Skipping Town

I can’t believe tomorrow is October There are two small squirrels in the tree today, different ones from yesterday, I think A bit of squirrel-tail fluff drifted onto the table this afternoon as I sat there Gym tonight Will CBS, as rumored, release more juicy Sarah Palin clips? Early voting has begun in some states Just read a few articles about self-diagnosis/Googling symptoms in the Times and feel compelled to Google something, like “delt pain” I wish my New Yorker came at the beginning of the week Last night we had pasta with sausage, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes for dinner Perhaps I’ll make a tomato tarte tatin tonight, a recipe from last weeks NYT But that involves another trip to the grocery store It was in the high-80s today Andrew, alarmed, reported last night that a few drops of something wet had fallen from the sky onto his windshield as he drove home; what could that be? I think I’ve checked my regular roster of political/news websites about ten times each today That’s ridic...

Several weeks ago, Andrew idly suggested he make a batch of his delicious chocolate chip cookies. It didn’t happen. The next day, I asked if he’d like to make cookies; again, it didn’t happen. Day after day for the rest of that week, he’d arrive home from work and I’d ask, my eyes filled with hope, if today was the day for cookies. And yet no cookies were made. Shrewdly, I revised my strategy. “I hope you’re not planning to make cookies tonight,” I said loudly one day. In the days that followed, I intensified the strategy. “The last thing I want you to do tonight is make those cookies,” I’d say. If Andrew would begin a sentence with, “You know what we should do?” I’d sigh in aggravation, roll my eyes, and say, “You better not say ‘bake cookies.’ I hate cookies.” This has continued for nearly a month. Last night, after watching some CNN and pulling out our hair for a while, Andrew said, “Tonight’s the night. I’m making cookies. Should I bake them tonight or let the dough rest till tomor...

I just watched a squirrel take a nap in a tree Before he fell asleep, he was leaping from branch to branch with another squirrel Squirrels are really cute and have human-like paws I just inhaled a bowl of pistachios Once again, it’s warm outside, though not as bad as this weekend Every day I search obsessively for news about Sarah Palin We bought a bag of plums at the farmer’s market that seem to be a bit hard Last night we had crackers, cheese, spinach dip, and pears instead of an actual dinner When I typed that last sentence I capitalized “spinach”—weird I’m mildly obsessed with Mojidoku puzzles Andrew found three mosquitoes in the bathroom yesterday There were two full pages of articles about Barcelona in Saturday’s Financial Times. Very annoying. This afternoon I called Andrew to report that the Dow had fallen 400 points, then realized I had little idea what that actually meant Now it’s fallen 700 I heard rumors of a bank run Perhaps I’ll make a bank run My shoulders are sore from ...

It’s hot again. High-90s, not a hint of the famed “Delta breeze” (but is there ever?). To escape our quickly heating-up apartment Saturday we joined Beth and Nate and the babies for lunch in Sonoma. It wasn’t much cooler there; usually wine country tends to be a bit more bearable. Nonetheless, we had lunch at a Mexican restaurant just off the main plaza, then wandered around for a bit. There was a wine-tasting festival going on, with a band, and lots of veteran tasters walking around with wine glasses in hand, and the requisite peppering of aging hippies, one walking a large parrot. While Beth and Nate did a little shopping in a kids’ store, they challenged us to keep an eye on baby Henry. After about three minutes of cleaning up a variety of things tossed in his (adorable) wake and chasing him up and down a small ramp and etc., Andrew and I were exhausted. I’m pretty sure Beth and Nate were secretly laughing. On the way home, Andrew and I stopped at The Outlets to begin our shopping f...

Yay, the weekend Big surprise: McCain will be in the debate tonight Watching Palin speak is painful I’ve never seen anyone so skilled at butchering the English language—and that’s after 8 years of Bush Prepositions, subordinate clauses, and restrictive phrases, oh my Andrew and I went to our favorite pizza place, Zelda’s, for dinner last night Andrew took baked ziti to work today for lunch I had leftover Zelda’s for lunch Very glad The Office has started up again It’s quite hot here today Andrew had a dentist appointment this morning I have a few mosquito bites A bird is screeching outside the window Maybe I’ll go to the gym tonight I need a drink of water Just got up and drank some water My California poppies seem to be growing again, after being parched and dead Where’s my new New Yorker??? Watching spoofs of Sarah Palin is becoming an obsession

It was 98 degrees here yesterday afternoon, and 55 degrees last night The thought of Sarah Palin in NYC actually makes my skin crawl Unazukin believes Obama will win the election Maybe I’ll get a neck tattoo of Spanish moss Andrew and I might go apple-picking soon This weekend we’ll try to book Japan hotels Our trash is a bio-hazard. Ick. I had a bowl of cereal and an avocado for lunch to avoid baked ziti Last night for dinner I had crackers, cheese, figs, and a bowl of apple crisp with ice cream…to avoid baked ziti The neck of my t-shirt is strangling me When I opened the paper this morning I found a moth I took the moth outside Tonight is the premier of The Office Last night Andrew and I watched reruns of The Office, including the one where Michael is going to Sandals in Jamaica and says he’s never been out of the country before Sarah Palin seems like she could be a character on The Office “I can see Russia from Alaska” seems like a line straight out of The Office I can see West Virg...

