Day 2 Day radishes

February 28/ philosophy for kids

My sister sent me a southern magazine called Garden and Gun.  How politically incorrect, and I love it.  In the issue that I got there was an article by a woman named something Turner.  She was a very attractive woman in her hunt coat.  She has started a group called, Go Outside. She wants children to go out side and do what ever they do, such as play, bike, pretend, lay on the grass.  She feels, I think rightly, that by being outside, this cuts down on TV, video games etc.  The woman said that her father was always screaming for the kids in his  house to “go outside”.  The father turned out to be Ted Turner, among other things owner of the Atlanta Braves.  I agree with Ted Turner on this single point. 

February 27 Bikers

Yesterday driving to Daytona Beach we passed the Speedway.  I never think of the Daytona Beach Speedway except on Memorial Day. No actually that is in Indianapolis, but there is the Daytona 500. Parked in the parking lot were huge buses for different motor cycle racing teams.  Are they painted up!  Some paint jobs.  As it turns out, starting this weekend is bikers week.  Hum.  This generally covers the area from Jacksonville to Daytona and maybe south to Cape Canaveral.

Aside from the races and entertainment they have a Poker Run.  Poker Run used to mean going to different bars and drawing a poker hand and then getting a beer if you won.  They have dropped the poker part now, and the bikers, or anyone buys a T-shirt and there are bars giving free beers in different towns , each beer and the bar are checked off the back of the shirt. 

Mr. Radish brought up at lunch yesterday about Hells Angels who ruined the town of Hollister, California years ago. In the old days to become a real Hell’s Angel had to kill someone to “belong”. Organized in Oakland, the bikers would ride up highway 101 and park in Willits, California for the weekend.  We would not consider even driving by the town in those days. 

Now the bikers are getting together and the runs are for charity. Some things can change.  I have seen a lot of them today and the area and bars and restaurants say Welcome Bikers.  Not so many women.  Our friend Hawley says that half of bikers, where they live here in Florida, are professionals. 

February 26/ Florida

Here we are in Florida!  We are staying at NoName’s Florida house which is close to Mr. NoName’s parents.
Mr. Radish and I have not traveled together on our own for a long time  and we have forgotten how long it takes to make something happen, or how much we have forgotten. 

For example, we got on the plane is Seattle at 11:am and traveled to Houston.  We had had a half a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast.  Mr. Radish and I have a disagreement over what the food served was termed, a meal or a snack.  That included a one ounce servicing of a KitKat bar, one small very small serving of salad, and a four  inch warm prepackaged cheese “pizza“.  I suggested  to Mr.Radish, we better think about some food in Houston before our next leg because everything will be closed by the time we would get to Orlando.  He said, “I can make it with the same snack we had from Seattle,”  Well, I could not, but let it go.  Our meal from Houston was two small packages of pretzels.  I asked the steward if there was anything less salty. “No”.  So I ate salt.  Naturally when we got to Orlando everything was closed to where  we could walk from our hotel.  That was my fault as physically and psychologically it was too long.   So it was trail mix for  Fat Tuesday dinner for us.   And lucky to have that.  I can see that overriding Mr. Radish may become more important in the future. 

I can not explain how it took all day to go two hours away. First, little did we know that we had to sign up for the shuttle to take us back to the airport, even though no one other customer was riding.  So we wait for that. Then at the airporto we must wait for the shuttle to take us to the car rental lot.  And though the shuttle comes by every 10 minutes, people on the shuttle frantically wave at us each time they drive by our pick up spot. That happened three times.   “Well they had to drop some one off.”  Then we get to the car rental place and one employee is Russian and does not have good English, and they other is on some slow drug.  Forty five minutes later we have our car, with which we are happy.

We drive to Daytona beach, more tomorrow, and we have to find a restaurant.  It is our custom not to fast food it.  So that means you have to use your head as to where good restaurants might be.  Mr. Radish says the beach.  There are a lot of bikers on the street which is really apropos of nothing, but we do notice.  We settle on an Italian restaurant that serves seafood.  But then you have to find a place to park and that takes us 15 turns  to get back to the parking lot behind the building, which does not look like a parking lot, so we passed it by the first time. 

Are you getting the idea?  The last few times when we traveled we had relatives to guide us. It is hard work to travel. 

Here are the good things:

There is sun.
There is sun.
There is sun. 
Mr. and Mrs. NoName have a lovely home.  And if I were to move to Florida, would buy it in a minute.  The furnishing are of the last six decades, and two continents. 

This place in Palm Coast is full of older people who keep their yards nice and the cars in the garage.  People are very friendly and in less than a day we have met the next door neighbor. I am not sure what we will do here, but I do know that I love being here.  Plus when we need people to come out and play, Mr. NoName’s parents seem eager to accommodate.  We will have fun. 

This computer is not working well.  I do intend to publish, but if I am not, it is because of technical difficulties. 

February 22/ Books

Today is George Washington’s birthday. I almost missed it, but in the midst of writing a check, the date reminded me. And though we are leaving town tomorrow and there will be a lot of pie thrown away, I still want to remember George, and am baking Marie Calendar's’s very own.

Tuesday is Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras and Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. Tuesday is travel day and we will not be celebrating with a calorie laden meal, but please enjoy yourself and I will try to stay away from the pretzels on the airplane.

For Lent this year I am reading. I am going to finish the book the SHACK. I need to reread it in a few places, but it is a novel that personalizes God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Particularly I am going to review the part about the Holy Spirit and its role. The book is advertised as be to us what Pilgrims Progress was two hundred years ago. I did not like the book as much as my friends did, but it does have many thought provoking ideas.

I have read, skimmed, reread the book called EMERGING CHRISTIANITY, by Phyllis Tickle. And I am going to give it another read. I am fascinated by the book which I do not understand. It is over my head, but I am thinking I may have not paid enough attention to careful reading. One of the things which she points out is how history has such a large role. For example the Gutenberg Bible was there for all to understand, and that encouraged literacy. Therefore the Bible was the standard of behavior and religious inspiration. But now we all have moved outside of merely reading, and we are all schooled and educated by the Internet, television, radio. There is a huge mass of information for us. Christianity is changing and somehow we all have to meet at the middle of a circle. Because her writing seems politically liberal to me, particularly how much we are to do for others, I have read some of her lectures and writings on the Internet. She is an interesting woman.

The last book which I am just starting is WHAT IS SO GREAT ABOUT CHRISTIANITY by Dinesh D‘Souza. He has written five books including WHAT IS SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA. He is widely published by Vanity Fair to American Monthly. His is a more conservative approach, but like the above book is going to give a church history lesson and likely come up with a similar conclusion to the above books. He too is going to tell us why there is a purpose to Christianity as opposed to Atheism. He definitely feels Christianity is under attack.

I am thinking that between these three books I will find out a lot more about God, the universe, and the meaning of life.

February/ Just stuff

I am going to have to do something really nice for Mr. Radish tonight, because he fixed my mess of a computer. He brought a program off of Kim Kommando and down loaded the software, cost approximately $80.00. PC Doctor Pro. It said that I had 1,700 errors, and I believe it. An example of a minor error was when I hit period as in . ,the thing typed >. I am sure that at times you may have noticed it. That was an intsy irritation.

I was really irritated with old Radish as he did not want me to take my computer into be fixed. He worked and worked on the computer himself, but nothing changed until he worked his magic with the new software program. But all is well that ends well. The best part was that no lecture was included.

I am leaving for Florida on Monday. We are going to NoName’s Florida house. We will see NoName’s in-laws there. Here is an interesting thought. In late summer NoName is moving to Madrid with her husband and family. They think they have won the lottery, although she will have to give up princess status when she moves. No maids, no drivers etc. I did not go to China myself, because I did not want to be sick in Chinese, but I think I could be sick in Spanish. I am readying my Castanets. But here is the question. . . Will we have to continue to call NoName, NoName when she moves. I am hoping not. I would really like to switch from Things 1,2, and 3.

February 13/ Vacation

Now that I have started back to the gym, and am doing well with increasing my being around women, I am running out of time to blog.  Plus the main topic on my mind is the non stimulus bill.  I must add here that apparently if you drove from Washington D.C. to Seattle and at every mile post you put 10 million dollars, when you got to Seattle, you would have enough to build a fleet of aircraft carriers. 

This will not fly for blog material, even cooking, being thin, being happy does not sound writable at the moment.

So I am going on blog vacation.  See you in about a week. 

February 11/ Disgust

Well, I guess  now I am a socialist, which is what Newsweek and others say. I am wondering if the government will pay all my health care now. That will save money on insurance. Wait, I might be too old. We are thinking about a new car as we have heard that there is $7,500.00 tax credit. We need to buy our leased car, will that count? Mr. Radish says that maybe we should get two, which would be $15,000.00 saving. I am wondering when they start building those roads tomorrow, if the little secretaries who lost their jobs at the banks etc will be willing to work shoveling gravel on the tar for the roads.

If we were English socialists, we would at least have a queen and bad boy Harry. Here is a quote from I don’t know who, “When the world wearies and ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.” In my case, I think I am going to bed for a week.

February 9/ Food scales

I just finished mixing up a batch of World Peace Cookies. The cookies were originally created by the famed Pierre Herme of Paris, but these cookies were from Dorie Greenspan’s

website. Dorie rarely publishes on line a recipe that is in one of her books. You have to buy the book. But today on her sight she has the metric amounts for the ingredients and if you mix the sugars with the butter for two minutes and then add the dry ingredients until just mixed and then add the chocolate and wrap like you would slice and bake cookies for three hours and bake, you will have the recipe. Actually, the recipes is at cookbook Habit

.

The reason that I bring this up is that I have been working with a food scale for about 4 months. It is a great boon to baking as one knows oneis using the correct amount. For example the flour you add to something can vary from day to day with moisture. What does packed brown sugar mean. Accuracy has been pitiful in my baking until I got this gadget. The other reason for having a scale is that you can reduce the number of bowls that you get out, and measuring goes faster. It is hard to describe the kind of scale, but if you get one, it has both ounces and grams. I am now becoming more accomplished with grams. The beauty of a scale is that for dry ingredients, you get a bowl and say add the flour, then you push a button and the scale returns to zero where upon you can add the right amount of sugar, hit the button and the scale returns to zero, and you add the right amount of coco. There is a learning curve, but I am mastering it.

Then say that you want to work in grams, what to do?

It involves some work, but

here

is a web site that converts for you. Once you have written down the grams along side the ounces in your cookbook, it is there forever.

January 8/ how many hours in the kitchen

Recently I read that in the 1950’s a women spent about 13 hours in the kitchen a week. In those days it included breakfast, lunch and dinner, even if it was a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. It was theorized that home cooking was one of the factors in the lower rate of obesity. Home cooking leaves out all the wicked additives. And I venture the woman got tired of all the work, and so served less.

My husband, for whom I cook, says that he thinks I spend more than 13 hours a week. I think I agree if I count kitchen clean up which is a huge time gobbler. No one helps me out here. But when I was a child at home, my mother worked her way out of kitchen clean up certainly starting when I was 10. And several years later she let the kids do almost all of the clean up, and that meant pots and pans, clean sink and washed counters. She had done a lot of tidying up before dinner, but the nightly after dinner clean up was my brother’s and my job, which is to say it was my job. She would help out if I had a something like a test the next day.

Two of my daughter’s work. I have nothing but admiration for them when they cook after they have worked all day, or when one has cared for young children all day long. But the clean up is the rub, especially when one girl has to work after dinner, and one has to help with homework. Society has done a lot over the years to improve things for women, with the exception of premenstrual stress and kitchen cleanup.

I am going to try to keep track of my time in the kitchen this coming week. I ask you to send in any kitchen clean up tips. I have no tips. But maybe I can work on shorter meal prep.

January 7/ Write your senator

http://www.senate.gov/ is the place to go to write your US Senator. You might remind them that the new stimulus package bill has only 7% stimulus.  Your children and grandchild will be paying for this economic package.  I personally think it is a disaster, but I really hope everyone will write, Republican and Democrat and even if you like the bill. By writing you will maybe have learned more about the bill, and be ready for the long haul.