Welcome to Five O'Clock Somewhere, where it doesn't matter what time zone you're in; it's five o'clock somewhere. We'll look at rural life, especially as it happens in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, cats, sailing (particularly Etchells racing yachts), and bits of grammar and Victorian poetry.
Well, I wasn’t REALLY dead, but I don’t blame you if you thought that I was.
How time flies. I’ve been working on all sorts of other things, and now it’s been more than a month since my last post (“Father, I have sinned …”). The truth is that my life has gotten filled up with so much going on (most of it, for a change, of a happy sort) that all I’ve had time for lately is more short-attention-span media. But I hope to get back to the blog on a regular basis now.
I was teaching two classes over the summer term, which is condensed, so more time per week is required for each class, especially with the vast number of papers I have to grade. Yeah, I’ve had students suggest that if I didn’t assign so much work, I wouldn’t have to work so hard either. But then they wouldn’t be getting their money’s worth for their tuition dollars.
We’re also still dealing with Pat’s dad’s estate. The Old Soldier died a year and a half ago, and some things are still up in the air. That’s been a drain, especially on Pat’s time.
Meanwhile, in the happy news department, this spring, we closed on a house in Mesa, Arizona. “Why?” I hear the two or three people who still follow this blog ask. Well, Gerald is attending college at Arizona State in Tempe, plus taking a few classes at Mesa Community College that count for the same credit but cost less than a third as much in tuition (gotta love community colleges!). Instead of sending him rent money every month, we will now be sending him compensation for household maintenance and fixing things up. Also, we will no longer have to pay for a hotel room when we go to Arizona to visit him. In addition, at some point Pat and I will be retiring, and we already know we want to get rid of the house in Albuquerque. If we keep the cabin at Heron, we will be able to migrate seasonally between there and Mesa. Finally, home prices in Arizona are in the basement right now, but they’re bound to rebound, at least some. So we may have an investment that makes money even if we decide not to use the place as a retirement residence.
The upshot of the home purchase in Mesa is that we’ve been directing a lot of time and energy to getting that house up and running, learning the ins and outs of agricultural-style irrigation, and furnishing the place. While I was teaching, we took some long weekends for whirlwind trips out to get things done. Then the break between the summer and fall terms was only two weeks rather than the usual three, so we had to pack a lot of activity into a short time span that included a quickie trip to San Diego for some touristing.
Furnishing the house has been fun. One of our friends commented on the short-attention-span media that it must be like right after we got married. Actually, it’s lots better. When Pat and I first got married, we had no money whatsoever, so we took what we could get, which was mostly castoff furniture that friends and relatives had no use for. For nearly all of our adult lives, we’ve felt like we’ve been living in a junkyard. With this new house, we have a fresh start. We can buy things that we specifically like, and we can make things match. We’ve bought a few new things, but mostly, we’ve been getting great deals on high-quality furnishings at used-furniture stores. Serendipity plays a big part with used furniture – we may not know exactly what we want when we go into the store, but I will find something that just feels right, such as the bedroom set with the magnificent headboard that is now in the master bedroom. We also now have a place worthy of some of the art that we have picked up from family over the years – an elegant ceramic black cat, a bowl of fruit carved out of African wood, a pair pictures of prancing horses, an R.C. Gorman print, and more. It feels good to get those works out of the junkyard.
Of course, the house isn’t perfect. It was originally constructed in 2000 with high-quality materials and workmanship, but one of the previous owners took out the original bedroom flooring and replaced it with the most God-awful, crappy, plastic pseudo-laminate, and didn’t even install it properly. So we’re now replacing it with high-quality engineered wood flooring, natural red oak. Actually, Gerald’s doing most of the work – that’s part of the aforementioned compensation for home improvements instead of rent subsidies. He got most of one room done by the time we had to return to Albuquerque, but since he’s taking a heavy course load this fall, it may take him a while to get all of the bedrooms done. Still, what’s been done so far is beautiful.
Meanwhile, now that we’ve got most of the time-consuming stuff out of the way on the house, I should now have time to return to the blog. Glad to be back.
The few people who frequent this blog might have noticed a lack of activity lately. That’s primarily because Pat and I have been on the road for most of the past three weeks. For a detailed travelogue, including pictures, you can look at Pat’s blog, Desert Sea, where he’s gradually putting up posts about the journey. I’ll just touch on highlights here.
The trip seemed to have two major themes: barbeque and detours. Just about every day, we had at least one great barbeque experience – when I travel, I want to sample the best of the local food, and we kept stumbling on great barbeque places. And just about every day, sometimes multiple times in a day, we ended up someplace we didn’t intend to be, sometimes because of road construction, sometimes because of our unfamiliarity with the territory, and sometimes because of a little of both.
Barbeque, May 2: OK, this doesn’t officially count as part of the journey, but we had lunch at JR’s Bar-B-Que in Albuquerque with the guy who was helping his buddy sell the fifth-wheel trailer we just bought, and exchanged a check for the title to the trailer.
