I found out that we were in a recession when I was a kid in 1988 because Heather on my bowling league said so. We were eating fried cheese sticks between frames when she whispered, “Did you hear?” I thought she was going to tell me about Burke and Kim making out behind the vending machines again. “We’re in a recession!” she squeaked. “Yeah, my dad said something about that,” I said dryly, dipping my cheese stick into a side of marinara.

Everybody was talking about layoffs in the café I sat in at lunch today, and this time I was all ears. In fact, I may be far too up-to-date on the situation. It’s sadly cathartic I suppose, to tick off statistics if you’re not a part of the number. “Starbucks layed off 6,700 people, and Boeing’s cutting 10,000 jobs,” a balding business-casual huffed to his friend at the table next to me.

Phrases including “all bets are off,” “completely wiped out,” and “it’s a sign of the times” followed. As a casual listener, it’s completely unnerving to hear this sort of banter. My husband and I both work for small companies and, while ready for anything, we’re hedging our bets that we’re in the best places we can be right now. And really, I can only ponder the not yet so much before I start drawing birds with four legs or graphs of imaginary weather trends. It’s not that I’m especially out of touch. Just coping.

In the car last night, we were listening to M83, to the song Graveyard Girl from the Saturdays=Youth album. A girl has this little monologue around the bridge and says, “Waiting for somebody to love me. Waiting for somebody to kiss me. I’m only fifteen years old, and I feel it’s already too late to live. Don’t you?” It’s so tender, almost too tender, but there’s this lovely resolve. The music becomes hazy and endless, and then you feel fresh, teenaged hope.

Sara Billups writes the blog Weatherspoon, a diary of living alongside the weather in the Great Northwest.

When my husband and I traveled to Prague recently, a pattern to our days quickly emerged: walk and eat, walk and shop, walk and go to a museum, and repeat. Before the trip, I imagined shaking off my shy coat and boldly clanking glasses of pivo (Czech for beer) in slow motion with new found friends, the beer’s froth spilling onto the floor of a neighborhood pub with wide wood floors and leaded windows.

It may not have felt especially Bavarian, but the closest we came to finding a dream-pub was the excellent Pivovarsky, (Krizikova 17) a microbrewery with about 200 beers to boot. I’m not a big beer fan (I’d prefer a Lillet with a twist any day, thank you very much). But Drew, a home brewer, saw the hundreds of beer bottles lining the wall and went into some other dimension. To find Pivovarsky, we followed a fuzzy map and kept walking until things looked unbearably seedy (a real neighborhood!) and there it was, warm and bustling. The staff was jovial and the food looked bountiful—the place gives you a whole loaf of bread with each order. Too bad the by the time we arrived, we’d already eaten at Perfect.

Thankfully, Prague remained largely in tact after World War II. The apartment we stayed in was touching a building Kafka lived in later in life on Bilkova Street. There’s history everywhere, and walking around it’s easy to feel like you’re part of a very old bedtime story. Inside, many of the city’s buildings have been gutted, swept repeatedly, filled with mod furniture and painted bold colors. The restaurant Perfect pulled this aesthetic off with heart, creating the right balance of intimate ambiance with homey kitsch. The food was straightforward, fresh and memorable. My plate, spinach and smoked chicken gnocchi, was simple and honest-to-goodness one of the most glorious things I’ve ever tasted. The only thing better was my salad—bitter greens with cranberry compote and baked goat cheese.

Still full from dinner and drinks the night before, we stopped for coffee and pastry the next morning at Bakeshop started by an former New Yorker just off the main square. The exchange rate from dollar to euro was dreadful, but we were still tempted to carry out bags of the bakery’s flaky tarts, meringues the size of pancakes, and cherry pecan golden raisin bread (even if it did convert to about $25 dollars a loaf).

After breakfast, we felt like reading the newspaper, so we trekked to Globe, an ex-pat haven that first opened in 1993. It’s smoky, creaky, and a little hippie-dippie. With an English-language book and periodical shop in front, Globe is the kind of writing and reading place I dreamt finding in my college town. Patrons are intentionally scruffy; men with bed-heads and women with berets, drinking swimming pool-sized au laits.

After a full day of wandering around parks and exploring Prague Castle, relaxing with a glass of wine seemed in order. We stumbled upon the old and faithful Café Savoy, recently restored to its Art Nouveau glory after a couple of remodels. It’s easy to sip two glasses of wine and people watch here—the place was filled with an even split of eager tourists and grown up locals with sass. Drew left me to catch up on journaling while he went for a walk up Petrin Hill, and when we met up later, my stomach was empty and mind light from the wine.

Luckily, we found a gem at the venerable Cukr Kava Limonada (Praha 1 – Mala Strana, Lazenska 7), filling up with an herbed omelet and big, fresh plates of house-made taglitelle. Not sunny but warm, the cafe is decorated like the living room of your coolest Parisian aunt. Well fed, we shifted back to our apartment in the Jewish Quarter, past Tyn Church.

There were merchants in the square selling metal work, painted eggs, and festive breads. Some schoolgirls dressed in traditional Czech outfits danced on a nearby stage. With Tyn looming bigger than a mountain behind us and with bellies full, “I could really live here,” Drew said. “Me too, easy,” I sigh. Trouble is, we say that about every place we travel, especially after a series of very excellent meals.

Sara Billups writes the blog Weatherspoon, a diary of living alongside the weather in the Great Northwest.

I’

ve never had the true and honest urge to buy everything in a store until walking into Little Otsu in San Francisco’s Mission District last summer. It’s not just that Little Otsu’s calendars, journals, cards, buttons, and planners are equal parts earnest and inventive. It’s that you can tangibly sense how a community of artists and friends have influenced the accessible, home-spun aesthetic owners Yvonne Chen and Jeremy Crown have built into their business. Using alternative materials like soy-based inks, wood-free papers and sweatshop-free materials, Yvonne and Jeremy relocated a few hundred miles north to Portland last fall to develop the publishing arm of Little Otsu. In addition to running their Valencia Street shop with help from friends, the couple is now focusing full-time on production and sales from their Oregon home.

Sara Billups: Portland, Portland, Portland. If you like to make things, or like made things, and live on the West coast, seems like Portland is this diamond-studded dangling carrot. What about the place did you find enticing enough to make the move there from San Francisco last fall?

Little Otsu: We’d been thinking of moving to Portland for the better part of the past decade and even had a store here in 2004. We came to get to know it better during our trips up here for the store. We have good friends here and love how relaxed and vegan-friendly it is. Finally, it just felt like the right moment for us to try it. We actually live about 10 blocks from where our store was, so we ended up back in the place we started, so to speak.

SB: Any favorite Portland spots to share?

LO: The vegan mini mall at the corner of 12th and Stark Street in Southeast. A bunch of our friends all moved their businesses there so you have a grocery store (Food Fight), the only vegan bakery on the west coast (Sweet Pea), a vegan boutique (Herbivore), and vegan tattoo shop (Scapegoat). We also love all the trees and parks here and plan to explore more, but highlights so far include Mount Tabor, Kenilworth Park, and the Audubon Society Bird Sanctuary. Plus Jeremy’s favorite bookstore is Paper Moon on SE Belmont. Reading Frenzy, Floating World Comics, and Guapo Comics are also great.

SB: You’re keeping your store front in the Mission. Tell me a little about how Little Otsu fits into that neighborhood’s creative culture.

LO: We opened our store in October 2002 and there were always things happening in the Mission and it seems like there always will be with huge creative forces around like 826 Valencia and Creativity Explored, just to name a couple. We know some fellow business owners from the indie music scene and that seems to make for its own subculture of Mission businesses (Faye’s, Aquarius, Lost Weekend). We kind of fit in with that culture in the sense that it was born of indie diy and that we have evolved to express our creativity by becoming a producer of things. And of course there are our officemates McSweeney’s who set a great example of how to get things done. They serve as a paragon of productivity and inventiveness and inspire us to work hard at what we do.

SB: You have this very distinct aesthetic—it feels both keepsake and home-spun, yet accessible. How has that evolved?

