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A podge of hodges

I want to tell you that my family is full of good cooks. My mother, when we were young could invent dishes out of random extra things that would make your mouth water. When she has the proper ingredients she’s quite incredible. She may not have a green thumb, but if you grow something and put it in her kitchen she well make you one of the better meals you’ve had in a good long while.

One of my grandmothers is also a good cook. My grandparents raised a large garden that was essentially subsistence farming. Only, when I was young, I got tired of all those vegetables of course. Now I’d love to see that farm back in action for some creamed corn and various other things we pulled out of the ground.

My other grandmother is not a bad cook, either. People disagree on this, but I think she’s a fine cook. But that could be the grandmother, oldest-grandchild thing. (I’m her favorite. Just ask.)

All of this leads me to one of those curious things in life that we never think about until it is forced upon us. What if something you’ve always eaten is not so very good? For instance, God bless the fine cooks in my family, but they will bake a turkey dry as a dusty road at Thanksgiving.

I never knew what turkey was supposed to taste like until The Yankee cooked one the first fall we dated. Sometime after that her father was telling the story of how, as a boy, he didn’t know what a hamburger was supposed to be like. His mother burned them and then cooked them some more. It took eating at a friend’s to learn what he’d been missing.

It is a good tale, and the full version of that story is great, but that seemed silly to me until I considered the turkey example of my own culinary experiences.

Similar to my family’s apparent hatred of delicate turkey meat, there’s also a big bias against pork chops. I’m not sure what it is, maybe my grandmothers thought you needed to cook them at lunch and again at dinner, just to be sure any germs were dead. Perhaps we distracted them too much in the kitchen. Could have been anything, but even as a kid I knew that my lovely, saintly, giving and patient grandmothers respective pork chops didn’t taste good. I think I was in my mid-20s before I had a good one.

All of the above to say, if you’re not grilling your pork chops, friend, your missing out.

Had a too-hot ride yesterday. Last weekend we reversed a route we occasionally take and I found it grueling in the sense that I wanted to do it again. I thought I could easily improve my time on the trip. Only it was much, much warmer and I found myself questioning the wisdom of all of this within about 10 miles.

I struggled through it though, happy to see a gas station about four miles from home. I stopped for a drink, and this must be regular enough now that they don’t even think twice about bikes being walked into the store.

They have a picnic area to one side of the story and a porch swing on the other side. I sat in the swing for a few minutes to have a drink and top off my bottles. I was only four miles from home, but this was the first truly hot riding of the year.

A man walked out of the store and playfully chastised me for stopping. He had the easy, friendly face that makes you think you’ve seen him before. Maybe you’re supposed to know that guy.

“You aren’t supposed to be taking a break,” he said.

“No” I smiled, “but it is warm out here.”

“Yes it is. You’ll fall out!”

The heat index was about 95 at the time. It was not a strain to believe it, either.

So I came home, dropped the last few miles I had in mind because, as I came up the big hill I realized there were no cars behind me. I could move to the center and then duck into the neighborhood without a problem. And that thought made me so happy I leaned on my handlebars and took the 90 degree turn.

It was only 18 miles, but it was hot. But still, I thought, 18 miles.

And then I read this:

Tamae Watanabe, 73, beat her own age record for an Everest climb by a woman set 10 years ago. She also recovered from an accident in 2005 in which she broke her back and feared she would never climb again.

“It was much more difficult for me this time,” Watanabe told reporters Friday after returning to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, from the mountain. “I felt I was weaker and had less power. This time it was certainly different. I felt that I had gotten old.”

She reached Everest’s summit from the Tibetan side on May 19, at the age of 73 years and 180 days.

That was properly deflating.

Things here are just fine. We’ve finally had to shut the windows and turn the air conditioning on. We’re to the point of the season where you have to start thinking strategically about when you want to do things like, work in the yard, heavy exertion or breathing.

Grilled tonight, watched the second game of the 2010 Auburn football season on DVD. I received the complete championship season as a Christmas gift and they’re becoming regular summer weekend viewing. I hope the Tigers win.

I thought I should take notes to see if and how and when the announcers started trying to talk differently about Cam Newton. So far, after two games against lesser opponents (sorry, State fans) they’ve been properly deferential. The in-game tone may not change, but if you’ll think back the commentary overall got very nasty.

It is great to see this team play though, and as I said tonight, to do so without having to worry about the outcome. There were a few points that season where they were almost defeated. There were moments when you just thought it was all going to come undone because that’s just the way of it. But, knowing they kept it together and defeated everyone, knowing they survived the biggest smear job this side of the classic 1960s Bryant-Butts piece, the feel of it is altogether different.

Watching Cam Newton play in retrospect, I wrote on Twitter, is like knowing the end to the world’s best sonnet.

What I’m saying is that the guy was like poetry. He was pure, violent, graceful poetry. Pure, violent, graceful, championship poetry.

One of the things I have to do this weekend is eat an entire watermelon. We’ll be out of space in the fridge, otherwise. It is ridiculously good, the first of the season and seedless — despite the presence of seeds. I ate a big portion of it last night and the middle of it today.

