Michelle just brought to my attention that my favoritest-ever congressional candidate is back! Goodspaceguy Nelsonis running for congress, again on the very sound platform that we should colonize space because this planet obviously isn’t going to hold all of us very much longer and is probably going to be blown up by an asteroid anyway.
I notice he’s made a few changes to his candidacy statement. Let’s review.
First of all, his photo is full-color now. As a man proposing we leverage our considerable technological skill to colonize space, I’m happy to see he noticed that computers support color images these days. Well done.
Second, he appears to be concerned with the three-fold increase in human population in the last hundred years.
Instead of starvation, genocide, and war, we should use nicer methods (such as the head tax and birth fees and study and work and social security) to decrease the number of people boarding Spaceship Earth. Goodspaceguy is pro choice on almost everything.
How could you ever disagree with someone who is pro-choice on “head tax”?
Thirdly, diplomacy is important in politics, and this guy’s got it in spades. Read this passage and think about how much better it sounds than “Get off the couch, you lazy, bottom-feeding Americans!”
Meanwhile on computerized Spaceship Earth, Goodspaceguy wants us to raise the quality-of-life by longevity research and by getting more people working, producing the goods and services that will make up our improving living standard and health. Let’s improve the incentive system. Let’s coax more people into productivity. Goodspaceguy wants safety-net employment of helpers. Goodspaceguy wants more people studying at our colleges during the underutilized evenings and weekends.
Well, Michelle and I are off to vote tonight, and you can sure as hell bet I’m voting for GoodSpaceGuy. This guy is a “Straight-Shooter” with “Upper Management” written all over him!
Memorial Day Weekend has held a special place in our hearts for a few years now; I moved to Seattle on the Tuesday after Memorial Day two years ago. Since it was our last weekend together before I left, we made sure to make it a special weekend, and we’ve kept the momentum up ever since. This year it was extra special since it was our first full weekend at home since returning from India (not counting our first full weekend at home).
We started the week by cutting out of work early and watching two movies at the Seattle International Film Festival: The Fall and Before the Rains, both which took place (at least primarily) in India. (Correction: the imagination sequences of The Fall mostly took place in India; the movie itself took place in LA.) The former took place in North India where we didn’t travel, but the latter took place in Kerala, which is where we vacationed. While The Fall was a much better movie, it was great to see Kerala again in Before the Rains, especially since it was filmed in one of the regions we visited. We closed out the day with a nice dinner at How to Cook a Wolf in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.
Saturday morning we woke up to a stunning day and enjoyed a nice espresso and a stroopwafel on the porch before heading off to the farmer’s market to pick up a bone-in pork shoulder from Woolie Pigs. We had Jim and Jess over to enjoy some roasted pig and some St. Joseph that we brought over from France last time we visited. It was the first time we saw them since we’d left for India, so it was great to catch up and swap stories. Add to that a delightful cheese platter, a fresh, light soup, a delicious hunk of pork, fresh lemon gnocci, and a few great bottles of wine and you’ve got yourself one hell of an evening. Provided that “one hell of an evening” for you doesn’t mean “going out drinking with friends and waking up in prison with a I LOVE FORMALDEHYDE tattoo on your left shoulder”. I’ll be honest with you: that just doesnt’t sound very relaxing to me.
Jim also brought over his home-brew which we had started before I left; it was awesome. In fact, I proposed we start making two batches of it staggered so that we always have some beer of that particular recipe on hand. It would require that I buy a supply of beer-making equipment. Jim said it would be cheap if you do it ghetto-style like he does. I said, “I can do it ghetto-style” to which Jess remarked, “You don’t do anything ghetto-style.” Besides being spectacularly unfair, her statement is also annoyingly accurate.
Sunday, we woke up to another spectacular morning and spent the day lazily reading the New York Times. One of life’s greatest indulgences is to spend Sunday on a sunny porch with a great cup of espresso while spending hours pouring over the paper. We finished the day off by sipping Mojitos and grilling bratwurst, chickenbreast, and corn. Beat that.
Memorial Day dawned with overcast skies. At least I’m guessing it dawned that way, because by the time Michelle and I got up, it was overcast. We started our day with our favorite breakfast: a fried egg on a sourdough muffin with ham, arugula, vinegarette, tomato and Beechers Flagship cheese. We even managed to squeeze in some Bollywood and a dinner of fresh pasta.
