I've never seen this happen before that I can recall: the breeze was coming towards the audience, and as the smoke accumulated from the shells going off, it got to where the smoke formed a cloud that obscured much of the finale. Not totally, you could still see the stuff, but some of it was like looking at Hubble shots of nebulae.
Cool. Despite the lame attempt to put a country music soundtrack to the display.`
Earlier, we tried to go launch rockets at Celebration Park but it was way too windy. Ended up taking a kite for a walk around the lake. Just love when my honyocks get along with each other.
Edgerton did their city display on the 3rd, which I think is nice. Lots of people from Gardner come down for the Edgerton fireworks, then Edgerton comes to Gardner for its fireworks. And we all get a double dose of flash-flash-bang-bang.
I only caught the last four minutes or so on video. I spent the bulk of the time trying (in vain) to get good still shots of the fireworks. Fireworks are hard to shoot, I didn't have my tripod set up, and my camera really isn't the man for the job anyway.
But we had fun. You can hear Mo laughing in delight in the background of my video. And whistling, counting, singing...
Crazy Training Through the Hollers of Johnson County
Okay, I wanted to test myself and see how far I can ride at this point. There's a trail that runs from the Kansas River to south of 119th Street, over 15 miles of trail. If I can go from end to end on it, that's 1/3 of the daily ride on the MS Ride I'm training for.
And, by the way, really. SPONSOR ME! I know the economy sucks hard right now, and if you can't, you can't. If you're one of my many out of work friends, I'm not hectoring you. But surely not every single person I know except one is insolvent these days. I'm going to ride 170 miles in two days and sleep on the ground in between. I'm not asking you to go along, just make a donation to a very worthy cause to encourage my behavior.
I remember raising $200 to $300 for the Relay For Life a few years running and all I was going to do for that was walk around a track at night for an hour.
Anyway, I didn't get to see if I can really do the whole trail. My original idea was to start at the river and go south, then back north. Theory being, the river is likely the lowest point on the trail, topographically speaking. So wouldn't it be nice to finish with an overall downhill situation? But I was running out of daylight, so I started from 119th/Northgate.
Well, it turns out there are many peaks and valleys between Olathe and the Kaw. The trail does indeed have long flat stretches, skirting the edge of enormous meadows as it follows Mill Creek. But there are plenty of hills, ones that require braking on the down side due to hair-pin turns and blind corners, and going the other way can only be described as Ultimate Granny Gear.
I was honestly awestruck by how beautiful a lot of the scenery is. Who knew Kansas was so beautiful?
And anyone ever tells you Kansas is flat, ask them if they own a bicycle.
When I was getting ready to set out, I wondered about the sign saying the park I was leaving from closed at dusk and the gates would be chained shut. The curb was hoppable, but I wasn't sure how stringently they enforced this dusk closing. Or what they considered 'dusk.'
Another person parking there said, 'Don't worry, they don't lock up until after nine, maybe even ten.'
It was eight when I started off...
I made it from the 14.5 marker to the 6 mile. Then I realized that the sun was going down and it was getting dark faster than I anticipated. Plus, at mile marker 6 the path was going downhill pretty steeply and I didn't relish the thought of climbing back up it.
I should have turned around a couple miles sooner. I saw lots of deer, which is cool. I saw more deer than cyclists, runners, etc., actually. As it got darker, I saw bats, too, in the wooded parts of the trail. I felt, rather than saw, why I was seeing bats: tiny bugs, billions of them, come out right as the sun goes down. These bugs pelted me so fast I thought at first it had started to rain. Creepy feeling, sailing along the trail (hauling ass to try and get back to the car while there was still some light, struggling to see the trail) being peppered by insects.
It got harder and harder to see the trail in the wooded sections. Eventually, I heard voices coming from behind a house that backed to the trail. I could go forward on the trail but it was a black hole as it disappeared into the woods. And I remembered that part of the trail (between 119th and College) was the craziest combination of hills and turns.
I went to the voices and asked directions. The kid told me to take a right and then an immediate left on 114th (which he described as a 'really steep hill' to my delight) to Ridgeview, then right to 119th and right to my car.
As I huffed and puffed up 114th, which was the Return of the Son of Ultimate Granny Gear, a couple of boys I'd guess were about ten asked me if this was tiring. I grunted that it was, and one of them said, 'I feel sorry for you.'
You and me both, I told them. I've been feeling sorry for myself awhile now. They thought this was funny, but I had to go back to panting and hoping I wouldn't pass out.
It was good to get back into civilization. Breath the wholesome goodness of car exhaust and ride through air free of tiny bugs thanks to liberal doses of insecticide. And street lights, they don't put those on the trail.
The detour added about a mile, far as I can tell, to my ride, which I'm calling 18 miles. 17 if I'd stayed on the trail, I think my detour added roughly a mile of extra east-west travel.
The park was still unchained when I made it back to my car at 10:00. I guess maybe next week I can try and see if I can get to the river and back...
My Dad's fridge spells out the names of all the grandchildren. Who often rearrange these letters. I decided to rearrange them myself, and Em had an apoplectic fit.
So I made sure to come up with combos she'd like in a special way.
Well, not really, I know. But we got together for a belated Father's Day (travels prohibited it last week) and Dad bought a wild-caught Copper River Sockeye salmon filet to grill.
I've grilled a lot of salmon, eaten a lot of salmon in restaurants. Never seen salmon with such a bright red color. Grilled some veggies and had all sorts of other trimming son the table, wild/brown rice, a couple kinds of salad, etc.
But this salmon was, without a doubt, the best salmon I have ever eaten in my life. It tasted just like other salmon I've eaten but more so in every dimension. Makes me want to move to Alaska just to bait a hook. I had a slight mis-step getting it off the grill, the fish separated from the skin, but no harm. The fish was moist, light, flaky and too delicious.
Em had fun playing with her cousins. She bought Candyland at a thrift store yesterday and was thrilled to have apprentice players.
That and the elephant pool set up out back. Which had a timid spray until Mo came out and took one look, cranked the water pressure. All of a sudden the water was shooting clear up through the canopy over the pool.
This was the usual dinner party at Melissa's except she had this idea that Foolkiller's first performance should be part of it.
Okay, she says the band will never be called Foolkiller. Seems really dead set against it. But if I pretend otherwise, maybe she'll come around. She hates all my other suggestions even more (such as Camel Toe, Split Wet Beaver, A Confederacy of Dunces, Three Rails of Blow & A Hooker, etc.) It seems I can't come up with an alternative so bad it makes Foolkiller look good enough by comparison.
Anyway, Rachel & Meghan were our merchandizing act, our opening band. They played Mozart, The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E-flat major, K. 364 (320d). Well, not all of it, and they didn't have an orchestra, so humming and laughter tended to fill those roles.
Well, that and the occasional daughter wrapping herself around Mommy's leg.
I saw Rachel cringe every time she made a mistake, but dude, this is a piece neither had played in over twenty years. They were sight-reading it. I started to video them, and Rachel told me to knock it off. So I found this on YouTube: it was more or less like this but with Melissa's furnace where the orchestra should be:
So anyway, I realized listening to them that not only did they have balls to do this, but any slight mis-steps were perfectly understandable given they were reading it cold. Such things are unavoidable, even by the most accomplished musicians.
Whereas the band Melissa says can't possibly be called Foolkiller, we've been working for months on this handful of songs. And rehearsed as recently as yesterday. So all my self-critical interior voices were saying to me, Self, what's your excuse?
It's the interior voices that give me the nerves. Mostly, anyway. It crossed my mind that Meghan did go to Julliard, which is about as elite as it gets. But Melissa's done (if I recall) a Berklee summer program and graduated from Eastman, and I don't get nerves loading my gear into her basement to play with her.
Really my nerves weren't bad for Weenie with a Tragic Cramp and Vertigo. Well, there was an aborted run at Vertigo, where Em came running downstairs to get me (she was being paid a bit to keep an eye on her sister while I participated in the musicale, with the understanding that she come get me if I was needed. Needed as in a seizure, or really egregious behaviors. I almost dropped my guitar trying to get it off and get upstairs before finding out all it was, Mo had asked to go home. She was bored.
So anyway, those first two songs weren't total train wrecks. I've played better guitar solos, but we started and ended more or less together.
Then it came to Code Monkey, the number I sing. My knees went a bit wobbly and my mouth went dry. I realized in mid-phrase that I was running out of breath because I hadn't inhaled when I should. We started out fast (because I start us off and I was having a little anxiety attack) but by the first chorus we were slower. But at least we were together, so I guess that means we were listening to each other enough to speed up and slow down in unison.
There's a level of stage fright that actually improves my performances. This was about 16 levels above that, a fight or flight response that could have gotten someone killed, at least if pitchy singing were a gun. I was having fun, don't get me wrong, so much so I suggested we go ahead and inflict Modern Love on our audience. And as we started it, I noticed my middle, ring and pinky fingers on my right hand quivering. My thumb and index were holding the pick, which kept them steady, but the other three were having a full-blown nervous breakdown.
I know I need to practice a lot more, and we need, as a group, many more hours of rehearsal. The part I have trouble figuring out is why I want to go do it again, given that performing in front of even the smallest and friendliest audience possible made such a credible attempt at scaring me to death.
Picked up Em from Camp Chippewa this afternoon, where she spent the week. The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster went there when she was a little honyock.
I was surprised going in and seeing the place how beautiful it really is. Almost made me wish my parents had sent me to camp. But my parents never went to camp themselves, so I don't think it ever crossed their minds.
