Summer update.

All-you-can-eat. Running son won a pair of gift certificates for Sweet Tomatoes restaurant at his 4th of July race. After meditation, he decided that he'd take his friend, a member of the Teen Boy Squad, and they'd stay all day, taking the "all you can eat" premise to its fullest possible extent. They borrowed my older son's laptop for DVD viewing, took a GameBoy, and spent the day. Findings: the actual menu at Sweet Tomatoes, broken into categories, is approximately seven items: salad, soup, bread, ice cream, pasta, and a couple of other things. You can actually stay at Sweet Tomatoes all day and no one will call you on it. "We've been here since noon," they told a member of the waitstaff, late in the day. "Is that right," she replied. You can take a nap at Sweet Tomatoes. You can watch movies (Tommy Boy and Dumb and Dumber) and no one will bother you.

[I think it's clear that I wish I were a teenage boy, at least sometimes.]

I love trivia. Last night the historian and I were with my family, celebrating my sister's birthday up at a condo timeshare in Park City. The evening concluded with some rousing game -playing, led out by my son-in-law. We played 90s Trivial Pursuit, which was pretty darn fun, girls v. boys. The girls held their own, but the boys surged ahead when the girls fumbled a question about NBA players who had done WWF wrestling (oh! the shame, when I did not remember that Karl "the Mailman" Malone wrestled under the moniker "The Mauler"! and my homegirls talked me out of venturing it as a guess!), whereas the son-in-law knew that Master P had tried out for the Toronto Raptors. Oy! Still, it's fun just to play the game, and I would like to call on all SLC bloggers to have a Trivial Pursuit tournament sometime before the summer is over.

Poor Betty. Betty, despite being nine years old by the vet's estimate, and despite the vets having located what they said was a spay scar on her abdoment, is in heat. What? Are you f***ing kidding me? we said. Anyone who's ever had an unspayed female dog (disclosure: not me) knows, then, the messy ramifications of this event. Oh, the indignity, though it should be said that it has not affected her overall sweet temperament. And she has to be spayed, at her advanced age, once this is all over. Jeez. Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

Job change. College daughter has resigned from her position as Membership Champion at Sam's Club and is now a Sandwich Artist again. Even though this means she will come home smelling of meat and vinegar for the remainder of the summer, I feel we should raise a glass to honest labor. Hear, hear!

Implements and apparati.

As a result of my new swimming mania, I have reacquainted myself with goggles, which have the virtue of allowing you to swim with your eyes open, which has the practical effect of allowing you to swim in a straight line and not bump into people who are swimming in the lanes to the right and the left of you. This assumes that you put your face in the water, which allows you to swim faster, generally speaking (though I'm currently coming to terms with what "faster" means at this point in my life, as opposed to fifteen years or so ago).

As I was reminded this morning, getting the suction just right is a bit tricky. Too much suction and when you get out of the pool, your eyes look like someone has applied a cruel form of torture to them. Too little, and you have water leaking in to each lens, which is somehow a little worse than just swimming without goggles--it's like each eye has its own little pool of water, with independent sloshing action. It can interfere with the whole project, which is after all, to move through the water--i.e., to swim. I will say nothing of the swimming cap project, which in general is a pain in the ass, but which I'm still trying to work with because I'm still holding on to the vain hope that swimming in chlorinated water won't wreck my hair.

In a related development, when I was picking up a printer on sale at Target for college daughter, who will be returning to Logan before very long, I bought a pair of headphones on a whim. I don't have an iPod, but I do have loads of tunes on iTunes that I have heretofore been listening to through the crappy "speakers" on my laptop or through an almost equally crappy pair of plug-in speakers (also bought at Target, but I was definitely in a cheaper mood when I bought them). These were $20, but as a result of this rather modest purchase, today I am having a throwback experience to my youth. I remember listening to tapes I had made on my dad's old reel-to-reel tape recorder--Cat Stevens and Emerson Lake and Palmer, if you must know--laying on my back in front of the gigantic stereo cabinet, looking at the backs of the LP covers, my head ensconced in huge headphones. It was pretty much a religious experience
--engulfing, making one feel set apart in a self-contained aural environment. Today I'm listening to the oeuvre of Ben Folds, which sounds pretty damn great on headphones.

