haller lake

As a week ago, all of the leaves fell off the lilac trees and now we can blatantly see the neighbors behind us, ever so conscious now of pulling the blinds. I have lost my appetite for yard work way over a month ago and have been far too busy for even walking in the leaves. Now today a holiday I don’t want to leave the house, not really with the rain coming down. The dandelions came back with a vengeance and are choking the front slope. I don’t care. The back yard is beyond reproach, I will be months again before anything appealing grows in it.

It’s been almost a year here, well really we have two more weeks to go. It still feels like we just moved in, I’m not sure how to remedy that. The garage is still under construction so undoubtedly all the boxes piled all over the house add to displacement. At least it is cozy at night with the fireplace.

I’m imagining I will be here even less and less, unable to keep two masters. With the studio hopefully being usable by the end of the year, I told Ben I vow to do way less gardening next year. I feel time squeezed out of me like a mildewed sponge, and my brain way more frantic than I let it get in the past year. It was kind of fun to wallow in my own back yard for a year, but this too should pass.

I read this passage last summer in Ackerman’s Cultivating Desire that I kept thinking about all week, and I just found it again:

Birds still berry in the woods. Grass grows high enough to choke the lawn mower. And though I see houses clearly through the barearmed trees, low brambles and brush still make a thatch wall. Soon, fearing snoopers, I’ll draw the curtains at night, lest strangers watch us swimming between lit window frames, unshaven, bare-faced, amorous or bickering, letting our bellies out, picking our teeth, being homebodies. p.191

I have a million projects I should be doing today, priorities such as laundry head the list. Still I sit here hoping to get the energy up to to go make myself another cup of coffee. Last night during dinner, celebrating our 15th, we started a tally of all the foibles this place has brought us, including getting locked out within the very first hour we were here. I am ready for nothing but sheer boredom please.

Well Haller Lake, if I don’t get back to you before the end of the month, it has been an interesting year. We shall see what we do with you.

PS I am threatening to finally get some sage to burn, to roost out any fine stakeholder who has been cursing us all this time.

Oh, we are being rebellious today and sitting here while we shall be at work. And of course soon we shall. I just wanted to say I love this picture of Yvette. We had a wonderful time yesterday, on a mission to pick out a tree as an homage to her recently deceased Mom — an avid gardener, whose generosity of giving gardening advice undoubtedly was handed down to her daughter. In the photo Yvette is moments away from grasping her new charge- Harry Lauder’s walking stick (I kept unfortunately calling him Henry- wtf?). An incredible beauty of a tree, that both of us fell in love with last February at the Garden Show.

A brief note, it was an unfortunate moment to realize this place called Swanson’s Nursery. Why does it have to be so close to my house? A crack den of unmeasurable largeness.

Happily I actually got all my languishing plants into the ground by the end of the day. Well, with the exception of bulbs, many more to go. Many.

Okay, the work horn calls. Happy Monday.

In typical Zick family fashion, four days of socializing, being out on the town and subsequently a road trip lands me in bed. I have a cold. This could lead to theories that I am allergic to masses of people. I am tired.

However, this means I get to spend quality time with my new favorite friend, Nick Hornby. I found Housekeeping vs. The Dirt on the library shelve, it literally was a moment of judging it by a cover. How lucky, I needed a short, pithy, witty book about reading books and being a smart ass. It is basically a collection of his essays he filed to the Believer about reading books. He spends a lot of time discussing the relevance of reading in a world that doesn’t read books. Through the course of a year he makes lists of intended reads and then what he actually reads. He gives up on Larkin for farting, but plows through Gilead. He compares and contrasts The Dirt by Motley Crue (sorry umlauts be damned) and The Shrimp and the Anemone.

I certainly recommend not reading anything for a month before, because the strong flavors of Nikki, Tommy Lee and the other two will overwhelm pretty much any other literary delicacy you may have consumed; and you probably won’t want to read any fiction for a month afterward because it will be hard to see the point.

