| Glorious day with Mom |
[13 Jul 2008|01:02am] |
So we started off the day at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant, Cafe Colucci in Berkeley. That's not a place I ever thought I'd get Mom to - the stew spices would not be to her liking - but she wanted eggs, and I wanted beans, and I remembered that Cafe Colucci serves breakfast. She was adventurous and did try some bits of my veggie combo... and liked it! Wow, I can take her for Ethiopian food now - that is awesome.
Next we drove to Tiburon, since Mom had read an article about it. We oohed and aahed over the houses, and the views, and the houses-with-views... it is a pretty place. Mediterranean-style in some ways, with old churches and colorful houses lining the hillsides all the way down to the fair-sized harbor. We saw a fleet of teensy sailboats following a larger one like ducklings after a mother-duck. We also found 4 geocaches, two of which were cleverly concealed.
With time left to spare in the day, we headed to the Legion of Honor museum, as Mom had noticed signs for an exhibit on 4 Women Impressionists. I liked reading their autobiographies, which detailed their struggles in making names and places for themselves in their male-dominated art world. One of them was married to another artist, who disliked her painting style and eventually talked her out of pursuing her art. Another never married, so that she could keep her freedom to pursue her art - but the repeated theme of mother-and-child in her work belies a certain wistfulness over that choice.
I enjoyed seeing the ancient blown glass vessels - such intense colors! - and a pretty Egyptian beaded collar from ~1500 BC, which contained stitches that I know how to do! My favorite painting at the Legion was by Konstantin Makovsky, The Russian Bride's Attire, which depicts a roomful of women fluttering around a shy raven-haired beauty and preparing her for her wedding. There's an amusing detail of the bride's father attempting to peer into the room and being shooed out by one of the women as another looks on with amusement. So much busy lush detail in that piece! It reminds me of an Orthodox Jewish wedding I once attended, with all the family offering commentary at once on how best to do things, and with the bride being treated like a literal queen, as the reverent center of attention, garbed richly and carefully to be presented to her groom.
I also liked, across from it, Bouguereau's The Broken Pitcher, for its depth of expression. Also, something about that girl seems to bear resemblance to some of my ancestors - her body shape and big eyes - so it's doubly endearing.
We went next to a Mediterranean restaurant for dinner... I had baba ghanouj made with mint and caramelized onion and flaky wisps of bread, along with a salad of baby greens, beets, walnuts, feta and pomegranate dressing.
And then Mom treated me to a production of A Chorus Line at the Curran Theatre! I enjoyed it lots... Morales was sassy and cute with a cuddly-looking bounce to her, and Paul was such a lovable tragic figure, and Cassie was heroic and oh, her dancing and that classic-style red dress.
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| Mom's fun to be a foodie with... |
[11 Jul 2008|11:24pm] |
...she arrives off the plane all bright and chipper, armed with her usual raft of newspaper clippings - useful ones, full of restaurant reviews of the very best vegetarian fare around town. She's wonderfully indulging when it comes to my weird culinary preferences, as long as I don't ask her to eat curry.
So the noon hour found us at Cafe Gratitude - oh goodness, how is it that I've never managed to eat there before? It's paradise for someone who's veg and low-gly... they focus on raw vegan delicacies, and have the most gorgeous salads full of colors like pink and orange and red, and excellent protein varieties, and ooh, dessert - we shared a vegan chocolate cream pie.
Then we took a spin up high into the Berkeley hills, into Tilden Park. We took a pretty wander around part of Lake Anza, and admired the reservoir views from Inspiration Point.
For dinner we headed to the south bay and met up with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) oakdragon - this was his first time meeting my mother, and it was a lovely warm relaxed meal together. We sampled dish after dish of dim sum from Loon Wah in Cupertino, enjoying such delights as lotus seed balls and turnip cake and pan fried greens pocket and honeyed walnuts and bean curd skin. Then Don took us to find a cleverly camo'ed geocache a couple of blocks away. Afterwards we dropped him off at his house and said hi to everyone there briefly, and headed back up to Mom's hotel - she's staying at the Claremont. We nibbled heirloom beets and cresses and fine cheeses there, as a late-night appetizer.
Tomorrow we'll find some cute little place to go geocaching in -- Mom's clipped an article on Tiburon, so that's one possibility...
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| My 415 phone number is working again... And I have a phone! |
[11 Jul 2008|09:56am] |
Thanks so very much to tenacious_snail, who gave me her old treo... I've got my old sim card in it and so I now once again have a phone and my old number is working. Relief!