The cabins aren't air-conditioned, though, so that cured me of that false nostalgia. There's probably a word that actually means nostalgia for something you never experienced, and if there's not there certainly should be.
I asked Em what she did all week and she struggled with an answer. 'Same old same old,' and 'I don't know.'
Then she talked to her Mom on the phone and told her extremely detailed stories about what she'd done at camp. Then at the musicale at Melissa's, she was telling some of my friends, in detail, what she did. I guess there's a blockage when it comes to explaining camp to a Dad who's never been a camper...
My ex emailed it from her phone last night when circumstances prevented my routine bedtime call. It's important, because it is easily the high point of the dark period since Monday evening's bike ride and Steak & Shake scene...
My car was in the shop for a mighty $1291 in repairs, for a start. This was true, actually, Monday. It just wasn't until late Tuesday that my mechanic was finished with the two radiator fans, the timing belt, water pump, and I'm pretty sure a heart-lung-liver transplant on my 97 Accord.
This right after my home's AC blower fan melted down to the tune of $547. Right on the heels of the $125 snaking of three (or more) pairs of Mo's underpants from the sewer line. And all this while my income has been cut by 20% for months—not that this decreased my child support, mortgage, or any other obligations along the way...
How could it be any worse? Jehovah! Jehovah!
Right?
So I'm on I-35 this morning driving a car that hasn't even been out of the shop for a whole day and I see wisps of steam? Smoke?
I pull over, pop the hood and find it's steam (that's good, I think, at least the fucker's not on fire). Green stuff is leaking all over my brand new, very expensive radiator fans. I call my mechanic, who dispatches a character I'll call Igor simply because I didn't get his name. Igor showed up in an old Buick Century that was a mobile testament to mechanical prowess. Only a wizard could keep this thing running. His wasn't quite the same year, I don't think, but it was basically the car my 97 Accord replaced.
Igor tried to tighten the hose clamp on the leak (where the radiator met hose, but to no avail. The bottleneck that comes out of the radiator was crumbling. I didn't know they could do that. A radiator is a device filled with boiling-hot fluids all the time, I thought they were made out of, I don't know, METAL or something. Nope, this one's plastic. And toast. Another $179 plus tax and tow.
Did I for just a moment wish I'd let that salesman push me back to the finance office when I test drove that Nissan Cube? No, not really. I love the Nissan Cube, it is the perfect automobile, my dream car (if they offered it in yellow anyway), but no. I have no desire to be on that awful TV show where they show the fat chick and the dirtbags repossessing people's cars. And since I can afford, presently, a car payment of about zero, that's where the whole Nissan Cube affair would end.
I've had plenty of humiliations in life: divorce, bankruptcy, being 39 years old and having to ask Mommy for help with bone-crushing car repair bills, but I've never had a car repo'd. I haven't had a car payment since I was 22, when I paid the last payment on my one ill-advised car loan, and consequently I've not been vulnerable to this one particular shameful experience.
It's not that I've totally embraced the Dave Ramsey Lifestyle or anything. I have a couple of credit cards, full ones. I have no emergency fund saved and see little opportunity to put one together. To hear Dave tell it, if I had an envelope with $1000 in cash hidden in my freezer or coat closet, all this shit wouldn't break. I can't prove the theory wrong since I've never in my life had anything that resembled this 'emergency fund.'
As the skit goes, where does this 'saved money' come from???
But anyway, lest you think this is all about appliance and car repair, it gets better. Well, worse, but I'm counting on schadenfreude to make this worth your time. Sincerely, I hope you enjoy my misfortunes because I can't. It's okay, laugh a little at the Lobster, I'll laugh at you when you're circling the drain. Depending on who you are, I probably already have.
Igor dropped me at work and had my car towed back. If you're not impressed he had this old Century running, check it out: the air conditioning even worked. Impressive for a car built before the invention of air conditioning.
My Dad (dropped me at the garage to pick up the car) offered to take me and Mo to dinner. My night for the girls this week but Em is at camp.
So we go into Bob & Dee's, a restaurant Mo has eaten at and enjoys. And she's loving on me like I'm the reason we're in there. And I order her the three piece fried chicken dinner, which has every single one of her favorite foods, and she's got her lemonade.
And she starts shouting. She cups her hand over her mouth to create and echo and, well, it's more like a bark than a shout. But it's fucking loud.
So I roll out the tried and true admonishments to use her quiet voice, and it's not even making a dent. I try a time out and she screams, and I mean a coach's whistle can't compete with this. So we box up the food and leave, and as a consequence I took away her favorite soundtrack to being in the car (the Jolly Rogers, which she refers to and asks for as the 'Silly Rogers') and the computer. As in, when we get home, no computer because you made bad choices and ruined dinner.
I know I could have stayed and eaten and let Mo ruin everyone's dinner, but I'm not an asshole. Well, not that kind of asshole anyway.
We get home and I hit the garage door opener and nothing. Then I notice the house looks eerily dark.
Now, I mentioned above I've had a few unexpected expenses lately, right? And I've been on 32 hour weeks for a few months, so money would be tight anyway. I paid my electric bill on the way to work today because today was the cutoff day if I didn't. And because I only last night had enough money deposited to cover that check.
So I figured they had cut off my power before anyone checked the drop box and I was screwed. But I tried the after hours number trying to think of an angle that would get them to turn the power on at 7:00 p.m. My CPAP, my autistic daughter, the fact that you can't live by candlelight with a child who can't abide a lit candle (they're for blowing out) and who likes to eat candles.
Fortunately, everybody's power was out. Yay! It was a fallen tree and a messed up doo-hickey. Driving around, killing time (the car was much easier to share with Mo than an unlit, un-air-conditioned house), I even saw the linemen make the final vital repair: placement of a doo-hickey on a thingy up the pole. I saw a spark and the cherry-picker came down and I asked them if that meant the power was back on and they said yes.
I love those guys. And envy them their completely recession proof jobs.
All the while we were in the car, Mo asked for the Silly Rogers. And I repeated, over and over, 'No, you made bad choices and wouldn't find your quiet voice. Your bad choices ruined dinner, no Silly Rogers, no computer.' After an hour and a half, I think it almost sunk in. She tried to turn on the computer, first chance when we got home of course. I'd locked up the power chord, so nothing doing.
I'm aware, by the way, that some of the stuff I'm bitching about here is the result of my own bad choices...
Roj is one of my bestest friends in the whole world. He drew the buckaroo lobster in the masthead of this blog, the only tattoo I've ever gotten. But I haven't seen him in over ten years.
Not because he lives in Copenhagen or something. He lives in midtown. No, Roj is a bit of a hermit when he's not acting. If I really wanted to see him, I should have decided to shoot a movie. Then he'd show up.
Turns out, there's another soft spot. Cycling. JSC talked Roj into coming to Trek for the Monday night no-drop ride. No-drop is what I call the No Lardass Left Behind ride. And that's me, the one bringing up the rear huffing like he still smokes 3 packs a day (I quit 14 years ago).
Roj showed up, in character, with his Mongoose BMX bike, circa 1981. Restored including replacement decals. And a girlie backpack with a flashing light. And a skateboarding helmet.
I bought the bike from a junk shop for twelve dollars. It was an old-fashioned cruiser with a high aristocratic seat and handlebars, the kind beautiful Italian girls with perfect posture ride in films set in the 1940s, pedaling past olive groves...
...I thought I had some local color, some neighborhood folk hero charm...
...Until the day I caught my reflection in a storefront window. Sitting high on a girl's bike, my bulky rain pants yanked up to my neck, my shiny yellow Gorton's fisherman slicker, my tiny child's helmet like a vulcanized yarmulke on top of my head. Those smiles and thumbs-up were really saying, "Look at that retarded boy riding his bike in the rain. And all by himself too! Good for him!"
Okay, so Roj's bike isn't a girls' bike, but it has one gear and tiny wheels. And most of the riders in this group wear the full uniform of padded bike shorts, a rash-guard like shirt, a camel-pack, etc. Many have special pedals that require a shoe with a cleat that hooks in to allow them to pull as well as push the pedal.
I was so relieved. For once, I wouldn't be the slowest member of the group. The one the leader asks, 'Feeling energetic?' of before deciding whether to take the way he wants to go or the easy/short way.
Except Roj smoked me. I was riding a $2000 mountain bike borrowed from my brother (thanks Bro!), a bike so easy to propel I felt like I was cheating. And I was getting my ass handed to me by the goofy guy riding a child's plaything.
Oh, the shame except I love Roj. I prize eccentricity and have collected my share of strange friends. And if he's not the weirdest one, he's tied for first with someone.
Like I say, Bill Clinton was President last time I saw Roj, I think. Well, I saw him with his sister at a sidewalk cafe last year, but I was on the clock and on the move and couldn't stop. It felt like an Elvis sighting.
So I rode 12 miles in the sweltering heat and humidity of Monday evening (gotta train if I'm going to finish the MS ride—SPONSOR ME!!) with Elvis. I didn't even want to be outside, it was so hot. But if I'm going to do 170 miles in two days, I gotta train when I can. Help me out, I'm trying to talk Roj into riding, too. And he'll be the one on a BMX bike, nobody will believe it...
I don't eat out much, let alone in toney restaurants like Kabuki. But this is where a shit-ton of old friends were meeting and I really wanted to be in on it. Common denominator, all but one of us went to high school together.
