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~ The adventures of Richard and Julie Lary

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Monthly Archives: March 2008

Visitors and Visiting

26 Wednesday Mar 2008

Posted by rajalary in Travel

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In February, Rich’s long-time friend – Mike Pomeranz — visited him from Jerusalem. Mike and Rich both graduated from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Academy in 1976 then joined the Glendale Police Department. Throughout the years, they’ve kept in touch and were finally able to reconnect in person after twenty or so years!
 
After picking Mike up at the SeaTac (Seattle Tacoma) Airport, they headed to Port Townsend to see Stacey on the Adventuress, a tall ship she’s been working on since October. They then took a ferry to Anacortes to see our lot and wandered through a local park, where Mike posed by a very large Native woman holding a Chinook (salmon).
 
After spending the night in Mount Vernon, they zipped down to Kirkland. That evening, all three of us went to a fabulous Indian restaurant and ate some very unusual vegetarian dishes. I had a yummy cheese curry. Both Mike and Rich had large divided trays of food with small servings of curry, yoghurt, vegetables, and dessert.
 
The owner of M. Pomeranz Bookseller, Israel’s premier English Judaic bookstore, Mike was interested in seeing the Elliot Bay Book Company. So after dinner, we headed to the historic Pioneer Square District in downtown Seattle where the Elliot Bay Book company is located. The store looks to have started as a small, hole-in-the-wall hippie bookstore with handmade cedar shelves set on bricks with posters to cover the holes, pipes, and electric cables in the exposed-brick walls. As neighboring stores closed, the bookstore expanded until today it takes up an entire block. It reminded me of Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon.
 
I scrambled up to the "sale book" section in a little loft and quickly found a book on Indian cooking, which Mike (thank you) purchased for me. I need to visit Uwajimaya or another local Asian food store to get the necessary spices and sauces like garam masala and asafoetilda to replicate the Matar Paneer (green peas and cheese curry) I had that night.
 
A few weeks after Mike’s visit, we flew to Bullhead City, Arizona to see Rich’s father, Ted. Also visiting Ted was his son Chris and his wife, Teri. Rich couldn’t remember the last time he saw Chris and only remembered that he was "nice."
 
Well, Ted has a very dry, quick sense of humor. Chris (sorry Ted) is three times funnier and can find humor and irony in the mundane and ordinary. Add a cupful of Ted, a healthy dose of Rich’s propensity for puns, insert Teri’s hysterical Italian wit and flamboyance and you have four days of hilarity. I laughed, giggled and chortled until my sides hurt!
 
The first day we were there, Rich and I had an afternoon to ourselves while Ted and Chris drove to Las Vegas to pick up Teri at the airport. We drove to Oatman, an old mining town, to pester the wild burros who are descendants of the burros brought by the miners in the late 1800’s. The burros all have attitude and will only pay attention if you whip out a dollar to buy them a bag of carrots. Over the years, they’ve developed super long ears to better hear the crinkle of money in tourists’ wallets!
 
Several new shops opened since we were last in Oatman. Behind one shop was a fenced in area with several huge tortoises. I think they were African Spurred Tortoises. Of course, I couldn’t resist petting them and thoroughly examining their scaly feet and long toenails. They’re kinda’ pigeon-toed and walk on their sharp claws.
 
In spite of the popular belief that the hare beat the tortoise, the tortoises in Oatman moved surprisingly fast and after a few minutes, I came to the conclusion that one of them was "chasing" me and not coincidentally walking the same direction. I can’t say whether he was territorial and simply determined to evict me from his fenced-in area or enjoying the attention since the scowl on his solemn faces never changed.
 
The following day, Saturday, we went to a flea market in the parking lot of the Mojave tribe Avi Casino on the Colorado River. It was fun wandering among the booths and talking to the people; Rich wasn’t impressed and thought most of the stuff was junk.
 
