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Saturday, January 9, 2021

Nutcracker Safari Made Easy

Many years ago Scott and I spent a very hot fourth of July on Pig Safari, searching all over Seattle--on foot and via Metro--for the Pike Place Market Fundraiser pigs--at least, I think it was for Pike Place Market. Some months, or maybe a year and half later, they did the same sort of fundraiser with nutcrackers and we scoured the city for those, this time bundled up against the cold. Salty's in West Seattle seems to have collected nutcrackers and, in these sad Covid times, they have about a dozen lined up outside of the restaurant which we bike by fairly frequently en route to Alki.

Today's ride was in West Seattle since the Queen Anne snowy owl is on top of Queen Anne hill and that is one bit of elevation gain in Seattle that I just can't face. Damned hill. Pesky owl. But we got in 14.4 miles and had many fine views of Puget Sound and a mess of waterbirds today. But I choose to share the line-up of nutcrackers, perhaps for old times' sake.

Crappy, lousy, no-good day

The photo really fails to capture the extent of the horror.

It was a pretty lousy awful day at the end of a universally crappy week (though, I force myself to remember, such excellent results in Georgia). The work day had me feeling like I was only getting further and further behind. There was no biking. It has been a month since I last held Gradka.

Some evenings call for a glass of rye and absinthe.

The sort of day that, when it finally ended, really called for sazaracs and, a few hours later, starting cinnamon rolls for tomorrow morning.

It has been ages since I last made cinnamon rolls; fingers crossed.

And now I've done something to screw up the formatting here which, really, comes as no surprise. I heard that someone declared that after the one-week free trial of 2021 they didn't want to subscribe to the year; that pretty much sums up my feelings entirely.

Thursday, January 7, 2021

Another brief bike update

Today's ride started not so long before sunset so there are no scenic photos. It was a lot of up one street and down the next for a little over seven miles. Hey, at least the weather was clear with no wind and, as a bonus (for us anyway) many people haven't taken their holiday lights down yet.

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Biking? You've got to be kidding!

Good god, what a day. But I'm not saying anything about the events in DC here. I had to break away from that horror and go for a ride this afternoon.

Monday, January 4, 2021

January 4 bike report

The first workday of 2021 offered up a not-rainy interlude late in the afternoon so we took a break to go for a back-and-forth ride in the neighborhood for about five miles. So it goes.

Sunday, January 3, 2021

January 3rd; sort of pathetic

Today looks like it's just going to be a quick trip to the farmers market and back for bicycle miles--meaning scarcely over two. It was a sleepy vague morning and Scott forgot to put the panniers on his bike. That meant that all the farmers-market-obtained goods traveled in Bessie's TARDIS-like basket. The baked goods, which came from Bakery Nouveau (where--oddly--I'd not been since before the pandemic started locally), since Stephane of All You Need is Loaf was not at the market, gosh darn it, were packed into my diminutive backpack which Scott kindly carried. Perhaps he thought baked goods wouldn't be safe with me.

Saturday, January 2, 2021

Books of 2020

I'd really hoped I could just cut and paste my list from the side column but, of course, that didn't really work so goodness knows whether I managed to get all the proper links aligned here. If not, there's always google for the truly interested.

It turns out I read more than I thought I might in 2020; like many people, I found I lacked focus at various parts of the year. That resulted in my not blacking out my Seattle Public Library/Arts and Lectures bingo card--or maybe it's just that I found some of the categories particularly uninspiring. But looking through the list now, I find that I remember a great many of these titles quite fondly; I read some truly excellent books in 2020! It shouldn't be a surprise, but--by gosh--The Grapes of Wrath is phenomenally good. Like amazingly good. I'm so glad Paper Boat Booksellers had a nice-looking edition that caught my eye. Other stand-outs of the year were Circe, Three Things About Elsie, A Burning, and As Always, Julia. Particularly surprising to find fine was Pasta for Nightingales--a Christmas gift that looked like it would fall into the "pretty pictures but not such fascinating text" school. The text turned out to be quite fascinating and weird.

I read quite a number of Louise Penny's "Gamache" series and, in fact, a Gamache is my first book for 2021 as well. They aren't profound but they are somehow comforting. I cheat by quoting the last bit of the Acknowledgments for Glass Houses (which will be on next year's list, should we all survive that long): Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines. I don't always make those choices, but I do know when I'm in the wilderness, and when I'm in the bistro. I know where I want to be, and I know how to get there.

Some numbers: 54 books total including 11 re-reads, roughly 10 non-fiction (depending on how you want to categorize The Book of Mark, Maus II, and perhaps a few others), more or less 6 children's books. Some books this year were admittedly very short indeed (Cat Heaven had perhaps the fewest words on the fewest pages); others were quite long (The Levant Trilogy and The Balkan Trilogy are, as their names imply, actually each three not-short volumes).

As usual, the children's books were almost uniformly outstanding; Charlotte's Web never disappoints, though Jack and Jill was not exactly spellbinding. Anthony Trollope (Rachel Ray, The Claverings, and The Kellys and O'Kellys) is also always reliable and comforting. I admit Gingerbread left me a little baffled, How Long 'Til Black Future Month and My Purple Scented Novel were both a bit "meh," and The Thirteen Clocks was distinctly underwhelming, but there were very few outright stinkers this year. Utopia Avenue got some pretty lousy reviews, but it was a sweet, if predictable story (and oh! so much better than Slade House). I had some doubts about Piransi but it also turned out to be quite decent. Some of the books I've had to look at the links to remember--Homegoing, The Yield, Signs Preceding the End of the World--were truly excellent, but somehow just failed to stick with me; I blame my mental state, not the books themselves.