I tried to think, when was the last time I ate some place this upscale on my own dime. And I think I was still married. I tend to think of Five Guys as an extravagance, or for that matter McDonald's or Long John Silver's.
Sushi, though, is one thing I've never learned to make at home. I had the Chirashi platter tonight, with some roe and Uni on the side. Delicious.
I have to say, though the restaurant is very upscale, I was surprised at the service. This is where Julie and Roger deflowered me of my sushi virginity, but when I showed up early, I was abruptly told they didn't open until 5:30. It was 5:25. When I came back and we went in, I made an inquiry about the beers available and instead of an answer, I was given a menu that didn't list the beers. I ended up having a Mai Tai instead, but anyway...
This was about friends, friends I hadn't seen in a long time (from two days to four months to 20+ years), and we had a blast. Though at one point one of my dinner mates asked what one of the things on her plate was and commented, 'I'd ask the waitress but she'd probably reprimand me.' So I wasn't the only one who thought she was a little short on the service side.
Sorry, but have you seen the news? This recession that's going, it's impacted everyone I know and me, big-time. If Kabuki's sales aren't off this year, I'll eat my shoe. You'd think they'd be falling over themselves, nine customers walk in. Granted, nine separate checks, but we're slow where I work, too, and I don't care how high-maintenance a customer is, I want their business.
I over-ordered. My cash should have been ample, but when the check came I only had about a 4% tip available. Good thing the waitress ignored my empty Mai Tai (which was gone before my food arrived). Since she never asked me if I wanted another drink (I did), I didn't go over my money. Normally, I'd feel really guilty leaving such a tiny tip, but in this case I'd say it was fair.
I'd still go back to Kabuki. Being deflowered by Julie and Roger there alone makes it special. And it is great food, if pricey.
And we had so much fun. I'd have paid every penny twice to hang out with this crew, and it wouldn't have mattered if they fed us at all.
And yes, Julie, I'm posting this under Grub. And I'm giving you credit, right here, for most of the pics. All the good ones were taken by Julie (plus all the ones with me in them); if they're a tad dark and noisy, she was using my camera with its child-like capabilities.
Em has gotten into buttons, which she insists are called 'flair.' I tried to explain this was strictly an Office Space definition, possibly ripped from the real life employee manual of T.G.I.Fridays, but she doesn't believe me.
Anyway, she wanted more flair for her bag/purse/thing. And I got out my old collection, almost all of which dates back to when I was a high school nerd attending science fiction conventions with my weirdest friends.
A lot of the custom ones are very obviously printed on a dot matrix printer. Some are hand-written by me at age 16 or 17. Many are embarrassingly pseudo-clever.
One that's not as old as that, Em wanted to know 'why her hair is like that?' I told her that, if she knew, she wouldn't want the button. And she took my word for it.
This flair was all in a plastic bin with some other evidence of how much of a geek I was back then. Actually, it probably paints me as worse than I was. There are gaming dice, but I only tried role-playing games (Gamma World) once. But I liked the idea of roll playing games (still do, or I probably wouldn't be playing Mafia Wars), so I'm probably as guilty as if I'd played a lot of D&D. Then there was the WWI cigarette lighter I enjoyed using to light flaming wands of death back then. The tobacco companies claim they don't want to hook kids, but only a kid would pretend they like cigarettes long enough to become dependent on them. And finally, a religious necklace I wore despite my atheism when I was the pagan bass in the St. Theodore's Russian Orthodox choir.
My dinner was interrupted by a solicitor wanting to know if I'd like to have that dead tree removed.
What dead tree?
The one that doesn't have any leaves on it.
Oh, that dead tree. Honest, I hadn't even noticed that it was dead, obvious as it is. This is another piece of evidence that I should never live in a house unless its a house so cheap I can afford a lawn & landscape service to take care of the yard around it. I'm pretty sure such professionals would notice a thing like a dead tree.
$450 was his bid to take it down to a stump. He said he didn't know anyone with a grinder small enough to get through my gate to do the stump removal. I guess I'll get some additional bids to make sure that price is competitive, though it's an academic pursuit at this point. I wonder how long I realistically have to come up with the dough to do something about this thing.
The idea was to hit the Plaza and check out the dragon boat races, then go to Crown Center for the Chalk & Walk, a sidewalk chalk event.
We got to Flush Creek in time to watch the first and second place boats shake hands on a good race and paddle back up the murky stream to the dock. It was all over.
So we headed to Crown Center and when I couldn't see any evidence of the sidewalk chalk thing, I asked and was told that's next week. Way, way early. Yeah.
We looked around Crown Center some, but having recently been it wasn't all that novel.
Em had asked about having cheeseburgers for supper, so I lit the fire when we got home and got after it. She said these were in a league with Five Guys—she knows how to butter her old man up. I made smaller patties this time, 1/3 cup per, mashed out to about 3/16" to 1/4" thick. It was tricky getting them all on the grill and back off without them bursting into flames (between my hot fire and the thin patties). I should have popped for the leaner ground beef, but I think the flavor Em was responding to is the taste of 80/20 ground chuck cooked very hot and fast. I know most of that excess fat drains off into the fire, but I'll bet what's left behind is worse from a health standpoint.
This was Rotary Night and my Dad, a Rotarian, was buying.
We dined on hot dogs and chips, excellent, and then went to appreciate the Africa exhibit. Ended up closing the place.
We also celebrated my sister-in-law's birthday.
Mo was all about labeling things. She'd gesture and then shout, 'Giraffes!' Or when she didn't know what something was, she'd just gesture at it. I read the plaque and said, 'That's a Bongo,' and she shouted 'Bongo!' Only down side to this was the Bongos are in a section posted 'QUIET AREA.'
We didn't prep her very well for this expedition, and the girl craves routine. So when Grandpa picked her up instead of me and then she was at the Zoo with a bunch of family, she wasn't necessarily unhappy, but I think she was anxious.
I think the big turtle was dead. Not sure, but I watched him a long time, and besides having all his limbs splayed, he didn't move the whole time I was watching. Maybe he was just taking a nap, but I would have thought a turtle would sleep more inside its shell or something.
When I showed up, she gave me a big hug and then basically hung on me more than not the whole time we were at the Zoo. It was a muggy evening, but she insisted on draping a sweaty arm over my neck every chance she got.
Well, that and she kept trying to run her hand along the rail of the fences, which are cracked and obviously splintery. Oh, and licking things (railings, trees, benches). Gross.
Em paired up wither her favorite cousin and had a blast.
There's a special kind of tired you can only get by working all day and then racing off to spend three hours at the zoo with your kids. It's not a bad tired, but it's an extreme one. Maybe that giant turtle was just worn out by his kids.
Since I had my layoff day today, I got the girls extra early. When school let out for Mo, right before that I picked up Em. By then, I'd already had my annual follow-up with my Cardiologist (I'm to fuckin' young to have a cardiologist, but I have one because I had a heart attack when I was too fuckin' young to have a heart attack).
And the good doctor was so enthused that I'd started cycling, I ended up riding when I wouldn't have. But looking at my schedule, the next likely window of opportunity for a ride is Sunday evening, and just starting out I need to avoid six-day gaps if at all possible.
It was misting. I would have skipped the ride and said it was because it was raining, but it didn't really do the word 'raining' justice. It was cool, overcast, the ground was wet. Humidity had to be 100%, it wasn't really raining.
And anyway, if I'm ever going to live the dream of moving to Portland or Seattle, I better not be a pussy about riding in mist. And if I'm going to live long enough for one of those destinations to be a realistic possibility, I better get my ass in shape.
Plus, the MS ride, I think I'm going to attempt that, and if I'm going to get to being able to ride 170-185 miles in two days by September, I gotta get past the sore ass and raw thighs from ten measly miles stage.
I wanted Em to ride with me, and originally she said she would, but today she said she didn't want to. She said it's complicated, but it's embarrassing, just the thought of me being on a bike.
So I hit the trail. I'm told it's part of the trail that goes from Olathe to the Kansas River, but where I started at 75th & I-35 appears to be the Southern terminal of what I rode on. Not sure where you pick up the next Southern leg.
I rode North on the Streamway trail, which is about 3-1/2 miles, then cut over to the Waterfall trail, which I think was a half mile and back. Eight miles, the first half of it mostly downhill. I think I should have started the other way, but maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Not sure from the Waterfall Park where you go to pick up further trails going North, either. But eight miles was about all I was good for today anyway.
So after lunch, we headed to the Moon. No demonstration this time. He was doing them, but for field trips. We hung out and checked out all the bizarre merchandise. Talked to Bruce, learned about the Smokey Hill River Festival this weekend, but it's too expensive and too far away for me to really consider.
Then home for grilled pork chops, a visit to Celebration Park and the library. Not an entirely idyllic day, Mo was in time-out for kicking me and later in time-out plus lost computer privileges for putting her bra in the toilet. What's that saying? The days are long but the years are short?
I really liked the Scion XB, even came close to buying one about three years ago. It was perfect, an economy car with a tiny footprint that had massive amounts of space, huge doors, easy for a big guy like me to get in and out of, funky, got good gas mileage, etc.
So naturally they changed everything. The Scion XB they're making these days looks like a Dodge Nitro, has a bigger motor (there goes your mileage). No! It ruins it! Stupid, fat hobbitses!
So while I was being disappointed in movies Sunday afternoon, I saw an ad for the Nissan Cube. I couldn't tell in the ad what the scale of the thing was, if it'd be too tiny or too big or whatever, but it looked like it might have a lot of the virtues of that original XB.
