Rainbow Pizza

I seriously don't know why I didn't think of this sooner.





I tried to dye the Easter cookies and failed, but the neon food coloring was still by my trusty pre-1963 KitchenAid, and I thought, well, my pizza dough is mainly white flour so what could mess with the color?





First I told Em we could start a pizzeria and call it Play Doh Pizza, because that's what it looks like.



But I'd probably have to pay royalties to use that name.



So I thought, well, Rainbow Pizza.





The green looked coolest as raw dough, the blue looked best as a finished pizza. The 'pink' crust on the pepperoni came out more magenta than anything else.





And to make sure the variety theme was carried through, I made four pizzas: prosciutto & black olive with Alfredo sauce; Pepperoni Monomaniac Pie with Alfredo; jalapeño with Alfredo/pesto and Fish Guts (smoked oysters and tinned anchovies) with Alfredo/pesto.

Roof

My neighbor was putting on a new roof. DIYing it from the look of things.



And since they were working into the night and causing a bit of a ruckus, I found myself outside with nothing better to do than try to photograph it with a really long shutter.

Chemistry

These tinker toys were on display outside the theater we saw The Mission Continues presentation at.

Nelson / Shakespeare / Ferment / Porno

I took the girls to the Nelson, thought maybe we'd check out the Monet exhibition. Except it was a ticketed event.



We got there and right where I parked, the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival people were having a rally, a hail Mary attempt to raise enough money to have Free Will this year.



Em wanted to go chant with them not long after we got into the museum, and I told her she could as long as she didn't wander far from where they were chanting. Alas, they were already breaking up when she got back to them and it just ruined her disposition toward the trip from there on out.



We were thwarted on Monet, but the new installation, Ferment, made up for it. It's like a big, stainless steel tree. 56 feet tall, if memory serves, and so recently installed that the sod where the installation tore up the lawn was still fresh and fenced off to thwart destructive foot traffic.






There was a movie showing in the Bloch addition, and we went in to watch that. Mo was interested. Em wasn't having it, but that was disappointment about the Shakespeare thing. There was a warning at the door about an explicit sex scene near the end, but it was a small warning and it was an open exhibit.



RMB City focuses on two people's virtual interactions in the online game Second Life and eventually the interactions between the virtual characters absent their masters.



Just so you know, if you have kids you're taking to the Nelson, that warning is serious. You can't un-ring the bell, and while it doesn't amount to a realistic sex scene, it amounts to a realistic cybersex scene, and that may be worse in several ways. At least if your fourteen and fifteen year old daughters are sitting there.



Ferment was cool, though. It's tree-like, right? Well, there were birds landing on it, and I really hope some of them will build nests in it.



In retrospect, even Em had to admit it was a cool sculpture.

Heat

Corinna and I have been experimenting with various fire sauces, and the thing is, we can't figure any of them seem hotter than the others.

We're not talking Tabasco sauce here, we're talking about stuff with habaneros as a first ingredient, sometimes sauces with ghost pepper...



I realized the likely answer is that while sauce X may bring 260,000 Scoville units and sauce Y might be a more impressive 400,000 units, maybe the threshold of perception is more like 150,000 units. If all the receptors on your tongue are getting nailed and all your neurological receptors are answering the call, maybe there's a point at which more capsicum does not equal more intensity.

Lama (Scribe)

As I took this pic, Corinna told me I couldn't shoot all the graffiti in town.



My response, 'Wanna bet?'

I got really good results light-painting this one with my bike's headlight. My silhouette came from Corinna's helmet-light, I guess. 15 second exposure, ISO 80, aperture f/5.6.

My Molecule

Guess what this is?



It was my engagement present from Corinna, but that's not much of a hint as to what it is. It's a molecule, a psychoactive molecule. Probably the most important one, because [waves his hand at civilization as we know it] All This wouldn't have happened in the absence of this molecule.

We'd all still be nomads and cave dwellers but for this marvelous stuff.

How Much Irony Did You Need?

I love this bottle design, but what I love even more is that I spotted it through a window on the Country Club Plaza. At almost $3 a bottle, it was priced to start a revolution.

Bro's Birthday @ Blanc / Plaza

We ate at Blanc for my brother's birthday. I'd never been there, it's a little outside my usual bounds. I love a good burger, even get into a bit of cheffery sometimes with my homemade jobs, but I think of Five Guys as a high-dollar burger joint and it's roughly half Blanc's prices.





Blanc's decor is decidedly more upscale, as I guess is appropriate. Not sure what to make of the miniature grocery carts the sides come in. It's a restaurant full of cute imagery but none of the images seem to tie together in my mind. I don't know if there's a theme I'm too obtuse to get or if it's just a random confabulation of white, cool gray and orange with Barbie-sized shopping carts on the tables.



I did catch my nephew smiling before he spotted my camera and paged security. He's a cute little man, almost a year old and far more serious about everything than I'll ever be about anything.





After lunch, we went walking around the Plaza. I visited the North Face store to find out about sleeping bags and such. Not that I'm in the market for these things at new retail, this was more research than anything else.






