holyoutlaw

Adding a third person to the household has multiplied the chaos, not merely added to it. [Edited to add: I mean that in a good way. I like chaos.]

Last night, during dinner, I said "I want this to happen every night." It was me, Jane, Julie, and Art, and we ate Jane's roast beast, with broccoli and hollandaise. Mmmm, it was wonderful. After dinner, Art, Jane, and I watched the restored Metropolis, which is really good. Then Art and I watched two of the featurettes about the restoration.

This afternoon, intelligentrix and slave_driver came over to use our computers. And this evening, Julie and I went to Foolscap briefly, mostly to have dinner with calimac and wild_patience, whom she hadn't seen in a couple years. The group also included jerry_kaufman, svtompkins, Marci M. and Art Widner, and much good conversation was had.

After that was the Artist's Reception, where I had mumblety chocolate covered strawberries and Julie claims she only had one piece of cheesecake. After that, food stupor took over and we repaired back to Seattle, where we snuggled rats, talked with Jane, and then came upstairs where we've been reading LJ on one computer and playing Breakquest on the other. She was supposed to cure me of that! This is like all the times I had a woman move in with me on 2nd Ave. hoping that would cure me of Mac'n'Cheese.

Tomorrow: We work on tidying up the office, and go to Foolscap in the evening.

Pretty good so far, I guess.

We've cleaned up the bathroom (for the male value of "we" that involves any bathroom cleaning, of course¹) and rearranged my bedroom so it's "our" bedroom.

Art Widner is also staying here, and hopefully enjoying himself. Monday Julie and I took him to Judy Fu's, because he had not yet been taken there during his birthday week celebration. When his granddaughter asked him "How was your birthday party?" he said "Which one?"

A few large parties had all arrived at about the same time, so although they had tables for two we three had to wait a while. Then several tables cleared off at once. Oh well. But the food was tasty as usual.

Tuesday Jane and I went out to anitar and jackwilliambell's to have a meeting with them and Anita's sister, M-----, about the next step in the process. I think it was productive, with movement and action items on several major issues. Hah! Gotta dust off the meeting vocabulary I guess. Anita made a great roast pork, marinaded to allegedly provide a taste of wild boar. This was amusing to us all, because of course none of us know what wild boar tastes like (my Uncle Will would have said "tastes like chicken," his response to any exotic meat). Julie had the house to herself! That rarely happens to me, dang it!

Wednesday we had intelligentrix and slave_driver over for dinner. I made lamb chops, steak, stir fried some zucchini in olive oil with curry powder and a shallot, and sauteed mushrooms with basil and PickaPeppa sauce. Widely considered tasty by all. tamiam showed up by welcome surprise, and we made a space for her and were able to feed her, too. Yeah!

Today Jane is off at Computer Workshop for the afternoon, and will make roast beast for dinner. Art is off on walkabout, I think, and Julie and I will go off to Best Little Rabbit Rodent and Ferret House. (If you know Julie, tell me -- do you think she'll like visiting there?)

Tomorrow: Foolscap! Several LJers will be there, of course, and Saturday night will be a Potlatch party. We're looking forward to it.

---

¹    "You helped a little," Julie clarified, holding her thumb and forefinger together.

I guess this counts as officially Day One of our Zoom Across the Continent.

I'm in Madison right now. I got here at 4, earlier than we'd originally planned. After Julie picked me up, we went to her apartment where I was able to do oh, maybe even five or six minutes of work before I had an asthma attack. Sigh. It's a good thing it was so sudden, because that meant I'd recover quickly, too. The slow slide asthma attacks (as they're called) take days.

So, darn it, we just had to lounge about in the hot tub and what not, then have dinner at Noodles. I know that Noodles is a prosaic local chain, but it's exotic to me. Hah! Julie's back at her apartment doing some more work.

Tomorrow, As We All Know, is crate loading day. Wednesday is Apartment Cleaning Day. Thursday is Hitting The Road Day. And Monday or Tuesday is Arriving In Seattle Day.

