How to make a Secret Compartment Book!

At my just recently ex-Audubon job, we received a donation of a bunch of old children's books. After conducting a e-bay/amazon/google search concerning the current value of first-edition "Tom Swift" (boy wonder from the 50s and 60s who does things like go to space and play cowboys and indians but for real) adventure novels, I was allowed to take one home. I promptly destroyed its literary value by turning into a cool, if somewhat sloppy, secret compartment book. You can make one too, if you want. Here is how:

You will need a book (hardcover is better) that either is really awesome (judging by its cover) or super-boring in case you want to hide things where no one will find them.

Also needed are an exacto knife (the sharper the better) some type of glue, a paintbrush, plastic wrap or a plastic bag, and heavy books. Felt is optional.

First mix whatever type of glue you have with a little bit of water, so it's thinner, but still not too runny. Wrap the front cover of the book and several of the beginning pages in plastic so they don't get glue on them. Paint the outsides of the remaining book pages with glue, on all three sides-- these are the sides of your book/box and need to be solid-- you won't be able to flip the pages anymore.

Next, put the book under several heavy books and wait for it to dry. This is important so it doesn't warp.

Once the book is dry, you can start attacking the pages with the exacto knife. Leaving yourself a margin of 2 or so inches (or whatever shape you want) start carving out the pages a few at a time. This part is lots of fun, but also pretty difficult. I am sort of an impatient person and probably went too fast, which led to some sloppiness in my final product, particularly around the corners. Go slow with the corners! After you've cut out all of the pages to the back cover, clean up the inside sides a little. This is also hard, it's tough to get a good angle to cut the raggedy paper.

Now, paint the inside sides with the glue/water to strengthen the box. If you want to add a felt lining, this is a good time to do it. I measured vaguely and then cut a piece of felt into five separate pieces (one for each of the sides and the bottom) that fit pretty well. I had a hard time getting the felt to stick with my glue/water mixture, so I broke out the gorilla glue. Not a good idea. It kind of dries in blobs, leading to further sloppiness. Next time, I will try a different, less extreme adhesive for the felt bits, or I will try to prop them up until they dry using toothpicks or something. It could be hard. Lemme know if you find a good gluing method for felt!

Now, with the first few decoy pages and the front cover still wrapped in plastic, put the book under heavy books again, for good measure. When the insides are mostly dry, you can open it up and put it somewhere your pets can't reach so the inside felt portion will dry. Stay away from gorilla glue.

Now you have a neat secret compartment box that wasn't purchased from Urban Outfitters. yay!

Red Crossing

This past weekend I decided to take a CPR/First Aid certification course with the Red Cross. My desire to do this came out of some convoluted ideas about being a good citizen and spur-of-the-moment decision making that a click or two and an idle moment on the internet can offer.

My class was held in a miserable windowless cinder block room deep in the boonies of Union City. Union City is one of those sad towns of central California you read about in Steinbeck novels, only not as romantic. There's a street sign (the kind on a stoplight, official and everything) that has two arrows pointing in different directions and reads "Target" and "Circut City". Like, this is Target and Circut City street?

Our instructor was a man named Dave, who seemed to use the class as a vehicle for telling gruesome personal anecdotes as much as a means to teach us CPR and first aid. Apparently, Dave had been the Sheriff/Chief of Police/miner of some kind in a small town in Utah for several years, and had also served as the interim EMT until real medical personnel could arrive from fifty miles away. "Yep," he said. "I have to tell y'all to use a breathing barrier cause that's what the Red Cross recommends. But lotsa times you don't have a breathing barrier, and you just gotta do mouth to mouth. Remember to plug the nose, or you'll get a face fulla boogers." Charming man, Dave. A lot of his stories sounded suspiciously like lies. He described giving someone the Heimlich maneuver (which they don't call the Heimlich maneuver, by the way) at an Outback Steakhouse after walking up to an old man choking on a shrimp. The way he described the scene, play by play, sounded exactly like the part in "Mrs. Doubtfire" when Robin Williams (disguised as the housekeeper Mrs. Doubtfire) saves Pierce Brosnan from choking on a shrimp. It's the pivotal scene in the movie, because all of the man-lady makeup comes off, and I remarked (kind of under my breath) after Dave told his story that it sounded just like Mrs. Doubtfire. He laughed uncomfortably, which I took to mean he was either an exaggerator or a liar. Perhaps both.

