bittersweet distractor

So, OK, ’s my birthday. My awesome Main Distractor is here, asleep atm. I am a little too warm and not quite tired enough to sleep. I received a lovely parcel a week ago from my man, with some lovely unmentionables, that was Part 1 of my birthday present, and it was a pretty damn cool present. Part 2 I got yesterday, his old laptop, being as he replaced his and mine went so utterly haywire. That’s a pretty awesome gift, too! Later today we have a loose plan to go for brunch (I’m craving Hollandaise) and then shop for a while, and then Parkside for dinner. Wheee! so I’m a spoiled girl.

Each year on my birthday I look up my TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY horoscopes, and the first one I found says:

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY (AUGUST 17). The people who love you are growing in numbers throughout this year. The new environment you visit this month will indirectly boost your finances. There’s a favorable change in your finances and by November you’re more proud than ever of the work you turn in. The winter holidays are wildly romantic. Cancer and Capricorn adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 8, 19, 40, 17 and 6.

Sounds good

The year ahead is bound to be a significant one in your life, as personal projects bear fruit and/or culminate. Love matters, finances, and social relationships have a more serious quality to them this year, and you are called upon to accept more responsibility in these areas of your life. You are bound to do this willingly and can enjoy very positive results. It is likely that you make serious headway in your studies or other mental pursuits this year. Willfulness could be a downfall, however, if you succumb to it.

Hmm.

Actress/sex symbol Mae West (1893-1980) shares your birthday today. You know how to make an entrance. You’re dramatic, forceful and very talented. You can also be explosive! You’re quick to defend your beliefs; and equally quick to take charge of any situation. You’re never petty. You always take the high road. You’re also very private. This next year could be one of the most powerful years of your life. Dream big.

Well OK then!

Very Good Taste Omnivores Hundred.

Things I’ve eaten in bold.

1. Venison (médaillons…mmmm)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding (boudin!)
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush (I love the name but I cannot bear eggplant)
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart (in four cities in two countries, at least!)
16. Époisses (no stinky cheese for me, merci)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns (char siu bao bao bao)
20. Pistachio ice cream (gelato, really)
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries (huckleberries off the bush, baby)
23. Foie gras (oh yes)
24. Rice and beans (qué bueno)
25. Brawn, or head cheese (scrapple)
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (yup)
27. Dulce de leche (oh yes)
28. Oysters (po’boys!)
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (seems unlikely somehow, but can’t recall)
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (only sweet)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (don’t enjoy cigars)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk (only in cheese, under duress)
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin (once)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine (regular, poutine italienne)
60. Carob chips (blech)
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst (ja ja ja!)
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (three out of four)
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (CHERRY!)
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (I would if I could!)
85. Kobe beef (does Wagyu count?)
86. Hare (Here, hare, here.)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate (not that I’m aware of)
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Only 77 (or 78 if you count Wagyu for Kobe).

Would have thought I’d done better than that.

Maybe you remember tristero, whose work I featured a while ago (I think she’s so talented!). She’s got a new blog and it includes links to a bunch of her gorgeous art stuff.

Nice!

no sooner did I thank the powers that be for Skype and internet than the Main Distractor lost the wifi he was hijacking. (It was beneficent and emergency hijacking: when he was originally supposed to have moved last month, he took the leap of faith and cancelled a whack of services, and when he learned that he wasn’t going to be moving on that schedule after all, he cancelled the cancellations, except he forgot that one. So aside from a little Skyping, he wasn’t using much…not downloading music or movies or anything, he’s kinda straitlaced about that kinda thing, as am I.)

So we’re back to telephone in the evening, which has a certain charm. It’s not the same though.

This too shall pass.

I’m bad at waiting. Or maybe I’m good at waiting. I don’t know. I know I hate it though. There are approximately 12 days till my Main Distractor arrives, to help me celebrate my birthday. Yay!

It doesn’t get any easier, I guess that’s all I’m saying. You may become inured to it, but that doesn’t make it any more fun. And you simply can’t think about the fact that he was originally supposed to have been here by now, permanently. Because it makes you, well, sad and or mad, and what’s the use of that?

We have lots of stuff planned for when he’s here; some involving shopping and cooking, and some involving restaurants and/or meeting up with friends, so many of whom haven’t met him yet. There are a couple of unprogrammed days, too, because while it’s nice to have plans, I usually find that I’m saying OH WE SHOULDA _______! the day before he leaves, and time’s run out. So with a little luck some of those things will occur to me before he actually leaves LOL. There will also be a great influx of Radiohead people to see the Vancouver show, which should be lots of fun! and some of them will have a chance to meet him, too.

This week is a bit fidgety, and then next week there is a hair appointment and a spa appointment (birthday traditions, you see). And me becoming ever more impatient.

Thank god for the webcam, is all I can say, and Skype. I think I would have lost my mind by now if we couldn’t talk/see each other the way we can.

