12 questions

Got this idea from the biz-to-biz publication my employer puts out each month:

1. What brought you to Walla Walla? Originally, college. This time, a good job in a small city with great weather where work and a lot of other destinations are a short walk from my house, which is pretty much downtown.

2. Favorite memory: How to choose! Honestly, though, I look forward, not back. If I had to pick one, maybe having dinner with new friends in Redeyef, Tunisia, with the butterfly lady.

3. Current favorite song/CD: CD? What's that? Current song: Carvel, by John Frusciante.

Album: Sea Sew, by Lisa Hannigan


Favorite movie: The Deer Hunter, but it depends on the day. Maybe Heat, maybe Romeo + Juliet.

Favorite food: Well, that is an impossible question, isn't it? I guess it is a tie: Pastrami and swiss on rye with Russian dressing and sauerkraut or peanut butter and jam on country white.

Favorite book: Only one? Wind, Sand and Stars. But seriously, only one?

Favorite hobby: Bird watching. First easy question!

Favorite place in Walla Walla County: In the wheat fields east of the city, in the hills that overlook the valley.

Most recent local purchase: Two delicate drinking glasses with dragonflies from Willow of Walla Walla.

Worst job: Depends on how you look at it. You might imagine the curséd cannery, the miserable mill or the horrible hospital, but you'd be wrong. Worst job? Working at Roth's Vista Market as a box clerk, where the owner would drop by now and then to patronize his low-paid workers and exhort us to run, run, run when bringing those shopping carts back in from the lot. What a jerk. One of my jobs in New Hampshire was pretty high on the list, too.

Dream vacation: Beats me. How about three months in summer to complete the New England 67? (That'd be summiting the 67 peaks in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine that are over 4,000 feet). I'm between a third and halfway done now, but they're a long drive these days.

Person you'd most like to talk to: Cate Blanchett :)

Litmus tests

I don't know about you, but when I go to new restaurants and bars, I have a couple of standby orders I use to assess whether I'm going to want to come back.

Sandwich - Reuben
For me, a good Reuben is a few slices of corned beef, about the same amount of sauerkraut as beef, a slice of Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on toasted - but not greasy - rye bread. I can live with some of the variations, like marbled rye or pastrami, but those are small strikes against a place. Too much meat and not enough kraut are the most common felonies.

Drink - Martini
Pretty simple. Gin and olives. If you can't figure out how to put chilly gin in a glass with some big, tasty olives, I'm pretty sure you can't be trusted to make a sidecar. I know, I know, vermouth. I'm with Churchill on this one.

Pizza - Italian sausage, bell peppers, onions, thin crust.
I eat other pizzas, but this combo will uncover any fault, whether it's subpar toppings, flimsy crust, incompetent baking or insipid sauce.

The funny thing is that even though that's what I order to find out if a place is good, I'd really rather have a peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich on toasted wheat bread and a glass of bourbon. I'll stick with that pizza, though.

Thursday tunes

I'm not sure if this is my favorite Springsteen song, but it is near the top of the list. At least in the top 10!

I guess the rest of the list is:
Ghost of Tom Joad
My Hometown
Atlantic City
Highway Patrolman
Youngstown
My City of Ruins
Radio Nowhere
I'm on Fire
American Skin
That's not in order, because the order changes by the day. And it is probably incomplete. Damn lists.

Influential albums - a list

Carlos tagged me on this challenge - Fifteen albums that changed your life. I'm not sure how to qualify some of these: I'm sure several albums helped form my world view. I mean, I'd say Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Cisco Houston and those kinds of people, but they're where I started. I guess that rules out Springsteen, who's in that set.

In a lot of ways, my musical experience has been one of blundering from my sheltered past into unknown universes. Cool, but also a little embarrassing when I arrive somewhere everybody's already been.

I'll shoot for albums that changed my outlook. These are pretty much in chronological order. I put in some samples, too.

1. Bad Religion - Suffer. I grew up listening to classical music, Dust Bowl folk and country & western. I rarely listened to rock 'n' roll until high school. I mean, I knew about Ratt, Styx, Foreigner, all that in middle school, but that wasn't what I usually listened to. When I heard this (with my best friend, Chris, over at Jay Dunlap's house), it blew me away.
   
