The Edmonds Market
I made a quick round of the market very early, as I wanted flowers to welcome Mom back. First round – maple bars, flowers, farm grown zucinni and carrots, and some lovely farm-raised lamb chops for dinner.
Later, Mom told me about the wonderful Pear and Gorgonzola pizzas made at the market, and after some grocery shopping, I stopped by and ordered the Pear Gorgonzola and the Pizza Fresca, both vegetarian, and, woo hooo, very thin crusted, and baked right there on the street in a special oven they have created:
Mom was right. The pizzas were really, really good. We also had enough left over to freeze several slices to microwave on a night when she doesn’t feel like a heavy dinner.
While I was waiting for my pizzas, I visited my favorite soap maker. Last year, I asked for clove soap. AdventureMan and I fell in love with clove soap in Zanzibar, and we have used ever sliver and are yearning for more. This year, she had it! And more! Wonderful soaps, but these two are my favorites:
Sorry there is no photo of the gorgeous finished pizzas, but we gobbled them right up. 🙂
Old Spice Man Goes Viral
Today on NPR I listened to a lengthy interview with Ismail Mustafa, the new Old Spice Man, and actor in what has been called the most successful advertising campaign, EVER.
My friends, this is totally hilarious. Old Spice is so old that my father wore it. It is so old that is has been way past unsexy, and this campaign boldly reversed everything.
Not only is it getting hit after hit on YouTube, Old Spice is now flying off the shelf. This is a total hoot!
Seattle Library Flash Mob
“I knew you’d like a Seattle one, if you haven’t seen it already,” my friend wrote to me. I totally do. Seattle ROCKS! What a great study break, and what a cool library to allow the Seattle Theatre Group to stage it there. 🙂
Flash Brindisi
Why? Why? Why am I never at these places when these Flash events take place??? This took place April 24, 2010 at the Reading Terminal Market in Pennsylvania.
Hope this brightens your day as it did mine. I just love watching the crowd reaction, and you can see the opera singers are just having a ball with the whole scene. 🙂
True Blood Season Three
First, if you have never watched True Blood, go to the library and check out Season 1 and Season 2, or buy them, or download them – whatever it takes, watch every episode so you will get where this show is coming from (grammatical: from where this show is coming).
We don’t watch this show to learn about Louisiana. We watch this show because the writers are truly gifted, and sometimes in the midst of yet another totally over-the-top situation, there is a line tossed off that is hysterically funny.
As the vampires discussed ethics last night, the Queen of the Vampires said “isn’t moral anarchy kind of the point?”
LLOOOLLL! When we first met the vampires in Season 1, they were mostly a nasty bunch, no morals, living in viperous “nests” and preying on humans. Little by little we have begun to know a few as ‘people’ and discovered they are not all bad. Vampire Queen reminds us that long-lived vampires live by a different code, and that the problems arise when mingling with humankind.
Don’t expect any of this to make sense. Just grab that speeding train, get aboard and hang on for a wild ride. 🙂
As they warn – nudity, sexual content, adult language – none of this is for children. This is definitely grown-ups only.
Warning: As raucous and raunchy as True Blood gets, it has a thick underlying morality. It may not be my morality or yours, but it is exploring some interesting and pertinent issues.
Get Him to the Greek
AdventureMan and I saw the most hilarious movie, Get Him to the Greek.
I don’t think this movie will ever show in Kuwait or in Qatar. It contains violence, drugs, alcohol abuse, nudity, gross sexual content – it could be incredibly offensive. Somehow, it manages to be totally hilarious, reminiscent of the old classic This is Spinal Tap It also manages to have some serious moments, and a hint of redemption.
A lovable but nerdy employee at a record company is assigned to fly to London, meet and accompany an aging rock star to a come-back concert in Los Angeles. There are multiple opportunities for disaster and unpredictable moments. No one can tell you how sad and funny and pathetic and disgusting and . . . well, mostly funny – this movie is going to be. Even the music the rock star sings is hilarious and totally made up for this movie.
Trust me, this is not a family movie. It is, as our son said, raunchy. You do not want to be with teens or adult children. It would be squirmingly uncomfortable. We found it hilarious.