I used to go to Seattle fairly often. The girls and I would go for shows, or for shopping. I’d head down with or without Vancouver Radiohead kids to meet up with Seattle Radiohead kids for shows. Lately, I haven’t been going south nearly as often. But the fact that I’ve made more acquaintance in Seattle and my friend Peter from Denmark moved there, and buying concert tickets for a few shows down there, I got my NEXUS pass so I could skip lineups and move a little more freely.

The pass got me through YVR in record time when I came home from Europe a few weeks ago, and yesterday, it enabled me to bypass a good two hours’ worth of lineup on the way to Seattle. So holy crap! I recommend it. If my Main Distractor ever gets his permanent whatnot or employment status squared away here, we are going to have to get him registered pronto. Or plan on crossing over at 4 am or something. Guess which one I prefer :p

So I headed down, made it in just under 3 hours, and met up with Pete and a friend of his from work. We picked up Pete’s gorgeous and really cool wife, whom I hadn’t met before (long overdue!) and went for a v nice supper at The Pink Door. That was delicious. Then we walked over to Key Arena, stood in a couple of lines, and missed most of Crystal Castles, who evidently had started before the ticket showtime of 8:00 pm, as their set was done at 8:15. Whoops! that was a pisser (or a pity, as Pete would say) as we both were interested in seeing them.

The Nine Inch Nails show (the floor tickets were originally intended as a birthday present for my Main Distractor but, alas, Canadian bureaucracy decided that it was not to be) was better than I expected. Not that I expected crap or anything, but while the music was about what I thought I was going to get (a little more new and less old than I would have preferred in a perfect world, but hey), the light show was phenomenal (I keep using the same adjective, so I guess it’s the right one). Radiohead put on a pretty sweet LED show on this tour, don’t get me wrong, but Trent’s light guy has better drugs than Radiohead’s guy or something, because it was on another level entirely. Here’s The Frail and Closer which doesn’t show the stuff I’m raving about, but anyway. I’ll keep looking on Youtube in the next weeks to see some of the songs later in the set, because it was really really cool. I thought the bass player, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, was stunningly good. It was a good show and if my dear sweet boy couldn’t go, I’m glad that I got to go with Pete as he really enjoyed himself too.

Made it home in three hours, including stopping for gas and stopping to read some Nexus paperwork and take out my contacts, and half of Portishead’s Third while waiting for the  border.

Just a sidenote, I just saw my spam trap, it’s full of two sorts of spam: breast enlargement spam, and promise-ring-engagement-ring-wedding-ring-wedding-dress spam.

Wha?

Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. The last time I was in Berlin, it was I think 1988, January? there was still a Wall. Rodrigo and I were an item. Rainbirds was still his band. He didn’t have a wikipedia entry yet! I was still in University. I knew about three words of German.

So a long time has passed, and I hardly saw anything I recognized this time, since I didn’t make it to KaDeWe (omg, SHOOT ME! I really should have gone. I didn’t hit the Ku-Damm at all). I speak maybe 300 words of German. HA! anyway.

First order of the day was to see my last Radiohead show. Some pics from Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide:

Radiohead has one or two fans in Berlin...

The last time the band played there was in 2001. September 11, 2001.

The steam rising from the crowd after the pouring rain stopped.

A good show.

The next few days I met up with a friend from the WGB, and he kindly showed me around. We went to the Pergamon Museum, and several photography exhibitions. We ate Japanese and Currywürst, and had a few. It was lots of fun!

All of the museums in Europe are currently being renovated!

A Long Island Iced Tea gets an umbrella? who knew?

We went to see Rodrigo’s band, Die Ärzte, at Kindl-Bühne. Radiohead sold out one night; DA sold out three.

Die Ärzte on stage. Rodrigo is on the right.

He's still pretty cute!

And Hasa got a shot of us backstage, oh the glamour

Hasa_2006 picture.

I spent an extra day in France, and was lucky enough to have a native host, chauffeur, and tour guide. And chef! I was lucky enough to eat some home cooking, including some of the best pommes frites of my entire trip. We did some sightseeing around Lille, and had a great concert at Main Square, Arras. I don’t have a lot of pictures of the concert, though. We had a pretty decent view, though; we started out sort of close, but the pushing people got too much for us, and it seemed also as though there might be some very un-Radiohead-like discord amongst the fans, so we moved back to where there was something like room to breathe.

Sigur Rós stage setup

the threatened rain just gave us a taste--not much at all

Le Kev. Sorry you're blurry!

Not blurry this time!

clouds

former Gare du Nord

Oysters, anyone?

I already wrote quite a bit about Bruges, and getting there and leaving there, but here are some photos. (All of my photos are taken with my Samsung D900, for what it’s worth, and have not been processed, although one or two have been cropped. If I use anyone else’s pics, they’ve probably used a real camera. I think mine does OK considering what it is, and how unsteady my hands are!)

houses

sculpture

A horse is a...