Gary Dahl, inventor of the pet rock and Don Featherstone, inventor of the pink flamingo. Both, in their late 70s, died recently.
Just think about it: they were born, they were fed and clothed and sent to school by their parents. They went to college/art school. They came out and had a chosen paying profession (Dahl was a mediocre copy writer in advertising, Featherstone a classically trained sculptor and artist). Then they EACH had crazy, creative, off-the-wall ideas that not only made millions but the ideas made millions of people happy. And by all accounts in their obituaries – these were GREAT human beings.
What surprising twists and turns led to their remarkable lives – all laid out in their obituaries for you to read (linked in green above). Creativity was certainly behind their success and drive. I’d bet the willingness to persevere in the face of criticism and skepticism was as well. I guess their obituaries cause me to ask, are we really teaching our kids the right things? Shouldn’t the emphasis be on imagination, perseverance and the importance of creativity mixed with hard work. How will we teach our kids to intuitively see trends and follow their guts? RIP Gary and Don – you brightened my life with your zany products. May your example brighten the lives of my kids.
The other morning I had a Freudian slip that got me thinking a few funny thoughts about my Main Man of Neuroses. As you might gather from this blog, I have a whole Hell of a Lot of random thoughts, including thinking up the beginnings to jokes- a HUGE time sink. As I’m sure you’ve noticed in jokes as in life, the setups come fast and easy – it’s the punchlines that are always the killer to create. When a setup does come to me, I typically go to Google Images and type in my thought. Inevitably someone – like the guy behind the above t-shirt image (That Web Design Guy) has already produced some similar take on the idea that is amusing enough to satisfy. It’s a nice quick way to process the thought so that I can move on with the important stuff in life, like penning a grocery list or picking up the dog poop, rather than sitting around for the many hours it may take to flesh out the joke.
So, back to the morning’s slip – because let’s face it, aren’t Freudian slips the ultimate punchlines? As the blip occurred, I was thinking to myself, “Already? It’s only 7:42 AM and already I’m doing this?” The trigger? A new post on Facebook from a Professor friend, Jeff Nunokowa. (*More on Jeff below) Well, Jeff was making the point that in his teaching, much of what he accomplishes is to help his students “fill in their blanks. ” But, as a mother of a son soon to start the college process, I brought a certain listening to this post and instead of their blanks, I read it as saying that he helped kids, “fill in their banks.” A Sigmund moment if ever there were one. Oh, the ever-present subconscious worry of a parent breaks through again. At 50, if there is one thing that I’ve figured out, it’s that life plays out over a lonnnnngggg time. This realization has led to my biggest concern: Have I done enough to help my children sustain their efforts, or have I been helping them train for one isolated sprint. High school to college is of course a very public sprint — one that we cannot ignore. However, as anyone out there knows who has ever run a 10K or a marathon, sprinting only takes you so far. Doing well over longer distances requires a whole different set of mental and physical skills (managing BOREDOM being one of them – more on that topic later this week.) Aware of the worry behind my mis-reading, I took consolation in my breeding retriever who does not even seem to recognize her puppies when she meets them again only weeks after they’ve left the whelping box. And I paused to ask myself, are robins at all worried when their hatchlings fledge? Certainly we have all heard that the lilies of the field don’t share our concerns. Maybe I just need to plant more lilies.
Lilies of the field
* You can read about Jeff Nunokowa in Fast Company and then buy his new and acclaimed book, entitled: Note Book* with its cornucopia of literary life lessons and philosophical insights.
If you are like me, gremlins put all kinds of food in your fridge that you didn’t even know about until it’s too late. Ever found a cucumber that’s devolved into a puddle of oozing goo? How about the jar of olives that may be from last week – but then again it may be from last year and it will KILL you? If you want to save time and money, try to go through the contents of your fridge before you go grocery shopping, be it on Saturdays or whenever. With the steps below, you may not even have to shop for a few more days.
The first thing you are going to do is get a Sharpie and put it in the flip top butter area of your fridge. You will see it every time you open the fridge, and from now on you will be way more likely to use it to mark dates on any half-opened food.