On the way we ran into a couple of really neat street performers. I remember asking at City Hall back in the early 90's about what licensing you needed to do this and they told me to go jump in a lake. The rules were so strict as to make street musicians and their ilk defacto criminals.




Apparently the city lightened up since then and realized that people like street performers. A lot more than they like idiotic city laws that ban street performances, anyway.



Or maybe the law is still the same and the recession is so bad that a the desperado count is more than the cops can deal with.

Easter / Announcement

We hosted an Easter dinner, the idea being, in part, to announce our engagement to be married. An announcement we didn't quite bring off as planned.

Part of me wanted to hold off on this announcement because we don't have a date yet. The spirit is willing, but I have an enormous financial albatross around my neck and I wouldn't want to bring something like that into the union. It's one of those albatrosses that millions of other Americans found themselves with when the music stopped on the big Housing Bubble game of musical chairs.




I refinanced in the spring of 2006 in the wake of a divorce, mainly to get the house solely in my name and to get on a 30 year note to lighten the payments in my new circumstances. With timing like that, I could make it in stand up comedy.



But that's not what I started to tell you about. Me and the girl of my dreams got to host a bunch of our friends and relatives, including all my parents and my kids. Ken Braiterman was in town visiting.

Corinna put out an embarrassment of produce, fresh coconut, beets, papaya, mango, passion fruit, pineapple, hot peppers, jicama — and I don't know what-all. And a ham, mashed potatoes, that regular folk stuff.

My 'rents brought a huge salad and I made puke/pink cookies.

The cookies were conceived as a dessert, of course, but the thought was food dye to make them Eastery.




Unfortunately, all the brown sugar in the macadamia-white-chocolate-chip cookies made the neon green dye Em chose look bad. The effect was pre-digested-looking.



The pink frosting (cream cheese, butter, vanilla and confectioner's sugar) might have distracted from this bad impression or made it look worse by comparison. I don't know. They tasted good, maybe too good.

After the party, we decided to deliver most of the remaining cookies to some homeless guys we know rather than let these massive calorie-bombs sit around the house tempting us.




We also got a lot more of the fam marked on the door jamb Corinna measures people onto as a guest-book for the house. The first time I was in this kitchen, when I barely knew her, I thought this was one of the most charming things I'd ever seen: the previous owners' kids' growth accompanied by all Corinna's friends and visitors.



It all worked out, including Mo coloring like crazy in a magazine box with a bunch of (scary to trust her with sometimes) Sharpie markers.



Like I say, we kind of blew the announcement part, but we had a good food orgy

Chocolate Fairy @ The Blue Room

Corinna wasn't headlining, but she was appearing on stage, for the first time, as the Chocolate Fairy after an epic storm of grant-writing on behalf of the same.





I wasn't planning to stay the whole night, it just worked out that way. And I saw a couple of spoken word poets I'd have missed out on, poets who were really good. Really funny, really entertaining.




And Corinna placed Third, which she was really proud of even though I know she was a legitimate First and was robbed by judges who couldn't hear or see.

Wall

On the way (racing to it, really) Corinna's appearance as the Chocolate Fairy at the Blue Room I spotted this wall. I had to snap a pic, even if I only had time to stick the camera through the sun roof on the car while the light was red.

Night

I was waiting with the bikes and decided to play with my camera. I think this was the night we bought margarita making stuff at four places, inspiring me to conceive the Race to the Bottoms (I hear 'Bottoms Up' is taken), an alley cat race centered around cocktails.



For a tripod, I had a skid of wood chips. I am often frustrated by the limitations of a pocket camera, but also sometimes delighted at the better-than-expected results.

Beware of Assheads

It all started innocently enough.

I rode to Wally World to get a couple of groceries, then called Em to see how the fort was holding up. Wal-Mart is too close, it's just not far enough to ride. Nothing I had required refrigeration, and the girls seemed to be contentedly wasting their Saturday afternoon in front of computer screens like a pair of vidiots.



Saw a cool old Honda 750 by the bike rack at Wal-Mart. I think I prefer being the motor on the cycle.

I'd dealt with a Realtor, worked on bills, taxes, and generally played Grownup all day, so I took the stuff from Wal-Mart for a ride in the country. It felt like it'd taken forever to get out on the bike, and realizing I was hungry, I had a burnt end sandwich, Carolina-style at Smokin' Babes. A bit of an indulgence, but I feared if I went home to grab a bite I somehow wouldn't get back out on the road.



It was windy, but not obnoxiously so. As I got into the unincorporated area, I moved the pepper spray from its holster to my chest pocket because, well, there's a reason I carry that shit: Farm Dogs.

I've never been officially diagnosed, but I guess I have some PTSD issues from seeing a childhood friend mauled by a German shepherd when I was maybe seven years old. By PTSD issues, I mean that intellectually I know that my reactions are disproportionate to the actual likely threat.

That said, a dog doesn't have to mean you harm to hurt you on a bicycle. They might just want to herd you, play with you, jump out in front of you. And when their heckles are up head to tail and they charge you snarling, that's when pepper spray is called for.

