on ice

i feel inspired by the sunshine to do a survey of iced americanos in portland. my budget will limit me to approximately one americano every two weeks, i fear, but here's what i have for you so far:

iced americano, 16 oz, to go. with a healthy splash of soy milk.


arabica: *perfect. $3.50

bard coffee: *perfect. $2.60

(i'm not being scientific enough, because i'm not positive how many shots of espresso are present in each of these beverages. so i may have to go back and re-survey both locations.)


*i think my scale will be terrible to perfect. where perfect = smooth, rich, crema-topped shots of espresso; a high coffee-to-water ratio; plenty of ice; and they let me pour the soy milk in by my own self.

reminder

thirty days have september, april, june, and november...blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...all the rest have thirty-one.

don't forget to say "rabbit rabbit" tomorrow morning!

from a german ukulele site

(bean just sent this to me, knowing it would make me laugh out loud):

Whoever spends his time with the ukulele doesn't do any evil. By all means you can assume that all ukulele players are nice people. Furthermore there is an old saying: „Where people sing, you can settle, evil people have no songs (said the devil while sitting down in a swarm of bees)!“ Well, you can't settle down in the internet. But with this in mind you can meet nice people virtually. For instance in the 1st German Ukulele Club which was founded on july 20, 2005. You are warmly invited to join in. By the way: In this regard „German“ means that the common language is German. But most of the members are able to speak English, too.

sweet ride

i don't know if i've mentioned that boo (my baby) is going to turn thirteen in may. well, it's true. we really wanted to get him something fabulous for his birthday, so with the help of boo's wonderful grandparents, m let him pick out the most fabulous bike he could find at the great maine bike swap this weekend for an early present. here it is, a vintage fuji road bike that fits him perfectly, is in great shape, is fun to ride, and is a gorgeous shade of almost-turquoise.

cute

a friend of mine (who just happens to be a thirteen year-old girl) was telling me about someone she met recently who reminded her of me: "she's really cute, and, you know, kind of awkward." this made me inordinately happy!

july, july

well, april really. but minnow and i were pretending like it was july at baxter woods this morning! i was sleeveless.

have a nice day

i really hope you have as nice a day as i did today!
























first of all, it included the first official iced coffee drink of the year, a perfect iced americano from arabica.

and then these feet of mine went for a stroll on the prout's neck cliff walk. i wish you could hear the fabulous sound these stones make when you walk on them.
























our friend jason came along with us, and we paused to stack some stones in amazing piles, which you should try some time if you've never done it. it's such a lovely surprise to leave behind for the next people who happen to come along, plus it's extremely meditative.
























boo, jason, and m work on their rock art:
























it was a beautiful walk on a perfectly spectacular day. that's a lot of adjectives, i know, but...blue sky, gorgeous ocean, stones and cliffs and sea birds and sunshine and seventy degrees...see what i'm saying?

on the freedom trail

we spent a few fun days in cambridge this spring break week - boo and m volunteered with my dad at a boston food bank, i got a blissful massage from my mom, delicious foods were consumed, movies watched, and one day m, boo, and dad walked most of the freedom trail. mom and i met up with them in the north end for cannoli and cappuccinos, and then m, boo, and i continued along the trail to the old north church and the nearby copp's hill burying ground.
























my favorite thing by far was the st. francis of assisi garden. isn't he adorable?



















there's a bird on his shoulder. who does he remind you of?



















see the resemblance at all? if there were a bird on m's shoulder? or if st. francis had glasses on?

i really like being alive. a lot.

i love this so much - from bakers dozen, via fine little love.

lovey-dovey

okay, i am really excited about this movie:



but it's weirdly similar to this movie, which i'm even more excited about:



the first one is a fake documentary about love made by one of those quirky "indie" directors; the second is a real documentary about love made by a genuine indie director. and the second one features ira glass, which the first one does not.

