Lift Up Your Hearts!

We celebrated my birthday with a three-way phone call (Florida/Pittsburgh/Basel), good wishes from family and friends, and a dinner at the Kobé Japanese Steakhouse.  We'd been to the Kobé before, but that was probably 15 years ago.  Their teppanyaki service doesn't remind me in the least of our experiences in Japan, but that doesn't mean the food wasn't good.  We didn't even spring for the $80 Wagyu beef; the $18 sirloin was quite delicious enough.  And the $15 birthday bribe was worth a bit of mild embarrassment.

Today was a bigger birthday, with a slightly bigger celebration.  For our part, we once again joined the Greater Geneva Grande Award Marching Band for Geneva, Florida's genuine, old-fashioned, small-town Independence Day celebration, the only Independence Day parade in Central Florida to occur on July 4th.  I love Geneva's celebration—I hope that it is not a bad sign that the cow-chip toss game used plastic "chips" this year—and I love the band even more.  It was 15 years ago that we first marched with some of those great folks!

As usual, I made loud crashing noises with cymbals, and Porter kept the band members well hydrated.  He's had that job ever since our first gig, Atlanta's Independence Day parade in 1993.  Geneva lacks the television coverage, the long parade route, the melting tar in the pavement under our feet, and the real, desperate need for frequent hydration—in Atlanta we were the only band not to have someone faint—but his efforts and antics are no less appreciated.

  

Geneva's Master of Ceremonies challenged us to take this patriotic quiz in today's Orlando Sentinel, claiming that he only missed two questions.  I was more than pleased that I missed none at all, though on one question I used my multiple-choice test taking skills more than my real knowledge.  (Porter, of course, easily got them all right.)  The pride was somewhat short-lived, however, since I found the full version of the test and only scored 90%. That would still be a respectable score if I did not have the nagging feeling that I've seen that test somewhere before, so it doesn't really count.

I hope you all had a great day, however you celebrated!

For a monolingual person, I have an inordinate love of languages.  Not only is multi-lingualism increasingly important in today's world, but it does wonderful things for the brain—from increased brain growth in babies to decreased dementia in the elderly.  I wish the great resources available for teaching young children another language had been around when our kids were little, and I wish I had more aggressively pursued what there was.  Be that as it may, I am only a language dilettante, enjoying learning a few phrases of Japanese before our trip there, brushing up on my minimal high school French, and listening to the language CDs from the Hippo Family Clubs.  I wish I were multi-lingual, but face the reality that at my age it just isn't going to happen.

Nonetheless, I should be able to learn, if I put the time and effort into it, enough of a language to get along reasonably well with basic, necessary communication.  Which brings me to the question of why I find myself attracted to almost any language other than the two that would be of the most immediate practical use to learn: Spanish and German.

The source of my prejudice against Spanish was not hard to discern:  I don't react well to threats and pressure, and the increasing dominance of Spanish in Florida makes me feel about that language the way many Québécois feel about English.  Unreasonable prejudice, I know, but at least I understand its origins.

German is another matter.  Anticipating many future trips to Switzerland, not to mention German-speaking grandchildren, learning German should be a high priority.  And it will, when I can talk myself past the mental block.  But why the reluctance?  Why does the German language sound ugly and angry to me?  Sophie Scholl helped me untangle this puzzle:  My association with German and Germany is too much influenced by World War II.

Not that I ever experienced WWII myself, nor did my parents express any particular anti-German sentiment.  But when I was growing up, the memory was yet green in American culture, and Germans were not presented positively in the books we read, the movies we saw, the television shows we watched, and even the games we played.  The bad guys barked "Heil Hitler!" and "Seig heil!" and "Ya voll!" and spewed angry-sounding, though incomprehensible, strings of harsh consonants.  For some reason, perhaps because I grew up on the East Coast rather than the West, Japanese was spared this treatment.

I'm sure that German words out of the mouth of a young grandchild will sound perfectly lovely.

And fortunately for me, Schwyzerdütsch k'valt mir goed.  (Real Swiss German speakers please forgive my attempt at spelling what I hear.)

