sun returns, called Bruce and Kathy to arrange a visit ("sure!"), called back to book a Sunday morning departure, called Avis to reserve a car, and spent the extra time typing up my meeting notes so I didn't have to take pictures and transcribe them later.

I got to the airport about 90 min early, planning to find something to eat, only to discover that every last food outlet in that airport closes at 7pm. What's THAT about? Finally I found a plastic chicken caesar and a lousy margarita and settled in with my novel. At 8:40 there was still no sign of our plane, but the unattended gate still had the "ON TIME" sign and the "DEPARTS 8:40" as if that could possibly be true about a 7:35 flight that was over an hour late and still planeless. In a fit of self-amused pique, I pulled out the ONTIME sign and put it back in upside-down. The dozen or so people sitting at the gate giggled and thanked me. I asked the assembled if anyone had some Post-It so we could add a "NOT SO MUCH" sign to their "ON TIME" sign. A remarkably large portion of the group started digging through their bags looking for some. I finally was the one who found some (guess who leads a lot of meetings?), so I made and posted the sign, and by now the little gang of us were all chatting and laughing together.

We were all amused when the gate agent arrived and started doing her thing without touching or even appearing to notice our alterations to signage.

About this time, some salesman-looking guy walked up to some people sitting near us and practically shouted a greeting and introduction of himself, so several of us sort of shouted back to him, "Hi, Shannon, we're everybody else!" He happily greeted "everybody else" back, and by this time we'd all figured out that his volume level had two causes: iPod earphones and rum and cokes. After we all joked around a bit about our plane not even being here yet, he asked if we would mind bellowing, "Hey, Shannon!" toward the bar when it did finally arrive. We practiced, and he was so amused he offered everybody traveling to Dulles a drink on his company. About five of us took him up on it. I offered my little tub of greek olives to the party. About fifteen minutes, the plane was finally boarding, and sure enough, as the check-in line dwindled, about four people yelled "Hey, Shannon" together, and we joined the queue. (We'd been keeping an eye on it, actually, but still!)

It was a happy flight. Late, and I think one passenger of the thirty of us actually made a connection, but fun.

Just before we landed, the flight attendant told us why we'd been late: Dubya was in Memphis with Koizumi, and the whole time Air Force One sat around in Memphis, nobody else was allowed to do anything in the airspace for a 30 mile radius. I hoofed it out Dulles with our pilot, who said it was just standard security practice and mentioned that he'd been involved in "the Clinton haircut" debacle, too: "same deal, both parties--it's just stupid."

And now here I am visiting college friends for a weekend, and the company gets to pay half, since it wasn't my fault.

As for Shannon, I was right--he IS a salesman. I won't name his company, but it's a luxury goods maker I've yet to patronize, because their stores never, ever stock extra fine nibs. Therefore I carry around products from half a dozen of their competitors (because of course I'm one of those high-tech geeks who loves-low tech fountain pens that make big, ungracious, unmodern messes of ink all over my latest, greatest gadgets). I told him as much, and it put him on an absolute tear about how frustrated he is with the stores thinking medium is all they'll ever need. We exchanged business cards and he promised to fix the problem, because he doesn't want me traveling all around the world with those other brands. I suspect what this means is that either I'll never hear from him or he'll arrange an opportunity for me spend a gazillion dollars on an XF in his brand, but you never know!

Like I said, my airline kharma is changing. Didn't say it's getting worse.

07 May 2006

Translation queries

I get several emails a day--on a good day! sometimes it's more than several--that have this subject line: translation queries about some aspect of the software that it's my job to get localized. 

When I travel to various countries to meet with my translators, I have translation queries of my own: how do I order another beer? (in Japan, for draft, it's "o sem a sen!--nama hitotsu") how do I excuse myself after bumping into people on the elevator with my enormous multi-laptop-laden backpack? (in Korea, it's "shilye hamnida"). 

