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adventures / family / food / Monday / photo — Comments Off
18
Mar 13

Try the cookie butter

Before we took the in-laws back to the airport we visited Lonestar for lunch, where we had the waitress who tries hard to put every other waitstaff who’s tried to hard to shame. And she did. Everything was delicious and amazing, mostly because she loved it. And you’d have thought she’d been there three days after about 18 months out of work and just happy with the prospect of getting the bills paid and maybe a little take-home sirloin at the end of it all, but she said she’s been there a year.

So the orders come and go and the bread comes and then the lunch comes, because that’s the order of things. More bread is delivered. She visits the table to ask about the food, as all discerning waitstaff will do. She did it a little too fast, though, so I could only assume that my unrolling of the silverware was superlative in every way. She asked my father-in-law about his steak — as he was going to be traveling the bulk of the day lunch was key — and he was ready to emotionally invest himself in his potato, but now the question was just out there.

So he had to go to the steak. The waitress, meanwhile, did something maybe you aren’t supposed to do, I don’t know, but it seemed odd. She leaned both hands on the table, which felt wrong considering our food was now here. And she really wanted him to try his steak. Try the steak!

And for some reason all I could think of was “NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to steak!”

He obliged her and pronounced it delicious. She concurred, which just made you wonder about what was truly going on in the kitchen. She said it was the bone that made it good, which isn’t exactly true, but everything was so amazing and delicious and wonderful and the textures of everything was so perfectly green or yellow or whatever. She must have been on ecstasy. That’s what I’m going with. She needed more tables and less pills.

So we had lunch, the folks packed up and we set out for the airport at a time that would allow them the generally desired two hours of people watching on Terminal C. I missed how we arrived at this necessity, but someone back-timed it, allowed for the time zone and we had our jump off point. We missed it by eight minutes. And we still had to get gas and drive the necessary 99 miles to the airport.

We arrived at the airport precisely seven minutes behind schedule, my mother-in-law promising a summary of their travel segments in a post-flight report. The sign at security said 10-20 minutes, which was cutting into the people watching time. We stood and watched them sail without incident through the first part of the security theater. It seems that they both possess driver’s licenses that match the names on their boarding passes.

We turned and left the airport, dodging rain drops and trying to decide what to do now that it was raining and rush hour. There is a Trader Joe’s nearby. The Yankee said she could get some things, but the rain, and rush hour and I said I’d never been to Trader Joe’s, so that sealed the deal.

And amid the dusky rain and the finally coiffed and intensely decorated people of midtown I had my first Trader Joe’s experience. These are some of my notes.

Some things never change, no matter the store, no matter how high-end, culturally adaptable and politically fashionable the target audience. Every store, everywhere, occasionally gets a guy in camo cargo shorts and a white t-shirt. And, also, traffic jams full of people oblivious to everything around them. That sounds catty, but I found it to be a relief. Also, you might note in the background, unisex restrooms. That’s just a grocery store bridge too far:

Brand diminution. I’ve been here four minutes and already I’m not sure what store I’m in. The name seems to change with every vaguely international flavor. And the labeling is already slipping from the precious to the universally childlike. This is a fine enough place, but this box strikes me as the thing that will end up in all future image searches of “Graphic design in the 2000-teens.”

I don’t know about you, but my great-grandfather and his son after him ate these wafer snacks, they were usually pink or this mild orange color and looked a lot like this. It made me think of them and smile, and then wonder if they were feeding me natural vegetable cellulose as a child. And what of the unnatural vegetable cellulose? Don’t those guys have a union? Where are they?

I am now kicking myself for not spinning this container around to see exactly what it is made of. I know better, I know better, I know better. And the Trader Joe’s site isn’t helping either. Someone please go check this out and let me know.

The logical conclusion of the popularity of someecards.com:

A bit more from the line art characters that provide us with the retro-neo-post modern pop art ideals that so blithely inform our generation. Post-consumer content, a phrase surely designed to rip all of the joy out of the language, is a product made from from waste that’s been used by a consumer, disposed of, and diverted from landfills. Now go wipe your child’s face:

Game changer: Trader Joe’s bathroom tissue. Is it that the one guy has a passing Rooseveltian resemblance or that the other guy needs some of this stuff – and right now?

At least they take their cornbread seriously.

So Trader Joe’s, interesting packaging, clever names on many of the items. The vast majority of their inventory was marketed as their own product, which probably makes someone checking out at register three think there is actually a Joe somewhere, who perhaps engaged in some fair trade for post-consumer manure to fertilize his humble fields to bring this product to you. The biggest move away from the Trader Joe’s brand was on the beer and wine aisle.

I felt healthier just being there. We purchased several bags of things, none of the items pictured here, and The Yankee pronounced them as good deals. We shop smart like that, cherry picking all of the best products from the most economical places we can conveniently access. The airport tripped helped with that today.

And, then, of course, we waited out the better part of a meteorological deluge. The in-laws plane was delayed, and delayed again. There was a missing flight attendant, presumably whisked away to Oz. There was a search for another one. And also an inspection of their plane for hail damage, because that’s what you do when there is hail.

