Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've been an adotive Red Sox fan for more than 30 years now, and duly celebrated when they won their long-awaited World Series title, and when they did it again.  But I'm from Philadelphia (among other places), and the only major league game I've ever seen live and in person was with the Philadelphia Phillies.  That was back in the Connie Mack Stadium days, which incidentally makes it fun for me that one of Florida's Congressmen is also Connie Mack, grandson of the original Philadelphia manager.  I wonder if he suffered conflicting loyalties in the recent World Series.

Had it been a Red Sox - Phillies battle, loyalties here—and in at least one other household in our family—would, indeed, have been conflicted.  But it wasn't, and my identity with Florida is not enough to extend to Tampa Bay if they're going against the Phillies.  Not that I watched any of the games myself, though I read that the final game so was exciting I almost wish I had.

To all those following and praying for Heather, Jon, and Judy Wilson:  Judy's trial resumes this afternoon.  I'm no longer there to continue my blow-by-blow commentary, but I'll pass on the news as I am able.  Jon is now scheduled to appear as a defense witness, so prayers for him and his testimony would be appreciated.   (I find it bizaare that he was ping-ponged that way—he was originally scheduled, like Heather, as a witness for the prosecution—but my prosecuting attorney friends don't.  Facts are facts, and you use whomever you need to establish them.)

There may even be a verdict today, so prayers for the judge would also be a very good thing!

I spent several of my formative years in the City of Soft-Pretzel-y-Love.  Not the fancy, cheese-filled mall variety, or the bake-at-home frozen blandness, but the soft, chewy, salty Philadelphia Pretzel, preferably from a germ-laden street vendor's cart and drizzled, of course, with mustard.  Nothing ever tastes as good as memory makes it, so for over thirty years I have been making do.

Enter Facebook.  Bear with me here, it's a convoluted story.

It all began, for me, when Janet joined Facebook.  I no longer remember what brought her, reluctantly, to that point, but she had so much fun re-connecting with old friends that she persuaded me to join as well.  The connecting-with-old-friends bit only works if one's friends are also on Facebook, which is much less likely for folks of my age, but nonetheless I've made a few enjoyable connections.  As a whole I find the Facebook package more annoying than not, but can put up with it for the few gems it tosses my way.

Like the inspiration for this post.  This summer I met a friend of my son-in-law-to-be.  Enjoyable as our time together was, we are far apart both generationally and geographically, and in the old days the chances of her sharing a recipe with me would have been nil.  But she is on Facebook, and graciously accepted my "friend request," the result of which is that when she posted a video on pretzel-making, I found it.  There are actually two in the series:

It is a very good thing we do not have cable television.  Put me in front of a food channel and I might not move all day.  Other shows by this guy are proving a major temptation getting in the way of progress this week.  "This guy" is Alton Brown, and his show, Good Eats, is on the Food Network (whatever that is).  Some related links:  One set of shows on YouTube, another set of shows on YouTube, and the fan page.  (I spent a fair amount of time trying to determine the legality or lack thereof of having the shows posted on YouTube, without success, but they've been there for quite awhile without being removed, and one of the posters runs the fan site and knows the chef, so I'm feeling free to enjoy them unless convinced otherwise.)

After all the preliminaries...ta da!  What I Did Yesterday:  I made the pretzels!  It was easy!  Dark brown, shiny, chewy, and exceedingly delicious, with or without mustard.

Did I say they were good?  I mean really, really good.  Even without the umibacillus vendorophilus.

Many people travel on business.  It's not an easy life, and different people have different strategies for coping with the stress and boredom.  Some appreciate the opportunity to explore new cities; some enjoy the perks of nicer hotels, restaurants, and even golf courses than they would otherwise be able to afford; some accumulate airline and hotel points and use them to provide their families with otherwise unreachable opportunities.  There are also those who take advantage of the relative anonymity and distance from home and family to indulge in wanton behavior.

Some businessmen, however, wax poetic.  Don't miss this offering from our favorite thduggie.

The European Parliament has awarded its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Chinese activist Hu Jia.  I'm embarrassed to say I know very little about his work, but the fact the the Europeans defied Chinese pressure to ignore him is enough for me to cheer about.

The life of a travelling businessman is not easy, but rain brings rainbows, at least if you look from a favorable angle.  My recent trip to Phoenix was such a rainbow. You'd think that an introvert like me would not be eager to leave home so soon after having been away for a month, but this was the time that was available—and it turned out to be perfect.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed the flight, as I usually do.  You can tell I'm still a novice flyer:  I love observing the ground and the clouds; I love having an extended time when I can pull out my World of Puzzles magazine without any guilt feelings.  Well, not many anyway.  I know there's work I can do sitting in an airplane, but I generally give myself permission to ignore it when I'm flying.  After four hours in my seat, however, I could see why these little perks don't have the same thrill for those who fly frequently on business.

