Blog Archives

Why Didn't Jean-Paul Sartre Think Of This?

5/29/2015

My daughter Theresa,

...here with her hubby Phill and kitty Dory,

... sent me this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7LBggDKEtMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7LBggDKEtM

    ...which presents the basic existentialistic premise and problem of human disconnection and fundamental loneliness, then offers a solution - in a snappy 2 1/2 minute cartoon.
    So, use the 2 1/2 minutes you'd have taken to read this blog and watch the cartoon instead.
    It'll make you feel better.
    I promise.
    Have a wonderful weekend! 8)

6 Comments

The Posse Does Creekside

5/28/2015

2 Comments

Inspired by a photo from the 5/12/2015 post,

...no, not this photo,

...but this one,

..and this one, too, shots of Tom's and my breakfasts one morning

at the Creekside Cafe in Gahanna, myself and two other members of the Panera Posse decided to go bagel-AWOL this week and meet here instead for breakfast.

Being the most regular Creekside customer among the Posse members, I assured my mates as we approached the entrance from the back lot that at 10 am on a Wednesday morning the place wouldn't be too crowded.

Whoa, did I lie! The place was packed, inside:

...and outside, too, on the deck that overlooks the Big Walnut creek:

I guess this shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, as it was such a lovely late spring morning and Creekside is always a popular Gahanna spot for breakfast, brunch or lunch at a reasonable price:

...not to mention the je-ne-sais-quoi yet cozy decor:

...and the pretty view of downtown Gahanna (which was also quite crowded yesterday morning) from the front window:

But of course the true draw of the Creekside Cafe is its great food, of which my Posse Partners and I happily partook:

I had the traditional breakfast with sunny-side up eggs and whole wheat toast,

...one of my friends also opted for the traditional breakfast but with her eggs over easy and some beautiful-looking slices of rye toast,

..while the other prudently settled for the lovely fresh (very fresh!) fruit plate and whole wheat toast.

Our eggs and bacon were cooked just right, though in truth, the true piece de la resistance of any Creekside Cafe breakfast platter is always the fried potatoes.

Nobody does fried potatoes like the Creekside:

And though I'm not a coffee drinker my colleagues assured me that the coffee was soooo good and rich.

One caveat: The Creekside Cafe is not the place to come for a quick meal: the service is slow, as only one server, friendly, hard-working Scott, with the help of several busy busers, waits on us all.

So if you come to Creekside, plan on wiling away an hour or more chatting with friends or just enjoying the ambiance.

After our fine and satisfying breakfast at the Creekside Cafe the Posse and I mosied on into the consignment shop next door,

...a cute place full of neat stuff:

I fell prey to this $50 mirror,

...which now hangs in my in my family room.

And I guess that's the end. 8)

2 Comments

Courtesy 201

5/27/2015

4 Comments

    A friend of mine received an invitation to a high school graduation party.
    On the invitation was a request for some words of wisdom for the graduate.
    This got me thinking: If someone asked me for some words of wisdom for a young person about to set out into the world, what would I offer them?
     After thinking about it for a while, Here's what I came up with:
    I'd offer them a brief course in Courtesy 201.
    I call it Courtesy 201 because it deals with issues of good manners that are a stratum above the 101- level basics such as saying "please" and "thank you", holding the door, and covering your face when you cough or sneeze.
    This next level of courtesy has to do with polite behavior in social situations and its tenets are not as ubiquitously taught as are the better-known and more basic good manners.
   Anyway, here, for starters, are ten rules of Courtesy 201 that it would probably do well for every youngster to hear at least once before they set off from home. So feel free to share, or to add to, these:

                                                     Ten Rules of Courtesy 201:
    1. If you are out in a public place, such as a restaurant, the mall, the park, or even just out on the street, with another person and someone you know comes up to you to say hello, immediately introduce this person to the person you are with, even if you only plan on talking to the new arrival   for a minute or two, so as not to make the person you're with feel left out while you're talking to someone they don't know. Don't carry on a long conversation with the new arrival unless you can include the person you're with in the conversation.

     2. If you pull out a chair to sit at a table in a public place such as a restaurant or library, when you get up to leave be sure and push the chair back to the table so it isn't in people's way.