After a month of relentless sunshine, it’s funny how refreshing a nice cloudy day can be.
Christmas time is here again. Its not the Christmas music playing everywhere that tipped me off; stores have been playing Christmas music since the middle of August. It’s also not because of all the Christmas cards that we’ve been getting with what appear to be stamped signatures and false wishes of warmth. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain Christmas cards I love getting; but the one from the car dealership in a state we don’t live in anymore wishing us a “profitable” 2008 seemed a little false. (Profitable for who, anyway?)
But we love Christmas Season. As Michelle puts it, it’s ChowDownTime plus Presents. That equals Awesomeness, for those of you who are weaker in the math department. In equation form, it’s
ChowDownTime + Presents = Awesomeness
In essence, it’s all the best parts of Thanksgiving, plus you get presents.
Since we celebrate Sinterklaas, the season starts for us the first weekend after the 6th, which is when we get a Christmas Tree. Every year, Michelle and I have the same struggle: she wants a Christmas Tree that is at least four feet taller than our ceiling and has a girth somewhere between two and three times what our house can accommodate. I have input on which trees I do and don’t like and Michelle does her best to find something that will fit in our place, but once Michelle has her heart set on a particular tree, my protests have limited influence. To be fair, I am easily swayed by a quick estimation of how much loot we’ll be able to fit under the bigger trees. Needless to say, Santa’s got his work cut out for him.
Due to our powers of self-restraint, we usually come home with a tree that’s only about two feet taller than our ceiling. The tree has to get shoved into a corner in our house between the front wall and our bookcase which houses our stereo. You can imagine how much fun it is to turn the stereo on or off, or to swap out records on the record player with pine branches poking me in the ass and going up my shirt. “Tree Hugger” doesn’t begin to describe it.
After pruning the tree from both ends and getting it set up in the house, the real fun begins. Michelle insists on having about 100,000 lights on the tree, with the trunk cloaked entirely in light so it glows from the inside out. (Don’t worry, we live near a fire station, and I’m told they’ve got our backs.)
Since I’m taller, I’m the one who “gets” to put the lights on the tree. This involves getting maimed by the tree’s branches and needles, and getting into a life-or-death struggle with the strings of lights which insist on tangling no matter how carefully I roll them up. I invariably fall into cursing fits, it’s part of my process. Michelle remedies this by buying me a bottle of Scotch of my choosing, which I get to bust open as the first lights go onto the tree. The downside of the deal is that I’m not allowed to swear once it’s open.
It’s that bottle of The Balvenie Founder’s Reserve that tells me it’s Christmas Season.
While camping and hiking is always an activity you should take very seriously, the Cascades are much more wild than other places we’ve been; it’s very easy to get lost, stuck in bad weather, or run into an animal looking for a meal. (In case you’re looking for betting tips, in Human vs. Beast fights the safe money is on the Beast.) We’ve been reminded constantly over the year we’ve been in Seattle that people really can die in these mountains - even when they’re headed out for a day hike. With this in mind, we’ve been waiting to go with more experienced hikers because dying in the mountains seems like a worse deal than living in the city.
In a flash of brilliance, Jim suggested a week ago that we go hiking on his and Jess’s back country skiing route near Steven’s Pass and camp at Skyline Lake near the end of the route. This obviously established a “need” for various pieces of equipment, especially anything titanium: cups, spoons, forks, and a French press. Oh, and a stainless steel grill that about doubled the weight of my pack.
Being the compulsive over packers that we are, we brought everything we could think of including 5 different lights, a GPS, enough batteries to last a month, 6 different types of rain-gear, hiking boots for us and the dogs, special sleeping pads for the dogs, flashy lights for the dogs, and bear bells to attach to anything with a pulse. We would have put bells on the actual bears if only we could have found some. At one point Jim turned to me - decked out head to toe in Gore-Tex, headlamp, and technical pack - and said, “I like camping with you, you guys make me feel less like a gearhead.”
We hiked about a mile and a half up a jeep trail which gained around 1,000 feet in that distance. Jim and Jess had been camping with their dog before, but Michelle and I had not been with ours. We were pretty sure that Mack would do fine, but our expectations for Kirki ranged anywhere from her being dragged up the trail to her being carried up the trail. We almost packed a wagon in case things turned out worse than we expected.
