All posts by eachnee

Thai food in an LA strip mall on a Saturday Night

jaguar

You know the kind of strip mall I’m talking about, the corner lot with two exits/entrances, where more backwards driving is done than forwards, with pockets of weird parking spaces that make no sense, like the one we parked in, where upon finishing our dinner we saw that we were blocked by not one but two cars.

The first car was owned by a fellow Thai crispy pork aficionado, and the other figured that after that car got moved, we could squeeze by, so the three guys inside this second car stay put, giving us a thumbs up as we pass.

Within minutes these three guys become either loiterers, carriers of open containers of alcohol, or skateboarders in public, as the LAPD shows up in an unmarked black Dodge Charger and issues them a ticket.

A very fancy BMW with a driver who is either a valet or an Armenian comes roaring into the parking lot. Turns out it’s the latter. He gets out, unwraps a new auto detailing clay bar and immediately starts to dress his tires. He finishes one tire and walks over to talk to the cops. He leaves the bar wrapper on the ground.

David tells Bill and I about when he was sixteen and worked at a Haagen Dazs and how a co-worker’s dad would wax his Jaguar (the one with two fuel tanks) in the parking lot as he waited for his son to get off work. Bill asks how many days a week the kid had a shift. David says 3 or 4. Bill says that the dad probably had a serious build up of wax.

The fancy BMW exits the parking lot, turns right, screeches to a halt, backs into the mini mall and then exits again, turning left. After ten minutes he comes back.

The BMW driver tells a couple, who are the only people on this planet wondering if their parking spot is legitimate, that it’s OK to park where they are, because “we’re closed.” “We” meaning his store, so presumably he’s the owner of the Armenian/Russian/Spanish deli we are standing in front of. The couple goes into the Thai restaurant. (This is a given, the only woman hanging out in the parking lot is me, and one of the cops). A fancy Mercedes drives up behind the BMW and the guys have a chat and a smoke and then leave again.

I peek into the deli, trying to see if he sells my favorite Bulgarian juice. The disco lights inside make it impossible to tell for sure but they look like they’re in there, sour cherry, apricot, black currant. YUM! And suddenly crazy Armenian man is my new best friend, and I am seriously hoping he comes back so I can ask him if he’ll sell me some juice off hours. Bill reminds me that it isn’t a good idea to watch Cassavetes’ movies one after the other.

There’s a moment when we try to figure out why the doughnut shop is called Windsor Donuts, since Windsor is a few blocks away, and that digresses to why the House of Windsor people in England don’t actually have last names.

We try to figure out what a movie is about from a poster hanging in the deli’s window. The text is in Armenian, but it’s got a graphic of Russia, France, and Armenia and the man is holding a hammer and sickle flag and smiling. Must be a comedy, says Bill. Another poster advertising a performance with “Bouzoukia style seating” gets all of us googling, and once you pull out the phone, you know it’s time to go home.

Black-charger

DWP rebate here we come

Our friend Andrew gave us a Kalanchoe to kick-off the plant portion of our landscaping project.

MO-kalanchoe

So off to Theodore Payne we went for the first part of our plant buying spree. Since it’s the summer, the selection is pretty limited, but we picked up some Marrow, Yarrow, Lupine, Sage, Buckwheat, Penny Royale, Fuchsia, Milkweed, Manzanita and a Catalina Cherry.

theodore_payne_stash

theodore_payne-packing

Next we scored free tickets to the Huntington Gardens and attended the Los Angeles Cactus and Succulent Society sale, filled with crazy plants and even crazier people.

succulent_sale_goods

succulent-sale

That thing on the right with flowers that look like string beans is a Tylecodon Wallichi from South Africa. I went up to the guy who was selling it, and said “Can I ask you a question about this thing?” and he said “Why, look at your freckles!”

Other than that Wallichi, we stayed away from the exotics, especially the ones that were super expensive and looked like we could kill it in one stroke.

expensive_succulent

Plant buying is a little stressful (way more so than rock shopping), so we shugged off some extra weight and went on vacation for a week.

