You Know You're Getting Old

You know you're getting old(er) when others' reactions to you start changing in strange ways: today I was at a grocery store looking for rice roll wrappers, when I spotted a young man wearing a shirt with a name badge dangling off the pocket. "Excuse me," I said, "Do you know where - "
"I DON'T WORK HERE!" he practically screamed in my face, glaring at me as he edged away from me. He seemed insulted that I was suggesting he worked in the grocery store. Upon closer inspection I saw that his name badge was from some auto parts store.
"Well, SORRY," I said, "But you're wearing that BADGE." I said BADGE in the same tone I would say TURD, like, "You're wearing a TURD."

So I made a mistake and someone yelled at me; no big deal, right? People ask me ALL THE TIME in stores if I work there. It's usually in department stores or Crate and Barrel that this happens. I don't know why that is. I think I just have Retail Face, or else I'm hustling around the store with so much purpose that it seems I work there and I'm actually working intstead of just bargain-hunting. I don't get upset, I usually just tell them I don't work there, but then I offer advice anyway as if I did work there.

The thing that upset me so is that a few years ago, even two years ago, a young, presumably heterosexual Asian American boy like Mr. Auto Parts would have HAPPILY pointed me to the rice wrappers, possibly even walked me there, while explaining regretfully that he did not work at the grocery store but maybe we could hang out sometime. Two years ago I had long hair and wore open-toed high heeled shoes every day, which I don't now, because I work at a vegetable warehouse, and because, well, it's San Francisco, it's winter, and my feet are cold and need socks. It's just a fact. I've lived here for four years and only in the past two years have I accepted and admitted that my feet need socks and shoes in the winter here. I froze my feet for a full two winters here. When I lived in Southern California, I barely even owned socks. Maybe a few pairs of running socks - that was it. Other than my shoes and my hair, which is now shorter but I think actually cuter, I think I look the same as I did before I was thirty. But I think youngsters can just SENSE that I'm over thirty, and that's why he treated me like I was an eighty-five year old wild woman who had just dropped her dentures on his shoe and grabbed his balls.

To make matters worse, when I discovered that the store didn't even carry the rice wrappers, the young man (who did really work there) who explained that to me said, "Sorry, ma'am." He called me ma'am! Dear Daniel is a full four years younger than I am. I'm an older woman. I'm an old woman. It's so unfair.

Hey. Pleasure Heals!!!

Last weekend, when I ventured to Sebastopol, California, I visited The Sensuality Shoppe. I'm always curious about sex toy stores, since I used to work for the mail order division of one. The Sensuality Shoppe is small and feminine and the three staff members who were there when MM and I visited were all very nice, soft-spoken and gentle. They all had on clothing made of silky and flowy fabrics. The sex toys and porn movies are housed in a little back room. There's a window in the wall of the toy/movie nook leading to the register area, and the window is covered with an amber bead curtain. When one of the soft, silky ladies wants to check on how you are doing back there, she parts the strands of beads gently, smiles, and says, "Are you doing okay?"

It was interesting... The store I once worked for was more like The Gap or the IKEA of sex toy stores: generic, apolitical, bright, overly-cheery, and guilty of the gag-inducing use of too many cutesy, saccharine puns in their web, catalog and ad copy. So by contrast, the overtly feminine, amber-patchouli-ness of the Sensuality Shoppe was fun to experience.
Pleasure Heals. And don't you forget it!

Tara Mc Pherson

Meagan Moonshine really loves Tara McPherson, so I'm featuring T McP here. She uses a cutout heart or an empty space in a character's chest in the shape of a heart often, and I wonder why and what this means to her. If I ever meet her, I will ask her. Or, perhaps this is discussed in her book Lonely Heart: The Art of Tara McPherson.

There is something disturbing about her images, to me. The characters are so still and expressionless; mannequin-like; they freak me out a little. The angel is one of my favorites, though. It reminds me of someone I know.
the website of Tara Mc Pherson

Camille Rose Garcia - Artist

Camille Rose Garcia, besides having a beautiful name, draws and paints things that are dark, gothic, blood-drippy, jeweled, glistening-shimmering sweet and cute, all at the same time. This piece is called "Aquamarine Refuge." I love her stuff.
She has a book I would like to have, called The Saddest Place on Earth: The Art of Camille Rose Garcia. She has a show called "Doomcave Daydreams," showing right now at the Merry Karnowsky gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Visit Camille Rose Garcia's website..

