Metamorphosism

I barbecued various meats and vegetables this weekend, including various peppers that I bought at the store, and a couple of my own. Mine were spicy red ones that I grew this summer, turned out great, I can barely eat them. The box from the store had a diagram explaining the relative hotness levels of the ones that came in said box. On a scale of 0-10, the ones like the ones from my garden were a 5. The little orange ones were a 0. The slightly bigger orange ones, jalapenos apparently, were 10s.

So of course when a relative came out to our place on his bike, a cousin who is spending the summer in Vienna with an enigmatic organization (not my enigmatic organization, another one) I offered him one. I didn’t even have to insist, he cut off a piece and ate it up.

Him: Wow!

Him: Hyyrrp!

Me: Heh, that’s what everyone does on the youtube videos of people eating jalapenos! The jalapeno hiccup!

Him: Hyyrp!

Me: [Eat a piece] Hyyrp!

Him: Hyyrp! Hyyrp!

Me: Hyyrp! Hyyrp! Hyyrp!

It was like listening to a conversation from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” machine-translated into Icelandic.

Jalapenos are hot!

Apparently ghost peppers are much hotter, but I won’t be eating one of those anytime soon, not on purpose.

I gave the left over jalapenos to my daughter for her boyfriend.

Beta. She brought me some extra-hot sambal from Indonesia. When I cut my pork cutlet with the knife I had used to cut the jalapeno, the meat was spicier than when I put the sambal on it.

We don’t eat a lot of spicy food around our house, but I think now that the kids are bigger, it wouldn’t hurt to up the piquancy a little.

1. Go outside and look at the Perseids.
2. Go outside and look at the Perseids.
3. Go outside and look at the Perseids.

Actually, I think last night was supposed to be the high point, right? We had good conditions - no moon, clear skies, dark.

I made Alpha and Gamma go into the back yard and look at the sky. Since it was my idea, I let them have the lawn chairs (due to factors including rusty structural elements and slapstick we currently only have two) and myself reclined seductively on the picnic table to stare at the sky.

I even saw one, better than anything Disney ever did.

“Did you see that?” Gamma said, “the way the tail glittered afterwards?”

Indeed I did.

Later, something something, stars, sky, dark, zzz.

“No, he’s not,” said Gamma.

“He is. I think he is. Go see,” said Alpha.

“Dad, are you asleep?” said Gamma.

Indeed I was.

My apologies in advance for the ugly way the text wraps in this post, and doesn’t align with the pictures the way I want it too, but I can’t figure out how to stop it from doing that. Thanks to Bran for fixing my CSS.

I woke up this morning at four. I was too sad to sleep so I got up. I don’t know why I was sad, everything has been fine lately.

I didn’t get up immediately. I prayed to a benevolent deity in my non-theistic universe for everyone to be okay. I kept thinking of more people I wanted to be okay. Then I got up, before my vibes could wake my wife.

This first picture I took by accident when Alpha and I went to Paris a couple weeks ago. It is one of my favorite pictures from the trip. All of my favorite pictures are the ones I took by accident. Not only from that trip. You would think that I didn’t try to take composed pictures anymore, but I still do.

We saw this hotel on our first night wandering around Paris, I guess. We didn’t look inside. It didn’t even occur to us to look inside. We stayed in another hotel with a balcony and a ceiling fan on the Left Bank in the Latin Quarter.

“Just walk around” is the best advice re: what to do in Paris. Thanks, Ian. Although, you’ll sometimes want to take the subway, since Paris is really big. The subways are okay. They ran often, we never had to wait long when we took one.

Here is our balcony. Good call on the hotel, that was more good advice. Latin Quarter = good neighborhood to stay. Some nice sidewalk cafes, restaurants etc. but not too many tourists in general.

We had a couple guide books, but we used them sparingly. We bought chocolates at a place my book recommended, once, and went to a department store that was a must, apparently, and so on. But more enjoyable was just going into restaurants that looked good and eating, and that sort of thing.

One advantage of doing that is you avoid masses of tourists and can convince yourself you’re having a more authentic experience. Not speaking French was no real problem. Everyone we encountered was helpful and friendly.

One disadvantage of choosing restaurants that way - just walking in - is that you don’t always end up eating in a good restaurant. Turns out the Phuc Yieu Vietnamese restaurant (name changed) where I had the Bouef avec ecoli was not only empty of tourists, it was pretty empty of non-tourists as well, and for a reason. The Moroccan place we ate at was so-so.

Here is Notre Dame. It was, more or less, across the Seine from our hotel, so we walked past it a lot. We also went inside once and looked around. There was no line when we went, but there was every other time we went past.

It is covered with gargoyles and saints. It looks too delicate to stand, but it stands.

Here is the Seine. I was standing on a bridge when I took the picture. It was evening. What were we doing? I don’t remember. Walking around being romantic, perhaps. On our way back from the Moulin Rouge, maybe, although I think it was darker when that was over.

The Moulin Rouge convinced me of several things. First, that I need an appointment for new glasses. We had dinner there, during which instead of women dancing around on stage there is a lounge act, a man and a woman singing, and a trio (drums, bass, keyboards, sax, guitar, quintette I guess) playing.

And it’s very well-done lounge music, but lounge music, right? The male singer had something on his head. What the hell does he have on his head, I asked Alpha.

His hair, she replied. Apparently he had a little Afro.

The Moulin Rouge was very good, I highly recommend it, it does a great job of being what it is. The waiters are extremely efficient and professional, the food is okay, but the audience was the usual mix of okay and rubes. Also too many brought their small children (WTF?).

Here we are under a bridge. On our last day in Paris we had lunch on a bench near this bridge and observed a middle-aged couple kissing. They leaned up against the wall and kissed passionately. I figured they weren’t married to each other. My wife figured the woman was the man’s wife’s best friend.

I like it when you can see the moon during the day.

The front of Notre Dame.

The Eiffel Tower is awesome. But the lines are really long, so we didn’t go inside.

The Louvre is also awesome. Long lines, too. By the time we got there (it was a hot day and we were tired from walking, or at least I was) I wasn’t up to dealing with lines so we just looked at it from outside and underneath. Underneath, above where Mary is interred in the DaVinci Code, is a Starbucks.

See? There is also a McDonalds.

One of the best things we did while we were in Paris, besides walk around, was have dinner on a boat going around on the Seine one evening. It was romantic. We had a good table. The food was good. It was expensive, but so what. Not that expensive.

The Eiffel Tower is awesome.

Here are some gargoyles on the Notre Dame.

Shakespeare and Company was smaller than I had expected, although I had expected it to be small. Still, it was nice to see it. Across the street is the Seine. There are lots of stands along the wall by the Seine, green stands selling postcards and souvenirs and books and so on. I got Gamma a snowglobe with an Eiffel Tower in it, and some postcards.

There is a church next to the Ministry of Justice. To get there you have to pass through a metal detector and let your bag be x-rayed. Inside the church are many stained glass windows. Please note that there is an upstairs and most of the coolest windows are up there. We didn’t realize that and nearly left. This window here is something-something Apocalypse, so I took a picture of it.

I took this picture by accident too, because I liked the light so much.

I took a bunch of blurry pictures in Paris and still intend to write a post about our visit, but I’m too lazy today, plus I have to clean the oven while my wife and Gamma are in Carinthia hiking with visiting friends and relatives.

Also vacuum the house. So maybe later.

BUT I have to tell you that I have attained my latest Holy Grail, baking a high-rising fluffy loaf of sourdough bread without adding any yeast. Here is what i did differently than previous times:

• Kneaded the dough longer. This is said to something something gluten and so on, enabling more rising action.
• Instead of using 5 cups of all-purpose flour, I used 4 cups plus one of Lancelot flour, from the King Arthur Flour company, that my cousin Lisa gave me.
• I also added a tablespoon of gluten powder to the mix when making the dough.
• I let the dough rise until doubled, as always, about 4 hours, then divided it into two loaves, as always. But then I let the loaves, which I put into forms, rise pretty long, about 5-6 hours, but not so long that they would dry out (i.e not overnight, as I did last time).
• Then I asked my wife to bake them, as I was away from the house and couldn’t get back in time.