A lot of the class participants were there because they were teachers, or had to complete the course for work. There were two pregnant couples present, one with a particularly wild-eyed mother, who insisted on telling everyone that this was the second time she'd taken the course, (the first time was before they had their first baby) and that she never let anyone without a CPR certification NEAR her daughter! I can appreciate being cautious, but sometimes these things serve as forums for people to congratulate themselves on being responsible citizens. Which is a good thing, really. But I wish the shrill, self-righteous attitude didn't come with it. Everyone had an aunt or a coworker or had witnessed a stranger have some terrible accident. "This isn't group therapy, people," I felt like saying more than once, but didn't, because generally that makes one look like an asshole.

The CPR training itself was useful. I'd taken courses before, but it's been a long while. We got to practice on alien dummies and babies with removable faces. And on one another, which is always sort of awkward, even if you're just pretending to give the other person mouth-to-mouth, and instead are repeating "breath, breath" right over their faces. The first aid training was a little bit of a joke-- it reminded me of driver's ed in high school, when we watched episodes of "Red Asphalt" which were basically cautionary tales of brains and guts spilled across the highway. I mean, if I'm actually going hiking and my buddy Marvin falls and breaks his leg, I suppose I will be a bit better off having watched an instructional video. But not by much. In either scenario, I'd probably scream for help and avoid touching poor Marvin's leg if possible.

Sharks and their attacks have been a theme at our house the past few weeks (Bryan, boogie boarding, etc.). In honor of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, our landlady Phyllis (who lives next door) had us over to watch Jaws. That's her in the costume. She made it herself, and is quite proud of it. I fell asleep halfway through in Phyllis' "Cadillac chair" (a nice, broken in Laze-Boy)

This is the most useful thing I learned this weekend, in reference to poisonous snakes that can bite you and make you die:

Red touching yellow, he's a deadly fellow.
Red touching black, he's a friendly Jack.

As always, watch out for snakes, sharks, and please, take CPR. It's for the children.

How how how could I resist you?

Let me begin by saying that I think people who claim never to be starstuck are lying. Granted, this is coming from a person who gets really excited about "stars". I don't even like Julia Roberts, but I still followed her around like a crazy person when I saw her at Whole Foods a few years ago. (So did everyone else in the store) My freshman year of college, as my friends and I were waiting in line to hear Tom Hanks speak, I made a "Tom Hanks is here!" fortune teller/cootie catcher. I know, I'm pretty cool. But at least I'm willing to admit when I am starstuck. Yes, it's kind of lame to get all excited about famous people, but I never ask for autographs or anything like that. (OK, well, one time I did, but it was for my sister, and I made a complete fool of myself telling Lisa Kudrow that we named our dog after her-- a moment of mortification never to be repeated.) We live in celebrity-obsessed times, and um, yeah, I get a little thrill when I walk by Gene Hackman's pillow store in Santa Fe. It may be frivolous, but I take my fun where I can get it.

While I get excited about all manner of celebrities I've happened to encounter (Ted Danson, Michael Chabon, Obama before he was "Obama") there is a certain level of golly-gee excitement reserved for famous people I actually really like. Yesterday, as I literally dragged K to go see "Mamma Mia!" with me, three of them came to mind: Meryl Streep, Toni Collette, and Estelle Getty.