Crock Pot
Next, pull out your crock pot. And, if you don’t own one, order one right now on Ebay or Amazon. It truly does NOT matter what kind. Place the crock pot next to your sink because you are about to re-coup between $10-$50 every week and get healthier in the process. Now, gather ALL of the vegetables that are lingering in your fridge and pantry. You are about to start a meditative soup practice that will change your life. The easiest way to accomplish the making of a soup every 7-10 days is by buying either a pre-cooked chicken from the grocery store – eat it up and save the skin, bones, scraps and congealed juices in the bottom of the container – you can just throw the container in the freezer till Saturday. You can also always have a couple pounds of cheap chicken in your freezer for your soup (usually I buy organic legs, very reasonable at Trader Joe’s – you also often get a discount when you buy 2 chickens at Whole Foods and one of them can be frozen whole – even though it is cooked, it will thaw out just fine-remove most of the meat – recipes below for that- and use the skin and bones for your soup). I know it’s summer, but crock pots don’t generate much heat and if you start now, you’ll have 10+ quarts by the end of summer – plus, they make really nice gifts for people. Seriously, people LOVE homemade chicken stock.
Start by throwing the frozen chicken into the bottom of the crock pot, add any partially used up bottle of wine (red or white is fine) you may have PLUS 1/3 of a cup of cider vinegar – the vinegar leaches the minerals out of the bones and makes the soup more nutritious and flavorful; a TBS of salt or a couple packets of soy sauce also add flavor.
Now retrieve all the veggies you have NOT eaten this week – despite your best intentions. This prep step will go quickly – no agonizing – unless it is gross to touch or smell, just use it! Place all the veggies and the bags of veggies and the cans of half used veggies out on your counter and have at it! The following items are great for making soup stock-here’s how to prep them for your pot:
For the following, wash, scrub and quarter WITH the skins on – the skins have excellent nutrients: potatoes, yams, onions, garlic.
For green/white/yellow/red veggies, rinse well, throw out the really yucky parts (wilted is fine) and chop roughly: cabbage, parsnips, carrots, parsley, turnips, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, fresh herbs, leeks, peas, beans/legumes, mushrooms and celery (these two veggies are particularly good for extra flavor, always try to have them on hand).
Other items that add flavor: hummus, lemon (not too much, makes soup acrid), canned tomatoes, canned corn, canned artichokes etc.
DON’T add: in my experience green/red/orange/yellow peppers make a strange flavor as do avocados and olives. I love beets in a soup, but they add significant sweetness and a red that stains.
DO add: Water, to cover the carcass/veggies – then start to cook. Crockpots vary in terms of how hot they get and cooking time – I usually cook my soup for 6 hours on high. You can experiment, there’s no wrong answer, but I wouldn’t go longer than 8 hours because the stock starts to taste stale.
If I used legs rather than a precooked carcass, then at the end of 3 hours, I remove the cooked chicken from the bone, throw the bones and skin back into the pot and freeze the meat (I chop it before freezing so it can go in the soup or it makes great tacos or pulled chicken –shred it, then microwave it w/1/3 to 1/2 a bottle of your favorite bbq sauce – or make it into a chicken salad – more next Friday on chicken salad).
At the end of 6 hours, turn off the crock pot (most stay on on warm so you have to actually unplug it) to cool the stock – cooling often takes 90 minutes, then get a big bowl, put a colander in it, dump out the ingredients into the colander and strain the soup. You can freeze the stock in quart containers – I skim the fat afterwards, when I thaw it – scrape the fat off just as it is starting to get soft – much easier. Take the solid contents of the colander and throw the whole mess out into doubled up plastic bags-discard where dogs and other animals won’t get it. OR, you can compost everything but the bones.
Jam Jar Vinaigrette
Next, find all the jam jars with most of the jam gone – use them to make great sweetened vinaigrette for your upcoming week’s salads (classic vinaigrette ratio is 2/3 oil, 1/3 vinegar plus some dijon – about 1 to 2 tsp – to bind the dressing together and give flavor – shake vigorously to emulsify.) Ditto with almost gone mayo, hummus, peanut butter and tahini jars, even unsweetened yogurt or the last bits of a commercial salad dressing you love can become a homemade salad dressing.
Eggs
Eggs – I hard boil any that I haven’t used that week – my kids like deviled eggs – I often substitute avocado for half the mayo. We can use up a lot of leftover eggs quite quickly by making up a batch. I also make frozen breakfast sandwiches – easiest way to cook the eggs is baking them – just drop each egg into the individual compartments of a well-greased, non-stick muffin tin – I often place on top of each egg a mix of the following: any leftover ham and cheese or salsa, or frozen spinach that I’ve thawed and squeezed to get rid of wateriness. I then bake the whole thing till the eggs are quite firm, pop them out and place them on toasted english muffins. I freeze them individually wrapped in wax paper so they can be thawed/heated by microwave – voila, great breakfasts and/or snacks for the following week.
As mentioned before, half a bottle of bbq sauce over leftover shredded chicken makes a perfectly decent fake pulled chicken. Salsa over cooked ground beef or shredded chicken makes for great easy tacos.
Chop old bread up into croutons and bake them or fry them – nice on top of salads and soups or as the basis for a panzanella salad, bread pudding or egg and bread frittata. Turn any leftover pasta or rice or potatoes into salads with cut up peppers, onions, celery, herbs and salad dressing- if you like an old fashioned taste, your jam vinaigrette can be made thicker with yogurt, mayo or a pureed avocado and used for these salads- add tuna or chopped chicken for a complete meal.
St. John the Baptist Preaching, By Peter Brueghel, The Elder, 1526 Oil on Canvas,
Locusts, wild honey, fasting, caves: THE preacher to tell of the Messianic coming – St. John the Baptist cut quite the figure and preceded his cousin, Jesus, in a highly memorable fashion. It is fitting that the man who wandered the world gathering crowds – as shown in this wonderful Brueghel painting – and opening up their spiritual eyes to the coming of Christ would have festivals dedicated on his feast day that coincides with the timing of the Solstice.
Marvelous bonfires are set during late June, often floating mid-water. These pyres light the night skies from Newfoundland to Finland and beyond in a festival tradition that melds St. John the Baptist’s feast day (officially June 24) with the ancient pagan and Roman traditions of Solstice worship and the Roman celebration of their God of Nighttime Thunder (they had 2 – Summanus was the Nighttime Thunder God and the now more famous Jupiter was God of DaytimeTthunder, and actually less famous that Summanus, waaaay back in the day).
Ivan Kupula (St. John the Baptist) Night, Russian Oil Painting by Henryk Hector Siemiradzki, 19th century
Russians to this day celebrate wildly with fires and parties and often nude bathing – both in celebration of Ivan (John’s) baptismal role AND to celebrate the earlier pagan solstice emphasis on fertility rituals. If you have ever heard Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain – with its famous witches theme –
known to most of us from its use in the Disney Movie, Fantasia…note the fires and dancing in the cartoon – Disney certainly must have known of this Russian tradition.
Of all the short stories I was ever assigned, The Ransom of Red Chief is by far the most humorous, entertaining, and memorable. The story was written by O. Henry – a pseudonym for William Sydney Porter, a Southerner born during the Civil war who moved to Texas and had a very colorful life. A performer and humor writer of great regard, O. Henry may have honed his knowledge of the kidnappers in this story during his 3 year stint in an Ohio federal penitentiary. He had landed there, after being caught as a fugitive, accused of bank fraud and embezzlement (several articles on his life insist he was SLOPPY but not a criminal.) This marvelous story has a wonderful twist as do many O. Henry stories. I’d say read “in” it but at about 16 pages, it is a short read and well worth the effort. Children of all ages will love hearing it read out loud. Happy summer reading…
Here we go again, the time of year when the National Association of Letter Carriers (AFL-CIO)’s work comp filings go up by at least 10%. “Letter Carriers” my ass! What with the whole necessity of delivering Restoration Hardware “source books,” let’s just call a spade a spade: more like the National Association of Bowling Ball Carriers once they spend a day lifting those packages. Chronic lower back pain, strained lats, neck spasms – it happened back in 2014 and now I’m sure it’s happening again. Frankly, if RH keeps this up, the USPS may have to consider axle enhancements for many of its local delivery trucks.
All I can tell you is THANK GOD I began Cross Fit in March. Last year I swung the 17 lb bag of monochrome style folios up from my stoop and nearly had a coronary event as I lugged them into my home. And what’s with the slippery plastic wrapping? They could at least give us hand holds to grip onto. This year, applying the appropriate squat technique from my clean and jerks (which I have only recently realized is NOT called a snatch and grab), I was able to wrestle that beast off the portico and onto my forearms like nobody’s business. My technique eclipsed that of a hungry lioness dragging home a 1200 lb. cape buffalo, if I do say so myself. I seem to recall hearing one of my neighbors exclaim … “Wowww” as she backed away to call her husband for assistance with her RH deposit.
