Brace yourselves for campy inanity.

‘Course, if you have come to this blog on purpose, you were not expecting anything else.  Good for you!

Last night we as a family decided to carve our Jack O’ Lanterns. And by ‘we as a family’ I mean that I barked and bellowed and gnashed my teeth until they all came out onto the deck to shut me up.

I’ll tell you straight out that I am no novice at this.  Years of trial and failure have brought me a squash wisdom….call me the Gourd Whisperer.

And don’t mock my gloves.

I don’t ‘do’ cold and squishy if I can help it.

Oh, they laughed at me, of course, as they always do.  But I held fast as I pulled the nasty guts out of my flat little reddish gourd, with nary a dry heave.   And I had the last laugh when I saw Varmint sport this face:

And this face:

She could hardly get past the innards, my little Rosebud.  But Critter, total boy that he is, didn’t let anything bother him as he plotted and crafted and designed this year’s masterpieces.

He didn’t let Varmint’s squeals of disgust shake him as he worked. He had the concentration of Dr. Frankenstein!!!

With deft surety, he grabbed my best apple paring knife and proceeded to Edward Scissorhands the heck out of a pumpkin that weighs more than he does.

That’s right, I just turned Edward Scissorhands into a verb.  Let’s move on.

Sure, you’d think that My Captain would admonish him to be careful, but he was too busy carving his pumpkin IN HIS LAP.

That’s right, right on top of the ‘ol family jewels.

Even Varmint was concerned about that particular choice.  She envisioned sliced femoral arties mixed with pumpkin guts.

I reminded him that ‘safety never takes a holiday’, and would a Montgomery County Safety Officer approve?

He largely ignored me.

I begged Grandma Jane to step in.   But she was busy participating in her own way….  I hoped she was knitting a tourniquet as we would surely need it.

I kid you not.  The entire time she was just sitting there knitting and snickering.  What the heck, Grandma!

And me?  What did I get to spend the rest of the evening doing?   See this pile ‘o seeds?

I had to sift through them to get the gold out.

Gold that I then cleaned and dressed in a mixture of soy sauce, Worcestershire, garlic salt, sesame oil, sugar, and vinegar, and then baked slowly for this:

Oh YEAH, baby!

Like I said, I’m no novice.  I know EXACTLY what I’m doing here.

No Tourniquets required.

I walked again today.  That’s two whole days in a row.  Count ’em.  TWO.  Two days of invigorating fresh air.  Two days with a bounce in my semi-bionic step.  Two days of semi-occluded, sludge-filled arteried, aerobic activity.

You could say that I’m ‘on a roll,’ but whenever someone says that about me, it usually has something to do with lunch, and it’s probably whole grain.

There was a small setback, however, in my newest plan to control my burgeoning flabalanche.

You see, because my subconscious knew that I would be walking a mile or two today, my appetite decided to make up for it by forcing me to eat more breakfast than usual.

I KNOW it doesn’t work that way, that the law of thermodynamics still applies when trying to reduce one’s fat stores.  But the super-evil-villain-genius that is my appetite was one step ahead of me, the fiend.

I’m going to have to outthink him.  I WON’T go for a walk tomorrow.  That will teach him!

Ha!

You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to get one over on this ol’ bird!

A few salient facts:

1) I have a passionate love affair with food.  “Foodie” does not BEGIN to describe me.

2) I have the metabolism of an aging sea cucumber.

3) Every seam in every pair of pants I own is thoroughly punished whenever I close the zipper.

4) I’m not about to change the way I eat.  It would require an amount of effort equal to that required to reverse the direction of the earth’s rotation.

5) I don’t have the financial resources to enlarge my wardrobe at the same rate that my fat stores are increasing. And the only thing that would make my current fat stores of any use would be for this planet to undergo another ice age.

6) I don’t think an ice age is in our immediate future.

THEREFORE, I had to take action, so this morning, after consuming my daily McDonald’s Sausage Burrito, I went for a walk.

I know, I know, it’s not earth-shattering.  But when you consider my recent knee-replacement, as well as other sundry foot/ankle/Achilles heel issues, a walk is damned impressive.

In my head I can hear Orson B. Wells, in full theatrical regalia bellowing, “I WANT TO LIVE!  I WANT TO LIVE, I SAY!!!” only instead, it’s my own voice whining, “I WANT TO EAT!  I WANT TO EAT, I SAY!!!

So I have a feeling that this country lane and I are about to become intimately acquainted.  If you should pass by this way and see a large-bottomed woman in overstretched yoga pants sauntering down the lane while eating a McDonald’s Sausage Burrito, be sure to stop and say “Hi!”

And bring some chipotle barbeque sauce while you’re at it.

If ever there were a decent illustration of how fundamentally different My Captain and I are from each other, it would be the meal we shared the other night.  We tried a new restaurant opened by an acquaintance of ours, Julie, called Full On Craft Eats and Drinks.  Julie used to bartend at the Dogfish Head Alehouse, in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

It was her rendition of the White Chocolate Martini that made me fall in deep and abiding respect for her, for all eternity. And while you may think by saying that, I am a complete and total, intervention-needing lush, but if you had ever tried one of Julie’s Martinis, and could still wrap your tongue around your own name at the bottom of it, I’d be damn impressed.

