The Last Potato Pancake

At one point while I was driving around on Saturday, I got a text from my ex-boss that she was having a really really final day at the restaurant and a final toast. I rsvped yes. Then I got a text from the former GM asking if I was going and whether I'd see if I could rally the ladies. None of them were available, but then a plan formed where a bunch of us who worked together circa 1990-1993 would share a final meal.

But first I had an afternoon date with my girlfriend and neighbor at the wine and dog bar. Very fun to catch up and drink wine and pet dogs.

Sunday was delightful, with a walk with a different girlfriend. It was good to get out in nature-ish. She showed me a beach where we could swim if we have another heat wave. Then I had a bit of a rest and went out to the final meal. It was fun and loud and tasty. The GM and I share a name and he'd brought his daughter and a son who also shares his/our name. It's been so long since I'd been in a room with so many people with our name. Someone would say the name and three of us would turn our heads. Reminded me of Friday nights where there were three of us. I had to change my waitress name on my tickets (usually a letter) because GM had claimed that letter.

Anyhoo, I had my final potato cheese pancake with a side salad. Eaten with my hands, rolled up together in bites. It was a perfect potato cheese pancake. Not because it was the final one, and in fact I had a kinda sub-par one a month ago. It is just that it was perfect.

I took the GM and his kids to public transit. So he heard my latest podcast listen -- a history of women in hip hop. He knows how little I know about the subject and cracked up that I was a) interested b) listening to something so academic about music. I'm back in my own lane now, by the way, listening to the story of people who collect eiderdown from duck nests on an island in Norway.

On Monday, after a walk with my tiny but mighty friend, I had a thought. A good one, not like most of my thoughts. It's been weighing on me that I want to get rid of my 19 typewriters, but didn't know how. Some are enormous and not in good shape. In a flash of brilliance I remembered the reuse / recycle place that's near work.

This is what a dozen-ish typewriters look like in Tiger Brown. And on a cart. I feel accomplished!

While I was cleaning the garage I was inspired to find a home for my clown painting. I put it on the free table, making a lady at work very happy.

And just a few more pictures from the week. Mrguy sent me this photo of boy kitten relaxing on a pillow near his Clayton Bailey jug, enjoying his window.

Also there was a shipwreck at the ob/gyn.

Umeshu Update

Just in time for the July basho, the umeshu is ready. I had made it once before and it was flavorful but not tasty, so I made this batch with a fair amount of skepticism. And I was pleasantly surprised.

This batch has recently turned slightly amber. Clam and I had some last week and pronounced it delicious.

fyi: I tried portrait mode for the photo and it looks so teensy, but is not. Those are full sized ume (think green Japanese apricot) and there used to be 750ml of shochu in there.

And Now We Wait

I had seen the ingredients at the market the other day, and thought I'd make some umeshu. But the one other time I did it it wasn't so great, so I passed. 

But then I saw the perfect container this week on the free table at work and it was clearly a sign.

Right?

Should be almost ready by the July basho. 

Crab Cup

This is my crab cup:

It's by Angie:

I found it on the free table at work a number of years ago and made it my work coffee cup. How can you not like those oversized eyes on thin eye stalks? It gives me so much darned joy.

In March 2020, when we were told to find some work we could do at home and go do it there, I brought my crab cup home, sensing that my cup and I could otherwise be separated for a long time. It's lived here ever since. At home it functions as my beer receptacle during my Alzheimer's caregiver support groups which fall on the first and last Wednesdays of the month. It's impolite to drink out of a beer bottle during a support group, but if I'm going to talk about my mom and my wacky family in my free time, you bet I'm going to drink a beer while doing it. The crab cup is now code. I can tell mrguy that I'm using the crab cup tonight and he'll go "Right, it's Wednesday".

I love you, crab cup.

Feuerzangenbowle

During the holidays, there was an interesting item on offer on the local buy nothing group: a zucker hut, or sugar cone. What's it for? It's the essential ingredient in German Fire Punch, aka feuerzangenbowle, which is mulled wine enhanced with flaming rum soaked sugar. 

Once I knew what feuerzangenbowle was, you bet I wanted that sugar cone. A flaming table-side treat (like cherries jubilee)?! My love for regional foodways and bevways went into overdrive and I spent many hours trying to procure the items I needed without breaking the bank. The sugar alone (zucker hut) costs seven bucks plus shipping, and for-realsies feuerzangenbowle rigs were priced at close to two hundred bucks.

Now that it's March, the price has gone down by more than half. I bought a brand new feuerzangenbowle set and I am very happy. Now we just have to end the pandemic so we can have people over to enjoy the spectacle and drink all the wine. The recipe calls for three bottles (plus 151 rum to get the sugar burning).