Detour, May 2: Not a really big deal, but our favorite motel in Gallup had no non-smoking rooms available, so we had to spring for a suite.
Barbeque, May 3: Big Belly’s BBQ in Tempe, run by former ASU and KC Chiefs defensive tackle Bryan Proby, serves up massive portions of KC style barbeque. I didn’t have enough appetite for it this trip, but I’ve been told the giant potato is an experience I should have at least once in my lifetime.
Detour, May 6: This one was on purpose. On our way to the cruise on Saguaro Lake, we went to Arizona Cactus Sales to see what we might want to put into the landscaping if we buy a house in the Phoenix area – many of the properties we’ve been looking at have been bank-owned or otherwise neglected, and so the landscape is pretty much dead. We’d want to put in water-conserving landscaping, rather than recreating Scottish golf courses in the desert. We learned a lot about cacti and how to take care of them – which mostly means leaving them alone and absolutely not watering them or planting them anywhere water is likely to drain.
Barbeque, May 7: Right near our motel in Bakersfield was The Grill Hut. The menu is extremely limited (beef tri-tip or chicken breast, plus sauces and sides), but what they do, they do very well.
Detour, May 8: Trying to get from the Nimitz Freeway to Alameda Island is insane. The bridges that go to the island are not lined up with the roads the freeway exits lead to, and there’s road construction that makes things really “interesting” – such as semi-trucks turning left from an extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall into another extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall, during the extremely brief green-light interval of the temporary traffic light suspended from flimsy cables above the intersection, such that one truck takes three cycles of the light to complete its turn because of all of the other drivers who try to get around the behemoth and end up getting in its way, so it has to halt until they figure out that they have to back up to get out of its way. Apparently, “reverse” is not a setting that exists on the shift levers of most Californians’ cars.
Detour, May 10: Visited a friend on his boat in Marina Bay in Richmond, and then sort of got lost on the way out. Found the cheapest gas in the East Bay area, and also the mini-mart that was featured in the movie “True Crime.” Didn’t go in to see whether the potato-chip display had been moved.
Detour, May 11: Needed to do some financial transactions involving our credit union, so we used the credit-union branch-sharing network to find a participating CU in Berkeley. Google Maps got us there, but not back. We ended up taking a scenic tour of Berkeley and Oakland, including Chinatown, that we hadn’t intended.
Barbeque, May 11: We had already looked at our schedule for our time in the Bay Area and saw that the best time for us to hook up with family was Wednesday evening. My brother had the suggestion that maybe we could meet at Sam’s Bar-B-Que in San Jose, where our cousin often plays with a bluegrass band, Dark Hollow. As it turns out, the band was playing there that night, so my cousin saved us a table and we had a great time. The band played “Detour,” written by Paul Westmoreland and played by Spade Cooley, then subsequently by Patti Page and Willie Nelson, among others.
Detour, May 12: We had a coupon. We were hungry. We wanted seafood. Gerald’s Droid told us that Panama Joe’s atmosphere was “boisterous” but the noise level was “moderate.” I guess it depends what you mean by “moderate”; it was college night.
Barbeque, May 13: OK, we didn’t get to eat this, but our motel room was suffused with the aroma. We were right around the corner from the laundry room, which was also the housekeeping staff’s lunch room. Beneath the open window, they had set up a little electric grill, and the bulgogi smelled heavenly.
Barbeque, May 14: Free hot dogs and beer at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club open house. Those folks are really proud of their new elevator, which is done up inside like a fine yacht, with wood paneling and cabin sole. We’ve been told that Black Magic used to be part of the Etchells fleet there.
Detour, May 14: Met Silver Girl and visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, then took an extended side trip to the Coyote Grill in Laguna Beach.
Detour, May 15: Sunday Brunch on the Queen Mary, followed by wandering all over the ship for several hours. We only got lost a couple of times …
Detour, May 16: Dropped Gerald off with the ASU sailing team for several days’ training at the US Sailing Center in Long Beach and made it out of the LA area with only one or two wrong turns along the way. Made it to Tempe, dropped off a couple of things and picked up a couple of things at Gerald’s apartment.
Detour, May 17: Less than an hour from home, we saw smoke rising and lots of red flashing lights up ahead. We got off the freeway onto Old Route 66 and meandered through the village of Paraje before getting back onto the freeway, which we then had all to ourselves until we got to the outskirts of Albuquerque.
Detour, May 18-20: You thought we were done traveling? Nope. First, Pat went to Los Alamos to pick up Dulce, who had been getting royal spa treatment at my folks’ house (dinner whenever she wanted it, an electric blanket to sleep on at night, and other general spoiling). Then we took the big truck (Enterprise) south to pick up the fifth-wheel trailer and learn how it works.
Detour, May 21: I had been scheduled to teach only one class during the summer term, but I was given the opportunity Friday to add another – this one on the West Side campus, where I haven’t taught before. Pat and I took a scenic drive to assess the layout of the place, and man, is it far away!
Today: No detours, but maybe some barbeque – chicken “wings” from JJ’s (they’re actually thighs, and therefore really meaty) should go well with the hockey game. Now I’m getting hungry!