So I peeled off on the way home last night and test-drove one. I think I like it even better than the old XB, because the automatic XB felt a little underpowered (probably why they put a bigger motor in). The 5-speed was fine, but the automatic was sluggish. The Cube I drove was an automatic, and it's not going to win any drag races but it has plenty of scoot.
I like the asymmetrical back window and fridge-style door on the back, too. The only thing I would like better, and this was an issue with the XB, too, is some hotter color choices. The Scarlet Red is probably what I'd get, the Moss Green isn't bad. But no yellow, orange, neon green, purple? Why do car companies insist on painting everything so Hello Boring?
The salesman was saying something about how their transmission doesn't have gears, a 'CVT' that's unique to Nissans. You never know with salesman talk, a guy who wants to sell you a car will tell you the tires are filled with air imported from Brazil if he thinks it'll close the deal. But I know I was able to get up to highway speed and merge as easily as in my Accord.
As in when he made the self-serving observation that 'it's time for a new car.' I can see where he's coming from, the economy sucks, they want to move inventory. I'm driving in there in a 12 year old car with 175,000 miles on it. To him, continuing to drive a car that old is a sin.
Of course, I need a car payment like I need a big fat hole in my head. Actually, that's true when I'm getting 40 hours a week, and I've been on 32 hours for months now. But if I was going to visit the circle of Hell where you have a car loan again, I'd be Cube'n it for sure.
JSC talked me into coming out to Trek for the 'slow ride' this evening. This is where a bunch of really fit cyclists humor the out of shape with a No Lard-Ass Left Behind policy.
I was told this would be ten to fifteen miles, and that the slowest person sets the pace. I knew, of course, that I would be that slowest person. By a wide margin.
There were roughly a dozen of us. JSC guilted me into buying a helmet. I used to have one somewhere, but it's bermuda triangulated on me. I wanted to wait until I could get to Wal-Mart to buy the cheapest lead-painted Made in China helmet possible, but the bike shop probably sold me a better helmet. Very adjustable and thoroughly ventilated. I question whether my brain holds enough wisdom to warrant almost fifty bucks worth of protection.
Huffing and puffing, I only saw spots on the longest climb of the route. At one point, when I felt like we had to have gone at least 10 miles, there was a discussion about which way to continue, one being another mile or so, the other being almost five.
I was clearly the weak link, so it was sort of made my decision. What the hell, the weather was perfect, and it's not like my ass was going to get more kicked.
Actually, I definitely felt worse as we continued. Small hills seemed big. But I did sort of reach a critical mass where my misery couldn't expand any further. Endorphins probably helped, though I could have done with a double dose.
At one point, it was pointed out to me that if I pedaled on the downhills I'd gain momentum, speed. By posting I was losing speed on plateaus.
But my ass hurt so much on the seat, that was why I was posting. On the uphills, the burning in my lungs could distract me from my poor, tender buns. But on the downhills, once the sweat started to dry, there wasn't anything to distract me from my fundamental distress.
People were good sports. A couple even claimed to have been as out of shape as me only a few months ago. As if anyone has ever, in the history of man, been as out of shape as me.
Thing is, I know what it is to be in shape, to crave the gym, feel like I couldn't get enough of a workout in. I knew it briefly in the few months after my heart attack when I was a true gym rat. Then I sat on my ass and ate and drank the wrong things for six plus years.
When we got back to the bike shop, by the way, someone with an odometer told me we'd gone 10.3 miles. Seriously, I thought we had to have gone at least 15.
JSC says she's going to help me tune the bike up, show me where something called bearings live and how to lube them up. Because I weigh something like twice what she does and I wasn't passing her on the downhills. If my brother reads this line, he's going to have a stroke. He's a serious cyclist, and it violates everything he believes in for someone to ride a bike so poorly maintained it doesn't even coast well.
So anyway, not to take this whole healthy living thing too far, we ate at Five Guys after. Which probably undid any benefit I got from the ride. Though since, sooner or later, I'd have probably caved and eaten there (I just saw this one the other day) eventually, I guess maybe I'm marginally better off than if I ate at Five Guys without doing any exercise.
I'm about to go to bed, I can't wait to see what I feel like in the morning. Or maybe I can.
The crazy part is, I'm seriously thinking MS150. A little over three months to train for it...
This was the band I wanted to be in when I was a teenager. I went to junior high with the bassist and drummer, who remained the constants as the band perpetually changed singers and guitarists. Actually, they were called ATB before they came up with Perpetual Change, I believe because they couldn't think of 'Any Thing Better.' I think that name worked against them because it looked like a dyslexic was listing them as 'TBA.'
Anyway, a good bassist is essential to a rock & roll band, and since everybody plays guitar, they're hard to come by. A good drummer is in close second on the hard-to-fill roles for a high school garage band, and Mike & Andrew were both very good as well as being very good friends.
I managed to insinuate myself into their rehearsal once, and rendered myself totally obnoxious. I wanted to be in the band that got gigs and chicks, but I wanted that band to be too cool to play a song just because it was popular. There was a wide swath of 80s rock I was, at that age, unwilling to embrace, and it was probably 70% of the band's repertoire.
Plus, I was thinking 'jam session,' and they were thinking 'rehearsal.' Mike was teaching (I think Jim Parker, though it may have been the guitarist before that) parts to I forget what song, probably something by the Police, and my ADHD was in high gear. I tried to steer them into playing some Black Sabbath, Van Halen and Rush, and they did include those bands in their covers, but these kids were too well adjusted to be exclusively heavy metal or exclusively prog rock. And in the Rush case, they probably also noticed that band is pretty much only loved by guys, so a Rush tribute band is a bad idea from a chick-attracting standpoint.
I remember several times being told, 'You're killing my ears.' I didn't think I was playing that loudly, and maybe I wasn't. Maybe what was killing ears was my attempts to make their rehearsal into my Black Sabbath Festival. I wasn't invited back, and I think my social skills were more to blame than my chops.
All of which set me up, once I got to high school, to decide I was too cool to play any sort of rock & roll. When I got into jazz I got seriously snotty about rock & roll, and honestly that was partly because I had made friends with a bassist and drummer who were into jazz. It's not that my affection for jazz was insincere, it's still easily 3/4 of my CD collection, but my hatred of rock & roll was a lie I made up, told myself and mostly believed for a few years.
Once I grew up a bit and quit trying to figure out what I should and shouldn't like and just went with what I actually responded to, I found out those first two Ozzy solo albums really are awesome. And a lot of that 80s rock that I shunned in junior high has its virtues.
Anyway, 20 years out, these guys have started playing together again. I think Andrew's a dentist these days, not sure what the others do for a living. But they play the Brooksider from time to time.
And they still sound great. They're obviously having a blast, and still have to beat the chicks off with a stick. The same chicks, in fact, the place was like a high school reunion.
Good show. They were joined by the singer for KC/DC for 'You Shook Me All Night Long' and by the guitarist for Rattle & Hum for a couple of U2 numbers. Good stuff, and two more bands I'd like to catch at the Brooksider sometime.
Band practice on a Saturday. We've missed a couple weeks, but to my pleasant surprise we didn't seem to forget everything.
Still have tempo struggles on some numbers, still haven't mastered that first nine-song list as a group. Many hundreds of rehearsals to go before we're in any danger of playing the Brooksider...
But potential is there. Even though my band-mates don't all seem to like the name FoolKiller at the same time. And they really, really hated my idea that we all put on clown makeup and dress as clowns on stage. My image was of a sinister clown with a tommy gun as 'fool' and 'killer.'
I don't know how many warning shots God is going to shoot over my bow, but I get the message. Friends and relatives dead at 60, 50, and 39, and it's not like the heart attack I had at 32 wasn't warning enough. Granted, Jeff going at 39 wasn't anything he could help.
Anyway, since I still have some heel spur symptoms over a year after my last attempt to get in shape back-fired, I'd been thinking of a bicycle. As in maybe I should buy one (I used to have one, but it got kinda trashed and I gave it away when I was clearing debris after the divorce). Maybe a used one at a thrift store or something.
I mentioned this at band practice, was going to check out a bike shop after practice and was offered the loan of this bike. Loan-to-buy, I guess you'd call it. If I keep it, I owe the owner $50. A bargain, I'm sure. And if I turn out not to be able to stick with it, at least I don't have the guilt of having spent a bunch of money for another dust collector.
I took it on a three mile run before going to the Brooksider to see Perpetual Change. Three miles, and it kicked my ass. I wanted a nap.
Tonight I did better, 5.4 miles and didn't feel as exhausted after. But I still have a lot of getting in shape to do.
My muscles aren't sore yet, but my ass is killing me.
I shouldn't let Mo eat in such a monstrously uncouth way. but she always wants to do this with her Rigatoni Alfredo. And rather than correct her, I just got my camera.
Pick your battles, sometimes. Because the flip side of all this cute, messy eating, is the $125 I spent having my sewer line snaked to remove three pairs of Mo's underwear she had flushed. It's not the first time her flushing inappropriate things has caused me to need a plumbers services. In fact, it's not even the first time this year.
I have seriously considered investing in my own industrial power snake. They cost about $2500, so it'd pay for itself in about ten years if I can't get through her OCD tendencies in this area.
