A driver is stuck in a traffic jam going into downtown Chicago . Nothing is moving north or south. Suddenly a man knocks on his window.

The driver rolls down his window and asks, ‘What happened, what’s the hold up?’ “Terrorists have kidnapped President Bush and Vice President Cheney,” the man answers.

He continues, “They are asking for a $10 million ransom. Otherwise, they are going to douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. We are going from car to car, taking up a collection.”

The driver asks, “On average, how much is everyone giving?”

“About a gallon.”

-------------------------------------

I want to laugh at this joke, but it's getting harder and harder to find the humor in our national debacle. Still, I'm in for a gallon.

Truth, and siding, for sale.

So I'm downstairs this morning, tidying up the kitchen, eating a nice late breakfast, just getting ready to sit down with a cup of tea for a minute, and then I spot them out the window, coming up the street.

The Jehovah's Witnesses.

At least I assume they're Jehovah's Witnesses--three African-American ladies, nicely dressed, a couple of them pushing strollers. They were through here a couple of weeks ago and I hid then, too.

Yes, I drop what I'm doing in mid-tea sip, close the front door which is standing wide open, and pop upstairs so they can't spot me through the windows, ignoring their knocks.

I have lived in many different neighborhoods in my adult life, and never have I been subjected to as much prosetylization (is that a word? Blogger says no) as in this neighborhood. If it's not the Witnesses, it's the Mormons, and if it's not the Mormons, it's the home improvement companies. What is it about this neighborhood that makes these people think I might be even remotely open to buying their religion or their storm windows?

There's enough daylight crime in this town that I've simply stopped answering the door when I'm home alone unless someone I know is standing there. But it still feels like an invasion of privacy when they come up on my porch and can see me through my front door and windows unless I run and hide.

What's the solution? It's so irritating!

Como se llama?

Just poking my head in to say...there's only one reason I wish I'd had kids. Not for the companionship or the joy of knowing my genes will carry on forever, or the hours of potty training, homework and driver's ed.

I wish I'd had kids so I could have named them. I have some strong opinions on weird made-up names, and I always felt that parenthood would be my chance to strike a blow for nice, normal, pretty, traditional names.

(I know my name isn't exactly traditional, but I do think it's normal and pretty. Now my parents did make up my sister's name, as far as I can tell: Jenita. I think it's pretty, too, and maybe not totally normal, but not crazy, either! And at least they didn't give it one of those semi-literate spellings that are all the rage nowadays. Today my poor sister would be named JyNee'tah or something worse.)

Anyway, I stumbled across this site the other day and it's given me such reading pleasure I thought I'd pass it along:

Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing

Just a little pretty I saw while I was out and about today. -->

I don't know why, but none of my violas came up this year. Unless they're buried under piles of leaves out there and I just haven't noticed. I'm afraid we killed a lot of things in our garden last year by overwatering. And what didn't get killed that way got taken out by the sun and heat. I just can't seem to get it right!

I am beat tonight, and my arm hurts...I am off to bed early with a good book. That's my favorite thing about winter nights--getting to go to bed early with a book and my down comforter!

Happy birthday...

...to my sweetie-pie, my best friend, my husband extraordinaire! You are a special guy in so many ways. I hope you know how very much you are loved by all of us who are lucky enough to have you in our lives. Smooches!

A chicken in every crockpot.

Was it Herbert Hoover that promised a chicken in every pot when he was running for President? Maybe it was Coolidge...

Anyway, maybe that's something today's candidates should get behind. Or maybe not. Because chickens are gross.

I don't cook a whole bird very often, but I just wrestled one out of its skin-tight plastic and into the crockpot. And it was soooo grooooosss! Jamming my hand down in to get the little gizzard packet (shudder) and rinsing its slippery little body off and then cramming lemons, onions and celery up its butt, and then dusting it with spices. It's like handling a dead baby. (shudder again.)

I feel bad about being ooked out by poultry, since I am merely one hop on the family tree away from people who butchered, scalded, plucked and cleaned their own poultry routinely--my mom and her parents, my dad and his parents. Seems like I'm not far away enough, genetically, to have developed the aversion so soon.

