the end

Friday was Bootiful Princess's last day of preschool. 

It was hard for both of us. 

She had been coming to school with me since she was six weeks old.  

The notion of turning my tiny baby over to some overcrowded public school has been really rough. 

There will be no tree house loft to sit under, not capes, no crowns, no silk cushions and woolen toys.   

There will be no softly watercolor painted walls and windows with  flowing draperies.

There will be rough, creepy children with snotty noses, and Disney themed clothing. 

When Maxwell went to kindergarten it was at a magnet program and the principal allowed me  and some other mothers to lazure the walls, make cushions, a father made a story loft. 

Miss F, lost in the lottery and will go to a regular old school, school where the principal has bigger concerns than my sense of aesthetics.

with luck there will quickly,  be new friends, and we will try like crazy to keep up with our dear old friends.

misfits and a new camera

the fam, with Mark looking more bald than he really is.

We have a million things this week.  Most of them related to Maxwell's new school. 

I hate casual social events and meeting new people in particular. 

I cringe at the thought of  social situations, where one is required to make small talk. 

It has been a painful week. 
On Sunday there were a number of potlucks "get togethers", so I randomly chose one and RSVPed. 

We showed up to a very fancy house with very fancy grass, only to discover that the people all lived in that neighborhood, and that all of their kids had gone to school together since kindergarten. 
Maxwell was not feeling well, but was a pretty good sport, as the other kids ignored him completely and none of the parents encouraged inclusion. 
It felt weird. 
All of the parents looked really old.  They looked like my parents- well not my real parents, but like what my parents would look like if they were ultra middle class, and fancy.  I felt like some kind of hippie freak, with tacky shoes.
Freyja was horrible, and wild and I wanted to crawl under a rock.

And to add insult to injury, only one person ate my pie. 

It was an outstanding pie, damn it and deserved to be eaten.  

Needless to say this is not what I had expected from the arts magnet school crowd, but Mark thinks it was an anomaly.  The children there didn't seem arty to me, they were all in band and ballet, the expensive kinds of art, not the alternative kinds of kids that are Maxwell's friends.


The good news is that Rolf bought me a new camera, and hooked it up to the computer. 

Hooray!  Lots of random photos to follow. 

Lucky YOU!

test shot of kitty

a blueberry polenta cake I made for Rolf's girlfriend's birthday

my new $2.50 t-shirt!

the raccoon, up to no good!

amazing local produce!

black quinoa salad, with chickpeas!

pickled beets and green beans!

Food cart wars

Unless you live under a rock, you are probably aware of the exploding food cart scene in Portland, there was even a story about it on NPR recently..  

Portland is a foodie town with fantastic ethnic restaurants and cafes around every corner. 

The food carts are taking it to a new high, with "pods" of carts turning up all over the city offering an amazing selection of top notch grub. 

We took Mark's mom, Wawa out to lunch at the downtown pod at 9th and Alder, where there are two blocks of carts to chose from. 

Our target was "the frying Scotsman", since Wawa misses England and the fish and chips, she loved to eat there.  

Wawa says  fish and chips lived up to the hype!

(sorry about this weird centered text, there is some kind of autoformat issue today.)

 

I chose this Bosnian place.  I had a sort of Bosnian version of spankopita, that was excellent, with cucumber salad on the side.

Maxwell elected to play it safe, with salad rolls, which he said were good.

Mark chose a Turkish kebab place, that was passable, but not stellar. 
He really wanted the Polish place, but the woman is super slow.

Elderberries

We are in the process of harvesting and processing our elderberries. 

We have been lazy this year, the birds have gotten a lot.

Rolf is very fond of making this Swabian dish out of them, basically just the berries stirred into a roux, with sugar.  I don't really like it, at all.

I have been making syrup.  The stuff at the health food store is $10 for about 6oz- making my own feels like  a great choice.

It is a lot of work for this tiny payoff.  We also put a lot of berries into the freezer, so if I feel more ambitious later I can make more.

We used some of the syrup to make homemade sodas, man was that ever good! poured over crushed ice, with charged water & lemon!

Does this dress look too much like a nightgown or is it OK?


A little.

It looks a little like a nightgown? Or it is a little OK?

The poofy, scrunched up part looks a little nightgownish.

