(no subject)
This has been such a great weekend. I regret it's ending, but the rest of the month is shaping up nicely. This is going to be a good month, despite the crumbling condition of the rest of the world.
On Friday I arrived home from work to a wonderful smelling apartment. Noel had spent the afternoon making an elaborate dinner: a creamy veggie soup featuring roasted potatoes, carrots, and celery as the base .. and a pork loin crusted with a savory paprika rub. It was a radiant dinner, and there were enough leftovers for days of delicious meals.
I got up early, on Saturday morning, as I do every day. Quietly, so as not to disturb Noel, I made coffee and a small omelette for my breakfast. I did two loads of laundry as well. She woke up late, much rested, and we made our day plans. We walked up to the garden for a visit, then went home and had soup and pork for lunch.
Afer a nap, we got up and bussed to Georgetown. There is a giant art studio there, Equinox, that has a holiday open house, where all the artisans show off their stuff. It's quite an elaborate party. Before we went, to collect ourselves we stopped at Katsu Burger .. Japanese American fusion fast food, beef burgers encased in a crust like katsu don, then fried. The burgers are huge and delicious.
It's a block from there to Equinox; we entered the party area and were taken up. The studio complex is a cluster of buildings with studios, plus there are shipping containers that have been repurposed as studios as well, and every room and space in the place was full of art. In one room, a large guy in a fez operated a plotter that cut words and designs out of a thick sheet of steel. In another, two men worked smithing steel knives: one pulled slates of molten metal out of a kiln and hammered them into shape, another used a machine that pounded them smooth. There was a table which displayed the knives they had made, impressive blades.
There was music. A large area filled with representational paintings also contained two guitarists improvising chugging, twining lines. In sharp contrast, in the next room two violinists paced through some string duos. We went out and toward an area lit with the pink lights of a stage, and we heard a woman singing "Back to Black", but on the stage the musicians were setting up and tuning. As we stood there we suddenly realized the singer was standing a foot away from us, singing into a handheld mike to the accompaniment of a recorded backing track.
There were other wonders, like a fire pit where combusting gas came up through a thick layer of sand -- if the surface of the sand was level, the fire would be small, but a line traced in the sand would make the fire stronger along it. A kid was raking patterns into the sand that glowed with blue flames. There were food trucks, but we were both immune to their lure.
We saw everything, and then we went home. Next day I was up early again, and this time I got Noel up early, using my often threatened method of putting "Preachin' The Blues" on at nine, very quietly, and every so often goosing the sound, so that by ten it was loud enough to wake her up. She got up, we got ready, and then went out to Ballard, and the Majestic Bay movie theatre. Had a soft drink at the coffee shop, then went inside.
It was time to see "Coco", the Disney / Pixar film. I've heard enough about it from my FB friends, some of whom worked on it; and we'd waited out the "Frozen" short, they'd taken it off the front of the film -- in fact, the usual sload of trailers one has to see in front of first run films was pared down to three, two of which ("Early Man" and "Incredibles 2") were bearable.
The film is not bad. A film about Mexico where nobody sings or plays that god damned Mexican Hat Dance is points ahead for me already. The film was standard issue Pixar emotional manipulation, always effective -- at the end I could hear people weeping openly in the theatre. The jokes are smart, and the Bullwinkling (jokes kids won't get but their parents will) deft -- there's a fast mention of Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante that I may have been the only person in the room to notice. Less wince-y than I had thought it would be (the "Ferdinand" trailer before the show made me grit my teeth).
We hadn't had breakfast, so we went all out on a late brunch at Root Table, a Thai-inspired place just across Market Street. Noel had a delicious Garlic Cashew Chicken, and I had a wonderful creamy Mongolian stew with beef and carrots. We caught a downtown bus and went to Bed Bath and Beyond to get Noel her heart's desire: a Zoodler, a machine that grinds zucchini into noodles like spaghetti, and a cleaver for chopping veggies. We came home as the sun was dipping down behind the buildings.
