Holiday Food

When my friend's shopping trip reached its conclusion and I received a pick-me-up text, I drove to the mall and picked her up and then decided that, before we went to my home, we would take a walk along the greenway beside the river. The greenway has a paved path. It was late in the day and the air was somewhat cool, so we walked only a mile. Along the way I snapped a photo.

It's not a great photo, but photography was not my mission. I merely wanted to be outdoors and do some walking. We were not the only people who were walking the greenway and enjoying the late autumn air. Winter begins in three weeks, on December 21. The trees will be bare and the air will be colder, and walkers on the greenway will be much scarcer.

We returned to my home and my guest prepared dinner. She put together a great salad with lettuce, tomato, chopped green onions, bacon bits, garlic croutons, dried corn, cranberries, and avocado Caesar dressing. She made rice sauteed in butter and diced onion and seasonings. She sauteed broccoli, carrots, and onion with seasonings, she made deviled eggs, and she cooked a chicken breast in some manner of herbal seasoning. She is spoiling me. Soon I will have to return to Stouffer's and Healthy Choice and such, and I'm not going to like the change.

I snapped another so-so photo in order to document dinner (and to help me fill space in my blog post). This was dinner, except the deviled eggs are not in the picture and the croutons were added to the salad later. It really was a delicious meal, and that's coming from someone who is normally non-judgmental about food. I can eat most anything. I've eaten alligator, and pickled jellyfish, and pickled pigs feet. I'll admit I've never eaten roasted tarantula. There are some lines I refuse to cross.

Thanksgiving Postscript

This Thanksgiving was different.

My guest from a foreign land arrived in Richmond on time, two days before Thanksgiving. The next day she decided to clean my house, and I was somehow roped into helping. I really couldn't not help her, because it was, after all, my house, so I felt more or less obligated to pitch in. We worked all day and got the first floor clean and orderly. The next day was Thanksgiving, and I prepared the meal, which entailed heating vegetables. I also microwaved sweet potatoes, mashed them, and added brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter. They were delicious. I winged the recipe but, apparently, it's hard to mess up sweet potatoes.

The next day we went to Walmart and commenced shopping for various items, some of which were needed if we expected to eat again, and some of which she wanted to take to her home. We argued briefly over who was going to pay for her purchases. I wanted to pay, but she insisted that because she was buying things for herself, she should pay. The way I saw it, if someone flies 4,000 miles round-trip to visit me on their dime, the least I can do is pay for their Walmart purchases. (Never let it be said that I didn't do the least I could do.) But she wasn't having it.

When we got home from our shopping outing, she cleaned my bathroom, which she hadn't gotten around to cleaning the previous day. While she cleaned, I took a nap. The thought that I should help with cleaning the bathroom tried to enter my mind, but I am adept at keeping such thoughts out of my head. 

The next day we cleaned and organized the second floor of the house. By "we," I, of course, mean "she," mostly, but I helped as much as I could by staying out of her way. What is this obsession with living in clean houses? I already miss the dust bunnies that used to live beneath every item of furniture in my house. Dust bunnies are the closest thing I have for a pet.

Now, I finally have time to add a few words to my blog, only because my guest is at the mall buying goodness-knows-what. I would gladly keep her company as she shops, but she knows very well how that would go:

"When do we go?"

"I have to go to the doohickey department and look for a thingamajig. 

"When do we go?"

"Calm down, we just got here."

"When do we go?"

"Ay, Chihuahua, you are making me crazy."

"When do we go?"

"Son of a biscuit eater!"

"When do we go?"

So I drop her off at the mall and I go home. It's better for her. It's better for me. 

Thanksgiving Day Minus Three

A breezy morning arrived today, with hordes of brown leaves dancing down the street. Those are the leaves that made it past the gutters, which seem to be a magnet for dead leaves. The trees are half naked now, their last leaves awaiting that just-right gust of cold, autumn breeze to launch them onto the wind.

Today will be sunny. This afternoon the high temperature will peak at 59°F. Tonight's low will drop to 33°. That's what the weather prognosticators say. The days will be sunny until Thanksgiving. That day, and the night before, have a good chance of being wet.

