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The 10 most recent entries are displayed here. See Archives for previous entries. Best viewed on 1024x768 and with Internet Explorer as Netscape is a piece of shit.
10.02.2001 22:24
Beneath the Veil should be required viewing these days.
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09.29.2001 22:03
Sightseeing
It being a beautiful early fall day, Ben and I decided to venture to Bainbridge Island to visit the Bloedel Reserve. (On a side note, Blödel or Bloedel in German means idiot, which is kind of funny.) It’s a huge private park, owned and maintained by the Bloedel Family. In order to minimize the disturbance to the grounds and house itself, you have to make reservations to visit, but that doesn’t seem to pose much of a problem. Ben made reservations on Friday, for a Saturday morning visit.
We took an early ferry to Bainbridge, not sure how long it would take to get to the Reserve. Of course, we could have gone through Seattle, but to avoid the inevitable traffic mess (and the perpetual weekend closure of the 520-bridge) we went via Edmonds and Kingston. Because we had an hour to kill, we went into Winslow for breakfast, and after bailing at a terribly formal and very understaffed French restaurant, we settled for a very funny Mexican joint for breakfast. I felt like I was in a bad movie, with combination accordion and Mexican show tunes playing on the stereo.
The Reserve was really great and quiet enough to hear yourself breathe; a great place to bring visitors and I imagine that it would be pretty with a dusting of snow too. The gardens are a mixture of semi-manicured wilderness (I didn’t know that you could maintain moss so well) and formal gardens; fields, woods and ponds. To avoid the gaggle of bored housewives on parade (however small the crowd), we did the tour backwards. The Japanese garden was wonderful, which led into second-growth woods to the house. From there, we wandered as close to water on Puget Sound as we could get (which was really nowhere close to the water), by the waterfall and through the bird refuge. There were the ever present Canadian Geese, but also trumpeter swans. The colors were beginning to change and it was nice to see New England-like reds and yellows. There are pictures in the picture section.
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09.27.2001 22:03
Travel advisory
Our illustrious president today urged “all American to go out and visit the sights of this great country”, so in honor of that, I have resurrected the cross country trip pictures when Ben, Da Maus and I moved to Seattle. Here are some of the great sights of our country, avec Da Maus. I’m particularly fond of my addition to Mt. Rushmore.
On a related note, there was a proposal put forth today by some member of Congress to charge a $2.50 per leg “security charge” on each airline ticket, so $5 round trip. I’m pretty indifferent on the money and all that. What I did find interesting is how he put it, exact words were: “This amount of money is less than the cost of a grande cappuccino at the airport Starbucks.” Now, I realize that we have been using the length of a football field as a measure of distance for many years, but I didn’t know that Starbucks drinks are now being used as a measure of price.
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09.27.2001 20:39
This is Ben, my significant other, the love of my life, and the person listed as my emergency contact person.
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09.27.2001 20:28
Bert is Evil, a twist on everyone's favourite Muppet. Even CNN and the Pakistani supporters of the Taliban promote Evil Bert!
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09.27.2001 16:49
Newsflash
I've been watching the news far too much these days, and that being said, I have slowly watched it degrade back into the pathetic nonsense that it was before this whole crisis. For the first week, I'll give them credit. Breaking news, false reports, reporting from the proverbial seat of their pants. But now, they've stooped to interviewing Barry Mantilow and they have gotten to scraping the bottom of the barrel and will interview any idiot that walks their way. An especially scary moment was when Greta van Susteren on CNNs The Point had these two people on who evidently were the cleaning lady and the maintenance man for some flea-bag motel two of the hijackers stayed in. She, literally, had one tooth in her mouth and neither had an education over the fifth grade. And here we are asking their insights on these people. She did astutely remember that one of them had dropped a box cutter outside of their motel room once in June 0f 2000. Yeah, that was foreshadowing.
I was hoping to find their words of wisdom on cnn.com in one of The Point transcripts, but even they couldn't fathom posting this nonsense.
Then there was the car salesman on Larry King Live: "A-yuh. They just seemed like ordinary folks. I just noticed dem coz they paid with new hunred doller bills." Evidently they don't see new $100 bills much at used Jeep dealerships in Georgia.
