Once More Into the Breach

New Year's Eve is the best holiday.

You can, of course, polish off an entire bottle of champagne by yourself (it makes a good chaser for six glasses of boxed wine) and pass out on your bed fully clothed with a cat on your head any old night of the year. But on New Year's, you can still respect yourself in the morning.

Not that you should.

Okay, "Portlandia" is now getting a little out of control. Not only does Carrie Brownstein look uncannily like my sister Jessica, but in Season 3, Episode 3, they go to Seattle (which happens to be where my other sister Margie lives) to recruit new residents. One of the Seattleites they meet looks and acts just like Margie. I mean, has her haircut and everything.

Later in the episode she turns up and nonchalantly says she's decided to come live in Portland. They ask her, what will you do? Where will you live?

"I guess I'll just live with you guys," she says, nonchalantly.

If there's one word that describes Margie, "chalant" is not that word.

So now I'm waiting for the episode where the trying-desperately-not-to-be-middle-aged friend comes up from Austin in order to experience the bike culture. She'll have a flat-bar road bike she tries to pass off as hip by color-coordinating it as if it were a custom fixie. But it has 27 speeds and she still can't make it up hills without walking.

She's pretty damn chalant, I'm sorry to say. However, because the champagne hasn't quite worn off yet, she'll be played by the beautiful, brilliant, and still-living Madeline Kahn.

Happy New Year! Now for chrissakes get that damn cat off your head.

As if a Million People Were Silent, Then Suddenly Cried Out in Terror

So I took a couple of years' break from my blog. You might have noticed, except that assuming you were one of my three regular readers, you stopped checking for updates by early spring of 2012.

This was all part of my master plan.

Writing is a wonderful thing, very therapeutic, not to mention that organizing one's thoughts (or attempting to, anyway) to the point where they are not only comprehensible, but maybe even interesting, to complete strangers, is excellent mental exercise. And God only knows I need it. I've been watching too much TV.

But having an audience adds pressure. That being said, I guess it isn't clear why I don't just keep a paper diary or take advantage of one of many available software programs which process words, which are what I produce by typing, assuming I lay off the wine.

Yeah right!

The topics on my mind seem off-limits tonight. A man I never met, but consider a kindred spirit because he was a fellow bicycle commuter, blogger, parent, and 44-year-old, was killed yesterday on the frontage road of I-35 in Round Rock on his way to the office.

His poor family. Those poor kids. I am so terribly sorry. God bless and keep you.

To spare a little pity for the driver who hit him, as well: We live in a society deeply entrenched in the premise that driving is safe - that, if you slip up a little, the worst anybody is likely to suffer is a little property damage and maybe a stiff neck. This mindset is in the process of changing, but there's a sense that, behind the wheel, drivers are almost entitled not to have to worry about these things. Well, I never did when I was driving, not until I really got out there and felt the vulnerability of knowing that a momentary lapse of attention on someone else's part might kill me. They'd feel shitty about it, and I'd actually feel really sorry for them having to go through that, except I'd be dead.

My daily danger zone is my daughter's middle school. I walk with her there each morning, through our quiet residential neighborhood, walking the bike I ride to work after dropping her off. She's in seventh grade now, so at some point fairly recently, she stopped holding my hand (though when I occasionally take hers, she doesn't yet pull away).

Everything is fine until we get to the school itself, where we walk across the narrow neighborhood street where the cars pull out of the school driveway after dropping off kids. That place is a hellish free-for-all slice of mayhem.

The people waiting to turn out of the driveway rarely signal, so you have to guess if it's safe to cross in front of where they'll be pulling out if they're turning left. Meanwhile, cars are approaching from both directions in the street, sometimes to pass through, sometimes to pull up to the curb and drop off a kid, again not often signaling. Many of the cars departing the school are trying to get the hell out of Dodge via the cross street on which my daughter and I are approaching. Signaling? Whatever. It's like fucking Frogger.

The school, neighborhood, and surrounding streets largely predate cars. Traffic control at the school consists of one extremely nice and patient lady trying to keep kids (and the occasional irresponsible bike-walking parent) from getting run over. And the car horns? It sounds like Manhattan up in there. Everybody is PISSED.

