Moving Pains
November 14th, 2012 | Rachel
“Steve-Got-His-Captain’s-License! Blueberry Pie“
In addition to a few (or six) slices of particularly delicious blueberry pie, I’ve had a lot on my plate lately. I’ve been putting in a lot of hours at the day job trying to get more fiscally stable before I have to dive into the new business full time. At the same time, I’m trying to get enough balls rolling with Arthur that we can hit the ground running come January 1 when we become an official business entity.
We actually have a name picked out, but as a somewhat comical oversight, we realized this evening that we never nailed down a particular way to spell it. Arthur sent off the paperwork to have the name reserved with the state of California using one spelling, while I set up a blog on the website on a domain name using another. Oh details.
On top of these two jobs, I’ve also been coming to terms with the effect of a cross-country move on some of my more significant personal relationships. As a result, I have renewed my efforts to create and grow more local friendships. It’s an exciting prospect — after all, I didn’t know a soul when I moved to Chapel Hill for law school and only knew one person when I moved to New York City and ended up forming some of my most treasured friendships in both cities — but it is also deflating and frustrating at times.
I’m still trying to figure out how to build cultural bridges to some of these lifelong Californians who haven’t spent any significant time away from the west coast. In a weird way it reminds me of my attempted interactions with people born and raised in Long Island who still seem almost culturally incompatible with someone from the south. Its amazing the assumptions we have for how people should act based on the environment in which we were raised. Despite the increasing distance from my homeland, I am still most comfortable interacting with people who grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Texas.
Of course, life isn’t about being comfortable, so here I am in Santa Cruz, California where the only person I knew before I arrived is the person who came with me.
I’m curious to see the effects of west coast living take shape. As I stated in my Ode to New York City, there are a number of things I have taken away from that living experience: “to be a little tougher, a little more confident, a little more open-minded, a little more adventurous.” All of those things still hold true. As for California, the biggest change I’ve noticed so far is that I wear a lot less make up (or, gasp, sometimes none at all). I’m also in noticeably better shape and use the word “gnarly” every now and then. Other than that, only time will tell :-)
In the meantime, I get to ride my bike and take walks along places like this:
Surfing Lessons in Santa Cruz
Falling Into Fall
November 3rd, 2012 | Rachel
Austin City Limits Music Festival 2012
I still haven’t gotten used to the 20-degree swings here on the central coast of California. The air is so crisp and chilly in the mornings that it feels like its going to be one of those Saturdays that you want to bundle up and read a book or watch a movie at home, but by the afternoon it is sunny and 70 degrees and you want to kick yourself for not leaving the house earlier.
I wasn’t sure what fall would look like over here, but the leaves on some of the trees are starting to turn red and orange and fall to the ground. Of course they are dispersed amongst the palm trees and Redwoods, but it is still more of a fall than I was expecting. Steve is coming home this week, and I am hoping we will have a chance to take a motorcycle ride up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to see the grape leaves changing colors at some of the wineries.
Fall has always felt kind of “serious” to me. You’ve had all summer to play and now its time to buckle down and get ready for the winter. Maybe that would make more sense if I lived in a time when winter posed more of a threat to survival (and I didn’t live in California), but maybe it also stems from school starting in the fall, so cooler weather means time to get back to the books. Invariably, fall is when I gain the discipline to go to the gym regularly (only to lose interest just in time for swimsuit season).
Things are also getting serious for Arthur and me. Arthur recently returned from his “last hurrah” trip to London and is making his big move to the west coast in less than two weeks. In the meantime, we are starting to get more specific with our plans and cross things off of our long to-do list.
We decided to postpone registering as an LLC until 2013 so we won’t have to pay the $800 minimum tax for a business that barely existed in 2012. In the meantime, we are putting together our official mission statement and are collecting inspiration for the brand image.
We are going to be in the market for an awesome graphic designer pretty soon, so if you know someone — particularly an up-and-coming talent — let me know. As soon as we get the trademark registration out the door, we’re going to go public on Facebook and a scaled-down website to start getting input from the community and the interwebs to help us make this thing a reality.
