Hellfire.

Bex wrote about it earlier today. I've been following the updates online since talking to the Goldstein clan while they were being evacuated from Encinitas, texting them updated road closures on the route to Palm Springs, where they were headed to Grandma's. Southern California is burning all up.

This map scares the shit out of me. Right now there are TWENTY fires listed from Santa Maria to San Diego. The satellite photo posted by Bex reminds me of this one from a few months back of the Greek islands. Is it really a coincidence that all of these fires are burning all at once?

Living in the cool wet climate here, it is easy for me to forget about how the hot dry Santa Ana winds make you feel like you will spontaneously combust at the next spark on your skin or static charge through your hair. Yes, gale force winds (hurricane wind speeds, according to NPR) and the dry parched chaparral that practically wills itself to burn - part of the landscape life cycle - are completely conducive to these types of fires, of course living in California there are out of control fires almost every year. But look at the map, look at this sat photo:



Is that how it happens, really? Do 15 or 20 fires spontaneously erupt in a two day span up and down the lower left of a state?

I don't know how many people have died so far, nor how many homes have burned. I know the fire crews are worn out and that people are scared and that there are no answers that satisfy anyone at this time. One fire commissioner said today that several of the SD fires will probably just have to burn down to the water's edge, that there are simply not enough resources to win the battle on every flaming front at this point. Which reminds me - where's the National Guard, and don't they usually come out and assist in local disasters like this?

Oh yeah.

I bore me. Care to join?

It poured today (shocking for Portland, I know, alert the media).

I wore Birkenstocks, a skirt and a beer sweatshirt (the one with Rasputin's image, that gets me lots of guys staring at my chest and saying "That is an AWESOME beer" and lots of girls staring at same, trying to figure out what the hell they are seeing, as The Unkillable's head sort of gets crammed in the bra-fashioned concave between the twins - the girl-staring is usually followed by a sneer, by the way, and yeah, I totally get it). So after walking around for a few hours like this, I was both proud of, and disgusted by myself. And not a little bit uncold.

Sun came out for a bit. Second rainbow in as many days. Nawwwww.

There was some sort of weirdo streetside snowboarding-in-October event today in what I did not previously know is known as "one of Portland's most famous alleys" (due to its location off the backdoor of a well-known strip-club), at the top of the North Park Blocks. I couldn't get a super good look at the action due to the throng of parka-ed and knit-capped young people standing around drinking the Redbull, Rockstar and other energy drinks being thrown at them by the "savvy" flash marketing teams crowded around the busy block in their slick marketing vehicles, but from what I could gather, there was essentially a fake-snow covered skate ramp and lots of daredevil youngins jumpin around and hollering and cheering for apparently amazing feats of snowboardery. I thought about trying to get a closer look, and perhaps a camera phone snap or two, but the weed smoke started to make my eyes burn (were that it were not true, but yes, I am obviously settling into utter old ladyness without even the hope of trying to fight the inevitability) and I was crankypants hungry (see above), so we kept moving on to the always-reliable if not funnily named Thai Peacock for late lunch/early dinner.

While enjoying veggie Pad See You and Pra Ram (listed on the menu with the words "It so good" after the description, and truly it is so), and watching the Red Bull Mini parked outside get mobbed by Trustafarians in dirty ripped pants and super expensive looking, Ready-for-Aspen-Mimsy? snow gear, I suddenly understood the context for something that I'd witnessed earlier while standing in Peet's, waiting impatiently for the condiment station to clear:

Four early-teen boys in what appeared to be coordinated down snow jackets (not rain jackets, mind you, but the fluffy puffy and totally unwaterproof fancy jackets that always make me think of Coco Chanel because of the cross-stitching) and ski hats (one boy in yellow jacket/yellow cap, another in purple jacket/purple cap, etc) crowded around the condiment cart trying to docter their beverages. Their ensembles troubled me, but as I had not yet had a drop of coffee, I didn't possess the powers of concentration needed to focus on the troublesome bits, nor the brain power needed to try to resolve it by coming up with plausible explanations for who they were or why they were there. Rich kids staying in the Marriot above, fully unclear on the concept of Portland as wet but not freezing, is the best I could come up with before forgetting the question altogther in my utter annoyance at how long the little pishers were taking to pour milk and sugar into their drinks. How hard is it to put some shit your cup and move along, hmmm?

