Lint results.

As you may recall, my Lint projects this year were to meditate daily and to eat mashed potatoes every day.  Here are my results:

As you can see, I was much better at eating mashed potatoes, only missing two times.  The first time (March 22) I completely forgot, remembering at 9:00pm that I had yet to eat potatoes. The second time I just didn’t prioritize eating mashed potatoes.  I must note that I still like mashed potatoes and I will eat them again, but I was quite happy on May 6 to not eat them.  It turns out that while I could eat them every day of my life, they are not quite as pleasurable as when I don’t eat them every day of my life.  It would be interesting to see if Andy Lee-Hillstrom (the person responsible for this particular  Lint Project) would have a similar experience.

The mediation was harder, mostly because once I make a batch of potatoes and portion them out, scheduling the eating of them is no problem.  Whereas I must find time every day to meditate.  Most days that’s just a thing that takes some effort and then there are days that even effort doesn’t get it done.  I missed two each of Sundays and Thursdays and Saturdays, one Friday and Three Mondays.  Mondays are my longest workday, and Saturdays and Sundays have less structure, so there’s no “automatic” meditation time.  On weekdays, my “automatic” meditation time is right after I get home from work.  Thursdays, however, are movie night and I usually plunge right into the movie, which causes me to skip the meditation.

I will keep up with the meditation because I feel much better when I do it on a regular basis, much less high strung.


Here’s my final mashed potatoes breakfast, hidden under the spinach and eggs.

Drat. Lining was off.

I am very much “over” sewing this dress.  I melted part of the lining because the iron was too hot (oh well!) I sewed a dart on the wrong side (it’s interior, no one will ever see it) and so I was very excited to put the final stitch in and have a triumphant try-on.  And I did.  And all was not good.  I didn’t properly line up the lining seams with the dress seams and voila! Messy, poorly executed bubble effect.

Matt, observing me taking the above picture said, “It looks funnier from this angle. Let me take the picture.”  So I did.


Happily, this meant that I had to pull all the stitching out and watch another two episodes of Friday Night Lights in order to finish the dress before attending the Greek Easter Celebration.  So some good came of it.

Three sentence movie reviews: Iron Man 3

Yet another notch in our “see superhero film to celebrate anniversary” belt.  I’ve liked all of the Iron Man movies, but franchises tend to diminish as their sequels become more numerous, so I was surprised how much I liked this movie.  I think it had a lot to do with the fact that Robert Downey Jr. spent most of the movie outside of the suit, plus there was good acting throughout.*

Where watched: Regal’s Vancouver Stadium 12 with Matt
Cost: $10.50 (grumble, grumble, “evening” begins at 4:00 now and my very spendy ticket to the 5:15 show didn’t keep the too-young child sitting in front of us from talking through a lot of the movie, grumble grumble)

*And, for once, Pepper Potts wasn’t in sky-high heels when being chased/in danger.