I think I've seen one other family that walks their child to school there. It's sad, because our walk is about 1/2 mile across the park and up a steep hill (by Austin standards) and is a pretty nice start to the day, up until we get to the street bordering the school and it gets fugly. And it's a neighborhood school, you know, so not many of the students live more than a few blocks away.

These are things we've lost sight of, as a society. It's not anyone's fault, it just naturally happens when you get in the habit, as pretty much all of us do, of never traveling further on foot than from your front door to your car, your car to your office, your car - in the parking space you've found, after circling the parking lot for 10 minutes looking for a close-in spot, near your grocery store or shopping mall or gym. We all admit this, and it's not your fault or my fault or anybody's individual fault, but maybe we can make a little change and all our little changes together can make something better. We all crave the invincibility and anonymity that cars, or online comment forums, give us. Who wouldn't? It's safe, you can do what you want, and nobody has to know who you are.

I don't have a master plan. I just want us all to be well and happy and not get run over.

Oenomatopoeia

This may come as a bit of a shock, but it turns out wine is quite nice, and vineyards are pretty places. Who knew?

Robbie brought his friend Emily and me along yesterday on a hike down the Central Texas Wine Trail. Well, you don't actually hike it, you're supposed to drive, though frankly it would be a lot more convenient if all the vineyards were within a mile of each other so that you could simply stumble from one to the next. But then I suppose there wouldn't be enough room to grow the grapes. Really, how inconvenient.

We started out with a printed map listing the locations of about 25 vineyards within a 100-mile radius of Austin. Emily is an old hand at this - she's been on a Napa Valley wine tour, and is already familiar with many of the Central Texas wineries, and knows that she usually likes Sauvignon Blanc and doesn't care much for Sangiovese. She's fancy that way.

I drink wine out of a box.

We started with Driftwood Estates Vineyard, which is a beautiful place just south of Dripping Springs (the locals call it "Dripping" or even "Drippin'"), where Robbie and Emily favored the sweet plum red and I cottoned to the Lone Star Cabernet.

Have you ever done a wine tasting? See, I never had really. My stepfather and grandmother, sisters and I did visit a vineyard in central Alabama once, where they made wine from muscadyne grapes. The facility was spotless and beautiful, and the vineyards spread out lush and green before us. As far as I remember, they didn't charge anything for the tastings or the tour; but, seduced by the heady beauty of our surroundings, we probably bought more than a dozen bottles among us. We brought it back to my grandparents' suburban Birmingham home. It was just awful. We practically had to pinch our noses shut while we were drinking it.

These central Texas wineries have their act much more together. You belly up to a shiny blond wood bar, or sit at a high table in a pale stone room, dusty with newness. You can also relax outside on sloping lawns overlooking the vineyards in the valley below, or on a wooden deck surrounded by oak trees; and - unlike the place in Alabama - you are far from alone; wine tourism is popular, and though you're out in the middle of nowhere, the place is thronged. Visit two or more wineries on the trail, and you'll spot some of the same customers again and again.

You get about six tastings for 5 or 6 bucks - the equivalent of a glass of wine, more or less. You and your companions compare notes and discuss the nose, overtones, and aftertaste of each sample as if you were an elegant bunch who had never seen a box of Franzia in your lives. Then you order a glass and/or buy a bottle of the one that you particularly liked, relax and enjoy the atmosphere, and eventually - this is a highly leisurely pursuit - you head off to the next winery. There are dozens and dozens of them within an hour's drive. We managed to visit two.

After Driftwood we headed to Woodrose Winery outside Stonewall, close to the LBJ Ranch. Driftwood with its hilly vistas had a Tuscan feel, but Woodrose has a deck nestled in the woods behind it, with an acoustic guitarist/singer (most singers are acoustic as a general rule) providing a little ambience. Woodrose has fixed tasting menus laid out in a particular order, because "if you start with the port, nothing else is going to taste good," the woman explained to us. "Your taste buds will be fried."

This is good to know.

