Thoughts on Las Vegas so far:

1. This is the best place for people watching, ever. You simply don’t see people like this anywhere else. People like… the 50-something beanpole and his Asian wife, she wearing a beaded Sears pantsuit and he wearing an oversized orange-and-blue paisley suit jacket, dancing ala Studio 54 to a live band. Or the old mob boss in his black dress shirt and his cold, much-injured wife in a 60s mod dress, dancing in careful arthritic steps to same band. Seriously awesome.

2. Star Trek Bar. Yes! I tasted blue beer and talked to a Klingon. Proof:

3. I am seeing far fewer people on drugs/women that are obviously prostitutes this time. What up, Las Vegas? Losing your edge?

4. The weather is… nice. It has been in the high 70s the whole time. I cannot tell you how relieved I am about that.

5. Skyline:

6. Fancy French food in Las Vegas seems like a good idea (in context), but it turns out it isn’t that great. It’s not awful, but the little details are messed up–the appetizer it too acidic or the frites have been left sitting under a hot light too long–and the waitress explains what escargot and steak tartare is to you. Why is this town starting to be known for its food, again?

7. Bellagio Fountains, not without charm:

8. Gambling continues to be a mystery to me. I spent $2 on slot machines and won ten cents. Winning money is confusing. The machine makes noises and then you get a ticket for ten cents that you have to go redeem somewhere. Also, everyone who gambles is sad. Walking through some of those casinos is like walking through a funeral. Aren’t these people supposed to be enjoying this?

9. Ceiling at the Bellagio:

10. Drunk bicycling: A Las Vegas pastime?

Funny little video making fun of promoting your book in today’s Twitter/Facebook/YouTube world, while simultaneously promoting this guy’s book in that world. Clever! I tell you, it’s hard to be a writer now when you have to waste time with all this stuff (, she blogs). Whatever… what are you gonna do? (Via)

I am still over Las Vegas, but since Kyle’s work is sending him out there for a week to fix servers, I figured I would tag along. Ah, the beauties of being self-employed.

I am not sure about being in a desert for a week, let alone in Las Vegas for a week. Las Vegas is a weekend trip, not a week-long trip. However, this time I’m going to do some of the odder Las Vegas stuff. Did you know there is a pinball museum? And I hear there is a Star Trek bar that everyone should check out. The art museum is supposed to be pretty decent too. Vacation! A possibly depressing vacation, yes, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

If you have any suggestions for what to do in Las Vegas besides gamble (not interesting to me) and drink, I’d be delighted to hear it.

Sorry I haven’t blogged. I can’t blog when there’s a heatwave. I can’t do anything during a heatwave except hide from the sun and moan about being hot.

But I have been meaning to tell you about our mushroom farm. We bought it at Maker Faire a couple of weeks ago. It looks like a molding loaf of bread in a plastic bag, but it is actually sawdust and rice bran that has been cured of bacteria and infused with water and mushroom culture.

We bought the organic Shiitake Mushroom farm for $19.98. The guy who sold it to us said that they guarantee one pound of mushrooms from the farm. I was a little doubtful, because $20 for one pound of mushrooms is pretty high. However, that is the minimum amount that they guarantee, and the farm is supposed to go through 3-5 cycles, and besides, it’s just cool to watch.

We took it home and put it on our kitchen counter. Within two days, lumps began to rise out of the farm. Within three days, something that looked like mushrooms began to emerge:

Within a week, we had huge Shiitake mushrooms coming out of the bag. We harvested 15 in all, over a pound of mushrooms, and we have 2-4 more cycles on the farm to go.

Even better, the mushrooms were fresh, tender, and clean in a way I have never had before. I guess like all other food, they are best when fresh. We had them in a mushroom ragu over pasta and then a mushroom strudel wrapped in phyllo dough.

Now the mushroom farm is supposed to rest for a couple of weeks before we get our next crop. Hurrah! If I get as many as I did in just the first cycle on the remaining cycles, I will definitely buy this thing again.

Dear Friends,

I hope you can make it to the Word Pirates reading tomorrow night. Marcia and I have been working really hard to make it awesome. I will be reading an essay. Here are the details:

Petaluma, Calif., May 15 – Word Pirates, a professional writing group, will host its second annual reading on May 15. True to their name, the Word Pirates will commandeer the Phoenix Theater to tell tales that could rouse a dead man.

Last year’s standing-room-only reading featured local artists, gripping stories, and a surprise pirate duel. This year’s event will be even better. Doors will open at 7:30 p.m., with pirate-themed appetizers, grog, and surprise entertainment. Then the Word Pirates will read original pieces created in the group during the last year. This event is free and all are welcome. Peg legs and parrots must be checked at the door.

Word Pirates Reading
Date: Thursday, May 15
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Place: The Phoenix Theater – 201 Washington St., Petaluma
Cost: Free (donations welcomed)

Reading at the Event: Robin Cadogan, Noelani Price, Morgan Elliott, Joy Lanzendorfer, Ross Lockhart, and Marcia Simmons.

For more information, visit www.wordpirates.org, e-mail wordpirates@gmail.com, or call 707-782-0971. Arrr!

My book review of Marya Hornbacher’s Madness: A Bipolar Life is up at PopMatters. Excerpt:

In 1998, Marya Hornbacher wrote Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, about an eating disorder so severe, she whittled herself down to 52 pounds and was given a week to live. The book stands out in its ability to dig inside the mind of someone with an eating disorder. Hornbacher, who was 23 when she wrote the book, hadn’t yet gotten distance from being sick, and that, combined with copious research, made Wasted a particularly unflinching look at anorexia and bulimia. …

Now, a decade later, Hornbacher has written a follow-up: Madness: A Bipolar Life. The book picks up where Wasted leaves off, covering the last 10 years of Hornbacher’s life, when she discovers that her real problem all along has been bipolar disorder. Everything else—starving herself, drinking, cutting, throwing up—was just a means to control the roller coaster of her moods. As with her eating disorders, Hornbacher ignored the diagnosis for as long as possible, descending into an ugly hole of self-destruction.

Go take a look.

On Sunday, Kyle and I were sitting in our backyard, staring at the ivy. It is Afghanistan Ivy. Some brilliant person planted it back there 20-30 years ago, thinking it would make a reliable, drought-resistant ground cover. And boy is it ever.

See, in California, Afghanistan Ivy is an invasive species. It just loves it here. Nothing eats it. It spreads by root and by vine, both creeping under the soil and up every surface above ground. It winds around other trees like a boa constrictor and chokes them. And, when it gets very old, it grows into a tree and begins to make berries to further propagate itself.

We had two such ivy trees in our backyard, and subsequently, our yard is covered with ivy.

(In this picture, the ivy is choking the tree next to it. I don’t have a picture of the ivy trees themselves, but it gives you an idea of the back fence before.)

I have been dutifully killing it, but it’s coming back already, its shiny new green leaves waving like plastic lily pads at me. So on Sunday, Kyle asked me if I wanted to take down the ivy trees, even though it meant we would have less privacy in our backyard for awhile. I said yes. Or rather, YES. He got out the chainsaw.

I knew that taking down these two large trees meant that I would have less privacy. I didn’t realize how much it would open up the space, or how much sunlight it would let into the backyard. The ivy was dark, heavy, and full of bugs. As the trees came down, my backyard suddenly seemed huge and sunny. For the first time, I liked it back there.

As for privacy, I plan to replace the ivy trees with another tree, maybe an olive or something that flowers. But the truth is, I will probably never get rid of the ivy altogether. Even if I manage to eradicate it from my yard, the house next door has at least two trees of it.

Seeing those hated trees come down limb by sneaky limb was satisfying, let me tell you.

Let me start out by saying that I’m a fan of O’Reilly Media. After all, Kyle has written several books for them. I have gone to the Maker Faire for the last two years. In fact, Kyle had a booth at Maker Faire last year, which I wrote about here. So, having gone and enjoyed it every time–especially the craft fair aspect of the event–I was happy that Marcia invited us to go again this year. She even offered to drive.

The sign that something was wrong started at the freeway interchange to San Mateo, where Maker Faire was being held. Suddenly, there was a lot of traffic. After slowly driving through it for a half hour longer than felt necessary, Marcia and Kyle started suggesting that maybe the traffic was because of the Maker Faire. I didn’t think so. It seemed impossible that this many people wanted to look at crafts and lasers. The whole DIY aesthetic and geekiness that Marker Faire represents still seems too grass roots and small to me to attract this many people. I mean, this was like being caught in traffic for a football game, not a cute little geeky fair.

But when we pulled onto the off-ramp for the Maker Faire exit, I saw that I was wrong. The off-ramp was jammed full of cars and moving at a glacier pace. For an hour and 40 minutes, we sat on the off-ramp. We were trapped. We stopped and started, stopped and started. People were parking their cars on the shoulder and peeing in the bushes. I was dying of boredom. I mean, all I saw for nearly two hours was this:

FINALLY we got into San Mateo, but the craziness continued. Traffic was clogging the streets. There was no where to park. We drove around and around but all the lots were full. My mood started to sour. I can only be in traffic for so long before I start getting upset. I took to desperate measures to entertain myself.

“Help Me! (Trapped in car, can’t see lasers)”

“All these people are coming here? Really?”

Line to get in

At last, we gave up and parked in downtown San Mateo and ate at a taqueria in the back of a Mexican grocery store. Marcia had excellent tamales. The Jesus statue on top of the meat case lifted my spirits.

I would have been happy to go home at that point, but it had taken four-and-a-half hours to get there and Kyle and Marcia still wanted to go, so we walked over to the Maker Faire. Luckily, because Marcia is all connected and important, we had free tickets, so we didn’t have to stand in the line to get in.

Once in, it was… crowded. And yet the faire was pretty much the same. I mean, yeah, they had a few new things, like bands and giant metal statues–

–but overall it was the same. Same giant robot giraffe, same cupcake scooters, same pinball trailer, same $3 water and soda (and $9 beer, I hear). What was different was that somehow–and I admit this is a subjective viewpoint–the joy had been sucked out of the event. Last year, there were people riding around on every weird bicycle contraption you could think of. This year, there were only a few people on such things. Last year, people were so cool and strange that I wanted to take a picture of everyone I saw. This year, while there were plenty of geeky tee-shirts and pony tails, only one or two people struck me as interesting. And also, people were kind of rude.

One of the biggest disappointments was the craft fair. Last year, the Bizarre Bazaar was full of awesome crafts. I walked around and got idea after idea. This year, the overall quality of the crafts seemed lower. While there were some repeat crafters, the new stuff slipped into more predictable craft territory: baby booties, cards, cutesy pillows, etc. And anyway, I couldn’t even look at the booths because they moved the Craft portion of an event into a small building and it was so crowded, you could hardly walk.

(Sample of the crowd in the Craft building)

That said, I’m glad I went because I got to hang out with friends. There were a few other cool things:

1. Giant metal statues, as mentioned before.

2. A DIY mushroom farm where you can grow your own mushrooms at home. Kyle and I bought one. We are growing shitake mushrooms on our kitchen counter now.

3. Goats

4. Various lasers, Tesla coils, robots, et. all.

5. Pops! by Krystina Castella, a book about making popsicles. I was so impressed, I went right home and made popsicles with fresh lemon and grapefruit juice.

Kyle kept saying that I thought Maker Faire wasn’t cool anymore because, like an indie band geek, I didn’t like that my little “discovery” had gotten so popular. Maybe so. It amazes me that that many people wanted to go to it, and I suspect the reason is hype more than anything else. Or, it could simply be that I resent sitting in a car for five hours.

Still, I don’t care if it is a little snotty: like a good restaurant or an indie band, some things start to suck once they become popular.

Poynter has an interesting little contest going on–six-word journalism mottos. Some are pretty funny–”Dirty commie latte-sipping liberal scum”–and some are kind of depressing–”Stop the presses! Oh, you did,” “They’ll miss us when we’re gone,” and “We’ll always have Paris … or Britney.”

Of all of them, the one I most relate to is: “But this IS my day job!”

(Side tangent: I think it’s kind of silly that people think print is going away. It’s clearly not, it’s just readjusting itself to include the new media. Also–and I say this as someone who writes for three blogs AND supports herself a professional writer–blogging is not the same as writing. Bloggers are not “authors.” Gawker writers and PerezHilton are not the same as journalists. Please, please, please, can we stop moaning about this subject on every writing/lit blog out there?

Everything is going to be fine.

There. Six words.)