Anger Burger

No.  No.  No.

House hunting is one of my least favorite things ever.  I kind of like moving into a new place, of getting everything settled and learning the way the light moves through the windows at dawn, or how the eaves shake in the wind.  I don’t necessarily want to become familiar with the way the carpet squishes in the toilet dungeon – oh I’m sorry, I mean third bedroom with en suite.

We’ll keep looking.  MEANWHILE!  My mom had a birthday.   An important one, but I guess they all are.

There’s no real explanation, but she wasn’t really feeling her birthday this year.  The winter storm we just experienced was costly for her, having had to hire a professional to come clear her driveway so my stepdad could attempt to get to work and help my grandpa get a massive tree cut up and hauled from his driveway.  I really wish we could have surprised her with an Alaskan cruise or a room full of pug puppies, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen that way.  So what’s a family to do?  Eat at La Tarasca, for starters.  And then Harbor City dim sum for seconders.

And for dessert we tried Olympia’s new Jewish deli, Kitzel’s, which is a source of great drama for generally Jew-free Olympia.  Not the Jewish part, the skimpy-but-expensive-portions part.

My salted herring plate was $9 and actually too much food for me to eat.  Well, specifically too much salt.  Which is unusual.  I need salt like most people need water.  But the herring is magnificently, astonishingly salty, which is why there’s a heap of underseasoned potato salad and two pickled tomatoes on the plate.

My mom and The Viking shared a pastrami sandwich, which at another $10 wasn’t exactly a deal, but was enough food for them to share as a modest lunch.

I do have to call total and utter bullshit on them for charging $1.50 for a bagel (okay, I’ll let it slide) but $3.50 for a bagel with cream cheese.  TWO DOLLARS FOR CREAM CHEESE.  And!  Just when I sort of calmed down about that, I noticed that a bagel with butter was $2.75!  A dollar fucking twenty five for a pat of butter!  Oh ho, oh man.  That.  That is… ballsy.  And insulting.  The show-down at Yelp gives a good idea of the dramz, but the one thing that really irked me has been taken down: Kitzel’s gave themselves a five star review and then sassed back to every bad reviewer about how their prices and servings were the same¹ as elsewhere in town.

I like the sass, but I’d like it backed up with some substance. And by substance, I mean that I’d like to not spend four dollars on a bagel and a schmear.

¹ They are actually more expensive, but who cares, facts are for meshuggeners.

I’m tired.  I’d say it’s a Crohn’s thing, but I’m at the point where I can’t honestly place the blame on having an autoimmune disease that prohibits my body from absorbing useful nutrients.  It might be more honest to say: I’m winter tired.

Don’t get me wrong, here.  I love winter.  I missed winter.  It had been a handful of years since winter and I had a chance to be intimate, and we’ve been making up for lost time, let me tell you.  But I had imagined something a little more romantic, something log-cabin-hot-cocoa-bear-skin-ruggy, instead of coming into work and finding that someone thought it’d be a good idea to have a vent drilled through the sterilization room during work hours.  For example.

My mom accused me of being unhappy, and I can tell you and her with all sincerity that she is wrong.  I missed the Puget Sound more than I was willing to let on, and each day I slog to work through sideways rain I breathe a sigh of somewhat damp relief.  Weeks are flying by faster than I care to acknowledge, and the internal timeline I’d had for getting back on my financial feet is now a hilarious blip in my review mirror, but you know.  It’s winter.  We hibernate by watching too much TV and eating nachos and telling ourselves that the reason we can’t find a second job is because it’s winter.

And then!

My co-workers and I crawled into work like a cannibal soccer team each morning to see if the power was on (mostly!).  Ice-encased branches ripped from trees with the heart-stopping sound of china breaking.

It’s always heartbreaking to see the damage of an ice storm, and I worry every single minute about my mom out in the forest by herself with just a little generator and spotty cell phone connection, but it’s just so fucking gorgeous, I can’t stand it.

Every blobular twist, each straining and drooping branch; nature simply cannot more clearly put her arm around your shoulder and steer you back toward the electric heater and say “Just one more cup of tea.  You’ll have time to go down to the basement and start the laundry later.”

