While working from home has its obvious perks -- not having to dress up, mid-day thrifting runs, actually being home when the UPS guy stops by -- I do have to put up with some annoyances. The most frequent one recently has been door-to-door solicitations.
In the past week alone, I have had the following show up at my doorstep:
- Jehovah's Witnesses - Two clean-cut young men in shirts-n-ties whose spiel I cut short by agreeing to take one of their little religious pamphlets (into the recycling bin!).
- Amateur Mechanic - He showed up asking if he could borrow a lug wrench to "fix his car." When I said I didn't have one, he asked, "Can't you just get one out of your truck?" No, that broken-down truck parked on the street in front my house isn't mine. (Side note: A day later, the truck, which had been parked there for about a month, mysteriously disappeared -- coincidence?)
- Real Estate Agent - This guy's mission: to convince me that I should sell my house. He gave me a postcard with his contact info noting recent neighborhood sales ("Georgetown is very desirable right now!") and asked me if I owned my house. Yes, and I'm not going anywhere. Bye!
Thankfully there have been no more meth-heads trying to sell consumer electronics, like the guy who rang my doorbell to see if I wanted a $5 VCR. Really.
What's your favorite restaurant?
I don't have any one "favorite" restaurant -- more like a handful of favorites in each of the cities in which I've lived. But one that would be a favorite if it were located here in Seattle is Cuvee, in New Orleans, where I had the best meal in recent history with dishes like these:
- Sweet-spicy frog legs, baby spinach; farmers' cheese vinaigrette
- Steen's cane syrup-cured-smoked duck breast and whole confit leg, walnut-blue cheese risotto, seared Hudson Valley foie gras; pear glace
- Chocolate torte; strawberry - almond ice cream; aged balsamic caramel
Favorite in Seattle would probably be Thai Tom, where the $6 spicy noodle is soooo fiery good with a tall Thai iced coffee.
I've lived in Seattle for about three and a half years now. I was reminded of this fact once more while cleaning out the basement this past weekend. Josh offered to assist and, with the help of some Mission of Burma on the CD player, we managed to make quite a bit of progress. A carful of recycling went to the dump, and a mini-mountain of garbage bags and Goodwill-bound ephemera is now standing by near the water heater.
But it wasn't until much later, Sunday night, that I ended up opening a couple of boxes that had remained sealed for almost those entire three and half years. These boxes were the very first ones, labeled numbers one and two (of, er, 80-some-odd), packed in April of 2003 in my old NYC apartment.
They'd followed me from NYC to my Capitol Hill apartment, then to a Seattle storage unit, then to the basement of my house, where I'd passed by them a few times a week on the way to grab more TP or pasta or other rations from the storage room. And yet I was always afraid to open them, remembering the tell-tale tinkle the last time I'd so much as shifted them from one spot to another. There was broken glass in there. But how many, and which ones?
Because in those boxes was a large number of vintage drinking glasses, the kind with flowers and fishes and other cool patterns etched or silkscreened on to them. (I know, I know -- as if my record collection wasn't enough of a pain to deal with transporting and caring for.) I'd broken enough due to carelessness throughout the years, but that's price to be paid for actually using and enjoying them. But I didn't want to think about the movers dropping one of those boxes six feet onto a concrete sidewalk and everything inside going smasheroo. Too depressing.
Turns out that my vivid imagination was much worse than reality. When I opened up both boxes, I found that, yes, there were broken glasses. Only three, which was good. But two of them among my favorites, leaving me with just two (out of an original eight) of that pattern left.
Anyway, it was actually pretty fun unwrapping each piece from layers of bubble wrap or paper -- just like Christmas! I had totally forgotten about all the cool glassware I'd managed to accumulate.
Now I can get rid of some of the boring glasses I've been using and stuff my kitchen cabinets full of these.
What's your musical horoscope? (Put your music player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.) Inspired by Stephanie.
