Volterra exceeds expectations

This evening Zorg and I dined at Volterra, a Northern Italian restaurant that opened in Ballard earlier this year and has received high praise from the local foodies. It's not for everybody; many of the diners who left comments about Volterra on CitySearch seemed put off by the lack of familiar Southern Italian dishes featured in the couple hundred other Italian-style restaurants in King County.

Zorg and I have quite different culinary backgrounds and interests, but we both found Volterra's take on Italian impressive and tasty.

We began with two of the house special cocktails. Mine featured a homemade limoncello (lemon peel liquor). It was quite smooth and well balanced. Zorg had an espresso martini; too sweet for my taste, but he liked it. Next time I want to try the grapefruit negroni.

The appetizers and salads were small, tasty and inexpensive (about $7 each). I had wild boar proscuitto on a bed of greens, followed by a little salad of greens, sliced roasted beets, and sliced grana parmesan. Perfect! Zorg had the special of the evening, veal-stuffed calamari in a light tomato sauce. The big calamari tubes were as tender as a rigatoni, and the stuffing was complex and interesting.

The main courses were substantial. Zorg chose one of the specials, wide noodles with ragu. It was one of the best ragu sauces I've ever tasted. I had lobster ravioli in a lobster sauce. The ravioli were stuffed with big chunks of succulent lobster. The lobster sauce, with cream and tomatoes, wasn't quite on target, however. Again, both dishes were reasonably priced at about $18 each, and we took quite a bit home with us in boxes. Desserts at Volterra are intense; I had a panna cotta with an extremely fragrant floral honey and fresh strawberries. Zorg went for a semi-freddo, two flavors, with a flavored whipped cream. The combination was decidedly heady, more to his taste than mine.

Volterra's unerring selection of top-flight ingredients, from the tender greens to the out-of-season strawberries, allows them to cook up dishes with vivid and complex flavors -- without covering dishes in overpowering garlic sauces or tsunamis of dark green olive oil that leave you feeling hung over the next day.

OK, so we completely overdid it. The next time I go back, I'll likely stick with a cocktail, appetizer and salad -- in part because those were the most interesting offerings. I wanted to taste every single one they had on the menu!

I mention the prices because the evening before I'd eaten at a similarly priced restaurant in Ballard and the food wasn't half as impressive.

My only caveats: The recorded music -- more industrial trance than jazz -- is just too LOUD. And, like many of Seattle's trendy new eateries, a table for two is practically on top of the table for two next to you. This is not the place for an intimate conversation. If you open your mouth, just put a forkful of pappardelle with duck sauce in it.

Patio's done!

Big improvement. Here are the before and after shots:

$5 off your $20 purchase at Epilogue Books

Epilogue Books on Market Street in Ballard is having a Dec. 10 all-day open house with everything in the store 20 percent off. They have a nice mix of used and remaindered books, in very fine condition. They also have a holiday discount coupon that customers have been invited to forward to friends. So, download it here and enjoy Epilogue.

Help! I'm stuck in the San Jose airport

What, I thought, could have been worse than this morning's flight to San Jose from Seattle, packed to the gills with people who seemed to have been eating garlic-laced turkey for the past several days? Followed by an hour-long taxi line and a van driver who didn't seem to have any idea where she was going, it was one of the worst trips down here I've had in the past five years.

This evening, when I arrived at the airport for my return flight, I was thrilled to see just a few dozen folks in the waiting area for the Seattle flight. Unfortunately, the plane itself is missing in action.

I still have a Boingo internet account, which can be reactivated on a monthly basis. I'm logged in, and, I guess, will get to work on various projects after I've finished blogging. I'm hoping that there will be plenty of room on the plane and I can sleep on the way to Seattle. Unless, of course, it arrives with hordes of travelers who are staying on the flight...Arggggh!

Too cute

A graphic design friend of mine is involved in the launch of Cute Overload, a site featuring incredibly cute photos of fuzzy animals, plus a design analysis of what constitutes cute.

It has one definite advantage over other "cute animal" sites: All the photos are in focus and properly exposed.

Where do we go from here?

Here's an excellent interview with Mark Hallenbeck, the Director of the Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC) at the University of Washington about Seattle's transportation woes. And keep in mind, this was before the two monorail trains got stuck together this past weekend!

Video conferencing, family style

My late grandfather used to tell us that in our lifetimes we'd be able to talk on the phone and see the person we were talking with.

A few minutes ago, my computer announced that I had an audio iChat invitation from his daughter (my 87-year-old mother) in Florida. I answered, and she was just thrilled to have discovered what is essentially free long-distance phone service. (She'd "called" to tell me that her new Kensington mouse had arrived.)

If my mom gets an iSight camera (such as I have) we will have free video conferencing -- just the service her dad predicted.

For anyone wondering what on earth I'm talking about: iChat for Mac OS X is a free download from Apple. The text instant messaging and audio versions work with Mac OS X; to use the video version, you need the latest version of Mac OS X, v10.4 "Tiger" and a webcam like the iSight. To IM or conference with iChat, log in with an AIM account name or create a trial .Mac account and log in with your .Mac account name. You get to keep the name and use iChat even after the .Mac trial expires.

iChat instant messaging is also great for exchanging files. You can drag and drop graphics or text files right into the message field of your chat and the other person can open them immediately and discuss the contents with you. I use this technique quite a bit for reviewing layouts with graphic designers.

A banner week for letters to the editor

Collision detection reprints a short-but-sweet letter that appeared in Vanity Fair in rebuttal to some egocentric blathering from celebrity Paris Hilton's sister Nicky.

The Zorg called my attention to this even shorter gem in the Monday Seattle Times:

"Medicare: proof that complexity doesn't always imply intelligent
design..."

—Ray Hamlin, Burien

Kaylee using the "Go-Meow" Guide

Close cover before striking

About 20 years ago, while paging through a catalog, I came across a frame for displaying matchbook covers. Since my father had a big drawerfull of matchbooks from the 50s and 60s (my mom was always after him to toss them), I gave him the frame for Christmas. He put some beautiful matchbooks in the display. I'm not sure how he chose them, but it looks as though he picked ones from his travels for the Office of Naval Research and NASA — the majority of them from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and various desert test stations in the Southwest. There is also a nice group from posh restaurants in Washington, D.C.

I look at these covers and I'm taken back to the era of the Cold War, men wearing fedoras, cocktail lounges, cool jazz, and Raymond Chandler. The cover for the Blue Fox in San Francisco opens to give the address of "659 MERCHANT STREET, OPPOSITE THE MORGUE." Somehow, I don't think "THE MORGUE" was a proto-Goth club.

Here are a few of my favorites:


The California Hotel, San Bernardino. There are similar covers showing Motel Freso (in Fresno) and Furnace Creek, a hotel in Death Valley.








The Porte-Avions Bearn (aircraft carrier). There were fewer European matchbooks than I'd expected; the other one was from the Grand Hotel National Luzerne. My father was so impressed by the Grand Hotel that he insisted that we all stay there in a suite in 1984, when I was living in Europe and he brought my mom over on her first trip overseas. It was a pretty spectacular place, with Oriental rugs in every room, and a waiter who brought me breakfast in bed.


The Balkan Room, Washington, D.C. I don't remember my dad mentioning the Balkan Room, though he did talk about the Roumanian Inn. These were the days of three-martini lunches!













Lulu Belle, Scottsdale, AZ. The interior text on this matchbook describes it as "Show place of Scottsdale, the West's most Western town" and goes on to promise "Food and Fun." Hmm...













Water Gate Inn on the Potomac, Washington D.C. This Water Gate preceded the Watergate business complex where all the Nixon-era skullduggery took place. My parents took me to this Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant a few times; it was famous for its popovers. The Water Gate Inn was demolished in 1966 to make way for the Kennedy Center, but the popovers live on at the sister restaurant, Normandie Farm.

What to bring to the feast

Thanksgiving.

How can you not like a holiday that has a standard menu requiring minimal advance thought? At the worst, it's: Go to supermarket, pick up obvious, well-labeled ingredients, cook standard dishes on autopilot, follow familiar streets (over river, through woods) to relatives' house, nod agreeably at whatever people say, and eat.

If you feel creative, and are considering squash chiffon pie instead of pumpkin pie, you probably won't get extra points. Think about it: Haven't you heard more stories about Thanksgiving cooking disasters (read on) than stories about brilliant and original creations? There is a reason why we are still eating many of the same dishes served by the Pilgrims (with perhaps the addition of the marshmallows in the yams).

At Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for a relaxing, guilt-free holiday, for our good health, enjoyable jobs, fantastic friends, happy families, and last but not least, our wonderful neighborhood.

