Our neighbor to the north

Last Friday, David and I got on the Victoria Clipper, a high-speed catamaran that plies Puget Sound, and took a three-hour ride to Victoria, B.C. for an overnight getaway. (Leave it to us to go someplace wetter, colder, darker, and farther north than Seattle for a winter holiday, but whatever.) It was a smooth ride on a choppy sea, with dramatic clouds and patches of blue sky above. I enjoy boats, so already I was having a good time. The champagne continental breakfast we got with our package deal didn’t hurt, either.

When we got to Victoria, the weather was chilly and varied from thickly clouded to misty to showery. We had from lunchtime Friday to late afternoon Saturday to hang out in town before the trip back. We didn’t do a whole lot; we wandered the streets, visited Munro’s Books and Utopia (a funky T-shirt shop), went to a couple of vegetarian restaurants (Green Cuisine and Lotus Pond), and strolled in Beacon Hill Park, watching the fat, happy ducks in the ponds there. (We didn’t see any Canada geese; they’re probably all vacationing on the golf courses of the Lower 48 for the winter.) Even though we didn’t do much, it was still nice to have a change of scenery and a new place to explore.

We didn’t take many pictures, but here are a couple of shots.



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Me in front of the Parliament building just after we got off the boat.

This sculpture was in front of our hotel, the Château Victoria.

Here's David with a totem pole in Thunderbird Park next to the Royal British Columbia Museum.

No needles to vacuum up

This was our substitute Christmas tree this year – a very nice lamp my sister and brother-in-law gave us. We opened it a few days early and David arranged our gifts under it.

At least I didn't need to take out a loan

Last Saturday I bought the most expensive yarn I've ever purchased: $45.50 for 100 grams (about 3.5 ounces). It's called Camelspin, and it's a hand-dyed blend of 70% silk and 30% camel from Handmaiden Yarn in Canada. I believe the "spin" in the name refers to the justification and rationalization one has to do to explain why this skein of yarn is worth $45.50. ("It's very special...one of a kind...imported from Canada...I only need one skein...feel it yourself!") Of course, the only justification for spending that much on a skein of yarn is that you're in love with it and you just have to have it.

Since by now I'm sure you're dying to see what a $45.50 skein of yarn looks like, here it is:


I'm going to make a pair of luxurious fingerless mitts to wear while I read, type, or knit. See, that's practical. And I'll get maximum value out of the yarn because I'll be wearing the finished product right there on my hands, where I can see and enjoy the beautiful yarn. Yes, I'm demonstrating advanced Camelspinning here.

Dead Man Working

A couple of weeks ago, one of David's coworkers was found at the bottom of a swimming pool, dead. He had had some kind of seizure, apparently. Fortunately, he was revived and is expected to make a full recovery. But everyone else at the office was shocked when, just a week after he had died, he showed up for work.

"He didn't look too good," David said.

"I bet," I said. "When I die, I'm taking at least a month off."

Shagadelic, baby!

My high school friend Angela, with whom I reconnected in 2006 at our something-th reunion, lives with her husband Michael and their preschool-age daughter Jessica in Redding, California, up at the northern edge of the great Central Valley on I-5.

They have many interests, but one of the more festive ones is that they (especially Michael) are big fans of the revival of tiki culture, a passion that can’t be easy to satisfy where they live.

Earlier this month, Angela emailed us to let us know that the retro-fabulous artist Shag was going to be in our own Seattle on December 14th and 15th for a gallery opening and nightclub party, and hinted that they would be forever grateful if we would attend one of those events and possibly pick up a little something for them.

Shag, if you’re not familiar with him, is the art moniker of Josh Agle, whose art was instrumental in the revival of tiki culture a few years back (although he doesn’t identify himself as primarily a “tiki artist”). I first became aware of his art from a line of greeting cards he designed. His subjects are ‘60s-chic men and women in sophisticated settings; his style is cartoonlike, with large areas of flat, bright color and simplified shapes. It’s immensely accessible, appealing, and hip.

Well, we were so grateful to Michael and Angela for inviting us to stay at their home in Redding the night we drove away from our beloved North Beach apartment in our moving truck, that we were happy to be the deputy ambassadors of the Tiki Appreciation Society of Redding (disclosure: this is my own made-up name).