I heard one of them say "No no, she said she likes it 'Light and Sweet' so put more cream in it" as he tossed three more sugar packets to the one pouring the milk (Whole milk, by the way, not cream or half and half). Purple Cap said "What does that even mean, anyway?" and Orange Cap repeated it "Light and sweet, you know, Light. And. Sweet." as if Purple Cap would get it if repeated to him several times in rapid succession. I involuntarily snickered, but I swear it was not about teen boy stupidity, but rather the fact that I so badly had to fight the urge to say something to the effect of "She likes it light and sweet, like her men!" At the slight snicker, Yellow Cap realized I'd been standing there waiting and seemed to get a bit desperate to move on. He poured more milk in, then more sugar, then more milk (and again with the Whole milk, which if you know Peet's coffee, you know is about as likely to lighten the cup as my pointing to it and saying "light and sweet, light and sweet" over and over again). Finally I couldn't take it anymore and stepped up with some elbows between the boys and grabbed the half and half jug to tip into my cup so I could get the hell out of the strange universe into which I had inadvertently stumbled. Orange took notice of my choice and totally punched Yellow in the arm and said "That's not even cream, you idiot, gawd" and rolled his eyes in an exaggerated manner in my (or maybe Rasputin's) general direction as he grabbed the cup and poured a bunch of coffee into the trashbin next to the counter. "Yeah, but why is it called 'Light and Sweet?" said Purple again.

Let's hope it was the gange, yo, because otherwise I continue to live in fear for the future of this once great nation.

What must Google think of me?

Have you noticed much about the Google ads on the side of your Gmail account, when you are reading your harmless, innocent, email messages? I happened to take a closer look at mine the other day...

While viewing a message from the Hyatt Regency RFP for event services in Tampa, Gmail gives me the following off to the right:

Kits, Buggles, Gear
www.coastalwindsports.com
"Life is better when it blows"

Followed by:
Find Married Swingers
"Married but Feeling Unfullfilled? Find local like-minded partners".
(I'm NOT linking to that one here, sorry Mr. Burton).

And finally:
Special Event Favors
"Say it with favors: Unigue and Elegant Favors and much much more..."
(Again, not linking, because some of those favors are way NSFW).

Wow, what must Google think of me??? Obviously that I'm a wh0re, for one thing. Wow, whatever I did to lead you on or piss you off, Google, I'm sorry.

In other news, I can't believe I wrote 18 paragraphs about fermented juice last night. Apologies to my myriad fans.

You would, wouldn't you.

I have periodically been mistaken for a hippie. No, no dreadlocks to speak of, I abhor patchouli, and it's been over a decade since I was anything close to a practicing vegetarian - but still somehow the misconception tends to crop up. Is it my flower child middle name (something to do with songs made by the wind, ahem), the fact that I majored first in Women's Studies and then in Peace and Conflict Studies (at Cal, for gods sake!) or perhaps my penchant for Birkenstock sandles and not much make-up? I don't know, but somehow it's an assignation that I can't seem to shake.

If you know me, though, you tend to realize pretty quick that I'm generally not so much in the realm of the typical hippie spectrum. (I think I am too mean, frankly, to ever be accepted in the group hug, plus I'm really big on daily showers and I find overzealous commitment to anything extremely annoying - not that I am generalizing, or anything).

So if you know me, you might think that I would not subscribe to weird food concoctions, health supplements, vitamin regiments, etc. You would think that I would not participate in things like Raw Food and Veganism and wheat grass juice and tonics (unless it's the tonic that goes into my Sapphire GT, ow!). And for the most part you would be right. Therefor, you would think that I would roll my eyes in disgust at the apparent nastiness that is Kombucha, the so-called latest and greatest in rejuvenating, restorative, revitalizing, replenishing, regenerating health tea.