I don't like Abba practically at all. Except for "Dancing Queen" which we used to listen to at camp dances between rounds of the macarena. I don't know anyone who does like Abba, except for this guy I was friends with, and after he revealed to me his sincere enjoyment of the band, I decided he was kind of pathetic. Still, though, I saw Mamma Mia on stage when I was fourteen, and boy what a lot of fun. You can only imagine my unbridled excitement at seeing the movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep. Like half the planet, I worship ol' Meryl, probably to an unhealthy degree. As I tell anyone who will listen, one time she touched my shoulder, said my name, and told me she liked my buttons. (She and my cousin were co-board members at the time, and I wheedled an introduction out of her) Yeah, that was a high point of age nineteen.

Mamma Mia the movie did not disappoint, or at least it didn't disappoint me. K checked his cell-phone for the time on six occasions throughout the film, but he gallantly escorted me. Moreover, he tolerated my renditions of "Waterloo" and skipping and dancing through the grocery store after the movie was over. To be clear, it's a ridiculous film, full of cheese, fluff and bullshit. But (I'm pretty much stealing NYT critic AO Scott's review here) Meryl (and Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, Christine Baranski et al) knows that the film is as silly as it is, and she has a great time with it. They all do-- and if I can suspend my disbelief to see Christian Bale leap off of buildings and drive a monster-truck motorcycle in "The Dark Knight", well, then, I can suspend it in the other direction and watch Meryl and Pierce sing "SOS" to each other and then engage in bikini-clad conga lines up and down the Greek isles. (By the way, I want to move to Greece. Preferably to my own private island with clean whitewashed buildings, cobblestoned walkways, chalky cliffs and tall pines.)

No less absurd, equally entertaining and a good deal more poignant is the 1994 film "Muriel's Wedding." My beloved AO Scott (another one I'd go crazy to meet) put up the following lovely little montage about Muriel's Wedding, because like Mamma Mia, it's also structured around the songs of Abba. Muriel (Toni Collette) lives with her lazy, mean family in Porpoise Spit, a small town in Australia. Her friends are mean to her too, they're bitchy cheerleader types and it's not clear why they're friends with Muriel in the first place. Muriel has two obsessions: the music of Abba, and getting married.



In the video, Scott clips a scene from Muriel's Wedding that could have been taken straight from Mamma Mia. Muriel and her new pal Rhonda (played by Rachel Griffiths) do a really awesome feather-boa wearing lyp-synch to Waterloo. Similarly, the cast of Mamma Mia breaks into song and strictly choreographed dance at the drop of a hat, but of course, they do this in the "musical theater is real" world. Muriel and Rhonda are clearly performing, but they may as well not be. To them, Abba's song and dance routines are as natural as real life, and more fun than most of what their lives are actually about. It's escapism, and watching Muriel in her room in the early scenes of the film listening to Abba and looking at brides magazines initially makes one pity her. Later though, Muriel starts to get a life and kick ass, and the pity slowly evaporates. It's like being starstruck-- we all have our personal Abbas and stacks of bridal magazines. Or, erm, "I met Meryl Streep" stories, and Tom Hanks themed fortune tellers.

On an unrelated note, other than the fact she's a celebrity I adore, Estelle Getty died yesterday. All hail the late great Golden Girl!

The Red Triangle of Death

Last night, our friend Brian came over and we told him about our boogie boarding adventures last weekend. Brian listened patiently before breaking into a huge evil grin and telling us "you guys know you went boogie boarding right in the middle of the red triangle, right?" I thought he was making something up to mess with us, and I started thinking about the Bermuda Triangle and that one episode of the X Files where Mulder is transported back to the Caribbean circa 1930ish and they're all lost on some ghost ship. But then we went to Wikipedia, which of course never lies, and discovered the fated, fabled Red Triangle.

Apparently, the red triangle is this axis of shark attacks that we went boogie boarding smack-dab in the middle of last Sunday. (We'd have to drive for hours to the south or north to escape the red triangle-- check out the map, it's big) Now, I'm not really that scared of sharks. (K is a different story). And 13 shark attacks since 1952 really doesn't sound that bad. Brian is terrified of sharks and kept ratcheting up his terror-speak. "Being eaten alive is the worst possible way to go, I think" and "Hey, there's this awesome video on youtube of this guy getting attacked by two sharks at the same time. Let's watch it!" I tried to distance myself from the madness by getting out the lint roller and picking up pet hair, but I did watch the video, and yeah, it looks really, really scary. Still, that's not going to happen to us, is it?

The red triangle exists for a few reasons: 1. Sharks like cold water. 2. A bunch of seals and other tasty marine life live in the bay area. and 3. The Bay Area is heavily populated and lots of people like to go swimming and surfing here. Thus, (says my friend Wikipedia) "It has also been estimated that of all documented great white shark attacks on humans, more than half have occurred within the Red Triangle."

Bah. We were still going to go out today, because as my sister pointed out, we're more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the beach then we are to be torn limb from limb and then chewed up and spit out by Bruce. And besides, 13 attacks since 1952, and millions of people have been swimming in the red triangle since then? Our odds are pretty decent. Then I remembered that I am currently, um, experiencing my menstrual cycle. (And I'm sorry if that's oversharing, but come on, half of the population gets their period). So we're going to wait. But we're still going to go. If I bought into various sources of fear mongering (Bush, the media, Brian, rival gangs)I wouldn't fly on planes, eat tomatoes, talk on a cell phone, or live in my neighborhood. This blog post as my witness: I ain't afraid of no shark.

Farmin'

OK, so I don't really want to be a farmer. I don't think I'd be very good at it, for one thing. I like working with my hands, but doing nice quiet indoor things while watching movies on my laptop: embroidery, sewing, coloring, folding paper, cutting, gluing, you get the idea. I've done some supervised gardening in the past, and while I've always had a fun time, I only had to keep at it for an hour or so, before turning the job over to someone else who knew what they were doing. The one summer I tried to have a garden in New Mexico, everything shriveled up in the hot sun/dry crusty soil immediately, or bunnies ate it. I tilled the soil and got bone meal and everything... But, this Sunday's NYT magazine article was really neat and inspiring. I have friends who do this sort of thing, and these pretty pictures and success stories make me think I just might be cut out for it. I do really like ride-on lawnmowers.

I was going to blog about the carbon footprint of cheese, and I still might do that. I was going to give myself an assignment, maybe do a little research, read and post an article or two. It seemed like a relevant, socially responsible thing to talk about: I love cheese, I eat cheese, I care about carbon footprints and it sounds smart. While one of these may be forthcoming (I know, I know, contain yourselves) I am instead captivated by boogie boarding. Fancy artisan French aged-in-caves and blessed by monks creamy dreamy Camembert will have to wait.

K and I have been entertaining family these past two weeks. First his little sister (just turned sixteen) came to visit for a week or so, and then my parents came to town for this past weekend. It's been really nice having our family members visit, because we get to take them fun places. This may be painfully obvious and redundant at this point, but one of the nice things about living in California is that you can go to the beach pretty much whenever. (Hey, I grew up in the high desert-- the thrill of living within spitting distance of the ocean has not yet worn off) K and I took my parents and Belly to Stinson Beach yesterday for picnicing and frolicking. We hadn't been to Stinson since my birthday last September, when I wandered down the beach alone and ended up swimming briefly at the far end of the beach, in my underwear, with two old gay dudes. This being September, it was pretty cold and I couldn't have been in the water more than five minutes. Even though the outside temperature was in the 60s yesterday, K and I still went swimming while my parents went to go look for birds or something like that.