But don't be deceived by the inflexibility of the menu. Our waitress - probably an owner, I'm guessing - overheard Robbie expressing curiosity about one of the reds, and slipped a sample of it in for him before the port (which - this is extremely important - comes with chocolate). In fact she very good-humoredly gave all of us a couple of extra samples. My last tasting was a Merlot and she poured a sample for me twice, simply shrugging at me and smiling when I told her she'd already given me my last one. "Damn, she's nice," we agreed as she left.

My pick from Woodrose was the Wicked Red, so I ordered a glass to enjoy on the wooded deck and bought a bottle to take home, too. It's sitting on my kitchen counter. How it feels about the box of Merlot lurking six feet away is nobody's business but its own.

The Journey Continues

There are certain advantages to having a literary alter ego, but occasionally there are drawbacks as well. For example, Magda Silhavy went to the beach today and burnt her pallid Alaskan hide to a crisp, which means that this evening, I find it particularly uncomfortable to wear things that chafe against my skin, such as, oh I don't know, clothes.

The sacrifices we make for our art.

Magda - I - and my brother Dumas are once more in Corpus to scatter our late father's ashes in the balmy waters of the bay; leaving them on the baggage carousel in Seattle, we found, was not adequately respectful to the old patriarch's memory. This is a more sobering trip than the last, as we are mourning the loss of our brother Edwin to one of the very whales he loved and worked for all his life. We are once more struck by the differences between Corpus Christi and our own hometown of Barrow, Alaska.

We don't really get wine festivals back home, but attended one in Rockport yesterday. Dumas suggests that perhaps we could start a winery back in Barrow. What could we call it? We're a little stumped, but frankly, in the wake (so to speak) of the current tragedy, we've gone right off whale marketing. Never mind that we have a three-day growing season. I've seen those tiny wine bottles they sell on airplanes; if that doesn't represent a niche we were destined to fill, I'd like to know what does?

During the course of the evening, the emcee began walking around among the tents and tables, greeting guests and asking what their favorite wine of the day was, and where are they from? Naturally, Dumas and I felt that this situation was custom-tailored for us, and began casually placing ourselves in the emcee's path. We're from Barrow, Alaska! Nobody else here is from that far away!

But he evaded us, so many times in fact that we began to suspect he was doing so on purpose, especially when he singled out a guest drinking Coors Light. We left in disgust.

Another thing we don't have in Barrow is cockroaches. But back at the hotel, dozing off the wine, I saw something moving underneath the notepad on the nightstand. I lifted the notepad to see two German cockroaches, engrossed in one another, tail-to-tail. I slammed the notepad back down onto them hard.

If I'm not having a good time, I don't see why anybody else should.

Also on the nightstand is an evaluation card. Outraged, I scrawled "FUCKING COCKROACHES!" in the comments section.

It occurred to me that clarification was needed. "(Seriously, they were having sex)," I wrote underneath, and added after further thought, "(I squooshed them)."

Also unheard of in Barrow are nightclubs such as the one where friendly locals Omar and Garrick took us dancing last night; nor, as I discovered to my dismay today, is the sun nearly as strong back home.

So it's rather ironic that they don't have whale blubber sunburn balm here, where the need for it is so much greater. That will just have to wait until the next chapter, the scattering of our father's ashes, and our eventual return home.

If only Edwin were here to experience it all with us.

Chicken Marsala for the Soul

On the hike-and-bike yesterday, a cute bicyclist caught my eye and smiled as he was passing. "Hi," he said, so I smiled back, and as he passed, he added, "You look like a million bucks."

Isn't that nice? Frankly, for the last couple of weeks at least I've been feeling like maybe a buck-fifty, buck-seventy-five, tops. So this really made my day, though I was much too surprised, slow, and shy to turn around and yell "Thanks!" at his retreating form.

No wonder I never get any.

Chickens are a whole nother story, at least according to some very highly placed people in my division, who made some surprisingly inappropriate comments at dinner last night. This is perfectly all right, of course. The comments were not aimed at me, and actually this is the first time I've seen the higher-ups in my "new" job (one year next month!) behave with anything less than the utmost probity (which sounds dirty but isn't).