I'm very happy to be here and to see Julie. Everything feels much better now. Yeah!

The registrar at PCNW wrote back saying all I had to do was reassure her I knew the material in the prerequisite class. So I did that!

I got an assignment for Real Change last night, a candlelight vigil for the victims of Katrina. I'm not sure, actually, what the sponsoring organization was. The organizer started off with an introduction and some remarks that were pretty good, then gave the mike to a reverend who gave the opening prayer. After that, it was an open mike for people who felt like doing so to come up and speak. As is the case with these things, some people were moving, some were rambling and soporific. But overall, there was a positive energy. Many people said we have to stop taking it and stand up for ourselves.

For a while I was thinking about the Art of Resistance procession I covered back in mid May, and how incredibly lame it was to me. It was strictly middle class downwardly mobile Caucasoid slackers (much like myself, of course). A woman gave a short speech in Spanish. While she was speaking, I wondered if anyone understood her. As it turned out, there was: One of the bums in the park did.

I've covered five or six union events over the summer. They've all been multiethnic and multiracial. Last night I felt that the fluff of the Art of Resistance had been washed away, and finally I was left with the core of the beginnings of action, what I was at last night.

There weren't many people. I counted 42 before we started, and enough arrived during the event that we may have gotten up to 60. Somebody passed a bucket and we raised a couple hundred dollars to go towards a project one of the speakers was coordinating.

As I said, I felt like there was a core there, a core that will keep growing.

I've already told the RC editor that I'd like to keep working with him when I get back. My schedule will be full, which is always nice: A class on Monday nights, Riley care, Real Change photography, and exploring Seattle with Julie. I also think that with the earlier sunsets I'll get back into neon pictures, which I've been hankering to do, believe it or else, for quite a while.

Yesterday morning I hung out with R---- so Anita could rest from her second chemo. I was a little tired, so basically I watched him play with his wooden train; the toy store in Wallingford Center was going out of business, and they had a series of dashes (well, the other letters in his name) to go along with the R that Anita had already found. After a while, we went to the park.

It was a cloudy day, so there were plenty of parents and kids there. It's a very international park; there were Chinese, Polish, Russian, Indian kids and parents there. At the Wallingford playfield, the only child of non Euro-American (white, basically) that I recall descent was a mixed race child.

You know, I think it's an example of privilege and prejudice that until I typed in that sentence I'd assumed the girl was adopted. In another park (in a neighborhood of a different socioeconomic level than Wallingford), I'd have assumed she was the biological child of the woman she interacted with. (See? Now I can't even say "her mother." Hah!) At the Redmond park, I'd have also assumed adoptive rather than biological parentage.

Um, anyway, at the Wallingford playfield, I didn't notice any accents to English, or languages other than English being spoken. At the Redmond park, I heard Polish, Hindu, and Chinese, at least.

Again, basically I followed him around and watched him play. I took him home, we had lunch, Anita put him down for his nap after Jack came home from work.

Back at the slidey puzzle, we worked some more on the basement after dinner (Szechuan Bistro, to which we have not been in quite a while -- Jane was a little embarassed by how eagerly I agreed to the idea of going out). One of the things I've learned, over the years, is that when you rearrange things, during most of the project everything slowly expands. Then, the reconfiguration is achieved and everything rapidly recondenses. In other words, we're still at the "everything slowly expands" part of the project, but we should achieve "everything rapidly recondenses" soon.

In my area, I've cleared off some bathroom counter and cabinet space and emptied a closet. Most of the bathroom stuff got tossed or given to Jane, but the closet just um, let us say, expanded. Hah!

Today: Mostly Vanguard prep (which is at CascadiaCon), not that we have elaborate plans or anything. Some basement work, I'm sure. Tomorrow: If Jane has Sam, I'll work on stuff up here. If not, more basement work.