So I got to 135th Street on Moonlight and wanted to know if it was paved all the way to Gardner Road. It is, and beyond, but while I was learning this from a woman who was out mowing her lawn, her dog came out to run me off.

His body language wasn't friendly but he wasn't completely on the attack. I dismounted and kept the bike between me and him, got the spray out and did my best to talk him down.

"Okay, pup, I don't want to spray you, it'll wreck your day, but you're scaring me pretty good."

His owner kept calling him and assuring me he was utterly harmless. His hackles were sure up, and I waited until he was in hand before I attempted to get back on the bike, thanking her for the directions.



On the way across, I felt a bug in my hair. Creepy feeling as I went down a steep hill, and I feared it might be a tic about to dig in. I pulled over on a bridge and took my helmet off. It wasn't big enough or hard enough to be a tic, I don't think, but whatever it was I killed it and hand-combed my hair and generally grossed out.

I heard a crash in the trees and looked over to see a beaver coming out of a tree. He scurried to cover before I could get my camera out and even after I stood quietly for a bit, he didn't come back out to be photographed. So I sallied forth, thinking about that farm dog and how maybe I'm getting better at handling those situations.



Sure, he was big and all that, but I had my spray, noted the wind being at my back, and could reasonably have given him a powerful new Pavlovian template for thinking about bikes in the road. But I hadn't pulled the trigger.

Then, coming up Four Corners toward town, two of them, about as big as that earlier dog, were on me before I knew it. Heckles up and snapping at me. I kicked at them, made contact with the snout of one and got slobber all over my ankle, at which point they ran around to my left to see if I was a softer target from that angle.

It took me probably 100 yards or more to get clear of them, all the while screaming and cussing, the neighbor two doors down came out to see if I was okay.

She said her horse had been nipped at by those dogs and that they ran around like strays causing mayhem all over the neighborhood. No leash laws because it's out in the country, so it's just something she seemed to think she had to live with.

I told her I wished I could have gotten to my spray faster. I had my camera around my right wrist because I'd been taking pictures from the saddle a moment before all this, and they were so close when I realized they were there, all I could do was kick them.

Which is the thing that sucks about pepper spray, I can never seem to get to it when I need it.

As proud as I was of handling the first dog, I was disappointed, hearing these dogs are a general public nuisance, that I hadn't gassed them. The neighbor said they chase cars too, and they're such a constant problem she sometimes hopes they'll get run over.

I rode on and after a few minutes a car passed me and stopped in the road ahead of me. A man with a white ponytail got out and came back toward me as I approached saying, 'My dogs have never bothered anybody...'

Hello? Denial is the first sign you have a problem.

Just in case anyone reading this is an ignorant redneck with unleashed dogs running around his property: when a cyclist or pedestrian has been charged by your animals, don't expect them to be impressed with your assertion that they're friendly animals.

He told me if I didn't like dogs I shouldn't ride in the country, and I told him, in indelicate terms, that I have a right to ride my bicycle on a public road without being hassled by his animals.

He asked me if they'd bitten me, and I said it wasn't for lack of effort. They were the most aggressive dogs I've come across so far, most dogs back the hell off when you kick them hard in the snout.

He said there were no leash laws, and I said there should be because my right to travel the street safely trumps his right to let them run free. You can't have an un-penned bull, I pointed out, even though I bet there's no law that says so in as many words. At which point he said 'Or un-penned cyclists.' He said something about how he guessed it was a free country if I wanted to ride around with pink ribbons on my head.

Part of me craved this confrontation, but as angry as I was (and I was angry enough to physically fight, something I've never actually done in my adult life), it sucked. I'm no good at confrontations, I lose my cool and say things I shouldn't. And in hindsight, this jerk was actually surprised that I was angry.

His telling me where I should ride my bike, telling me not to take the Lord's name in vain and telling me his dogs never hurt anybody only enraged me further. And while there was some truth to it when he told me I was being unreasonable, I was right: a disproportionate response by me does not relieve him of his social obligation to keep his canines on his property.

And as I pointed out to him, he came to me. If he didn't like the way the conversation was going, maybe he should stay home and give some thought to controlling his dogs.

Postscript

At church the next day, the message was about what it means to love your neighbor. About how I shouldn't marginalize the guy with the dogs, but rather should pray for him. This is a hard one for me, because in my heart, I hoped that when he got home his dogs turned on him and ate him. Or mauled him badly, anyway. I admit that isn't a very Christ-like approach, but as it was pointed out, people who claim to know that one group is going to Hell never thing it's the group they're in.

I can tell from Facebook that I have at least two friends who have farm dogs and think I should just magically find dog-free routes if I want to ride in the country, and I guess I don't really wish for my friends' dogs to eat them so much as I wish they could see that people on bikes and afoot have a right to safely navigate a public road that is just as compelling as their perceived need of canine-provided security.

If living in the country is that dangerous, maybe they need razor wire and landmines around the property, which would have the added benefit of keeping the dogs out of the street.