Peg Duthie's Blog, page 48

228 moons

The BYM at a moon festival on Sunday, pondering a riddle:



We celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary the next evening with beer and bbq at Dae Bak Bon Ga. Good times. :-)

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the Paper Hound (and some other things seen in Vancouver so far)

The BYM and I walked around a fair bit of downtown Vancouver yesterday. Our stops included:

JJ Bean: terrific chocolate croissants; a Happy Planet "Extreme Planet" juice -- I find the smiley face on the cap somewhat unnerving, but the beverage itself was fine, and it's kind of cool seeing bilingual labels everywhere); Sunday tabloids spread across the front bar; fun people-watching/story-concocting (the range included a couple of exceptionally tall, nerdish chaps; a middle-aged Asian social worker; fashionable executives (the latter African Canadian); hipsters; painters; a meter man; lots of students; an older man in shapeless shorts that were probably older than anyone currently playing for the Grizzlies; a young woman stalking by with a quart of milk; and at least two poodles with vests)

the Moon Festival at the Sun Yat-sen Garden. It was a low-key affair. I especially enjoyed the koi feeding, which involved a large gong and included a huge, orange 47-year-old fish named Madonna.

noshing and sipping at New Town (fried radish cake, oh YES), Bambo's, The Shop Vancouver, and Marutama

glimpses from the March for Reconciliation: a hip-hop choir; feathered cloaks and chaps; an orca mask; a sea of umbrellas

poking around The Paper Hound, a bookshop on Pender. Here's my sweetie in front of the science shelves:



( more snapshots behind the cut )

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life chasing art's tail, and my subconscious on its heels

or, why I ordered an Almond Pink Squirrel at the Minneapolis airport:



The conscious version: I first read about pink squirrels in a Polish American church guild cookbook I found in one of the free bins at McKay's. Something about the description tickled me enough to write a poem-story featuring pink squirrels, but I'm not a fan of cream-based cocktails in general, so I didn't add the ingredients to my shopping list or mix a squirrel for myself.

This is, however, why "pink squirrel" leapt out at me from the menu at Ike's yesterday afternoon, and why I uncharacteristically chose it over the other libations on offer. It was made with vanilla bean ice cream, and seemed more beige than pink (at least in the pub-inside-an-airport lighting), and was in fact pretty tasty -- like a thick, boozy milkshake. It's not high on my list of drinks to order again, but now I have tried it, and it didn't clash with the fried calamari.

Subconscious version (as in, the connection dawned on me only ten minutes ago): the Minneapolis airport has more moose tchotkes per square foot than I've seen anywhere outside of Quebec. MOOSE AND SQUIRREL! :-)

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studies, 1992 and 2013

While shuffling some other papers into new boxes, I came across a folder from my time at Michigan. In addition to the usual assortment of notes and photocopies, it also yielded five diphenhydramine/hydrochloride capsules, a half-painted nail, and a 22-page draft of "Ugly Kings and Happy Endings: Orfeo, Pericles and Political Anxiety in English Romance" (my paper for English 731) with a bit of advice from my housemate Eric in the upper right-hand corner: "write the best paper you can in the time you have."

7x20 featured two micro-pieces of mine this week:
Shakespeare festival
Athens

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clippings: style

From a T Magazine profile of Carmen Almon:

Slatkin describes her as "a charming bohemian." He recalls an incident when she was painting furniture in a back room of his shop. He invited her to dinner. "She looked down at her white shoes and they were speckled with green paint. She took her brush, painted her shoes green and said, 'I’m ready.'"

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/under-the-influence-carmen-almon-the-naturalist/

From a David Colman profile of Anne Fontaine:

In the last decade, many men and women have come to realize that gender is closer to polychrome than to black and white.

Ms. Fontaine described the color [of her lipstick] as a "deep violet pink." Guerlain calls it grenade -- in this case, French for pomegranate, not the weapon.

From a 1912 New York Times primer on makeup, then becoming more widely accepted: "Touch the lips slightly with a lip-stick, but do not make your mouth look like raw beef."