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| A dizzying array of phone options... not to mention resets... |
[09 Jul 2008|06:28pm] |
Well, at this point after attempting soft resets, hard resets, an intricate type of reset that involves pressing 3 buttons with 2 hands while poking at a 4th with a stylus held between one's teeth (I kid you not), and 2 stymied store clerks, I think it is safe to declare my Treo defunct.
I'm eligible for a phone upgrade via AT&T, and so I spent the morning researching many, many phone options - first online, and then down at the local store branch. I came away from the process feeling disgruntled - there are so many good phone features out there, and each of the high-end phones seems to have a different subset of them but not the full assortment. This one has GPS but not a touchscreen. That one has both of those but not built-in IM. And so forth. Nothing has screamed "this one!" so far, and so I haven't bought one yet.
I need to look into a couple more options that weren't on display at the store (anyone got any experience with the LG VU?), but I think I'm currently waffling between just buying another Treo - used and cheap off Craigslist, to be used with my Sim card, and with features I'm already familiar with - vs. buying the new iphone, due out this Friday. Of course, it'll be well nigh impossible to actually get it this Friday - they're expecting huge lines and my mother is coming into town - and I am hesitant to buy one before I know more about how well it works. A middle ground option would be to get the used Treo now, and then when that one goes, to look into the by-then-less-new iphone, with lots more info at hand at that point about its functionality and what programs are available to run on it.
Thanks very, very much to emmett_the_sane, who has lent me his London partner's iphone to use for the next few days, to citore, who let me come by late at night and test my old phone using oakdragon's treo battery, and to mikz, who helped me to optimize the temporary iphone's usability for my needs.
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| Oh hell, my phone went kaput |
[08 Jul 2008|12:06am] |
I can phone in on a different line to collect my voicemails, but otherwise, I can't use it - the treo keeps rebooting and rebooting. I at least happened to sync it just minutes before it went down, so I've got all my contacts stored, but... sigh.
So not a good time for this.
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| Happy Birthday, Runeshower! |
[02 Jul 2008|01:31am] |
Hope your day and your year to come are absolutely wonderful! I am so happy for your friendship in my life.
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| Happy Silver Anniversary, Pat and Jay! |
[01 Jul 2008|05:27pm] |
It's now July 2nd in France, where you are... so I'll wish you a wonderfully joyous 25th anniversary, and lots more years of joy in each others love to come.
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| Oh, excellent! |
[29 Jun 2008|08:38pm] |
A book that I have a chapter in is winning an award! Ron Fox, the book's editor, wrote this note to those of us who contributed chapters:
APA Division 44 Distinguished Book Award:
I (referring to Ron Fox, not cyan_blue) just received notification from the APA Division 44 Awards Committee that I have been selected as the recipient of the 2008 APA Division 44 Distinguished Book Award for our book "Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men."
This is really an honor for all of us and shows the degree to which Division 44 is committed to acknowledging and recognizing the work that we have all been doing in terms of education, research, therapy, and advocacy in the area of bisexual issues.
A copy of my chapter, Therapy with Clients Who Are Bisexual and Polyamorous, is here (the book is also a special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality):
http://www.numenor.org/~gdw/psychologist/bipolycounseling.html
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| We love our goats, we do... |
[24 Jun 2008|02:20am] |
...but they sure are LOUD at night!
No, we don't have goats at our house - but we do have huge herds of them in the neighborhood, grazing on the dry grasses, to help prevent the spread of fires in these Oakland hills. We are very happy to have them here... they are doing an important service. They might well be saving our house.
But, yeah. Loud. Incessant baa, baa, baa - sometimes solo, sometimes in a whole chorus. All night long.
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| Restaurant saving coupons... |
[23 Jun 2008|10:59pm] |
Hey, this is cool... if you go to http://www.restaurant.com/ and enter your zip code, you can find participating restaurants that you can buy significant coupons for (like $25 worth of food for $10).
Some of these have additional terms, like "valid only with minimum purchase of $35" - but it's still a very good deal.
I found a few restaurants that I already go to on the list - and plenty more that I'd be willing to try, for those prices!
Thanks to geekchick for indirectly providing the link, via another website that she linked to :-)
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| Bugs of the South ;-) |
[20 Jun 2008|08:58pm] |
I'm happy to report that my normal squeamishness about insects and arachnids can be overcome by my fascination with discovering new (to me) species when I travel. That and the temptation of figuring out the perfect way of framing their beauty with my lens... before they flit away.
So, while it's sort of an odd focus for a travelogue, here are some photos of bugs and butterflies from Houston and Atlanta.