The conversation turned, as conversations sometimes will, to the topic of chicken resuscitation. Someone, a friend or relative of the teller, used to swat flies for his chickens, and the chickens ate them as they dropped. Perfectly normal so far, of course; we all do that. But apparently, one time, one of the target flies was too close and the guy accidentally swatted a chicken clean into next week, right? So the chicken fell over senseless. (As opposed to how chickens normally are.) Anyway, the guy freaked out and tried to revive the chicken by giving it mouth-to-mouth through its beak - "I guess that'd be mouth-to-beak," added the husband of the Big Boss, sitting next to me. "Mouth-to-pecker resuscitation."

Oh no he didn't!

The chicken survived with only a mild concussion, though the conversation never quite recovered. Still, our dinner was tasty and the service (Romeo's, by the way) was really superb. Hooray for planning an event where everything comes off perfectly!

But I had to rush, because my high-school friend Pam is in town - for the funeral of a friend, unfortunately, but it was really nice to see her. Tony was my date to the reunion, so she knows him; and we met up at his house to drink wine, reminisce, and muse about men; panties; childrearing; vibrators; unwanted body hair; going in the out door; prayer; virginity (appropriate attire for, loss of, Rohypnol and); alcoholism; turtles; penis size and sexual duration; and perhaps one or two dozen other things that wouldn't really interest anyone, so I won't go into details.

I didn't get around to telling her the chicken story, though. Maybe she'll be able to visit again sometime under happier circumstances. I think we should go hit the hike-and-bike trail.

Rendre Puissant!

There's something about work-related stress that always makes me want to speak French. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the fact that the French have 35-hour workweeks? Or that at least one major French employer's company cafeteria, I have it on very good authority, serves wine with lunch? Or does stress simply bring out an otherwise latent desire to quit shaving my underarms?

Whatever the case, it's best for everyone concerned if I don't undergo too much stress at work. For one thing, I don't speak French.

The poor panicmonger. I hate it when bad things happen to people you don't like, because then you have to feel sorry for them. But whatever else you can say about her, you have to admit, she doesn't hoard bad tidings. She's great at delegating, and we should be grateful; because, as you may know if you've ever taken a Fred Pryor seminar, delegating is the same thing as empowerment.

We're so empowered, we should all be shooting lasers out our butts.

But today was not a banner day for the panicmonger. Her boss gave her a pointless project which largely entailed duplicating a lot of research already done by another group. She was not allowed access to this research, so she had to do it all over again herself in order to answer the questions the other group had raised. Fortunately she immediately empowered all of us to handle the situation for her, and went home in a snit.

It kept me so busy, I barely made it to break. Sacrebleu!

Get Packing

What do you bring on a trip? And how long does it take you to pack?

I pride myself on traveling pretty light, for a girl anyway. One week in Syracuse with my parents means I'm bringing one small-to-medium wheeled suitcase and my backpack. My backpack has purse-y things and my iBook in it; the suitcase will have a few pairs of jeans, a couple of skirts, a few tops, the requisite unmentionables, and a toothbrush and eyeball supplies and cosmetics, my camera, my dad's birthday gift, and such.

Come to think of it, my backpack still holds a little sample baggie of flavored lubricants that was tossed to me at the Gay Pride parade a few months ago. I suppose I might not want to bring that. Then again, they ARE all still in the Ziploc baggie that they were distributed in, so it'd make it through security. Perhaps it might brighten their day a little! Only I wouldn't, because that's sort of the girl equivalent of being known to carry a bottle of Viagra, and I don't want anybody thinking I need that, because I don't, thankyouverymuch.

Once my stepfather gave my sister Margie a mortar shell he'd acquired through work at some point. It was, of course, hollow; but she had to leave it behind. You can't exactly carry a 5-foot-tall, olive drab, oblong metal bomb-shaped thing on the plane. Or at least that's what she assumed. I'm sorry to report she didn't actually try. I, being of a somewhat more practical bent, am giving my dad a book.

For tonight, it's laundry and white wine. Tomorrow I fly!