We then headed to Katherine’s Landing, a resort and nature area on the Colorado River and the site of Katherine Mine, an abandoned gold mine… one of the many in the area. I’m particularly fond of Katherine’s landing because the water is crystal clear and you can walk down the marina and feed giant carp. If you get on your hands-and-knees and toss out a couple of pieces of bread or other food, you can pet the carp with their huge, tooth-less gapping mouths and silly little whiskers. Most are light to dark gray. A few, like their koi cousins, are yellow, orange, white, and black.
 
They’re very friendly (or maybe just hungry) and swim up to the dock. When they swarm, they can lift a duck out of the water. It’s not unusual to see a duck walking across the backs of a group of carp.
 
That evening, Rich made his "famous" macaroni and cheese along with stewed tomatoes. My contribution was sampling (and sampling) the cheese along with making tossed green and fruit salads. While eating dinner, we watched the "Killing of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." It was a rather strange movie.
 
The next day, we visited a few places then found ourselves sitting outside at Ted’s house, sipping libations and talking for hours before Rich and I dashed to the store to buy the "stuff" to make spaghetti with puttanesca sauce, garlic bread and a large salad.
 
It being our last night together with Chris, Terri and Ted, we talked until nearly 1 a.m. No one wanted to say "good-bye." Just when the conversation started to wane, another topic would be introduced and the laughter and sharing of stories would start all over again.
 
After a restful night, Rich and I packed up and headed to Hoover Dam, Boulder City and the surrounding area before driving down the Las Vegas strip on the way to the airport. The strip is surreal with so many large, flashy, themed high-rise hotels and casinos that seem to change every few years. Twenty year old casinos are now "so yesterday" and are being torn down to make way for higher priced and more luxurious establishments. Treasure Island and the Mirage now look shabby next to the Wynn Las Vegas, Bellagio and the Venetian.
Mike looking very small in Anacortes  Mike, Stacey and Rich in Port Townsend  Colorado River  Cool sculpture at Hoover Dam, commemorating the men who placed dynamite  Hoover Dam  Julie tormenting a tortoise in Oatman, Arizona  Rich with a mule from Oatman, Arizona

Why I’m Miserable

16 Sunday Mar 2008

Posted by rajalary in Seattle

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It’s been six months since Rich and I bought our Kirkland house. Why I wanted to buy a low-maintenance townhouse since we need to do extensive work on the Mount Vernon house, Rich wanted a house with a yard. We look at houses for about two hours then Rich’s attention span wanned and he decided to purchase our Kirkland fixer-upper. It’s been six months and look at the progress… below.
 
Yes sir. Much of my stuff has been packed for going on two years. Rich doesn’t care because he life revolves around having two pairs of jean, some tee- and sweat-shirts, working from home (his office is decked out with what he needs), going to Safeway to buy his lunch (he rarely buys anything for "us" since he only needs food for his immediate needs), purchasing music CDs and tools, and having a place to sleep. Nothing else is important to him. He could essentially live in a one-room hut and be happy.
 
Meanwhile, I long to be have a nice place to live and to be surrounded by my pictures, collectables and furniture.
 
Most of our rooms continue to bare light bulbs for lights, limited or no flooring, and boxes everywhere. Take a look.
 
Dinning rooom with no lights or flooringFamily room with boxes of flooring and other boxesHallway with no flooring or doorsLiving room with tools and not flooringRich's officeStairs inside house

A Weekend in Tacoma

03 Monday Mar 2008

Posted by rajalary in Travel

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Last weekend, we zipped down to Tacoma for some cultural enrichment and relaxation. Less than an hour south of Seattle, Tacoma is the second largest city in the Puget Sound with a recently renovated downtown, featuring the University of Washington, Tacoma, several museums, a beautiful waterfront, dramatic convention center, and the Tacoma Link, an electric light rail that whisks people to the Tacoma Dome and other destinations and transportation, including Amtrak, Greyhound and Sound Transit.
 
Opting to be tourist, we leisurely drove down to Tacoma, stopping at Shari’s for a large breakfast, complete with the Saturday paper and elderly waitresses with fluffed up hair who called us "Hon," and chatted among themselves about local events. It was a radical departure from our typical on-the-go breakfast of an Egg McMuffin and flavored coffee from am pm.
 