Give Thanks for Mushrooms

Some people theorize that mushrooms are the descendants of interplanetary traveling spores from other galaxies, or something like that. All I know is that mushrooms are one of my five favorite foods. The other four are Champagne, chocolate, butter, goat cheese and crab. And coffee. Well, hell, that's seven. Plus duck. And heavy cream. And payaya with lime.

I invited no guests over for Thanksgiving this year. After a big Thanksgiving with a lot of guests last year, I promised myself and DD we'd have a quiet, relaxing one by ourselves this year. His work gives each employee a free-range turkey, and my work gives the employees an abundance of wonderful organic produce, so we are making a turkey dinner. I already roasted and carved the turkey and threw the weird bones into a pot for turkey soup, and made horseradish mashed potatoes with Yukon Gold potatoes. And we went running! Now we get to drink mimosas and get hungry, then comes mushroom gravy and vegetables. I feel happy that we're using nothing packaged and that my trip to the grocery store yesterday was only for Champagne, flowers, and ice cream! "Where are the CANS OF FRENCH FRIED ONIONS?" I overheard a woman asking a worker, with a note of hysteria creeping into her voice. Thank God I'm out of all that.

Somehow I feel like I already ate a whole turkey, because I've been smelling it and dealing with it all morning. Even with just the two of us, cooking the turkey seems to be about how many times I can mess up the kitchen and then clean it again...I dropped meat on the floor, I spilled hot turkey grease... last year I used a disposable aluminum pan - the wing pierced the flimsy aluminum and the juices dripped into the oven... it was dramatic. My mom laughed at me, told me the same thing happened to her once upon a time, and then she bought me a nice roasting pan for Christmas. A really nice roasting pan. It only took a few moments to clean!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here are some things I'm grateful for:

1. I'm really, really healthy and able
2. I have a peaceful and happy living situation and there's a tree outside my living room window
3. I have a job where there are a lot of nice people, working for a company that doesn't do harm
4. I'm grateful for Dear Daniel
5. I still have both my parents and they're both healthy
6. I have pretty hair!

...and more...what are you grateful for?

Blue Sky "Real Sugar" Cola

Around two years ago, I had my last Coca Cola; I used to drink Diet Coke or Cola Cola Zero once in a while. When I was really young, we were poor and hardly had any groceries period, but as I got older my mom started drinking Diet Coke, and it was always around. When I was a kid and a teenager, she told me not to drink it, saying it would stunt my growth. Of course, I drank it anyway. Till two years ago, I used to drink one bottle a day (not a liter bottle - a 2-serving bottle, maybe 20 ounces). Then I read some article about how Coca Cola sets up shop in other countries and pollutes them, how they kidnapped and tortured union leaders in Colombia, and more. (see www.killercoke.org)

After I stopped drinking Diet Coke, I lost my taste for it and for any and all aspartame-type sweeteners. I'm not so much of a sugar addict, but if I'm going to have something sweet, it has to be sweetened with real sugars. I have a friend who is trying to wean her husband off Coke, so we split a case of Blue Sky Real Sugar Cola. Blue Sky also makes a cola sweetened with corn syrup, and a ginseng cola, but we got the real sugar one because we thought it would be the easiest one for Husband to adjust to. Plus, cola of any kind is a real treat for DD and me - for the most part, we try to drink water. We drink water, sparkling water, coconut water, and unsweetened iced tea, mostly. We both agree that Blue Sky "Real Sugar" Cola is like liquid crack!!! It's so sweet, so bubbly, and so BROWN. The more water and less soda you drink, the more shocking it is when you actually do have a real soda...

Hello Kitty "Tokyo"

Much to my own shock, I'm beginning to lose interest in Hello Kitty. I still love her, but I'm starting to get a lot more selective about what I like - for example, I now reject anything Hello Kitty that is pink, because so much HK stuff is pink, and I'm tired of the pinkness; it's a little too sweet and cloying for me lately.