Tomorrow is the season premiere of The Office A mariachi band was just playing for a while at the park down the street Baked ziti meal count: three. Approximately seven to go. Andrew has his third business dinner in a row tonight so I’m on my own with this. My shoulders are stiff I'm tired of baked ziti Watching CNN last night kind of gave me a panic attack Our Mourning Doves seem to have abandoned us for greener pastures A squirrel was watching me from a tree branch yesterday Two Kyoto books we ordered from Amazon have arrived I think I’ll go to the gym tonight I wonder if I should wear pants or shorts to work out later There were a few mosquitoes in our apartment yesterday; one bit Andrew

The backs of my knees hurt I wonder if the Mourning Doves are back Yesterday there was only one Dove—I’m afraid the other was eaten by a cat My neck is kind of stiff Thinking about the debates on Friday makes me kind of jittery and sick Thinking about Palin meeting world leaders in NYC today makes me even more sick, not to mention embarrassed I think I’d like to extend our Japan trip from two weeks to one year I really love that red pen I was just using Should I put in my contacts? I can’t believe how many dishes I used last night making baked ziti There won’t be enough milk for my cereal tomorrow There are crumbs on the table Should I have leftover baked ziti or leftover gazpacho for lunch?

Last night was the last game at the existing Yankee stadium, which was somehow sad even for a quasi-baseball fan like me. Andrew, of course, has no love lost for the Yankees, but that was the team he got to see most often when we lived in NYC; he had season tickets, went to countless games. And it was at that stadium that our relationship actually began—so I’ll miss it there, despite the fact that my game-going consisted more of people-watching than game-watching. Andrew took me to a Yankees game—my first MLB game ever—several months before we started dating. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was a weekend, and I think we met up at the stadium—somehow finding each other in the crowd. Andrew introduced me to his baseball-game rituals—beer, peanuts—and explained the game now and then. I remember being floored by the vast size of the ballpark—the population of more than five Connellsvilles could fit inside. Afterwards, we hugged goodbye at the entrance to the subway, as I headed ba...

For the past couple of weeks, a pair of Mourning Doves has been visiting our terrace and the tree that hovers in front of it. I first noticed one of the doves sitting peacefully on the railing; it stayed there for a large part of one afternoon, flying away only when I inched a bit too close as I was watering my plants. After a few days I noticed it on a tree branch nearby; eventually, it was joined by another dove. Those two have been together, and usually well within sight, all week. They sit very close together on the terrace, or in the leaf-padded gutter, or in the tree; they’re never apart. They are quite beautiful, and seem so content just to sit together for hours in front of my crispy, dead plants. One of them seems a bit rounder than the others; I’ve looked for a nest but haven’t yet found one. Last night, I dreamed about the birds. They were sitting on the terrace with their backs to me, and they were very large—like the size of small dogs. One was a bright red cardinal. The o...

Our trip to Japan is coming up in just 8 weeks. There’s still lots of time to make plans, etc., but it’s also time to start figuring out just how we’re going to structure this trip, start booking hotels and train tickets, and basically start getting our trip in order. I don’t think Japan is the place to make plans on the fly, calling hotels from the side of the road as we decide at the last minute what town to stay in overnight. This was easy enough to do in Spain, with Andrew’s language skills; not so easy, I’d imagine, in Japan. Along with studying guidebooks, we’ve begun reading books that are either set in Japan or written by Japanese authors. David Sedaris’s new book, If You Are Engulfed in Flames , was a good place to start—much of his quitting-smoking section takes place in Japan. I read a couple of light mysteries set in Japan, by a writer named Sujata Massey. Yesterday I finished a memoir, Learning to Bow , by Bruce Feiler, writing about his year spent teaching in rural Japan....

