12 Hours in Seattle

Since I'm cleaning house, photographically speaking, i figured it's time to put up the last of the West Coast trip pictures.  After the lovely week spent visiting Portland and the rugged Washington Coast, we headed off to Whistler, Canada for a week of mountain biking camp.  I was too busy trying not to die to take many pictures of Whistler, and none of them are really worth posting here.  We ended our trip with a day in Seattle.

Anatomy of a Friday Night Shutdown Watch

4pm - Attend goodbye party for new work colleague (i barely knew ye!)
5:30pm - Send out last (?) emails, collect work i will do at home (just come and arrest me!)
6:30pm - Decline invites to continue goodbye bacchanalia due to lingering flu effects and responsibly head home sober and stone cold, as temps dropped at least 15 degrees from when i left house in tiny skirt - may as well be walking around naked from waist down.  Ooo, and now it's raining too - cold and wet, my favorite!
7:30pm - First Friday night alone in years.  Ask Scout for suggestions; decide self-administered tongue bath is intriguing from a gymnastic perspective but otherwise holds no real appeal for me.
8-9 pm - Replumb toilet and successfully stop tiny leak behind toilet that had potential to destroy entire floor.  Given how many toilets I have fixed, both here, at friends', relatives', restaurants...wonder if i shouldn't take up plumbing.
9:15pm - check news on shutdown.  Nada.  Think maybe i should eat something.
9:30pm - Hmm...leftover Chinese? Leftover Mexican?  Cereal?  Salad?  Oh look, here's that block of feta cheese i got to try as an experimental butternut squash-feta-hazelnut homemade ravioli recipe.  Huh...it's going to expire next week...and there's the squash....
9:35pm - Cut open butternut squash and roast.  Look for something to eat.  Maybe the leftover Chinese.
9:45pm - Leftover Chinese terrible.  Not really hungry anyway.  Still trying to work off the 9 course extravaganza with wine pairing at Per Se, although 3-day influenza and bronchitis did most of the heavy lifting.
9:50 pm - Start making new homemade pasta recipe for ravioli dough.
10:15 pm  - No news on shutdown.  Hang out with friends...on Facebook.  Realize 95% of friends and relatives require advanced planning to visit.  Then realize seeing the friends i have here requires as much or more advanced planning to visit.  Start to feel very, very old, yet not old enough to live in retirement home where are your friends live down the hall like they did in college and you can count on everyone getting together to watch tv every night in the smoking lounge.  So now feel both old and not old enough.
10:45pm - Squash is done and cooled.  Start inventing recipe and try to document for blog.  Musical selection: Feist, The Reminder.  Because I'm feeling feisty.  Perpetual problems with taking photos without casting a shadow.  Discover standing on counter ameliorates this problem.  Realize I need new lens and really, a new camera.  And some indirect flash equipment.  If only I weren't about to be furloughed...
11:45pm - Squash formula perfected!  Time to roll out the pasta dough!!  Need happier music - Sufjan Stevens Illinoise!
12am - Don't like new pasta dough recipe at all.  Plus, should have kept it in fridge so it didn't dry out.  Make best of it.
12:15am - Check the news - have job!  Hooray!!  Oh wait, they gave away the farm.  Or the women's half, anyway.  Spend half hour reading analysis of the deal.  Democrats doing usual circular firing squad; Republicans win again.  Weep for women's rights; write angry FB status update.
12:45am - Back to ravioli.  Angry woman music selection/dedication to the Dems:  Aimee Mann I'm With Stupid.
1:45am Two dozen ravioli made...filling for ten dozen more.
2:15am - Clean kitchen.
3am - Still not tired.  Surf Netflix and find the bad romcom I watched half of on plane to somewhere is available as streaming video.  Woo hoo - can now watch other half!
4am - Happy ending!!  Time for bed!

11am, Next Morning - Wake up, still upset about budget deal.  Disgust with analysis in major newspapers - most of which essentially leave out entirely, minimize, or poo poo the continuing erosion of women's rights.  Et tu, Economist?!
12:30pm - Find what I think is tongue-in-cheek political commentary New York Review of Books' Poem of the Day (Remember everyone, it's National Poetry Month, so be sure to read a poem a day!!)
And so, I close, with Frederick Seidel's Evening Man (2008).  Learn more about Seidel's awesomeness here and here.

Evening Man

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
Who does the things most people only dream about.
He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
You can't drink that much port and not have gout.

In point of fact, it is arthritis.
His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
To be a candidate for higher office,
You have to practice drastic openness.

You have to practice looking like thin air
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.

Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we're always headed.
Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.

Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless—
Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.

Three Days in Barcelona

It's particularly dreary around here today, as it is pouring rain and I am on day 2 of a vicious flu.  In between bouts of unconsciousness, I decided to cheer myself up by finally going through the Barcelona pictures from last October's 3-day girls' weekend.