We also have a deadline set for finishing the business plan, which will be a satisfying way to end 2012 and set up 2013 to be a pretty exciting year.
In other news, despite its seriousness, October was a very fun month. I went back to New York for the first time since moving and co-hosted a successful Oktoberfest beer crawl. Thank you so much to everyone who came! I also went down to Austin, Texas for a long weekend for the Austin City Limits Music Festival. When I wasn’t traveling out of state, I’ve been taking some beautiful Sunday drives. I have posted photos from two of those drives below.
As always, thanks for reading! For those of you in New York and New Jersey, I think about you constantly, and I wish I was there to help you recover from the hurricane.
Sunday drive through Pacific Grove, near Monterey
Just north of Santa Cruz
The Business of Soupe à l’Oignon Gratinée
October 21st, 2012 | Rachel
I was sitting in the office (still in the converted barn surrounded by chickens and homegrown vegetables, btw) on Friday when a former coworkers stopped by to pick up his coffee bean grinder. Now our only option for freshly ground beans is a manual grinder with a crank that takes a solid five minutes to grind enough coffee to fill one tiny K-cup filter. Wah, life is hard.
This former coworker struck up a conversation about food, a frequent topic of discussion when we worked together, and he ended up telling me about a couple of bowls of French onion soup he recently had in Monterey. As soon as he said the words “French onion soup,” I knew what I was having for dinner that night.
I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and ambitiously bought twice as many onions as I ended up needing, and spent the rest of the evening slowly caramelizing (half of) them and turning them into a large pot of sweet and salty French onion soup.
Making French onions isn’t complicated, but it does take a bit of time and vigilance. I am beginning to see that starting a business is, in some ways, very similar.
You see, there is a lot of detail work in the beginning, thinly slicing a pound and a half of onions that will probably leave you in tears at some point (and cursing in vain at the onions for their particularly gaseous quality). Then there are the multiple stages involved, each of which is very important to the end product. I followed Julia Child’s recipe for Soupe à l’Oignon Gratinée from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which you can find here.
You start by heating oil and butter and then cook the onions on low heat with the lid on for 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes doesn’t seem like a very long time and you may want to keep them in a little longer, but you can’t. It’s time to take the lid of and present your lightly cooked onions to the rest of the kitchen. Some people around might not like onions, and they may take one look at your pot still brimming with bright white onions and turn up their nose. You just have to shake it off and keep moving forward. You are making French onion soup, and it is going to be delicious.
This might be a good time to pour yourself a glass of wine. One of my favorite wineries at the moment is Little Vineyards in Sonoma, California. They produce some pretty tasty Syrah and Zinfandel with a lot of character, no oak, and just the right level of dryness. If you are in the Sonoma area, you should visit them. If you are in the Santa Cruz area, you should come to my house and have a glass with me.
Anyway, back to our French onions. At this point, you have to turn up the heat. You’ll add some unexpected ingredients, like sugar, and then spend the next 40 minutes painstakingly watching and stirring the onions while you wonder if they are ever going to turn the proper shade of golden brown. Your focus might lapse for a few minute and you may find a onion sliver or too has skipped the stage of caramelization and gone straight to burnt, but don’t let this get you down. Just remove the offending sliver, turn down the heat ever so slightly, and remember to stir more frequently.
Then the moment comes and you realize your once full pot of onions has been reduced to a concentrated layer of rich and fragrant caramelized onions. You look down on them with satisfaction. Success.
But wait, its not over yet. You have to remove the onions from the heat, stir in flour, and pour in boiling stock (hopefully you planned ahead and had it ready). Mrs. Child says to add two quarts of stock, but I find this dilutes the soup too much, so I recommend cutting the stock by 25% or starting off with more onions. At this point you might realize you don’t have everything you need after all, such as a bay leaf, but you improvise and make it work anyway.
Now its time to wait. Again. Things are kind of on autopilot now, so you don’t have to make as many trips to the kitchen. The aroma filling your apartment lets you know the end is in sight, and it is time to gather your remaining ingredients. After all you aren’t just making French onion soup. You are making it gratinée.
