Had brunch with Kineta and Demian before a viewing of the great “Old, Weird America” exhibit at the Frye. A communications snafu meant that Adrian was not tracked down to join, which seems a shame. I had seen the show a couple weeks ago while waiting for a League meeting and it knocked my socks off, especially the work of Dario Robleto.
Greg wants me to go see a collaborator's screening tonight at around 9, I am inclined to do so. I need to spend tomorrow at the libraries, though, so I'm sorta dithering.
Finally gave the lawn a winter haircut, mulchinated the leaves in after waiting for the whole treeload to end up on the ground.
Just before I started mowing, I noticed a bit of white plastic peeping out from an eroding bare spot in a corner of the yard that we know was used as a dump by prior owners. Usually when something surfaces from the tip I just pull it out and put it in our trash, so I pushed some dirt away and pulled out not one but two twenty-year-old real estate signs (“Better Homes and Gardens Realty”). The real unpleasant surprise was what was just below the signs. The motherfuckers had buried about six well-cracked window-sized single panes of glass and used the fucking real estate signs as a safety cap!
I dug up a good amount of the glass and realized I have a real problem: dog, meet hole in ground that will cut the hell out of your feet.
After thinking about it for a while I ended up refilling the hole with a bunch of dirt we had cleaned this summer; I guess I'll just have to keep an eye on the pooch.
Now done:
Meats and cheeses
Veggie platter
half-boiled taters to roast under the bird
bird defrosted
gravy set
green beans ready
Black beans rich and chocolaty
Cornbread: done
Rice: done (yesterday)
Speckroches (yesterday, kinda regret not making the bread part by hand, but the filling came out good)
Stuffing: done (this should be YUMMY, cornbread based. I had a flash and added a tiny bit of curry and used only wine as the liquid)
on deck: black beans
to prep:
staging for gravy and beef stock
green beans
cold platters:
cheese / crackers / etc
Emmentaler
Gruyere
Beechers (local artisanal, yum)
prosciutto
finger veggies (looks like I missed the boat on getting something from my garden in here, dang it, and I forgot some kind of dip. i have dill and mmmmaybe enough yogurt)
carrots
broccoli
celery
The damn bird is not thawed, thanks to my over-cold fridge, so I'm babying it along too.
I kind of think I should cook the pies tonight but if I do that it bogarts the smell, so maybe not.
Hey UW people!
How are the books that line the walls in the giant Suzallo study room organized? There does not seem to be a system, and the books do not have dewey decimal tags. The spines nearest me are a jumble: “Pacific Slope Railroads” is next to the “New Oxford Book of Carols,” et cetera.
Veggies trimmed, washed and wet, awaiting fate in the dark of the fridge, but for the green beans.
Speckroches done, cooling, to bag and tag.
Oysters not obtained, may be a push, which irritates me, but DAYUM I gotta lotta food.
One of the kitties decided that broccoli florets are THEE BAST for cat toying, dethroning wine corks. She, the mischievous one, is also a climber and surreptitious counter cat. I gather she is determined that it bee HER toxoplasmosis that occupies our brain stems rather than others. In service of this goal, she has taken to sitting demurely on the lid of our flip-top kitchen garbage can, attentively observing me as I chop and thaw and steam and roll and season. When I turn my back, she makes her move: into the sink! A daring pounce upon the chopped food (thankfully, I got her before litter box paws did any damage)! A snaking sneak to camouflaged hiding behind the toaster and the paper towels! I must needs keep the spraygun handy, I think.
I like having the tiny audience, but the participatory nonsense has the potential to wreck dinner. Dominance and training. A loving hand.
Right, today is shopping.
Taters
Rice
Smoked Salmon
Bacon
Oysters
Prosciutto
Sausage
Green beans
Green pepper
Tomatoes
Mushrooms
Broccoli
Celery
Lemons
Limes
Eggs
Cheeses
Yogurt
Ice cream
Cornbread mix
Stuffing mix
Croissants
Pies
Cranberry sauce
Wines
Pitcher
Large ziploc bags
Ah, the start of a five-day unwork week.
