A bit of bathroom humor

Took my mom for a walk today and encountered this sign.

Tree Time

Had a master arborist come out to the house today to discuss services. Here above you see a picture of our Live Oak in the back, which is old and beautiful and needs a bit of pruning and clean up. We have Hackberry trees sprouting up everywhere, which are just awful. Their structural integrity is not good and they start falling apart at a certain point and destroy a lot of property...these are prolific trees undesirable by homeowners. In the front, we have a crepe myrtle, which is small and produces pink-purply blossoms later in the spring. This will be pruned gently. The hackberries will be removed, other than a couple of big ones that we will deal with later on. I discovered I have a new pecan tree growing back there, a baby from the neighbor's stately pecan tree. It is going to be decades before our baby becomes such a being...but nice to have it. There is a dying mesquite that we'll deal with next year. Also, there are two mature pear trees in full blossom, which are a lovely first taste of spring. Now on the side of the house is a giant thirty year old Hackberry and it is already starting to fall apart. They will clean it up and reduce the canopy size to take some weight off and get the branches away from the roof. In the very back by the bedroom window is a large Gumbumilia, which has some ball moss in it and has some branches touching the roof. That will be cleaned up and branches removed from the roof. We also have a five year old Chinaberry tree growing between our fence and the neighbor's fence, which we'll deal with next year or so. It is already huge. First things first.

Yo Ho Ho (and...)

For the three plus decades that I have been on this planet I am still fairly ignorant of certain things that perhaps should not have escaped me for this long. Like Rum. Rum, it turns out, is made from molasses, which comes from sugar, and it was invented in the tropics in the 17th century on English sugar plantations in Barbados. I now understand the tropical association with rum. Like I said, I feel I should have been cognizant of this. Too busy trying to be a wine snob, I guess. Anyway, the molasses gets fermented to make rum. According to one scholarly source, plantation masters used to empty their chamber pots into the mix to keep the slaves from drinking it. I'm certain that it worked well if they did and the joke was on the folks back home in England who drank the stuff after it had been through the rest of the process that made it into the drink it was to become. (Source of my new knowledge: Sugar & Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624 - 1713, by Richard S. Dunn, which is one of the best written academic texts I've read-very literary in style-and a pioneering work of social history published in 1972, pointing out, among other things, yet another facet of Western society that depended utterly and completely upon the brutal and immoral practice of slavery.)

This also explains the pirates' association with rum, since pirates were well known in the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries as the English and the French lusted after Spanish gold, Spain being there for a time the world's richest nation due to her infiltration of South and Central America and conquest of the great Mesoamerican empires. Pirates could easily get hold of rum, one assumes, both by nabbing rum cargo and simply by being in the right place for pirate living, such as the infamous hard-drinking town of wanton living, Port Royal of Jamaica, prior to the earthquake of 1692 followed a couple of years later by a fire that ultimately destroyed the town, which shifted things over to Kingston and pretty much ousted the pirates. (Same source as above.)

Rum drinks:

Bahama Mama-equal parts light, gold and dark rum and one part coconut liqueur plus orange juice, pineapple juice and a splash of grenadine garnished with cherry and pineapple wedge plus one of those cool little umbrellas (this sounds so very breakfasty to me...)

Cable Car-spiced rum, orange curacao, fresh lemon juice, stirred over ice (or maybe shaken?) and strained into a cinnamon/sugar rimmed cocktail glass (YES!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Blue Hawaiian-Light Rum, Blue Curacao, Pineapple Juice, Cream of Coconut, ice...mix in blender, strain into highball glass, garnish with cherry and/or pineapple (I do not drink blue anything...too much look like windex)

Hurricane-dark rum, light rum, OJ, passion fruit juice, lime juice, fine powdered sugar, grenadine, mixed and shaken with ice, strained into a glass, garnished with orange slice and/or cherries (would love to try a New Orleans original of this sometime)

Long Island Iced Tea-vodka, gin, triple sec, light rum, tequila, sour mix (many variations of this, served in a tall glass, geez, this would mess me up)

Mojito-spiced rum, mint leaves, sugar, lime juice, soda (good for summer)

Hot Buttered Rum Cocktail-this involves some chef work: cream butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Keep refrigerated til nearly firm. Then spoon this mixture into serving mugs and pour rum over it to fill these about half full, after which you will cover this with boiling water to fill the mug. (sounds good for winter)

Zombie-Jamaican rum, light rum, orange juice, lime juice, and pineapple juice plus powdered sugar and Bacardi 151 rum; shake everything but the Bacardi and strain into glass, float Bacardi 151 onto it and garnish with cherry or other fruit wedge.

Naturally if you want proportions/ounces, etc, you can use the web to get those. My rum exploration is overdue...so...guess I'll be trying some rum drinks...one at a time, of course! The real test will be finding a bartender in Austin who knows what a Cable Car is (maybe they all do, who knows...). I went to Club DeVille and the bartender there did not know what a Vesper was (James Bond drink from Quantum of Solace). For such a supposedly hipster joint (and surely the stopping place of a few wanna-be pirates heading downstream to the heart of the Red River district), I was disappointed.

