7 posts tagged “richmond”
For about five months I was only in Richmond during the week and stayed with a roommate in the Bellevue section of town. It's such a great neighborhood (sadly out of our price range), and down the street from my old roommate lives a neat couple who host summer and winter solstice parties, inviting the entire neighborhood to come celebrate.
We went to the winter solstice last December, and came back last Friday for the start of summer. The high point of each solstice is when the hostess passes out branches from her rosemary bush and everyone gets into a circle and leans in one direction or the other in the hopes of influencing the weather ever so slightly. (We leaned for snow in December).
Then everyone tosses their rosemary branch on the fire. It smells delicious. This time around, there was also a pair of musicians playing wonderful bluegrass music.
The building behind them is Jane's studio-- she's a great artist, and teaches neighborhood kids there as well as her own work.
I have a couple of pieces in a show that opens tomorrow, June 6th, at the GlaveKocen Gallery here in Richmond. So if you're in the area, come on down and check it out! It's work specific to the show, and very different from the stuff I usually do... but it's been interesting working on it, and I may do more in that vein.
My parents came to visit for about thirty seconds last weekend, bringing some long lost stuff, including a dining room table that I've owned for more than a decade but hasn't made it out of the box, despite having moved to at least three states. It's still in the box, but in my dining room instead of my parents' basement, which I know delights them to no end. There was a whole lot of other stuff as well, none of which has made it out of its respective carrier.
Meanwhile, I went out to water the garden this morning before leaving for work and discovered a cornucopia, nay, a veritable menagerie of animals attempting to feast on my garden. Squirrels. Rabbits. Birds. At the suggestion of a farmer friend I'd recently covered much of my container garden with bird netting (though something still chomped down on the last of the thyme, resulting in the death of the last of the stuff I'd tried to grow. Three packs of thyme seeds and zero yield, though some animal has a belly full of herbs). P covered the main garden with the same netting last week after seeing one of the family of bunnies poking around. (I see those damned rabbits every day. EVERY DAY. They are ravenous little bastards). When I made it out to the garden this morning I found that one of the black birds wasn't flying away. Why? Because the nasty little bugger had gotten UNDER the bird netting and was trapped inside the garden, flapping violently at all my cucumbers, including the fragile little transplants. DANG. It took some doing, but I got him out. That said, sheesh, how many animals could be attacking my garden all at once?? I may never get the chance to eat anything out of it. I live in a city that is in the top 100 largest cities in America.... I know it isn't like I'm back in Brooklyn, but jeeeeez, I hadn't thought that wildlife would be quite this much of a problem. But we've got squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits (lots of rabbits), all manner of birds.... and they will not be deterred....
We went to a farm party at the lovely home of friends and providers of our produce-- the Collins clan at Victory Farms-- last weekend. (We're CSA members). It was great to see them, and great to see the field where the zucchini I'm putting in tomorrow's lasagna came from. Of course, we were wildly jealous of the spread...
Finally planted something in the garden yesterday. I don't have super high hopes, as I usually am the angel of death when it comes to plants, but I have my fingers crossed that something will sprout. Of course, if anything sprouts, it may then get eaten by one of the bazillions of squirrels or the wild rabbits (including the giant one that I believe is a feral Flemmish Giant), but I'm trying to take one step at a time.
I seem to have gotten the stuff in the ground just in time-- we've got thunder, lightening, and a whole lotta rain going on out there this morning. Guess that's it for the gardening this weekend. On the, ahem, "upside," there is enough stuff to do indoors to keep me busy for ten years, so whatevs. I hope it's sunny next weekend, though, cause I gots to plant the rest of the seeds if they're going to have enough growing season to grow. In the meantime, I'm going to watch the rain falling on the purdy dogwood that is in full bloom on the side of the house. It's about the only thing looking nice that was here when we arrived (our predecessor was not, it appears, much of a green thumb).
While the transition from city livin' to suburban life is a bit of a transition (try as I might, I can't find a way to ride my bicycle to work... everything involves highways and major roads... these Richmonders are not so bicycle-friendly.... there aren't any bike paths to be seen :( which is kind of depressing), it's good to know that there are some familiar practices in place. Mayoring style, for example. I give you the style of Richmond's Mayor Wilder. Should be an easy transition from life in the District.
So, after a week of being on hold and bounced around between the truly useless "automated" system at Verizon ("I did not understand you. Please choose from the following options: if you would like a coterie of farm animals, say, farm animals; if you would like to add the Nine Million Channels of Crap to your package for just $349.95 a month, say, crap; if you would like customer service, please hang up, we don't have that.... you said, farm animals... is that right?") and rude customer service (ahem) folks, our service got hooked up. Then, this week some other Verizon dude came to the house. He didn't ring the bell or anything, he just went around back and started messing around. P came outside and asked what he was doing. "Hooking up your service." Uhmmm.... we got service a few days ago. This guy was insistent that we had service coming. He was going to hook up service for a phone number we'd never heard of. And shut off the service we have. AND CHARGE US FOR IT. So, you know, we're less than impressed with them.
Then, the other morning, a sewage back up pipe-y thingie started to... you know... back up. Cause it was open, though the cap was lying on the ground next to it. P, handy guy that he is, got a wrench and recapped it. At which point none of the drains in the house would drain and the toilets went BLUB BLUB BLUB.... BLUB BLUB..... BLUB. For hours. While looking for a wrench around the house, P found a box of septic tank treatment stuff left by the previous owner. But we don't have a tank; we're on city water. Clearly, the previous owner was a moron (microbes will only eat the gunk in the tank because it's a tank. They need to hang out for a while. It don't do much good to send them zipping into the city sewer system) who obviously knew that there was some issue with the sewer line prior to selling the house. Which they failed to disclose. As they lightly capped the pipe-- just enough to vent the pipe for the inspection while having it appear as though the cap was actually on. Meaning that Mrs. S, abuser of walls (many of them have really weird scratches on them-- as though she were keeping a werewolf in the house who periodically got busy in the dining room), defiler of carpet (the carpet in the bedroom was disgustingly filthy. No, really... it was filthy), possessor of bad taste (the brass! The brass switchplates and nasty ceiling lamps! My eyes!
I include here, for your consideration, two of the lamp monstrosities that the truth-challenged Mrs. S left behind for us. The Offensive Grape Lamp is in the dining room and involves grape bunch shaped pieces of plastic dangling from a brass base (at least three levels of wrong there). The Brass and Glass Grandma Fan is currently flashing its brassy tackiness at us nightly from its perch above the bed. High on the list of home improvement projects once the unpacking has gotten under control is to Get. Rid. Of. All. Lampage, as Mrs. S could not be trusted in that aisle of Home Depot. Though the lamps did go, stylistically, with the vertical blinds (shudder... though they did make for amusement as Phil put them on his shoulders and pretended to be a car wash), the brass switchplates, and the horribly flouncy curtain bar left behind in the living room.
P and I had a very nice, very chill weekend, that, miraculously, did not involve looking at houses. Whoo! The last day that we went to look at houses our realtor told us that we had seen more houses than any other client he had had in over five years. We were fast approaching the 100 mark. In two months. Which, by and large, involved grueling days of seeing 12, 14, 17 houses in a day. That all blended together in one, big, lump of ghetto madness. (We spent a lot of time cruising the ghetto in search of real estate.).
Blissfully, we were able to got a whole weekend without having to look, disgustedly, at some fool's get rich quick tiling job on the house they were flipping. Yeay! Instead, we went to Richmond's Italian Film Festival. You didn't know Richmond had such a thing, did you? Well, neither did I. But who wouldn't love this? You have some very yummy Italian food, you watch an Italian movie, you drink some Italian wine (or beer, in P's case), and there you go. This is a great date, no? Well I thought so. Which is why I took P on a date to the Italian film festival. We were outrageously full of really good food, and then we got to watch Divorce, Italian Style, which I had not seen before (though I am a fan of Marcello Mastroianni). I was torn between seeing that and the Fellini film that was showing before it, Juliet of the Spirits. But I was glad we saw Divorce, Italian Style-- it was hilarious (darkly so, which is my favorite kind of hilarious).
We need more weekends like this. Though we won't get them soon-- it looks like we'll be spending our weekends packing for the near future, in any case. But I'm hoping to have more movie nights in the next year-- particularly after having gone through the entirety of 2007 having only seen one film in the theaters, and that on the second to last day of the year. (We went to see I am Legend, which, P will attest to, scared the hell out of me. I'm not so much with the zombies, though I much prefer (usually) zombies to straight up gore-- I have no interest in Saw or Hostel or anything along those lines. Watching it did make me curious about the two stabs at this that have preceded it-- The Last Man on Earth (with Vincent Price!) and The Omega Man (Charlton Heston!). If I ever get around to watching something that we have from Netflix so that the queue isn't full, I'll have to put them on there).
Well... we've still got a bit to go to get to the finish line, but it is looking like the bird will have a new cage come March. And if all goes well, it will be a cage of our very own (in conjunction with the bank, I suppose, but they won't actually be living there with us or anything, so they will be more of a silent partner, I would assume). It is all very exciting.
In the meantime, and on a completely unrelated note, I have to ask-- has anyone else noticed that Rudy Giuliani has been wearing way too much make up lately? I've had a chance to see him, briefly, on two different television shows, and both times he was made up like Pamela Anderson-- black eyeliner, heavy, light eye shadow, heavy concealer for those under-eye dark circles. I mean, I'm not completely opposed to the idea of pols sporting some make up (though, sadly, I think it wouldn't help for most of them), and I'm not really taking Rudy seriously as a candidate at this point (though, honestly, I never really was. He was my mayor for a number of years, and I do not have fond memories. That aside, I didn't think that he would actually play all that well outside of his region)... but man. Does this guy have a stylist? And if the stylist is doing this to him, please, fire them like you did Rudy Crew. I can't take another night of looking at Rudy in drag.
For my birthday P got me an awesome book and just what every Dr. Birdcage needs: a beautiful 4x5 pinhole camera. We went to Richmond for part of my b-day and visited a neeeeeat cemetery there, where I tried out my new superawesome camera..... and discovered when I got the film back yesterday that the 25mm thing (he got me an extension so I can do 50mm too) is reaaaaalllllly wide. Like, wide enough to get my head in many a shot, even when I'm standing back from the camera. Note to self: step awaaaay from the camera. Such awesome gifties from my super fantastic mister. :)
Then on Sunday we had a multi-birthday bbq, as we have a gaggle of friends with near-birthdays. And that, too, was superawesome and lots of fun and involved rum-soaked watermelon, so really, what more could one want?
It also involved me using up most of the color 6x6 polaroid that I had left, which is a sad sad story since Polaroid stupidly has discontinued this format-- the format of the Holgaroid. *le sigh* But I always loved the b&w more than the color of this stuff, and will be much more distressed when my hoarde of that is gone... a day that is coming soon.
P and I went up to Massachusetts a few weeks ago to visit family, and I got to see my parents, brother, niece (cutest. thing. ever.), grandfather, and the Fabulous Miss A and her beloved A-lo (however briefly), which was all a super fabulous thing.
I had this brilliant idea that P, my mom, and I would swing through the Hopper exhibit at the MFA in Boston as it is mere blocks from Miss A's place, and I like Hopper (I mean, really, who doesn't?), and we were going to be in Boston to see GrF. This would have been a brilliant idea had I accepted the fact that the Hopper show was a blockbuster show and that people are really into blockbuster shows. It being the last day of the show, it was, of course, sold out. A fact deeply disappointing in and of itself, coupled with the disappointment to realize that the much beloved MFA of my youth (I used to go in there almost every day the summer I was at MassArt, since MassArt is just up the block, and I believe I got free admission with my student ID) has become outrageously expensive. It's over $20 to get into the regular museum. Though I think a lot of museums are charging outrageous sums like that these days, and my extended years of student-dom, giving me cheap/free entry into educational institutions apparently insulated me from any gradual change in cost. I likes me some art, but holy crap-- twenty-three bucks?
It's an interesting book, and not surprisingly talks a lot about Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and other Irving tales. (I'm not done with it yet, though the reliance on this one group of stories, as told by Irving and then retold by others, seems a weak point, though it's still an interesting book). It made me want to reread Irving, having not read it since I was a kid. So I went to the library.
Okay, having spent years locked away (literally, in a cage. This is where the name for the blog comes from) in an enormous research library, I admit that I am spoiled. Possessions lists numerous derivative works and travelogues and guidebooks for the Hudson Valley from the nineteenth century, and I was deeply disappointed and perplexed to find none of them in the collection of the D.C. Public Library. (Yes, okay, so it isn't a research library.) Well, at the very least, I'll get the Irving, I thought. I used their online catalogue, which is enough to make you cry. I put in Irving as the author and got back three pages of hits, 80% of which were written or created by someone other than Irving. Some of them were derivative works (Rip Van Winkle imagined as an illustrated childrens' book blah blah blah), but a significant number of them were just random works of sociology or statistics or whatever. In short, their search engine sucks.
I finally found where it would be, and set off to the library to find it. Which was a futile mission: not on the shelf (nor were any of the other books I was interested in that were all listed as being on the shelf). I ask a librarian. He says, oh that must be up in literature. Okay. I head up to literature. Where I get Not-Listening-Librarian-Dude. I explain that the book I was looking for wasn't where it was indicated to be in the computer, and that downstairs librarian has sent me upstairs. "What's the call number?" Well, there isn't one because it was listed in the popular section, where you don't do call numbers, and all of your computers up here are being used by people doing email, so I can't get into your catalogue. He then proceeds to explain to me the difference between the popular fiction section downstairs and the literature section upstairs and then how call number work and that I need to go to the card catalogue. I quickly began to lose interest in finding the book.
But he wouldn't let me go. No, he was going to explain to me what a card catalogue is, how one uses it, what purposes it has, why it's important, and how one does a search. "The only way you're going to find it is if you put in last name comma first name, see." Yes, I know. I did that. And you'll see that, in fact, your search engine does not come back with items only by Irving. It has fifty other things that I'm not looking for. I just want to find this book. "The only way you're going to find it is if you put in last name comma first name, see." He repeated that about fifty times. Every time I said, okay, thanks, gotta go, he'd call me back to look or listen to something, mostly to him repeating the basics of how to search a catalogue. Exhausted with this, bookless, I finally said, "I'm already well versed in using a library catalogue. I have a doctorate and spent years doing research in libraries. I guess the book just isn't on the
And people wonder why no one reads. Sheesh. I ended up breaking down and going to Barnes and Noble the next day where I was able to pick up that damn Irving book (the last copy-- apparently not a popular selection), new and mercifully inexpensive. I'd forgotten what a hapless and somewhat mercenary character Icabod Crane was (no Johnny Depp, he), and had also forgotten how enjoyable Irving can be (in my mind I've put him into the pool with other overly flourid nineteenth century writers who you assume were being paid by the word as they spend way too long on the unneccesary details and not nearly enough time on the plot). Not just enjoyable, funny. So go, go now, reread Irving. You won't regret it.