I've always wanted to visit Barcelona's sun-kissed shores, meander the winding streets of the Gothic Quarter, and discover for myself the culinary wonders I had heard everyone talk about.  But mostly, I wanted to see Antoni Gaudí's Casa Milà.  This is because about 15 years ago, when my mother asked what i would like for my birthday, i asked for a painting.  While trained as an architect, she's also a talented watercolorist, and since i couldn't afford to buy any art, i thought it would be great to have her paint something.  Inspiration being a funny thing, she was at the garden center shopping for a strawberry pot, when it occurred to her that the pot sort of looked like Gaudí's famous apartment building Casa Milà.  So she went to the library, checked out some books on Gaudí, and for my birthday, I received a Gaudiesque strawberry pot.

Foolish Choices

First of all, I must send the happiest of birthday greetings to my dear friend L. I am terribly envious of her April 1 birthday, as I am quite fond of a good practical joke and am prone to foolish behavior. Aries also seem to think they're the best of the zodiac: all headstrong, passionate, brilliant, and always, ALWAYS right. Given that the majority of my friends are Aries, I must subconsciously agree. But it may just be that we leos are drawn to other fiery dispositions.

As this is a significant birthday year for a bunch of us, we are planning a trip to Paris to fête the occasion as one should: with lots of good food, great wines, and best friends. I think it is also particularly appropriate to return to the City of Lights accompanied by those with whom I first visited it. And to help boost the Now Serving portion of this blog, I'll be spending a few extra days there, walking in Julia Child's footsteps by taking some cooking classes!

It's no secret that Paris is my favorite city, although our first introduction was not auspicious. As L can likely recount better than I, since she watched it all happen, we took an overnight train from Switzerland and arrived very early in the morning, and in my groggy state, I ended up tripping over my bag, tumbled down the train steps, and greeted Paris for the first time on my hands and knees. So I kissed the ground of my ancestors and tried to regain my dignity after the peals of laughter from the entire crowd subsided.

Despite the awkward beginning, a weekend was all it took for Paris to steal my heart. So I returned to spend a schizophrenic junior year of college studying at three different institutions, the bulk of which time was spent at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques trying desperately to keep up with my exceedingly bright cohort and generally failing to do so. It's my own fault, of course: most of my friends took a year abroad and lightened their courseloads so they could jaunt around Europe every weekend. Little overachiever that I am, I was offered the "opportunity" to do a program where I was fully integrated into the notoriously difficult IEP program (vs partial integration, where the small classes were with other foreigners and considerably less demanding on the workload front). As with my first trip to Paris, and most of my life generally speaking, I leapt before I looked, and so spent a year where all my American friends spent the weekends discovering Prague or Barcelona sprawled across piles of books in the library. But sticking close to campus meant I spent a year discovering the complexities of Paris, from my piano lessons in Cité de la Musique to admiring the buildings in La Defense. I think I visited nearly every museum on my free student pass from my one art class at the Sorbonne. I taught English to the lycée students near the Père Lachaise Cemetery and took photography classes in the industrial 11th. I loved Paris more than ever at the end of it, but not in the romantic whirlwind way; more in the ups and downs of any long term relationship kind of way.

So planning a trip back opens up doors of memories. Of course, as they say, it's never the same river twice, and so I'm excited to see it anew and am especially excited about my cooking class! However, i need to finally decide whether to take the easier classes at Ecole Lenôtre's Paris branch prettily situated at Le Pavillon Elysée, whose website makes it sound like cooking classes for Ladies Who Lunch, or brave the 3-day course with Joël Robuchon at their professional school located someplace near Versailles called "Plaisir," which sounds pleasant enough, but which is going to entail an hour commute. I have received special dispensation from the administration to attend M Robuchon's course, but although I am thrilled by the idea of being 1/12th of a student body taught by the world's best chef, I am having flashbacks to my various foolish leaps in Paris, and wondering if perhaps just for once, if for the first time ever, it might be better to choose the easier option. Might I not be happier with some perfectly nice chefs teaching a handful of women how to make pain au chocolat instead of trying to understand how to make the most elaborate entrees from a self-described perfectionist who wanted to be a priest - the man who taught Eric Ripert and Gordon Ramsey - while surrounded by more of France's best and brightest? The thing is, while I hated being the class dunce, I loved -and always have- being pushed harder by my peers. But this is my birthday, and supposedly a vacation, and maybe I'd actually enjoy being head of the class for once.

So I put it to you in my second reader's poll: do I make the potentially foolish leap in a quest for culinary excellence, or take it easy for a change and just enjoy the pleasure of cooking in a pretty space with pretty people?