But come to think of it, my dad avoided eating chicken for years and years because he claimed he could smell the chicken yard stink even on a cooked bird, so maybe my aversion isn't that irrational.

Todd says that a dead chicken carcass is nowhere near as disgusting as a freshly killed rabbit carcass, and that when the intestines are pulled out of a dead rabbit, you can see all the little rabbit poop pellets inside them. Ulp. That sort of makes the unlaid eggs I once saw inside a freshly butchered chicken seem almost sweet and wholesome.

I know there's a lot to be said for knowing where your meat comes from, especially in light of all these tainted meat scares and nasty corporate farming practices. But there's a lot to be said for neat, cut-up bits of meat from the grocery store, too.

Anyway, we're having chicken tonight--want to come over??? There should be plenty, because I think I lost my appetite!!

Eyyyye, matey.

My friend Cheryl brought this over today...she and her son Matthew got a load of my freak eye yesterday and thought this little kit might come in handy:

Inside, all the necessary accessories:

It's so nice to know that no matter how hideously disfigured I become, I have friends who will not only supply what I need, but present it in a decorated tin! Thanks, guys!

Hey Jeremy, I did it.

My brother showed me his Facebook page while I was visiting him this past weekend, and I'm sort of convinced it might be a fun thing. I think I need more of a tutorial, though--he has all kinds of things on his profile page that I don't know how to put there.

Anyhoo, if you're on Facebook, add me to your friends list, won't you?

Lots o' stuff.

We had a nice Valentine's evening...the shrimp scampi and crab cakes both came out quite nicely, and then we had sugar-snap peas on the side, and chocolate-chip cookies for dessert.

The crab cake recipe is from a book called Lean Beach Cuisine that I picked up on a trip to the Outer Banks five or six years ago. The recipe called for coriander, which I didn't have on hand, so I put in a sprinkle of Old Bay instead. I made half the recipe, and that made 4 ample-sized cakes, of which we only managed to eat 1 1/2. Since even medium-quality crabmeat is pricey, it's nice to know you don't have to use a whole pound, unless you're feeding a real crowd.

Chesapeake Coconut Crab Cakes

1 pound fresh lump crabmeat
1/4 cup egg substitute or egg whites (I just tossed in a whole egg)
1/2 cup finely crushed fat-free potato chips
2 tablespoons shredded coconut, toasted
2 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
2 tablespoons light mayonnaise
1 tablespoon fresh chopped parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried coriander

Pick over the crab meat to make sure all the shell fragments have been removed. Gently combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl, and shape into 8 patties about 1/2" thick. Place crab cakes on a baking sheet sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. (I just used Reynolds Release foil, and they came right off.) Broil about 6 inches under the heat until the top browns. (This took five minutes for me.) Turn and brown the other side. (Another five minutes.) Serve immediately.

It wasn't till I started typing this in that I noticed the coconut needed to be toasted. This may have been why I couldn't taste it at all in the crab cakes! Other than that, they were good. I especially liked that you could broil them and completely remove the need for frying in oil.

I'm home today doing laundry and getting some things ready for a short trip to my brother's house tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to post some more pictures.

So in mid-December, Todd had to go do some work at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and I went along so that we could leave from there to do our holiday traveling. We were in Aberdeen for five days.

Now, Aberdeen is a tiny town with not a lot to recommend it, so I spent my days about five minutes down the road at a slightly larger town called Havre de Grace.

From my one year of high school French, I assumed the town's name was pronounced "Hahv d' Grah." But knowing that we Americans usually butcher our foreign-language-named towns (Cairo, IL = "Cay-ro"; Versaillles, MO = "Ver-sayles"), I asked at the visitors center how to say the name. Sure enough, round those parts, it's pronounced "Hav-er de Grace."

And Americans wonder why the French look down their noses at us!