Jojo once asked me if I knew of and/or liked this Kombucha stuff (pronounced kom-BOO-cha). I replied with a vehement "Blech, God, NO!" having recently had the disgusting experience of purchasing what I thought was a light, sweet, refreshing juice beverage, and taking a swig of what appeared to be a rotten and expired version of the anticipated light, sweet, refreshing juice beverage. I was SO pissed. I thought for sure it was another case of my once beloved New Seasons (like Andronico's bred with Whole Foods but cheaper and with fewer evil hillside bitches making clucking noises at you in the checkout line for wearing your pajamas to the market) selling something a bit too close to it's expiration date. Only later did I read about the whole fermentation process, the enzymes, the live cultures, and other details that served to further gross me out. All I knew was that it tasted like the bottle of grapefruit juice you bought to make your friend her stupid Madras drink for your cocktail party that she didn't show up to and which you thought didn't get opened, but really it did, so a few days later after you've finally gotten all the party mess cleaned up and you are too poor to go buy a better mixer for your remaining vodka, you think "Hmmm, maybe a Greyhound" and you open it and take a swig of the now-rotted, pruney, near-carbonated juice and then gag in the sink before cursing the jackass party attendee who opened the bottle for no reason, didn't use a drop and then didn't put it in the fridge. My kombucha "juice" was vile. A small swig put me in a foul mood for several hours.

So I vehemently, adamantly, cursedly claimed my utter disgust for the stuff, never even asking if Joj liked it (obviously she'd brought it up for a reason, right?). Even if she had sung it's praises on high, it never would have occurred to me to ever pick up another bottle again, even though I continued to be mildly attracted to all the pretty colored bottles and new delightful sounding flavors that appeared on the shelves (I mean how can you resist something called Passionberry Bliss or Cosmic Cranberry? I managed.).

Well, I'm over thirty now. And I can't even begin to describe what that magic number seems to be responsible for creating in my rapidly aging body (good times, real fun, let me tell you). So I read about Kombucha in a women's health book and was convinced by the nurse practitioner author to give the swill another shot.

It is a miracle from the depths of all things disgustingly fermented for food, beverage and health purposes. Knowing that I was going to be swallowing something that had the effervescence of expired fruit matter, I was prepared to give it an honest evaluation, and my god, it's amazing. The first Cosmic Cranberry, I'm certain, got me mildly drunk, which was a nice bonus (it does say .05% alcohol by volume is a possibility, right on the side of the bottle, so look out you lightweights). But it also seems to have fulfilled all the promises also on the side of the bottle: aids in digestion, metabolism, immune system, appetite control, liver function (this one is hard to assess, but I feel less toxic, so I'm going with it in the yes column), body alkalinity (man this is a big deal these days - more on that later), anti-aging (jury is still out here, though my skin feels better, but my crows feet have not flown away or anything), cell integrity (hm, sure, why not) and healthy skin and hair (totally!).

I don't mean to shill for a company that might just be peddling promo material instead of a nutrient-rich elixir as advertised, but it is the fabulousness of my life right now. If you can avoid the slimy, egg-whitey strands of live cultures floating around like loogies in the bottle (cause you WILL gag when you start to suck a string down, I assure you), these crisp, tangy, sparkling, fruity beverages are awesome for, oh hell, I'll just steal from the label already: restoring balance and vitality.

Namaste, kids, may the 'boocha be with you.

Mama Said.

I don't know about you, but my mom always said that all horizontal stripes (and most plaids) were to be avoided. Here's why:




Jesus, H. I know Charlotte has always had herself a wee bit of junk in her trunk (in the Baby-Got-Badonkadonk, not the Martin-Lawrence-in-Big-Momma sort of way) but this dress makes her look like someone took Dakota Fanning's waist and shoulders and stuck it on Beyonce's hips and thighs.

Not sure what you did to piss off the SATC stylist, Ms. Davis, but you might wanna consider apologizing A. S. A. P (and by apologizing, I mean sending something from Tiffany's, not a florist shop). In the past, if you looked crappy, it was 25 minutes of screen time, maximum. With the feature-length film in production, and with this as the first evidence of how you will be dressed therein, it could conceivably be over an hour - possibly more, depending on the pithiness of this particular resurrection- of you looking like fat-thighed death. You are cute as a button, really, there is no reason for this. Go make nice. Like now .

Chuck = Dumb Name

Joosh has delivered unto me some new crack. I hesitate to post the url here for fear that all my millions of readers will flock to the site and overload it's systems and therefor deny me my new habit. This. Would. Be. Bad.