And the best part of all he publishes excerpts from some of the books he recommends, and perhaps as you are reading his recommendation and wish you really knew what he was talking about, well you can right away. I now very much want to put on hold at the library Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which is about the drudgery of the workaday world, but very funny, if that is even possible.

I have resisted Hornby due to his High Fidelity fame, but now I think I need more of him.

Here are some excepts just so my small, feeble brain can remember why I just wrote that.

On Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:

We all know the circumstances surrounding the reading of a book are probably every bit as important as the book its self, and I read Gilead at a weird time. I was on book tour in the U.K. and I was sick of myself and of the sound of my own voice, and of appearing on daft radio shows, where I found that it was surprisingly easy to reduce my own intricately wrought novel to idiotic sounds bites: if anyone were ever in need of the astonishing hush that Marilynne Robinson achieves in her book- how do you do that, in something crafted out of words? - it was I. Caveat emptor, but if you don’t like it, then you have no soul.

On Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin:

I think I’d sort of presumed the eponymous penguin was metaphorical, like both the squid and the whale in The Squid and the Whale, my antipathy to the animal kingdom in such that even animal metaphors tend to have a deterrent effect. (What kind of person thinks in animal metaphors? In this day and age?) Imagine my horror, then, when I learned during Kurkov’s reading that the penguin in Death and the Penguin is not like the squid or the whale, but, like an actual penguin. The penguin really is a character, who- pull yourself together, man, which - has moods and feelings, and has an integral part in the story, and so on. And, as if the author actually wanted me to hate his novel, it’s a cute penguin too. “It will be a hard-hearted reader who is not touched by Viktor’s relationship with his unusual pet.,” says one of the quotes on the back. (Why not just find a blurb saying, “DON’T BUY THIS BOOK“?). And of course, Death and the Penguin turns out to be fresh, funny, clever, incredibly soulful and compelling, and the penguin turns out to be a triumphant creation. I might only read books about animals from now on

.

And oh look, here is Nick’s latest reading list for us here and right now.

Back to bed.

Wow, when I get up in the morning to let the dog out it’s pitch black out. A week ago or so I started noticing this and it was a bit unnerving. Summer is really over. I like fall and I have my winter socks on in fact. I just wonder what I did this summer? I can barely remember.

A royal concept came my way about three weeks ago, cutting out a few bad habits has allowed me to get up really early again in the morning, so I can feel like I have a life. Maybe start writing with intent again. This weekend marks, like chalk lines on a cell wall nine months in this house. Strangely similar to the length of a pregnancy you say. Nine months suddenly feels like a hell of a long time, like the world has gone around in orbit while you stand still. We’re trying to remedy that.

Last night I went out and bought bags of bulbs. This is what we do with our Friday nights in our new life. Alliums. I was so distraught by the lack of alliums in my life this year that it practically hurt me. Also some dwarf irises. I look at my knees and tell them to get ready, this weekends going to be a tough one. Daffodils and tulips need to go in too.

The most beautiful morning, in the dog walk today. The sun is crisp and white, like it is in the autumn and there is enough of a chill to wear a light coat. The berries, mostly black and those red ones I am too lazy to identify are ripening with force.

I finally feel like I am getting a sea leg back. Only one, but that is good enough. I told my husband this yesterday in the car and he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. At least he doesn’t care if I am insane.

Fall is here.

This has been in the fridge for two years. At this point I am too terrified to either open it or throw it away. One of these days soon I think it might wear out its welcome but until then its like a book end or something for the condiments.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. - Karl Marx

For various reasons, I have been digging around in my archives this week, stuff you think you’ll never look at again. Spread across various clunky old computers it’s all a mess- with no rhyme or reason to organization- which is probably fine. In a fit of inspiration though I realized the Wayback Machine, that magical apparatus has been carefully chugging along keeping track of this and that that I have spit out over time.

