The Christmas Martyr has spoken.

Several months ago I signed up for a six-week quilting class. Because I wanted to learn how to quilt, sure, but also because I was looking to expand my social circle to include a bunch of women who share my combined loves of lozenges and sitting.

I took this six-week class, and then I took a two-day class, and then I took a three-hour class, and then I asked if I could retake session two of the six-week class. At which point the instructor handed me a class schedule to recommend another course I might find helpful, Give Up Already 101. Little did she know I'm already deep into the 300-level of the Quit It curriculum.

So after like forty-five hours of concentrated instruction, I decided I would make everyone a quilt for Christmas. It seemed like a fantastic idea in September, sort of, to me. And I announced it to everybody like a jackass and ran out and bought a metric shit ton of fabric so I could spend the next four months cordoned off in the back of the house trying to jam a queen-sized quilt underneath the arm of my basic $279 Husqvarna sewing machine. It's a lot like trying to feed a VCR into a paper shredder.

The indie quilt store where I took all the classes is less than a mile up the road; yesterday I busted in there with a rotary cutter in one hand, seventy-three too small quilt squares in the other hand, nine yards of purple flannel around my neck, and weeping. Like a sad, sad king whose scepter is just WAY too sharp.

As of today I have one quilt left. ONE QUILT LEFT. I'm actually really enjoying the process; I tend to learn better with endless hours of instruction coupled with an almost unbearable amount of immediate and tedious practice, so I feel I'm thriving. I would have been done by now but there was a Christmas onslaught of zombie orders that rightfully took priority; as it stands I expect to have this quilt completely finished around three in the morning on Christmas Day.

I've taken pictures of all the finished quilts but I don't want to post them yet-- I don't want anybody seeing the evidence and getting all disappointed this far before Christmas. Nothing like a baby blue and eggplant quilt that looks like it was hand-quilted by mice to make you wonder whatever happened to Nordstrom gift cards.

I'm the Foursquare Mayor of this Goddamn Safeway.

I've got a piece up at McSweeney's today that chronicles my manic highs and lows on Foursquare. I wrote it, surprisingly enough, after I discovered I'd just lost the title of mayor at my neighborhood Safeway. Once the wracked sobs and teeth gnashing subsided, it occurred to me that I might be overly invested in an application that awards points based solely on my ability to leave my house.****

Foursquare fun facts:

I once held the mayorships of two In-N-Burgers at one time. It was mid-August, I believe, though I'm not sure; around here we just refer to that period of time as "Camelot".

In the interest of quasi-privacy, I changed the number of the Safeway I temporarily owned and the name of the dude who apparently lives there now. The indignant power struggle, however, is all too real.

****I am the long-standing Foursquare mayor of my house. We've got a special going right now- if you steal the mayorship away from me, I'll smash your smartphone with a tack hammer in the garage.

I'm Foursquare friends with The Palazzo Resort in Las Vegas. The Palazzo Resort is currently checked in as "off the grid- checked in but hiding their whereabouts". I can only deduce by this that the 3,000-room Palazzo hotel is hanging out at The Palms casino.

I believe that Foursquare might be the most useless application currently available online, which explains why I love it so. "Erin," one might then ask, "What's the second most useless application?" Answer: The rest of the Internet ties for second place.

Architectural Road Trip

Randy came to me last week and told me he wants to take an Architectural Road Trip to cover a bunch of stuff at one time that he'd like to see but that doesn't necessarily warrant its own road trip.

This has nothing to do with China, by the way.

So here's what we're doing this weekend. We're driving up Route 66 through Winslow, Peach Springs, and Seligman and we're spending the night in Kingman.

Then tomorrow we're going to finally go walk out on that big glass bridge thing they built above the Grand Canyon a few years ago that we haven't seen yet because it costs like eighty dollars a person which is ridiculous. I was surprised to find out this was on the list since Randy generally takes his boycotts pretty seriously, but apparently the awesome factor broke him down. It is, after all, a giant glass bridge above the Grand Canyon and we are, after all, only human.

Provided neither one of us plummets to a steep, shardy death, we're then driving the rest of the way to Las Vegas. Primarily to see the new Hoover Dam Bypass, obviously, because whenever I think "Vegas" I always immediately then think "bridge".