Rich did not go unnoticed in death. The Kansas City Scar ran a short article by Dave Helling, and his former pupil Ramesh Ponnuru noted his passing in National Review Online. Jack Cashill, naturally, wrote a nice piece on the Minuteman blog (not the natural place, given Rich's most recent work on immigration policy). Tom Donelson weighed in (and drew an amusing anti-semitic idiot comment that would have cracked Rich up).
But what pleased me the most, as a friend, admirer, former employee/protégé, was what has to be the longest obituary ever written. Half policy dissertation, filled with details not normally considered appropriate to the form, this is the sort of obituary Rich would have appreciated.
I'm still kind of processing this. My ex wife called me at work this morning saying, 'I don't want to freak you out, but how old is Rich Nadler?'
Late fifties, I guessed. Turned out there was a Rich Nadler in the obits, a brief notice. Age 60. Interment in St. Louis Tuesday, service today at the Torah Learning Center.
With each detail, any doubt I could have entertained drained away. It's not a totally unique name, but there was only one Ultra-Right-Wing-Vegetarian-Jew from St. Louis living in the Kansas City area, and he was my friend and mentor.
How I met Rich: I was listening to this new guy on the radio. A conservative talk-show guy* who did funny stuff like 'caller abortions' (when a liberal caller was particularly unentertaining, a vacuum sound would commence and the host would apologize that the call had been un-viable). The show was new, so the ad time was cheap enough a local tabloid could swing a trade-out with the station, and I heard the following ad (more or less):
Without the Federal Government, our roads and bridges would crumble, armed gangs would maraud the streets and our children would wallow in ignorance. In other words, things would be exactly the same except we'd get to keep all this money we're paying in taxes and wouldn't have to put up with a bunch of stupid regulations.
Naturally, I called the number. The phone was answered by a woman who promised to have someone call me. Nobody did.
I heard the exact same ad the next day and called again. This time the phone was answered by a guy who laughed easily and spoke in paragraphs. I had a newsletter, he had a newspaper. He said he'd send me one 'gratis,' (I didn't know at the time it was a free publication anyway) and I said I'd reciprocate.
I sent him a copy of Midwest Rock Lobster, my newsletter. I never got a K.C. Jones in return but I did get a phone call from Rich a few days later saying he wanted me to write for him.
First impression of Rich: the man smoked a corn cob pipe, which he tamped with a calloused thumb. He was the biggest character I'd ever met (and probably still holds the title).
He paid me the going rate for K.C. Jones articles at the time: they paid nothing, but it was nothing per word. I'm not exaggerating, Rich never, ever paid for editorial content.
A few months after I'd started contributing movie reviews and whatnot, he called me with a 'career opportunity.' This was, it turns out, my entry into a career. Not as a writer, what I thought I was supposed to be, but as a graphic designer. I wore a lot of hats, actually, including distribution routes, phone solicitations for the Missouri Taxpayer's Watchdog Association, and I don't know what-all.
I worked for Nadler Publishing about five years of the seven it was in operation, and might still be working for Rich except two weeks after Em was born Rich called a meeting to tell both of the remaining employees (the company had fallen on hard times) that 'We're tits up.'
I've stayed in touch with Rich in the 13 years since, but not as much as I wish I had. A friend of mine mentioned being a big admirer of Rich when he was a regular on Ruckus! and I said, 'If you want to meet him, I have the juice to make that happen.' We had lunch with Rich a few weeks later.
I'll let the 'ultra-right-wing' part stand as read since I've got all these K.C. Jones covers I photographed this evening for you to get an idea of his ideology. Rich was a small-'L' libertarian/Republican. I know he's not exactly a household name, but trust me, Grover Norquist, Ed Meese, Ramesh Ponnuru (who used to write for the Jones), etc., knew and respected him. He was a constant researcher and scholar, the most educated high school dropout I'm pretty sure there ever was.
He was, yes, a vegetarian. Out of extreme hostility to plants, not any sympathy for animals, he was fond of saying. No ideology behind it, he simply found meat inedible. Except for the shellfish his religion forbade.
He got more serious about his religion as the years went by. When I started working at Nadler Publishing, he'd observe the fasts and whatnot, but by the end of Nadler Publishing he was strict about the Sabbath and had finally found a rabbi who was orthodox enough for his tastes. At the service today, I learned that he had become quite adept at reading the Torah (I take it this is a chanted-in-Hebrew deal in the worship service, and harder than you'd think), and that he walked 4+ miles each way to this service because it was the Sabbath, so no cars.
He would tell me of the fasts, that it doesn't help and in fact makes it worse, but 'I routinely eat a large pizza before and after the fast.'
If there was a constant thread to all of Rich's endeavors it was his contrarian nature. Summed up by a friend of mine, seeing Rich's panning of the movie Titanic, 'That contrary motherfucker!' I'm certain Rich would have taken it as a compliment.
The K.C. Jones covers I've shot for this post, Rich didn't draw them, he was the art director. Most were done by Scott Freeman, at the time one of Hallmark's stable. Rich would give him the idea and let Scott run with it. Scott also contributed a cartoon, Zeitgeist, under the pseudonym Elvis Lackey.
K.C. Jones was the only free tabloid to ever champion market forces, even though it was market forces that put it out of business. If only there'd been something like Blogger back then, Rich could have published his intensely researched, dense, 10,000 word articles at a cost of zero in a searchable forum available to the whole world. By the time he could have done that, he'd figured out other, more effective ways, to deliver his research. He also got into producing television commercials, political ones guaranteed to boil the blood of liberals everywhere.
I remember the little house in St. Louis Rich's family had. He had lived in it for a few years after Pavlov's Dog (the band he was in under the stage name Sigfried Carver) broke up. This house was a tiny affair by the old Blues arena. There were easily 10,000 books in the house, all of which Rich had read I'm pretty sure. His reading taste was encyclopedic, catholic and fearless. He would read, and could discuss, anything.
The Missouri Taxpayer's Watchdog Association was one of his hobbies: every year, he'd read every law voted on by the Missouri General Assembly. If it had any implications for taxpayers either in the form of increased taxation, increased government spending, or regulation, he decided if it was good or bad for the taxpayers from a cost/benefit standpoint. Then he compiled a rating chart for every legislator based on how they voted. Few legislators even got C grades in the Watchdog guide.
I remember during a press conference for a group opposing a local tax-hike ballot initiative, a reporter asked Rich how come he was always against any tax increases. 'If you believe that people are already overtaxed,' he said, 'Then what is the benefit of supporting some tax increases in the interest of being fair-minded?'
Another line I remember him coining, 'Those who love liberty always seem to underestimate the degree to which some people hate it.'
Oh, the Pavlov's Dog thing: I meant to call Rich the other day when I learned of a CD reissue of Pampered Menial, the album he played on. Rich used to get a call every year or so from someone saying, 'We're getting the band back together.' 'Not with me, you're not,' was his answer every time.
He had moved on. He wasn't even interested in being party to lawsuits over various elements of the contract where, apparently, both the band's manager (an ex-con) and the record label had played fast and loose with rights and money. He had taken a lot of drugs, played the violin in a rock band that toured around in a used bread truck, opened for Meat Loaf and whatnot, but that was his misspent youth. He didn't want to revisit it any more than he wanted to go back to being a Communist like he was back then.
I remember, too, his delight with Missouri's 'sunshine law.' A friend of his had been elected to the General Assembly, a fellow traveler, and asked for a suggestion on how the law should read. The idea being, to make it impossible for government entities to do closed-door smoke-filled-room deals that the press couldn't report on. So Rich submitted his suggestion after researching other states' laws of a similar nature. His 'suggestion' was, verbatim, introduced, voted on and made law.
Oh, and on the subject of these K.C. Jones covers, of which I'm providing only a taste, I think we set a record for the most times Emmanuel Cleaver could be caricatured in a skirt. Or a robe in the case of the cover mocking him as Jesus casting the money-changers out of the temple. I think it was that one, or a subsequent one, where I asked Scott, 'Is it a conscious decision that Cleaver can't be depicted in pants?' Scott pointed out, Cleaver was in pants in the first cover Scott did, actually, one I can't find at the moment (I hope it's not a casualty of water damage), with a Siamese Twin Cleaver, the coat and tie wearing politician pushing off from the 60s radical with the Afro and the Free Angela Davis poster.
There was also the ArchRival, which was K.C. Jones St. Louis. Rich envisioned an empire of local free tabloids roughly combining the Pitch and Riverfront Times business models with the content of National Review.
Last time I talked to Rich was a few days after the election. I asked him what he was up to, and he said the usual, researching, writing. 'Illegal immigration and the cheap labor it provides is good for the American economy and I can prove it,' he said.
I'll bet he could, too. He ended the call, and this would have been probably 9:00 p.m. or so, with 'I have to get back to work.' I gave him a hard time, said that he wasn't working, he was doing whatever he wanted to do, like always. But yeah, the only thing he really wanted to do was work.
It's impossible, really, to encapsulate Rich Nadler in a blog post. Impossibly long as this post is, it's only about the first 20% of a Rich Nadler cover story. It would be hard, actually, in a mutli-volume biography by Robert Cairo. The time in Pavlov's Dog would be Volume I, I guess.
I won't say he was like a father to me because if he was I probably couldn't have listened to him. But he was an influence of that magnitude in a lot of ways. Rich helped me develop my work ethic, my critical thinking, and generally helped me pull my head out of my ass. Five years working for him was better than college: I didn't make a lot of money but I learned a ton with no student loans.
