Drawing Blanks

I feel like blogging but I have no idea what to blog about. So, I present random thoughts.

We're looking for a new place to live. Not that we haven't enjoyed threats from the neighbors about our dog's barking and a field of dirt for a backyard during our time at our little Mexican Jail in the Alley, but, it's time to move on, and move closer to the beach.

We've found a place we both really like, still in Santa Monica, but on 4th Street, which, if you can count, makes you four blocks from the beach. We're meeting with the landlady on Thursday to present ourselves as respectable people with good credit, and after that, hopefully, we'll start packing boxes. It's a one bedroom with hardwood floors, blah blah blah on the inside, but it comes with a sliding patio door that opens onto a little patio and a decent yard WITH GRASS. I have missed having an outside living space and natural lighting so much. Sometimes it gets hotter in the house than outside during the day, and we can't hang outside because, well, we have no place to hang. The alley smells like garbage and the backyard makes you feel like you're in a desert. Another perk of the new place is that it's on a hill, so if you walk out to the street and look West, you can actually see the big Pacific Ocean right there. And that's pretty cool.

Work is going good, ridiculously busy with irrational demands, but good. I actually just did a shoot in New York City, which was a blast. I love that city. It was a literal pain getting around on the subway with all of our production gear, but I just counted it as exercise. I wish we had a subway (one that wasn't a joke) here because I would totally take it everywhere. It's so fast and efficient, and it forces you to interact with people, which seems to make you a little nicer. I gotta say though, at some parts when you're two levels below the ground in the ultra humid parts that only smell like electric train track, if you let that "What if" train of thought take hold, it can make you realize claustrophobia you never knew you had.

Let's see, what else? We recently got a membership at the Co-opportunity, which is a healthy food store that is actually cheaper than the grocery store. In New York, we interviewed a really cool woman who runs an amazing vegan restaurant called Candle 79, and her food was so delicious and beautiful -- and some of it so meatlike -- that I bought her cookbook (totally endorsed by me, but some of the recipes you gotta do once and then figure out what you'd do differently next time to make the better suited to you) and made four recipes in three days after I got home. Some of the stuff she's mastered include seitan, which is wheat gluten that I swear is just like meat; tofu, which has so many textures it's great for everything from making creamy desserts to making barbecue patties; and tempeh, which she says is the hardest to learn how to make but is ultra versatile. I made a smokey tempeh potato salad (vegan) from my friend Jordan's website VeganRobot, and it tasted just like potato salad with bacon in it. I feel like there's so much food I never knew about before becoming a vegetarian, and the wierdest thing about it is that when you eat vegan or vegetarian meals, and I mean eat as in pig out on seven dishes like we did at Candle 79, you actually leave the table with energy. Most of the times when I pig out I immediately need a nap, but with this kind of food, you pig out and have a spring in your step as you walk away from the table.

Speaking of foods I never knew about, and how clever these little vegans have become, I discovered something called Cactus Jerky at the Co-op the last time we went. It's a little weird at first, cactus being turned into jerky, but it's actually pretty good, maybe even better than most of the beff jerky I've had (not Dave's though, his is the best). It's got the right texture, it sticks to your teeth the right amount, it's the right amount of salty and sweet. It looks a little like dried kelp, but it's the same color as beef jerky, so it's pretty convincing.

What else??? Oh, I'm studying for the GRE. Don't know what I might go to grad school for, maybe creative writing, maybe journalism, maybe something totally unrelated to anything I've ever done. Studying has been interesting. I'm relearning geometry and arithmetic and theorems and properties. I haven't made it into the verbal part or the logic part yet, but I'm not too worried about verbal and I'm desperately worried about logic. Logic is hard. It makes no sense to me, and it makes perfect sense to Mack, and I get frustrated that it's so easy for him and then I want to stab him in his glowingly brilliant brain with my number two pencil but I can't because I love him and being a widow would be just depressing. So I study, and I will hopefully be taking this thing before the end of the year.

Today is Mack's Dad's birthday, so we are going out to lunch with the Thomases, and it is also the 4th of July, so this afternoon we are going to a cookout at a friend of a friend's house. Hopefully there will be fireworks. I love fireworks.