MO_fur_shug

stevie_vacation

Which prepared us to move our bricks yet again from the backyard into the front so the landscape guy could use them. These bricks are from our old deck and we’ve hung on to them because they’re odd-shaped and handmade and we seem to enjoy moving bricks around. This is probably the fourth time we’ve moved them, roughly 400 of the buggers.

landscape_plants_and_bricks

We chalked out the path for the bricks, dropped in the rest of the rocks, and set the plants in place. GULP.

dog-rock-chalk

landscape_rocks_in

landscape_ready_to_plant

A moment of WTF is that?

landscape_viewing

And here’s our completed project! Now we get to submit our photos to DWP and wait for the rebate to come. Notice the stack of bricks is gone. We used about half of them and had to move them into the backyard. Lucky for us our landscape guy and his two sons are so cool they helped us move them (and strong – they carried 9 or 10 bricks at a time). Maybe we’ll build a fire pit? BBQ?

landscape_final

blooming_cactus

A visit to Sean Thackrey

MO-sky

Famous people are not necessarily interesting people if you’ve only got a few minutes to chit chat, like really, wouldn’t most people, famous or not, just say, “is the chicken BBQ done yet?” or “do you think there’s onions in the guac?”

But we’ve got a short list, a very short list, of those we’d like to have those few minutes with, and Sean Thackrey is at the top, though technically David’s met him a long time ago. He used to work at the bookstore ST frequented, and ST has kindly remembered this fact over the years.

thackrey_fifi

The drive to Bolinas on Highway 1 was a winding northern California classic, part fog, part sunshine, sheer cliffs overlooking a slightly angry ocean. We made a brief stop in Sausalito, which we made very brief, after designating it the Lake Como of the Bay Area, if you can judge a town merely by their galleries and penchant for regattas.

Our instructions for arriving at ST’s “barn.”
Park, let the dogs out, knock on the door.
The dogs were so happy to be face to face with the quintessential San Francisco guy: ST in his denim shirt and black turtleneck, work slacks and his marvelous Peter O’Toole look. San Francisco people from his generation (Alice Waters, etc.) are pretty much in a league of their own. Plus he’s missing more teeth than me, only his gaps are more uniformly distributed and wine-tinted. The dogs checked out a couple of his crushing tanks and his historical-plated pick-up truck, and got started munching on his weeds.

MO_lick

We asked ST whether he commuted to the city over Highway 1 when he worked there (he was an art dealer before he become a wine-maker). ST said yes, winding roads can lead to motion sickness, but how could he complain about his commute, since it was the centerpiece of other people’s vacations.

ST told us he now had a feral fox which he was feeding regularly, some mixture of duck fat, egg and dog food, confirming Stevie’s frantic suspicion that this whole damn place smelled like fox.

stevie_alarm

We got onto the topic of the Siberian experiment that bred foxes for tameness, in which the foxes got cuter after just a few generations, and ST said that was just blatantly impossible, and if it were possible, then it was purely heart attack material, that is, to have anything bred to be cuter than a fox.

heart-attack-cuteness

When we went inside the barn Stevie got to lick ST’s pans and even chew on a discarded cherry pit, while MO vapor waked the fox food. DUCK FAT is her middle name afterall.

In the kitchen hung the shrine to Aquila:

sean_thackrey_aquila_shrine

When ST explained that the things at the bottom were Belgian glove molds, we hit on the idea of soldering two of them together to create menorahs for Belgian Jews, a niche market for sure, but certainly one which would buy our product.

belgian_jew_menorah

The other 2/3 of the bottom floor of his barn held wine barrels, which we are thinking might be around 30,000 bottles of wine give or take a few thousand. On the shelf were bags of Vole repellant, but I’m not sure how many ounces of repellent works for one vole.