It seems impossible Rich is gone. 60 used to sound old to me, but that would put Rich only a year or two older than I am now when he offered me that career opportunity. I guess I always figured if the Grim Reaper came for him, Rich would simply prove Mr. Death to be wrong on policy, write a paper about it and live a few more years.
*Yeah, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh. He was entertaining for a few months back in 1990.
Some asshole went into a church in Wichita this morning and dispatched George Tiller. You might think, me being pro-life and all, that I'd think this was great news.
Think again.
First off, let me say I don't expect to sway your opinion about abortion at all. You're either wrong or you agree with me, but either way, nothing I say is likely to change your mind.
My opinion of Tiller is he was a worse vermin than Fred Phelps. Phelps is a scumbag, sure, but he hasn't killed anyone as far as I can tell, and his whole 'God Hates Fags' thing is so over the top as to provide a certain level of comic relief. Tiller, on the other hand, specialized in the slaughter of innocent life, and spent a lot of money on politicians of both parties to protect his interests as he played fast and loose with the few abortion laws that are on the books.
However, shooting him is going to prevent how many abortions? Oh, that's right ZERO because the law hasn't changed. It may be bad law, but some sociopath with a medical degree will be in that clinic sucking babies into sinks in Tiller's place before you know it. The murder of Tiller may have caused a few appointments to be rescheduled, but that's it.
Plus, now George Tiller gets to be a martyr for the other side.
And on the flip side, what does this do for the cause? It hurts it across the board. Pro-choice friends of mine were on Facebook before I could even learn of his death through normal news channels ranting about pro-life ideology and how we're all a bunch of hypocrites.
Sorry, but me and the guy who did this are not a part of any 'we.'
As for the evangelical and Catholic pro-life types I know, and I know plenty (especially the former category), most of them part company with me when I say I hope Tiller's murderer gets the death penalty. As I see it (my pro-life ideas are humanistic in nature, not religious), there is a distinction between innocent life and, say, an asshole bringing a gun to church to commit premeditated murder against an unarmed man, even a despicable unarmed man.
But the evangelical argument I've encountered over the years goes like this: we are all damned but for the grace of God. George Tiller is no more or less in need of redemption and forgiveness than your pastor, the guy who runs the homeless mission, or anyone else. We are all sinners, and there is no sliding scale: you can be saved by Jesus' sacrifice or not, but it is not up to you to take the life of another on God's behalf. And in fact, it's blasphemously arrogant to assume you know God's will and to enforce it by homicide. Or the death penalty.
So a lot of pro-life demonstrators will be protesting outside the state penn when Scott Roeder gets executed when and if he is.
As for this supposed member of Operation Rescue who was arrested on the highway not a mile from my house? Well, if I wanted to harm the pro-life cause in a big way, I'd join Operation Rescue and then shoot a prominent abortionist in church. That's about as much harm to the cause as one guy could do. Because here I am, trying to explain why any 'real' pro-life person would not assassinate anyone feeling like millions of 'real' Muslims must have felt when a big chunk of America thought the 19 hijackers were exemplary of mainstream Islam.
Mo's small group leader from church hosted a shindig for the girls in her group. This is the same one who hosts pumpkin carving parties in October and all that, one of the neatest people I've ever met.
There was pizza, snacks, and then each girl got to decorate a bag. There was more to come, but by this point Mo was fried and it was already almost her bedtime. And that bed was a good 45 minute drive away, so we bailed.
It was fun. Mo wrote her name in puff paint, then went over it with glitter puff paint, and it kind of became a puddle. Thick enough I wonder if it'll ever dry.
Em has been into the Horror genre lately, including finally convincing me to watch the Amityville Horror with her. Both the 1979 version, which she found utterly unbelievable and fake, and the 2005 remake, which she found amusing because I startle so easily. She laughed at me every time it got me. And she's the one that believes in haunted houses.
But anyway, she drew this in the car today while we were looking for Serbs. I think we're going to make an attempt on Clive Barker's Hellraiser this evening, can't wait to see her drawing Pinhead.
I took the girls to the Serb Festival. I'd looked it up online and clicked on a link to directions. But whoever it was at the site (not St. George's, some list of community activities I found) had the wrong address.
Well, it was the right address until a few years ago. Back when I was still married, I tried to take the girls to St. George's one time so they could see the beauty of an Orthodox liturgy. I went to St. Theodore's Russian Orthodox Church in high school, not out of religious conviction but because it was beautiful and I liked the music. I even sang in the choir, which scandalized at least one of the faithful, that a pagan who made no bones about his paganism would be singing in the church choir. But the congregation was good people, and I hard second hand that the parish priest had told the openly scandalized woman that 'This is a church, not a country club.'
So anyway, Orthodox churches being small and rare, they'd sometimes get together for a service, especially if the Bishop was in town or something. So I've been to at least one service at Holy Cross Russian Orthodox and at St. George's Serbian Orthodox. Never done the Greek, I understand they sit down instead of standing to chant for an hour and a half.
Anyway, the time I took the girls to St. Georges, we lasted about two minutes with Mo's vocalizing 'Look at the Christmas!' and all that. Then we were locked in the parking lot and had to wait through the service for someone to move their car so we could leave.
Anyway, we went to 1119 Lowell Ave in KCK, where the map said to go, where I remembered the church being, and there wasn't a soul in sight.
A few phone calls to find someone online or with a newspaper and I found out St. George's built a new church 20 miles closer to home. So we back-tracked to it.
I'm told they sold the old facility to an Ethiopian Orthodox congregation, be curious to see how that differs. The Orthodox never did embrace Latin the way the Romans did, so they've always done the liturgy in the vernacular. At St. George's, at least 20 years ago when I went, that mean the priest and choir were doing it in Slovanic, St. George's being a mainly immigrant Serbian church. St. Theodore's, while officially Russian, had hardly any Russians in its congregation, being a hodge podge of Syrian, Polish, Greek, and I don't know what mixed into a large group of former Episcopalians who founded the congregation when they felt the Church of England had gone too far astray. So St. Theodore's was an English service. I think Holy Cross did it in Russian, but I could be wrong.
Ethiopian, though. I don't even know what language that ends up being.
So anyway, we got to the Serb Festival at last, and mostly it's food. Same as the Ethnic Engorgement Festival, but mono-ethnic. I bought a couple of samples, a Cevapcici and a Raznjici, neither of which I can pronounce even vaguely. I know the first one has the accent on the second syllable, and I know it's basically like a hamburger in the shape of a little smokey. The Raznjici is a pork kebob. I couldn't get the girls to take even a test bite of either.
The thing I like about the Ethnic Engorgement Festival is my daughters get to refuse to try a wide variety of foods. The thing I don't get about their fear of Serb food is how American Serb food is. I mean, this is basically just grilled meat, food a Midwesterner would recognize. This isn't some out-there curry with 15 spices they haven't heard of or whatever.
I wish I'd kept the camera going longer on the dancers in the video. No ethnic clothing, and it appeared to be spontaneous, this group of four teenagers who knew the dance that went with this particular song. It builds from what I got on video, and was really pretty cool.
Robert Goddard, the father of the liquid fueled rocket, was famous for his disasters. He single-handedly got rocketry banned in Massachusetts during his early career. He was known to have said, 'we learned things today.'
So who says pizza isn't rocket science? I made the Alton Brown pizza dough, but this evening making the pizza I still managed to learn things.
If you don't give the dough the rest period he shows, you get a super thin, crackery crust. Which is fine. But also, his dough recipe is smaller, 2 cups of flour in 3/4 cup water compared to the Lovely One's recipe of 3 cups flour and 1-1/2 cups water. The longer kneading, though, and you get it pretty darn stretchy. I stretched these out as big as ones I've made with half again as much flour and double the water, in other words.
I learned you can still tear a hole in it, no matter how well developed the gluten. And I learned that a pizza this thin does not take seven minutes at 550ºF like the ones I've been doing, five is plenty.
At seven, it's starting to be a big, flat cinder.
The pizza I didn't burn was topped with onions caramelized with fenugreek, bay leaves and fresh thyme, along with bleu cheese, bacon, dates and jalapeños.
Five minutes. Not seven. Seven is for a much thicker, bigger pizza. Which does make me wonder about the claims that a pizza oven should be 900ºF. This sounds like bachelor cooking logic, instead of 10 minutes at 250 degrees, why not 30 seconds at 5000 degrees?
I've made eleven batches of dough using variations on Jill Santopietro's NYT Magazine formula as a basis. It's a very wet dough, creates a very light textured crust. I like it.
But I have bad luck hand tossing it. So I'm taking a few tips from Alton Brown, as he actually shows it done. Which means using his dough recipe as a starting point.
Big difference besides the proportions of stuff, he uses 'instant' yeast instead of regular active dry, and I figured out from his description (yeast plus ascorbic acid) that he was talking about what's labeled 'bread machine' yeast in the brands I can find. That, and he kneads in the KitchenAid for fifteen minutes. And finally, he goes straight to the fridge with his, no rising on the counter and punching down.
That's a lot of kneading. Before it was done, I thought at one point the machine had torn itself up. It started making a horrible clunking noise, and when I stopped it I found a metal disc at the bottom of the dough. Which turned out to be the cover for the attachment port on the nose of the machine. It had vibrated out.
I did, indeed, get a reasonably spherical dough ball, and I did get a good windowpane (where you stretch a sample to see if you can get it paper-thin without tearing.