Do you mean the gathers, or the ruffles.

I don't know the difference.

the ruffles are this decorative part around the bodice, and the gathers are here.  This part, right here, around the empire waist.

"Impure waist?"

NO! Empire, empire waist, that is what a waist is called when it ends right under the bust, like this one does.

I guess, the gathers at the empire waist, then.  The part that makes you look pregnant.

I look PREGNANT?

Not really, but isn't that what you asked?  Does the dress look like the kind you wear when you are pregnant?

That is NOT at all what I asked.  You are talking about a maternity dress.  I ask if this looks like a nightgown.

Is there a difference?

Are you insane?  Of course there is a difference.  A nightgown is what you wear to sleep in.

You never wear nightgowns, only pajamas, how was I to know?

Just forget it.  I am going to go change my clothes.

Why?

We spend all day Saturday, and some of Sunday refinishing and weatherizing the deck. 

It is a big  400 SF deck and it took a lot of elbow grease.

We opted not to pressure wash, because we have been told that it can cause splintering. 

The deck is almost 13 years old and still in very good condition, so we wanted to be careful.  What we did was scrub the deck with laundry soap, and get all the dry leave out from between the cracks with  a butter knife.

We used a colored sealant this time, which came out more orange than I intended, but I like.

a work in progress

I am tiling the top of a coffee table, using free tiles from Pratt & Larson's free box. 

It has taken me forever to get enough of the one inch tiles to do the job, but I am pretty happy with the outcome.  

I got this little table out of the trash when we lived in NW, but the top was pretty beaten up. 

It goes well with all of our other repurposed furniture and makes me feel empowered on my "buy nothing" crusade. 

I wish I had the skill to tile the floors. Dang!

facebook taliban

I like to play scrabble online through facebook.  I sometimes play with my friends, but sometimes I join games with total strangers, because I like to play more games at once, than my friends do.  

I consider this a pretty wholesome activity, that keeps my mind more nimble than sitting around watching TV.   

I have a few people that I met through these games that I chat with and consider "pen pals" or even think of as friends. 

Nice people, with  similar interests, that happen to live far away from me.

In the past week, there has been this freaky shift in the tone of the people posting games.  Three of the games I've joined recently have been with men that have made overt sexual comments- on a scrabble game!

Like a scrabble obscene phone call! 

Who in the hell would find that attractive? 

And what on earth is their objective?  Do they think women are going to be pleased, attracted or titillated by that kind of behavior? 

I told Mark about it and his reaction was "with all the sex venues on the Internet, why do that on a scrabble game?" and I totally agree.

Why indeed?

I asked, and one guy told me to post a photo of my cat, rather than my face.

Great, so my face, my unmade up, face is to blame for some schmuck's potty talk? 

Isn't that the argument used to support the wearing of burkas?  That the site of women's bodies or faces will arouse unwanted attention from men?

Geesh.

Block Party

Block party food

Ripley with Rolf's girlfriend's dog Pincone.
These dogs have nothing to do with the block party, I just thought the photo was super cute and wanted an excuse to post it.  Freya loves Pinecone and thinks he looks like Scooby Do.  He is very gentle and long suffering, which I like.

Today is our block party. 

We have been having a block party, for many years, maybe ten.

The block party has consisted of a potluck and on a few years a garage sale, and a visit from a fire truck, for the kids.  We have had a face painter and a clown come too. 

I have no idea who organizes the entertainment, because I try to avoid all organizing duties, since I do so many things like that for work, and I am essentially antisocial.

This year we received a invitation to the block party that says it starts at 4:00pm and ends at 10:00pm, which is about five hours more than I am comfortable with. 

It also includes a scavenger hunt, pinata and something else that makes me nervous, that I can't recall right now.

I hate pinatas. 

They are way too dog eat dog for me, not to mention I don't like my children eating candy.

Freya is always too wimpy to take a turn hitting the damn thing and always afraid to run into the fray and get the loot, so I am left to beg candy for her from other parents. 

I hate it.

She always elects to get shy at the pinata time, after she has waited in line for her turn.  She chickens out every damn time (we go to a lot of children's birthday parties, due to my work in a preschool). 