On Friday I arrived home from work to a wonderful smelling apartment. Noel had spent the afternoon making an elaborate dinner: a creamy veggie soup featuring roasted potatoes, carrots, and celery as the base .. and a pork loin crusted with a savory paprika rub. It was a radiant dinner, and there were enough leftovers for days of delicious meals.
I got up early, on Saturday morning, as I do every day. Quietly, so as not to disturb Noel, I made coffee and a small omelette for my breakfast. I did two loads of laundry as well. She woke up late, much rested, and we made our day plans. We walked up to the garden for a visit, then went home and had soup and pork for lunch.
Afer a nap, we got up and bussed to Georgetown. There is a giant art studio there, Equinox, that has a holiday open house, where all the artisans show off their stuff. It's quite an elaborate party. Before we went, to collect ourselves we stopped at Katsu Burger .. Japanese American fusion fast food, beef burgers encased in a crust like katsu don, then fried. The burgers are huge and delicious.
It's a block from there to Equinox; we entered the party area and were taken up. The studio complex is a cluster of buildings with studios, plus there are shipping containers that have been repurposed as studios as well, and every room and space in the place was full of art. In one room, a large guy in a fez operated a plotter that cut words and designs out of a thick sheet of steel. In another, two men worked smithing steel knives: one pulled slates of molten metal out of a kiln and hammered them into shape, another used a machine that pounded them smooth. There was a table which displayed the knives they had made, impressive blades.
There was music. A large area filled with representational paintings also contained two guitarists improvising chugging, twining lines. In sharp contrast, in the next room two violinists paced through some string duos. We went out and toward an area lit with the pink lights of a stage, and we heard a woman singing "Back to Black", but on the stage the musicians were setting up and tuning. As we stood there we suddenly realized the singer was standing a foot away from us, singing into a handheld mike to the accompaniment of a recorded backing track.
There were other wonders, like a fire pit where combusting gas came up through a thick layer of sand -- if the surface of the sand was level, the fire would be small, but a line traced in the sand would make the fire stronger along it. A kid was raking patterns into the sand that glowed with blue flames. There were food trucks, but we were both immune to their lure.
We saw everything, and then we went home. Next day I was up early again, and this time I got Noel up early, using my often threatened method of putting "Preachin' The Blues" on at nine, very quietly, and every so often goosing the sound, so that by ten it was loud enough to wake her up. She got up, we got ready, and then went out to Ballard, and the Majestic Bay movie theatre. Had a soft drink at the coffee shop, then went inside.
It was time to see "Coco", the Disney / Pixar film. I've heard enough about it from my FB friends, some of whom worked on it; and we'd waited out the "Frozen" short, they'd taken it off the front of the film -- in fact, the usual sload of trailers one has to see in front of first run films was pared down to three, two of which ("Early Man" and "Incredibles 2") were bearable.
The film is not bad. A film about Mexico where nobody sings or plays that god damned Mexican Hat Dance is points ahead for me already. The film was standard issue Pixar emotional manipulation, always effective -- at the end I could hear people weeping openly in the theatre. The jokes are smart, and the Bullwinkling (jokes kids won't get but their parents will) deft -- there's a fast mention of Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante that I may have been the only person in the room to notice. Less wince-y than I had thought it would be (the "Ferdinand" trailer before the show made me grit my teeth).
We hadn't had breakfast, so we went all out on a late brunch at Root Table, a Thai-inspired place just across Market Street. Noel had a delicious Garlic Cashew Chicken, and I had a wonderful creamy Mongolian stew with beef and carrots. We caught a downtown bus and went to Bed Bath and Beyond to get Noel her heart's desire: a Zoodler, a machine that grinds zucchini into noodles like spaghetti, and a cleaver for chopping veggies. We came home as the sun was dipping down behind the buildings.