I was hoping this would be about frying trout, but it ain’t.

It’s about setting the alarm for 5:40 in the morning.

And wearing three pairs of socks at once, one of which is made from possum-fur.  And refusing delicious, hot, wonderful, magical warm coffee because you’re on a goddamn boat in the middle of a lake and you don’t want to be the person who instigates a poop-stop.

Unsurprisingly, much time was spent arguing the relative safety of island-living to ensure safety from the zombpocalypse.

Everyone once and a while we changed bait.  Different colors.  Spinners.  Glow in the dark.  Shrimp scented. Little pieces of earthworms.  Big pieces.  Then we started bargaining with the fish: we’ll take perch instead of trout.  Then we started threatening them: we were going to release¹ but now we’re going to keep you.  Eventually we told the fish we really just wanted hamburgers anyway, so we left.

¹ A lie.

I understand that for a lot of you these deer are magical forest ballerinas, but at my mom’s house they are thieving seed ninjas.  She even bought this tall feeder box to keep the deer out, but of course the second after I took this photo that deer stood up on it’s hind legs and started cramming it’s eathole full of seed.

My mom is used to this so she immediately went outside and started hollering at them, which did absolutely nothing and I was left clutching my cell phone wondering if I’d have to call a deer mauling into 911.

But they do this almost every day.  She walks out there and they casually saunter off, and five minutes later they wonder around the other side of the property and show back up at the bird feeder.  Merry Christmas, deer assholes!

My sister brought these and despite knowing we’d regret it we all ate one.

They tasted like you think.  Waxy chocolate.  Pure liquid sugar center that instantly chokes you.  Scented blueberry Mr. Sketch marker flavor.  Mmm, tastes like dreary drugstore Christmas.

It’s been six years since I’ve been in Olympia for more than a holiday visit, and the first time in six years that I could hotglue a bunch of shit to packages since I wasn’t shipping the presents in from another state.  God bless hotglue for reals.

Never dismiss the joys of hotgluing stuff to stuff.

This year we cooked absolutely nothing on Christmas day.  We made dips and sliced meats and cheeses and thawed shrimp all on Christmas Eve, and then merely decanted it all to plates for the festivities.  It was plenty of food and no one was trapped in the kitchen making food hot while everyone else enjoyed themselves drinking schnapps and tripping over dogs.

 It only took us nearly four decades as a family to get it sorted out, but we’re on track now.

The punchline is that I went to a Star Trek trivia night and it sort of sucked.

I wanted my first night back on the town in Olympia to be worthy, and when my friend Fraoigh invited me out for Star Trek trivia I knew we were on the same page.  Unfortunately, it was at my least favorite bar in town, The Voyeur, and the entire thing relied on a room full of drunk people shaking noise makers – toy tambourines, bicycle horns, baby rattles – in order to be called on to answer questions.  Clearly this was not going to end well.

First, though, I had to be pissed off by one of the hosts announcing that “Anyone dressed in Star Trek outfits gets a drink!” and then when I, a dude and a girl in a short red skirt all showed that we had outfits, he gave the girl in the skirt a drink and ignored me and the guy.

There were a lot of other things handled poorly, and mostly it was my fault because I hate chaotic games and the more that people shouted answers over each other and before the questions were even finished, the angrier I got.  The final straw was someone answering that Majel Barret’s character as Deanna Troi’s mom is named “Roxanna” and the quizzer telling them “Close enough!” and giving them the points¹.

Also, let’s discuss this Klingon bloodwine:

I ordered it, of course, mostly because I couldn’t believe without physical proof that they were serving bloodwine cold – COLD! – and with kombucha as an ingredient.   But they were.  So it’s pretty official, I’m never stepping foot in The Voyeur again.

But can I tell you what makes up for all of this many times over?  During a break and before I decided to split early, I stood outside and said “This thing is stressing me out!” in response to which a guy turned to me, pulled a bottle of lavender oil from his fanny pack, handed it to me and in total genuine seriousness, expected me to self-aroma-therapute myself.  So I did.  It was not effective.