Mack did what he always does, which is run at full speed wherever he goes and jump on top of any object big enough to support him. This results in the occasional miscalculation and resulting collision with the ground or a nearby obstacle. Kirki, to our amazement, was incredibly active as well, bravely exploring the camp and surrounding woods.
We set up camp in the middle of a huckleberry patch. They’re incredibly comfortable to sleep on, by the way. Jess became progressively more obsessed with the berries and was sure they should be used in a recipe. The next day on the way back to the car, we picked a bag full of berries which Jess used to make an awesome cake.
The only snag was that, while Jim, Jess, and Bromley peacefully shared their tent at night, our plans to have Kirki and Mack sleep in the vestibule of our tent didn’t work out - due in large part to the fact that it was snowing. So the dogs came into the tent. Both dogs were still pretty cold and since we neglected to bring a jacket for Mack, we ended up spending the night taking cat naps and alternating Kirki’s jacket between the two dogs.
Everything ended well; we had no encounters with beasts of any kind and didn’t get lost or frozen. But Kirki did pay a price for her efforts on the hiking trip: she didn’t get up off her pad all day Monday and whined any time she had to lift her head.
Birthdays are awesome. But they have one inherent flaw: they only last one day. It ends up being a bittersweet experience because after a day of glorious self-centric celebration and indulgence, the next day is spent wallowing in the disappointment of having to pay attention to other people again.
Michelle and I discovered some time ago that things go much better when you spread the celebrating out over longer periods. Enter Birthweek and Birthmonth. The concept is simple enough: once you enter the month of your birth, you can officially begin celebrations under the umbrella of Birthmonth. Then, celebrations intensify during Birthweek. Birthweek is the week during the month that contains your actual Birthday. There is some leeway here, as the person of honor is allowed to choose the official start and end of Birthweek - the only stipulation being that Birthweek can only last seven days and has to contain the actual birthday. Of course, the festivities are most intense on your Birthday.
My birthday is in September, so I have the glorious honor of currently being in Birthmonth. Festivities started this past weekend. It’s the last weekend Michelle’s parents will be in town, so we celebrated my birthday early. Technically, we celebrated both Michelle’s and my birthdays because her parents won’t be in town for Michelle’s birthday, either. I’m going to ignore that. It is my Birthmonth, ergo, I get to ignore things like that.
We spent an awesome day Saturday in the city. We started with breakfast at Cafe Besalu in Ballard before heading over to South Lake Union to take an air tour of the Seattle area by waterplane. The weather was perfect and the trip was spectacular. After the plane ride, we headed up to Shilshore Marina and walked along the shore at Golden Garden Park. Finally, we headed over to Ray’s Boat House for dinner. We took advice from regulars and sat at the Boat House Cafe and ordered from the restaurant. The Cafe has outdoor seating on the rooftop patio, but the restaurant has a superior menu, so it’s the perfect situation. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a more glorious view than the one from our table. We were lucky enough to catch the sunset while we ate in almost perfectly clear weather.
We love this city.
Enjoy the photo album, but if you’re not interested in flipping though 95 photos, make sure you skip to the end and see the photos of the sunset; there really is no sunset like a sunset on the West Coast.
is running for congress, again on the very sound platform that we should colonize space because this planet obviously isn’t going to hold all of us very much longer and is probably going to be blown up by an asteroid anyway.
Since it was our last weekend together before I left, we made sure to make it a special weekend, and we’ve kept the momentum up ever since. This year it was extra special since it was our first full weekend at home since returning from India (not counting our first full weekend at home).
It’s also not because of all the Christmas cards that we’ve been getting with what appear to be stamped signatures and false wishes of warmth. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain Christmas cards I love getting; but the one from the car dealership in a state we don’t live in anymore wishing us a “profitable” 2008 seemed a little false. (Profitable for who, anyway?)
than other places we’ve been; it’s very easy to get lost, stuck in bad weather, or run into an animal looking for a meal. (In case you’re looking for betting tips, in Human vs. Beast fights the safe money is on the Beast.) We’ve been reminded constantly over the year we’ve been in Seattle that people really can die in these mountains - even when they’re headed out for a day hike. With this in mind, we’ve been waiting to go with more experienced hikers because dying in the mountains seems like a worse deal than living in the city.
because after a day of glorious self-centric celebration and indulgence, the next day is spent wallowing in the disappointment of having to pay attention to other people again.
