Those Spinster Sisters!

How can they still be spinsters when they cook as deliciously as they do?  Jenn and I went for a quick little dinner two nights ago, tired of making our own food and cleaning up our own mess.  Four small plates, one small carafe of wine on tap, two happy females.  We always sit at the very long bar, usually get to enjoy Vanessa's company and usually have good discussions of random subjects.

The korean short ribs are off the menu for the summer (sad) but pork belly is back (good!).  We also had a very good wilted kale salad, much better than I expected, perfect fries and corn and coconut fritters with a siracha aioli.  I wanted the duck terrine but it would have been too much.... next time! 

We really enjoy this place, it is local, most of the people in the restaurant are locals, there is something to please everyone and it isn't expensive.  Go.  Sit at the bar if there are only two of you (trust me, it is much easier to converse at the bar) and order recklessly.  You will be glad you did.

Oh, the joy of wedding guests at a hotel

Today, children, we will revisit a topic that has been a favorite of ours over the years and yet never ceases to amaze this instructor: hotel guests who are in town for a wedding at some other location than the hotel where they are staying.  Yes, a long title, one that I like to condense into GNATS:  Guests Not At The Site.  Yes, it lacks the W for wedding, but I like calling them gnats, so that's what they shall be named. 

I work at a 12 room hotel in the quiet hamlet of Glen Ellen, Sonoma County.  This past weekend, Memorial Day, how fitting, 6 rooms of gnats checked in on Friday.  On Saturday 4 more rooms arrived and the last two came in very, very early (while other non-gnats where still sipping their morning coffee) on Sunday morning. Interspersed with these gnats were regular guests who were subjected to loud, obnoxious behavior about which we, the front desk, could do little to abate.  Thank goodness those guests were gone by Sunday, the day of the real festivities, aka the Wedding.

These asshole gnats were drunk or stoned most of the time.  They stayed up til almost dawn on Sat-Sun-Monday mornings, some of them staying up past dawn, never going to bed.  They drank a lot. They smoked dope a lot. They broke things. They were rude, loud, cheap and nasty.   It was the first wedding of the season that this hotel has encountered (it's their first year in business, so I am cutting them some slack here) and I think they are already re-thinking their position on wedding buy-outs for 2014. 

I could go on and on, I could give examples of their loutish gnat behavior beyond the obvious cigarette butts in the hot tub, broken window screens in the rooms, red wine spilled on the walkways, rooms reeking of smoke..... but suffice it to say, it was not a pleasant weekend. Not one of the gnats were even remotely nice or fun or gracious.  No one tipped anyone, their rooms were disgustingly filthy and we were all happy that they all felt like shit on Monday morning, the day after the wedding.  Hangovers were too good for them.  Needles in their eyes might have been better.

Ah, well..... no wedding group this weekend but there is another one coming up. And throughout the entire season there are wedding groups almost every weekend.  I am not holding my breath.... the guests will be good or bad or somewhere in-between.  It will be nice when the season is over.  In November.  It's a long ways away.

Blank

Memorial Day has come and gone and look, nothing from me in over a week!  Not that anything hasn't happened, nothing remarkable but there is always something to write about.  I will do so tomorrow, Wednesday, almost at the end of May.  If nothing else, I can report on the total assholes who stayed this past weekend at the hotel where I work..  Great tales abound.  "Snacks, do you have any snacks, can we get some snacks, are there snacks anywhere, we need some snacks......."

till then......

Garden, again

My garden has not yet died and this is a good thing.  However, while most plants are thriving, there is a thing... a pest....  an alien, I just don't know what, eating the leaves off my bean plants.  Anyone have hints about this?  Whatever the pest is, it ate all the leaves and most of the stalk on one plant that was in the ground.  Some of the leaves are gone from another plant that is in a container on a bench 18 inches off the ground.  Now one other plant, in the ground but not near the other two, has two leaves missing.  Whazup?  So odd.  It looks like a rabbit or deer, but that's simply not possible here.  Unless it is Suburban Death Rabbit.  I have heard stories about that critter, so perhaps.......

But the tomatoes are getting bigger, some blossoms on them. However, I was walking past a guy's house yesterday and his tomatoe plants are huge and he already has big fruit on them and I felt like a gardening failure!  He was very cool, very nice, very encouraging, but really?  Mine have nothing, his have fruit the size of golf balls.  Oh well, I will persevere.  My basil and arugula and dill are great! And the pea seeds I planted have sprouted, as have two of the zucchini seeds, and I hope more of those come up.  I am hoping nothing eats them and they give me nice peas and nice zukes.  And I tossed some hot peppers seeds in the ground (well, they weren't hot when I tossed them, they might be hot if they produce) and they are coming up as well.  Slowly and very small.

Many nasturtiums are coming up, too.  The twigs of mint I planted are growing, which is nice.  One of the dogs (the big one, not my small Cooper) crushed my small rosemary plant so I am sort of sad about that, hoping it comes back up.  We'll see.

