The other day, someone gave us some Pepper Plant barbecue sauce, made in Gilroy, California, and we decided to give it a try on some chicken breasts.

The bottle of BBQ sauce.

My husband has barbecuing down to a fine science. We use a Weber Grill and plain charcoal, which we light with the use of a chimney starter.

The chimney starter lights your coals quickly and without the use of lighter fluid. I think we learned this trick from an old episode of Alton Brown’s show Good Eats, and it definitely works more efficiently than lighter fluid does. (Not to mention it’s more cost-effective in the long-run, since you never have to buy another bottle of lighter fluid again once you have a chimney starter.)

In the end, we had chicken breasts and kabobs with leek, bell peppers, and mushrooms. We sat at the top of the hill in our backyard looking out over the Petaluma hills, watching the sun set. Since it was January, we needed some blankets and candles, but otherwise we were quite comfortable.

There are a lot of spectacular hikes in Sonoma County. Maybe that’s why I never paid attention to Helen Putnam Regional Park in Petaluma. I had read it was an easy 2.8-mile hike, and because it seems like it is in the middle of town, I had it in my head that it was going to be a city park with a jungle gym and a lot of planted landscaping.

But to my delight, I discovered that Helen Putnam Regional Park is a lovely park. A concrete road takes you over a series of hills and down to a little lake. In January, with the endless oak trees and everything green from winter rain, it feels like walking through one big meadow. I sat by a lake, climbed a hill, ate an apple, saw a jack rabbit, and looked at a lots of spectacular views. Here’s some photos:

What kind of man am I married to? I am married to a man who skins a TickleMeElmo Doll and puts it on the Internet for all to see.

Haven’t you always wanted to see what the robot under the TickleMeElmo looks like? Well now you can! Complete with videos!

Elmo Stabs!

In between all the other things I have been doing, I’ve been experimenting with wire working. Above is part of a necklace I made this week.

To make the necklace, I cut 50 pieces of copper wire at 6.5 inches, curled both ends with pliers, and then hooked them together.

I’ve been playing with beads since high school, but I like working with wire more. You have no need for crimp beads or clasps or connectors or anything like that. However, I now understand why metal necklaces are so expensive. They are not hard to make, but time intensive. Good thing they look good on.

Oh New Cup! So fresh and clean. Yet to have coffee stains, yet to have cracks and chips. How I enjoy drinking lattes out of you. How I enjoy looking down at your cheerful-yet-elegant design. I thank you for brightening my morning.

Hail new cup!

This weekend, Justin and Stephanie hosted a DDR Party in their apartment in San Francisco. DDR, as you may know, is a music video game where you match arrows on the screen to a dance pad.

The DDR Screen

To quote from Wikipedia:

The game is played on a dance pad with four arrow panels: left, down, up, and right. These panels are pressed using the player’s feet, in response to arrows that appear on the screen in front of the player. The arrows are synchronized to the general rhythm or beat of a chosen song, and success is dependent on the player’s ability to time and position his or her steps accordingly.

Granted, you don’t have to live in Petaluma to have a DDR party. In fact, you don’t even need a TV–Justin and Stephanie used their computer–just snacks, friends, and the game. Here’s some pictures:

Marcia had only played DDR once before.

Justin is fancy and tries to do the steps backwards

A blurry photo of me playing. Apparently, I am sassy when I play DDR.

Casey hadn’t played DDR before either, but she danced with flare.

Afterwards, Stephanie brought out the chocolate salami she had made: Nuts and cookies and rich fudge-like chocolate rolled up like a salami. Delicious! Thanks for the great time Justin and Stephanie.

Stephanie and the chocolate salami

The other night, my friends and I were walking downtown for pizza at Bricks when someone stuck his head out of Vine and Barrel, the new wine shop we were walking by.

“Hey, do you guys want to come in for a free wine tasting?” he said.

“Okay!” we said.

Inside at the back, the winemaker from St. Francis Winery was showcasing their new Wild Oak wine to a crowd of people hovering around the tasting bar. We tasted three varietals, chatted with some locals, and listened to the winemaker explain about the wines.

I ended up talking to shop owner Chris Sawyer. He and his partner Jason Jenkins had been thinking of opening a wine shop together for the past six years. Since they both went to high school in Petaluma, they wanted the store to be in town, but nothing had worked out until their current location–143 Kentucky Street–went up for rent last fall.

