New Year, oh dear

Actually, I'm looking forward to 2008. We have some big plans and I am all about action, so that's good. Besides, 2007 has been a herky-jerky ride at the fair--I have spent much of it feeling nauseous and wondering when I can get off. Even now, having reached the end of the ride, I am clutching my stomach and staring at the ground trying not to chuck.
So to make myself feel better, I have been thinking about what I want to accomplish in the next 12 months, besides the big ones like figure out career, find new home, make some kind of difference in this world etc. They are too stressy for my current state of mind. Plus, I don't really like New Year's resolutions because they tend to be all about guilt and self-loathing, neither of which I am willing to play host to for very long. So I have some spiffy new goals instead. Such as:
1. Get a pound puppy. Finally.
2. Learn how to cook three decent meals. Just three. I will find the Nigella inside and I will enjoy her company.
3. Eat more vegetables. Refer to #2.
4. Make a new friend. It would be very easy as we are slipping back into the lives we left in Auckland in 2005, to just hang out with the same people all the time. While I am very excited to be close to my lovely friends again, one of the cool things about 2007 has been new friendships.
5. Wear heels more often. My bung knee is almost up to the job and heels just look better with jeans.
6. Read more worthy books. I have read some great stuff this past year (and some utter pap) but I have refused to read any of Tim's books about democracy, the Middle East, the global economy, or Christianity. I can't expect him to delve into Joan Didion if I won't do Thomas Friedman.
7. Cut down on the reality TV. It is making me stupid. I have had two guilty pleasures this year: Tori and Dean: Inn Love and Bridezillas. And lately there has been a new one called My big, fat fabulous wedding about people for whom there is no budget when it comes to wedding planning. They will spend, for example, $2,500 on seashells to decorate their tables, or $240,000 on jewels for the wedding day, or $50,000 for flowers. It makes me feel like a better person.
8. Stay on top of the housework. Tim's dropsy tendencies (he'll drop his junk on any flat surface) have squelched my will to tidy, but in 2008 I will fight back.
9. Take more and better photographs.
10. Make albums of the photographs, so I can appreciate all the wonderful adventures we've had and will continue to have.
Happy New Year!!

Burned potstickers and peanut butter

Tim is at class tonight so I had a dumb dinner. He really is a most excellent husband--he rang when I was on the bus to tell me how to cook frozen potstickers: throw them straight in a pan of hot oil, brown for three minutes or so, add boiling water to the pan (almost enough to cover), cook for a further five minutes, and you're done. Except I burned them, the fire alarm went off, I had to stand in the foyer fanning the smoke detector with my blazer, the pan boiled dry, I spilled half the potsticker sauce on the kitchen bench, and after all that I was still hungry. At which point I improvised with dessert: chocolate chip cookies smeared in peanut butter.
Another weird day at work today although, unlike most, it ended with champagne. One of the girls at work is getting married, hence the champagne. I edited stories about a potential biological control for fruit flies, a woman who sells accessories made from antique brocade, and an artificial nose that, when tested in Berkeley, sniffed out cocaine, meths and pot. Hence the weirdness.

Ain't easy being green

Tim has written another piece for the Guardian online. Ch-ch-ch-check it out.

80 hour weeks: The American Dream

Tim has got a great wee piece in the Guardian about America's working poor. Take a look. There's some plonker who calls himself YanksWorld (I'm assuming it's a man because the writing has a masculine voice) who weighed in on the issue A LOT yesterday when the piece was posted. Apparently he thinks it's just marvellous for people to work 80 hour weeks and take on multiple jobs because it is that kind of work ethic that has made this country great. He doesn't seem to have twigged to the fact that many people are doing this out of necessity, and might prefer to spend evenings and weekends with friends and family instead of coworkers. Oh, yeah, and some health benefits wouldn't go amiss either.

Art patrons

Tim and I share few interests—we have an embarrassing passion for The Amazing Race; inhale chip and dip whenever we have the opportunity, therefore must ration ourselves, or suffer malnutrition; love reading and writing (though not the same stuff); and derive tremendous enjoyment from teasing each other. And that’s about it. So when we stumbled on a painting—a grown-up, put-it-on-the-wall and admire-it-for-the rest-of-your-life painting—we both absolutely loved while poking around Bodega village, where Hitchcock’s The Birds was filmed dontcha know, we bought it. Even though our budget didn’t really support it at the time. (It should be noted here that we did get a beautiful painting from Tim’s sisters and their families when we got married, but it’s in New Zealand, with our house and barbecue and the rest of our adult lives.)
In our California painting, two cows stand on Baker’s Beach, with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate and Marin headlands. One is a fresian, and the other is that reddy brown and white sort of cow, the one that looks like wet clay. Both cows are beautifully rendered, would look completely at home on the walls of a great ranching home, but the killer part as far as we’re concerned is the striped beach ball that hangs in the air between them, as if one of the ladies has just nosed it towards the other, and both are trying to look nonchalant for fear of losing their cool. Once you’ve spent a few minutes looking at this scene, drinking in the loopiness, you notice a black cow (Angus?) in the background, thundering up the beach to join the game. The whole thing is surreal and lovely. We swallowed our anxieties and whipped out the credit card, feeling confident we had bought the best thing in the gallery.
That was four months ago and today we returned to Bodega to attend a reception for the painter. We were a bit nervous to meet her, given how much we love the painting and how cool we’d imagined she must be. I was expecting, lord knows why, a woman with a husky voice, lavender hair and shiny black boots with the laces undone. I didn’t realize this is who I expected until we met the artist and she turned out to be quite ordinary, with an embroidered waistcoat (I have a weird hang-up about these), and little interest in talking to us, her patrons. We were miffed, I tell you. She even, at one point, took a huge step back towards the wall, positioning herself in front of another of her paintings, a well-endowed mermaid hugging two sea otters, but that didn’t stop us from sidling back into her space and talking at her some more. We so wanted to make a connection with her. Sad, huh? To heap disappointment upon disappointment, the gallery owner served Chablis in the smallest disposable cups I have ever seen—literally not much bigger than a cough syrup measure. So when “our” artist turned away from us again—crying out and practically jumping into the lap of a man she knew to escape us—there was nothing left for us but to get back in the car and drive back to San Francisco, an hour south.