Lafayette himself named the town, which sits at the spot where the Susquehanna River flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The settlement grew up around the ferry service that took travelers from Virginia and Maryland up to Philadelphia and New York, which means that every Colonial and Revolutionary War bigwig came through there. He stopped in and mentioned that the spot reminded him of Le Havre in France, so when the townspeople incorporated the town several years later, they named it Havre de Grace, or "harbor of grace."

I really enjoyed exploring this little town. It reminded me so much of several other small old river towns I've known in my life--specifically, Marietta, Ohio, where I went to college, and Hannibal, Missouri, where I was born and where my dad's family still lives. A little shabby, its days of glory and importance long since past, but still clinging to its history and community.

So every day that week I would head into Havre de Grace and stroll the streets. I quickly found my daily lunch spot and my afternoon coffee spot.

This is where I sat and ate lunch every day that week. The restaurant is called MacGregor's Restaurant and Tavern, and it sits on a bluff looking over the railroad bridge across the Susquehanna. I can't begin to describe how oddly relaxing it was to sit there and watch the tiny commuter trains go back and forth over the bridge. The food was good, too. I didn't intend to eat there every single day, but there was just something about the place.


The town has a couple of used bookstores--Todd and I like to sniff out the used bookstores first thing when we go somewhere new. This one was fantastic, the Courtyard Bookshop.

It was this little nest of rooms crammed with books. Not so crammed that you couldn't browse, but the shelves were full. And I had just the best conversation with the owner, an older gentleman who's a real booklover (of course), a Vietnam veteran, a Democrat (we sniffed out each other's political leanings first thing), and just a terrifically articulate, smart gentleman.

We chatted for a while, and then I headed back into the nest of rooms, and just lost myself for a good hour and a half. When I surfaced with an armload of books to buy, it felt like I was coming up from a deep sea-dive or a very long nap. I had to try to remember where I was, what day it was, I'd been so lost in books. What a great feeling.

Here's me on a street corner:

Havre de Grace's downtown proper is about five blocks long and two blocks deep, so I came past this corner quite a few times as I tramped around over four days' time. I had this feeling that all the locals in the restaurants and coffee shops were saying, "Who's that woman in the red coat and how did she just suddenly appear here? And why am I seeing her everywhere I look?"

Because the locals all know each other quite well. Every store and shop I entered, there was a little knot of people chatting and gossiping and laughing. I've never lived in a small town, but that made me wish I did.

The town has built a wonderful boardwalk that runs from the marina to the lighthouse. Here's the spot where the river meets the bay:

This was the one sunny day we had that week, and it was so pretty by the river.



Looking back at the marina, where I was parked:


The walkway to the lighthouse:

Same spot, but looking right, toward the river:

Such a pretty, pretty day. I love that winter sunshine.

The Concord Point lighthouse is the absolute cutest thing I ever did see. I sent a postcard of it to my niece Kylie, and told her that if Santa had a lighthouse at the North Pole, this would be it, and the elves would be the lighthouse keepers.

The lighthouse is only 36 feet tall, and it was built in 1827. The man who became the first lighthouse keeper was John O'Neill, an Irish immigrant who was a hero of the War of 1812. He helped defend the town from British warships out in the bay until he was captured. His 15-year-old daughter rowed a boat out to the prisoner ship and pleaded with the captain to release her father. The captain did, and gave the daughter a gold snuffbox because he was so impressed with her bravery.

Hard to imagine this quiet little town full of booming artillery and flying cannonballs! Here are a few more pics I snapped just walking around.

I always tell myself that I'm going to start collecting pictures of those "ghost signs" on old brick buildings...they're just so neat.

So it was a relaxing way to start our holiday traveling, a real luxury to be able to take a few days and just explore. The last day, Todd was done with his work, and I was able to take him around and show him all the places I'd found, which was doubly enjoyable!

Happy V Day!

Here's Todd's Valentine's Day present...I think he'll be pleased. Chocolate-chip cookies are his all-time fave, and he's had several sub-par versions at various restaurants in the past few months. I don't know why I don't bake them more, but I did, just for him, today, because he's my sweetie-pie!

We got a little snow here last night, but it's mostly melted now. Just the stuff on the north side of the house where the sun never shines is still there. So pretty.