the adventures of buckaroo banzai

does every family have a personal cult film, a movie that each person pretty much knows by heart (and can recite, annoyingly, line by line)? for my family, that film was buckaroo banzai, which came out in 1984. we owned it on vhs and watched it dozens of times and subjected our friends to it and quoted from it in unison. here's how much i loved it at the age of 16 or 17: you know those rocks, way up above the road, that in most towns high school kids will paint with sports-related or school-spirit-type messages, such as "JJ LAX '85" or whatever? i shanghaied my high school friends into climbing up there with me so we could paint "BUCKAROO BANZAI." i was so proud of myself.

m, boo, and i are visiting my mom and dad in cambridge for a couple of days, and last night we realized that boo had really never experienced buckaroo banzai (officially he'd seen it, but i think he was about two), so we all watched it. it's just as bizarre and wonderful as ever, twenty-five years later!

"hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. hey. don't be mean. we don't have to be mean. because, remember, no matter where you go,...there you are."

weekend report

*m sold some shirts at an organics fair at o'donals nursery in gorham.

*we watched the utterly mystifying last days. a haiku about it might go something like this:

kurt cobain mumbles
and wanders around a while.
then he falls down dead.

*we started to tackle the hideous situation in our yard (i will eventually document the willow branch disaster area back there, but i can't stand to look at it today).

*m and boo participated in the second annual portland, maine captcha the flag game. they played for the west end, which was ultimately victorious (this is a city-wide battle, east end vs. west end, wherein each team attempts to locate and steal the other team's flag and return it to the monument square starting point without getting tagged and "jailed")! i stayed at home consulting google maps for them as needed.

*we went to arabica early sunday, where boo had toast and hot chocolate:
























and m and i had perfect lattes:
























it was picnic weather. sort of (i mean, except for our frozen fingers, which we just ignored). so we took some pasta salad to kettle cove and ate it while gazing at this view:
























as hard as things feel sometimes, i try to constantly remind myself how lucky i am to live in such a beautiful, beautiful place. *i really love it here.



*this is no doubt the blue sky and sunshine talking!

the story of spicy tofu

enoch came over last week and cooked dinner for us. on the menu: *spicy tofu and rice.
























yum:
























yum:


























yum:
























*secret ingredient = shisen toban jan. seriously, this stuff is mesmerizing. you might be able to find it at sun market.

russian commuter dogs

my very favorite recent international news story is about moscow's commuter dogs:

"The clever canines board the Tube each morning. After a hard day scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs where they spend the night."

there is a monument to a stray dog who was killed in one moscow subway station, a group of zoologists studying these dogs, and even a russian website devoted to metrodogs.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ADAM!!!

i miss this bruddy of mine. i hope he's having a wonderful birthday!

achtung!

please be careful when you're milking a cow that the cow doesn't have her tail wound around a...pole of some sort with a live electrical charge running through it.


(this image is from bre pettis's set of photos taken from a german book called elektroschutz in bildern. via kottke.)

what's your NPR name?

my NPR name is, according to these rules,

*emary saint-georges.

i like it. what's yours?!



*i used my real first name and my real middle name; for the "smallest foreign town you've ever visited," i used the town where (i think) we shyly stopped to order pizza en francais while en route to quebec.

best of portland

the phoenix announced its best of portland winners last night, and while a very worthy "portland filmmaker" won, it was not my portland filmmaker. also, correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't lone wolf live and work on the other side of the bridge to south portland?! just to get persnickety about the whole thing.

plus, when you really think about it, portland is way too small for this kind of "best of" poll. it is never any surprise who the winners will be in most categories, and in several categories it's kind of a toss-up between two or three places. and plus,... well, never mind. you know what these lists are good for? if you just moved to town and have no idea where to go for a burrito or to rent a movie. i remember when we first moved to portland, i was very happy to have the casco bay weekly's best of list as a kind of guide to the town. but the popularity contest aspect of it rubs me the wrong way.

stop all the downloading!

i don't know. you might not find this as hysterically funny as i do. there are a whole bunch more on the internets!

the amazing race

well, it was pretty sad this week without mel and mike (who were on fresh air a few days ago, by the way!), but i watched anyway, hoping that either the identical redheaded cheerleaders or the very short stuntmen would be eliminated. i've grown, actually, to dislike the stuntmen most of all. however, the most ridiculous moments of this week's show involved them:

1) "all i knew was we had to please these crazy local girls - pretty local girls, i should say!" said either mark or michael, in reference to singing karaoke in a taxi with a bunch of thai transvestites.

