Almost Home

I’m sitting in the trailerhouse on a late afternoon in early October. The sun is slanting through the window. Duke — the black kitten — is basking in the ray, which strikes his forehead, turning the fur almost silvery. A mild wind is blowing, and as it has for thirty-five years, it moans softly around the cracks and crevices of the trailer.

This trailer, which is now the business office, I once called home. Sometimes it still feels like home. At this moment, with the warm sun slanting through the window, with the wind moaning, with the kitten by my side, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not home. It even smells like home.

I slip into a reverie, find a memory from childhood that seems almost real. A Sunday afternoon from just this time of year. Lunch is over. Mom is washing the dishes. Jeff and I are in the living room with Dad, who is sprawled on the couch in the tipout. He has his shirt off, and Jeff is using a felt pen to draw faces on his big belly. I am stretched on the shag carpet (harvest gold), have claimed a rectangle of sunlight, and am reading the paper. I am reading the comics. I am reading the sports section (the Beavers lost again, and so did the Ducks). I am reading the poems in Northwest Magazine. Maybe there’s a cat, or a dog, or a bird in the room. Maybe Tony is here, coloring quietly.

Outside, the wind blows dully, and, if I listen carefully, I can hear the trailer moan. I can smell —

— and then I’m jarred to reality by a fourteen minute conversation with a customer who is woefully confused about an item we made in August, but which he cannot recall…

I’m always amazed at how little things — like sunlight on a kitten’s forehead — can trigger waves of nostalgia.

This morning on the drive to work, the sun was shooting God-rays through the lingering mist. You know the ones: the great shafts of light that slice through the trees, as if they’re something real, something tangible, something that you might be able to touch and hold.

Corked

So I’m trying cork’d, the new web-based wine-tracker. It’s a keen idea, and looks very nice. You enter information about the wines you own, and about the wines you try, and that information is shared with the cork’d community. You can add “drinking buddies” — Rich has already joined me, and maybe Jeremy will someday. (If you want to join, let me know, and I’ll e-mail you so that we automatically buddy up.)

But the thing is, cork’d is frustrating to use. It feels like an application where the designers were able to get it to work for them and the way they work with this information, but failed to test it in the real-world. (I’m not saying that this is what occurred; it just feels that way.) It’s also an application that’s prettier than it is functional. (It’s very pretty.)

Here are some specific things that bug me about cork’d. (And this list comes after only entering half a dozen bottles!)

The idea is that this is a social wine site. That is, after one person has entered the data for a particular bottle of wine, anyone else can use that information without having to re-enter it themselves. For example, here’s a bottle of two-buck chuck. If you go down to Trader Joe’s and pick up a case of this, you don’t have to enter the data because it’s already in the system.

But what if you find the wine you want and the information is incorrect? That is, what if you find this entry for the exact same bottle of two-buck chuck. What do you do? Well, you probably try to create one of your own. So right away, there’s one problem: with a system like that, you’re likely to have multiple instances of the same bottle of wine.

So should the designers limit the information that people can enter? That presents problems, too. Speaking from my own experience, here’s a bottle of Willamette Valley Vineyards 2003 Pinot Noir that I’d like to add to my wine cellar. The information is basically correct, except for two things:

This user paid $23.99 for his bottle — I paid $14.89 the same wine. It does me no good to have this in my cellar with his pricing information. I want my pricing information.
The region listed is wrong. Yes, it might make sense that a bottle from a Salem winery called “Willamette Valley Vineyards” would have an appellation of “Oregon – Willamette Valley”, but in reality the correct appellation for this body is simply “Oregon”. A small thing, but it bugs me. I’m not allowed to edit this information if I want to add the bottle to my cork’d wine cellar.

So what should I do? Create a new entry for this wine? That seems like a poor choice. But I don’t want to use the info as-is, either. It’s a stalemate, which basically means I don’t enter the wine at all, and I write a weblog entry complaining about the website.

There are other problems, too, such as:

cork’d calls appellations “regions”. I can deal with that, I suppose, but I can’t deal with the fact that you have to choose your region from a drop-down menu of pre-defined choices, a menu that out of seven bottles, was missing two of the regions I wanted. I want a way to add appellations.
I’m attempting to add all of my wines to my cork’d wine cellar at the same time. First, there’s no obvious way to add a wine from the front page at all. I eventually found out how to do so by clicking to a different page where adding a wine was an option. But why not on the front page, too? And after I add each bottle of wine, I’m taken to that bottle’s individual page. That’s fine, but there’s now way to just immediately add my next bottle of wine from this page. I have to click through a bunch of stuff again.
I want a “personal notes” field — something that isn’t a review, but something that isn’t a “description” either. I want to keep track of where I bought a wine, or who gave it to me. I just entered “purchased at Costco on 07 October 2006” for several bottles in the description field, and now that’s part of the permanent record. Oops. But it doesn’t belong in a review, either. It’s a personal note.
The search system seems broken. Searching for “willamette valley vineyards pinot” generates a “can’t find it” message, even though there are several wines that should return matches. But searching for “willamette valley vineyards” works as expected.
When I add a wine to my cellar from search, I’m given a choice of how many bottles to add, but when I add one by entering the data, I’m not. It just enters one bottle. If I actually bought four, I have to go to my cellar, find the bottle, and change the quantity there.
I’d love the ability to add actual images of each bottle instead of the generic graphics that are currently used.
Wines are rated using an Amazon-like star system. My ratings are shown in a sort of brightish pinkish red. If I haven’t rated a wine, its rating is shown in a sort of darkish winish red. This is fine if both colors are on the same page, but when they’re not, I have a hard time remembering whether what I’m seeing is my rating or the system-wide average.

Don’t get me wrong. I like cork’d and think it’s a fun idea. I’m hoping that several friends will join and we can have quite the drinking party. But in its current form, it feels very much like a piece of software in beta.

I like the idea of Cork’d but it still feels very beta to me…

The Crane Wife, Annotated

I’ve been listening to the Decemberists’ new album, The Crane Wife, for weeks now. (A loyal foldedspace reader sent me a copy a month before its release.) I meant to post a preview weeks ago, but time passed, and now the preview is a review of sorts.

First, you may wish to visit my previous entries about this Portland group:

24 Jan 2004 — The Decemberists (Live in Concert)
17 Mar 2005 — The Decemberists (Live in Concert, 2005 Edition)

With one exception, this is a fantastic album, a tapestry of words and music unlike anything I’ve heard before. (Well, actually, it reminds me some of Natalie Merchant’s Ophelia.) It’s like the promise of The Decemberists come to fruition. The more I listen to it — and I’ve heard it about forty times in the past month, according to iTunes — the more I love it. It just gets better and better.

The Decemberists are a hard band to describe. They’re sort of alt-folk-rock with lots of pirates and death and stuff thrown in for good measure. Colin Meloy, the lead singer and primary “face” to the band, is a big fan of The Smith’s Morrisey (and, in fact, has released a solo CD covering five of his songs). Meloy has a penchant for penning witty songs filled with archaic words and vivid images.

Though their last album had a couple of standout tracks, it was actually the group’s weakest effort to date, marred by too much topicality. They’re best at doing quirky, quaint story songs; they’re not so good at political statement.

The Crane Wife, I’m pleased to say, is a return to form. It features many lovely songs, and they lyrics are Meloy’s strongest to date. In fact, I like the album so much that I spent most of my free time today transcribing lyrics and annotating them. (You can see the results at the end of this post.)

This album is built around a theme: the Japanese folk story of the crane wife. Three of the songs (contained in two tracks) are directly related to the story; the others are less so, but still fit thematically, except for the woeful “The Perfect Crime 2”, which is the one track I’ve unchecked in iTunes (so that it never plays unless I specifically select it). (“The Perfect Crime 2” isn’t the worst Decemberists song. That would be “The Sporting Life”, which is simply painful to listen to.)

Here, then, is my attempt at transcribing the lyrics. I made a pass on my own, then googled for other people’s efforts (such as here and here). Some of the other transcriptions make sense; others don’t. What I’ve posted here is my best guess at most of the lyrics. I welcome corrections. I’ve annotate the more obscure lyrics — I welcome corrections on these, too.

Enjoy!

Continue reading →

A Taste of Autumn

Ah, autumn is here. Do you know how I can tell? It’s not because the weather has turned colder; it’s not because the leaves have begun to turn; it’s not because the tomatoes are bursting at their seams. It’s not for any of the reasons.

I can tell that autumn is officially here because Kris and I just made our first Fancy Meal of the season. It was a quickie, and only for ourselves, but it was very, very tasty. We had:

Caprial’s port- and soy-glazed beef tenderloin, using meat from the side of beef we bought last winter
Fresh corn from the garden
Fresh apples from the “orchard”
A salad containing cheese from the farmer’s market and various veggies from our garden
Some bad wine

Aside from the bad wine — a California product, naturally — this was all locally-grown food, much of it from our own yard.

From April to September, our meals are rather simple. But October arrives and suddenly we’re ready for complex flavors and gourmet cooking. That’s how I can tell that autumn is here.