For the past few years, Pat and I have been operating on an austerity budget. Part of that program has meant that I haven't had much in the way of new clothes for a very long time -- we've been shopping at thrift stores for most clothes. But now, at long last, I have the first pair of actual new shoes that I have had in about five years. And they're magnificent: delightful little black numbers that fit my feet like gloves, but with just enough extra stretch that in really cold conditions I can wear a pair of wool socks underneath.
Especially over on Facebook, many friends, including old high-school classmates, have reveled in their shoes -- how many they have, the special virtues of each pair, the stylishness, the excitement of finding just the right pair. Now, I can join them.
Meanwhile, it's not just my feet but also my boat, Black Magic, that is enjoying the end of austerity. We came down to Elephant Butte Friday with the hope of sailing with Zorro as well as working on boats. As it turned out, it was too windy to sail. First, I helped Zorro with patching some cracks in Constellation's deck and re-rigging the outhaul, which had been fouling far too often. Then Pat joined Zorro and me at the mast-up storage lot where Black Magic is, and we replaced a lot of the rigging: backstay control, mainsheet, jib sheet, traveler (including some blocks and other hardware), jib tack, mast block shock cords, and tiller tamer. Zorro also mixed up some epoxy filler, which he used to patch up some gouges in the keel as well as some dents in the deck.
Saturday, we had hoped that at least in the morning, we could get in some sailing; the weather forecasts predicted a breezy morning and a windy afternoon. But it was blustery from the get-go, much too windy for sailing. Zorro did some work on Constellation while Pat and I paid a visit to our favorite used-book store in the universe, Black Cat Books in Truth or Consequences. Gerald has a rule of thumb that a used-book store is not a proper used-book store unless there is a cat on the premises. I think I agree. Pat and I ended up getting a wide range of books, including a German grammar book, a collection of essays about what it means to be human in a technological environment, and a James Patterson (plus one of his more trustworthy co-authors, Maxine Paetro) thriller.
After that, Pat and I stopped by the hardware store to look for bolts to use when replacing the old cam cleats on the boat. In stainless steel, the longest bolts the store had were two inches, so we bought only four, two flathead and two pan-head, with the idea that whichever fit best, we could come back and buy more, and if neither fit, we weren't out much money.
Then Pat and I returned to Black Magic, where Pat set about working on replacing the old cam cleats on the console with the new ones that we had ordered. The old cleats were ancient and decaying even when we first got the boat, but we had never had time or money to replace them all -- when one of them failed, we put a new one in, and we kept saying that we needed to get them all replaced. It took Pat 20 minutes to remove just one cleat. We discovered that flathead bolts were the best for the new cam cleats, but two inches was too short -- we needed three-inch bolts.
Meanwhile, Zorro had done some more work on Constellation but had learned that the Sunday weather forecast was for even more wind, far too much to go sailing, so he decided to put his boat away and head back to El Paso. He stopped by Black Magic before heading south, and he and Pat worked on the shrouds -- we're looking at replacing turnbuckles at the very least and possibly at replacing the shrouds completely. We made plans to do more boat restoration next weekend, including new bottom paint at least on the parts of the keel that got patched. In the meantime, we can get the three-inch bolts and a few other bits of hardware we need. Top of the agenda for next weekend is completely redoing the outhaul on Black Magic so we can depower more effectively in a gust. There have been a lot of those lately.
Zorro is super-eager about all of these repairs and refurbishments, because he really, really wants to see Black Magic racing next weekend. And I do have to admit, I'm excited about seeing my boat finally getting back into a condition where she can sail well. But I'm feeling ambiguous about actually racing. I'm not sure I want to support the RGSC's current leadership -- the current commodore who, when he was vice commodore, tried to call meetings of the board even though the club constitution doesn't give him that power, and on shorter notice than even those who have the power are permitted to do; Zorro's replacement as race committee chairman to whom I gave the blog nickname "Space Invader" because of his creepy behavior toward me even before I learned of the New Mexico court records about him and the many restraining orders women have taken out against him; the club management that failed to notify one of our favorite restaurant owners that the sailing club was planning to hold a skippers' meeting in the restaurant's back room and thereby royally pissed off the restaurant owner ... I don't know that I want to race and thereby seem to support the current club leadership.
I think I'd rather just go sailing. And wear my new shoes.
Once again, Captain JP has issued a request for his fellow bloggers to submit their top 10 blog posts for the year. As my previous post indicated, this has been, yet again, annus horribilis, with too many disasters to count.
But I did find 10 posts that were, at least in some way memorable. Here they are:
I started the year with observations about astronomy, tides, and how Pat and I got into sailing, with A tale from the past.
Those of you who have known me for some time know about my love-hate relationship with photocopiers, including how a copier figured strongly in my novel Murder at the Community College. In February, I had an ironic experience, recounted in The copier temptation.
Also in February, Tillerman issued a challenge: Write about the worst sailing innovation ever. My contribution: Work.
In March, a fellow instructor at the community college, whom I also knew through the sailing club, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Then a week later, Pat’s dad passed away. The Old Soldier had lived a long life, and he didn’t want a fancy funeral – no fancy church service or procession or anything like that. What he got was a very simple graveside service, with his fellow veterans from the American Legion providing an honor guard to shoot a 21-gun salute and blow “Taps” on a bugle. He would not have wanted anything fancier. I reflected on his life in Sending the Old Man Home.
As it turned out, the Old Soldier had chosen a beautiful time of the year in Texas to die, and according to the people who follow such things, this past spring was one of the best ever for Texas wildflowers. Planting wildflowers along highways was a passion of former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. We took many great pictures on the way home from the funeral, and I put some photos online in Thank you, Lady Bird.
May 1 was the most devastating day of the year. Our extremely dear sailing friend Marty Stevenson went overboard from the boat he was on as we were preparing to hold a regatta. I wrote about how much he meant to us in A few words about Marty. I had been planning to deliver those words at his memorial service. Unfortunately, his widow would not let me or anyone else from the sailing club speak. So nobody heard those words. Only those who read them in the blog or the sailing club newsletter ever received them.
On a lighter note, I did get into one of the more specialized cooking techniques that I know. I have known all of my life about Beer can chicken, a tradition I probably learned from relatives in Arkansas, but for many others, it was a novel method.
July was funeral time again. Another sailing fried passed away. This time, it was not so shocking; he had been in declining health for some time. And his widow and family welcomed me to speak at his funeral, In Memory of Richard Dittmar. It is good to laugh at a funeral, when it’s remembering what made us all so joyful about the person who is now no longer among us.
There was another memorial in July. My colleague had died in a car accident in June; his family and very close friends had had a small, private funeral. But long before his death, he had made his wishes clear to his family and partner: He didn’t want mourning; he wanted a party. So that was what he got. I summed up that party in Remembering Herman.
In September, we had car troubles. Babe, the Ford Expedition, has been increasingly having problems with electronics. As it turns out, the troubles that led to When machines rebel were not electronic but physical – the rear differential and axle essentially disintegrated – but at the time, it was easy to blame the computers.
Then I had another trip down memory lane, thinking about classic cars and beautiful times on a European road trip nearly 30 years ago. I don’t like big roads; I like little ones. I don’t like big places; I like little ones.
So 2010 on the blog was often melancholy or wistful. It’s been a rough year. I will very much miss the people who are no longer with us. But I know I will go on.
Those of you who know me well know that the past few years have been disastrous. 2007 was calamitous; at the end of that year, I hoped that 2008 would be better. It wasn’t. At the end of 2008, I desperately hoped that 2009 would be better – I even said that things were so bad that they couldn’t possibly get worse. Unh-unh. 2009 was so bad that, by the end if it, I was calling it annus horribilis, because of all of the disasters that had occurred.
And then 2010 was even worse. There were times I wondered why the hell I even bothered trying to survive. What was the use?
Pat and I used to send out Christmas cards, which I always chose carefully to express exactly what we wished for our friends and family, along with a letter telling of our adventures and accomplishments over the previous year. I worked hard to keep it honest – no “little Susie is the most accomplished violinist in the state for the third year straight” or “Butch became the first high-school player ever to be nominated for the Heisman Trophy.”
Unfortunately, the need to be honest clashed with the expectation that holiday letters also be cheerful and upbeat. For that reason, Pat and I haven’t sent out a Christmas letter for the past three years.
So … if we were to send out a holiday letter this season, what would it say? Let’s see …
Holiday greetings to all of our friends and family for 2010 and the 2011 New Year!
We’re sorry that we haven’t been in touch lately as much as we should. Life has been busy. If you wish to contact us, you can find our email addresses and cell-phone numbers at the bottom of this letter.
It has been an eventful year, although not always in a good way. Pat continues in his fourth year “between jobs,” so we’re not exactly financially comfortable. We’ve had to cash in retirement funds to pay off bills and fend off foreclosure, leaving us with nothing but Social (in)Security and the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board to fund our “golden” years. And the one-eighth of my paycheck that has gone, without any choice on my part, to the ERB, has been invested 20% with Bernard Madoff and 70% with companies represented by buddies of the governor based not on which was a wise investment but on who got the biggest kickback. Not exactly reassuring.
We lost a lot of good people this year. In March, Pat’s dad died. He had been in declining health for quite a while, but he had never made plans for that eventuality – he had never made any arrangements for his care in the event that he became incapacitated, or much of any other advance plans, other than making some extremely naïve assumptions about how things would work once he was gone. In this case, it was fortunate that Pat was “between jobs,” because if he had had a job, he would have lost it because of all the time he had to spend on his dad, both before he died and after.
For me, probably the most devastating event of the year was the loss of our dear sailing friend Marty Stevenson. On May 1, we were preparing to start a regatta when Marty went overboard from the boat that he was on. He was not wearing a life jacket. We were only a hundred yards away; many other boats were even closer. The Coast Guard Auxiliary was already on the lake, doing an exercise; they and the park rangers were on the spot within minutes. But Marty was gone. His body wasn’t found until three weeks later. Stand by for sermon: ALWAYS WEAR YOUR LIFE JACKET. ALWAYS. YOU MAY THINK YOU DON’T NEED IT. HOGWASH! IT’S BETTER TO HAVE IT AND NOT NEED IT THAN TO NEED IT AND NOT HAVE IT!
OK, stepping down from soapbox.
On to the next obligatory section of the holiday letter: accomplishments of the offspring. That area, too, has not been up to the typical Christmas-letter standards. Last year, the financial aid office repeatedly lost forms that had been filed showing that Gerald’s father was unemployed and that therefore Gerald was eligible for financial aid. Because of the bungling in the financial-aid office, Gerald was found in default of $11,000 tuition for the Fall 2009 term and therefore ineligible to enroll for the Spring 2010 term. We’re still trying to straighten out the records, but at least he was allowed to enroll and take classes in Fall 2010. Problem is, the financial aid office is still losing paperwork, and we’re now sending a barrage of faxes to replace the same forms that we’ve already filed that the office keeps losing, in order that he can enroll for Spring 2011.
On the upside, Gerald seems to have found some direction in his life. He’s discovered that he loves photography, and so that’s now his major. He does, however, recognize that photography is not necessarily something that pays the bills. He also loves nature and the outdoors. He has decided that he wants to become a park ranger, so he can work in a beautiful place and indulge in photography on his days off. Especially at the elite levels in such organizations as the National Park Service, rangers have to perform a wide variety of duties: law enforcement, emergency medical technician, resource management, interpretative services, archaeological preservation, and more. This summer, Gerald got his basic EMT training, so that’s a start on the park ranger track.
OK, now that I’m done bragging about the offspring, I’m supposed to talk about what the parental units are doing. Well, Pat has just stepped down as the commodore of the Rio Grande Sailing Club, and I think he’s glad to be rid of the burden. Pat and I both went to the US Sailing class in race management a month ago; Pat’s already certified as a Club Race Officer and is hoping to get certified as a Regional Race Officer; I hope to get certified at the club level, but I also passed the test for regional level, so if I get ambitious, I could also work on the resume component.
Meanwhile, I’m still teaching developmental English at Central New Mexico Community College. My job is to work with students who need to get their English skills up to the level at which they can do college-level work. On my darkest days, when I am most discouraged, it is my students who keep me going. I may feel like giving up, but then I realize, my students need me and I don’t want to let them down. And then when I come to class, one or another will say something, and it will cheer me up, and then the whole class session is happy. I have the very best students in the world. I am so lucky to have them.
Yeah, not exactly a conventional holiday letter. But then, my life hasn’t exactly been conventional lately.
Pat, Dulce and I are at Five O'Clock Somewhere; Gerald has taken Scratch to Tempe for the start of the new school year.
Dulce had found the new kitten to be rather irritating, so she had been hiding in her lair under the bed in the master bedroom since his arrival, coming out only briefly to eat or use the litter box. She is now much more at ease, without the vexation of a kitten to put up with, and up here at the place she likes best.
Our main reason for coming up here, and being here on a weekday, was so we could arrange for a plumber to fix a leaky water pipe. The well is at one end of the house, and the place where the water line enters the house is at the other end; for most of that distance, the pipe is buried four feet deep so it won't freeze. But the last couple of feet before it enters the house is not as deep; it probably froze in the winter and cracked. We didn't even realize we had a leak until recently; it's been gradually getting worse.
So now that I have a couple of weeks off between terms, we decided to come up for a few days, get the plumber in, and just relax a bit. We've been doing some reading, some sleeping, some movie-watching (Clint Eastwood), and of course, some online stuff. Dulce has been enjoying her royal cushion on the back of the sofa, and she's eating much better now that she's more at ease.
Gerald is making coffee, preparing to go sit on a mountaintop with a friend and watch for the aurora.
Normally, we don't get auroras in New Mexico – we're too far south. But NASA has reported a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun. In plain English, that means that there is an unusually strong wave of ionized particles headed our way. These particles interact with the Earth's magnetic field to create the glowing displays known as auroras.
The peak of the first wave is supposed to be about 1 a.m. MDT. Gerald's ham-radio friends are already reporting a high level of electromagnetic activity, and he's hoping not only to see the aurora but to photograph it – he does have a good camera for that sort of thing, as his pictures of Earthshine during last summer's eclipse attest.
I can recall one time when I actually did see an aurora in New Mexico. It was faint, and I'm sure it could never compare to the spectacular displays that folks further north can see. It was September, and the sun was in a phase of high activity. The high-school astronomy club had a star party (if I remember correctly, it was to look at a comet) in the very small hours of the morning. We saw very faint wispy glowing streaks, in pale yellow and green. It was not exactly spectacular, but it was an aurora – in New Mexico.
In honor of the aurora, here is Walt Kelly, the creator of the Pogo Possum comic strip:
Oh, roar a roar for Nora, Nora Alice in the night. For she has seen Aurora Borealis burning bright.
A furore for our Nora! And applaud Aurora seen! Where, throughout the summer, has Our Borealis been?
One of the challenges in cooking a chicken in an outdoor grill (whether charcoal or gas) is getting the outside of the chicken nicely browned and crispy while keeping the meat tender and juicy. If you wrap the chicken in foil or a bag, the skin stays pale and soggy, but if you leave the chicken uncovered, the meat often dries out.
Beer can chicken solves the problem. First, you season the chicken, inside and out, with whatever herbs and spices you're in the mood for -- pick seasonings that complement the side dishes you plan to serve. Then, open a can of beer (you can drink some of it if you wish, but leave at least half in the can), and slide the body cavity of the chicken over the can. Place the assembly in a barbecue grill over medium-low heat, close the lid, and cook 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until the juices running down the outside of the beer can are clear. If you wish, during the last 15 to 30 minutes, brush the chicken with your favorite sauce -- barbecue, teriyaki, or whatever.
As the chicken cooks, the skin crisps up nicely, and the beer evaporates to permeate the meat, keeping it moist and tender, as well as imparting some flavor.
Gerald and I cooked this up at the marina at Heron this evening. Lots of people asked us where we got this recipe. Thing is, I couldn't say. I think I've known about it pretty much all of my life, possibly courtesy of my Arkansas relatives.
Nowadays, you can even get a metal frame that holds the beer can and keeps the chicken from tipping over (as pictured above, courtesy of Life on the Water Magazine). You can find one in many mail-order catalogs.
Yeah, once in a while, rednecks come up with a good idea.
It's been more than three weeks since Marty disappeared beneath the waves, and three days ago, his body was recovered. Eventually, the medical examiner should be able to answer at least some of the questions about his death.
As time goes by, I'm getting better. The summer term at the community college is about to begin, and getting immersed in work should help. Also, as the events surrounding Marty's death fade into the past, they're not so painful any more.
We had a couple of Gerald's buddies visiting up at the cabin this past weekend, and they're both just fantastic guys who really made the weekend a success, helpful, courteous – their parents should be proud of them. We even had a bit of comic relief when the State Parks people put the ranger boat into the water and forgot to put in the drain plug; Gerald's buddies helped to save the day, along with the current NMSC dockmasters.
But I do still get spells. I have thoughts and memories, and sometimes I find tears leaking from my eyes even without a triggering event. I took a nap, and I had a dream that I was riding in Marty's truck with him. There was no conversation; he was just driving and smiling that smile.
It is probably true that most states have some irregularities in voter registration. Organizations such as ACORN have hired people to register voters and given these hires commissions based on the number of voters they register. Even though ACORN officially forbids fabricated registrations, putting people on commission gives them a strong motivation to fudge things a little.
But New Mexico has more odd things going on than most states. For example, we have had a law on the books that forbids idiots from registering to vote. The state legislature has attempted to overturn that one for a while, but last I heard, the efforts hadn't been successful.
Meanwhile, the legislature attempted to enact legislation that would allow a county clerk to remove a person from the voting rolls if that person died. That proposal failed. This means that there are only two circumstances under which a person gets removed from the rolls – either the person is convicted of a felony, or the person fails to vote in eight straight elections. If a dead person continues to vote, he or she remains on the rolls.
A couple of summers ago, Gerald got a job as a canvasser for a political candidate. He went around Albuquerque, from neighborhood to neighborhood, knocking on doors of registered party members to encourage them to get out and vote for the candidate. It was an eye-opening experience. In many cases, the voter no longer lived at that address. In some cases, the voter had died – one of them had been dead for eight years. He was sent to an apartment complex where many registered party members supposedly lived, only to find that the apartment complex had been torn down a long time before. He also found a large number of voters with registration addresses that turned out to be motel rooms.
In Rio Arriba County, things get even fishier. There was one election in which a candidate's campaign worker showed up at the poll with a large number of highly intoxicated persons. These voters were literally falling-down drunk, and they needed the campaign worker's help to stand up. Because the Americans with Disabilities Act allows someone to assist a disabled person, the campaign worker was allowed into the voting booth with each of the drunks.
Lately, it appears that our cat, Dulce, has been registered to vote. She just got a letter from Joe Biden that started out "Dear Fellow Democrat," and followed with a summary of the party's initiatives and a request for contributions to support the party's efforts. Well, she certainly is not an idiot, so she can't be disqualified on that point, but she's not quite old enough to vote yet – she's only 15. Unless one counts in cat-years … then she'd be a wise old lady.
We had a home burglary a few months ago. In Albuquerque, there has been an identity-theft ring that has bought bills and bank statements from home burglars, run credit checks, and then stolen the identities of the most credit-worthy burglary victims. Pat and I didn't pass the credit check, but maybe ACORN was willing to buy Dulce's information from the burglars.
Of course, when you're in Arizona, you gotta take pics of saguaros …
Pat and I just spent this past weekend in Arizona. The original plan was to sell a boat, but that deal fell through, so essentially we ended up making a very expensive green chile delivery to Gerald.
It's been rainy in Arizona lately. According to Gerald's roommate/landlord, the Phoenix area has, in the first two months of this year, received about as much precipitation as it usually gets in about three years. As a result, the desert is looking … well … not so desert-like.
In Albuquerque, there's a company that used to sell and install sprinkler systems. Now, it still does sprinklers, but it also does artificial lawns that don't need sprinklers to stay green, and other landscape components. Until recently, it had a patch of artificial lawn out front, with a saguaro cactus (presumably also artificial, but very real-looking) in the middle of it. Every time I went past it, I thought, a saguaro surrounded by green grass … that's so … so … wrong.
Well, maybe it isn't, as demonstrated by these shots taken along the Carefree Highway near Lake Pleasant.
We ended up with a very low-key New Year's celebration at the lake. New Year's Eve, Pat, Gerald, and I headed south, to find that Zorro was already out on the water in very light air; we rigged Black Magic up and set sail. He had sailed up to the northern part of the lake, and then had been becalmed, so it took him a while to get back to the area near the marina where we were sailing. We returned to the marina together about sunset. As we were finishing putting the boats away in the increasing dark, the moon rose big and yellow over the far side of the lake. It would certainly have been pretty to sail under that moon, but the temperature was near freezing and falling; early October is definitely a better time than late December for moonlight sailing.
We headed to Cornhusker's house to warm up and have a light supper; we then ran by Wal-Mart for some miscellaneous supplies and went to join Zorro for an extremely quiet New Year's celebration. He had brought a video of a documentary about Erroll Flynn that we watched, and then we watched the television countdown to the New Year. Before we headed back to Cornhusker's house, Zorro played the Bette Midler version of "Slow Boat To China" for us.
New Year's Day, the weather was nice, sunny with a high temperature predicted in the high 40s; there was, however, very little wind. Zorro went out earlier in the day, and then he said he thought the wind was coming up some, so Pat, Gerald, and I set sail on Black Magic to join Zorro on Constellation. The first 20 minutes or so, winds were light; we got about halfway across the lake. Then the wind became close to non-existent; it took us three hours to get back to the marina. Once again, we put away boats in gathering darkness and plummeting temperatures. (Pictures of the "sailing" are available on Desert Sea.)
So we returned to Albuquerque, and the weather reports from the lake have been of very light wind, so we haven't bothered to try to go back and sail more. Perhaps mid-week there will be more wind, although there also might be lower temperatures and some chance of precipitation. And then, we have some business matters to take care of both here in Albuquerque and up at Five O'Clock Somewhere. Plus, the new term begins next week, and there's a new textbook and a new master syllabus for the classes I will be teaching, so I have a lot of work to do on revising my syllabus and assignment calendar.
So Pat and I have taken a trip to Arizona to have Thanksgiving with Gerald. While we were driving through the mountains of eastern Arizona last night, the temperature did get down to 34 degrees, according to the thermometer in our truck. However, now we’re in Tempe, in the Valley of the Sun, and the temperature is somewhere in the vicinity of 80 degrees.
Pat discovered that he had forgotten something in his packing, leaving him short of pants. No problem, we found that one clothing store in the outlet mall was open special Thanksgiving hours. This shopping center has one of the very trendy sound systems that plays music in all of the outdoor areas. It’s playing holiday tunes.
There was something incongruous, however, about what was playing as we were walking from the truck to the store: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
He’s had to deal with a lot of other stresses as well, financial, automotive, academic, and health-related. It hasn’t helped that Pat and I haven’t been able to get out there to visit him, or that we haven’t even been able to send him green chile to ease his troubles. He recently Twittered, “Odd thoughts flowing through/ thinking about the people/ I want to be with.”
Here’s one for Gerald, the lullaby “Baby Mine” from the movie Dumbo. It just seems right for right now. (Thanks to Distant Melody for the lyrics.) It’s strange … when he actually was little, I wasn’t capable of this kind of caring, either because of depression or –much more likely – because the anti-depressant medications I was on kept me from feeling anything. In fact, I have almost no memory of his first two years of life. My memory begins when I got so fed up with the side effects of the anti-depressants that I quit taking them.
So maybe I feel a little bit guilty about having abandoned him back then, and now I want to make it right. I can’t sing a lullaby to him right now, but I can blog it to him.
It has been a long time since Pat and I have been sailing, or since we have seen Zorro. Pat has had to take repeated trips to South Texas to deal with the Old Soldier's health problems and other affairs. Meanwhile, I've been working – normally, I would take the summer off from teaching, but with Pat not currently working, we have needed the income. In addition, Zorro's employment has kept him away from the lake much of the time (it's nice for him to have not merely a job, but one he's well suited for, but it involves a lot of travel out of town). And he keeps having girl trouble: He just wants to have a good time with no commitment, but the women he's been dating lately have, after about two dates, started talking about moving in with him, getting married, getting rid of the cats, changing his housekeeping style, changing his lifestyle, and generally trying to do a total makeover of his personality – in other words, making him into not-Zorro. He's been spending a lot of his time and energy trying to get disentangled from them.