I’ve never given much thought to Tacoma. It’s simply another traffic jam to-and-from Seattle. It always appeared very industrial and bleak with the dull gray Tacoma Dome and lots of refinery and manufacturing-like complexes. I was pleasantly surprised, however, as we drove through downtown. I could hardly wait for Rich to park the car so I could get out.
 
In the late 90’s, the University of Washington (UW) opted to renovate some of Tacoma’s oldest remaining industrial structures for campus classrooms and offices. No doubt, the University architects received numerous accolades for their innovative approach to melding the old with the new. The campus is a brilliant and scintillating blend of old brick buildings, industrial pipes, new additions, plazas, and walkways that run along and cross railroad tracks that divide the campus.
 
The former Snoqualmie Falls Power Company’s transformer house became the campus library. The Mattress Factory and West Coast Grocery buildings, their names still painted on the rough brick exteriors, were gutted and made modern.
 
Looking towards the Glass Museum from the University of Washington  University of Washington in Tacoma  Dale Cuhuly sculpture at the University of Washington
 
The building of the University spurred additional improvements in the area, including turning other manufacturing buildings into trendy lofts, added pedestrian friendly parks and light rail, and cleaning up the waterway from decades of industrial waste and abuse.
 
Within walking distance is the Museum of Glass, Washington State History Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Union Station, Tacoma Trade and Convention Center, Broadway Center for the Performing Arts (three historical theaters), and many restaurants, art galleries, and boutiques.
 
We wandered around the area for an hour before the opening of the Museum of Glass. In that time, I used up a camera battery taking pictures!
 
Chihuly Everywhere you Turn
If you know anything about glass, you know that Dale Chihuly is "the man." His work has ricocheted glass blowing from collections in art connoisseurs’ cabinets to public displays that can be enjoyed by everyone. His pieces are imaginative, gigantic, fragile, and seemingly impossible to create. If you’ve walked into the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, you’ve seen one of his sculptures/chandeliers.
 
Having grown up and stayed in the Pacific Northwest, Chihuly pieces appear in buildings throughout the area from Lincoln Square in Bellevue, Washington to Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Walking around the UW campus in Tacoma, we looked up to see a dramatic sculpture of red glass in one of the buildings.
 
Tacoma Union Station, now a U.S. court house has many of his glass pieces. The large windows at the back of the station are dotted with large red, orange and yellow platters of glass, which resemble psychedelic jelly fish.
 
Hung from the rotunda is a jumble of curly glass forms in a multitude of colors. Many of his pieces take on this form and it’s a mystery how he holds them together. A similar piece is on another wall. This one has a circular structure on which the glass is wired.
 
Union Station by the Natural History Museum  Reflections in the front entrance of Union Square  Dale Cuhuly pieces in the windows of Union Station
 
A short walk from Union Station is the Chihuly Pedestrian Bridge, which spans six lanes of a freeway along with three sets of railroad tracks and a waterfront access route. Completed in 2002 at a cost of $3.9 million, the "bridge of glass" showcases more than $12 million worth of blown glass, created by Chihuly and his team.
 
Dale Cuhuly Walkway of Glass  Dale Cuhuly wall of glass
 
Across the bridge is the Museum of Glass, which on the day we went, featured the work of Lino Tagliapietra, considered the world’s greatest living glassblower. At eleven, he started working full-time in the glassmaking industry in Murano, Italy. Sixty-three years later, he’s still creating art and exploring new techniques from large display pieces like those done by Chihuly to breathtaking, traditional venetian wine glasses, and large bowls and vases of varying colors and techniques. Unlike Chihuly, however, he seems to have changed his style every few years. What he produced in the 60’s is radically different from his later pieces. In a film we watched on him, they elaborated on his ability to constantly come up with new ideas.
 
