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Thursday, June 9, 2005
YES!! YES!!! THANK YOU, LORD!!!!!
Of the two yellow apartments, one is empty and BOARDED UP!!!! It is entirely empty and every window and door is covered with heavy plywood. This is what you would call an answer to prayer except that I did not even dare to pray about it. It is a gift from God. I did see piles of mattresses and old, junky furniture on the curb this week. Of course, I assumed this meant that someone had been evicted. Now I know the whole lousy, rotten, drug-dealing, prostitution station full of gun-toting lunatics is empty. Oh. I am so thankful.
Chuzzle On!
My Zen Chuzzle score...the game never stops...you just accumulate until, well, forever...my score is now 450,000. How much Chuzzle can one person take?
Ants
Up-north, if you want ants, go for a picnic. Sit on the grass outside, scattering crumbs. Ants will arrive sooner or later.
This is down-south. Ants are such a fact of life. I am tortured by ants. If I fail to completely clean and sterilize all kitchen surfaces each day, if I fail to completely sterilize the kitchen garbage can each day, if I fail to vacuum up every tiny crumb strewed around on the carpet by Sadie and Benny, then lines of busy ants toil back and forth from someplace into my house. In self-defense I must be cleaner than clean. My kitchen must sparkle. And that's not enough. They found my snack food cupboard, high on the wall. There goes a busy little black line.
Lydia guessed that if we interrupted their line of march with fresh lemon juice, they'd give up. Didn't work. With children around all the time, with a small chihuahua here sniffing the fooor, I don't want to use pesticides. I'm getting desperate.
This is ridiculous. No one needs to tell me that all down-south women are cleaner than I am because I know better. I have seen dirty houses. How do people get rid of/prevent ant infestations? This clean business is sick and wrong.
Since I have to be ultra clean, I've begun to make a fetish of lavendar-scented cleaning products, hoping to ameliorate the gloom of all that scrubbing. The other day at Williams-Sonoma, I spent over $200.00 on everything lavendar. There's separately labelled lavendar for floors, counters, windows, bathrooms, sinks and tubs, dishes. Lavendar for hands, to use in the shower, for bathing. Then I went to Yankee Candle and bought lavendar candles plus little packages of lavendar for in drawers of clothing and towels, lavendar to hang on clothing hangers in the closet. Finally at Crabtree and Evelyn I bought a lavendar powder to sprinkle on the carpet, wait 10 minutes and then vacuum. Of course I also bought lavendar water and talc for me. Now my house is clean and smells delightful but I still have ants.
The other day following Benny's recital, I briefly endured the after-reception. A mother passed me, trying to find her little girl, calling out to her. Realizing that she had yelled into my face, she apologized, "Oh, sorry. I'm trying to find Ciarra. She wanted to go home right away to see her new ant farm."
I asked, voice trembling, "You BOUGHT a container of ants and brought it into your house? Deliberately? You didn't already have ants?"
She looked at me as if I'm crazy and replied, "Of course not."
Fortunately, I have a life-long habit of not hitting people who upset me. If I were one of the residents of the yellow apartments, that woman would have been picking herself out of the wall paper. "Of course not..."
Fresh Fish
I live in one of the world's great ocean ports. About a block and a half from my house, you start meeting fishing boats out on the water. All the time, men and boys ride by here on bicycles with fishing poles and tackle boxes tied to the back. I am an easy hot-weather stroll from restaurants backing on the water, places that get fresh fish delivered to the back door right off a fishing boat. So why is it that the other day when I set out to make crab cakes, I had to use shredded crabmeat out of cans? The answer is that I have no idea how to go about buying Chesapeake blue crab right off the boat. And why is that? Because I've never tried to buy menu items from anywhere but a grocery store. I need to locate a dock where members of the public may purchase just-caught and cleaned fish. Not in a store. Fish in the store looks long-dead.
