Mall as greenhouse

How amazing would it be if malls everywhere took a cue from Cleveland and converted themselves into greenhouses and gardens?

Stuff I Will Eat

Mystery box, I love you I love you I love you.

From left: spinach, rapini, broccoli di cicco, butternut squash, savoy cabbage, escarole, carrots, leeks, spring onions, chard (massive chard!), collards, green garlic, fennel. Soon to be in mah belleh.

Stuff I Eat

Maybe everyone else knows this already, but the mixture of these items is delicious:

• grains
• beans
• greens
• fresh herbs

What you see below is my new favorite dinner: wheat berries with Rancho Gordo beans, escarole, arugula, fresh parsley, and homemade vinaigrette.

Damn it is good (even though I think my camera phone always makes things look a little gross). I'm home for a few hours at least one night a week, which is enough time to make big batches of grains and beans, so I think my weeknight dinner groove is now set. Next up is barley, or quinoa, or Israeli couscous, or one of the other dozen things I bought from the bulk bins at Rainbow this weekend.

Rainbow bulk bins: yuppie crack.

(Is that just coke?)

I like gluing things to other things

Is it weird that I would totally live in a house that the New York Times is calling out for its tackiness? The owners were gospel singers and evangelical preachers before constructing a 25,000+ square foot mansion! They used a cake decorating kit to ornament their house! The woman has a 34 pound bedspread trimmed in pearls (why?)!

A choice excerpt:

More glass shoes had been glued to a six-foot silver-and-faux-candle candelabra.

“My shoe-delier,” said Mr. Hart, 50, who was decked out entirely in black, complete with a black cowboy hat.

Ms. Hart, slim and raven-haired at 82, wore a tailored black suit trimmed with two dozen gold-plated teddy bears. “Larry did this,” she said, referring to the trim.

“I like gluing things to other things,” Mr. Hart said, by now stating the obvious.

Also at lunch was his brother, Garry, a 48-year-old contractor (“The normal one, like Marilyn in ‘The Munsters,’ ” Larry said).

I want to be friends with these people.

Age doesn't mean a thing unless you're a piece of cheese.

The grandmother of Mike's coworker is 91 and teaches aerobics on the Jersey shore. What a badass.

Some people wears glasses.

Including me. And since my purse got stolen last month and only my glasses (and a wool hat) went missing, I decided to get two pairs so that I am never sans eyewear again.

The ones on the left are black, and the ones on the right are brown and white. I was going for sexy secretary. I am becoming less photogenic every day (my nose isn't really that shape, I don't think), but the glasses are cute.

And who wants to teach me how to wrangle my bangs?

Brewery p*rn

Friday night Mike whisked me away for a super romantico weekend away. We drove up to Jenner on the Sonoma coast on Friday night, with a large veggie pizza from Little Star for company. The B&B had a deck with a hot tub overlooking the ocean (ok, actually the Russian River just before it hits the Pacific, whatever) and was freaking sweet.

Saturday we drove along the coast into Mendocino, then inland to the Anderson Valley Brewing Company. And my oh my, do they brew. We went home with a growler of something that was a cross between an IPA and a stout. So tasty, and a good marriage of the two ends of the spectrum - where Mike and I usually sit, wrinkling our noses at each other's beer.

Here is one of their copper mash tuns, brought over from Germany. Please don't drool on the copper.

Ain't it a beaut? The tour of the brewery was led by their maintenance guy, Robert, with whom we spent a nice afternoon talking beer, watching coverage of the Hawaii "tsunami", and listening to stories about his time traveling with the Grateful Dead. Of course.

Here's Mike by the bottling machine, happy happy happy.

I loved the factory episodes of Mr. Rogers when I was a kid - "Come see how candy is made!" Don't mind if I do! So the bottling machine was heaven for me - it had lots of moving parts, just like the machines on Mr. Rogers, but all for the sake of BEER.

That there's a reclamation pond. Anderson Valley, in addition to being 50% solar powered, processes the chemicals that they use to clean the tanks. Beautiful for a cesspool, no? And they have an 18 hole disc golf course!

We'll definitely be going back, probably for their Beer Fest in May.

Daily Routines

This blog is a collection of writers' daily routines - it's pretty darn interesting. And, as The New Yorker comments on the left sidebar, it is also appropriately titled. My favorite routines are the ones that talk about the drinking and the drugs and the sexo.

Snowpocalypse

You probably can't see this very well, but below is a flipbook-like series of photos that my dad took of my brother jumping into a huge snowbank, and then menacing my mother.

