year in review

in pictures.

january:
a new year's day walk on the south downs in west sussex near the village of south harting.

le village. waaaay down there.

another walk, with charges, down a roman road. with fog.


february:
success in sabering fine champagne in the berkshires!
(except..... this might have been in march- i'm not sure i took any pictures at all in feb.)


march:
bar in springtown. with seestor. the great wedding planning commences!


april:
gravel dump. part of great wedding scheme.


may:
jenny and matt get hitched, ed and shley get drunk. jenny and matt follow suit.



then we go down to the river to wash it all off.



june- this month in lomo:
workin' (that is, breakin') at the bistro.

driving over the confluence of the mississippi and ohio rivers.


july:
space age ice cream making in the berkshires! golden raspberry was my favorite.


august:
birthdays in colorado.

driving home from the farm with tomato hands.


september:
the first great squash picking. (i still have one of those warty hubbards- the green one on the left. yes, i recognize individual squash).


october:
first snow.


november:
walking to the argonaut in second snow. (or third?) denver backdrop.


contemplative about thanksgiving leftovers.

marley sitting on a portable printing press.


december:
flowers at the mancave- an image of the blizzard, taken from indoors (use your imagination).

dolly burger

FDA will allow cloned food! creeeeepy science fiction world!

denver is expecting lots more snow ,.lots n lots.

ruhe sanft

Ich beneide Sie um Ihre Ruhe. which is what i found when trying to find out what ruhe sanft means. seems to be a bit of a redundancy, but i'm sure there's some poetic explanation to this aria.

the sudden interest in audience behavior and german translation is because, once again, i find myself needing to listen to mozart exclusively. i bought the remastered soundtrack for amadeus and it's solid gold! well- it's plated gold! 24 karat gold discs, it says. maybe i'll make a ring out of one.

definition

the 'bayreuth hush' is the quiet that descends upon an audience in the few seconds preceeding the beginning of a classical music performance that, somewhere along the line in audience etiquette history, became the standard for examplary sophistication. i'd like to experience the good old days when composers were treated like rock stars and shouted at during their performance. enthusiastic clapping after a particulary stunning passage! whoops and hollers! lighters in the air (which, in mozart's day, might've been... a candelabra?)

google it and you'll find my new favorite scholar- simply because i envy his choice of subject matter and fucking status at the new yorker.

bayreuth hush

i'm experiencing a new addiction to mache. it's a simple little green with mild nutty flavor and i think the chief reason why i like it is because it comes in a box and looks like lamb's ears. soft little nutty lamb's ears! in desperation for a crunchy addition to my salad i poured some oat flake cereal on top. results are fairly boring- oaty cereal lost it's crunch, or maybe wasn't crunchy in the first place, being that it's au naturale. in fact, it's getting pretty goopy as it mixes with my salad dressing and...... ew.

we saw the ground today for the first time only to be told that another winter storm is on its way tomorrow. yay. strange time to be learning the ropes of grocery store produce ordering- blizzard, christmas, post-christmas fasting, preperation for another maybe blizzard- when will i ever understand the shopping habits of the average elder hippie? and why does everyone want to eat green beans on christmas? we at least had food on our shelves, which is more i can say for the supermarkets. this begs the question: where do they get their food from that they still don't have basic food stuffs on their shelves one week after the snow storm?? i imagine some giant safeway warehouse in nebraska where all canned, fresh, frozen and bagged products are magically conjured from within to be loaded on a truck and distributed around the country once a week- whereas at natural food stores there is an emphasis on getting local, or at least regional food from smaller vendors. so we get it more frequently because it's sorta local? i don't know how else to explain the lack of potatoes at safeway. apparently the magic food warehouse is what most people imagine, though- people looked at me increduously when i told them the green bean truck didn't make it, even though there was a foot of snow on the ground and any normal person should know goddamn well that green beans don't grow in WINTER unless you're in california, and therefore they must be driven here and...... can't drive in the snow!! mountain passes, people! anyway. at least christmas is over and i don't have to listen to the most wonderful time of the year anymore.

christmas in denver was accented by casino royale, tamales, and sake. let it be known that, although i can't envision your average mexican and japanese fellow being boon companions, their food and drink go together remarkably well. and that new james bond is righteous.

marley has a serious case of the waggy friskey tail.

santas on skates

here they are:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

my cat just licked my cookie

and i'm debating whether i should keep eating it.




well, that was a short debate. yum.