And I most certainly do not want to try catching my own fish. Yecch. Once a while back I asked school kids to bring in fish so that we could make Japanese carp prints. A little girl showed up the next day with a cooler full of fish. They smelled hideous. They were covered with mucoid slime. First I scrubbed off the slime, using lemon-scented ammonia. Then we painted the fish and pressed fabric onto them, peeled off the fabric, and therefore had carp prints...all the while wearing surgical masks dipped in lemon oil. I have no desire whatsoever to again in my life encounter uncleaned fish. I simply want to make authentic crab cakes using real, fresh crab. Right now is supposed to be peak season for Chesapeake blue crab, so where are they?
Another thing...I need a better recipe. The whole crab "cakes' thing didn't happen. Yes, I know that I was making it up as I went along, but it shouldn't have been so hard. What turned out was a soppy mess which could not be formed into cakes. I flattened it into a big iron skillet and put it in the oven at 400 degrees. After a while, it was almost possible to cut it into wedges and serve it like pie slices, but that wasn't my plan. My neighbor supposedly makes great crab cakes but she works long hours and I see her very seldom. When I do spot her, she's coming in tired from work and I haven't the heart to ask for a recipe. So anyone reading my blog, if you make good crab cakes, please e-mail your recipe. Also, anyone from Norfok who reads this, where is the place to buy fresh crab/fish?
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Zen Chuzzle
I have left the house and a Zen Chuzzle addict now inhabits my body. That crazy person has so far racked up over 200,000 points and the end is not in sight.
What Was He Thinking?
I'm trying to imagine what Patrick Robinson was thinking when he wrote his latest military-guys techno thriller, ScimitarSL-2. This is the last of my latest grocery store binge books. Briefly, the plot is that evil terrorists learn that if a volcano in the Canary Islands were to erupt with sufficient enthusiasm, the resulting tsunami would wipe out the entire east coast of the USA. So terrorists obtain nuclear missiles from North Korea, a nuclear-powered sub from Russia, and pay smart people in China to modify that sub so it will fire their missiles. Then they blow up Mt. St. Helen's, hurriedly claim credit, and present the US president with a list of demands which, being a liberal weenie, he decides to ignore. This leaves the noble US military to save the world behind the president's back, if they can.
Now here's the deal. If it's actually possible to wipe out the entire eastern seaboard of the US with a tsunami in this way, why would he carefully explain how to go about it...which is what this story amounts to...a detailed manual. The question is not moot. I live right where I would be most likely to get kaboomed by such a disaster. Did he write thinking that terrorists would try to do this anyway and his book could alert enough Americans to get action in time? Is it all just a political treatise aimed at helping to elect another Republican in 2008? Is the book just a bunch of silly-science, far-fetched sensationalism to sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money for him? Of course I have no idea what Patrick Robinson was thinking, but I do know that a great deal of media energy since 9/11 has gone toward speculation re. what terrorists might do to us next...and this book reads like a class in how most efficiently to achieve the greatest amount of death and destruction. For an author with a life career in the military, it's a peculiar book.
Re. grocery store books in general, right now there is an abundant harvest on the shelves at the ghetto grocery. All through the winter there were just occasional new ones. Now there are lots of new ones each time I look. That's because it's getting to be vacation time. People buy "beach books". A beach book is a huge, fat paperback full of either crazy, outrageous adventure or sex...sometimes both. Needless to say, "beach book" and "grocery store book" are synonyms. I call it literature if I might want to read it again sometime. If it's a read-and-pass-it-on job, that's a grocery store book. Why aren't any books of my recent interest in the literature category? Because they have nothing whatsoever to say except, "Ooh, let me tell you what happened. You almost won't believe it," as if a friend got your ear to tell some crazy thing that happened to him/her. Literature tells what happened as a way of telling what to think, feel, and believe, how to live your life. At least that's what I think. I gave the author of Scimitar SL-2 the compliment of wondering if he's trying to do more than just report an imaginary event. It's not a very good a story, but maybe the author was trying to be more than a beach book hack.
Wow
Today Lydia spent many hours building my computer armoire. Then she neatly assembled all the components and wires inside this new piece of furniture. I do most certainly appreciate her extra good deed.
Monday, June 6, 2005
Ready Or Not
The sun came up today as usual but I wasn't ready. Last night was one of my up all night reading orgies. I probably could have gone to sleep at around 7:00A.M. but Pork Chop had other ideas, so I got up and took her for a walk.
