david 

Finished a story I have been working on, off and on for the last 6 months.  It's name has changed from "Flow" to "Renaissance" to "Claire's World."  Not sure what I think of it.  Last week I reread it as was very pleased.  Today as I was finishing it I reread it and wasn't impressed.  Good thing I'm workshopping it this weekend to gauge whether it works or not, whether I need to go back and delve into it again, or start submitting it. 

First book club of 2009.  Reading Passage to India.  Bobbi is back.  Don made some Indian food for the occasion.  Lots of fun.

Watched Ninotchka tonight (Lubitsch's comedy with Greta Garbo and Bela Lugosi) because our next film with Adam and Mimi, next weekend is Silk Stockings (with Cyd Charisse),  a musical based on Ninotchka. 

Last writing workshop, while I was gone,  was cancelled due to snow.  So tonight was supposed to be the first workshop in a long while.  But it snowed again!  And, alas, we've postponed once again.  Stayed home and watched the Lakers defeat the Blazers.

Lucie just heard that she is going to be involved in another dance performance in April (she tried out last year and they picked a small group from that).  Rehearsals start next week.

Went to Barb's house for lunch and hung out with her and Declan and Shawn.  At night, watched Hitchcock's "Marnie" with Sean Connery. 

Adam, Mimi, Phil, Marshall, Giger and I went to the Blazers tonight.  Horrible horrible game.  Hopefully we get Roy back soon.

This may be my lowest step count.  If not close.  Went to a very festive New Years Day gathering at Seth and Julianna's.  Got to see lots of people and eat insanely good food.  Afterwards went to "Rachel Getting Married" with Adam and Mimi, a movie they liked more than we did. 

Jean-Jacques, my father-in-law sent a book of stories about cats written by Doris Lessing as a Christmas gift.  We are both addicted to it.  It is a very gruesome but enthralling read, particularly about raising cats in Africa.

Used our pastaworks gift certificate (thanks Sharon, Danny and Julia) and went to the restaurant Evoe joining it.  Was fantastic.  Had a raddichio, green apple, frico salad,  a delicata squash mint, salt, pumpkin seed and balsalmic vinegar salad, and sausages with lentils.  With wine paired to everything for us.  Really nice.  Then headed to the Hollywood Theatre for the French film "A Christmas Tale"  perhaps my favorite film this year so far.  Afterwards we went to see Lucie's dance teacher in a bizarre, intriguing dance performance/artistic protest called Freedom of Information 2008,  where one dancer in each state is blindfolded and earplugged for 24 hours and performs that whole time with people coming and going as they see fit (or watching it streaming on the internet), it all ending at midnight.

The Roy-less Blazers beat the Celtics.  Unbelievable game.

Went for a late breakfast at Navarre with Adam and Mimi and then to Mike Leigh's  "Happy Go Lucky"

Put together an online slideshow of our trip to Cambodia and Vietnam and also a small collection of travel videos for people to check out.

Here is my favorite video from Phnom Penh:

Finally got a chance to read my story in ZYZZYVA.  My first real look at ZYZZYVA as a publication too.  Howard Junker, the editor, is offering for a short time over the holidays the opportunity to get a free copy of this issue of ZYZZYVA if you email him at editor@zyzzyva.org    This most likely will be the only ZYZZYVA story this year with a golem in Hebrew school so act fast!

Several people in my writing workshop have been ordering various small press journals with prestige to both support them and to assess them.  And I have to say I'm by far most impressed with the quality of writing in ZYZZYVA.  Maybe it is a compatibility of sensibility, and thus it isn't total coincidence that my story ended up here.  Whatever the reason,  I really enjoyed "The Inn and Out" by Alia Volz, "The Job Interview" by Tom Lutz and Maggie Shen King's "Perfect Gifts for Mothers."  My brief experience with Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, River Styx (and my longer experience with Harper's) has left me flat in comparison.  Of course, this is only based on one issue but I'm excited to read the rest of it.

