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
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.
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?
—-
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.
—
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.
One more thing that I enjoyed was a scene shot in the Met in NYC, in the glorious gallery of the Temple of Hathor, which I last visited in very early spring, 2001.
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
I have conquered the rollover bedevilment. Huzzah!
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:
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:
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.
Around midnight last night I was informed of an astronomical conjunction, that of Jupiter and the Moon. To my surprise, with a decent set of binoculars, I was able to make out fur of Saturn’s moons.
Properly motivated, I spent a chunk of today finding and fetching an honest-to-goodness telescope, though not a proper reflector. Finding it frustrating to set up and control this afternoon, I have been awaiting the coming of darkness impatiently, apparently in the belief that things aggravating to perform in the light of day while sober will become easy and fun while lightly liquored in the dark. I mean, why not? So much else in life hews closely to this rule, why not astronomy?
Aggravatingly, clouds have been piling in as the dark comes upon us. There may yet be clear sky to the Moon’s direction, south and eastish.
I found it interesting to identify Mars without question as the dusk deepened, two hours up the sky from where it had been at midnight last night. Prompting the title of this entry, it struck me that the distance in the sky between Mars’ position at this moment – 10pm – and that when I saw it last night at midnight is exactly equivalent to the proportional distance of two hours on a clock face the size of the universe with my observing eye at the center. The magic – well, not magic – of base twelve.
REPORT TO THE LEAGUE:
The oncet-wuz Andy’s Diner in SoDo features the following:
– Asian cusine
– a liquor license
– FDR’s West Coast touring car
– at least two large-screen wireless mic karaoke rooms and probably at least one more
– a model railroad that runs around an aquarium
– a handsomely appointed Old-West railroad themed lounge, seeming unchanged from circa 1957
– all of the above is within an assortment of railcars
PLEASE TO NOTE
– the presidential car is not Karaoke appointed, although the layout is such that sufficient obstreperousness and cash money might result in such desecration
– the presidential car is broken up into two rooms, a larger room and a smaller room
– the smaller room appears to be the likely primary locale for presidential activities to have been conducted within
– the presidential car is remarkably well-preserved in most fixtures and structural details although it does not appear that historic preservation has been a primary goal of the maintenance and design staff
– the presidential car furnishings are clearly of the utilitarian variety and not intended to reflect the history and status of the car
– the karaoke rooms are newly furnished but distinctly less charming than the presidential car rooms.
MAKE OF IT WHAT YOU WILL.