And usually late at night, after a few rounds of beer, or wine, or mou tai, or sake, or soju, or shoju, or whatever the local firewater is, I get translation queries from my translators. These are the really interesting ones. These are the questions about English that professional translators are still wrestling with after years of translating professionally, so you know they're the good ones. 

I'd become extra-professionally close with one of my Japanese translators and struck up an actual ink-on-paper personal correspondence, and I'd signed one such ink-on-paper letter with an "XXOO --Erin" kind of sign-off that we use all the time over here in the so-called New World, and when my translator asked by email what this meant, it turned into a back and forth that lasted several days. Since kissing and hugging are not normal Japanese behavior among friends or even intimates, this was a strange signoff, and the mysteries of how and why X and O signify hugs and kisses was yet another line of inquiry. I could go on about this, but I won't. Not now, anyway. 

Recently after dinner, my Korean translators asked me to explain what "lovely" means. I'm reminded of their query by my blog mom's use of the word several times in her most recent post

I said that it's beautiful wrapped up inside loveable wrapped up inside elegant, but I don't think I quite hit the nugget of loveliness in "lovely." 

How would you answer that? Use the Comments link, people.

I forgot to clarify that in Great Britain (this translator's company's home office) it's just yet another vague adjective for "nice," i.e., it means nothing at all--same as brilliant, which here means brightly lit or brightly thought and there means anything from "thanks" to "mediocre." And then there's "cheers!" which means "drink your damned drink already!" here and means anything from "please" to "thank you" to "drink!" there. 

01 May 2006

You know the dust has blown in from China when:

The morning dawns bright and clear except for the clear part, not so much. This was the view from my hotel room yesterday.

By lunchtime your contacts feel like they've been in for sixteen hours.

You blow your nose and get black gunk. Mind you, you don't do this in public in Asia--they don't mind sniffing at all, but think blowing is disgusting, which is the exact opposite of how I was raised--so think twice before ordering that wonderfully-piping-painfully-hot spicy soup.

You've probably read in the news about dust storms from China affecting Japan and Korea. It's true. Deforestation and lack of forestation in the first place combined with strong winds have been making Asia one gritty, dusty place lately.

Breakfast potluck

Sometimes Dad hits the nail on the head. From his weekend email report today: "I just finished wading through the email that had accumulated over the weekend, including a whole bunch of spam and some of those sickening sweet inspirational things that would probably make Jesus puke." He went on to talk about shooting pistols and give a weather report, so if you think my blog posts are random, you ought to try my dad's email. (Hi, Pop!)

Sounds about right to me. And with that, I'll continue my breakfast bloggage with a hodge-podge of accumulated observations:

Even luxury gets monotonous. Today I couldn't face another breakfast of incredibly good lox with horseradish, capers, and minced onion on whole-grain bread. I'm having yogurt and muesli instead, and here's a yogurt flavor I've never thought of: concord grape and coconut. It's good! It's white! We're not in Kansas anymore.

Costs are all over the map here. I turned in several pairs of socks, 5 pairs underwear, two shirts, and a pair of pants to the hotel laundry yesterday. W75,000, about $75. Yesterday in Itaewon I bought five pairs of black dress socks with CK, Hermes, Boss, and Gucci logos (you might note that I'm not calling them CK, Hermes, Boss, and Gucci socks, although they might be) for W10,000, or about $2 a pair. Countless tailors offered to make me custom suits (ladies suits! dresses! you want blazer?!) for $200 or so. (Naturally I had to choose a tailor charging almost twice that, but even so it's a bargain--I asked about custom suits in San Francisco once and got an answer with four digits, and the first one wasn't a one, or even a two. No wonder the guy was skeptical about my interest!) Lesson? I should have thrown away my laundry and bought new instead. Oh, well.

Another contradiction: strangers throughout Japan and Korea call me "sir," yet the tailors in Itaewon yesterday were offering to make me dresses. I can't help chuckling over how somehow both are wrong.