Once in Vegas we're going to take a gander at the new and completed City Center they were working on last time we were there, and then we have reservations to go to the Minus 5 Ice Lounge, a bar made entirely out of ice. Ice tables, ice walls, ice chairs, even the drinking glasses are made of ice. We saw it on the Travel Channel last weekend. I can't even write any more about it because I'll start jumping up and down again.

I've packed a huge surprise picnic lunch complete with Brie and bread and prosciutto and tiny bottles of olive oil and aged balsamic, and I'm not at all embarrassed to tell you that I'll be busting out some of the good lingerie over the next couple of days because this is going to be the coolest, most weirdly romantic road trip ever.

Beijing, part three.

The Great Wall. I still can't quite believe I was actually there.

 

I carried that camera bag around like it was my job. And the camera was never in it so by the end of the trip it was just stuffed with random flyers and used napkins and stretched out hair ties, and there I am, curled around it on an airport bench like my left kidney's in there.

Randy and I knew we needed to bring raincoats with us so I, being hyper-cognizant of the 44-pound luggage weight limit, bought one of those "coats in a bag" from REI; an ultralight waterproof shell jammed inside a bag the size of a tennis ball. Randy went the other way, opting for this three-layer red jacket in the picture. He strolled around the store zipping up zippers and snapping snaps, looking for a coat with, quote, "enough systems". Randy really likes a coat that does the work for him; if he gets hot, he wants a ripcord he can pull that opens a hidden vent under his arm. If he gets cold, he wants to be able to reach back and unzip an entire other, heavier coat out of the hood. I felt smugly efficient tossing my coat/bag combo into the suitcase, but then in China I refused to take the coat out of the bag. It was sprinkling at the Great Wall but it wasn't enough to justify destroying the compact perfection of coat in a bag. Randy strutted around like a big red dry rooster, zipping shit, unzipping other shit, "Erin! Look at all my systems!" Meanwhile I'm hunkered down in a damp sweatshirt with the camera bag on my head, waiting for a typhoon so I could spring my coat from its skintight chrysalis. Whatever. When Randy manages to find the fifty yuan his systems ate I'll concede defeat.

 

We also went to The Summer Palace. Breathtaking.

 

And we drove downtown to walk around the Olympic venues, the National Stadium (the Bird's Nest) and the National Aquatics Center (the Water Cube).

Man, I love going back through these pictures. This was such an incredible trip. And now you're up to speed on the first two days!

Beijing, part two.

The timing worked out that we happened to be in Beijing for the Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Mooncake Festival. This is significant not only because we had the opportunity to witness and enjoy a significant cultural event, but also because it sounded a lot like there was gonna be cake.

Ming picked up that I was excited about this Mid-Autumn Festival, mostly because I kept slipping and calling it "Cake Day", and she pulled out her very best American analogies to talk me in off the cake ledge.

"In America, you have fruitcake? Yes?" Crap. Yeah. We have fruitcake. "The mooncake is like the fruitcake in China. You give it? And it's nice? But no one likes to eat it." She made a blick face there to punctuate. Mooncake is bad.

"Not all mooncake is bad," our regional guide piped up. "Some kinds aren't very bad."

"Ming, what's your favorite kind of mooncake?" I asked.

This required kind of a ridiculously long conversation with the regional guide in Chinese, I don't know what was going on there. Then she turned back to me, her hand on her chin. She squinted her eyes appraisingly.

"I try to figure out what kind of mooncake you will like best," she told me. I sat up straighter. I felt like I was about to get my cards read. She tapped her chin and thought.

"Okay, which do you like better: bean paste or soy curd?"

Oh. Wow. Okay. We're in a whoooooole other spectrum of "cake", now, aren't we.

"I like... strawberries?"

Ming nodded, satisfied. "I think you will like the bean paste."

Uh, and I think we need to work on our negotiating skills. The only thing bean paste and strawberries have in common is their inability to get along.

The hotel left complimentary mooncakes in our room that night; Ming told us to eat the mooncake while looking up at the moon and thinking about our families. I'd already eaten a mooncake when pressed at dinner so I was pretty sure that if I ate a mooncake and thought of my family, my family would be filled with an instant yet mysterious sense of annoyance. So I packed it instead and brought it home. One of these days I'm going to frost it and try and convince Randy it's a cupcake. And then I will pack my shit and go.