Shrubbing it

I picked up the PDT Cocktail Book a couple of weeks ago and have been experimenting with it here and there.  I've figured out that margaritas don't need that pre-made syrup that looks a little too neon yellow to be natural, and that rinsing a glass with triple sec makes a Negroni taste a little different, and to my palette, a lot better.  Then the inevitable happened.  I had an idea.

I'd been reading about shrubs for a few months, and had been dismissing them as a "hipster thing" and kept on drinking the same thing over and over.  It's always good to have a go-to cocktail.  Someone says "I think it's time for a cocktail" and you're ready to go.  Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I lucked out and got to go to the Taste of Potrero.  One of the drinks on the menu there was a grapefruit and rosemary shrub mixed with gin.  Long story short, I was wowed by the taste.  Nothing like the pickle brine cocktail I had thought it would be. 

I took the blueberries from the freezer, tossed on some vinegar, and let them steep.  A week later, I drained the berries, mashed them to get the rest of the liquid out, and then boiled with sugar.  Voila, a shrub was born.  Now for the experimentation!

This weekend, with a few willing taste testers, we had the following:

#1: 2 oz Absolut & 2 oz of shrub, splash of soda and garnish with a lemon wedge or wheel.

#2: Same as the #1, but with a squeeze of lemon juice stirred in.

#3: 3 oz bourbon, 2 oz shrub, 1 oz Aperol, and a splash of soda.

The tasting panel enjoyed both 2 & 3 the most.  #1 seemed a little lacking, and maybe bitters would have helped round things out.  The #3 was, if I recall, the best of the night.  For some reason, the bourbon and blueberry flavors complemented each other a lot more than I thought they would.  The Aperol added a nice bitter note, cutting through some of the sweetness of the shrub.

Finally, I had a taster on the panel who was not partaking of alcohol, because she's severely under the legal drinking age.  For her, I crafted up the "fancy kid cocktail", also known as #4.

#4: 2 oz shrub and 6 oz soda water.  Stir, and make a 5 year old's night.

More of this to come, and suggestions happily taken and tested.

Not even close, bud.

I was talking the other night with a friend of mine.  We had had a few Negronis. Not too many, for a night when both of us had to be up at the crack of way too early the next day. One of us for work, one of me to catch a plane. We got to talking about music, and the songs that really speak to us, and whether or not that evolves. 

Fix You, by Coldplay. That's mine. Now my secret is out. Want to punch me in the gut while we're having dinner? Toss that one into the mix, and take a sly glance my way when those first few haunting notes are played. See what kind of mood I'm in that night. I'll either end up laughing along at the joke, or you'll find that I've become a shitty guest, all sullen and stoic, ready to hide out in the kitchen for the rest of the night.  I'm far more likely to laugh now, but I have my days. We all do.

When it first came out, I listened to it and heard one thing. Lights will guide you home. I lumped it in with Phil Collins' Take Me Home as a song that I could listen to as the end of a journey was near. It meant I'd get to see familiar things soon. It meant that I'd have my dog running down the hallway to greet me. It made me smile. I heard what I wanted to hear.

Then, as life does, things happened. When you feel so tired but you can't sleep. Tears streamed down my face. Far more often than I wanted them to. I listened to this song again. Found a whole new meaning in it. Found that it was an outlet for all that I was feeling, even on the days I didn't know what I was feeling. Found that when Aaron Sorkin used it in an episode of The Newsroom(Season 1, Ep. 4), I had to rewind TiVo a few times to get through the full episode. I was a mess. Literally.  Figuratively. Everything in between.

About halfway through, though, there's a great guitar break.  Soaring.  Hopeful.  Optimistic. The exact opposite of the opening organ chords.  Like the song, halfway through, I found hope in this song.  I found optimism.  I found a live canary in the mine.  The tears had stopped.  The world was still spinning, and I was going to be OK.  If you never try, you'll never know just what you're worth.  I found I was worth more than I gave myself credit for. So much more. And now, everyday, I work to live up to that.