Given all the airport problems Vancouver, Seattle and Portland have had over the past two weeks, I won't complain about any minor hiccups on our return home.  Comparatively it was pretty uneventful.  Was hoping to write on the way home but given two sleepless nights prior to flying I was pretty useless.  Did finish David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress and then watched a lot of movies on the planes.  Wall-E,  Bienvenue a Chez Sty,  30 Rock,  The Riches....  Came home to a deeply frozen Portland, with most side streets still snowed in, cars buried.  Ewok was happy to see us.  Plump and very furry this winter, I think she has gained some weight during our absence. 

Ho Chi Minh city was packed, at 4am!, with people out drinking, eating and motobiking, many wrapped in or waving Vietnamese flags in celebration of Christmas.  There were still traffic jams at this time,  outdoor cafes were full and spilling over.  Christmastime in both Vietnam and Cambodia has been a weird experience.  Both countries celebrate it wholeheartedly,  not as a religious event I don't believe,  but as part of modernization,  some sort of effect of capitalism,  and an admiration of Western traditions.  Even way back near the beginning of our trip we were hearing jingle bells at random restaurants and hotels and trees were being erected, fake snowflakes, a the ubiquitous Santa Claus who is always playing a saxophone here.  Go figure.  Unfortunately they usually only have 1 or 2, or at best 3 songs at any given cafe so they play them in an endless loop.  Jingle Bells extended play version played for hours. 

We are in the Hong Kong airport now.  Hoping we are going to get home today.  Have a 4 hour layover here, at a nice airport.  Several Chinese herbal shops where we got Lucie some more specific medicine for her cough.  Lots of weird restaurant options ranging from chicken claw in bean sauce to sea blubber with chili. 

Been thinking about the disappearance of wildness.  It's been 20 years since I've read Edward Abbey but I always found his philosophy compelling that there needed to be places remote and difficult to arrive at, places essentially non-human.  That the existence of these places was important to us, even if a given individual couldn't witness it.  That there was a danger in making everything accessible and easy to arrive at, for wildness could not exist in this context.  Is it better that we can drive a luxury bus to the foot of Machu Pichu versus the original 30 mile hiking trail, or that you can see all the major geysers at Yellowstone from your RV?  Places that require effort, stamina, discomfort, and patience to arrive at, there is a value in that...Lucie and watched the sunrise this morning over our little island paradise, Lucie's cough having returned, and both of us not sleeping much.  We took the one daily plane off the island.  We saw a HUGE spider in the airport, with a big egg sac underneath her.  Went back to our usual Ho Chi Minh hotel and then spent our last afternoon having fun.  Went to a place called the Temple Club, with supposedly the best haute-Vietnamese food in the city.  It looks right out of the 1920s, absolutely gorgeous, sort of like a Vietnamese version of Huber's bar for those reading this from Portland.  We have another thing to our best list.  We had salad rolls that are a specialty from Hue that use mustard leaves instead of rice paper and have shrimp and pork inside.  Insane.  Also had barbequed eggplant with purple rice,  a lemongrass chili chicken and two delicious desserts, another Hue-style cake with secret sauce and a banana-coconut dessert that i imagine must rival heroin in its ability to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain.  Was definitely a culinary highlight for us (and only put us back $20 total).  Lucie then got a foot massage while I went to the internet cafe to find out whether Vancouver and Portland airports had dug themselves out of the snow or not.  Bought some coffee, including the famous (infamous?) weasel coffee that is fed to weasels and then harvested from their excrement and had a last pho before retiring.  Unfortunately we had another cough-filled sleep disturbed night.  We watched a couple bad movies and then were up at 3:20am to head off to the airport.

