No bad news

When I have more time, I'll publish a post about David's and my recent and triumphant return to SF last weekend. But I just wanted to post a quick note now to say that we got a call from the vet and the results of the biopsy showed that the growth on Simone's leg appears to be a benign cyst, as we had suspected and hoped.

Everybody do the Michigan Rag

Last night David and I talked to our friend Linda (a.k.a. my blogguru). She said that she’s thinking of leaving San Francisco after many decades and moving back to Michigan, where she grew up. Her parents are about to move from Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti and she’s thinking she’d like to be closer to them.

“What do people do for jobs in Ypsilanti?” David asked.

“Work in bars,” said Linda.

She said that she might even be able to afford an itsy-bitsy house in Ypsilanti, which inspired me to write the following ditty:

I love my itsy-bitsy shanty
In tipsy Ypsilanti
Where my uncle and my auntie
Own a bar,

Yes, my acreage is scanty
But I love my Ypsilanti
Shanty shack from which I’ll never
Wander far.

In my head I hear this as a jaunty Tin-Pan-Alley-style melody, something like another ode to a Midwestern town — think “Gary, Indiana” from The Music Man.

(All right, you critics out there; just be glad I didn't include some of the other rhymes I thought of for "Ypsilanti," like "panty," for instance.)

You’d better not be taking me to Montana

This morning Simone had her first trip to the vet since moving to Seattle. Actually, it was her first trip in several years, as she’s been blessedly problem-free for almost all the time we’ve had her. But now that she’s around ten years old, and also because we needed to establish a relationship with a new veterinary office here, we decided to take her in for a checkup. Besides, a few months ago an odd, bare, wrinkled flap of skin appeared on the back of her left hind leg; it looks like a deflated blister. It didn't seem to bother her at all, and we were trying to get ready to move, so we just decided to keep an eye on it and find a vet in Seattle when we were able to get around to it.

Eastlake Veterinary Hospital is, as the name suggests, near the eastern shore of Lake Union, about a mile away from our apartment. We loaded Simone into her carrier, which she hadn’t been in since our big trip up from San Francisco. She was not happy about this at all. I had to reassure her repeatedly that we weren’t going to move her two states away again.

It was mostly a routine checkup — the weigh-in, the temperature-taking, the rabies and upper respiratory infection booster shots, the dental exam. She’s an acceptable 12 pounds 4 ounces; the vet said that ten pounds would be better, but her current weight’s not bad. Being a ten-year-old cat, she’s got some tartar on her back teeth and she’s due for a cleaning, but fortunately there was no obvious evidence of serious dental problems. The vet, a tall, slim middle-aged woman, found that the most convenient way to examine the growth on Simone’s hind leg was to pick her up like a baby, which was very cute. Simone submitted to this meekly for the most part, and only after a while did she reach out and tap the vet on the chest with her front paw, as if to say, “Excuse me, but if you’re finished, would you mind putting me down now?”

The vet wasn’t sure what the growth was — possibly a cyst. They took a needle biopsy at the clinic, and gave us the option to have the growth removed and a more thorough tissue biopsy done at the same time as Simone’s dental cleaning. We’ll probably end up doing that next month. For now, we’re expecting the needle biopsy results around Thursday.

Seated in Seattle

Our love seat, a compact microfiber suede model, was delivered from Macy’s today. I worked from home in order to accept the delivery. The first thing I did after the delivery guys left was sit down on the new love seat for about fifteen seconds. The second thing I did was throw a bed sheet over it to forestall the inevitable — I know Simone’s going to ruin it; I just didn't want her to ruin it today.

When David got home from work I had him take the sheet off and set up the camera on top of the TV for an American family self-portrait with love seat. Simone, a highly evolved predator detecting fresh upholstery, got in the picture as well. (To show what a skillful predator she is, she has cannily camouflaged herself by placing herself in front of David's black shirt.)

We celebrated by sitting side by side and watching Blades of Glory, the Netflix selection we had on hand. We have the two-at-a-time Netflix plan, which has its pitfalls. You can seed your queue all you want with serious, high-minded fare you know you should see, like The Corporation or When the Levees Broke, but come Friday night all you want to see is the other of the two DVDs they sent you — The Simpsons Movie or Superbad. We held on to The Lives of Others for weeks while we watched and returned Napoleon Dynamite, The Music Man, and other silver slivers of pure entertainment. We finally admitted to ourselves that we were probably never going to “feel like” watching a highly acclaimed drama set in East Germany, so we just made ourselves sit down and watch the damn thing. (Very good film, by the way — glad we did see it.)

