Shnow!

We had the first flurry of snow last night. It was beautiful (as it will probably always be to a Californian living in a place that only occasionally sees the white stuff). Joosh and I drove up into the hills by the zoo and took turns throwing fresh, clean little snoballs at each other.

Pardon the blurry photo. It was taken with Joosh's new Crackberry, which has a tiny bright white LED that it uses as a flash in the dark when taking pics. It's not high quality, but it does do the trick.

The snow smelled really good - super clean, and mildly herbal, like babies and sweetgrass. I was impressed with nature for creating such a lovely nosegay on frozen water. Very nice.

It is supposed to snow again tonight after 10pm and there's a 60% chance on Saturday as well. Pretty crazy that snow used to be an every few years event around here, and yet we've had significant snowstorms each year that we've been here. Thank you global warming and your interestingly shifting weather patterns.

In other news, I'm in a ridiculously foul mood today due to the idiotic project that will not die (if you say "Timeshare" to me, you are going down, Sucker). It's the goddamn Energizer Bunny, with the whole 'keeps going and going and going." Never was a person more over something than I am of this little venture.

Strength, Camille.

Cutting your bytes into smaller, easily chewed pieces. You are welcome.

So I tried to break up last night's mega brain-barf-on-blog post into smaller, attention deficit-worthy, bite sized pieces (I don't have the stamina or attention span for posts like that one, why should you???). I also hoped to correct my ridiculous photo positions and formatting, but I'm sorry to report that I have grown tired of such things and it will all have to wait.

Also, apparently I just risked outing TeabaggerT as a workday slacker (which is not to stay he doesn't stay up all night working, it's just that he claimed to be playfully working in the middle of the day and I thought maybe that statement needed some air quotes around it " ") and now I feel terrible because I posted my zinger in a place where his co-workers can spy my facetious handiwork. Crap.

On the plus side, I was able to instigate a multi-threaded conversation about bezoars, which I think takes not a little bit of talent.

Ketchup, part 2: Trip to California, subpart B.

And shortly the All Hallows Eve, full of sugar and expensively-suited small people running up your steps, was upon us.

Halloween-y at Joosh's mom's place. Nephew Liam, being the damn cutest giraffe you'll ever see. Except that his outfit was a tiny bit too tight and he kept trying to yank the crotch free. Technically he was a bit of a skeevy giraffe, I guess.



And still later in the week I drove through parts of LA previously unknown to me (Irvine, Santa Ana, godforsaken places one and all) to see El Jefe, with whom I'd been working on the aforementioned ridiculous project for the last few months. We were supposed to go the Oceanography center, but when I arrived at about 1, there was a police blockade, so we renegotiated our plan to involve mediocre pizza and a park for some fun times.

The kids were along for the ride, and if you know Jefferey and his lovely wife, you'll know at first glance that these two are literal chips off the old blocks. May I present Mini-JLG and Mini-CSH:


They are incredibly funny and absurdly smart. And it's probably a good thing they are home-schooled, because they are the kinds of adorable precocious who would get their hilarious butts kicked and their brains shrunk in public schools (yes, even the snotty la la schools in So. Cal!).

Here I asked them to make their kookiest craziest grossiest faces. This is what they came up with:

With a smidge more prompting (grosser! crazier! C'mon!):



Ash conquers the rings:



Autum(nal) conquers the rock wall:















El Jefe conquers Dana Point (while rocking the ever-sweet 'Refugee Facial Hair' look, apparently grown during the wildfire evacuation the previous week):




The entire family (sans CSH who did not join, but was surely wearing them within a hundred miles of us all the same) wore Crocs. I found this funny.



Hipster parents and their hipster spawn, taking over the world one dress-over-jeans or punked-out-hoodie outfit at a time:

(Please note the evidence of California's real estate market shining on the hilltop in the background, just above jeans/dress girls head).

I didn't get a good shot of the possibly older women dressed youngisher (so of indeterminable age) in tight leopardy-slash militantish yoga wear who Jefe insisted were a lesbian couple. I had hoped you might weigh in on the subject. They were wearing Neimen Marcus versions of ghetto caszh, basically. And I disagreed about the couple thing. But Jefe also thinks that JK Rowling outed Dumbledore (who is CLEARLY not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that) in order to make the actress who plays Hermione feel better about the fact that she is, in fact, a total lesbian. So take his assessments with a grain (or several) of salt.


Prior to the arrival of the other kids in the photo above, I had a total "That kid is STILL on the ESCALATOR" moment with this aging skater punk dad and the daredevil egg-onment of his progeny.