For my own feast, I bought a three pound package of Black Forest cooked, sliced, smoked ham. Plus a few sweet potatoes with which to make some manner of casserole. Green beans, sliced carrots, and black-eyed peas with peppers and onion will round out the show.

I'm going to the Home Depot store later to pick up some odds and ends. One thing I want to buy is a box of fire logs. When the chill of evening comes calling, I'll throw a fire log into the fireplace, strike a match to it, and when the log gets burning good I'll turn down the room lamp and watch the flickering light and shadow that the flames cast over the room.

Before I go out, I'll add hot chocolate to the grocery list. Some manner of boozy, Thanksgiving cocktail would hit the spot; like a sangria or a margarita, or just a generous portion of brandy in a rocks glass (because I don't own a snifter and never will), but I swore off the sauce back in August when I realized I was over-indulging too often. 

For now, I'm sitting at my computer and waiting for a roofer to arrive. My house has a leak in the roof and the repair procedure goes like this:

1. Call the roofer.
2. Roofer comes and works on the roof.
3. Pay the roofer.
   
4. Rain comes and the roof leaks.
5. Go to Step 1.

This is apparently an endless loop. The same loop applies when working on 74-year-old plumbing. If you're not careful, this same endless loop can also apply to medical issues.

1. Me: I have a new medical symptom.
2. Doc: Take these pills.
3. Me: The pills worked but now I have another new symptom.
4. Doctor: Take these other pills.
5. Go to Step 1.

These endless loops are prone to arise whenever spending money is involved. I know; I've been on this merry-go-round more than once.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, readers. If possible, be sure to ingest too many calories. It's what Thanksgiving is all about.

Reaction

I was standing in my kitchen making a salad. I had just finished cutting up a tomato for the salad. I use the sharpest knife in my knife block for cutting tomatoes and other soft veggies and fruits. The knife is like a long thin razor. I finished cutting the tomato and turned to the kitchen sink to rinse off the knife. Then I turned to grab a towel to dry it, and the knife fell out of my grasp. My first instinct was a little voice in my head that said, "You're fast—grab it out of the air!" But at almost the same time, before I could move, there was a second voice in my head.

To explain this, I have to go back a way to my last job. Dave, a co-worker, had an unusual habit. If he lost his grip on something—if he accidentally dropped something—he didn't attempt to grab it. Just the opposite—he snatched his hands away as if he had touched a hot stove. One day I asked him about that reaction, and he told me a story.

At one of his previous workplaces, some men were handling a very heavy object. I don't recall what it was or exactly how much it weighed, but it weighed plenty. The men were maneuvering this object from one location to another when something happened—a chain broke, perhaps—and the heavy object fell toward the floor. One of the men instinctively tried to catch it by placing his hands under it. The result was that this massive object fell onto his hands and crushed them. In fact, it more than crushed them; Dave said it flattened the man's hands to the size of dinner plates. The man lost both hands. From that day onward, Dave undertook to train himself to instinctively snatch his hands away from any object he dropped.

Although I didn't do physical practice, I did think about that industrial accident a number of times. Maybe that's why, when I lost my grasp on the knife and an instinct told me to grab it, another voice in my head insisted, "Let it go!" I pulled my hands away from the knife and it fell harmlessly to the floor. I picked it up, rinsed it off, dried it, and placed it back into the knife block. 

This is a reaction that everyone should think about. If you drop an inanimate object, yank your hands back. Don't let your hands automatically grab for it. You won't have time to think about it when it happens. So think about it ahead of time, so that a seed is planted in your brain: "Let it go!"

Thanksgiving Day Minus 6

It is now one week from Thanksgiving Day. Everyone in America (plus a few people in far-away lands) knows about Thanksgiving. The History website has a long article about it here. 

Thanksgiving is celebrated on various dates in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia, as well as Leiden (a town in the Netherlands), Norfolk Island (an Australian territory), and the inhabited territories of the United States.

I have a friend who lives nearby and he will be gormandizing Thanksgiving dinner with his close family at a family member's home—eight people in all. He has other family who, due to distance, probably won't attend. Last Thanksgiving I dined at his house with his family, and the food was delicious, but not knowing most of them sort of takes the fun out of it. Everyone is talking to each other about family matters, and I can't help feeling like a proverbial "fifth wheel."