As we were about at the point of passing the airport to head for home the flight was canceled. We thought briefly we might be picking them up and taking them back home for the night. They found another flight, which was still somehow short a flight attendant. (Perhaps if they consolidated crews … )

This plane, much later, was also canceled for reasons that we haven’t learned. What was supposed to be an 8 p.m. arrival at their home airport began to look like spending a night in the Atlanta airport. We found this unacceptable. Two flights canceled underneath you, you are not struggling through an evening on Terminal C at Hartsfield. We will return to the airport!

This was politely refused.

OK, fine. We will book you a stay at an airport hotel. The Yankee did the reservations, coached them to the shuttle and they arrived there to find they’ll have a flight out first thing in the morning and the last room of the night.

That’s timing. This was all done, of course, by a series of phone calls and a few searches on an international network of computers and resolved in short order. A nice man in a large passenger van took them to a hotel they’d never heard of on a side of town they’d never visited and got them safely to a room. We did this from our house after a long stay at an all-natural, organic, feel-better-about-yourself grocery store, insulating our frozen purchases in a special bag made with space material and driving home, dodging trees felled by straight line winds in the relative comfort and safety of a marvelous piece of Japanese engineering that was assembled in the U.S. and Canada. It is an amazing world.

We celebrated with Chick-fil-A, which will let you order online from your particular store, but insists you call personally to obtain their hours, so we still have a way to go.

Oh, at Trader Joe’s we bought something called Cookie Butter. You should look into it. You’re welcome.

Auburn / baseball / family / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
16
Mar 13

Your typical incredible, wonderful Saturday

Talking turkey with professor Mark Smith at the Louise Kreher Forest Preserve. He lectured on most everything you could think of about the wild turkey, what they eat, how they choose mates, how they raise their young, mortality rates and so on:

And then we made turkey calls. We yelped and clucked and keekeed and gobbled on slates and boxes.

Because we know people at the preserve we got to hold turtles:

The Yankee and her mom did not enjoy watching the turtles eat their worms, though.

We walked to the waterfall, meandered through the woods and then had subs for lunch. We went to the baseball game, which we aren’t going to talk about this weekend at all, it seems, because it hasn’t been good in any way. Except for the weather, which has been stunningly gorgeous the last two days. These are the days you’d order from Amazon, have them shipped Prime and be in disbelief when they arrived early.

We had dinner at Warehouse Bistro, which is always delicious. They’d called us to say there was a hot water problem, so we’d be dining outside, but by the time we got there that was fixed.

We sat next to a long table of one large, happy family who celebrating a life or a marriage or a death. It was hard to say, but they all took turns giving speeches and it was beautiful. I filed one away for future use.

The chocolate torte was also wonderful. But try the duck breasts. That’s what I had tonight. Or the rack of lamb, which is another favorite. Or the filet, or the crab cakes … Really, anything at the Warehouse Bistro is worth having. Also they’ll unabashedly play Hank Williams next to the Delta Blues next to Harry Connick, Jr. I don’t know why that matters, but I noticed it and it seemed like it could be important later.

cycling / family / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
14
Mar 13

Anyone have any marshmallows?

Pausing on a quick evening ride:

I saw a fire as I rounded for home. I believe someone was doing a prescribed burn to clear out the underbrush, but there was no one around.

I sit there for a moment or two, looking or waiting for someone to come back to the fire, but no one is around. The occasional car or truck cruises through, slowing down in the smoke and haze, and I’m taking pictures. So, great, someone probably think I started this. I did not.

The sun was just to that point of getting to ready to let go and the world was quiet, except for a little whirling wind over distant crackling. It was as if a great thing had been done, but the environment didn’t know what to do with it. There was a stunned feeling. There was an anticipation.

Love the woods, but not a fan of this fire. Just down this little country road there was a house and in the driveway of that house there was a man who made a big point of waving at me as I went by. In his yard was another small fire. I assume he was taking care of the serious business of the controlled burn. He wave awfully emphatically.

Most importantly, no one stopped me to ask if I did it. i did not.

Atlanta by nightfall, we picked up the in-laws for the weekend. There was a former basketball player waiting at the airport and giggling teens and people who were happy to take their picture with him. There was a family looking for their Marine and a limo driver flagging down clients with names on his iPad. Everyone was walking to the left of everything. It was amazing and awkward at the same time.

Sort of like Segways, which are now appearing at the airport. Because navigating the crowds isn’t challenging enough on most days. Who needs a Segway here? There are already shuttles and a train. There are wheelchairs and carts. I suppose if you’re working there and going back and forth you could use something that moves at slightly faster than walking speed that’d be the way to go.

