Dead Letter Department #131

(something like) vacation

I was feeling perilously close to real burnout, so I decided to put down two of my three part-time jobs for a week and act as much like possible as if I were on vacation. Does the simple fact of three part-time jobs maybe add up to more than one full time, perhaps contributing to said burnout? Nothing we can do about it, so let’s not get into it now! But here are the things I did, in no particular order, to try to refresh as many areas of my life as possible in a week.

get your shit together

Cleared out & organized several areas in my mom’s house, leading to better space and flow for her, producing enormous piles of things to go to Value Village and Hope House, which I then promptly took to said locations, instead having them kicking around and annoying both of us for weeks & leaving the projects feeling unfinished. Speaking of unfinished projects, spent a fair amount of time working on her filing, which was completely organized for her use and utterly opaque to me, involving a number of drawers in every room in the house which I am slowly consolidating to a single filing cabinet.

Deep cleaned my kitchen and bathroom, tossed expired food, washed the shower curtains (how on earth do those get so gross so quickly is always my question—should I get one of those fabric liners instead of the plastic kind? does it make any difference at all?), took my beloved car through the car wash & vacuumed her thoroughly, sorted the enormous pile of unread books, pulling out the ones that are vaguely categorized as ‘next’ into a single towering stack next to my desk, oiled the various wood things that require such tender ministrations (the board that is now my desk, the butcher block kitchen counters), cleaned and organized my entire desk area so it would feel nice and fresh the next time I sat down to work, thoroughly weeded several beds that will now need to be mulched, trimmed the plum branches that hang too close to the driveway when it rains & the shrub that was blocking my mom’s living room window.

Made a small pilgrimage to the Ace Hardware in Mount Vernon which happened to have the battery for my lawnmower, finally allowing me to mow both the front and the back yards without having to stop to recharge, and also the bird bath I’ve been looking for, priced quite reasonably, and heavy as shit. I seemed to be at a hardware store of one kind or another every other day the whole week, running the gamut from Lowes to Home Depot to Ace Hardware for whatever small things were on my list, including a set of drill bits that was explained to me in loving detail by one of the most charming hardware store employees I’ve ever met, which I am now convinced hold some sort of secular blessing to be bestowed upon what I drill with them.

eat good

Pasta salad my beloved, inspired by J: hot Italian sausage, artichoke hearts, two or three kinds of olives, roasted red peppers, cherry tomatoes, raw zucchini sliced very thin, mozzarella balls &/or cotija cheese, dressed with a little garlic mayo, perhaps with a bit of anchovy ground into it, a few hot pepper flakes, a garnish of fresh basil.

Chicken salad, with Costco’s rotisserie chicken, procured in a brave and daring run during the busiest Costco hours & well worth the effort: tiny pieces of apple, golden raisins & cashews, over fresh spinach, with a few tomatoes that are finally becoming their best selves.

Breakfast with my dear friends, finally catching up with them after several long months: the exact same cheddar-sausage-mushroom omelette I’ve been getting at Arlis for nearly half my life, with two little fluffy pancakes on the side.

FRUIT SEASON has truly begun, Goods Produce is open, and so far I’ve had Rainier cherries (perfect), strawberries, raspberries, and a big bowl of exquisite apricots currently ripening on my counter. I’ve also become slightly addicted to mangoes, which have been cheap as shit at Trader Joe’s, and discovered that my city is finally big enough to have a mango guy outside the Mexican grocery store in my neighborhood, which I plan to investigate at the earliest possible opportunity.

