Cubed

Just stopped in to show you what I've been catching lately. We had buds in town, and you know, I have plenty of excuses for what's been keeping me from updating lately, but I think that mostly I haven't been around because I've had to adjust my sensibilities a bit since working. As someone who generally gets excited about meeting new strangers and wandering around cities and bright colors and particularly well formed sticks, the office where I work is painfully drab. Furniture and plants and wall colors that are all variations on taupe and forest green, on the seventh floor inside a high rise, inside an office park, AND headsets. I still can't believe I've infiltrated and acclimated to such a scene.

My point is, it's hard to find nice details in the cubicle setting. I can sort of get into the whole office-culture-is-hilarious-thing, with the mini-drama and the abuse of power and the procedure, but it certainly requires a bit of suspended disbelief.

Lately, though, there's been a little light, in the form of the view we have out over the bay. Since clocks rolled back, the sun sets here around 4:50 and every day, I get to see this mini-blind framed sunset.



Some things are breathtaking no matter how you find them.

The Bake Shop

Happily over Halloween, we woke up this morning to an extra hour, which gave us time to go for a sweet bite at Neldam's before heading out of the neighborhood. This little neighborhood bakery specializes in Danish pastry, allegedly the oldest scratch bakery in all of Oakland. It's pretty charming, with a genuine DMV style numbering system and generically festive decorations strung all around and classic cakes that can be ordered ahead and customized with things like "Happy Retirement" or "It's a Boy!" This morning a young couple sat in the bakery's classic lawn chairs looking through a three ring binder to pick out their wedding cake.

Every time I've been there, no matter the day of the week, someone is picking up one of these cakes, which leads me to believe that a Neldam's cake is a sort of tradition in lots of Oakland families. This morning a woman who looked to have stopped by on her way home from church, dutifully took a number ticket though she was the only person in line and said, "It should be under Tina." No bother mentioning what should be under Tina, of course. The lady behind the counter produced the box and opened it so she could look over the script. "Oh yes," she granted, "That'll be fine."



It reminds me so much of Gene's Bake Shop, the downtown bakery located conveniently next door to my parents' store when I was a kid. I used to eat their seventy-five cent eclairs or M&M cookies while my parents were working and they were the go-to Saturday morning donut destination when friends slept over. Gene's was a scratch bakery too and everything was made fresh at the bakery, every single morning. When I was in junior high it went out of business after a fire and never reopened, but it was certainly around long enough to make an impression. It's no wonder I'm such a floozy when it comes to the smell of frosted cake.


Neldam's doesn't do eclairs or donuts, but I can highly recommend the bear claw: in this case, a chocolate almond croissant with course sugar dusted on top. And someday, I'm going to invent a special occasion for one of those cakes.

Dilly PIckles

If flowering dill weren't so dern tasty when it's floating in a spicy brine, I'd put the stuff in vases all over my house. That yellow of the flowers is nearly the color of paint covering the walls of our living room and man, I cannot get enough.


Where was I? Oh yes, PICKLES. Usually I'm more of a refrigerator dills sort of a girl, thanks to the expert tutelage of my friend Gerik, but we really wanted to complete this trifecta of canning projects with something more savory. Tomato sauce seemed a bit risky and we'd heard mixed reviews of canned salsa, so with little hesitation we picked up this hefty bottle of vinegar at the store and mixed it up with several shades of carrot and bean.





Keeping with our habit of beer pairings, we sipped a dark porter whose name I can hardly recall. I swear that at the time the beverages were clouding our minds just enough to numb the swell of our ankles and dull our sense of time's passing, not enough to get sloppy in our sterilizing and incubate the makings of botulism. Promise.