I have to get yet another headset for a technology project--putting sound files with PowerPoint presentations for my online class(es)--and I really didn't need these headphones which are purely for pleasure, but they seem like a genius purchase at the moment.

Happy Pioneer Day, wherever you are.

First of all, this is a holiday not celebrated the world around, not even by Mormons. For instance, my daughter, born and raised in Utah, now living in Scotland, informs me that the Scottish--yet Mormon--children had never heard of such a thing as a pioneer. For my daughter, who's in charge of the organization that educates the children in her congregation, this necessitated activities such as a simulated wagon train and the picking up of simulated buffalo chips. She tells me that this was one of her most successful activities yet with the Mormon--yet Scottish--children. Of course--it included talking about poop, if simulated.

Here in Mormon Central, I marked the day by going to church yesterday and hearing a woman talk about the Martin Handcart Co. (of which some of my predecessors were a part). I also took these pictures of the sky after visiting my aged grandmother.

Microjammery.

I have been small-batch jam-making now for a couple of weeks. Basically, this means buying some of whatever fruit's in season and preserving it in the form of freezer jam or freezer preserves. So far, I have made strawberry jam, raspberry jam, cherry preserves, and blueberry preserves.

Last week, we were lucky enough to get a paper sack full of apricots. We ate some of them, and as they ripened in their sack, we put them in the refrigerator so they'd keep a little longer. I thought about making a tart--my cosmic calling to tart-making being something I have only recently responded to--but I am making dinner for a bunch of family this afternoon, and have tried to keep the baking to a minimum (so far: flourless chocolate cake and a bunch of different quick-roasted vegetables. There will be grilling, but that will be outside.). So, instead I made apricot jam, and now I have about a pint of apricot jam. It is damn good. All told, it took me maybe a half an hour, which seems worth it to me.

You take half a paper sack full of organic apricots, pit them and slice them into a pan (which I did in my hand with a paring knife, since there weren't all that many apricots). Then you use your Microplane grater (<< indispensable kitchen tool!) to zest two lemons and an orange, preferable organic. After that, you juice the lemons and the orange over the fruit and zest, then add as much sugar (preferably raw, preferably organic) as you think you need (I used maybe three quarters of a cup).

Then you cook it until it's jammy. Pour into small containers--I used those little ziploc containers that hold between a half a cup and a cup. You can refrigerate this if you think you'll use it soon-ish, or you can freeze it and use it later. Before you do either, though, take a spoonful, let it cool a little, and eat it, because it is tasty.

Awesome b-ball movie.

Last night we saw Heart of the Game, a documentary about a girls' high school basketball team in Seattle. We came in a little late, but the gist of it is this guy, who teaches tax law at some institution of higher education, coaches the Roosevelt High School Rough Riders, always to the playoffs and to the brink of championship. Their emerging rivals, the [X-named High School] Bulldogs, after years of ignominy, retain the services of awesome basketball player and alumna Joyce Walker, and become powerhouses in their own right.

Apparently, the filmmaker (Ward Serrill) worked on this film over several years, and it shows, because he's got more than one story to tell--will the Lady Rough Riders win a state championship? Will Darnellia Russell be the first person in her family to go to college--on a scholarship? etcetera. But it doesn't matter what narrative brilliance this film may or may not have. It is stirring and stimulating and interesting. Excellent basketball action, too, in my opinion. I encourage one and all to see this little movie right away.

Just for the record, the best films we've seen this summer have all been documentaries--Wordplay, An Inconvenient Truth, and now this. The best fictional film I've seen was A Scanner Darkly. Not too talky, intelligent, absorbing. I haven't seen any of the blockbusters--not Superman, not X-Men, no other -men--and that's just fine by me.

