Five decades in, and I have just discovered the magical deliciousness of Lucky Charms.
My fortune cookie the other night:
"The current year will bring you much happiness."
1. Are you a vegetarian? Vegan?
No. I like all the meats, too much, and can't get overwrought about the cruelty/conditions issue. Or rather, I'm too good at looking the other way. If pressed, I would prefer (and could manage) slaughtering my own.
2. What's your favorite food?
IM-possible question. Anything with a rich melange of textures, flavors and color. Sweet and savory together. Anything fresh.
3. White bread or whole wheat?
Whole wheat. Although fresh home-made white is hard to beat. Sourdough: no thanks.
4. What's for breakfast?
Coffee, juice, toast, honey, banana. Cereal. Sometimes oatmeal. Weekends I like to pull out all the stops -- eggs (any style), pancakes, bacon, fruit bowl. Specialties for breakfast: champagne mimosas; gjetost.
5. You're making a Dagwood sandwich. What's in it?
Ham, salami, cheese (any kind), leaf lettuce, tomato, sweet pickle, mayo, mustard (preferably whole grain), maybe basil pesto, mmm... how about marinated artichoke hearts?
6. What's on your pizza?
Sausage, mushroom. Or sometimes one of those highfalutin feta-chicken-and-broccoli things that some people don't consider pizza. There was a lovely restaurant near me in Boston that would load up its pizzas with whole roasted garlic... yeah.
7. Coffee, tea, milk, or soda?
Yeah, but tea is last. Water is best but I find it hard to be that virtuous all the time. I do try to watch the aspartame and HFCS.
8. Dark, milk, or white chocolate?
Dark, sometimes white. I don't favor most "candy", so a little dark chocolate is a super treat to me.
9. Teetotal, beer, wine, or hard liquor?
Touchy subject? I favor wine -- can't really keep nice beers and especially liquor in the house. It goes too fast, and the next thing I know "Matty's Package Goods" is a line item on the household budget and personal hygiene has slipped. But... tequila. Blue agave.
10. Does cilantro taste like citrus, or like soap?
Neither. It is cilantro, and a godly ingredient of much Mexican cooking. However, nobody in my immediate family can tolerate it, so it stays in the cabinet.
11. Is chorizo the greatest thing ever or is it totally disgusting?
Yes. Oh, sorry -- greatest thing ever. I'm slowly discovering Portuguese cooking. Great.
12. Do you use garlic like a vegetable or like a spice?
Both. It's practically a vegetable in chili (6-8 cloves to a pot); and roast elephant garlic as a spread is ambrosia.
13. Onions: raw, cooked, or not at all?
Again, both, but I lean toward caramelized. Raw minced Vidalias are a fun addition to some salads or as a soup or taco topping.
14. Does broccoli taste sweet or bitter?
"Uh, neither. Broccoli is delicious when cooked properly, but err to either side and it becomes the cliche." - ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
basophil
15. How do you feel about fish?
Give me some. Cooked hot and fast. Any fish, must be fresh. I came late to shellfish, and only discovered the sublime joy of raw oysters a few years ago.
16. How about sushi?
Fabulous. I think I started enjoying sushi as an "adventure," and it quickly became a staple. I don't love EVERY type, but will try anything. Tried making it at home once too -- wow, do I respect the sushi chef skill.
17. Fave ethnic cuisine?
Another impossible question. A year isn't complete without at least once, each: Mexican, Italian, French, Indian, Thai, Chinese (including Dim Sum), Shwarma, American Diner, Spanish (preferably a seafood paella, maybe with chorizo thrown in). We have Honduran and Salvadorian near us which I intend to sample soon.
18. What's your favorite fruit?
Peach, cherry, orange, grape, banana. Prickly pear. Hmm, been a while since I made bananas flambe.
19. Cheese - thumbs up or thumbs down?
UP. Sheesh. I can hang around the cheese section of Whole Foods till the cows come home.
20. Finally, favorite dessert?
Something extravagantly fattening, preferably with chocolate. Something like this.