But I rode 30 miles late today, through fire.

family / memories / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Mar 13

Happy Birthday mom

I left her a voicemail while I was outside and it was gray and cold and windy. She called me back while I was in the library, but I needed to leave anyway. She was on the way home from a movie, trying to get back before winter fell, so she could sit and enjoy the rest of her evening in a warm, dry place. We talked about old friends and impossible things we did and our general awesomeness among other things. We’d sent her flowers earlier in the day and she’d texted me but now she said in person on the phone that they were beautiful and colorful, which is exactly what I’d hoped for.

She had a little smile in her voice when she said it, which was the other thing I’d hoped for, and constituted the best part of the day.

And many more …

collarbone / cycling / family / history / Thursday — Comments Off
10
Jan 13

A review up top, a ride below

About the map: I spent an afternoon last weekend building that. I had to make the markers myself, so all of those little pins had some sort of sequence to them. I’d found my great-grandfather’s unit history online, and it goes day-by-day, so I could follow along, village by village, during his time in Europe.

And I found all of that because a friend of mine, a history grad, suggested I go to the county courthouse where he would have filed his discharge papers when he came home in 1945. Soldiers, he said, did that with more diligence back then.

So at Christmas I went to the appropriate courthouse. I looked on the sign in the lobby and determined it was in the old building. A security guard told me to go up to the fifth floor. Two ladies there told me I needed to be one more building over, in Veterans Affairs.

I walked over to Veterans Affairs and a very nice lady dropped everything to try and help me. The problem is that my great-grandfather’s records were lost in a huge fire in the 1970s. The government, if you formalize a request, asks for your help in rebuilding their records. If I had the records I’d be happy too. What I do have is his enlistment card at Ft. McPherson in Georgia. I have two references of him in the local newspaper — once when he shipped out and another in a list of local servicemen wounded in battle. I have his dates of birth and death and his serial number.

So the very nice lady at Veterans Affairs, just a few days before Christmas, burns up the phones. She calls every surrounding VA office, the VFW, we fill out forms. She found, in one of her phone calls, my great-grandfather’s discharge papers.

Some other lady, on a very cold day, had to go outside to an onsite storage facility to pull the file. She faxed it over. And, together, the nice VA lady and I pored over every line, taking turns to explain different aspects of the mysterious codes to one another. She’d become invested in the search, and was almost as emotional about it as I was. The DD-214 had the date he shipped out, where he returned home and, before that, the date he was wounded — January, Belgium, the Bulge.

Never liked reading about the Bulge, now I have to become well-versed in it.

His discharge papers had his unit, finding the unit history allowed for the creation of the map. Now I know he spent more time convalescing in a hospital in Georgia than he did getting shot at. Maybe that means some of his family was able to go to south Georgia and see him. Now I know he had Christmas in Metz, which was surely not where he wanted to be, but better than dreading mortar shells.

I wonder how much of Europe this country boy with little education saw before he was put into an active unit. Probably not much, but still, I like this idea of my great-grandfather, at 24 and away from home for the first time in his life, seeing Paris. Even if he did, the best view was probably his farm when he got back home near the end of 1945.

I came to this information 12 years after he died, mostly because he was not the sort to talk about his experience in the war and, in my early 20s, I wasn’t quite ready to find these things out. Sometimes we have to move sooner, the present is what is present.

Visited my ortho today. Actually made him sit down and talk to me for a few minutes. I did this by complaining. It would have been preferable if he’d listened better months ago, when I was also complaining. But I finally got him to think about the things beyond just my collarbone.

I have the muscle spasms, you see, exacerbated by exertion and driving. It doesn’t take much to do too much and I tend to have to drive a fair amount. He asked about working out, I told him not so much, because of the muscular problems. I told him I have only just this week started riding my bike — which I should have been doing in September or so — because of my back.

He said maybe it is a degenerative disc problem. You are at that age —

Let me stop you right there, doc. I saw another ortho over the break who specifically looked at the neck and that isn’t the problem.

So I got another prescription, this one for inflammation. I was so pleased with the idea of not taking any more medication, too. He wants me to consider more therapy. We’ll see I guess. I’ve grown weary of the “Everyone’s recovery is different” answer. Almost as much as dealing with a slow recovery.

But, hey, after the visit to the doctor’s office I rode my bike a little bit. Today I felt like I could have done more, but I was sneaking in a few turns of the pedal in between rain and darkness.

Still waiting for my confidence to return on little things like diving into turns, riding one-handed and riding in the rain. So I have to wait out an afternoon shower. Maybe I’ll try the rain next week.

There’s a mail drop box a few miles from home so I stuffed an envelope in my jersey and rode up there and back, just getting in before night fell. This is my fourth ride back, none of them worth writing home about, all of them short, but this one could have been longer. It seems like my three short rides this week at least woke up my legs, if my neck is still sore.

That’s a question of posture. I want to look far into the distance, but the neck doesn’t want to be held like that just yet. So I have to look short, and then peer up as far as my eyes will go and only occasionally glance ahead. I haven’t decided how much of that literal pain in the neck is a muscular issue and how much is cranking my upper body in an unusual way so as to make sure that, this time, I don’t run over anything. It still feels like every little piece of debris is out to get me.

Silly, I know.