Here is what my wife did differently while baking, which I think also had a lot to do with getting a soft-crusted loaf rather than loaves with a crust that makes your gums bleed:

• She sprinkled the loaves liberally with water (which I usually did).
• She put a dish of water into the oven while baking (which I never did).
• She turned the heat down from 220 C to 200 C because the bread seemed to be browning too fast.
• She let the loaves get good and cool before covering them, then covered them with a Tupperware cake cover rather than popping them into a plastic bag like I always did.

The result was 2 loaves of tangy sourdough bread with the consistency of, very nearly, Wonderbread. Just a little easier to slice, not quite as soft.  I just had a slice with ham, and two more slices with half an avocado each. Tasty stuff. I’d post photos, but I’m lazy, also one of our cameras is currently in Carinthia, the other is in Indonesia.

Now I need a new Holy Grail. Learn the Star Spangled Banner on the electric musical saw, perhaps.

1. Your uncle dies and you make a quick trip to the United States for his funeral.
2. While there, your sister gives you sourdough starter your cousin gave her to give you.
3. The starter is basically an empty plastic bottle with a little scum stuck to the walls.
4. Which you refrigerate, and worry you were too late in refrigerating it and it will already be dead, or it will die on the trip home because you can’t refrigerate it nor take it in your hand luggage and in your checked luggage the extremes of temperature will do it in or something, or you will forget it.
5. Everyone laughs at you because you’re so jetlagged.
6. And you are more susceptible to jetlag than most people. All someone has to say is “airplane” and you get tired and disoriented.
7. OTOH you are happy you let the lady at the car rental place talk you into the upgrade. In fact, you practically talked her into talking you into it. The midsize SUV is so much more fun to drive around in a state of extreme fatigue than the ultracompact thing you reserved.
8. By now your shoulders and upper back are burning from tension and your lower back is painfully close to throwing in the towel from sitting in airplanes and cars and sleeping on unfamiliar beds, and your tailbone hurts from all the sitting.
9. So on the flight home, the long leg from Washington, D.C. (where, upon your arrival, a woman in uniform pulled you out of a long line and gave you to a man in uniform with the words, “Got one for you,” and he swabbed your hand and stuck the swab into a machine where nothing happened and you are secretly happy because normally it’s your brother who gets searched and interrogated and it’s nice to fit into a profile too, or even share one with him, and the man asks you, “How long have you been out of the country?” and you say, “26 years, just back for a few days for a funeral,” and he says, “my condolences” and lets you go because the swab didn’t set off alarms or anything, and, WTF a swab?) to Vienna, with your sore tailbone and 10 hours of stupid movies ahead of you, on tiny screens that are burning out and only show the colors brown, white and black, which is okay due to the jelly-like nature of your brain, although it ameliorates nothing, you find yourself moved to a (marginally) better seat so a family can sit together, and you find yourself sitting beside a pretty, young, dark-haired, pale woman, early 20s if that, and her baby, which was apparently drawn by Edward Gorey and cries a lot, like the sixty other babies on the plane.
10. The woman is apologetic and you smile and try to reassure her, saying that your kid cried all the way between Tokyo and Vienna once, in first class, but the woman’s English is not so good, or maybe your pain and confusion makes you creepy, or you smile too much at her baby (at least you didn’t offer it a peanut, which briefly crossed your mind, Here baby, like a peanut? Would that shut you up, huh? How bout one of these pretzels, as they don’t actually serve peanuts on board aircraft anymore, due I guess to the allergy thing and people giving them to crying babies too much) or she is just polite or wants to sit with relatives, and she moves during the flight, trading places with her 15 year old girl cousin.
11. The 15 year old girl cousin has a friendly, tough-guy persona and informs you that all the crying babies are Albanian, going home to Pristina for summer vacation, from Dallas where her father remains because he couldn’t come along because he has to run the restaurant and she’s going to Pristina for 5 weeks because her grandmother’s paralyzed and maybe her father will go next year and she’ll run the restaurant while he’s gone.
12. The Albanians are all from Dallas, which is for her not such a great place to live because there are only two things to do namely 1) go to school and 2) go straight to the restaurant to work after school.
13. Meanwhile, your sourdough starter is cooling its heels in your suitcase somewhere in the plane’s cargo section.
14. The woman beside you talks and talks and you say you’re sorry about her grandmother and you think, although you don’t understand the thought, entirely:
15. Take care of this girl, America, because she is your soul.
16. Mainly because she is working and not consuming or otherwise out of control. Because she thinks of herself but also of others and glows with intelligence.
17. Remember, America, back when you worked?
18. Remember those days? When Walt Whitman wrote his poems going on and on about the working man and grass and so on?
19. Before you went out of control?
20. This girl still embodies that. It’s not dead. She carries it with her. You just have to feed it.
21. So watch out for her.
22. At home, pop the sourdough starter into the fridge and google instructions.
23. Kingarthurflour.com is good.
24. Follow the directions inexactly. Here is a fact about bread making: if it were such an exact science, wheat-based societies would have died out thousands of years ago.
25. Result: two flat loaves no one in the family wants to eat because the crust would stop a .22 and the bread is extra, extra tangy.
26. Sour dough bread baking is a slow process which you can’t hurry. There is something exhilarating about this. Those bacteria there can’t be rushed. It takes the time that it takes.
27. We need more of this sort of thing.
28. Follow instructions more exactly next time (and reduce refrigeration time because that turns out- refrigeration - to be connected to tang, and maybe your family will be more likely to eat the bread if it’s not so tangy) and get less-tangy, higher loaves. A little higher, anyway. People you communicate with during this process tell you they have never gotten high sourdough loaves without adding a little extra yeast, which you consider cheating.
29. Letting them rise longer must be the key, you think.
30. You resolve to follow instructions to the letter next time, to try to get nice, high loaves. And also to use just white flour, not whole-wheat.
31. Apparently bread making is an art not a science, but at the same time pretty forgiving and not rocket-science type art see #24.
32. Unfortunately, on your third try (you let the starter rest during the week and bake on weekends) you get off to a late start and in order to bake before you go to bed on Sunday you have to rush things along a little.
33. So the loaves are still flat.
34. This coming weekend you’re going to Paris for a week so you’ll skip it and try again when you get back. You plan to start on Thursday evening, not Saturday morning, so the loaves will have time to rise and rise and rise. Maybe that will help.