The Tagliapietra exhibit comprised most of the museum’s galleries. The other half of the museum, the Hot Shop, is in a 90-foot, tilted steel cone. Inside is an amphitheater where you can watch glassmakers at work. Throughout the year, sometimes weekly, a visiting artist can be seen in the Hot Shop. The Saturday we were there, an artist from England (or maybe Scotland) was creating a black and white sculpture with the help of six of the resident glassblowing team. They were using three of the six available furnaces with one group making the base, another creating a vase and a third forming a strange stem that emerged from the side of the vase.
 
History Can Be Eye-Opening
Hungry after a morning of site- and glass-seeing, we hopped on the Tacoma Link and headed to the Tacoma Dome. Across the street, in old cargo warehouses, were numerous shops and small restaurants. An enthusiastic salesperson roped us into ordering from his Thai fish and chips establishment. Normally, we won’t eat fried fish, but his pitch was very convincing. And we weren’t disappointed.
 
Rich had a plate piled high with lightly battered fish filets with fries. I had two pieces of fish with a Caesar salad. It was very decadent and delicious!
 
Our hunger satiated, we took the Link back to downtown and the Washington State History Museum. I was anticipating zipping through the museum, but we barely saw everything before the doors closed. The more interesting exhibits were about "Hard Times and Homefront" and "Wageworker’s Frontier." The former showcased Seattle’s Hooverville shantytowns during the Depression, Japanese internment camps, and women having to join the work force, building airplanes for Boeing and other defense contractors during World War II.
 
"Wageworker’s Frontier" illustrated the challenges of utilizing Washington natural resources and related industries, including logging, shingle mills (very dangerous work), fishing and canning (primarily done by Chinese immigrants), farming (orchards and wheat), and mining in Roslyn, Washington.
 
The best part of the museum, however, was the traveling exhibit, "Art of the Stamp."It featured 100 small works of original art, which are used to create postal stamps. There were a couple of paintings by Norman Rockwell and other famous artists. The detail of some of the images was mind-boggling. Many took months (and several took years) to draw.
 
Our favorite stamps were done by Michael J. Deas and Mark Hess. They created miniature portraits that must have been painted with brushes, one or two bristles in size. Walter DuBois Richards has created 37 stamps and creates impossibly detailed drawings of buildings. Howard Koslow paintings are like photographs. It took great discipline for me to stop staring at his lighthouse paintings.
 
Our motel was south of Tacoma, near one of the many casinos that line the I-5 corridor. It took about 15 minutes for us to slip off our shoes, sip some cola then curl up on the bed and fall asleep! We woke an hour later then went out for Mexican food before calling it a day.
 
Zoo on a Point
The next morning, we drove to the 702-acre Point Defiance Park on the Puget Sound. Originally, a military reservation, the park was opened to the public in 1888. Along with containing the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, it has numerous formal gardens (Japanese, iris, Northwest native, fuchsia, rose, rhododendron, etc.), hiking and running trails, salt water beaches with a marina, pagoda and lodge that can rented for events, an old fort, logging museum, and much more.
 
We drove around the park until the zoo opened. We were one of the first to the gate and were greeted by an elegant peacock outside the gates. He was obviously very used to humans because he casually walked around even though I "chased" after him. The peahen was meeker and stayed in the bushes.
 
I was excited about visiting the zoo because it has two beluga whales that you can view from underwater. There are only four zoos in the United States that have beluga whales… and at one of those zoos, the beluga whales refused to swim where anyone could clearly see them! Let’s put it this way, we visited the whale enclosure twice!
 
Worse, the polar bear and penguin exhibits were closed. Half of the animals were in hiding and I only saw one large cats. Dumb zoo!
 
In fairness to the Point Disappointment [Defiance] Zoo, the previous zoo that I visited was the Fort Worth Zoo, which is huge, has many fabulous animals, birds, reptiles, and water creatures, and is rated one of the top zoos in the nation.
 
Next time I want to see animals, I’m going to the Vancouver Zoo in British Columbia, Canada! And if I want to really see beluga whales, I’m going to the Vancouver Aquarium.
 
    Peacock greeter at Point Defiance Zoo  Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma    
 

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