( See, I'm being nice and starting with the pretty butterfly, in case any of the rest of you are squeamish as well. More intense bugginess herein... )
I did have some challenges with bugs on this trip, though. The first was while I was walking the trails of the bayou... a large bee, and then its cousin, began to really dog my path relentlessly. I actually cut that trail walk short and headed back to more populated areas... I've never been stung by a bee, I am allergic to lots of things, and an isolated mile loop trail would not be the place to determine for the first time whether I'm allergic to bee stings.
The other challenge... well, lets just say that the dirt mound near a geocache hide did *not* turn out to be the optimal place to rest to log the find. Fortunately the ants swarmed the cache first, and I was able to jump off the mound before more than 2-3 managed to jab their little pointy parts into me. Goodness, but those teensy little things pack quite a pinch! Not fire-ants... these were black. Once I was clear, I managed to lean back in and retrieve the cache by its one non-swarmed corner, and fling that off the mound as well... eventually there were few enough ants on it that I could clean it out and replace it several feet away in its hiding spot. I posted a warning to future 'cachers in my cache log.
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| Great parents think alike... |
[19 Jun 2008|01:33am] |
Last week I got to meet brian1789's family in Georgia and see his childhood photographs for the first time... And I noticed that his parents had taken a photo of him that was endearingly similar to one that my parents had taken of me as a child, each of us asleep with our arm outstretched and a siamese cat curled in close...
(That's him at age 9 and me at age 6 :-)
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| Conversations with the visiting Ottawa sweetie, who had his lay ordination as a zen monk yesterday, |
[15 Jun 2008|04:43pm] |
and who is recovering from cancer sugery:
Me: Have you seen [A] since your last visit here, or has she moved back to Germany by now?
DEC: She has moved back to Germany. It will likely be several years before I see her again.
Me: Are your doctors predicting that you have several years left in which to not see her, then?
DEC: They are hopeful. But it is never certain.
Me: That is very good news then.
DEC: We are reasonably certain of having this afternoon together, at least. I suggest you make good use of it.
Me: I intend to...
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| Enjoying Georgia and Houston |
[13 Jun 2008|09:13am] |
Hi from Houston, where I'm taking some downtime in our hotel room before heading out to check out a bayou.
The trip is being very good, and I've been appreciating all of your sightseeing recommendations tremendously. On Wednesday, I dropped brian1789 off at Georgia Tech and went off to explore the region. First I went to the Cyclorama (I keep wanting to say Cyclothymia ;-) which is a huge painting that encircles a room, and you sit in the middle of the room on a platform which revolves to let you see each part in turn. It depicts the Civil War battles that took place in the region.
Then I met zwol and queenpam at Cafe Intermezzo, which has an impressive selection of beverages - the drinks list is a many-page pamphlet. He recommended the hot chocolate, of which there were about 8 different types to choose among... mine was rich and came with schlag and dutch chocolate chips :) I got black bean hummus with greens, and enjoyed their company lots - it was sweet of you folks to take the time out to come meet me in the midst of preparing to move!
After that I rode out to Stone Mountain, a huge monolith of granite surrounded by pretty woodlands. Due to incoming storms it wasn't possible to ride the tram up to the top, but I enjoyed finding a geocache and wandering the grounds, and taking in the picturesque scenery.
Picked Jay up from Georgia Tech, and he drove me out to his childhood home where I got to meet his parents, brother and nieces for the first time. That was a wonderful visit - I felt very welcomed, and enjoyed their company a lot. I got to see pictures of Jay when he was little, and I brought my laptop over so that I could show them some recent pictures and videos of his kids in turn. We stayed 'til late into the night, talking and hanging out.
Jay also showed me some places of interest in Marietta and Austell - his high school and elementary school, the places where he held his first jobs, a house where he and patgreene lived many years ago, and also some interesting features of the terrain - you can see furrows in the earth in the places where the Civil War battle trenches were dug in those towns. It was eerie to see those trench sites after having just seen films and artwork of those very battles at the Cyclorama that morning - it was sombering to think that those events took place right on these spots that we were looking at. He even showed me one such furrow in the back yard of his family home.
In the morning I got to meet his younger sister, who was just off-shift from her job as a firefighter. She is someone with lots of adventuring spirit and many good stories to tell, and breakfast ended long before we were ready to stop talking. I hurriedly drove Jay back over to Georgia Tech to arrive by 9:30am, where he served on a student's doctoral defense committee - and later in the day I got to meet and congratulate the new doctor. Meanwhile, I did another round of sightseeing in town.