Having worked my way (the first time) through the Pimsleur Swiss German lessons (unfortunately there are only 10 of them), I can now say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you, ask you to repeat what you just said, tell you my name, and ask how to get to Bahnhofstrasse or Marktgasse.  I can also order a restaurant meal—though only if it's Gschnätzlets mit rösti—and a drink, if I'm willing to have coffee, beer, wine, or mineral water, which means I'd get pretty thirsty if it weren't for those great Swiss public drinking fountains.  I can make a date with you; that is, if you're willing to come at 9:30, 10:00, 1:30, or 2:00.

Schwyzerdütsch ish schön!  Especially if spoken by someone you love.

[Insert whistling here]

Front entrance lights and tiles 

              

Kitchen bar lights and hand-crafted wine rack

              

Yep, he did it all, plus about a dozen more cool things on a smaller scale!

You may have noticed I've been posting a lot recently.  At one point I decided to try to write a post a day for the month of June.  There were two reasons for this.  The first—and this doesn't matter for those who use feedreaders, but not everyone does—is that I want to give people a reason to stop by frequently; if you don't write anything new, people get out of the habit.  At least I did, before I let Bloglines keep track of things for me.

The second, more compelling, reason is the accumulating backlog of things impelling me to write.  Books lined up for review; interesting tidbits of news and commentary I figure folks might otherwise not encounter; and the everyday happenings in our lives, which is my attempt to close somewhat the 1000 or more (sometimes much more) mile distance between us and those we love.  The only problem with this system is that the list grows even as it shrinks.  But at least I'm holding my own this month.  I suppose I could post more often (this is actually my second post of the day), but there is more to life—like laundry, as the persistent dryer buzzer is now reminding me.

Last night we enjoyed an outing to the Texas de Brazil restaurant.  This is not what I would normally call my kind of restaurant:  although I find salad bars, buffets, and all-you-can-eat establishments appealing for their wide variety and options, the high price and the encouragement of overeating make them generally unattractive to me.  However, our friends had two-for-one coupons, which brought the $45-per-person price down from the outrageous to the merely ridiculous-but-acceptable-for-a-special-occasion.  So we celebrated Father's Day one day late.

Was it Brazil?  No.  The theme was Brazilian, with the churrasco-style grilled meats brought to the table on huge skewers, but the salad bar included sushi, and while the bar had suco de maracujá it was not sem açúcar, so I was not able to indulge in my favorite Brazilian drink.

Was it delicious?  Yes.  The first meat to come by our table was the filet mignon, which was so good that we never had more than a taste of any of the other meats.  The salad bar, bread, and side dish offerings could have kept me happy (and overstuffed) without any meat at all.

Was it worth $45/person?  No.  Half that?  Yes, for a special occasion.  Porter pronounced it one of the best restaurant meals he's had in a long time—and with his travel schedule, he gets a lot of restaurant experience.

Did we overeat?  Yes, but it could have been worse.  I calculate that if I had stopped five bites sooner I would not have been wishing we'd parked the car further away.... 

We've been nibbling on the basil, parsley, and Thai basil from our garden, and the hot pepper plant has been producing prolifically and steadily for a year now, but this week saw the first harvest from our radish, lettuce, and stevia plants.  The radishes aren't quite ready yet, but the baby lettuces were spicy and delicious.

I've never grown stevia before, and didn't know quite what to do with the leaves, but I cut one stem, stripped off the leaves (maybe a dozen), and poured not qute a quart of boiling water over them.  I let that cool and then put it in the refrigerator.  Next I took a quarter cup of juice of a fresh lemon, poured it over a glass full of ice, added about half a cup of the stevia infusion (filled up the glass), and stirred it all together.  It was a delicious concoction.  Still tart, but that's how we like our lemonade.

A week ago we paused in the middle of grouting our new entrance tile to turn around and watch the Space Shuttle Discovery sail through the clouds.  This morning the twin sonic booms informed us it was time to turn on the television to watch Discovery's return home.

And you thought the thrills of living in Florida had something to do with not shoveling snow.

We've lived in Florida more than 20 years and haven't yet mastered the art of gardening in this climate.  After a year or two of being defeated by nematodes, giant grasshoppers, and the need for daily attention, we pretty much gave up, until inspired to try again by Heather and Jon, who managed to get a few good things to grow even at their zero-yard city apartment.

Our biggest (and nearly only) success from last year was a hot pepper plant.  As I wrote last year, it had been labeled as a sweet green pepper but was clearly not.  The first couple of peppers were quite mild, with just a little bite, but I think they were just testing the waters—subsequent fruits have been the fabulous "don't touch your eyes after chopping them up even if you've washed your hands three times" variety.  This is the only plant to have survived from last year, and it has been blooming and bearing continuously.  Here it is with its new companions, sweet basil (left) and Thai basil (right).  Thai basil is that wonderful anise-like herb served with Vietnamese pho, and often in summer rolls.

The radishes, lettuces, and carrots were just starting eight days ago; now they're filling the pot and ready for some thinning.  On the right is our parsley and stevia, along with a left-over Christmas poinsettia and some aloe and coleus plants.

Last year's tomatoes never did very well; these heirloom plants look much more promising.

Don't take my word for it; read about Our Big News in Janet's own words (and pictures).  For the really curious, you can find a link to Stephan's blog there.  Hmmm, her webmaster is going to have to make a change, and move thduggie up from Friends to Family on the sidebar.  And while I'm at it, will IrishOboe change to SwissHarp, or maybe SwissFiddle?  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I'm contemplating the complexities of having an international family.

Such as figuring out how to type umlauts.  In Word, it's easy—CTRL/SHIFT/colon key followed by the letter, in this case "u"—easy to remember because the colon looks like an umlaut turned 90°.  In HTML, ü translates to ü, and in LifeType one can insert it via the "custom character" button.  (Technically, in LifeType it's called "u diaeresis," but while that may matter to people like Peter, it's a distinction without a difference to me.)  There's also an easy out:  one can write "ue" instead.

Oh, I know there are a few other difficulties, such as no matter where they live, at least one half of the couple is going to be too far away from family.  But I'm not thinking about that (much) now; instead I concentrate on the delightful side, such as having in-family tutors in another culture and several other languages.  It's not all bad to have an excuse to visit Europe.  :)

And have I mentioned that Stephan is a nice guy, that he and Janet seem to complement each other very well, and that he makes her very happy?

Thanks to Janet reminding me (she'll have to write her own post as to why), I was able to watch NASA TV live coverage of the landing of Phoenix on Mars (and at a much more reasonable hour than she did).  For obvious reasons (the view out our front door) I pay more attention to Shuttle launches than other NASA activity these days, but watching this excitement took me 'way back.  Back to 1969 and the Apollo 11 moon landing...stories from my cousin who worked in the space program...some of the first pictures of the Earth from the moon that were treasured trophies from a Boy Scout (Explorer) program I participated in with General Electric...and even 'way, 'way back to standing on the porch with my father, watching Echo I pass overhead.

Thanks for the memories, Janet and Stephan!

Having finished watching all the available “Best Picture” Oscar-winners—all except for one or two he decided early on weren’t worth the wasting of his time—Porter is catching up on the James Bond movies he’d missed, which was many if not most of them.  Not feeling any lack whatsoever for having missed them myself, I’ve generally elected to indulge in what to me are more profitable activities, such as reading, writing, or sleeping.

Every once in a while, however, I’ll find myself sucked into the story, never long enough to see the entire movie, but enough to provoke a few of thoughts.

There’s a lot of fun in the Bond movies, or at least the early ones, which is all I’ve seen so far.   Many of the lines, and in particular the way they are delivered (by Sean Connery, anyway) are genuinely clever, and some of the scenes border on slapstick, which I was not expecting.

What surprised—and disturbed—me most, however, was how tame the movies have seemed so far.  In violence, sex, and foul language they are far outdone by today’s ordinary, broadcast television fare.  Yet I remember how shocking James Bond was when first he came to the theaters.  Few of my young teenaged friends actually managed to see the films, but reading the books—or pretending, or wishing, to have done so—was risqué and definitely cool.  I remember the birthday when my mother gave me The Diamond Smugglers in an attempt to satisfy my desire for a Bond book.  How ignorant and uncool could she be to have picked out one of the very few books by Ian Fleming that was not about James Bond and in fact was not even fiction?  Ignorant like a fox, my Phi Beta Kappa mother!

Even from a perspective 40 years in the future, there are scenes in the films I would not want an adolescent to see; I’d rather not have seen them myself.  To this day I remember lines from one of the Bond books I managed to read that I wish had not been burned into my brain.  (My naïve imagination was not up to visualizing the scenes very well, but words stick.)  Yet that from which we were sheltered is standard fare for elementary-aged students (most of the children in Janet’s middle class, suburban, second grade class had watched R-rated movies—and that was 20 years ago); many of today’s teenagers have had more sexual encounters than James Bond himself, and been exposed to more violence.  Without the cool gadgets.