Too f***ing hot.

This aggressive heat will not stand, man.

Aesthetic education.

I. There's nothing wrong with plot ("Comment," Middlebrow). Listen, you don't have to tell me. I love plot. One of my favorite writers, Elmore Leonard, is a genius plotter, I feel. I get tickled purt near to death by certain felicitous plot moves. I was watching The Philadelphia Story on Saturday night on tv, and thinking to myself, after K. Hepburn and C. Grant have a nice rapprochement, how sad to have Cary Grant in this movie and not have him get the girl. Because the plot seems to be hurtling toward K. Hepburn and J. Stewart (who is, of course, equally adorable to C. Grant). But no! Without any creaking of gears, the movie pulls a deft U-turn, and Kand C end up together after all. When Pulp Fiction pulls its "and now we're going back in time" move, I practically stood up on my chair in the theater (this would be only the first time I saw it) and shouted, "Wait a minute!" But in a good way.

I love plot. I don't like it when the plot of anything either (a) is ham-handed, which is to say, not deft, or (b) says to the reader/viewer, "Ha! You're so stupid that you missed this fantastic twist." I guess the (b) experience happens mainly in movies for me, like The Jagged Edge or that one Kevin Costner movie where he turns out to be a Russian spy after all. Movies like that make me want to jump up and kill someone, preferably the movie-maker.

2. Bad movie, good movie. Running/cinephile son watched Clerks the other night, a movie that, mom-like, I happen to find vulgar and over-rated. Of course, mom-like, I also haven't seen the whole thing, so probably should make allowances for that in my judgement. I also, more to the point, find this movie to be so static and boring, visually, that I can't believe they let Kevin Smith make another movie, whoever they is. Which would have been a shame, because I do like Dogma (under-rated). I shared all of these opinions, delivered with passionate gestures, to try to persuade my son to watch something else (Philadelphia Story? what about it, Teen Boy Squad?). No dice. So I said, "Fine, but promise me you'll look for how crappy the staging is, how they just point the camera at two people talking, blah blah blah, scene; then point the camera at two people talking again, blah blah blah some more."

Day two, I asked him what he thought of it. "Pretty funny," he said. Which I'm sure is true. I just didn't get past what seemed disgustingingly vulgar to the funny parts, probably. Well, what about the staging--every bit as crappy as I said? I asked. "Yeah, but wasn't this his first movie?" he noted, ever compassionate, ever reasonable. I pointed out to him that plenty of people never get to make even one movie. What about Quentin Tarantino? I asked him. There's someone who has a visual imagination, and his first movie has all the great talk of Kevin Smith, plus better imagined scenes, cuts, camera angles, etc. All conceded. You can imagine how enthusiastic Cinephile Son was as he edged toward the stairs to escape this tutorial. "But it was pretty funny," he said, having the last word.

Bad books and the people who read them.

Last week, I checked out a short stack of novels from the library, each of which was satisfying in its own way. One of them, a detective novel that aims to be the first in a series, was so pleasant that everytime I opened it to read, I fell into a soothing slumber after about 3 pages. That means either that I'm in need of many naps or the book was a little too tepid. But never mind that. What I really am concerned about is another book I checked out, one I heard endorsed on NPR, a legal thriller, which shall remain nameless. I even bought this book for college daughter for Christmas! That's because she generally likes this sort of thing.

I was bemused, then, to find out how not good the writing in this novel was. Okay, it was bad. A computer program could have written this book, almost, so hackneyed was its structure, characters, plotting. This is not to mention the actual words!

Yet I kept reading. There was a certain amount of pleasure in proceeding through the hackneyed plot to see just how far the hack would go, as it were. (Pretty far, as it turns out.) The lawyer, whose name begins with the initial "A." (as in "F.R. Leavis"), and who always says the "A." stands for nothing? Oh no, the "A." stands for "Atticus," as in--you guessed it--Atticus Finch. It's set in Dallas, and that was probably the best part of the book--getting a picture of what this guy, who is an attorney (and novelist!) in Dallas, observes about his crass, Big D town.

Maybe novels like this serve the same purpose that, say, episodes of Frasier in syndication serve. I've seen almost all of them, and thus am deeply familiar with all the moves--but the moves still give me pleasure, and there's even a special kind of pleasure that you derive from knowing something's coming--the pleasure of the completely predictable.

Some people who know me well (Mom? Hi!) have implied that my standards are low. Well, this may be true, and in fact, as of this moment, I'll take the opportunity to stand by my low--or shall we say broad--standards. I will not recommend this book to you, and I feel a tad sheepish that, on Alan Cheuse's recommendation, I gave it to my daughter sight unread. (I've never read Grisham, but I bet his better novels read like Tolstoy compared to this one.) I find I have derived something from even the consumption of this book-product: some sense of how book-products with practically no redeeming aesthetic value can reach the hands of readers like me, and probably even some discriminating readers: fall into the category of "popcorn reading" and get your product placement on NPR.

Summer news.

College daughter decides to get a tattoo.















Some of Teen Boy Squad get jobs and wear snappy work outfits to go to the jobs.















We decide to let our front lawn turn into a meadow. You can't really tell from the picture, but there are tall-ish grasses and creeping thyme and perennial geranium and a little bit of another herb I can't remember the name of at the moment--sweet woodruff!--all growing in through the lawn. I figure one more season oughta do it. In the meantime, we haven't mowed in I don't know when and the bees are having a heyday in the thyme, which is covered with tiny purple flowers.















Bruiser takes a moment of repose to catch up on the Sunday New York Times.

Swimming.

Today, I fulfilled one of the items in my summer master plan: I swam laps outdoors at the West Jordan pool. And here's how good it was: I want to do it more, even though it was clear from the first length I swam how shockingly out of shape I am.

Swimming is awesome as exercise because:

• it's in water
• it's a whole body exercise
• it loves your joints
• even though you're usually swimming next to other people, you don't have to talk to them because your face is in the water
• it makes you feel buoyant

I used to swim a mile a day. I think it would be great to do that again. Here's my next plan: to buy a ten-pass to the Olympic Ice Oval and go skating!

It's all happening at the zoo.

There may be too many animals at the megastore, especially if you include teenagers.

That's partly because it's summer, and there are comings and goings at all hours. Running son works about 30 hours a week at a local movie theater (job: sweeper and ticket taker), one of the perks of which is that he can see blockbuster movies before they open, but only at midnight. This means that he sometimes will come and go a half dozen times (I might be exaggerating, but only a little) in an evening, with the last arrival being at 2:30 a.m., if you've just seen the overlong Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Blather (not that I've seen it--I'm just guessing). Add to this scenario college daughter, who sometimes has to stay up till God knows when talking to friends, and excitable dogs, who want to be in with the in crowd, so have to get worked up when someone pulls up to the house.

I am not early to bed, early to rise, but I think quiet past, say, 12:30 a.m. isn't too much to ask of a household. I have not been fully persuasive on this point, however, to either the teenagers or the dogs. I occasionally have to work up a big fit of MadMom (TM) to get my point across, but the point never seems to hold past a few days.

Add to the above the fact that Betty is an old dog. She is on the whole very well-behaved--mild-tempered, sweet, a bit prone to huffing and puffing in a rather warm way a bit too close to your face, and definitely a big shedder, but she's a doll. At the dog park, she's a big hit. "There's Betty," all sorts of people say, and stop to pet her, which she loves in any amount from any human. However: she can forget, apparently, how to hoist her middle-aged self up the stairs to pee outside. When this happens, none of us is quite sure. I formed a hypothesis that it may most likely happen during the night. Bruiser will come up and basically knock on the door and say, in a polite voice, "I need to be let out so that I can urinate on the lawn," and then remind you, if you're disinclined to wake and hear him, with a small, civilized whine or nose-nudge. Betty, on the other hand, will sometimes come upstairs, but you have to be a light sleeper and hear the clicking of her toenails in order to wake up and let her out. And she won't persist, which may then (I hypothesize) lead to the peeing issue.