For your enjoyment, I leave you with a video of fire punch in action.

Cue The Plague of Frogs

Pandemic.

Shelter-in-place for six months.

Wildfires galore that mean you can't open the windows for weeks.

Heat wave after heat wave (without opening the windows).

My favorite cousin died on Thursday after a recurrence of leukemia. Amazingly, on Tuesday he sent me a text that just said "call" and we had one last phone conversation. Took a bereavement day on Friday.

Last night it was 101.7 in the kitchen last night and 120+ in the aku room. I watered the tomatoes 5 times, and the canna corms I've been resurrecting started the day underground and ended the day with 1/4" of growth. 

Several weeks ago, while on a toilet paper hunt for the mama at a local bodega, I passed a bottle of piña colada mixer. Impulse buy! It came in really handy last night. Why did I always think that making blended ice drinks was difficult? It is not.

Among all of the awfulness, we are not alone. Friday night cocktails with friends. Saturday evening zoom with our good friends who were good friends with our cousin after we introduced them. Sunday morning conversation with Cack and Blick. Sunday evening conversation with my cousin (youngest brother of the one who died).

In honor of my cousin, who someone described this week as "an animal of music facts", listen to some Richard Thompson and use the word fuck. 

A LOT.

Hawaii 2019, Day 2

We had big plans for day 2. Get up early, swim at our beach and go to Shangri La.

I wish I could recreate the experience of the little beach in front of Michel's restaurant via a photo tableau, but I don't want to lose my phone there, so I just have to keep it in my heart. To get there you walk through our hotel's parking lot and walk next to the service entrance of the little hotel next door. Then you're on a teeny little beach with one palm tree. It's maybe 100 feet wide, and bounded by the sea wall and the Outrigger Club. People meet there every day to swim and take out their outriggers, with the occasional small group that has hired an outrigger to do a paddle out and scatter cremains. It's perfect for us because both the beach and the water are in the shadow of the hotel above Michel's.

When I'm feeling stressed and want to settle down I think of that beach, of floating on my back and listening to the pebbles clink against each other underneath the waves. It's so restful. I feel like I leave my body when I'm there.

We had lunch at the museum, which is always a pleasure, and visited an exhibit that paired my favorite Lee Bontacou piece with Louise Nevelson's work. So satisfying. I kinda want to make a quilt in the likeness of this Lee Bontacou.

And then we went to Shangri La. It's incredibly beautiful, and during our tour I suffered from heat stroke. This is why January is the perfect month for us to be in Hawaii.

After Shangri La we went to a great beer bar and waited for our friend who works at UH Manoa to get off work. She used to work at the forklift factory.

And then we went to dinner. OMG it was so much fun to reconnect. We heard all about her new adventures moving back to Hawaii. She's such a foodie. We told her how much we like the experience at Michel's (on the other side of the glass from our little beach where we swim). So we agreed to get reservations the next night and have some Cherries Jubilee :)

So ends day 2.

Except! I forgot that somewhere in this day we also found time to go sell clothes at Barrio Vintage. This is the second time I've brought a suitcase full of clothing to sell them, and it's been quite satisfying both times. I don't think I walk in the door looking like someone who has an amazing stash, and I do. My boobs are just too big to get into some of my outfits, so it's time to downsize. It makes me happy to repatriate the goods to Hawaii.

Stockholm, Day 3 and 4

Next was presentation day. We got up early and headed over to the venue. And when I say we, I mean that mrguy resumed his role as my manager and stayed with me. He sat through a morning's worth of presentations in Swedish, and then went record shopping after mine had concluded. You can imagine the impression he made on everyone (just by being himself, of course, but sitting through Swedish presentations? Everyone was swooning because of his chivalry).

My presentation was the first after lunch. I should say that the venue was a small ballroom in a very old hotel. It was really lovely. All presentations are a bit of a crap shoot because local conditions vary. In this iteration I used a borrowed PC and wore a headset mic for the first time. And the folks from the Scandinavian office came to see me. No pressure at all!

At night we went for dinner and then drinks with new friends, a presenter and her husband. I swear we would have kept into the wee hours were it not for jet lag. Such interesting and funny conversations. These people were really cool. She's the archivist for a publishing house. He is a video producer.

The next day mrguy and I went to the Scandinavian office and the team gathered for a q&a with their boss and I. Then we found some lunch in an arty spot where we sat in the fog under heat lamps and blankets. It was a music venue, and Grandmaster Flash was doing soundcheck below us. We could only hear the drums, but whatever.

We got together again with our friends and did some communal record shopping and beer consuming. In Stockholm they do that thing where the alphabetize the music by first name.

So, right, you find Human League, "Indian Records" and INXS in that order. And lots of signs explaining that everything is by first name. Some day I'll get to the bottom of the reason why people choose this organizational scheme.

 Just one more record sleeve:

We had already eaten, but our friends had not, so we met up and had a beer with them while they ate. This gave us ample time to check out the restrooms, which were also interestingly organized:

I wish our new friends were local. They were so much fun. We shared all our favorite television shows, music, thoughts about how people problem-solve and interact. Again, were it not for wanting to sleep we would have spent more time with them. 

Bye, new friends!

Stockholm, Day 2

On our second day in Stockholm we wandered around the town until it was time to go to the speakers' dinner, provided by our host.

Hotel With Urban Deli was wild and great. Our room was downstairs via glass elevator or spiral staircase. Our floor also contained a public space with carpeted risers and large work tables.

The carpeting in the hallways has a "undressing on the way to the hotel room" motif, and there were shower rooms in the hallway that were for "dirty little girls" and "dirty little boys". I don't even want to know why.

The deli upstairs was super fancy. A glass-fronted freezer for single-serve mochi covered ice creams. I guess that's a thing.

The pre-made salads were impressive, they had a shrimp bar and had a special sauce which they named after Sean Connery, with no apparent explanation

We had a few free hours on Day 2, so we walked around and got coffee. Mrguy found us a very satisfying thrift store where he bought records (a theme on this trip) and I bought printed denim fabric and a teensy watercolor of a chicken, from 1920. All for the princely sum of 17 Swedish Kroner.

Speakers' dinner that evening was a delicious moule frites kinda affair, with lovely conversation with other archivists and our host whose father was a famous director of infamous Swedish movies. Our host took a different route, to business school. Lovely fellow.

Then we came home and had a nightcap in the hotel bar:

 
So ends Day 2.

Dog Mayors

The other day I read an item about the passing of another honorary dog mayor. Pour one out for Lucy Lou, who was the mayor of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky.

Which reminds me that in July, for lack of anything better to do, I took my mom to a biker bar in a town about 40 minutes' drive from the mama's place. 

The town's claim to fame is that it once had an honorary dog mayor.

The bar's claim to fame is that after the mayor's passing, they taxidermed the dog and routed the beer tap through its body, which stands on the bar back. As I heard it described, the bartender lifts the dog's leg and the beer is dispensed. Whereas we were pouring one out for Lucy Lou, we were pouring one out of this dog mayor.

So I take my mom for a road trip to the town in question. It's one of those unincorporated areas that's not quite a town. Of course my heart sings for such a place, like a town near the Old Place where you drive through the yellow hills til the road dead ends in a broken up wharf. There you find a bar filled with bikers and a taxidermed polar bear. There's a certain romance in that. Or the Old Place itself, where a multitude of crazy things would take place and either make us laugh or frustrate the hell out of us.

So this bar and the town it was in were much farther than I expected, but the mama loves a drive, so it all worked out. We got there, and there were lots of bikers. A little known fact is that the mama really loves a Harley, so she definitely perked up. 

And we get to the bar and check out the tap and...WHOA NELLY! I guess you hear what you want to hear and it never occurred to me that they would be dispensing the beer out of the dog's nether regions. I thought it would be the mouth. Guess I lack the proper imagination.

 

The beer was not tasty. But they did make a good Shrimp Louis, two things that the mama really likes, and have Harleys and the mama had never been to this place before.

All in all a successful outing.

Dinner With Fambly

I feel like this week I've been making up for months of being homebound or mama tasking. The estate sale, the game, the rock show, and then I did this with the neph. We do a monthly confab, which is one of the high points of the month:

On this outing's menu was strawberry cider and a vichyssoise (using coconut instead of dairy) and some onion rings and some brussels sprouts that I should have read the fine print on (shaved, not whole). Not the best choice. I hope that his innards were not as discombobulated as mine the next day. Maybe my podiatrist was right!

Germany 2017 Post 10

If this were MRguy's observatory, there would be much more written about Dessau. We went there in order to visit the Bauhaus. I liked the setting quite a bit. We stayed at a 1950s hotel that had a great East German vibe. Neat, but not too fixed up. It was right across the street from lecturers' houses where famous Bauhaus guys lived. 

The asparagus hut was closed the day we got there, but we scored like bandits on the day we left, what with it being spargelzeit and all.

I drank bananaweisen at the Greek restaurant in Dessau. Somehow the summer's most refreshing beverage of 2012 was not my favorite by Spring 2017. And that's ok. We are moving on, People!