Grilling at Garden Gate Nurseries
Late Friday, we saw a notice in the paper that there would be a class on grilling vegetables held on Saturday at the Garden Gate Nursery. Any excuse will do; AdventureMan calls and finds there are still a couple slots available and we sign up.
Oh what fun! The teacher, Kim, was clever and entertaining, and best of all, she has a gift for imagining what flavors will go together if fresh ways. We learned how to grill corn-on-the-cob which is plentiful right now in the Florida markets, and how to grill pineapple, with an orange sauce, fabulous over ice cream.
Garden Gate is so clever, combining gardening and growing and grilling, but also, they are coming up with classes on how to manage the vegetables and fruits that you grow – cooking with basil, iced courses made with exotic and unexpected ingredients, new ways to utilize all those zuccini and tomatoes . . . Well worth the drive. 🙂
How To Be a Southern Lady
You’d think moving back to your own country would be a piece of cake, wouldn’t you? We nomads know better. Young people who travel to other countries to go to school know better. Military people know better. Missionaries know better. Diplomats know better. Anyone who has spent time living abroad know that it works both ways – you have an impact where you are living, and where you are living has an equal impact on you. You may go back, but you are never the same.
With this move, AdventureMan and I have been too busy trying to get settled and to take care of the incredible amount of bureaucratic detail it takes to relocate. Even with AdventureMan ‘retired’, the days are flying by, and we don’t know why we are so busy.
For one thing, I am doing my own housework, and I am finding I am not very good at it. Like I am good at getting laundry done, and even folded, but I haven’t ironed in a long time, and the things that need ironing are stacking up. I have bought a beautiful new ironing board, and a beautiful iron . . . and some starch, the liquid kind I like, not the spray kind. . . but I haven’t set it up, and I haven’t ironed, not a thing. I have discovered that all my packed things looked a lot better after hanging in the closets for a week, most of the wrinkles fell out, lucky me. But . . . the day of reckoning is coming.
The worst part, for me, is cleaning my floors. My floors are supposed to be beautiful; wood and tile floors. They actually ARE beautiful, maybe two days a week, the day I clean them and the next day, but five days a week, they need work. I wish I had asked my cleaning lady in Doha how she got my floors so beautifully clean. I wish I had paid more attention. I keep looking in the store for some miracle, a machine that will clean them in a heartbeat and make them all shiny. . .
The wonderful thing about moving into this culture – and it truly is a different culture from the one in which I was raised – is that we have our wonderful son and his wonderful wife to give us hints on what to do and not to do, and we have his wife’s wonderful family.
Mostly, I try to keep my eyes open. Southern women admire things extravagantly, and after living for so many years in the Middle East and Gulf, learning to admire extravagantly goes against all my instincts.
In the MIddle East, when you admire extravagantly, you can make people nervous. Some people worry about attracting “the evil eye” of jealousy, evil intentions, people who envy you and wish you harm. Some people, if you admire something, will give it to you! It’s true, those stories, it has happened to me. So now I have to un-learn my lessons in retraint and learn to appreciate, if not extravagantly, at least enough to be polite.
One of my wife’s relatives gave us a house-warming gift, an iced-tea maker, with a darling card that states Rule #1 is that every Southern Hostess knows that a pitcher of iced tea is a MUST for all occasions. I like iced tea, but I have never kept it on hand to serve, and I guess I need to start!
Her second rule was one that made me burst out laughing – “A Southern Lady, the most interesting ones anyway, know that rules are made to be broken.”
“Just be prepared for people to leave your home saying “Bless her heart, she must be getting forgetful. There was no iced tea!”
And then rule #3 – “The only correct and acceptable way to criticize anyone is to add ‘bless his/her heart!’ and then, anything goes!”
At a party at her house this weekend, I learned a couple more – the first rule being that when you are invited to a great big family dinner, bring dessert! Thank God, I did take a little guest gift, but now I know – bring dessert! And it had better be sweet!
