Via Jason Kottke, here’s a six-minute video that blends bits and pieces from 270 different films produced or distributed in 2010. It’s amazing.
My mind boggles at how long it must have taken to put this together. That reminds me that this year’s United States of Pop mash-up should be out soon. Can’t wait to hear it!
Kris and I had lunch with my cousin Nick today. He wanted to take us to Sushi Kata, a Japanese place in a strip mall not far from our house. But Sushi Kata isn’t open on Sunday, so we scrambled for a replacement. “Let’s go to Ohana,” I said. “I eat there all the time.”
Playing favorites
Because Kris and I eat out fairly often (especially in the winter), we develop favorite restaurants. My favorites are those that are both cheap and good. (These are harder to find than you might think.) Ohana is a Hawaiian joint located in downtown Milwaukie. It’s not super cheap and the food isn’t great, but the prices are fair and the food is consistently good. Does that make sense? In other words, it’s not a bargain, but it is a good deal.
So, about once a week, I walk (or ride or drive) the 2-3/4 miles to Ohana for lunch. The guys there know me now. They don’t give me a menu, and they just wave for me to take any seat I want. They do check to make sure I’m ordering the usual (the Huli Chicken, which is basically just a flattened, salted chicken breast, with greens — two slices of lemon, no dressing — and a cup of rice), and to see what I want to drink (water or diet soda or, rarely, some sort of juice), but then they just leave me alone for an hour or two while I write. I like it.
I’ve probably eaten at Ohana more than any other restaurant this year. And I’ve probably had their Huli Chicken more than any other dish. Which got me to thinking: What are the restaurants and dishes that we’ve loved most over the past couple of years?
A few of my favorite meals
Thinking back, Kris and don’t know if we actually had regular restaurants before 2007; we just rotated around instead of picking favorites. But in late 2006 or early 2007, Amy Jo introduced us to Gino’s, a local Italian joint. For a variety of reasons, Kris and I fell in love with the place. It’s not always great — but it usually is. (I say that Gino’s is great 80% of the time and lousy 20% of the time, but those are odds I’m willing to play.) For most of 2007 and much of 2008, Gino’s was our go-to restaurant. We ate at other places, but mostly we ate at Gino’s. (Which was an expensive habit.)
On 25 March 2008 (my 39th birthday), we tried Pok Pok, which serves “street” Thai food. Instantly, I was hooked. So, for the next year, that became my go-to restaurant. Because it’s open for lunch (and Gino’s isn’t), I conducted many business lunches at Pok Pok, as some of you know from experience. It’s rough to conduct business while eating the messy (but tasty) fish sauce wings, but I make it work.
I’m not sure that Kris and I had a favorite spot in 2009. We ate a lot at Gino’s and Pok Pok, but we also enjoyed the local diner, Sully’s, and I ate many lunches at Cha Cha Cha, a Mexican joint in Milwaukie. But nothing stands out as the place we had to eat in 2009.
This year, however, there’s no question that my favorite restaurant has been Screen Door on east Burnside. We actually ate there for the first time in the summer of 2009, but it wasn’t until 2010 that I became obsessed with their fried chicken. Screen Door serves southern food (I’m not sure how authentic it is), and boy is it good! Their boneless, batter-fried chicken is fantastic, especially when served with mashed potatoes and gravy. I’m salivating just thinking about it.
Which restaurant will be our favorite in 2011? There’s no way to tell. We did have a great dinner at the Doug Fir Lounge the other night, though, and we both agreed we should go back there more often. We’ve eaten there a few times before and liked it, but for some reason, it never occurs to us to go back — probably because Screen Door is just a few blocks away.
Keeping score
To summarize, here are my favorite restaurants and dishes from the past few years:
In any event, there’s no question that Kris and I like to dine out. We’re not doing it as much as we used to (probably only once every couple of weeks instead of once a week), but that may be because I’m eating out for lunch about once a week. I’m the one who really likes restaurants, I think.
We look forward to exploring Portland’s vibrant restaurant scene for many years to come!
This post is from Kris. It’s part of the Christmas package we’re giving to friends this year.
Tahitian Vanilla Beans are prized for their traditional vanilla flavor and are perfect for pastries and other sweet treats. 
These beans that Santa has brought you are from Papua New Guinea, and the resulting extract is smooth and aromatic. It stands alone or can be used to complement other flavors.
Store your Tahitian Vanilla Extract in a cool, dark place. When the extract is gone, you can remove the bean pod to use its tiny seeds in one of the recipes below — or refill the bottle using one teaspoon dark rum and the rest vodka. Allow to sit for six weeks before using.
Enjoy!
If I’m going to resume writing here regularly, I’ll obviously be writing more and more about my cats. After all, they rule the house, right? Kris and I are merely here to serve them. Besides, they do plenty of silly things worthy of blog posts.
For example, all four cats — Toto, Simon, Nemo, and Max — are of the firm belief that while human-provided food is great, the best food is the food you provide yourself.
