chopsticks

it's been a wonderful but very warm weekend. warm as in the weather with a daytime high temperature is in the high 70s f. which is a bit weird and rare even for sunny northern california. but i've been grooving on it. the light is simply gorgeous and the high 70s is still shorts weather. so we took nicholas to the nimbus fish hatchery today, a fish ladder on the american river for both steelhead salmon and rainbow trout. except that this was a bad year for both fish so the populations are low and being at the hatchery on such a sunny and warm day could not but remind me not of abundance but of scarcity. how we are depleting this planet and soon the shit will hit the fan.

but that sounds rather bleak and glum. and i surely didn't feel like either. nicholas had a blast feeding the fingerlings with these tiny pellets of fish food. the fish were jumping big time. we were splashed by the young fish and by the end of our visit we stank from the high stink of concentrated fish chow.

well then anyway, last night we ate at a local vietnamese restaurant that serves strictly vegetarian dishes, andy nguyen. there is a small chain of the restaurant in town but this particular store located on broadway blvd in downtown is, or so i've read somewhere, owned by the divorced wife of the founder of the chain and because of her buddhism stopped serving meat. the food is delicious and as we were served our appetizers nicholas noticed at the next table over the diners using chopsticks. he never held a chopstick in his life but that wasn't going to stop the boy for he - and me too - have been watching kung fu panda on dvd and the hero of the movie, po, is trained in the art of kung fu by his master thru po's love of food.

which is a long way of saying that thru trial and error nicholas learned in increments the art of eating with chopsticks. the lesson was not without a few tears and a small level of frustration. it was anna who helped immensely in nicholas using chopsticks. but finally dinner was consummed by the child and ho boy! was it ever.

i can draw no parallels in the arts of dining and the arts of living and poetics. tho there probably is since we only have this one life and mine is centered on family, poetry and well, i don't know, every obsession i own, which again somehow relates to poetry. for example, i was re-reading alex gildzen's book it's all a movie yesterday where alex in a poem cites leigh snowden then i see that kiss me deadly is scheduled for broadcast on turner classic movies. or that in another poem richard harrison makes an appearance while the night before last i watched a bit of challenge of the tiger which is the flick paired on the dvd with for your height only. and that is only a partial grazing of connections with alex's book and my own obsessions in movies of late.

and there is jean vengua who's been writing about ghosts and her trip to death valley here, here and here and my own fascination with the paranormal. i've long wanted to take driving trips to the weird parts of california. we've been now to the winchester mystery house and next year anna and i are thinking about checking out the salton sea after we take nicholas to disneyland.

anyway, it is the christmas season even if it does feel like summer, still. all the evidence points to it. so in the spirit of the holiday season i'll start writing about movies that are either straight up holiday movies, or flicks centered around christmas. i won't guarantee all my posts will be about holiday films but i'll make an effort. i like christmas. so some of the movies might be obvious candidates of the holiday season and some might surprise you. well, they might. who knows. and now it's late. i should be in bed. to all a good night.