101 in 1001: [no. 14] learn one new car repair

{25 September 2009}

so i’ve never changed my own tire before (or anyone’s tire, for that matter). when i was about 17 i remember asking my dad about changing a tire, and he told me i shouldn’t bother learning, because if the lug nuts had been put on by machine, i’d never be strong enough to get them off. okay, case closed. i used that as an excuse for not knowing how to change a tire for the next 14 years. silly, right? (also lucky and surprising that i’ve never been stranded on the side of the road and forced to figure it out). and totally unlike me, to take the “i’m a just a wimpy girl so i wouldn’t be able to do that anyway” anti-empowerment route anyway. as it turns out, that’s silly. Ben walked me through it (showing off for a boy, how could i refuse to do jump in and tackle the project?), and changing a tire was surprisingly easy. and who knew that the car comes with a spare, jack, tire iron, and everything you need, all tucked away in secret compartments within the trunk? awesome. 15 minutes, some greasy hands, and we were on our way.

no. 14: learn how to do one new car maintenance task

Awake and Sing, Aurora Theatre Company

{18 September 2009}

good script, Odets really has a sharp edge to his writing that i like. the production was…perfectly serviceable, utterly forgettable. B pointed out a number of design anachronisms that, in retrospect bothered me, but at the time were minor enough not to distract. the pacing was weird. acting uneven.

given similar budget constraints, i think we can do better.

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder…

{15 September 2009}


photo credit: fgfathome

okay so a couple of nights ago this thunderstorm woke me up around 4am and freaked me the fuck out.

4am, sitting up through a thunderstorm, afraid of my hillside going up in wildfire. realizing i am NOT emergency prepared. if i had to leave…put on pants, grab laptop-phone-purse-keys. how would i get the cat? could i shove him into his carrier or would he sense my fear and run and hide? // do my smoke alarms even work? i haven’t tested them. i haven’t gotten renter’s insurance yet. // am radio is talking about afghanistan, that’s a good sign, right? power still on. no emergency sirens. // first drops of rain since i moved here almost three months ago. bang of thunder that shakes the house and sets off car alarms down the hill.

now, admittedly i have a tendency to be easily disoriented/frightened when i’m really groggy, but it was also a HUGE FUCKING STORM. i’ve lived in the bay area a total of five years now (4 college, .7 post-college, .3 since i moved here this past june) and have only witnessed two thunderstorms. they just don’t happen. so i layed awake for more than an hour listening to the storm and fretting about how dry the hillside i live on is (later that night the first drops of rain fell…i’d been here almost three months, and no rain. how does anything green stay alive? ). Gene sent me the link to this photo later in the week and wow. okay, see? it WAS a huge scary storm.

the best thing about waking to a thunderstorm is burrowing deeper into the arms of a lover. waking alone, it underscores the loneliness sharply.

thief in the garden

{09 September 2009}

there has been a thief in the garden. a wildflower-eating thief. a few weeks ago i put new potting soil into several flower boxes on my porch and scattered a packet of california wildflower seeds onto the dirt. they started sprouting immediately.

until yesterday, both boxes looked like this:


there has been…

now one of them looks like this:


…a thief in my garden

i can’t believe that some creature managed to clean out the box so completely. a squirrel? a crow? who loves to eat wildflower sprouts?

on the upside, this mystery creature has left my edibles container alone. the basil is thriving and begging to be made into a batch of pesto. in the smaller pockets i have cilantro, dill and chives. the chives, transplanted from teresa’s garden, were doing great right up until zeke discovered how tasty they are. now if i don’t watch him when he goes outside, he sits on front of the pot and just happily gnaws on the chives. they all have stunted ends.

rosemary, sage, and mint are are all meant to go in the other little pockets of the herbs pot. the amazing thing about california is how LONG the growing season is. it’s september and i still have time to put some small plants (growing from seed now might be a bit ambitious) in and grow them enough to trim and cook with before winter arrives.


edibles

actor’s nightmare

{08 September 2009}

so i blogged a couple of weeks ago about seeing Happy Days at Cal Shakes. Happy Days is the Beckett play in which the main character, Winnie, is buried in dirt up to her waist for the entire play. the text of the play is mostly a circular, spinning monologue of post-apocalyptic despair. the set pretty much just a big mound of dirt, and Winnie is dug into the dirt about half way up the mound. Cal Shakes’s outdoor amphitheater is set in the hills in Orinda, outside of Berkeley, CA. (whew! enough setup for what is a small news item)

so anyway, i heard through the theatre grapevine that last week there was a rattlesnake that got into the dirt mound during the first act play. the actress saw the snake coiled out of the corner of her eye, and then heard the rattle of its tail and knew what it was. in the end, the actress escaped injury (tho i’m afraid the snake did not survive the evening). but i can’t think of something more like an actor’s nightmare: she’s buried up to her waist in dirt, delivering a meandering, circular monologue characterized by a desperation bordering on panic. had she screamed, ‘oh god, a rattlesnake, i’m trapped,’ i don’t know if any audience member would have had any idea that she had deviated from the text! can you imagine screaming for help and having everyone calmly watching you, munching on their picnic dinners and shifting in their lawn chairs? to illustrate my point, at one point in the play, per the script, the umbrella she’s holding catches fire.* well, that happened and no one jumped up to save the day, we sat quietly and politely and watched to see what she’d do next.

these are the things we do in the name of outdoor theare.

* how to make an umbrella spontaneously catch fire, by the way? garage door opener, model rocket igniter, flash paper. boom.

I win the prize for weirdest thing found backstage today

{07 September 2009}


I win the prize for weirdest thing found backstage today

the instructions say:

Easy to Grow CobraCo Egg Plants
1. Place plastic wrapped mushroom on plate.
2. Use a spoon to gentle crack the top of hat. (yes, hat. the mushroom-egg is wearing a hat?) Remove plastic wrap and broken pieces.
3. Add water to growing medium
4. Place in a sunny location

After this, apparently, a marigold will hatch out of my mushroom. Egg. My mushroom egg with the broken hat.

it’s like a kinder egg for horticulturists. would this make more sense or be less funny if i weren’t so sleep deprived? it’s tech.

Happy Days, Cal Shakes

{24 August 2009}

i’m going to quote my own twitter feed on this one: (insert comment about hubris in blogging here)

Happy Days at Cal Shakes: Beckett’s quiet desperation punctuated by the crunchcrunch of someone in the third row eating entire bag of chips.

i’m not sure that beckett was meant for outdoor theatre. i’m also not sure i was meant for beckett. i found his plays life-changing when i was in college in the same way that Thoreau and Emerson were life-changing when i first encountered them in high school (or Douglas Adams when i discovered Hitchhiker’s Guide in the 6th grade). when you go back to revisit it later, it’s not the same. the actress playing Winnie was tremendous, and holy shit how difficult would it be to perform a 90 minute monologue while buried up to your waist in dirt but still, i found myself totally unable to stick with the play, and instead wondering whether beckett actively or only incidentally hated his audience.