And I'm thankful for the memories of some truly distinctive Thanksgiving disasters. Here are a couple of my favorites:

1964 (or thereabouts) - I wandered into my aunt and uncle's elegant dining room, minutes before we were going to be called to the beautifully appointed table. My aunt Arv was in the kitchen, whipping mashed potatoes in her KitchenAid mixer. My uncle Bob was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the diningroom, next to the buffet. Huh? It seems he'd placed the china tray with the 20-pound turkey on a swing-up wing of the buffet that had not been securely braced; it had promptly swung back down, dumping the turkey onto the floor and covering the rug with juice and stuffing. Bob was carefully spooning stuffing back into the turkey. I was not the sort of child given to yelling "Hey! Bob dropped the turkey." Instead, I went back into the family room where all the guests were enjoying appetizers and cocktails, and quietly told my father what had happened. He picked up his camera and we both tiptoed back into the diningroom, where he carefully focused, then yelled "Hey! Bob!" and got a memorable picture. (The turkey made it to the table, and tasted, we thought, particularly delicious. "It's the rug fibers in the stuffing," my cousin Buck assured us.)

1987 (give or take a year) - I had set up a particularly nice table for a dozen friends at the Shady Rest, my Wallingford bungalow, with a blue plaid tablecloth, heavy wine goblets, colorful Stangl dinnerware, and, as I recall, a pretty decent turkey with stuffing for both the pro-oyster and anti-oyster contingents. All went well until we reached dessert. One of the gourmets among us had brought a new-fangled whipped cream canister with various downpointing levers and spouts. My friend Jim, fiddling with the controls, successfully sprayed gobs of whipped cream not in the direction of his pie but in the direction of Nina's suede skirt. Was Roger standing by with his camera? You bet he was.

The moral of these stories: Have a great Thanksgiving, and don't forget to take along a camera.

Frappr!

I'm feeling so hip -- I was invited to a Frappr group! But what's so weird about the invite is that it came from one of the least techie, most touchy-feeling web groups I know, the Yahoo Deaf White Cats group. Yeah, Deaf White Cats!

If you're exploring Frappr, you might look for me on there as Mysterious Traveler.

In a fog

Seattle is apparently experiencing some kind of annual weather event in which cold damp fog enshrouds the neighborhoods. It certainly helped cast a pall over the "before" pictures I took this weekend for our patio project. Our backyard, which looks rather sweet and whimsical in the summer, barely even qualifies as "shabby chic" in November. And after we moved all the glazed pots and white metal patio furniture out of the way, the result was plain, unadulterated "shabby." In fact, it's so grim I don't plan to post the "before" pictures until there are some "after" pictures to go with them. We're thinking that'll be around December 5.

And, speaking of fog, Zorg and I went to our first round of holiday events Saturday night. I discovered two things:

I have the best holiday outfit I've had in a long, long time

We are both dangerously out of practice at swilling cocktails and grazing through the evening on salty little hors d'oeuvres and cholesterol laden mini-desserts while beaming at people we barely know and carrying on conversations in loud rooms.

There were moments the following day when we each thought we were going to expire (though the other one was usually able to offer reassurance that the end was not imminent). I was barely able to get my act together in time to meet my friend Sharon to shop the Best of the Northwest crafts extravaganza. But I'm glad I did. We had a delightful time, and I purchased the perfect evening bag to round out my holiday outfit. How perfect is this bag? When I'm not wearing it, it doubles as artwork you can hang on the wall.

Sharon brought me the 1970s-era KitchenAid mixer I'd spotted on Craig's List at an estate sale near her neighborhood. She was able to purchase a few things at the estate sale as well, so everyone came out ahead. The mixer is in the kitchen, waiting for a test drive. It's one heavy, serious piece of equipment.

In San Jose, with shrimp

Last night a group of us from work went to something called The Viking Store (kitchenware) for a cooking class. We made a Mediterranean salad (vegetables, pita, and dressing), steak with an herbed butter sauce, oven-baked seasoned potatoes, and ice cream with Jim Beam caramel sauce. We also made marinated grilled shrimp, which we'd like to forget, but can't, because the smell of incinerated marinated grilled shrimp still lingers in everything we brought to the session, including purses and jackets.

It's 80 degrees here today, so I have my corduroy jacket airing out and am hoping it will be wearable before I need to get on the airplane back to Seattle this evening. It promises to be a jam-packed pre-Thanksgiving flight as the Silicon Valley tech workforce makes its weekend exodus back to the more affordable cities where we live.

Other blogs, other universes

Occasionally I stumble upon well-written blogs by people who live in quite different universes. I find them fascinating! I subscribe, and reading the daily entries is better than following a soap-opera. For awhile, I kept up with the blog of a survivalist from West Virginia, but eventually his entries took a racist turn and I unsubscribed.

Currently I follow a blog by an Orthodox Jewish school teacher who is looking for a husband and is being set up by matchmakers in a series of hilarious mis-matches. She is quite a handful (the blogger), and I imagine the matchmakers and potential husbands are as disconcerted by the disasterous dates as she is.

I have recently come across a blog by a Seattle-based dominatrix, and am getting another view of the city. She and her boyfriend are in the process of buying a house, and she's been posting pictures of the houses she's checked out but rejected. In addition to the usual sorts of amenities we all look for in a new house, she needs a basement with high ceilings (for hanging equipment) and a house with a fairly private entrance -- thus a house on a cul-de-sac, with all the neighbors looking the front door, just wasn't for her.

There's a nice brick house up for sale one street over from us...it has a basement, and is probably fairly sound-proof. Hmmm.

Whose 70s were those, anyway?

60s, 70s and 80s nostalgia pieces, like this website, always make me wonder if I'm on the wrong planet. I was into bluegrass when everyone else was doing disco, and I wouldn't know the Bay City Rollers if one rolled over me. Oh, well, if I didn't get it the first time, I guess I'll be spared the pain of missing it now.

The cake

Taking a picture of a chocolate cake presents many of the same problems as taking a picture of a black cat, except that on the cat at least the eyes stand out. Then, again, the cake didn't move. Here it is:

Adventures in Bundt

Last summer an old friend who has been trying to find himself for 50-odd years decided to move the search overseas. At his leaving-the-country yard sale I picked up a top-of-the-line, unused, Nordic Ware non-stick Bundt pan, which I've been promising myself I would use.

This week's vacation, plus a potluck invitation for this evening, seemed like a good oppportunity.

What is a "Bundt?"

Bundt is what happened when a traditional Eastern European Kugelhopf pan (used to bake yeasted cakes) met a marketing department.

A Kugelhopf pan is a circular metal mold, sometimes with peaks. The ladies of Minneapolis Hadassah approached Nordic Ware with a request for a Kugelhopf pan, Nordic Ware designers came up with one, and the cookware company went on to promote it as a "Bundt pan" for the baking of regular (non-yeasted) cakes. In the 1960s, Bundt cakes made it into the mainstream via cooking contests and ladies magazines and in 1972 Pillbury began to sell special Bundt cake mixes for the 12-cup batter pans. Nordic Ware now makes Bundt pans in dozens of shapes and sizes: Star, Cathedral, Chrysanthemum, Holiday Tree, Fleur-de-Lis, Bavaria, Rose -- even a Bundt brownie pan. But the ultimate, the absolute ultimate, is Williams-Sonoma's Bundt Sandcastle pan (apparently a W-S exclusive), which inspired this blog entry from High Maintenance Mom. According to the Nordic Ware site, there are now 45 million Bundt pans in American homes. Since moving to Ballard, I have met quite a few nice Bundt pans at yard sales.

BTW, mine's a plain Bundt pan.

The retro charm of the Bundt pan, especially a non-stick one like the high-end Nordic Ware, is that you can create an extremely fancy-looking cake without much work. These things don't even have frosting, just a sprinkling of powdered sugar that goes on after the cake has cooled. Theoretically, you could get away with just mixing up a cake mix (make sure it's for a 12-cup Bundt pan), dumping it in, and baking it.

Tips and tricks

But of course, there are some tricks. Such as getting such an elaborately crenellated cake out of the pan in one piece. Cook's Illustrated described one tip that involved lining the sink with towels, pouring on boiling water, and setting the "top" of the pan down on the towels for 10 seconds before turning it over to deposit the cake onto the parchment-covered cooling rack. Another Cook's Illustrated recipe has you prep the pan beforehand, thoroughly greasing all the interior ridges by brushing them with a mixture that's equal parts butter and cocoa powder, combined and heated (microwaved) to just-melting.

After contemplating a shelf of sticky-looking cake mixes at the local grocery, I went home and put together a chocolate sour cream Bundt cake recipe from Cook's Illustrated, including the greasing of the interior of the pan. My one frustration was that cookbooks seem to assume that everyone has a deep-bowl, KitchenAid standing mixer. Using a hand mixer works, but increases the probability that you'll splatter batter all over the kitchen as you stop to use a splatula between each step of the mixing. (Note to self: Get the batter off the refrigerator door.)

The cake is now out of the pan, cooling, and I'll post a picture after I apply the powdered sugar. Now, if only I had the Deluxe Bundt Cake Keeper. Ya, sure, you betcha!

So you want to write an SF novel?

Professional editors are standing by, praying that it's not another one of these.