In some cases, this means food they’ve hunted. Simon, as long-time readers will recall, sometimes catches squirrels. (We just put a poor, dead, fat rodent in the trash last week — Kris found it in the rose garden.) Nemo is a fearsome bird hunter, and he especially likes catching baby birds. And Max? Well, Max is an expert and seeking out and destroying unopened bags of cat food.
Because Simon is on an expensive prescription diet for his urinary-tract infection, all of the cats are on the same diet. They all eat the same expensive food. I have to buy this expensive food at the vet, which never has it in stock — they have to special-order it for me. So, to save hassle, I order three bags at a time and then store them in the basement.
Max, the fearsome hunter, likes to venture into the basement whenever possible. His mission? To stalk the bags of unopened cat food, and to tear them apart. He enjoys the thrill of the hunt, and he especially enjoys the seemingly endless supply of food once he’s killed a bag. (Nemo enjoys this, too. In fact, he invented this game. Lately, though, he lets Max do the killing.)
We do our best to keep Max away from the expensive cat-food bags, but it’s not always possible. And sometimes, we just forget.
This morning, I woke early and came downstairs in the dark. I opened the door for the Cat Swap. The Cat Swap occurs when Toto comes in from her nightly exile (since she started peeing outside the litterbox, she’s banished to a heating pad on the porch every night), and one or more of her brothers bolts to the freedom of Outside.
After the Cat Swap, Toto usually begins crying for food. Her bowl under the kitchen table is empty because Max has eaten it all during the night. (Max has no off switch. He will eat and eat and eat until there’s no food left.) But this morning was strangely different.
While I spent a few minutes in the bathroom, Toto was silent. There was no yowling, no insistent begging. Instead, I could actually hear her crunching on food. “That’s strange,” I thought. “Why didn’t Max eat it all overnight?” When I came out into the kitchen, I saw.
Max had indeed made his best effort to eat all of the food overnight. But it wasn’t the food in the bowl he’d been consuming. Instead, he’d torn open the cat-food bag I brought home yesterday (and foolishly left in the kitchen). All night long, he’d been feasting from the bag, enjoying the fruits of self-sufficiency. And now, Toto and Simon were contentedly following in his pawsteps: They were crunching away from the never-ending fount of food pouring from the bag.
“Dad,” they seemed to say. “This is a fantastic idea. Can this be a regular thing?” Nothing seems better to a cat than an entire bag of cat food, just sitting there, ready to be eaten.
sigh
Cats.
Via Frykitty, here’s a great video of a man interacting with a lioness and her cubs. She seems to trust him completely:
My favorite part of this video is how the lioness is so cat-like. Her mannerisms are just like those of a common housecat. In fact, if you watch how the lioness acts in the first thirty seconds or so, that’s just how Simon and Nemo act toward Kris here at home. It’s how they say, “Give me love! Give me love!”
My least favorite part of the video? The silly Lord of the Rings music in the background.
As you’re all well aware, I can be obsessive sometimes, and about the dumbest little things.
Lately, for example, I’ve been searching for wool clothes. I’ve decided that I don’t like cotton — it shrinks! it wrinkles! it fades! — and I’d rather wear clothes with more versatility and durability. That means I’ve been buying synthetics, but it also means I’ve become obsessed with wool. I love wool. Wool is cozy and warm, and best of all, you can wear it for days at a time without it stinking. (I wore a single wool t-shirt for the last week in France, and it still smelled fine when we got home.)
Another one of my recent quests is for a stylish and comfortable men’s swimsuit. As I’ve lost weight, I’ve begun to swim once a week. Swimming when I’m fat is a chore, and it’s embarrassing. But when I’m moderately fit, it’s a great workout, and I’m less self-conscious about my appearance. But since my decade-old pair of swim trunks died last April, I haven’t been able to find swimwear that I like.
Women have all sorts of flattering options for swimwear. There are one-piece and two-piece options that can be attractive, modest — or both. Not so for men.
Men basically have two options: tight Speedo-type suits for serious swimmers and gigantic, baggy “board shorts” for the average guy. The former are, well, too revealing for my taste, and the latter are just plain ugly. Seriously: Board shorts are one of the ugliest garments ever invented. (And remember, this is coming from a guy who doesn’t usually care how clothes look!)
Recently, I re-watched Casino Royale for the zillionth time. It’s my favorite James Bond film. Midway through, Bond (played by Daniel Craig) does some beach reconnaissance while swimming in the Caribbean Sea. He emerges from the water wearing this:
Leaving aside the fact that I’ll never look like Daniel Craig (and that’s not my goal), I liked the cut of this swimsuit. I thought my quest for the perfect men’s swimsuit had come to an end. I paused the movie to show Kris. “That’s the sort of swimsuit I want,” I said.
Kris laughed. “No you don’t,” she said. “That’s way too revealing. That’s basically a Speedo.”
“It is?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “If you wear that, you’ll shock all of your friends.”
Well, I don’t want to shock all of my friends, so I’m not going to wear that swimsuit. (Even though I was able to track it down — for $112.) But I’d love to find something similar to the James Bond swimsuit that isn’t quite as revealing. I guess I’m looking for a swimsuit that’s cut relatively short, but which doesn’t cling to me like a second skin. Surely there must be something out there that fits the bill. But so far, I haven’t found anything.
