“Why Do Americans Do This?”
AdventureMan and I were with a group of delegates from Iraq yesterday, taking them on a visit to a variety of Pensacola sites. They are here visiting through the GCCDC, on the IVLP program, studying elections and campaign strategies in the USA.
One stop we make with many delegates is the First Methodist program Serving the Hungry. Two days a week, led by Jerry Vititow and supported by many happy, willing volunteers, they serve a hot lunch to the hungry, varying in numbers but never less than fifty or so.
The delegates learn about the program, then don aprons and serve up the trays. It is often one of the highlights of the trip.
One delegate raises his hand to ask a question.
“We see this everywhere,” he starts, “Americans who are working for nothing and smiling. Why do they do this?” He was genuinely perplexed.
Jerry explained that it wells up from many sources, a yearning to give back some of the blessings we have received, an eagerness to serve those who have less, maybe just an eagerness to serve. “It’s part of what we believe in,” he sums it up.
The delegates had a wonderful time.
Pensacola Grand Mardi Gras Parade 2014
We love having a grandson, not that we need an excuse, but it’s always more fun to go to a parade when you have a youngster with you. Today was particularly fun, he is four and totally gets the whole parade thing, we found a great parking place with no driving around and we had a great place to watch the parade from. Some kids sitting in front of us knew our grandson, and we were all invited “up front” to be with them.
Parades are always more fun with fun people, and these people were fun. The parade was fun. This is a family parade, lots and lots of children, and the bead throwers and gift givers are most generous to the children. While grown-ups compete to catch the beads, they turn around and give them to the little ones almost immediately. It’s a gentle spirit, and everyone has fun.
Our favored place is very near our church. You can see how crowded it is as the parade begins. It only gets worse; Mardi Gras parades attract more than 50,000 people. Imagine, 50,000 people all behaving themselves, families, children, and when it ends, the street looks normal within an hour or so. Thank God for civility.
Our church and the Mardi Gras revelers waiting for the parade. If you look closely, you can see beads hanging in the tree from the Krewe of Lafitte Parade the night before. Pensacola has LOTS of parades 🙂 :
I watched this guy in this crazy-wonderful horse head get LOTS of beads during the parade:
Everyone has a gimmick to try to get more beads, but it is a FAMILY parade, so there are no drunks (not that I saw anyway) and no one lifting up their shirts for beads. Several people had “targets” for bead throwers:
McGuires throws green beads, and our grandson got one with a medallion, very special 🙂 We’ve hung them all – all this treasures – in his room at our house so his little baby sister doesn’t chew on them by accident and he can visit them every time he stays 🙂 :
As you can see, it was a fabulous day for a parade, maybe 70 degrees F. and a slight breeze. We say “when March comes in like a lamb, it goes out like a lion” so we are expecting that the end of March may be cold and dreary, perfect Lent weather.
Hilarious Pensacola Blog: Dicksblog
Note to my Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabian readers – YES. This is legal. This is what free speech looks like. This anonymous blogger can poke fun – and does – at everyone. He probably will want to remain anonymous because he does not discriminate in who he pokes and won’t have any friends if people figure out who he is, but yes. Yes. YES. This is legal, this is freedom of speech. He won’t go to jail.
Poking fun at appearance-over-substance Mayor Ashton Hayward, who made national news this week as he prayed, and rethought his ban on homeless people using blankets in Pensacola: Dicksblog goes viral:
Brunch at The Grand Marlin on Pensacola Beach
“Do you have any questions?” the waiter asked, and AdventureMan asked “Yes, what is a TGM hamburger?” and the waiter responded “The Grand Marlin; don’t be embarrassed, you’d be amazed, just about every customer asks that question.”
We thought it might be a brand name or something, and sort of it is.
It is Sunday, a glorious warm Sunday, and everyone is feeling it, everyone is ready for some sun and some heat after the devil of an ice storm that hit us at the end of January. The yards of the gardeners are heaped with devastation, and we are warned not to cut anything yet, wait until all danger of frost is passed. Cutting your “dead” plants signals them to send out new growth, and you don’t want them wasting energy sending out new growth until you can guarantee that the new growth will not be killed by another freeze.
Meanwhile, it is a glorious day, a perfect day for brunch at The Grand Marlin, where we are shown to a small private room that reminds us of similar lunches in Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, or sometimes even Kuwait where ‘families’ (women) might like to dine without prying eyes. There is even a curtain that can be pulled to insure privacy.
They have a great brunch menu, and the whole back side of it is drinks. You wouldn’t think people would be hittin’ the sauce at 0930 on a Sunday morning, but you would be wrong, LOL.
We had a great waiter, he took good care of us and could answer all our questions, brought us the extras we requested, made sure our cups and glasses stayed filled, all unobtrusively.