Living next door to us are a few elderly women who seem to have some sort of assisted-living arrangement. Don’t get me wrong—these aren’t frail old ladies with walking sticks. These are the women who called me to complain about the parking barriers I’d rented in January to save space for our ReloCube; these are the women who, we realized one Saturday afternoon, were roasting some kind of whole, large animal on a spit in their backyard. One of the women tends to talk extremely loudly on the phone while sitting on their back deck, which is just outside of our bedroom window. I heard her yesterday, yelling. “WELL, DON’T FORGET YOUR NEW YORK CLOTHES,” she shouted. “NEW YORK CLOTHES DON’T WORK HERE, AND CLOTHES FROM HERE DON’T WORK IN NEW YORK. DON’T FORGET THEM. JUST DON’T FORGET YOUR NEW YORK CLOTHES.” Words to live by, certainly. Don’t forget your New York Clothes. (Sacramentan men, in particular, should leave behind their Hawaiian-style shirts printed with beer bottles and the phrase “I...

So many of today’s technological communications methods (“texting,” “IM-ing,” leaving comments on people’s “walls” on Facebook) seem irrelevant to my life. Such a statement dates me, and ages me, and reveals that there was actually a point in my adult life when I rolled my eyes and said “Email? Why would I ever use that ?” That point was freshman year of college. How far I’ve come. This dinosaur, email, serves every one of my communication needs. Yes, I occasionally send a text message, but maybe once a month at most. My point is this: I am not planning to begin Twittering anytime soon. Twitter, as I understand it, is a way to send updates about your every thought and action to a large group of people who have elected to “follow” you. These missives must be 140 characters or fewer. Dedicated Twitterers might send out dozens of updates a day. The missives have practical uses—if you report that you’re at a certain bar, then all your friends will immediately find out and come and meet you...

Last night, over dinner, Andrew remarked that when we think back to what we were doing a year ago, we’ve now reached the point that we’re thinking back to California. Until June, thinking about what we were doing a year ago was pretty painful, since we were usually doing something ridiculously fabulous: journeying to Madrid, or having a seafood lunch somewhere on the Costa Brava, or taking a road trip through Basque country, or swimming at a Barcelona beach, or drinking one-euro wine on our terrace with La Pedrera just out of sight around the corner. We’d always recount those “year ago” observations while doing something not-so-fabulous, like sitting in traffic or waiting at the Laundromat or passing out from the heat, and it was enough to bring about a difficult-to-shake malaise. Now, however, when we think back to a year ago, we admit that we have it pretty good: after all, a year ago, we were still in the studio apartment Citrus Heights. We may have had an air mattress and a chair b...

Andrew and I found these books on the discount racks at Borders in San Francisco. They were produced in Prague, Germany, and the Netherlands, and, along the way, a little error seemed to have slipped through. Six times. I couldn't not help but take these pictures.

This weekend, Andrew and I went to San Francisco overnight, which is one of my very favorite things to do. We drove down Saturday morning and headed immediately to the de Young museum to see an exhibition of works by Dale Chihuly, glass-blower and sculptor extraordinaire. It was an amazing show—I especially loved his Ikebana series, not least because I’ve got Japan on the brain lately, what with our swiftly approaching trip. Chihuly makes glass look as fluid and malleable as clay, though the documentary being screened at the end of the exhibition revealed the work to be less delicate and more physically arduous than one might expect. It took two men (in full-body, heat-resistant garb that looked like silver beekeeping suits) to lift some of the larger spheres. I’ve definitely been inspired—though setting up a glass-blowing studio might be a bit difficult in our apartment, what with the need for a large, white-hot oven and all. The exhibition was one of two reasons we had for visiting S...

It looks like my days of being a paid blogger have come to an end: As of the end of this month, SacLights.com will no longer be in existence, and my final blog post for the site was last Friday. But blogging three times a week is a habit I’ll try to keep—it’s time to return my attention to much-neglected Skipping Town. More to come…

Our mission for Labor Day weekend was clear: spend two days by the water, relax, read, and avoid the sight, sound, and chatter about Sarah Palin. And so we were soon blissfully ensconced in one of our favorite places in/near Northern California: at the Cal Neva Resort in North Lake Tahoe. Andrew and I stayed here last year around this same time, but this time was even better. We had a “terrace room” set apart from the main hotel, with our own little deck and a lovely view of the lake. We felt separated from the world. The Cal Neva, indeed, is its own little world, one of those funny places you find in Nevada where you have to walk through a casino to get to the restroom or the elevator. There’s a small-ish casino on the ground floor of the Cal Neva, along with a restaurant and a bar; there are large chandeliers made from deer antlers, and a “circle bar” overhung with ornate stained-glass light fixture. The Cal Neva opened in 1926, and it was owned by Frank Sinatra in the 1950s—...