The makings of “Gratinée”: Raw Onion and Parmesan and Swiss Cheeses
Bread sliced and trimmed to mug-size, then toasted in the oven
Shredded Parmesan and Swiss and a few drops of olive oil
I recommend adding more shredded cheese than I did. The cheese should completely cover the bread and, for the sake of aesthetics, extend to the sides of the bowl or cup. You’ll want to add the grated onion and a few slivers of cheese directly into the pot of soup before you divide it up. For bread, I picked up a bag of dinner rolls from my local grocery store’s bakery section and cut them in half horizontally before toasting them cut side up. I like the texture of the dinner roll more than french bread because it is easier to cut with your spoon as you eat your soup.
By now, your onion soup is made, the gratinée is added, and all that is left to do is pop the individual portions into the oven for 20 minutes (you didn’t think you were going to be eating any time soon, did you?). At the end of the 20 minutes, if the cheese isn’t as toasted as you would like, turn on the broiler for a minute or two.
Now take a sip of wine (if there is any left) and pat yourself on the back, because you just made French onion soup that will rival any restaurant you’ll ever go to.
Soupe à l’Oignon Gratinée
I first staged this photo on the kitchen table in the glow of the late afternoon sunlight complete with a fall-themed placemat…
But then I thought, who am I kidding? I might as well admit that I enjoyed my cup of soup siting on the sofa watching an episode of Pretty Little Liars.
I can’t say what it’ll be like to finally have this business up and running (you know, the one I’ve only vaguely referenced and won’t tell you anything about), because it is still just the beginning. I can say that there is a long and detailed road ahead of Arthur and I, and like the soup, it’ll probably definitely involve tears and cursing.
We are just a week or two away from incorporating the business and registering our trademark, so I’ll start dishing the details very soon.
Thanks for joining me on this journey.
Introducing… Arthur!
September 18th, 2012 | Rachel
Let’s get back to business, shall we?
While it may appear that I have been gallivanting about all summer — taking a bar exam here, camping in the desert there — there have been some pretty exciting things going on behind the scenes.
If you are familiar with my story, then you will know that I moved to California with the mindset of opening a bakery. The idea of starting my own business had been going strong for almost a year (I was actively learning French in preparation for opening a bed & breakfast in southwest France), and then working six months at Three Green Ducks bakery confirmed I want to be involved in food — something I had joked about doing since law school.
I even picked a name and developed a logo for my bakery (neither of which have formally been announced, so I will save them for another day).
Then the serious business planning began. Almost instantly, I realized how much better the experience would be if I had another person with whom I could share the inevitable emotional roller coaster and with whom I could share the responsibility of making smart business decisions.
Enter Arthur.
The California sun suits you, Mr. Chang
You’ve actually heard about him before. It was Arthur who suggested we meet for a cupcake at Three Green Ducks that fateful day last July, and it was Arthur who talked me into asking about the “help wanted” sign on the door. I think he thought he was just getting an inside connection to free baked treats at an amazing bakery only a few blocks from his apartment, but ultimately he got a regular napper on his sofa after my early-morning opening shifts and, eventually, a loft full of furniture between the time I moved out of my apartment and moved to California.
Arthur and I first met at church. He attended the University of Tennessee for undergrad (boo!), and I, of course, attended the University of Georgia. We were instant rivals with the deep connection of SEC sports.
Arthur grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, so we also had sort of a cultural connection of being from the south and having a lot of shared southern values but also finding a natural fit in the diverse and fast-paced city environment. A little known fact is that Arthur actually went to law school for a year, but then changed paths and ended up in the finance sector.
Although we do have a lot of things in common, our personalities are very different, and it was sort of an unlikely friendship.
Who’s this guy?
It’s a strictly professional dynamic
I can’t remember exactly how the idea of starting a business together was born. I think I’ll have to get him to write a guest blog to tell his side of the story and maybe fill in some of these holes. I do know it started off as a joke. Arthur had a fried chicken party in his little backyard every summer, and I started teasing him about moving to California and selling fried chicken.
Around the time I moved out here (or perhaps because of it), Arthur started reevaluating what he was doing with his own life, and somehow came to the conclusion that he was also an entrepreneur at heart.