We strike out on the first of what we hope will be two or three walks today -- it's 11:30 and still just early enough and cool enough to qualify as "beating the heat." The birds and the bees are out, kids on trikes, puppies on leashes, it's a gorgeous Saturday morning in spring.
We've gone several hundred yards -- barely a sixth of the route -- and the conversation has already veered and branched several times, from our gardening plans, to the weather forecast, to Scrabblesomething about Living with Purpose, when Marsh pulls me back a couple of paces to observe a flying insect on a railing.
"This one's blue," she says, and as I watch, the plain black thing takes flight revealing a shimmering teal body, and is gone.
"Cool!" I say.
"We didn't bring a jar," she says. We've been trying to collect bugs to add variety to Bambi the chameleon's diet, and save on trips to PetCo for crickets. Crickets bore Bambi. I'd even ordered a butterfly net earlier in the week, knowing that we could harvest many, many grasshoppers in the wild later in the season. We don't know if Bambi will like grasshoppers, but we're always thinking.
"I know," I say, "and the butterfly net didn't come yet. When it does, I'll look like a supreme dork." I pantomime an Edwardian gentleman, pirouetting as I swoop an imaginary butterfly net. Marsh laughs, charitably. (I'm actually an old and rusty pro with an insect net, but that's another story.)
As we're laughing dorkily, I spy the mail truck careening into the neighborhood. In the time it takes me to register its arrival, in the time it takes me to start to feel embarrassed that our mailman has seen me dancing like a loon, the little white van has swerved over to the curb and stopped opposite us. The lovely mailman -- is he Pakistani? Yemeni? Algerian? I cannot tell -- says to us, to me, "Mr. Van Pelt?"
"Yes?"
He's smiling, he enjoys his work, he enjoys knowing the real people behind the thousands of numbered slots and lockboxes. "I have a package for you today, I can give it now." He reaches beside his seat, next to heaps, mounds of trays and bundles of sorted mail, and pulls out a shipping box, bigger than a book but smaller than a breadbox, not heavy.
I'm thinking, as I'm sure Marsh is, do we want to carry a box all the way around with us, on our walk? He has handed it to me, he senses our hesitation. "It's okay -- I can leave it down there," he offers, nodding toward the mailboxes.
"No, no," I say. "It's fine, it's great, we'll take it. Thank you!" I turn to Marsh. "It's the butterfly net."
"You had ordered the net," you may say. "Its arrival was imminent. This was no coincidence." Even so, it's impossible to convey the feeling of unlikelihood in that moment. We unpacked and assembled the net as we continued our walk, and marveled at the universe.
Sagan spends parts of each day now among the rafters of the basement storeroom, knocking things off the high shelves. We can provide daily reports, if desired, of the continuing efficacy of gravity (at least in the Northern Virginia area).
We've been nurturing young things -- a cat, a pup, a chameleon, teens, lettuce seedlings, creative ventures. Why is the lettuce so pale, droopy, and spindly? I moved some under the grow-lamps; it's a quasi-scientific approach to determining if they need more or less light, water, soil, or something different.
Sagan is on a 100% tilapia filet diet, which she loves and seems to thrive on. But she's very hungry come mealtime, and we may introduce some variety -- bones, offal, etc.
Bambi the lizard turns grey and frail-looking when hungry. According to the literature, he can tire of a monotonous diet. Still, we're only feeding him small crickets, and he is growing. The crickets are supposed to be dusted with calcium occasionally. And soon we'll switch it up a bit: bloodworms, other insects. Although there are concerns about taking insects from the suburban "wild", and their elevated toxin levels.
Babies tell us what they need, in their way -- a parent learns amazingly fast how to read that cry. It used to baffle me until I had my own girls; then it was pretty much unerring -- were they hungry? Tired? Wet? A parent knows.
Teens don't need you at all. You know? And then you see a young adult, grown in such wonderful ways.
What about ideas? How do they tell you what their diet should be? Anything but neglect or disdain, I think.
