Minor Kitchen Catastrophe

Kitchen drama today: A package of raw chicken leaked all over a shelf in the refrigerator.   A river of salmonella!  In the fridge!  Nightmare!

"What a disaster," I wailed.

"Why did it leak?" asked Jerry-the-scientist, examining the package as it dripped blood on the kitchen floor.

"The plastic bag  didn't have a twist-tie! And it was upside down, oh, God!" I rooted around under sink for Soft Scrub with Bleach.

"This doesn't usually happen," he mused. 

 "Throw it in the sink!  Aaaaargh!"  I pointed to the sink like he didn't know where it was.

He dropped the package in the sink.  Then he went back to the fridge and extracted a plastic bag of bread that was sitting in a pool of chicken blood.  He put it down on a formerly uncontaminated counter, near the dish drainer full of clean dishes.

" Aaaargh! No!"  I cried.  Everywhere I turned: more chicken blood.  I washed the refrigerator shelf three times with Soft Scrub.

It took me 25 minutes to decontaminate everything and transfer the bread to a clean plastic bag.  I could have strangled the butcher.

Does this resonate with anyone but my sister, who was also raised by a Food Poisoning Phobic (our dad)?   I nearly called her, but I was too busy wiping every surface in sight with Soft Scrub.  Now I need extra-rich handcream--and maybe a drink. 

Soggy Weekend

It's winding up to rain big time in the Bay Area (hysterical weather people predict a "fire hose" and a "deluge").  Here's a recommendation for a good read.

  

I loved this book!  If you went to college and faced a big turbulent scary void when you graduated, didn't know where you were going to live, where you'd find a job, whether you'd ever find a boyfriend/girlfriend, where you'd go to graduate school or if--this book evokes that time  so thoroughly that I thanked God several times that I'm old. 

A girl, two guys, all brand-new graduates of Brown University, Class of 1982,  try to find their way, their lives intersecting romantically and intellectually.  I thought the writing was wonderful, the descriptions so apt, but not over-the-top.  Here's a sample:

"Beyond the bay window of Carr House, the graduation traffic was now steady.  Roomy parental vehicles (Cadillacs and S-Class Mercedeses, along with the occasional Chrysler New Yorker or Pontiac Bonneville) were making their way from the downtown hotels up College Hill for the ceremony.  At the wheel of each car was a father, solid-looking and determined..."

Roomy parental vehicles!  Solid-looking fathers!

Below is  a photo taken the day I graduated from Berkeley wearing a home-made, flame-colored dress.  I was full of book-learning and a baby in Life.  Several bummers followed.

Graduation lunch, June 17, 1972.  Claudia, Debbie, my sister, my mother, and me.

Full Extent of Shopping This Weekend

 

 

 

That's it. 

Fortunately, these were buy-the-entire-spool, so I didn't have to have ribbon cut.

It would have been a long wait:  I had #64, picked up just in case while I searched for ribbon, and the last number called was 52.  But there was a bit of a wait in the cashiers' line, with 16 people ahead of me.

Now all I have to do is buy some gifts to wrap.

Another Pie Bites the Dust

Someone donated 16 homemade pies to the Food Pantry the Monday before Thanksgiving.  Bill, the director, didn't have the heart to tell her that we can't give out homemade food, so he told each of the volunteers to take a pie.

No problem!  I brought an apple pie home to Jerry, the Pie King.  He polished off the last slice this morning. Then he wanted to know when I'd be calling Leah, next door, about a slice of the pecan pie she'd made for Thanksgiving.  He'd heard one was available.

Here he is on his birthday one year, wearing a t-shirt I made:

Art Trek: Works from the William S. Paley Collection and the Louvre

When are the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco--the de Young and the Legion of Honor--going to show art that isn't a) decorative, b) all about fashion, and/or c)  pretty much stuff you've seen before? 

"Milk Can and Apples," 1879-83, Paul Cezanne

Jerry and I were in San Francisco last weekend and dropped into the de Young Museum to see paintings and sculptures from the William S. Paley collection/New York Museum of Modern Art. The show, "A Taste for Modernism," consists mostly of Post-Impressionist works.  Lots of big names: Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Much of the art is wonderful, but it's very, very familiar.

