In the mailbox this week from Calgary: 5 menus, only 1 of which appears to be aimed at Chinese Canadians with stuff like “3 Kinds of Seafood Cold Plate (Shrimp, Scallops & Squid on a bed of Jelly Fish).” The others are all fried rice & chop suey. But guess what?! No crab rangoon anywhere! What can this mean? I admit, a 5-menu sample out of all the Chinese restaurants in Canada has no statistical validity whatsoever, but I’ve always allowed my imagination to run wild on stuff like this. (Why do you think I became an artist instead of a statistician, anyway?) Could it be that Canada, so much more civilized in so many ways, upholds its integrity & dignity even in the matter of Chinese restaurant appetizers?

(A quick riffle through previously-sent menus turns up only a small handful from Toronto, all of which are authentic Chinese-food-for-Chinese-people places, so are not fertile rangoon grounds anyway.)

I’ve always said I was mainly interested in USA menus, but I welcomed others if people wanted to send them. Now? I’m really curious… can Canada possibly be rangoon-free? Canadians, send me your menus please!

Don’t worry, I won’t cry if you send me a rangooned menu that shreds my fantasy to ribbons like so much jellyfish.

Look! Chinese Chuckwagon! Spotted in sleepy Sunday afternoon Pt. Reyes Station, when most other things were shut.

I was with my pal Plastic Lam, who bought a pork bun (baked, not steamed). I think she liked it.

Hey, have you noticed I’ve been on-topic three posts in a row now?!

If you’re like me, after you see godzillions of Chinese restaurants emblazoned with the Evil Chinky Font (or worse… wait, is there worse?), you develop kind of a morbid sense of humor about certain manifestations of racism. In this case, I really don’t know if it’s the Chinese restaurants… maybe I always would have, um, appreciated the kitsch value of Le Restaurant Chinois.

In my mid-August reverie, I was gonna post a photo of peach blackberry pie, but a different side of reality came up instead.

Looks like some Methodists in the area are doing their best to help the family. At the bottom of the article is a phone number you can call if you want to get involved.

Remember those Romano beans? I don’t think we planted enough of them.

You might still be able to catch the last of the Flavorella plumcots at this week’s farmers markets, but then again, their season is so blindingly fleeting… they may be gone. How about a really good consolation prize? Taste test between apricot ice creams from Ici & Sketch: Ici’s has a pleasing bit of tang to it. Sketch’s couldn’t be further from tang, instead giving you a subtle perfume of apricot. Your choice. Personally, I need both in my life. (That’s burnt caramel cuddling up with the apricot.)

I think I blogged a couple years back about being totally floored by Dave Rawlings singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Since then I have searched high & low for any documentation of this exemplary cover; here is the only thing I’ve been able to find. (Tapers of the world: I will give my firstborn child, or at least a good bunch of radishes, for something better.)

The healing pelvis likes to sit around & watch movies. Lots of em. Recently rented The Story of the Weeping Camel & loved it, but you know what I just can’t get over? When the baby camel is born, it comes out with its humps all flat & folded over, like Tab A & Tab B. This is one of those obvious things that you just never think about (unless you regularly hang out with camels), I mean, of course they’re folded over, otherwise ouch for the mom camel, right? My brain just has not been able to let go of this insanely cute factoid ever since I saw the movie. It’s like camel origami. I even found some baby camel photos if you wanna see what I mean, but you should really see the movie, which, to tell the truth, has a whole lot more going for it than just the folded-over humps.

We got some very robust “Musica” Romano bean seedlings from Kassenhoff Growers at the Temescal Farmers Market. Here’s what they looked like 11 days ago:

Here is what they looked like 8 days ago:

Here they are this morning:

I realize such stupendous growth is not news to some of you more experienced gardeners out there, but wow, for this polebean virgin it’s quite exciting. Especially since I’m really needing things that demonstrate visible & rapid progress.

Hey, look at this cool DIY origami CD sleeve! If you’re a type geek control freak & need to specify your own font (I don’t know anybody like that, do you?), you can open up the pdf in some designy program & go wild. Add images! Print in color! Whatever!

Further adventures of the temporarily disabled: Donna found out that you can borrow a beach wheelchair at Crab Cove in Alameda & also at Crissy Field in San Francisco. These are wacky-looking, dune-buggy-evoking contraptions & they definitely grab a lot of attention from everyone on the beach, so if you’re feeling shy it might not be the best thing. Anyway, we have now tried both.

The one at Crab Cove worked out much better:

I’m pretty sure the one at Crissy Field is meant for a child; it’s really narrow & if we hadn’t brought our own cushion it wouldn’t have worked for me at all. It was also much harder for Donna to push than the one at Crab Cove. I think I was just too big & heavy for it. Fortunately, Crissy Field is liberally sprinkled with benches, so I ended up walking quite a lot (that’s a relative term), with frequent sitting breaks.

It’s been 11 weeks since my ass so painfully parted ways with horse & saddle. At looong last, leaving the house has gotten easy enough so it no longer has to be all about doctor’s appointments & physical therapy. I guess you could say the terms of my house arrest have gotten more flexible. Maybe I’m on parole now?

The latest example of this delicious freedom: Last night I got an urgent phone call from Eve, reporting breathlessly that Bakesale Betty is now making lemon slushies out of neighborhood lemons! (We can only assume this heartwarming micro-localism is a legacy of the recently-decamped Temescal Amity Works.) If I had gotten this message even a couple weeks ago, all I could have done was sigh wistfully, shrug, & add it to the long list of Deferred Delights Of The Outside World.