LO: It’s hard to talk about our aesthetic except to say that we really try to focus on publishing artists that we really like. We’re not dogmatic insofar as defining a look for our projects. We are pretty open to what artists bring to the table, but we definitely know what we like and what we don’t when we see it. We have no formal art schooling whatsoever so it really is just kind of a gut thing. But we also make an effort to keep in mind what our general audience would like so maybe that’s what helps with the accessibility.

SB: How has Little Otsu formed a community of artists over the years?

LO: We feel really fortunate that we’ve been able to meet all these amazing artists through our store. Most of our artists were customers or vendors or friends thereof. Being a public space in a busy city seems to lend itself to a natural outgrowth of community. Everyone knows each other or are only a few degrees apart and it makes for a nice extended family.

SB: Do each of you take on a certain part of the business?

LO: We definitely each have our own jobs we do but there is a lot crossover as well. Yvonne does most of the buying and bookkeeping and nitty gritty stuff like project specs and production. Jeremy focuses more on artist relations, project and website development. We both fill orders, help customers, and answer email. And a good chunk of our time is spent just thinking of ideas for new projects, business development, and the store. Brainstorming can be time-consuming!

SB: Do you think Etsy has helped or hurt creative businesses? Could it be over-saturating the market?

LO: Etsy is a great thing! It helps people start small and have an audience, which is important. Anybody can have a business and Etsy helps them do that. Not everything is good on the site of course, but that’s also part of having a space that isn’t curated by a buyer. Personally, we like going to a store that’s curated really well and prefer that to having to dig through lots of stuff to find what we’re interested in. But sometimes it’s like going to a thrift store and finding that perfect pair of pants, it can all be worth it. Has it oversaturated the market? I don’t think so only because the good stuff tends to rise above the rest and the market works itself out (more or less). And everyone’s tastes are so personal that it’s nice to think there’s something for everyone.

SB: Are you together together, or just business partners? I’m wondering what challenges there may be working creatively, daily with a partner.

LO: Yes, we’re a couple and have been together for 8 years. Working together is actually really great and has only gotten better the more time we spend together. We can definitely disagree about things, but that’s also what tends to make our work (or life or whatever) better. Plus, you can talk about work at dinner and not bore the other person. There seem to be more and more couples doing indie businesses together and when you’re working with your best friend and partner, it just makes work all that more enjoyable and rewarding.

SB: A lot of people have ideas about starting projects but either never begin or don’t follow through. With Little Otsu, you’ve done both. What helped you take the risk?

LO: We really like working for ourselves and that’s a big incentive. Honestly, there is a real thrill (for lack of a better word) when you have the finished product in your hand. Plus we’ve gotten to work with great people and it makes working so hard fun.

SB: What did you want to be when you grew up? Does it seem like LO grew out of childhood aspirations or is it something that took you by surprise?

LO: We both did zines when we were younger and it had a pretty lasting impact. Yvonne worked on the zine-turned-label Zum with her brother George and Jeremy had a small publishing company in high school called Smock Publications, putting out his own zines as well as zines and books from his friends. While we had a passion for it, neither of us thought that this is where we would end up, but now that we’re here it feels like a natural fit.

SB: Sometimes I’m afraid that if I plunge in to a creative project that could also be a main source of income, I’ll end up resenting it in this way. Like the reason I love creative projects is because they are these really great sides, like they’re mashed potatoes and not the turkey dinner or something. Do either of you struggle with being creative while having a creative business, and does it ever feel too much like work?

LO: Running your own business is always too much work. But it all comes down to how you want to spend the bulk of your life. What do you want to be doing all day long? For us, working together on things we believe in and with people we believe in and using materials we believe in all makes it seem worth the time. We are lucky for sure, but it’s a good way to spend time. As far as sides, you gotta do that too to get away from business and we both do other creative things that we share with ourselves and friends and family. We also both love to read and go bird watching (which we are novices at for sure, but it’s so much fun).

Info and on-line store at http://www.littleotsu.com

Sara Billups writes the blog Weatherspoon, a diary of living alongside the weather in the Great Northwest.

