Oh, Katrina. You done what we were afraid Ivan would do last year. So sad & so ironic that such a hospitable people would be made homeless en masse. During the anticipation of Katrina, all my residual hurricane anxiety from last year resurfaced. What this makes me think about is the power of travel. Once you go to a place & make human connections there, your relationship to it is never the same.

Instead of being an abstract concept (as it had been all my life before the trip), for me now New Orleans is a collection of specific & detailed memories: the warm, tree-lined night streets of Faubourg Marigny, which were supposed to be dangerous but instead felt sweetly sleepy; the conversation with the KMart check-out clerk about her siblings who had been to California; at dusk, driving the long bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, like driving through the sky itself; a hot bag of beignets (de rigeur tourist treats) snatched at the last minute on our way to the airport, how they spewed puffs of powdered sugar all over our faces, shirt fronts & the seat of the rental car.

Oh yeah, & there were some Chinese restaurants there, too, heheh. But we never did make it to the place called Takee Outee; I wonder if it survived?

I've been trying to wrap my brain around the concept of having to evacuate the entire city. It seems just plain unimaginable.

Why I Haven't Blogged, or
A Synopsis of My Life Recently

Fat thumb.
Fat thumb.
Fat thumb.
Fat thumb.
Fat thumb.
Fat thumb.
Fat thumb.
Horrible cold. Flat in bed for days. Lost voice. Cough syrup.
The thumb at least appears to like this.
Chubby thumb. (Progress!)

I paid a visit to Trudy the Titan today. She wasn't stinky anymore, but it was still kinda mindblowing. That flower is as tall as me!

My thumb is slowly getting a bit tougher, thanks to lots of Feldenkrais, walking, & patience.

I switched from my hand specialist (he of the electric gizmo) to a physical therapist, who diagnosed me with DeQuervain's syndrome, more glamorously known as Washerwoman's Sprain. I'll leave y'all to ponder that for a while until the next time I feel like typing. Don't hold your breath....

I was so tired yesterday afternoon that I actually fell asleep while listening to Sleater-Kinney's new album. Didn't realize that was possible, especially since I had it turned up decently loud. I guess music can create a space inside of itself like that, where you can curl up & go inside yourself too... kind of like how the neighbors' little black cat has hollowed out a sleeping hole in our daisy bush.

My horoscope recommends the dullest blog in the world as role model of the moment. How pleasing, then, that this blog was already starting to resemble it!

I had a very bad hand flare-up this week after I spent a day on the computer tying up loose ends for the Creative Work Fund grant. Doesn't diminish the enormous gratitude I still feel for all that fabulous support.

Now the self-sabbatical continues.... The sweet peas (red & white streaked heirloom "America", in case you want to know) continue to flower & have begun podding. My left hand has not complained about snipping the pods off in addition to harvesting blossoms. But I don't do it every day.

Galia melons!!!

Back to the ice. Will try to make next post duller.

Heads up, the Whole Foods in Berkeley has peonies at $10 for a bunch of 5! I would normally never plug Whole Paycheck like this, but peonies!

So. It's been a while. I'm trying to train myself to type w/o my right thumb, hitting the spacebar w/ my left thumb instead. I get more typos this way, I'll tell ya that much.

Continuing the walking campaign... people's gardens segue into summer. I love the smell of tomato leaves. I was thinking this could become a repetitive, seasonal-cyclical blog: Every May I write about Bing cherries (a Chinese American point of pride; thank you bro Bing!), Rainier cherries (like eating tiny nectarines) & the singing robin. Every June, the smell of tomato leaves.... It could loop around & around & be a life-long project. By the time I'm like 80 I'll have to be super-creative coming up w/ new ways to talk about the same stuff.

Just an idea. You know I've always had an unusually high tolerance for repetition.

A week or so ago was the first time I ever spotted a Western Tanager in our backyard. Could have something to do with being sick & spending a lot of time looking out the window.

Yep, in the winter it's a knitting blog. In the spring it's a bird blog. When I'm sick it's a sick blog. (It would be a cooking & gardening blog sometimes too, except for the *$#!!% hand.) Who can fit in Chinese restaurants between all that?!

Listening: Jolie Holland, Scrabbel.

There's a robin living here who sings his little heart out constantly. Very sweet. He sounds slightly different from this but I guess that's how I know he's our very own neighborhood robin!

My medium-boiled egg jones seems to have passed, but in case it's passed on to you, here's my method for perfect medium-boiled eggs:

Put your egg(s) in a small pot w/ enough water to cover. Cover the pot &heat until the water boils, then turn off the heat. Leave for 6 minutes, then rinse egg(s) in cold water. Peel immediately. Bite off enough white to expose the yolk, then dribble a few drops of soy sauce into the yolk. Give the egg a couple of gentle squeezes so that the soy sauce gets absorbed down into the rest of the yolk. Mmmmm!

Hey, maybe now I want one again.

Anyway, I must be feeling better: yesterday I ventured out of the house & saw a Chinese restaurant I'd never noticed before. Unfortunately, I didn't have any cameras w/ me. Next time.

All that grumpiness in my last post must have been a sign that I was getting well. My voice came back! Still kind of scratchy & weak, but it's there. I can make phone calls now. In fact I made a couple of them yesterday. Woohoo! It's a thrill a minute around here....