I'm still walking around looking like I'm half-zombie, with my one bloody eye. Call me Mrs. Sweeney Todd. [Neat movie, great music, but--um...rivers of blood just don't do it for me.] I keep forgetting about it, and then I look at someone and they do this little double-take at me, and then I remember and feel dumb. I am so not the kind of person who worries a lot about what I look like, but this thing is making me really self-conscious. I ran a couple of cookies out to the mail lady just now, and she did the double-take thing...I'm sure she was thinking, "Do I really want to take food from this person?" I'm kidding, of course, but I will be so happy when the red goes away!

In fact, I'm cooking dinner at home tonight partly so I don't have to go expose my freak eye to half of Newport News. I'm going to make shrimp scampi and crabcakes. People always say, "Oooh, shrimp scampi!" like it's this really complicated thing, but it's about the fastest, easiest thing you could ever cook. Way easier than, say, meatloaf!

Here's the recipe; I may have shared this here before. It takes longer to peel the shrimp than it does to cook them:

Monterey Shrimp Scampi

1 T. butter
1 T. olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound large shrimp, peeled and cleaned
1/4 cup white wine
1 T. fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 T. flavored bread crumbs
2 T. Parmesan cheese

Heat a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Add butter and olive oil. When butter melts and sizzles, add garlic and cook for one minute. Add shrimp and cook for two minutes; shrimp should only be partially cooked. Add wine, lemon juice, salt and pepper; cook about two minutes more until the shrimp are cooked through. (They will turn pink and the tails will curl.) Remove from heat and top with bread crumbs and chopped parsley. Place shrimp on serving plates, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese, and serve immediately.

I serve this over linguine, by the way. Now, the crabcakes will be a new recipe for me, so if they're successful, I'll share it later. It's hard to tell how they'll come out; the recipe is a little...different.

Hope everyone's having a happy day today, love and hugs to you all. I appreciate everybody who drops in and reads my ramblings!

Mmmm...crabcakes.

Yes, today is the day--the day of the Potomac Primaries, the Chesapeake Primaries, the Beltway Primaries, the...Crabcake Primaries?! I can't believe people get paid to come up with such silly names.

I went out and voted this morning...I've been looking forward to this for weeks! I don't remember ever voting in a presidential primary before..it seems like we've always lived in places that voted late enough that the candidate was already a done deal by the time it came around to us.

So this year is exciting. The race is exciting. I voted for Senator Obama, I guess I don't need to make a secret of that. I think he's got a better chance of a) winning the election, and b) being able to govern effectively, than Hillary does. I can't wait to see how it all turns out today and in the races to come!

In other news, I burst a blood vessel in my right eye somehow. I got up yesterday morning and looked in the mirror and yikes! The white of my eye was all bloody. I went straight to the eye doctor and he looked at it and said it wasn't serious, and the red should go away within two weeks.

Meanwhile, I'm walking around looking like something out of a particularly nasty freak show. It's gross. I went out to vote and get Valentine cards for the kiddies, and grab some lunch, and I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone lest they recoil in horror. I'm trying to figure out how to make a fetching eye patch out of scrapbook supplies!

More later, I still have a ton of pictures from December to post.

More pictures.

If you have a Trader Joe's nearby and you like tea, go check out their blueberry green tea. I'm enjoying a cup right now, and it's weird--I don't like green tea, and I don't like fruity-flavored tea, and yet this stuff is totally hitting the spot! Weird, huh?

As I continue to catch up my pictures, here are some more from our Thanksgiving trip. We did a little bit of Black Friday shopping and went in search of some good used bookstores. We ended up in Alexandria in the late afternoon and decided to explore the downtown area, which has tons of old buildings and old homes.

This was sort of cool: when I was 13, in the spring of 1984, I got to participate in the National Spelling Bee in D.C., and all the spellers and their families got to take lots of cool tours. One evening they took us to a place called Gadsby's Tavern for dinner, one of the many places that stakes their claim to fame on the fact that George Washington stayed/slept/took a potty break there.