The assistant Tim came and pulled some wine of out of barrel to see if it was good enough to start bottling. We took our leave and told ST we were off to Marin Sun to get some burgers. We told him that we heard the tasting room at Marin Sun wasn’t working out, and asked why that was. ST said they were a good customer, and sell quite a bit of his wine, but they don’t have a dedicated person to actually stand there and talk (i.e. understand) his wine. In other words, he said, Marin Sun is a butcher that also cooks, they buy his wine but they are not a tasting room. Get it?

stevie_snooze

Thank god foxes don’t live long enough to develop cholesterol issues.

Tuo Cha gone awry

1996_menghai

If you’ve ever visited a tea factory it will come as no surprise that there can be a lot of variation between bags, or batches of tea. In fact, if a tea farmer serves you tea, and you want to buy some of it, it’s best if you buy from that bag of tea they are holding in their hands. Don’t let them scurry it away into the back, and don’t believe them when they say, “there’s plenty more where that came from.”

Since tea is an organic product, there’s always the chance that over time it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. For Pu’er (and especially raw Pu’er), since it’s stored and aged, there’s years of opportunity for something to go wrong. In addition, Pu’er is sun-dried, which doesn’t quite halt all the oxidation, so over the years it’s still alive, slowly changing and reacting to its environment.

Recently we were able to compare a Menghai 1996 Tuo Cha that someone described as “something wrong, slightly moldy, or else my palette has gone completely off its rocker” with its respectable batch mate.

It was almost too easy. The compression of the “bad” tea was very loose. It crumbled when we went to break it apart. The odor was fine (no mold), and the wet leaves smelled slightly weaker than our sample, but the color of the rinse tells us this tuo cha ran with the wrong crowd.

1996_tuo-cha_compare

The amber color that should be there for a raw Pu’er from 1996 was more of a watered down yellow. It was very clear, which is good, but the color was that of a younger tea. But even younger teas have some kind of flavor, and this tea had no flavor, just a sharp, bitter aftertaste. I am not throwing around the word “bitter” carelessly. I was actually surprised to taste real bitterness in the tea, as opposed to astringency, or a puckering sensation, or other subtle tastes similar to bitter but more complex. Bitter is actually an uncommon taste to have on its own. Sometimes it’s paired with sourness (grapefruit pith) or sweetness (licorice root) but pure bitterness for bitter’s sake is something very special indeed.

1996_tuo-cha_compare_cups

I doubt that the tea was improperly stored, or that anything could have been done to the tea over the years to save it. Sometimes you just lose one.

lostpaw

This drought

mud_slide

So I’ve never really liked grass. It stains your hands and your pants. It’s never as comfortable as it looks. It goes yellow and brown for no reason. A green, well-kept lawn is supposed to be a symbol of assimilation, class and suburban sameness, but a well-kept lawn which is mowed only up to the property line merely tells you something about what it means to have neighbors.
We tried to kill our lawn several months ago by not watering it. But apparently the type of grass that’s growing in our yard will turn green again as soon as it’s watered. So what does Los Angeles weather do in June during a drought? It rains.

rainy-sidewalk

After getting approved by the DWP Turf Removal Program the first thing we did was to officially kill the lawn and get paid for it. Very exciting.

turf-removal

Rock shopping came next. And rock shopping is super fun.
With help from our friend, the very rock-experienced Robin, we scouted out good rocks (Sidney Quartz) by doing quality butt testing, only to be told those rocks were sold.

butt-testing-rock

So we turned our attention to the bacon rocks (Grand Canyon White Onyx), in search of the fatty layer that is a national treasure in China.

national-treasure-of-china

This particular bacon rock is from the Qing Dynasty (on display at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan) and when Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists fled China for Taiwan this rock (as well as a ton of other good stuff and lots of gold. LOTS) was probably in General Chiang’s back pocket. Which tells you one, how coveted these rocks are, and two, how something that great got off the mainland.

