Sick
Funny how the common cold can make you wish you were dead.
I know who did it: daughter of a patient I saw on Friday. She kept coughing without covering her mouth, launching snot rocket after snot rocket. One of them hit home.
The annoying thing is, I’ve already passed it to my son. Isn’t that the opposite of what’s supposed to happen?
So excuse me while I cough up a lung.
D.
Those poor bruised male egos
Here’s the background: on Friday, the Huffington Post’s Amitai Etzioni wrote a short piece criticizing Toni Bentley for a sensationalistic review for a sensationalistic book, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, which front-paged the NY Times. Apparently the book’s premise, which Bentley puts forward without question, is that all sex is sex for money. Etzioni points out that sex workers are usually victimized by their pimps, while sex between equal partners can strengthen the bonds of a relationship which has far more benefits than lusty animal comfort.
That’s not the interesting part. The book’s premise (as reported by Etzioni) is extreme and easily dismantled. The interesting part is the firestorm of male fury Etzioni’s brief article elicited.
To build a barbecue
Yeah, barbecues in a moment. Can I rave about a product first? It’s Howard Restor-A-Finish, which claims you can make your furniture look good as new without going to the bother of stripping and refinishing.
With a simple wipe-on, wipe-off process, most finished wood surfaces that seem to need a refinishing job can be completely restored in a few minutes. White heat rings and water marks, sun fade, oxidation, smoke damage, and most other blemishes can be quickly eliminated.
Our poison dart frog tank sits in a custom-made black walnut cabinet — essentially a big aquarium stand with a canopy top. What was once a handsome piece of furniture has become dingy in recent years, with lots of scratches and water marks. With our recent move, a side panel got cracked, so I had a carpenter come out to give us an estimate on the repair. The carpenter recommended Howard Restor-A-Finish, and oh boy was that a useful tip. I’ve been wiping this stuff on many of our bathroom and kitchen cabinets (the last owners didn’t take good care of the wood) and this stuff is damn near miraculous. The acetone smell overpowers after a while . . . were it not for that, I’d have wiped down all of our wood. I’m looking forward to doing the dining room table, another piece of fine furniture which has seen better days.
BBQ foo below the fold . . .
Faith
My brother the born-again had a good laugh over Jake going to Catholic school. “They’ll make a Christian out of him yet,” he said, or something like that. How little he knows my son! More likely he’ll have the other kids doubting their faith by the end of the school year.
Me, on the other hand? I suspect I’m a true agnostic, inasmuch as atheism feels as much an act of faith as believing in God. Yet the only concept of God which has ever felt right to me is a God who is absolutely foreign and unknowable yet also deeply personal. Some thing inside me which I can never fully understand. Some thing I can talk to, appeal to, yet God only knows if it hears or understands. My God, I suppose, is synonymous with all that is mysterious.
This concept runs afoul of all religious absolutism.
On the drive home, I listened to a radio call-in program with a Brother Something-or-other who has predicted the Rapture to occur in 2011. (Yes, he had an exact date, but it didn’t register with me.) After that, he said, the Salvation Era in our world will come to an end, and the Earth will be transformed into a realm of punishment. Et cetera. Anyway, what really caught my attention was one fellow who called in. Brother So-and-so said, “Caller, what’s your question?” and this dude said, “I have no question. I am beyond questions. I accept everything without question.”
Even Brother Looney who thinks the world will end in two years didn’t know what to do with this guy. “Thank you for sharing,” he said, and quickly moved to the next caller.
I’m not sure why, but I have a fondness for these people who live with absolute certainties; they’re precious, just as cloudless, smogless summer nights are precious. But that fondness ends when these folks try to inflict their certainties on the rest of us. If they would only keep their absolutism to themselves, they would be a delight for those of us who live our lives on spiritual quicksand.
D.
By popular request
Coming soon, to a womb near you.
Gimme some time to compose my thoughts. I’m frazzled from the move, from work, from lack of sleep.
Oh. Still need to pack the kid his lunch.
D.
Away for a bit . . .
We’re moving out of temporary housing today, and our internet service won’t kick in until Tuesday. Regarding the move from this rental: it is amazing how much stuff we’ve accumulated in two months. Most of it is food, but still. I’ll be able to transport this stuff in two trips with the Camry stuffed to the gills, if I’m lucky.
D.
Barely dented it
At least, that’s how it feels. Yes, there are a number of emptied & collapsed boxes, and the kitchen is almost serviceable (or at least it will be, once I find our flatware), and I’ve unpacked and broken down all of those big boxes where they hang clothes — what are those things called? But I haven’t managed to clear a room yet, and I haven’t found our bedding.
Add to that, our problems keep multiplying. We gave away our old gas dryer when we moved from Oregon, and wouldn’t you know it, this place needs a gas dryer. Our old electric dryer won’t adapt. Either we would have to get an electrician to change out the wall socket, or we would need a new (gas) dryer. Our dryer is 12 or 13 years old, so who knows how long it has to live. And I know how much electricians charge. They’re worse than cosmetic surgeons. So I went with the cheaper option and bought a new gas dryer.
Anyway, I’m thoroughly wiped. Dehydration will kill you in this climate. I won’t drink the tap water (it’s heavily chlorinated) and two sodas, decaf though they may be, will not cut it. So I got dehydrated, my allergies have been bugging me all week, and the air quality today was miasmal. And if miasmal isn’t a word, it should be.
Goals for tomorrow: move the tarantulas; find our bedding; finish the kitchen; take receipt of the new gas dryer; wash and dry all the bedding. That’s not so much, is it?
Have I mentioned how much I hate moving?
D.
The damage
We have a three-car garage, one-third of which is mostly full of boxes and assorted junk. By stowing the low priority boxes in the garage, I was able to keep the number of boxes in the house to a minimum. That means I really ought to be able to make our house box-free by Monday.
The garage is another story. Back in Oregon, I never did succeed in ridding the RV garage of all boxes. It became an impromptu storage unit. Some of those boxes were simply ridiculous — about half a dozen packed solid with ten-year-old issues of Nature and Science. What, exactly, did I mean to do with them? Cut out the pretty pictures and use them to make mobiles for hyperintelligent infants?
When we moved south, I managed to rid myself of most of that stuff. Things are better now. Really they are! We never could have fit our belongings from 2 years ago into our current space. The guy who moved us said we weren’t all that bad. He could itemize all our belongings on four pages; some families’ belongings fill fifty pages.
Tomorrow, I start unpacking. Tonight, I need sleep.
D.
I’m back!
Didja miss me?
I drove up to Santa Rosa on the 24th. Without traffic, it’s a 4.5 to 5 hour drive, but somehow I managed to 6.5 hours, what with stopping for gas, food, and water, toothpaste, toothbrush . . . The later it got, the more I began to worry that by the time I made into Santa Rosa, the grocery stores would be closed, so I stopped in Castro Valley to pick up some stuff, then promptly got discombobbled. Don’t ask.
The rental home in Santa Rosa was remarkably dusty. Sleeping in my bed was enough to kick my allergies into fourth gear, and sweeping up the next day only made it worse. I’ve been trying to decide if this is a cold or allergies. It feels like allergy only worse . . . but then, I drove back to Bakersfield with my trunk and rear passenger seat stuffed with bags of cat hair-laden garbage.
Once the movers emptied out all of our stuff, the rental home looked quite nice. Much nicer than when our stuff was still inside, which leads me to the conclusion that our stuff is crap. Which is true, really. We have a black leather (I guess it’s leather) living room three-piece set which looked handsome when we bought it back in the mid-90s, but that was a lot of baby vomit and cat hair ago. Our Ethan Allen dining room table and chairs were once nice, too, and still are, provided you don’t examine them too closely.
But the real problem is the hodge podge of furniture and the abundance of junk. Why, why didn’t anyone tell me in college to pare away all belongings? “Never own more than you can move in the smallest of U-Hauls,” someone should have told me. I guess it’s inevitable. You need a bed or two, a desk or two, a table and chairs. There’s a kitchen to stock, after all, and a TV, and a computer or two or five. To keep possessions to a minimum, I would have had to swear off owning my own home and only rent furnished apartments.
Which really doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, now that I think of it.
Just received the key to the new house . . . and tomorrow’s our move-in date. We’re in our furnished rental until the 30th, so I have a few days to make the new home livable. Part of Thursday, Friday, and the weekend . . . gaaah I’ll barely have time to set up the bedrooms and make the kitchen serviceable! Unpacking is the worst, the absolute worst. Let’s hope I won’t have to do this again any time soon.
D.
What’s in a Moon Cake?
We’re closing on our house this week, which means I’m taking the week off to get our crap moved from Santa Rosa to Bakersfield. Not my idea of a fun vacation; a necessary evil, that’s a better designation. So this morning I did some shopping at our local Chinese market to buy some bao and shumai. That way, Karen and Jake can steam their dinner tonight, and they won’t have to order takeout.
Karen told me “no more bean paste snacks” because the stuff I’ve brought home hasn’t been too fresh. But today, they had Moon Cakes. The real deal. The stuff you only find in Chinese markets a few weeks out of the year, since they’re a special snack for the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival.
According to this Anne-Marie Slaughter Op-Ed for the times (whence the pic), Moon Cakes
are the Chinese equivalent of fruit cake at Christmas – tradition demands that you have one, but no one actually eats one.
I beg to differ. Even the worst Moon Cake is better than the best fruit cake I’ve ever sampled — and I’ve made my own fruit cake, so I left out all that citron crap. But what’s in them? Anne-Marie again on one particular brand:
which is made with an Asian version of phyllo pastry and which has fillings of chopped nuts, red and green bean paste, poppy seed and lotus seed paste, as well asa number of more savory fillings, one of which smells a great deal like truffle.
I was always partial to the kind with a salted egg yolk in the middle — just weird enough to be memorable. Wikipedia claims they’re duck egg yolks. Ours contain egg yolks (no word on the ingredient list as to whether this yolk would go cluck cluck or quack quack), lotus seed paste, and hopefully very little melamine. Yes, they’re made in China.
Not surprisingly, there’s no single answer to the question, “What’s in a Moon Cake?” That Wikipedia article has a nice overview of regional differences in the treat. The Japanese, for example, rarely use salted egg yolks, and prefer red bean (azuki) paste to lotus seed paste. The Vietnamese use mung beans, sometimes coconut, and even durian, which would be a nasty surprise.
The cash register woman wanted to know if I was Chinese. Was she kidding? I told her I grew up in Monterey Park, which isn’t entirely a lie, and that satisfied her, for the obvious reasons. “I know the good stuff,” I told her. Which, sadly*, is true.
D.
*Because apparently, you just can’t find the good stuff outside of the Monterey Park / Alhambra / Rosemead corridor. Not in restaurant food, anyway. Not to save your gwailo soul.