Anyway, the upshot of my hypothesis was that we (a) let Betty sleep upstairs in our room, on the floor, and (b) left the door open. This meant that all night, I kept waking up at the smallest Betty-sounds, which meant in turn that I had a lousy night's sleep.

Add to that the fact that the cat, Tiger, has recently reasserted her primordial identity as a mighty, mighty hunter. We have found small spots of blood out on the porch where she sometimes sleeps; a day or two ago, I found feathers. Last night, however, at 2 a.m.-ish, she woke me (not that it took much, since I was already jittery from the Betty situation) with a low-pitched meow that sounded like a person talking in a whiny voice. I got up to find her meowing around a small mouse she had in her mouth. Tricky! Talking with a mouse in your mouth!

I awoke the historian, who made the cat let the mouse go--oh yes, still alive--and then shut her back on the porch. It took a few minutes after that to fall asleep again, what with wondering where the mouse came from--the field? under the sink?--as well as contemplating all the other critters that cohabit with us, such as spiders, which may run across my face all night long, who knows?

That is all.

Revolt.

After a certain amount of reflection, I have a short list of items I would like to overthrow:

• the song "I'm Proud to Be an American."
• parades, with the possible exception of small, small-town parades. But only a possible exception.
• Big fireworks extravaganzas that cost money to go see, or where you have to drive and park.
• Pretty much the whole 4th of July.

Our day started with a 5k at Murray Park, where runner son came in 14th overall, and 3rd in his age group (a guy passed him just at the finish--burn!). However, the race organizers held all of us hostage by holding a drawing for a huge pile of stuff before they awarded the medals. Oy! The fact that there were some electronics in the huge pile was the holding hostage part--also, if you placed, you might want your medal.

In a parallel event, college daughter went to help her dad, who is running for the State Legislature. They had a booth at the West Jordan 4th of July festivities, and also a float. The kids' friends also came to help, which I think is pretty great of them. "Helping" included sweating in the booth and hurling candy at the crowd from the float. College daughter told me that the booth looked like something had swallowed her dad's name and vomited it back up in red, white and blue. Sounds persuasive!

After we were released, finally, from the race/drawing/awards/tail end of the Murray City Parade, which included some float bellowing "I'm Proud to Be An American," we drove home, runner son got a shower, then off to work he went. I fell into a sleep-deprivation nap that lasted three hours. After that, I went off to participate in that all-American activity, the 4th of July summer clearance sale. Then we went to dinner and college daughter and I went to a movie.

There was a time when I would have baked a cherry pie or something. There might have been a barbeque, and we might have sat out on the lawn watching the neighbors lighting up their fireworks in the street. All good, certainly. Maybe next year. This year, I'm feeling just a tad less celebratory. But there was this to celebrate, after the race:

Power ballad.

I was driving my college daughter to work (she is a Membership Champion at Sam's Club--there are so many things to say about that little phrase, "Membership Champion at Sam's Club," that I think we should just think them and spare ourselves the effort) the other day, when "Incomplete," the Backstreet Boys' single from their relatively recent recording. (I think this recording is a year old at least, because I remember having a conversation with college daughter last summer about this self-same single.)

Anyway: here is a short list of stuff I hate in popular music: (1) strings backing up an (2) overheated melody with (3) cheesy love lyrics. "Incomplete" has all of these things going for it. Yet I found myself strangely compelled by the song this time around. Why? Why? I instantly identified it: the Power Ballad Syndrome.

There are certain song that just get you with an irresistible force. The soaring strings, the singer, usually a tenor singing in girl-range, bellowing without irony some utter crap about love--it creates a vortex that you get sucked into, and then before you know it, you're singing along in the car, you're figuring out the chord changes so you can play it on the piano if you're lucky enough to be alone with the piano when no one's home to laugh at you . . . It's awful and wonderful, the power ballad.