I totally understand,  having been a shy and nervous child myself, but she isn't generally shy and nervous, only when it comes to bashing in a paper mache donkey.

Then there is the inevitable candy fight with Mark. 

My strategy is to let them eat all the candy up in one sitting and be done with it, but Mark tries reasoning and doling it out, which leads to fighting and crying and begging, that drags on for days and makes me insane.

So anyway, today we will have a stupid pinata and most likely tears.  Then some kind of stupid scavenger hunt, that I think I was supposed to contribute "white elephant" stuff, for prizes, but didn't, because I don't have anything I feel like giving and I would have purchased something, but the message was so vague, it was unclear what kind of prizes they wanted, and it was also unclear who was doing the organizing. 

I will be lame and offer who ever seems to be doing all the purchasing and organizing $20 and hope it is good enough. 

I will then resent it for the entire year, until the next one rolls around.

Mark is in Florida at a Star Wars convention for work. 

He is not here to help me move our table outside, which means I will have to sit on the curb, or perhaps with the elderly couple across the street.   

Rolf is hiding out at his girlfriend's house, to avoid the festivities. 

Maxwell is still at my mother's house, so it will just be me and Freya, the bad family that didn't contribute to the pinata, perhaps that is better than our current title- the people with dandelions, or the people who painted their house orange. 

I did make some nice food, though.  some roasted beets with horse radish and sour cream, eggplant salad, marinated wax beans, deviled eggs.  Does that sound to weird and boho?  I may go up and make some baked beans, and potato salad, just to be safe. 

It is super hot today, so I don't see myself making a cake, although the pinata guilt may drive me to turn on the oven.  Who knows?

Bracing myself

I am a creature of habit. 

I like routine. 

I like stability and predictability.

Lots of things are going to change for me, and for our family in next month, so I am mentally bracing myself.  I am preparing not to be overwhelmed and nervous. 

I am waving, not drowning, that is my story and I am sticking to it- today, anyway.

Both kids are starting new schools in September, and I am almost doubling my work hours. 

It should be interesting, at least.

I don't have a solid plan on how I am going to get both children to school, and myself to work, but I am working on it, and friends have offered to help, and Maxwell's new school has a good carpool, pool, so things will work out.

That is what I have to believe. 

I am taking on more new responsibilities and going back to some old  responsibilities, so I am feeling a lot more positive about work. 

That part is good. 

Mark is taking the first week of school off, because that is my super busy time, and he can take on the kid transportation  piece, hopefully he can help smooth things out. 

I feel good about dumping that on him, since I am mostly on my own until then, with all of his business travel.

movies

We went to see Winter's Bone,

which is amazingly well done, without a drop of sentimentality. 

Harsh alert. 

If you can't stand harsh, then this is not the movie for you.

On a lighter note, we rented "hot tub time machine", which is not as lame as it sounds, and "kick ass" which is gory, but entertaining.  

Oh, and I adored The last station , which is not a big surprise, with  my  giant crush on Russian history, not to mention James McAvoy. 

Who could resist him? 

Not me.

The story is first rate, the acting excellent and the scenery gorgeous. 

We are also rewatching "Six feet under", and so far it is totally holding up. 

Love it.

a cool summer

Since my  ability to post photos has been so hit and miss, I will bombard you with a heap of miscellaneous summer photos, which you wouldn't really identify as summer photos, due to the fact that we are wearing sweaters and long sleeves. 
Brrrrrr.
What a weird, cold summer!

The Mississippi Street fair was one of the best events of that kind that I have ever attended. 

Lots of variety and diversity!

It was a spur of the moment thing, and I am am not looking very pulled together, but there we are, first thing in the morning- wind whipping our hair around, enjoying the free vitamin beverage, in search of the perfect street food. 

We found it in the form of meat on a stick, an Pan African curry, and herb flavored ice cream. -

We did manage to find a few lovely little strawberries, depspite the cold weather, and had a cream cake to celebrate the 4th of July.

best cocktail EVAH!

Oh. My. Goodness.

the kids are at my mom's.

 Mark and I went out for dinner at  The Observatory and had the best cocktail in the history of my cocktail drinking life (which is not that extensive, since I never drink cocktails, because they never live up to my expectations and I usually only ever, ever drink red wine). 

