Bloggin from the hammock.

Another post from the hammock, which generally means I'm feeling self-indulgent and nostalgic. It was hot here today, and as with heat under clear West Coast skies, the real heat peaks late and stirs this odd hot wind, back and forth bothering the trees. It's like opening the oven to check on a cake and the wavy blast almost knocks you back. That was today, at least from when I left work until now.

I made a very indulgent dinner and burned each part of it: tomato sauce (onions left to sweat on too high a flame while I picked oregano, marjoram, and kale from the garden), white beans and kale (again, flame too high while I moved the sprinkler), and grilled polenta (turned the grill up after the first sides didn't sear well). Today was the second class in my swim lesson session, for which I've dropped my whole schedule for the next two weeks. One of my resolutions for the year was to do a triathlon, so I am finally set on that course. The lessons are remedial but the time in the water is worthwhile.

Donna arrives home to Portland tonight, and like the entire environment of the greater metro area, I feel electrified.

I've tried to think of stories in parallel, but I'm lost in pleasures of the senses tonight-- the taste of cold, spicy asparagus pickles, the firm night breeze and taut hammock rope, the smell of night flowers blooming after the burn of a triple-digit day. I don't think I experienced these things well enough in my worried childhood, and so now I delight in their depth. It's that or some commuted sense of shame when I'm the only one over 12 years old racing after soap bubbles, splashing in shallow creeks, or staring with wide eyes at a many-legged insect on the hunt.

Make up for past summers spent indoors.

night breezes

I'm outside in the hammock under the Big Dipper, distant firework rumbles, and pulsing red lights in the sky that are alien to me although I know them to be aeroplanes. It's not so late, but it is so quiet. The air is mostly still, and today was hot enough that the usual night chill is barely even present in the breeze. Outside in the hammock under the stars, on the laptop. Now that is modern.

Life is strange and cyclical, and it's either the Spanish coffee I just had at Huber's or the cool night air that takes me back, but I remember all of those summer nights twelve years ago, the end of high school and edge of something else. I worked at a video production company, my first web development job. I would get to the office in Silver Spring around 10am in my uniform of cut-short thrift store skirts, fishnets and little boy's soccer tshirts.

After work I'd go home and make plans with Matt, Grace, or Adam. Matt was difficult to get in touch with because although he was my best friend, he had fallen for a punk rock dream and the drummer of the Snark Outs. I'd leave a message with his little brother, and Matt would call me back later with the promise that we'd hang out when school started and his girlfriend went back to Beloit. That's not how it went come September, but I must've known even then.

What did I do to while away those evening hours? What I remember best is emerging when the night had coagulated and its density allowed me to pull the parking brake, roll out of the driveway and down to the end of the street before starting the car and turning on the headlights. I'd pick up Grace, go to Tastee Diner (the original one in Silver Spring until it went non-smoking, and then the one in Bethesda), maybe go to Adam's house. Or downtown to Dupont Circle via Rock Creek Park with its unmapped curves and streetlights permanently dark to conserve energy. We'd gulp down the terrible brew at Soho coffeehouse on P Street, or walk around to see what was open.

There was so much darkness, road, and dashboard glow. That's how it felt just now out in the hammock. I won't get home at dawn, though, to sneak in the back door closed just enough so that the lock doesn't engage.

After I moved out of my parents' house when I was 17, the first time I came home at dawn was a let-down. No quiet tiptoeing, headlights blazing, and costume from the Industrial night intact. The whole charm of the summer was based on darkness and secrecy. Where are the secrets that make adulthood a precious commodity? Which are the quintessential bits of experience on which I'll look fondly back? Memory is an odd bird, and its flight path is lost in the thick summer night.

aussie babes

When I was eight years old or so, my mother would take me to this Australian import store in a mall somewhere, on the way to or from somewhere we had to go. I think it might have been a mall with an entrance to the subway, to/from her work at the Smithsonian. They had loose Australian opals, which were my absolute favorite stone. I could watch them shine fire and ice in a trance for as long as she'd let me. I was saving up money to buy one of the loose stones. I can't remember what I thought I'd do with it.

