Passports with Purpose
November 18, 2008 – 8:40 am | by nerd's eye viewWelcome to Nerd's Eye View. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Want to know more about this site? See the Meet the Nerd page. And thanks for reading!
On Monday night, I headed back up to my ex-neighborhood to attend Blogsgiving, a Seattle area bloggers’ fundraiser for Northwest Harvest. Prepared to drop in and flee - my usual reaction to a room full of mostly strangers - I ended up staying for a couple of hours while talking about photography, neighborhood blogging, publishing, Capitol Hill vs. West Seattle, and a lot of other things with my fellow bloggers. I had a nice time and it was for a good cause. And telling you about that event makes a perfect - if a bit hackneyed - segue into telling you about Passports with Purpose, the travelbloggers fundraiser for Heifer International.
If a room full of strangers makes me jumpy, a room with only three or four of them is fine by me, and they fast become friends. I’ve been meeting Debbie (Delicious Baby) and Beth (Wanderlust and Lipstick) and Michelle (Wandermom) for lunch or coffee or something for a few months now. We’re all travelbloggers of some stripe. Last month we hatched Passports with Purpose. It’s a raffle, the proceeds go to Heifer International and raffle winners get fabulous prizes. The whole thing is administered through First Giving, a fundraising site that make it easy for anyone to raise money online.
Now that we’ve done enough in the background to make it real, we’d love it if you’d participate. There are three ways you can help, though there’s no need to pick one, you can do all three.
Want to know more? There is additional information on our “host” site at Passports With Purpose. You can also contact me directly (pam at nerdseyeview dot com) or leave your questions in the comments.
We’ve got some great participants lined up so far, but we’re missing you. Join us?
| Posted in » Recycled: and after all, you’re my Westerwald…
February 18, 2006 – 11:09 am | by nerd's eye viewThere’s not much to do in the Westerwald at this time of year. We tagged along because our friend was registered in a “log cabin building course” and we thought we’d serve as moral support for his Mrs, our friend Sabine. We had a unexpected treasure of stopover in medieval Limburg on the way up there, but I’ll just post some pictures later, it will do. What won’t show in pictures is the remarkable awfulness of the hotel where we stayed the night.
The stern hausmeister greeted us with a gripping handshakes and recitations of last names. “FRAU MUELLER,” she pronounced, crushing each hand in succession. “Witting!” “Sommer!” “Sommer!” I uncharacteristically used husband’s last name, it just seemed the thing to do. During introductions, we wrinkled our noses. The lobby stunk of meat, boiled meat, and not of the best quality. We were passed from Frau Mueller to the Stasi manager. “YOU AND YOU, ROOM THREE! YOU, ROOM FOUR!” “Sir, yes SIR!” I wanted to shout, saluting.
The scent trailed us up the stairs to our French provicially furnished room. No phone. No TV. No hot water, it turned out, either. Okay, that’s not fair, the rooms had their own boilers and we just had to turn it on. We ordered our dinners in advance and went to have a little lie down. Husband was delayed, having been ordered to move the car. “YOU MUST ALWAYS LISTEN TO WHAT FRAU MUELLER TELLS YOU AND YOU WILL NOT FAIL!” he was told. Honestly, we thought he was joking and went in to fits of hysteria.
I’d asked for a veggie meal and was told I’d get fish and salad. Fine. Husband was braver and went for the meat. I ordered for him. “HE WILL ALSO HAVE VEGETABLES AND SOUP,” Frau Mueller commanded. “SIR, THANK YOU, SIR!” At dinner, we were hard pressed to contain ourselves. Behind us sat a quiet Dutch family. The other folks in the dining room were students in the course. There were eight or ten of them, but we were making noise enough for the entire room in our laughter. The Stasi waitress neatly slammed our plates on the table. We were faced with giant mountains of salad, the husband with a tray of brown sauce and two unappetizing roulades. This was followed by a large bowl of brocolli and a larger bowl of potatoes. We easily had enough food at the table for six. Underneath my mountain of salad were any number of other mixed salads, all of them punctuated with meat. Our unit soldiered away as best we could, but we could not complete the mission of eating all the food in front of us. We are not sure if we were purposely denied our share of the canned fruit cocktail dessert for not finishing our meals. “It was fine,” we all said, “just a little too much food.” The Stasi waitress looked exasperated. “It is always so,” she said, storming off to the kitchen.
Having nothing to do, we went to bed. The rooms, though questionably decorated, were very clean but the blankets were too short. Take note, readers, I am just over five feet tall. And I am telling you my blankets were too short. I thought I had slept okay, but the scent of boiled meat must have been too much for my sleeping psyche as I woke up feeling queasy and a little ill.