¹ Her name is Lwaxana.

I want to say up front that everything could not have turned out better. It really couldn’t have.  Given all the things that could have gone terribly wrong, and given that nothing did, I’d be the first to admit that I should just shut my trap and accept that we’ve been incredibly lucky.    But I’m me and I like a good yarn, so grab a Big Gulp of 7-11 coffee, buckle up and take a ride with me.

I don’t have photos to share and I don’t want to talk about why not, but I will try and share with you the gibbering terror of moving 1,100 miles through bullet points:

• When you rent a moving truck, it turns out that when you ask for a specific size and they confirm it?  In the fine print it says that you will get that size or larger.  I reserved a 22-foot truck one month and advance thinking that the 22-foot was already ridiculously large, but that I could handle it.  When I went to the Penske place to pick it up the guy says to me “Oh, we give you free upgrade!”  I’m unclear what the fuck could be upgraded about a truck, but when they pulled a 26-foot moving truck around for me I basically shit my pants.  Seriously.  TWENTY-SIX FOOT TRUCK.  I realize that people drive those giant RVs and stuff all the time, but everyone I know who saw this truck said something along the lines of “They just let anybody drive off the lot with that thing?!”  Me being the highly suspect “anybody” of course.

• We again used the REAL RocknRoll Movers of Los Angeles, and once again their premium fees are totally justified.  We  hired two guys for just labor this time, but they arrived on time, were downright jovial and packed the truck in two hours flat.  I wanted to pack them in the truck and bring them with us so they could unload it on the other end, but I didn’t have enough Rohypnol on hand.

• We had the truck loaded two days before we intended to move and planned on cleaning and finishing up for one whole day, and man, was that even cutting it close.  We worked way too late, ended up all getting low blood sugar and being generally cranktastic and awful and then ate sad Subway sandwiches and passed out at 8 in the evening.  And then were woken by drunken partiers knocking on our front door at 1am, one of which who answered my dad’s gruff demand of “CAN I HELP YOU?” with the sort of peculiar and interesting response of “I was instructed to come here.”

• Did I mention that my dad flew down just to ride in the moving truck with me?  He did.  He’s a pretty amazing dad.  Mike the Viking’s dad offered too, and we briefly debated letting the two of them move our stuff north and we’d just fly up.

• It turns out the truck is so hugely massive in every way that Mike had to construct a wooden platform for me to place under the gas and brake pedals so that I could press on them while keeping the heel of my shoe on the floor.  I mean, I’m 5’6″ and have huge feet, so I feel like I have a pretty average body.  The brake pedal ended up being so hard that I had to literally stand on it to press it anyway, so that wasn’t fucking terrifying while driving through several major mountain ranges or anything.

• Also, in order to pull the parking brake I had to put my feet on the dashboard to brace myself while I pulled it up.  It was seriously at the limit of my physical ability, which seems vaguely dangerous.

• So, the morning that I leave I decide to take the 170 freeway north that connects to the I-5 – it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, just keep reading.  Anyway, I’ve driven this way a dozen times or whatever, no big deal.  But at 6am (yes, 6am) when we departed, in the black of pre-dawn, I missed the merge onto I-5 and realized the exact second that it happened that I was now driving toward Palmdale instead of north.  Why did I do this?  Because there is major construction and only a sign that read “PALMDALE – RIGHT LANES ONLY”  I figured at some point I’d get better instructions on when to merge for I-5, but nope.  While near tears and shaking with fear (remember: 26″ truck, basically no backing up allowed) I made a 15-minute detour around the middle of the Antelope Valley while trying to get back to where I was supposed to be.

• I’d forgotten that I have a secret affection for the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish sandwich.  After 11 hours of driving a giant wall of a truck at 60mph, it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.

• At some point in Oregon, the fuel tank gauge got stuck.  It was like fucking Apollo 13 up in that shit, doing math to figure out what our miles per gallon was, how far we’d gone and how much was left in the tank.