It is odd to be on the California end of the Snowpocalypse - we just enjoyed a 70 degree weekend, while my parents are dealing with winds that make the icicles on their house form sideways.

Stuff I Eat

Last night I made Butternut Squash and Sage Pasties. They were fantastic, and the only change I made in the recipe was to use Jarlsberg in place of parmesan, because that's what I had on hand.

I recommend. I also baked Chocolate Puddle Cookies (from frozen dough made last week), and they are amazing, like gooey meringues. Make them now.

My baby's growing up

Into the secondary fermenter!

We're now t-minus two weeks (or so) to bottling!

Let's tally it up

Wins for today:

• Got my eyebrows threaded. Hurt like a biznitch but it turns out my eyebrows DO have an arch!
• Bought a blazer that is made out of sweatshirt material. A new day has dawned: the day of the Professional Sweatshirt.
• Scatterbrain Jamboree at Thee Parkside tonight.
• Ate a pound of Jordan almonds.

Losses for today:

• Also got my upper lip threaded, just because I had a Groupon. Hurt like a biznitch but it turns out I look no different sans invisible moustache.
• Persistent sinus headache.
• Ate a pound of Jordan almonds.

Let's-see-how-it-goes for today:

• Questionable haircut. Bangs good, A-line cut not so good; Ramona Quimby-esque in the back. Unfortunate.

• Dreamed last night that we new apartment; apartment fantastic, except contained tomb of Nabokov in the living room. Received Wellesley magazine today, noted full article on Nabokov. Eerie.

The wins have it, for now, dependent upon the haircut. If a shower and some time saves it, excellent - if not, I'm going to have to lop it, and then I really will look like Ramona Quimby.

Popo

The San Francisco Police Department has been pretty awesome to me lately. A few weeks ago my purse got stolen from a bar. One minute it was next to me on a bench, the next minute it was gone. I knew who took it, since a guy sat down next to me just before the purse disappeared, and he was also gone when I noticed my purse was missing. SUCKAGE. The purse had my keys, my wallet, my glasses, and a hat. My phones were in my pockets, thank god, since my Goog phone is the only thing I own that is worth anything.

A friend call the police for me and two officers showed up. They took information from me, they took information from a guy at the bar who saw the dude that took my purse, and they were very thorough. One of the officers had very neat and endearingly girly handwriting. They put me on a call alert list that would automatically dispatch officers to my apartment if I called 911, since I was afraid the thief might try to use my keys to get in and steal my stuff.

When I got out of a cab outside my building, a car pulled up to the curb, and two plainclothes officers asked if I was Genevieve. Um, yes. Turns out they were patrolling my block. Impressive!

Just a few minutes later, a chick called to say she had found my purse, with my wallet still in it. My wallet had my business card, so she called my cell. Fantastic! I went to get the purse, and everything was there - keys, wallet with cards and CASH. But not my hat. I lose hats every month or two, so I figured this was the universe's most elaborate way of keeping my on schedule.

It took another few hours to realize my glasses were gone. It's been a pain in the ass getting them replaced, and it would have been cheaper if the thieves had just taken the cash and left the glasses, but I promise I am not complaining.

Since the theft, I have gotten two voicemails from the SFPD asking if I have any more information on the suspect. I have managed to forget to call them back both times, but that changes today, I swear. The thing that's crazy is that I called the night of the theft to say the purse had been recovered. So either they missed that memo, or they are just that thorough.

And I don't want to sound ungrateful, but: don't they have better things to do?

Vietnamese Beer

I already wanted to travel to Vietnam, but now that I know they have good beer, I really really want to go. 2011 maybe?

Bookmobile

Last week I was interviewed for a documentary film about books. The concept behind the film is that a dude is driving a Bookmobile around the country, stopping in towns to ask people questions about books and reading; they get a free book in exchange. Different authors drive the bus and do the interviews in different cities, and everyone gets to talk about what books mean to them.

It's a great idea, and I had fun in the interview. I talked about my job and what we do and why I think it's important, I talked about my college obsession with the short story, and I talked about a few books that had meant a lot to me because they connected me with other people.

So I was super bummed to see that the website for the project totally blows. The background, oh my god, the wallpaper background. Maybe it's supposed to seem nice and old-fashioned, but it seems like the better approach would be a clean layout that doesn't look like a crappy family blog.

Don't take this to mean that I wouldn't be excited to be included in the documentary, though I'm sure my large hand gestures and tendency to look at the camera and not the interviewer have knocked me out of the running there. But moral of the story: don't have a good idea and then build a website that sucks. The end.