Our flight landed about 7 p.m., but as Arizona is a "free" state—refusing submission to Daylight Saving Time—my first ride through Phoenix was in the dark.  Despite the darkness, navigation to our hotel in Tucson was a piece of cake, thanks to the Hertz NeverLost GPS system in our rental car.  We had come prepared with physical maps from AAA and Google Maps printouts, and indeed they were also useful at different points during the week, but the NeverLost was a very helpful—not to mention fun—toy.

Porter had chosen to stay in Tucson to give us a head start on the drive to Saturday's destination:  Chiricahua National Monument.  One doesn't normally associate Holiday Inns with luxury, or at least I don't, but having frequent-stayer status hath its privileges, and we had a nice little suite—not that we had time to enjoy it much.  Jet-lag was making its presence known, and we had a big day planned for the morrow.

We've lived in Florida over 20 years and have had a few interesting animal encounters, like the time we were driving home from choir rehearsal and had to stop while an alligator crossed the road ahead of us.  Usually, though, it's pretty tame around here, once you get accustomed to lizards in the house, palmetto bugs (aka cockroaches on steroids), and spiders half the size of your hand.

I try to walk every day for about an hour, and at my pace four times around the jogging trail runs just five minutes over that, so since I had to be out in the car anyway, that's where I decided to walk today.  It was on my second lap that I had The Encounter:  wending its way across the trail just a few feet in front of my striding legs was my first ever, in-the-wild, live-as-it-could be coral snake!

Pencil-thin and about a foot long—perhaps he was a youngster—he was minding his own business and slithered off into the woods on the other side of the trail, so I did not let his presence deter me from completing my circuits.  On returning home, however, I hastened to google "coral snake" to prove my memory, which has been confused ever since I realized that the old jingle, "Red and yellow, kill a fellow; red and black, friend of Jack" (and variations thereon) could easily be reworked to say just the opposite.  It's like when I thought I was clever to remember how to get to the public parking lot near St. Luke's Cathedral in Orlando:  Turn at the first president.  Easy enough; one turns on Washington Street.  But then I realized that when driving one actually encounters Jefferson Street before Washington, so in another sense that is the first president, and I remained confused until I had made the trip often enough to remember to turn on Washington without any clever memory aids.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has recently doubled its recommendation of vitamin D intake for children, from 200 IU to 400 IU per day.  Not only is vitamin D important in the prevention of ricketts, but there is increasing evidence that its deficiency can promote type 2 diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.  Some doctors think 400 IU may not be enough.

There's a point there.  If the nursing mother isn't getting enough vitamin D, one or both of the pair will suffer.  And I suppose the widespread recommendation of supplementation is the best a group like the AAP can do to address a general problem.  But I would be more inclined to address the real problem by making sure the mother is properly nourished, and in ways as natural as possible rather than through artificial supplements.

How can one acquire 400 IU of vitamin D?  A teaspoon of cod liver oil will get you more that, but if you want more palatable sources, 3.5 ounces of cooked salmon have 360 IU, the same amount of cooked mackeral has 345, 1.75 ounces of sardines in oil have 350, and 6 ounces of tuna canned in oil have 200.

Then there's my favorite source:  playing outside in the sun.  It doesn't take much, although the amount is variable, depending on latitude, time of year, and cloud cover.  The factors that affect UV radiation exposure and research to date on the amount of sun exposure needed to maintain adequate vitamin D levels make it difficult to provide general guidelines. It has been suggested, for example, that approximately 5-30 minutes of sun exposure between 10 AM and 3 PM at least twice a week to the face, arms, legs, or back without sunscreen usually lead to sufficient vitamin D synthesis.

There you go:  permission granted to play outside a few minutes several times a week.  Maybe schools should re-institute a sound recess policy.  Northern children would need longer playtimes, however.  The UV energy above 42 degrees north latitude (a line approximately between the northern border of California and Boston) is insufficient for cutaneous vitamin D synthesis from November through February; in far northern latitudes, this reduced intensity lasts for up to 6 months. Latitudes below 34 degrees north (a line between Los Angeles and Columbia, South Carolina) allow for cutaneous production of vitamin D throughout the year.  [Pardon the source's obvious prejudice against the southern hemisphere.]

Did you note the clever design here?  The northern climes, in which sun exposure is insufficient for at least part of the year to produce adequate levels of vitamin D, have the cold-water fish whose oils are high in that vitamin.  How efficient is that?  It's another indication to me that the system was designed to work, and since babies were designed to subsist solely on mother's milk for at least the first several months of life, it makes much more sense to me for the mother to make sure she gets plenty of vitamin D herself, and to take her baby outside with her now and then, than to give artificial supplements.