So none of us got in any sailing during June, and while Zorro had managed to get in a bit of sailing on his own last weekend, the last time Pat or I had been sailing was the Race to the Elephant at the end of May. We also had not seen Zorro since that weekend, and I was getting especially stressed-out and depressed. I needed a good dose of Zorro.
Finally, this weekend, the universe has come into alignment (which may or may not have anything to do with the solar eclipse that Gerald, Jer, Fuego, and others will be watching in just a couple of days). Pat and I were at the lake at the same time as Zorro, and we were able to go sailing with him.
Friday afternoon, we headed for the lake. When we left Albuquerque, we were in hot, dry, windless conditions. By the time we got to Socorro, we were in thunderstorms that had not been predicted in the weather forecasts that we had seen, with very little rain but a lot of gusty wind. When we arrived at the lake, the clouds were heavy, the wind was screaming, and there was lots of lightning. We met Zorro, Carguy, and Carguy's girlfriend at the marina; they reported that up until just before Pat and I had arrived, sailing conditions on the lake were fantastic. Zorro had been on Constellation, and Carguy and his girlfriend had been on Caliente, which Carguy has just repurchased from Ribbons, and they had had about three hours of winds in the vicinity of 15 knots. They had just gotten in to the marina and tied up when the gale started raging.
It was a little disappointing to have missed out on that afternoon's great sailing, but it was good to see Zorro again. Pat and I went to dinner with Zorro (during which time a squall moved through, with fierce winds, lots of lightning, and about 10 minutes of heavy downpour), and then we joined Carguy, Carguy's girlfriend, Dino, and a couple of Dino's workers at a house on the river that Dino has recently purchased that he's remodeling into a vacation rental (3 bedrooms, 2 baths, spa tub in the master bath, fireplace in the living room, and a fantastic deck over the river where one can sit and be soothed by the whooshing sound of the rapids just downstream, for just $1000 a week). Dino, Zorro, Pat and I relaxed on the deck in the dark, listening to the rapids and the occasional night bird, catching up with each other's lives. Dino had a fishing rod in a holder mounted on the rail of the deck, with a line trailing into the water, but he didn't seem to be expecting to catch anything.
Pat and I then headed for our lodging for the weekend, the guest room of Cornhusker and Bassmaster's house. Cornhusker is off on an adventure in the Pacific Northwest with a friend, but Bassmaster is, at least sometimes, around.
Saturday morning, we ended up sleeping in extra-late. Pat attributed this to "cumulative fatigue" from all of the stress that we have both been under, although there may have been other factors. Zorro phoned about ten, saying that the wind was looking really good and he was going sailing; we might be able to get in touch with him later.
Eventually, we got moving. Pat wanted to take care of some sailing club business with the State Parks people. While we were working on that, Zorro phoned. He had just had a fantastic time on the water, in 20-knot winds that were left over from the front that had moved through the previous night. Single-handing in those winds, in the hot sun, had made him tired and hungry, so he was going to get some lunch and then go out sailing again. Pat and I arranged to meet him for lunch and then get out on Constellation with him for the rest of the day.
It was beautiful. As the frontal system moved away, the winds abated, so they were generally in the 10-15 knot range. Carguy and his girlfriend were out on his Newport 28 with some prospective buyers, and we sailed to them, sailed with them for a bit, sailed away for a while, rejoined them for a while … and so forth. Meanwhile, Zorro put Pat through some fairly rigorous training on foredeck duty and headsail trim. This is really good, as Gerald is now at college and not usually available to run things on the front end of the boat, and so I'm going to have to depend on Pat for all of that. Conditions were stiffer than Pat is accustomed to, especially when trimming the spinnaker, so he got a workout. He also seems to be getting more coordinated – today, he clocked me over the head with the spinnaker pole only three times, and he stepped on my toes only twice.
Several times, we thought about going back in to the marina. There were some heavy clouds hanging just northwest of the lake, but they never came in close. We kept an eye on them, but as long as they held off, we were having just too much fun sailing to quit. We sailed up and down the lake several times, which gave Pat a whole lot of practice with that spinnaker. What finally led us to head in to the marina was the fact that we were running out of daylight. If there had been a full moon, we might still be sailing; but it's approaching new moon, so there's no light to sail under once the sun is gone.
Once in the marina, we helped Zorro put his boat away, so he could go back to El Paso. He said he had thought about staying over another night and sailing more on Sunday, but he didn't think there would be enough wind to make that worthwhile. Later I checked the weather forecasts, and it looks like he made the right call – the forecasts are nearly unanimous that there will be very little wind Sunday. Pat and I may go out with Carguy and his girlfriend on Caliente, and Zorro thinks that would be good – they're almost total beginners on the Etchells, and in gentle conditions, Pat and I can teach them things.
I guess that means we've graduated to the next level. There's an old saying in medical school about learning procedures: You watch one, you do one, you teach one. Then you've learned it. So Pat and I are now at the third stage, at least according to Zorro.