(I have seen this rock in person but have no memory of how large it is. Otherwise I’d be able to tell you something about the size of General Chiang’s back pocket.)

bucket-o-bacon-rocks

Of course the best bacon rocks are in the middle to bottom of the pile. The people at the store look at you real funny when you ask if you can have the one at the bottom. We compromised by buying all four of the rocks that were blocking the way above the one I really wanted.

bacon-rocks

Up next, getting the plants.
plant-plan

Inspections of the highest order/odor. Hi Desert Landscape in the shape of a parallelogram.
mo-rock-inspection

Let me tell you about what’s wrong with Vanessa Place

Calling Vanessa Place a racist is wrong because it’s not enough. It’s not getting at the root of the problem. She’s using race to call attention to herself, so calling her a racist must tickle her to no end.

She’s definitely a certain type of racist, but mostly she’s a grossly egotistical patronizer, yeah, and a bad artist. But she comes from a whole line of very well paid and respected patronizers, but because she’s not a guy she has to use the next thing down on the totem pole from gender, and that’s race.

At first I was simply baffled by all the backlash against her. Not baffled like I didn’t get it, or that I didn’t think the tweets were racist. They were simply appropriated quotes from a racist book. Not Vanessa Place’s voice. OK. Appropriation is sort of the flavor of the month. But then I realized that all these people going after her for racial insensitivity are falling into the trap she has set. If Vanessa Place didn’t have race to be patronizing about she’d find something else. But she knows that race will get everyone riled up and get her a ton of attention but the anger and the criticism is misdirected.

She’s the white person telling everyone GWTW is a racist text. Well no duh, it was written in a racist period of our country, by a white woman living in the racist south. Do we need yet another white woman to tell us? Do we need an artist from Iceland highlighting the absence of a mosque in the historic center of Venice, Italy? Do we need another all-male panel discussing how women can make it in Silicon Valley? Do we need a nearly all-male Senate or Supreme Court writing legislation on women’s reproductive rights and who can control their bodies?

If other issues, say child labor, food stamps, or bone-shaped flea medication tablets were as hot as the issue of race, Vanessa Place would be telling women this, telling children that, telling animals this and that. That’s what patronizers do. So it’s not stopping the real problem if you allow her to bring the hammer of race down on everything.
Race gives her something to hide behind, something to shield her.
Calling her a racist allows other patronizers to slide by, to get ahead even, to feel justified in continuing to say “So let me tell you about how you feel being on your period, your situation of poverty, your sense of smell, etc.”

So why is getting all wrapped up in the race card so bad?
Because it allows people to bash on her while keeping their conscience clean. Everyone who signed the AWP petition, and everyone bashing Vanessa Place on social media can very proudly distance themselves from the race bit (hopefully). They can say they will never and never have and have never wanted to do something as grossly gross and profoundly awful as the RACIST Gone With the Wind tweets and accompanying image. They can be proud thumbs-uppers and wield their twitter stars and Instagram hearts all over the place. But if the crime Vanessa Place can be accused of is being patronizing under the guise of sheer egotism, from the position of white privilege, then are so many of these AWP petition signers still so innocent? And if you take the white part out, can they say they have never patronized from the point of gender, class or social privilege? Mansplainers? Hear me?

dog_splaining

buddhist_males

Duck breast in my jersey pocket

flat-tire-note

Last week while riding down Topanga Canyon I got my first flat as an adult. Technically it was my second flat, as the first one happened in my garage overnight, so let’s count this as my first puncture acquired in public.

The people I were riding with had already gone down the hill, because who wants to linger on Topanga Canyon? It’s quite possibly the dumbest downhill stretch in Los Angeles. The grade is between -3 to -8 and you have to pedal super hard to keep the headwind from blowing you into a complete standstill.

agoura

Of course the nail went into the back wheel but I was more worried about the CO2 cartridge failing than figuring out how to get the wheel back on. I had heard so many stories of cartridges failing, and I only had one, and I’d rather call Uber than ask anyone to ride all the way back up the f**king mountain with a little extra CO2.

Needless to say I successfully fixed my flat, and have been trying to figure out the best way to carry my beautiful little bicycle pump in addition to my one cartridge.