However, in the interest of sharing the love (and getting you to be my co-dependent crack using partner so I don't feel so bad about imbibing alone), I will tell you that if you use the abbreviation for television, and you add a hyphen, and then you type the word for something that connects two things, or the thing that chains are made of (and as we know, chains are only as strong as their weakest this same thing), and then instead of writing dot com, you type dot and the abbreviation for company and then another dot and then the abbreviation for the other name of Great Britain, you will find yourself at a beautiful, masterful, endlessly entertaining bounty of time- suckage material, both currant and vintage.

I really should not be telling you about this, especially you myriad of friends and relatives that are in school right now, but if it can bring you one ounce of the fun times it has brought me so far (and I've only known about it for a week), it will be worth the risk of my being responsible for your having to take Incompletes in two classes due to your time spent on the above-hinted-at site.

It is this site, this place of Wonderment-and-Punky-Brewster that is responsible (along with the recommendations of Bex, of course) for my newfound love interest, Veronica, a perky blond from Neptune, California. It is this site that allowed me to watch and be baffled by what I assume is the NYC answer to The OC, a little drama called "Gossip Girl" (which, by the way, super sucks, and managed to mortify me in many many ways, none more so than by the fact that the parents of the high school kids seem like they are barely older than I am - uh oh, Botox-io).

Anyway, this site is both good and bad, and I do fear it will cause me not to be able to say "I don't really watch television" anymore and get away with it (as if I could ever really get away with that one, right?).

BUT (and this is what I came here to tell you today), because of this site and the little fuzzy red "updated" next to it's myriad bounty, I discovered this show:

Chuck.

This is show is all about everything I have ever loved on TV. This show has elements of X-Files, 24, Arrested Development, Clerks/Mallrats (okay, not technically TV), Firefly, and The Office, just to name a few. If you can get past the main guy's not-even-remotely-disguised impersonation of our beloved Jim (John Krasinski) from The Office; overlook that the blond gal is sort of a Portia de Rossi/Ben Stiller's Wife knock off (actually, to be fair here, she's way better looking than both of those gals) and that she has sort of distracting teeth (though honestly I'd rather be distracted by her bunny teeth than by Portia's eyebrows and the fact that she sleeps with Ellen, but nevermind); not dwell on the weirdness of there being another show on TV with an unextraordinary, nebbishy, nerdy guy working in a "Big Box" type store suddenly developing an extraordinary life (but thanks to the evils of the devil, instead of the evils of the US guvment); and totally ignore the fact that entire thing is COMPLETELY implausible and ridiculous (less so than 24, though, so you viewers of that ongoing explosive pile will have no trouble suspending your disbelief, I hope), then you will love this little oeuvre.

It is exciting, it is funny, it is laughable, it is relatively suspenseful, it has cute boys and girls in it, it has crazy driving (in a Fiat Punta, Joosh pointed out to me, which are all over U.K and Ireland, but rarely seen in the likes of LA, and if they were they would be mistaken for, like, Ford Aspires, and by the way the name reminds me of a spanish curse word, but again, nevermind), absurd computer geek inside jokes and kick-ass fights, stabbings with poisoned hair accoutrements and other stunt-type hat tricks. But most of all it has our long-loved Jayne back on the airwaves*.

He didn't get a lot of play in the pilot episode, but what little he did get promised good things to come. At the end of the show, dressed in the full-on dork uniform of an Almost-But-Not-Exactly-Best-Buy employee, he has the old Knowle Roher/Jayne Cobb look on his face that I predict bodes well for future episodes. (Can I just say, though, I really liked Adam Baldwin better when he had some more meat on his bones? This gaunt faced/intense/trim/lean/angular/craggy thing he's got going on doesn't do it for me quite the same as the brawny doofus from Serenity. Wah.)

So yeah, "Chuck" is super dumb name for a show, as far as I'm concerned (then again, with this tagline: "an offbeat look at spies in their 20's," what the hell would I have called this show?!?), and Chuck's sidekick with the really crotchy facial hair is so far not deserving of airtime, but Chuck is darling and Jayne rocks almost anything, all the time, ever, oh and ps this show, as with so many others, has figured out that music is important to the likes of us and so the show has a very KCRWesque soundtrack. What's not to love?

Thank you tee vee dash ell eye enn kay ess dot see oh dot you kay. I am forever (for this week, anyway) in your debt.