By the time we got to the Roc LaRue Gallery in Belltown last Friday, they had run out of cocktails and were serving only beer, but the live band was just getting started. We snapped up the last copy of Bottomless Cocktail (a book of Shag’s art), schmoozed, posed for a few photos with the prints and paintings, and eventually got our picture taken with the man himself, who was very approachable and laid-back, I’m glad to say. He signed the book for Michael and Angela, and with that, our mission for the evening was complete. We stole stylishly out into the night and headed home, not on a vintage Vespa, alas, but in a cab, feeling way groovy, baby, all the way home.

Here I am with the painting "The Lost Book," which I chose because of its Paris background, the black cats, and the fact that the book the cats are looking at is Baudelaire's classic book of poems, "Fleurs du Mal."



Here's David with a print that portrays some of Shag's characteristic themes — the suave fellow with a cocktail, the dark-haired '60s fashionista, the swinging pad. Note the tiki mask on the back wall and the minotaur in the picture-within-a-picture. (Tikis and minotaurs are also recurring Shag images.)


Here we are with Shag, a.k.a. Josh Agle. The book under my arm is Bottomless Cocktail, the book we had Shag sign for Michael and Angela.

First snowfall

On Saturday, December 2nd, it began to snow in the early afternoon and it continued to snow all through the rest of the day. I took these pictures in the community garden and park across from our apartment building:

In the next picture, the building in the background on the right side is our apartment building. Note the snowman being built on the left edge of the picture:

By way of comparison, this is what the community garden looked like just the week before:

The snow had all melted by the next morning, under the steady rain that signaled the start of the catastrophic storm that flooded Chehalis and I-5 on Monday the 3rd, the storm that's been all over the news here since then. Still, Saturday was pretty magical to this coastal California girl.

Our 30-foot Christmas tree

Much to our surprise and delight, the neighborhood center that runs the community garden across the street has strung a dense network of colored lights on the 30-foot cedar tree that dominates the foreground view from our apartment. With absolutely no effort, and from the cozy comfort of our own living room, we'll be able to enjoy the cheery lights of this spectacular tree all through the holiday season. What could be better?

Thanksgiving menu, or "What do those poor, deprived vegetarians eat for Thanksgiving, anyway?"

Our friends Paul and Michael came up from San Francisco for Thanksgiving weekend. They arrived on Friday, so David and I had our Thanksgiving Day feast with them a day late.

The menu: for starters, potato skordalia spread on baguette slices (very popular), with Marcona almonds, mixed olives, and crudités. The soup was a hearty lentil soup seasoned with Dijon mustard and vinegar — very good with Tabasco sauce!

For the main course, we had butternut squash purée seasoned with whole Indian spices and wrapped in baked whole wheat phyllo dough triangles; Mom's traditional garlicky cranberry chutney (made by David); bread stuffing with toasted pine nuts and chanterelle, oyster, and crimini mushrooms braised in white wine and lemon juice (with a touch of black truffle oil); and slow-braised Swiss chard with cilantro and garlic.

For dessert we had spiced dried fruits in wine syrup (also made by David) served over soy ice cream.

The meal was a great success — very festive and traditional in feeling even without the dead bird.

We were so busy socializing during the meal that we forgot to take any pictures, so we staged the following shot the next day with some leftovers.

Hot grilled hummus with pickles

Saturday afternoon we went shopping for a love seat, as it's started to get old trying to relax and watch a DVD together when one of us has to sit on the floor while the other gets to sit in our one upholstered chair. Won't bore you with details about the love seat search — found one we liked, not available right now — but before we looked at love seats we popped over to Pike Place Market for a bite at the counter at Three Girls Luncheonette, a tiny, very old and funky establishment staffed by obvious art students. They build sandwiches to order; we each had a sandwich described by the title of this post, and if it sounds like the sort of thing only a pregnant hippie vegetarian from Berkeley would eat, and only then as a last resort, trust me, it isn't. Especially if you include Dijon mustard, tomato, and lettuce. Yum — I could eat one right now.