I remembered going to the tavern, but I had no idea where exactly it was...and then I happened to spot it as we drove down a side street:


We didn't eat there because it was pricey and the menu sounded a little too Olde English to really be good, but I did want to get a picture for posterity.

We just strolled up and down the streets and kept ducking into various shops to warm up as the sun went down and the wind picked up.

Having forsaken the colonial British pub food at Gadsby's, we decided to go with the food of Todd's ancestors, which is way more tasty--Italian food at Il Porto:

It turned out that this particular night was the town's Christmas tree lighting, so there were lots of people about, and we got to see the tree light up and the little dance/songfest they put on. It was all very festive, but sadly, it all took place after dark, so--no pictures!

In fact, checking my files, I see that this is the last of my DC pictures. We took a candlelight tour of Mount Vernon the following night, but again--it was dark and I didn't even try to get any pictures. One of my little resolutions for this year is to try to take more pictures...it seems like I got burnt out on picture-taking from my early hardcore scrapbooking days, when I had a camera basically attached to my hand at all times. Now I've gone the other way and I never get good pictures of anything! Which will become apparent when I share my Christmas pictures in a few more days.

Yep, pictures.

I'm holed up in the study while Todd has a big poker party downstairs with his buds, so I thought I'd throw down a few more pictures, from Thanksgiving this time.

So we didn't have any travel plans for the holiday, because it's too far to go to Ohio for a four-day weekend. We often go to my brother's family for part of the weekend, but they decided to make the trip home to Ohio. So we weren't sure what to do, but I didn't want to sit home and stare at the walls.

So Todd suggested we go up to Washington, DC for the weekend. And we had a terrific time. We got there about 10 AM Thanksgiving morning, and headed for what I mistakenly thought was the Smithsonian American Art Museum, but which turned out to be the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a different place entirely. This gallery exhibits American crafts of the 19th-21st centuries. The building dates from 1859, and was the site of America's first art museum, and it's named after James Renwick, the architect who designed it and who also designed the Smithsonian Castle. Just a little tidbit!


The Renwick sits at Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th St...if you scootched the building about half a block to the right, it would be sitting in Lafayette Park looking at the White House. We got there a bit before the doors opened, so we took a stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue and admired the White House from the street. It was a very warm sunny morning--but that would change.

I couldn't get any pictures inside the Renwick, but by far the best thing we saw there was an exhibit of late 19th-century quilts from the Plains states. Many of them were civic quilts, with stitched names of businesses or prominent citizens, or redwork-style stitched pictures of town buildings. And there were two crazy quilts that I just wanted to cry that I couldn't take pictures of--one was worked by a milliner who incorporated all her scrap bits of velvet, lace, flowers, silk, feathers, you name it, into a quilt that just glowed with color and texture. The other crazy quilt was worked by a girl in her late teens or early twenties around the turn of the century, and she stitched words into many of the patches, like slang phrases that her crowd used, or a few words about an event, like ice skating on the river, or a particular dance she'd gone to. It was one of the most memorable, fascinating things I've ever seen--like a scrapbook made of fabric.

On the way back to our car, we stopped at a hot dog vendor and ate at the sidewalk tables of a cafe that was closed for the holiday. Note the sunshine and Todd's shirtsleeves. It was so nice out, and the city was so quiet. There were some people out and about, but not many.

Then we headed to the actual Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, which are in the same mammoth building several blocks away. I didn't get a picture of it, but just picture your standard marble temple with steps and big columns and you've got it.

I adore looking at art, but this museum had lots of furniture sprinkled in with the art pieces--lovely, old, historic furniture to be sure--but kind of boring. However, they were running an exhibit of American propaganda posters from World War I, and how wonderful that was! The artwork on them was amazing, and the colors still glowed, after almost 100 years.

We also strolled quickly through the Presidents' portrait gallery, and that was terrific, too.

Todd is such a good sport about going to all these museums and looking at stuff. I'm so lucky that he enjoys it, too, because it's one of my favorite things to do, and so much more fun with him along.

By the time we came out of the American Art Museum around 2:30 or 3:00, the weather had drastically changed!

