Home of the Snarkmaiden

I have to be grateful that the pets are all pretty sanguine about loud noises, since our beloved city of Kent sounds rather a lot like a war zone tonight. The dogs periodically react to Ray's dog, across the street, who is barking almost incessantly, but even that doesn't stay interesting very long. They've never reacted particularly to the sound of sirens, which is a blessing tonight. I was watching the rockets from the front window for a while, but I can't say I love the local fondness for firecrackers, M80s and such. Sparkly lights are one thing, and very nice some of them, but I never could quite get the point of things that go bang! just for the sake of going bang! and some of the near stuff sounds sufficiently like mortars and gunfire going off as to be a bit distressing after several hours of it. What this needs is a distraction, so I think I may just make some popcorn (all the noise has given me a taste for it) and curl up with the dogs and watch another episode of Midsomer Murders. What a homebody I've become...

Knitting group did not seem to be there when I stopped by Panera tonight. So I swung by St. Vincent de Paul for a quick troll through. I picked up a couple of unworn summer weight shirts, one 100% linen, and then prowled through the crafty bin and picked up a bag of highly promising-looking yarn. Highly promising is right. It was clearly meant to be a sock-making kit from the (sadly, now defunct) Local Yarn Store -- a pair of pre-wound skeins, one larger, for the main body of the socks, plus a smaller, for contrast toe-and-heel, plus a sock pattern and a business card, all nicely bundled together in a fancy gift bag. The larger skein still had its original wrapper in the middle. It's hand-painted, DK weight superwash merino yarn, thank you very much. (And for non-yarn people, it also had the original price on the wrapper -- $26 for the skein.) Anyone wanna guess what I paid? Two. Bucks.

And it's pristine. This stuff is so well kept, it still has that lovely, wooly, yarn store smell to it. Oh, boy, fancy sock yarn.

So, David Levine is doing a reading at Powell's Books this evening. A reading from his very first published book. It would be very cool to go, thinks I. But Hal's working tonight, and a 6 hour round trip is rather a lot of solo driving in the dark on a school night. So I thought maybe I could hop a train down to Portland to catch the reading. Not a sausage. I would have to leave at 2:00 this afternoon and literally could not get back to Seattle earlier than 12 noon tomorrow. And that's only true assuming that the "optimal" trains weren't booked up, which they generally are days and days advance.

This strikes me as totally inadequate. I would totally hop a train to Portland (or, for that matter Vancouver) for a short weekday or weekend trip if the schedules were remotely cooperative, and the trains weren't packed to the rafters. The fact that the trains are packed to the rafters suggests that I'm not the only one. Why on Earth don't we have better passenger train service between Portland and Vancouver?

So Ellen Klages is teaching a YA Fiction workshop through the offices of Richard Hugo House. Cool. In fact, there are several workshops in the series that sound interesting. The James Patrick Kelly workshop sounds particularly useful. Interesting writing workshops with fine writers, available locally -- keen, right? What's not to like?

Yeah, except I've been through this before. Last year there was another such series, and so I clicked through the complex maze of links to and through the Hugo House web page, only to find that the when/where/how-much information was all buried deep in a gigantic .pdf of the poster-sized flyer for all of Richard Hugo House's workshops for the entire year, and NOWHERE ELSE. Pages and pages of scrolling later I find the eyewatering workshop fees in 3 pt. Bodoni narrow in the bottom drawer of a locked filing cabinet, stuck upside-down, in a disused toilet with a sign on the door saying 'BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD! at the very bottom of the form, with no way to find out if the workshop was already full. And so it was only with some trepidation that I again essayed the journey, drilling down through the links again, only to find that now the folks at Hugo House have managed a new wrinkle, and the link to the registration form comes back with a 404 Not Found error. So this time the particulars for signing up aren't available anywhere at all. And that, dear friends, is Richard Hugo House in a nutshell. So close and yet so very, very far.

The helicopters are circling again. Here in Seattle, where you seldom hear helicopters at all, their massed, fluttering rumble feels oppressive. If you look at KOMO or KING 5, you'll see endless live footage of the buildings of UW from the air. It's not that informative.

The good news -- for me anyway -- is that I was not shot this morning.