We kept Belly with us, and tried to get her to go into the waves, but she wasn't really into it. She gets scared if they're at all big, and big means anything that could potentially crash over her head. So she waited for us, very sweetly, by our cooler and picnic blanket. K and I did some bodysurfing for awhile (the waves were big enough that I got tumbled once, and slammed medium-hard on the shore). We yelled lots of "dude, this would be really good with a boogie board" and "yeah I knows" back and forth. Stinson beach is a tiny vacation town in the summertime, so we ventured down a sandy second-home lane lined with Land Rovers and S Class Mercedes in search of a boogie board (surf) shop. (We brought a sandy Belly with us)

Within five minutes, we found a weird little surf shop/workout gym with a bleached blond Australian lady and a crusty old surfer/fisherman ready to do business. Rentals were ten for the day, or sixty to buy. We hemmed and hawed only briefly before deciding to shell out the dough to purchase bright shiny new boogie boards. I got bubble gum pink with light blue trim, and K got royal blue because they were out of yellow. (I know, how sickeningly gender appropriate-- it was kind of cute, though).

It took about twenty minutes back in the water for me to start thinking that maybe I'm more of a boogie boarder than a surfer. (You'll recall my Point Break antics of late...) Consider the advantages: boogie boarding is a lot, lot easier than surfing. Seriously, it requires very little skill, not much beyond figuring out the best spot to catch a wave, and a little bit of paddling or kicking. Then all you have to do is hang on. Sure, surfing is a little bit more fun, but it doesn't have the same sort of instant payoff. And, um, surfing requires a shitload of skill. So. A lot of skill and a little bit funner, versus no skill and almost as fun? I'm pretty lazy, I'm pretty sure I know which one I'd pick. Also, boogie boarding does not require one to be in as good of shape as surfing does. The whole paddling out thing is greatly minimized on a boogie board. You're still getting exercise, of course (believe me, I can feel it in my quads today) but boogie boarding doesn't constantly remind me that I have no biceps and am unlikely to anytime soon, or that my forearms are flimsy.

Plus, boogie boarding is cost-effective. My brand-new pink boogie board(I really like that it's pink-- it's the same color as my bike)cost about 1/6 of what a new softtop (read: beginner) surfboard would. Maybe I'll get a pair of flippers and really start tearing it up. Mostly though, the appeal of boogie boarding is all about the instant gratification. You get a lot for a little. Which is pretty good, I think, in most circumstances, beach recreation being at the top of that list.

So now we have a new hobby. Also, there's a wide range of skill to develop in boogie boarding, it's not like only amateurs do it. I can see it now-- K and I enter doubles boogie boarding competitions and win big prize money. If we teach Belly how to ride, we could make it a trio sideshow thing and charge admission-- it'll be great. Last night after we got home, I started trawling the internet for good boogie boarding beaches near and far from our house-- it's difficult to discern between a good surf spot and a good boogie spot. For instance: a beginning surfing beach-- good waves for boogies too? Or a more advanced beach, would it be OK for us if we just stayed closer in? Are there beaches where the waves are too small, or it's not a long enough break for surfers, but boogie boarders could get a pretty decent ride? At Stinson yesterday, which is a pretty huge beach, boogie boarders were stretched along most of it, except for at the far northern end, where all of the surfers were. (They were so far away we couldn't see them from where we were, so I don't know about the size of the waves, or the break, or any of those fancy maritime things surfers care about)

Next up: something heady and intellectual and no doubt incoherent and questionably accurate about cheese. Because we've been a little heavily weighted to the beach sports and Belly lately. (But really-- what else is more fun?)

**The picture of the surfer was taken on Maui in March. Atmosphere, y'know?

my gramma's house

Key to photographs:
1. My gramma, circa 1929
2. The wood circle floor in the atrium.
3. The art deco bathroom in the basement.
4. Gramma's baby shoes, picture of my dad in the 70s, picture of her house from the outside.
5. The phone booth.
6. The bar.

My grandmother's house is better than your grandmother's house. That might be petty, or beside the point, but it's true. I wouldn't say it if it weren't. I recently returned from a business visit to Minnesota, homeland of my ancestors. I was born there, my dad was born there, my mom was actually born in Virginia but should have been born in Minnesota, all four of my grandparents and five of my great-grandparents were born there, too. Deep roots in the fertile flat soil, or something like that.

