place2place

sitting on pennsylvania ave

We may not know what country we are living in, but it's Friday, and at our house--or hotel--that means pizza. Last week we walked across the street to Papa John's, got the largest pizza they had and kids ate it in about five minutes. Dave and Elisabeth will not be surprised by this, when we come over on Friday, they don't double the pizza order, they square it. Last week, after vanity-sized pizza tragedy, Peter and I had to have cereal with red wine--c'mon it was Friday!--for dinner. So this week we walked across a different street to Trader Joe's and got all the ingredients for a white flour/pepperoni and a whole wheat/mushroom-onion-bell pepper. In Niger we missed Trader Joe's so much. Since it's our only grocery store here within walking distance (I don't count Dean and Deluca), I hope we are good and sick of it by the time we leave. I wonder what pizza Friday will mean in Moscow.

Barnes and Noble is killing me, so today we got library cards.

guess where

Emily of Black Apple (see not a day goes by without, left) moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta a couple of years ago. She just moved again. Guess to where? Portland, Oregon. What a town that is.

what would you be buying?

Peter is one of the few people in the State Dept to ever qualify for the wardrobe allowance, you have to change weather zones radically. Niger to Russia somehow qualifies, can you believe it? Would you be running around in a panic? I'm just blocking it out. I figure we're okay, as long as kids don't have to go to school the first day on ice skates.

I picked up a scarf, Peter bought himself some boots. None of us have worn socks in a year and have a hard time wrapping our minds around the idea. And then I got semi-panicky for a minute and bought a coat, mostly because I liked the idea that it had a special pocket for my iPhone. (I'm joking!)

Then once we were in Land's End mode I bought kids some fleece, and we bought Stefan a coat. I read somewhere that in Moscow they think people who wear light blue are gay and beat them up. Of course, of the ten color choices he wanted the light blue coat. His second choice was orange. I'm sure people who wear orange get beat up for being...loud or for having bad taste.

Camille wanted a new backpack so we got her one. I brainwashed/bribed Stefan to reuse his backpack from last year. Target is full of backpacks with green themes; I'd like to write "I'm reusing my backpack from last year," with a Sharpie pen, rather than buy a new backpack that says "Recycling's cool."

Having gone to French schools forever, Camille thinks when we refer to the Revolutionary War we are talking about the French Revolution and refers to herself as "we, the French." Stefan asks if he was born in the state or the country of San Francisco, and tells people he was born in the city of Disneyland. So I bought a nice jigsaw puzzle of the US, although once we get west of Idaho, don't ask me which state is which until we get to Vermont.

Peter says he has no idea what I'm buying this other crap for, what we really need are these:

let the tourism begin

While Camille is at riding camp and Peter is in class, Stefan and I have all day to play tourist. We went to the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum one day and another day we all went to the Kennedy Center to hear a Hawaiian slack-key guitarist. Our nation's capitol is a great town.

dc report and i do mean david cook this time

The Idol show was about ten blocks down the street from where are in Washington, they're stalking me. Stefan and I had some free time, (what do we have besides free time these days?) so we headed down to see if David Cook would come out and talk to us. In the cab on the way there I wrote out the lyrics to The World I Know, the Collective Soul song he covers. I've been trying to figure out the chords on the guitar, and even with the tabs on the internet, still can't quite get it.

David Cook was out for about an hour. Stefan gave him a Hot Wheels car, "Thanks, I need a car!" (he gave the one he won on the show to his brother.) And he wrote out the chords to TWIK for me.

dc report and I don't mean david cook

There's Camille in the long pants, walking to Trader Joe's. From where we are staying in Washington DC I can watch her go door to door.

We were suppose to leave for Moscow on Sunday, but because visas to Russia take not seven days but thirty days, we are here until mid-September. Once we wrap our minds around this concept, it's okay, it just took a few days to get use to. I feel the most for Camille, a new country, a new school, and three weeks late. 

To make up for it, Camille is at Rock Creek State Park everyday this week for horseback riding camp.

mr. martin meets art lutherie

Peter went on a guitar scouting mission for me and found a beautiful line of Canadian guitars called Art and Lutherie. I went and played some, they had a great tone, but were kind of expensive and I wanted to shop around. I played some Yamahas, some Ovations, which is what I thought I wanted until I heard the Martin and felt like, why even get a guitar if it's not a Martin? I'll just wait and someday get a Martin. Then we went to a used guitar store, Trade Up Music. I was goofing around on the Epiphones and Ovations there, and Peter found the Martin behind the counter waiting for us.

Last weekend, Helen brought her dulcimer. Let me tell you, we were killing on 'Shortenin Bread,' we'll save it for the encore when we go on tour. Helen loved my electronic turner--me too, I always thought the hardest part of playing guitar was tuning it, back in the day when I was trying to tune it by ear. We wanted to get her a tuner like mine so we headed to Trade Up Music. We spent an hour in there, Elliott on the banjo, Stefan on the the ukulele, me playing the Epiphone Hummingbird I didn't get and started thinking that maybe I somehow need. Nina was playing away on a used Art and Lutherie. The more we listened to it, the more we loved it, it's high notes sound like chimes.

So we bought the Art and Lutherie. Peter thinks we need an extra set of strings, but we are afraid to go back to Trade Up Music, we don't need three guitars.

pdx report

Peter found us the best house on SE Salmon with hydrangeas blooming all around. After spending so much time walking down nearby Hawthorne Street, I really feel like there is something wrong with us because neither of us have a tattoo. I can't get one because I could never decide on an image or where to put it--remember it took me three years to choose a sofa. And when it comes to his own body, Peter is needle-phobic. For the first time we visited the Chinese Garden in Portland. Camille reminded me of her joke about people who get tattoos written in Chinese, how do you know what it really says? "Truth, peace, trust, or 'I let someone write something in a foreign language on my body and it's permanent'?'"