The Cat and the Tree of Life

When Oriental rug dealers die, they are often reincarnated as cats. How else to explain the talent of most cats for finding the most expensive woven item in the house and peforming The Dance of 20 Sabres upon it?

We always have a runner in our front hallway, in the ultra-high traffic zone between the front door and anywhere else in the house. We've had a rust-colored dhurrie from Pottery Barn, a cheap Berber-style remnant from the local carpet warehouse, and special dirt-resistant looped rug from Land's End. Briefly, last spring, we had a green-gold-and-burgundy Tree of Life runner from Pottery Barn via eBay.

The Tree of Life was made of thick, plush wool and, unlike any of the other carpets, it mesmerized the cats. Every few days one of them would leap onto it and shred, tear, and knead as if possessed. The following day I would vacuum up the loose threads and trim the dangling ones. After about a month of this, I decided the carpet was too dark for the livingroom, and too vulnerable to cats, and I took it to DA Burns to be cleaned and then put it into storage.

This fall I cleaned and retired the white Berber runner, and, obviously having forgotten about the Tree of Life problems, brought the Tree of Life out of storage. It was, of course, still way too dark for the livingroom decor. Before I could take action, a cat set to work on it in ways I won't describe, but which were far worse than clawing. Zorg rushed the carpet to DA Burns the following morning. When I brought it home, I unrolled it for a quick photo, rolled it back up again, and then put it up for sale on Craig's List at a very reasonable price (we'd just about recoup the cleaning expense).

This time, instead of attracting insane cats, The Tree of Life attracted insane people. The first person who expressed interest in it kept sending me questions, one at a time. She wanted several additional pictures taken. I unrolled the carpet on top of the washer and dryer, took detailed photos, and sent them to her. The final question from Madame Carpet Princess, in its entirety, was "Do you think I could get a better deal online?"

I went on to the second buyer.

After sorting through a number of flakes, I made phone arrangements with a very pleasant woman who was going to come by to view, and possibly buy, the Tree of Life runner at 2 p.m. today. A few minutes before she arrived I ran downstairs to tidy up the laundry room for the best possible viewing. I nearly had heart failure when I saw the carpet. I had left it unrolled on top of the washer and dryer overnight and a cat had attacked it! There were shredded carpet fibers everywhere. Grabbing vacuum and scissors, and feeling like a character in a bad sit-com, I quickly coiffed it back into shape -- and just in time.

The Tree of Life has gone to a new home. I didn't ask if they have cats.

Guest blogger?

Prednisone, one of the drugs I'm taking for my herniated disk, can have a profound effect on personality. My doctor reported that one of his patients who took the six-day course of medication become so energetic that he went home and painted his entire house. The doctor didn't say what color he painted it, and I was wondering.

Anyway, you take six pills the first day, five the second, four the third, and, well, you get the idea. You've tapered off right about the time all the paint on the trim is dry.

The last time I had this therapy for a herniated disk (nine years ago), I not only changed personality, I liked the new assertive personality so much that I dashed off to a psychologist to do role playing to see if I could learn how to make it permanent. That didn't work, but I am still able to access some of the more effective phrases (such as "That's your problem," "I'm busy," and "So -- fix it. Now.") and recall, if only faintly, how immensely pleasurable it was to speak these truths without fear that someone would get mad at me. (Thanks to the prednisone, I could have cared less.)

By the middle of next week I'll be back to my usual "I'm so sorry!" and "Oh my, can I help you with that?"

But in the interim, be prepared for a possible guest blogger. She could be a bitch.

Capote

My friend Mattie and I caught the 1:30 showing of Capote at the Egyptian today. (A very pleasant place to see a film on a weekday afternoon, about two dozen people in the audience. Nice screen, decent audio. $6 for the film, $4 to park at the Seattle Central College parking garage right across the street. Funky old coffeehouse that pre-dates espresso bars on the premises, so you can enjoy a decent drink with your movie.)

Capote is about a great writer and what it took for him to write a book, In Cold Blood, that changed the course of American writing by deliberately meshing fiction writing and journalism. You'll see Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) do some shocking things, and later see exactly how those shocking things made his book so powerful. Capote makes several bargains with the devil, and both cheat shamelessly.

Great movie? If you're interested in writing, absolutely.

When I retire, I'm going to go to matinees at the Egyptian once a week.

eBay's new ads for "it" spoof Apple

Logged on to eBay to look for a J Jill jacket and spotted the new eBay ad campaign for "it," with many subtle little send-ups of Apple ads. Check out the many clever videos that make up the campaign.

Ouch!

My back. Muscle spasms? That awful disc problem again? Who knows. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! (If my back feels this bad through the methocarbamol and hydrocodon, what would it feel like without them? My right leg is on fire all the way down to the ankle!)

I'd been having some very mild back pain for about a week, but my whole lower back seized up this afternoon -- about 20 minutes after my office called and asked me to fly to California for a meeting next week, in the middle of my long-awaited vacation. When I declined to cancel my vacation plan on less than two days notice, the reception was definitely frosty.

I didn't realize how furious I was, but apparently my back did! Now I can't even raise my right arm to open a cabinet.

Yet more effective communication. Right.

Ring. Ring.

Hello, my name is (Susie Feathyrbrain/Joe Bob Glocktoter/Margaret Urbahn-Yuppei) and I'm (co-rotating chair of Citizens for More Committees/assistant treasurer of the Iron City Police Union/secretary of Parents Furious at the School Board) and I'm calling to urge you to vote (for the Monorail for the fifth or sixth time/for the guy who's running for sheriff against a woman/for anyone running against a current school board member).

It makes sense to have a public official or activist with high name recognition (say, a Presidential candidate) do recorded phone calls to get out the vote, but who came up with the bizarre idea that we wanted to pick up our home phones and hear recordings of the political amateur hour?

The gravitas play-off

Don't touch that remote! TV anchor Stone Phillips whomps Steven Colbert at his own mischevious game. We'll be back after a brief message with two pros in top form.

There goes the neighborhood

Thanks to John of Don't Ask Me; I'm Making This Up As I Go Along for this link to a truly amusing and well-executed political cartoon/animation.

Another great Halloween

Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, 10/29/49

And you thought you had a weird Halloween

Things just...happen...to our friend Geoff. And on Halloween, weird things happen.

Halloween in Ballard: Very Ghoul

North Seattle is decorated to the hilt for Halloween, complete with wet, windy weather.

There's an enormous (at least two-story high) Grim Reaper at the intersection of NW 3rd and 76th St. (west side of Phinney Ridge, heading into Ballard), and that whole neighborhood is full of tombstones commemorating the Viaduct and Leilani Lanes.

Very serious

Size doesn't matter

My late father had little respect for television, a medium whose content had reached a particularly low ebb in the 1980s.

While going through his papers today, I came across a tiny 1988 newspaper clipping of the (then) new Sony Color Watchman pocket television. It had a a 2.7-inch LCD screen, ran on batteries, and was capable of both UHF/VHF reception and display of recorded images from a camcorder.

I hadn't realized there had even been such a forerunner of the iPod video. The reason my dad had saved the article was the off-beat headline, which echoed his opinion of miniaturized TV, Sony or iPod:

"Trash Compactor."

Nowadays, even the cat sends email...

...but does anyone read it? Probably not, if the subject line is "Hey!"

Today's rant is about email subject lines. The scope of the rant is personal and business email (as opposed to commercial email and its creepy cousin, spam).

A subject line can be the most important part of any email message you send or receive. Three reasons:

1. It, along with the sender's name, determines whether the email gets opened and read, set aside for later, or deleted.
2. It can (considerately) set expectations for what's in the email (good or bad news, critical information, an amusing joke, time-consuming demands on the recipient, etc.)
3. It distinguishes the message from the dozens of others in the recipient's inbox by indicating that it's urgent, important, or interesting

Yet, I get email with the following subject lines every day:

Hey!
(Response: huh?)

A question
(Response: About what? Is this going to take all day to deal with?)

Computers
(Response: What computers?)

Are you there?
(Response: No, a robot is reading my email.)

You get the idea. A particularly infuriating variation on the clueless subject line involves an onging work project, let's call it "Starshine," in which hundreds, if not thousands, of emails have been flying back and forth -- about Starshine splash pages, Starshine product briefs, and Starshine icons. Then, three or four months into it, someone sends an email with the oh-so-informative subject line:

Starshine

(Response: You've got to be kidding.)

If people want their emails read and responded to -- and want to increase the chance that the recipient will read them in a reasonably good humor -- they should put the message, or a good clue to it, right in the subject line:

Capote Sunday night?

I passed the bar exam!

Question: email software programs

FYI: New condo regs in Seattle

URGENT: Mom's plane delayed

Fun: Bush pursued by mongooses

Attached: Pix from Tokyo

Bottom line: It's flattering to an email recipient to see by the subject line that the sender has taken the time to tailor the message -- to (gasp) actually communicate instead of grunting "Hey!"

Decisions, decisions...

The latest blogthings quiz might help you decide what to wear for Halloween.