Alton's Dough Add to bowl in order: 2 tbsp. sugar 1 tbsp. salt 1 tbsp. olive oil 3/4 cup warm water 1 cup bread flour 1 tsp. instant yeast 1 cup bread flour Knead 15 minutes on medium Let rise covered in fridge 24 hours cut in half roll into balls and rest for 30 minutes covered. If it won't stay stretched, let it rest 5 minutes. Optional rest of 30 minutes after stretching for a fluffier crust.
We'll see how the pizzas turn out on this one. The pizzas pictured here are not from this crust, they're from my most recent variation on Jill Santopietro's crust.
One pepperoni, one half black olive & one half black olive with jalapeño. Both with Alfredo sauce.
Took the girls to the park yesterday evening after pizza. Mo actually let us bury her almost completely, but then before I could get the picture she jumped up.
Dictates of my children's palates, tonight. I made a pepperoni-Alfredo pie for Mo and me to share (mozzarella and some parmesan/5 cheese shreds), and a bacon-black olive-Alfredo for me and Em.
I had a piece of each and figured what we didn't eat tonight would be leftovers for lunch the next couple days.
I've learned a new trick from Alton Brown, how to make the pizza dough into a better ball. As you're shaping, move your hands together under the ball, turning it. The dough ball comes out much better, and you get a rounder pizza. I haven't gotten a perfect sphere yet, maybe there's another trick for me yet to learn.
I'm going to try Alton's recipe once I find the 'instant' yeast he raves about. The one I've been playing with the past eleven batches is great, but if his turns out better...
Em doesn't really want to help, but she likes to keep up appearances by getting flour all over herself.
My, but this place has grown since last I was here. I asked the girls if they wanted to go to Deanna Rose, expecting Mo to say, 'No no' (she always doubles it these days) and Em to protest that it was 'boring.'
Instead, they both wanted to go. So we did. I tried to feed a swan from my hand, and he bit my thumb. The thing they don't tell you about swans is they're assholes.
The goats are a tad greedy, too. Mo wanted to go in the pen to feed them, so we did, and they were climbing on her and trying to eat my shorts. A goat will bite a man on the but if they think there's food to be gained.
Went to Celebration Park after supper. Cool two-line performance kite was being flown by a guy who, when I talked to him, turned out to also be a bit of a rocket nerd.
The girls had fun playing in the sand and I don't know what-all. I brought a guitar along and did a bit of half-assed practicing. Incredibly pleasant end to a very nice day all in all. Church, the Nelson, salmon for dinner, the park, great weather.
With steamed broccoli & basmati rice. Garnished with alfalfa sprouts, a dab of Hmong oyster sauce on the side.
I almost set the fish on fire. I was out of pan spray, and since Costco's salmon is skinless for some reason (I'd prefer to cook it on the skin), I have to put it on foil, and if you don't coat the foil the fish sticks.
So I poured a little olive oil on the foil and tried to spread it thinly and evenly. But it was a lot more oil than what would be there with pan spray.
When I went to get the fish off the grill, some of the oil ran off the foil onto the coils and burst into flames. This ignited the oil on the foil as I was trying to transfer it all to a tray. It was a miracle I didn't drop the whole flaming mess onto the driveway.
Em made this fish at Kaleidoscope yesterday and was showing me how it fits the description in this song from Veggie Tales' Lyle the Kindly Viking. Couldn't find a video snip that quite captured it on YouTube without being half the show, so here's the lyric:
Look, Olaf! There's a fish, with a pretty little circle on the bottom of the backside of his fin! Look, Olaf, there's another, and another, and another! And the little one has got a funny grin! Look, Olaf, Olaf, Olaf! Way down underneath the water, it's the biggest fish I think I've ever seen! It's got blue and purple stripes, orange and yellow markings, and a dorsal fin that's iridescent green!
Sixteen pizzas in seventeen days, a burger was a refreshing change of pace.
I have a friend, one of the best known psychics in the midwest (name two others, he says when challenged on this), eats the same thing every day. Same breakfast, 364 days a year. Same lunch, a sandwich made with two toasted slices of thin Aldi bread and a slice of Daisy canned ham. I think there's mustard and/or mayo on there. You can't buy this guy lunch, I've tried. He has to eat the same thing every day.
As he puts it, he knows how long his groceries will last, how long until he'll be hungry for supper after that sandwich, and on day 365, his birthday, when he hits the Chinese buffet, it seems really, really special.
It works for him, though it's nothing I'd want for myself. It's un-American.* But if you're going to make your living as a psychic janitor, these are probably pretty healthy rules to live by. It's not as if the option of buying groceries at Whole Foods instead of Aldi exists in that scenario, and he seems thoroughly happy with his lack of choice at lunch time.
So anyway, I don't eat the same thing every day even when it is all pizza. But I admit biting into a cheeseburger with fresh sliced tomato and alfalfa sprouts was pretty satisfying.
*In a previous job, I had conversations with a Jewish client in New York. He had a Goy secretary, and he told me she seemed to buy the same sandwich he did at lunch, but she didn't buy from the kosher deli. Her sandwich was less than half the price his was. 'Is mine better? I hope it's not worse,' he told me. And I had an epiphany: this is what it means to be unassimilated. Nobody who's fully American wouldn't at least try the other deli to find out if the sandwiches were identical. One unclean meal, sure, but at least you'd know. This guy had no interest in knowing, it just wasn't an option. The American fetish of choice just didn't phase him.
Went to Kaleidoscope today. They weren't doing the formal 'sessions' today they were, as the guy up front said, 'mixing it up.' Which is to say, it was just one long session the whole day. I think it was taxing on the staff, but the kids were having fun.
And I saw something interesting. They have ribbon dispensers, have as long as I've taken the kids there. The wide silver ribbon, I've seen kids make crowns out of it, I've made one myself. But I've never seen a wand or sword. And today I saw about twenty, one of which was Em's doing.
I asked a staffer and she said, yeah, you'll see things go in spurts. Lots of wand/sword deals the past couple weeks. Akashic records of whatever is going on in the culture, I guess. Or some Jungian thing.
That, and it was pointed out that one kid will figure out a trick and a bunch others imitate it. Which make sense to me as a graphic designer. Designers are all a bunch of lemmings that way, me included.
It was tricky getting in to Crown Center today because of something called Jiggle Jam. I don't know what it was, a festival of some sort, but it wasn't free so we didn't go in. And it appeared, at a glance, to be for little-little kids.
Oh, and I came up with another logo possibility for the band name I can't seem to get all three band-mates to go for at the same time.
One of my all-time favorite novels, Motherless Brooklyn, as a hilarious Tourettic telling of this joke (mine is sans Tourette Syndrome outbursts, read the Jonathan Lethem novel to get the full effect).
A guy walks into a bar with his pet octopus. Puts the octopus on the bar and bets the bartender a hundred bucks the octopus can play any musical instrument the bartender can come up with.
'Fine,' the bartender says, 'There's a piano.' And the octopus sits down and plays a nice little étude. 'Pay up,' the guy says, but the bartender comes up with a guitar. The octopus tunes the guitar and plays a little fandango on it. The guy with the octopus asks again to be paid, and the bartender pulls out a clarinet.
The octopus isn't great on the clarinet, but he can get by. 'Pay up,' the guy says again, and the bartender says, 'Wait,' and goes into the back room, digs around until he finds a set of bagpipes.
Puts the bagpipes on the bar and the octopus starts checking it out, lifting one pipe and letting it drop, lifting another pipe. The guy who brought in the octopus says, 'Aren't you going to play it?' The octopus says, 'Play it? If I can get its pajamas off I'm gonna fuck it!'
Ba-doom-dah. I'm here all week.
But anyway, this is all a way of delaying the inevitable, when I admit this is another pizza post.
I was going to get the anchovies at the store and spotted something I'd never seen. Tinned squid and octopus. Last time I remember having octopus was that Dominican restaurant in New York, about five years ago.
Octopussy Pizza 1 medium vidalia onion 2 tbsp. butter 1 tsp. fenugreek 1/2 tsp. powdered thyme crushed black pepper (to taste) 2 bay leaves Caramelize the onions with the rest of this stuff and then put on the pizza along with black olives tinned octopus a little mozzarella a little 5-cheese parmesan/romano/etc. shredded blend a little crumbled bleu cheese Spray the edges of the crust with olive oil pan spray, if desired and bake on the stone, 7 minutes at 550ºF.
I made a black olive/mozzarella pie for Em as well, and she had complained about the floured surface of the dough on my latest pizzas. I admit a time or two it's been a bit much for me. The dilemma is how to keep shit from sticking, and flour works pretty well.
Right before moving from peel to stone, I sprayed the perimeter of the crust with some olive oil pan spray, just enough to absorb the worst of the excess flour and help the edges brown. It's a trade-off, Em liked the surface texture better, but you lose some of the surface crispness.
The octopus is good, smokey and salty, a tad chewy. It plays well with the tang of the bleu cheese and sweet onion. The calamari I got is packed in some sort of sauce, I'll have to sample it to figure out what else would go on a squid pie.
I struggled with what to call this pie. It uses cream cheese, and almost included Lox except I didn't have any around. I had bacon, though, which is also a salty protein, albeit the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of lipids.
And I had a green bell pepper, that's always good on pizza, right?
And I had about six ounces of cream cheese left from an 8 oz. package Em discovered in the fridge last night and made two wraps with.
Caramelize some onion, throw in a small portobello mushroom (on sale for $3.99/lb., about a four ounce shroom), and next thing you know it's a pizza. Not sure if it's really related to Philadelphia, but that is a brand of cream cheese and I toyed at one point with the idea of a cheesesteak pizza (didn't have the 'steak' part for that, though).