What?
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I'm hosting a bird feed on Thursday; tomorrow shall be to market. I had thought to mow the lawn, in order to mulch the leaves, but it started raining about when I had intended to fire up the mower. They do say this week is to be a bit drier than it has been. Hopefully on Tuesday. I have been waiting until nearly all the leaves are down, and it looks to me as if they are, finally.
I need to pull in the rest of my garden harvest, too. I have about four peppers of various kinds, most mostly ripe, some excellent-looking and very colorful Swiss Chard, some past-its'-prime kale, a ton of parsely, a few onions, tarragon, verbena, sage, and a ton of largish Roma tomatoes that have been coming off a late-season volunteer plant, a monster that popped up in September and shot up to five feet or so before I racked it and wrapped it to keep the cold off.
The heatwave and the deck-replacement project quite thoroughly screwed up my fall succession planting, so no squash or winter potatoes or broccoli this year.
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Last night Viv and I watched and enjoyed the somewhat-confused 2004 (?) Ricky Gervais comedy Ghost Town, clearly intended as a programmatic inversion of, among other things, The Sixth Sense and Ghost. Of course, it is also a platform for Gervais' inspired squirm-inducing improv and the film was at its' best when he was doing his thing. However, I have to say I admired the rigor of the film's inversions. The bereaved widow's new boyfriend, for example, is a sterling fellow. The ghosts aren't kept hanging around because they have unfinished business but because we, the living, hold them here.
There's a scene which as shot struck me as the film's intended closing - Gervais' character has resolved the attachment problems for a series of ghosts, and so they leave him alone, and in v/o he muses that we die just as alone as when we enter the world, which is certainly my worldview. Of course, what kind of major-release romantic comedy would ever embrace pure, unsympathetic existentialism in whole? The film is also confused with regard to its' position on the supernatural - each of of the in-narrative points regarding the existence of the film's ghosts is essentially extrapolated from an atheist position, yet here we are, interacting with the dead in the, um, grand tradition of the films Ghost Town is seeking to take down. It's forgivable, I suppose. I laughed a great deal.
The windstorm last night freaked the dog out and since then he will not sit still until he is allowed to touch me.
Last night that took the form of rooting around until he got my hand on his head and today during the day it has meant that he has been lying on at least one of my feet. Since we are apparently in for another night of 30 to 50 mile-an-hour winds I expect to have some dog blanket later on tonight.
Greg just sent this along and I crossposted it to SIFFBlog:
Hello Friends, friends of friends, family, and neighbors,
Forgive the spam, but Frenetic Productions is going live! I've told many of you that I'm a filmmaker - and here's the proof.
To thank you all for your support and encouragement over the past couple of years, I would like to ask you to join me for an important event. I would also appreciate it you would forward this invitation to anyone you feel might be interested in attending or learning of this exciting event.
FINDING PLAYLAND
December 1, 2009 - 7pm
Shoreline Community College Auditorium
16101 Greenwood Ave N
Shoreline, WA 98133
We will have DVDs available for sale at the screening for a reasonable $10 each.
View the FINDING PLAYLAND trailer at http://www.findingplayland.com
FINDING PLAYLAND is an hour-long neighborhood documentary exploring what it meant to work and play with the family at Seattle's long-lost Playland Amusement Park.
Playland was a regional amusement park on the shores of Bitterlake, just off Aurora avenue at 130th St. in North Seattle. Open from 1930 until 1960, generations of Seattle kids were thrilled by rides such as the Shoot the Chutes and the Big Dipper. Regional amusement parks such as Playland were a characteristic feature of American urban centers at this time and Playland's story reflects opportunities and changes in American history. FINDING PLAYLAND uncovers a lost funhouse of Seattle's regional heritage.