This happened to me last year with leopard print. I've loved leopard print since I was a little girl. I remember asking for a leopard print sweater when I was around eight and my mom was buying some holiday clothes for me. The sweater was a little cardigan with fake pearl buttons. "Eeew," my mom said, and that ended that.
When I was old enough to choose my own things, I began amassing leopard print clothing and accessories, peaking a few years ago when my whole bed was leopard, and about half my purses and clothing! Of course, a lot of people love leopard, and it was never just "my" thing, but I became good friends with a woman who also loves leopard, and she's a few decades older than me, so she's had more time to amass leopard stuff. Her whole house is leopard, including toothbrush handles, the handles of her cutlery, her drinking glasses, towels, bedding, and half her shoes, purses and clothes. At my work, I met another woman who loves leopard and wears it often. So from knowing the two of them, I get enough leopard around me without craving it as much myself. I still buy pretty much all the leopard underwear and shoes I can, but other than that, my taste for it has declined a lot. And I feel the same thing beginning to happen with Hello Kitty.

This is a new tee shirt, though. I like it because it's blue (not pink!), and I like it for the way it makes a funny and ironic play with my ethnicity and nationality. I've never been to Tokyo (I want to go), and I don't speak Japanese; for chrissakes, I'm 4th generation - "Yonsei". Even living in multi-cultural San Francisco, a lot of people (white people) like to speak Japanese to me. I understand a little and can say, in Japanese, "I don't speak Japanese," which is what I always reply. But that's another whole rant for another day. Anyhow, I'm Japanese American (Chinese American, too). I'm not sure that everyone gets the joke or the irony if the tee shirt, but it still tickles me. Plus, it fits well. The shoulder seams line up just right on my shoulders, which is kind of rare when you're petite like me, but not skinny. I'm a bit more on the "solid" side... A small juniors tee shirt is usually too tight, and a medium, too big in the shoulders. This one is just right!

Jane Janey's Dream House

Speaking of outdoor showers reminds me of Jane Janey's house. I don't have photos of Jane Janey's house, so I will just have to describe it from memory.

Well, Jane's last name is not Janey, but everyone calls her Jane Janey. She is this very warm, generous, kind woman Dear Daniel and I met via some other friends a few years ago. Somehow we ended up visiting her house in Ojai, California, when we still lived in L.A. I can't remember why we went there, really. Jane was renting this house. She was some kind of semi-retired semi-wealthy semi-older person. By semi-older I mean older than me. Maybe in her late 40's or early 50's. She's masculine and kind of sexy in that gruff Daddy way. I think she was some kind of computer person who was part of the Northern California dotcom phenomenon, but I was never really sure. Anyway, she was taking a break from the hustle and bustle and renting this house in Ojai.
The house was modest from the outside, built on a hillside. The inside of the house wasn't huge or palatial, but it was beautiful and everything was the best - beautiful Corian countertops in the state-of-the-art kitchen, pot lighting in the ceilings, a gorgeous bathroom, a warm tile floor (I think it was heated), a nice guest bedroom with a soft bed and awesome sheets and towels. She was a great host...


The house was sort of U-shaped, with a center portion and two wings, and an incredible back area; a wood deck, huge - a hot tub, outdoor shower, native plants, an incredible mature oak tree. There was a steep drop off down to a canyon out back. She had a homemade wood-and-rope swing tied to a branch of the tree, and if you swung, you swung over a cliff and out above the canyon; nothing below you but a thousand feet of air. It was hella scary, but I went swinging anyway. Jane Janey and Dear Daniel were drinking beer and talking on the deck and the sun went down. I was swinging in the darkness and the sky looked deep purple and dark blue and coyotes were howling out there somewhere, and the air smelled like sage and woodsmoke and grasses. After swinging for a long time, I went into the kitchen and cooked some salmon Jane Janey had, and we ate it for dinner, outside on this thick plank table she had out there. Later, Jane Janey took off her clothes and got into the hot tub. Dear Daniel isn't one to get naked in front of people very easily, but we took off our clothes and got in the hot tub too. Jane Janey laughed about how young DD and I were; she said my skin reminded her of butterscotch, of a lover she had once. (She had a way of giving a woman a compliment that made you feel sexy and admired without feeling uncomfortable. There aren't many people who have that ability.) It was amazing sitting in the hot water out there in the wild. I felt like I was in some kind of Western film. Or some movie about California that's nothing like anyone's real life. But I guess it is some people's real life!