Instead, this morning I took cane in hand to accompany Donna on a studio-scouting mission in the neighborhood, after which we walked (walked!!!) up the block to Betty’s. How happy I was just to be there again! My delirium only increased upon discovering that the famous chicken pot pies, which went AWOL last winter due to kinks in production logistics (ironed out by sacrificing cakes!), have made a comeback, now in take-and-bake form. The instant gratification factor is gone, but I am willing to wait & bake the pies for dinner tonight. Besides, this also meant we were not forced to choose between the pies & Betty’s even-more-famous fried chicken sandwich, that irresistable bundle of banh-mi-meets-downhome-Americana.

But what about the lemon slushy?? Well, I’ve always wished that we had streetcorner frozen lemonade carts here like they do in New York. But now… Betty & her Temescal lemons kick East Coast frozen lemonade booty, & hard. Best of all, my stomach uttered nary a complaint. Thanks to too much ibuprofen & other such drugs, I’d had the most non-acidic early spring in memory. An entire February & March suffered without benefit of blood oranges! I’ve been testing my recovery with tart early strawberries, & now with the lemon slushy I can declare the battle is won!

For those of you suffering from ibuprofen-torn stomachs, the very excellent advice I got from my herbalist is: marshmallow root. You take a handful of the dried herb, throw it in a quart mason jar with cold water, & stick it in the fridge overnight. Drink it throughout the day, squeezing the herbs to get as much of the viscous goo as possible. I was drinking this stuff for weeks, & it really does help.

There, how’s that for a comeback food post?

Oy vey. Where do I even begin? My excuses for not blogging just get better & better, but trust me, I’d rather be blogging. Back in February I got bucked off a horse, fractured my pelvis, & I think you can imagine the rest from there. I’m hobbling around with crutches now & doing physical therapy exercises of various kinds, & gnashing my teeth with impatience. If you can walk, be fucking grateful!

Speaking of gratitude, here is a particularly blogable tidbit: in the East Bay (that’s San Francisco Bay Area), if you have old medical equipment you’re not using, or if you are in need of free medical equipment, Home CARES Equipment Recyclers is the place to go. Obviously a shoestring operation, they work out of a church basement on Broadway & 27th in Oakland. They’re only there on Thursday afternoons between 1-4pm. You drive into their parking lot from the 27th Street side, go down underneath the building, & there the good people are on your left. You can get a tax deduction receipt if you’re giving them stuff, or if you’re like me & want a cane, they’ll bring out a selection for you to pick from. Too cool!

People, it’s film festival time, & you must see Air Guitar Nation. This film doesn’t just rock, it shreds.

If you’re in Houston, you can check out One Way or Another at the Blaffer Gallery. If you’re in SoCal, go to Torrance Art Museum to see a small drawing from my long-ago drawing residency. If you’re in the Bay Area, get outside & enjoy the nice weather, like I’m about to do.

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Where have I been? Busy consuming persimmons at an astonishing rate. & if you’re wondering how to cook that dinosaury Romanesco, just steam it whole, pour olive oil over it & sprinkle on your fancy salt of choice. Fractal goodness!

See, I told you I was gonna be scarce for a while. I still am, but I thought I’d give you a little Hand Update. It’s easy to forget when I’m in a fit of premenstrual, pre-election crankiness, but overall I’m pretty dang cheerful these days, because I recently realized that my hand is no longer the defining limitation of my daily life. This is truly amazing. I can actually do a lot of things without thinking too hard about how, exactly, to do them. I ironed some clothes the other day! I cut an Asian pear in half! (Those cores are very dense & hard, much tougher than most things I have occasion to cut through.) I schlepped that Asian pear & its brothers & sisters home from the farmer’s market all by myself (along with sweet peppers, eggs, apples, lettuces, pasta & ROMANO BEANS oh my gawd romano beans!!! & dry-farmed tomatoes & so forth).

Part of this blissful freedom from microscopic hand awareness & “oh well I can’t do that”-ness is due to great improvement of actual hand ability. Part of it is because I have been living with this problem for long enough now that a lot of those initially-annoying adaptations have become habit, so I don’t have to concentrate so hard on every little thing. I have learned how to open jars (there actually is a process & a technique to it) & I have also learned how to assess very quickly whether a particular jar is un-openable, in which case I just move right along to asking somebody else to open it.

There are still plenty of things that trip me up. Vacuuming is my Challenge Of The Moment: can I vacuum more than one and a half rooms (including crown molding & odd little corners & crevices) without my hand getting all tuckered out & anxious? Driving to Montana is still out of the question. Getting a job, ha Other things too just have to wait a little longer.

Dude. I am obviously out of practice w/ the PR: I should have mentioned in my emails, & also in the announcement below, that the Asia Society show is gonna travel so if, for example, you live in San Francisco & you have way too many people to see & places to go on your next New York jaunt, why then you can just wait & see the show when it comes to the Berkeley Art Museum next fall (that’d be 2007)! En route, it’ll spend the spring (2007) in Houston, & after it leaves Berkeley, it’ll end up in Los Angeles in spring 2008 (wooo… that’s really far away).

Sorry I didn’t tell you all of that before. & while I’m looking out for ya, try not to catch this nasty cold I picked up. If you live around here & you know what’s good for you, you’ll be wearing wool outside after 5pm. & make sure you get lots of sleep.

Heads up, those of you who like to have a twangy good time for free: coming right up this weekend is Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park. I will be in the front row at Freakwater on Sunday! Take public transit. Traffic & parking are not to be trifled with this weekend.

Meanwhile, you may think I’m all twang all the time, but sometimes even I gotta kick off the old cowboy boots for a good dose of homegrown Bay Area sound: Destani Wolf has a solo album out & it is very yummy, soulful stuff. That girl has a voice! Her CD has pretty much taken up residence in my player for the past few days. (Oh, except for once when I needed a quick shot of Freakwater. Of course.)