Heather, our cat and house sitter, sent us a photo of our front yard and car swallowed by over a foot of snow with more coming.  Hope we are able to reenter Portland uneventfully.  Today, our last full day on Con Dao island,  we rented motobikes and drove the other road in town with the intention of hiking to a lagoon called Dam Tre.  The drive was beautiful, with rocky cliffs, and huge turquoise waves,  but it was a little difficult to enjoy, not being so smooth on a motorbike in high winds, on steep inclines and declines at the edge of dizzying cliffs.  With the help of some locals, we found the little dirt path and walked to the most beautiful beach on the island.  And Lucie's most beautiful beach ever.  You know it is a good trip when you have a "best list."  Lots of things on this list for us.
Best mango, beach, pad thai, Indian food, fruit shake, pho.  Not bad.  From the beach we intended to do a 2 hour hike to a lagoon but couldn't find a trail.  Thus, we stayed and swam instead.  On the way back to the bike we encountered a very beautiful snake climbing into a tree, a fluorescent lime slender snake, that glowed on the ground, but blended in well with the tree's foliage.  Back in town, we made a short stop at the open market where we drank some coconut water out of a coconut and then headed back for lunch.  Lucie had squid and shrimp with noodles.  I had mustard greens and rice, not being as hungry.  On the drive we noticed two billboards with construction blueprints for new hotels developments, and one beach where they were already building another,  concrete bungalows that would go well for people who crave a vacation with a prison motif.  I have mixed feelings about this.  Of course, I'm glad that we are here with only a handful of others, before this place, like so many others gets fully developed.  But yet we are part of that process, "normalizing" these places and telling others about them.  Then seeking the next place also not so touristy, and so on.  Thankfully the other 14 islands have no development as of yet.  But it is hard to imagine that will last either.  But for now we are in paradise, an airport that receives one plane a day,  and tourists who want to be somewhere without any. 

Happy Hanukkah and Winter solstice.  Haven't stumbled on any Vietnamese synagogues so far but I'm sure they are out there.  You are supposed to eat oily things on Hanukkah, which shouldn't be too hard here.  Lots of fried rice,  sauteed greens (mustard, spinach etc.),  fried tofu etc.  After a breakfast of coffee, boiled sweet potatoes and mystery congee we rented snorkel gear and motobikes to begin one of our most stressless fun days.  I say this, because I forgot to mention my bike debacle of yesterday.  My bike, built before the invention of the wheel,  I mainly walked next to on the way to our hike yesterday, as we were going up a hill, a beautiful forested hill, but a hill nonetheless.  As children flew down the opposite direction on their bikes,  I looked forward to the crazy slalom to the bottom when we were done, even though the brakes squealed in such a manner as to cause any mobile intelligent creatures to evacuate the immediate area.  Little did I know that once moving over a certain speed, the one functioning brake did not work at all.  Hurtling down the thankfully untrafficked road, my burning rubber-soled shoes dragging against the asphalt as I zig-zagged past the military outpost towards the bridge built by prisoners, I was finally able to stop, and no I did not see wildlife during my debacle.  Today we had a functioning motobike which was a delight and took one of only a handful of roads, past a shrine for an attempted prison escape by sea,  half died, half recaptured, past the only other "town", a fishing pier whose bay was full of bright blue boats moored offshore,  toward the end of the road literally, where we snorkelled with a Swedish family.  There probably are no more than 20 non-Vietnamese tourists on the island in total and the hundreds of Vietnamese tourists move en masse, and thus are usually unseen.  The hotel and beaches usually feel deserted, and then suddenly 40 men decide to swim, loudly and exuberantly at the same time.  Or we come to lunch and the place looks like a tornado hit it.  Tables strewn with shrimp heads, black mushrooms,  and half-eaten fluorescent jello-like desserts.  On the return I had become much smoother with the bike,  expertly warning goat herds, or greeting half-sleeping cows with my horn, and we turned toward the interior, through rice paddies with water buffalo and ended up at a large open market.  Lastly we headed back to the bridge, the site of my biking debacle, and spotted a large noble macaque who seemed as interested in checking us out from his tree, as we were of him.