My new burrito

Comfort foods — we all have them. Foods we eat when we want to feel satisfied and filled up with something tasty. Being a SoCal girl originally, for me one of those go-to foods is the burrito, and when I worked in downtown San Francisco, I had a couple of places I could turn to when I wanted a good, hearty lunch containing everything I was craving — starchy, cool, crunchy, spicy, and creamy tastes and textures, all wrapped up like a gift — a vegetarian burrito with beans, rice, guacamole, lettuce, and salsa.*

It dismays me, therefore, to report that I haven’t been able to find a truly satisfying vegi burrito yet in downtown Seattle. There are a couple of chains that have several convenient locations, but they don’t really do it right. The search will have to continue.

But I can live with this state of affairs for now, because I’ve found something I think of as my new burrito: the grilled tofu sandwich at Café Pho, the Vietnamese lunch place across the street from my office.

This package of delight is a crisp baguette stuffed with grilled seasoned tofu, strips of pickled daikon and carrot, slices of cucumber, sprigs of cilantro, homemade mayonnaise, soy sauce, and a couple of slices of jalapeño lurking in there somewhere to ambush the unwary. It’s the perfect combination of cool, crispy, rich, creamy, starchy, veggie, salty, sweet, and spicy. All for just $3.95. Heaven.

I’m making myself hungry.


* Having spent my formative years in San Diego and later going to college in Texas in the late ‘80s, I was shocked — shocked! — to order my first vegetarian burrito in the Bay Area and find that it contained rice. Rice???!! Why would you wrap rice in wheat, one grain inside another grain? It made no sense to me. I’d never had a burrito like that before. By now I’m used to it, and the trend seems to have taken hold in other places, so it doesn’t seem so weird to me anymore, but I don’t know…maybe it should.

Not fooled

I noticed this trompe l’oeil mural on the side of a building today.


It’s a view of the Seattle waterfront with Mount Rainier in the background, very nicely executed. The effect is somewhat diminished, however, by the fact that the viewer is standing on 3rd Avenue facing west when looking at the wall, meaning that if the painting were a real window, one would be looking across Elliott Bay at the Olympic Mountains, not southward along the waterfront at Mount Rainier. To see the view depicted in the painting one would have to turn 90 degrees to the left. It’s a little disappointing to have the illusion broken like that. But the view of Mt. Rainier is the money shot around here, so that’s the one they painted on that wall.

I’ll shut up now and let you enjoy the picture.

New Year's card photo

Almost forgot to post the photo from our New Year's card this year. It was taken in October when we went on a sightseeing cruise in Elliott Bay. It was the last time we saw the sun...

Happy New Year!

I was looking forward to this New Year’s Eve more than I usually do, for several reasons. First of all, I found out that every year they shoot fireworks off the Space Needle, which sounded pretty cool, and also, we happen to be living right now in an apartment building with a rooftop patio that has an outstanding unobstructed view of the SN, which is only about one mile away.

Add to that the fact that the weather conditions were flawless — no rain, clear skies, mild temperatures — and the fact that we may be living somewhere else by next New Year’s Eve, and I was anticipating this New Year’s Eve as possibly a one-time-only chance to watch the Space Needle fireworks under ideal conditions.

David and I timed it just right; we went up to the roof about five minutes to midnight with our champagne and a portable radio for tuning in to the simultaneous music soundtrack (the theme this year: “A Tribute to Hollywood”). Some of our fellow tenants were up there, too, but there was plenty of room. At midnight I turned the radio on, and waited.

And waited. And waited. A couple of minutes went by. Then some rockets went off, but the display was lopsided and didn’t look coordinated. There was another long pause, then the show continued to the end, although the fireworks still didn’t look as if they were firing quite right.

We found out later that the computer file that was supposed to run the show had gotten corrupted, and the pyrotechnicians had to run the show manually. What a disappointment, although as one person commented on one of the news websites, if this is the worst thing that happens in Seattle in 2008, we should all be grateful.