Afterward, I showered under Jane Janey's outdoor shower. It was one of those wide shower heads that looks about as big as a dinner plate, and the water rains down on you. The floor was the wood of the deck - wood feels really good compared to shower tile or cheap porcelain bathtub, let me tell you. The air was kind of cold outside, it was hot under the water, and I used Jane Janey's Dr Bronner's liquid peppermint soap to wash with, which delivers quite a tingle. Just that one day and night at Jane Janey's house was the best, most restful vacation I've ever had. When I imagine owning a house one day, I always imagine living in a house like that; simple, with a lot of glass, no clutter, the best of everything but not too much of anything, in the middle of nature, with an outdoor shower and a swing that lets you swing into the sky.

The Outdoor Bathing Room...

Yesterday my pal Meagan and I went on a day trip to Sebastopol, California, which is in Sonoma County. One of our coworkers lives there, and she was exhibiting and selling some of her jams, pickles and photography at a friend's home there. Several women were putting on a craft fair party, benefiting some charity that helps at-risk young women. Sebastopol is about an hour from San Francisco by car (on a no-traffic day). Unfortunately for us, there were three multi-car accidents along the way, so it took us much longer to get there, (plus, we got lost) but we made it. The weather was incredibly mild and lovely yesterday, and the artisans were set up both inside and outside the house, so it was nice.

As Meagan and I got further and further from San Francisco, the landscape got more and more green and more and more "country". Meagan was driving my car - she loves to drive, and I was pretty tired from working a sixth day at work (I'd worked from 5 - 9:30am in our warehouse at work) so I was happy to be the passenger. At some point I began to see cows on the hillsides, and when we were actually in Sebastopol, driving along a country road dotted with adorable houses and the occasional restaurant or shop, I saw a little herd of miniature goats. (Herd of goats? Flock? Pack of goats?) I interrupted Meagan's story she was telling me to say, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just saw a whole bunch of cute goats! I love the country!"
"But why would anyone want to live here?" Meagan of the City wondered.
"Because it's beautiful and clean, and because you can have GOATS here, Paris Hilton," I replied.

Next we got lost.
"Can you turn there?" I asked, pointing ahead at what looked like a road.
"Uh, that's not a road, it's the entrance to a Flea Market," Meagan said. Finally, we had to stop at a gas station, where Meagan/Paris proceeded to accidentally hit the horn, loudly blasting some Country (Sebastopol) Lady with Mall/Country Hair who was waiting in a plastic chair for her car to get serviced. Jeez.
I asked some nice white man (okay, EVERYONE was white there; it was really kind of weird and shocking to me) where "Hessel Road" was, and he kindly gave me directions. "You'll see an Indian motorcycle shop, you'll see a lot of old Indian rugs and totem poley type stuff, and right beyond there, you turn right," he said.

Yes, he said TOTEM POLEY type stuff...

The craft fair was great fun. I bought hand-dipped beeswax candles, pickles, fig jam, raspberry jam, and a handmade hoola hoop. The Hoola Hoop lady was also selling something she called, "Ma's Moonshine", which contained apple, pear, spices and brandy, among other things. That shit was so strong, I felt drunk after just two samples and was pretty sure I could breathe fire if someone lit a match near my mouth. Meagan bought two bottles of this home made Ma's Moonshine, and she kept trying to get me to taste more and more of it. I think I'm going to call her "Moonshine" from now on.

The people who own this fantastic country house built an outdoor, open-air bathing house. It has an elevated redwood deck, matching deep antique bathtubs, full plumbing, a wood wall covered with passion flower vines, and an outdoor shower made of galvanized steel. It is so fucking cool. There are few things in life I love as much as taking an outdoor shower... much less an outdoor bath! I hope I own a house one day. It would not have to be huge or fancy, but I would definitely build an outdoor bath room!

Sonoma County is just about the most perfect place in California, and probably the whole lower 48 states. But I could never live in a place with that little ethnic diversity. I was the only person of color I saw the entire day there.

Emzymion Skin Cream

Lush is a weird phenomenon: it's this line of fresh, handmade skin products that have a cult following. It started in either Canada or England (I know, I know, they are two very different places, but I know it began in one of them) and spread to all the English speaking countries, and then some. Apparently they are the originators of the round fizzy bath bomb and everyone else who makes one copied Lush.

I avoided Lush for a long time because the shops are so fragrant you can smell them down the street. But taken individually, the stuff smells amazing, works amazingly well, and is so fresh it expires. The combination of these two products, "Enzymion" skin lotion, which has papaya enzymes, and is designed for oily skin, and "Enchanted Eye Cream", which I dab around my eyes and onto my eyelids, has turned out to work really well for me. I rarely even apply foundation any more, because my skin look so freaking good. I used to get a little oily by midday and now I don't. Also, my makeup lasts longer and I reapply blush and powder less often. I'm like some preserved wax museum creature now. My skin is all even and smooth, I don't have dark circles under my eyes, and my makeup doesn't disappear.