As I have frequently thought, never put anything out there you don’t want to reclaim later because it will come back to bite you. And bite it will. Even if you think you have lost that train of thought and taken down all your files because you couldn’t afford more server space or that whim was gone- gleefully you can rifle through it all again.

I’ve never been good at transitions. That’s why I was surprised and kind of amused I had forgotten the last time I uprooted myself - when we moved out here-, I kept a very brief website called Seattle Notes. About one thought a month was about all I could handle.

I’m not sure how this archiving mechanism works, this Wayback Machine, but some times it keeps everything in tact and some times bits and pieces mostly photo images are MIA.
More fun things I had forgotten about: A fan site for Liz Renay (John Waters star of Desperate Living)…who I sadly found out this week passed away in January (what kind of fan am I really?). One of the first websites I made, a tribute to the conceptual band The Bloody Lips, Celebrity Knitting and god knows what else. Part of me wants to bundle it all up and put it in one cart and other other part says let sleeping dogs lie. I know better though.

(I love it, but it is not my photo)

It’s pretty apparent I’ve never been the athletic type.
If you know me (and most likely do if you are reading this)- you’re guffawing at the mere thought. It’s true. Even worse, good luck in wrapping your mind around the concept of some agreement to perhaps would find me on a competitive team. Yay team.

I conveniently blame all this on genetics, but that didn’t excuse me in the youth days.
Like the rest of the masses I had to take the dreaded P.E. credits in school.
After failing aerobics (for unwillingness to show up) I first chose bowling, a sport that accepted smoking habits during participation, and after that ball room dancing. If I had to take P.E. at least then I could spend the hour hanging out with my gay male friends listening to tango phonographs.

So it is a curious fact that I suddenly have an insatiable interest in curling. Okay, not enough to actually get off my duff and walk the probably 25-30 or so blocks to see if it is real, but I have read there is a reported franchise in my own neighborhood.
Granite Curling Club is allegedly situated in my own fine neighborhood of Haller Lake.

While I am not sure if this is enough to pull me in:

If you think you might be interested in joining a league or are just curious as to what curling looks like, stop by during any of the leagues. The evening leagues start at 6:30 or 7:00 pm weeknights…

this certainly is:

…..(and the bar upstairs usually opens around 8:30)

Love that!

Well, I’m not so certain I am down with a bonspiels , but I could be up for sitting, sipping and watching some ice action. Thank god for the internet, if I ever change my mind, I can brush up on a few rules before heading out. Just to give me plenty of time to think it all over, the curling season doesn’t start until mid-October.

Before you know it, it could be me saying:
So help me, I like curling. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I’m not even going to pretend that I understand Russian, or even think this is actually remotely entertaining. However, I take it as scientific proof that my annoyances are universal enough to turn up in a Soviet cartoon factory.

ДАНДЕЛИОН!

Last Friday on the way home from work, a sudden decision to veer off the normal route brought us to a promising site: an entire block filled with international food.
Okay, don’t get too excited now, I am reporting to you from North Seattle.

But first a Thai restaurant entered the frame, followed by a Pakistani grocery store, immediately followed by Mr. Kabob “ Authentic Middle Eastern Food freshly prepared in the traditional style”. We went for the thai food and while waiting for our take out pursued the aisles of the grocery store next door. Heaven. For one millisecond the sidekick told me he thought he was standing on 23rd Street. The grocery store and Mr. Kabob will have to be visited again. The Thai food was acceptable for a pleasant I’m-so-tired-its-Friday-dining experience. And while I absolutely adored the rites of Chilipalooza in the neighborhood, it was nice to know there are indeed options.

As an aside, Haller Lake Radio, the conceptual magnet that is continues to be- is threatening to harvest a booth at next year’s Chilipalooza. True. I am feverishly working on the offering: Midlife Crisis Chili, a concoction of regrettable vegetables stewed for about 2.5 years in a bitter peanut sauce. No sports cars or bad haircuts will hopefully be involved. Most certainly we will additionally be broadcasting live that day. Probably some sour cream will be involved as well.