I can’t put the pump on my bike because my bike is so small there just isn’t any more room, and I’m not going to be one of those people who figure “someone’s bound to have a spare tire” (or have 5 bucks to buy me a coffee) so jersey pockets have been on my mind.

closed-PCH

One of my jerseys has a third, tall pocket for a pump, but many jerseys for women only have two short pockets, although some brands provide us with little secret secret areas that are sewn in weird triangular shapes, and nothing normal, as in keys, tampons, credit cards, phone, can fit into them, but someone thinks we women like them.

What I do know is that a Muscovy duck breast is shaped perfectly to fit into a jersey pocket. Yesterday after a great up & down tour of Griffith Park, Elysian Park, and Echo Park, we stopped in at McCalls, who packed us up a bag of ice with our duck and away we went, ice water dripping down our back and leg.

duck-in-jersey

Marinate this jersey-pocket sized piece of meat in soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger, sear it with Sichuan peppercorns and salt, and then smoke it with lapsang souchong tea, rice, and brown sugar and I’ll do that ride any day of the week, even double-flatted.

salting-duck-breast

tea-smoked-duck-smoker

tea-smoked-duck

My Google Important folder, and the authentication of Pu’er tea.

important-folder

dog_trash

When you manage your email through Google, the system automatically creates default folders for you, and although most of them make sense (Sent Messages really do contain emails that I have sent), there is a truly confounding folder labeled Important, which is where some of my email goes, and ALL of the emails I delete.*

* Yes, I have my settings set correctly, my deleted mail is set to go to the Trash. But whatever.

A folder labeled “Important” is confusing because that’s not how I work, I can’t even begin to fathom the agony of deciding what’s important and what’s not, because importance is a matter of context. You can relegate something to be not important simply because you want to blow that person off, or you can say getting one’s buttocks and abs whipped into shape is of upmost importance.

Since Google’s Important folder seems to follow no apparent logic, the other day I got tired of it.** I deleted an email that had credit card info on it, and it somehow found its way to the Important folder so I seized the moment and deleted all the emails that were in there. Yes, all 19,000+ of them.

** Yes, I have recently found the setting where I can hide the Important folder, which just goes to show you its importance.

And suddenly a lot of my emails were gone. Not my Sent mail (they were in the Sent folder), and not the emails that I had filed to other folders, but the weird emails that were in the middle ground between save and delete, the ones I scroll past every single day and wish someone would just come and tell me what to do with them. And amongst this epic pile, only some, but not all of those emails were gone.

Did I freak out? Nah, I just got a little sad. OK, a lot sad. If a company creates an Important folder for you, when you delete it, shit should really hit the fan. But nothing important was missing. I couldn’t remember anything that I was going to miss having around. Invites to events, notice of stores having sales, or links to dumb articles were resent by whoever, re-spawned into my Inbox like sea monkeys. All those 19,000+ emails were stupid. Email is stupid.

bundle-puer-drawing

The other day someone from a fancy ass hotel in Beverly Hills called up a friend of mine, looking for an expert on Pu’er tea.

Apparently the cleaning lady at the hotel tossed out a very special guest’s stash of Pu’er tea, which, to any normal person, does look like a clod of dirt.

The guest either threw such a fit, or was so special that the hotel was considering replacing the tea, or at least finding out whether it was something they wanted to do.
My friend asked whether they knew what kind of Pu’er it was, and they told her that the guest said the tea was from the 1920’s, and sent some photos. The guest had quite a few tea cakes from this era, and the wrapping on them looked old and dirty.

A little history here: aged Pu’er is one of the most sought after teas and certainly the most faked. An authentic Pu’er tea from the 1920’s is most likely a fake or impossible to replace, and probably wouldn’t have buddies from the same period. Authenticating Pu’er is hard but understanding that the history of tea and the history of China go hand in hand is the first place to start.

