The Homemade Brigade is Rolling Into Town

I am really excited about this. My brother has collected a group of artists, craft masters, and musicians and is going to contain them all in one coffee shop in West Seattle. It's located a Freshy's Cafe at 2735 California AVE. Seattle 98116 - just a block north of the West Seattle PCC. This is one of the coziest, most laid back cafe's I have visited. The owner and her patrons seem completely unconcerned about stressing over anything. Come on over and browse whilst sipping a tasty brew, allow yourself to be serenaded by live music, find out what local artists and artisans are up to these days. For more information click on the poster (above) for a better view, or google it.

Twitterpated on Capitol Hill

I’m pretty lucky that I have a boss who hates sitting in a cubicle as much as I do. Today we worked from a café on Capitol Hill and it was this afternoon that I decided I really do like Valentines Day...but only on Capitol Hill.

Free red roses were handed out on the street. The sidewalks displayed an assortment of heartfelt, chalk graffiti love notes. Men strode confidently with voluptuous bouquets of flowers for their boyfriends and girlfriends. Toys in Babeland was packed with unashamed shoppers. For the first time in weeks the sun peeked through the thick gray clouds, sprinkled the pedestrians with some warm vitamin D, and any unsuspecting Seattleite caught within its reach appeared to lift two feet off the ground.

Capitol Hill was, in a word, “twitterpated”.

Just your average disaster four times in a row

I stopped blogging for a little while. I have my reasons. Below is a recap of my last two weeks, in bulleted form (sorry to those who had to hear the long version):

- January 27: Dinner guests come over to partake in cod/potato stuffed crepes (gluten free) and carrot-ginger soup. Kitchen sink transforms into geyser of mucky, stinky water. Guests help us snake sink to no avail. Plumber is summoned.

- January 28: I come home to find freezing cold breeze blowing through our house which was freshly stripped of all its siding and insulation. House is 38 degrees inside.
- January 29 - February 1: Snowy, rainy, and windy in our town. Spouse and I seek refuge in every warm bar in a 5 mile radius.
- February 2: Spouse gets fed up and insulates our bedroom. Does robot dance in front of silver insulation wall. Complains of severe stomach pains.

- February 3: Spouse returns from emergency appendectomy surgery. In-laws and my family descend upon room 8026. We watch Barak Obama's speech on MSNBC.
- February 5 - 8: Living with in-laws. Spouse is still excited that he got to play Trauma Center for Nintendo DS while in a hospital bed.

- February 8: Throw down $2000 to fix car that fell to pieces whilst driving Spouse to emergency room (serpentine belt, rotors, brake pads, skip plate, starter, window roll up switch thingy)
- February 10: Wine tasting party at my parents house.

What can I say?

Ko Denmark

Plenty of people are dissatisfied with sitting behind a desk and talk about their dreams, starting their own business, not having a boss yadda yadda yadda, Hell, I am one of those people. One day I am determined to start my own hand-made hair-clip business, the next a cheesemongerie - every few months it changes. Rarely do I meet people who actually DO start their own businesses.

Enter Henriette.

We would eat sandwiches and kvetch about work together at ACME CORPORATION. She said she wished there were more organic soap-products on the market. I wished there were too, I said. And now she has done it - she has made lotion, and what jasminy lotion it is! I ordered a bottle. It's lightweight, and smells like milk and lots of jasmine. I put it on at night and the next day I wake up with baby skin. I can put it on my hands, and then open a jar of pickles immediately after because it's not greasy and slippery. Pickles and soft skin = euphoria. The lack of oil-slick alone is reason enough for me to throw away all of my Lush lotions.

Here is her website: http://www.kodenmark.com/

Please take a peek.

Yogurt Success!

Last night I made a successful batch of yogurt for the first time. This happened only because my mother worked at William's-Sonoma and purchased the Euro Cuisine Digital Automatic Yogurt Maker for me for Christmas. It has been sitting on my counter top for weeks, shiny and new, and this is the first time I have had a chance to use it. I apologize for the dark photos, but since our house is wrapped in plastic everything looks like it is the inside of a cave.

There's just something about having a birthday in the second week of January that predestines it to be terrible. Is it the weather? The fact that the holidays are over? What is it that makes January the month where bosses yell, lovers squabble, bank tellers give evil looks, and drivers act meaner on the roads?

I console myself therapy shopping. Behold, a cheerful orange talisman to ward off January that I found at a weather-weary antique store in downtown Kirkland.