2. Jimi Hendrix - Some compilation or another. I was unaware of the existence of classic rock that was other than what you might hear in Back to the Future.
   
3. Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers - My introduction to reggae. Chris bought that one.
   
4. Pink Floyd - The Wall. Weird-ass movie but a ton of great music.
   
5. N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton. My exposure to rap was pretty limited until college (first roomie was an Army brat, a black guy from Oceanside, not a jazz guy). "Fuck the Police" was a revelation.
6. The Geto Boys - The Geto Boys. Pretty much the most outrageous and funny gangsta rap ever made.
   
   
7. Richard Thompson - Rumor and Sigh. Opened my eyes to the folk scene of the early 1990s.
8. Tori Amos - Crucify. My favorite from the angry woman movement. Alerted me to the existence of a completely unexpected scene.
9. The Butterfly Lady - Her musical taste is similar to mine, but she searches for new music in completely different circles, so I get a lot of exposure to music I probably wouldn't find on my own, like Ali Farka Toure, Outlandish, Mister Gang...
   
   that one is aka:
   
   
10. The White Stripes - The White Stripes. Opened my eyes to garage rock. I think I listened to this album about 50 times in a row.
11. Townes Van Zandt - Live at the Old Quarter. I obviously had heard his songs before, but not performed by him. This is a fantastic album. Minimal production is a big plus. This album got me to check out a lot of folk/country from the 1970s.
    
    
12. Joe Purdy - Julie Blue. Uh, yeah, there's a pattern here. I didn't know there was an L.A. folk scene until I blundered into Joe Purdy, who incidentally kicks ass live. Here is a song from his supposedly upcoming album, Last Clock on the Wall:
    
    
13. Mitch Hedberg - Mitch Altogether. Not music, right? Yeah, but he changed how I tell jokes and how I look at run-of-the-mill stuff, which was his bread and butter.
14. 9 Songs. OK, that's a movie. But it tuned my in to music of the hipster scene. What they were listening to in that five minutes, anyway.
    
    

Movies: An abbreviated list

Disclaimers first: We watched some movies in the theater, and we rented some from a local shop. Ergo, this isn't an all-encompassing observation, just 10 keepers and 10 throw-'em-backs of the 91 Netflix flicks seen in 2008, in reverse order of date seen (i.e. most recent at top of list) with a short note. Yeah, yeah, your favorite movie's on the wrong list. Whatever.

Play it again, Sam!

1. Lust, Caution (tense!)
2. PU-239 (touching)
3. The Tunnel (tense *and* touching)
4. King of California (engrossing)
5. Shortbus (uncommon people have common problems)
6. Enchanted (way cuter than I would have thought)
7. Reign Over Me (way deeper than I would have thought)
8. My Life as a Dog (fuggedaboutit - awesome movie)
9. The Brave One (predictable, but really good)
10. Cashback (unpredictable, and really, really good)

Can I get those hours of my life back?

1. Cassandra's Dream (as boring as Broken Flowers)
2. Making Of (nope, the fake documentary parts do not work after all)
3. Amores Perros (gratuitous dog fighting)
4. Year of the Dog (too preachy, and not even close to comedy)
5. Lions for Lambs (if they'd stuck with the guys in Afghanistan and skipped the rest of the movie, it would have been good. They didn't. Oh yeah, and too preachy.)
6. Vantage Point (boring. boring. boring. from several different perspectives!)
   
7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (too fucking long, just like the title)
   
8. The Omega Man (I can see how this would have been good when it came out, but it did not age well)
9. Gone Baby Gone (just couldn't give a crap)
10. Lucky You (it would have been lucky to skip this one. I tried, really, but it is still just typical poker crap)

So, that was 2008?

The year seems to have slipped by pretty quickly, though I didn't perceive the days to be shorter and I don't think the time was wasted!

I guess that means it is time yet again to conjure on resolutions. I like to make at least a couple each year, and I find I tend to follow through. But I'm not sure what to put on the list.

Learn more Arabic? Bake a cake? Learn to play guitar? Beats me. I'm having the same problem at work, because I have to concoct five or so goals to accomplish as part of our bonus program. Hey, I like a bonus, but I'd rather earn one by kicking ass rather than ticking off a list of stuff that may not be relevant by year's end. Ugh.

Things I wish I knew how to do

I'm not sure when I'd learn, exactly, because my to-do list is always longer than the days have hours. But here are a few things I'd like to know how to do. When I say "know how to do" I mean "know how to do well."

• Play guitar (or piano, or banjo or harmonica, for that matter). I know, I know, this is a skill that white people commonly have. But I don't.
• Make a decent batch of sembei (Japanese rice crackers). I'm working on this one. The last batch (the labor of my Labor Day) were pretty bad, but not as bad as the previous try.
• Make furniture/cabinetry. Especially cabinetry.
• Swim twice as fast, run twice as far. Um, yeah. Eventually.
• Write dialogue in fiction that isn't clunky.
• Build a sailboat. Or a pirate ship. And sail it.
• Distill whisky.

Of course, that's the realistic list. I left off "teleport," "conjure tornadoes" and "learn telekinesis," even though I think those would all be wicked handy skills.

Saturday morning shuffle

all from my bought-music category...

The First Cut is the Deepest - Cat Stevens
That Time - Regina Spektor
Conquest - The White Stripes
Mr. Bad Man - Tori Amos
abbie's song - Joe Purdy
San Jose - Joe Purdy
You Can Bring Your Dog - Tori Amos
Get Em High - Kanye West, Talib Kweli and Common
Munich - Editors
Fat Slut - Tori Amos

10 books in a row

On one of my shelves:

The Sea of Trolls - Nancy Farmer
Mind of the Raven - Bernd Heinrich
Kanji & Kana - Hadamitzky & Spahn
A book entirely in Japanese, indecipherable at the moment
Kyo Noren - Takai Kiyoshi
Godless Morality - Richard Holloway
The Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels (oooh, *that* communist manifesto!)
The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara
The Next Million Years - Charles Galton Darwin
Forgotten Kingdom - Peter Goullart

Busy weekend

Thanksgiving weekend was a busy one:

• Drove to Willamette Valley on Thursday morning for visit/studio sale/etc.
• Drove to Bellingham (and back) on Friday to pick up loom.
• Helped with studio sale on Saturday. Went shopping afterward.
• Drove to sunny (well, usually sunny) Walla Walla on Sunday (about 1,200 miles for the weekend).

So now I have a different new-to-me loom, one that is similar to the one I'd been using and therefore much easier to get into working shape for production weaving.

I also sold and/or traded five scarves, which means I am due for a couple of massages in Portland down the line and also have some inventory actually out walking around in the world. This is a nice validation.

Of course, the butterfly lady and I also got to have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat with my mother, who made a great dinner. We consumed a healthy amount of wine, too.

Damn, that was a lot of driving.

Things I miss about big cities

A weekend visit to Portland reminded me that some things are better when you live in a more densely populated area:

• Haggling over whether to eat at the Ethiopian place, the Japanese place or the Pakistani place (in Walla Walla, the only place to enjoy those cuisines is our dinner table or the table of able friends).
• Large, good bookstores (Walla Walla is OK, but our stores can't hold a candle to Powell's).
• More than one choice of where to buy dog crud for the Newfy, and being able to find a good deal.
• Stylish clothing. Stylish people. In force.
• Ethnic grocery stores. Counting Uwajimaya, large ethnic grocery stores.
• A million other little things.

In the shuffle

Besides a couple of Arab songs I would get big cred for being able to ID, here's what I'm listening to on deadline:

Tom Joad - Country Joe MacDonald
Waitin' Round to Die - Rhonda Harris
Big Wheel - Tori Amos
Jimmy the Exploder - The White Stripes
One More Cup of Coffee - The White Stripes
Kathleen - Rhonda Harris
Rock the Casbah - The Clash
Store-bought Bones - The Raconteurs
President - Wyclef Jean
Diamonds and Rust - Joan Baez
Rattlesnakes - Tori Amos

A list of fall favorites

Just a few:
Spiced apple cider, warmed up on the stove.
Football (American rules), preferably a couple of no-name colleges on some ESPN derivative.
Clam chowder.
The World Series (of course, without the Cardinals, it isn't quite right)
Casseroles.
Watching the wind blow the leaves down the street.