What I like about my office

My little digital camera can't adequately capture the view to the west from my office building. In the morning the light shines on the eastern face of the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound. The feet of the mountains show as a blue-gray mass planted in the waters of the Sound; the peaks are jagged and white, with dark vertical ridges running down their slopes. Often, there's a band of clear sky running across the horizon between the peaks and the overcast marine layer of clouds, making it seem as though a dark theatrical curtain has been partially raised to reveal the mountain backdrop behind it. The summits I can see from here are between 5000' and 7000' high. I still haven't gotten over the fact that I can be standing in my office in a sea-level city and be looking at a vast snow-capped mountain range at the same time. It knocks me out every time I leave my cubicle and walk down the aisle toward the windows on days when visibility is good.

This is the best I can do with my camera from my office window.


Since I can't take a decent picture of the view myself, here's a link to a nice photo I found on someone else's Flickr page.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwmullins/217458760/

SAM I am

Expecting rain today but getting none, we went down to the waterfront in the late afternoon to check out the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. This place has it all. If you want to look at art, there are sculptures by Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen, Louise Nevelson, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, and others of note. If you don't want to look at art, you have the beauty of Elliott Bay, the Seattle skyline, and the Olympic Mountains to gaze at.

What I love about this park is the way it's laid out. It spans multiple levels of ground, and bridges the waterfront railroad tracks with a diagonal walkway. You can't see everything at once, so you walk along the varied pathways with a feeling of discovery. It's not just a collection of sculptures; it's a real place.

We started in the Pavilion, where we nestled ourselves into one of the "Capula" suspended sculptures by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes.

I found it inspirational, as you can see.

Then we went outside and checked out Richard Serra's monumental "Wake." Its undulating rust-colored walls were an echo of the hulls of the ships that were passing to and fro in Elliott Bay even as we stood there.

(Note of Bay Area interest: San Francisco has a fairly recently installed sculpture by Serra at the UCSF campus in Mission Bay; David got to see it as it was being installed a few years ago while he was on an urban planning conference tour.)

Here's Alexander Calder's "Eagle," along with David and the Space Needle.

Detail of "Father and Son," by Louise Bourgeois.

We eventually left the Olympic Sculpture Park and entered Myrtle Edwards Park, another waterfront park that lies to the north of the sculpture park. There we saw the old emblem of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, mounted on a new building.

There was a fire boat out in the bay running its hose -- to clean it out, perhaps? -- and when we turned to walk back towards it we realized that we could see Mount Rainier. I couldn't get a very good image of it on my camera, but it was worth taking a picture of anyway; Rainier is so often hidden behind clouds.

Soon the fire boat turned its hose on at full power, and David said, "Oh, come on; now they're just showing off."

The spray even spritzed us on the shore as we passed the boat on our way back to the streets of town, ready for dinner as the sun set behind the Olympics and the air suddenly turned cold.

Link to the SAM Olympic Sculpture Park:

http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/artrentals/OSP/AboutOSP/default.asp

You've gotta start somewhere

I must truly belong in the Pacific Northwest if I can walk out my door on a morning like this one, look at the silver-colored sky, feel the damp, cool air on my skin, see the sidewalk darkened with moisture, and think with buoyant gratitude, "What a lovely day!"

It's been almost two months to the day since David and I moved from San Francisco to Seattle. Now that some of the dust has settled from our move, I'm starting this blog to share my pictures and perceptions with family and friends.

Today for lunch I followed a recommendation from Yelp and went to Mae Phim Thai on Columbia Street, owned by a Thai immigrant with the unforgettable name of Orawan Butkiewicz. (She married a Polish American.) The food is cheap, fast, tasty; yes, if you come visit me at lunchtime I'll take you there. We'll want to get there around 11:30 if we don't want to wait in this line:

Afterwards I wandered around Pioneer Square for a bit, exercising my new (first) digital camera.

Detail of totem pole at the foot of 1st Avenue:

The Pioneer Square Pergola:

The name of this store is "Utilikilt," and yes, it's a kilt shop for manly men.

In two months, I've seen more men in kilts in Seattle than I normally would have in, oh, eight months in San Francisco. What's the deal? Do some guys just get tired of having rain-soaked trouser hems?