So, many thousands of dollars after we agreed to have the entire exterior of our condo ripped off and then replaced, in the middle of winter, we were finally asked to remove all objects from the wall. A night of pulling bookshelves from our wall revealed a sad, scared white palette that was begging for a mural. An email was sent, paint was purchased, friends (and siblings) arrived, and the result was...a church nursery style nightmare of cheerful trees, space aliens, and the tree-spirit of Darth Vader. The below pictures of before and after evidence of our work. The wall is scheduled to be torn down in a few weeks, so we're not terribly distraught.

The inception...

Work in progress...

We have decided to keep our day jobs.

Super Water Warrior

Who needs a toddler when you have a Spouse who will provide mess, crankiness, cute moments, and hours of entertainment, AND has the added benefit of being able to get in the car and pick up the dry cleaning if you’re too tired? Today the Spouse and I were in the grocery store shopping for necessities. While I looked for alfalfa sprouts and over-priced organic yogurt (good health is reserved for the rich…the rest of the masses have to eat sugary Yoplait) he came bounding across the linoleum carrying none other than the nefarious SuperSoaker 30 of childhood ambushes and summer camp games.

We need this, he said, it would be very useful for our home…our 690 square foot home. I’m still a newlywed so I acquiesced, knowing in the back of my mind that after a year or two I would look back and wonder what I was thinking.

The Spouse proudly carried his prize around the grocery store and into the car, and when we arrived home he tore into the brightly colored packaging, impatiently trying to unwind all the twisty ties. Once liberated from its bindings, he hastily filled the squirt gun with water, pumped, primed, and then whisked outside where he proceeded to squirt the entire exterior of our condo balcony. Every spider living on my potted geraniums was dispatched of with ruthless precision. Ladybugs and beetles could not withstand the wrath of the squirt gun. Every plant was watered with cold acuracy.

Victorious, he returned; socks dripping, hair flying, baby-blue eyes flashing. He stalked into the bathroom and subsequently soaked the shower stall. He was helping me clean, he told me. It’s better than having a hose because you can take it inside.

Right now he is hunched over his laptop, writing code, with his glasses reflecting the sunlight so I can’t see his expression. I think he might know I am writing about him. He’s probably checking my blog from his location at the dining room table, and thinking he is pretty smart for preempting me. Little does he know…

There is a gray man who works in my office. A small, self-contained man, with neatly trimmed hair, shaved chin, and pressed clothes. He looks like he pays his taxes on time, does yard work on the weekends, drives a well-tuned, reliable Japanese car – probably an Accord. Even though his name is written in a Plexiglas plaque next to his office I never remember to read it. When I pass his open door, it is all I can do to keep from stopping to gape at the bare walls, the slate-colored computer screen, the books neatly arranged on their dust-free shelf, and him, sitting like a little puff of fog behind his stony desk. Somehow it has been arranged that the lighting in his office is half as bright as the light in the other offices, and is distinctly…gray.

No matter what color of shirt he is wearing, his complexion resembles young cement. As he walks through the halls the color around him seems to drain away, and his cold gray eyes never show any light when he greets people, greyly, without smiling.

I spend a shameful amount of time thinking about this gray man. I wonder if he always looked like this or if it is because he has been working here at ACME CORPORATION for too long. I wonder if he has a gray little wife and two shadowy children. I wonder if he can see in color or if, in his gray world, everything looks as bleak as he does. I wonder, not without terror, if I will be as gray as him someday.

I noticed a curious thing as I was driving around on Phinney Ave in Seattle, the day before Easter. I had every intention of re-visiting my new favorite boutique, The Frock Shop (the only boutique I have ever heard of that is affordable, check it out Seattleites: 6500 Phinney Ave. N. - http://www.shopfrockshop.com/ ) and after spending about 20 minutes trapped in University District traffic I was intensely frustrated when I became embroiled in an entirely different kind of traffic on Phinney, near the zoo.

The cause of this congestion? Mothers. Mothers everywhere.

Hair in pony-tails, pushing strollers, dragging toddlers and diaper bags and sometimes evening fathers, they migrated to the zoo in a slow, nose-wiping, scolding caravan. They clogged the crosswalks, snapped at impatient drivers, and herded their broods across uneven Seattle streets like geese with goslings under their wings.

Apparently the zoo hosts an annual “Bunny Bounce” every year on the Saturday before Easter. I later looked up their website and read that the Bunny Bounce offers exciting times, with “amazing egg hunts for children ages 1 to 8, crafts, bunny encounters, an egg ‘n’ spoon walk, photos by Team Photogenics and eggs-citing zoo programs throughout the day”.