    3. When you hand a cashier, or anybody, one or more dollar bills, make sure the bills are straight, not folded or crumpled, and have the face side up, which makes the denomination clearer to see and is the way the cashiers are required to set bills into their drawer.

    4. If you're a guest a someone's place and buffet-style refreshments are served, don't start digging in until your host invites you to.

     5. If you invite a group of people over to your place and serve buffet-style refreshments, as people with good manners don't dig in until until invited to, be sure and let people know when it's time to eat and direct them to help themselves to the food and drink.

     6. If you are a guest at someone's place for a sit-down meal or snack, it's good manners to wait until your host starts eating before you dig in.

    7. If you are hosting people for a sit-down meal or snack, as soon as grace is said and everyone is served, begin eating as a signal to your guests that they, too, should start eating.

    8. Rule of thumb: Whether sit-down or buffet, the well-bred host indicates to the polite guest by word or gesture when it's time to start eating. Following this rule avoids uncertainty and allows everyone feel more at ease.

    9. If you ever bring an offering of food to someone's place, whether for a dinner party or pot luck, always leave the left-overs for your host; do not take home left-overs of something you brought unless requested to do so by your host.

    10. When in doubt, think about doing unto others as you'd like them to do unto you you - it's the height of good manners.

4 Comments

Straight Flight, A Fable

5/25/2015

2 Comments

                                                                    Straight Flight
                                                                               By
                                                                        Patti Liszkay

    It came to pass, though slowly at first, in Year Of Our Lord 2013, soon after the Boy Scouts of America announced that openly gay youngsters were now openly welcome to participate in scouting, that religious-backed, straight-only scouting-type organizations with names like Life Trail USA, Troops of St. George, and On My Honor began springing up across America as alternatives for parents who did not wish for their children to associate with gays.
    But straight flight from the Boy Scouts did not truly take off until 2016, the year when the Boy Scouts of America, having been summoned the previous year by their president to do so, welcomed gay leaders as well as youth into their ranks.
    But once the Great Straight Flight, as it came to be known, began, the following years ushered in an era of fundamental sea change for the Boy Scouts of America.
    Typically, as soon as one openly gay scout or leader joined a troop, the straight (or not openly gay)
boys would one-by-one be pulled from the troop and re-located into one of the "no-gays allowed" alternatives.
    And so the anti-gay youth organizations prospered and flourished, and soon banded together into a new organization known as the No Gays of America, or the NGA.
    Meanwhile membership in the Boy Scouts became a "Gay Thing" and the ranks, from Tiger Cub to Life Scout, filled up with boys who were openly gay as well as those who, while they were learning orienteering, could find a safe haven for figuring out their own orientation.
    The scope of the Boys Scouts expanded, and along with camping and other outdoor activities the troops also focused on new kinds of activities of interest to the scouts, such as art, musical theater, dance, gourmet cooking, and fashion design.
    Neatness in dress and appearance were stressed, as was personal physical fitness.
    Soon teen-aged girl scouts, whose organization has never had any kind of LGBT discrimination policy, began taking an interest in the sharply-dressed, nice-looking teen-aged members of their brother organization, and boy scout troops began graciously inviting girl scout troops to activities that they thought the girls might share an interest in, such as dinner theater and shopping trips. The invitations became reciprocal and these co-ed scouting activities became known as Just Friends outings and were enjoyed by all. Enrollment in the Girl Scouts soared.
    Meanwhile the members of NGA troops were starting to cast a jealous eye upon the Boy Scouts, who appeared to be having a much better time than they were.
    But the boys weren't the only ones who were eying the Boy Scouts.
     Being in an environment where they found acceptance, guidance, and positive adult role-models, the members of the Boy Scouts tended to flourish as persons to the extent that, when it came time for college scholarships, their well-roundedness, in the outdoors, the arts and other worldly matters, not to mention how well-dressed and self-possessed they presented themselves at their college interviews, began blowing the straight male college applicants out of the water.
    This situation did not go over the heads of well educated,affluent parents.
    The subsequent gentrification and re-straightification of the Boy Scouts of America began with a few groups of upper-class New York City Central Park West parents who, with an eye on the Ivy Leagues, started enrolling their sons in Cub Scout dens.
    The trend caught on, and soon parents from 5th Avenue to Beverly Hills and every wealthy neighborhood in between were rushing to get their sons, gay or straight, into the Boy Scouts.
    At the behest of the parents, a new badge called "Getting into Harvard" was created and became a requirement for making Eagle Scout, the name of which was changed to Ivy Scout.
    Soon every Boy Scout troop in the country became so crowded with upper-class, upwardly-mobile youngsters that affluent expectant parents, upon learning that they'd be having a boy, would hurry to get their unborn progeny's name on the waiting list for entry into a den of Diaper Cubs, the most recently created entity for the youngest future Boy Scouts.
    It was all very stressful.
                                                       The End