While waiting at the computer, and feeling a little nostalgic for Basel, I found this, which I post for those who wish to see a bit of where they will be in a few months.  Be sure to show Jonathan the Hammering Man.  If I don't look at the feet I can imagine the runner is Janet.  :)

I love to cook, but that's something I keep forgetting.  Maybe I need an audience; it hardly seems worth the time and effort when I'm eating alone, and even when I'm not we're usually so busy it hardly seems reasonable to spend much time cooking.  But Porter keeps talking about how this is the best restaurant in town, so it seems only fair to work towards making that a reality.  On Saturday, we had some of our favorite company over for dinner—the best kind to cook for, because they're always appreciative and don't mind being guinea pigs for whatever I want to try out.

Earlier this summer, my nephew had feasted us on Hazelnut-Crusted Chicken with Raspberry Sauce, a Bon Appétit recipe from Epicurious.com.  The taste was even more amazing than this beautiful presentation (click on picture for larger view):

It was a recipe I knew I had to add to my repertoire, so that's what I served.  Sort of.  Well, actually, that was the starting point, but I never can resist changing things along the way.  One of our guests doesn't eat meat, so I used salmon instead of chicken.  I had the store take the skin off the filet, then sliced it into pieces about two inches wide.  I could have bought hazelnuts, but had pecans in stock, and I used raspberry balsamic vinegar instead of white wine vinegar, canola oil instead of safflower, Cherchies' Champagne Mustard instead of honey mustard, Penzeys' Florida Seasoned Pepper for half the black pepper—you get the picture.  And because it was fish, I baked it for about 20 minutes instead of frying it first.

Despite all the changes, the end result was still really, really good.  I'm going to go raid the leftovers now....

I've never been to the Blue Ribbon Tavern in Grove City, so this isn't really a review, despite the category.  But I hope to get there someday, and since it sits nearly at the intersection of I-80 and I-79 in Pennsylvania, it's likely I will.  Taverns aren't at the top of my list of places to visit, but this one eliminates a huge potential problem by not allowing smoking on the inside.  (Not that they necessarily get credit for that, since I believe it's Pennsylvania law.)  However, this one has a few special attractions.

The bar itself was crafted by a good friend of ours, and I'd like to see it in real life.

The tavern is more than the bar; they have bona fide chefs, not short-order cooks, serving the restaurant.

I love heart-warming stories of dreams fulfilled.  This has been a life-long dream of co-owner Jim Nichelson, which he thought would never come to pass, least of all in his home town, since Grove City had been "dry" since Prohibition.  Nonetheless, he continued to garner work experience that prepared him for seizing the moment last year when the city voted to permit two liquor licenses.  To have a vision; to continue laying the groundwork for achieving it even when it seems impossible, so that you're ready to walk through the door when it opens; and to work hard and succeed because it's your job and you love it—that's a big part of the American Dream.

Here's a story about the Blue Ribbon Tavern, and here's another.

Among the people who read this blog, at least sometimes, there are those who live not far from Grove City, those who went to college there, and those who occasionally have business at the college.  If you find yourselves visiting Grove City and are hungry around lunchtime—or dinnertime, but it's likely to be more peaceful for lunch—stop by, admire the bar, and tell Jim where you heard about the Blue Ribbon Tavern.

Having read this analysis of what the next U.S. president (and other members of the Executive and Legislative branches) must face, I have two questions.

(1) This job clearly requires someone of superior intelligence, knowledge, skill, courage, and moral grounding.  Where in our political process is the ordinary voter given the opportunity to evaluate the candidates on those qualities?

(2) Why would anyone in his right mind want the job?

Housing markets are funny.  I know, it's all in supply and demand, but I've found it somewhat amusing, ever since several of our friends in a missionary organization ended up living in upscale houses when the organization moved from California to Florida, because for tax reasons they had to reinvest in housing the large profits they made from selling their missionary shacks in California.  That works both ways:  having moved to Florida from the Northeast, we found ourselves caught in a real estate market that was flat for almost 20 years while places like Massachusetts and Connecticut skyrocketed, effectively precluding a return to our roots.

What intrigued me about this home was its surface similarity to our first home, in Rochester New York.  Our house was 1338sqft on a 40ft x 104ft lot; this is 1888sqft on 33ft x 122ft.  Actually, I think they are even closer in size than it appears, since the basement was not counted in our square footage, and it seems theirs has been converted into 750 square feet of living space. The houses were even built in approximately the same era.  Note that our old home is now supposed to have a market value of $110,000.