Still plenty left, if anyone is interested.

adventures / iPhone / music / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
22
May 12

“… then you’re not from Jersey.”

We visited Fox Theatre in Atlanta to see the Tony award-winning Jersey Boys. Great show: funny, dramatic and a terrific juxebox musical. Many of the tunes, of course, have forced their way into a certain level of timelessness, and all of your favorite Four Seasons songs made their way into the show.

It was a great way to learn about the band, too. Some things had to be capsulized for theater purposes, of course. Condensing the better part of three decades into two hours can’t be easy. But there’s a great tale in this show and, if you didn’t know any better you’d think it highly improbable.

My in-laws saw it on Broadway some time back. They grew up with this music, they lived in some of the same areas, so they find it very relatable. We might have been the youngest people in the place when we saw the show, but it transcends generations easily. After all, we grew up with the music too, just in a different time.

They said the performers they saw were better than the original Four Seasons. (The guy they saw playing Valli was in his debut role on Broadway. Incredible.)

Here’s that original cast performing at the Tony Awards in 2006:

The cast we saw wasn’t the Four Seasons, but they were great. Catch the show if you can.

adventures / cycling / iPhone / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
21
May 12

There are no clever title on Mondays

We went for a ride yesterday. Well, I went for a ride. The Yankee is in training and so she did something called a brick. This involves swimming and riding and I’ve no idea at all how bricks have entered into this.

So she swam in the neighborhood pool. The Olympic pool was closed, on account of their being no Olympians there that day. (There usually are. We live in a place where she gets to be drowned in the wake of people showing off Olympic ring tattoos. Not a bad perk to the locale.)

We counted out the laps, measuring and doing math. The neighborhood pool is small; she did a lot of laps. And then she hopped on her bike and I hopped on mine and I chased her through the countryside.

She was moving on well. I had great legs, owing to taking a day or two off, perhaps. But I was also going on the longest ride I’ve been on in a while, so I wanted to pace myself.

I caught her on a hill after about eight miles. I’m a little bit stronger on hills and this was a series of three respectable climbs. She caught me again later, I let her play out in front and then chased her down just before home. She took the direct route and I meandered through the neighborhood. It was a 20.75 mile ride. Felt great.

I’d intended to take a few wide pictures to celebrate the day, but there was too much huffing.

Did take this somewhere along the way though:

Pretty as a roadside wildflower can be, it was the three buds on this one that intrigued me.

And now for something beautiful:

That is the Lyrid meteor shower, from space. Did you catch Florida as it moved by?

Astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS took the shots last month and they were converted into the inspiring quasi-video. The Lyrid meteors, dust trails from the comet Thatcher, have been observed from Earth for thousands of years. I learned all of this from a Huntsville reporter.

Finally: the grading is done. Now on to other things.

movies / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
May 12

Still grading things

I will only say this about the grading of things: it takes time.

But you get a lot of pleasant surprises in final papers. Some of them are of the “Nice job!” variety. Others are a pleasure derived from seeing a student’s hard work, or how far they’ve come. Others are purely unintentional.

For example, somewhere early in the school year we made a joke about the word plethora in a news story. It was funny, we had a good laugh and one of the editors of the Crimson tried to sneak it into copy whenever he could, as a way to amuse us.

I ran across that word in a final paper today and now I no longer think of it as simply a Three Amigos bit:

Now it is a teaching moment. The word, not the scene from the movie.

This could be used in a classroom. Ken Burns’ enthusiasm is still contagious:

And, finally, this. This was on television late tonight. I wish it wasn’t. I watched an hour, mortified, before I could finally stop:

I saw Pauly Shore years ago. (Don’t judge me. I took a date who I knew loved his gimmick.) He does a decent standup routine. His father opened for him. Dad killed.

music / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
9
May 12

The last day of class

You can get a omelet at a lot of places across this great late and, truly, across this beautiful marble floating in the sky. Many of them will be good, too. But sometimes you run across a chef who’s making them to the music in his head. And it is almost art, this spreading of chopped things and the mixing in of egg and cheese and seasonings.

Our guy at the Caf at Samford, he’s a friendly guy, big laughs, big smiles, carries on running conversations with a lot of the people that he sees every day. And he’s something of an artist, maybe.

Or maybe it is just a fine omelet full of fresh tomatoes. Either way.

The last class of the semester. We got in our last presentations. We discussed the final paper. They brought me cookies. I thanked them for their patience in the class. I told them I hoped they learned as much as I did and, I said, “This is my favorite part of the semester. Have a safe and happy summer. I look forward to seeing you in the fall.”

One of the students stood up and cynically said “That sounds like a prepared speech.”

I was so proud.

In my office I cleaned things up and did the last few remaining chores of the day. This stretched out longer than it had to, but this day always does. I lingered to listen to Van Morrison:

Why it is Van Morrison I am not sure. On the last day of my first semester at Samford I was parking the car when some really obscure tune of his was playing on whatever random satellite channel I was listening to at the time. It seemed appropriate for the day and I have a weakness for appropriate, yet pointless traditions.

Wednesday omelets seem like a good tradition …