What is it with hotel art? Why do they even bother? It's not like anyone ever appreciates it. We either ignore it or despise it. The art in this hotel is innocuous--a vaguely modern abstract in the living room zone, and two small, vaguely antiquey things (one diagramming a parachute, another seashells) in overly ornate gilded frames hanging in the bathroom of all places.

Hoteliers have a hard job. If the rooms aren't beautiful, we whine, but if they are beautiful, we don't notice them--we really just sleep, bathe, and dress in them. That is, we sleep if they've gotten the things that matter right: comfortable bed, sheets that aren't itchy, and a way to get the room dark, by which I mean so dark you can't find the Kleenex on your bedstand. My bedroom at home has loads of light all night long, and it rarely bothers me, but when I'm on the road, my room needs to be dark, because jet lag asks for the tiniest of opportunities to keep me awake.

Why do we say "on the road" and "road warrier" when it's all about airplanes?

Jet lag is weird. I fly to the East Coast for a week, a meager three hour time difference, and my sleep schedule is messed up for two weeks, but I can come halfway around the world and be fine almost immediately. The nice thing about flying to Asia is you arrive tomorrow evening exhausted from the 11+ hour flight, so you go to sleep, you wake up 8-9 hours later, it's morning, and you're switched over, as long as you don't think to much about how it's already the day after tomorrow. For me, jetlag in Asia means I wake up every morning around 4am, then sleep some more until about 7am, after which I'm awake for the day. I'm not a morning person in real life, but it's convenient that business travel makes me one. A week into the trip, I finally slept until my alarm went off at 8am, so I guess I'm getting adjusted--more's the pity, since it means I didn't have time for the gym this morning.

Flying back home from Asia is brutal. It's a slightly shorter flight (something to do with headwinds vs. tailwinds) and you arrive home two hours before you left, and it's morning, and somehow you have to stay awake for another 16 hours or else your sleep will be hopelessly screwed up for weeks. Since I'm coming home to a week of orchestra gigs and then three-plus weeks in Europe, I can't afford that, so anybody who has ideas for fun things to make me do to keep me awake on Saturday is welcome to sign up for babysitting slots.

Please, I'm serious about this. Come keep me awake on Saturday. Last time I flew home from Korea (in 1992) I became desparate for diversions the second evening and ended up putting myself in the emergency room to be sewn back up after a bicycle repair accident. Thanks to the trip, I'd just had a tetanus booster and got to astonish the series of residents and interns who came in get my history by answering with great precision a question most people can only guess about. For those of you who are know scratching your heads (I guess I flatter myself that a few people might read this blog, even though nobody ever comments to cop to it), you probably need one--boosters every ten years, folks.

I love nanotechnology. I just spilled espresso on my "nanocare" or whatever they call it semi-plastic (insert brand name here) khaki slacks and wiped it off with my napkin.

Size matters

Americans seem to think everything needs to be bigger to be better. Japanese go off the other deep end.

I already knew this, as do most people who have any curiosity at all about Japan, but still I found cause for astonishment.

I arrived at Narita Airport early Wednesday afternoon and, after some frustration trying to get cash (the fourth ATM I tried finally spat out a meager ¥10,000, about US$ 100) took the Narita Express train into central Tokyo for about $30. At Tokyo Station I bought a bottle of iced tea, and faced with at least a dozen choices and having no clue how any of them differed except in color (gradations of light brown and light green), I picked the one that had a little bonus pouch of something around its neck--osembe (snacks), I assumed. I opened the pouch when I got to the hotel and found the world's tiniest lunch. Too bad it was out of scale with the world's tiniest little bottle of soy sauce, which had come with my lunch on the plane.

