We have a week left. Somehow I ‘ve left it a week, or more, since my last post. I didn’t mean to. I meant to post and post lots and lots and frankly didn’t think through the logistics of moving house/continent/everything when considering whether I would be able to do that. Particularly when simultaneously having to take temporary but long-distance leave of some of the best friends I’ve ever had the pleasure to make.

I even started posting this first thing yesterday. SEVEN - this post was called, with me meaning to write a short post every day from now until we actually leave. Again, I’m quite glad that I got led off back into packing and clearing out and didn’t post it, because let’s face it, it would have been stupid to promise to post once a day in the run up to this move, I’m in enough of a haze/funk/cloud/daze/stressyshoutywhinefest already without that.

Some things, though, some points that I feel I should be keeping hold of:

1) I went on a cycling tour of Napa Valley the other week. I keep meaning to mention it, because it was a brilliant, sunny, happy day and I would happily relive it any time at all, apart from the fact that there’s no funny way to write it - however I try and angle it I just sound ridiculously happy, so that, perhaps, is all there is to it. No, wait, actually, there is a way I could write it, but it would involve so many grape wine puns as to be bordeauxing on the insane, so I’ll be reislingable and keep it all bottled up.

b) In the middle of all the officialness and business and ridiculousness, there was time to go for a walk to cover some more of the map that has been important to me while living here. Basically, I needed to cover the Northern most rim of the city and one particular edge of Golden Gate park in order to make the map look, in silhouette, with all other information taken out, completely like San Francisco. Three and a half hours and 14 miles and a few episodes of This American Life helped draw out the lines that I hadn’t already covered.

3) For someone with no piercings (not even ears), not much talent for self-adornment and with no rings, bangles or other jewellery, I now have a rather large amount of ink implanted in myskin until I a) die or b) choose to have it painfully extracted from my body (it will be “a)” incidentally). More of this in another post. I know a lot of people don’t like girls with tattoos, but having lived here, and seen the way it is used to celebrate the spirit and form of a person’s body (how Californian, yes), I really, really do. And that is the end of that argument.

4) All my belongings, all of the things we have accrued in the last two years, are now either sold, given away, or placed into boxes marked GARAGE SALE, PACK, or SF STORAGE. The last one, in this case, just means friends who’ve agreed to keep stuff until we’re next in (or passing through) town. With some of the work I’ve got at the moment, this might (cross fingers) mean a couple of weeks.
It’s still a horrible process, though. I find myself clinging on to the bits of personal possessions and signs of a life still lived here with the very tips of my short fingernails. When My Beloved removed the comfort objects and vitamins and photos and things of life from my bedside table as part of a general house sweep to sort out remaining clutter, there was a tearful stand-up row for half an hour. This is not a rational time. (But good to know for the future: my bedside table is sacred until the last minute in any house. FACT).

5) The cats are being lovely and not at all freaked out by the disappearing stuff and very loving and I only hope that this time next week, when we’re in a new country, a new house, and after all going through a ridiculous amount of flying, they will be equally lovely. My experience says they won’t. But after a week or two, hopefully, they will.

6) Moving is coinciding, unexpectedly and annoyingly, with a sporting event that I have got unexpectedly and wholeheartedly into. I’ve slowly been getting to know and like baseball, and the fact that the San Francisco Giants are currently in the World Series has been driving the city insane with excitement. If the series stretches to its maximum (it’s a best of seven games, so it could be over in four) then we will be on the plane for one game, and not able to see two others, and certainly not be able to join in with the celebrations. This is annoying.

7) Tomorrow, as a farewell to the city, we have rented a limousine to drive around the city with our closest friends and take pictures at our favourite places. I am so excited about this I’m not sure how I’ll concentrate on inventorying all the contents of the boxes of books we’re sending over. Somehow, sadly, I will manage.

I just made - and ate - the greatest chili I have ever made. And I’ve made a fair few chilis, and they’ve all been pretty good, but this one? Superlative, frankly. Which sadly doesn’t mean I’m going to stop going on about it. Not for a few sentences at least.

It. Was. Brilliant.

Sadly, I’ll never be able to replicate it. For now begins the series of meals made entirely out of ‘whatever needs using out of our cupboards’. I think we may have lucked out with the first one, though, it had all the best stuff in, too.

I am, in this, as so many other things, my mother’s daughter. My mum refers to these kind of meals as “Barge Meals”. Dating from when I was a child, and we used to go on canal holidays, the last day and a half meals would be made up of the leftovers from the other five and a half days, combined with all the things we hadn’t got round to eating already. This made for either a) Spectacular one-pot dishes filled with a hundred flavours or b) A spread of bits and pieces, warm and cold, in a Very British Tapas kind of way, out of which the most spectacular sandwiches in the history of creation could be formed.