Their Blood Orange Negroni was fabulous, and bitter and herby and a brilliant color.

If you are in PDX and have a hankerin' for some fancy food, for lowish price and some fancy top drawer drinks, I highly recommend heading over to this lovely little Monta Villa spot!

don't buy this book

Man, am I ever irritated by Lousie Erdich's "red convertible".   The whole thing is just a remix of chapters from her other books. 
I liked the other books, but I am not interested in reading them again, under one cover -the cover art sucks on this copy, to add insult to injury.  I feel like a damn fool every time I pick that book up, with it's stupid photo of a red car.

have I mentioned the raccoon?

Last Thursday there was a giant raccoon sitting on the ledge of our deck.

It saw me and just sort of sat there looking at me for a minute, then hopped onto the neighbor's arborvitae hedge, climbed onto her roof and disappeared.

I was afraid it might carry off the poodle for a midnight snack, or fight with the cat, so I called animal control, but they don't deal with wild animals.  Then I called the wild animal people, and left a message and never got a call back.

I hope the raccoon is not rabid.  I have a hard time seeing myself getting all Atticus Finch and shooting it.

the notion of productivity

Our bathroom is horrible. 

Old, rundown and just horrible. 

For years the biggest issue was the fan- the funky odd sized, outdated fan.   Then our friend John fixed the fan by welding a bunch of random parts together and creating a functional franken fan for us. 

Hooray.

My plan was to paint the bathroom today, to make it slightly less hideous, since a real remodel is pretty much out of the question, unless we win the lottery.

I started washing the walls, and peeling off the peeling paint, but the poor design made it impossible to get the ladder into the corner where the toilet sits, so washing that part (or painting) was out.

Damn it to hell.

I have rarely felt as defeated as I did when I realized the ladder was never going to fit, and that the ugly bathroom would continue on for the foreseeable future being horrible and ugly and making me upset multiple times each day.

The reality is that the walls need to be properly repaired and resurfaced, anyway, so hiring someone that knows what he is doing makes a lot of sense, however, knowing that doesn't make me feel less annoyed and let down.

They should not let poor, unskilled, unhandy people purchase 100 year old houses. 

It should be against the law.

another hot one!

I stayed up until 1:00M reading Beat The Reaper another absolutely original and delightfully entertaining novel... man, I am on a hot streak,after a long run of duds.  this one has all of my favorite elements... vengeful orphans, mafia badguys, a tall protagonist with a trench coat and a gun, even a shark tank.  Just OUTSTANDING!

Like True Confections, the story flows so nicely and is so unique, that you don't want to put it down, until you have finished. 

I am also reading The Brother's K which I read in my early 20's and adored. 

It is a little John Irving meets the Glass family, set in Camas, Washington a paper mill town.

I loved it a lot more when I was younger, but I am still enjoying the story a lot this time round. 

Mark picked it up for me at the library, the week my friend Dom was in town, and we laughed and laughed because I shared the book with her after I had finished it and it wound up going through our whole circle of friends as well as her mom (who comes from small town Washington) and her brother, who loved all the baseball analogies.  I think it is a remarkable writer, that can make me love a book about baseball and fishing!

Want to know what I am not enjoying?  Augsten Burroughs book about his father.  It totally sucks. 

I loved Running with scissors so much, but everything since has just be dreck. 

I want to like it but I don't. The writing is poor, the story derivative- the whole thing could have been condensed down to a one page essay, and served the reader much better.

Speaking of dreck, I am also reading James Frey's Bright shining morning  (the link is to a scathing blog review that I think is overly harsh).  The stories are quite good, but the writing is gimmicky and adolescent, it feels as if it were written by a person who has not experienced much but has a romantic idea of how relationships are.  I still enjoyed it.  I am not burning through it like I do when I love a book, but I will finish it and I would give it to a friend.  Not a writer friend perhaps, but  my dad, or my friend Dom, who has little patience for artists and writerly sensibilities.  I think that anyone who is still pissed at James Frey for his "memoir" is a since I could tell in the first chapter that it was a fake, (and someplace, in the archives of my parenting board, there is a thread, where I say "this is totally fake!")  silly goose and anyone with any sense should have been able to tell that too, so a lot of the negative reviews of this novel feel like sour grapes.