Alpha just left for Carinthia with her father, to pick up her mother who was getting massages because she got a fresh knee, is my understanding. Beta is in Vienna preparing for a visit to Indonesia. Gamma just sent us an SMS from London, BIN LEBEND ANGEKOMMEN (”I arrived alive”).

There have been ads for a show on television recently, something something SOLITARY CONFINEMENT something, with images of people freaking out because they can’t take 9 days alone. What could be easier? I thought.

Except. Ignoring people who are here is easier to take, it turns out, than dealing with their absence.

Despite the list of activities my wife gave me before she left.

And the list I have myself. Water garden. Tie up tomatoes. Filter pool. Yell at cats and chase them around. Chat with tortoise. Play cello, which has brand new Larsen strings and sounds amazng now.

And other stuff. Walks and stuff. Sleep. Icecream straight out of the container.

My uncle Phil died on Saturday. He was 86. I don’t want to write a long, emotional thing here, but I don’t know.

My brother sent me this picture. I was kind of numb until I saw this, then I cried so hard the cat got worried.

Listen, I was trying to remember my first memory of Phil, and it turns out to be my first memory at all. I was maybe two. He was carrying me on his back, down the path between his filbert orchard and his garden. A row of blackberries was on the left, the filbert trees on the right. Do you know the smell of filbert trees?

Beyond the row of berries was his large vegetable garden. The path led from his barn and chicken house between his junk pile and his wood pile, past his garage and tool shed, to his house. On the right are the fields where he had cows and my dad would later have horses sometimes.

Phil is carrying me, and I say, “Phil, you’re a pill.”

The rhyme interested me. And kidding with Phil.

There are a lot of things here. They are central to me, and they all come from my uncle. Everything I am, or very very much of it, is thanks to uncle Phil.

And this one image, this one memory says so much about him.