Reluctantly, we went down to tackle breakfast. The Stasi waitress was ordering around the blotchy faced indentured servant, who at one point, came out of the ladies room looking as though she’d been crying. “She’s got the wrong end of Frau Mueller this morning,” husband speculated. “Let’s rescue her!” I suggested, imagining smuggling her off to freedom, perhaps to the cozy bakery where we’d stopped on the way to our Westerwald gulag. Sabine was more circumspect. “She must find her own freedom…” she suggested. “Plus, once we’ve got her, what are we supposed to DO with her?” Meanwhile, to the husband’s left, sat a taxidermied duck, looking annoyed. The room was full of dead animals - a fox, a deer, the pelts of several wild boar, a badger, even a squirrell. Perhaps Herr Mueller was a hobby taxidermist. The duck frowned, I reached over to turn him away from us as the Stasi waitress marched in. “Be careful!” whispered the husband. “Frau Mueller will find out!”
After paying the much too expensive bill and recieving, once again, Frau Mueller’s vice grip handshake, we fled the hotel to the south.The sky was black, a mix of snow and heavy rain was falling. Hours later as we returned to Grosskarlbach under a golden sunset, I thought of our brief incarceration. “Those poor women…” I said out loud, to no one in particular.
Seeking a Different Sky
November 16, 2008 – 4:47 pm | by nerd's eye view
Sometimes the fall sky gets so heavy in Seattle. It drops low, a big gray blanket that covers everything and drags your spirits down. We had four days of miserable weather, cold and wet and dismal. Every afternoon last week I’d wander into the kitchen around four muttering. “What the hell? Why is it so damn dark already?!” We had a break on Thursday when we wandered around the neighborhood greeting people who were just as relieved as we were to see the sun. It wasn’t going to last so there was only one option: It was time to get the hell out of town.
It’s a tough call in Seattle when you’re seeking sun. There are those who plunk down the credit card and book tickets to Vegas, others who shell out a little more and head for Mexico or Hawaii. We had only the weekend and I wanted my transit time to be part of the adventure. I’d narrowed it down to two destinations: Eastern Washington or the coast. Our last weekend away was to the coast so we picked Eastern Washington. Plus, it’s supposed to be sunny there.
Sunny it was, thank god, but wow, was it cold! This morning we awoke to frost covered sidewalks and a below freezing bite to the air. We didn’t care. The sun was out and it was another beautiful morning. And though my belly is full of diner style road food, I feel lighter from seeing different colors over the last few days.
Eastern Washington is golden brown at this time of year, the sage is a scrubby dry gray, the birch trees are white with sparkling leaves that look like real gold leaf. The espaliered fruit trees still hold a few pomegranate red apples even if the fruit stands are shut tight. We had a sound track of county music and Mexican radio, a cheap hotel across the parking lot from the gun show, and empty four lane roads lined with decaying neon. The sky was high and blue and gas was cheap enough to make taking a short road trip seem less like a decadent shopping spree and more like feeding a sun-starved soul.
Washington State is a wonderland and if the Yakima sidewalks rolled up a little too early and the Chamber of Commerce propaganda was out of date, it doesn’t mean we didn’t find one of the oldest and most popular diners in town stuffed to bursting with the girls volleyball team, their grandparents, and a waitress with hair and makeup that said “I am getting out of this town some day, I don’t care if I have to go on Project Runway to do it.”
I scored two vintage Hawaiian shirts at the second hand store, J, got a nice new wool hat, and wow, that was the best damn coffee mocha milkshake I’ve had since summer. Whew, it was good to get out of town.
Pictures are here.
Accidental Guests at Ping Chow’s Birthday Party
November 8, 2008 – 10:11 am | by nerd's eye viewPing Chow set a bottle of red wine on our table. He smiled broadly and nodded at us. “Happy Birthday!” we all said, reaching across the table to shake his 94 year old hand. Our friend N. kissed him on the cheek and Mr. Chow brightened up. “You see why my mother told him ‘No more women!’ before she died?” said Mr. Chow’s only daughter.
She’d noticed we were paying attention. It was hard not to. We were one of a few tables of white people at Ho Ho, a Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s International District. The place was packed with an enormous Chinese family - four generations filled the dining room, from Mr Chow at 94 to his highchair seated great grandchildren. Mr. Chow was making the rounds, standing behind seated family members for photographs, teasing the youngsters, beaming over the huge family that filled the restaurant in his honor.
Ruby Chow, his wife, died earlier this year. She was a Seattle legend, a matriarch, a grand American success story. “Don’t mention Ruby,” said our waitress “or he will be very sad and start crying.” Of course. They were married for more than 60 years. “The family has been coming here for over 20 years. We know them all. He calls me, I say ‘How many?’”