I am now using Rolf's fancy new computer for blogging, and the spell check is different, so if you notice my shitty spelling has excellerated in it's extreme shittiness, then you know why.

mice and other things

I just returned from putting Freyja on a plane to San Francisco.

I was worried that she might not get on the plane, right up to the time we pulled into the airport, given her capricious nature, and tendency for drama, but she was a total champ.

We wound up cutting it pretty close, do to a last minute trip downtown to the Pearl Bakery for a pistole to go.
 It was Rolf's idea, to calm her down with bread products, but we didn't anticipate

A. The Morrison bridge being UP! (when is the bridge ever up, other than at Rose Festival?)

B. 10 MILES of construction on I-84

We raced in to the looooong check in line, about 50 minutes before her flight was to leave (totally not my style), while Rolf & Maxwell parked the car.  I was sweating bullets by the time we finally got to the counter, 15 minutes later, only to discover that her flight was delayed a half hour (hooray!). 

Bootiful Princess insisted on pulling her own hot pink hardshell suitcase ( a gift from Grandpa for this trip) and carrying Eunice the pillow pet unicorn, while wearing a giant pink backpack stuffed with tiny travel toys, granola bars and a smaller auxiliary unicorn named Eudora. This is Eudora's first trip away from her mom unicorn, Ursula, so she was a little nervous.

We got caught in a slow security line, behind a  young soldier dressed in full uniform, including boots, that was slowly being shaken down one article of clothing at a time by security screeners, then an elderly lady with one of those machines for people that have sleep apnea.

Clearly they both posed a high level of threat to security.

I wondered if the boy in uniform perhaps had some kind of metal plate or leg that was setting off the detector, as most of his clothing and the contents of his pockets had been removed.

We had to wait at the gate for a while, which Freyja spent rolling around on the floor, and forgetting that she was wearing a dress, and that when you roll around on the floor, with a dress on your underpants are likely to be seen by the people sitting on the seats around you, which leads to revelations like

O H      M Y     G O O D N E S S  ! 

My UNDERPANTS are showing!

shrieked at top volume.

When the time came, she marched off with the flight attendant, as if she had been flying alone her whole life. 

On the drive home Maxwell informed me that the cat had brought a mouse into the house earlier, but he didn't tell me because he was getting out of the shower and didn't want to walk out the deck, where I was sitting, because he was naked. 

You saw a dead mouse in the house and didn't tell me?

Yes, except it wasn't dead.

You saw a LIVE mouse in our house and didn't tell me? 

When I came home I walked down to the basement to do laundry, and nearly tripped over what appeared to be a dead mouse.  

Thank goodness!  

The mouse is no longer at large.

When I bent to pick it up to remove it, it sprang to life, nearly giving me a heart attack.

Then it sort of collapsed and I called Rolf to come and take it outside.  

Yuck.

RIP Harvey Pekar

Anthony Bourdain how I do love the, and your most excellent taste

http://anthony-bourdain-blog.travelchannel.com/read/the-original-goodbye-splendor?fbid=xHlBl62uiLZ

There is a rental house a few houses down, that seems attract irresponsible pet owners. 

Six years ago when I was pregnant, I went for a walk with my friend Karen and Maxwell.  We were accosted  by the giant, drooling, wet, dirty dog, that lived in the rental house, and ran the streets with no supervision, scaring children and jumping on pregnant women. 
On that morning, he jumped on me, knocked Maxwell over and proceeded to follow us to my house and pee on my front porch!  Which made me furious, so I grabbed the dog by the collar and dragged him up to his house, banged on the door for a long time with no response.  I then opened the door, pushed the nasty dog inside and walked home. 
Those people left, but the new folks are just as bad.
they have a white male cat that is not neutered. 
The cat runs up and down the street spraying houses and gardens, and attacking other cats. 

What on earth would make a person NOT neuter a cat?  I mean this is not a prize show cat, this is an ordinary white housecat. 

Last night he attacked my cat, and after we brought Moonshadow inside, he continued to menace her by yowling at our front door, for over an hour, which totally enraged me, because I like to keep my front door open for fresh air. 

I am ready to do complain to the owners, but Mark made me promise not to do anything while he is gone, and I suspect that this might  be considered doing something.