It might be too small to see without enlarging the photo to full size, but man, I could practically hear the bones breaking, precognitive echoes playing over the voice of Brodyman in Mallrats in my head. A few minutes later they busted out a skateboard and went to town. No, no helmut. (God help me, I'm an old old old lady).

So that's about it. There were many other activities on the California trip, of which I did not manage to photo document any further. Visits with grandparents, brothers, mom, dad, step-brother and fam (where I broke the news about the fact that one of their Halloween pumpkins was covered in the recalled "Aqua Dots" beads, you know, the ones that turn into the frickin date rape drug when ingested? Thank you, China, you piece of shit, and thanks all you nutjob USA consumers so desperate for cheaper and cheaper crap that you don't give a rat's ass about where it comes from, how it gets here, what the impact is, etc, until your own spawn are threatened with immediate comas or a case of lead poisoning. Grrrrrr. Though I should offer the caveat that the Aqua Dots were not at all cheap, they are absurdly expensive, actually - I guess you have to pay extra for a drug in your toys that some people actually want and pay good money to procure on or before date night).

Hmmm, I seem to be getting bitter and crankypants. Perhaps I should leave off about now. I meant to end with a tribute to my love and yours, Mr. Ben Harper, who graced us in Portland with his harmonious presence last week, but my account of the lovefest, it will have to wait.

Congrats to Bexy on her last day of classes for the first semester!!! Crazy fast, this semester flew by. I've yet to try the New Year's Drink contender recipe yet, but I will do so soon. There's always the sweet Saphire nectar to fall back on come 29 December, right? Congrats, honey. You are totally rocking the school of law.

Ketchup, part 2: Trip to California, subpart A.

Trip to California: The Cemetery Visit.

My favorite Un-Niece, Hedrita. Joosh's older brother's daughter. She let's me call her "Cookie" just like the Jewish Tante I've always wanted to be.

She and my youngest brother are the same age, and went to the same High School and according to what I have gathered on Facebook (The MyFace, I call it), they refer to each other as cousins. But if Joosh and I actually did get married, she'd be my niece (by marriage, but still) and my brother would be... her uncle-in-law? My brother would be Joosh's Brother-in-Law, and Joosh is her uncle, so wouldn't that be it? Uncle-in-Law? Maybe they'll have to stick with cousins. It'll be much more fitting for the day when they get drunk at a party and make out and I have to tease them incessantly by calling them "Kissing Cousins". God, I hope they don't find this blog. They will kill me.



On Sunday, the day after we arrived, I went with the not-in-laws to visit the family cemetery plots. Our friend ML here in Portland has been doing some Geneology research (she LOVES it, apparently - ask her about the Royal Family line, go ahead, I dare you), and Joosh's mom is in that sort of family reckoning stage of life, so armed with two notebooks and some vague plot numbers, off we went to the most beautiful, most glamorous, possibly the most would-be-expensive-land/ currently-occupied-only-by-dead-people-not-able-to-enjoy-the-million-dollar-view I have ever seen. Right on the bluffs at the edge of Santa Barbara, this no doubt used to be the outskirts of town. No longer. It is smack dab in the middle of Oprah territory, huge swaths of gravestone-dotted prime-ass real estate, totally gorgeous. Breathtaking.

First we went to the park where Jojo got married and had ourselves an old-fashioned picnic full of mayo and cookies and lunchmeat, etc. Char made fabulous hummus for her (shockingly) vegetarian brother (meat family, very very meat family) and the jackass refused to eat it. I found out later it was because he thought the roasted peppers were tomatoes, but that may or may not be the full truth of it, one never knows.

At the park, we totally annoyed some hippie dippie group of Food-Not-Bomb'ers having some sort of free-out in the center by the turtle pond. Apparently we sat down too close to their food collection area or something, and they kept looking at us with decidedly un-peaceful expressions. Peace and love kids, peace and love. Hopefully we redeemed ourselves when several homeless looking dudes came over and asked for food, saying they'd been told there was food to be had by the tree (all I saw were sacks of uncooked potatoes, by the way, and a fuck-off HUGE clear hefty sack of hard-tack looking bagels with a double knot at the top that people kept picking up and putting back down again). We gave them food, and they were excited.

Best moment by the tree: An adorably overeager college student came over and dropped a brown bag off on the other side of the tree (where the bagels and potatoes and oh oh, I forgot to mention the rotten looking bell peppers! were) and turned to us with a jaunty little informational sing song: "Butternut squash! From my garden! Organic! Tra la la!" Oh Peace and Conflict Studies peeps, how I miss you.