Slowly I inched my vehicle through the crowd, looking out for large headed children that might try to dive under my tires. As I rounded the side of the zoo I saw something else. At the West entrance was a loosely assembled crowd of sign-holding protestors. If I wasn’t so busy trying to keep from squashing children with my car I would have paid closer attention to their signs, but they said something to the effect of “save the bunnies” or “don’t buy bunnies” or “bunnies can’t bounce when they live in your garage” or something.

An hour later I emerged from, another fabulous boutique called Lil Paisley with a green and gold vintage necklace clasped in my sweaty palms (also affordable and terrific – I swear this shop is smaller than my office cubicle: http://stores.lilpaisley.com/ ) and dodged giant raindrops as I jumped into my car. The unseasonably warm rain disturbed me. Although rain in April…or July, or September, was completely normal for Seattle, 70 degree weather and rain was eerie. I meditated on this as I drove home again, once again past the West entrance to the zoo.

The rain increased. It must have been disturbing to the protestors, previously seen picketing outside the zoo as well, for they were nowhere to be seen – perhaps they had taken shelter in a corporate coffeehouse nearby, or the RedMill burger joint up the street? The mothers, however, plowed on, determined that their children should have “bunny encounters”. This is oddly funny to me. As a homeschooled kid, I certainly know how stubborn a mother can be. Come to think of it, my mother would probably be just as tenacious – “You’re going to have your bunny encounter, and you’re going to like it! I didn’t drive all the way out here to let you wimp out from a few little drops of rain!”

Top five annoyances for the week of April 2, 2007 (in order)
1. The fact that H&M doesn't have an online store so I can blow my paycheck on their cheap, trender clothes
2. The crackly paper toilet seat protectors that fall into the bowl before I have a chance to sit on them
3. Friends who move far away so I can't spend time with them any more
4. The fact that for the last several years I thought that the chorus for "Float On" by Modest Mouse went like this: "We'll all float on a cake..."
5. Picking up after myself at home

Apparrently I missed this because I was in Thailand, but I am completely in love with Rodrigo y Gabriela's fiesty and vibrant music! Check them out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lvMQCmUVv8

And even better is their story, which you can listen to here on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6412458

Allow me to rant for just one more minute. Certainly this will not be the last of my complaints against the American female urge to glorify herself through the wedding ceremony – it was a positive feast for my sarcastic appetite, but out of respect to mainly my new family I refrained from writing about the horrors that I saw during the planning of my wedding.

One such horror, however, was a certain wedding website that I visited while I was living in Thailand, sweating in a crowded internet café, trying to figure out how to plan an event from thousands of miles away. Because weddings are distasteful to me, I had the distinct feeling that I was selling off a bit of my soul by registering for said wedding website, but I had no choice. They wouldn’t let me scout out locations and dress designs without an account.

Throughout the course of my engagement they pestered me with “50% off bridesmaid gifts!” and pre-“your big day pampering tips” for local spas and salons. I took it all in stride – I had provided them with my occasionally checked spam email address in anticipation of their not-so-underhanded tactics. I even looked at their tacky products once for a laugh: “Bride to Be” T-shirts and pink flasks. How original!

The wedding day came and went and we zipped off to our honeymoon - despite the fact that my overly-zealous new husband bought me a ticket with the wrong last name since I didn’t change it in the 12 hours between our ceremony and the flight out of town. When I returned from my honeymoon there was an email waiting for me in my spam account: babyshop.com (name is fictional). I was furious. I wrote them a letter:

Please stop insulting me with this crap. Just because I got married doesn’t

mean I am going to start reproducing like a 19-year old from the mid-West.

My wedding is over. I didn't order any of your chintzy bridesmaid gifts,
now leave me alone.

Sorry, I know the reference to the mid-West was incorrect and rude. It was a stretch. At 5 p.m. on a Saturday, waiting for The Spouse to return from work, I was short on analogies.

From one adventure to another. I have discovered that being “lost on earth” is just as easy when you get married as when you travel to humid countries with no traffic laws. Today is Saturday the 24th of March, my one month wedding anniversary. I did my wifely duty this morning and put in a load of laundry, then dragged my bored self over to the mall to paw at over-priced clothing while Jordan works…let me restate that this is Saturday…thanks Jordan’s job! I satisfied myself with buying him two shirts that are in colors I know he will hate. I am formulating a way to try and convince him that Kelly green will look fabulous on him!

