Red Robins: We Were So Bad
I told you how I wasted my hamburger and cholesterol calories on the burger at Tin Cow, but the problem was, it didn’t solve the yearning problem. I yearned for a totally tasty burger like . . . Red Robins.
Red Robin and I go way back – back to the dive on Lake Union, a bar that sold great burgers. You could walk to the Red Robin from campus, and the place was always full of hungry, thirsty students from the UW campus. I think the only food they sold was a burger and fries; probably you could have a cheeseburger if you wanted something extra. It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a bar.
Today’s Red Robin is so much more a restaurant, and holy smoke, the selections. At least fifteen kinds of burgers, and then also chicken, veggy burgers and fish. Salads. You can get anything.
But what I wanted was a hamburger. I settled on a new one, the Smoke N’ Pepper. It was as good as my normal favorite the A1 Burger, maybe a little better.
This is what the Red Robin photo online looks like:
This is what mine looked like, and yes, sadly, we also ordered the onion rings – look at those onions! And the batter is crisp and thin! (I only ate two and a half.)
AdventureMan had the Whiskey River Burger, another old favorite, with a delicious BBQ Sauce.
It was SO good. The other good thing is that when we left, we were on total beef overload. We don’t eat a lot of red meat, and it just clogs your system. We still felt full at dinner time, and just had a half sandwich when we were hungry enough. Even the next day, I thought I would never be hungry again; beef takes a long time to digest. But oh, while we were so bad, those hamburgers were so GOOD.
Eid Mubarak 2014
To all my Muslim friends, may your celebration be full of family and all good things with which God may bless you!
“Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor . . . “
Who are we?
I’m listening to a heartbreaking discussion on National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm show about the masses of children heading toward the southern border of the United States.
Anti-immigration is nothing new, not in the United States, not in newer countries. It is shocking to me, however, that people who came from somewhere else are so strongly opposed to allowing these desperate children in. If they are running for our border – and they are – they are desperate. They are desperate to escape violent death, and death by starvation, death of the spirit eeking out a living day to day.
“They come here for a hand-out!” is the most common complaint.
Read your American history. Very few immigrants – your ancestors, American citizens – arrived with money. Most relied on friends, family, the immigrant community, social services – whatever they needed to survive until they could get on their feet.
And get on their feet they did. Immigrants to America come here to work hard, believing that working hard will give them a chance at a better life. Your ancestors and mine – they came and worked hard, scraping together the money to build a business and/or to send their kids to schools. If you’ve ever attended a citizenship ceremony, you will love the jubilation. They don’t want a handout. They want a chance at building a decent life.
So now it’s “I’ve got mine, go back where YOU belong?”
When I grew up, not even in the United States proper, but in a U.S. territory, we sang a wonderful song, from a poem by Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, which is on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I’ve never forgotten those words we all sang as children. The immigrant flows into America are our life-blood. You can keep your stale traditions and meaningless pomp, she cries, send me those willing to work hard and yearning for freedom.
How can we refuse CHILDREN seeking asylum? Each child we feed, house and educate will have a chance to become contributing citizens. The face of our nation is changing, has already changed greatly and will continue to change, and what we choose today will have a critical effect on what our society will look like tomorrow.
Do we still yearn for liberty for all? Do we want a highly stratified society where some are born to high paying jobs and others relegated to trades (I’ve seen how this works in another country; it’s stultifying.) Restricting access to all that we enjoy will create a wholly different society, a zero-sum-game society, where your loss is my gain, instead of an everyone wins society, where my success lifts you, too. Our country thrives on the creation of wealth; ideas are generated, resources and labor pools are created, they are not finite, they transition. Immigrants fuel the kind of innovation and population flow that keeps the lifeblood of our country flowing.
My family has been in the US a long time. We qualify as daughters-of-just-about-everything. We were immigrants; we were not native-born. The entire United States, other than the First People, are immigrants. We are immigrants, all of us. It makes us strong.
