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May 19th, 2013
 | 09:16 am - Aspirations
Just dropped David at the airport. He's off to Taos to hobnob with his fellow wizards at Rio Hondo, a writers' gethering hosted by Walter Jon Williams.
While he's gone, my ambitions are to: eat regular meals; pick up after myself, and have lights out by 11:30.
These may seem rather pathetic as goals go but they'd be a triumph, really. Things usually go to pot when I'm baching it. (David assures me it's mutual.)
For now, I'm going to go settle in with Season 2 of Downton Abbey, and a nearly-finished sock. I promise to have lunch. It will be hard: I've been sorting through my accumulated knitting patterns. WANT TO KNIT ALL THE THINGS.
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May 18th, 2013
 | 12:52 pm - Saturday
Today is our anniversary. we went to Zell's for breakfast, a long-time favorite. It's drizzly and chill {pause while I go close the front door}, dissuading just enough people that even at 9:45 we did not have to wait at all, much less wait outside consoling ourselves with the infrared heater and self-serve coffee. Portland does like its weekend breakfasts.
"Candied bacon is so over the top, it leaves a contrail."
Zell's doesn't have candied bacon (that's 'The Original, a Dinerant' downtown) but it does have German pancakes. Currently with fresh strawberries. Fresh RIPE strawberries. It is sad that I even have to qualify that. I don't know what's worse, getting pale out-of-state strawberries in November or getting them in strawberry season.
We bought a couple pints of strawbs at the farmers' market last Saturday. People were piled three deep, practically throwing bills onto the table.
Neighborhood Clean-up Day. Filled the car with plastics that we'd sorted last night, plus styrofoam and an old computer monitor, hauled it all over to the church parking lot. Signage inadequate. I'd probably say the same at the Pearly Gates.
Bought an old braided wool rug for the TV room. David says "It looks like it's been there forever."
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May 4th, 2013
 | 11:52 am - You can't take us anywhere
Corflu is this weekend, and here in Portland. A hundred people or so, from at least three countries, gathered to swap/sell/reminisce/discuss old-school science fiction fanzines. And drink beer.
The hotel, whatever its current corporate branding, is one I've been attending cons at since my second ever, in 1984: Orycon, Potlatch, Smofcon, now Corflu, all have taken over its awkward suite of top-floor meeting rooms.
This morning we picked up Pat Virzi and Geri Sullivan, who wanted very much to breakfast at the original Original Pancake House. Twist my arm!
We ordered three things between the four of us (plus bacon). When the food arrived, we quartered each selection and busily passed one empty and three full plates around until each contained bacon-cheddar omelette; pecan pancakes; and apple pancake (plus bacon).
Collating our breakfast, in other words.
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April 22nd, 2013
 | 02:48 pm - Oh ho!
We spent last Saturday with llamas. It was a Good Day. David has many photos in his LJ post.
Today I am wrestling with online phone trees, medical billing, credit reports, and so forth. I find myself thinking, "The llamas wouldn't care. They wouldn't be fussed by this at all."
Maybe I can learn from llamas.
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April 12th, 2013
| 09:52 pm - Books Read
The set of Books Read has been growing by leaps and bounds. I’ve let myself be daunted by it. I’m going to do a big honking Books post tonight, even if many of them are just title & author.
The Serial Garden, by Joan Aiken. The complete Armitage Family stories, written across five decades. Wonderful wry, dry humorous fantasy.
But I Wouldn’t Have Missed It For the World! by Peg Bracken. I grew up reading and re-reading Mom’s copies of The I Hate to Cook Book, The I Hate to Housekeep Book, and I Try to Behave Myself; hadn’t known she wrote one about travel. Includes a visit to Japan less than 30 years after the end of WW2. Think about that.
Ironskin, by Tina Connelly. I would rather the story had not been so much Jane Eyre but its own self—at this rate, might as well put Jane Eyre With Fairies on the cover and be done with it.
The Secrets of Mary Bowser, by Lois Leveen. Novel based on the real lives of two women in Richmond, Virginia who worked to undermine the Confederacy from within. This came home with me from the library on a whim, and I was startled by sudden recognition: Jacober’s Only Call Us Faithful (previously read) focused on the eccentric white woman Elizabeth Van Lew; this one takes as its protagonist Mary Bowser, born into slavery in the Van Lew household. Recommended.
Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat, by Denis Smyth. In 1943 the British kitted up a dead body in the guise of a Royal Marine, bearing certain secret documents, and arranged for it to wash up on the shores of Spain. It changed the course of the war. You’d think it would be simple to get hold of a body during wartime. You’d be wrong.  hal_obrien, I think you’d love this. Very well written.
Alton Brown’s Gear For Your Kitchen. What he uses and why. A good read.
All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye, by Christopher Brookmyre. As the back cover says: “Intrigue. Espionage. Advanced technology. Clinical violence. Hoovering.” My kind of thriller. One of the protagonists is a young grandmother, caught up in the sort of events that usually happen in CB novels. Funny: I read this one and said “He’s just become a father.” googlegoogle… yup. ( Read more...Collapse )
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April 11th, 2013
| 10:07 pm - DC in the rear view mirror
I think that hour at the Air & Space Museum on Thursday night marked the point in our trip where we jointly had the most energy: Isobel over her cold and I not yet symptomatic. By Saturday, when we flew home, I had very nearly lost my voice.
