My Best of 2019

We are in the era of remakes, reboots and revisits. This year we finally got a Deadwood movie and we finally got a Breaking Bad movie and I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that neither makes this year’s Best Of list. Deadwood was fine but felt like an extension of season 3, which was, shall we say, not the best season of Deadwood? The characters and dialogue in Deadwood are always superb, but I don’t think the plot ever recovered from making Al Swearingen and Seth Bullock allies against another villain, one with neither the complexities nor the charm of the first. And my dear Breaking Bad simply picked up the story in the wrong spot. It jumped only far enough forward in time that we could flash back to what was happening as the series ended, with Jessie imprisoned by the neo-nazis. I knew Jesse got away and I wanted to see more of how he rebuilt his life and less – a lot less – of Todd. One thing I was not asking for in a Breaking Bad storyline was more Todd.

As always, this post contains the things I had the most fun watching, reading or listening to the previous year, whether or not they came out in 2019. All Most of the entries are new to me in 2019. And wow, I found a lot to like in 2019.

First up is:

After Life

This Ricky Gervais series was short, sweet and perfect. Ricky Gervais is hit or miss for me, and I was surprised to like this one so much, since I generally prefer to avoid the subject of death. In that genre, though, I often find that the art that deals with grief has a lot to say. And After Life said it so well. I was sobbing by the end of it, as was the main character, and not for the reasons you might think. So many series tug on the heart strings in a contrived manner, where you know you’re being manipulated, but this was so genuine and genuinely surprising. Good work.

NSFW

Barry, Season 2

Season 2 was better than season 1. It asked questions about life’s essential truths, such as: What does it mean to be honest with other people? How can you be honest with other people if you’re not being honest with yourself? How can Barry be honest and move forward in his life when acknowledging his past will end his future? It’s very dark. And still, I found one scene so morbidly funny, I had to explain to Sonja why I kept randomly laughing throughout the day.

In this scene, a gang of Chechen mobsters are about to be incinerated on a school bus. Their leader delivers the following monologue:

Since we’re all about to die in a moment, I have to be honest about something, okay? I have been deceiving you guys.

And before we die, – I have to come clean. I know you look at me and you see hard-as-nails criminal, stone-cold killer, ice man.

But, uh, this is lie. In fact, I have been lying about who I am my entire life.

Real talk? I should not be manager of crime syndicate. I should be manager of hotel – chain of hotels. Instead of being this conning man, playing the role of the ruthless gangster. I mean, that is not who I am, because – so be it.

I’m nice. I’m polite. I’m optometrist by nature, you know? But because I did not have courage to stand up and be my true self, nice guy, and instead chose pants-on-fire existence, we are all on the barbecue bus.

Sonja’s interpretation of the barbecue bus.

Chernobyl

I bought a subscription to HBO so I could watch the two-hour Deadwood movie. I stayed for Chernobyl. This 5-episode miniseries is impeccable. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not just the incredulity of the events, but the way the storytelling unfolds. I cannot say enough good things about it, and I don’t want to say too much about it, so just go watch it if you haven’t already.

First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran

I love reading about writing and this book, recommended by the New York Times, was very fulfilling. It was chewy and in-depth talk about constructing writing at the sentence level, and I loved every word. It gave me a new favorite word – nouny – and a new favorite phrase – Columbo adverbs – and if either of those piques your interest, you should definitely read this book.

The act is its own reward; do not expect applause. You must be willing to keep writing in the absence of any evidence that anyone is reading. And no use complaining either, since no one asked you to do it in the first place. The rewards of writing sentences are real, but they are long-deferred and mostly unconfirmed.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Not the movie, which is also a favorite of mine. The television series, which began this year on Hulu. It qualifies as a remake and an expansion. Mindy Kaling, whom I love, created the show. The film and the series bore very few resemblances, except for a few key shots, like a love-declaring character getting soaked in the rain, and the precise number of weddings and funerals. I heard about the show, knowing I loved the movie and Mindy Kaling, and still I didn’t watch it until late in the year when I got very bored. And how glad I am that I was bored, because I lapped up every second.

The Good Place

Speaking of preferring to avoid the subject of death, I avoided this show about the after life as long as I could. When I finally dipped my toe in the water, they had me at “fork.” When Chidi described himself as having, “directional insanity” and said that he, “once got lost on an escalator,” there was no turning back.