One of our regular Skype meetings
Our initial conversations about starting a business together were purely hypothetical. If we did have a business, what would it be. After a couple of months, the conversation shifted to, “Hey, maybe we really should do this.” Arthur, being the careful and calculated person he is, weighed his options and booked a trip to San Francisco and to visit me this past July. By the end of the trip, he was convinced that west coast was calling him (although he thought Santa Cruz was a little too small-town).
By that time, our hypothetical baby had a menu and a name (which will be revealed in time). Some serious discussions were held, promises made, schedules set, and then Arthur took a leap of faith and quit his job.
Now that the bar exam and Burning Man are over, we diving into this project head first. It will be a month and a half more of Skype meetings, and then Arthur’s going to make his own big move, first to San Francisco and then to Santa Cruz. I’ll save the details for future posts, but we are very excited about the business and what the future holds. I’m also excited about this new partnership. I don’t know anyone more trustworthy and dedicated than Arthur, and I think that the two of us together have an unstoppable skill set.
Let’s all give a big welcome to Arthur…. you’ll be seeing a lot of him from now on.
Business partners
Oh Man… Burning Man
September 17th, 2012 | Rachel
Almost-Full Moon over the Man at Burning Man
I am going to deviate from the true intention of this blog for one more post. I have a lot of friends on the east coast who don’t know much (if anything) about Burning Man, so here are a few photos and a weak attempt at sharing my own experience. It is hard to describe exactly what Burning Man is, but I can tell you it isn’t as scary as you probably think it is.
Going into the week, I was a little nervous about what I was getting myself into. The prevailing view among those who haven’t been is that it is a bunch of naked people doing a bunch of drugs in the desert. Although it is true that I encountered both, it was such an peripheral part of my experience that I find it hardly worth mentioning.
Instead, I present to you the Ten Principles of Burning Man, as stolen from their website:
- Radical Inclusion – Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
- Gifting – Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
- Decommodification – In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
- Radical Self-reliance – Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
- Radical Self-expression – Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
- Communal Effort – Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
- Civic Responsibility – We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
- Leaving No Trace – Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
- Participation – Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
- Immediacy – Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
So what does all of that look like in practice? It looks like a bizarre, pop-up city (called “Black Rock City”) in the middle of a very flat ancient lake bed in the Nevada desert that is made up of thousands of camps full of refreshingly friendly people wearing anything from casual hiking attire to elaborate, colorful costumes. The lay out, which spans two miles, looks like this:
Burning Man, as seen from Google Earth
In the center of the circle is a large structure with a “man” on top that is burned at the end of the week. You’ll see what I mean in the photos below. The road lining the camps closest to the Man is called the “Esplanade” and features some of the more developed camps. I was fortunate enough to be a part of one of those camps.
In the center of the city, in the space between the camps and the Man, there are dozens of other very large art installations. Driving throughout the streets of the city and the empty spaces around the sculptures on the playa are elaborately decorated “art cars” (although many were built out of RVs, trucks and buses) shaped like giant warthogs or fish or toilets or ships or even octopuses with flames shooting out of the legs.
Since we were in the middle of the desert, the elements were pretty harsh at times, and my friend Davina and I built a 6′ hexayurt out of rigid insulation board to keep us cool during the day and warm at night. Although it was a little small for the two of us, it worked beautifully.
Our Hexayurt
Once you have your housing situation set up, you have nothing on your agenda except exploring Black Rock City and accepting whatever adventures come your way.
Making an ice run aboard the Warthog art car
Sculptures and the Man
Temple of Juno
My absolute favorite time of day was between 6pm and 8pm because the sun would make its slow decent behind the mountains and for about two hours the temperature would be perfect.
Sculptures and Art Car at Sunset
Sadly, I don’t have any photos of nighttime to share with you. Black Rock City is fascinating to see during the day, but at night it is mind blowing. The elaborate lights of the theme camps and the art cars are a little reminiscent of Las Vegas… if Dr. Seuss had been the city planner and chief architect.