A friend of mine once lamented that at her church Mother's Day received more attention than Easter.  I'm sure most churches do better than that, but I'm equally sure that in many churches, at least in the United States, yesterday received more honor as Mother's Day than as Pentecost.  We celebrated both, making the Christian festival primary, but not disdaining the secular celebration.  I like the way our rector mitigates the other problem with Mother's Day celebrations, the pain they cause women suffering from infertility, by asking to stand first all great-grandmothers, then all grandmothers, then all mothers, then all daughters, till all the women of the congregation are standing, and all the men of the church pray for us.  Still, the main focus was Pentecost, and we even had a baptism to go with it.  We sang a lively and appropriate anthem by Pepper Choplin called Fill-a Me Up! for two services, though we sneaked out of the second service after the anthem to get in a few minutes of our Sunday school class.  Unfortunately, the anthem is sung after the sermon; good as the sermon was, I'd happily have skipped the second hearing to have attended more of the class, but the memory is still too strong of one occasion in which the normally long-winded preacher (in a different church) drastically and inexplicably cut short his sermon.  We didn't want to risk not returning in time.

Knowing many churches give short shrift to Pentecost, I asked Jonathan if they had done anything special for Pentecost in his church.  "No," he replied.  "Do you know what Pentecost is?"  "Yes, I do!  We saw a movie about it.  I remember the part about the paper clips...."  Hmmm.  That part of the coming of the Holy Spirit had apparently escaped me.  Later, Heather cleared up the mystery by remembering that they had seen a movie about the Holocaust.  Not quite the same thing, but you can see the confusion.  I still wonder about the paper clips, though.

On the way home from church we stopped by Lowe's and did our part to stimulate the economy—of the U.S. and, unfortunately, of China too.  Nothing against the Chinese people, but I'm not happy with their government, their cavalier attitude towards health and safety, their blatant disregard for patents and copyrights, and the fact that it's so difficult to find items that are made anywhere else but in China.

It wasn't completely an impulse purchase—I believe Porter had been ruminating on the idea for quite a while—but nearly so: Porter had to go home (fortunately only about 2.5 miles away) to exchange our smaller car for the one that could carry...A PORCH SWING! I love porch swings, and I remember many happy hours reading, napping, or just daydreaming on my grandfather's porch swing, which turned into our porch swing when he moved in with us.  Sadly, when it was my father's time to move to a place too small to accommodate the swing, it had deteriorated too much to make it worth moving 1000 miles south.  Nonetheless, that swing remained the gold standard for porch swings in my mind, and though we've looked at swings off and on over the years, I've never found one that really excited me.

Until yesterday.  That's why I was able to overlook the "Made in China" label, and the fact that Lowe's was rather disorganized and we had to wait quite a while before they actually found a swing we coudl take home.  Porter spent the afternoon assembling the swing (no small task—it might have been worth the $10 assembly fee, except that an installer wouldn't have done such a careful job), and there it is on our porch, looking very much like the picture, except without the sunshade, which we don't need.

Quite a Mother's Day present, huh?  It's as much like my grandfather's swing as makes no difference, perfect for naps, meditations, sitting side-by-side with my sweetheart in the evening, and reading aloud with grandchildren snuggling on either side.  What's more, it opens out into a bed; I foresee a "rite of passage" for the grandkids, marked by being old enough to sleep on Grandma and Dad-o's swing.  (Age is important because of the proximity of the pool.  No sleepwalkers need apply.)

Of course the very best Mother's Day presents were the cards and calls from our children and grandchildren!  No, scratch that.  The VERY best Mother's Day present is having such children and grandchildren as we do.

As my father would say, we were sloppin' up culture like a hawg yesterday.  (I believe the reference was to a L'il Abner comic strip, although it may have been Pogo.)  It all started when the Orlando Magic (local basketball team) advanced to the playoffs, thereby causing a parking problem for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert since the Bob Carr Auditorium and the O-rena (it keeps changing its name based on sponsorship, so since I can't keep track of it I generally call it by its original appellation) share parking facilities.

In order to help alleviate the problem, the OPO delayed its concert by half an hour.  We figured that still wasn't going to be good enough, since one never knows how long a basketball game is going to last, so we decided to expand the evening.