He's Just Not That Into SALSA

Ok...so everyone who knows me knows I married a man who could not possibly in any conceivable reality be into salsa dancing. I tried to change this. Change him. Change the laws of thermodynamics. And. We arrived at Copa at 9:00 p.m. sharp for the $5 salsa lesson. It is pretty informal, so they wait a bit for stragglers and random adventurers to be drawn in. I started out with a dry vodka martini, odd number of olives, Tito's. Sonic Stud started out with a dirty vodka martini. Dry & dirty, what a pair. So...we get started, doing the basic step (I've done this lesson at least three times in the last few years). I see that Sonic Stud (hereafter abreviated as S.S.) is having a bit of difficulty with the foot work. We get into turns: right turn then hook turn then right turn followed by a hook turn. S.S. is lost. I mean lost as in Land of the Lost lost. Just not in a salsa universe AT ALL. So we get started and he is bouncing up and down...and adding an extra step in the middle to increase the bounce. I tell him you can't just "add an extra step" and he says he will do it the way he wants to do it. I tell him that isn't salsa. He gets angry at me for criticizing him.

Fast forward thirty minutes. He is still not knowing the basics and I'm being spun around and around by some tiny nerdy latin lover type who has clearly done this before and is apparently there to introduce his date to the dance. I was like, wow...great things come in small nerdy packages. Well, who knows...anyway, I'm still invested in my marriage and wouldn't dream of dissing a great guy who has no soul (confer James Brown).

At the end of the lesson S.S. looked at me and simply said, "I'm done." I was like, "what?!" I had been looking forward to a fun evening of salsa and now S.S. is just as dour and uncooperative as he can be and emphasizes that he hates the music and he can't do it and he doesn't like it and that he doesn't mean to hurt me but that is just how it is and can we please leave now.

Hmph. Men take note: when a lady likes to salsa, you are a fool to hold back on her. Anyway, he agreed that it is fine for me to come out by myself and salsa and suggested I borrow Monkey Wit's husband for this purpose.

If I didn't have the most rock solid confidence in our marriage, I'd think this was a conspiracy to drive me away. But I know better. Next on the agenda: the Texas Two Step. S.S. says he'll try anything once.

Synthetic Chain of Being

I just finished Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932). This is a must-read. I don't see it as prophetic in the literal sense but I do see it as a powerful and prescient metaphor for some aspects of the human experience in Western civilization, specifically the U.S. We do love our bread and circus, not to mention antidepressants. I find it amusing that there is actually a very commonly prescribed drug currently in use called Soma (generic name Carisoprodol), which is a sedative and skeletal muscle relaxant with anxiolytic properties as well. I am amused by the audacity of the drug developer...the joke is on everyone who hasn't read BNW, apparently.

Meanwhile I could use a Soma holiday (the fictional Soma) while this nasty cold (or allergy attack?) works its way out of my system. I've never had full blown allergies but apparently January is peak Cedar allergy time. I hear it is really bad. I feel it, too. I started taking Claritin-D, which caused me to have bizarre nightmares and to become extremely irritable. For example, see the following conversation I had with my husband about 45 minutes ago:

I am reading the encyclopedia while eating some microwaved spicy Thai soup and rice. My husband is in the kitchen making his own dinner.

"I would like to travel to Maine someday," I quipped after reading about Winslow Homer in the H encyclopedia (an American watercolorist and oil painter who spent a lot of his life in Maine where he painted seascapes and the like).

"Why?" My husband's question seemed to have a tone that implied that there couldn't possibly be a reason why I'd want to go to Maine.

"Because I've heard it's beautiful and I want to go there. To see the coast. The whole state. Why wouldn't I want to go?"

"Well, ok..." He was clearly bewildered by the hostility in my tone upon responding.

I then told him that it must be the Claritin-D. I had visited an online forum earlier in the day to see if other people had had bizarre nightmares while taking it, which, apparently, many had. I also read about everything from hallucinations to losing girlfriends to feeling like a zombie to hands itching and on and on and on.

Ok, so I got off topic. I read a lot of reviews people had written on BNW and I sense that people feel a bit obligated to say how it scared them and how we're headed in that direction. Crap, if we are then I hope to be an alpha who gets to go live in the tropics with other "individuals" as a "punishment" for being antisocial, aka willing to take my lumps in order to feel (and not at the "feelies"). Ah, well. I think we're pretty far off from such a utopia/dystopia scenario and are more likely to see such scary things as bioterrorist attacks on our soil than we are to start decanting our progeny. Not that there aren't lots of ethically murky scientific developments on the horizon, but BNW is not exactly the direction in which we are headed. Again, a great read, a must-read nonetheless.

Krav Maga

So I started Krav Maga on Saturday. I'm incredibly sore. I will take it easy Monday in class, to the extent that is possible. I primarily want to get in shape and learn self defense. I'm 115 pounds and consider myself to be a skinny person who is secretly fat (I'm pretty flabby). I hope to be toned and strong by the summer when we go to the beach house. My husband is doing it, too. We made a 12 month commitment and we're both pretty excited about it.

Reading Brave New World as an exercise to quaff my interest in utopian literature.

Out with 2008!

Well, there's one more day of it. I made my New Year's Resolutions, which include things like drinking eight glasses of water per day and reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and running a 10K and making sure that I laugh as often as possible. There were 25 in all.

I haven't blogged much because my semester was too intense. But I'm baaaaaaack. For now. Only because I like to be with my friends in cyberspace. It's a way to be there and not be there but still feel like you're there even when you're not there and still feel like other people are there even when they're not there because they are immersed in their own lives out in real spacetime. Oops...I almost slipped into ontological mode.

Christmas in Memphis was fun. I sort of felt like Elvis was singing to us through the cold dark earth. Well, not really.