tasty fruit is tasty – annathepiper.org

June 8, 2011

The things I think of

Yesterday I had an eye exam, which required me to alter my usual morning commute–and sacrificed my daily morning swing through Pike Place Market, on the grounds that I could get to work a lot faster after my appointment was done if I took the 30 and went practically straight to Big Fish, vs. taking a 70-something and going downtown and doing the usual marketwalk.

So when I went through the market in the evening, the Handsomest of Marketboys gave me this stern “where the hell were you?” look and was all “we were going to call hospitals and everything!” To wit: HA. And also, clearly I must make a point of informing my marketpeeps (I must now say marketpeeps since now they have a marketgirl!) in advance when I will not be making my usual rounds.

Which of course led me, geekily brained as I am, to imagining a helpful web page they could consult in further situations of this nature, possibly called isangelacomingtothemarket.com. It would include options like:

Yes! Save me a banana!
Yes! Those raspberries aren’t going to eat themselves!
Yes! solarbird demands cherries!
No! My bus broke down and I’m running late!
No! I’m home sick with a cold/the flu/the plague/Kellis-Amberlee!
No! I’m working late tonight because all the servers are on FIRE and the QA team is frantically trying to verify when things will be fixed!
No! We’re going out to sushi tonight. Mmmmmmm soooooooshi.
No! solarbird and I are heading to Vancouver/Portland/Newfoundland for a Great Big Sea roadtrip! Because blackberries are swoonable and all but they still don’t beat Alan Doyle With a Bouzouki!
No! The Murkworks has gone to Disneyland!
No! The latest Dresden Files just dropped and I am putting EVERYTHING on hold until I find out what happened to Harry. I’m sure you understand!
No! I just sold a novel and am too busy bouncing around the house shrieking!
No! I just got my latest rejection letter and am busy sulking at the cats.
No! The zombies have risen in Kenmore and solarbird, spazzkat and I are currently huddled in the upper floor of our house, shooting zombies out of the second story front bedroom window. If I don’t survive, Marc, you can have my iPad as promised. Unless you’re the zombie that killed me.

What else would be on this web page, do you think? Suggest options in the comments!

May 30, 2011May 30, 2011

Several awesome things make a post

I’ve been total Scattershot Girl when it comes to blogging for some time–like many, I’ve found most of my day to day online communication shunted over to Twitter and Facebook. But that said, I’ve had several recent lovely things happen that are worth sharing with you all in longer, blog-based form. So! In no particular order:

Finally saw The King’s Speech, since spazzkat got it via Netflix. That was a very satisfying film, and I’m not at all surprised that it’s spawned so much fanfic across my various Friends lists and such. Everyone in that film did an amazing job, and I have much increased respect for Mr. Colin Firth now. Also, mad love for the scene where the speech therapist’s wife comes home and discovers the King and Queen in her dining room. :D
Also, as of today, finally saw Source Code with solarbird. Mad, mad props to mamishka for recommending that! It’s a nice, tight little SF flick, and if you like alternate-reality type plots, try to catch this before it vanishes entirely. If you’re local to Seattle, it’s still playing at the Meridian 16 downtown, and it’s running at the Crest as well.
I have finally found a way I might actually read more comic books: the Dark Horse comics app for the iPad. I installed this on the grounds that a couple weekends back, Dark Horse had a sale of all its digital versions of Serenity and Firefly comics. Since I didn’t have Shepherd’s Tale yet, I thought what the hey, I’d buy ’em all. The iPad is definitely more suited to digital comics reading than the iPhone, that’s for sure, although the iPhone does actually talk to this app as well.