2 Comments

You're A Good Man, Robert Gates

5/22/2015

2 Comments

Robert M. Gates, president of The Boy Scouts of America.

    Yesterday Robert M. Gates, former head of the CIA, former Secretary of Defense and current president of the Boy Scouts of America, called for an end to the Boy Scouts' ban on gay leaders.
    At the annual national meeting of the Boy Scouts of America he made the statement, "We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be", also pointing out that if the Boy Scouts wouldn't change on their own then the court would end up forcing them to. "We must all understand," he said, "That this will probably happen sooner rather than later."
    My first reaction to Mr. Gates' statement was that he was commiserating with the Boy Scouts that, though of course they all wished for a world without gay people, the gays were here to stay and the Boy Scouts might as well raise the white flag of surrender before they were pummeled by the courts.
    But then my husband Tom reminded me that it was in 2010 during his tenure as Secretary of Defense that Robert Gates called for an end to Don't Ask, Don't Tell and ushered in acceptance of gay men and women into the military. Tom, many years a Boy Scout leader, also said that last year when Robert Gates was appointed as president there was speculation among the Boy Scout leadership that he would probably bring the organization's new policy of accepting gay scouts to its logical conclusion of accepting gay leaders, too, given his legacy to the American military.
    Tom's observation changed my interpretation of Mr. Gates' words.
    Now I wonder if "We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be" was meant as a veiled reprimand to those within the leadership of the Boy Scouts of America who wish they could live in their own world of self-righteous exclusion. On the other hand, doesn't the fact that the Boy Scout chose Robert Gates for their president probably exhibit a desire on the the organization's part for a leader who they knew would take steps to do away with past discrimination against gays?
    Score one for equality, zero for bigotry.
    Of course the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou Star-bellied Sneeches of the world have already started screaming bloody murder over Robert Gates' declaration of acceptance of gay Scout leaders.
    But they, like all disciples of bigotry and inequality since the beginning of time when God created us all, will eventually be dragged kicking and howling into a better world where they and their kind will be forced by public opinion to stifle themselves.

References
1. "Scout Head Calls for End to Ban on Gay Leades, Erik Eckholm, The New York Times, May 22, 2015.

2 Comments

Walking, eating, walking, working, walking, eating, walking, sleeping...leaving

5/21/2015

5 Comments

...Continued from yesterday:

    We started off Saturday morning by walking to a recently-opened Wicker Park restaurant called Kanela Breakfast Club.
    Claire and Miguel had never been there before but were hoping that nobody else had yet discovered it so that it wouldn’t be too crowded.
    Too late, apparently the place was good and the word was already out.

But luckily we were able to get seats, a good enough cause for celebrating.

Miguel got the Pork Belly Benedict which he said was awesome,

Claire got the spinach and vegan bacon benedict, which she also declared delicious,

I got the bagel and lox with capers, vegetables and cream cheese, which was likewise wonderful, but piled so copiously high that I could only finish half of it.

Tom’s breakfast was good, too, but was delivered about five minutes after the rest of us got our meals. The server said that the chef broke the yolks on Tom’s eggs 4 times before finally getting it right. (Well, okay, half-right. One of the egg yolks came out kind of broken anyway). Hopefully with all those tries the chef will soon have mastered sunny-side up eggs as well as eggs benedict.

Anyway, all the food was really good, especially the fried potatoes, which were seasoned with rosemary and other savory herbs.