My Lil Cube

This is our new favorite restaurant, serving up homemade, authentic Japanese ramen. It’s local and family-run, and we go as often as once a week. The things I love have a habit of being discontinued, so if I have to single-handedly keep this restaurant in business, I’ll do it. Luckily for me, this is a pretty hoppin’ place.

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  Shoyu Chasu Ramen

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  Frothy Iced Tea

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  Vegetable Croquettes

My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary

It was great fun rediscovering the Ramona series with Sonja. We read every book in the series between last year and this. I was surprised how good the writing was and how the stories, with their emphasis on character over plot, fit right in with my adult literary proclivities. Among the shelves of Cleary books at the library were two memoirs, one which focused on her childhood years (A Girl from Yamhill) and one which focused on the college plus years (My Own Two Feet.) Both were great but I connected more with her stories of going to college and becoming a writer. Like me, she was unapologetically unathletic.

In physical education I was unexpectedly lucky, for the physical therapist decided my metatarsal arches were in need of strengthening. This put me in a remedial class where I picked up marbles with my toes while strong-arched girls ran around in the hot sun chasing a ball with hockey sticks. I was deeply grateful to my metatarsal arches for not measuring up to Chaffey’s standards and for sparing me the sweaty misery of chasing a ball with a stick under the hot sun.

My Own Two Feet, pg. 37-38

I think Beverly Cleary and I would get along swimmingly.

This Moose Belongs to Me by Oliver Jeffers

I’ve spent the last 8 years evaluating children’s literature, from the tongue-twister-on-steroids, Fox in Socks, to the mastery of Mo Willems to the Five-Minute Stories that are supposed to be appealing in their length but are just the opposite because five minutes of poor storytelling is five more than you want. This Moose Belongs to Me is, hands-down, my favorite children’s story. It is short but perfectly executed, from word choice to character development to plot and plot twist. Sonja found out at school, from one of her teachers no less, that a department store was selling the author’s characters as stuffed animals, and now we have our very own Marcel, star of the story, to carry with us wherever we go.

Much of the time, it seemed as though the moose wasn’t listening, but Wilfred knew he was. Mostly because he followed Rule 4 very well: Not making too much noise while Wilfred plays his record collection.

• 

• 

We love Marcel!

Wired for Story by Lisa Cron

Another great book on writing, this one discussing the macro-elements of storytelling, as opposed to the micro-elements in First You Write a Sentence.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, a story is not about the plot or even what happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story, as we’ll see throughout, is an internal journey, not an external one.

You’ve Got a Friend in Me and Old French Tune by Pomplamoose

I almost never like the covers/remakes of Randy Newman’s songs because they don’t understand the complexity of the harmonies and usually leave out most of the orchestration. Enter Pomplamoose with this spectacular version. I like everything about this.

This might be (gasp) better than Newman’s version

I also love this old French tune, which is new to me, and like the above, perfectly executed.

Je Me Suis Fait Tout Petit

For No One by James Taylor and Diana Krall

I also really love this cover of The Beatles’ For No One by James Taylor and Diana Krall. I don’t know when I first found this – not this year – but I never mentioned it before and I should have.

No Excuses Video by Meghan Trainor

This song is all right, but when I first discovered it – again, not this year – I couldn’t get enough of the video. I don’t watch many music videos anymore – I’m not even sure how many artists make them. But they should all strive to be this visually interesting. From the dance moves to the camera moves, I love it.

My Favorite Quote

I can’t tell you how many great lines I come across as I read. Well, I could. I could count because I write them all down. But I don’t have that kind of time. But I read the following line in The New York Times travel magazine and I’m declaring it my favorite quote of 2019:

Going through the Times’s archive of family vacation photos was a powerful reminder that what makes a family vacation great is less about where you go and how much you spend, and all about how excited you are to be there.

I’m prone to worry about whether the things we do and the places we go on vacation are the “right things to do” and the “right places to go.” I can’t answer that question, but I know that we’re all of us really, really excited to be there, so I guess we’re doing all right.

Those were some of the things I really enjoyed in 2019. Here’s hoping 2020 produces just as much good stuff!

