Dry Ice Factory

holyoutlaw and juliebata invited Denys and me over for dinner, so we walked to the center of the universe yesterday evening, critiquing the neighborhood along the way. (The traffic calming devices on 36th have not calmed the traffic. The old Fremont News space has been taken over by Sonic Boom's vinyl section. The old Empty Space Theater space is still empty.) Luke and Julie's apartment was neat as a pin, showing no sign of the truckloads of stuff we helped to move in there whenever it was we did that. Luke's upcoming photography show was stowed mostly in the bedroom, wrapped in plain brown paper.

Dinner was a lovely green salad with cranberries and blue cheese, followed by tasty chicken tikki masala, and then, to really distend the carpet python, a delicious extra-chocolatey chocolate cake from Simply Desserts. I'm still digesting twelve hours later! Julie showed us strange musical videos with singing badgers and mushrooms, lions and tigers (and one dead zebra) in Kenya, and that anime girl twirling a leek that Luke linked to recently. We looked at Alaska-cruise travel brochures and scary pictures of Julie wearing polyester as a child. (There are no photos that I know of showing me in my powder blue leisure suit in 1977.) A wonderful dinner, and great audio-visual aids and yikkety-yak. Denys and I could barely roll up the hill afterwards.

Thanks, neighbors!

holyoutlaw has pointed to a flickr pool of Fremont Solstice Parade photos. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, my favorite part of the parade was probably the enigmatic statue of a goddess on a stone platform that opened to disgorge a troupe of weird giant babies who sported and cavorted about in a disturbing fashion. Eventually the goddess fired streams of elixir from her breasts, which brought the babies scrambling back into her stone womb, clamoring for sustenance. Apparently in the design phase, a baby met a babyhead. Not much chance of a normal life after that.

I just spoke with a police officer who was in the middle of using my ladder to get on the roof of my house. Finally I know what's going on.

When I got back from a dinner outing last night, there was a loud party going on in one of the apartment buildings nearby. I woke up around 3am to hear boisterous voices in the street. I woke up again around 6:30 to the sound of a distant argument and a popping noise that might have been a gunshot. A half hour later, I heard a loudspeaker in the distance, and about five minutes after that, it was right outside our house. It was the police demanding that somebody come out with their hands up. This demand was repeated, with the further observation, "We're not going to go away."

Denys and I peeked out, and saw the police car in front of the house. Denys went back to bed, I started some coffee brewing, and when I peeked out again, I could see a police car at the bottom of the hill in the middle of the intersection, lights flashing. Later I saw that there were cops behind a car across the street, one of them with a rifle.

This is now close to two hours after the loudspeaker announcement. A while ago, I went out to pick some raspberries in my backyard and heard a voice from what sounded like the front of the house. I went back in and looked through the window, and there was a cop in body armor with a rifle standing in my front yard. A few minutes later, I saw him peeking around the house next door, and then I heard the sound of the ladder being moved from where we store it outside. I finally went out to ask what was going on.

The friendly officer said he hadn't realized anyone was home. (Denys had gone out, much to my amazement, to do some grocery shopping a half hour ago.) The officer explained that a woman with a shotgun is holed up in her apartment and refusing to come out. Apparently she fired her shotgun at the party, but it doesn't sound like she shot at anybody. A couple of officers might need to get on our roof, I guess because of the angle on the apartment.

Okey-dokey, officer. Maybe I should get under the bed with the dust bunnies?