My gramma is rapidly aging and has many myriad health problems, so now she has round-the-clock nursing care in her house. One of her caretakers lives in an attached apartment, and her nurses use the guest bedroom as their home base for watching TV while she's asleep and stock piling their various medical supplies. My parents were in Minnesota, too, but they were staying at a hotel downtown. I knew it was going to be sort of weird to stay at the house with the ever-changing shift of nurses, but I love my gramma, and I love being in her house. And anyway, the basement was free and sofa-bed equipped.

I don't know how old the house is, but I'm guessing the 1930s or so. When my grandparents got divorced in the late 70s, my gramma moved a whopping 3/4 of a mile down the road, to a house very similar to the fab post-modern one she was leaving behind. The house is old enough that it boasts features like maid buzzers built into the walls, you know, if you don't feel like getting out of your bath or whatever.

Since I was little, the way I see my gramma has been inextricably tied to her house. If you meet my gramma, or if you see her house, it just sort of makes sense that this lady lives in this house, or that this house is home to this lady. The upholstery looks like clothes she'd wear, or it's cushions she's needlepointed, Andy Warhol flowers or the ski lifts at Aspen. The art is the kind that's in museums she likes. And the house is full of things (bric-a-brac, kitsch, bona-fide artifacts) and pictures from all of the places she's been. I suppose it's a shallow idea that a person can be defined by their material possessions. And of course, my gramma is much more than the sum of her stuff. But I think it's OK in this case, wonderful, even, that I associate my gramma so much with her home.

The house isn't all that big, but it feels huge-- partly because of an open, airy, floor plan, and partly because there's so much to look at. The house is low and long and rambling, Japanese style, through the woods, almost up to the shore of Long Lake. The central room is called the atrium, and the entire ceiling's a skylight. In the atrium, it feels like whatever kind of day it is outside: snow covered and soft, muggy and overcast, or blazing sunshine. The floor is a series of cut tree trunks, and when I was little I thought that there had once been a whole forest standing there, that the builders had simply leveled to make the floor. (See picture above). There are nooks and crannies off of the atrium, including two of my favorite closet-sized rooms: the phone booth, and the bar. The phone booth echos and has a chalkboard for writing insults about your sister on. The bar is mirrored, walls and ceiling, and stacked high with glass. There's also a huge ice maker, lots of top-shelf liquor, and tons of garnishes I've been gorging myself on for ages: cocktail onions, cornichons, olives, maraschino cherries.

The house feels grand, and yet accessible. The carpet's white, but surprisingly stain-resistant. There's art all over the place (Matisse, Calder, Miro) but nothing is precious or protected. I was never told not to touch anything, and I can't remember if I ever broke anything or not, but if I did, I don't think it was a big deal. We played, we ran around, we picked stuff up. One of our favorite games when we were little was to feed endless rounds of dimes into this vintage slot machine she has. We did break that, come to think of it, it's jammed now.

My gramma has various post its stuck everywhere with weird notes on them. Instructions to herself for how to turn on her computer, for example. On the red velvet pool table in the basement, there's one that implores the reader not to move the table because it's been leveled and also it will scratch the floor. The pool table stands on carpet. My gramma's eccentricity is part of all the things she has, and the way they're put together. She's pretty tidy, but believes that objects should be used and enjoyed. She's also generous-- often when I'd pick something up, or try it on (sweaters, books, do-dads) she'd say "Oh, you like that? Why don't you keep it." This past visit I uncovered (and took home) a 60s era Gucci bag in one of the basement's endless closets.

Visiting my gramma is different now. When I was there a year ago, she made me scrambled eggs and orange juice, and I couldn't help but obsess about this, and how she can't do that anymore, as we hung out on the porch, she in her wheelchair. I don't mean or want to be sentimental. Yet it means a lot to her, to me, to be in her house, an affirmation of a terribly fabulous life.

I know it's just a house.