In the end, this was probably our least successful of the three recipes, mostly because we lacked the foresight to anticipate how beautiful purple carrots when bathed in hot brine would turn the whole mess violet! Also, we should have erred on the side of stubby vegetables instead of tall ones because while processing them in boiling water, we lost some brine out of the jars. Now the tips of some of our vegetables protrude above their liquid, which is no way to craft a crunchy pickle. Worst case scenario, they'll grow mold. We were really too tired to worry much about it at the end of the day. Total cost for 8 quarts of pickles? $9. If they're inedible, we'll live.

From this insane project I believe we gleaned a few lessons:

1. Jam is best made in small batches to ensure you can get a nice pectinated result.
2. A dishwasher is not for chumps. It is one of modernity's conveniences and comes in handy for washing jars.
3. Refrigerator pickles are probably easier and just as tasty as canned ones. While living in California with year round produce, canning pickles may be actually unnecessary.
4. Three canning projects in one day is a bit of a stretch, but doable.
5. Holiday weekends are perfect settings for crazy projects.

{High Five!}

Adventures, of late

I've been withholding a minor detail of my state of mind from you people. I have what you might call an elephant in every room right now. He's really terribly enormous and invasive and he seems to whisper, always, the things I should be working on. Drawings, research, letters of recommendation. It being August, it is the beginning of application season, for those of us who dare to apply for graduate school. And this year, of course, that means me.

But last week Miriam had the good idea to take a bike ride out to the furthest point west, in the East Bay, to the port of Oakland for some exploring. It was a great way to ease my mind against its tendency to become overwhelmed and subsequently useless, but also a good time to just pedal and think and formulate. It had been too long since I'd visited a place unknown and it made me want to hop in the car and just drive somewhere new. Maybe with my next visitor, I'll enforce this plan.

Here are some of the parts of our journey that were best suited for a quick picture:










I'm a kid in a candy store, when it comes to industrial landscapes, because they offer such intense contrasts in color and texture. I wish I had a nicer camera, for times like this more than ever, because some of the lines get a little muddy with further distance. The scale is harder to convey, but in case you were wondering, those white cranes behind the shipping containers are bigger than anything with moving parts you've probably ever seen.

Slow Motion

I loved this series that Roxanne caught at dinner, the three of us wearing sweaters in shades of popsicle and laughing like crying.

Safe Travels

Sunday we rode up to the Albany Bulb, the man-made trash heap turned peninsula park up north of Berkeley for a soiree in honor of Kurt and Hubert before they depart on an epic bike ride. Multi-national, and multi-continental for Kurt. It was my first time visiting the Bulb, though I'd heard quite a bit about it: a pile of trash from the 1906 Earthquake grown almost completely over in flora. We were able to follow the Bay Trail most of the way up at right about the time of sundown, an impressive trick intended to woo Lauren. I think it worked.

The trail out along the bulb was a bit rocky, and tired (literally, tires buried in the ground like boulders) and we had to walk a stretch of it that was too mountainous for our road bikes. After some brief wandering through a grove of wild fennel, we made it to the clearing just as the light was waning and took in as much as we could.



There were bikes walled up along the outer edge and people all over the place, dogs all around and did I mention all the bikes? Someone (Kurt, probably, who crafted my new front bike rack is even more unstoppable than I am when it comes to hauling) carried an entire keg of Sierra Nevada out by bicycle. (!) Meanwhile, all this mangled, gnarled metal embedded into the landscape hung around the party like vines, making it hard to decipher boundaries and depth. Hall and Oates playing on the boombox.

There was some more contemporary trash strewn here and there, brought out here by other punks over the years. And all of it manages to enrich the quality of the natural space; an extraordinary case study for a landscape architect, for sure.


Before long, the fire was raging and the air had turned chilly. So we huddled and chatted and nibbled on puppy chow and drank a few and then before the stroke of 11 wandered back out and headed for civilization again by the glow of our bike lights. The whole evening was so unreal that I might assume I'd dreamt it, except for how the next morning my clothes smelled of bacon, the way they do after camping.





And looking back through the pictures, the firelight makes everything even more romantic.