"Seated Woman with a Vase of Narcissus," 1941, Henri Matisse

Paley was a founder of CBS, and he spent part of his fortune on paintings, many of which hung in his Manhattan apartment.  There are photos of his apartment, which was elegant, but do we care that he shared a decorator with Jackie Kennedy?

(Someone does care--perhaps the chairwoman of the board of the Fine Arts Museums, who's a well-known socialite with lots of money and whose own house has been photographed for shelter magazines?) 

Afterward, we ate hot dogs from a food truck in Golden Gate Park.  Delicious and we didn't have to brave the crowded museum cafe.

Then we took a walk along the Coast Trail at Land's End--terrific views--and ended up in the parking lot of the Legion of Honor, where we took a quick look at a new exhibit from the Louvre, "Royal Treasures: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette."  If you're into bejeweled trinkets designed for kings of France, this is your kind of show.

 Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, described the show as "a feast of eye candy from the French aristocracy," and called the items "dazzling tchotchkes of excess."

He also wrote " 'Royal Treasures' and its ilk on the exhibition front reduce museum-going to the higher window shopping."

It's very off-with-their-heads.  And at $20 a head (no pun) to get in without a membership card, a bit steep.

Even Jerry, not a big art museum fan although God knows he's been dragged around enough of them, called the show,  "garish."

But the walk and the hot dog were great.

"A Taste for Modernism," William S. Paley Collection, de Young Museum, through December 30, 2012.

"Royal Treasures from the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette," Legion of Honor, through March 17, 2013.

And now for a rare lapse into sports...

I don't give a damn about football,  but the confluence of the remodel of UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium to include expensive luxury seating with finding out that the football coach, Jeff Tedford, makes $2.3 million a year really got to me.

So much so that I actually looked up his contract online to see what else he was getting. 

Turns out he has a car allowance for two cars,  his membership paid for at the Blackhawk Country Club, and he would have gotten a bonus of $1,000,000 if Cal won a National Championship.

(Ha!  Fat Chance!  Snowball's chance in hell, in fact, given the record of the past forty years.)

Why does Cal need a big stadium and a Division I team and fancy work-out rooms?   I know--so they can compete for top athletes.  But why top athletes?  Why not good enough athletes who actually graduate and get launched into life with a bachelor's degree? The graduation rate of football players who entered Cal between 2002-2005 was 48%, the lowest in the Pac-12 Conference. 

This at a school that is highly competitive to get into (if you're not a football player) and where student fees have been raised just about annually.

Yesterday, the athletic director fired Tedford, whose past successes had launched the stadium renovation.

But she didn't fire the concept  of a Division I team, with all the expense that  entails.  The luxury seats in renovated stadium remain, the construction costs yet to be paid off.  And the remainder of Tedford's contract has to be bought out ($6.9 million).

How about Cal ditches the idea of a Division I football and scales back to Division II?   How about everybody takes a deep breath and thinks about what the mission of the University really is? 

As alums,  Jerry and I got three pleading letters last week alone for money from the University, including one from Intercollegiate Athletics.  Lowest suggested amount: $1,000.

Fat chance, etc.

Personal History Pilgrimage

Yesterday we went to San Francisco just to get out of the house, despite the rain. As we left, I remembered a pilgrimage I've wanted to make:  to find the apartment building on Sacramento Street where my parents lived when I was born.

I knew the address from an old letter to my mother I found among her things:

 

The envelope is postmarked April 12, 1948, and the letter is from another Englishwoman who married a GI after World War II.  Her name was Mary Powell, and she seems to have married a man who didn't have a high school diploma and took her to live on the outskirts of Sacramento, where he earned $37.50/week at an unspecified job.  Sometimes they visited Vallejo, she wrote.  Could she and my mother get together?

Jerry and I found the building at the address on the envelope: 3906 Sacramento Street, in Presidio Heights.  I tried to imagine my parents' lives there, from 1947 until 1951, when they moved to San Jose.

3906 Sacramento Street, the beige building, center

 

In front of my first home

Across the street from the apartment building is California Pacific Medical Center, which used to be Children's Hospital of San Francisco, where I was born in 1950.   My mother had only to walk across the street to give birth.  My dad went back to the apartment and washed all the windows while he waited.



California Pacific Medical Center, former site of Children's Hospital, San Francisco

 

In the same block is a medical building where my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease 34 years later.  Beginnings and endings in a single block. 