Contemporary Art Bike Racks – Another Reason to Love Pensacola
These are so cool, on every corner south of Garden on Palafox. They are not only handy for our urban riders, they LOOK great, very svelte, minimal. Very cool. Woooo HOOOO on you, Pensacola!
Miscellaneous Around Anchorage
Anchorage bumper sticker:
View from our hotel room:
Live aquatic transportation:
Moose crossing signs are everywhere; hitting a moose is a lot like hitting a camel, not good for your car and not good for the moose:
We didn’t expect much from the Golden Palace on Tudor, near our hotel, and we were delighted at the quality of the meal. It was wonderful and spicy, and the flavors shone!
For All Young Parents: I Salute You
Every time I see this commercial, it gives me a big grin. These little babies and children need so much attention, and we applaud the loving care their parents put into cherishing them, sustaining them, nurturing them, civilizing them, educating them, exercising them, and sharing with them until they can care for themselves.
Young parents, you are doing the toughest job in the world. We see you. We see your sacrifices, and the effects of sleep deprivation, we see you giving, giving, giving to those who cannot give back, and we are in awe of your loving patience to your children.
I also love it that men are also featured prominently as caregivers 🙂
Rehab, An Unlikely Hero
I love this story. When you start reading the bible, you come across the most human of our race, you have the dramas of sibling rivalry, disobedience, and murder, the heartbreak of childlessness, slavery, and terrible loss, you have marriages and wars . . . the full spectrum of human behavior is there. And you have Rehab, a prostitute, who has heard of this God, but is not a Hebrew. She will help them in return for safety for her family. All who shelter in her small apartment, protected by a red ribbon (or rope), live.
In a later chapter of the bible, we learn how Rehab figures in the family line of Jesus.
Joshua 2:1-14
2Then Joshua son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.’ So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there. 2The king of Jericho was told, ‘Some Israelites have come here tonight to search out the land.’ 3Then the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come only to search out the whole land.’
4But the woman took the two men and hid them. Then she said, ‘True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from. 5And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly, for you can overtake them.’ 6She had, however, brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax that she had laid out on the roof. 7So the men pursued them on the way to the Jordan as far as the fords. As soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.
8 Before they went to sleep, she came up to them on the roof 9and said to the men: ‘I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before you. 10For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea* before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. 11As soon as we heard it, our hearts failed, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below. 12Now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family. Give me a sign of good faith 13that you will spare my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and deliver our lives from death.’ 14The men said to her, ‘Our life for yours! If you do not tell this business of ours, then we will deal kindly and faithfully with you when the Lord gives us the land.’
No matter who we are, no matter what we have done, the love of God follows us everywhere, with the free gift of salvation, if only we see it, as Rehab did, and ask for it. God is great!
The Little Mermaid; One of the Best Restaurants in Homer
The last time we were in Homer, we tried to get into The Mermaid, which was near the Driftwood Inn, but it was full, and worse – fully reserved. We had not made reservations. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake this year, but as they do, things had changed, The Mermaid was under new management and the people who had created it’s huge success were at another restaurant, The Little Mermaid. So we made a reservation at The Little Mermaid and hoped for the best.
Oh my.
It is about as opposite to Captain Patties as can be. While both emphasize great fresh seafood, The Little Mermaid is more experimental.
We were really glad we had made reservations. There is a bar, very small, and then there are like four booths and maybe three more bar stools at a counter in the room to the right.
This is the exterior:
This is the blackboard, posted to the left as you enter, actually in the bar area which overlooks the harbor:
And this is a view into the kitchen:
A view of the interior where the booths are:
Our appetizer, Halibut Balls with Teriyaki Sauce. This was absolutely delicious, and I have never seen halibut presented this way before:
Now the sad part. When our meals came, I forgot to take any more photos. AdventureMan had Kodiak Scallops, which were very simple and absolutely delicious. I had a Brazilian Stone Bowl, a big (stone) bowl of Alaskan seafood in a coconut milk liquid, boiling hot and it stayed hot; it was novel and unforgettable and delicious. As we were waiting for our meals, the waitress came and asked me if we could wait just a couple minutes more; they had a fresh batch of mussels in and would like to throw a few into my dish, would I mind waiting?