I used to buy other people’s clothes for a living. It was part my job managing a vintage store in Seattle. Some sellers were college students trying to pawn off last season’s Forever 21 party tops, others were business casual-types clearing extra pant suits out of their closets. Then there were the Vintage Pickers (VPs), daily sellers who hauled in duffle bags filled with faux designer purses, butterfly belts and 80’s track suits freshly rounded up at local thrift shops and estate sales.

There’s this place in Seattle the VPs call the bins, a clothes-by-the-pound warehouse of extra Goodwill donations. At the bins, you’ll find Book Girl buying paperbacks for a local shop, Electronics Guy looking for old record players to refurbish and sell on eBay, and of course the VPs. There are things that the VPs know about picking clothes that they do not want you to know. They don’t want you to go to a garage sale and be able to spot a pair of Big E, redline 501s worth hundreds of dollars in a junk pile. They don’t want you to leap for banana-colored Frye 14L Campus boots at Value Village. And the VPs absolutely don’t want you to know the difference between good vintage keepsakes and old throw-away clothes. But I think there’s plenty of good vintage to go around, especially if you know where to look. If you live in the Midwestern U.S., there are racks of vintage dresses, corners of unsorted old sweaters and Sta-Prest pants waiting to be discovered. Here’s a few picking tips:

+If a sweater smells like moth balls, it will always smell like moth balls.
Certain odors won’t come out of old pieces, even after dry cleaning. Also, look for ring around the collar on men’s shirts. Old, yellowed age stains do not come out, even with Oxyclean.

+ Dry rot: enemy of all things old and beautiful
I’ve seen the most lovely 20s dresses tear like tissue paper if they’ve been stored in damp places without proper ventilation, which causes dry rot. Nylon-lined boots from the 60s thru 80s often have dry rot, too. To check, slip your hand inside boot’s lining and rub your fingers together. If you find black, peppery dirt on your hands, pass on the purchase.

+ Versace from the 80s is still from the 80s
You may find a pair of haute designer pants and think, in spite of their tight-assed, tapered leg hideousness, they’ll sell for a small fortune on eBay. A tip: imagine your friend, you know, the one who’s a ‘really wicked’ dresser, who takes fashion risks and pulls them off. Imagine this friend in said pants. If even he would turn up his nose at the prospect, pass. Bad clothes, even if they have labels like Pucci or Ferragamo, end up at thrift shops for a reason.

+ Are you really going to wear it?
When thrifting, some choices are intuitive. It may be thrilling to find a 50s beaded sweater, especially at Goodwill where less than 1% of the store’s stock is vintage. But unless you’re willing to alter the piece and it’s a steal, avoid boxy, awkward fits. If you wouldn’t wear it, odds are no one else will want to, either.

+ Dating is an art.
The web, especially Google Images, is a godsend if you’re not sure whether a dress is from the 40s or the 80s. To get you started, here’s a few basic tips to help date vintage based on material and accoutrements, from the Vintage Fashion Guild:
* Men’s dress trousers continued to have button-flies thru the 1940s.
* Metal zippers were not used in men’s pants until 1927 and were not common on women’s dresses until the late 1930s.
* Side seam zippers were used from the late 1930s-1960s.
* Velcro(R) was invented in 1948, but not used in clothing much until 1960s.
* The serger has been in use since the 1920s for seam finishing.
* Garment care labels began in 1971 in the US.
* Three-quarter and seven-eighth sleeves were popular late 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
* In 1942, men’s double-breasted suits in the US lost their vest and became 2-piece due to the war effort.
* Spandex’s first commercial use was in 1959, began to be seen in lingerie in the early 1960s, but was not widely used as a fabric until the 1980s.

Happy picking!

Sara Billups writes the blog Weatherspoon, a diary of living alongside the weather in the Great Northwest.

Before we begin, there are certain things you should know about Pete Jordan, a.k.a. Dishwasher Pete.

1 In 1989, Pete began to wash dishes. He wanted to get out of San Francisco where he was raised, and a job like dishwashing could take him from city to city easily. So he jumped on a bus and ended up working in some thrift store corner of Brooklyn for a few months. And when he got the notion, he took off for a new place.

2 He started chronicling his adventures in the classic zine Dishwasher. These stories turned Pete into a larger-than-life pearl diver (slang for dishwasher), a Rosie the Riveter not just for dishwashers but also for manual laborers, urchins, and suburban kids waiting to slip out of their own sleepy hometowns.