ripe_puer_test

real_and_fake_Hong_Tai_Cheng_bags

real_and_fake_Hong_Tai_Cheng

– Before 1949 (invasion by Japan, Chinese civil war) the Pu’er producers were family owned, and used no wrapping.
– After 1949, with the establishment of the Communist party, state ownership took over with 4 major Pu’er companies, each with specific brands on their wrappers.
– After 1970, an agricultural entity takes control and starts production of Pu’er under the name of Seven Sons. At this time there is a proliferation of private label teacakes, a lot of family farms and suddenly everyone has a different wrapper and a different name and a different recipe, leading to a lot of confusion.
—End of history lesson—

Here’s the funny part.
The photos that were sent from the hotel guest were of tea wrapped in none other than the Seven Sons label, which started circa 1970. A 1970’s Pu’er is nothing to sneeze at, but unless you taste the tea, you don’t know what year it’s from, as Seven Sons Pu’er is still manufactured today.

So, 1920’s Pu’er tea my foot, or my ass, or my Google Important folder.

Here’s a commemorative Pu’er from the People’s Liberation Army on its 80th anniversary. This one is real. It’s from 2008. The friend who gave it to us had a relative who was a general.

communist_puer

Salute to all things annoying

My mom is neither young or on Facebook (nor does she read my blog) but lately it feels like she has taken on the most annoying Facebook posting habits.

You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re the status posts where the person says “Oh my God I’m so depressed about what happened,” and after a million comments of “r u ok?” and “praying 4 u” and “did something happen?” and after a couple days, the person finally writes and says “I can’t really say.”

Or how about the person who says “I need obedience for my dog. Whaddoido?” and the Facebook limit on allowable number of comments is reached with all sorts of advice ranging from asinine to extremely well thought out and helpful and the person NEVER replies?

Or how about the person who asks for things to do in some grand city like San Francisco and people suggest all sorts of places to eat and hike and bike and visit, taking into consideration the person’s food preferences and hobbies and interests, and create itineraries that include coffee breaks and ethnic joints and interesting architecture, and then two weeks go by and the person writes back and says “Nah, didn’t want to go there after all. Ended up going somewhere else.”

It’s like that, only on the phone. I swear. Sure the calls are interspersed with tidbits like “How come my heater starts working again as soon as I reset the circuit breaker?” (she didn’t like my suggestion to call the HVAC guy), how far Federer got in the Australian Open (only the third round), and questions like “You already took the dog agility class, why are you still taking lessons?” but she wants to buy a new computer, she wants to go on a trip, she wants to fire her real estate agent, that’s the picture.

But it’s only January and the sun is shining and instead of ranting, I’m going to lie down and embrace it.

pig-candy1

I salute the annoying Facebook posts… all of them, with PIG CANDY!

pig-candy2

Fight back with bacon baked with brown sugar, rosemary, maple syrup and mustard.

pig-candy3
Take that!

Here’s what the pups think about no more agility, and morsels of pig candy.

pups-bacon

pups-no-agility

Doing, meaning, and things that look like other things

A client said to me the other day: “Just because I ask for something, doesn’t mean I want you to do it.”

“…”

Now, I’ve already got a client that never means to ask me to do something.
It goes like this (he calls it a conversation):

———–
“I wonder if there is an app that does X.”
I_dont_know_smiley
“I wonder if you googled “app for X” whether you’d find something that did what I need.”
I_dont_know_smiley
“Seems like there’d be a bunch of apps that did X?”
I_dont_know_smiley
“I couldn’t possibly be the only one. Very useful, this X.”
I_dont_know_smiley
“Just keep wondering whether there isn’t something out there, already built, free. I really do wonder.”
I_dont_know_smiley
———–

But not meaning to ask me to do something is different than asking me to do something without meaning to ask me to do something.

Maybe my response should have been to ask her what she meant by “do.”

due-as-stamped

Yet another client’s problems inspired this drawing, in which case I know what to do, but am confused as to what it means.

ACD_diagram

My fitness app showed me what I did:

agility_diagram

Which meant I had done what this diagram asked me to do:

dog-agility-STD

Maybe my response should have been “just because I do something doesn’t mean it means anything.”

tri-tip-as-ahab

clowning_with_moogie1

clowning_with_moogie2

stevie_as_felix

cycling_route