You're Doing It Wrong

Today we have a guest blog from Auntie Janet:

“Barry gets home today too, a day early. He has been gone for nine days to Montana. Hope the weather will allow the plane to land. He missed Joe’s birthday party since the airline had to overfly the weather conditions, on to Redding. Passengers would have had to put themselves up overnight there or go back to Portland and put themselves up for the night there, and then, in either case, the airlines would graciously try to fly them to Eureka again the next day.

“So he rented a car with 4 other people and drove to Eureka. One couple was from Iowa on their first trip out to see their kids, one was an older woman who did not drive and one was a young lady who didn’t drive since she had just been in an accident and was afraid to. So here was this gray haired, one-armed old man in a hat driving all these people to Eureka. We tried to get him to get off in Willow Creek and come up with Joe’s friends from there for the party, but he had put the car in his name, and felt responsible for all these people who could not get to Eureka without him Isn’t he a prince?”

The past two nights I’ve made awesome dinners. Last night was the PamStandby Bean Soup. When we were in San Fran and at David’s Deli, the menu had about 300 things on it and I said if I had a restaurant I’d have a simple menu with only 3 things on it and Bob said: let me guess, hummus, little cut up raw vegetables and bean soup. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. I also made these Cooks Illustrated cream biscuits which turned out great. Tonight I made a thing from Sunset magazine where you basically make a pizza topping: marinara, onion, peppers, mushrooms, sausage and then dump them in a casserole, cover with mozzarella and Pillbury Bread Sticks. Then you bake. It tasted fabulous. I also made something from the Oregonian — fresh pineapple bread with chopped macadamia nuts. Another big hit. I’m stuft.

Yesterday when I was driving to work — there was a car in front of me on Mill Plain at the light with its hazards on and the driver looked slumped over from behind. When I went to pull around I looked, and sure enough the driver was slumped over the wheel. Can I tell you that I am not a good samaratin and normally would have just kept driving and hoped someone else stopped. But for whatever reason, I go into full panic mode, pull over and in my mind I’m clicking off options — I don’t have a cell so I can’t call 911. Maybe this driver has a cell and I can call. But the car is decrepit and maybe she’s locked in. Maybe I can flag down another driver to call 911. But when I get out of the car and turn around, this woman is sitting up in the car looking at me — along with all the other folks stopped at the light. I start mouthing the words at her “are you okay?” thinking maybe she had a seizure or something. Apparently she was slumped over because she was aggravated with her nonworking car, and realizing what I thought and embarassed, she starts laughing. Which would be fine but she completely refused to acknowledge me — I mean, wouldn’t a normal person wave and say “I’m okay, thanks” or something? Not this loser. I was furious.

Today I’ve been doing all sorts of chores and errands and projects. Bob has been telling me about this band Nickelcreek forever but I never followed up until today. Wow, they are fantastic. And look at their pictures — they’re young and beautiful too. We’re going to see them this Friday at Wintergrass in Tacoma.

I’ve been fighting with this cold-thing. I felt rotten on Saturday when we were looking at cars and we were on the eastside the this horrible wind was whipping around my head. And Sunday I felt a bit sketchy. But Monday I thought I felt okay and then Tuesday I felt like hell on wheels and left work early. I wanted to read but I was too tired but I didn’t want to take a nap because I knew if I slept at 4pm I would never fall asleep at bed time. Luckily, I found a great cure. I made a gigantic bowl of soup and I did a Buffy binge. Buffy’s on FX at 6 and 7pm and then the regular Buffy was on at 8pm. Went to bed at 9pm.

Woke up this morning feeling fabulous.

Everything smells like hot plastic. Yoda must be ready for bed. I was trying to find something interesting to link to but it all looked lame. Who cares about the SuperBowl? I called my Mom and Dad at around 3:20pm yesterday and Mom said, “We’re watching the SuperBowl” and I’m like, “Oh. Is that on? I don’t want to tear you away,” and Mom’s like “oh no.” So we visit and then she gives the phone to Dad who says, “When is this damn football game going to start?” I have no idea. I just saw the part when Bono was running around and all the pretty, young extras shipped in to stand around the stage lifted their fists to the air. I love U2 so it was all perfect to me.