Look at that sky behind the Capitol. The temperature had dropped about 30 degrees, and the wind was howling. We drove to the Capitol because I never seem to make it down to that end of the Mall on any of my trips to DC.

Here are some of the windows along the front of the National Botanical Gardens, which sits right next-door to the Capitol building.

Indoors was a conservatory decorated gorgeously for Christmas:

We strolled up to the bottom of the Capitol steps, and turned to look out over the Mall:

As we'd driven toward the Capitol earlier, I'd noticed an Edward Hopper exhibit at the annexe of the National Gallery of Art. The annexe is just a modern smaller addition that's accessible to the Gallery by strolling across the street or crossing to it underground. They do special exhibits there, and the high ceilings are all decorated with fantastic Calder mobiles.

Well, I have always loved Edward Hopper, so that was our last stop before heading out to Woodbridge to find our hotel and some Thanksgiving dinner. And the exhibit was WONDERFUL. Again, no pictures allowed, but I'll never forget the beauty of those paintings--and they had dozens!--and the way the colors glowed. You can look at paintings in books, and that's nice, but there is no way, NO way, to reproduce the detail and the hues and the just pure glowing beauty of a painting viewed close up in real life. It makes my heart pound.

Some of the people I mentioned this exhibit to had never heard of Edward Hopper, so here are two of his best-known pieces, Chop Suey:

and Night-Hawks:

It was awesome, and I'll never forget seeing his gorgeous work up close.

More pictures later, but I want to add that I had this moment tonight, reading the CNN website about Obama's South Carolina primary win, where I looked at his picture and just marveled in a way that almost made me teary-eyed, that we have a black man and a white woman running for President--and each actually has a better-than-good shot at it. Not that I didn't know that before, but the realization came over me very strongly tonight. It's just so wonderful. High time, and wonderful.

More pictures.

Continuing with the time travel, back to October briefly, and Todd's parents' fall visit:

Here's Todd and his dad hanging out and no doubt hatching up some plan, as they always do:

And Todd's mom cleaning up the dinner dishes. Aren't I a great hostess, making the guests work? Actually, we've worked out a plan when they visit, wherein I do the cooking and she does the cleaning up--it's beyond wonderful. At least it is for me--I hope it is for her! I think she enjoys not having to cook, and I totally enjoy not having to clean up.

In November, we went to visit my brother and his family, since we wouldn't be seeing them at Thanksgiving. My brother is a fanatical geocacher, so we went out into the woods one day to look for a couple of caches.

Here's my SIL Tracy and my niece Natalie (I love Nat's little red Crocs!):

My brother digging for the treasure:


Me and Miss Marissa:


We never did find the cache in this pile of rocks:

More later!

Pictures.

I've got about three months' worth of photos to catch up on here at the blog. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...October 2007:

Here I am on my 37th birthday, in Smithfield, VA, on a luncheon-and-shopping day with my mother-in-law and my friend Cheryl. It's been three months and I still haven't come to terms with being 37 yet. By the time I do, 38 will be right around the corner!

Smithfield is a fun, old little town, famous for its ham and pork products, and booming around the edges with lots of brand-new homes and ugly shopping centers. But the downtown has some great old homes and storefronts:

It was one of those gorgeous blue-sky fall days, and WARM! We browsed through an antique mall and had lunch in a terrific cafe/bakery downtown. I seem to recall coconut cake...mmmmm...

More pictures later.

Isn't is sad, sad, sad about Heath Ledger? There's this really selfish part of me that hates it when actors die tragically, because scenes that I formerly enjoyed in their movies will now be forever tinged with sadness over their death. I'll never be able to totally enjoy "10 Things I Hate About You" again, when he leaps down the bleachers singing to Julia Stiles. Selfish, I know. What a life he could have had...it's a waste.

Todd is downstairs catching up on the last season of "Gilmore Girls" and I'm poking around on the computer in my study for the first time in a long time. For those who have asked--I will get back to my aborted Christmas journal, I promise. I just have to get some of the other piles of chores attended to first!