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Frenetic Productions is an award-winning Seattle-based film production company. Our most recent release, THE VIOLIN MAKER, took honors at the 2009 International Documentary Challenge and has been screened at the Port Townsend Film Festival. The film is available to view in its entirety at our website:
http://www.freneticproductions.com
Friend or fan, follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Seattle-WA/Frenetic-Productions/157140361297
Man! That storm last night was really something. I was too tired to wake up and appreciate it properly, though. Still, giant thunderstorms are one of the things I miss about the weather from elsewhere. Haven't walked around the house to check for deadfall yet but I bet there are some downed trees and limbs here or there.
Today was a hamster wheel of falling behind.
First, I woke up at 5:30, thanks to the time change. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but around 1 pm I really started feeling it.
Then, my first-off activity in the morning is scouring Craigslist ads and prepping responses. There were so many this morning that I did not wind up until 10; I try to be done by 9. From 9 to noonish I am scheduled to work on this portfolio-dev site showcasing a local filmmaker's award-winning doc. I have been making good progress on the site and my work objective today was to deploy a a vanilla HTML version of the site with linked nav elements before I slap some chrome and lorem in place tomorrow. Just as I started to crank, the phone rang, and it was my firewood delivery.
The wood was as promised a full cord of mostly cedar, a bit weather-wet but not unseasoned. Cords are an inherently variable measure. It's whatever volume of wood you can fit into four feet by four feet by eight feet. Ideally the wood is tightly stacked to fit that volume, but in practice dealers can make more money by stacking loosely, so it's common to receive significantly less than 128 cubic feet of wood. This guy stacked his material super tight for delivery and may have actually bonused me. The upshot of this is that while I had budgeted an hour to stack the wood, it took two hours. So at noon I was two hours behind on my work schedule.
Things progressed along these lines all day. Various disruptions and commitments stole another hour and a half from the afternoon, notably shipping some telescope parts, and at the end of the day I wound up with just over an hour in on one of two projects slated to use six hours. I have to tighten up!
New home workspace set up, streaming iTunes all over the house. Sweet!
We have a full basement and there are two tiny 'bedrooms' on that level of the house. When we moved in, we set up one room to use as an emergency guestroom and the other room is where I dumped all of the stuff from my office in the old apartment. Since the rooms are so small, the place where my gear and files and such ended up in has not seen much organization, although every now and then I have taken a crack at it.
Anyway, since the extra guest room is empty, I just set up in there, got an Airport Express working and I'm off!
I have promised to gut and organize the other room; Viv even asked me about taking down the wall between them, which would produce a very spacious basement office indeed.
Well, it has been a while, hasn't it?
For a few years this blog has been more of a quick blog, mobile photos and such, than the long-form essay blog it began as.
Some changes have happened that will permit me to spend a bit more time on the blog at the moment, I'm happy to report.
For starters, my ex-employer ran into a cash flow problem and cut 2/3 of their staff, including me. It was somewhat unexpected but I helped develop the business plan that included eliminating my position and I'm satisfied that my leaving the operation was the correct course of action both for me and for the company.
I am actively looking for work and have been overhauling my various online resumé assets. Part of that initiative involved finally upgrading this blog from MT 3.x to MT 4.x, which went well enough. I have also wrangled the majority of my visual assets into one location, at long last.
Here is my online portfolio, as it stands. There are a couple-few things to do:
- build a comprehensive web-dev section; what I have ready to show is pretty damn weak
- cross-link scanned images of published articles to online-searchable text
- adding clips from my tenure at Now Playing magazine
- wrap a 'best-of' subset in embeddable presentation tools
I have been carefully reviewing online advertising for available positions over the past month and the average number of listings for which I am nominally qualified has been about ten per day. I like those odds.
As I wrap up the tasks above, I have begun several portfolio-development projects for friends and acquaintances. I can't blog about them in specifics, but they include:
- design, development, and deployment of a publicity and promotional site for a short film about a well-known musician
- design, development, and deployment of an online credit-education tool for a non-profit organization
- business process review and recommendations for an independent multi-channel merchant with an eye to creating that merchant's web presence and online customer-service tools
Of course, there are innumerable house projects to address as well. I'm thinking I'll be posting more often here for the short term at the very least.
