Seattle Heatwave Sees Temps Above 65!

Today, which is really still Sunday, despite the timestamp, is the end of our 'heat wave' in Seattle. There were 'heat advisories' in effect for a couple days, to help people cope emotionally with the fact that they were perspiring in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle may not have good weather, but it has fairly consistent weather. It is usually mild, and it is usually grey. After two years of living here, the new resident develops a 20-to-30-degrees-F comfort range, temperatures on either side of which routinely cause physical symptoms and spiritual crises. Here, the ideal is around 60 degrees, but most citizens can bear without great difficulty temperatures dipping to as low as 50 or soaring into the slightly-above-70 range. Below 45 is Positively Arctic; anything above 72 is Paralyzingly Torporific.

When it snows here, the Boy Scouts can't meet, the seniors can't get transportation to cribbage, the Lutherans can't have pancake breakfasts, no one goes to the Nordstrom Blowout Shoe Sale, everybody's Christmas bazaar gets put off till May, and people abandon their cars by the side of the road. Those who don't give up drive one mile an hour up steep inclines and then slide back down backwards, taking out all the other intrepid SUV-driving explorers with them.

But they very, very rarely have 'snow days' in Valdez, and people living in Phoenix or Fresno somehow manage to eat tomatoes, get haircuts, and read books even if the temperatures are routinely above a punishing 75 degrees. Here, we complain when the weather is monotonous, and then we complain more loudly when it deviates. What an odd little town. I will admit that I, too, perspired yesterday and was perplexed for a second, but I was reading in bed under two down comforters at the time, so my confusion was quickly put to right.

Blowin' in the Wind

I was finally brave enough to tackle the wine cabinet redo, and I don't know what to think. I do know I did as best I could. As you can see in the 'after' pictures, the cabinet is covered in nice marquetry veneers. I say 'nice' because it looks nice and took some time to do, but also because the piece is old so the depth of the veneer exceeds that of paper.

However.

I have a deep-seated and possibly pathological desire to be polite, commingled with a distaste for shopping. These two tendencies taken together (and so far, I haven't been able to take them apart) mean that I sometimes encounter great difficulties when trying to buy things. I don't go into stores to browse: I go in stores to get the one, or three, or six things I know in advance I want or need to get from the store. If it turns out they do not have the items, I leave. I am not, in other words, tempted to buy a bathtub because there are no more pruning shears, nor a new lampshade because the store ran out of my brand of stockings. I recently went to a lot of antique stores looking for a particular type of settee, and one with upholstery I would not have to change immediately, as well. The settee still eludes me, but I did not turn to dining sets or hall stands to anesthetize my feelings of setteelessness.

Still, though.

The situation is different when in response to an advertisement for an item I go to someone's house. I cannot contemplate the horror of a day spent going to several strangers' houses to look at various single items. If you place an ad and I call you, it means that I want to come your house, buy the item, and take it away, assuming the photos and description are more or less accurate. However, once I am there those conditions shift. I realize I am in your house and in that house I am passing judgment on an item you own. Yes, I am not a guest; yes, this is, despite the surroundings, a business transaction -- but I don't want to be mean. Rude. And I don't want to have got your hopes up for nothing.

Moreover.

By this point, as well, I have driven, at great risk to myself and other travelers, to wherever it is that you have your house and your possibly-unattractive-in-person piece of furniture. Perhaps, as was the case with the wine cabinet, I did so in the dark and was in the process nearly driven into a cow pasture at the urging of a less-than-inerrant GPS. At some point -- and almost four-wheeling in a farmyard is as solid a point as any other -- it is simply the case that I am 'all in': I am going to buy that hideous piece of Bombay Company MDF loathsomeness photographed through Vaseline and described as 'gorgeous settee 1880s Victorian Eastlake must see xlnt cond' no matter how much it hurts to do so, for to do otherwise would make me look like a fool for having driven so far for nothing. At least to myself it would make me look like a fool. And since, as you all know, I'm a) the only one who has to live with me and b) not one to suffer fools gladly, I can't afford that sort of rancor between me.

But still also I don't want to hurt your feelings.

So, prior to looking at the wine cabinet in person, I asked what were those 'designs' on the front in the two faraway photos, and what were they made of. The very nice lady said she thought one was a flower, and the other, well, she couldn't quite tell. She was happy enough to send me photos of them, but they were huge and I was as ignorant as her as to how to scale them down for viewing from within this solar system, at least on a then-dying computer with about three programs left on it. Fair enough, I thought, the rest of it looks quite sexy, and I've never been out to that village (but I bet they have livestock nearby!).

In short, the cabinet was unusable in its state at the time. The Seventies were a challenging period, I realize: so much change, tumult, and uncertainty, as though all the moorings were coming loose everywhere, equally, fully. Fashion, popular music, design, and graphic art reflected the confusion. By the middle of the decade, 'hippie look' design was mainstream in clothing as well as home decor. Housewives sewed granny dresses and quilted skirts, découpaged and scalloped-edged everything in sight, and stuck cork embellishments on anything not actively running away from them.

Such was my cabinet's fate.

This unlucky chump had been the victim of the Seventies hat trick of cork, scalloped edges, and the ubiquitous mushroom-as-decorative-motif. The mushroom, moreover, and the 'flower,' which turned out to be a leaf, appeared to be products of a Ladies' Intro to Metalwork class. Plucking the metallic flora merely solved the glare problem; there was still the issue of the incongruous texture, shape, depth and appearance of the cork appliqués, which were painted in shades ranging from black, brown, and 'natural' to metallic gold.

I first thought of taking the hacksaw to it, and getting the depth of the appliqués to a sliver, over which I would simply paste something more in line with the original lines and look of the piece. They would still protrude a bit, but not two inches and, more importantly, not hideously. Then, positioning the tool first one way and then another, I realized there was no way that attack would be possible as the plane of the front is interrupted by molding at the top and base. I could have someone else do it, of course, someone who knew about these things, someone with expertise, but that would be cheating.

Now, I don't receive much child support from my exhusband, so it is a good thing he came in handy on a Christmas visit when he stuck his penknife a bit under one of the cork bits and emboldened me terrifically by his revelation that the adhesive was loose and elastic, as well as by his prediction that removing the grisly duo would be simple and quick. Still, he is an exhusband, and it took me a few more weeks before I grew the confidence to begin to test what I still considered to be no more than a hypothesis about the state of my glue.

My glue, it turned out, was quite healthy.

Accordingly, I slathered both doors with copious amounts of oil in hopes of loosening it and the cork ovals without damaging the veneer unduly. The scheme largely succeeded, and no veneer ripped off, but once the cork was removed it turned out that the final embellishment to the ovals, the dark brown paint around the outermost edge, was applied after they had already been glued on. Additionally, although I hadn't damaged the veneer, there were in fact gouges in it which appeared to have been what precipitated the 1970s modifications. I sanded enough to even out most of the surface, but there would have been no way to get below the absorbed paint and the deeper gouges.


So, I decided on two-tone gold leaf under stain in a geometric pattern that echoed the existing geometric pattern. Yes, it is not original, but not much about this cabinet was by the point of making that decision. I know it is not more authentic, and I am not sure it is much better, but I am absolutely certain it is not as bad.

We'll Frolic and Play, the Eskimo Way

It's not as though I don't have Christmas cheer, as the previous post may have seemed to imply. I have scads of it, as evidenced by the Christmas dioramas in the accompanying photos. One is inside, and features some kind of dwarf fir, I think (I made notes at the time - and thank you Flower World - but I don't remember where I put them), and the trio outside may be firs, as well, but, again, I no longer recall.

At any rate, two of the boxes outside are green and one is red. That equals Christmas, as does the shape of the trees, and the fact that they are some kind of conifer. Inside, as you can clearly see, there is red, green, and gold in the diorama next to the planter, in the form of vintage, modern, and Saudi perfume bottles. What is less obvious is the exuberant holiday cheer stuck into the planter itself, consisting of a sparkly apple, two sparkly little balls, a tiny drum, and simulated, sparkly conifer and ivy branches.

Moreover, my bedroom itself is red, red, red and gold. My living room is green and red and gold. Or at least celadon and sage and raspberry and gold. So I am living Christmas all the time. I even have Balthazar in Spanish, yet none of the rest of the (less-Christmassy-titled) Quartet in any language right now. Add in the photo of St. Joseph with the infant Jesus, and it's almost oppressively Yule in here. All I need is a karaoke machine and some nutmeg, and the opportunity to catch the neighbor's cat unaware and stick some stuffed reindeer antlers on him, and then no one, no one, will again question my holiday cheer.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

It seems I had misremembered Christmas. It's not surprising, really. I did so well with my sombre Yom Kippur wishes for my more Hebraically-minded friends that I was bound to mess something up.

