woo hoo!

Congratulations are in order for my friend Hope who's just won an Eisner Award for her graphic novel Gray Horses! I highly recommend checking out both Gray Horses and her first book, Salamander Dream. Perhaps you may have also noticed her piece in the New York Times Op-Ed section this past Wednesday...


we've been a little a.w.o.l lately because we had cynthia and leland visiting for a while, then some frantic house cleaning and laundering due to an unpleasant amount of fleas and fear of reoccurring ringworm, and after that i have no idea where we've been. halley's coming out to visit monday night and will be here for a week...and half? or something? and the entire time she's here my co-worker, emily, is out of town and graciously letting me borrow her fancy 2007 prius. which couldn't have happened at a more perfect time because the brakes on liz's car need fixing and the rabbit is still on vacation.

i have to say, i'm very proud of george for making a post on the blog. i've urged and proded and asked and bribed him to do it in the past but he just wasn't interested. i guess all it took was some killin'.

morning kill

jenne's baking... i'd don't really know how to work this blog thing. but, girl brought me a gift this morning that i thought everyone should see... her first kill! ugly bugger, eh? the penny's pre-zinc w/ copper coating. but, if you have a new penny...

looks like she hasn't posted in awhile. things are pretty quiet around here. aside from the traffic. they're tearing up all the streets to replace drainage pipes, so the morning traffic backs up for miles. bikes are good.

the rabbit's still resting. i think there's a drain on the battery that i haven't found yet. today however, i'm messing around with the fuel injection. "hillbilly tuning". the site seems to be down right now, but i've been learning from a vw diesel guru. hagar (i think his real name is sven). he's a 75 year old "scanderhoovian" (as he calls himself) from the birthplace of the diesel engine. his english is quite poor, and sometimes he claims he went to hogwarts with harry potter, but he knows more about tuning diesels than anyone else... 70-80mpg is pretty good.


george

new neighbor.

the apartment directly across the street from us is pretty cute, it's the old train station so it has this nice line of windows above the door and says, 'landsdale station' above those. we're convinced it's got to be cool inside, so when we saw and ad on craigslist for it we figured we'd go to the open house and if it met our criteria (gas stove, bathtub) we'd consider it. the landlord (or tenant) was fifteen or twenty minutes late to show it so we decided to just forget it and went to see a movie instead.

our new neighbor moved in yesterday and the big glaring drawback to this guy is that he's got a little yappy dog that insists on yapping almost constantly. GREAT.

birthday weekend

george's birthday was pretty quiet and strangely exhausting. he ended up with the poached pear and almond tart, which turned out not perfect, but better than expected-and it's delicious! he spent the morning working on the dashboard and the display for the rabbit and in the afternoon we went into san francisco to say bye to karl and lindsay and to track down the elusive krylon spray paint for plastics in the color orange (we were hoping it'd be perfect for the dash.) driving through san francisco is always stressful and irritating (always), but more than just driving, parking is a nightmare. being that it was george's birthday and i was already exhausted he did all the driving, which he soon regretted.

karl and lindsay sent us home with various householdy things (like a totally sweet salad spinner), then it was back to marin and off to dinner with the boss & co. at the pub/brewery up the street. which only lasted until about nine but felt like two am.

yesterday was quiet. ish. we drove all over looking for a seatpost for my bike, never found it, had sandwiches in sausalito, and finally picked a color for the dash. the color is a nice light green (more like a celery and less like a mint), we think it'll be perfect.

the bike is coming together well; we've got everything we need save for bar tape and a seatpost. because the frame is old it uses a post with a smaller diameter-26.0mm as opposed to 26.2 mm. we went to six different bike shops yesterday and none had the correct size. we did discover our new favorite bike shop, the village peddler. george ran all of the cables for me and has been working on the brakes because after fighting with them and being defeated three or four times, i just couldn't bring myself to work on them. hopefully today we'll be doing some derailleur alignment.

as for the cats: