11.21.10
True Story – ATC
Frozen Rooster
03.18.10
Our 15th Anniversary
Today Jeff and I celebrate our 15th Anniversary together today. Even though we were actually married two years ago in San Francisco, we still consider March 18th, the day we actually met and started dating as our anniversary. Since I wrote about our yearly anniversary tradition of reciting how we met last year, I’ll spare everyone the repeat but rest assured, the Recitation has occurred already.
I was greeted this morning with two cards, one seriously romantic and heartfelt and the other, funny and heart-felt. Then I was treated to one of Jeff’s poems of which he has become famous for, which ended with something about “tossing my salad”. Jeff’s reputation as the Funny One stays intact for another year.
While it’s a work day and we’ve gone our separate ways, we’re reconvening tonight for dinner and a B’way show. Nothing flashy for us, just some good time spent with one another, enjoying each other’s company, watching the world spin by. It has been the hallmark of our years together and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
10.01.09
Fall Tradition: Roasted Garlic Soup
Fall for me starts off with the first chilly weekend that calls for making a big pot of Roasted Garlic Soup. I’ve posted the recipe on the blog several times but thought I’d do so again because it’s so good that it just has to be shared.
Roasted Garlic Soup (recipe via ‘Country Living’ Jan. 2002)
8 servings
2 lg. garlic heads, plus 1 clove minced
3 tbls. Olive oil
2 bay leaves
1 tbls unsalted butter
2 cups minced onion
1 cup minced carrots
1 lg. potato peeled (1 ¼ cups) and cubed
4 cups chicken stock
½ cup dry white wine
1 tsp. kosher salt
½ tsp. pepper
¼ cup heavy cream
1. Roast the garlic: Preheat oven to 350oF. Using a serrated knife, cut the top off each garlic head so that the tip of each clove is exposed. Place the garlic heads on a large piece of aluminum foil and drizzle with 2 tbls. Olive oil. Add the bay leaves and fold the foil to form a packet. Place the packet in the oven and bake at 375oF for 45 minutes. Remove and let cool until able to handle. In a small bowl, squeeze the garlic head until all of the roasted flesh is released. Discard outer husks and bay leaves.
2. Make the soup: In a large heavy duty saucepan, heat the remaining olive oil and butter, add onions and cook over medium heat until translucent – about 4 minutes. Add the carrots and continue to cook for 5 minutes more. Add the minced garlic and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in the potato, chicken stock, white wine, roasted garlic, salt, and pepper. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low and continue to cook for 35 minutes.
3. Finishing the soup: Using a blender or stick blender, puree the soup in small batches until smooth. Return the soup to the saucepan if using a blender over medium heat and whisk in the heavy cream. Heat until warmed. Do not boil. Keep warm until ready to serve
Suggestions: I like a lot of garlic so I always double the amount I use for the single recipe. Same for the onions. I’ve used a sweet potato in place of a regular potato before with great results though others have said it makes the soup too sweet with the carrots. I’ve also used a red wine instead of white when that was all I had on hand. Get a stick-blender! You need to pour this scalding soup into a blender like you need genitals on your face.
Garlic cook time: 45 mins. (Soup prep time: 15 mins)
Soup cook time: 55 minutes
Total Time: 1:40 minutes
08.09.09
Make the SAGE frolic, and the serious smile.
Jeff and I attended and helped host one of the local fundraisers for SAGE (Service and Advocacy for GLBT Elders) last night. To be honest, I didn’t quite understand what “hosting” meant since we weren’t having it at our house but came to find out about half-way through the party that hosting meant we were supposed to give out our “list” being a list of names of contacts to help add to the head count. We didn’t know know anyone that wasn’t already invited or at the party so we kind of sucked on the hosting bit but it was a good party and I’m a member of SAGE now…at 39…which trumps getting the first AARP magazine at 50. So there is that.
But the funny part of the evening was when a friend who was also hosting came up to me after the speech part of the party and said, “It’s all well and good to be here trying to raise money for a good cause but I couldn’t stop looking at your nipples the whole time I was standing up there speaking.”
Apparently my nipples are now so constantly erect that unless I wear an under-shirt or put Band-aids® on them, I look like I’m standing in an Arctic wind during frost-bite season. In the pro column, It’s a ice-breaker.
08.03.09
The dying back of a garden
My garden is dying. It is true, even in the first of what I assume will be the dog-days of August when the fruits of gardening labor should be apparent, mine are not. The garden suffers thusly:
The cucumbers have refused to grow and vine up the trellises I’ve so carefully built and strung for them. While we’ve gotten a few cukes off of them, the yield versus the number of plants I put out is a pittance. There will be no 2009 Aunt Kitty Pickles this year, I’m afraid.
The tomatoes are limp-wristed, pale, spindly, and wither at the slightest glance. Even if I walk past them and try to look from the corner of my eye, they droop and will drop a leaf as if to say, “ooooooooh” and throw the back of a hand up to their forehead in some pre-fainting theater. It should have been obvious that so few blooms equal even less fruit.
The only other vegetable of note are the peppers which I say using the word “stunted” would be aggressive. They are almost knee high when they should be at my waist and while they appear to be a robust verdant shade, I’m wondering if there is even enough juice coursing through their leaves to hold them up against gravity. No worries about needing support cages for these poor things.
My theories about what has happened to my sad, pale plot of dirt comes down to several plausible and probably somewhat connected reasons:
The cold, wet summer of our discontent. This year in upstate New York, zones 4A-5, has been one of the coolest and wettest won record. As a human being of a certain make up and constitution, I’ve found having no 90-degree days and a moderate and tolerable level of humidity to be a surprising delight. Am am not of a beach constitution, do not like to sweat, and cannot find it in my brain (nor my Ohio-born and raised genes) to entertain an afternoon siesta, languishing through the heat and humidity of the day. I find it perfectly hellish and it flattens me into a whiny, complainer that I hate to be around. Also, I’m driven inside and usually end up baking something which heats up the kitchen and provides food which I’m now paying a lot of money to a very nice trainer to tell me not to eat. All that being said, I believe the heat and humidity is exactly what a garden is used too. Sure it might like a good steady rain throughout the week and especially through July and August but there needs to be some sun and heat and this year, there hasn’t been a lot of it.
Have I expended the very limits of my soil’s nutrients? Every year, I enrich the soil of my raised plots with aged compost. I do have limited areas for rotation which I’ve worried somewhat about but there is little I can do with limited space. That being said, adding hundreds of pounds of rich compost to each individual bed should more than make up for heavy feeders…or so the though goes around in my head. But now I’m not sure and will spend most of August research soil refurbishing techniques to try and figure out what I need to do this fall and next spring to zap the beds back to life.
Bees. They’re dying…I send a little money to different places to find out why and hope to turn it around but I can’t say that a dearth of bees in my back yard isn’t distressing me. Even the Lamb’s Ear are typically covered like an undulating carpet of pollen-brushed little buggers but this year, it goes untended.
A Loss of Vision and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike previous years, my heart just wasn’t in the right place for the garden this year. There was no obsessing over seed catalogues and laying awake at night to dream of a dense, moist garden that kindly wound it’s vines around my ankles as I walked through whispering, “This is good, this is good.” There was only desperation as the early spring became late spring and I realized I was going to be working through all summer and fall and would only have short weekends to care and love my garden. Can anything grow without attention? I hurriedly put out a few things but nothing that really made my heart sing or want to spend afternoons weeding and turning over leaves to pick off bugs and whatnot. And now the cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchini, and tomatoes are all dying of powdery mildew and fungus that is rotting them from the inside out.
So I stand on the outside of the fence looking inwards to the neglected beds and think better thoughts for next year. Perhaps a planting of winter wheat to help the soil and the addition of some other natural concoctions that will amend and give back what things might need. And more importantly, I’m going to find the vision again I had for the garden and do a little more and better planning next go around to keep it fresh and alive.
06.20.09
Passing
I’ve spent the weekend thinking of friend who lost his mother to cancer this week and who is sitting at the funeral right now next to his partner and the rest of the family. His partner lost his mother several years ago to cancer also. When I think back now, I now have a spate of six years, really since my own mother died, where a friend has lost a parent each year and while I initially thought “how strange” to myself, now that I’ve really looked at it, I guess maybe it isn’t so much strange as just part of our lives as we’re getting older.
I don’t know if there is a right or expected time to start losing our parents. I would have said in my early to mid thirties that I would have expected people to start losing their grandparents. I lost two and have my very last grandmother still around and kicking which I know I’ve been lucky to be able to say and appreciate each conversation and time I spend with her. But now that I’m on the countdown to 40, I know I have to be more expecting of eventual life events. I was even telling Jeff the other day that on my run I was thinking about the next ten years of our lives together and how, statistically speaking, this will be the decade when things start breaking and falling off of us. I could realistically expect one of us to have a heart scare if not an outright cath and stent for a blocked artery. I think we’re now in the window for certain kinds of leukemia and more uncommon organ-based cancers. On the plus side, I feel more and more confident that I’m finally out of the woods for testicular cancer which I was at a higher risk for and had been expecting anytime after I turned 25, since I’m a black cloud kinda guy.
As I’m big on clich´s, “I guess if it’s not one thing it’s another” suits me just as well as anything else. Pithy, for sure, but true, none the less.
And yet my thought still go back to Jay and the passing of his Mom. This one a steep and quick decline from pancreatic cancer that took her so quick I’m still not sure anyone can make sense of it. Jeff’s dad was that way too…three weeks from diagnosis of lung cancer to being gone. In some ways, I can’t even fathom what it takes for someone to gird themselves to that kind of decline because unlike a sudden accident, I think people probably tell themselves and hold out for improvement or at least more time. I thought it was amazing to watch Jeff with his dad the day after the diagnosis go in and settle up the account, making sure his Dad knew exactly where he stood in Jeff’s life. Jeff had a clear idea that there was no time to wait, even with a long-term diagnosis and that days are lived as days. I was luckier, some would say, I had six months with my Mom before she passed away and five and a half of them were really good months and so, in my typical fashion, I stammered and hemmed-n-hawed over the months, dribbling out the same truing of accounts with her, never denying we had limited time but in some kind of denial that there would always be a tomorrow to say and do more.
And so we’re here today. More sorrow and loss and now, rather than an aberration, it seems like maybe more of a right of passage for those of us getting a little bit older and moving from our young adult hood into whatever this next phase is (Early middle age? Certainly not!).
06.06.09
MoBlogging
I was accused last night of faking my way into marching with the gay blogger group for gay pride in a few weeks.
“A video of a bear in your yard doesn’t really qualify as blogging,” I was told.
As I thought about it, he was sort of right but also getting his drunk on so I dismissed it out of hand. But with the wisdom of sleep, I understand and agree.
What the hell am I doing around here?