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in front of the Lin family pharmacy, 1979

Me and my dad's oldest brother (at that point), Lin Eng-hok:



My understanding is that the family ran the shop in Shin-hua, Tainan, Taiwan, for over four hundred years. There were some very rough times (during his childhood, my dad's family could seldom afford meat -- he remembered his high school celebration dinner with this big brother both because he was told to choose something with meat and because he accidentally ordered dog), but the family had clawed its way back to affluence by the time he married my mother (my grandmother was reportedly both iron-willed and an investment genius).

The business in Tainan shut down after my uncle's death in 1982. (There may still be a branch in Kaohsiung, though. I don't know if I'll ever get my Mandarin up to a functional level -- and the aunt I'm closest to prefers Japanese, which is a whole 'nother saga -- but every now and then I resume the struggle.)

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bedtime conversation

[The BYM peers at the book I'm reading, which happens to be Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food)

Me, reading aloud: "Anyone who has lived for long in Greece will be familiar with the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheep's lungs frying in oil."

Lui: I doubt they whistle.

Me: That's what the lady reports.

Lui: You need to go to [local Greek diner] and confirm it for yourself.

Me: I'm thinking they probably don't keep sheep lungs on hand.

Lui: They can't call themselves authentic if they don't have sheep lungs!

Me: And my clients think I'm a stickler?


Speaking of meat in Greece... (Athens Central Market, 2011):



( Read more... )

And then there's the meat that is here in Tennessee. When my friends James and Gail stopped in Nashville earlier this summer, they enjoyed the burgers and the phosphates at the Pharmacy. James can be credited for most of the good photos of me between age 10 and 17 (his camera was always with him, long before these iPhone-in-every-palm days), so it seems fitting that he snapped a nice shot of me and the BYM over dinner.

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from the Kalendar of Shepheardes (1604)

Good for the heart: Saffron, borage, laughing, joy, musk, cloves, galingale, nutmegs, the red rose, the violet, mace.

Evil for the heart: Beans, peas, leeks, garlic, onions, heaviness, anger, dread, too much business, travel, to drink cold water after labour, evil tidings.

-- quoted in the entry for September 12 in Charles Kightly's Perpetual Almanack of Folklore (Thames and Hudson 1987)

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selections from THIS PLACE I KNOW

I came across This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort last month, while looking up Karla Kuskin in my library catalog. Each poem is paired with an illustration by a different artist. You can see some of the illustrations in this Candlewick Press PDF, including one of my favorites, Chris Raschka's depiction of New York City. It's next to Ann Turner's "The Beginning," which opens with

This is where it begins
like God really lives in New York
and he opens his hands, PRESTO!
there are subway trains
churning through the dark
and Brooklyn Bridge swaying
all its lights like ribbons...

And the line "dogs running underfoot / like bits of escaped rug" -- oh, hee!

Another pairing I especially liked was Margaret Tsuda's "Commitment in a City" with a painting containing dozens of people (as well as some dogs and cats and birds) by Jill McElmurry, whose work I now definitely want to see more of (her new book, Tree Lady, is about "the first woman to graduate from the University of California with a degree in science," Katherine Olivia Sessions). The ending of Tsuda's poem:

... You are part of my city,
my universe, my being.
If you were not here
to pass me by,
a piece would be missing
from my jigsaw-puzzle day.

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how does my garden grow?

Three of the fifteen Prairie Fire seeds have sprouted, a touch ahead of schedule (planted 8/29, 14-21 days to germination). It was kind of cool to see the husk of one of the seeds at the tip of a new leaf (as if to reassure me: hey! this is what you planted!).

I thinned out more of the arugula yesterday. It looks and tastes like arugula. Whee!

There is a handsome caterpillar parked in my parsley, and devouring it. The plant wasn't looking great to begin with, so I shall leave it to the critter and admire his or her stripes.

I need to devise a solution for my other plants, however, especially at the foot of the stairs. There will be no point in planting more radishes until I do. I may try making hot pepper spray. I will also try lining my hollyhock patch with dog hair (to deter bunnies).

The weather forecast says it will be stay above 80 F the next two weeks, so the lettuce and pansy seeds will stay in the cupboard. There are plenty of indoor projects and chores to contend with, so it's just as well. At the same time, some say this is the best month to sow hollyhocks. I have been dreaming of lining my driveway with them, so perhaps I will splurge on a packet or two...

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