The next rule is would make any Kuwaiti or Qattari feel right at home – spare nothing in making our guests comfortable. This Southern Hostess had seating areas inside the beautiful air conditioned home, and also seating outside for those who don’t mind a little heat. She had a big basket loaded with all kinds of insect repellents to keep her guests from being bitten. She took time with each guest, and although she was running her little bottom off getting everything organized, she made it all look easy, and as if she was having a good time. I have a sneaking suspicion the truly was enjoying having all the people around and that her great big heart loves taking care of the crowd. She was the essence of gracious hospitality. Did I mention she has also lived in Kuwait?
Dinner was “Perlow” an old Southern tradition, made in a huge old kettle from her husband’s mother, and hung from a tripod over a roaring fire to cook. The actual cooking was the men’s work as they sat outside drinking iced tea:
Home grown peas and beans mix – delicious!
Serving up the perlow:
My Middle East / Gulf friends would be comfortable eating this meal – Perlow is a variation of Pilaf, and very similar to Biryani. No alcohol served. No pork. Lots and lots of fabulous sweet desserts.
It’s funny, I used to tell people in Kuwait and Qatar that it was a lot like Alaska; when the weather got too bad, you just stay inside most of the time. When the weather gets good, you go outside as much as you can. When it’s too hot/cold, you run from your air conditioned/heated car to your air conditioned / heated store or movie theater, or restaurant, and then back to your air conditioned / heated car and back to your air conditioned/ heated house.
In the same way, I am beginning to wonder if the South and the Middle East know how much they have in common? In Pensacola, on Saturdays, we have the religious people on the corners shouting at passing cars, not a whole lot different from the volunteer morality police in Saudi Arabia. In the South, as in the Middle East, ‘family’ isn’t just blood, it’s also who you’re married into, and there is a lot of emphasis on family getting together and spending time together. In the South, as in the Middle East, men tend to gather in one area, women in another.
In the South, they drink iced tea; in the Middle East, it’s hot tea. Both have passionate patriots, fundamental believers and a tradition of gracious hospitality. Both have a passion for hunting and fishing. Nobody much likes obeying the rules in either culture. Maybe I’m still in the MIddle East?
A Normal, Wonderful Day
Yesterday, Friday, AdventureMan and I had our first “normal” day in Pensacola, a day where we are living in our normal house doing very normal things. Normally, I find normal kind of boring, but after the last month, I find normal very comforting. I was beginning to wonder if life would ever be normal again, and what normal would look like.
Here is what normal looked like: We got up and went to our water aerobics class, which was really HARD (hard is good; we want to be living healthier lives, it was hard in the way that it was challenging, not hard in the way that is discouraging.) On our way home we saw a coffee shop we had heard about, and on an impulse, we decided to have breakfast on the way home.
I had an egg sandwich on a biscuit, and AdventureMan had biscuits and gravy. We were in and out in about 20 minutes, eating food that was probably not good for us, but it gave us all the energy we needed for what came next.
We cleaned house.
That may not sound like a fun normal day to you, and no, we don’t get a lot of joy out of cleaning house, but when you have lived in a chaos of boxes, and everything is put away, but it is all messy and disorderly still, you can see how dirty the floors have gotten. AdventureMan took the upstairs vacuum and he READ THE MANUAL (I know, I know, I am still in shock) and he vacuumed upstairs AND mopped the bathroom floors. (!) (!) (!)
I finished getting most things put away downstairs and then vacuumed and mopped all the tile and wood floors, and holy smokes, that is hard work. And when you finish, it feels so good!
AdventureMan worked in his office. I read the newspaper.
Our son and grandson came by for a few minutes to drop off some tickets to the Chocolate Fest Benefit for the Gulf Coast Kids House, a local facility that helps kids who have been abused, investigating and prosecuting offenders and helping provide children with a safe place to tell their experience. We got to see Baby Q grin at us. It’s for these moments that we moved here; we don’t need to be living in their pockets, but a few minutes now and then is heaven.
Then we headed off for Date Night. We went to dinner and a movie – a Swedish movie called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which was playing in Gulf Breeze. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on a book by Stieg Larsson, and is a very unusual mystery book with deeply flawed characters. I’ve now read the follow-up, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and I am hooked. There is only one more, and I am waiting for it to come out in paperback.