Once inside, I decided a few overhead squats with the catalogs were in order – just to test my mettle. (See photo below)
And then I thought, next time there’s a Murph*, I’m gonna roll each “book” up and stick them all into the slots of my very own weight vest. That way I can do my workout with RH close to my heart, because what better way is there to honor a fallen American Hero who died protecting my right to be mailed the heaviest catalog on earth against my will? Just think, if he’d had a set of these “books,” they may have protected him significantly better than the standard-issue Kevlar vests they’ve been dispensing down at Coronado. I reckon that if being mailed a 17 lb piece of junk mail isn’t the most stunning example of the power of a corporation to exert its individual right to free speech, I don’t know what is. And you know those Navy Seals just live for their next purchase of fancy RH poolside furniture when they aren’t out there in the God-forsaken desert gunning down bad guys. Hell, maybe we should advise them to take along a few thousand kilos of RH catalogs for their next bombing raid – nothing like “leafleting” the enemy – Patriot-style.
So, what to do with the catalog until my next Murph? Well first of all, with a winter like we just had, I’ve sworn I’m gonna get prepared early this year, and I know I can use all the ballast I can possibly find to combat the fish-tailing tendencies of my beat up minivan. Who needs four-wheel drive when you can have the added traction of the RH “source books?” Since the catalogs will be in the car anyway, I will now have access to a full 7″ of insulation any time I need it. If you’re anything like me, October through late November you’re freezing your ass off at multiple stadiums around your county watching your kids play second-rate sports and wondering why you didn’t just get a couple of extra housebound pets and call it quits at that. Well friends, with the help of the RH “bundle” you will freeze-no-more. In fact, there’s so much insulation there that you will have plenty of cold-busting layers to share with all your friends. My guess is with your new RH butt-saver-bundle, you could now sit in an igloo stadium watching Eskimos play a game of ice ball and it would feel like a spring day in Savannah, you’ll be so comfortable.
Speaking of spring, do you feel like you should also be getting some warm weather use out of these things? Imagine the shock that first mosquito of the season is going to get when you whack him and all his buzzing friends from behind with 17 lbs of lethal RH force. Talking about force – I’m thinking about starting a new RH self defense course. Jab the sharp corners into your attacker’s eyes; place the slippery pages below his feet so he will slip and fall while running with you in a headlock; let’s face it, just one blow of the RH pile to the scrotum and your attacker isn’t getting back up any time in the near future. Future female fraternity-party goers, take note – arm your self with the RH bundle and do it early…
The RH “source books” 2015 model is just the gift that keeps on giving. Frankly, if you can persuade a bunch of your neighbors into giving you theirs, and you – like I – are strong enough to carry them – just stack several bundles up. Voila your very own DIY RH coffee table …MOVE OVER IKEA hack websites! No need to buy ANYTHING from this catalog ever again.
* Murph: An agonizingly long CrossFit workout dedicated to a fallen Navy Seal.
_____________________________
Restoration Hardware’s Bogus, “What Do You Think We Are, Stupid?” Enviro-Caveat Page, recreated below, for your eye-rolling pleasure:
1
OUR COLLECTION
OF SOURCE BOOKS
IS MAILED ONCE A YEAR.
Our 6 source books – 2 Lifestyle and 4 category books – are published just once a year and shipped to you in a single package. BLAH BLAH BLAH
2
OUR PAPER
IS FOREST CERTIFIED.
Our source books are printed on FSC chain-of-custody certified paper. 100% of the fiber used in our paper is sourced from responsibly managed forests. We are the founding sponsor of the Verso Forest Certification Grant Program. The program provides start-up funding to expand forest certification BLAH-BLAH, BLAH-BLAH, BLAH-BLAH
Happy Father’s Day – It’s raining here so movies seemed like a great way to celebrate. Here’s a short list of classics that showcase dad at his best:
1. Finding Nemo – Marlin – widower – gives some pretty great advice, despite the fact he’s grieving the loss of his wife AND 400 of his kids to a barracuda.
2. Father of the Bride – Spencer Tracy’s version AND Steve Martin’s – dad’s trying hard – both are charming and funny
3. Vacation – any/all – Chevy Chase really plays the comedic dad role to the hilt – personal favorite? European vacation but maybe because it is the closest to some of the crazy antics my family had when I was small.
4. My Life – with Michael Keaton – Want to make the dad in your life cry? this is such an underrated movie – MK pulls a Shirley MacLaine Terms of Endearment-level performance as he films life’s lessons while declining from terminal cancer.
5. Mrs. Doubtfire – because no doubt, Robin Williams LOVES those kids (can’t say he’s the best at marriage though…)
6. Boyz ‘N The Hood – Laurence Fishburne – just a wow performance – dads can be serious too and his character – Furious Styles – well, the name sums it up – tour de force performance on what it is to mix tough with love.
dispatchfromthecave 