I did look through several dozen swimsuits when I went thrift-store shopping last Saturday. I found one that had many of the elements I’m looking for. Since it was three bucks, I bought it. But it’s still not quite right. I guess maybe I’ll have to wait another decade for fashion to change so that the ugly, ugly board shorts go out of style.
Man, I’m wishy-washy sometimes. “I’m going to re-boot Animal Intelligence!” “Wait, no I’m not!” “I’m going to start a blog about awesome people!” “Wait, no I’m not!” Etcetera. Etcetera.
After talking with Kris and Paul Jolstead, however, and after thinking about what my life goals are, I’m coming down on the “No I’m not” side of things again. Besides, I’m having a lot of fun doing and writing about lots of different stuff. I might as well be sharing it here.
Sometimes I get discouraged that the readership at Foldedspace has dwindled to nothing, but what can I expect? Yes, this site used to get 40,000 visitors a month, but that’s back before I had a money blog, back when I was posting every day. And it took me five years to reach that level.
Nowadays, Foldedspace is lucky to get 4,000 visits per month, but maybe if I spend some time actually, you know, writing here, I can bring those numbers up. What do you say we give it a shot? Maybe in five years, I can be back to the 40,000 visits a month I used to have.
So, here are my goals for this site:
I know I’ve made several false starts to resume regular blogging here, but I do hope this time will be different. I just have to remind myself that even if nobody else seems to be reading, at least I’m having fun.
I used to write for this site as if nobody were reading it. Lately, I’ve been writing as if everyone were reading it. Doing the latter makes me feel cramped. I’m going to let loose, I think, and just be myself. If that pisses some people off, so be it. And if others are bored by the cats and comic books, that’s fine too. I’ll just make this a blog that I want to read.
Allow me to be immodest for a moment.
I’ve worked pretty hard this year to get fit, and I’m finally starting to see the result. I like it. By chance, I’ve posed for three photographers in 2010, about four months apart. That means I have visual documentation of my progress, which I’m proudly sharing below.
January 1st – 213 pounds (35% body fat, 30% muscle)
photo by J.D. Roth
At the start of the year, I weighed more than I ever had in my life. And I felt awful. I couldn’t sleep. Walking uphill to my office was taxing. I was stressed, and I ate to cope with it. It wasn’t good. I resolved to make 2010 the Year of Fitness, but I was slow to start. Here’s how I looked on our jungle vacation in late February:
April 1st – 207 pounds (33% body fat, 31% muscle)
photos by Gabby Francis
My first photo session this year was with Gabby Francis, a Get Rich Slowly reader who e-mailed offering to take my photo. Gabby works as a production assistant in television, but wants to branch out into photography. She was very patient with me, and it was fun to chat with her while we worked. But I was more than a little uncomfortable. I hated how I looked and felt. In three months of trying, I’d lost only four pounds.
July 23rd – 187 pounds (27% body fat, 34% muscle)
photos by David Hobby
You’ll remember David Hobby from my tale of win-win conflict resolution: I stole one of his photos from the web; he suggested a creative solution for restitution, and ever since we’ve been supporting each other. He’s a good guy. He’s also a pro, running Strobist, a giant among photo blogs.
When David told me he was going to be in Portland and wondered if he could shoot some photos of me, I was happy to agree. I’d lost 20 pounds since the photo shoot with Gabby, which allowed me to feel more relaxed in front of the camera.
Aside from the fact that I chose to wear the same shirts for David as I did for Gabby (what was I thinking?), I like how these turned out. I was still heavy, but the weight loss was starting to become apparent.
November 18th – 175 pounds (24% body fat, 36% muscle)
photos by Amy Jo Woodruff
My friend Amy Jo is an editor — but she wants to be a photographer when she grows up. After seeing her photos of Lisa, I agreed to pose for her too. This was my favorite photo shoot so far. I haven’t yet lost all of the weight I want to lose, but I’ve shed most of it. I no longer have those chubby cheeks or the bags under my eyes!
Amy Jo asked me to list fourteen words that I feel best describe me. I gave her this list:
“It’s funny,” she said as we were walking to the park. “Whenever adults do this exercise, all of their words are positive.”
I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “Kris told me that she could think of some other words to describe me. Like ‘obsessed’. I told her that’s why ‘zealous’ is on the list.”
I have negative attributes, just like everyone else. I’m sure you all could name them. But I don’t think it’s productive to dwell on them. Instead, I like to focus on my strengths, and let those guide my life. Dwelling on the negative is a sure path to misery. I don’t want to be miserable.
So, to summarize: Since the start of the year:
My physical transformation hasn’t happened by chance. It’s taken hard work and dedication. But I’m starting to believe I really have made a lifestyle change. I want to exercise more now, not less. It sucks when I don’t get a workout in. (And somedays, like I hope to do tomorrow, I actually work out twice.)
So, do I think Crossfit works? Hell, yeah!
Maybe if I keep it up, when I’m 91 I can be like Olga Kotelko.