Instead of gems, my mother sometimes bought me a book at the store. I had completely forgotten the series I so loved, but a passing mention of opals and the Mohs scale jogged my memory. I hope to find a copy of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie at some point. The odd flora, fauna, and fantasy characters spurred my childhood imagination.

29 March 2001

I got lost in archive.org's Wayback Machine, and discovered my old blog from 2000 to 2004. This isn't particularly well written, but it's a snapshot from six years ago and probably only interesting to me.

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Erik's off in Austin for the weekend visiting his brother. I spent last weekend in London visiting my mom. We took turns so that our cat wouldn't be alone on the weekends. No joke. Actually, our trips had similar aims: checking up on a family member. I worry about my mom ever since my [great] uncle died, and especially now while the great foot-and-mouth disease crisis is going on in the countryside of England. She can barely leave her house. Erik worries about his brother being a homebody, especially since he's down in Texas.

My trip to London was intense. I left Thursday afternoon, flying Virgin from San Francisco. I was given a terrible middle seat, but I used the trick of asking for a change at the desk, and got a window. As per usual, I had the row to myself til what seemed like the very last minute, as though I really would have the space. But the flight was packed, and soon a huge group of sixty English college kids arrived. They took ages deciding where to sit, kept switching up, etc. They were all sunburned and boisterous, returning from a week-long trip to Tahoe. Two guys sat next to me, and it was impossible not to hear when people kept coming up to the guy right next to me, talking about his girlfriend who was mad at him for some reason.

Sure enough, the girlfriend switched with the outside guy, and the couple proceeded to argue. Or rather, the girlfriend talked very loudly and shouted. After a few hours of this, they seemed to make up, and so they made out for another couple of hours. Meantime, I watched some movies-- Tigerland and Billy Elliot-- and read The Shipping News. I talked to the girl a tad right before we landed.

We arrived late, so I was late to meet my mom. I wanted to take the AirBus because Matt and Shauna had told me it took vastly less time than the tube, but it took us literally three or four circles to find the airbus stop. People kept giving us wrong directions.

As soon as we got off the bus, I was pretty disoriented, and it took us a bit of turning to find the hotel. As soon as we did, the sign on the door said to cross back over the street to register at the sister hotel. We got the key, crossed back, and I climbed six flights of stairs til I realized that the room number didn't exist in the building. I crossed back, confirmed that our room was in the sister hotel, and went back to get my mom. I was dizzy from the circles.

Our room was awesome, like a little apartment. We had a little bathroom at the entrance, a small living room with kitchenette, including cooking utensils, stove, and fridge, and then a separate little room with the beds. After a brief rest, we went out in search of food. We took the tube over to High Street Kensington, and ate at the Wagamama there, but they wouldn't let me take my leftovers, so most of the food was wasted. My first solid meal had been the planefood, so the noodles were too much for me. We walked back to the hotel through Kensington Gardens, and I fell asleep into the night. I woke up at midnight, talked to my mom a bit, then went back to bed. Only to wake at 3am and not sleep for the rest of the night. That was my pattern for the rest of the time.

The next day I talked to Dawne, and our plan was to meet at Portobello Market. So mom and I walked through Kensington Gardens down to the V&A, where we saw the costume exhibit, the plaster casts, and a new, awesome glass exhibit (the glass exhibit inspired me to want to take the stained glass class at ACE, but when I tried to register, it was full).

From there we walked up to our meeting place, Notting Hill tube stop. We tried to find a place to eat along the way, but it wasn't until Kensington that we did. It was a good little Italian place, but we ended up being late to meet Aaron and Dawne, so I rushed out to call them, but kept leaving stuff by accident at the restaurant.

Finally, we met Dawne and Aaron, and we proceeded to weave through the market. I tried on all of this woman's net skirts, but they were exorbitantly priced. I ended up buying a glass barbell earing and a paper lantern with pressed ferns within the thick, handmade paper. I had planned to be extravagant with the hip young designers' clothing, but I just couldn't bring myself to it. Dawne had to leave right as we got to the clothing area, to secure a place at the wine bar for later. She left Aaron and I with walkietalkies, but we couldn't get them to work. We mostly just flowed through the place.