You'll often see tiny garbage cans lurking in the rear corner of the stall in Japanese bathrooms--say, four or five inches wide, and often a quarter-cylinder that tucks oh so preciously into that corner. You might not notice the wee trash can, though, for all the distractions provided by many Japanese toilets. Most of the toilets I used had seats heated to the point of being uncomfortably hot. A warm seat on a cold day is an enviable luxury, but a hot seat on a sweaty day seemed a bit much to me. My Japanese colleagues had a different view of the weather, though--where I was wearing short sleeves and sandals without socks and still sweating and wishing I were wearing short pants--they were putting on jackets and worried that I'd be cold. They must have some genetic adaptation for surviving the sweltering heat and humidity of +40˚C summers, whereas my ancestry prepares me for –40˚C winters.

Speaking of genetic adaptations, though, may I digress for a moment to share a comment made by my guide in Beijing last December? He said that in the millenia before water treatment plants, Asians boiled their water for safety and made tea, whereas Westerners came up with beer and so on, and that's why many Asians can't metabolize alcohol but can drink pots and pots of tea up to bedtime and still sleep like babies, whereas Westerners get the jitters after a few cups of coffee but can handle considerably more booze. Interesting theory, at least.

Getting back to the Japanese toilets, the obsession of many a world traveler, they also had amazingly complicated apparati (and, thank heaven, bilingual instructions) for "do bidet" and "wash bottom" with adjustable water temperature and pressure, "flushing sound to mask toilet, 25 seconds" with a button for repeating and another pair of buttons to adjust the volume, and on and on. Two hours' flight separates the world's extremes in toilets: in China many toilets are squalid porcelain holes in the soiled floor, bring your own toilet paper, and in Japan a toilet has more buttons, switches, and dials than an iPod. The one in my hotel room was a little simpler.

Speaking of electronics, both my hotels (in Tokyo and in Seoul) feature bedside control panels for everything. Necessary it's not, but it sure is nice. I spend a lot of nights in hotels, seemingly around the world, and let me tell you, wandering around this night's room in this city's hotel trying to find all the switches needed to achieve darkness at bedtime can be enough of a challenge that it wakes you back up. Both hotels also offer tea kettles, but the one in Japan wins the prize. It boils water in ten minutes and then keeps it at tea-brewing temperature all day. When you're making tea in Japanesely-small cups, you'd make yourself nuts putting water on separately for each cup. I suppose here is a case where bigger might be better--making one big pot, or at least a really big mug, is easier--but I think the Japanese emphasis is on having the tea painfully hot, just like the soup and the toilet seat.

After finishing up work on Friday, I had a few hours to kill before meeting colleagues for a settai (the Japanese business dinner, famously elaborate and expensive), so I walked about twenty minutes from the office I was visiting to the Ginza district. Around the corner from the famous Mitsukoshi department store was a store that my colleague Chie correctly predicted would thrill me: Itoya. You probably know the brand name: office supplies. In particular, my own fetish, cunning little pens and mechanical pencils. Mind you, a Japanese stationer in the States is plenty fun, but this was a nine floor department store of pens, pencils, writing paper, engraved stationery, gifts, wrapping papers, fountain pens and related luxury goods, novelty items and desk toys and garish but dear pencil cases, and god knows what else. I used up all my time just browsing the first four floors and managed to spend over ¥10,000 (US$ 100) on a fistful of delightfully fine-pointed pens and pencils, impossibly narrow-ruled notebooks, and assorted gifts.

Most Americans consider a .5 or .7mm pencil or pens to be "extra fine point," but by Japanese standards, these are cloddishly fat; .4, .3, .25, .20, and even smaller are the sizes that prevail here, unless you're looking at calligraphy brushes or their brush-tipped pen-style jobbers that I don't yet fully understand. (I bought one, strictly for research purposes of course.) And then there are all the pens and pencils that are themselves tiny--I mean mechanical pencils the size of a swizzle stick and pens that fold down to the size of a golf tee and unfold, telescope, or otherwise contort themselves into something resembling a normal-ish sized pen. How was I supposed to resist?