The International Spy Museum is well done and extremely popular--if there's ever an after-hours thing where you can browse the exhibits sans crowds, do it! We jumped the lines, though not the overall crowds, by starting our day with their "Operation Spy". With the wave of a wand (or ticket-scanning laser) we and a dozen other tourists became a crack team brought to the back streets of a foreign capitol to help track down a sensitive missing object. We were taken through a series of rooms and spaces where we worked together to ungarble communications, search an office, and generally try to decide who to believe. It was well scripted and the interactivity very well thought out. Izzy and I had a blast.
We turned right around and upgraded our tickets to include their other spy experience, "Spy in the City". ( Read more...Collapse )
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April 4th, 2013
| 10:19 pm - DC, cont'd.
Today started with lunch at 2Amys, known for pies so authentic they meet Italian gov't standards to be called true Neapolitan pizza. We colored outside the lines by having ours with pepperoni and grilled peppers. Gooood pepperoni. I didn't know there was such a thing.
Passing through Georgetown on the bus up there I was conscious of a certain relief at seeing all around me homey, human-sized buildings. Our surroundings for the most part have been a different scale entirely: Smithsonian museums, Library of Congress, headquarters for the FBI, DOJ, NIH, State Department, Treasury—you get the idea. ( Read more...Collapse )
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April 3rd, 2013
| 12:37 am - White Space
We had no timepoints today until evening, so I let the snuffly teenager sleep as long as she wanted or for 12 hours, whichever came first.
I prodded around on my phone in hopes of finding a decent DC bus app (nope) and happily read Jennifer Crusie. Welcome to Temptation was all rom-com for the first 200 pages and then a body showed up. He appears to have been strangled, drowned, shot, dosed with sleeping pills, maced, and whacked with a blunt instrument, probably not in that order. Oddly, if he had only been strangled it might be tragic but with that dogpile of death it's gone right out the other side to comic again.
After breakfast in the room (remind me to get a picture of our kitchenette-cum-shuffleboard court) we hopped a #36 bus down to the Mall. The line at the Archives went around two sides of the block! I remember going there with my folks when I was ten or so. I am amazed and grateful that they piled three kids into the car and took us to DC, more than once even! Have a sweet photo of Mom and an exhausted little sister, bedraggled stuffed dog held by one ear, waiting for Dad to bring the car around after a day of tromping the Smithsonian. ( Read more...Collapse )
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April 1st, 2013
| 09:56 pm - Spring Break
I am in DC with middle niece, 14. She has a cold and I have a bum knee but we're muddling through.
Yesterday got in just too late to schlep over to Union Station and catch a nice orientation-by-moonlight opentop bus tour, but far too early to go to bed.... So we went out the front door of our hotel and proceeded down Penna. Ave. to #1600. Because. We were far from the only Americans gazing at the Obamas’ front lawn in the gloaming.
A slow amble took us to the Mall where we speculated on the height of the flagpoles encircling the Washington Monument, and walked down a tunnel of trees that seemed more likely to end in an inter-dimensional vortex than at the Lincoln Monument. (I've seen The Twilight Zone, I know how these things go.)
It did lead to Lincoln, though, and masses of young teens, many striking "I squish your head! I squish your head!" poses with respect to the Washington obelisk at the far end of the Reflecting Pool. I like Lincoln's statue very much. No uniform, no charging steed; just tired dignity. Gettysburg Address to his right and the longer but still pithy 2nd Inaugural, in which he says war is awful but slavery was worse and we just have to see this mess through, to his left. I like very much that there are people on the Mall and at the Monuments even late at night. ( Read more...Collapse )
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March 4th, 2013
 | 08:54 pm - Laws and sausages
This started as a post about logic gaps, which exasperate me even (especially?) when perpetrated by "our guys". I got email from a group called SumOfUs, about a petition currently before the FDA, submitted by the International Dairy Foods Association and the National Milk Producers Federation.
How SumOfUs presents the issue:
"Tell the FDA not to approve aspartame for use in milk." (Page header)
"Do not allow milk and dairy products to include aspartame or other artificial sweeteners." (Pull quote)
"The powerful dairy lobby is pushing the FDA to approve the artificial sweetener aspartame for use in dairy products. .... Tell the FDA to say no to artificial sweeteners in natural food. Stop aspartame from entering our milk." (Body text)
"The powerful dairy lobby is pushing the FDA to approve the artificial sweetener aspartame for use in dairy products. .... Tell the FDA to say no to artificial sweeteners in natural food. Stop unlabeled aspartame from entering our milk." (Text of email they'll happily send to your friends, which you see if you sign on)
Everything was nicely on-message until I hit the changed wording in the last quote. Is aspartame currently verboten--or not? Are we trying to fend off adulteration? or is this about labeling? They aren't the same thing. It always seems to me that to rail against something not the issue at hand undermines the protester's credibility. I looked for primary sources. ( Read more...Collapse )
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