Dry Ice Factory

Well, it was a glorious weekend, and aside from mowing the lawn for the first time this year I also went for a couple of walks yesterday. I walked to Fred Meyer to pick up some fertilizer for the raspberries and kneepads for my knees, and I came back through the Fremont Sunday Market to pick up some organic apples. The variety was new to me, but I can't remember the name now. After working in the garden for a bit -- in a tanktop, no less -- I walked up to the post office to check the Incunabula mailbox and then over to Bottleworks. Then down the spine of Wallingford ridge to the Pacific Inn for a chicken caesar salad and a few pages of The Olympic Rain Forest: An Ecological Web by Ruth Kirk and Jerry Franklin. (Fascinating stuff about the symbiotic relationship between fungus and tree roots.)

A marvelous day, except for the fact that I broke a tooth, and this morning I discovered that my dentist's office is closed until Thursday. Weird! I'll just have to gut it out on Vitamin D, I guess.

Last night I walked to the Cinerama (it's about an hour walk) to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) for the third time. Yeah, I guess I love that movie a little bit. Afterward I went to the Palace Kitchen, where holyoutlaw and I have eaten a couple of times before or after movies recently, and I sat at the bar and had a pint of Hale's Wee Heavy, a shot of Chivas, and the duck breast with winter squash dumplings appetizer. It was so freaking delicious I just about wet myself. I walked home around midnight, and the only mild disappointment was that it wasn't snowing. What a life.

I spent the long weekend in Portland with my family. I may write more about it later, but for now I'll just tell an amusing anecdote. On Friday I walked to the Lloyd Center from the Pearl (where my parents' new condo is) to meet up with Dan and Lynn Steffan, and along the way I spotted a woman who looked vaguely familiar from a distance. She was walking with a guy. When I got up to them, I suddenly realized that she's a cook at the Pacific Inn pub, just down the street from my house in Seattle. All this time and I'd never learned her name or exchanged more than a friendly smile and a few words with her as she set food down in front of me, and it's always strange when you only know someone in one context to run into them outside that context.

"Fancy meeting you here," I said.

She laughed, thought for a second, and blurted out, "Chicken caesar salad!"

Which is what I usually order at the Pacific Inn.

Turned out she was in town visiting her son, who was the young guy with her. We finally exchanged names, even if we had to go to another city to do it.

Yesterday I walked around the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop again. It's six miles, and I did it in three stages. First I walked Westlake downtown to the Meridian 16 theater, where I caught a matinee of A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, which I loved despite my general aversion to gross-out humor and bromances. Then I walked along the Eastlake part of the loop to the U District, where I stopped at the Big Time for a pint of the cask-conditioned Icculus IPA and a bowl of bean-and-bacon soup. Then the very familiar leg along Northlake back home (essentially the Burke-Gilman trail that I walk to and from work every day). I left the house around 10:30am and got back around 5pm, so it was a day trip. I was beat after all that walking, which was probably closer to 8 miles counting the excursions off the loop. If I did that more often, I'd probably be in a lot better shape. Walking always gives such an intimate view of what's going on in the city, too, and I wandered through parts of the South Lake Union neighborhood that I normally don't see. Massive transformations going on there still.

It was a pretty slack weekend, all in all. Mostly watched football on Saturday. It felt good to just goof off for a couple of days.

Feels like it was a quiet weekend, but I got a lot done and had a fair amount of fun too. Friday night I watched two of Jacques Tourneur's lesser movies on Netflix Instant, The Fearmakers (1958) and Timbuktu (1959). Chris Fujiwara says that the five films Tourneur made after Night of the Demon (1957) are pretty weak tea, and certainly the three I've seen are at best barely passable time-wasters. Not sure if it was that nobody was hiring him to work on decent projects any more, or if he'd just lost interest. In 1958 he would have been 54 years old. Which is, you know, very young! (ETA: Tourneur started directing for television around this time, and the episode of Twilight Zone he did, "Night Call" (1964), is outstanding.)

On Saturday I did some writing, posted some pictures to Facebook, looked at paint colors at Daly's, and applied more primer to the back of the house when the temperature finally crawled above 50 around 1pm. Then it was a Chunga meeting at Andy's, plotting the publication of the next issue and actually doing some thinking about the one after that too. Then back to my place with carl, where we met up with Scott to drink many good beers, including a gueuze from the first batch by a new blender in Belgium called Tilquin and a couple of shots of Brewdog's Tactical Nuclear Penguin (courtesy of the fishlifters) to top things off. carl and Scott brought great munchies, too. The spicy pickled green beans that Scott had made himself were particularly tasty.

Because of the epic drinking, yesterday was a bit slower. I watched a replay of the Oregon-Arizona State football game (yay, internet!) and mowed the lawn. Did some more editorial work, puttered around with ironing shirts and washing the dishes. Finally settled down to watch a couple more movies: Humoresque (1946), which is a brilliant, beautifully-shot melodrama with John Garfield and Joan Crawford, and my umpteenth viewing of Diva (1981), inspired by all the music in Humoresque (in which Garfield plays a virtuoso violinist).

Does this kind of life look interesting to you? You know, I think I'll take it.

It was a fairly busy weekend, all in all, although half of it seemed to be spent in front of a computer screen.