My personal favorite power ballads are "(When the) Lights (Go Out In the City)" and "Open Arms," both by Journey, and "What it Takes" by Aerosmith. I was also once in a band (which was also awful and wonderful--horrible name for the band, which I will never, even under pain of death, disclose, awful use of MIDI technology to enhance band sound, pretty much an awful set list; wonderful to sing Joan Jett and Patsy Cline, wonderful, truly, to get paid for singing). The set list included the power ballad "Everything I Do," the bad, bad song by Bryan Adams that turns out to be tons of fun, seriously, to sing. Bellowing with out irony some utter crap about love . . . is . . . awesome!

Note: theorris asks philosophically, " Who polices the blog police when the blog police don't blog?" Thank you for noticing, theorris. I hope this post answers the question, if obliquely.

Dog days.

Here is how Betty likes to spend part of her day.















Bruiser soaks up tile-floor-coolness.

Healthy Eating Report: My son told me today that he had a dream that he was eating healthy. "I had a dream that I was eating healthy," he told me, which included having a bag of carrots and a bag of red grapes with him. "I was eating grapes," he told me.

"Do you like grapes?" I asked. I have to ask, because the crappy eating habits of my two remaining at-home kids so floors me that I have finally given in to the shopping list that reads as follows:

1. Doritos
2. Pop Tarts
3. Chocolate crunchy cereal (whatever the brand name is)
4. Non-organic milk (which my son insists is the milk of his forefathers)
5. pizza pouches (pouches! I ask you!)
6. soda
7. Gatorade
8. crap candy

"I have a dream," I told him, and though I'm sure he got it, he refused to give me the satisfaction of a courtesy smile, even.

"Yeah, I like grapes. The red ones, seedless. Not the green ones. Those look too healthy."

"The red ones are better for you, anyway," I said, which I think is true.

"Good. Now don't tell me that ever again," he said.

Score one for healthy eating, stealth-style.

The U.S. Wins the World Cup!

. . . on my son's GameBoy FIFA 2006! They totally skunked Italy.

In other news, we planted strawberries and sundry herbs, mulched the whole garden box apparatus, bought and implemented a new soaker hose (also Stadium Arcadium, in the miscellaneous purchase category), and saw no new movies. Does it strike anyone that this summer's theaters are even more of a wasteland than usual?

I'm also recovering from my first Writers @ Work service. It was fun, it was real fun, and now it's over, and I'm glad. The best thing was that nearly every registrant I spoke with had a good time at the conference. The next best thing was hanging out and getting to know people better. I had a useful manuscript conference with Janet Holmes of Ahsahta Press, and that was good. There were parties and receptions and readings--I attended more readings last week than I had in the last two years, easy. And now, the best thing is that it's over for the year, and the rest of the summer stretches forth before me without too many specific demands, other than to keep the cupboards stocked with NoodleRoni and PopTarts (for the kids!).

My cruise: the photo essay.

At the Long Beach Aquarium.















This idea somehow never gets old.















The historian classes up the boat.















He comes dancing upon the water,/ Cortez, Cortez/ What a killer
(Neil Young). Okay, fine. You come up with a better caption.















This is the Monarch of the Seas (!) as we leave it in the tender boat.
















This is a view of Avalon.















Free your mind.















World Cup, baby, en Mexico.















Homage to Christo (at the Long Beach Museum of Art).















(pathetic) Homage to either Hockney or Mondrian, take your pick (LBMA).

Back on dry land.

To begin with, I wish I could report to you that, post-cruise, my nerve endings are all smoothed out, that I am stress-free and ready for re-entry. I wish I could say that the cruise transformed my life. I wish I could, but I can't, and so here, as promised, is my report, but sans pictures, because I have evidently left my usb cable elsewhere. But I digress.