• And then the anti-lock brake warning light came on.  The truck manual said that if it wasn’t blinking, to not freak out.  So I just freaked out a little.

• My dad and I called in a drunk driver after we passed into Washington State.  First time either of us has done that, but the guy was seriously terrifying us and when I passed him on the left to just get away from him, we both saw that he had his hoodie pulled up over his head and was blearily rubbing his face while swerving over the lane markers, so we called 911.

• We rolled into Olympia about 5:30 in the evening, I made Mike assemble our bed frame which was like those exhaustion tests the military does where they limit your oxygen and make you play patty-cake and stuff¹.  It took him about 500x longer than normal to do it, but he did it.

• I had my friends John and Nathan come and help me unload the truck today and they totally busted ass and are my heroes for ever and ever.  I also gave them some money.  Not as much as it was worth to me, but it is what it is.

• The morning was so bright and crisp and sunny and fall-y that it was breathtaking.  I even passed a friend while walking back from downtown after getting a coffee before unloading, and even though we haven’t seen each other in months the first thing he exclaimed was “This day is amazing!”  And it was.

• And now that we’re done it’s pouring down rain; like I said, everything that could have wrong?  Didn’t.  Imma go eat now.

¹ Everything I know about the military I learned from An Officer and a Gentleman.

Goodbye Guacamole House.

Goodbye California.

Goodbye squirrel archenemies.

As you read this we hurtle forth along I-5 for wetter pastures.  It is time for me to wallow in the beaver swamps for a while and rejuvenate my newt skin.  And for Mike the Viking to hunt and pickle some shark fat.

All things must end, including ThinkTank’s dignity.

Let’s have Bullet Time:

• I’m still miffed that Chelsea Handler now owns all the vodka jokes.

• I keep forgetting to tell you about this old article my dad sent me about the cutlery tattoo bandwagon.  We get it.  You love eating.  You know how I prove I love eating?  I got this radical muffin top.  Check it out, deeeewds.

• I’ve had two food-related celebrity run-ins this week.  The first was at the farmer’s market where a woman said “Hello!” to my friend Hatherly very familiarly, so I assumed she was Hatherly’s friend and just smiled and didn’t get a good look at her.  Then Hatherly whispered to me, “Was that Alicia Silverstone?”  I turned to look, and yes.  Yes it was.  The second was when our friend Scott and Mike and I went to a coffee shop where I stared at a woman’s tattoo for some time before realizing A) that she totally cut in line¹ and B) she sounded like Leela from Futurama.  Probably because she was Katey Sagal.

• Today was the Viking’s birthday!  But he wanted to hibernate in his office and play computer games all day, so I cooked him quiche and a Victory Pie and we will continue to celebrate his birthday over the week.  Tonight’s dinner marks the last of the functional kitchen days, as tomorrow I start packing it all up.

• I went on a sugar binge and almost immediately had a serious Crohn’s flare up.  I am furious at what is turning out to be consistent anecdotal evidence that my disease wants to me stop eating sugar.  Furious and miserable.  Sugar is my drug.  Well, sugar and fat.  And opiates.

¹ What made me even realize she’d cut was that she was so apologetic and sheepish about it.

The down side to this expensive and often frustrating cooking hobby that I have is that it’s not a great hobby for someone that moves regularly, which is me.  It’s not by choice, though I’ll admit to no small amount of blind stupidity on my part.  Maybe “blind optimism” is a better choice of words, though anyone who knows me will snort at the use of the word “optimism” in conjunction with myself.

We’re sad to be leaving Guacamole House, but it’s time to be closer to our families again.  My mom is also a medical celebrity because she’s officially had more of the particular chemotherapy she’s on than any other human being in the history of human beings and I expect we’ll be doing the talkshow circuit soon and will need me to be her business manager, so you know.  Time to head back north.

Moving!  Moving is the most tremendous bullshit, but you already know this.  What you may not know are some things that I’ve learned through trial and trial.  And some error.  But mostly trial.

