12.17.19

the dirty dozen {excerpts from yelp reviews of crystal springs rhododendron garden*}

01 During our trip to Portland to see extended family, I set a goal of walking as much as I could.

02 I came across this online and realized it's not too far from our house. I thought it would be a nice excuse to get outside and do something on a decent weather day.

03 I will say there was one very big duck that I definitely got frightened of and I felt like the other ducks could probably feel my fear.***

04 Some poor fool was disappointed that there was no "foods."  It's a fucking park, bring a picnic for yourself if you must have "foods" "because this is America ."

05 I went to the garden and the lady at the front desk had the audacity to yell at me and my Girl Scout troop. All we did was walk up to have a ceremony with my girls to celebrate growth in there life. and she screamed at us with a horrible tone.

06 Not a concern unless you have a bee allergy. It is a garden, so there are, naturally, bees around the area. Be aware of this if you are allergic to bees. 

07 Turns out I spoiled an opportunity to get proposed to in the rain on the bridge by the lake. It's a perfect setting to be proposed to. The person that gets propose to here would be lucky. 

08 Watch some birds do bird things.  Sit by a pond or lake.  Stare down a squirrel.  All around good times.

09 If you're having a tough time deciding whether you want to procreate, there are usually enough well-behaved, cute kids here to push you over on the side of spending the quarter million dollars it will cost you over 18 years. And then you, too, can take your own cute, well-behaved kids here and hear them scream, "Look at the weird duck, Mommy!"

10 It's a garden. And like the many other gardens, foliage, parks, and recreational destinations in and around Portland, it's gorgeous, well maintained, and generally awesome. I love shit like this.

11 On the way out there was an enormous road sign that said "Inmate Work Crew Ahead" that wasn't there on the way in.  Now, I'm sure they were all non-violent offenders but if I was a Mom with an infant in tow I think I would be a bit unnerved.

12 They have some hideous and rare type of goose here that has a red fleshy head similar to a turkey.  Does anyone know what this hag bird is?****

*where we saw our first nutria!** we thought they were beavers and then that they were muskrats, but no, they were nutria.

**i pity the nutria, and the other invasive species portland rehabbers like the local audubon society won't help; it's not their fault they were brought here for their fur. we're an invasive species, too, and our fur is worthless. 

***i'd totally forgotten joe is afraid of waterfowl until he startled away from a couple of canada geese. geese, no less! i'm a goose whisperer, he totally gets the family and friends discount!

****yeah, a muscovy duck, hater.

03.22.10

i love me some spray paint. the opportunity to use it doesn't come up very often; i made silver ornaments for our christmas tree a few years ago and have long-standing plans to make a magnetic chalk board (if someone will step up and sell me a reasonably-priced-but-interesting-looking vintage frame, brooklyn flea), but joe tends to ignore me when i point out poorly finished wooden things at thrift stores and note that we could paint them. finally i managed both to read the faux porcelain pottery tutorial over at ps - i made this... and to finish the fancy bottle of rum* joe's coworker gave us for christmas (he gifts us with liquor without provocation every now and again; i don't understand it, but i like it). Project Adler-Inspired Vase was born.



ye olde rum bottle. it's lovely, thick, bubbly glass, and probably would've made a fine vase on its own - but when one must paint, one must paint. i coaxed the labels off with some goo gone and ran it through the dishwasher.



per the tutorial, i used a sharpie to draw lines on the bottle before puffy painting it. i thought the red lines would be light enough to cover with paint, but i ended up using something like five coats. if there's such a thing as an extremely light-colored sharpie, i'd recommend that.

after letting the bottle dry overnight in a kitchen cabinet (the kitten can be trusted with nothing at this point - last week he pulled joe's only credit card out of his money clip and hid it under the rug), i newspapered the balcony within an inch of its life and spray painted like it was my job. i started out with a cute little craft can of krylon from the local art store and ran out long before the red lines disappeared; i came back the next day with a giant can and felt much more powerful. and deeply toxic.



et voila! i could pretend that i've stopped anthropomorphizing things and didn't immediately refer to the finished project as count vasie, but i think we all know the truth.