Moving house - as I’ve now done, oooh, about once a year for the last 15 or so, basically, sometimes more - the bizarre culinary creations demanded by neurotic need not to waste ingredients are one of my favourite things.

I will never again be able to replicate this chili. But, for myself, for the record, it was turkey based, with tomatoes, a bag of frozen ‘tuscan style’ vegetables, a bottle of guinness, the ends of two jars of barbecue sauce from the fridge, watered down with beef stock, half a tube of ‘fresh chopped morrocan herb mix’ (also fridge), the end of this morning’s espresso jug, some spicy seasoning I bought in new orleans, and a handful of at least eight other herb and spice jars.

And it was AMAZING.

reposted from snailrprojct.com

I must apologise for my quietness on the snailr front. People are still recieving cards - although I’m aware many haven’t arrived at all. Which is sucky beacuse a) I know I sent one to every one of the 160+ people on my list and b) I got so panicky about getting postcards into mailboxes when I got the opportunity/found a mailbox near a station that I forgot to put the small number notation I was marking on some of them and didn’t take a picture of many. 

And now we’re in the middle of moving house, and collecting all the lovely emailed pictures, links, blogposts, tweets and flickr pics that people have sent me of their postcards becomes a more onerous task by the day. I think it all might have to wait until we’re safely on that other continent, then I can spend some time packaging it all up like a christmas present.

Le sigh.

Still, many many thanks to everyone who has sent me a picture, and an enormous pout to people who haven’t received a card - I only wish I’d taken pictures of them all so I could send it digitally to you instead. Bother. Still, that’s the beauty of the postal system, and a lesson learnt for next time.

Meanwhile, I’ve included the picture of the postcard sent to Marie Nash at the top of the post here because it happens to include one of my favourite of all Bobbie’s illustrations for the cards (he did about half of the front, I did the others), and this link: in which JonnyB proudly displays the card I sent him, which , I am ashamed to say, was mainly a riff on the current anti-meth campaign in the heartland states of America being quite a lot like a favourite oven chips ad campaign from the eighties. “Mummy or meth?” indeed.

I was just coming out of the gym, onto the quiet little street a couple of blocks from my house, in our quiet little neighbourhood., in the middle of the day.

Quite unexpectedly, I was met by this:

Which is not the most dignified position to discover a bear in. Well, it’s not a dignified position to find anyone in, but the bear looks pretty embarrassed.

Still, it does add more fuel to the all important and ongoing “Do bears shit in the woods?” debate.

Interestingly, this is not the first confuddling thing I have happened upon on this street. Here is something I came across the other week.

All I can think is that something either Very BAD or something Very GOOD has happened in this place:

Very very good, or very very bad.
Nothing inbetween.

We went to the beach. To a beach with a pier and a nice wooden boardwalk and a funfair. We went there ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of one of my favourite four-year-old friends (on the occasion of him becoming a four year old), although since he was quite a lot too short to go on most of the rides I wanted to go on, it could be argued that I actually mainly went to Santa Cruz boardwalk for ‘larks’ and ’shenanigans’ with a touch of ‘lollygagging’, AND fourth-birthday celebrations.

So alongside the laser tag and the log flumes and the the rollercoasters that rattled around the track like they were attached with spit and sellotape and led to me uncontrollably screaming “OH FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST WE’RE GOING TO DIE WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP NOW” (after remembering to check that there wasn’t a child sitting directly in front of me, of course. Well, sometimes remembering, anyway), we also went on some children’s rides.

Of the small-person rides we took there was one that was really quite scary. It was a train that went through a tunnel, and a mess of caves filled with enormous grotesque rubber-faced cave people with parts of their extremities painted in florescent paint so that they glowed, eerily, in the dark. Disembodied voices came from nowhere, laughter rang through the stale air, bouncing against the plastic walls and bloated and distorted cavepeople and, frankly, I was surprised they allowed children to go on it at all.

My little friend sat between me and his mother, bouncing at first, as excited to go on this ride as he was to go on any other, amplified by the fact we had to get on a train to do it and, well, he’s a four-year-old boy, and THIS IS A TRAIN.

As the ride began, though he stopped bouncing, and became quiet, as he looked around at the weirdness in the dark.

After a couple of minutes, his hand slipped into mine.
And it stayed there the whole ride, holding tightly, and saying things like:

“It’s ok, Anna. It’s not that scary. It’s only made up. Don’t be frightened. It’s not real. You can open your eyes if you like, it will be ok.”

Yep.
I’m a HUGE wuss.

I have a new pet.

Not one I’ll be moving back with me, nor one I have to pet, nor feed, and he’ll never be allowed in the same room as the cats, because they would eat him. In a single bite.

But regardless, I love hummingbirds, I consider them extremely good luck (or at least have happened to have been around them at points of interesting changefulness in the last couple of years), and if I realised they lived in my bit of the city (quite windy, high-ish up), I would have bought a feeder and hung it in the tree behind the house the very second I moved here.