Conceptually I don’t like being married. Jordan referred to me once as his wife a few weeks ago and I lashed out. I still tell people that he is my boyfriend. I don’t want to change my name. I tried to convince him to dye his hair blue after the wedding (refused), bought him super-trendy jeans so he will look younger (made me take them back), decided to change my name to Muffy so that it would spice up his bland last name (laughed at me). Despite my insistence that it is purely ironic, he has become surly since I started referring to him as “Snookie”. It’s ironic for pete’s sake!

I heard from Kham Chuen yesterday. Two of the OPC girls have been accepted to secondary school and he needs 5000 baht per girl per year. I also heard from Julia, our Austrian volunteer. She will be revisiting OPC in a few months and asked me if I would be interested in joining her. I have decided to give it some serious thought and then broach the subject with The Spouse.

I don’t know why I even started writing anymore since no one is interested in the adventures of a young, freaked out wife. I wonder if being married means I can’t volunteer at organizations anymore…

Yesterday evening I had my final dinner with the kids. Jon and some of the older children and I prepared food at the OPC office. We sang songs and peeled garlic together as the sun set. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind rustling the almost-ready rice and the kids quiet chatter and laughter and thought about everything that has happened to me at OPC. I do not know if I have changed, and I am not sure if I "made a difference" as many people ask me, now my trip is almost complete. I feel that things deterioriated towards the end of thie five and a half months, and I can't help but wish that they had ended differently.

We all ate Kham Chuen's delicious cooking together. I was unable to eat much of it because I am ill right now, but I enjoyed watching the kids go back with their tin plates for seconds, thirds, fourths...

After the kids left Jon and I got on the motorbike and drove to one of the wats in town. Three OPC sdtudents were dancing in a celebration. The wat was flooded with bright lights, people were milling about everywhere, and two stages were set up - one with loud rock karaoke, and another with traditional song and dance recitals. I could see Mokam, Puttaraksa, and Myaou peeking atme from behind the bright pink curtain, laughing and waving. When they began dancing I started to get emotional, and I am not sure why. They finished, changed, and then grabbed our hands and dragged Jon and I off to the mandala maze in the center of the wat. We chased each other around in the mandala for what seemed like hous, and then bought bubble tea.

After a final dash through the mandala maze again we left under a brewing thunderstorm. The girls hugged me and then ran off to find their friends. I held back from crying, but it was difficult.

Katie left this morning and I am glum. It was so nice to have fluent conversation, a friend that I have known my whole life, and her sense of humor here for company. Together we traveled from the far north to the upper southern gulf, shopping mercilessly, drinking daiquiris out of glasses shaped like naked women, getting kicked out of market stalls, soaking in a mineral pool, discussing intricate topics such as the multifaceted mysteries of chocolate and our annoyance at unwanted body hair. Oh, and we went snorkeling but our masks kept leaking.

To console myself I moved into a different guest house. A sullen lady boy wearing a blue headband with a bow checked me in. now I have three days to kill in Bangkok until Jon arrives on Friday.

All of my careful planning came to naught - my visa expired and I had to leave my friend Katie in Bangkok to rush to Aranya Prathet to dash into Cambodia and back into Thailand again. Annoying because Katie is leaving Thailand tomorrow and this took two days out of the time that I could spend with her.

After a five hour bus ride I arrived in Aranya Prathet at 9 p.m. In the dusty orange light from the halogen street lamps I could see...nothing. The place was deserted and creepy. A tuk tuk driver hailed me and offered to take me to a guest house for 60 baht. I had no other options, so I climbed in, his tuk tuk roared, and he drove me a mere 300 meters, across a busy intersection, threw my backpack and I out of the car and demanded his cash. A lot of money for a short distance.

The guest house was locked, but after enough pounding on the door a small twenty-something Thai man materialized and offered me the second worst room I have ever stayed in for 200 baht a night. Immediately next to my room was a raucous karaoke bar where a fight between three women was building up gradually, and would come to a full-blown brawl at about 2 in the morning. I had to give the guest house owner my passport (it's a long story, please don't criticize) with the understanding that I would get it back form him at 8 a.m. the next day so I could leave town. My throat was swollen and sore, and a racking chesty cough rattled my lungs.

The next morning the guest house owner was nowhere to be seen. According to the Cambodian cleaning lady, he was a very bad man, and was sleeping off his hangover in room #10. I waited until 8:30, telling myself that it is not polite to rush the Thai people - they have a different concept of time than Westerners, I am a visitor to their country, I don't want to set a bad example, etc. etc. etc.. I have been very good about being patient with the Thai people, but that morning my stamina failed and I dropped back into a very American attitude. I ran over to room #10, and tapped on the door.

