Weekend and To-Do

I cannot believe how much we've done this weekend.

LisaKit came over Saturday and helped Omaha and I weed out the worst part of the back yard, where the rhubarb plant and the cherry tree are growing. I mowed the entire back lawn, and then we rented a truck from Home Depot, raced home, loaded 700 pounds of downed fence and the wreck of the old metal playset, and dropped it all off at the local dump.

Woof. In 90°F heat, too.

Sunday, Omaha and I did our monthly shopping, then got home where I proceeded to re-butcher the packed sausage and salmon into 1-pound increments, and put away everything while Omaha attended a meeting. Then we went out back, and again in the high-80's heat dug two three-foot deep holes, lifted out two 60-pound cement footings for the downed fence, and propped up a pair of eight-foot fenceposts with a gravel drainage base and 30 pounds of concrete. We used double-wide cereal boxes to hold the initial pour of concrete. I must not be very reactive to lye because I got the stuff all over my hands and yet never felt a thing.

We have wasps in the house's frame, and they're eating my house. You can hear them in the downstairs bathroom and it's very, very creepy. They got in through a crack where the water line comes out to an outdoor spigot, and apparently they're moving up along the plumbing. I've got the phone number of a local pest control guy, and I'm going to contact him tomorrow. Wasps I can live with-- we do, here in Washington, every year. Wasps eating my house? Those are gonna die.

Dinner last night was utterly delightful-- Grilled hamburgers, mine mixed with feta, Kouryou-chan's with American "cheese", and Omaha and LisaKit collaborated on a zucchini bisque using a zucchini from the garden that was almost as big as some of my sex toys. That and tomatoes made dinner all good.

Tonight, we ate just as good: real baked potato, broccoli steamed with olive and garlic oils, and filet mignon wrapped in bacon. The meat was astonishingly cheap, but heck, they were barely 6oz each, and there were only three of us.

I have some stock cooking on the stove. I need to chill it and get it into the 'fridge, and process it before Wednesday. I need to buy lateral 2x4s and 1x6's for the fence. And I need to call pest control.

No! Ghorm's is gone!

A long time ago a roll playing game called Shadowrun came out. It was a kind of Faerie Emergent/Cyberpunk crossover set in Seattle 2019: Yakuza Orcs warred with Elvish Cybermages in the South Dome Arcology while dragons flew in from the Cascades and the Olympics to hear the latest punk phenomenon at the Gorge, etc. etc. Fun and silly.

But the Seattle Sourcebook contained references to many different places in Seattle, some of which are real. There really is a bar called the Pink Door. There really is a restaurant at the address of The Big Rhino, "The finest Orc restaurant on the West Coast": it's The Brooklyn, which is a damned fine (and damned expensive) restaurant.

And there really was a hamburger joint named Ghorm's! It was owned by a man named Ghorm! Isn't that just the greatest Orc name ever? They had greasy burgers in the 1950's style, handed to you wrapped in white butcher's paper, with an unwaxed cup of fries still dripping with oil. Phenomenal stuff.

It's gone now, replaced with this abomination: ( Pointless, sad photo )

A Papa Murphy's, really? Welfare ticket pizza? You can't buy a restaurant pizza with WIC coupons, but you can buy a Papa Murphy's because it's technically not "prepared"; you still have to take it home and bake it yourself. So it's like a semi-thawed frozen pizza, almost, and about that quality. Omaha and I bought one once. Once.

That's so sad. More than anything else, it tells us how dire the economy is. Well, maybe not. Maybe Ghorm just decided he wanted to retire and closed up. But it's still one less piece of the Seattle that I love, gone.