Despite blogthings' advice, I will not be appearing as a Playboy bunny. Not even as Gloria Steinem going undercover as a Playboy bunny.

Sigh

They say that women in their 20s today experience a completely different working world than the one I knew 25 years ago, one pretty much without sexism. I sure hope so. My generation is still hard-wired the wrong way.

We sold our leather sofa on Craig's List this week, and the buyer came over to get it today. He's my age (50), works in the high-tech music industry, and is what I'd consider to be a professional. As we walked through the hallway to get to the den, he noticed the elaborate iTunes Music Store launch team plaque on the wall and said "Wow, iTunes! Does your husband work for Apple?"

I guess I've encountered this type of remark so often through the years that I don't manifest any of the obvious reactions, such as rolling my eyes, letting steam escape from my ears, or muttering "oink oink." I don't even sigh any more.

"No," I said. "I do."

To his credit, the guy was immediately embarrassed. He seemed like the sort of person who just blurts out the first thing on his mind, and I suspect he'd made this sort of error before.

I've been wondering: If we were both 25, would he have assumed my husband was the techie? And, if he had, would I have cared? Would have I have called him on it more aggressively?

I'd like to hear from anyone under 30 about that.

I know I've seen that face before

I want to tag my photos with Riya! (For just a moment, let's ignore the scary privacy implications.)

The contractors from hell

It used to be that mid-way through a major home project, something about the contractor would get my goat.

My, how things have changed. Now I want to throttle most of them right out of the gate. In the past month, I've been annoyed by eight contractors, only four of whom actually turned up in person.

Contractor #1 was the stamped concrete guy who assured me that he did all his estimates on Sunday and would be by at 2:30 Sunday afternoon. I stayed home, waiting; he never showed up or called.

Contractors #2 and #3 were paver installers. One had me fill out a request for an appointment, but apparently filed it in his trash can. The other, recommended by the local stone yard, never returned either of my phone calls.

Contractor #4 was also a paver installer. He returned my call, showed up for an appointment, and spent most of his time trying to convince me to use a particular style of paver he "always uses." The fact that I wanted a different style (by the same supplier, whose catalog he brought along) just didn't even begin to sink in. Plus he didn't want to use a polymerized sand, and had no experience with it.

Contractor #5 was our cleaning person, who shows up for about 2/3 of her scheduled cleaning dates, usually calling to cancel 15 minutes before start time.

Contractor #6 was the fill-in cleaning person I tried out. She was slow, but thorough and very thoughtful. The disqualifying factor here was her insistance on using an"environmentally safe" cleaning solution that had a cloying smell that practically drove me out of the house (and it lingered for days). I asked about using use the cleansers I have (bon ami, vinegar Windex, Murphy's oil soap and a marmoleum cleaner sold by the Environmental Home Store) but she made it clear that wasn't going to happen. Phew!

Contractor #7 was recommended by a salesperson at the plumbing fixtures store as someone who could install a Panasonic fan to replace the mind-numbing Nutone currently roaring away in our bathroom. He cancelled two or three appointments; when he eventually showed up, it was clear he knew a huge amount about fan installation. Unfortunately, he would be moonlighting from his regular job with a busy contractor, and had no idea when he could start. He suggested that I call him and nag him in three weeks! When he started muttering about having to remove part of the ceiling, coming back to do drywall, etc., I had an ugly premonition. It involved a gaping hole that would remain in the bathroom ceiling for the next two months while I chased him down to finish the job. He tried to convince me to hire his son-in-law to do the patio, but I managed to shoo him away.

Contractor #8 does specialty gardening, and was recommended by the (very competent) gardener I hired for a consultation. He warned me that the specialist would try to sell me on a series of treatments, but said that I really needed only one. As predicted, when I called the specialist he launched into a real hard sell about how this garden treatment needed to be done four times a year, and how he'd come over to analyze my garden and show me why it was crucial that I sign up for the entire four-treatment annual series. Stifling my incredulity, I gave him my phone number, but he never called to make an appointment -- essentially leaving my money on the table since I was ready and eager to pay him for the first treatment.

This is worse than dating.

Cheer up

or at least, be amused. (Thanks to mystical forest for this tip.)

Hurricanes, followed by greedy developers

News that New Orleans officials are considering suspending planning and zoning regs to allow quaint historic homes to be replaced with suburban tract boxes reminded me (by contrast) of Warsaw, Poland. Visiting the city center in 1984, I learned that what looked like 17th and 18th century buildings were less than 40 years old. Old Warsaw had been destroyed in World War II, but immediately afterwards the surviving residents rebuilt it, with many squares, palaces and culturally significant streets recreated exactly as they had been before the war.

In sync

A few months ago, when I upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger on my iMac, I chose to do the OS upgrade rather than the clean install. I mean, who wants to reinstall all their apps and try to remember all their settings and preferences?

All went swimmingly, except for the Missing Sync. As its name implies, it's a patch that deals with conflicts between between .Mac Sync (new), Apple iSync (old) and Palm OS for Mac (an unspeakable pain in the rear). With Missing Sync, I can keep the data that I already sync between my PowerBook, my iMac, and my .Mac online account, in sync with my Treo PDA as well.

It turns out that those of us who upgraded, rather than clean-installed, Mac OS X Tiger, locked deep into the system something that annoyed the heck out of the Missing Sync.

In my attempt to get Treo syncing to work again, I spent several annoying evenings downloading, uninstalling, reinstalling, and encountering "you do not have access to this file"-type messages. I found discussions of the Tiger-upgrade-hoses-Missing-Sync problem online, but, ominiously, none of them mentioned any solutions. The result was that my Treo hadn't been synced since July.

Trusting the people at the Missing Sync to address the problem (think about it, their whole product is based on addressing a problem Palm and Apple don't want to talk about) I kept checking back to their site. Sure enough, today I found a step-by-step solution. Of course, I'd already trashed, damaged, re-installed and generally mucked around with all the files and conduits involved, but I was able to follow their step-by-step about three-quarters of the way through, up to the point where it didn't make sense any longer. And at that point, being an experienced Mac user and trained to expect generally positive outcomes, I just pushed some buttons and leaped into the digital abysss.

The result? Synced again. I have no idea why it worked, but, once again, thank you to MarkSpace (that's the Missing Sync people) for putting out some signposts.

Faded love, fluffy omelettes

Salon columnist Cary Tennis had a lovely column this past week (sorry, subscriptions only). He was riffing on the implications of a letter from a Salon reader who was disquieted by ex-boyfriends who've taken plans the couple had developed together and subsequently implemented them with their new sweeties. She complained about the appropriation of everything from romantic date ideas to a complete wedding theme.

"Do men build dating structures, then simply insert 'woman'?" she asked.

Tennis points out, in his gentle way, that you can't help but absorb ideas during a relationship, and you can't be expected to erase the ideas when the romance ends.

"It's one thing if he cooks an omelet on your stove with your eggs in your pan and then carries the omelet out of your house into his new girlfriend's house and feeds it to her. But every time he cooks an omelet for her, in his pan, or her pan, does he have to credit you for it?" he teases.

This got me thinking of all the great ideas and attitudes I've gotten from past relationships. I don't mean old friends I still hang out with; I mean people who once meant quite a bit to me, but who I'll never see again!

Every time I chop the bamboo shoots and turn on the gas under the wok, I hear Blair, my pony-tailed college sweetie, reminding me "hot wok, cold oil." He's an orthodox rabbi now.

When I see my gray hair in the mirror I think of David, the New York civil rights attorney who showed me the city when I was at Columbia for grad school. One night at the City Limits one of my friends teased him about going gray. David said "I have a deal with God; he can turn my hair any color he wants as long as he lets me keep half of it." David died a few years ago; there's an ACLU scholarship in New York in his memory.

I can't imaging Blair or David being annoyed at me for perpetuating their cooking techniques or their clever lines. When the Salon reader's annoyance about the failed romances is long gone, she should feel flattered that her ex-boyfriends have such positive memories of her that they have kept those reminders in their lives.

Oh, BTW, Steve, wherever you are, I still remember how to make fluffy omelettes!

Is nothing sacred?

Friday's Wall Street Journal (sorry, print version or web subscription only, so no link) had an article about a new version of the classic writer's guide, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White.

If you haven't come across it, The Elements of Style is a slim, supremely elegant book that embodies its own messages. It's short. It's clear. It never aggrandizes the writers or flim-flams the reader. But apparently someone felt that such an approach was behind the times, so they've gussied it up with bizarre illustrations and changed the wording to make the writing instruction more cheery and inclusive.

Yech.

The late sportswriter and Boston University journalism professor, Timothy Cohane, had a term for the contemporary approach to teaching writing. He called it NSTO, or "no shit too odiferous." According to Cohane, NSTO started with doting parents who insisted that every creative effort of their children was perfect, and that no revisions or editing should ever come between the beloved offspring's spoutings and the reader. This attitude crept gradually from the home to the schools, where teachers got tired of calls from irate parents complaining that little Johnny and Sally would be stifled if their compositions, no matter how incoherent or sloppy, received any grade below an A. And, in a 1999 revision upon which the 2005 illustrated version is based, a whiff of NSTO insinuated itself into The Elements of Style.

