I'm moving to Portland, OR in September, so if you're a Portland-living person, say hi! New friends for a new city are much appreciated.
constantly reading / overzealous editor / chronic paparazzo / My Little Pony-in-training / lesbian / feminist / atheist
about me & personal
& photobooth & gpoy
flickr.com/rileyanne
DON'T GIVE NONE FUCKS.
(by riley anne)
Papa & Pico: Beard Bonding Edition
Post-graduation dinner: Queens Kickshaw in Astoria.
If the idea of gourmet grilled cheese sounds like heaven to you, this is the place.
I had the gouda grilled cheese on brioche with black bean hummus, guava jam and pickled jalapenos. Papa had the gruyere on rye with pickled and caramelized onions and a fantastic caraway & napa cabbage slaw. Mom had the great hill blue on cranberry-walnut bread with prune jam and fresh pears.
Mom and I drank craft beers and Papa had a blueberry shrub. (If you’ve never had a shrub, try one. You will be pleasantly surprised.)
This is one of those places you should visit before you die, it was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life. And the atmosphere! Punk music and dim lighting and salvaged wood and lovely.
Graduation!
(crossing the stage!) (Chrissy and me with Kathy)
(me & Papa) (my lovely dress) (me & Mom)
(Ben, Rosanna, Melanie & me) (people dancing on chairs to I Will Survive)
The day before graduation, my parents and I went to The Cloisters. We take a lot of photos of each other taking photos, as you can see.
(the one where I am photographing was taken by my father, the one where I am pretending to be a tree was taken by my mother)
Picocuddletime and a lovely bouquet from my parents.
email from my father
I mentioned author Jeanette Winterson to you the other day and this morning I started Art and Lies, which opens with;
From a distance, only the light is visible, a speeding gleaming horizontal angel, trumpet out on a hard bend. The note bells. The note bells the beauty of the stretching train that pulls the light in a long gold thread. It catches in the wheels, it flashes on the doors, that open and close, that open and close, in commuter rhythm.On the overcoats and briefcases, brooches and sighs, the light snags in rough-cut stones that stay unpolished. The man is busy, he hasn’t time to see the light that burns his clothes and illuminates his face, the light pouring down his shoulders with biblical zeal. His book is a plane of glass.
and I find myself in a place I haven’t been since my youth, the place where you now reside, where everything is possible and frightening and the frightfulness is in itself addicting. I had forgotten the feeling that occurs when words turn in the mind and fill the mind’s eye with images that mesmerize, so one’s soul, unbound from the tethers of logic, can take flight.I can’t speak to the whole, as I have just started the book, but I found the first few pages delightful.I am playing a game of fetch with Pogo as I write this. I throw a treat across the kitchen floor to the dining room and he thunders across the floor to get it and brings it back to me, albeit in his belly and he is only returning in the hopes that I have more, but I’ll take the games as I find them.
My parents sent me two dozen silk bow ties…
How do I even tie one? Melanie and I are experimenting before we resort to youtube.
New favorite hobby: stalking my parents on facebook and trying to figure out which of the baby boomers are trolling and which of them are just completely inept at socializing on the internet. I’m not friends with my parents, aunts, uncles or grandparents on facebook, so I base it all on comments on public photo albums, such as this one from my parents’ trip to Tuscon last week.
My current money is on my dad trolling the shit out of everyone, and my mom being completely inept. I base this on my dad’s judgment of his sister-in-law’s like and my mom naming herself “Aunt Ann” on facebook.
Also, mom, while we’re here, we talked on the phone 3 times last week and you never mentioned being attacked by cacti…
email from my father…
When you were a child, I went over to the Z’s to pick you up and heard someone playing the piano. When Janet answered the door, she told me that it was you and wasn’t it marvelous. You weren’t playing any song, just improvising and it sounded good. Until Janet came to the door, I thought it was her and when I saw her coming (and the music hadn’t stopped), I thought it must be Mark.
…untapped skills? (Probably not.)
But he then linked to this article about an NYU psych professor with a focus on developmental cognitive neuroscience, who taught himself to play guitar because, well, he wanted to:
Compared to his Guitar Hero controller his Yamaha felt heavy and awkward. The musical scale isn’t perfectly linear. (Quick: what’s another name for C flat?) And the guitar has the same notes at different frets along different strings. “That’s something the brain doesn’t want to deal with,” he said. “There’s no one-to-one relationship on where the notes are. You have all these memory traces that interfere with one another.”
I definitely recommend checking out the whole article, it’s a very interesting (if brief) look into how the human brain works with music.
| Papa: | Maybe it'll have inspired her to clean. |
| Me: | No, it just inspired her to want babies around all the time, lots of babies. And I just want to tell her, "Listen, you're not getting grandkids for at least 10 years." |
| Papa: | Because unlike the rest of our family, your kids won't happen as accidents, they have to be planned. |
| Me: | And if they get planned the way I want them planned, I'm going to need money to do it. |
| Papa: | Which is? |
| Me: | You take the eggs from one mommy and you put them in the other mommy, and then you're BOTH mommies! |
| Papa: | Yeah, that would take money. You could always take out a life insurance policy on your parents and bump them off... |
| Me: | As long as you consent to it! |
| Papa: | [laughs his way upstairs] |
Papa at Christmas with his beard all lit up.
That Christmas special was fantastic. I love ending Christmas day with Doctor Who.
I discovered upon opening my gifts today that my parents’ method of Christmas shopping is buying things and then showing me those things while we’re out shopping together to see if I like them. 90% of the time I don’t, and then I open the gifts and they say “sorry, we bought that before we knew you didn’t wear/use/whatever that thing.” They don’t seem to understand that I appreciate the gifts no matter what, and will use them no matter what.
the haul:
- my parents staying awake to watch Doctor Who with me even though they were both exhausted from the family party
- kindle fire
- circle scarf
- oven pot (slow-cooked veg french onion soup, here I come!)
- Tegan & Sara’s Get Along
- mad sweater tights
- a hammered metal bracelet
- a collection of mini alcohol bottles, all different kinds, about 20 of them—courtesy of the family gift exchange, my dad snagged it for me
- two bottles of wine and a bottle of olive oil, keeping the olive oil and giving my mom the wine—courtesy of the family gift exchange
- cheese grater—courtesy of the family gift exchange, mom snagged it for me
Christmas was really small this year. About 25 people, maybe 30, but that’s tiny for us. Katie and her family couldn’t make it because of car trouble, Steve and his family stayed in Washington, et cetera. We skyped with Steve & Holli & their kids, which was cute. Kim (almost 20) brought her boyfriend, which I feel like shouldn’t happen until you’re engaged, but he’s a nice guy and he’s been around for a few years. Alexis (19) IS engaged, but her fiance is a Marine and currently stationed in Bahrain. Stacey (29) was rather disturbed by this because she is single, but I told her I admired that she put her career first—she’s a lawyer with her own business and she isn’t even 30, she doesn’t need a husband right now.
The gift game was great this year, though the pickings were a little lackluster. Too many sets of lotto cards, which I don’t care about at all. The funniest one was the one my dad brought: gummies soaked in everclear, hilariously disgusting. I made an alliance with my dad so he could snag the mini bottles if they got stolen from me (they did, he did) and then got the wine for myself for the sole purpose of getting the olive oil that came with them. I’m collecting kitchen things, obviously.
Excellent holiday. Great times with a great family.
My dad puts his chop on his water bottle.
“So when we come to pick you up next week, we have to drive east before we can head home. I’m standing in the Pacific on Friday and I want to get the Atlantic within the same week.”
My father is the best.