I took in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which has a truly lovely orchid collection, and I got to indulge my macro photo habit - I'll post some of the good ones later. Then I had a scrumptious lunch at Soul Vegetarian - some amazing ginger root juice, a hearty garlicky split pea soup, and battered cauliflower dipped in BBQ sauce. YUM!
Afterwards I went to the High Museum of Art, where Jay's mother is a member, and she graciously arranged for me to see the museum for free. I enjoyed the exhibit on Greek and Middle Eastern statuary and artifacts from the Louvre, as well as a photo-documentary of civil rights era photography and relics. Then it was time to pick up Jay again, and off to the airport we went.
We arrived into Houston around dinnertime, and discovered an amazing Jamaican restaurant, Caribbean Jerk Cuisine. The food was to swoon for... succulent island plantains, savory callaloo, bittersweet mauby bark beverage for me, a strong ginger soda for Jay. Jay found his jerk chicken to be eye-wateringly spicy and delicious.
We drove the rest of the way to our hotel, noting the $3.85 gas prices with some wistfulness (they've gone up past $4.50 in California). After we checked into our hotel we looked up some of the local geocaches and set off to do some night 'caching. We had a bit of a comedy of errors of technological failures at first - a slow 'net connection for looking up caches; batteries running down on one of the GPSrs; me forgetting the flashlight entirely ;-) - but we persevered, and were proud to locate 3 caches in the dark. We also simultaneously thought of the notion of using the car headlights as a flashlight - and it worked like a charm.
Had a sweet slow morning together before Jay headed off to his meeting today, and I'm now catching up on 3 days of email and LJ before wandering off to see a local bayou. Oh, for the geocachers on the list, you'll be amused to see this string of geocaches that I noticed in the area - now *that*'s a proper 'caching trail! (Zoom out a couple clicks to see just how far the line extends).
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| hi from Marietta, Ga |
[10 Jun 2008|08:59pm] |
brian1789 and I are safely in the Atlanta area, and have been having a most excellent evening. The ride was a smooth one, with pretty views of red Utah earths and the silvery Tennessee River.
After landing we went to Mary Mac's Tea Room for dinner, which a bunch of you recommended, and which turns out to be one of the places that Jay liked to dine at as a grad student at GA Tech. We had fried green tomatoes & okra, corn popovers, squash & sweet potato souffles, spiced apples, pears w/ cheese, peach cobbler, bread wine pudding, and some of that very sweet Southern iced tea.
Then, some night geocaching... we found both of the ones we searched for, and met a very friendly tabby along the way. The local caches are of excellent size. We dropped one of runeshower's Tiny Tarot sig items off in one of those caches... so we can now be corny and say that the Devil has gone down to Georgia ;-)
Tomorrow, he goes off to do some drill testing and I'll choose from some of the wonderful activities that you all have recommended... then we will have dinner with his parents and siblings, who I'm looking forward to meeting for the first time.
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| What are some must-sees in Atlanta? |
[05 Jun 2008|02:35pm] |
So I'll be in Atlanta next week, with a bit of time free to explore the area, and I would love peoples' recommendations of things to see. I am fond of nature scenery and museums and quirky little offbeat places, and less so of anything swarming with tourists. (For instance, if an out of town visitor were coming to SF, I'd take them exploring along the coastline and to the ScharffenBerger chocolate factory, and I'd steer them well clear of Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli Square and that sort of thing). Recommendations of indoor activities would be a plus, as I hear the forecast is for rain.
Likewise, any must-try local foods (keeping in mind I'm vegetarian)? (Again, as an example, I'd tell someone visiting NYC that they needed to try some NY pizza and a bagel and a pushcart knish and some of those little sweet steaming praline things).
Thanks!
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| Alameda County - Measure F |
[02 Jun 2008|05:56pm] |
Am pondering Alameda County's Measure F that is up for vote in tomorrow's election... it essentially asks the entire county to vote on whether or not to continue a tax that is only levied on part of the county, for which the revenue theoretically benefits the entire county, although the language does not legally bind the money to be used for any purpose.
On the surface of it, I'd say that it doesn't seem ethical to vote for a tax that isn't levied on me... Is there anything I'm missing there?
Also, given that premise, would it be better to vote No or to not vote at all on that measure (after all, if that portion of the county does want to be taxed thusly, which rumor has it they have in the past, then I don't want to vote against their prerogative to be taxed). Anyone know what the current prevailing preference is in the affected part of the county?
Further, has anyone local come across any good online source for candidate statements for 18th Assembly District County Central Committee and 4th District County Supervisor? The voter info pamphlet didn't contain those. Thanks...
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