Food is always popular, with people; talking about it, selling it, growing and raising it, trading recipes, criticizing it’s taste and preparation, perfecting its creation, enjoying it with a fancy wine or domestic beer. With lots of restaurants and eating establishments closed in our community, those of us who don’t have cooking interests, or skills, fend for ourselves.
In honor of our current American lock down, due to a mysterious virus from the East, tonight’s meal is a chicken pot pie, prepared and sold by Marie Callender, in a local Smith’s grocery, for $2.79 plus tax. Slipping it into the microwave for ten minutes, with two minutes to cool down, it makes a dinner, not too much to give me nightmares, but enough to make me feel full and sleep when I turn in.
” Why do you have to write about a chicken pot pie, ” some might laugh?
I can only say that Scotttreks writes out of the moment, and this moment belongs to Marie’s pot pie. This pie has a crust many bakers would kill for, is chock full of meat and veggies, and is so much cheaper and better than I could cook on my own if I had too buy all the ingredients. We had these when we were growing up, but they were cooked by our mother, who was a master chef without the title.
Taking a few photos of the pie, and looking at it, as I eat, convinces me, that, even after this lock down becomes history, my eating habits have changed, forever.
Eating light, and eating at home, is a money saver.
Because I live in a city, far away from where people raise and grow food, I get a little jumpy in times like these.
What do us city folks do when we can’t buy a pot pie, or chicken, or pasta, or fruit, in our stores?
When that happens, revolution is just around our corner.
All this national drama, twisting around me like a tornado, makes this pot pie, this evening, much more important than it should be.
Food gets more important as it becomes harder to get.
Golf is the kind of sport that doesn’t appeal to everyone.
First, the idea of hitting a little round ball, on a tee, with a stick, seems silly. I mean, the ball just sits there. It isn’t coming at you like a football pass, or a baseball pitch. The only times you touch the ball are when you tee it up for a drive, mark your ball on the green so someone else won’t hit your ball when they putt, or pull it out of the cup on the green, after you putt out.
Second, there are all kinds of rules, depending on who you are playing with. Don’t tee the ball up in the rough. Don’t improve your lie. Your club can’t touch the ground in the traps. If you hit out of bounds, or in the water, there are penalty shots. Rake the trap when you are done with your shot. Don’t talk when someone else is swinging. Don’t hit into the group ahead of you, even if they are old and crippled and disastrously slow. Don’t throw sunflower seeds on the green. The list of rules is extensive.
Third, the equipment is sometimes expensive. Wood shafted clubs are not used any more and there is a lot of technology in designing clubs that make it easier for non professionals to ht the ball straighter and further without having to go to the range and work on their game.
Fourth, you have to look like a golfer to play like a golfer, with a pair of golf shoes, a golf cap, glove, a clean pair of shorts or slacks, and a nice cotton or cotton polyester shirt that gives you free movement of your upper body.
Fifth, golf is played in all kinds of weather, and wind is a weather condition that sends most golfer birds into the clubhouse.
Sixth, golf is a social sport and is usually played in groups of four, with lots of time to socialize between shots. In point of fact, getting out of the house and joking with the boys saves more marriages and relationships than it destroys.
This Official PGA Birdhouse is another Charlie creation, and I can see it hanging in a tree just by the eighth tee, swinging gently in a pine tree with the occupant watching us chili dip an iron on this par three into the front bunker.
There are enough downsides to golf, that I can see why more people don’t take up the sport, or stick with it.
This, us addicted golfers, always say, is great.
There is nothing worse than not being able to get a starting time.
You wouldn’t think playing a simple blues would be hard.
You have an instrument, a backing track, some music lessons behind you, and no one in an audience is cracking up, holding a conversation, or talking on their cell phone. The musicians on the backing track are pros, some of the best.
This is a simple Blues in A major , and, working on roots is the theme of this practice session. What comes out, is, most of the time, a revelation. Repeating it would be difficult, and probably not necessary with an improvisational art form.
Playing four minutes of music and making it sound smooth, inventive, interesting, takes all my attention, and relaxation.
When I’m playing, I’m not thinking about anything else.
Why would I want to?
The project is simple enough, putting up a thirteen foot shelf and using the shelf to secure a back privacy wall along a back porch wall. All that is needed is wood, deck screws, a drill, a tape measure, a handsaw, and patience.
A local Home Depot isn’t far from the house and they cut a sixteen foot, 2×8, down to thirteen feet for me. Next, I look for a box of deck screws. The deck screws, incredibly, come to $9.94, for a box of fifty 3 and a half inch deck screws. These same screws, several months ago, were, for the same sized box, in the six to seven dollar range, including tax. Made in Taiwan,the box does include a little drill bit, which I need, because the screw heads have a star pattern and can’t be driven with a normal bit.
The cost of building a house is going up at the same rate as this box of screws, around 30%. Even with an illegal immigration workforce in this state, that keeps costs down, it is going to cost a pretty penny now to put up a house. With supply chains broken and dollars everywhere,the total on my sales receipt is going to keep going up, up, up.
We are told there is no inflation, but, building this simple shelf is getting expensive.
Inflation is sometimes defined as too much money chasing too few goods.
Seeing a simple box of exterior screws, fifty to a box, costing almost ten bucks, hammers the point home.
Most of the workforce in New Mexico don’t make ten dollars an hour.