1. "Nothing New" - Game Theory
2. "Christmas Song-Original Version" - The Cavedogs
3. "Well Done" - The Donnas
4. "You Drive" - Game Theory
5. Track 15 - ?? [this is something from a mix CD someone made me that I never tagged when I ripped it]
6. "I Throw My Toys Around" - Elvis Costello & Gwen Stefani
7. "She Cracked" - Velvet Crush
8. "Brighter" - Acid House Kings
9. "Catherine" - PJ Harvey
10. "BeginningEnd" - Benni Hemm Hemm
Wow, that's an incredibly bizarre selection. Two songs by Game
Theory? And there are two in there that aren't part of my own
collection, since my mp3 library contains songs dumped from at least
two of my friends' iPods. I had to skip forward to random track
#26 (past yet another Game Theory song!) before I hit a single
Go-Betweens song, arguably the crappiest one they ever recorded ripped
only to satisfy a "worst song off of best album" challenge.
Whatever, iTunes.
I like cooking, and it's all the more fun when using ingredients grown in my yard. So I went out and picked a bunch of apples from my apple tree yesterday:
If you could watch any movie on the big screen right at this moment, what would it be?
What are your personal memories of September 11th?
Here is something I wrote on that day, from the private blog I kept for a good part of 2001:
Almost left for my 10:30am meeting in midtown today without finding out the news. Was hurriedly sending an email to a coworker before dashing to my meeting just a few blocks away when I saw the alert on the NY Times main page (my default home page). Turned on NY1 and saw images of smoke around one of the towers, heard a plane crashed into one. That's all I heard. Went off to my meeting.
I think being here in NYC for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 may have dulled me a bit to this -- just "plane crashes into WTC" was really jarring, but I didn't think for a minute to do anything other than continue with my regular routine. Walking east to Times Square, seeing the images broadcast on the Jumbotron screens I started to get the sense it was worse. Walking into the client's building, seeing streams of people leaving... then running into my client in the lobby of building, him telling me the extent of what happened. He and everyone there saw it all happen from the 41st floor of their building. Everyone leaving, meeting cancelled.
So I walk back west toward my apt, thinking how I was glad to have had this appt. in midtown today (otherwise I'd be stranded at my office downtown), marvelling at the relative quietude on the street, passing by people -- stoic, crying, indifferent, tense, but nothing out of the ordinary. Tried to use my cell phone multiple times, but that wasn't working. All pay phones in use. Walked over to my friend's apt a couple of blocks away from mine to use his phone since I figured he'd be home (he works nearby) and all I've got is my cell and my DSL (no land line). Sat w/him and his coworkers watching the events on TV unfold for awhile before returning home to my cat, pleasantly surprised to see me again so early in the day (mrow!).
Take a look at the pic in the upper-right corner, my live webcam pointed north from the mid-40s in Manhattan. It's such a beautiful day out right now, blue skies and hardly a cloud in the sky, at least from where I sit right now. The only hint of what's going on elsewhere is the intermittent sound of sirens.
I enjoyed seeing The Mountain Goats (John solo) last night at Easy Street Records, but still fell victim to Tall People Syndrome. This was my lovely view:
Fie on you, freakishly-elongated indie rockers!
How cute were you as a baby/child? Let's see those baby pics!
Instead of a picture, here's a short clip from a home movie. When this was being filmed, I remember being mad at my dad for some reason, so I pulled up a lawn chair to sulk in silence facing the side of the house. But my dad kept filming me, and I got even angrier -- grrrr!
In addition to the Mango Sour recipe I posted a little while ago, there was another one I was planning on sharing and totally forgot about... until this morning. That's when I logged in to my email account and found that my Guava Margarita recipe I posted on ExtraTasty some time ago had won me prizes. Woo!
Apparently my drink was named "Drink of the Day" back in April, and again in June. But for some reason I only just now got two emails, one for each announcement. Each one is more or less the same, exhorting me to "claim your prize!" -- in this case, an ExtraTasty t-shirt, shot glass and pint glass.
I submitted one prize claim form already, but hesitated about sending the second claim at first. I mean, really, how can one drink win twice? But hey, I don't pick 'em, and I could use some more barware anyway...