So up to the Ritz Carlton of cemeteries. It took us a while to find the right plots. In fact we had to flag down a groundskeeper. It was a Sunday, so the main office wasn't open, but there was a tour of some kind being led around the grounds. I was exceedingly annoyed by a super disrespectful woman wearing a green and black striped witches hat throughout the tour. Show some respect, lady, jesus. I seriously wanted to yell at her, but settled for sneering whenever she passed. I'm not sure if she noticed or not. It was sunny and there was lots of squinting, so I highly doubt it.

Here, for your amazement, are more cemetery photos (I'm obviously having trouble getting images to rotate, but it's too late at night for me to bother with it, so apologies for the neck cramp in case you care to turn sideways for viewing).











Bury me here please. Oh wait, I want to be cremated, or neptuned or something. So scatter me here, or in that beautiful sea off the bluffs from here. Or just think of me fondly when you pass by.

We managed to find both family plots, but there's a bit of a mystery about the Sprouls because there are 5 people listed on the records as buried in the plot, but only 3 names appear on the newer looking headstone, and the dates of birth and death appear to be off slightly. Hmmmmm.

At some point when I am feeling less "What am I going to do with the rest of my life" and more "Nancy Drew" I may attempt to get to the bottom of this like the super sleuth I know I can be in my heart of hearts. I suspect it will be a nice chunk of a novel one of these days, from all the stories I've heard so far. (And you thought YOUR family was bad?!?).

Ketchup, part 1: Oh, Canada.

There's no good reason for me not to have been updating with photos and interesting ("interesting" perhaps) tidbits for the last month (and them some). I'm lazy, I suppose. Or just really really really lost in my own head, so much so that I have a hard time putting the speed-of-light/off-they-rush-into-the-ethers thought bubbles out on the page in readable words. Plus it's pretty much Bexy that reads this little vanity project, and we talk weekly, so c'mon, whatevs, right? Except my visual descriptions of photos can only go so far, I would assume... So here are a bazmillion catch-ups for the last month or 6 weeks or so:

Trip to Oh, Canada.

Though I had been aiming for Italy, I was way to busy with my last project (did I say project? I meant to say debacle) to plan and execute such a trip for Joosh's 35th birthday (yep, 35, not a typo). But I did promise the old man that we'd get out of the country, and so out of the country we went. After pit-stopping at the Peet's in Vancouver, WA (conveniently located just off the 5, and open quite early, thank you Peetniks), we drove up I-5 to Hwy 101 and enjoyed the beautiful scenery all the way up to Port Angeles where we hopped a 90 minute Ferry to Victoria, Vancouver Island, Beautiful British Columbia, Canada (hard to fit on a post card, eh?). I saw two small whales on the voyage over, so it was already a terrific trip for me. The only bummer was that our coffee and pastries from 7 that morning had pretty much worn off by 1 but the items they passed off as food on the boat was sadly lacking in a) substance b)nutrition and c)anything without meat contained therein.


Joosh's "mmmmm" face at the only vegetarian items we could find, nachos and sliced veggies. I am eating a super gross chicken sandwich (cold) with a piece of pineapple slickering across the boiled chicken surface. Mmmmmm, indeed. Oh well, what can you do. Next time I'll bring a picnic.

Here we are on the Ferry, blowin' in the wind* and fairly freezing. Joosh may have been wearing shorts (quelle suprise) but I can't recall for sure. (Please excuse his fuzzy neck - the last time I buzzed his head, we forgot to attend to the neck region. It was about an inch longer than the hair on his head. Ah well, all the more to gross out our North-of-the-Border compatriots, I guess).
Actually, maybe the neck fuzz was why we were so harshly questioned at the border crossing! In retrospect, it probably wasn't that harsh, but somehow I felt like I didn't have the correct answers, and that I looked obviously guilty each time I looked at Joosh to see if he was going to answer the interrogator or if I should. Guilty of what, you ask? Absolutely nothing, unless toting a bottle of California champagne over the border is a crime! Authority figures make me nervious, I guess. Even 5'3" slender women in funny hats. It was the clipboard. And her cold cold stare.

We arrived in the afternoon at our first night's destination, Fairburn Farm, in Cowichan Valley. I found it through this website, and as it reminded me of the Agritourismos of Italy, I thought it would be a fitting locale. Plus, you know, Water Buffalo. How could I pass that up?