Cohane, like Strunk and White, knew that writing is demanding and good writing is the result of thought, practice, and study. Just read 10 blogs and you'll have no trouble telling the difference between the ones written by talented, experienced, disciplined writers and the ones written by blathering nincompoops -- nincompoops making exactly the same mistakes that Strunk and White show you how to avoid or correct.

The version of Elements of Style that you want is the final revision by White (1979), and the good news is that it's still widely available. I recommend picking it up at your local used bookstore. The versions you want to skip are the 1999 revision and the 2005 illustrated version of that revision. "The 1979 Elements will be studied long after the post-White versions have been filed under 'mortifying mistakes' and forgotten," reviewer David Gelernter predicts in the Journal.

Looking for something different?

I've started to follow local event blogs, including Metroblogging Seattle and Ballard Community, as well as inballard.com. That's how I've found out about some unusual community events, such as Ratapalooza, Nov. 12 in Ballard.

Not yet on the blog sites, but certainly on my calendar, is the Nordic Heritage Museum's annual Yulefest. It's a bit early this year -- Nov. 19-20. The crafts for sale range from Scandinavian sweaters and jewelry to the work of mid-range and high-end local artisans. I do much of my holiday shopping there on Saturday, then go back on Sunday for the the food. They have a tea room, a beer hall, and an a la carte lunch in the first-floor dining room, all with musical entertainment, plus a hallway full of baked goods. I highly recommend the lunch. Nibble on a few open-face sandwiches, but save room for the Romme Grot, a warm pudding that will remind you of crepes and sour cream.

If you miss Yulefest, you can get your holiday shopping done at the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market, 11-3 p.m. in the winter (except for Dec. 26), or the Fremont Sunday Market, 10-4 p.m. in the winter (also closed Dec. 26). Unfortunately, there will not be a weekend Holiday Gift Fair in Ballard or Fremont this year because the old Safeway building that housed it in recent years has been torn down. Waaaaaah!

Another excellent crafts fair option is the annual Phinney NeighborHood Association Winter Festival and Crafts Fair, Dec. 3-4. That's about the right time to buy seasonal greenery, and I recall their wreaths are usually a very good deal. By the way, those stunning fused-glass plates you see on the fair website (and at right) are the work of our friend Els Gangloff.

Garden reassurance

A couple years ago our community club brought in three garden experts for an evening presentation. One of them, a fellow from Ohio, immediate caught my interest. He spoke clearly and plainly, with an obvious love and respect for plants and little or no interest in garden design trends. I held onto his business card, and last week made an appointment for him to come over for a garden consultation.

I was a concerned about what he might think of my garden, since I never seem to have enough time to apply all the special sprays and organic additives. But he liked it, and reassured me that the fungus that affected the pear tree this year was probably a result of the unusual spring weather and would not permanently damage the tree or threaten any other plans. His advice was to put plenty of Cedar Grove compost on the beds, and to use compost tea at least once a year. I've since made arrangements with the local compost tea person to have the whole garden treated later this month.

Calvin -- that's the gardener -- suggested two plants I might add to the garden: Sarcococca, also called "Christmas box," (a very small shrub with fragrant white flowers that bloom in the winter) and the hardy Geranium "Spinners," a particularly large and dramatic hardy Geranium with intense purple/blue flowers. I've had up to 40 varieties of hardy Geranium, but have never grown "Spinners."

It was a pleasure to be around someone who knows plants and enjoys gardens. He made improving the garden seem very do-able. Calvin will be back in January to prune the pear tree and execute a major remodeling of the gigantic camellia. Stay tuned for my upcoming adventures with the compost tea guy.

Fruit ice cream recipe

A reader who found the Waring Ice Cream Parlor directions here requested my strawberry ice cream recipe. I'll preface it with some general comments on fruit ice cream:

You base fruit ice cream on either a plain vanilla (uncooked) or a French vanilla (with eggs, often cooked) recipe. (I use the plain vanilla). If the fruit has been reduced to a puree, it can be added to the mix at the beginning of the freezing process. But if you want the fruit in larger pieces, mix it in at the end of the freezing process. It prevents clogging the dasher, and it prevents the fruit from ending up as hard as rocks.

Fresh fruit: Slice or chop 1-2 cups of fruit, and combine them with half of the sugar called for in the ice cream recipe. Let this mixture age in your refrigerator for 24 hours. (The extra sugar in the fruit will prevent it from freezing solid in the ice cream.) After the aging, puree some of the fruit and add it to the ice cream mixture, saving the rest of the fruit pieces to be added by hand at the end.

Strawberry Ice Cream

2 cups heavy cream (1 pint)
2 cups light cream (1 pint)
3/4 - 1 cup sugar
1-1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1/8 tsp. salt

Chop strawberries, mix with half of the sugar, and let fruit mixture age in the refrigerator 24 hours.

Puree about half of the strawberry mixture.
Pour cream directly into cream can of ice cream machine.
Add the pureed strawberries.
Add the rest of the sugar, along with the vanilla and salt.
Stir with wooden spoon or plastic spatula until sugar dissolves.

Place can into ice cream machine and follow Ice Cream Parlor directions to process and freeze ice cream. When you remove the ice cream from the freezing container, mix in the reserved strawberry pieces, then allow the ice cream to harden or "ripen" in the freezer of your refrigerator.

Fluff-in-mouth disease

A colleague and I have been discussing ways to improve the readability of web sites. (All aspects of readability: word choice, sentence and graf length, voice, tone, fonts, colors, use of links and buttons, column widths, and use of bullets.)

We've been collecting ideas, and that sent me back to one of the classic web readability writers, Jakob Nielsen. This page is worth visiting if you do any writing for the web. I love the way Nielson's research with users demonstrates the inherent unreadability of what he calls "marketese."

Of course, marketese is also inherently unreadable on the printed page for exactly the same reason: It's padded with a lot of self-congratulatory fluff.

Here's an example of classic marketese. Write this way, and your marketing team will dislocate their shoulders patting each other on the back.

We've been hard at work developing more great features for our loyal readers! You'll find more than 50 scrumptious new recipes for holiday meals and treats that'll have your friends and family jumping for joy. Plus plenty of links to sites on holiday party planning. Be sure to check out the new pages on selecting a turkey, carving a pumpkin, making cranberry sauce, and using your kitchen mixer to prepare pie crust. Need more help? Head for our our video library on cooking techniques.

Now here's the same information, rescued. But, sad to say, the only people who will congratulate you for writing this way are the readers who are trying to get information from your site.

New on the site:

• 12 recipes for seasonal meals
• 38 recipes for cookies, cakes, and candies
• Party planning links
• Selecting a turkey
• Carving a pumpkin

Need more help? Check out:

• How-to guides
• The video library of cooking techniques

Nielson concludes:

Promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts. When people read a paragraph that starts "Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions," their first reaction is no, it's not, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.

I'd argue that, outside of his experimental environment, web users don't even get far enough on the page to argue with the fluff. I think they just scan it, move down the page looking for actual information, and (if they don't spot it), go to the next website on their Google results list.

A group of ravens...

...is sometimes collectively referred to as "an unkindness" or "a conspiracy." This bit of info came up today during some research I was doing for work. Honestly! "A Conspiracy of Ravens" would be a great short story title.

Dinner on the new patio?

...It could be yours! I am seeking recommendations for a top-rated, highly experienced patio contractor. (Not a contractor or garden design person who has done a couple attractive patios, but a stone or concrete company whose work has been proven to stand up to the damp Northwest weather.) If the contractor you recommend gets the job, I'll cook dinner for you (and a friend) next summer and serve it on the patio (weather permitting).

Patio will be 18' x 20' and includes a short pathway.

Please submit recommendations in either category:

1. Concrete pavers
The contractor should be committed to installing all the correct drainage and founation layers for the patio, and willing to guarantee the durability of any cement/mortar used.

2. Stamped concrete
I recently saw some beautiful stamped concrete patios in California and realized that, if done by the right contractor, this can be subtle rather than garish. The contractor should be able to show examples of previous work with subtle "aged brick" staining, plus needs to have access to a stamp with the octagon-and-tile pattern. (Not all contractors have all stamps.)

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

How to recondition a leather couch

10 years ago I purchased a semi-custom high-end leather couch. It has some of the thickest leather you can buy, and the back cushions are filled with down. With its combination of thick hide, and dark coffee leather, I figured it might -- just might -- survive in our cat-infested household.

After an initial onslaught from Bosco the Destroyer and Sam the Sprayer (both departed in the couch's early years of residence) the couch has done well with the cats. In fact, the current crop of kitties shows little interest in it, preferring cat trees, fleece slumber balls, and desktop cat beds.