Anyway, I've been meaning to point y'all toward Donna's new Waribashi Project. She's been collecting & washing chopsticks every day, like a maniac.

Is this weather splendid, or what?!

HELLO. Thank you! Gawd, I can't believe how people persist in constructing their fucking sentences this way. (& no, this is not a grammar post.) Arnold deserves some kind of medal for saintly patience; he actually takes the time to spell out the obvious, in an effort to enlighten any unconscious dolts who may happen upon his very clear explanation.

Sorry if I sound insufferably superior. It's the exasperation talking. By the way, if "gay men respond in the same way as women," does that mean that all women respond the same? Including lesbians & bi women? I guess so. Feh!

My body is in total rebellion. It's not enough for it to have a lame hand. I have now had this weird coughing flu for over 2 weeks now. I guess the silver lining is that I get to make my own contribution to the irresistable & charming genre of Sick Blog Postings.

So. This one started out pretending to be hay fever. It was like that for 2 days & then suddenly I felt like shit. That, plus I began coughing up gunk in bad colors. I had such violent coughing fits that I thought I'd gag or choke to death or something. Or at least throw out my back. Misery.

After about 10 days, I thought I was getting well, whereupon I had the audacity to actually go out to get some dinner. It didn't seem like an extreme act at the time, but my body decided it better let me know who's boss. I was slammed flat into the bed then, only dragging myself up to hobble slowly to the bathroom every few hours. I was hot. I was cold. I didn't want to eat anything except broth & some cubes of cantalope that Donna cut for me. I slept like the dead.

Mercifully, that flu-within-a-flu ended after a day or so, & I returned to my regularly scheduled flu: low energy & plenty o' coughing. By this time my throat is so fucked up from all that coughing that I can't really talk; whenever I raise my voice above a whisper, it sets off more coughing. In this condition, on Friday I ventured out to fetch snake bile from Chinatown (hey, only $1.25/box!), which is helping me cough less but I still can't really talk. Ventured out again yesterday for acupressure, & to get eggs to satisfy my jones for medium-boiled eggs with soy sauce.

& now I must stop typing before I draw down the wrath of the Hand Gods. Pray for me!

Nice article by Gish Jen, updating the Chinese restaurant:McDonald's ratio, now 3:1! Dang. Thanks to angry asian man for pointing this one out. He's so incredibly thorough & consistent, that angry brother. How does he do it? Does he have a dayjob? Just make sure you don't hurt your angry hands!

Hey, gingham's going for big bucks these days. Makes my gingham look like a total steal (which it is, actually). No secret pockets though.

I'm sure all you smart cookies out there in blogland have already figured this out, but: yes, my hand is still fucked up. I'm trying all kinds of different things for it. Walking. Yoga. Feldenkrais. Thumb bondage & ice play, ha ha. (That's what you call bitter laughter.) It really sucks, but the truth is it could be a lot worse. I get to look at all the lovely Berkeley flowers. Yesterday on one of my many walks I found a whole block full of fragrant, pink flowering trees. I have no idea what they are. Maybe I'll bring my camera next time & put up a picture of them, in case somebody can tell me what they are. So heavenly! I forgot all about my hand while I was walking there.

Anyway, if I seem a bit slow at answering emails, the hand is the reason why.

Check out this hilarious phonetic analysis of Marge Simpson's signature noise, complete with wav files. Donna accuses me of sounding like Marge sometimes, when I make my version of a noise we both picked up from Caitlin. Unlike the Marge noise, the Caitlin noise isn't just for frustration & annoyance. It's very adaptable. You can use it for enthusiasm, skepticism, irony, &c.

Just my luck. I finally got the DSL up & running, only to find the plug's been pulled on EzTorrent. Doh! Good thing there's a million audioblogs out there still. Wheee!

Yeah, you heard me right, I only just now graduated from the old-school dial-up I was functioning on this whole time. Laugh all you like. I never had a cell phone until a few months ago, either. & no, I don't own an iPod. Sheesh, somebody's gotta be a luddite around here. (As if.)

The hand is still limping along. I went for another session of electrical weirdness. It helps.

Fucked-Up Hand veterans tell me that they have uttered the following bitter sentence hundreds, no, thousands of times: "My hand was almost all better, & then I did something careless & sent myself back to square one."

I am saying it once. Believe me, I am crying over this. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel... I thought, wow, maybe just a couple more weeks & then I'll be clipping my fingernails, washing large pots & opening jar lids with the best of them! Now? I'm back to doing NOTHING. I prevailed upon the long-suffering good sport Donna to de-install my show for me. She brought it home & schlepped all the photos up the stairs to my studio. Those things are heavy!

I got to read through the comment book from the show. So many people from the South! It's kind of amazing. I have more to say about that but it's gonna have to wait till my hand gets a bit better.

Meanwhile, thanks to Michele K-Tel for helping me past the annoyingly inescapable media hype about Conor Oberst: there's actually some good music behind all that, including a song or two I could really use right now.

I don't know who these people are, but they're brilliant: The Bay Area Leisure Foundation is giving out $500 Leisure Grants, which are exactly what they sound like... money to take a break! People in the Bay Area really need this. Apply, all you worker bees!