3 Pete hit 33 states over the next 12 years, washing dishes everywhere from a hippie commune to an offshore oil rig.

4 Pete’s a storyteller at heart. You know when you have a wild experience or meet a real character and have to tell someone about it? Well, Pete had lots of poignant, hilarious stories about dishwashing to tell. And certain people, from Ira Glass to David Letterman, were listening. Turns out lots of New York publishers were, too.

So Pete Jordan became the mighty "Dishwasher Pete". He’s contributed to This American Life and other NPR shows multiple times, has been a guest on The Late Show, and published Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States (Harper Perennial). I recently caught up with Pete, who is settled in Amsterdam with his wife and son, writing and fixing bikes.

Sara Billups: What’s the best music to wash dishes to?

Dishwasher Pete: Whatever gets one’s mind off the fact that they’re working. For my suds buster guru Jeff, it was Sun Ra. For me, at a lot of gigs, it was whatever local oldies station I could find on the radio (back when radio had local oldies stations). These days, while dishing at home, I usually don’t just listen to music, just the BBC news.

SB: I bought your book at Elliott Bay in Seattle recently. When I handed it to the clerk at the register she honest-to-goodness lit up: "Oh, he was sooooo wonderful when he read here. Such a nice, genuine person" It sounds like you made quite an impression. I’m wondering, what’s it like being on a book tour? I mean, was it turtlenecky with proper signings and Q+A’s and everything?

DP: The Dishwasher book tour occurred during May and June 2007 so the warm weather didn’t permit any turtlenecks. But indeed, the tour did see me reading passages from the book, answering audiences’ questions and signing books or other things (like one guy’s sauce pan). Despite years spent avoiding any sort of public speaking, I really enjoyed doing the readings and look forward to doing more in the future.

SB: I’m fascinated with the love of maps that started when you were young. You write, "I carried around a map of San Francisco and traveled as much as I could within its borders by attempting to walk the city’s every street and ride the entire length of every bus line." What compelled you to learn the city’s every nook and cranny?

DP: I’m very curious about my environs, especially those that aren’t considered terribly interesting. Attempting to walk every street in San Francisco when I was a teenager forced me to go to parts of the city that I wouldn’t have thought to go otherwise, even if it was just a block or two out of the way from one of my well-worn routes. My fifty-state dishwashing quest took place for much the same reason. It forced me to go to lots of places I wouldn’t have thought to go if I wasn’t trying to work in every state. And I really appreciated going to and experiencing those spots. Nowadays, I’m still fascinated about forcing myself to explore the less likely parts of my surroundings. Recently, I completed a project to photograph all 185 bicycle shops here in Amsterdam. Though I thought I knew the city quite well, with this undertaking, I discovered some streets and neighborhoods in my new hometown that had been previously unknown to me.

SB: You hit 33 states, washed dishes in 88 kitchens and lived in some great cities. Was it always easy to leave?

DP: Leaving was my specialty. That’s probably the thing that I was best at. I was always eager to quit a job or leave a town and go someplace else. It was always easy. Then again, there was the time that I ditched my dish gig in the mess hall at an Alaskan fish cannery. I presumed I’d be able to say goodbye to my buddy and dishwashing partner. But, in the moments when I was leaving for the airport, he wasn’t around for me to explain why I was bailing on him. Writing the book made me feel guilty all over again for having abandoned him.

SB: Why do you think some people talk about doing really adventurous stuff, traveling and so on, but never do it, while other people just get up and go?

DP: Some people are lazy, I suppose, and others aren’t. Then again, I’m pretty damn lazy which is actually one reason why I traveled so much. Seeing out life in one place or at one job was, I thought, what took the kind of patience I didn’t possess.

SB: It seems like creative people have a couple of options when it comes to making a living: 1. Work a job to pay rent and discipline yourself to write or paint or make music in your free time, or 2. Get a job doing ‘what you love’ and hope it doesn’t dilute your creativity. For a good ten years you picked #1, and then you pulled a book out of it. Did writing the zine ever feel like a job you had to do instead of something you wanted to do?

