Nom de Plume

I was on the Seattle Pugs rescue site last night, and was so upset by what’s on the home page that I hauled Harry out from under the desk to snuggle with him.

In their words:

How could a person in their right mind let this happen? The owner of a puppy mill did this to this pug and many other helpless dogs in her care.

SEATTLE PUG RESCUE HELPS DOGS LIKE THIS AND MANY OTHERS.

This is our newest foster pug, Petunia. This 4-5 year-old female was just rescued from a puppy mill. She was on her last legs! Used extensively as a brood bitch for numerous litters, her injuries included a broken jaw that remained untreated for at least 9 months, mange, malnutrition, and open sores. She was left in a chicken cage with her fossilized puppies.

Since being picked up by a good samaritan and delivered to Seattle Pug Rescue, this sweet darling pug’s tail has not stopped wagging. She knows she is safe now, and will be taken care of.

Her recovery will be long and costly. Please donate to help pay for her care, and other pugs that need your help as well.

Thank you
Cathy Moore
Chairman, Seattle Pug Rescue

Update 7/27/05: Petunia is at Norton’s Ark Clinic being nursed gently back to health. She is already much happier, and eating better.

If you’d like to donate to the cause, more details are available here.

Seattle Pugs Rescue

Chick is a company that publishes comic books about how you’re going to burn in hell if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. Elizabeth sent me a link to a sample comic this morning and I think I disappointed her. Instead of being offended, I was pretty amused. Actually, I laughed really hard. Now you can too. Happy Monday night.

Is it just me or does little Susy look like a sullen crack whore in the making?

Chick Tracts

Comparisons between Charlie Bone and Harry Potter are inevitable. They can both do magic. They both go to magical schools. They both fight on the side against good against evil. They both have the same titling convention. And the publishers have even designed book covers that evoke Harry Potter, with a similar font and cover art.

It’s an unfortunate comparison. Side-by-side, Charlie Bone seems a little flat, its characters less complex. But Charlie Bone is obviously for younger readers and the series really is imaginative and fun. The fourth book in the series, Charlie Bone and the Castle of Mirrors is the best yet.

Charlie Bone is Endowed, meaning he is one of the descendents of the Red King, who was a powerful magician a thousand years ago. Today, the Endowed are evenly split between good and evil. His aunts are evil and the people who run his school are evil. Each of the Endowed has a unique gift. For example, Charlie can enter photos and pictures, one of his friends can make it storm, one of his enemies can hypnotize people just by looking at them.

This story centers around the heritage of Billy Raven. Billy Raven (who can talk to animals) is an orphan who lives at the school. More than anything, he wants ot be adopted–and the Bloors, the evil family that runs the school has capitalized on this. If he spies on Charlie Bone, they’ve told him, they’ll find him a family. If he helps them, they’ll get him a mom and dad who will love him. They never have–and Billy’s wising up. Until they actually do get him adopted.

But his adopted parents are evil to the nth degree. Meanwhile, it transpires that Billy is really the heir to the Castle of Mirrors. With the help of the trustworthy Flames, cats who belonged to the Red King, he escapes. And the battle is on.

My one complaint about the Charlie Bone series is that the plots seem to center around liberating one of the good Endowed children rather than against evil itself. I never exactly know what they’re fighting against and why the evil people are evil.

We were totally prepared.

Lamb and Italian sausages, check.
Hot dog buns, check.
Corn wrapped in tin foil with butter, salt and pepper, check.
Plates, napkins, check.
Firewood, check.
Beer, oh heavens yes, check.

We piled in the outlaws’ rental car and headed up to Shilshole Beach for a Sunday evening cookout.

The weather was slightly cool and overcast. The water glistened as darkly as black oil under the gray sky, while the mountains gleamed in the distance. The air was perfectly, beautifully clear. Pam and I settled down with our books while Steve booted up the fire and started cooking. After the first course–the corn–we waited for the sausages. “I’m waiting for the sun to peek out,” said Pam, looking up at the sky.

So naturally, the sky obliged by pelting fat raindrops.

We were troopers though. Stood around in the pouring rain eating our hot dogs.

Most dogs were bred for something. Australian shepherds herd sheep, braving cold, wet weather and stampeding hooves. Labradors sniff out and retrieve birds and other game with their keen hunting instincts. Newfoundlands plunge into icy water to rescue drowning people and retrieve ropes.

And then there’s Harry.

Harry would get stepped on by a sheep. He’d last about 3 seconds in the wilderness by himself. And he can only swim if he starts paddling before he hits the water; otherwise he sinks. Yep, he was bred for one thing and one thing only.

To lounge.

Observe, if you will, my dog in his natural habitat.

Steve bought me a present on Vashon Island yesterday, and we’ve hung it in the bedroom. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, but it’s lovely.

Until I checked out Little Children, I didn’t know the movie with Reese Witherspoon was originally a book. I remember liking the movie, so I placed it on hold.

Let me just interject a note here. I’m one of those people who goes to movies based on books solely so I can say how bad it was. All the Harry Potters? The movies sucked. Any Hollywood adaptation of Jane Austen? Eeeuuww. Even Must Love Dogs? The movie REEKED and the book was pretty cute. The list goes on and on. But for Election, the story works better as a movie.

I never thought in a million years I would say that.

For those of you who encountered neither, Election is about a high school election gone awry. Overachiever Tracy Flick feels she’s assured of the election. Teacher Jim McAllister hates Tracy and urges Paul Warren to run. Then Paul’s sister decides to run because her girlfriend starts dating her brother. Tracy sleeps with a teacher. Jim cheats on his wife and fixes the election. Drama, angst, drama.

A fun read. But it makes me want to see the movie again.

I could just say this was fabulous and leave it at that–but, of course, that would leave you, Dear Reader, hanging. So before I start, let me just say again that it is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. Funnily enough, the first five pages bugged the hell out of me, with their stream of consciousness rantings on some Western novel, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it through another 341 pages.

And then all of a sudden, I was finished.

The story hinges around the illusionist David Blaine, who enters a clear box next to the Thames. His goal is to starve himself for 44 days, completely in the public eye. Television cameras monitor him 24 hours a day, while passersby and other curious folks can ogle to their hearts’ content. But what is his purpose? Why is he doing this? And what, precisely, does it mean?

Adair Graham McKenny spends the course of the novel trying to find out. Adair, to me at least, represents Every Man. He works at a nameless job in a governor’s office. He shares a Georgian townhouse with a charismatic, famous overachiever. And suddenly, Blaine’s actions both obfuscate and illuminate his own existence. He becomes obsessed not only with Blaine, but also with a mysterious woman named Aphra who is similarly obsessed. She suffers from migraines, is a “sniffer,” collects shoes. She cooks fabulous meals that she takes somewhere in tupperware containers. There are other strange characters: the homeless man who tells fortunes; the woman who warns him away from Aphra; the roommate’s intellectual girlfriend who first proposes that perhaps Kafka’s The Hunger Artist has something to do with the stunt.

He dips into Blaine’s history and motivations–a man who has the same concentration camp numbers tattooed on his arm as Primo Levi even though he’s not Jewish, a man who has the same eyes as Houdini, one of his role models. And the more Adair tries to understand the point of the self-imposed 44-day starvation, the more confused he gets.

Barker confuses us, too. Her relatively unstructured prose belies her very structured intent. As one of her character says about Blaine, “That’s his trip. And maybe — bottom line — you just don’t get the joke. Or perhaps what he’s doing is more complicated than you think. Maybe it’s the very multi-layeredness of the whole thing which is putting your back up. He’s confusing you. He’s challenging your preconceptions. You don’t like that.

Highly, highly recommend.

I’m not really sure why I checked this out from the library; the description emblazoned on the cover–”desire, memory, and murder on the bayou” in case you’re curious–should have warned me off. Two chapters in, I gave up. Maybe I’m not giving Oyster a chance, but it just bugged me. The dialect, the murkiness, the labored characterizations. I drowned.

I fantasize about having a househusband. Well, except for the fact that I’d have to share the house during the day. That could be a drawback. But someone to do all the cooking and cleaning and greet me at the end of the day wearing an apron with drink in hand? Count me in, I am so there. So you can imagine that this title screamed my name.

Lincoln and Jo move to Rochester, New York to pursue her career. He leaves a thriving landscaping business in L.A., and ends up taking care of the kid (that’s the part I could personally live without) and the house. He’s not happy. He has crises. He feels emasculated. (I could live without that too.) And when he finally gets a job, he decides that when push comes to shove, all he really wants to do is take care of his family. Househusband was not a great book; it was, at times, awkwardly written and Linc often comes across as extremely pedantic, which I don’t think the author intended. However, it was entertaining with some decidedly comic moments. And it also talked about that pesky little thing those of us who do most of the housework can all relate to: having the stupid things we do around the house go completely unnoticed.

Steve and the outlaws took off for Vashon Island about an hour ago. I stayed behind because Harry needs to go to the vet. I will spare you the gory details, except to say that pugs get swollen anal sacs. Yeaachh. It’s overcast and cool, with a slight hint of autumn in the air. I would ordinarily be thrilled at the onset of my favorite season–but my tomatoes have not yet ripened. These are the heirloom varieties I started from seed and managed to keep alive, so you can imagine that I want to at least taste the fruits of my labors.

Speaking of gardening matters, our neighbor has just ripped out everything in the yard except the trees. The last owner of the house was a little old lady who had lived there for 40-odd years (we never met her; she passed away right before we moved in) and it was obvious the garden was her pride and joy. Actually, it was the best thing about the house. And now it’s all gone, being replaced with fresh rolls of sod as we speak.

Come to think of it, we seem to be surrounded by garden ripper-outers. Our new neighbors two houses up just pulled out all the organic vegetable beds that came with the house. “We just don’t have time to take care of them,” she explained guiltily. Fair enough. And though the previous owner may disagree, the loss of that garden wasn’t nearly as heartrending as seeing an entire truck bed overflowing with plants collected over nearly half a century.

hi… since its sunday its time for me to talk about baby jesus again…

baby jesus is a god that lives in my heart and talks through my gut….

and he tells me to do stuff like invade countries and stuff and he has promissed to smite my enimies… and he has asurred me of victory over all my enemies. and i hear him real lowd when i have my whisky… i will win soles for baby jesus all over the world with the power he has given me.

and that is how i got elected all the real americans heard the baby jesus calling to them out of my gut and they just love baby jesus… and he has promised me a thousand years of powwer. and he blesses evry thing i do… all the other gods are false gods.

and that is good for america to have a god-man leading them. i shure am glad i let baby jesus in to my heart. bye for now.

Read more from the blog of our illustrious preznit

I want this Sekino print.

At the White Lotus Gallery

The outlaw visit is going very nicely. They arrived day before yesterday in time for the lunch Maribel prepared (and they were in raptures over it). When Steve got home, we ran to Mutual Fish for halibut and mussels, and then stopped at the Columbia City Farmer’s Market for produce. Cooked here.

Yesterday, they took a drive up Lake Washington and the Arboretum, walked around. We went to the locks in the evening, and watched humongous salmon migrate their way up the fish ladder. (I wonder if they think these creatures that watch them through plate glass windows are as strange as we think they are.) Then Ivar’s for dinner; they can’t get enough seafood.

Right now, Pam and Herb are taking an Argosy lunch tour of the harbor. And I need to get back to work.

On Saturday, I bought nopal (cactus) on a whim. I had no idea how to cook it, but thought it would be interesting to try–or at least to think about trying. Knowing me, I would have left it to rot in the bowels of the fruit bowl. Maribel to the rescue! She came over to clean today and was duly impressed with my Mexican culinary skills.

Until I asked her how to cook it.

Whereupon she went into a frenzy and cooked it for me. I love this woman!

The Nopal

Peel the prickly stuff off the nopal and dice it. Boil, with a quarter of an onion and salt, until the water looks gelatinous and the color has faded a bit. Then drain, toss the onion, and add chopped cilantro, tomato, and garlic.

The Mexican Rice
Blend the bejeezus out of half a tomato, garlic, onion and water. Fry white rice in oil. When it turns a golden color, add the above mixture. Continue to add water as needed.

It’s really delish. She also made salsa to go with it: Boil tomato, whole jalapenos, onion for about 20 minutes. Drain and blend.

And I’ve been given a shopping list for next time. On the menu? Chicken mole.

And it strikes me that, apart from the bathroom, there isn’t a single white wall in the house. I wanted something to match this rug, and pull out the colors in the pictures I have hanging in the hall.

And now, it’s blue, blue, blue. Amazingly enough, it makes the space look bigger, and like its own entity.

Here’s my Sekino print of a little girl. I love her; her hair is marvelous.

And Romanian icons.

Steve is one of those people who needs a hobby and something to obsess about. Otherwise, he feels unmoored and purposeless. And right now, he’s at loose ends.

In this, we’re actually very similar; the only difference is that his obsessions take an external form –kayaking, surfing, collecting (anything), building (something)–whereas mine are more internally focused and usually consist of amassing vast quantities of information on some uselessly esoteric topic.

I went to the library the other day, and Steve asked me to pick him up a how-to book. “Any how-to book,” he said. “It’s not important.”

Well, if that’s not a heaven-sent opportunity, I don’t know what is. I marched straight to the home improvement section, and lugged home several books on bathroom remodeling.

Only it didn’t work.

Last night, as we were driving to Renton for dinner in the topless Jeep, he said, “I’m going to be an aquarium person.”

“You can’t be an aquarium person,” I said, grabbing his baseball cap so my hair wouldn’t blind me.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because you’re weird, but not that weird.”

“Aquarium people are weird,” he agreed.

“Like reptile people.” This from people who have lived for five weeks without a bathroom sink.

“Weirder,” he said. “I’m going to get a huge aquarium and lots of fish. I’m going to join Internet chat rooms and talk about my aquarium. I’m going to invite people over to drink beer and watch my fish. Then I’m going to start breeding my fish and sell them on eBay.”

This clearly points to an existential crisis.

We need to find him a new hobby. Quickly.

The outlaws are not descending us tomorrow night at 10:30, but tomorrow morning at 10:30.

I am in a frenzy.

Steve asked me this yesterday, referring to the fact that we still don’t have a bathroom sink.

Steve had planned to fix the sink this weekend because the outlaws are coming on Wednesday. (Married couples have in-laws; unmarried couples have outlaws.) But we got sidetracked and it never happened. It should be interesting; the only thing worse than four people sharing a bathroom is four people sharing a bathroom without a sink.

As to whether normal people could live the way we do, I feel heartened after reading how one houseblogging couple has been brushing their teeth using the bathtub faucet for two years. (Watch the video.) They seem normal enough (and also, in my opinion, are an absolutely adorable couple).