My favorite Lush stuff (other than the aforementioned):
Honey Bee bath ballistic, Honey I Washed the Kids soap, Snowcake soap (smells like almond extract), Sonic Death Monkey shower gel (smells like chocolate, coffee and tobacco. Weird, but great), Butterball bath ballistic, Twinkle bath ballistic, and Skin Sin body lotion.

As bad as my retail shopping experiences are at places like Macy's and the MAC cosmetics pro store, they are inversely great at the LUSH store on Union Street in San Francisco. The store is staffed by zany women who talk really slowly (I think they get high from all the stuff they're smelling all day) and who are very sensual. "Feeeelllll this...." they purr, offering a wooden posicle stick that's been coated in some kind of lush goo. "Smellllll this.... mmmm..." they moan, proffering some open bottle or a bath bomb. It's like walking into some kind of soft core porn movie. It's really fun!

PS The background is the Wonders of America commemortive postage stamp sheet, available at your local US Post Office.
They're one of the few stamps I really like right now.

The 2007 Stamps Suck

When I was a child my dad would take me to the big Post Office in downtown Los Angeles, right by Olvera Street and Union Station. I would look at all the commemorative postage stamps they had to offer, and choose a pane. They were even more exciting than stickers! The Georgia O'Keefe ones were beautiful (well, I wasn't a kid when those came out) and there were usually some amazing flowers and animals stamps to choose from. I still like commemorative stamps, but they're getting suckier and suckier every year. There are fewer and fewer good ones.

Something that really bugs me is the glorification of corporations in US postage stamps! Remember when the LOVE stamps just said LOVE and had heart images? For 2007, the LOVE stamp has a Hershey's corporation brand kiss on it. As if there isn't enough Disney-down-your-throat in all other aspects of American life, there were Disney stamps in 2006 and there will be more in 2007. Hell why not just drop all pretense and have Halliburton stamps? Mc Donald's? Verizon? Time-Warner?

The only ones I'm excited about for 2007 are the animals and plants of the tundra stamps, and the "Pollination" ones which show four different pollinating bugs and birds with four different flowering plants. The Ella Fitzgerald ones are cool, too. But that's all. No wonder everyone has stopped sending real mail...

Gimme Brains 'Zine Distro!

You can find my 'zines (and many others!) at Gimme Brains Distro, run by zombie queen Mae Undead, right out of NorCal.

I can't even fathom how much organizational skill it takes to run a 'zine distro, and it's a labor of love; most distros barely break even on costs. They do it to give others access to rare and underground publications. Distro owners are just awesome! So swing by Mae's distro - you are sure to find some 'zines that will interest you.

GIMME BRAINS 'ZINE DISTRO!








image from Gimme Brains Distro, Mae Undead

Fountain Pens and True Love

Each year, San Francisco artists participate in "Open Studios" - where they all open their studios to the public. My calligraphy teachers, Ward Dunham and Linnea Lundqust, opened their studio, Atelier Gargoyle, and I went there and tested all of Ward's special fountain pens, which each have a hand-ground italic nib so you get that wonderful thick and thin line variation while you are writing. I fell in love with a pen that day; an orange marbled Conway Stewart number. I never would have guessed just by looking at it that it was the pen for me, but once I held it and wrote with it, I knew it was The One! Well, sometimes love is unpredictable like that. I haven't consummated this burning passion yet, by the way. It goes against my plan of not spending money on myself before the holidays.

Do you like writing with fountain pens, or want to find out if you do? My pal Meagan recently introduced me to the Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen. It's inexpensive, but smooth-writing, comfortable, and just really nice. The ink flows extremely reliably and generously (it's advertised as "fine point" but compared to many fine fountain pens I've tried, I feel it's closer to what's described as medium point) and it's a fountain pen you don't have to worry about losing. Writing with it is a simple pleasure! Try it out and in the meantime, you can spend a little more time looking for the fountain pen of your dreams. Don't settle!