The highlight, culinarily, was the meal I had at Storia Cucina, which I’ve wanted to go to for literal years: a mocktail with lime and rosemary, sourdough bread from their 1971 sourdough starter, tiny perfect clams in fragrant broth, tender, savory meatballs, and—finally—arancini (little rice balls filled with sauce and cheese & then fried for those who are uninitiated), the first time I’d seen them on a menu since I moved west. It was all delicious, and I can’t wait to go again. I ate all of it with a very old friend who was in town to get on a sailboat for a 10 day trip in the San Juans, and the combination of a beautiful summer evening, his company, and the ridiculously good food was simply a delight.

do things

This was the hardest category to get my head around. Like all of us, I tend to fall into my West World robot track, trundling to the same places at the same times, part habit and part simple existential exhaustion making novelty seem like more trouble than it’s worth. So I went to the movies—I hadn’t been to the movies since Covid, can you believe that? I used to love to go, seeing everything from weird indie shit to giant sci-fi epics, but first I couldn’t go, and then it simply disappeared from my horizon, the way that things do when you stop paying attention.

I saw I Love Boosters, and frankly if you like going to the movies you should too—it’s probably going to be great on the small screen, but it’s so bright and colorful and wildly unexpected that seeing it on the big one was a real treat. The soundtrack is a banger, the acting is delicious, including the exquisite Keke Palmer, Demi Moore as the deliciously over the top fashion designer, and LaKeith Stanfield who I will describe only as a spoiler. The audience was super into it, and I had kind of forgotten what it was like to get carried along on the current with everyone else, to feel conscious of their enjoyment as well as my own. I want to go back soon.

I’ve written to you a number of times about expeditions to the Seattle Art Museum, but they’ve all been solo for some time, and this round I got to have C with me, who turns out to be a perfect art buddy. She’s an artist, so she’s got all kinds of thoughts on mediums & different schools of things that would never occur to me, our opinions are different enough to be interesting without making each other miserable, and we had about the same level of stamina: in this case, one long visit to the particular exhibit (Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest), really diving into it, a couple of strikes out into other galleries, and departure before the glassy fatigue of too much input starts to take hold.

We ended up having lunch at a random little plaza in Everett, a banh mi place where we discovered that the county health department was inspecting it literally as we sat down, but the sandwiches were delicious and as far I know neither of us suffered any kind of ill effect.

make things

There’s a particularly stubborn corner of the front yard, right next to the steps, where there used to be a beautiful mature lavender, brushing almost against the door, until it had to get removed during the great sewer line debacle a couple of years ago. Since then, that spot has languished sadly—I can’t plant anything there with deep roots, because of the sewer line clean out, and it’s mostly underneath the porch roof, so shallow-rooted things tend to dry up and die without the rainfall other areas get. I thought of a container of some kind, but everything I like, particularly these very chic old stone troughs I kept looking at, was either too small to look right or tremendously expensive.

I found a tutorial for hypertufa planters, using plastic molds, that I thought might create something similar enough to be satisfying at a fraction of the price, and that is how I found myself spending much of the past week elbow deep in a mixture of cement, peat moss, and & perlite, troweling away until it became the desired texture (wet oatmeal, for the curious) and smacking it into various configurations. You do have to wear a mask, because of the cement dust, which is a sweaty proposition in this weather, but it is satisfying to make something entirely new, and utterly out of my normal skill set, something I can fill with dirt and flowers, look at & know that it did not exist before I made it. Also, as I told J, there’s almost no waste to the project, just a few strips of irretrievably dirty plastic sheeting, which is a pleasant change from some of my less successful ventures into making things.

and then the week was over—

—and I had a terrible case of Sunday scaries at the prospect of picking everything back up again and rolling on. Does this mean the part-vacation was a failure? No, not at all, although god it would be good to have a real week off, away and free of responsibility, but since that’s simply impossible right now, this really was the best I could do.

I’m planning to take a couple of long weekends this summer, for similar shenanigans, maybe a little time off around my birthday, a few mornings for swimming when it warms up a little more. Lately J & I keep using the phrase a change is a good as a rest, when of course it isn’t, we all know that, but if a change is all you can get, you might as well make the most of it you possibly can.

More soon, and in the meantime may you have the pleasure of making something that did not exist before, no matter how inexpertly assembled.