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09.24.2001 20:22
Oktoberfest
As a true German trying to relive my German heritage, Ben and I went to the Fremont Oktoberfest on Sunday. What a disappointment. Despite the nice sunny Sunday, people in a decent mood and Fremont, which is Harvard Square 10 years ago, the Festival itself was pretty lame. The inherent problem, of-course, is the fact that any place where alcohol is served becomes a militarized zone, with more so-called alcohol enforcement officers than actual patrons. They spent a good 5 minutes inspecting my drivers license and I noticed that they were carding 50-year old men with long, gray Z Z Top beards (oh yeah, fake IDs for sure. I'm surprised that they didn't tug on the beards to make sure that they were real). Once you got into the special, cordoned off area of the Oktoberfest (henceforth called the Beer Prison), there wasn’t anything to do. The Beer Prison even had double fences around it about 4 feet apart, so you couldn’t hand a glass of beer over it to some almost 21-year old. Heaven forbid. Beer was served in shots, although you could keep the 4 oz. “souvenir glass” made of plastic. I’ll treasure it.
On a slightly more entertaining note, although not German at all, they did have the cross-dressed, transvestite Texas chainsaw pumpkin-carving contest. It’s amazing what people will do for attention. There are pictures in the picture section of this silliness.
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09.23.2001 11:02
Kat rant
It’s been quite a week for mundane, and not so mundane reasons. I haven’t posted anything new here because I have been battling Network Solutions to switch over suletzki.com to a new hosting provider. One would think that this would be simple, and could happen in a very short period of time, but I practically had to promise my first born for them to type a set of numbers into a computer. Evidently I didn’t give them the correct information in their silly form, and it got spit out as invalid (did I put apt. 1 vs. #1 vs. suite 1, and which telephone number had I used originally, and is this still registered to Slummerville or what?) I know that this is rather mindless drivel in the larger picture, but this was terribly infuriating. In end, I had to print out a fax, photocopy my driver’s license (which in this day and age really proves that I’m me) and send them a copy of a utility bill from Somerville, from 1998. Stupid.
Regardless, the larger picture makes this rant quite meaningless.
The missing in the WTC attacks is now at 6,333. I know what at least 862 look like. On the cnn.com site, they have a place to post pictures of the missing. On Wednesday, the day after the attack, there were maybe 50 photos. This week, I have counted every day at noon: Monday: 270, Tuesday: 453, Wednesday: 510, Thursday: 630, Friday: 863. Many of the pictures of people are my age. All of them are smiling, or at parties, on vacations, holding their children, drinking a glass of wine, wedding pictures. There is one of a boy, who was visiting the observation tower on the WTC, with his parents. The caption reads “was separated from his mother as they tried to get down”. Does that mean that the mother survived, got out, made it, and her son did not? It is merely unfathomable.
I saw an interview with the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald this week on Larry King Live. Cantor lost 700 people, as he called them, many of them babies, as they were known to be a young firm. Lutnick, the CEO, was likely the most devastated New Yorker that I have ever seen. While there is a tremendous amount of pain everywhere, he was truly touched. Or touching.
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09.16.2001 19:37
Driving
In an attempt to return to, or for that matter redefine 'normalcy', Ben and I drove to Portland on the spur of the moment yesterday. It's about a two and a half or three hour drive, through rather uninteresting highway-scape. It was hazy so we couldn't see the Olympics or the Cascades. Portland was nice; it's a nice city, very green, reminds me a bit of Boston. In the Courthouse Square, they had laid out huge pieces of paper for people to write out messages and condolences. That was touching. The city was hot and after walking around for a few hours, it was nice to find a bar to relax. We ended up at the Kells with a funny bartender. Dinner at Jakes, a local steakhouse, overnight at the Heathman hotel (nice and central, and it had a great restaurant for breakfast). In the morning, we walked about a bit more, got inundated by the women completing the Walk for the Cure, and then drove to the park. It's amazing how much green-space there is. We explored the rose garden and the Japanese garden and then headed back to Seattle. It was good to get away; it helped, even though the news, the television and the thoughts are impossible to avoid.
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09.13.2001 16:42
"Dear Hero..."
I'm known to cry at news reports anyway, but this is beyond compare. I have had a headache for days. I can't sleep because of this tragedy. The little things have been setting me off. I have cried at the members of the US Congress standing on the Capitol steps singing God Bless America off key. I cry at signs on the side of the road that normally scream the price of peaches that now simply implore us to pray. I cry at the stories on the radio about fifth graders in Westchester County, NY encouraged to bring in pack lunches tomorrow to be brought to the rescue workers in Manhattan, and all of them will be asked to write a little note that starts with "Dear Hero...". And what really set me off this morning was the British changing of the guard playing the US national anthem.
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