 

I wonder what happened to Mary Powell and whether she and my mother ever managed to get together. In her letter, Mary wrote, "I just feel anything English would be a real treat just now."

 

She enclosed a photo of herself with a baby:

 

Mary Powell and child, 1948

 

 

 

 



A Plate of Brown Mushy Food

After a decade of trying clever recipes for Thanksgiving dinner, I realized when I was about 40 that a plain old turkey, cans of yams, cans of cranberry sauce,  Brussels sprouts (see below), mashed potatoes, and maybe a tube of dinner rolls add up to Just Fine. 

This time of year there are always recipes in newspapers and magazines for more interesting versions of Brussels sprouts and yams and pumpkin pie and killer directions for how to make a pear relish that takes half a day and a special strainer you have to go buy at Bed Bath & Beyond.

 

Unnecessary tart-up of Brussels sprouts: Roasted Brussels Sprouts, Trumpet Mushrooms & Persimmon Dressing

Not worth it.  Someone will be heartbroken that you didn't do it the traditional way, plus you end up doing a lot more work.  It's gonna be a plate of brown mushy food, no matter what you do.  That's the goal.

The only concession I've made to the need-for-novelty is to saute very finely sliced Brussels Sprouts in olive oil, with plenty of salt and pepper, so it's like a tasty cooked salad. My mother's traditional recipe was to boil the hell out of them.

Free-range, organic turkeys are good but expensive and not dramatically better than ones from Safeway, in my opinion.   No matter what you do, the breast is always dry or dryish, which is why you have gravy.

Typical seasonal recipe: Hard Cider Gravy with Shallots & Thyme

Gravy binds it all together. My dad used to make it, stirring up a roux and gradually adding milk and Kitchen Bouquet while the turkey "rested" on a platter. As he got older, the handwriting was on the wall, and my sister and I began to take notes. When he died, we figured out how to do it, but it's always a fraught experience and there's never quite enough.

Only a first-timer would bother cooking pumpkin for a pie and then making pastry. Buy one. In my family, we always have a cake, too, because it's my sister's birthday. I buy that at Masse's in Berkeley, expensive and totally worth it. 

I have a pal who swears by the complete turkey dinner you can buy at Whole Foods. My friend Claudia is going to buy one of those this year, and we're going to help her eat it. It will come with gravy, glory be.

Even if you buy the dinner, you'll still spend the next week putting away platters and serving spoons, and in my family, impractical pieces of Chinese export porcelain because my dad collected it, and my sister and I inherited it.  It's all about tradition.



Getting Some Zzzzzz's

People have been asking about my sleep and whether it's improving  now that I'm going to a sleep therapist.

Thanks for asking, and yes, it's improving.  I'm doing everything the sleep therapist suggests, including increasing "sleep pressure"  by lopping 2-1/2 hours off my time in bed, which means getting up at 6 am instead of my usual 8:30.

It's awful.  I'm so sleepy during my quiet hour before bedtime that I have to fight to keep my eyes open, but when I get into bed, I go to sleep right away.  No lying awake worrying.  When the alarm goes off, I drag myself out and sit in the living room, zomboid, for an hour before I rally and begin drinking hot tea.  Before I started this therapy, I had nights when I tossed and turned until 5 am. 

I've cheated once each week, sleeping an hour or two later in the morning because I'm exhausted, can't concentrate, have something going on the next day that requires some sharpness.  But then  I have to come clean to the sleep therapist.  He's not entirely happy.  We spar.

I'm tired!  I can't think straight!  I have things to do that require concentration! 

He blocks every exit.  Plenty of people are underslept (long-haul truckers, for example),  he says, and life goes on.  New parents are chronically under-slept and cope. Surgeons are exhausted, and what about pilots?  This is an investment in my future quality of life (even though I feel like hell now).   We're "re-regulating" my sleep.

This week I may not even bother to cheat, because I'm too tired to explain myself.

Three more weeks.  In the meantime: no naps, no TV or computer before bed, no reading in bed, no excuses.  I think it's working.  If only I weren't so damned tired.

Peaches Gets Caught

Peaches is the nickname of David Petraeus (can you believe it?).  As everyone knows, he got caught having an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula  Broadwell, and had to resign yesterday as director of the CIA.

I was stunned, because he seems like the straightest of  arrows.  On the other hand, sometimes the straightest arrows are so straight, they're brittle.  Whatever, he snapped.