We left for downtown at 4:30, and found our usual parking garage already filled to capacity.  On to Plan B, which involved parking some distance away but near the free downtown bus line.  We could have then taken the bus to our first event, dinner at the Napasorn Thai restaurant, but decided instead to enjoy a walk in the lovely weather.  Mmmmm, tom yum gai, beef with basil, and pad Thai. :)

Our next stop was an easy walk away, for an Orlando Cabaret Festival show at the Mad Cow Theatre.  This was our third year at their popular It Was a Very Good Year series (see last year and the year before, and our choice of year was made easy by the fact that 1951 was the one that made it possible for us to see it and still make the OPO concert afterwards.

Actually, 1951 had been my first choice this time, anyway, it being close enough to my birth year I thought it might be especially interesting.  It turned out to be my least favorite of our three years, not so much because I recognized fewer of the songs as because the singers often didn't take them seriously enough to make them sound authentic.  Well, okay, there's only so much you can do with I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat....  The songs from various musicals were the best, and the most convincing.

No lingering allowed after the show; it was time to run to the next event:  The Orlando Philharmonic and the Bach Festival Choir presenting Verdi's Requiem. We didn't run, exactly, but having just missed a bus we decided to walk the nine-tenths of a mile to the Bob Carr, moving as quickly as we could against a flood tide of basketball fans in various states of depression, elation, and/or inebriation.  Arriving on time to the concert was necessary because the Requiem was performed without intermission.  Not only is it rude (and often forbidden) to enter the hall after the performance has begun, but we had also consumed many large glasses of water with our fiery Thai food....

This was, as far as I remember, the first time I'd heard Verdi's Requiem, and though I go into OPO concerts predisposed to enjoy whatever they present, I must confess I found this oddly disagreeable.  The orchestra and chorus were splendid; it was an excellent performance.  But it felt less like a requiem mass and more like an opera without costumes.  Actually, supertitles would have helped, since it was too dark in the hall to read the words printed in the program.  One of the advantages of being in a liturgical church, however, is that I was familiar enough with the words to follow fairly well anyway.

Perhaps it wasn't that much of an advantage, because often the music did not seem to fit the words.  A mental shift, not without effort, did enable me to envision someone (not seraphim) singing the light, dancing Sanctus around the throne of God, but it was a far cry from my usual Isaiah 6 inspired image.  Verdi did the Dies Irae well, however, with Carl Rendek and the men of the chorus providing a relentless, driving energy to the terrible words.

One or two of you might understand when I say that the absolute highlight of the delightful evening was the few minutes we shared with our table-mates at the Cabaret.  Turns out they were from France, and though as always in such situations my very limited French vocabulary took rapid retreat, nonetheless we did manage to communicate some in French before reverting to English.  It's always a thrill to me when someone actually understands my French, and, gracious woman, she said my accent was very good....

This took much longer than I had expected...I guess Pentecost and Mother's Day will have to wait till tomorrow. But I did get the coolest Mother's Day present. 

The end month of Porter's recent gig was very stressful, with lots of pressure and 80+ hour work weeks.  My father often said that his favorite Bible quotation was "And it came to pass...."  This, too, has passed at last, and we have survived.  Many thanks to those of you who upheld Porter in your prayers.

If anyone wants a measure of how stressful the time was, I need only say that he has spent several days recently working on replacing a neighbor's roof, and some of you remember that two years ago—after replacing ours—he said he'd never, ever do that again. But this is how he chooses to relax these days, finding the physical work a delightful change.

So, onward!  Two days in Roanoke, then who knows?  It's always an adventure. 

When I was in Pittsburgh, we bought some dried pineapple at Trader Joe's, and it was very, very good!  Thus when I saw the same at my local health food store, I snapped it up.  Did I say it was the same?  Not.  Even thought the label did not mention added sugar, this pineapple must have been sweetened, as is the dried pineapple I can buy at the grocery store.  Yuck.  I couldn't eat it, so I cooked it with some dried apricots to make a fruit topping for my breafast muesli.

Not to be defeated, however, I set about making my own dried pineapple out of canned pieces (rings work best) heated in a low-temperature oven.  Voila!  Wonderful!  Delicious!  The only trouble is that a can of pineapple shrinks to something so small—and so tasty—one could easily devour an entire batch in one sitting.  (One didn't, but it was a close thing.)