My week at Burning Man was a little unusual because a big focus of it was the wedding of two friends, Liz and Eric. They commissioned a sculpture made out of large panels of painted glass (pictured below) and were married in front of it… by a pirate. No, really.
Beautiful day for a Pirate Wedding
I have to pause for a moment and tell you about this wedding. Although I was camping with a larger theme camp, my sub-camp was the entire wedding party, and included both sets of parents, as well as a number of aunts, uncles, and siblings. On the evening of the wedding, the wedding guests were picked up in an art car called the Black Light Lounge and were driven out to Liz and Eric’s wedding sculpture where the bride, groom, and family were waiting.
We gathered around them, and all of the sudden a small art car shaped like a boat drove up and a pirate stepped out. The pirate greeted Liz and Eric, and Liz told the pirate that she and Eric were supposed to get married but their officiant was not present (which was kind of true because they had been assigned an officiant by Burning Man but decided it wasn’t a good fit). The pirate told them not to fear because he could marry them, at which point he pulled out a scroll, opened it, and performed a beautiful ceremony. At the end, after Liz and Eric exchanged very sincere vows, they stepped over the pirates sword and were officially wed.
Liz tossed her bouquet, and we all boarded the Black Light Lounge, which took us back to our camp where a champagne reception was waiting. We were then ushered back to our sub-camp where we had a cocktails, passed hors d’oeuvres, and a gourmet dinner (keep in mind we are still in the desert). Several members of the newlyweds’ families gave speeches, and then we all boarded the Black Light Lounge once again (only now it was stocked with a full open bar) and cruised the Playa until the sun rose. A small group of dedicated wedding guests — myself included — gathered at the “Bubbles and Bass” party next door (held every morning from 6am until noon) before finally going to bed.
It was definitely a wedding to remember.
Watching the sun rise became a regular part of my daily events, and my favorite place to do so was with a collection of DJs with their own mobile sound system called Robot Heart.
Sunrise with Robot Heart
Sunrise on the Playa
An art car rides off into the sunrise
There were so many things that made my first week at Burning Man very special and life changing, and one of them was the people I camped with. Just about everyone at Burning Man is extremely friendly and open to the people around them. It made it so easy to meet new, interesting people throughout the week. The people I camped with were no exception. They were all so intelligent and multidimensional and were always fun to be around. I have no doubt I am going to keep in touch with many of them for years to come.
My Wonderful Campmates!
Wedding Guests
And of course I appreciate any opportunity to wear a fun outfit :-)
One of many carefully orchestrated outfits for the week
I will end with briefly mentioning the burns. Burning Man started in 1986 when a small group of people got together and burned a n 8′ tall wooden man. The exact reasons why they decided to do this are unclear, but the tradition has grown every year, and now a number of other wooden sculptures are burned as well.
Burning something can be symbolic in a number of ways, and each of the burns I witnessed was very different from the others. The burning of the Man is the peak of the week, and it is marked by a lot of celebrating. The temple burn, on the other hand, which usually happens the next day, is a very solemn and reflective event. I also watched the burning of two independent art projects, one of which was called Burn Wall Street. The sculptures were large buildings modeled after some of the large banks and the New York Stock Exchange. The buildings were open during the week for an assortment of activities, and then on Saturday night at 1am they burned them down. I have a video of some of the burn posted on YouTube: Burn Wall Street.
I thought each burn was interesting for different reasons. For all of them, the 7th grade pyromaniac inside of me was filled with glee.
The burning of the Man
Dust devils created by the burning of the Man
Crowd watching the Man burn
Burn Wall Street
The burning of the Temple of Juno
A phoenix rising from the burning of the temple??
Crowd watching the temple burn
I’m hesitant to write anything about the week because I know I can’t do it justice. My first time at Burning Man was incredible. A lot of people call it “home” because of the complete freedom and acceptance it provides and the community that is built on those and other shared values.
There was a moment after the Man burned when I walked toward the fallen, burning sculpture and was approached by a random person who handed me a handmade metal Man, gave me a hug, looked me in the eyes, and said “Welcome Home.” It was the first time someone had said it to me since my arrival, and suddenly I understood what it meant.
I will definitely be returning next year.