The coffee was noticeably good. As do many restaurants around here, The Grand Marlin has its own bottled hot sauce, Fire in the Hole, which warns you that it is very hot:
The restaurant fills up fast, even early in the day, with church goers and with beach goers, and so there is a wide range of dress from very casual to church-going chic. The live music starts early, too, around 1000, so there is also a wide range of ages, from kids to young adults, to some aging geezers around the bar, hitting it hard early in the morning.
When our breakfasts come, we are both delighted. I had intended to order the crab cake benedict, but when I saw Smoked Salmon Benedict on the menu, I was a goner. AdventureMan ordered a Vegetable Frittata and said it was one of the best. We were both very happy with our food.
Although by the time we left there were people waiting for tables, we were never rushed. It is an altogether civilized and enjoyable Sunday brunch, with lots of delicious temptations on the menu to try each time we go.
Most Criminals are Dimwits: Attempted Kidnapping
Today in Pensacola, from the Pensacola News Journal What I wonder – did the guy selling the ring get to keep the full $4,500 that his attempted abductors were buying from him?:
Two people have been arrested in connection with a kidnapping and shooting of a man after a botched robbery attempt in a Wal-Mart parking lot, an Escambia County Sheriff’s Office arrest report said.
Darius Beasley, 21, and Jamichael Tucker, 19, were arrested Tuesday afternoon after deputies responded to reports of shots fired near the intersection of Pensacola Boulevard and Hood Drive, according to the report.
A victim at the scene said that he had met Beasley in the parking lot after arranging to sell him a $4,500 wedding ring on Craigslist, the report said. The victim allowed Beasley into his vehicle, where they exchanged the ring and an envelope containing cash.
The victim said that immediately afterward, Tucker approached the driver’s side of the vehicle and pointed a gun inside. Tucker then allegedly opened the door of the vehicle and attempted to put duct tape around the victim’s wrists.
The victim was able to get out of the vehicle and run away, and the two suspects returned to their car and drove off, the report said. The victim began to chase the pair in his truck, and Tucker reportedly leaned out of his car window and began shooting at the victim.
The chase ended when a deputy arrived on the scene and advised the suspects to pull over. Tucker and Beasley were taken into custody without incident, and no one was injured in the event.
Both men are facing an array of charges including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, robbery and attempted kidnapping.
Tucker is being held on $125,500 bond, and Beasley is being held on $103,000.
A Stalwart Falls
“Are you catching colds?” our friend asked as the funeral ended.
“No, no, I said, funerals just find us very vulnerable, and we have to deal with losses, past, present . . . and future. We have an ongoing fight over who is going to bury whom.”
We did not know the man well who had died, but we knew him as a stalwart. He was a greeter and usher at our service, and he was only rarely ever not there. He served the church. He was always there. I had asked his wife to help me with tickets, and she had laughed and said “of course, I’ll be there because my husband will be there, and if you need me just holler.”
They weren’t there. It made me uneasy, it nagged at me. I didn’t need her, but I missed her, and as I said – they are ALWAYS there. Sometimes it’s what is missing that catches your attention. It caught mine.
When I learned her husband had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as the Antique Fair was starting, it came almost as a physical blow. It’s not that I knew him that well. It’s that his presence at the church was something we took for granted, he was stalwart. You could count on him. We attended out of respect, respect for him, support for his wife.
And I know that the two of them spend (spent) as much time together as AdventureMan and I do. I don’t like to think that it could happen to me, that I could be suddenly left. AdventureMan was a military man, he would often leave, all these years, and he might tell me where he was going but I never knew for sure where he was going. We had a code to use if he was lying, but although he never used the code, I know there are times he lied, all for that bitch, national security. Yes, yes, I know, strong language from Intlxpatr, but strong times call for strong language. We both knew that there were times when there was a risk he wouldn’t come back.
We didn’t have to deal with death a lot in our life abroad. Of course, in the military, everyone is young. In all the countries where we worked in the Gulf, there were upper age limits – people retired and people left; you can’t live out your years in Qatar or Kuwait, there are laws against it. You can’t even be buried there without special permission. We learned to deal with the losses of people coming into our lives and leaving, but we didn’t have to deal with the great finality of death. We’re learning.
AdventureMan insists he is going to go first. I am tough in a lot of ways, but I don’t know that I am tough enough to go through his funeral. The very thought of it makes me sick to my stomach.
He tells me not to worry. He wants a Viking funeral; he wants to be sent out in a kerosene soaked ship and for archers to set it on fire as it sails off, disintegrating in flames. Isn’t going to happen, AdventureMan, but if it did, I might give some thought to pitching myself on the ship as it departs . . . otherwise, I’m afraid I might live the rest of my life as the one of the walking wounded.