The word coming down from the government this year is to cancel family dinner plans or adjust them for a small number of people. The more people who are in a home, the greater the chance of spreading Covid-19 to everyone in the family. 

That makes good sense, but I doubt many people will do it. Thanksgiving is one of those big holidays that people have to celebrate. Many Americans will say, "I'm going to celebrate Thanksgiving if it kills me." For some of them, it will. But what can we do? Sit around the dinner table with our masks on? Or eat by ourselves? Neither sounds like fun.

Normally, I don't celebrate Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or July 4th. Or, you know—holidays. That includes my birthday (which, don't get me wrong, is not a holiday, but if it were I am sure many Americans would celebrate it with some manner of ethanol-fortified beverage. "VirtualWayne? Never heard of him, but I'll drink to his birthday!")

I am planning to have a guest this Thanksgiving, and I am wondering if I should attempt to cook a Thanksgiving dinner beforehand. I am not much of a cook, as evidenced by a number of my blog posts which describe how I have, on occasion, filled the house with smoke, or annihilated a bird, in an effort to produce an acceptable meal. I guess I could go out for Chinese. I've done that on Thanksgiving. The buffets are almost empty on that day—it's just me and a few forlorn stragglers who likewise can't cook. But I don't want to inflict a Chinese buffet meal on a Thanksgiving Day guest. Of course, I could tell my guest it's not really Thanksgiving Day. 

Thanksgiving Day? Oh, I'm sorry, but that was yesterday. Yes, they changed it to Wednesday this year because of Covid. But how about a nice Chinese buffet?

I wonder, would that work?

Unicorn Heads

The song of the day is New Orleans Crawfish Boil from the album On Beach by San Francisco music production studio Unicorn Heads (Grahame Lesh, Kirby Hammel, Jeremy Joenig, Connor O'Sullivan).

Election Fraud

The following account was inspired by a real news story.

I watched an interview with a voter whom the Trump campaign has accused of being dead. She seemed to be a very nice, elderly woman. She admitted she voted and insisted she was not dead. However, a Trump campaign official disputed this and said she wasn't qualified to judge whether or not she was dead. 

"I'm not dead," the woman stated.

The campaign official asked her, "Are you a doctor?"

"No," the woman answered.

"Then what makes you qualified to answer a medical question?" the official continued.

"Medical question?" the woman asked.

"Yes," the official replied. "Determining life or death is a medical question. So, are you a doctor?"

"No," the woman admitted again.

"There you have it," the official said smugly. "Another dead person voting, and she cannot prove definitively that she is not dead. We have only the word of an unqualified person as the sole evidence that she is not dead. Excuse me, now. I have many more dead people that I must complain to the courts about." 

And with that, the campaign official moved on to interview another deceased voter.

I admit to taking lightly this incident. Because that is what this kind of story deserves. All of the Trump campaign's claims of voting irregularities have fallen apart when they got to court and a judge began asking questions. Of course, there could be vote-counting mistakes here and there. People are not machines. People get tired, people make mistakes. However, that kind of mistake is equally likely to happen with a Biden vote as with a Trump vote, so they tend to cancel out in the long run. There has been no evidence of systemic fraud. We will have a new president, unless the present occupant of the White House can find some way to block a legitimate transfer of power.

As this Internet philosopher once famously said (or at least thought): "A loser who cannot accept losing is the biggest loser of all."

BVRNOUT & Mia Vaile

The song of the day is Take It Easy from the 2017 album Take It Easy by electronic dance music artist/producer BVRNOUT (Chris Barnhart) featuring American-Israeli singer-songwriter Mia Vaile.

Quick and Easy Part 2

Saturday's blog post was titled Quick and Easy Part 1. When I was halfway through it, I knew I had enough verbiage to publish. I wanted to write more, but as I said in the post, I was ready for bed. So I published what I had and began this post.

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America has changed in many ways during my lifetime. "Quick and Easy" has become a maxim for many of us. But life in America wasn't always easy, and I think it bred a different kind of American. As I mentioned in my last post, my grandmother would have to build a fire in a wood stove if she wanted to cook food. It was hard, but you can bet she learned patience.

Now, we want instant this or that: instant coffee, instant tea, instant hot chocolate, instant powdered milk, instant freeze-dried fruit juice, instant oatmeal, instant grits, instant noodles, instant mashed potatoes, instant rice, instant pudding, instant soup, instant MRE (meal, ready-to-eat).