Yesterday I roamed around on the internet to see what I could find out about Broadwell,  including an interview she did earlier this year with Jon Stewart.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-223097

 

In terms of fidelity-challengers, she's a nightmare:  young, beautiful, smart, funny, self-deprecating, in tiptop physical shape, an ex-Army officer, and a Ph.D. candidate.  She was  homecoming queen and student body president and valedictorian, for God's sake.

I could imagine it:  There's Dave, over in Afghanistan, being interviewed by her in a war zone, taking runs with her,  and no doubt being flattered with all the attention.  Then he had a life-changing revelation of a) his own attractiveness, and b) what a powerful man can get away with when he's thousands of miles away from home.

Paula Broadwell (above, right) and with David Petraeus (above)

And Mrs. Petraeus, his long-time wife, advocate for military families, is not young and beautiful, and you know what?  I bet she doesn't flatter the hell out of him.  She's probably ticked because he tosses his socks around the bedroom.  And she's probably not eager to have sex under a desk, which apparently was mentioned in the tell-tale e-mails the FBI found on Petraeus's computer.

I told Jerry about this.

"That must have been a monstrous desk," he said.

But did he see this affair as inevitable?  The perfect storm?

"You don't hear about Army generals who don't have affairs," he said, continuing upstairs with his cup of coffee this morning.   "Only the ones who do." 

Of course, he knows that I'd personally strangle him if the FBI came up with damning e-mails on his computer, but he may have a point.  Check out the Jon Stewart interview and see what you think.



Accepting Irrelevance

Not easy to do.

It's like finding out you've been wearing Mom Jeans for years;  that you've never heard of, say, the Radioheads; that you're wearing hopelessly dated underwear.  Boomers held sway for so many years, partly because there were so many of us and partly because we did, by God, have an impact, messy or not.  Look at the sixties.

But now, alas, we're old.    Interest in our generation seems limited to  how many of us will get reverse mortgages, burden Medicare,  move into retirement homes.

And post-election,  another dimension: we're not only old and white, but we're conservative.  Apparently, scads of us  voted for Mitt Romney.  Therefore we're so, you know, like, irrelevant.  Demographically, we're on the losing side.

Well, hell!  I'd like to point out to pundits and columnists that plenty of boomers are liberal, Obama-voting, gay-marriage promoting, feminist-identified,  pro-choice insistent people.   Not all of us were in the group of dejected over-groomed white people who stood around in Romney headquarters the other night. Instead, we  identified with the casually-dressed, multicultural crowd in Chicago who lost their minds when Obama was announced the winner.  Lots of us lost our minds right along with them. 

And one more thing:   Don't  underestimate the slew of Boomers who have raised remarkable daughters and sons who are now carrying the flag,  young people who are passionate, enlightened, and empathic.  They give me hope.

The other night, I  let go of worry about the soul of this country and became a bit more comfortable with accepting my own irrelevance.  Those young people are the future, thank God.  And they've been nurtured by the best.

My friend Debbie (r) and her two daughters, Annie and Libby, Democrats all.

.

Woohoo!

 

 

 

 

"...the former Massachusetts governor ended up a loser at the polls because of the racial, ethnic, and generational changes that have altered the U.S. electoral landscape."  San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 2012

 

 

Map colored in by children at an election night party in Berkeley

 

Election Day Fantasy

$450 hand-painted scarf at Barney's

When the alarm went off  this morning, I was having a dream--I swear to God--about making friends with Ann Romney. 

She and I were together because our husbands were doing business (what on earth could THAT be?), and we were discovering some shared interests. Painting, for one; she liked to paint scarves.  Even in my dream, I was surprised.

Then I staggered out of bed, threw on my robe ($20 at Target years ago--you can imagine what it looks like), and crept downstairs in the dark.  I plugged into NPR for a long day of listening.  Every time there was a Romney sound bite, I turned down the volume and whispered a defiant obscenity.  When he was finished, I turned up the volume to listen to Obama and crossed my fingers.

I'm worn out.  From lack of sleep and an overload of political reports.  My wide-awake brain wants the Democrats to win today, but my poor old subconscious wants to figure out a way to be friends with the other side.

The Morning Before the Election

Jerry leans over the kitchen counter reading the sports page, with cup of coffee at hand.  Front section untouched.