Today we flew to the Con Dao island chain, a chain of 15 islands in the South China sea that have little tourist infrastructure and which are currently famous for their natural ecosystems, 80% of their surface area being national park, with the World Wildlife Fund protecting the habitat for egg-laying sea turtles,  the rare dugong (like a manatee), and with lots of endemic wildlife (monkeys, lots of birds etc.).  It is supposed to be one of the only hassle-free places in the country, you being able to leave your bike or motobike anywhere without fear of theft.  The islands have a dark past, being infamous as the site of French prisons from the late 19th century until the 1960s, including the "tiger cages" that housed prisoners in a way they could be viewed from above.  Thus,  the majority of people who visit are ex-Viet Cong soldiers who are coming subsidized by the government on package tours.  There were 4 other tourists on the plane mostly full of ex-soldiers I presume.  Our first 24 hours on the island, with Lucie sick and our lodging scenario in question were quite stressful (but as I write this everything has been ironed out and we are psyched to be here).  Apparently 800 soldiers were meant to arrive for some sort of commemoration and thus we could only find a hotel for the 1st night. 
The only town is beautiful, full of turn of the century French villas.  Many are uninhabited, their really aren't many shops,  only one restaurant,  and almost no traffic, the streets almost deserted, which is a huge novelty after all the motobike honking and crazy traffic elsewhere.  The technique for crossing the road in most of Vietnam and Cambodia is actually counterintuitive.  There never is a right time to cross.  You actually begin to cross the street without any obvious way to succeed and the key is to walk slowly directly into traffic, so slowly so bikes and taxis and tuktuks, and cyclos can adjust and weave around you as you walk and pause, walk and pause.  None of that here.  The one restaurant has the craziest menu.  Ostrich, frogs, crocodiles, nails (do they mean snails?), pigeon.  Lots of misspellings, so you can get "forgs in a pot" for instance.  We weren't so adventurous but the food is really good.  Lucie had a tamarind crab dish that she loved.  The place next to our hotel was lived in by Camille Saint Saens in 1895.  Apparently he was friends with the director of the prison who invited him to come here to finish his opera Brunhilda.  He would be awoken every morning not just by street vendors but by the sounds of chains dragging against the ground and the groans of prison workers.  But, hey, his view was amazing.  The island is gorgeous.  We rented bikes to go up to the National Park headquarters, bikes with no gears, pedals that wobbled underneath your feet,  bikes so rested they creaked,  bikes whose rear brakes were gone.  We got directions to a hike.  Heard the strangest bird song,  heard unidentified creatures leaping from limb to limb in the canopy, saw something black with a white face, sort of like a squirrel but much larger.  Lots of butterflies and weird vine-like trees.  Passed a bridge built by prisoners of the French,  with a group of Vietnamese men having their picture taken there.  Unlike Saint Saens we were not awaken by prisoners but instead by a loud speaker broadcast throughout the town at 5:30am that sounded like someone directing military calisthenics.  The next day we couldn't get a motobike because of the groups of white baseball cap clad tour groups.  That was the only sign of their presence.  Even with 800 extra people here it often felt like we were alone.  Walking deserted beaches, full of purple sea shells, with a lonely fishing boat here or there.  Passed one of the French prisons,  a mass burial site,  the pier built by prisoners, all commemorated.  This place does have a ghostly haunted feel.  After lots of legwork we were able to get the last room on the island for our final 3 nights here.  And in the most luxurious of hotels ($45 a night).  A stunning view.  And our stress has finally melted away as Lucie is feeling better and we have a place to settle for our final days.  So many strange details here.  In the mini-bar there is a soda or energy drink or something of the sort with ingredients that include white fungus and bird's nest.  Breakfast is boiled sweet potatoes.  Congees (a Chinese breakfast staple, where you boil rice with 1 part rice, 16 parts water into a soup, here served with crab and scallions),  squid and noodles.  The coffee is sweet and flowery.  There was a French movie on TV last night dubbed into Vietnamese with english subtitles.  But they had the same woman doing all the voices in one long monotone.  Very funny. 

Air Asia is giving away 100,000 free tickets to Thailand because nobody is going.  Unbelievable.  Definitely we've reaped the benefits of our trip coinciding with their political turmoil, despite our initial agenda being derailed. 
The next two days are our most logistic oriented of days, and unfortunately conincide with Lucie coming down with a virus.  Sorethroat, fatigue, slight fever.  Flew back from Siem Reap (after eating the worst and most expensive pho at the airport) to Ho Chi Minh today and went back to our first "hotel".  The owner when he saw us hugged us with genuine spontaneous affection, a nice thing, since we are basically sleeping in his house, maybe even his room (as he seems to always be sleeping on the couch in the entryway),the walls covered with pictures of his childhood.  I was excited to eat pho again after our pho-less Cambodia journey (even after the airport pho debacle) and pho was just the right thing for a sick traveler.  Boy is it good here.