Some of us want many more things to be instant. They want life's problems to be solved instantly. They want the nation's problems to be solved instantly.

The answers to the nation's problems can often be boiled down to that age-old predicament: Should we each promote the common good, or should we each follow the maxim "every man for himself"?

Often, issues have two solutions: an easy one and a hard one. We can allow people to live in storm tunnels underground and in tents above ground, or we can do the hard work of finding a solution to homelessness. We can put impoverished, desperate people in cages, or we can do the hard work of finding a solution to the poverty, crime, and wretched quality of life that drives illegal immigrants to this country and too often to their deaths.

America has changed, and the world has changed as well. Finding a solution to a difficult issue will not be easy, and there may be no solution that pleases everyone. A solution will require thought and effort and may require a degree of sacrifice from some of us. But I suspect that the "easy way" to solve an intractable problem—a "solution" that is often simply a feel-good, knee-jerk reaction—will not work. If it would, such a problem would have been solved long ago. A problem persists because it's a hard nut to crack. Even so, it behooves us to make the effort.

Quick and Easy Part 1

It's almost time for bed, and I was reflecting upon the meals I've consumed today.

For breakfast: a hamburger. (Yes, a burger, but I ate breakfast at 1:30PM.) I nuked a frozen beef patty for 65 seconds. I put it on a jumbo size bun. I sliced tomato and lay the slices on the patty. I sprinkled chopped onion on it, and lathered ketchup and mustard over it. After another 11 seconds in the microwave, the assemblage was ready to eat. It was warm and tasty. Best of all, it was quick and easy.

For lunch: a tossed salad. I began with a bag of chopped lettuce: romaine, green tango, and radicchio. Plus shredded carrot. (There was just enough carrot in the bag to make it legal to list it on the bag.) I drizzled olive oil and cider vinegar over it. It was tasty. Best of all, it was quick and easy.

For supper: a microwave dinner. I heated a tray of frozen spaghetti with meat sauce for 6½ minutes and sprinkled Parmesan cheese over it. It was warm and tasty. Best of all, it was quick and easy.

For a bedtime snack, I juiced a pound of carrots and a few ribs of celery. The juice was delicious! Afterward, I cleaned the juicer, which took a bit longer than drinking the juice, but I would still call it quick and easy.

You may detect a theme here. I love things that are quick and easy. And it makes me think of my grandmother. When I was a youngster, my family (Mom, Dad, and me) lived with my grandparents. This was Olden Days, of which today's young 'uns know nothing. My grandmother cooked a "real" supper (and it was called supper, doggone it.) She also cooked a meal for lunch, which was called dinner. And she cooked her meals on a cast-iron wood stove. Was it hard work? You bet. Building a fire in a cast-iron stove on a hot August day, so that your family can have a hot meal, was just a way of life. 

I mention this to draw a contrast between the way things are now and the way things used to be. No one in America has to build a fire in order to cook a hot meal. But there was a time when that was just the way things were. Believe it or not, there was a time before mobile phones—or any kind of phone. There was a time before television. There was a time before radio. There was a time before moving pictures. 

There was a time when houses had big front porches and everyone knew their neighbors. Not only knew their neighbors, but visited them and conversed with them. I have new neighbors across the street from my house and I don't know who they are. I don't know if they bought the house or are renting it. I don't know anything at all about them. Apart from idle curiosity, I have no need to know and I'm okay with that. Even so, it's a little sad to not know your neighbors. I know the man next door is Egyptian, and he speaks with such a thick accent that I cannot understand half his words. Still, we have the occasional conversation, though it's made of verbal fluff. 

I have neighbors, but I don't have connections. There are people living around me and I know little or nothing about them. It's reciprocal—they know little or nothing about me. This is 21st century America. No wonder there are so many angry people willing to fight over something as ephemeral as political winds. Donald Trump said he wanted to "make America great again," but I'm afraid that what really made America great is gone forever. What we have now is the new way of life—the manners, morals, attitudes, and principles—that took its place.

It's almost time for bed, and I will be there soon. I'm not sure what I'll eat tomorrow, but you can bet your life it will be quick and easy.