Every few years "recondition the couch" makes my summer task list, but I never get beyond a quick once-over with a leather cleaning solution. Thus the couch gets drier and dustier looking, sort of a scratched cafe-au-lait. I contacted two local carpet cleaning companies that recondition leather furniture, but discovered that much of their hefty price is the cost for moving the couch to their facility and back.

I did some research online and got advice and supplies from the local Tandy leather shop, and finally executed a couch-reconditioning plan (described below) that turned out to be quick, neat, and effective. Even the cats noticed the difference. As soon as I tucked in the last seat cushion, Kaylee jumped onto the completed couch and made herself at home.

Supplies:

• Reconditioning supplies: 1 small (200 ml) bottle Lexol pH leather cleaner and 1 small (200 ml) bottle of Lexol original formula leather cleaner preservative. Since you will use an entire bottle of each for one couch, you should buy two bottles, or the larger size (though the larger bottle will be harder to handle with wet rags and slippery hands). BTW, both of these treatments are scentless and safe to touch.

• Other supplies: tarps or old sheets to protect the carpet and floors around the couch. 4 - 6 lint-free dish towels or other old towels to apply the liquid treatments.

Step-by-step reconditioning:

1. Put down tarps or sheets; then remove all easily removable cushions. NOTE: If your couch has zip-on back cushions, don't remove them. The zippers can be hideously fragile.)

2. Working from the top down (to avoid problems with drips) apply the leather cleaner to a wet towel and rub in to all the leather surfaces, raising a little lather. Wipe off lather with a damp towel. This process should take 15-20 minutes for the entire couch and cushions.

3. Let everything dry for 30 minutes.

4. Shake up the the leather conditioner (which is sort of creamy and sticky) and (again working from the top down) apply it with a damp towel or sponge to the leather, rubbing in broad motions. Don't panic if dark streaks appear where leather is scratched, nicked, or has been stained. These will disappear within 10-15 minutes. Be very careful to get the conditioner in to creases and seams in the leather; if you don't, these will look dry and dusty afterwards. Make sure all conditioner is rubbed in (don't leave wet spots). Conditioning should take about 20-30 minutes for couch and cushions.

5. Buff with a dry towel. Keep in mind that this not shoe leather, and the conditioner is not shoe polish. The leather will be soft and pliant, not smooth and shiny.

6. Reassemble couch and enjoy.

The rain returns

I arrived in Seattle in late September, 20 years ago. On October 1, I woke up to pouring rain which, in my memory, continued steadily through the following April (with the exception of a week of snow in late November).

Since then, I've joked that every year on October 1, someone turns on the faucet. Sure enough, around midnight tonight, the annual deluge began. Now it comes back to me what all those raincoats in the hall closet are about.

23/5

One of the new online memes, which I plucked from the thought-provoking Music and Cats, is "23/5." It works this way:

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post the sentence in your blog. Ponder it for meaning, subtext, or hidden agendas….
5. Tag 5 others to do the same.

Here's the 23rd post in The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out, posted Saturday, Oct. 25, 2003:

One percent magic
Ninety-nine percent of writing is practice and hard work, but the one percent that's magic is important, too. The Oct. 27 issue of The New Yorker has an article on the career of Toni Morrison. The article closes with Morrison showing the writer where she writes—not in her office, but on a rustic Norwegian wood table in her kitchen. That makes perfect sense.

The problem here is that this post has only four sentences. There is nothing to ponder for meaning, subtext, or hidden agendas. Whew!

Leave that poor bagel alone

I am looking forward to recovering completely from my weekend visiting with my mother's friends in LA. [...]

Looking back on it, the visit to LA just had to have been a dream. And it did have a surreal ending. On the way to the Burbank airport, we saw a bright red antique roadster tootling along in the righthand lane of the freeway. As we passed it, we got a closer look at the driver: It was Jay Leno.

Revenge

I came home from my travels to find two odiferous little spots on the floor at my end of our closet. The cats apparently whiled away the hours while I was gone studying these feline communications tips from The Joy of Tech.

Now I don't have to

Yup.

Dim Sum

I'm in Cupertino for a product launch. We got stuff done around midnight last night, and today everyone is wandering around in a bit of a daze. Eight of us went out for a dim sum lunch, which is much more interesting when several folks in your party are Chinese, or have grown up exposed to Chinese and Asian culture. There was one dish that I'd never seen before, and we didn't try it since it did not turn up until we had reached the dessert stage of the meal. It was a stuffed green vegetable that looked like a green pepper. I was informed that it wasn't a pepper, and it tastes "very very strong!"

Next time.

Wrong door!

[a post by Kaylee and Zoe]
Suddenly she opens the back door and it's all cold and wet out there. Can't she get anything right? Boy, has the level of service ever declined around here. We're reporting this to Zacats -- as soon as we finishing downloading brochures for Arizona and Palm Springs.

Don't think we're being passive-aggressive. We confronted her directly by tearing all the papers off her bulletin board and all she did was show us the open door, apparently oblivious of the unacceptable environment out there. She mentioned something about "an estimated seven months of downtime." No wonder Smokey switched to another household. We've even heard rumors that she's going to San Jose and Los Angeles next week and leaving us here.

Night Life

A couple times in the past week either Kaylee or Zoe has gotten back outside after dark and refused to come in. Evening is a particularly quiet time on our street; on weeknights, all the neighbors are home by 7. This makes the dead-end street an ideal place for the cats, and they are all out chasing bugs under the streetlights.

Once one of the Stripe Sisters gets out, the other one sits in a window and yowls loudly and (apparently) incesssantly. I've given in to temptation and let them both out just to get some peace.

We have created a precedent, and it's a bad one.

Tonight I was determined to keep them in. They yowled. They were bored. Kaylee reverted to her old habit of attacking my bulletin board and removing the pushpins. I gave them catnip, but a half hour later they were back in my office, looking stoned AND bored. Finally I hauled out the garish nylon "cat tunnel," a long Y-shaped tube they can hide in. From the crashing and thumping I hear coming from the livingroom, it seems to be working.

But I have to admit, it's probably much more fun to hide under a bush on a warm evening and leap out at moths.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

If demands that Intelligent Design be taught in schools have you steamed, you'll love the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Coming soon to a textbook near you! (Note to self: Never run for School Board.)

Word verification

Have you visited someone's blog recent and seen bizarre comments posted that refer only tangentially to the blog but go on to advertise something? That's comment spam. Blogger now lets me turn on a word verification feature to prevent comment spam.

Oil crisis, revisited

December, 1973 -- My job during Christmas vacation from college was to get up before dawn in the frigid New England winter, bundle up as if for an Artic trek, and drive the family car to the gas station. There I would buy a cup of lousy coffee and a pile of newspapers and wait two or three hours in a gas line.

Fortunately, one of the family gas-guzzling Impalas had a license plate that ended in an even number while the other car's plate ended in an odd. Under the Massachusetts rationing system of odd and even days, that meant I could be gassing up one car while my mom was driving the other one on her dailly commute from our house on the Cape to Boston, where she worked and where her elderly parents lived. The next day we switched cars and did it all over again. My father instituted a strict system of recording all gas purchases and mileage in little notebooks kept in the glove compartments.

In those days, cars didn't have locking gas tanks, so after you filled up, your next task was to back the car into the driveway with the side with the gas tank as close to the house as possible. All porch and yard lights were left on through the night to thwart gas thieves who were cruising the neighborhoods with gas cans and siphoning equipment. This fortress mentality was even creepier given our living arrangements at the time.

My parents had sold our house in suburban Virginia the previous spring and were supposed to be retiring to a new development in East Sandwich, a historic town on the Cape. My father had designed a large house overlooking the bay, but the builder had gone bankrupt and the subcontractors had walked off the job. While new house stood half finished, my folks were living in our tiny, uninsulated summer cottage in Dennisport. It had two little bedrooms, a closet-size bathroom with a shower (no tub), and a combined kitchen/diningroom/livingroom. The sole heat source was one floor register in the livingroom. Each morning, I woke up with ice on the insides of the windows of my bedroom, scraped the window, and peered out to make sure we had fuel in the two propane tanks outside. The washing machine, intended only for summer use, was in a closet off the back porch, where it was in constant danger of freezing water lines. Summer cottages didn't have dryers, so the clothes went out to the backyard clothesline where they were usually frozen before they were dry.

We were the only off-season residents on our winding dirt road and many days ours were the only cars that went down the street. We picked up our mail at the town Post Office, hauled our trash to the dump, and were eyed suspicously by the year-round residents, many of whom had been living on the Cape since their surly ancesters had arrived on the Mayflower and set about inbreeding. If I hadn't wanted to leave home for good when I first went off to college, I sure did after that long winter in Dennisport!

Today, when I paid $31.65 for 10.4 gallons of gas at the 7-11, it brought back memories of the winter of 73-74. I made a mental note to go home and check the insulation, caulk the windows, and get out my UGGs. I think it's going to be another long, cold winter.

September

Here's Kaylee enjoying the beautiful September weather on our front porch.