The cruise was pretty great, I must say. From the moment we got onboard, after a bit of nerve-wracking buzzing around Long Beach with my folks, it was plenty of fun. For one, when we took off for the first time, I had fallen asleep in my room (hereafter to be known as "stateroom"). The movement of the ship on the water was what woke me up. It was, somehow, rather thrilling. I hastened up to the deck to see and watch. There's something about being surrounded by water, and a vast body of water at that, and watching the coast recede, that feels almost instantly redemptive.

The fam had dinner together every night at the same table in a dining room. The same team of folks attended us, and this felt effervescent and charming. Our head waiter was from India, the dining room manager was Polish, our drinks waiter was also Indian--every night, the same people, and by the end of it, you felt kind of bad to be leaving them behind. Also, when we returned to our staterooms, the beds were turned back, and the stateroom attendant, Basil, had made various types of animals out of folded and twisted bathtowels. There was a bunny, a bat, a stingray, an elephant . . . we had a whole menagerie, between our five staterooms. Also, a lovely bedtime chocolate mint on the pillow, or forming the eyes of the stingray, depending.

What I did do: buy presents for various folks in Avalon (Catalina) and Ensenada; take naps; get a little sun-burned, despite dutiful application of heavy-duty sunscreen; see whales spouting off the coast of Baja; karaoke, including a stellar duet with my brother on "Get Back" ("her high-heeled shoes and her low-neck sweater"), a killer rendition of "Hotel California" with my younger sis, and, irresistibly, a trio with both sisters of "We Belong"; read a novel and some magazines; most of one crossword puzzle; sleep perfectly every night.

What I did not do: read as much as I thought I would; much lolling around at the pool; make use of the fitness facilities, despite having packed workout clothing; sit for hours watching the ocean.

I would do it again, in a heartbeat--especially if someone else was paying! The only thing I would change is to spend more time actually out at sea.

When we got off the ship, the historian and I had hours and hours to kill before getting on a plane back to SLC. So we decided to rent a car and check out Long Beach. We had just made a book-killing at Sam Weller's before we left, so we opted not to visit Acres of Books, which was perhaps a mistake. We did, however, have a lovely time at the Long Beach Museum of Art, a small museum with a lovely exhibit of Ruth Duckworth's sculpture. I had been only peripherally aware of this wonderful artist, so the exhibit was just great. On the second floor of the museum, they showed other works, including many ceramics, which created a nice conversation with the ceramic work downstairs.

On the way back to the airport, I was on the lookout for a place to have some iced tea. We ran into the Vintage Tea Leaf tea room, which was hilarious and also happened to offer a very nice pitcher of Lady B's Southern Comfort iced tea and some lovely scones, accompanied by clotted cream and lemon curd. The hilarity derived from the massive charm overkill--it's aiming for a Victorian-style tea room, and I suppose it might come close. Anyway, it was funny and very refreshing.

After that, we went to the Long Beach airport, which I highly recommend to anyone who has to go to the LA area. It's basically the size of a couple of postage stamps, and is very lowkey and friendly. Most airports make you feel like you want to kill yourself or somebody else, but this one makes you love all mankind. "Thank you for checking in early," said the guy at the Delta counter. No, thank you!

Sadly, now that I am back in regular life, I am just as snarky and irritable as I have ever been. Why? why is it that after a vacation, real life feels so much more unbearable? Sigh. I need to have a consult with the Tea Mistress (I am not making that up) of the Vintage Tea Leaf tea room (only $100). Or maybe just a pitcher of that Lady B's Southern Comfort. Or maybe just some Southern Comfort. Now we're talking.

No way.

Here are two bits of information that I think will be of interest to various readers:

(1) In today's NYTimes, in a brief profile of William H. Macy, David Mamet reveals that he loved Crash, which was reviled by most if not all bloggers in this neighborhood, as it were. "I loved 'Crash,' " Mr. Mamet said of the Academy Award winner for best film during a recent phone interview from his office in Los Angeles. "I just adored it. A very important movie. The dark secret of America has always been and always will be race. It's a secret hard to be rational about because it's so much a part of our lives."