Friday evening I went to the Clarion West party at Andy and Carrie's. I mostly hung out with my old confreres in the lounge area that had been set up in the middle of the back yard, complete with couch and firepit. Two Clarion West students came out and were interactive. One was a young Aussie guy named Jack who had just graduated from uni. I would have identified him as British from his accent, which reminded me of a young upper class guy I met in Melbourne the one time I was there. The other interactive student was a middle aged guy whose name I didn't catch. He was ex-military, and he mostly sat and smoked his pipe and listened to us, although he was willing to talk when I started asking him questions.

I was feeling pretty wiped out from the announcement of the layoffs at work, which I've decided it's not appropriate for me to write about here. Suffice it to say that I did not get laid off, and the atmosphere around here is pretty tense.

For the rest of the weekend I spent a lot of time working on my blog and on WOOF -- correspondence, the table of contents, my own zine. It all seemed to take up surprising amounts of time. I didn't get out in the sun enough, although I did work in the yard a bit yesterday. I also did find time to do some reading here and there, which felt good. Finished Moebius and Jodorowsky's The Incal, and read more chapters of Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and William K. Everson's American Silent Cinema.

Yesterday evening was a BBQ on the neighbors' back deck. It was the lovely day for a BBQ. The food was great, and the company was fine. Yet I was feeling a little out of synch. I don't know what it was. Maybe still feeling the tension from work. I didn't sleep well this weekend either. (Which is actually one reason I got more reading done than I would have normally.)

So an industrious weekend, and a social weekend, but slightly off. August is going to be pretty crazy, between various projects, visitors, a family reunion in Oregon, and Worldcon. carl got the first galley of Alternative Pants to me yesterday. That's the epic trip report I've written about my travels last November. So I can add proofing that to my To Do list. Und so weiter.

Well, it took me all weekend to recover from surliminal's visit! The party Friday night was fun. Somehow she had never been to our house in all her previous visits to Seattle, so I got to show off the back garden and the Zen Room (a.k.a. the Kingdom of the Spiders). A good group of the usual suspects showed up, despite the fact that it was a Friday. Jerry Kaufman said I must be getting them in shape for the Clarion West parties that start this week. L seemed slightly disappointed that the party didn't rage until 3 ayem, but we don't do that anymore. As it was, I think it was 1am when I threw her, John, and Eileen out and collapsed into bed.

Saturday was pretty much a lost cause after four nights straight of social engagements. Sunday wasn't much better, although I managed to make it to the Potlatch committee meeting and subsequent pubmeet, as well as a Skype conversation with ron_drummond. Oh, and I finished a blog post, and I wrote a letter. However, I didn't get any work done on any of the other writing projects that need my attention, and next weekend is the Solstice Parade and Fremont Street Fair. Well, I've really got to get cranking on a couple of these pieces, and I need to figure out what I'm doing with the Potlatch progress reports.

I'm almost feeling human today. We'll see how long that lasts. At the party holyoutlaw asked who the next British visitors would be. It was kind of a joke, based on the fact that almost exactly a year ago we threw a part for Doug and Christina, but after a moment's thought I realized that in fact the Fishlifters will be coming through after Worldcon. Keep your party hats handy!

So surliminal is in town for a few days, and last night we had dinner at Kaosamai, a very good Thai restaurant in Fremont (apparently good Thai is hard to find in Edinburgh), and then went to a SIFF show, Fuck My Life (Que pena tu vida, 2010), which is a very funny Chilean rom-com. We saw it with surliminal's friend, A, and A's boyfriend, B. Which makes you wonder who C is in this story, but I digress. They were fun, and it was fun getting caught up with surliminal's complicated trip so far, as well as variegated gossip about hither and yon.

I think I've got things going on every night this week, including Friday when (skipping C for the moment) D and I are hosting a party for the visitor. Hope to see a bunch of you there. Meanwhile I have survived my yearly performance evaluation, and it actually seems as though I accomplished things this past year. More to come. Gotta run.

Once again got a lot done over the weekend, including taxes (using Turbo Tax) and mowing the rest of the lawn and weeding the front beds. Hazel came over to help me make an adjustment to the blinds she installed last fall, and we got caught up on what's going on in her life. Sunday was the Potlatch 21 concom meeting before the pubmeet. I've agreed to handle publications, with Andy Hooper as my comely assistant, and now I'm the meetings secretary too. Plus I got a fair amount of blogging/writing done on both days. Even movie watching feels a little bit like working at this point, although it's work I enjoy. At the same time, my mind is feeling a little bit too busy right at the moment. Not enough slack time, maybe. Yet I'm enjoying the feeling that I'm firing on all cylinders. I'm enjoying the sense of productivity. Finding a good balance is the trick, as always.

It isn't all drunken debauchery around here, you know. For the past couple of months I've been working on a travelogue/trip report about my travels in November 2010. I've written close to 13,000 words at this point, and I'm just to the point of leaving Britain. This is already the longest thing I've written since Travels with the Wild Child, which was just over 30,000 words. Of course there's no certainty yet that I'll finish this or that I'll publish it if I do. We'll see how it turns out, if it turns out.

I'm also continuing to work on setting up a blog to use as a repository for my film and early science fiction reviews. I've been reading a WordPress book that holyoutlaw let me borrow, and this weekend I've been trying to settle on a theme (as the visual scheme is called in WordPress). Any comments or suggestions would be welcome. There are some other WordPress features that I want to understand before I start posting. Still, it feels like I'm getting closer.

And now that I've bragged about how productive I've been, I think I'll goof off for the rest of the day. Work has been kind of stressful lately, since I've been delving into a piece of software that I don't understand very well, but last week I made headway on that front too. Progress!