OK, when I have photos I will post them.  I know this whole thing is boring to most people but I just have never had luck with growing things so this is pretty cool to me.  Blah, Blah, Blah. 

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The Clock, Christian Marclay

Since I first read about The Clock in 2010 I have wanted to see it.  The concept of it was so intriguing and it seemed almost impossible to pull off: a 24 hour movie in which each minute is either shown or mentioned via thousands of film clips, montaged together. It's in real time: the movie begins at 11:00 am and when it is shown it always starts at 11:00 am. It ends at 10:59 am the next day and it plays for the entire 24 hours, real time.  You can see some of it or all of it.  I have been following its journey around the US and it finally came to SF.  SF Museum of Modern Art is currently showing it until the end of the month.  http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1333

Gabe and I were planning on seeing it last evening, Saturday night, but the wait, which you can follow on the SFMOMA website, grew longer and longer as the night grew later and later.  We decided against waiting for over two hours, but I was determined to get my Clock fix.  I slept at Gabe's last night, got up this morning at 5:50, jumped into my clothes, brushed my teeth and was at the museum door at 6:14 am with really bad bed hair.  SF streets were empty, I was able to park across the street from the museum, walked into what looked like a closed building, got a ticket and made my way to the movie hall.  They have 27 low couches, each can seat three people.  When I entered there were perhaps 50 people watching the film.  For the first 90 minutes, no one left, a couple of people came in.  By 8:00 the theater was full (81 people is max) and when I left at 8:35 there were already a handful of folks waiting.

It's difficult to explain how mesmerizing The Clock is.  Each minute is either shown or mentioned in dialogue, often many times.  For example, 7:00 am is shown probably a dozen times, as alarm clocks ring and people reach to turn them off.  Since I was watching it in the morning, the scenes I saw were morning scenes:  people getting up, getting dressed, cooking breakfast, shaving, stretching, yawning......  doing what everyone does at 7:00 am.  And it was actually 7:00 am!  

How Marclay managed to watch so many films and capture over 1440 individual designations of time is simply an astounding feat.  And it's fun!  It isn't boring, it moves along, you get to see clips from tons of movies, and he often makes the scenes bleed into each other in novel ways.  I could go on and on but suffice it to say that I really want to go back and see more of it.  If you get the chance, check it out.  Go early in the day..... right now, at 4:00 on Sunday afternoon, there is more than an hour wait.  Still, it's worth that hour..... it is nothing short of originally amazing.

An Excellent Movie

Do yourself a favor and rent this film: "The Intouchables."  It's french, it has subtitles and it is one of the best movies I have seen in a long, long time.  Based on a true story, it tells of a rich quadriplegic who hires a caretaker who is outside of the realm of most caretakers.  This guy knows nothing about taking care of anyone, has a criminal record and is barely literate.  But the reason he is hired is because of all those things, not in spite of them.  The man in the chair doesn't want anyone feeling sorry for him and the caretaker doesn't.  The two of them form a great bond, a   relationship built of mutual respect and it has everything a good movie needs: great script, great actors, great filming. It is laugh-out-loud funny, poignant when necessary, real, uplifting but definitely not a "redemption" movie. It's just a really good movie.  Almost a perfect movie in my estimation.  I loved it, which I rarely say.

 

 

 

thank you Tom, for the recommendation.

 

 

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Movement

It occurred to me the other day that in the past three years I have lived in several places.  From the fall of 2010 until now, a period of less than three years, I have had six "homes."  I lived in the cottage in Inverness for more than ten years and left there at the end of October 2010. That's habitat #1.  Then I stayed in Daly City with Gabe and Annie for six months, #2.  For a couple of weeks I was in Healdsburg, in a lovely house next to my friend Margaret, doing a little innkeeping while she took a little time off. I don't count that as #3, but it was someplace different.  From there I drove to #3, Grand Prairie, Texas, where I stayed, as a couple of you might remember, for a couple of months in the hottest climate I had ever encountered.  After that I drove around for a couple of weeks, through Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon and then California, and I lived in a trailer for two months.  #4.  (Yes, that counts because I paid rent.)  Gratefully, after that I lived in the tiny place in Santa Rosa with the awesome garden, #5.  And now, #6, a much larger house, still in Santa Rosa. 

Six places in less than three years.  Remarkable. It's no wonder I have a such a small amount of possessions. Move that stuff around enough and it all can go into the landfill.

Here to stay for a while, I hope. Below is a teeny pic of where I live now, it's the house on the left side.  You can go to maps.google.com and put in the address, 2219 Meyers Drive, Santa Rosa, and see a bigger photo if you want, which I am sure you don't.  The house was built in the 1950's and is fine. I am working on the backyard, slowly and cheaply. It's nice to come home and water the possible seedlings.

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