*I just looked at Adam Baldwin's imdb page more in depth and he was on some crappy looking show last year called "Day Break" that I never heard of, and in addition to some other junk, he was on an episode of something called "Invader ZIM" and played a character called "Shplooger's Customer". I am dying.

**Update. I should have suspected from the name, but alas, I am not savvy in the ways of non-live-action television: "Invader ZIM" is indeed a cartoon, er, um, 'scuse me, I mean an animated series. Ahem. But seriously, who am I to judge, anyway... Brother's got to pay his mortgage, just like everyone else, right?

Sucktastic.

I am a truly sucky blogger. It's true. So true that I've had to use 'truly' and 'true' in adjoining sentences, right out of the gate. That is some truthy truth. See, I thought it had been maybe two or two-and-a-half weeks since logging in some mindless sharing here, but no no. When I clicked over today, I realized: it's been over a month. Shiza.

This is pretty typical of me and projects. Fun or otherwise. Big ideas. Lots of thought/discussion. TONS of intent. A decent start, full of commitment and maybe a dash of ingenuity (I'm thinking of the millions of bead-store-necklaces that are sitting around half finished, not necessarily the bloggy blog here). But delivery? Um. Yeah.

I don't have any great excuses. It's only stupid Working On Work Projects stuff. And since I sit at my computer 10 hours a day some days (14 on more than few, I'm sorry to admit), it's not like I couldn't click over and login and dash off a post. Except I can't. Because I'd have to log out of my work Gmail and all associated Google docs (people, Google docs are amazing - a bit slow on occasion, but cheap and convenient... like my men). In logging out of work Gmail, I risk not only missing something time sensitive and critical (it's been one emergency after another, I'm telling you) but also having to log back into 25 spreadsheets and templates -that would be pure craziness- anytime I want to say something. Plus with the constant sitting and writing and stressing and staring at the (lovely and large but glaring) screen, I'm completely boring and have nothing interesting to say, can't even pretend to have anything noteworthy to note (hilarious conversations & periodic chat with Bex notwithstanding, but totally inappropriate for bloggage, I'm afraid).

But you know, popping in this evening, I realized something: I've lost time. Not X-Files lost, but like, blink of an eye/where is my-life-flying-off-to-now lost. I don't know what happened to our beautiful summer, or how the cold crept in and bit the leaves red and yellow and called in the Big Storm guns to battle the sunshine and shower us heavily in bursts throughout the day (super beautiful, I must say, but best of all: washes away all the damn crazy HUGE spiders that have invaded the building and the greenery around here). So suddenly there are only a few fragrant peaches and crapload of pears, apples, pomegranates, and other fall-ish fruits where the plums and plucots and berries spilled forth just a few days ago (or possibly a few weeks ago since I am obviously completely dissociated from real time right now). If I didn't have a calendar and had to guess the date, I'd think it was maybe Labor Day at most. So wrong.

But as far as blogging goes, it's not that I haven't made some attempt. In the past few weeks I've written and somehow not saved for editing the following posts:
Why Iowa is Great (a beginners guide)
Why Jakob is Great (an ode to the pre-three's)
Sneaky Subversive Movies and the Studios that Hide Them (until two minutes before the Oscars, forcing me to suffer "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" when I need some movie time but the screens are utterly bare.)
The Coming Recession.

I will likely not try to recreate these, with exception of Why Iowa is Great, but it will be sadly lacking in photos as my phone was an unworthy tool for capturing more than a few up-close details, and the fellow traveling with me through it's cornish hills and prairies can't be relied upon to send me any of his promised photos (from his dumb i-phone that totally didn't work anywhere in the entire state except Des Moines, by the way).

Oh yeah, that was another entry: Why iphones Are Dumb. I will likely skip that one too, so as to avoid the wrath of the growing Applafia.

Though it has kept me from participating in the blogosphere lately (writing or reading), the one good thing about current work is this: the utter ridiculousness that will make an excellent story one day, maybe even mildly amusing enough of a sitcom scenario to get a pilot made (but not shown, of course). The bad side of this absurdity is that some of the circumstantial hoopla is so totally implausible outside of something like an (admittedly poorly written) sitcom that you will think me totally trite and/or a lier if I try to explain it to you here in a factual rendering.