Ruby and Ping met in New York. Mr. Chow was quite the ladies man, apparently, but when he was hospitalized for a condition affecting his eyes and thought he was going blind, Ruby was the only one who came to visit. “This is the girl for me!” Mr. Chow was in the military at the time - he’d joined to get his US Citizenship - but his training was in classical Chinese opera. He’d worked his way to New York from Hawaii where he’d been left by his patron/employer when he’d fallen ill. Ruby and Ping went on to build one of Seattle’s grand families.
Mr. Chow’s daughter, Cheryl, told us these stories while we sat in at our corner table drinking Tsing Tao beer and letting the waitress tell us what to order. She passed our fond birthday wishes along to her father and he looked up from his place at the head of the crowd. That’s when he walked over and placed the bottle of wine on our table.
“You’re lucky!” said the waitress. “He is passing along this good fortune to you! You are very lucky!”
We all agreed.
Ho Ho Seafood Restaurant is at 653 Weller in Seattle’s International District.
Field Trip Report from LG Action Sports
November 6, 2008 – 7:38 pm | by nerd's eye view
For some people, gravity seems an arbitrary thing. I’m not one of these people so if I gawked open mouthed at the skateboarders during the LG Action Sports events, that’s why. To see these guys - and it was the guys we were watching, though women compete too - clear the ground and rest for a brief moment in the air as though it’s completely natural to stop in space… it’s a fascinating thing to watch.
For about the first, oh, ten or fifteen times.
Thing is, as a complete novice to the sport, I was immune to the allure of what might have been big name athletes. As someone who knows nothing about what the guys were trying to achieve, I couldn’t appreciate the execution of certain moves. And after about 45 minutes of watching some undeniably impressive half pipe action, I was kind of bored. As were our fellow field trippers.
We changed locations and watched the BMX bikers spin warm up loops around the ramps, popping up on to some bleachers, casually clearing the ground, turning into blurry action figures and reappearing on the other side of the floor. That was also jaw dropping. And insufficiently engaging to keep us there.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we did not enjoy ourselves. The noise, the cheering, the wanton disregard of gravity combined with some skillful harnessing of momentum, that was worth seeing. It just wasn’t engaging enough to keep us there for the long haul.
We walked the concourse at Key Arena through the onslaught of marketing - cell phones and skateboards and video games and, yup, the US Marines. We spun the wheel for prizes and recieved headphones and CDs. We watched the unintended fashion show, spent too much money on snacks, and skipped out in to what was left of the afternoon.
And hey, here’s some advice for those of you invited by PR to spectator events. Ask for a press pass. J. took these pics with his Lumix, and they’re pretty cool, but I wasn’t allowed to bring my semi-pro kit in the door and had to hoof it back to the car. Bummer.
Fish Wednesday: Not Quite Blackened Black Cod Edition
November 5, 2008 – 6:20 pm | by nerd's eye viewI get cravings sometimes. Sometimes I think, yes, crispy, blackened, spicy, that’s what I want. Sometimes I think of the once portly Paul Prudhomme and how he seemed to start his recipes with a pound of butter, hence the irresistible deliciousness. Sometimes, I get it in my head that I can replicate the luscious, spicy food of the south here in under the mossy green glow of the Pacific Northwest.
And I fail. Not in an inedible, “Wow, that sucked” sort of way, more in a “Yeah, that was all right but not exactly what I had in mind” kind of way.
There are some cases where it is best to spring for the ready made stuff. A Cajun spice rub is probably one of those - fish sauce and black bean sauce come to mind. I was surprised to find I had most of what was needed to make a Cajun rub in my kitchen, save powdered onion and powdered garlic, which I never have. The resulting rub came out nice enough, but I probably should have cooked the fish on a blazing hot and well oiled grill rather than in the skillet in a hot oven. Or fried them on the stove top in a half a pound of butter.
As a side I’d cooked up a big batch of collard greens. For the first time I bothered to boil the greens for a sufficient amount of time in a big pot of water - wow, did that make all the difference! I tend to flash fry my greens or steam them barely at all, but collards are tough if you don’t cook them properly. In a rare instance of memory of collard green failures in the past, I remembered to start the greens good and early, and then I sauteed them with onions, Tabasco, and some tomatoes. What a difference it makes to cook the collard properly. Good stuff.
The fish was cooked perfectly, but it didn’t have the crunch I was looking for. I’m not big on pan frying, not unless it’s in someone else’s kitchen, but this fish was worse for being treated as though it was a healthy meal and not an artery clogging adventure. Next time, I’m springing for the Cajun spice mix and firing up the grill.
Because you know I care, I’ll tell you that Black Cod, also known as Sablefish, is a okay choice according to our friends at Seafood Watch. It’s best if the fish is from Alaska or BC, so see if your fish monger can tell you where, exactly, the fish is caught. It’s a mild, white, flaky fish. It’s probably a nice stew fish, but it’s firm enough to hold up to grilling.
Eat your fish, it helps you learn from your past.
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