2) "in the land of buddha, i don't want to create bad karma," said either michael or mark, as phil stared at him, stony-faced.

3) even though they incurred four hours of penalty for breaking the rules of the race, and came in last, they were not eliminated.

bo obama

i keep reading on the internets about how everyone's tired of hearing about this dog, but not me! i love this photo and the accompanying analysis of it by michael shaw on the huffington post. i can tell these two are going to be great friends.

sick

m is sick, with a bad cold that he just hasn't been able to shake for the last ten days or so (my diagnosis was "this cold is your body telling you to get in bed all day with a book and a cup of tea," but his method for dealing with illness is more along the lines of "ignore it and it'll go away eventually"). anyway, he was raised on the curative powers of vick's vaporub, and the stuff is pretty great when you're hideously congested. however, he just realized that the above vial of vaporub has an expiration date that ends in '97. as in, 1997, twelve years ago. which not only means that we possess a twelve-year old pot of menthol rub, but that we must have packed it and moved it from baltimore to maine.

goodbye solo

and now i am not just recommending a movie, but instructing you to see if if you can. for all you boston-area friends, goodbye solo is playing next week at the kendall. enoch* and i drove down to cambridge on saturday, where we had some falafel with my dad and then walked to the harvard film archive to watch the film and hear its young and brilliant director, ramin bahrani, answer questions. goodbye solo is a pretty wonderful movie - smart, funny, moving, very true to life - and i really think you should make plans to go see it.




*enoch also made time for some dog-kissing:

easter, cont.

fueled by bags and bags of candy and chocolate, a big plate of rice and beans, a thrilling game of monopoly, and the presence of our friend enoch, boo put on this huge coat and staggered around like a blind zombie for about half an hour last night.

zombie chilling on the couch:
























blind lurching zombie:
























zombie fangs:

easterama

happy eastery-springtime to you! i was just thinking of some things i like about easter, and i thought i'd share them with you.

1) swedish fish.

2) zombie-themed graphic novels. a tradition in our household, but why? if you think about it long enough, it starts to make perfect sense.

3) even though every year i NEED to buy something at the grocery store, which is mystifyingly closed on easter sunday, i still love driving around town and seeing so many empty parking lots and not-open places of business. i love that about thanksgiving, too.

4) i bought some coffee beans from starbucks (that's what i NEEDED, otherwise how would monday morning ever happen?). i know, i know - but they were open. and everyone working there was so incredibly cheerful ("time and a half?" suggested m) it made me even happier to be alive.

5) spring sunshine, although it was deceptive. the wind on the beach was bone chilling.

6) a big pot of rice and beans for dinner, and the company of our friend enoch.

A haiku about gus van sant's elephant

lots of characters

walking through the high school halls:

mostly, they all die.

infinite

minnow's guarding my great big book, as you can see. i'm on page 430!

dear nina totenberg,

please don't pronounce "err" that way. i really think it's supposed to rhyme with "where." the way you said it on the radio this morning sounded more like "urr."

holly's etsy shop

my best, best, oldest friend in the world, holly, is an amazingly talented artist. her current medium is silverclay, which she uses to make the most gorgeous fine silver jewelry. she incorporates semi-precious stones and organic shapes, and the result is pretty much breathtaking. she recently opened an etsy shop: go check it out!

spam report

just in case you were wondering what was up lately with my spam. i have not heard again from any nigerians (except the one who wanted to buy a t-shirt from our etsy shop, and required our bank information to do so). for a while, i was getting a ton of sneaky-type spam, messages that would say things like, "one more thing - i forgot to tell you during our conversation!" or "sorry, i think i hit your car yesterday." but now i seem to be back to: "you'll brake walls with your boner."