After breakfast we discussed swinging by Stan’s for a post-breakfast round of donuts,

...but decided we’d better get back to finishing up the cleaning of Claire and Miguel’s new house (side-door view).

It was, however, decided by popular consensus that my labor skills could be put to better use by staying back at Miguel and Claire's apartment and making a cherry almond streusel pie (see post from 10/9/2014 for the recipe).

But. alas, the local supermarket that was close enough to walk to had neither the sour cherries I needed nor the sliced almonds, so I ended up having to improvise.
By good luck Claire and Miguel had a mega-bag of blueberries from Costco in their freezer so I decided to try a blueberry no-almond streusel pie, mixing a half a cup of oatmeal into the topping instead of almonds.

The blueberry version was actually a great success, though I think now I'd like to try it again sometime with almonds in the streusel, as in the cherry version.

After the pie was baked I walked from their Bucktown apartment to the new house in Logan Square- a half-mile - to check on the cleaning crew, who were just finishing up.

Then we all returned to the apartment, cleaned up, and pow-wowed over where to have dinner. The vote went to by Native Foods Cafe, a Chicago vegan chain restaurant with a location in Wicker Park.

It was a lovely evening so we sat outside,

...and ate our vegan food:

Claire had the Avocado Crunch Wrap, which received its crunch from the fallafal in the vegetable filling, with a side of sweet potato fries.

I also had the Avocado Crunch Wrap but with standard fries.

Miguel got the Twister Wrap, which was a spicy wrap made with vegetables and tempeh. Don't ask me what tempeh is, but Miguel said it was very good.

Claire and I also really liked our wraps and all the fries were outstanding.

Unfortunately Tom wasn't crazy about his sliced-seitan Reuben. I don't know what seitan is, either, but I guess it doesn't work as well as corned beef. He did agree the fries were great, though.

After dinner we took a pleasant Saturday-evening walk around Bucktown.

The we returned to Claire and Miguel's apartment for our blueberry pie with ice cream. Afterwards we sat out on their second-story sun porch, which opens out from their kitchen.

We expect that will have been Tom's and my last night in Miguel and Claire's charming Bucktown apartment.
The next morning we all woke up early and Miguel drove Tom and I downtown through the empty Sunday-morning Chicago streets to the Megabus stop,

...across from the Dunkin Donuts that plays gospel music on Sunday mornings (See post from 10/1/2014).

Then our Megabus to Columbus arrived and we were back on the road again.

5 Comments

The Furious Spoon, The Crotch, The Wonderful Walgreen's, and The Goddess And Grocer

5/20/2015

0 Comments

...Continued From Yesterday:

I hope Claire and Miguel’s new neighbors turn out to be as nice as they are.

But I do believe that city neighbors have to learn to be neighborly to and considerate of each otherwise nobody would survive living in such close quarters.

I say this having grown up in the city and, though I’ve spent most of my adult life living in what one of my children once described as “chain-link suburbia”,

I am a city girl at heart.

The view from my family's front yard in Northeast Philly.

Anyway, Friday evening after we were all cleaned-out for the day we headed back to Claire and Miguel’s apartment to clean up ourselves,

...and from there we walked to a Bucktown ramen restaurant called The Furious Spoon.

The décor was fun – we sat at long tables.

The place was pretty crowded, which was not surprising as the food was great.

Tom got the Chicken Ramen. Nobody was sure what that little spirally thing was in the soup, but Tom said it was quite tasty.

Claire and I got the Vegetable Ramen, which was loaded with mushrooms and had the most delicious broth,

...and Miguel got the Furious Ramen, which had slices of pork and a poached egg and which he said was very spicy but very good,

The only problem with the Furious Spoon was the ear-splittingly-loud rap that blasted from ubiquitous wall speakers. I asked the server to turn the volume down a bit but to no avail. Thus we hurried through our delicious meals and were quickly out of the restaurant, which Miguel thought was the point of the loud music: get the customers in and fed then chase them out so more customers can come in, be fed then chased out. If that was indeed the principal it worked, at least with us.

After dinner we strolled towards Wicker Park until we came to the 6-street intersection known as The Crotch.