He was always carrying someone in one way or another. He lived to help other people. He was never rich and never had money, but he always had a twenty for you when you were broke, there was always cash in his birthday cards, or a check. He never had money but he made the world an abundant place and then he shared that abundance with everyone.

He helped my folks a lot. He helped all the relatives, he helped old people, he baby sat nieces and nephews. When I was in college I worked with him recycling metals and paper, and washing windows, and he shared the proceeds with me way more generously than he ought to have.

He financed my first trip to Europe by selling government bonds. I worked after school jobs and summer jobs to pay him back. He financed my second trip to Europe. I paid him back for that, too. Never once did he mention it or ask me to repay him.

And he was this way with everyone.

Always a twenty. Always a box of tomatoes from his garden. Always some eggs from the chicken house.

He took us camping, and his pack was always the heaviest, despite the rocks he hid in your pack as a practical joke.

Dinners were fun times. If you looked away, he stole your food.

I won’t go on and on here,  although I could.

He took pictures. It was like having Diane Arbus in the family. He took many thousands of pictures since the 1940s. Always the camera. Always posing us. Or taking candid shots. We were often, Oh, Phil, not another picture. But, now we have dozens and dozens of albums, dating back to the 1940s. It’s a precious thing.

Little did we know.

And funny thing, he liked word play, especially spoonerisms, and I like words too. I have a garden. I like practical jokes. And it’s not only me. My brother has a garden and chickens. If you go to his house, he will give you vegetables. He takes care of old people. And my sister is that way too. And my cousins. Phil was central to all of us. We all want to go to Hawaii again. He got us started with that. We all like to travel. If you look away, we will all steal your food.

So, Phil. Abundant and funny, practical jokes and generous. I am not monkey man strong, though. Things have their limits. He was not a big guy, average size about, but he would come home from the mountains with a truckload of waste wood he had salvaged from some logging operation, to burn, and dude - there were logs in there that filled the bed of his truck. How did you get those in there, we would ask him. I just put them in, he would say.

And he had an arm. He liked ball sports. He was athletic. I’m none of these things. I remember him one time, he was up on a ladder picking pears. I was bugging him about something. Then I ran away. I got clear across the field. I thought I was home free. How far away was I? It felt like miles. I was running and laughing when a rotten pear hit me right in the lower back so hard that half the pear went up my shirt, clear to my shoulder blades, and the other half filled the crack of my ass. It was the most perfect rotten pear shot known to science.

I started crying, I was so shocked. It shouldn’t have been possible! No one can throw a rotten pear that far!

I don’t know how old I was. Forty? Or nine, maybe? Something like that.

So, Phil. I could go on and on. We were driving down the street once, and a guy on the sidewalk spazzed out and fell down. Phil stopped the car, ran over and helped him. Would you have? At the time, I would have just ignored it. But he got the guy into the shade, found out what was wrong with him, got help.

I think the guy was drunk. I think it turned out he was drunk, but I also think I’m making that up, or made it up then. He may have had a seizure, it was a hot day. I don’t know. It was just a weird, scary guy, and Phil didn’t even think, he ran over and helped him.

I could go on and on.

On and on.

It’s sunny out, the first sunny day after many rainy ones - unpredictable days of strong rain. And it’s a holiday. So I’m inside blogging and Gamma is upstairs trying to get Sims to install on her laptop. We did have lunch outside with my wife and her father. And Gamma and I did drive into town for ice cream. So we have not been like locked up all day or anything.

And I did go hiking with a friend this weekend. Actually we visited a couple distilleries, and hiked a little to kill some time. Although it was a rainy weekend in most parts of the country, we were very fortunate that the little spot we visited had some very nice weather. Saturday evening we sat around in a small distillery and tasted the products, while our friendly and generous host, the distiller, explained the technolgy behind it, and his philosophy of distilling and life in general.

We purchased several of his products when we left. He makes a good rye whisky and some nice single malt (I bought a bottle of his vat-strength) and several different fruit schnapps, including huckleberry (very subtle), raspberry, and pear. I would like to write a more detailed account of our trip, and still may, if I find the time. But probably not. We’ll see.

And my friend even gave me a ukulele lesson. It was a very nice way to spend a weekend.

Not only that, but the flowers I ordered for my wife came on time for our anniversary on Sunday, so she was in a good mood when I got home.

And yesterday we saw a big rainbow.

#1.

Salesclerk: You give these away as gifts, don’t you? I saw you in here last week buying some.

Man: Er. Actually I seem to collect them. I just love Moleskines. I can’t write fast enough to fill them up and they accumulate.

Salesclerk: Okay.

#2.

Girl: What’s that?

Man: [Sees group of 2-3 cars parked off the road, beside a large van. The rear doors of the van are open, revealing several tanks, one of which is open and emitting fog. Several men in their forties populate the scene.] Looks like a bovine sperm transaction to me.

Girl: Uh.

Man: They keep it in those tanks in liquid nitrogen. That’s what’s making the fog. What else would middle-aged guys be standing around doing this early in the morning, but buying bovine sperm?

Girl: Okay.

Man: Can you imagine? It’s someone’s job to extract bull semen?

Girl: [Leans back, looks at man, settles in] Okay.

Man: I wonder what it’s called. Bovine sperm extraction technician? And how is it done, exactly? Do they like have to wear a cow mask? Or… ew.

Girl: Heh.

Man: Hey, I have an idea for the mystery you have to write for your English test. They’re at Smith Mansion, right? Dinner party. Dessert is tapioca pudding? All their rich friends, right? Only the cook was a bovine sperm thief. Prize-winning bull, worth millions. And the police raid his kitchen, but all they find is tapioca pudding because he switched it. And the Smiths’ rich friends destroyed the evidence.

Girl: Okay.

Man: And somebody kills someone for some rea… ew. Now I have to think of something nice. Unicorns. Rainbows. Unicorns, unicorns, unicorns.

Girl: Lamas.

Girl: I forgot the word ’suddenly’ yesterday.

Man: When I forget a word, I just use a different word with the same meaning. Or with a different meaning.

Man: I’m trying to think of a story for kids about a summer vacation.

Girl: They come to a town, but it’s abandoned. Everyone has locked themselves in their houses because a serial killer is on the loose. And they get attacked by the killer.

Man: Er. That might be too exciting for this market.

Man: AND THE KILLER IS KILLING EVERYONE BECAUSE HE’S UPSET OVER SOME BAD TAPIOCA PUDDING!!!

Man: You can use that on your English test today. You have my permission.

Girl: Unicorns.

Man: Lamas.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have been somewhat happy lately. The German word for happiness is the same as that for luck: Glück. That feels right.

Not sure why. Maybe I’m sleeping better.

Maybe it’s the phase of the moon. Austrians are strongly affected by lunar phases. The moon is currently full, and the road to work was full of crazy asshats this morning. Either the full moon turns about 25% of Austrians into really bad drivers, or it makes me cranky, impatient and hypercritical.

I think it’s sleep, though. I have a phobia of going senile. After observing the process in two relatives, I have the feeling that there are aspects of the onset of senility that one notices about oneself and either accepts or denies, and there are (and this is maybe worse) aspects that one does not perceive. And I have noticed myself forgetting words and names. I tell myself that I have done this all my life and it is just the fact that I am 50 that I connect it with senile dementia, but one still worries. And I did get all flustered at the music store recently and buy a stack of sheet music that I had eliminated, and neglected to buy the notes I wanted, and had to go back the next day and exchange, but that can happen to anyone, right?

And now that I am sleeping, I feel less confused. So there’s that. And there is also the thought that maybe part of my problem is that I’m surrounded by so many sharp people. There are all you smart people reading this. There are all my smart friends. Many of you belong to both groups, of course. There are the women in my family who have been kicking ass lately. Gamma, who turns 13 in a few days, was at the doctor recently for a checkup with her sister and her mother, where the following conversation ensued:

Doctor: Und was hast du für Beschwerden, Gamma? (What complaints (symptoms) do you have, Gamma?)

Gamma: Ich kriege viel zu wenig Taschengeld! (My allowance is way too low!)

Anyhow. Maybe I need to watch Fox News for awhile until I start feeling smarter.