A New Orleans refugee

One of the blogs I follow has a post from a New Orleans refugee who works at Tulane. She moved her belongings to the top floor of her house and fled north by car on Sunday. The friends whose car they were caravaning with had a breakdown, so the contents of both households had to be crammed into a Ford Escort as they pushed on in the traffic. Here's her story.

I think of a Seattle disaster, us in a traffic jam on I-5 fleeing with our computers and as many of the cats as we could locate, and I shudder. Zorg says that New Orleans is essentially gone for good. He has an interesting post on someone who accurately predicted the storm impact three years ago.

Bumbershoot: They really don't get the picture

According to the general info page for the Bumbershoot Festival, cameras will not be allowed on the Seattle Center grounds during the four-day festival.

I can understand flash cameras being banned from indoor concerts, but from the grounds of Seattle Center? Particularly when half of the cell phones around are equipped with cameras? Who is going to enforce this rule, and how on earth could the concert organizers determine if someone had used a cell phone camera. Would they confiscate the phone and read the memory card?

Bumbershoot also has a ban on audio and video equipment on the grounds during the festival. That was easy to enforce a few years ago, but how are they going to spot and deal with someone whose iPod is equipped with a microphone?

What's even more fascinating is that their website doesn't say that use of cameras and recording is equipment is forbidden -- it says clearly that the devices themselves are forbidden and that attendees should leave those (cell phones and iPods) at home.

Glad that Bumbershoot security isn't my gig. I doubt that most people going to Bumbershoot will bother reading their info page, and cell phone and iPod users will be in for a very bad customer service experience when they arrive with those devices in hand or in backpack.

Hope the weather is excellent for the festival because the info page also states that umbrellas are prohibited. Umbrellas. At the Bumbershoot Festival. Hello?

Frye boots are back

30 years later, embroidered jeans and Frye boots are back. Seriously, if you go to Nordstrom online, Frye boots are one of the featured items in women's shoes. Not just the Frye brand, but the actual square-toed, camel-colored boots from the '70s. They're called "The Campus" and come in the traditional colors "banana" and "saddle" as well as, I kid you not, "lilac." Nordstrom has the knee-high 14" shafts, but, as I recall, most of us wore the mid-calf 12" boots. They were the most comfortable boots I'd ever owned (though later surpassed by a $300 pair purchased in Milan).

This picture of me in my Fryes was taken at the Berkshire Mountains Bluegrass Festival in 1976. The boots are long gone. (As I recall, I wore them until they fell apart, and by then they'd gone out of style). However, I still own the patchwork embroidered hiphugger bootcut jeans which surely have a future in a museum of the counter-culture.

Real-life Katrina coverage

Real writers covering Katrina in New Orleans, courtesy of the New Orleans Metroblogging group.

I can't believe how uninformative the official news sites are. They must be printing the press releases from various public safety bureaucracies. Is post-Iran journalism now the standard for covering weather crises as well?

Ouch!

Just spent three hours typing, first time since wrist surgery Tuesday. OUCH! My arm is on fire.

This afternoon, as the wind came up, I sent Zorg out to close the patio umbrella. I remember years when we had to batten down the whole patio set every few weeks, but there hasn't been a storm all summer. This looked like it would be the first one. But the rain that came, after all the wind and ominous clouds, wasn't much. Now Betaille's out there on the back porch looking in at us as if to say "What a bunch of wimps!" (I'd taken in the nice outdoor pillow for her cedar bench.)

I hope we got enough rain to soak the arugula starts.

BTW, gardening alert: Swanson's 50%-off-shrubs-and-vines sale starts Thursday, Sept. 1, and they'll be getting new stock in during the sale period. There are some very nice beauty berry bushes.

PLANTS AVAILABLE SOON: I'll be removing from my garden one very large bear's breeches, a large purple hebe, a young pieris japonica, and (if possible to remove in one piece) a big woody purple hydrangea. Also, a rosemary in the shape of a 5-foot Christmas tree that just isn't happy in the terra cotta pot it's currently in. All very nice plants but just too big for this little cottage garden. Let me know if you are interested in any of these. Have any dahlias or peonies to trade?

Needed: butler and gardener

Tuesday's wrist surgery was short, successful, and pretty much painless. Now I'm wearing a bulky cast on my right arm and gnashing my teeth in frustration at everything I can't do. Like type, cook, garden, and drive. I've been working lefthanded, going for long walks at lunchtime, and reading. Zorg has been chauffeuring me around. I still need a butler/chef, a gardener/cat wrangler, and a typist who takes dictation. The cast comes off Wednesday, and everything except extreme gardening should be possible.

Slow blog

You've heard of the slow food movement? I'll be kicking off the slow blog movement tomorrow or the day after when I return to the keyboard after wrist surgery. The surgery is not for carpal tunnel or anything serious; it's to remove a cyst created this spring when I spent an afternoon digging up a big rhody. The cyst has been coming and going ever since, and tomorrow it's supposed to go away for good.

They said I could type for two or three hours on Wednesday, but I'll need to ration most of that for work.

So, look for short blog entries for the remainder of the week.

Bumper stickers

I came out of the Mandalay Cafe after dinner this evening and found a note on the windshield of my 1990 Honda Civic. It read:

"Love your bumper stickers! I vote we put Vetinari and Shrub in a locked room for a few hours...the first one to reduce the other to a gelatinous blob wins. P.S. I drive a Mac, too."

If this note has you scratching your head, it's because you aren't familiar with Lord Vetinari, the Machiavellian ruler ("Patrician") of the city-state Ankh Morpork in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. A fan of the Discworld series, and disgusted with the 2004 elections, I designed a limited-edition, very official-looking, red, white and blue bumper sticker that reads "Vetinari for Patrician." That's on my car, along with my Kerry/Edwards sticker and lots of Apple stickers, including "I'd rather be driving a Mac."

It's nice to know that somebody out there understands.

Well, duh!

When I was growing up, that was the favorite put-down from my beatnik cousin Laurie. It was her bored expression of total contempt for the views of teachers, parents, The System -- and anyone outside her own circle of terminally jaded teenage friends.

As someone who occasionally works in the area of marketing communication, I try to warn colleagues and clients against taglines, headlines, and subject lines that are so wimpy and self-evident that they simply beg for the "well, duh!" response. Or the puzzled "so what?"

Every few days I get an email from the Democrats, and I cringe. Today, feeling guilty about my utter lack of enthusiasm for the party that needs to be leading us away from the Bush mess, I put the subject lines of their emails to the "well, duh!" and "so what?" tests. Do any of these pique your interest?

• They deserve answers
• The fight starts now
• A victory for democracy
• Changing stories
• Rove has to go
• How are we doing?
• Actions speak louder than words
• Dividers, not uniters
• Show America the truth

Talk about preaching to the choir! Nothing about any of these subject lines makes me want to open the email and be subjected to another santimonious, droning, Democratic finger-wagging. At most, I can be grateful that these flaccid subject lines give plenty of warning of the well-intentioned drivel just a click away.

Now try these news reader subject lines:

• Let's just say the unlikely happens
• The problem with lawyers (part of an ongoing series)
• Will you help us?
• Clueless
• Hurry!
• The best thing I never said
• Hard to be nice (easy to be mean)
• Hot day hot stock
• It makes you sick?
• How to make a jillion dollars
• A pox on (most of) their houses

These are from the blogs of marketing guru Seth Godin and management guru Tom Peters, two of the best-read blogs online. These headlines make me at least want to click through and read a few paragraphs.

Now if only the Democrats would hire one of these guys.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Marden House

One of the most-viewed articles in today's Washington Post is The Wright Way, an article about the house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Luis and Ethel Marden's land on a cliff overlooking the Potomac River in the late 1950s.

The house, which the Mardens never allowed on public view, was purchased in 2000 by the multi-millionaire property owner next door to preserve his own view of the river. Like many notoriously difficult-to-maintain Wright houses, it was in shabby condition. The Marden's representative carefully brokered an arrangement that encouraged the new owner to restore rather than remodel the house, and the Post covers the heartening story of how that deal came about.

Ethel Marden was my mother's boss (they were mathemeticians at the National Bureau of Standards) and my visits to the Mardens' house as a child had a profound impact on me. I came away with the belief that it was possible, and common, to have a house with curved banks of floor-to-ceiling walls, painted concrete floors, and a tree stump that came up through the floor to serve as a coffee table.

Of course, I never saw another house like Ethel and Luis's until I visited Wright's Phoenix studio, Taliesin West, this past summer, and felt immediately at home. In the Wright scheme of design, each house was supposed to embody particular principles of livability (regarding light, air circulation, and materials) but was customized to fit the way the homeowner lived. I listened to all this being explained at Taliesin and thought to myself "this sounds like a Mac!"

Tomato season

The good news in the garden this year is that the tomatoes like their toasty new digs on the south side of the house beside the brick chimney. We have already harvested a couple Early Cascades, some Black Cherrys, and this Costoluto Genovese:

About this blog

StatCounter tells me the following things about this blog:

It gets about 100 hits daily; 35 of those visits are "real"--between 30 seconds and an hour long. The rest are the blogger equivalent of "wrong numbers."