I had forgotten the brand new gloves I had made the day before the trip at the Italian place, so we stopped by there to retrieve them. If only I had known how they would end up.

After the crush of the crowd, we took the tube down to Embankment to Gordon's Wine Bar, the oldest wine bar in London. We met Dawne and Turtle there. They already had a couple of empy wine bottles on the table, which was situated in the corner of an old, dank, low, cavernous wine cellar. The place was only lit by candles stuck in empty bottles, and we proceeded to eat olives, cheese plates, and hummus, drinking wine into the night. I spent approximately fifty pounds there, buying wine and finger food to go with it. Aaron must have spent a helluva lot more.

At one point, Dawne's head was drooping, so Aaron took her out to get coffee. Two large Aussie guys and a gal finally arrived, Turtle's friends. We left the place late, around 9pm, and went separate ways from the Australians. Aaron, Dawne, mom and I went up to North London to an Ethiopian place. But as soon as we got out of the wine bar, Aaron's level of intoxication became apparent. He was wasted, gone. I tried to help him along, but Dawne insisted I was babying him. We got to the restaurant, and he basically passed out while the rest of us ate. After the food, I realized that I had left my gloves once again, at the wine bar. I called them the next day, but they were closed all of Sunday. They were gone for good.

We made our way home from the restaurant, Aaron puking on the way to the tube. I talked to Erik, then fell asleep right away, but woke up at 3am again for good.

Sunday. We took the tube to Tate Modern. It was fantastic. Even my mom enjoyed it. My favorite piece was a room of works by Susan Hiller. It consisted of many handmade cardboard boxes, custom made to fit collections of thing. The collections were things like tagged bottles of water from three rivers prominant in ancient Greek mythology. The underside of the lid of the box usually contained some kind of text, clipping, or image that went along with the collection, often as a foil, and really made you think about the significance of the object. It was brilliant, and reminded my of Joseph Cornell's works that I love so much.

I felt a little queasy during the whole museum visit. We were exhausted, our feet hurt. Finding food was again a pain in the ass. We ended up eating at another Italian place right off of Embankment tube stop, when we went back to Gordon's Wine Bar to look for my gloves. From there, we returned to the hotel, changed, and took the tube out to Wimbledon, to meet John Priddle, a distant relative. We walked through a neat garden nearby, converted from a villa modelled after the Italian. We went back to his house, ate some food, had a glass of wine, talked, and listened to his son play piano. Afterwards, he drove us back to our hotel, and the same sleep pattern occurred. When I got up finally at around 4 or 5am, after being awake since 3, mom got up soon afterwards, and we talked extensively until it was time to leave for the airport. She's never told me as much as she told me that night, although she told me alot of stuff she's told me before, as big, revelatious secrets.

We took the tube to the airport, got there a bit late. We waited through horrendous lines for my flight, which cut it extremely close for my getting to the gate. I ended up getting to the gate before they had even called my row number, although the monitor in the departure lounge had said gate closing. I had weasled an aisle seat, and it turned out to be in the center row. A woman with a young baby was on the other side, and no one ever came to sit in the middle seat by me. A man had demanded to be let off the plane, because of claustrophobia, and so his bags had to be retrieved from the hold. This whole ordeal took about an hour. I assume he was the one who was supposed to sit next to me, as the flight was overbooked. It made me extremely nervous, as there was a warm metal box under the seat in front of me, and I had been pulled for a random, thorough search while waiting in the line to get on the plane.

The baby threw things at me the whole flight, it was that age. I watched four movies: Low Down, Born Romantic, Dungeons and Dragons, and Taxi. I adored Born Romantic, it was very entertaining. D&D was literally the worst movie I've ever seen, with dialog and scenes so bad, so overly trite that they arrived past humor, out on the other side of terribleness. Low Down was good, but I couldn't concentrate on Taxi. The three small meals after the main one weren't covered under my special meal request, so I ended up not eating or drinking for ten hours. It was torture. It took forever to land, get off the plane, get custom'd, wait for my bag, and get out to Erik. But once I did, he was fantastic. What a relief to be home!