One of my best friends is spending January in Panama with her husband and she’s been sending me daily journal updates of their days and activities. I’m not sure I want to spend a month away from home but the daily stories are making me a little envious.
Where would you like to spend a month?
Today’s post comes to us from Port Huron Steve.
I recently posted about discovering several hundred scanned slides from trips my erstwife and I took in the United Kingdom in 1974 and 1975. Most of the original slides were good, but the company that converted them to digital files did poor work. After being scanned the images were badly underexposed and had harsh tones. I spent five weeks editing the slides, making each image look nice, or at least much nicer.
Last Friday night my daughter invited me to her home to deliver a marathon slide show. I presented about 500 edited slides and explained the circumstances of taking them. I talked so long I lost my voice. As my daughter drove me home I realized, with some surprise, that I had just experienced a “perfect” evening.
This surprised me because I am not comfortable calling anything perfect. That is such an absolute word. My experience of life keeps showing me that everything we experience is good or bad in relative terms. I am skittish about absolute words and absolute judgements.
And yet the slideshow evening could not have been better. For a storyteller, an ideal moment involves telling stories to an adoring audience. For a photographer, sharing images with people who are thrilled to see them is total joy. For an old storyteller/photographer what could be better than an evening sharing old images and their stories with family members?
Actually, I learned that there is a way that such an evening could be even better. Something already “perfect” can become nicer.
On our first British Isles trip my erstwife and I spent three days in the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds are a region of England where the countryside and the villages are unimaginably charming. Visiting there feels like stepping into a Beatrix Potter storybook. Perhaps the most appealing Cotswold town is Bourton-on-the-water. Its homes and shops were built centuries ago with locally quarried rock. The architecture is consistent, dating to the same period, and perfectly charming. A little stream runs through the heart of town, with stone bridges arching over it. The honey-colored stone used for all buildings is offset by many by countless lush flower gardens.
Bourton has a famous model village. Local craftsmen created a perfect model of the town that includes all the homes, churches and shops just as they looked in the 1930s. Each building was recreated with meticulous detail at a one-to-nine scale. Topiary trees and shrubbery line the tiny stone buildings. The stream is there, of course, along with those cute bridges. While the model town is accurate in scale, a few buildings have been given big windows so visitors can peer inside to appreciate how perfectly the interiors have been duplicated.
Because the model village occupies a significant area, logic dictates that the model village has to include a miniature model of the model. And it does!
The cherry on top of my perfect evening was watching my grandson grasp the concept of an infinite regression of models within models. “Wait, Grampy,” Liam cried. “So the tiny town has a tiny model of the town in it? Whoa! That’s awesome! And does the tiny model of the model have its own tiny model?”
Yes! Of course it does! Liam’s smile improved an evening I thought could not be better.
What kind of day or event would be perfect for you?
YA loves cheese more than almost anyone I know. When we came home from China, I was prepared for the possibility that she would be lactose-intolerant; Asians have a higher percentage of lactose-intolerance than Caucasians. I never needed to worry about it; as soon as YA began to eat solid foods, cheese was one of her favorites.
Cheese sandwiches, cheese fondue (her godmother makes a wicked fondue), cheese sticks, lasagna, curds, nachos.. if it has cheese, count her in. After I experienced raclette (melted cheese poured on top of food) in Switzerland, I got a raclette machine for us. Pretty soon YA had an opinion on the difference between Swiss raclette cheese and French raclette cheese (she prefer the Swiss as it has more “bite”).
Every year for our Family Day celebration, she chooses a fondue lunch at the Melting Pot in downtown Minneapolis. She likes the original Swiss fondue recipe followed by a dessert fondue. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when she requested a raclette lunch for her birthday celebration – despite the fact that we almost never eat any meals together these days due to our conflicting schedules.
We had a nice salad of greens, pomegranate seeds, pears, walnuts and vinaigrette then the raclette! We like our melty cheese poured over cauliflower, little potatoes, baguette and also sweet gherkin pickles. It was a wonderful lunch and I was happy to stay inside rather than go outside in the freezing temps.
Do you/did you have a favorite birthday meal request?
On Wednesday I ran three errands over my lunch hour. When I got back to my desk, my cell phone was not in the pocket of my purse where I normally keep it. My very first thought was that I had left it at one of the errand locations. But then I thought about it and remembered that I hadn’t taken it out of my purse at any of those places.
Maybe it had fallen out of my purse in the car or on the way from my desk to the car. I went out, searched all through the car, including moving the seats forward and back to check underneath. Then I looked again. I emptied out my purse twice.
Then I decided to re-trace all my steps and drove back to all three of the places I had been over lunch. Weirdly, in all three places, the same spot I had parked in earlier was open when I arrived. I looked in the spots, looked under the cars on either side, went into each establishment and asked if anyone had turned a phone in. Nope.
Sadly I returned to my cube and over the next half hour discovered that my phone did not have any tracking capability turned on and then further discovered that for my particular phone there didn’t even seem to BE any tracking capability. I took a deep breath and suspended service and then called the phone company to see if perhaps they could track it from there end. All the while the cost of getting a new phone was running through my head and I was starting to make a mental list of all the information stored in the phone and how I was going to have to re-assemble it somehow.
While I was on the phone I thought I’d empty out the purse one last time. As I set the empty purse down on the desk, it “thunked”. I felt around and could feel the outline of the phone at the bottom. It was between the purse and the lining! The pocket that I normally put it in had a phone-sized hole and the phone had fallen through. The gal on the phone with me was really nice to me, reactivated my service and wished me a good rest of the day. I was so relieved, I could feel the weight falling away from shoulders – I almost shed a tear.
I got duct tape from the maintenance department and taped up the hole before I left the office.