DP: The zine was born simply out of a desire to entertain some friends. Only 25 copies were made of the first issue. I had no initial ambition beyond have a couple dozen people read my dish tales. It was something I did to make my day job more bearable.

But by the end, when I was printing 10,000 copies of each issue, it most certainly felt like a job. With all the mail pouring in, I simply couldn’t keep up with the demand. So I put it out of my mind by no longer opening my mail. Without realizing it, what I had done was quit my job–my zine publishing job. With the book, I didn’t have to fuss at all with the publishing and distribution of it. I just had to write it and that was a big relief. If writing fulltime is now my job, it’s one I can’t see ever quitting. I might get fired–but that’s another story.

SB: Now that blogs are around, what do you think will happen to zines?

DP: Zines will continue to stubbornly exist. On my book tour, I was amazed to see how many zines there were on the shelves of places where I read like Atomic Books (Baltimore), Quimby’s (Chicago), Needles & Pens (San Francisco) and Reading Frenzy (Portland). It’s definitely much more challenging to publish a zine than it is to write a blog, but for many folks, it’s still more rewarding to have their work in printed form.

SB: During your interview on Letterman last July you admitted, in front millions of viewers, that you actually don’t like television, thank you very much. I like not owning a television. But my husband and I will rent the Gilmore Girls or Curb your Enthusiasm on DVD and watch them on our computer, which is really inconsistent value-wise but undeniably satisfying. Do you think that’s cheating?

DP: Oh, it doesn’t really matter. On Letterman I told viewers to turn off their TVs because it’s so crazy how many of us sit for hours on end in front of the box, absorbing such crappy stimuli. Most bizarre is that people sit through countless hours of commercials. Having all that materialistic shit slung at us turns us into consumerist zombies. But comparing that kind of viewing to watching a couple shows on DVD now and then is like comparing a heroin junkie who shoots up every day to someone who just has a glass of wine now and then. Maybe the trick is in moderation. But if I never watched a TV show the rest of my life, I wouldn’t complain.

SB: You’ve got Irish citizenship and can stay in any EU country as long as you’d like. It seems like you’re staying put in Amsterdam. What perspectives about the U.S. have you gleaned as an American living abroad?

DP: Well, we arrived here just before the buildup to the American invasion of Iraq. Following the events in the American press and the European press was mind blowing. While the European press was still discussing arms inspections, the American press had already swallowed the White House’s spin and was discussing things like what new "toys" the military would be using in this new war (as I heard reported on NPR). Under such circumstances, we weren’t very eager to get back to the U.S.

There are plenty of advantages about residing here. One is to live in a place where some very basic beliefs that I hold on issues–that are all hot-button topics in the U.S.–are simply not even an issue here. In the Netherlands, gay marriage, abortion, soft drug usage and euthanasia are all legal (or at least in the case of soft drug usage–tolerated). Meanwhile, capital punishment is illegal (as it is in pretty much every European nation aside from Belarus). Affordable health care is for more accessible here for folks like us. That I live in a nation where these types of lefty politics are the norm makes my day-to-day life much more livable.

SB: You have a two-year-old little boy now. How has being a father affected your wanderlust?

DP: Well, obviously these days I no longer wake up and decide to split town and head for the nearest bus station. But my boy is my partner-in-crime in my explorations of Amsterdam. He’s probably seen more of this city (from the front of my bike) than many adult Amsterdammers have in their whole lives.

SB: What are you working on next, any new writing projects?

DP: I’m busy working on my book about my life in Amsterdam as seen through the lens of Dutch bike culture. I’ve been taking notes for it for five years but have only just sat down to start writing it over the past week or two. I don’t know when it’ll be out–late 2008 or early 2009 I suppose.

For more on Pete Jordan, visit www.dishwasherpete.com

Sara Billups writes the blog Weatherspoon, a diary of living alongside the weather in the Great Northwest.

When I was a kid, I thought bottomless cups of coffee never truly ended, that I could jump into my mom’s mug and magically slip and slide from Indiana to Asia. For me, living in Seattle is the next best thing. Follow my map to ten favorite Seattle cafes.

1 Top Pot Doughnuts: