Author Archives: David

Cooking For Fun

07 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in cooking, food, Uncategorized

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What’s the saying, “Why do it if it isn’t fun?”  Let’s be real. Sometimes cooking isn’t fun. Like it’s work and the budget for food is small ’cause there ain’t no money. Then again there are opportunities that cry out for creativity. 

Friday, there was almost an entire half gallon of milk with a “sell by” date of 30 December. It figuratively was imploring me to use it. Add to the ingredient pool two bars of Ghirardelli Baking Chocolate, one 100% Cacao, the other Semi-Sweet. Last night we made real hot chocolate with melted 100% Cacao. Just melt 2 oz of the chocolate, mixing it into a cup of water, Add sugar. Then add three cups of milk. Bring it almost to boiling. There are more steps but that is the gist of it. You will wonder why you ever use that instant hot cocoa mix, especially with the vile desiccated marshmallow marbles.

Today I melted  two ounces of the Semi-Sweet in a double boiler, dissolved that in milk and added it to Cook and Serve Vanilla Pudding as it cooked. I added a shake or two of cinnamon, just because the cinnamon was within easy reach. That received a nod of spousal approval.  Now there was a cup of milk left from the short-dated  half gallon. A cup of Hot Ovaltine finished that off.

I did not let the milk go bad. Mother and Dad would have been proud. The calories consumed is another question.

Happy New Year

01 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by in Family, Relationships

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To all my Word Press friends, I am sitting down, watching The Rose Parade, as my house warms from the busy oven. Happy New Year.

If my blogging has taught anything, it’s that people committed to respect and community can get along just fine, no matter what descriptors they choose to characterize themselves.

I love you all. Thank you for reading my blog and being my cyber-neighbors.

Mark Twain Quote 

01 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by in American History, Animal Baby Cuteness, Big Business

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“Show me where a man gets his corn pone and I‘ll tell you what his opinions are.”

To those of you with gender issues substitute “person” for “man”. 

Corn pone was a very basic food for people who grew up on the frontier West, as Twain did. Basically it’s corn bread.

Next consider everything said by every, and I mean every, journalist and news talking head in the country, from Wolf Blitzer to Sean Hannity. 

Follow that consideration up by asking why the information technology companies never run afoul of the antitrust laws. Does the money they give to the politicians affect their treatment by the Antitrust Division of the DOJ?

Happy New Year.  

Wednesday Drama

28 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in Family

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Today I was to take my stepmom to the Y. So I called to set up a time and I got a busy signal. I wait a bit and there is still a busy signal. An hour of this, maybe longer, transpires. Uh–oh. .

It could be no big deal. Then again. The lady is 92, lives alone, except for the cat. Better check. I go over. She answers the door. I am relieved. I don’t do 911 well.

“Your line has been busy.”

“Oh Dear.”

“There is a phone off the hook.”

“I have four extensions.”

We find the offending phone, put it back on its cradle. The phone rings now.

As dealing with elderly parent issues go, this is nothing. That moment of panic when the possibility of the inevitable happening now is hard to shake off as it flashes across the brain. The thought of losing a dear one is so unnerving, so scary.

I’m grateful for every day I have with this beautiful lady.

Waking At Night

27 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Bloggers, memoir, Old Cameras

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I get up at night for many reasons, a full bladder, upset stomach, too hot in the bedroom, to name a few. Then there is the sheer boredom that is trying to sleep. 

So I head to the bathroom, urinate, go downstairs for a glass of seltzer to settle my stomach.  I read a bit of a butch lesbian pornographic/erotic love story that is completely engaging, look at some Tumblrs that I follow and discover a new one about French photographer Robert Doisneau. Suddenly I remember my promise to get my conventional 35mm SLR Pentax K1000 up and running again.

I remember a time 35 years ago when I first got it. I discovered the magic of 32 ASA black and white film. I started photographing old derelict buildings on two lane country roads in Lunenburg County, Virginia, tobacco curing sheds, abandoned barns, stores long gone bust, What happened to those pictures? There was the property settlement of that particular divorce. Did I get them out of the house? If so, where are they here? I fancied myself a photographer, dreaming of being one, embarrassed that my pictures were perhaps too imitative of the photographers I admired, Weston, to name one. 

Time to get back to dreaming with my hands. A Baptist preacher once told me “Prayers work when they have feet.” He was a pretty smart guy.

Matters Of Taste

23 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by in Popular Song, Taste

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I’m sitting here listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing Rodgers and Hart ballads. Last night I binge-listened to interpretations of Noël Coward’s If Love Were All. Various artists from Rufus Wainwright to Barbara Cook have taken their turn at this hauntingly beautiful song. My favorite version? Judy Garland.

It used to be that for an American male to have a fondness for the American popular song would raise doubts about that man’s sexual orientation. Nowadays, who listens to Rodgers and Hart, Noël Coward (OK he’s English), Cole Porter? If you know who Billy Strayhorn was you’re an oddity. If you know that he was gay, you’re doubly peculiar.

The stereotype of so-called gay tastes goes beyond music, to interior design, architecture, cooking, fashion. My friend John A is writing a book about Fred Astaire’s early years in Manhattan. He’s writing a book about a male dancer. John is heterosexual, but then so was Astaire.

I’m going out on a limb and suggest that gays are today as devoid of good taste as the average het guy. If gay males stereotypically follow fashion trends and GQ Magazine is any sort of reflection of gay tastes, they have no taste as of 2017. GQ. has really crappy-looking clothes displayed in bad editorial photography. No great significance to this shift is implied nor should any be inferred. It’s really about the general decline of good taste in this country.

There is just so much good stuff that is largely ignored. It’s the secular version of the trend toward bad liturgical music in current Episcopal/Anglican and Roman Catholic Worship. Sadly we now settle for, if not aspire to the banal, not the exceptional or the sublime.

How did we get here? Can we go back?