Archive for the ‘My Old Salon Blog’ Category.
![A picture named Cartoon20030502[1].gif](http://phil2bin.com/OldPerils/images/2003/05/02/Cartoon20030502[1].gif)
The Flight Line
I can’t stay silent any longer! When was the last time George W. Bush had a flight suit on? Hmm, could it have been just before he deserted the Texas National Guard? He’s turned “teflon” form a kitchen wonder to a dirty word.
The Flight Line
I can’t stay silent any longer! When was the last time George W. Bush had a flight suit on? Hmm, could it have been just before he deserted the Texas National Guard? He’s turned “teflon” form a kitchen wonder to a dirty word.
Anyone besides me concerned by the inability of our military to a) plant and b) ‘discover’ weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? If they can’t even wiggle this puppy a bit, how are they ever going to be able to wag the kind of dogs they’ll encounter trying to re-culture Iraq into the kind of militarily quiescent and economically compliant Middle East ally that we desperately seek?
What is it about motion that loosens our tongues, our thoughts? While I sat in Seattle I blogged in fitful and uninspired tropes. Put me on a plane, into a strange city and the anonymity of a rental car that I almost immediately lose in a mall parking lot, and all of a sudden the synapses are firing like, well, like a crow that immolates itself on a high-voltage transformer. With as much coherence.
Struggle in a Residence Inn Kitchen (apologies to Leah http://blogs.salon.com/0001754/ )
How does the Boomer-age road warrior spend his evenings? Even in his youth, he might have gone to a club only to gaze wistfully at the action. In Boomer-time, though, this would be not even vaguely attractive, and may even lead to expulsion or arrest.
If you’re working out of town, but not part of a team of consultants with a built-in social dynamic, the evening meal becomes a confusing social problem, sort of like asking yourself out for a date, but hesitating because you fear being rejected. Eating alone in a restaurant, after one or two outings, starts to feel fidgety instead of luxurious, a public display of social failure and a waste of time that could be spent working, cruising the Internet or sleeping.
I quickly tired of the hotel/motels that had a microwave and small fridge, and trying to buy stuff I could nosh on within those constraints. Maybe I’m just not as creative as the generation that grew up with a microwave as ubiquitously convenient as a water faucet. When I formed my own company, I ventured to negotiate a comparable rate with the Residence Inn near where I’d been staying, and that’s where I hole up now when I travel to Milwaukee.
The cool thing about Residence Inns is that they have nearly complete kitchens. No matter what room you are assigned, the kitchens are configured so that the silverware, hotpads, cooking utensils, dinnerware, etc are always in the same drawer or cupboard.
So now, the first thing I do when I hit town is to visit the grocery store. I almost always purchase the following:
First is the produce section. 4 - 5 apples, either Fuji or Braeburn. Despite having a stovetop and an oven, there’s no chance I’m going to cook raw vegetables. In summer, I like to grab blueberries or strawberries of they’re selling for less than a dollar a berry.
I check out the seafood section, which in Milwaukee is kinda dicey. If there’s some decent looking salmon or tuna, I’ll buy it.
Lately, there have been bags of frozen IQF shrimp. It’s a product of Vietnam and, even though I’ve read what environmental degradation is committed to farm shrimp in 3rd world places like Texas and Vietnam, I might buy some, telling myself that hell! it’s already dead.
Then on to meat. Either Tyson or some local outfit has packaged boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I buy the smallest package I can find, which is usually more than I can eat in two sittings.
On to starches. My latest favorite is Marrakesh Express couscous, of various flavors, which you can prepare in about 10 minutes. Like most foods you can quickly prepare, its flavor probably owes too much to an overdose of sodium, but my blood pressure has never been a problem, and I promise myself to drink more water to compensate.
Dairy products. Wisconsin is the Cheese State, but there really isn’t any more stuff available than anywhere else. I’ve found, however, a goat gouda cheese at Kohl’s that I like. In the chiller, I try to find a quart of Dannon vanilla yogurt. It passes for ice cream if you use your imagination, and goes well with any seasonal fruit.
Condiments. I buy soy sauce, some olive oil to use for sauteeing, etc, and, if I buy the shrimp, some kind of horseradish-based cocktail sauce.
Finally, I head for the wine aisle. In Milwaukee, you have to purchase any alcoholic stuff prior to 9 pm due to some little-known Catholic precept, and this is sometimes a problem if I arrive on a late Sunday night flight. If, however, I’m early, I look for a bottle of representative white (sauvignon blanc is a favorite) and something red, either a merlot or a syrah. This is not the time or place for persnickety shopping, but I try to spend $10 per bottle. This is done with the presumption that I’ll be drinking all alone by myself in a hotel room, and we can engage, if necessary, in efforts at intervention in comments if you are so impolitic as to bring it up. I have reservations, but two bottles still always find their way into my basket.
Checkout. Even though, as a Seattle resident, I’m sort of an impostor, I present my Kohl’s preferred customer card, and accrue whatever discounts result. I bill my clients a per-diem amount for food and incidentals that’s a couple ticks below the allowed federal-employee amount for Milwaukee, and my grocery bill is generally about half of what I bill for the week, leaving a few bucks to compensate for ‘pain and suffering’.
Preparation is also fraught with ritual. I shortcut the instructions on the frozen shrimp bag, which call for a byzantine process of boiling water, pouring it over the frozen shrimp, etc., by storing it in the regular fridge area instead the freezer. When I return from work the first day, the shrimp is thawed but not spoiled. I can consume it as an appetizer or as a complete meal, depending on my level of ambition.
The second night, if I found some fish that had some promise, I will broil it and prepare a batch of the Marrakesh Express couscous, humming the old Crosby, Stills & Nash song unconsciously as I do so.
If there wasn’t a slab of fish for grilling, I’ll cut up the chicken breast instead. Residence Inn kitchens always have a plastic cutting board sort of thing, and a set of 2 - 3 knives that, truth be told, are sharper and more useful than the 20 or so knives that lurk preposterously in the kitchen drawer at home.
The chicken breasts seem to have a white integument running through them, with something like a pull tab at the end. I use the excellent knife to peel the meat away from this thing and cut it into stir-fryable chunks. It’s an effort to tell myself that, although they call it a ‘breast’, it’s nothing like that object of desire that is its namesake.
Using the frying pan, always found in the center island under the silverware drawer, and a little of the olive oil, I stir-fry the chicken chunks. I know from experience that they are about 2/3 done when the smoke alarm goes off, but this time I anticipate this gentle reminder by opening the door to the room.
I pour a glass of the white, sprinkle soy sauce on the chicken and couscous, and sit down to my laptop to read email, catch up on the Seattle Times and P-I, and read the blogs of other folks with interesting lives.
1st Prize - Career-ending Publicity Stunts
A local weekly called The Stranger ran a loopy little feature called ‘Seattle’s Sexiest Citizens’ this week, featuring out-of-the-way professions like Bike Messenger, Barista, Street Kid, etc. This may be a tongue-in-cheek response to the upcoming (pun intended) Playboy feature on the Girls of Starbucks. Based on some of the names and circumstances, these may well be hoaxes, but one that caught my eye was the one for Bank Teller:
http://www.thestranger.com/2003-02-13/ex10.html You wonder if she just stepped out from behind the barred window, walked out into the hall with the photographer and ad-libbed the pose while other tellers, customers and loan officers looked on indulgently. I don’t know anything about the culture of Washington Mutual, but banks aren’t usually recognized for an expansive sense of humor (except for a brief, madcap hiatus during the S&L scandal). As for me, I hope they’re into bygones. WAMU, here I come! Goodbye Bank of America!
Woke up to a sunny day, looked almost like summer. Kid got up uncharacteristically early (before 9. He’s on spring break) and headed out to rock climb, and I had designs on strapping the kayak on the car and heading for the Sound. Work moved in like a storm front, though, as a client’s software upgrade I did on Friday began exhibiting unsociable traits, and some others started demanding attention.
I’m ‘Me, Inc.’, so when I’m not at a client’s site I’m working from home. Broadband is just about the coolest thing to happen for people like me, saving me and my clients travel time and sparing the atmosphere the attendant car exhaust. My morning commute on many days consists of the 18 stairsteps from my bedroom down to my desk, with a stop in the kitchen to rev up the Vapore espresso maker. I use Microsoft Terminal Server for most of my clients, PCAnywhere for a couple of others.
I remember the first time, in 1985, that I used a remote program called CloseUp. It was a real squeak getting the client to pop for a 2400-baud modem, but, running character-based programs (this was pre-Windows), I thought I was SO swell. Once people started using Windows, though, remote consulting was effectively killed until the advent of broadband.
One downside to the work-at-home thing is, well, grooming. I sleep until the last minute, pull my coffee and hit the chair just as clients call or need attention. Along about noon, I’m still in my jammies (sweatpants and fleece top, usually. The times I’ve computed in my underwear, or even less formally, are mercifully rare), unshaven and beginning to feel a certain psychological impairment.
The other downside is that, although I still do my scheduled running and Nautilus workouts every other day, I have not been getting the ambient exercise I used to get walking from the parking garage or bus stop to the office, walking out at noon to graze, etc. So, though I don’t feel like I overeat, I’ve still added 10 pounds, and that’s relatively sizeable compared to the 142 I used to peg as acceptable. I’m starting to feel like I should contrive to spend more time working at clients’, even though my connectivity to some clients is arguably better from here than in their own buildings.
I’ve considered packing up and walking to Tully’s, Zoka’s, Starbucks or the other cafes within a few minutes’ walking distance, but I’m sure I wouldn’t get much done, and I’d be self-conscious about being the pain-in-the-ass loudmouth with the cellphone earbud at the next table. But if you see such a person while trying to luxuriate over a steaming latte, cut him some slack, try not to notice his incipient paunch just starting to pooch over his belt - and reboot his laptop if he so much as glances at the pastry case.
Having committed the offense for which this endeavor is named, I appear doomed to spin out another fitful post. We dined at a Mexican restaurant tonight, and the inevitable overeating fueled by the bottomless chip basket and Sauza margaritas spurred me to walk home from the restaurant. On the way, I happened on an interesting new coffee shop (in Seattle, this news is as stunning as discovering a mushroom fairy ring has come up overnight). Feeling like a little java might help me ‘get right’ for the trip up the hill, I stopped in and ordered my signature drink, a doubleshot macchiato with a dab of nonfat foam. The drink was near-perfect, and I motored on home.
However, I’ve been up screwing around ever since, trying to run some windows-registry gremlins out of my wife’s computer, and shirking that duty by grabbing my laptop and reading the work of more accomplished bloggers. Tomorrow’s gonna suck.
The kid came in from an assignation at a local tavern, and I tried my best to keep up with a discussion of post-modernism, existentialism, Hesse, Sartre and Beckett. He’s majoring in English at UW, and I’m being inexorably exposed as a poseur in literary matters. I read Hesse in my early 20s, and remember the works as turgid and solipsistic, even to the turgid and solipsistic young man that I was. My son is more taken with the novels, and I may have to revisit them to gauge the accuracy of my recollections, though I barely have time to complete my required reading (I’m in an online book club).
Also checked up on war news, scanning cnn.com and, reluctantly, foxnews.com. I haven’t watched any TV coverage, but can’t believe that there is any more immediate or informative content on TV than on the internet. I was struck by the irony of Bush exhorting Iraq to adhere to international law and the Geneva Convention. Also seeing the euphoria melting away as we learn that, when billions of dollars of ordinance is careening around in a small space, people are gonna get hurt. I hope for not much longer.
