Spaghetti

I fixed shrimp-basil spaghetti for dinner last night. I totally winged the recipe but it turned out pretty darn good if I say so myself. If you want to try it, I put the recipe (such that it is) on Google here. The recipe requires a certain amount of “winging” on the part of anyone who follows it. But it’s one of those recipes that is almost impossible to mess up.

Today I decided to fix spaghetti with meat sauce, and so I put a pound of ground beef into my slow cooker. I have one of those 6 inch by 10 inch rectangular-shaped cookers. I’ve had it for years and I no longer have the user guide. It has 5 heat settings, none of which are “Off”. I assume the settings are Low, Medium, High, Super-High, and Burn-Baby-Burn.

My intent was to brown the meat then add store-bought pasta sauce and simmer it for a while. Using a spatula, I cut the lump of ground beef into small pieces and spread them out over the bottom of the cooker. It takes the cooker a while to get going, as one might surmise from it’s name: slow cooker. So I walked to the computer and sat down and almost immediately got distracted, and I kind of forgot about the ground beef in the slow cooker. After a while – a good while – I remembered the slow-cooking meat, and went to the kitchen and looked into the cooker. I saw that I now had a 6 inch by 10 inch hamburger patty. I spent the next 5 or 10 minutes cutting it up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until I had converted the large patty into what could pass for browned ground beef if you didn’t examine it too closely. (I admit I did consider dividing the large patty into small square patties and pretend I was eating at Wendy’s, but in the end the original plan prevailed.)

I poured pasta sauce into the cooker and stirred the sauce and meat to blend them, and put the lid on the cooker. When it gets to boiling I’ll turn the heat down to medium and let it simmer for an hour. I don’t really know why I’m letting it simmer for an hour. Like many things in life, it just seems like the right thing to do.

Late Night Shenanigans

I was in bed trying to sleep when I heard a police siren. It sounded close. I looked out the window and saw a car in my neighbor’s back yard and a police car stopped in the alley behind my house. The siren was blaring, because that’s what sirens do: they blare. I glimpsed a man dash away from the car with an officer in foot pursuit. In a minute the officer came back, inspected the just-abandoned car, and called a tow truck. The tow truck driver was a young woman wearing short-shorts. She had much nicer legs than your average tow truck driver. She drove the car onto the rollback tow truck and chained it down, and off it went to wherever bad cars go. I wondered briefly what the car chase was about. After all, fleeing a police car seems the tiniest bit of over-reaction to getting a speeding ticket, so I assumed the driver’s misconduct was something more serious. Perhaps he had just robbed a convenience store, stolen a car, and fled with the loot. Whatever. I returned to bed. Another exciting day at the hacienda had come to a close.

Luck

I had a long and winding dream last night, as I often do. I won’t try to recount it all, but there was one small part that I will write about. I dreamed my brother went to North Carolina to buy a car. In the dream, he said he went to a town called Luck. So of course I Googled it and as it happens, there really is a town called Luck in Madison County, North Carolina. Well, it’s less a town than what one might call a fork in the road, but it’s on Google Maps, and it has an entry in Wikipedia, and I reckon those two facts alone make it semi-officially a town.

Luck is on the eastern side of North Carolina highway 209, about 20 miles northwest of Asheville. On the western side of 209 is part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

On a satellite photo, Luck appears to consist of two houses and a derelict gas station. (Click the image to view on Panoramio.) But I have no doubt that up and down state highway 209 and county road 1163 (the fork in the road), one would find a scattering of homes whose occupants count themselves a part of the Luck community.

Oh … about the car that my brother bought in Luck. It looked just like an Amphicar, the car from the ‘60s that you could drive on land and water. (Check out this page.) President Lyndon Johnson had an Amphicar, and he liked to frighten guests by driving them down a hill on his property and straight into a lake, all the while shouting that his brakes had failed. Lyndon could be quite the joker.

But my brother’s car only looked like an Amphicar. In the dream it was a brand called Phaedra which, as far as I know, is a brand that does not exist outside of my head. The Phaedra had an insignia on its front that looked like a golden, backward pilcrow. In case you’ve forgotten, a pilcrow (¶) is a typographical paragraph mark. In the Middle Ages, before the paragraph was invented, a pilcrow was used to indicate a change in the writer’s train of thought.