And the most memorable part of the Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions, for me, is the part where Kilgore Trout is hitchhiking and enters Philadelphia where he sees a sign 'You Are Now Entering the City of Brotherly Love.' Vonnegut follows that with, "As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sight of a sign about brotherhood—posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could see."
So, cutting the shuck and jive and getting to something like a recipe:
Brotherly Love / Bomb Crater Pie 1 medium vidalia onion 2 tbsp. butter 2 bay leaves 1 tsp. dried fenugreek 3 tbsp. olive oil 1 smallish portobello mushroom, sliced 1/2 green bell pepper sliced 4 strips thick-cut applewood smoked bacon cut into 1/2" pieces, crisped 6 oz. cream cheese Caramelize the onion in the butter with bay leaves and fenugreek, remove bay leaves and add the olive oil and mushrooms, toss to coat, leave in pan until ready to use. Crisp up the bacon, drain on a paper towel. Spread onions and shrooms first, then add pepper strips, bacon, and cream cheese (get it into small pieces and distribute it evenly). Bake on 550ºF stone for seven minutes.
I thought the cream cheese would spread out more than it did. I've had a cream cheese based pizza from Wheat State, but apparently theirs uses mozzarella in addition to the cream cheese.
As far as taste goes, this is one of my best efforts to date. Even if I did overcook the bacon a little bit.
I tore the first dough from the latest batch and couldn't get it to heal. I made a loaf of bread out of it and made another batch of dough adding back the wheat gluten I omitted in #8. I think the extra gluten probably helps avoid tears when stretching the dough. And it seems yogurt works better than simple sugar at providing some fermentables to the yeast without getting things crazy (dough popping bags in the fridge, for instance).
Number Nine 3 cups flour 3 tbsp. olive oil 1 tsp. salt 2 tbsp. wheat gluten 1/4 cup natural plain yogurt 1 tbsp. active dry yeast rehydrated in 1-3/4 cup warm water (ten minutes) Beat like hell in the KitchenAid for six minutes, divide, coat with pan spray and allow to rise in covered bowls for three hours, punch down, bag and stick in the fridge for 1 to 6 days.
I wasn't briefed on this, just so you know. But Em has a field trip tomorrow, swimming is involved, and she has outgrown last year's suit. Well, the upper half of it, anyway.
So to the Wal-Mart, and between her being 13 and a little high strung, and the fashions being what they are, I heard 'It's not fair' about 70 times. She literally tried on nine or ten suits, trying to find a single piece that fits because she'll go to a camp this summer that prohibits two-piecers, and giving up on that and just trying to find a bikini she could stand that wasn't totally immodest and wasn't the most expensive suit in the store.
I've been on 32 hour weeks for over three months, money isn't just tight, even non-money (credit cards) are tight. I haven't paid this month's child support yet because I'm still a bit shy of the total, so sorry, but yes there is a big difference between a $15 suit and a $25 suit. Ten more bucks I don't have to begin with.
Em had found a suit she liked, one that covered a bit more (a brief bottom instead of a string job). It featured hearts and barbed wire and 'LOVE' on one of the boob triangles.
I saw the $12.50 price tag and thought that was for the whole thing, but no, that was the price for each half of it. 'Not fair,' Em said as I hung it back up. Not fair? Not fair is marketing bikinis to children and stocking only a handful of one-piece suits that don't fit anybody .
And as she offered up some of her choices (every suggestion I made was met with the big news that whatever it was could not be more horrible if I wore it) I said, Look, I've been thirteen. Thirteen year old boys don't want anything as much as they want thirteen year old girls. They're going to ogle you even if you wear a gunny-sack, so do you want to wear a swimsuit on a field trip that encourages long gazes and wandering minds?
'How about this?'
It's perfect if you want boys to stare at your boobs?
'You're not making this easier!'
We were not alone. One of her classmates was trying on at the same time as Em, and talking to her mother, she was appalled at what was on the rack. Her daughter called her over to see one of the suits she'd tried on and the Mom returned saying, 'That one's a no.'
The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster was at Wal-Mart before we were done. Tears were shed. Em came close a couple of times to having to leave the store with no suit and just not swim tomorrow because there's a limit to how much shit I will take from a 13 year old I'm trying to help.
It doesn't help that, because of her age, Em can't decide between hating the stalker behavior of her male peers and loving the attention.
We got to the Stuff-Mart around 6:00, didn't get to the checkout until 7:45. I don't know what we'll do for a one-piece suit for church camp, but I guess we have tomorrow covered.
Want to get a terrorist to talk? Just tell him his other option is to buy a swimsuit for my daughter. Call it enhanced shopping, and he'll tell you who really killed JFK and how they faked the moon landings.
I got home this evening and said to myself, Self, it's been hours since you had a good slice of pizza.
No kidding. Chicken Carbonara Pizza this time. See, I'm pretty sure it's not a rut if you make a different kind of pizza every day.
Plus, as Dr. Goddard would say, 'We learned things today.'
One of the things we learned: don't pile the toppings on so damned high. I had the same problem last night but I didn't learn from it. No matter how careful you are transferring peel to stone, two inches of topings jiggle and topple, and you end up with a few bites of topping coming off on the stone. Where they burn, and there's nothing to be done but keep the attic fan going to evacuate the smoke after the pizza is done and there's still a strip of chicken and some cheese stuck to the 550ºF stone. The corn meal that burns on the stone is bad enough, so go easy. And/or make the pie lopsided so when things shift forward (toward the back of the oven), they shift onto pizza dough instead of the stone.
Other than that, this turned out great. Batch #7 dough, the one with a quarter cup of plain yogurt instead of some table sugar to feed the yeasties.
Hand-stretched quite successfully this time. Though batch #8, gotta tweak and experiment after all, omits the extra wheat gluten I've used the past few batches.
Latest Pizza Dough 3 cups bread flour 1-3/4 cups warm water 1 tbsp. yeast proofed in said water 3 tbsp. olive oil 1/4 cup plain yogurt 2 tbsp. wheat gluten Mix for a minute on low, then beat the hell out of it for eight minutes. Let rise in a covered bowl for three hours, punch down and bag it. Stick it in the fridge for one to six days.
The recipe for this pizza, then:
Chicken Carbonara Pizza 2 grilled chicken breasts (I grilled on charcoal and mesquite last night and put them away) cut into strips 4 strips applewood smoked thick-cut bacon, cut into quarter-inch pieces, fried crisp and drained 1/2 onion caramelized with 2 bay leaves in 2 tablespoons butter 1 tsp. minced garlic 1/2 cup sliced baby portobello mushrooms 1/4 cup Alfredo sauce 2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil shredded mozzarella (not sure how much, though I probably used too much) 1/4 cup or so shredded parmesan blend (the 5-cheese blend Wal-Mart sells) After the onions are most of the way there, turn off heat and add garlic, olive oil and mushrooms, toss to coat and leave in hot pan (I have an electric stove, so I left it on the hot burner to finish the job without scorching the garlic). Stretch your dough, thinly coat with Alfredo sauce, put the caramelized onion/mushroom mixture down, followed by the mozzarella, bacon, chicken and parmesan blend. Bake on 550ºF stone for seven minutes, let rest 10 minutes on rack before slicing, then brace yourself for some seriously good eats.
Some fresh rosemary might have been a nice touch, too. Also, for presentation, I'd have served it with salad and veggies. But I ate all that stuff while I was cooking.
This whole Pizza Diet thing is running around in my head lately. I wonder how terrible a diet it really is or isn't. After all, there are plenty of veggies and even some fruit that makes its way onto my pizzas. And while it's not exclusively all I eat lately, it's the bulk of it. Make a pizza, have two or three slices for dinner, have a couple slices for breakfast on the way to work (I love cold leftover pizza straight out of the fridge), and finish the rest off for lunch.
I tend to think bacon is pretty deadly, and there's bacon in this. Though according to the package, two servings of bacon on this pizza. 180 calories, 120 from super-deadly saturated fat, spread out over three meals isn't the worst thing I could do.
Actually, I think I'm closing on 1600 blog posts here, I guess maybe I have written a book. The Story of Me.
Is there a limit to my self-absorption? I doubt it, but that's not where this little epistle is supposed to go. I'm blogging about pizza...again.
Pizza is to me what chicken was to Julia Childs lately.
I've been thinking, more and more, about putting out a diet book: The Pizza Diet.
Because seriously, this is a diet you can stick to. And the slim prospects for weight loss are more than outweighed by knowing you aren't falling off this wagon. And by getting to eat a lot of pizza.
So anyway, tonight it was green bell peppers, sliced baby bellas, black olives with mozzarella and a thin coat of Alfredo sauce on the dough.
I tore the dough stretching it. Twice. Don't know if this is a problem caused by the latest recipe formulation or if I just got carried away. But I successfully folded the dough over the holes and stretched it back out. Into a shape that is not a circle, but at least I didn't have stuff leaking through onto the peel & stone.
Well, I had some stuff fall/run off on the stone, but that's life in the test kitchen, Apprentice Pizza Freak.
I think the next pie will be a Chicken Carbonara.
Give us this day, our daily flatbread, topped with all manner of comestible, salty, sweet, crunchy, spicy-hot, and lead us not to the drive-thru but deliver us from blandness. For yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of bad blog endings and mixed scriptural references...