The Golden Compass

I just finished reading this book: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. It's technically a piece of young adult literature, but it's incredibly rich and complex, and not exactly light fare. I loved it so much that when I was down to the last thirty pages, I had to go out and get the next book in the trilogy (The Subtle Knife) so I wouldn't have to agonize about what happens next.

It's got a brave young female hero who travels from London to the North Pole wearing furs and eating raw seal kidneys, armored polar bears, magical animal daemons which are part of each human being, sharing their feelings and thoughts and able to change their animal shapes, the aurora borealis, a hot air balloonist from Texas, and more. A grand quest, good versus evil, and coming of age, all between the pages of this book! As much as I love the ever-popular Harry Potter series, I daresay The Golden Compass is better, more imaginative, more creative and otherwordly. It has a cult following, but is nowhere near as popular or well-known as Harry Potter. Perhaps because the protagonist is a girl and not a boy? Hmm.

Flowering Tea

I'm currently into flowering tea - the tea leaves are sewn into a tight, dry ball. When you steep the ball, it blooms into a beautiful tea-flower that looks like a sea anenome. First it blooms, and then begins to infuse the water and turn into tea. It's extremely fun to watch. You can do it in a glass teapot, like mine, or even in a jar or French press. I'm looking for a clear travel mug so that I can drink flowering tea at work.

Numi tea sells little glass teapots like mine, and several types of flowering tea. They have a mixed box with nine different types of flowering tea in it; it's called Numi's Bouquet. It comes with a paper inside describing each type; kind of like a box of chocolates, only it's tea!
My co-worker Sue has a tea hook-up, though (her sister is a tea-dealer), so I purchased twenty dried tea balls from her for $1 apiece.

Numi Flowering Tea...

Voting at The Log Cabin

Today was the first time I voted at The Log Cabin location in San Francisco's Presidio. I've always seen this building while walking or running and wondered what it is and what people use it for. It has some big white letters on the outside saying simply "LOG CABIN". Inside, it literally had walls made of logs, and a yellowed, faded, flattened carpet that might have been installed in 1977. The air smelled like hamster pee. There were only three poll workers - two extremely young-looking teenage boys and an old man. They were very capable, though. They checked off my name (I was on the roster. I'd brought my ID and bills with my address just in case I was purged from the rosters. I was already rehearsing how I would demand a provisional ballot... I kept having this paranoia that I was going to be disenfranchised today...) handed me a ballot packet and waved me toward one of the empty plastic booths. (I suddenly remembered going to the polls with my mom when I was little. The booths then were made of wood and were much bigger than they are now. I asked my mom who she voted for and she told me it was none of my business! it was 1980, and Reagan won. I know she didn't vote for Reagan. I was dying to discuss politics with her, but she acted as though I was asking her about something totally personal.)

After I marked my ballot, I carried the sheets (in a blue "privacy folder") over to one of the young boys, who was babysitting an ancient-looking machine that looked like a prototype ATM and made little chirpy electronic beeps like R2D2. I fed the ballot sheets into the machine and it sucked them right in, beeping happily. The guy gave me my "I voted" sticker and that was it.
It's always kind of anticlimactic, voting, isn't it?

Attack of the Crocs!

Everyone in San Francisco is wearing these colorful, non-leather shoe things that look like gardening shoes or muppet foot coverings, or the blobs that a kindergartener might draw in an attempt to draw shoes. They are called Crocs. I've seen them on people of all ages and styles. I've been seeing them for a while (a few years, I think) but they've only become ubiquitous in the past year or so. They look cute on some people (mostly people under the age of six years). In this man's case, I like the way his red Crocs give a shot of color to his otherwise drab, colorless, and typically Bay Area outfit. I hear they are wildly comfortable. I tried on my coworker's pair, and they did seem wildly comfortable, in the way that my fuzzy bedroom slippers are comfortable, or that my boyfriend's gray sweatshirt, several sizes too big for me is comfortable, but you don't see me wearing bedroom slippers and my boyfriend's sweatshirt out in public, now do you?!

Okay, being completely honest here - I think they are totally hideous and look like clown shoes, and any man who can't be bothered to tie SHOELACES cannot walk alongside me!

Crocs cost less than $40 and are sold at many places, including Nordstrom. So if you MUST get a pair... they are easy to find.

Crocs

My Family - Trashier Than Footballers Wives

My mother wrote me an email, or I thought she wrote me an email - turns out it was only an email my aunt had written to my mom, which my mom then forwarded to me.
My mom has five siblings. I am an only child. So I think she likes to fill me in on the trials and tribulations of my aunts and uncles because I don't have any sibling drama of my own to deal with.