Anyway, Christmas is always a bit of a conundrum for me. There are so many options, and all are slightly discomfiting. When I had roommates, or lived at boarding school, Christmas was always a time to savor a brief bit of solitude and quiet. I remember at college in Southern California, KPFK would play a reading of The Alexandria Quartet all day and all night for days over Christmas. If I were staying in the dorm over vacation, I could sit alone in my dorm room for hours at a time and listen. I could stay up all night and listen -- and who cared? it was Christmas break!

Now, however, I usually fulfill my RDA of quiet, solitude, and contemplation without needing a state-imposed religious holiday to do so. This leaves me in a bit of a bind when I do find myself confronted with one. Most things are closed -- not just (all but eleven, according to Open Table) restaurants and supermarkets, but gas stations, convenience stores, tire stores, nurseries, book stores...almost everything. Probably even Wal-Mart, too. Well, maybe only in largely Christian markets.

Thus normally the activity choices outside of churchgoing are fairly circumscribed: some kind of Christmassy thing at someone's Christmassy house, or Chinese food and a foreign film with the Jewish population of whatever city I'm living in, since Larry Durrell can no longer be relied upon for succor. In the first case, not only is there no species of traditional North American or British holiday food that I enjoy (although I love getting the good charms in a pudding!), I also dislike feeling trapped in someone's house as people get drunker and stupider and the dread board games are resorted to one after the other in an attempt, presumably, to stave off the Holiday Melancholia from which the revelers would otherwise be suffering. If I should find myself overtaken with suicidal impulses and existential angst, God help me if I for one second believe Boggle to be the cure.

The problem with Christmas dinner for the single person who is not overwhelmingly inclined to celebrate Jesus' birth with drunkenness or ironic renderings of 80s metal ballads is that Jews and Chinese seem to be the only religious or ethnic minorities who want things to proceed with as much semblance of normalcy as possible amidst all the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And since, outside of Florida and big Eastern cities, the Jewish community in North America tend to leave the restauranteuring to other groups, while non-Chinese non-Christians in the business gladly leap upon their one opportunity a year to take a day off, that leaves the Christmas trinity of Hunan, Mandarin, and Szechuan, with the odd offering of late-night dim sum (not available in all areas). There are also, of course, 24-hour/365-days places and nicer hotel restaurants open on Christmas, if your Yuletide tastes run toward chicken-fried steak with eggs or eating amidst lonely, stranded business travelers and recent divorcés who haven't yet found the courage to cook for just one.

I hadn't misremembered that. It is hard to forget the limited culinary offerings when the same thing happens every year and I get sufficiently frustrated, once more, around 8PM so as to relent and find myself again numbly picking at a plank of ghastly tinned ham over a Monopoly board, with people potty on boozy curdled cream with nutmeg scum to the accompaniment of a whiskey-fueled rendition of My Way streaming from the den-turned-karaoke-studio.

This year, however, I had an alternative. My Australian friend was going to be in Denver on Christmas Eve prior to flying out for skiing on Christmas Day. The snow would lend a festive yet nonsectarian air, and the crack addicts outside the window would serve as handy stand-ins for more traditional holiday revelers. And since I'd already be in a hotel, it would make sense to eat in it. Or I could just have some nuts and Toblerone from the minibar. In either case, not a single incongruous eggroll would need pass my lips.

That is the part I misremembered. I had about 80 to 1 on it being Christmas Eve/Christmas with a hedge of 2 to 1 on New Year's Eve/New Year's. I lost out on both, because it was squarely in the middle, the 27th, which doesn't help me at all, since by then I could be eating Hakka or Lebanese again if I wanted to. My only wish is that, whatever transpires, however many rounds of cribbage or Pictionary and however many murdered Rat Pack songs and show tunes I have to sit through, however many people cry, or break up, or end up in the ER, and no matter how many bowls of punch are gone through, there be no Tofurkey at any time, anywhere. That would kill my Christmas cheer completely, and quite possibly permanently.