Yow! It was like walking out into a steam bath. We had not gone a block before I dripped with sweat,,,running down my face, fogging up my glasses. I had to take my glasses off. Looking at the forecast I read that the temperature is already 88 degrees Fahrenheit but feels like ninety. Seems that we have come into a real down-south hot spell. That's good. My tomatoes will ripen more quickly. Today I ate the first one for breakfast.
Anyway back to the book orgy. Last night I read Stephen Hunter's new one, Havana, about the time of gangsters running casinos, the rule of Fulgencio Batista, Castro's early stumbles into leadership, the South American Catholic attitude toward religion as something done in church, having nothing to do with daily life. The whole book was just a bath in trash and corruption, but somehow, also, it was a lot of fun. The rhetoric went completely over the top, shamelessly sensational. I have to admit that I enjoyed it, finished it about midnight. In a way it was like reading a book by a little kid, the hectic pace of disaster piled upon disaster just seemed like something an adult would be embarrassed to write. Of course, Stephen Hunter is anything but embarrassed. He cranks this stuff out all the time and his fans love it. He also writes for The Washington Post and has a Pulitzer Prize to his credit, so he's good at what he does. I felt that this author has a wonderful time writing, lets his imagination run amuck and enjoys the vicarious adventures he creates for the reader.
Then I started to read the new Douglas Preston book, The Codex. Here was another wild and unlikely adventure, this time in the jungles of Honduras in search of Mayan tombs and temples to loot. All the cliches are in there; machete-fighting with an anaconda to save a fellow adventurer, overwhelming insect infestation, hostile Indian tribes with poison-tipped arrows, lives miraculously saved with herbal rememdies harvested in the jungle, cruelly irresponsible American corporations. Yes, it was a cliche-fest, but it, too, was fun, from the man rescued as he hung by his fingernails from a rotten vine bridge a mile above the jungle river to the man rescued after being entombed in a Mayan temple for a month. Douglas Preston writes alone, but he more commonly teams with Lincoln Childs to write mad, desperate, horrorific adventures the latest of which, Brimstone, I read recently and found highly entertaining.
On the one hand if I were the talented person I am not, and if I wrote stories such as these, I might not admit it to my nearest and dearest. Books like this probably don't qualify as literature. They're stories. They're a cheap, safe trip to another place and an improbably exciting time. On the other hand, I'd feel like a public benefactor. Very few people could survive such adventures, would ever undertake them in real life. It's great fun, though, to live these hair-breadth episodes through the pages of a book. Last night I shot it out with gangsters in the steamy, crime-ridden streets of old Havana and then I survived a month in the jungles of Honduras. And now I'm tired.
Sunday, June 5, 2005
My, My!
Once in a while something happens that shows me how far things have come in a short while. A few minutes ago my computer-side phone rang. I could hear the voices of Benny and Sadie. I heard Dan's voice...then Lydia, "Ahno?"
Me, "Yes?"
Lydia, "We're approaching the Lesner Bridge. Go to wavy10.com and click on the Lesner Bridge traffic cam. You'll see us go under the bridge."
Me, "OK."
I went to the traffic cam and sure enough, there was a tiny boat approaching the bridge. I could just make out hands up and waving at me. Cute. I hit the refresh button and the boat had disappeared under the bridge. I hit refresh again and the little boat was on the other side of the bridge. Lydia invited me to go with them today, but I didn't feel up to it. Now, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, I got to see them waving at me from out on the water.
Saturday, June 4, 2005
The Recital
I always feel that when Benny makes a legendarily outrageous boy of himself, it's great. Lydia and Dan, on the other hand, agonize and groan and whatnot. With that in mind, this week Lydia has plied Benny with herbal extracts, predominantly valerian. Today was the violin recital.
Let's simply point out that Benny let down his fans. He has justly established a reputation as the boy to watch in Academy of Music recitals. I enjoy his antics and so do his many other fans. Today there was nothing to enjoy except this....he beautifully performed the most difficult piece played by any 5-year-old in the entire Hampton Roads area...and he played it superbly while behaving like a normal boy who feared for his life if he behaved badly at the recital. Woooo!!!! That valerian is serious stuff.
 
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