getting a little ahead of myself

i'm so ready for salad-and-iced-coffee-and-flip-flop-season, aren't you? particularly this iced coffee. any flip flops will do as long as they cost less than five dollars. last night my boys were indulging in a particularly cheese-heavy dinner, and i was feeling a mite vegan, so i made a big salad with vegan caesar dressing and tempeh croutons*. OH MY GOD. it hit the spot. my only critique is that this dressing recipe is a little heavy on the mustard; i would recommend one tablespoon instead of three. but then i have been traumatized by mustard in the past. it was a mustard-heavy pasta dish i ate back in the early '90s at this place** in lawrence, kansas. to be specific. i've never gotten over it.



*i didn't find a recipe for these, so i basically just fried up some cubes of tempeh til they were golden and crispy.

**i should add that everything else i ever ate there was delicious. especially the onion rings.

sprung

yesterday i really started to believe it might be spring - it was still nippy, but this is maine after all. the mountain of snow in my front yard had finally melted, and the sun felt like a big cozy golden blanket. we took minnow to the beach, and artemis came too. boo took a bunch of excellent action shots of min frolicking. you can see more of them here. we came home and ate chips and homemade guacamole, and then artemis retired with a blanket and a book to the flat roof over our garage (accessible only through our bedroom window), where she fell asleep in the sunshine.

david sedaris

i, lucky lady that i am, had the honor of being artemis's guest last night at a david sedaris reading. this is the second time i've seen/heard him read, and he's really good at it - funny, of course, but also kind of sweet and humble and grateful for the opportunity to do it. it was particularly amazing last night that he was so gracious and entertaining, since he'd spent the previous night in the hospital with a kidney stone and needed percocet to get through the reading. even so, he stayed for hours afterward signing books (which he always does, apparently even mid-kidney stone). when artemis and i got up to the front of the line, he looked up at her, and said, "now, if you and i were friends, i'd call you pigtails!" he gives small gifts to teenagers who attend his readings, and he offered artemis the choice between a hotel shampoo bottle or a condom which he said was "special, only for anal sex," and then said, "no, i'm just joking. it's for any kind of sex." artemis took the shampoo.

i got a copy of dress your family signed for boo: "i'm so happy you're alive, david sedaris."
























and when you are engulfed in flames signed for bean: "with the pleasure of meeting your enchanting mother, david sedaris."
























as we left, he emphasized that he was in terrible pain, and that he wouldn't be sleeping that night, but not to worry about him, he'd be fine.

dog saves girls

my brother david is transferring our grandfather's childhood home movies to digital - the fabulous thing about these movies (besides the fact that they're around 70 years old and just amazing in general) is that the family movies were always (or usually?) scripted, with an exciting plot. i need to ask my grandfather for more details! i love this one, wherein a small spaniel comes to the aid of a bunch of girls who have tumbled down a hill:

yowie

i got a shock in each ear this morning from my ear buds. or maybe it came from the treadmill itself, or from my own personal buildup of static electricity. i've researched this question thoroughly on the internets, and i'm still not sure if i should be afraid to ever go back to the gym again! i think from now on i'll stay at home where it's safe and lie on the couch eating whoopie pies.

boo's freaky eye trick

that's my boy!


Eye! from mh on Vimeo.

trying to be more laissez-faire

i really am trying to be more of a descriptivist and/or a "laissez-faire linguist," like one of my bruddies is. cause it's nicer and it's more laid-back and less uptight and critical. nobody likes the grammar police (except the other members of the grammar police).

BUT i still have to note, in my smarty-pants style, that jonathan safran foer (who gave a wonderful talk last night at bowdoin which i enjoyed immensely, and who overall is much, much smarter than i am) misused the phrase "beg the question" twice.

cake

i just heard this on the world, spoken by one of these g-20 summit tea party-style protesters:

cake asks the eater to trust that the baker means well.

it makes me want to bake cakes for all my friends and enemies!

fool

and a happy april fool's day from my dad to you!

rabbit rabbit

happy april to you!