Anyhow, my Uncle was married and had three children, very nice children. My cousins are now something like ages 22, 20 and 18. He and his First Wife (very nice wife; she was great) divorced some ten years ago and she went on to marry a Much Better Guy - good for her. My uncle then impregnated and married a woman who was in her mid-twenties when he was in his early forties. She already had one child of her own, who was around seven or eight. Yeah, you do the math on that! Fine... all fine. I might have raised my eyebrows at not exactly the age difference, but the fact that when I tried to make conversation with his new wife, she proved to be incredibly dull, but I didn't think much of it.

They had a baby. A year later, they had another baby. A year after that, they had yet another baby. Meanwhile, the 2nd Wife's First Child did not even live in their house - she continued to live with 2nd Wife's parents. Why 2nd Wife continued to make new babies when she wasn't caring for her First Child, I don't know.

Next, Second Wife had an affair on Uncle and got pregnant with Other Guy's baby.
She had a meltdown, admitted that the baby she was carrying (her fifth child, at age thirty-one) was not Uncle's, and she quit her job, left the house and the three babies, ages one, two and three. Uncle continued to work, and care for the babies.

The latest email forwarded on to me from my mom states that Second Wife is back living with Uncle and still seeing Other Man. She gave birth to Other Man's Baby and Uncle cares for all FOUR babies now. Second Wife is severely depressed and watches TV all day.

This is not, I repeat, this is NOT something I saw on TV - an old rerun of a Jerry Springer episode. This is my friggin' family. It's depressing. I'm far enough from them to just watch with a kind of sickened horror, and yet... they're related to me.

Uncle owns two pieces of art that I want - they are part of a four-piece series and I have the other two pieces. They belonged to my grandparents and I'm really not sure how he got them - I think they were given to him when I was just a kid and he was decorating his first apartment or something like that. Maybe I will offer to trade him some condoms for the two pieces of art. Seems like he needs something like that...

Banana Slugs

It stopped raining, although it was still very damp. We went for a walk. The air smelled pretty good; like eucalyptus... at first I thought I was looking at a fallen eucalyptus leaf, in fact, and then realized it was a banana slug. The path we were walking on was shaded and cool, and the slugs were making their way across it. We saw several of them. They look kind of gross to me, but I know they're beneficial creatures; they eat the fallen leaves and animal poop and turn it all into soil. Supposedly, they live all along the Pacific Northwest, in the coastal forests, and they're one of the largest slugs in the world. I've seen them in Santa Cruz before, where they were yellow and spotted, and fatter than the greenish ones I saw today. As the sun dropped lower and lower, their slimy trails gleamed...

Acacia, Olive Oil and Herbs...

Lately, I love acacia wood - I have some oval appetizer trays and several little dipping bowls. I would like to get salad plates or salad bowls made of this wood. It's rich and smooth and variegated, and feels so warm compared to stoneware or glass. In here I put olive oil, halved cloves of garlic to infuse into the oil (not to chew!), thyme, marjoram, rosemary sea salt and a little puddle of balsamic vinegar. It's delicious when you dip a little crusty bread into it!

Straus Creamery Eggnog

It's the first rainy, gray day of the season here in San Francisco. (Well, it's often
foggy-gray, but this is the first rain.) Halloween is over, and at my workplace, we're all anticipating the arrival of the literal TONS of Thanksgiving food that comes in and has to be dealt with; received, moved, stacked, counted, dated, sold and then moved, palletized, and trucked. Fifty pound bales of potatoes, sweet potatoes... carrots... Thanksgiving is the biggest time of the year for all people in the produce industry, and because it's all fresh (ours is organic and mostly local, so it's super-fresh) there's no way to space out the workload. It all happens in the span of four or five exhausting days. Everyone pitches in to do the physical labor here at this time of year, from our CEO to our receptionists. It's all kind of fun, but exhausting.

But before Thanksgiving... here comes Christmas! We also sell Straus dairy products, and today the first eggnog arrived. "There's no water in it," my coworker Mary, who orders the dairy stuff told me, "Egg yolk, whole milk, cream and nutmeg; want some?"

Heart attack in a cup!!! I told her, "Yes, But just an inch!"

So delicious!
(Even better with the rum, though, probably.)

Straus Creamery.