Home of the Snarkmaiden

You'll laugh, you'll cry. It's a great read. It was particularly fine to be reading it on the eve of Barak Obama's election. Overall, I recommend it enthusiastically, and my nits were few. Basically, there's a non-spoilery small one, and a fairly spoilery big one.

Non-spoilery small nit: the book is set in San Francisco, and most of the characters are lifelong Bay Area residents. And yet all of them keep refering to "the BART". As in, "I took the BART home," or "She got off the bus two stops before the BART". Who talks like that? Not any San Franciscans I know, that's for sure. It's BART. Just BART.

( Big Spoilery Nit Behind the Cut )

Screw the cut tag, nobody seems to be clicking through anyway.

Know thyself, and all that. So it wasn't a great surprise to me when Day 1 of our road trip dawned with me trying to do a week's worth of laundry and chores in a day. And it was no surprise at all that with all that 11th hour catch up, we hit the road a lot later than I hoped. Luckily, I had planned for it. So our first leg was just a quick jaunt up to Bellingham, with a (late) dinner stop in Seattle.

In the morning, we ventured out to seek breakfast and a little American touristry in Fairhaven. Bellingham, you see, is really the confluence of about three smaller towns that merged. Our favorite bit of Bellingham is the former Victorian port town of Fairhaven. It's kept a lot of its old original buildings, and turned into a funky arts and dining district, with galleries, bead stores, book stores, gelaterias, pubs, and the like. A fun place to browse through, as long as you don't mind a bit of hill climbing. We usually stop for tea in The Abbey Garden and browse the blond-wood shelves of Village Books, between stints in woodwork, pottery, and glass galleries. What we don't usually do is get to Fairhaven early enough to eat breakfast. And a lot of the eateries in the area tend to be pubby, lunchy, dinnery sorts of joints.

Luckily we spotted the Harris Ave. Cafe, whose posted menu did indeed include normal breakfasty things like eggs and toast. And pretty swell breakfasty things, as it turns out. My orange-infused blueberry french toast was, alas, too dry to skip the syrup, but it was a revelation once the syrup was added. And it came with possibly the prettiest side of fruit I've ever had. The real winner was Hal's omelette, where the blend of smoked Keta salmon, feta, roasted garlic, and pesto was so marvelously balanced that all the flavors came through in concert. Close to perfect fried spuds with chive, too. Lovely.

The cafe itself is brightly painted, sunlit, and popular, with the kind of happy buzz that you find in a local favorite. As an added bonus, across the street you can see the second story windows of an office that sports the legend Spade and Archer -- which lends just the right frisson of Through the Looking Glass to the proceedings. (The office is apparently the former digs of local author Steve Martini, and the new occupant decided to keep the signage. Yay, new occupant.)

Overall, lovely place for a meal, especially if you can get in between the breakfast and lunch rushes.

I can't help thinking that the dogged frequency with which cable station Retroplex is replaying Judgment at Nuremberg indicates someone in the programming department making a political point. Certainly the judicial summary at the end, as delivered by Spencer Tracy, becomes a carrilon descant of peals being rung over the collective heads of America if viewed in the light of current events. It's worth the movie, that speech. That and discovering that William Shatner was ever that young. Good lord.

This is a cross-post from life_in_kent -- things are a bit moribund over there (to say the least), so I thought I'd wander in and get something started. In particular, since there are a bunch of things I like about living in Kent -- you'd have to hope so, since we so doggedly pursued finding a house here -- I figured I could just concatenate some of them into a Four Things post. And so, dear friends, I give you:

Four Things I Like About Living in Kent

Russian Tea at The Velvet Goose. I thought what made tea Russian was sweetening it with jam, and drinking it out of glasses, but apparently that's not the only Russian trick with tea. This stuff is brewed up with a stick of cinnamon in the water, and the brewed tea is flavored and sweetened with orange juice, so that the spicy, aromatic result is wonderfully cosy on a wet, bone-chilling afternoon. And it is served in a glass. Once at the Goose, I generally spend at least a few minutes poking around the Mad Hatter antique mall in the same building.

The parking lot at the Kent branch of the King County Library. It's full. Completely packed whenever I go. Normally navigating a crowded parking lot only makes me crazy. But the charm of a library that's so popular at all hours and on all days that you can't find a place to park on a Saturday afternoon, so popular that a crowd forms outside the doors waiting for opening on Sunday, that wins me over. There are a lot of people who read in Kent. I like that.

Sunday Brunch at Wild Wheat. Best. Blintzes. Evar. You can get them with half-and-half of whatever fruit you prefer. I recommend strawberry and marionberry. And all the breads they bake are crusty, fresh, and perfect. If you're drinking hot tea (notice the tea theme working here), the water comes in a decent sized teapot, rather than one of those weedy little cup-and-a-half jobbers. The staff is always friendly, which makes up for the occasional lapses in service.

Thrifting on Meeker. Our old Christmas tree stand went astray in the move. So I picked up a used one at Meeker Street Emporium -- better than the old one, actually. I got it for $1.31. Yeah.