Yes, tears streamed down my face, and sometimes, they still do. No, I'm not fixed. I'm not that silly to think I'm fixed, or that I'll ever be fixed. But I'm better. Striving to continue to improve. Who knows, maybe I'll even find a new song. Suggest one, or share yours.

Freedom through digitization

I've been working on a project for a few months now.  Just a background thing, really, as I have time for it.  I'm taking all the music I have on CD and ripping it to my hard drive.  Digitizing the collection, we librarians call it.  I know, I know, I'm not technically a librarian right now, but I have a degree, I may as well use it now and then, even if it's just to establish that I know a little bit of what I'm talking about.

I'm mostly done with this project.  I now have a stack of CDs sitting here, ready to go to the secondhand store.  If I get a few dollars for them I'll be happy.  I'll be more happy to not have to store them in the house anymore.  I'll be even more happy to not have to pack them up and drag them around the next time I move.

Why bother?  Beyond saving the untold dollars that buying it all from a commercial service would cost(I've already paid for them once, so why pay a second time?), I'm able to put all this on at least two different hard drives, so in event of an unplanned disaster, I will still have it all available.  I had an external hard drive fail just a few months ago, and may have lost hundreds of photos.  Still waiting on the recovery efforts for that one, so I don't know the final result yet, but it did spur me to action.  New hard drive in hand, another old hard drive cleaned up and reformatted, all sorts of backups done now.  That's right, I said "unplanned disaster."  Is there any other kind?

Next up on the digitization horizon?  Photos.  I've just finished looking through my parent's house and they have album after album of photos of my siblings and I.  Seems like my entire youth was documented on film, especially the embarrassing parts.  But after seeing the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy, and how people were absolutely despondent over the loss of not just their homes but all their belongings, including photos of loved ones.  I don't know why, but it sparked another random thought in my head that maybe the time to digitize is now, before something happens.

Once the music is done, the photos are next.  One big digital archive for me, and the freedom to know that unless I lose all the digital copies at the same time, I'm covered.

Hillary and the miles

Just saw on the news a segment on Hillary Clinton's health issues.  They were talking about how much she travels and how exhausting it must be. 

In the last three years she's flown almost 900,000 miles over the course of about 370 days on the road. That's a lot.  In terms that everyone can understand that's like going from New York to Los Angeles every third day.  That's just over six hours on a plane every three days.  It's a lot. 

I fly a lot, but nowhere near what she does.  Even with all the perks she has(a bed on the plane), I'm surprised that she hasn't been sick more often.  I'm surprised she hasn't taken some time on the bench due to "exhaustion".

She is, let's be honest, to be admired for her stamina and tenacity, regardless of your politics.

Technology....or Why it's not good to laugh at your Mom

My mom is pretty smart.  She's mastered all sorts of things in life.  In her own words:

"I believe I've come very far in dealing with high tech - computers, cell phones, texting, iPad, Kindle"

Sometimes though, it's the little things.  I loaned her a food processor at Thanksgiving, and gave her a cursory lesson in how to use it.  I figured that was all she needed.  Like I said, she's pretty damn smart.  

This morning, I got a call from her, and she was frustrated with the fact that the food processor was not working.  It was all together, but when she hit the on button, nothing happened.  I tried for a few minutes to talk her through troubleshooting it, but to no avail.  I was about to give up when I remembered that she has an iPad, and she knows how to do FaceTime, and that would let me look at the thing and maybe figure out what was wrong.

Right away, I could see what the issue was.  The bowl was mounted on the base 180 degrees from where it should be, thus rendering the machine inoperable.  As soon as I saw it, I started to laugh.  It's an easy mistake to make, and thankfully, one that was easily fixed.  My mom was laughing too, at her inability to figure out a simple technology.  I was maybe laughing a little too hard.  Why?