But I have a hummingbird. His name is Flappy, though that is not set in stone. It might well turn out that her name is Flappy. Whatever the case hummingbirds are ridiculous. Only a finger tall, and buzzing around in zips and zigs and zags and fits and starts, I never realised they stopped at all. BUt it turns out they do, and when they do, they sing a weird song that sounds like this “peepy peep whoopy peepapoopy doop” and I love them very, very much. And the fact that they live in the city here (and remind me of one of the most insanely amazing roadtrips we’ve taken while here) pleases me greatly.

Yet weirdly, that in itself was not enough to make me cry - though fuck only knows that it doesn’t take much this week.

But looking it up in the bird books in the ‘probably take’ pile and discovering from them that its name is the “Anna’s Hummingbird”? And pictures to prove it?

Well, that pushed me straight over the edge.

Though we made the decision about moving back a fair while ago now, or so it seems, and started getting preparations in order (new flat, tickets, cat removal and all of those things) weeks ago, this weekend was the first that we started physically preparing - taking apart pieces of furniture, sorting books into ‘definitely take’, ‘probably-take’ ‘possibly take’ and ‘leave/sell/give away/where-the-hell-did-we-get-this-anyway-do-you-remember?’ piles, and having open houses where good friends and nice people pop in and see if there’s anything they can take off our hands before we go to the trouble of slinging it all on craigslist.

It’s been making me very sad. Of course it is. This is natural. Building a life - or a home - anywhere, no matter how tentatively, is a long and laborious process, and having to deconstruct it all feels like building a really impressive model of ancient rome out of dozens of thousands of lego bricks for a school project, only to discover (on the morning you’re due to take it for show and tell at school) that way too big to get out of the house, so you’re going to have to take it all apart again and rebuild it on the other side of the door.

But there are lots of things going on, I just keep forgetting to note them down anywhere, and we’re doing a bunch of exciting and important (to us) things, alongside trying to make sure we keep a steady flow of work going here, AND when we get back in the UK (and realising the first few weeks back are going to be a clusterfuck, no one commissions in december, so we’re going to have to hit the ground running to cover ourselves). So for the next few weeks I’m going to try and make sure to blog a bunch of little things as and when they happen.

See, the postcards HAVE taught me something (apart from teaching me not to decide to have an enormous project that I’m not going to have time to collate if, say, I’m moving country a few weeks afterward) short updates, while you think of them = good.

Right, so that’s what I’m going to do then. Lots of short posts over the next few weeks. Sorted.
(She said, setting herself another deadline-based project/promise mere weeks before moving country. Well done, anna).

There are many places that got pointed out by the trails and rails people, the volunteers of the National Park service, as we were chugging through the country on a very slow train. They pointed out mountains, and sites of battles, and rivers, and sites of deaths and births and told us how high the peaks were, how long the tunnels, who put them there and how.

But the best place that was pointed out - well, the second best, but I’m waiting to see whether the postcard I sent about it reached its intended recipient - the best thing OTHER than that thing they pointed out, was the world’s biggest egg.

“Coming up in a few minutes…” said the nice man who’d joined the train in Seattle and would be joining us until Portland with his nice lady partner trailnrailer to inform everyone in the observation car of things visible from the route “…is something really special.”

“…See in the late 19th and early 20th century this was one of the biggest chicken towns in the west. Not as in ‘they were all cowardly’, as in, there were a LOT of chickens. And every year they used to celebrate that by having an egg festival. Well, sooner or later, there wasn’t so much money in chickens anymore - not as in ‘the chickens they produced used to actively contain or expel money’, that would have been ridiculous, just as in the sense of ‘the business of chicken farming wasn’t as profitable as it had once been’.”

I may be taking some liberties with his narration a little. But it is what I remember him saying, so that is the way it is.

“Coming up, on the right of the train, in juuuuust a moment….”

…

“Aaaaaaaaaany second now…”

…

“If you’ll just beeeeeear with me…”

…

“Ok, well, that was a different town, but the point is, coming up really soon, there is the world’s biggest egg. It was built to commemorate the town’s annual chicken festival, and all the cultural and artistic chicken and/or egg related cultural activities encompassed in that. And you’ll see it in juuuuuuuuuust aaaaaaaaa….”

….

“…Alright fine. Whatever. Of course, the festival still happens now, although they have to import chickens - and eggs - in order to continue the festival in any way at all, although they’ve now decided to re-brand the city as a tourist destination for people inter… OH! wait here it is, folks!…”

“…The world’s biggest egg!”

“It’s not really an egg, it’s a shape of an egg made out of fibre glass…”

It was a pretty big white fibre glass thing.

“…I’m not that sure it’s still the biggest either, now we mention it…”