More later, perhaps.

Song collector

My favorite song is Pancho and Lefty, by Townes Van Zandt. It's been covered a hell of a lot. I have versions by:

Townes Van Zandt (Live at the Old Quarter in Houston)
Townes Van Zandt (a later live version)
Emmylou Harris
Kate Power and Steve Einhorn (oddball regional outfit)
Last Fair Deal (from a show at Roaring Brook in Canton, Ct.)
Laurie McClain
Old & in the Gray
Tendril (a punk band whose members seem to think this is a Willie Nelson song)
Tiki King (playing on the ukulele)
Effron White
Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard
Willie Nelson (not the one with Merle Haggard, more recent)
some weird Australian dudes

Anyway, here's a cover by Mick Conlin

A list of games

Games owned by me:

Scrabble
Super Scrabble
Scrabble (auf Deutsch)
Boggle (Newfy loves this one - so soothing for her nerves)
Cribbage (for that matter, cards)
Mah jong
Go
The Farming Game (like Monopoly, but much better)
Abalone (the butterfly lady's favorite, for sure)
Tangrams
A few hundred old-school video games, but those are on the computer

I'm probably missing something here...

On my to-do list

I've long since abandoned learning to use a 10-key, but I still think it would be useful. Survivors on one of my get-more-skills lists:

• Finish learning French. I can get by on the road, but that's about it.
• Improve in Japanese and Arabic to the point that I can get by comfortably on the road (and translate my new Japanese-language field guide to Japanese birds).
• Finish learning Spanish. I can get by one the road, if all the road demands is that I order a beer. Or another beer.

So that should be pretty easy, right? I have a plan, anyway, which involves French lessons that start today. Depending on how much time is left in my days, I hope to tackle Japanese through the translation project. It will be an interesting experiment anyway... And Arabic? Man, I need some more hours.

Spanish is kind of up in the air: My employer may offer some sort of kickback on tuition, which could mean actual classroom time starting in the fall. It isn't very expensive, about $1,300 for three quarters, plus books.

Favorite foods

Sets of threes:

Dairy
Grafton Village cheddar (the now-extinct Gold - aged three years)
Parmiggiano-Reggiano - from Italy of course
Whole milk - very cold, please

Fruits
Raspberries (with that milk!)
Blackberries (in cobbler)
Bananas (lotso K and good for primates of all stripes)

Vegetables
Odwalla carrot juice (carrots are OK, but this is way better)
Okra (stuffed with kheema and baked!)
Spinach

"Vegetables" that are really fruit
Squash - summer or winter, I love 'em all
Tomatoes - preferably a funky heirloom variety, right off the vine in the sunshine
Red Hot Chili Peppers

Meats
Hill Meats bacon
Homemade chicken soup
Ground lamb (good in lots of things!)

Grains
Jasmine or basmati rice
Sushi rice
Bob's Red Mill oats

Grains that have actually been made into something
Extra-crispy English muffins
That kick-ass crusty bread you get at good Italian joints, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar or harissa
Biscuits and gravy (maybe that counts in meat, too.)

Fats
Bacon fat - the best
Extra-virgin olive oil - also nice on the hands
Unsalted butter

Mandatory kill

That's wire-service speak for "Oops, that story/photo/graphic was a mistake. Do not run it."

I suggest a mandatory kill on a few words, at least in specific contexts:

• Artisan - This is a good word when you need a gender-aspecific way to say craftsman, but I'm tired of seeing it applied to cheese, chocolate, wine and any other food that can be made well. Yeah, I get it. Grafton Village cheddar, Moonstruck chocolate and Zerba Cellars 2003 syrah are better than generic mozzarella, Hershey's milk chocolate and Thunderbird. But for Christ's sake, artisan duck breast? Alas, yes. So it is time to strike artisan, no matter how convenient a longhand it has become for "good."
• Improvised explosive device - It's a homemade bomb. Or maybe even a roadside bomb. This phrase is even more annoying when it is Improvised Explosive Device (unless that's the title of a book).
• Comprise - Only a minority apparently knows how the fuck to use this word correctly, so fuck it, let's just throw it under the bus.
  