Let's remember who taught her to use this food processor.  Let's also throw in the fact that I did not give her any user manual or documentation for this thing.  I train and teach for a living. This was all my fault.

I'm just happy that she was laughing with me.

BBQ is like sex

This thing was named, on a whim, Eating and Thinking.  So far, there's been no mention of food.  Thankfully, none of you have pointed this out to me, although some snarky comments would have been appropriate.

If you know me, you should be at least vaguely aware of the fact that I like BBQ.  If you don't know me, let me state for the record, I like to eat BBQ.  Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the eating.

The last few days, I've been in Murfreesboro and Nashville TN. I thought I was in for a treat, having already enjoyed some Memphis ribs a few weeks ago. This is where the title should start to make sense. The old saying is that pizza is like sex. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. That made a lot of sense in college, but having had really good pizza since then, we all know that it's not true.

I ate at three different BBQ places, and the only good things I can say is that it wasn't Taco Bell.Of the three, only one had meat that was worth mentioning, and that was on night three.  It was like I saved the best for last. Night two saw a blackberry cobbler that was really quite delicious, but it didn't make up for the bland meat and forgettable sides.

Maybe I should have had pizza instead.

Meet the Mets

Chris Christie told a story: My wife says to me "why did you make our son be a Mets fan? You coulda let him be a Yankees fan and he coulda been happy." I said "As a Mets fan, he's going to understand pain and disappointment. Other losses that he experiences in life, he'll keep in perspective."

Growing up, I was a Mets fan.  Not out of love for the team as much as out of respect for my Grandmother.  She was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and when they left for Chavez Ravine, it’s not like she was going to roll over and become a Yankees fan just because that’s what was left.  So when the Mets came along in 1962, she started to root for them, and her anti-Yankees resolve stiffened just a little more.  I think it was my 4th or 5th Halloween, she got me a Mets uniform.  Wool, with the stirrup socks and everything.  I looked like I should have been out on the mound with John Stearns trying to calm me down or pep me up a bit about the next batter. 

As I got older, I lost interest in the Mets.  Sure, I still root against the Yankees, but that’s a duty, not a passion.  I don’t live and die by the win/loss record of a team.  I don’t have the inflated hopes of “it’s a new season, and at least until the first game is over, my team is undefeated.”  I don’t suffer the depression of a last minute loss.  But I get it.  You think wearing your lucky shirt will help.  Rally caps, rituals, and rain dances all are equally ineffective. You want something so badly, yet you have no control over it.  When it’s all over, you either celebrate(and hopefully don’t burn your city down), or you drown your sorrows for a few days and utter the simultaneously depressing yet hopeful phrase “Wait until next year.”

All of that brings me back to the idea of how people deal with loss and disappointment.  Some people spend a lot of time worrying.  Worrying “what if?” or “how will I react?”  Why? You can’t know how you’re going to handle a situation until it presents itself.  Every situation is unique.  We don’t control how things happen, but we can control how we react when it does.  We can either freak out and let our emotions cloud our judgement, and do something we’ll regret, or we can remain calm and take a deep breath and figure out a calm, rational way to deal with what we’ve been presented with.  The more often you encounter pain and disappointment, the better you get at taking a deep breath and figuring out how to deal with it.  You figure out how to remain calm, maybe even stoic.  You start memorizing lines from Rudyard Kipling’s IF.  You realize that the shitstorm you’re dealing with right now isn’t really as big and bad as it seems.  You see it coming.  You know you’ll have to deal with it, but you don’t stress out about it because no matter how bad you think it might look while it’s out on the horizon, who knows what it’s going to look like by the time it rolls up on you. 

How many times have you watched a thunderstorm roll in, excited by the prospect of a drenching rain, only to have it dissipate before it reaches you? Sometimes, the storm rolls right over you, dropping not a single glob of water.  Some problems are like that.

But sometimes, you see the storm coming, you know you may have to deal with it, and sure enough, it drops right on top of you. 

But you’re able to put it into perspective.