I asked Claire and Miguel why this intersection is so called and they explained that many decades ago a 6-cornered intersection was built in another part of Chicago and was named Six Points. A few years later when later another 6-cornered intersection, this one, was built in Wicker Park, the locals also began calling their intersection Six Points. Well, it ticked off the folks in the area of the original Six Points that the Wicker Parkers had swiped not only the idea of their intersection but its name as well, and so in derision the original Six Pointers began calling the Wicker Park intersection The Crotch. And the name stuck.
Now, I've never seen Six Points, but I'd venture to say that of Chicago's two 6-cornered intersections The Crotch must be the superior as the world's grandest Walgreen's is located on one of the Crotch corners in what used to be an old bank building:

The vitamin section is in the old bank vault, and is thus called The Vitamin Vault:

After our tour of the wonderful Walgreen's we all agreed that some ice cream would be the very thing, so we walked to a deli called The Goddess And Grocer where we'd had dinner on a previous visit (see post from 9/30/2014).

We got a round of yummy gelatos,

...which we ate in the pretty second-floor dining room.

This sign that I love is still hanging in the ladies' room.

Afterwards we strolled around for a while to walk off our ramen and gelatos,

... then we headed back to Bucktown to Claire and Miguel’s apartment to rest up for another day’s work of house-cleaning tomorrow.

To be continued...

0 Comments

City Kids

5/19/2015

6 Comments

…Continued from yesterday:
Miguel and Claire’s apartment-dwelling days are now numbered, as last Thursday they closed on a house.

Their new soon-to-be residence is a lovely old brick two-story

in Logan Square, the next neighborhood west of Bucktown, another old tree-lined Chicago neighborhood

...with mayhaps just a weence more up-and-coming to do. But it's nice.

Their house, which was given an attractive rehabbing a few years ago, has a bright, open interior, all blonde wood and white walls,

...and a jacuzzi in the upstairs bathroom.

But as the house hadn't been occupied for quite a while it was floor-to-ceiling dirty. So our plan for the weekend was to give it a good scouring.

Taking the alley way.

That's the elevated train at the end of the alley, an added benefit.

Anyway, we each chose our task and got to it.

Tom took the bathrooms,

....Miguel the kitchen,

...Claire the floors and windows,

...and me the walls, ceilings, and fan.

I checked out the views from some of the windows:

...and I thought, "Well, this is city living".

To be continued...

6 Comments

On The Road Again

5/18/2015

2 Comments

Bright and early last Thursday morning Tom and I grabbed our bags and walked up the block

to the COTA bus stop,

...from where we took the COTA bus to downtown Columbus

...to the Megabus stop,

...where, as luck would have it, Dwayne, our favorite Megabus driver, a really friendly and helpful guy, was driving the bus to Chicago,

...where we were headed to visit Claire,

and Miguel,

...and their two kitties, Kubo and Sassy,

    ...whom we hadn't seen since Claire returned from Sierra Leone (see post from 1/14/2015).
    The most interesting episode of the trip actually occurred during the first leg while we were riding the COTA bus to downtown, when an outdoorsy-looking girl who appeared to be in her mid-20's stepped onto the bus balancing in her hands a large shallow rectangular box, like the lid of a banker's box. She sat down across the aisle from me and when I leaned over a bit to take a peek at what was in the box I gasped and and jumped back involuntarily at what I saw. The box was full of squirmy, squiggly,
    "Silkworms," the girl said with a smile in response to my reaction.
    She explained that she had just picked up the worms and was planning to raise them and then spin the silk that they produced.
    "Oh, wow, good luck," I said as she got up to exit the bus with her worms.
    "Oh, well," she giggled, "if it doesn't work I'll just feed them to my praying mantis."
    To each their own, right?

After our Megabus arrived in downtown Chicago we took the subway

to Bucktown, where Claire and Miguel live

in a cute, spacious apartment overlooking the city:

...with a staircase that always reminds me of the staircase to my grandmother's much tinier apartment (see posts from 3/21/2014 - 3/27/2014) that, when I was a child, looked high and steep as a mountain.