With his peach tie and long sideburns, Chris Sawyer looked like he would be more comfortable in a tee-shirt and jeans than the suit he was wearing. His attitude was direct and unpretentious.

“When I don’t like a wine, I will tell the winemaker,” he said. “I don’t care how good it’s supposed to be. I’ll say, This wine tastes like gerbil food if that’s what it tastes like.”

The wine buyer, Lee, laughed. “He’ll be like, This tastes like Dog Chow,” she said. “This tastes like, green olives and … scalded milk.”

This kind of thing may be why I found the shop’s wine selection more interesting and accessible than that of most wine shops. And in any case, I definitely liked the wine we tasted that night.

I have been busy. The New Year is full of writing and I’m in a good place mentally about it, and about life in general. That wonderful focus I got at the beginning of the year hasn’t left me yet. If I could feel like this all the time, I wouldn’t have any problems with my career.

Here’s a run down of what I’ve been doing:

1. I have finished one major project and am having readers look at it.
2. I am making significant progress with another major project that has been kicking around in my head for a long time.
3. I have a lot of deadlines to fulfill.
4. I’m preparing for the Word Pirates reading on February 8.
5. I’m working on the Petaluma blog.
6. I’m pitching for new articles to write.
7. I’m organizing my documents, submission tracker, life, et. all.
8. I’m reading a lot… I mean a lot.

So that’s why I haven’t been posting. Also, I really wanted to post a video on here yesterday, but YouTube/Word Press won’t let me. I have no idea why and it makes me sad.

Regardless, you should check out this YouTube video of writer Margaret Atwood talking about myths and religion. I agree with her about human nature being the same throughout time. We have a tendancy to look down at people in the past as though they are stupider than us, but in reality, I think they were just like we are today. As she says, just look at the myths–our desires, our fears, our dreams are the same now as they have always been. That goes for all humans, everywhere. It is maybe the very thing that makes us human to begin with.

Last Saturday, I took this photo of a protest of the War in Iraq in downtown Petaluma. It looks more dramatic than it actually was. The police officer is not arresting anyone–she’s helping a car that got into an accident while watching the protestors.

Never a dull moment around here.

I originally posted the following for the Word Pirates, but since I still more or less agree with it, I decided to post it here as well. You can also read about the wine tasting I did this weekend over at my Petaluma blog.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I should have more established ideas about the function of creative writing. Is it to entertain? Communicate? Recreate emotions? All of the above? Chekov thought that the writer serves as an observer of life. Is that what I’m doing? Virginia Woolf thought that writing illuminated the otherwise isolated subjective experience. Do I agree?

Word Pirates is the closest thing I have to my own ideas about writing. Co-founder Marcia and I generally agree on these issues. For example, we both think that writing shouldn’t be boring. That sounds like a no-brainer, maybe, but you would be shocked by how much is written with no particular thought about being entertaining. Today’s writers are fighting tremendous odds–TV, Internet, short attention spans, et. all. They have to grab the reader right away and hold on tight.

Or, we both agree that writing should clearly say something. We want stories, we want a point. We aren’t the type of readers who can slough through a bunch of experimental poetry and feel like we got something out of it. And there are other things: We think short stories should be short, that essays should not be naval gazing, that pop culture is actually important, and that humor is awesome.

As for the deeper aesthetic meaning of art, I don’t think Word Pirates has gotten there yet. However, I do think writing, particularly creative writing, serves several purposes. Writing:

1. Puts you in the head of an individual in a way that nothing else can. It bridges culture gaps, age differences, and even death. After all, you are literally reading someone else’s thoughts. As such, it teaches you ways of thinking that you would never be able to understand without it. I think you could read the entire history of China and still not understand a particular kind of Chinese thinking the way one single Lu Hsun story could teach you.
2. Serves as a critique of the world around us. Nothing gets at the problems of our culture and government like art can. The writer is someone who explores the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual impacts of our social systems, which is an essential and important role.
3. Connects us to each other. Often this comes in emotional connection. You’re reading along, and then suddenly you realize that a character is describing an emotion that you believed only you had experienced. It’s like finding a friend who truly understands you. You are filled with amazement; you feel less alone. But writing also inspires connection through everything from new ideas, innovative language use, and an entertaining story. Language is communication, and communication is what binds people together. Fiction writing is communication distilled down to get at the places where language fails us–those unturned stones of the mind that we know and don’t know about at the same time.

I think that this is my basic opinion of why creative writing is important. But I could be leaving something out. If so, what?