Also on the iPad, I have a shiny new app called TunePal, recommended to me by Marilyn, one of the fiddle players who attends the weekly session solarbird and I have been going to. Those of you who know the Shazam app will find the way this works familiar; it basically identifies songs. But in this case, it identifies traditional Irish tunes! You can play them at the app on an actual instrument, or, it’ll identify ’em if you’re playing them in iTunes as well. Then it goes out and hits up a big ol’ database and yoinks back several guesses as to what it thinks you just played it. It’ll show you sheet music for its guesses, and it’ll play the sheet music for you as well. And, you can add tunes out of the database manually by searching for them as well. You can’t import your own tunes, which is my only complaint about the app, but it’s otherwise very, very cool. Any of my fellow music geeks out there who are interested in trad tunes, you should be checking this out.
Speaking of the iPhone, my coworker Joe pointed me at my new favorite iPhone game: Tiny Wings. You play a birdie with, of course, tiny tiny wings, and the object of the game is to get the birdie to fly as far as possible by tapping. It’s super-cute and only 99 cents, so check it out.
FOLKLIFE! Well, that deserves a whole separate post, but I’m noting it here anyway.
And while I am still technically on book buying hiatus, I’ve picked up a few freebies. And I will unrepentantly, UNREPENTANTLY I TELL YOU, break hiatus wide open to buy seanan_mcguire/Mira Grant’s Deadline this week. Because GIMME. Seriously.
My friend ravyngyngvar is sending me a Blu-Ray of a-ha’s last concert in Oslo! Thank you, Yngvar!
I am sorely behind on Doctor Who posts, and will shortly be doing a catchup post. It’s an indicator of how much I’ve not been paying attention to the net lately that I totally missed that BBC America did NOT air the second half of the two-parter on Saturday, to wit, bah. I did not however give enough of a damn about this to actually try to find and download the episode; it’ll air next week as far as I know, and I can wait that long. Especially given that we’re about to have the mid-season hiatus anyway. Just nobody spoil me, mmkay, those of you who’ve already caved and downloaded the ep anyway?
And because it’s always worth saying, mmmmm blackberries of my marketboys mmmmmm.

March 4, 2011

I will never buy blackberries from anyone else again

As y’all know I have repeatedly lauded the awesomeosity* of my Pike Place marketboys. As of last night and this morning, though, they have gone above and beyond the call of all awesomeness.

On my way home last night I sorta kinda wigged at one of ’em about my cousin Phillip and what’s going on with him. He made very sympathetic noises at me, especially when I got to the part about “and I’m kinda wigging about this because I’ve gone a couple rounds with cancer myself and why yes this is actually why I buy so much fruit from you guys: adjusting my diet to Cope”. Two of the other boys overheard me though on the tail end of that wigging.

And when I showed up this morning, I was greeted with a surprise hug, a surprise extra pear, sympathetic conversation from no fewer than four of ’em, and assurance that I’m not just a girl they sell fruit to, I’m a friend.

These are my marketboys, and I don’t think I’ll buy blackberries from anybody else in Seattle ever again. And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again with extra emphasis today: if you’re local to Seattle, look for them. The Frank’s boys at Pike Place Market. Buy tasty things from them and tell them Angela sent you, because she says they’re awesome.

* This is totally a word. That, in my capacity as a professional writer, I just made up. Do not try this at home!

January 25, 2011January 25, 2011

Tonight’s amusing conversation with the Handsome Marketboy

So there I am stopping by my marketboys on the way home for my evening round of tasty!fruit when I find that my favorite Handsome Marketboy has the stand all to himself. Hurray, I’m thinking, as he says hi and asks me how my day has gone.

I tell him I have to work tonight but a nice man is about to sell me blackberries and an avocado, so hey! And he asks me what I do with all the money.

Buy books, mostly, I say–because as you know, my children, some women buy purses or shoes, but me, I buy books!

Handsome Marketboy looks a bit boggled and asks, have I not heard of the library? It’s like Netflix, only for books! I explain that I want to Own All of the Books, because this man clearly has no conception of how much I read. I am, obviously, going to have to explain this to him. ;)

(After, of course, I buy All of the Blackberries. Because nom.)

December 17, 2010December 17, 2010

Raspberry Girl

As y’all know I’ve grown quite fond of daily stops to visit the nice boys who run the table for Frank’s at Pike Place. I know a few of them by name and a few more of them by face at this point, and several of them know me.