Love At First Sight: Gumbo Spoons
Vanity, vanity. When I was in university, along with our studies, we all picked out our china patterns and silver flatware. We were preparing for the rest of our lives, which meant getting married. My parents gave me six place settings when I graduated university and through the years, AdventureMan and I added settings. We used the sterling all the time, military people entertained more formally. We haunted French and German antique markets and flea markets, seeking obscure pieces we didn’t have, it was fun.
These days, not so much. I haven’t bought any silver for years. We do very little formal entertaining. My sister and her daughters have taken to using their good silver for every day. I haven’t reached that point – yet – but I am thinking about it.
In spite of the fact that we are not often using our silver flatware, at the recent Christ Church Antique Fair, a woman celebrated having found gumbo spoons.
Gumbo spoons? I have a lot of pieces, mostly French and German. I have asparagus servers, yes, really! I have pieces for all kinds of exotic foods, but no. No, I did not have gumbo spoons. I had never even heard of gumbo spoons.
Gumbo spoons are a little larger than soup spoons, wider, rounder, a little deeper.
As it turns out, they don’t even make gumbo spoons in my sterling, but they had some beautiful ones that will go with my everyday flatware; these had shells on the base of the handles. They are beautiful, and I can hardly wait to eat gumbo in such grand style. These will be well loved – and well used!
Energy Use and My Friend Who Kept the Cats Warm
“I was scratching their heads and ears and noticed that they were nice and warm! I wondered how they were managing to keep so warm in the awful cold, but I was glad they found a nice warm place,” my friend said, when I asked her how her outdoor cats had fared in the bone-chilling cold we experienced in Pensacola last week.
“Then I got my Gulf Power bill, and Intlxpatr, it was over a thousand dollars!” she exclaimed, her eyes huge.
Her normal bill is probably around what I pay. Not nearly a thousand dollars, not even on the hottest month of summer when I have to keep the air on full blast 24/7 on just to survive.
“So I called the heating people,’ she continued, and they had to crawl under the house, imagine, in this weather. . . ”
I imagined.
“. . . And they discovered the cats had clawed a hole in one of my air ducts and had luxuriated, down there under the house, while my heater tried to heat up half of Pensacola!”
We laughed, but a thousand dollars . . . that knocks a hole in anyone’s budget. It was one of those laughing-because-if-you-don’t-laugh-you-will-cry kinds of laughs.
I am an energy nerd. It comes from growing up in Alaska, I am convinced, where I had neighbors who fished in the summers and had to get by all year on that income, plus what they might come by with odd jobs the rest of the year. My friends had a huge garden in their back yard, and a root cellar where things were stored. In the root cellar, they had a chalkboard, where every potato, every carrot, everything they had stored was listed, and numbers subtracted as they were used. They had to keep track, to be sure they would make it through the winter.
In Pensacola, Gulf Power has a really cool feature on their website. You set up an online account, and you can check on your daily energy usage. LOL, this is mine for January. It has huge ups and downs – mostly we don’t need to have the heat on, but when the temperatures go down and stay down – it shows. There are also a couple days when we used our oven, and that shows up, too, but not badly.
I remember living in Germany, where I didn’t have a dryer (or any space for one) and my landlady brought me my energy bill. We lived in a very small farming village, where they were also all very frugal, but she couldn’t believe my bill was so small. I just smiled; I could hear her dryer going every day, and dryers are also a huge source of energy usage. Anything that heats up – or cools down – is an energy eater.
On the website, you can also compare this year against previous years – and my bill this year is nearly a third higher than last year, but last year we did not have a three-day arctic freeze!
God Bless Gulf Power Emergency Crews!
“You guys OK?” our son queried.
“Have power? Have internet?” he followed up.
Yes. Yes, thanks be to God and by the grace of the Gulf Power Emergency Crews who must have cleared that broken branch of the line, or restrung the line that fell from the weight of the ice – or whatever caused the outage.
Can’t binge watch True Detective with no cable 😦 We lost electricity around 10:30 last night. It fluttered, it re-gridded, fluttered, re-gridded, they have all these work-arounds now so that it’s been a couple years since we actually lost power, but when it went down, it took everything, even the street lights. It was DARK. We got out our little hand-cranked radio/lights from LLBean that we use for hurricane emergencies, to take a look outside.
It looked like snow, but it was frozen ice. The road was a sheet of ice. No cars; for the most part there are a few people out there, but most of Pensacola is wisely staying inside. This is NOT driving weather.
It is supposed to warm later today; it has been 23°F for about 4 hours now. Our son’s internet is still down.
Last night AdventureMan made the best seafood soup EVER. It was from the January Southern Living, Gulf Seafood Stew, served with Johnny cakes and a dipping sauce – it was THE BEST.
We haven’t suffered. When the lights went out, when the heat went off, we went to bed. I didn’t even hear the electricity come back on, very early this morning, but AdventureMan did, and together we blessed those brave, hard workers who have to go out into this blistering cold and fix the lines so that the rest of us can be safe and warm in our homes.
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