The most popular page is the homepage itself, with the most recent blog entry.

Most people come to The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out (TMTSO) from keyword searches (more on that later). They are also referred from my blogger profile, and from dougplummer.blogs.com.

Keyword searchers are interested in:
• Waring Ice Cream Parlor instructions
• Wolf stove wok grate
• Gary Broisma, dragostea din tei, and numa numa
• f1e2 error message (for the KitchenAid stove)
• catman cat scratching posts

75% percent of the searchers are coming to TMTSO from Google, with a few from MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves; more than 60% of the visitors use Internet Explorer and more than 30% use Safari and Firefox; 93 percent of the visitors are from ISPs in the United States.

It rocks (the Kasbah)

On our way out for a quick teriyaki and shopping for a toaster oven, we found ourselves stopped in traffic on 15th Avenue NW, just south of 85th. I remarked to Zorg that someday we should try Kasbah, which had opened on 85th a few months earlier. He thought it sounded better than shopping, so we circled around, parked, and found ourselves enjoying an evening in Morocco.

When I asked Zorg if he thought we'd be eating in the traditional manner with our right hands, he chuckled. But a waiter arrived with a basin and a pitcher of water. We found ourselves washing our hands at the table, and eating all the courses--include my main course of stewed lamb and eggplant--with our hands.

We ordered the Kasbah D'Yaffa Feast, which is a five-course sampler. It begins with Harira, a tomato-lentil-chickpea soup, drunk from cups. That was followed by a marinated vegetable and carrot salad, scooped up on a foccaccia-like anise bread. The first course, B'stilla, a filo-dough pastry filled with a rich stew of chicken and vegetables flavored with cinnamon, was extremely rich. But the main courses were simple: Zorg chose a couscous with chicken and vegetables and I selected stewed lamb in a savory broth, topped with a round of friend eggplant. The meal ended with another handwashing, followed by diced fresh fruits in rosewater and ginger, and a fabulous strong jasmine tea with mint and citrus. The tea was poured into small glass mugs from a teapot held two or three feet above the mugs. Zorg said that was how tea was served in the village he lived in in Senegal.

I almost forgot the almond milkshake! It was what Indian restaurants call sweet lassi -- yoghurt, rosewater, and honey whipped with crushed ice -- but this version had ground almonds and almond extract as well. There's also an avocado milkshake on the menu, which I can only wonder about.

Kasbah is a large restaurant, divided into rooms: an entrance lounge, the red room, and the blue room, each one filled with layers of rugs. The tables--giant brass trays on sturdy wooden legs--are surrounded by sofas with big cushions and throw pillows and leather hassocks.

There were many couples at Kasbah, but also large parties of friends and families, all speaking French. (Since French, as well as Arabic and Berber, is spoken in Morocco, the waiters were serving them in French.)

I loved the subtle food; Zorg loved the atmosphere, complete with fully costumed wait staff and a professional belly dancer. "We dined like upper-class Moroccans," he said. "It was like going on vacation."

The political history of Islam

Zorg has plunged into a study of the political history of Islam with the aim of understanding the stance of mainstream Muslims toward terrorism. He's going through a stack of books, and will be posting reviews as he goes. Here's the first review, on The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam.

Stripes, herringbone, and spirals

Kaylee the cat stars in a study of patterns.

Blogrolling

I admit, I'm still trying to figure out how blogrolling works, why I might want to do it, and how I'd get it to work. This post from J. LeRoy helps.

Explore

What's not to like about this?

How to deal with Qwest DSL problems

I'll spare you the play-by-play of our 7-day ordeal getting Qwest to admit there was something wrong with our DSL and fix it. After four in-person visits and dozens of phone calls, the tech who came today was able to restore our download speeds. And, miraculously, a while after he left the upload speed was restored as well. (The trick turned out to be something about having someone at Qwest change our "tree," which translates into changing a port for a DSLAM; a DSLAM is something that sits deep in the system, behind the ATM networks.) Apparently a problem with a tree is very rare, so DSL providers want to thoroughly explore the more plausible options (customer forgot to put a filter on phone line, customer's computer is infested with bandwidth-hogging spyware, physical damage to inside or outside phone lines, screw-up at the customer's ISP) before looking inside their own system. And the customer with the rare problem gets to twiddle his or thumbs while answering the same questions about the system performance over and over and over.

Every Qwest DSL service technician we dealt with in person was a joy to work with, genuinely interested in solving our problem. And every Qwest rep we spoke with on the phone was either an idiot or a jerk.

(If you're into Qwest-bashing, here's an amusing evocation of the Qwest phone support experience from a former Qwest customer.)

On a more positive note, here are some of the resources that helped us out during the 7-day Qwest DSL nightmare:

Seanet.com, our excellent Seattle-area ISP. When Qwest phone reps kept disconnecting us, Seanet got through and pleaded our case.

Speakeasy.net, another Seattle ISP that has a very useful and attractive test for upload and download speeds.

Broadband Reports. This site has free speed tests (a limited number per day) and forums for dishing the up-to-the-minute dirt on all the major DSL providers. I registered (free) and got some excellent ideas for testing from the Qwest forum. With paid membership you get access to tools for testing line packet loss, ping tests, and all kinds of cool stuff. Which I hope we won't be needing any time soon.

I could do without hearing the phrases "trace route" or "dSLAM" again. I want to forget the internet address for configuring our modem. I want to stop thinking about how DSL works and just take it for granted -- like electricity, water, and air.

Here kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty

Smokey the big black cat has resigned himself to moving back in with us now that his preferred owner is in a nursing home. Each day for the past week he's spent more time on our front porch and less on Steve's. Last night he ate dinner inside and came upstairs and spent the night in his old bed -- a cushion on top of a small laundry hamper.

The whole thing reminds me of getting back together with an old boyfriend. You suddenly remember all the things he did that drove you nuts -- in Smokey's case, that would be meowing once at precisely 5 a.m. That one little meow means you have 60 seconds to get up, stumble downstairs, and let him out. If you fail to respond, he starts gouging the fir paneling in the bedroom.

Smokey is still getting the benefit of our sympathy, which means shredded chicken instead of regular cat food. Today I walked in to the kitchen to grab lunch and Smokey materialized. I gave him some chicken. Then Zoe appeared, ready to bug him. I opened a can of Fancy Feast and lured her to her dish on the far side of the diningroom. By then, old Betaille was climbing slowly and warily up the steps to the back porch. I went out and put food on her plate. I turned around and saw Sheba, who also wanted chicken. But when I put the chicken in her dish, Zoe sniffed it, which was a total turn off to Sheba, who stalked off to sulk. Smokey, ever the opportunist, moved over to get the second serving of chicken. Meanwhile, Kaylee had showed up and now she was trying to bug Smokey. I lured her across the room and gave her some Fancy Feast. But by that time, Zoe was trying to shove Betaille off the back porch, so Betaille came inside and I fed her again, this time in the diningroom. I heard a strange meow and there, in the living room, was Coppertop, the neighbor's cat who lives at our house during the day but (thank god) eats at home. At this point, I'd used up 15 minutes of my 20-minute lunch break feeding cats, I had Fancy Feast dripping down my wrist, and Sheba and I still hadn't eaten anything. I washed off, grabbed a yogurt, and went back to the office.

An image of peace and hope

This photo by Doug Plummer is about as beautiful an image as I've seen on the web in a long time.

Writing

There's no one doing lifestyle blogging on the web today who I'd rather read than Wil Wheaton.

He has the true writer's gift of making the everyday fascinating. Everyone's had the experience of looking at the commonplace and perceiving something special; the frustration comes when you try to share that experience with a reader or listener. The professional writer can do it; the truly gifted writer can do it in a way that seems effortless.

Wil Wheaton got me so excited about poker (he plays competitively, and recently wiped out spectacularly at a high stakes game in Vegas) that I'm activly looking for a weekly poker game in Ballard.

In this blog entry, Wheaton writes about writing in as down-to-earth a way as I've seen in a long time. He shares with the late Northwest writer Stephanie Feeney the even rarer gift of writing well with a positive tone. So much "postive" writing comes across gushy, superficial and Pollyannish. It's much easier for an aspiring writer to sound clever and incisive while carping and whining than to get it together to praise something -- just compare the shrillings of The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger with balanced understatement of The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine.

Hiatus

The Mysterious Traveler will be on hiatus for a few days while she spends most of her waking hours on hold with Qwest tech support so they can once again assure her that they have no idea why, after their Internet service went down and they grudging admitted it was their fault and restored it, her 1500Kbps downloads are now running at 64Kbps.

Put your cat to work as a sundial

In the summer, our cat Betaille starts on the far left of the semi-circular bench seating in the morning, then follows the shade of the wisteria, reaching the midpoint of the seating by 2 p.m., as illustrated below:

If your cat is too lazy to follow the sun, here's a solution from the Halfbakery.