My Birthday – 2013 Edition

20 years ago, on August 30th, 1993, The Late Show with David Letterman  debuted on CBS. I was watching Dave for the first time that night, the eve of my 15th birthday, and I’ve been watching ever since. (WARNING: Obligatory but clichéd time-going-by-too-quickly sentiment coming up!) But that couldn’t have been 2o years ago. Yesterday, maybe, but 20 years?!? Man, I must be old or something.

I was up late that night 20 years ago as my birthday treat to myself, and it got me thinking about the things we do for ourselves on our special days. Whether it be a day of peace and solitude or a night of hard partying, everyone has something they want and feel they deserve on their birthday. (WARNING: Obligatory but clichéd I’m-a-sleep-deprived-parent sentiment coming up!) I think nowadays my treat would be going to bed early instead of staying up late, for there is no longer such a thing as sleeping in, even on a Saturday, even on my birthday.

Sleeping is thankfully not the only thing I’m thinking about on my birthday. There are other traditions. I always, always try to take my birthday off from work. I don’t care what I do, so long as it’s not work. I have on a couple of occasions traveled on my birthday, but really I’d much rather be at home.

I used to like to take my birthday as a guilt-free soda day, drinking as much as I wanted of the sugary nightmare and leaving the rest of the year to keep myself in check. But some of the unfortunate happenstances of getting older are not only understanding your body better but being less able to tolerate gluttonous treats. Now I realize if I overindulge, I will crash, and who wants that on their birthday?

For the last ten years or so, I have insisted on a birthday dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory, a favorite haunt of mine. I can’t convince Shaun to go as frequently as I would like so my birthday is an occasion on which he can’t say no. This year, my dinner was marred by a long wait time thanks to a Taylor Swift concert at the nearby Tacoma Dome. The place was filled with cowboy-booted teeny-boppers carbing it up before rockin’ out.

Sometimes I try to drum up enthusiasm from my friends to dine with me or have a party, but after last year’s septic debacle, I decided to spend all of this year’s energies on Sonja’s party. Perhaps the time for parties ends when you have to throw them for yourself.

So this was a very quiet birthday celebrating with family, no stressing or housecleaning required. A pretty boring, old-person weekend day. And for that I think we can all be thankful.

What about you, dear reader(s)? What are your favorite birthday treats and traditions?

My 5th Anniversary – Belated Edition

Don’t worry! Nobody here forgot any anniversaries. To the contrary, after a couple of rocky years getting used to remembering the date, we were both on top of it this year. We just didn’t really see fit to make a big deal out of it.

We had another no-gift year. The traditional fifth anniversary gift is wood (c’mon people, keep the snickers to a minimum) and the modern is silverware. After five years of looking up this information purely for the purposes of relating it to you, dear blog reader, I have to wonder if anyone adheres to these traditions. Someone must. But why? I have other questions, such as when was the “modern” gift list instituted and what if I already have plenty of really good silverware, thank you very much?

So no wooden forks here, but about two months ago we dropped two grand on a new oven, and I actually think that is a really good anniversary gift – except for the part where we didn’t really want a new oven but had our hands forced when the old one gave up. I digress. Making a marriage work often involves making dinner, along with a number of other quotidian tasks that make up a life. So we called off the gifts. Maybe next year nothing will explode and we’ll go crazy, but on the other hand our couch is looking kind of peaked…

The traditional 5th anniversary gift: Gas Range

So there was no gift wrap involved this year, but we did treat ourselves to dinner out. I thought it might be nice to revisit a somewhat nearby but somewhat off the beaten path Italian restaurant I frequented with my parents as a kid. The place looks the same as it always did. Not one thing is different. Which means that now it’s kind of a dive.

Actually one thing is a little different – the menu. My favorite thing when I was a kid was their fettuccine alfredo with ham. I know that fettuccine is supposed to be served with chicken, but as this was how I was introduced to it, this is how I prefer it. (Actually I try to stay away from cream these days as we have a somewhat tumultuous relationship.) It was sadly absent from the menu, but the outing did spark the idea to try to recreate the dish for my daughter, who loves ham and who is supposed to be eating fatty things like cream to help her gain weight. I’m happy to report that she loved the dish I made.

So that’s it. Not a lot of hoopla. Just another year come and gone. I see that next year’s gift is supposed to be candy. Hey, I think I can swing that. Bring on year six!

Year One.

 

 

 

 

A New Attitude

Not even a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the movie Julie and Julia in which I revealed my bad attitude towards cooking. In the post, I said of the attitude (not the cooking), “I’ll work on it and get back to you though, like the good student I am.”

I don’t recall consciously working on anything, but I must say that the other day, while making Rosemary-Marsala pork chops for dinner, I had a bit of a revelation. “Hmm…” I thought. “I don’t hate this.”

It appears that I may have gotten better at cooking, through no fault of my own. I’m not entirely sure how this happened. There was some encouragement from my husband who knows not only how not to burn things but also proper cooking techniques. There was some information culled from the recipes that didn’t turn out, which has made me better at judging up front which recipes have a chance and which are destined for the trash. And there was a fair amount of repetition. Sounds like a recipe for learning to me.

As I was making these pork chops the other night, I realized that I didn’t hate the time I was investing in it, because I knew they were going to turn out well. And boy did they! That’s the reaction I’ve had to a lot of recipes lately and that, it turns out, makes cooking kind of awesome. The fact that in my very own, kind-of-outdated kitchen I can prepare something that I would prefer to about 95% of restaurant fare. My favorites are my italian recipes, but unfortunately my husband, for some bizarre reason I may never understand, doesn’t want to eat pasta every night of the week. (He also calls my marinara sauces “bitter” but I think they’re just about the best thing on the planet.) So I am forced to experiment with other things occasionally, and like the pork chops, sometimes they turn out pretty good.

I should add that I’m not making anything too complex. My husband is the one for the Julia Child -type recipes that require hours and hours in the kitchen. I can usually get things done in about an hour. But still, I’ve amassed quite a personal cookbook of these types of recipes that are reasonable for a person of admittedly low tolerances such as myself.

I’ve probably jinxed myself writing this little post and the next thing I make will be a blackened, flavorless mess. But if that’s the case, I will definitely not find myself on the floor crying. I’ll just try again. And that was the attitude adjustment I was looking for. Now if only I could carry that attitude over to other plentiful areas of my life in which I find myself sitting on the floor crying.

Trackside Pizza – Puyallup

Occasionally, like any small fry blogger hoping to pass 15 views, I like to look at the stats for this blog to see what kind of traffic it’s getting. This obsessive numbers game led me to notice that I get a new hit almost daily from someone who has searched for “Sonic Puyallup” (referring to this post.)

I am actually not surprised. I found nary a hint of any local information when I was trying to ascertain an opening date for Sonic. It’s a special kind of frustration when all-knowing Google can’t answer your question. According to my stats, I obviously was not the only one searching, likely not the only one frustrated. It made me realize this blog might be just the spot to address the dearth of hyper-localized Puyallup news. 

I decided I would do a little experiment and review another Puyallup restaurant, to see what kind of traffic that gets. This one, unlike Sonic, is a true local gem.

Trackside Pizza is my favorite pizza place. My husband and I found their website when looking for a restaurant that would deliver but was not Pizza Hut. We had tried nearly everything in the area, and we were getting weary. Lo and behold, the Tracskide Pizza man arrived at our door with a faith-restoring pie. The pizza crust was thin and crispy, the the toppings tasty and abundant. The sauce, a make-it-or-break-it feature of the pizza for me, is marinara perfection…My only complaint is that they could be a little more generous with it. The chop salad was also terrific, complete with a thick, basil and garlic-infused balsamic dressing. The fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies were melty chocolate goodness.

So enchanted were we by the delivery, we decided to go downtown to check out the restaurant. Its brick walls are adorned with railroad signs from eras passed, and the pizza ovens and prep stations are visible from any table. Little ones get to take pies they made themselves at the table to the cooks on the line, say, “pie up,” and every single person working, in a burst of unbridled enthusiasm, shouts, “PIE UP!” right back. It’s extremely entertaining. And of course, the building sits but a few feet from the railroad tracks – hence the name Trackside – and when a train goes by, the whole place rattles and shakes. It’s the perfect pizza ambiance, the kind of place that gives “local” a good name. 

You can order delivery from the website, though we had to call as our zip code apparently isn’t in the system yet. It would be nice if they would fix that bug.

Whether you’re a native who hasn’t come across Trackside yet, or are just visiting and looking for some good pizza, I heartily recommend it. You won’t regret it.

 

Chocolate chip cookies straight outta the oven

A view of the booths and some signage

 

Frank looks at the pizza ovens