We had seen the man walk from the harbor into the restaurant, carrying a big bag of freshly caught mussels. Of course I would wait!
For me, this was one of our best meals of the trip, and if you go to Homer, be sure to make a reservation at The Little Mermaid, out on Homer Spit. This is also where the locals go; it is a very popular place, deservedly.
The Pratt Museum: A Gem in Homer, AK
It’s our last day in Homer, and we are going to the Pratt Museum
The Pratt Museum is a WOW. It is beautiful, for one thing, all woods and stone, a beautifully crafted, cared for museum. We happened in at a relatively quiet time and had time to talk with the volunteer at the desk, who sold me several raffle tickets for this year’s quilts. I really want to win it; it has blueberries all over it. I suppose I could do a blueberry quilt, but this one is already done!
They also have a super gift shop, with lots of gift ideas, many locally produced by local artists. You know how it is with tourists, there are a lot of places that sell schlock. When you want a step up, go to a museum gift shop. I used to buy my blank cards at the Tarek Rajab museum in Kuwait, beautiful cards with silver bedouin and Arabic jewelry, or doors of old Kuwait, old Oman, etc. Lovely, artistic cards.
This is one of the permanent exhibit quilts. It may have been on the bottom floor, with the marine exhibits. Things got crazy after our quiet visit with the volunteer; a large group of students came in, maybe eighth grade, with all the chaos and laughter kids that age engender. We hurried ahead of them to the exhibits, and there are a LOT of exhibits.
This was a map of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, from which Alaska is still recovering. We learned something interesting, and that is that as horrible as the spill has been for the environment, it put Alaska on the map, raised awareness, and that is when the tourists really started pouring in, maybe like to see the splendors of Alaska before they are destroyed by oil spills or climate change.
These are some of the Alaska birds you can see on the Kenai peninsula, including, I think, a puffin 🙂
The Pratt has so many clever and original exhibits. I loved the film presentation on how the First Nation peoples catch, smoke and store salmon. If there is ever a zombie apocolypse and I have to survive, now I know how to prepare and keep salmon over long stretches of time by smoking it and drying it in strips. And protecting it from bears, who love salmon.
This presentation was like a table, but the movie was on the table. There were foods, and it was like we were the people eating. Someone would pass a dish and explain a little about what it was, like whale blubber or seaweed something. As much as I like to try new things, some of what they had on the table was stuff I would cut into very tiny pieces and push around the plate so it looked like I had tried some but I didn’t. I loved the presentation; so interactive.
Although there were a lot of really good exhibits, we sort of hurried through once the crowd arrived. We did spend a good amount of time in the garden outside, where I laughed at myself. I learned a lot about myself this trip, why I love the colors I love (mostly greens – blues – purples and why I don’t like a lot of yellow or red in a garden. Almost everything in this garden was blue -purple – fuchsia with just a smattering of tiny yellow flowers, not a speck of red, except muted in some of the foliage, which was mostly shades of green. AdventureMan laughed, too, as it is the bane of his gardening existence that I want the bright red Turk’s Heads and the big yellow Cassia where I can’t see them.
All Who Exalt Themselves Will Be Humbled
Today’s Gospel reading makes me squirm; it does not come naturally to me, a first-born, to be humble. I love being special. I love to be honored, to be given a seat of honor, to get that upgrade. And I think I am very human, so I imagine the reaction this radical teaching received among his own people, and among the scribes and Pharisees who also loved being special . . .
Matthew 23:1-12
23Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; 3therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach. 4They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear,* and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. 6They love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have people call them rabbi. 8But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students.* 9And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. 10Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.* 11The greatest among you will be your servant. 12All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
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