Nothing.

I tapped again. Nothing.

I knocked, loudly. Nothing. The disgruntled Cambodian cleaning lady peeked around the corner, clutching her mop handle with both hands. I pounded my palms against the door. Then I hauled back and started punching it until the the building shook. I also yelled some names at him, but for the sake of my poor Christian mother I won't mention them. I could hear him stirring inside, then he wrenched the door open and blinked at me from crusty, bloodshot eyes.

My passport retrieved, I jumped in a tuk tuk and we puttered towards the border. I meandered through immigration lines, down catwalks and across cesspools in my little blue sun dress, bribes of pink 100 baht notes tucked snugly inside my passport - none of them were refused. After the deed was done I jumped on the first bus back to Bangkok and ate cashew nuts and dried bananas for lunch.

Poipet, the Cambodian compliment to Aranya Prathet, is a sick contrast between arrogant and humble, wealthy and poor. Casinos as big as airplane hangers, white and sparkly in the sun, tower over dirty, sick children begging in the dusty, stinking streets. Rich Asians climb into chauffeured cars and drive past lean, sweaty young Cambodian men and women pulling wooden carts loaded with oranges, pomegranates, and other tradable goods. Just another nasty border town where the absolute best and worst in human nature stands out starkly. This is the last time I'll have to go to one of these towns, and I will not miss it.

When I returned to Bangkok I took a motorbike taxi back to my guest house. While we were tearing down the crowded streets at 80 kilometers an hour, slitting lanes and driving the wrong way down one way streets, a helmet fell from the basket of the motorbike in front of us, directly in our path. I saw the helmet bouncing towards the front wheel, and then I saw our dog that I grew up with - Kiahulani, red apples on my parents apple trees, falling and skinning my knee when I was ten, Joshua hitting me with a tennis racket when I was 15, me throwing my drink in my ex-boyfriends face when I was 22, the first time Jordan told me he loved me, and then I realized that must have been a "life flashing before your eyes" moment just as my hero of the moment, the motorbike taxi driver deftly dodged the helmet, fingered the driver who had lost it, and swore in Thai. Then he stopped the bike.

"Ok you?" He asked?

"Ok, yes", I said, with my heart pounding somewhere in my throat, which was getting more and more sore by the minute. "Ok you?" I asked.

"Very goot!" he yelled, and then we were off again.

First wedding dress fitting today, and the verdict is: for the $250 that I am paying for this dress I am most impressed. Olan the tailor is also impressed with herself, and she told me so emphatically. Now I wish I had my mother and girlfriends with me so that I could have someone to be excited with...

Tomorrow morning I am leaving for Chiang Mai to have my wedding dress fitting, buy Christmas gifts for my family, and meet my friend Katie who is flying out here to visit me. The last few days have been frantic as I have been packing up some things, cleaning, teaching my last classes, and starting a construction project at our office.

Lately the alcoholic neighbor has stepped up her aggression, and continually breaks into the office to steal food, or harasses Kham Chuen, the kids, and me while I am teaching. My friend Jon donated money and time (he will fly out here in November) to build the fence, but we cannot wait until November because she is starting to become violent. Therefore, the fence was started this week, and the cost was surprisingly more than I expected.

If anyone reading feels the need to donate some cash towards the fence project, at this point we will come up about $50 short.

There is a night market here in Mae Hong Son that will last until the end of October. It is a quiet affair, with local vendors selling things they made themselves on one street, and a prodigious food market on another street, where the Thais lazily stroll from stall to stall, swinging bags of goodies wrapped in green leaves.

This evening, as I was prowling the food market for dinner (I chose some sticky rice, chili paste, and satay) the lights flickered simultaneously, and then abruptly went out. The people in the market let out a collective "oi!" but it was good natured. All of the late night diners sitting by the lake continued to joke with each other, sip their beer, and paw at their sticky rice in the dark. Some children brough out a package of sparkler fireworks leftover from the lent festival, and soon flares of pink and blue lit the street. I tiptoed to the side of the lake and waited for the lights to come on – and chanced to look up. The stars were twinkling with vigor, and for the first time since I was a little girl I saw the murky streak of the milky way. Honestly, I am so unused to nights without light pollution that I had quite forgotten about the existence of the milky way.

Five minutes later, while I stared open mouthed at the sky and Thai people caroused around me in the dark, the lights went on, and a whoop erupted from the market. The people assumed their original positions and commenced to shuffle in their flipflops, swing their bags of leafed treats, and yell good natured insults at each other.