...about love this evening, and the irrational love that one has towards one's offspring:
"You're thrilled when they're happy, you're terrified when they're hurt, and you're furious when they want you to be."
I basically dumped the refrigerator drawer out into the salad bowl -- broccoli, lettuce, snow peas, mushrooms....
And there are extra hearty grilled-cheese sandwiches, which apparently means extra butter and extra cheese.
We love the goat cheese Jamie picked out.
1. Overtoast should be a word.
2. When GWB correctly said (in a radio address about an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), "...three words: class action lawsuits...," somehow it still sounded wrong, as if lawsuits were really two words.
3. Freecycle is great, and we really appreciate being able to give away things that we might otherwise trash, and receive things that other people might otherwise trash. (Most recently, we picked up a full-size upright freezer, which is old but still has plenty of life in it, and will help us conserve even more by allowing us to buy in bulk.) But sometimes, when you read the Freecycle posts ("half-used box of #2 pencils," "shoe box," etc.), it all feels like nothing so much as a huge perpetual neighborhood yard sale, with the kids from each family running around and buying each other's outgrown toys for 25¢, and exchanging them all again the next spring.
4. The cat uses a lot of toner. She jumps onto a cabinet, using the printer keys as her springboard. We find random printouts of whatever was left on the scanner platen, or the contents of some camera disk.
I have officially joined the ranks of those eagerly awaiting the next volume in George R. R.. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series.
Bambi, the latest member of the family, a veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), is Emly's pride and joy. Bambi's terrarium is next to Thumper's, both under heat lamps. Bambi eats 3-5 live small crickets daily and needs plenty of moisture to simulate a tropical environment. He (or she) is quite young, and so far is doing well.
I am having an odd, restrained reaction to this. On the one hand, there's an imposed distance. Emly's dad bought it for her, with all the gear -- it was her heart's desire last week, and she really needed a heart's desire filled. I am so glad he did it, and glad for her. And the pet is hers... you know? I want her to discover and appreciate everything on her own.
On the other hand, I have my own associations -- from growing up in South and Central America -- and from a youth that could so easily have led me to become a biologist instead of an artist and writer. I adore reptiles, especially lizards. Some of my earliest memories include rescuing foot-long iguanas from our dog, who had chased them indoors. My mother would call for my help if a tree frog (I know, an amphibian) landed on her in the shower. And the brightly colored skinks that scampered across the sunlit patio are an integral part of my memories of Costa Rica.
This changeable little guy isn't mine, but he awakens things in me that are deeply felt, deeply "me."
I've been thinking about what looked like polarized opinions -- Joe Edley, Dan Pratt, perhaps others, on one side, and myself on the other -- and especially about Joe's 'good old days' post which I tried to puncture, and I've come to a key conclusion.
Putting myself in Joe's place, there *was* something distinct about the NSC incident: the bingo is what he intended -- in fact, for a brief second, he believed he had played it.
Let's look at a closely similar case: Player A sets down LANYARD, and as he is reaching to place the S, there's a loud disruption at the next table, he drops the S in the wrong spot, and hits the clock.
In the latter case it is (a) even more clear what Player A intended, and (b) the distraction was public and shared. In such a case I am guessing that a majority of directors would rule that the S could go where it was intended, and play proceed. I could be wrong.
( In the actual case, )
Let's not get distracted. This is not about accidentally hitting the clock.
Nor is this about random acts of kindness. Kindness would have been if Player A had said nothing, and Player B volunteered, "76 points? Maybe you meant to add a 7th tile? Here, why don't I restart your clock, and let you do that."
Kindness is allowing this sort of thing with a newbie in a club.
Kindness is often a component of "spirit of the game" exceptions, especially when they're volunteered, and especially in the lower divisions. We all want Scrabble to have a spirit of comity. This type of comity is about extending courtesies with the expectation (real or imagined) that they will be reciprocated. It makes our community a nicer place, which is important for a lot of players who aren't just about cutthroat competition.
Not relevant here, where someone requested a courtesy.
What is this really about? ( It's about five things: )
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