The movie was exceptional. Although it was in color, because so much of it was Sweden in winter, it seemed very black and white, very documentary. Even when spring came, the colors were muted. Somehow it made it more real, more gritty. The movie was very true to the book. There were things left out, but not things that impacted greatly on the sense of the movie. All in all, it was a very satisfying, if disturbing, movie, which leaves you itching for a follow-up. Isn’t that the sign of a good movie?
We stopped for dinner at Billy Bob’s BBQ, and I will write that up next.
That’s it. That’s our wonderfully normal day. It may not sound like much to you, but for a normal day, it wasn’t bad, in fact, it was a pretty good day.
We’ve had two weekends of stormy winds and heavy rains. My rosebushes were sparse, and all of a sudden, there are buds – and petals – everywhere!
And here, just for you, is a view of the sunset through the heavy thunderclouds over Pensacola on a Friday night:
AdventureMan Finds the Sunset
It was getting close to five p.m. and AdventureMan had just awakened from a much shorter nap than usual. There is no pressure to adjust to the local time, so he is taking it slow. I love to watch him take a nap.
“So what do you want to do?” he asks me, and suppresses a groan when I remind him he said we would find some places where I can watch the sun set.
We decided to head over to Perdido Bay, me navigating, but sometimes I miss the right turn and we have an “adventure.” It’s all OK, it’s not like we have to be anywhere by any time, so there’s no such thing as a wrong turn, just another opportunity to make some additional connections in the brain cells as we try to figure out Pensacola. Or that’s the way I am telling it, and it is my blog. Anyone can make a mistake, right?
Pensacola has very funny roads. Almost all the roads curve. Like the road we live on is the same road my son lives on, but where he lives, the road is north south, but where we live, it is almost east-west. A road called 9th, you would think would be a straight road, but it is more like a parabola! Fairchild road will turn south and become Navy Boulevard, but the real Fairchild road actually continues, considerably diminished. You just have to get used to it; it doesn’t have to make sense.
And there are Kuwaiti drivers everywhere!
(So, OK, now it comes. I apologize for all the bad things I ever said about Kuwait drivers. American drivers are also going through the orangey-red lights, even going through the red lights, and American drivers are also making left turns from the far right turn lanes. Yep. I’ve seen it. Guess I’ve been gone a long time. I wonder if even Seattle has become the Wild West on the roads? The difference between the really bad American drivers and the Kuwait drivers is that the Americans are mostly driving a lot slower when they do these things. So Kuwait, I apologize.)
We discover there is no state park along the band of land from where we thought we were going to watch the sunset, and there sure are a lot of slabs where houses used to be – which usually means they were blown away or seriously destroyed in one hurricane or another.
AdventureMan found a fabulous place, though, Tarkiln Bayou Preserve State Park. They have two walking trails, and since it was getting close to sunset (and I have a thing about being in swampy areas after dark) we chose to do the short hike, like one mile, out to the Bayou, but next time we will do the 7.2 mile hike out to the Bay.
We didn’t know we were going to do the hike when we left the car, so I didn’t have my camera. At first, we were walking not too far from the busy highway and thought it wasn’t such a great hike, but then AdventureMan spied the endangered white pitcher plant, a carnivorous plant that traps insects. Pretty fantastic!
This was one fantastic adventure. I am going to show you some pictures I got from the Florida State Parks website, focusing on Tarkiln Bayou.
This is a view of where the trail ended – it was unbelievably beautiful. The sun was setting and we were on a bayou with not another human being in sight, not a house, not a trail – it was pure nature surrounding this gorgeous tiny little bayou. But . . . the sun was setting, and I don’t like to be out in a park after dark. No, I am not chicken, I am a realist, foolish people who are where they should not be can find themselves in big trouble when the sun goes down. Also, I hate mosquitos and mosquito bites, and they usually come out around sundown, so we did our return hike at a healthy pace.
As we headed home, AdventureMan said “I think I remember a good place where you can see the sunset.”
And within five minutes, we were there.
You know how I love those sunrises in Kuwait. Sunsets are what I love even more. Here are some photos of last night’s sunset, thanks to AdventureMan 🙂
And so I ask you – is this not a magnificent way to end a day?
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