This has been an interesting week — um, I’m not going to go into it right now. Yesterday I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. While I was reading it, I wasn’t sure how much I liked it — I mean, I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it. But by the time I was finished I was completely won over. This is an impressive piece of writing. I still have lots of books left in my Christmas pile and haven’t picked my next one yet. I need to finish February’s Atlantic Monthly because March is probably going to drop through the slot this week. And I finally figured out how to get Sarah’s manuscript transferred to the laptop so I can read it comfortably. I asked her to email it to me, thinking this saved postage and paper but it never occurred to me how uncomfortable it is to read a novel while sitting in front of your computer.

Last night I got to see Concrete Blonde one of my favorite LA bands of all time. (aside: so is the entire world converting to Exploder as the browser of choice? — I’m finding more and more often that I have to launch that thing to get a decent look at certain sites.) There’s another good site at: http://blonde.vox.org/.

What can I say? It made me really happy to see them. They looked great. They sounded great. The new stuff sounded great. It was all good and the timing perfect for middle aged working people. We were home and in bed by 11:15pm.

Why are my comments all about the crowd? First, is bald the hair statement of the 00’s? From where I was standing I could count 7 bald guys. Not that this is a bad thing — just curious to see so many shiny heads in one place on one night. Next, what was up with the guy standing next to me? Mr. Chain-Smoker with the ski-gloves on. He wore a white t-shirt and would take a glove off to smoke but he had these goofy gloves on. It’s not that I’m smoking intolerant but a chainsmoker guy standing next to you in close quarters for a couple hours is kind of a drag. I hate that ashtray smell in my hair when I crawl into bed. There was also this redhead chick who seemed to think she was 14 and at an N’Sync concert. Even the Dalai Lama would have wanted to club her and throw her outside. Also, I was a major fan of this band, I never picked up on the goth thing. I never considered myself goth but thinking back at my outfits and hair color choices maybe I lurked on the fringes. When they played the vampire song the crowd took the roof off.

Overall it gets my highest recommendation. They played almost all of my favorite songs. I would have liked to hear “True” which is my all time favorite but a small wank for an otherwise fabulous show. I don’t have the new disc yet but plan to fix that situation very, very soon.

This afternoon I thought I’d throw up a few photos from our weekend in San Francisco. Now it’s almost 10:30pm and I’ve just barely finished some pages that I think are pretty sloppy. If you want to see the story of Erin carrying the Olympic torch. PamPage has the news.

In other news … we finally saw Vanilla Sky last night. We went to the closed caption showing at the Kiggins. For the first 2/3 rds of the movie I was sure I didn’t like it, but I liked it okay by the end. Didn’t love it. But I woke up still thinking about it and I think it’s a movie to be better appreciated on a second viewing. And I loved the music.

I’ve had stuff to add all week and I just can never get my act together. What can I say?

First — here’s an entertaining link to bizarre Asian snack foods.

In other news, I got my manuscript back from Cherry this week. I don’t have a link about it on my site — for some reason I thought I did — amnesia at its best. She wrote a very nice, non-form note which basically said she thought my writing was fine but she couldn’t connect with the story or characters and since fiction is hard to sell, she couldn’t take on something she wasn’t 100% excited about — completely valid. For those of you just coming in on this story — it’s about the 80′ rock scene in Hollywood and it’s hilarious.

Of course, I’m disappointed, but also, I’d already junked the thing to a drawer and just by pure luck several people asked to see it in the last year so I suppose I should allow myself some small joy for that. I have a couple of ideas for non-conventional approaches for publishing which I will check out this weekend.

In the meantime, I’m trying to get some momentum going on a couple of other ideas I have. I’m going to be okay on this stuff. It doesn’t feel like it right now — but my day will come, I know it.