By the time we arrived at Claire and Miguel's place it was dinner time. Miguel had to work late so Claire, Tom and I walked to Wicker Park, the next neighborhood south of Bucktown, to an Italian restaurant called

the Pasta Bowl,

...where the salads were to die for:

Claire had the Caprese made with fresh mozzarella over basil leaves,

Tom had the house salad with white beans, olives and tomatoes,

...while I had the spinach salad with bits of pancetta and the creamiest, most delicious goat cheese I've ever had.

Next we each ordered a different pasta, none of which any of us thought was anything to blog home about. In all fairness, though, I happen to be able to whip up several different really good pasta sauces myself as can Miguel, so it was just that none of us found the restaurant's pastas as good as what we could have gotten at home. The salads were magnificent, though.
After dinner, as we all were hankering some dessert, we strolled through the rain

over to Stan's Donuts,

a popular Wicker Park donutery.

Then we headed back to Bucktown feeling stuffed as a Stan's donut. Thank goodness for the 1/2-mile walk home.

2 Comments

The Coming Social Media Fatigue?

5/14/2015

3 Comments

    Among the morals to be harvested from Gahanna, Ohio mayoral candidate and indiscreet Tweeter Joe Gergley's Tweetgate heartburn (see posts from 5/12/15 and 5/13/15) is the obvious one that social media is a double-edged sword. Or maybe a teeter-totter is a more apt comparison. Giving and receiving on social media can be fun and engaging, but if you're not careful this activity can bring you down real fast, real hard. One wonders if over the past week, in some quiet solitary moment, Joe Gergley hasn't wished he'd never gotten on social media in the first place. Or wished he could get off now.
    Which begs the question: Might today's teens and young twenty-somethings, finding themselves over-shared with every person they know (along with hundreds more people they don't really know at all) sometimes wish they weren't so informed and informed about?
    A few weeks ago I saw a really good movie called "While We're Young".

The movie starred Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as an early-middle-aged couple who befriend a couple of 26-year-olds whom they find themselves trying to emulate, each unconsciously wishing to recapture the spark of youth in their own lives.

    There was one scene in the movie during which the two couples, making casual conversation, are all trying to remember what the word "marzipan" means. As the older man pulls out his I-phone to look up the word one of the younger characters stops him, saying, "Wait...let's just not know."
    The point of that scene, I believe, was to suggest that, while older people who came of age before the internet now delight in having all knowledge at their fingertips, members of the younger generation who've grown up saturated in available information about everyone and everything in the universe are thirsting for a little less knowledge.
    In truth I didn't give much thought to that movie scene until a few days later when I happened to be telling my nephew Randy, a 28-year-old IT wizard, about my 40th high school reunion a few years ago.
    I was telling him how after high school I left my home town of Philadelphia to go to college in Dayton Ohio, the exotic American Midwest to me who'd never been on a plane or knew much of anything about any place west of West Philly.
    Anyway, after I left home for college, probably from being caught up in the wonder of being in a new environment surrounded by new people and immersed in new experiences, I soon ceased communicating with all my friends and classmates from my all-girls' high school.
    After college I worked in Germany for 3 years, then lived in Louisville, Kentucky for a few years before finally settling in Columbus, Ohio.
    One day almost forty years after my high school graduation my mother called to tell me that one of my high school classmates had called her trying to get in touch with me to invite me to our 40th high school reunion.
    I went to the reunion and made a delightful re-connection with these women who, the last time I saw them, were young girls on the threshold of life. Now all of sudden here they were again, much older versions of themselves, yet still themselves, each with the same expressions and mannerisms, same laughs, same smiles, same styles, but all grown up now with husbands and partners, adult children and grandchildren of their own, with careers, vocations, and life stories that lay yet in the mysteries of their futures the last time I saw them. For me it was strange and wonderful, seeing what all these girls grew up to be. It felt magical, like being whisked into the future and the past at the same time.
    After I told all this to my nephew he was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Man, I wish I could do something like that. Lose track of people for years, then have the fun of re-discovering them again. But that could never happen to people of my generation."   He looked at his Smartphone and sighed, "everybody knows where everybody is and what everybody's doing all the time."
    His words recalled to me the scene from "While We're Young", and I wondered if members of the younger generation will soon be longing in their souls to let go of something they couldn't stand to do without.

3 Comments

<<Previous

Archives

Categories