(2) Scritti Politti has a new album. "If you're a British new-wave pioneer who turns 51 next week, if you were once known for your obsession with Marxist and post-Marxist theory, if your career includes big hits (none bigger than "Perfect Way") and long silences — well, if all this were true, then you would be Green Gartside, the man behind Scritti Politti. It's hard to imagine how he could have made a better album than "White Bread Black Beer" (Rough Trade/Nonesuch), his beautiful and puzzling new CD, out now in Britain and next month in America."

Just passing the news along.

Okay, then! For the next week, I will be on the ocean or on the shore, living the high life. I'll come back with pictures and a full report.

Ut pictura poesis.

This is either (a) a picture of a Jim Carrey movie being shown on a faraway screen, or (b) a window into the hell that is trans-atlantic travel.



This is a library. (The Reading Room at the British Museum, where Karl Marx retreated to study and write when all the revolutions failed.)



These are some of the Elgin marbles, either stolen or preserved, depending on who you ask, by Lord Elgin in the 19th century. These blow my mind.



My yellow shoes visit the U.K.



A soft drink with ice. (a rarity in Great Britain)



The Historian ("Papa"), my daughter Amelia, and Miriam at Urquhardt Castle



Once a rose window--the Cathedral at Elgin.



At Aberdeen University, which has been a university since the 16th c. Located in Auld Toon Aberdeen.



A field of rapeseed--growing everywhere, these fields blanketed in yellow.



At a historic farm near Newcastle, a warning about the historic pigs.



This is the ploughing champion of Great Britain, now retired. (my son-in-law's stepdad)



This is what Miriam thought of Lordi, the Finnish winners of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Destination: umbrella drinks.

I have never been particularly enamored of the idea of cruises, except in the mid-century notion of actual ocean travel, as in getting on a ship in order to go somewhere. Crossing the Atlantic, for instance. Sometimes, fidgety and sleepless in the middle of a trans-Atlantic flight, I have thought that taking however long it might take--a week? ten days?--to sail there would be infinitely more civilized than trying vainly to stretch my legs, fall asleep, etc., all the while worrying that I'm going to have a stroke from deep vein thrombosis or whatever.

But as it turns out, the historian and I, along with my parents and my sibs and their spouses, will be sailing from Los Angeles Harbor shortly, to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. This week, we got our travel documents, which were like a study in a foreign culture. You can, for instance, reserve a tuxedo for formal dining nights, something we hadn't considered. I'm pretty sure that the historian was, up to this point, thinking that his wardrobe would consist of four tee shirts, a pair of red shorts, a back-up pair of red shorts, and a pair of jeans. Maybe a pair of khakis. Maybe. Now, he has to think about a suit, in lieu of a tuxedo, unless he decides to go for the cruised-up tuxedo option.

I myself have been planning my wardrobe for weeks, but that's nothing new. However, I am contemplating the meaning of the term "resort wear," which my travel documents have assured me I'd be comfortable wearing while aboard ship. This reminds me that all the fashion magazines I have read in my life have a resort wear issue, usually in January, when a certain class of people apparently take trips to warm locations. I may have been to resorts in my life, but I don't think I have any resort wear. This is just another invitation for anxious over-packing on my part. As if I weren't going to overpack anyway.

Anyway, I find myself looking forward to this little adventure immensely. First of all, we will sleep for four nights on a ship! This sounds exciting and sexy to me. Second of all, there will be exotic ports of call, such as San Diego (okay, maybe not so exotic), but also Avalon (on Catalina, where I've never been despite many years in SoCal) and Ensenada. Third of all, I will get to spend time with my sisters and brothers and spouses, which I consider a lot of fun. Fourth of all, I plan to bring a pile of books to read. Fifth of all, I have reportorial urges to fulfill. What will the food be like? Will it be just like the Love Boat? Will we ever be out of shore-viewing distance? Finally, I live in hope that there may be karaoke somewhere on board. Mightn't there be? I will report my findings after the voyage.