Fudge it to heck! Where a devil with a thousand wee-wees fudges it forever! 

Last year I had a not-so-great cupcake experience at Dozen in Squirrel Hill.   A few months ago the Dozen folks opened the new Dozen Bake Shop in Lawrenceville, about five blocks from my house.  It's outstanding.

It's not just a cupcake joint; this is a full-service bakery with a big open kitchen and a busy, happy-looking crew.  You see them ( Read more... )

It doesn't feel right this year.   Maybe it's because we live on a street where we can't put out pumpkins (urchins will smash them; they already left an orange smear in the middle of the road that used to be the pumpkin of a lady across the street).  Maybe it's because Gwen is 15, and we have to admit she's too old to go trick-or-treating (neither ( Read more... )

I've started meeting with some people every couple of weeks for a dream breakfast.   Literally: we go to breakfast and talk about our dreams.  There are five of us.  I've known two of my co-dreamers for years (we're friends, but not as close as you might think, given the context). I met the other two for the first time at our first dream breakfast ( Read more... )

My vacation is over.  I spent it moving to Lawrenceville.

Day 1:  Poison, sulfur-water, lying on the floor crying

On the first day I paid two guys to move my heaviest stuff in their truck.  When they were done I moved more by myself.  I ran up and down stairs for 18 hours carrying boxes.

The water in the new house smelled like sulfur.  I saw a ( Read more... )

I'm moving to the ugliest block in Lawrenceville on or around August 1st.  Goodbye, pretty apartment on idyllic Highland Park street!  Goodbye to my house-mate situation, a model of friendship and mutual synergy so perfect it can't be real.  Hello, weird drunk neighbors with mean, shit-everywhere dogs...and greetings also to the packed-together row ( Read more... )

Novels I finally finished this weekend:

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.

If you're going to spend 900 pages setting up a rich and involving plot, your readers probably won't mind if you take the time to end your story gracefully.  I trusted the author to be careful with the large investment of time I put into his ten-pound novel, but ( Read more... )

I visited Scottsdale, Arizona for work-related training last week.  It's a hot, dry, tan-colored city full of electrical wires, parking lots, and flat rectangular buildings.   We mostly stayed in landscaped areas with palm trees, lantana, eucalyptus, and sometimes grass so lush and green it looked fake. Landscaping with green plants appears to be ( Read more... )

The Library is a restaurant with a literary gimmick -- books on the tables, books in the windows, books on and above the bar.  The table-tops are laminated montages made from the pages of books.  The menu-items have literary names ("The Secret Garden," "Slaughterhouse Five," "Jack and the Beanstalk").  It's part of a growing subculture of gimmicky ( Read more... )

On Saturday night, I had a spontaneous, unplanned, hilarious small party.  Phat Man Dee passed out on my couch.  I remembered that I used to have the kind of social life where the passed-out presence of Phat Man Dee was the norm.  I resolved to spend less time at work and more time among performers and half-empty bottles of wine and gin.  I felt ( Read more... )