One of them, a young rather cute fellow of Asian extraction, told me he was learning how to take pictures and asked if I could be a guinea pig for him. I said sure, and he promised me prints when he got the picture developed, while I thought to myself OH RIGHT that actually has to happen for pictures on real film, doesn’t it?

When I stopped by tonight for my usual raspberries (and by ‘stopped by’ I mean ‘sneaky excuse to bid them all a pleasant holiday’, and by ‘all’ I really mean ‘the really cute one with the glasses and the ponytail, but I didn’t say that in my Outside Voice’), he gave me two copies of the pic! One was too dark but the other wasn’t half bad, so I snapped a pic of it with my iPhone to share here.

Even though it’s kind of meta to post a picture of a picture of yourself, no?

November 23, 2010December 8, 2018

New record for WORST COMMUTE EVER

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter saw me live-tweeting this last night, but for those of you who follow me from the blog or LJ or DW, here’s the epic saga of Anna’s Worst Commute Ever!

My previous commute record was set back in 2006, roughly three and a half hours between solarbird calling me and my finally making home to MurkNorth. This beat that. Hands down.

Continue reading “New record for WORST COMMUTE EVER”

October 27, 2010

Weirdly sized fruit is weirdly sized (but tasty)

Remember those huge Asian pears I mentioned? Here is a picture of one of them, next to a cute little Clementine orange! (I shall be eating several of these cute little Clementine oranges, which are miniature vitamin C bombs, for the next several days as we are entering the last two weeks of a MONSTER PROJECT at work and I CANNOT GET SICK. And we have a bug going around the office AUGH.)

My keys are included for scale, and also because Chibi!Chewbacca is adorable.

October 27, 2010

Unexpectedly exciting walk home last night

As y’all probably know, one of the big reasons I like to work downtown is that I get a really nice walk through Pike Place Market and along Elliott Avenue on my way to my workplace, and back again in the afternoon. Gives me a nice view of the water, and the sidewalks are wide and relatively uncrowded. Bit of a bitch during the fall and winter when it’s windy and rainy–but on gorgeous days, you can’t beat the view.

I particularly like cutting through Pike Place since the fruit vendors are friendly, and I’ve started buying fruit and veg from them, often enough that they’ve started introducing themselves to me and cutting me discounts. (That one of them is also quite cute is bonus. ;) )

Last night in particular the older gentleman who runs the table I like to stop at gave me a really nice discount, five bucks for a (huge!) Asian pear, three cute little Clementine oranges, and late season raspberries. The aforementioned cute guy was also there, and while he was talking to other customers, I happened to jump in and assure the lady from Portland that why yes, their Asian pears were awesome and I bought them all the time.

The customer lady was amused and said to Cute Guy, “And she’s not even paid! Or your girl, either!”

I can’t swear to this 100 percent, but I’m pretty sure Cute Guy said, “Not yet.” To wit, lulz. And also *^_^*;;

That was the Good Exciting part of the walk.

The Bad Exciting part of the walk was that apparently, about an hour or so before I got to the market, somebody got shot. :( I heard somebody going by me saying something about a shooting, and then after I stopped at my marketboys’ table and went around the corner to head to the bus stop, I saw the area was still taped off. There was a uniformed guy on duty and I asked him what had happened; he said he didn’t know.

So I cut through the alley between 1st and 2nd to get over to Union so that I could reach my bus stop. A woman stopped me to ask for change or cigarettes (which I couldn’t give her, although I did offer her one of my oranges), and she said as well that “some guy got shot in the head”. To wit, um, yikes.

So yeah, that was unnerving. Second and Pike is right by the market and is right along my usual walking route, and I am very, very relieved that I and llachglin (who also is currently working at my workplace and who was slightly ahead of me on the walk home) missed all that action going down. All in all, I much preferred the Good Exciting part of last night’s walk.