smacky and bucky

I had a fun evening, despite the fact that poor wife had to work on a proposal due the next day. Our satellite provider started carrying the Tennis Channel, with five different channels carrying live coverage of the French Open. Tennis is the only sport I can watch on television. I saw #1 ranked Justine Henin beat Tamira Paszek. I had to google the match to find Tamira's name and came across this picture:




Doesn't it look like she put her dress on backwards?
(From an original article here: http://www.oe24.at/zeitung/sport/mehr_sport/article121353.ece)


Let's back up a few hours. After work I went to Home Depot to purchase a pair of hedge clippers. You'd think that such a simple tool, as old as reruns of the Flintstones, would be easy to find. I wanted a pair with wooden handles. I had previously purchased a new-fangled pair with metal handles, but the handles join the blades with a plastic ring, and the damn plastic ring broke and a handle fell off, making them useless. The store had 20 kinds of clippers with metal handles, but only one with wooden handles. And I had to dig behind some boxes to find them, but I did and they made me happy.

Since I was in the area, I went next door to Barnes & Noble and browsed for a few minutes and hit the jackpot:
The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954. It was in the clearance section for only $5.00. For the hardback first edition! It's going for over $30 on Amazon.

Incidentally, if you've never read On the Road, you really should. That book gives you wanderlust.

I entered the house yesterday afternoon after mowing the lawn and heard the beep of the answering machine. Laura had taken the day off to hang out with a college friend back in town for a visit from California. Since her college friend became my Peace Corps friend a year later (I met Laura through this common friend we had), Laura was calling to ask me to meet them downtown for dinner. A few other girls from our Peace Corps group were also meeting them. I said okay, got cleaned up, and drove into the city for dinner at an African restaurant.

I ended up seeing three other Peace Corps folks at dinner, one I hadn't seen in about four years and one I hadn't seen in about eight years, so that was fun (six women and me at the table). During a conversation about dating it occurred to me that I had dated one of them while we were in Africa. For about eight months I guess, until she returned to America with sudden health problems. It wasn't exactly a repressed memory, and it wasn't a big secret, as everyone at the table knew about it (yes, including Laura), it had just been so long ago (nine years ago!) that my first thought seeing her wasn't about our "history" at all. It wasn't weird or anything (we had invited her to our wedding three years ago, so it's not like we weren't all friends), it was just a little strange to realize that she was the first ex-girlfriend my wife has met.

We're all at different points in our lives right now. Two of us are married, one has a baby, two are still single and going to keg parties on the weekends, one is finishing her master's degree.

But never mind all that. I'm sure what you're really curious about is where we ate and what I had! We went to Bukom Cafe, which has expanded its menu since I last went there, thankfully. West Africa is a very large region as a whole (almost as large as the United States), so a two-page menu doesn't really begin to cover the diverse items you can get over there. I had Red-Red, a spicy dish popular in Ghana made with red pepper and black-eyed peas. When it's good, it's amazing. We had it in a variety of places when I was traveling around Ghana with a buddy for six weeks. The best we had was in the cafeteria of a bank in a small town. Here's an authentic sounding recipe, from congocookbook.com (I altered the recipe to make it vegetarian. I find dried fish to be REALLY unnecessary to this meal):

What you need
two to three cups dried cowpeas (black-eyed peas)
one cup red palm oil (or vegetable oil)
one or two onions, thinly sliced
two or three ripe tomatoes, quartered
cayenne pepper or red pepper
salt and black pepper
several ripe or near-ripe plantains (but not overly ripe)

What you do

Clean the black-eyed peas in water in a large pot. Soak them in water for at least an hour or overnight. After soaking them, rub them together between your hands to remove the skins. Rinse to wash away the skins and any other debris. Drain them in a colander.

Place the black-eyed peas in a large pot, fill with water to just cover the peas. Bring to a slow boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer until the peas are tender, thirty minutes to an hour. When cooked, the peas should be moist, but not standing in water.

While peas are cooking: Heat oil in a skillet. Fry the onions until slightly browned, then add tomatoes. Mash and stir the mixture to form a sauce.

Stir the onion-tomato mixture into the black-eyed peas. Simmer for ten minutes. Add salt, black pepper, and cayenne or red pepper to taste.

While peas and sauce is simmering: Prepare Fried Plantains. Serve peas and plantains side by side on a plate.

Slept in on Friday, since I was taking a day off. Did you know that cats and dogs get up for breakfast, then immediately go back to their same spots on the bed and go back to sleep for another four hours? What a life!

Drove to the very busy airport around 3pm and circled the place in a giant loop three times before Laura texted that she was out front. Looking, looking looking... there she is! The dog may be more excited than me, after a week of Laura being out of town.

Hit the road from the airport, battled through DC/Friday/Holiday weekend traffic (added an hour to the drive) and got out of town.

Saturday was time in the pool, but also some lawn work: feeding cedar branches into a wood chipper and spreading the chips around the plants in the front yard. Then back into the pool. Cookout for dinner, then second place in Scrabble.

Sunday was more time in the pool, watching Psycho II on cable (strange sequel to a much older classic film), reading more of the books from my previous post, throwing a frisbee around until dinner, seafood for dinner, playing a little poker, falling asleep around 1am.

Monday was more of the same. Time in the pool, falling asleep while reading in a hammock. Left for home around 5, Chinese food for dinner, and wow, the house looks nice! Oh right, I had made sure everything was spotless before going to the airport on Friday, and Laura hasn't seen the place in a week. Yep, place looks great.

...And that was our three-day (my four-day) weekend. Very relaxing.

The story of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music. Because I'm secretly a metrosexual who wants to be a suave crooner. Or it could be that I just really like the band and wanted to read more about them.

Well, day two of bachelorhood. Wifey had predicted I'd order a pizza Monday night, have leftover pizza twice on Tuesday, Chinese takeout on Wednesday, and just give up completely and have fast food on Thursday. I'm bucking expectations by actually making an effort. Yesterday after work I stopped at Wholefoods and got a variety of items. Last night I had Lebanese: tabbouleh, baba ganoush, hummus, and pita. Today for lunch I'm having a chicken sandwich and potato salad. So, hahaha!

Last night's season finale of Heroes was very good. I refuse to get pulled in to the comic book geek venom on some forums: "Why didn't Peter just fly away himself?!?" How about "Because he was using all his concentration trying not to explode!" If the writers are determined, there are a multitude of ways both brothers could have survived. Nathan could have flown very high and dropped his brother, flying out of the blast area to safety. And we know Peter should be able to put the pieces of himself together again, so he could live too. And since they didn't show any bodies, the first rule of a comic book (or any mystery) is if there isn't a body, the character could very well be alive somewhere. And the second rule of a comic book is "Even if you see a body, dead doesn't always mean dead. Just look at Superman, Hal Jordon, Bucky Barnes, Oliver Queen, and Jason Todd. (And trust me, look at Steve Rogers in a year. Captain America will not stay dead. His story will be just a Marvel version of DC's Knightfall.)

Excuse my whining this morning:

• I have bug bites and some poison ivy on me from this weekend.
• Laura left this morning on a business trip and she isn't getting back until Friday afternoon. We were talking about it last night, and this will be the longest we've been apart since we first started dating in 2000!

Okay, so I only have two things to complain about this morning.

Some TV spoilers from last night below. If you care about such things, you've been warned.

CSI: The miniature killer story goes up another notch. On one hand, I'm sorry it wasn't someone we'd seen before. On the other hand, I'm glad they didn't make anyone on the CSI crew the killer (like Hodges, as many predicted). Oh, and if the actress playing Sarah doesn't sign a new contract and is gone from the show, they wrote it in such a way it doesn't matter at all. The season finale ended with an arm sticking out from UNDER a car, weakly moving. If the actress signs the contract, the SCI crew will find her in time. If she doesn't, they locate her dead body. Perfect way to write around a stubborn actress. She tried a work delay a few years ago and they fired her ass. She isn't the star of the show, so she should realize how easy she can be dumped and replaced with some other actress.

Labels: TV, work

If you own a TV or radio and happened to turn one of them on yesterday, you probably heard that Jerry Falwell was found dead in his office. You may also recall that last November when we went to visit my parents, we ended up at the table next to him at a diner.

(Picture taken covertly with cell phone)

That day, the man ordered a 1/4 lb hotdog with everything and a bowl of broccoli cheese soup. Not something a 73-year-old guy on the pudgy side should do, so it's no big secret what helped kill him.

Media around the world picked up the write-up from the Associated Press, giving a brief overview of some of the more controversial (nuttier) things he's said in the last decade:

In 1999, he told an evangelical conference that the Antichrist was a male Jew who was probably already alive. Falwell later apologized for the remark but not for holding the belief. A month later, his National Liberty Journal warned parents that Tinky Winky, the children's TV character, was a gay role model and morally damaging to children. His remarks a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, essentially blaming feminists, gays, and liberals for bringing on the terrorist attacks, drew a rebuke from the White House, and he apologized.

Not surprizing at all, the republican presidential candidates are clamoring to say what a great guy Falwell was. John McCain, once viewed as the republican outsider, was courting Falwell and the Christian right, speaking at Liberty University's commencement last year. (Newt Gingrich is scheduled to this year's, this coming Saturday.)

I'm not going to speak ill of the dead myself. If you've read anything vaguely political I've posted in the last few years, you can guess where I lean on the spectrum. I was talking to a childhood friend just the other day about Lynchburg, and the influence Falwell had over our hometown, and we both agreed that he's the main reason we felt the driving need to flee after high school and only return for short visits.

# posted by smacky @ 7:12 AM 1 comments

Wow, what a great time to be a scifi geek. Heroes was very, very good last night. Next week is the season finales of both Heroes and Lost. It's going to be a long summer. And while NBC's plan is to have over 30 episodes of Heroes next season (including the six Heroes: Origins specials), the folks at Lost are scaling back to a rerun-free 16 episode season, not starting until February 2008! Are people going to remember the show after almost TEN months?

In more serious, real-world news, my mother called and told me they discovered a small cancerous mass in my grandmother's breast. The doctor believes it is so small and contained that they can do surgery and shouldn't need any further treatment. Fingers crossed.

I miss Aldo...

Our office held a health fair in our conference room yesterday, and I had my cholesterol level tested for the first time in my life. I wasn't looking forward to the results, since in the last five or six years I've gone from a very active life to a pretty sedentary life working at a desk all day. I suppose the irony is that the jobs that put you in the best physical shape are also some of the lowest paying and soul sucking.

Anyway, my bad cholesterol was borderline high (by 20 points) and the good cholesterol was borderline low (by 12 points). Not the worst in the world, and based on my diet and level of inactivity the past few years, I had feared it would be a bit worse.

So there are three things one can do: Not smoking (Check. Six months now), healthy diet (Okay, yes, I could certainly do better. More vegetables and less french fries), and exercise (Yuck. I don't mind physical exertion when I'm accomplishing something, like cutting and hauling brush, or splitting firewood, but I hate gyms).

So, in the spirit of getting healthier, I stopped at the Apple store and picked up something I'd been considering getting since they first came out last November: The iPod Shuffle.

Specs: half a cubic inch in volume, weighs just half an ounce and features a minimal aluminum design with a built-in clip.

I figured this would be great to wear while exercising. I love my video iPod, but it isn't really designed to be worn while doing anything more strenuous than strolling. This one clips on the shirt and you're all set. When you plug it into iTunes, you can choose "AutoFill" and it will randomly choose 240 songs. Or you can create a huge playlist and designate that it should grab it, or you can just pile songs into it.

I've been pretty fortunate in my life in regards to health issues. I only really exercised if I was playing sports, or at one of the "eight hours of manual labor" jobs I had in the past. My weight has remained somewhat constant since college, without having to watch what I eat too closely. But it's not going to stay that way forever, so I guess it is about time to start doing something positive, rather than waiting another decade and having a doctor order me off my ass. And it will be easier if I start now and try to slightly improve, instead of letting myself go and having to dig myself out of a poor health hole.

I still think exercising for the sake of exercising sucks, but since we don't live in pioneer times anymore, there's not a lot of opportunity to be active in our society. I have to offset 40 hours a week at a desk somehow.

We're heading toward the season finales for some shows I watch, so I thought I'd ramble a little about them. Spoilers below, so if you're waiting to watch last night's Jericho or Lost, be warned.


Jericho: It would be interesting if the series isn't renewed. A really open-ended ending to the show. I wonder if killing the show's biggest name was a response to being up in the air about the future of the series. If it's not renewed, killing him was a chance to give the actor a good death scene with no ramifications for the future of the series.

I'd like the show to return, but with the military coming after Hawkins (whether it's the "real" American military or a splinter group (the real America wouldn't change the flag like that. The flag is a rallying point, something to bind the nation together. Only a splinter group would design a new flag), the New Bern/Jericho shootout at the end bound to have more casualties (like farm boy that didn't want to die), and the death of the dad, I'd completely understand if this was it.

Oh, they also gave Gerald McRainy the most awesome line of the night. His son asks why he isn't curious about Hawkin's revelation that he has access to a satellite. Gerald's response: "Son, I'm about to go to war with New Bern, Kansas, home of the closest Costco. I'm far beyond questioning anything."

Lost: Wow, last night's episode gave us some answers. Ben wasn't born on the island as he asserted. His dad is Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite ("Bet I can throw this football over that volcano?"), a sad alcoholic addicted to all that free Dharma brand beer who could never remember his son's birthday. You feel sorry for little Ben for a little while, until you see that he sold out Dharma and let the island "hostiles" nerve gas the whole group (with, one would assume, the exception of the guys in the Swan hatch, who had to continue pressing the button). I'm a little confused about the timeline. I don't know exactly when this "purge" occurred, but I know Kelvin was brought to the Swan hatch after Gulf War # 1 in the early '90s, so Dharma must have still been functioning then. I don't know why the food drops continue though. Why would the outside world folks running Dharma assume their employees are still on the island? Is Ben making sure the company still receives regular reports? How is it that no one from Dharma has sent someone to check up? Curious.

Locke, even with a bullet in the gut, is still badass. Yay for the return of mystical Locke, who has been buffed up with a "don't take no for an answer" backbone. Standing up to Ben in front of the Others, beating up Mikhail (Patchy) (and the Others' complete lack of response to it, even when Ben ordered them to stop him. Loved that!), and demanding to be taken to Jacob. Awesome.

The ghost or whatever it was in the cabin? Meh. Not sure how I feel about Ben exploiting a trapped spirit or whatever the hell he's doing. I hope for a little more clarification. Jacob asking Locke for help? No way Locke is gonna die from Ben's bullet. And Ben's time as leader is definitely coming to an end if Locke walks back to camp, completely healed and quoting Mark Twain: "News of my demise has been greatly exaggerated."

Ben nerve gassing his pop and the rest of the group, walking around and seeing all the dead after? Creepy. The mass open grave with all the jumpsuited skeletons? CREEPY, but oh so cool. This show has really delivered this spring, after a really shaky fall. I can't even begin to predict what will happen these final two episodes. Charlie's death is being predicted all over the place, but I think it's a red herring, and someone else will die and we'll all be totally shocked by it. But who? Jack? Sawyer? Hurley? Sayid? I think any of those are good candidates. I think Jin is safe, with his pregnant wife, and Desmond, since his love story with Penny is supposed to be central to the rest of the show.

In the past two weeks, voices from the past have been contacting me. Living voices, thank goodness. I'm not being haunted or anything. First was the Peace Corps friend we met up with again after six or seven years.

Then last week I received an email from a college acquaintance (okay, it was an ex-girlfriend, but she's happily married (and so am I) so it's not anything secretive). We hadn't spoken since 1998, when, during her visit to see me in Africa, she told me she was getting engaged (to her now-husband). Obviously we sort of lost touch after that. I wasn't such a glutton for abuse that I wanted to know the details of her happy life without me, and blah, blah, blah. You know how sometimes it's easier just to cut ties and not know, right? But time heals the heart and we're just happy for each other now.

Finally, I received an email from a friend from high school. To the best of my recollection, the last time we spoke was around 1993. He's in Los Angeles now, but he had lived in NYC for almost a decade. He said when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, the windows in his apartment a few blocks away imploded. He couldn't get back into his apartment for 10 days, and then it was just to retrieve what wasn't covered in ash. Crazy.

The strangest thing about these three contacts is how completely unrelated they are. None of the three have ever met any of the others. No one from my high school days met any college friends, no college friends ever met any Peace Corps friends. Three people from three distinct periods of my life.

Weird. And of course each brings a different set of memories they've been dredging up. Mostly good, a few uncomfortable. I try not to dwell much on the past, for various reasons, but it's been interesting seeing it all come back.

I rediscovered recently what your mother has been saying since you were a little kid: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. (And by the way, please ask your mother to quit calling me. It's getting really awkward coming up with excuses why I can't to see her!)

Anyway, I've found that if I actually ate a little something in the morning, I'm more focused at work in the late morning. I decided to start making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The usual grape jelly and JIF got boring very fast, but it occurred to me that I'm an adult now, so I can make any sort of sandwich I want. Yay for being an adult!

Since I needed to stop and pick up allergy meds for the wife yesterday evening, I perused the condiment aisle. Score: I found mango jam (and the first ingredient is mango, not sugar!), black cherry preserves, and certified organic peanut butter. Those items and a loaf of honey wheat bread, and I had all the makings of my 21st century PB & J.

I'm very happy, though I have even less reason to be proud of myself than I did about yesterday's accomplishment.

I'm probably more proud of myself than I have a right to be, but yesterday, with a $6 cord from Radio Shack and an old boom box, I was able to transfer the music from some old cassettes onto my laptop. I'm not going to become the neighborhood pirate, so don't worry about that. I'm just transferring some things that one simply cannot purchase in digital format anywhere, at any price. I believe that would fall under "fair use" then, making a backup copy of something you already own. Besides, the music I copied was by a musician from Burkina Faso, West Africa who died in 2002. But now I have African reggae on my iPod, a genre it was severely lacking.

Labels: David Lynch, lawn, work

Wife is out of town the rest of the week, and I slept horribly last night. The two facts are probably related. That, and one of the cats was a complete spaz, determined to wake me up every hour.

But it was a good episode of Lost last night, though now I don't know who to trust, other than Hurley, Desmond, Sayid, and the hobbit from Driveshaft. Oh, and Sawyer. Want him on your side. Damn!

Locke is iffy, since he may or may not have his own agenda and is willing to use anyone to get it, and though I'm not ready to label him an "other" yet, he does still have that puppy-dog need to belong. When he was in their camp, I thought about the pot plantation, and how he couldn't kill that undercover cop.

Jack is going to have to do something pretty spectacular to redeem himself, because I think he's a dick now. It's like he's other-whipped (as opposed to p-whipped). He's pretty much been a dick since that lame "Jack's tattoos" episode. Next week's episode looks like a Ben flashback! Awesome!

Oh, and Jericho was good last night too. End of the world and small towns are wiping out their adult male population on both sides. Nice metaphor for a certain war, huh? Next week is the season finale, and it's war, baby. (Say it with me: "What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin!")

Labels: Jericho, Lost

Everyone should read this book, and read it again every few years after. It's a barometer for me. My reactions to the story depend on my frame of mind when I read it. I've read it while depressed and found it to be the saddest book. I've read it while happy and found it to be celebrating survival and finding joy. I've read it while stoic and alone and found it affirming our place in the universe.

I've read it in the soft cool grass of a college campus.
I've read it in the baked dirt of an African village.

I picked up a copy of this book yesterday evening after work. I always have to buy a new copy when I get the urge to read it, because I always end up giving my previous copy to someone else, urging them to read it. And I never get it back.

I love this book for all it gives me. It opens a window into my soul.