*pyrat, that is. i'm not usually a rum fan, dark and stormies notwithstanding, but this stuff (from the folks who make patron) is good enough to drink on the rocks.

04.16.09: again with the treacle and the cherry blossoms



on a double-time errand run over my lunch break this afternoon, a patch of excellence! as they assembled a construction site in front of an urban outfitters,* someone wove the nearby trees through their scaffolding.** the fixtures plus the flora reminded me of the park (a chelsea bar that looks like architectural digest guest edited by miss havisham - so-so drinks, but a wonderful place to explore). can one build an apartment around a tree? i'd quite like that.

*yeah, i went to urban outfitters. i wanted to celebrate our apartment's long-awaited unpacking with new pillowcases (his and hers), but i neglected to notice that they were online only. alas!

**trees are this spring's big medium, i think: a few weeks ago someone was adding false foliage to the ones in front of the time warner center.

04.15.09



favorite things: spicy inglehoffer mustard (and the excellent little potbellied jars it leaves behind), my great-grandfather's silver cigarette case (now a clutch), and cherry blossoms. happy spring, internets: you've been awfully nice about my umpteen tales of bed bug woe, and i dig you for that.

06.19.08



i think we all knew that kidchamp was capable of degenerating into amateur floral arrangement by committee and/or multiple disembodied head photos in a week; don't act so surprised. our neighborhood wine shop has a bunch of shelves up front near the street where they display and sell vintage glassware, cocktail accessories, serving dishes, and so on; the pieces are usually inexpensive and nicely edited, so i ogle them while joe takes his sweet time with the booze (i still let interesting labels guide me, which still seems to work, so i don't hem and haw much over wine). last night they had this ceramic horse head vase (there's a 4"x2" hole for flowers along the mane) for a mere $12; it clearly needed to come home with us. i promised the amused australian wine guy that we'd bring back a camera phone picture of whatever we ended up arranging in the head; he was joking when he asked, but i jump at opportunities to show my flowers to strangers. call it the wholesome version of what bai ling does on the red carpet. i feel like i really need to bring it, so i could use some help: internets, what sort of flowers would you put in a disembodied horse's head? and what would you name said head? the naming is also key.

04.28.06

today's lesson in wedding strategy is that it isn't always a good idea to muffle one's inner bridezilla. i'd been handling our florist with kid gloves because i was afraid she'd back out on us; after waiting a week for a return message and finally resolving to make a polite transatlantic phone call this morning, i got dumped via e-mail anyway. why this couldn't have happened a week or two (or, hell, a month or two) ago - so that i could have had that time to work with the person who inherited (see 04.18.06) her flower shop - is beyond me; what i do know is that it's really, re-ally tempting to be an ugly american when english reticence fucks with my planning. don't mess with the bride, young man. you'll get the horns.

i caught the last fifteen minutes of pretty in pink on cable last night. for those of you who lack total brat pack recall, that's when molly ringwald bounces back from being dumped for prom by whipping up a weird dress and making all of the rich kids look like conformist suckers. when i burst into tears (as i always do) as the soundtrack kicked into OMD's "if you leave," i realized why this wedding stuff is giving me zombie-filled stress dreams* and making me flip my shit over save-the-date cards; while i can shrug off traditions and don't exactly need to feel like a princess, i do need to feel crafty. i'm hoping the stuff i throw together will stand the test of time a little better than molly's dress did, but the temporary "huh? wow!" is what matters. so...which one of you is going to teach me how to pour my own candles?

*the zombies themselves weren't the problem - it was that i was supposed to be revivifying a horde of them while shopping for a rehearsal dinner outfit and my syringes lacked the proper amount of serum, so they kept coming halfway to life and stumbling all over the store and getting in my way. also there was a small dog on fire.