It was a lovely, old-fashioned, low-key, mellow, not particularly quiet between the rooms sort of place, but incredibly restful otherwise. (Like, the gal at Orangette went there on her honeymoon? Um, quiet sex only, in the cold bathroom, I would think, unless you wanted your neighbors to have an earful of your wheeeeee-we're-newlyweds!!!!!!!!). One bummer for me was that I selected our room because it had a jacuzzi tub, only to find out it was a jacuzzi tub for one. Duh.


This is the only remotely decent shot I have of our room, and it is both blurry and vaguely psycho. Better photos on the owner's website, I suppose.


This is the view out our window.



These are two very tired, very wind-blown, pretty darn hungry travelers. Dinner was not scheduled for a few hours, however, so we napped.

Dinner was amazing, I thought. Everything was local, most of it grown on the property. Unfortunately the vegetarian entree lacked any panache because it was just the fish dish without the fish. So just vegetables in a non-fishy broth. Probably boring. Sorry, honey. My fish was awesome (smoked something or other, monkfish, I think? I can't remember but it was perfect). The salad was the last of the heirloom tomatoes (uh, oops) with water buffalo mozzerella cheese (I gave Joosh my cheese and took his "vile" tomatoes) and incredible balsamic vinegar and smoked salt (kill me delicious). There was an AWESOME risotto with wild mushrooms with a slab of sauteed squash (very meaty, a bit buttery, yum). And the desert was an incredible butternut squash tart - rich, creamy, delicious, perfectly lightly spiced, gah! - and honeyed semi-freddo. Dude. So good. Did I take a photo? No. I loves me some food bloggers, but any ability in that department has yet to make itself known in my pic-taking skills to date.

I didn't get a photo of the Water Buffalo running by the window at breakfast the next morning, either. You can view them here or here. They were, no other word for it, rad.

I did ask Jooshy to take a photo of the garden while I paid the bill and asked for a recommendation for that night somewhere else on the island (oh hey, did I mention we were there on Canadian Thanksgiving? Yeah. We were. Cause I am an EXCELLENT planner that way). He got half the garden, maybe a 1/3:



We took a mini-ferry (held 18 cars, we were number 18 in line an hour before it left, and they took USD, for which I was extremely thankful since had about .35 Canadian on me) to Brentwood. We could have driven, but Mara at the Farm had suggested the Ferry, and thank goodness she did because they closed the trans-Canada highway in both directions right at the off-shoot for this Ferry, just before we got there. I tried to figure out why, but never did get the story.

The baby ferry (Joosh is standing next to our car):



We ended up at a new upscale spa at Sidney Pier where Mara had recently done some consulting. It was just what you'd expect of a newly developed seaside town, right along a new and perfectly landscaped strolling promenade, with the requisite "steakhouse" on the water, and what looked like Timeshare Condos (gah!) stretching along the shore. We ate a late lunch/early dinner at the restaurant, and I watched a Vietnamese couple pull crabs out of traps at the end of the pier. We spent the rest of the afternoon/evening chilling in the room, staring at the water and watching Canadian TV (tons of commercials for, about, or referring to Hockey, no kidding. They truly love that icy madness up there, man. Even the commercial for like, the local coffee chain, was about Hockey).

We got up early and headed back for Victoria, not sure if we'd get on the early Ferry or not. Apparently all the Canucks were headed to Washington to take advantage of our ridiculously depressing dollar (on par with Canada's while we were there, probably worse now, but I truly cannot bear to look right now) on what was essentially their "Black Friday". Enjoy your lead poisoning, suckers?

Back on the Ferry (Where's Waldosho?):



Oh look, there he is:



Taking a slow leisurely drive back to Portland, we stopped here:



And here:















And saw this:


And this:


It was beautiful, peaceful, restorative, restful, and just a long long drive. When we got back, it was back to work for both of us, though the viability and certitude of my particular project was crashing to a close. Well, my involvement anyway. Que Sera, apparently.

*Every time I say or hear the phrase "Blowing in the wind" I think of K-Dog and her awesome impression of Jodie Foster in the movie "Nell"... "Meeee, Nellllll. Bloooooowin eeennnn da weeeeeen" in a tone most akin to something like an actual deaf person forming unheard words (or more simply, kind of like an unkind person doing their best impression of a mentally handicapped child). Killed me every single time. J and I can still crack each other up by imitating K's spot-on mimicry of Ms. Foster's "Oscar, please" attempts to capture the 'specialness' of the Nell character. Full disclosure: I never saw the movie, but I just know in my heart of hearts (and from previews, I guess) that K has it down pat.