Friday, I head off to Oak Park, IL. Monday (12th), I take the bus up to Madison. Thursday (15th) (according to current projections), Julie and I hit the road in our zoom across the continent. Five or so days later, we arrive in Seattle. It took me and Jane five days (Minneapolis to Seattle), but North Dakota featured thunderstorms, tornadoes, diagonal headwinds, and we started out Montana by spending a half day repacking the truck so it didn't fishtail at speeds above 55 mph. With even regular over $3.50 gallon in Madison (according to juliebata), it's just as well we're not taking a leisurely trip. Seattle gas prices are nudging $3, but only premium has crossed over.

The vet yesterday suggested a couple treatments for Peaty. One would have involved driving to West Seattle every day to get him a shot. Call me heartless, but I didn't feel like doing it. Oh well.

The other thing he suggested was giving Peaty 6 ml of Batril once a day, instead of 2 ml twice a day. He also showed me how to hold him to be more gently persuasive. (I readily admitted that Jane and I are wimps about forcing the meds down Peaty's throat -- what's the point of struggling to give him meds if he winds up hating and fearing us?)

Anyway, we tried the new method of holding Peaty. Even though he turned away from the meds at first, he finally took them. And then he ate a big chunk of banana, and even some oatmeal cookie I gave him. Woohoo! (And some NutriCal, too.) 6 Ml to Peaty is about 1200 Ml to me -- more than forty ounces! If someone had just forced more than forty ounces of banana flavored medicine down my throat, I would NOT have eaten even a tiny little chunk of banana. And that chunk of banana to Peaty was five whole bananas to me! Just kidding.

While we were watching Edward Scissorhands, he sat in my lap for a while. Sweetie Peaty!

Today I started work on the basement, getting the room ready for Julie. Which, because we live in a slidey puzzle, meant moving stuff INTO the room. Hah! Oh well.

I've also been reading the translation of The Ring, although I realize this means I'm getting less than a tenth of the whole experience. But to Peaty, that tenth would be...

Feeling much better (and cleaner!) today than yesterday. Still tired and had a hard time sleeping, but I had a sweet, pleasant chat with Julie and that helped quite a bit.

We went out to Kent to have dinner with some Vanguard folks WINOLJ. The food was as tasty as the company. Hah! No, seriously, it was great fun. They had a bunch of corn that was picked earlier that day, cooked perfectly, and sweet as could be. Some meat on bamboo skewers that had been marinated, and finally, when we were almost all done, some ribs that were tasty, but too much. I made an off hand comment about using the bones in spaghetti sauce, and wound up taking them home. They're pretty meaty; the meat was cut off in the dark. Hah! My seekrit plan succeeds again!

It was fun sitting amongst the trees, and I thought it would be nice to go back out there someday when we could walk down to the stream, but I'm a city boy born and bred. The idea of living out there, with nothing within even a ten or twenty minute drive, does not interest me in the least.

Shortly before hitting the road, I listed the work remaining for the Frye Apartments, which is due Friday. Gosh, I've let it pile up. >_<

Oh well. Today's schedule is pretty open, so I should be able to get a lot done.

Urg. Time for a nap. Hah!

Yesterday felt very productive. Made lots of phone calls, made some arrangements for school, etc. Jane and I had Vonda's beef stew for dinner (with "Space Noodles" -- pasta in the shape of the Space Needle, get it? Arr arr arr. [That's a laughing dog "arr", not an exasperated "arg!" or even a pirate's "argh!"]). Then we watched "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" which, for all of its faults, I was moved by at the end. It was a movie about a nice man who found himself in being nice. I think "It's a Wonderful Life" is a movie about a nice man losing himself in being nice.

I thought I wasn't engaged in the movie, and then the DVD got all sticky and skippy, and it even skipped a whole section (I think), and then it felt like the movie had several endings, but after all I was pretty moved. It didn't hurt that Johnny Depp got to run off with a young Juliette Lewis. Hah! Actually, I was confusing her with Rachel Griffiths, who plays Brenda on Six Feet Under. Boy, they sure look and act alike.

Today's agenda includes returning Riley to Jack and Anita, working on more pictures for the Frye, and so on.

It's also cloudy and cool, which is nice. Yeah!