• This is worth the cost:

  

  It is U Haul brand packing paper, and I’m sure you can find cheaper paper somewhere in town, but the U Haul stores are always nearby, and at this point in the moving process I say fuck it. I wouldn’t move without buying at least one box and maybe two. $10 or $20 is a small price to pay to responsibly pack your breakables with padded abandon. When I was younger I used newsprint and discovered at our destination that everything I packed in newsprint – MY ENTIRE KITCHEN – now needed to be washed in hot soapy water to get the ink back off it, and She-Hulk was angry.

• Speaking of spending money on name-brand stuff, this is the tape ninjas use:

  

  It is Duck brand HP260 tape, and I have no idea what that designation is supposed to mean, but I assume the HP stands for “Harry Potter”. All I know is that for several moves we have used either Scotch brand packing tape or generic, and both came unstuck on our boxes to varying degrees. I even used Scotch tape that is supposedly designed for use on cardboard boxes, and that crap peeled off the easiest of all. Our last move I bought the Duck brand, and it’s the stickiest, meanest tape in all the land and I’ll never use anything else.  Be advised that I can only find it at Staples.

• Reward systems are where it’s at.  I get very overwhelmed and frustrated during the packing process where it seems like we’ve made little progress and still have so, so much more to do.  Today is that day for me.  Tomorrow might be as well.  But I generally know that things work out, and to just put my head down and pack another box.  Don’t think about the big picture, just pack another box.  In between boxes, I get rewards.  Usually it’s that I get to check my email and blog feeds.  Sometimes it’s a chocolate bon-bon.  Later in the day I’m allowed to have a beer for each box packed – if I start this too early, I’ll fall asleep at like 4pm.  Same with the emergency Vicodin stash.

• Get rid of stuff.  This is one of the hardest lessons, since moving is a balance of saving money versus saving effort.  Mike and I have continuously over the last few years moved with furniture that we hate.  But we keep it because it’s convenient and we need it on the other end.  We convince ourselves that after we move we’ll replace that stupid side-table with a radical Hobbit side-table that we actually like.  After 10 years, this has never happened.  This move we are trying harder.  I’ve listed multiple items on Craigslist, and if they don’t sell they are going to Goodwill.  Period.  There have also been more personal purges, because I have the time and I’m in the mood.  My mental position is: if it had burned in a house fire, would I mourn its loss?  No?  Then it can die in the garbage bin.

• Pharmeceuticals are your friends, particularly if you have Crohn’s disease.  Moving drama is the worst of the worst for my Crohn’s though so far (KNOCK ON EVERYTHING) my health is under control.  If you have access to drugs during this time, for god’s sake, take them.  Do not be above altering your own chemistry!  That’s why we evolved brains, for fucks’ sake, to make things better.  A little Xanax while moving is no different then getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist or wearing warmer socks in winter.  I, of course, do not have health insurance, so I have to treat my pain with macaroni & cheese and the occasional donut or seven.  And cuddles:

  

My family started “birthday week” many years ago after the umpteenth disappointing attempt at a perfect birthday.  That makes us sound like real assholes, but it’s true: my sister and I both have mid-summer birthdays and often had no way to inform school friends that we were having parties, and in later years attempting to arrange one event each with divorced parents resulted in the genius realization that a single day was just too much pressure.  Though, I have to admit that we are now into “birthday month” which might be stretching things a bit.

Still, birthday cupcakes a full ten days after my birthday means I finally got some cake:

Though my birthday flowers retired rather dramatically:

My dad and The Thing That Lurks are getting along like Sean Connery and a lightly drunken woman, which is to say spectacularly:

While walking around Venice beach, I came across these hand-carved wooden spoons and immediately fell in great lust:

They had a Japanese sticker on them and I otherwise know no way to tell you how to get one, other than to say I got it at The Tortoise General Store and if you telephone them they might be able to tell you where to get one – they aren’t on the website.

It is, I believe, intended to be a rice spatula, but the overall construction is just too perfect to be limited to rice.  It’s very difficult to find short-handled spoons and spatulas in the US, though that doesn’t justify why I was rubbing it all over my face while waiting for my dad to pay for it.  What can I say, it’s very satiny.