This seems more relevant to mention than most mornings because two people were in fact shot on the UW campus less than three hours ago, over in Gould Hall. The breaking news now seems to indicate a murder/suicide, and that possibly this was the culmination of a stalker episode, which is all horrible enough, but when we first heard about it here, the rumors were flying that the shooter(s) were still at large.

Possibly the weirdest aspect of a weird and unsettling incident was the amazing speed and reach of rumors in an age of text-messaging. I think that's something the University (and other authorities) are going to have to be more aware of in handling breaking news. The Campus Police did not send out any kind of blanket e-mail to let the campus know that the situation was under control and no lock down was necessary (though that is what they told us verbally when we called them), but since the rumors were flying well ahead of their response, I think a lot of micro-panics could have been forestalled if they simply had a policy of notifying the campus when something like this happens. We're going to find out anyway, the question is what's going to be our source and how reliable.

And so it's been a morning of tiny, incremental improvements in the information we have. Typical, when dealing with breaking news. Annoying, when you're this close to the epicenter of it. If it was a stalker that probably blows my expectation of yet another disgruntled employee on a spree. Still, I will continue to keep my employees gruntled.

Or not.

(Hey, who knew "edit" was a backformation of "editor"? I sure didn't.)

Ah, the joys of modern life in the electrified world. First thing I did once the power finally came back on was turn on the stove and start heating water for a nice big pot of hot tea. We had been without electricity for 34 hours, when it finally flicked back on at 11:00 this morning.

( 34 Hours Without Juice, The Gory Details )

Oh, and as you might be guessing from this post, my computer's not dead, after all. It seems the power supply overheated but did not burn out, during that power spike. We went out to CompUSA and got a pair of cheap UPSes, and each household computer system is on its own now, so maybe they're a little better buffered against flutters and spikes in the electricity. So we get a little smarter every time something goes wrong.

I'm still far from well, but yesterday libertango did manage to get me out of the house long enough to eat some lunch at Noah's. At the last moment I took a pass on the bagel&lox, and went for a pastrami-on-bagel sandwich instead on the theory that if I continue to avoid large glops of tasty dairy I may also continue to avoid glops of sinus-stopping mucous the consistency of set rubber cement. Yes, you're welcome for that image. Have some rhino-snot pie.

After food I was wobbly but not quite ready to fall over. I suggested that we might seek out the Kirkland Sur la Table which was supposed to be right nearby, so I could maybe spend some of the gift card I had been hoarding since I moved up. (The other local outlet is in Pike Place, which is singularly inconvenient were one to decide to spend one's loot on a cast iron thingumy, or a Kitchenaid whatsit, since the only times when it is possible to get the car near enough to the store to load into are times when Sur la Table has been closed for some while.)

I wandered around fingering things and exclaiming over others for the half-hour or so before the flu decided it was time to lie down again. I'm very pleased to see that someone has cottoned on to the idea of making the little fluted brioche and petit four tins in a non-stick-coated version. That is an invention that was morally necessary some time ago. And I'm very curious about trying some of the new silicone cake pans, which are supposedly not only non-stick (and able to withstand baking temperatures) but flexible enough to make it easy to simply pop your finished baked-goods out. Very whiz-bang. But I couldn't quite bring myself to trust a cake pan that is the color and consistency of a cheap Chinese marital aid.

On the whole, I find myself still vaguely disgruntled by Sur la Table. They display prominently weird one-of gizmos that I have no earthly use for, and hide, or do not have, stuff that I consider basic. They have a wall full of pepper mills, but not the William Bounds "love" mill that actually works. They have balloon whisks in every imaginable size, some large enough to bring us back to the topic of marital aids, but no spiral whisks. Okay, I take that back -- they had one weird silicone spiral which, while made inline to its shaft, could be made to take the right 45 degree angle and be used as a spiral whisk. But just that one.
And while they do have tampico bristle "vegetable" brushes, they cleverly hide them behind and amongst the vast array of nylon-bristled ones. Feh.

I came away with some pretty good loot, though. I bought two heinously expensive lifetime-non-stick cookie sheets (though I had to ask to be shown something that wasn't a jellyroll pan), three Orrefors knock-off rocks glasses (they didn't have more), a handful of the tampico brushes, and two sizes of the fancy, brightly-colored silicone spatulas that le creuset makes. Mine are red, natch. And I still have a hefty balance on the card. Woot.