What I’m saying is that this woman commands respect.

So off we went to give her new culinary venture a try!  An unobtrusive hole-in-the-wall, in a strip mall on Norbeck Road in Rockville, Maryland, at first glance Full On seems like a beer-lover’s haunt only.  Sure, there are plenty of lovely traditional sandwiches, but nothing crazy unusual on the menu, except the beer selection….

Until you get toward the bottom of the sandwich menu.

My Captain picked his specialty beer, and ordered a tried-and-true Meatloaf Sandwich to go with it.   That’s My Captain all over.  Tried and true.  Beefy.  Solid.  Filling.  Traditional.  Popular.  Savory.  It’s the perfect sandwich to define him.  I know few people who do not LOVE a well-made meatloaf sandwich.

But I….I had read to the bottom of the sandwich menu…and found the Roasted Cauliflower Grilled Cheese Barbeque Ranch, Pepper and Hummus on crunchy Oh Dear God Sourdough sandwich.  I had found the jackpot baby!  THIS was a sandwich I had never conceived of, doubted many others had, either, and sure as hell was not about to miss the experience.  Even if it might be a bad one!

Which defines me perfectly.  Chancy. Impetuous.  Impulsive.  Slightly charred, but deeper for it.  Tangy. Sweet. Spicy.  Crunchy.  Creamy.  Cheesy. A freaking flavor explosion.  It was everything I hope to be.  There are few people who would care for this particular mixture, but the ones who do, are courageous as hell.  And often have weird smelling farts.  Philosophically speaking, of course.

If you take nothing away from this inane post, I hope it is that 1) you need to try Full On Craft Eats and Drinks on Norbeck Road, and 2) What you eat speaks volumes about you.

(Like never, please God, never date a person who eats liverwurst.)

And Roasted Cauliflower Grilled Cheese Dates, quite simply Rock.

Trust me.

Go to Full On, today!  And tell Julie that I sent ya!

When My Captain was a tadpole, he played the trumpet and the coronet.  He got so good at it in high school, that by the time he graduated, he had acquired an American-made (Bundy) workhorse of a trumpet, a coronet, and a silver concert Bach Stradivarius, which, to those like me who know bupkiss about brass instruments, is impressive.  That Bach trumpet today would be worth several thousand dollars.

When he went to Virginia Tech after high school, he left his beloved horns at home in the basement.

Fast forward, everyone had grown up, and had kids.  My Captain’s nephew had begun to play the trumpet, and was using My Captain’s old workhorse.

He was not, er, gentle with it.  It got USED.  Then he graduated and back the trumpet went to the basement.

Fast forward again, this time to the present.  Now My Captain is helping me raise my children, and once again, a young boy wants to play the trumpet.   Critter asked his music teacher, Ms. Sprague, if he could try playing the trumpet.  She showed him how it worked, loaned him the school trumpet, and he put it to his lips….

….and played like he has always played.  Like it was nothing to have chops and make sound by pursing his lips and spitting raspberries.  Like he was born to play it.  She emailed me and told me she had never seen anything like it, and would we consider putting him in band class?  Critter wanted it….who was I to dissuade him?

So once again, the old American workhorse of a trumpet was pulled out of the broken leather case in the basement and called into service. This time, however, it needed some love.  It had broken bits on its broken bits.  It had dents and pings, and bends that belied a busy nephew’s years of use.  I took it to the music shop and they said they could put it to working order for about ….$450.00.

Eek.

My husband is a fireman, not a surgeon.  That was a lot of money!  What if Critter didn’t keep playing it?  What if it was a waste of money? I hemmed and hawed, but then Grandma Jane and Critter’s dad said they’d pitch in, and it was decided to fix it.

The night we got it from the shop, we couldn’t find Critter.  It was getting dark, and he’d been missing for a fair amount of time.  He had simply taken his newly refurbished trumpet, and vanished.  We eventually found him outside on his swing by the hammock in the fading light… just him, the crickets, and the last few hardy fireflies leftover from the dying summer….  …playing like Dizzy Gillespie must have at his age, (only skinnier).

He doesn’t even know how to read music, or know what all the names of the notes are.  All he knows is that he can control the music that comes out of that thing.  I mean everything…from the tone, to the pitch, to the clarity and volume!  For a boy who has very little control in his 11-year-old life, having control of something as magical as music, is golden.

We let him stay out there to practice for…get this….over two hours….before we called him in out of the dark.  He would play anything that came to mind.  He played the theme to the Pink Panther.  He played the theme to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  He played the theme to Club Penguin.  You know, all of the classics.

And that beat-up old trumpet….that dinged-up, American-made workhorse, and not the Bach Stradivarius…

has become the most precious thing that little boy believes he has ever owned.