• Issue - Are you speaking about an edition of a magazine? A political topic? Cool. A problem? Not cool. You didn't go bankrupt because of financial issues any more than Enron collapsed because of accounting issues. They're problems, damn it, problems!

There are others, of course. Perhaps you can think of a few, too!

Not quite popular

A wire story on popular names for children moved me to check on my own. Alas:

Alasdair is not in the top 1000 male names for any year of birth in the last 150 years.
Please enter another name.

So sayeth the Social Security Administration, anyway. I suppose over the ocean blue things might be different.

For fun, I checked on some other people:

• Holly: Surfaced in 1936 (981st), still going strong in 2005 (311th). Best showing: 1979 and 1983. (48th)
  
• Margot: Showed up in the 1,000 most popular names off and on from 1914 (999th); disappeared in 1966 (992nd). Best showing: 1936 (580th).
• Eugenie: Showed up from 1880 (first year the SSA has records for, at 694th), gone in 1920 (855th). Best showing: 1887 (413th).
• Maurice: Showed up in 1880 (146th); still going in 2005 (414th). Best showing: 1914 (94th).
• Robert: Showed up in 1880 (10th); still going in 2005 (39th). Best showing: 1924-1939 and 1953 (1st, and 2nd from 1940-1952).
  
• Daphne: Showed up in 1886 (1011th); still going in 2005 (551st). Best showing: 1962 (266th).
• Richard: Showed up, you will be shocked to read, in 1880 (23rd); still going in 2005 (93rd). Best showing: 1930 to 1947 (5th).
• Lauren: Showed up in 1945 (355th); still going in 2005 (21st). Best showing: 1989 (9th).
• Johnny: Showed up in 1880 (387th); still going in 2005 (243rd). Best showing: 1944 and 1945 (45th).

What's in your spice rack?

Mine is a cabinet, because I want to keep the light away.

Lower shelf

• Worcestshire sauce
• Mirin "sweet cooking rice wine"
• red wine vinegar
• seasoned rice vinegar (two varieties)
• one cellophane package of nori
• olive oil (bought in bulk, stored in a bear for honey)
• double-action baking powder
• baking soda
• corn starch
• dried chilis (little skinny ones - that's hot!)
• chili oil
• molasses
• rose water (from Tunisia)
• Spike, regular flavor
• Spade-L seasoning for beef
• garlic salt
• mustard powder (I can't remember the last time I bought prepared mustard)
  
• "California style" lemon pepper
• "Chesapeake Bay style" seafood seasoning
• Chinese 5-spice
• demerara sugar, some in a silver sugar bowl and some in a plastic container
  
• chicken bouillon cubes (I like chicken bullion, but they don't take it at the store)
• cocoa powder (whoops, almost typed coca powder, and I don't think I have that)
• two mortars and pestles
• Two sets of measuring cups, plain Pyrex for 1 and 2 cups wet and pretty robin's egg blue ceramic for 1, 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 cup dry.
  

Upper shelf

• lavender salt
• dried oregano
• dried basil
• saffron (also from Tunisia)
• harissa, sans olive oil
• caraway
• dill seed
• Dalmatian rubbed sage (I think that should be rubbed Dalmatian sage, but I can see why it isn't)
• sesame seeds
• summer savory
• celery seed
• dried lemon grass
• bay leaves
• white poppy seed
• paprika
• ground marjoram
• sea salt
• pepper
• coriander
• cumin
• turmeric
• fennel
• cloves, whole and ground
• cinammon, sticks and ground
• ground ginger (I also have a bunch frozen)
• cardamom, plain and (I think) smoked
• nutmeg (and snazzy grinder)
• cayenne powder
• chili powder

In other storage areas

• sea salt
• 2 pounds honey (I think it's a spice, too, in a way)
• extra nutmeg, turmeric, bay leaves, coriander, molasses
  
• vanilla, almond and mint extracts
• nuoc mam
  

In the fridge

• harissa
• wasabi
• tapatio
• sambal oelek
• ketchup (hey, that's a seasoning!)
  

'choo got?