Carcinogenic clothing and too much cake

We had cake for dinner -- a brick of carrot cake for me and a doorstop of chocolate for Tim -- and now we're sitting in front of the telly clutching our tums and complaining about feeling sick. It's been that kind of weekend -- self indulgent and spur-of-the-moment, the way you imagine you'll run your adult life when you're about nine years old.
Yesterday we poked around downtown and picked up some bargains (a new work-appropriate top and jacket for me, a couple of t-shirts for Tim; oddly there was a countertop sign at the shop warning that the State of California felt it important that we know cancer-causing substances were present...), ate Thai noodles for lunch, walked through Chinatown (where I insisted on stopping at the pet shop where we got Vodka and Lime, so I could observe the behavior of the other Dwarf hamsters and therefore deduce what in tarnation is wrong with our moody little boogers) and ended up in North Beach, the Italian part of SF, where we ate blood orange and mojito flavored gelato in the sun. As far as the hams were concerned, there was nothing to see. An exhausted mummy ham lay on her side, shielding a cluster of adorable babies the size of lima beans. Too young for behavioral issues.
Then we caught a bus home and blobbed in front of a Doris Day film in which she traveled to the Bahamas with Cary Grant, which should have been just dreamy, except they weren't married. Not very Doris Day of her.
Today we returned to North Beach to eat toasted focaccia sandwiches at a cigar shop/cafe that no longer sells cigars, walked and walked and walked, and saw the fabled parrots of Telegraph Hill, squabbling as we nosed around other people's gardens and sat for a while on a parrot-watching bench just off a path leading to Coit Tower. It was so appealingly bohemian. Someone's dragged a parking meter up there.
Then to top it off, we celebrated Tim's Washington Post piece by eating appalling quantities of cake at the top of the Macy's building at Union Square. My nine-year-old self would be have been delighted.

I read it in the Washington Post

Tim was published in the Washington Post today! Check out his searing analysis of The Secret, a vicious little self-help book that blames life's losers -- including the victims of natural disaster and war -- for not thinking positively enough. Cos if they did, they'd all be healthy, wealthy and wise, apparently.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040601819.html

The cotton anniversary

Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary. It was a good day.
Being married now is a lot more fun than it was two years ago -- it's absolutely true what they say about the first year of marriage. It's no pony ride. When I look back, I can see just how mulishly I resisted the trappings of coupledom: I was anti shared bank accounts, or credit cards, or decisions about all kinds of things from what to buy at the grocery store ("but I like this type of peanut butter!") to what color we should stain the deck. And we had already lived together for a year and a half.
Coming to America has forced us to meet in the middle on so many issues. We furnished the apartment from scratch -- no 10-year-old offerings from university flatting days, kitschy collectibles, or inherited dining tables to try to mesh into a coherent style. We picked everything together and were chuffed when one or the other of us scored something for free, a word that has become a totem these past, impoverished months.
A trip to the basement to recycle our glass and plastic netted what I like to think of as a "shabby chic" occasional table.
Me: "Look, hon, behind the boxes. Do you think that belongs to anybody? It's kinda dirty but let's take it!"
Tim: "That's my girl!"
And I couldn't have been prouder when I came home from work one night to find Tim sitting in an armchair he found on the footpath across the street.
Tim: "Do you like it?"
Me: "Yeah! Where was it?"
Tim: "Over by the consignment store. I looked out the window and saw it had a yellow sign taped to the front, but I couldn't read it. So I ran down and..." He smiled and pulled the sign from behind his back. In red letters, underlined twice, it read: "Free!!"
Other great scores: a picture of a pretty Renaissance girl (from the basement), a black bedside table for Tim (basement), a $5 bedside table for me (flea market), awkward cutlery that is weighted such that it rolls crazily in the hand (my brother's kitchen).
We now have shared bank accounts, and a credit card, and matching checkbooks, and for the past four months we've also had matching jobs.
Then yesterday I was hired for a month's mag work, so we took a picnic down to Crissy Field and celebrated our liberation from the bookstore and our anniversary with potato bread and spicy hummus and some cut-price Valentines chocolates from the pharmacy. It was a gorgeous day, the first really warm t-shirt day since October. We lay in the sun and read our books and watched tankers passing under the Golden Gate and felt peaceful.
Then we went home and tried to fix our cranky old toilet, which had blocked for the fourth time in two months. Ah, the romance.