Anyway, that was one little piece of my dream. You wouldn’t like most of my dreams. They’re quite tedious. Much like this blog post.

Battery Goes Bang

Seems like it’s always something. A couple of days ago it rained especially hard, so I went upstairs and peeked under the eave to see if the roof was leaking. You see, I had a new roof installed three years ago, and it leaked. The roofer who installed it refused to come back and fix the leak. So I paid another roofer to fix the leak, and I thought it was fixed. But when I looked under the eave I saw it was leaking again in the very same place it had leaked before. Oy.

Just last month my Jeep developed a problem. It would start but it wouldn’t keep running. I guessed (correctly) that the problem was the Idle Air Controller (IAC). I borrowed a set of hex keys (Allen wrenches – the brand name Allen was stamped into them) from my friend Butch and removed the IAC. I cleaned it and re-installed it, but that didn’t help. So I trekked around to the AutoZone store for a new IAC. I trekked back home, installed it, and it fixed the problem. That was three weeks ago.

This morning I went to my garage, got into my Jeep, put the key into the ignition, and turned the key to start the engine. BANG!!! Blue smoke poured from under the hood. I got out, raised the hood, and saw the problem immediately. The battery had exploded. You don’t have to be a mechanic to know a battery shouldn’t look like this. (I disconnected the battery cables before I took the picture – the explosion didn’t blow them off, in case you were wondering.)

What a mess. Battery acid was all over the front of the engine and dripping onto the cement floor of the garage. I used a box of baking soda – all I had – dissolved into a gallon of water to neutralize the acid. This time I asked Butch to drive me to AutoZone for a new battery. I was not about to lug an automobile battery back to my house. I got the battery, installed it, and the Jeep started right up. I have transportation once more. It’s a good feeling.

Blooming Lagerstroemia

Today is Sunday. I woke up late: 7:30 AM. The sun was already up too high but I went for a walk anyway. On every street bloomed Lagerstroemia (named after the Swedish merchant Magnus von Lagerström), commonly known as crape myrtle or crepe myrtle. There are around 50 varieties of crape myrtle. There is the bright red Dynamite Crape Myrtle, the deep pink Pink Velour Crape and the purple Twilight Crape Myrtle (which has bark that changes color). Some have white blossoms. So it can be said that when you’ve seen one crape myrtle, you definitely have not seen them all.

The neighborhood would be a poorer place without them.

Arthur

Arthur grazed the Heights this morning, as you can see from the WunderMap below. See the little red “pin” just left of the yellow-green blob? That’s me. But the rain stayed away, and the only wind was gentle puffs of air that came through the open window beside my bed.

I must have awakened around 5 or 5:30. I didn’t look at the clock, but it was pre-dawn, and the daylight peeking through the Venetian blinds was gray. The air coming through the open window beside my bed was cool in a refreshing way. I don’t usually run the a/c during the night, and sometimes the house warms up a bit because the exterior walls are still warm from the day’s sunshine, and so the cool air coming through the window felt good. I lay on top of the sheets. The gray dawn lingered for a long time, it seemed, and the cool breezes though the window lingered, and it was very pleasant, and I didn’t want to get up. But I finally did – get up, that is – around 7:30.

By noon the air is 79° and the day is sunny. It’s the fourth of July, of course. I was studying the Declaration of Independence and noticed a bit of punctuation that everyone has apparently overlooked. It’s a period. In England, I believe it’s called a full stop. What I found was that this bit of punctuation – this period, lost until now – totally changes the meaning of the document. When he wrote the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson was trying to express his admiration for England’s King George III and how nice it was to be a British subject. You see, Jefferson was quite the Loyalist. But unfortunately, due to that lost bit of punctuation, the colonists thought he was calling for a War of Revolution. Before Jefferson knew what was happening, events had unfolded way out of control and, well, the rest is history. America became an independent nation because of that lost period. (You may not believe me but remember, you’re reading it on the Internet so it has to be true. I couldn’t write it if it wasn’t so.)

Happy Fourth of July!