When an hour of your life gets you fifty screws, you really are getting screwed.
Our country is now on ” lock down. ”
I’ve never been through a government ordered lock down where businesses are shut down, movement is restricted, banks are closed except for drive up windows or internet banking, and the real economy grinds to a halt as the stock market tries to reach it’s old- new heights.
One of the few things we are still permitted to do, before we are fined for being on the road, if we don’t have our papers in order, is hike in the Embudo Canyon in the Sandia Mountains. The gate has still opened at seven in the morning and people are still coming to meet nature, in person, in their back yard.
People are cautious with the new ” social distancing ” orders from our state capitol building. On the trail, some hikers wear masks, and back ten feet away from us as we pass them on the same trail we have been hiking for the last several years. Some people you pass don’t even answer you when you greet them with a cheerful ” Good Morning. ”
When you are not a billionaire, you can’t escape this new reality as easily,you can’t take a private jet to your private bunker in New Zealand or Australia,you can’t play the stock market casino with someone else’s money.
It’s a great morning for a hike and Albuquerque, from up here, looks like it always does, from a distance.
It makes me wonder about the sanity of a “lock down.”
For most of us, at ground level, the health of the economy is always life, or death.
Is saving 2% of a population worth crippling the other 98%?
What would Spock say?
Back in ancient days, cave men only had fires to keep them warm, and the skins of animals fashioned into clothes. We doubt all the women looked like Raquel Welch, but then the men weren’t Brad Pitts either. Both sexes must have found something to like about the other though because we are still overpopulating the planet.
Last night, the electricity went out and all I had was a phone that worked on batteries, a flashlight with batteries, and some matches. Sitting in the dark, I Googled the Public Service Company of New Mexico, after checking my circuit breakers in the garage, and confirmed there was a power outage in my part of the city.
Sitting in the dark without electricity, not hearing your refrigerator work hard to keep your stuff from spoiling, the living room was very very dark, I kept thinking about those old ancients huddled around their fires, back in caves, looking out the door of their homes, with no doors, at a great star filled sky with no plausible answers for what created it, except for a God, or Gods.
The only thing I know about electricity is that it works when you flip a switch, or plug something into an outlet in the wall. It runs our world.
Sitting in the dark with cell phone in hand, I read about coronovirus and realize we could have it much worse.
When the power goes off, we aren’t a whole hell of a lot better than those cave men.
The news we have these days is apocalyptic.
Across the world, an unseen virus, emanating out of China, is obsessing people and governments. Daily, we are shown body bags and stressed hospitals, see death totals that are not yet of the Black Plague category.
Total economies are shut down and we are told our jobs and businesses are not essential, but you can still buy pot and alcohol. Some people, driving the same streets they have driven for decades, are fined for being on the road and neighbors are told to call a hot line to tell the government who is not following orders. Banks are closed and you have to make an appointment for most services, and you are questioned if you want to take your money out of the bank. Congress magically finds 2 trillion plus dollars when we have been arguing about healthcare for decades, and bails their crony’s out, again.
Walking, quite by chance, out my front door, I am greeted by a rainbow masterpiece. This double rainbow, just fading, has the right proportions, right colors, and a gorgeous, rich lustre. It is quite breathtaking, radiant, and rejuvenating.
Troubled times will pass and then talking heads will analyse and tell us what they want us to believe has just happened, politicians will claim they fixed the problems they created, and life, will go on.
In a year, most of this will be forgotten, but the precedents created will live with us, forever.
Part of travelling is bringing back stuff.
There are memories and words and photos on all trips, but there are also objects that get packed in your suitcase and brought back home. Maybe it is a piece of art from Uruguay? Maybe it is a recipe? Maybe it is a T shirt or a special cap? Maybe it is a new watch or a pack of seeds to try something new in your garden?
This little insect box, from a market place in Panama, hangs in a hallway at home.
Insects, as most of us know, can be good – like ladybugs, or bad – like mosquitos. Most often, we feel insects before we see them. Casual research suggests there might be as many as five million species on the planet with only a million species identified and described.
There is still plenty for ” bug lovers ” to do on our planet.
My insects on the wall are the best kind. They don’t wake me up, bite me, or talk trash. They remind me of great engineering designs and adaptability. We’re not in this world alone, even if we think we are.
If I were to take a trip into the jungles of Panama, I’d meet all of these guys on a first name basis.
Somehow, I like them on a wall, in a box, the best.
Inside Meow Wolf, there is a house, a mysterious house whose owners are no where to be found. They have their left artifacts; an old desk, an old saggy comfortable couch, a bathroom with toothbrushes still in the cup, closets with clothes hanging, a washer and dryer with clothes to be cleaned. As you roam through the house you find rooms just like you would find in a normal home, but, here, the rooms don’t look like our houses and it has secret passageways, and tunnels and challenges.
In a performance area of the installation, these two young men juggle and do acrobatics for their modern audiences, much like they might have done for ancient kings when the castle was dreary and the king threw a party for some of his political allies.
When this performance is done, we wander through the rest of the house, getting lost, finding rooms we have already been in. Finally, sensory overloaded, we leave the house and its ghosts and go find a green chili burrito and cup of coffee.
Getting lost in someone else’s house is okay, but you never want to be at a point, in your house, that you can’t find the bathroom.
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