What was the last thing you lost? Or found?
Yesterday I got all worked up (again) when “pescatarian” defined as a vegetarian who eat fish. If you eat fish you are not any kind of vegetarian.
So I was happy to read this footnote in Death From the Skies by astronomer Phil Plait:
“One of the best ways to tick off an astronomer – and it can be fun sometimes just to see how he reacts – is to mix up the terms meteor, meteoroid, and meteorite. The very best way to tick off an astronomer is to call him an astrologer.”
Guess I’m not the only one who gets riled up by language.
What are you NOT?
The baboons have banded together to open a pub – The Beaded Warthog. Now we need a menu. Here’s a favorite I’d like to serve:
Toasted Cheese w/ Chow Chow
1 nice slice of bread, maybe sourdough
A couple of pieces of cheese – gouda would be good
2-3 Tbs of chow chow relish (or a nice chutney)
Lay the cheese out on top of the bread.
Toast the bread until it’s toasty and the cheese a little bubbly.
Spread the chow chow over the cheese.
Enjoy!
What would you like to serve at our pub?
We had snow and ice fog on Saturday, and it stayed foggy all night. We came out of church Sunday morning to find the skies had cleared leaving a thick coating of frost on the trees. Every branch and tree needle was outlined in white. We take the same route home from church, past the college with its trees, past a pine tree covered butte that rises sharply a couple of blocks from our house. I have seen these same trees for 30 years, but the frost and brilliant blue sky illuminated them to make it seem I was noticing them for the first time. In an hour the wind came and blew it all away.
What have you been noticing lately?
Last week Steve commented that he thought there was an interesting story as to why I have a beaded warthog. I’ll let you all decide.
About 15 years ago, I traveled to South Africa to do a site inspection with a client. Like usual, I arrived a day ahead to make sure everything is all set for the client. The next morning, after I had met with the hotel and the ground supplier, I got a call from the States. The client and the account executive couldn’t get out of Cincinnati due to a huge ice storm. By the time they would be able get to South Africa, it would pretty much be time to turn around and head home. Believe me, traveling to South Africa is a long haul, so you don’t want to go there to come home immediately!
So the next six days were almost like a vacation including great food and even a little shopping time. I had already found a Nelson Mandela t-shirt for YA (this trip was the week after he passed away), but since there wasn’t a client, my driver and I started taking time to stop at roadside stands as we drove around. It was at one of these stands that I found the beaded warthog.
It’s very common to find beaded animals in South Africa. The locals use reclaimed/recycled wire to sculpt the bodies and then use little glass beads to do the decoration. Elephants make up the majority of these beaded souvenirs, but you can also find giraffes, lions and rhinos. I had never seen a warthog before (and haven’t since either) and it struck me as hysterical because the missing client worked for the swine division of a husbandry pharmaceutical company. I forked over the money happily and added it to the little store of items I had bought for the client.
When I got back to my office, I called the account exec to let him know that I was doing some good notes and also sending the gift items to the client. Since I thought the beaded warthog was so funny I mentioned it specifically. There was an awkward pause and he said “You know, she doesn’t have nearly as good a sense of humor as you.” When I pushed him about what he meant, he broke down and said that she was very sensitive about the pig connection and he didn’t think sending the warthog would be a good idea. He was worried that this would hurt my feelings. Ha – just the opposite – I got a great insight into a client I hadn’t worked with before AND now I have a beaded warthog!
Have you ever had a gift go wrong?
Husband went to the college library last week and took out Practical Baking, a comprehensive compendium for the budding commercial baker. The book outlines in over 800 pages in very scientific and practical terms, all the baked goods one could possibly create, and all the problems that could occur, such as why icings and toppings might run without stabilizers, why puff pastries blister and flake, and why your Napoleon sheets are tough or break easily when handled. Husband was interested in the section devoted to common problems with hard rolls. The book addresses common problems for every imaginable baked good.
The book also contains a suggested 6 month course of home study to become an accomplished baker. Weeks 9 and 10, for example, are devoted to perfecting biscuits and muffins. Husband brought the book home because he really is interested in common problems with hard rolls (It is a concern specific to people from Sheboygan, WI), and also because it is so funny in its seriousness.
What how-to manual would you like to write? What how-to manual would have made your life easier? Ever had an authentic bratwurst on a Sheboygan hard roll? (You know what they say, its not the brat, its the bun!)
As I was wandering up the stairs at our public library the other day, my journey was arrested by the bright-colored bulletin board pictured in the header. This board is changed monthly, and frequently has things like Staff book picks, or children’s drawings with a book pick, etc.
But this was over the top! A bright orange sign up top announces “Epic Opening Lines”, and another orange sign to the left asks “Any of these sound familiar?” On brightly colored cards are printed thirty one- or two-sentence beginnings to a book; you can lift the flap to peek at the title and author of the book represented. It was a challenge to see if I could recognize any of them – a few were familiar, and one or two were obvious, but many I had never laid eyes on. I realized when I started looking them up at home that quite a few were Young Adult or children’s novels.
Since I doubt if you can read them all from the header, I’ll type several of them here, and see if any baboons can guess them – then I’ll reveal answers Sunday. Here you go:
1. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
2. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
3. They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me.
4. I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
6. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
10. The early morning sky was the color of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.
11. The moment one learns English, complications set in.
14. “Where’s Papa going with that axe?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
15. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement… anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.
16. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
17. It was a pleasure to burn.
20. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.
23. I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.
24. There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smuggler’s town. You shouldn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing. And you probably shouldn’t be in it for the money.
27. All children, except one, grow up.
28. It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
29. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
30. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
Do you have a favorite opening line(s) from a book you’ve read?
Trail Baboon 