Essay: Bike Messengers

I saw my first bike messenger up close in 1988 when I was visiting New York City with my family.  We were riding an elevator in that great metropolis and he got on at the same time we did.  I couldn’t take my eyes off his toned and tan skin, shiny with sweat.  He may have had tattoos or crazy hair, I don’t recall the details, but something branded him as “other,” even more so than the slight odor wafting from his body.  I stared at his functional, hardy clothing, and his bag which held his package and his book for customers to sign.  As a jaded teenager, I did my best not to gape at everything in the city, but I’m pretty sure I stared at him the entire time we shared that elevator.
Bike messengers were everywhere on that trip.  Fax machines had started to catch on, but the city still needed a ton of people to get something from here to there.  I knew that people didn’t like them because they didn’t follow traffic rules and took every opportunity for a shortcut, angering pedestrians and drivers alike, but I loved them for their athleticism, the feral look they had about them, and the vague sense of anarchy that followed them around.
When I moved to Portland, I worked downtown where my path crossed with many of the bike messengers.  It was the early 2000s by then, and between the dominance of the fax machine and the convenience of electronic messaging, I’m sure the population was greatly reduced, but they were still there.  I took walks on my lunch breaks, descending from the twentieth floor of the Wells Fargo Tower, eager for fresh air.  As I walked I took in the sights and kept track of the changes in my environment, which meant cataloging the bike messengers.
There was a woman bike messenger I was always happy to come across.  She was lean and wiry, with thick pants and wool sweaters to keep the rain from her.  She kept her brown hair cut short in a bob and her black-framed glasses and cap reminded me of a friend from college.  She rode well, but I loved passing her while she was resting.  Sometimes I would come across her chatting with other bike messengers, but one day I caught her leaning against the wall of a high-rise building, her bike next to her, her feet propped up on a planter. She had her face to the sun, eyes closed, drinking in the good weather.  At that moment, she looked like a picture of freedom.
My job at the time had a bike messenger come to pick up our deposits.  He had black curly hair and wore shorts in every kind of weather.  All the riding had pared his frame down to a gristly muscle, the kind you see on cowboys who have spent their life on the range.  He wore a typical bike messenger’s cap, not a helmet and he was all business.  I was the receptionist so I saw him every day and no matter how hard I tried, I could never engage him in conversation beyond, “hello” (in response to my greeting) or “fine” (in response to how are you/the weather/the day?).  Because I was bored at work, trying to get him to talk became a bit of a project.  Flirting didn’t work, or general good vibes or questions aside from the standard greetings. I wondered if he had a speech impediment or a general dislike for me, or if he was just socially awkward.  The plot thickened one day when my coworker said something about Audrey Hepburn to me while he was picking up his parcel. “Oh, are you talking about Roman Holiday?” he asked her.  They chatted briefly about the film and he went about his business, leaving me with my mouth agape and adding “Audrey Hepburn fan?” to my mental list I was compiling about him.

I like bike messengers because they are a part of that class of hard working blue collar workers that businesses are always trying to eliminate.  I also probably romanticize them.  Their job is hard, and it’s dependent on them staying in good health.  I know it doesn’t pay much and I have a good idea that most of them don’t have health coverage.  But I love to watch them, moving through the city, getting things to where they should go, in all kinds of weather.

Books read in April 2013

Apparently Book groups have taken over my reading life.  Everything I read this month had to do with a book group!

Read
Twice Told
Scott Hunt
A book of short stories written by YA authors inspired by drawings made by Scott Hunt.  Each drawing had two different stories and it was interesting to see what inspired the authors.  In the back, each author talks a little about their process.

The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman
Matt and I read aloud.
This was a delightful fantasy about a boy whose family is murdered being raised by ghosts in a graveyard.  When I put it like that, the book sounds ghastly, but it really was quite sweet and whimsical.

Norwegian Wood
Murakami
Read for Kenton Library Book Group
An interesting view of 1960s-era college-student Japan.  After reading three of his books, I note that Murakami seems incredibly removed from his storytelling while at the same time is able to craft incredibly hot sex scenes.  I find this juxtaposition odd.

Brave Girl
Michelle Markel
Read for Librarian Book Group
A picture book that takes us into the early 20th century advocating for better factory conditions through the eyes of a brave girl.  Though I felt that there was no solid sense of time (how much does Clara age over the progress of the book?) I thought this was a good introduction to factories and the labor struggle.  The illustrations were interesting, using textiles as well as other media to tell the story.

One Gorilla
Anthony Browne
Read for Librarian Book Group
The pictures of the animals were great.  The pictures of the humans were weird.

Eleanor and Park
Rainbow Rowell
Read for Librarian Book Group
Rainbow Rowell’s name falls into the same category as Ransom Riggs (category:  YA authors with names I hope they didn’t grow up with, but suspect they did).  That said, this is probably destined to be a popular YA book and for very good reason.  The setting is unusual (Omaha in the 80s) the characters are interesting (Eleanor, poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Park, half-Korean boy who doesn’t fit in the standard of mid-80s Omaha masculinity) what brings them together is perfect (comics, music) and the dramatic tension in the story feels very real (I was quite worried). In short, this is a book to read now.  Go and find it.

Started and did not finish
Son of a Gun
Anne de Graaf
Read for Librarian Book Group.
Seemed interesting, but child solders is not a topic I am motivated to read about.