so now, a word about my neighbor. she has apparently only recently discovered john lennon, for she listens to his greatest hits all the damn time and it's starting to wear me out. not that there is anything wrong with lennon wailing about his mother- oh no, i like it!- but how many times can you listen to 'imagine' without it losing a bit of the magic. i reached that point at age 11 and thereafter everyday i was forced to listen to the classic rock radio station at work, so the song, while still very nice, has joined the ranks of over-played, over-memorized classic rock hits. songs that were once good but now booooooring, like 'tangled up in blue' and every fucking fleetwood mac song ever written. so i'm thinking there are at least two explanations for her continuous playing of john lennon's greatest hits (now we're on 'jealous guy' which i'll be really pissed if she ruins for me by over-playing): either, as i mentioned before, she just discovered john lennon and has not dived deeper into post-beatle expression of inner torment; or she only has the one greatest hits cd and can't find it within her to buy an original album; or she has very limited taste in music that allows her only to buy greatest hits albums and this might be the strangest music she has, but she's really into it because she recently got a divorce. ...now that i think about it, i think the last option is the most likely. sh regularly rocks out to denver's classic rock station and otherwise pretty much only listens to this john lennon album.

thus concludes my analysis of my neighbor's musical interests.

it is the day before the day before christmas and i'm either completely annoyed with christmas things or excited about the big christmas day. actually, i think this is a conflict i experience every year. this year my annoyance is dominated by people driving poorly in the post-blizzard mess to get their christmas shopping done, the constant absorption of christmas music at work, and people getting pissed that we don't have belgian endive at the store because they absolutely must have it for their christmas dinner even though there was a blizzard! and the damn belgian endive truck didn't show up. my excitement stems from the gifts that i've created (and am still creating) that will soon be opened by my peeps. but mostly i'm feeling foggy about the whole thing because i banged my head on the u-boat (big cart thing that we haul shit around on) so hard that i thought i broke my glasses, when what i really did was smash my frams into my forehead pretty hard. ow.

padal snieg

tired. trudged. snow. deep.

snow

it's snowing like crazy here. i believe this is one of those times when headlines across the country read "denver pummeled by snow storm" and "colorado hammered in blizzard". i went to work at 6 am and there was nothing on the ground. i left at 3 and there was at least 10 inches. maybe a foot. people were panic shopping and by the afternoon we were nearly out of potatoes, because when it snows people require potatoes. and because our delivery truck didn't come. no mo potato. the store closed soon after i left and on the drive home (our vehicle being the only one on the road with chains- wtf??) i noticed that even taco belch, e. coli haven, was closed due to the weather. everything done be closed.

now i'm holed up in the mancave with a fire roaring and the cats playing (hissing). we all came over for a winter sleep-over!


i've just been handed a list found in the police auction car sitting in the mancave shop:


porn store??
ANAL LUBE?

7-11- smokes

bank- ATM

liquior store
mixer


all the vices covered. emphasis and mispellings his own. wonder if he got those errands taken care of before his car was confiscated by the po-lice and sold at auction with all his other weirdo stuff. ex: several hand made leather pouches with odds and ends enclosed, like misshapen rocks (he was trying to make an arrowhead??) and a tidy collection of all forms of ID the fellow had since 1990ish. a mystery!

part time christmas music

sleigh bells. frosty the snowman. both annoying. both ear worms. both playing all day at the store.

Oh, but the christmas music gods do smile upon the dutiful workers of christmas retail (which, you might know, is ANY retail in america this week. no escaping! not even at the east side kosher deli!- ok, they're probably not torturing their employees). i don't know if we have satellite christmas crap pumped in or if it's a hand-picked selection from on high, but somehow, someway, in the midst of all the winter wonderland, "part time lover" came on the speakers and the workers were happily nodding their heads to the sounds in the key of stevie. aaaah.

then it went back to christmas.

inquiring minds want to know

why does my neighborhood always smell like chicken soup?

and why, after getting red spray paint from the can, to my fingers, and thus onto every surface of my apartment, am i taking this opportunity to type?

shley quote

"it's paralyzing, like writing about colonialism. you're just fucked"

-somewhere in the berkshires, sometime in july 2006

lemme esplain. no there is too much, lemme sum up

my favored wireless provider (who may or may not be my next door neighbor) has inexplicably disappeared, and my excursions to the darkest corners of the mancave have been limited by my new early morning produce duties, and so, dear people of shleydom, i have not been posting on my blog. yes, i could go to any one of the number of coffee shops in my neighborhood, but... i haven't.

updates? there is nothing to report. i have a cold, which might be due to drinking beer in an alley in downtown denver the other night. we were walking to a bar but instead ran into a catering crew that had just dropped a case of sierra nevada, so we got to take some foamy beer and make off to the nearest alley to slurp it up like hobos. i could also have a cold because my hands are cold and wet for much of the day at work as i shove heads of lettuce into the wetrack to create towering, impenetrable walls of greenery so no one will buy the shit for fear of making everything fall. this is my job. gone are the days of coddling eggplants and apples because they might bruise, we regularly THROW boxes of apples in the cooler and slam stalks of celery into place. i guess you're more careful with food when you grow it and pick it versus when it comes in a box on a truck from california. it's a weird disconnect that i'm not sure if i'll get used to. i will also not be able to get used to the fact that there is zero tolerance for employees taking bunk pieces of food, like bruised peppers or slightly-to-old limes. instead we toss it into this compost/trash bin in the back (which MIGHT go to a compost facility....) or give it to a couple of local organizations. i'm a local organization! i need bunk lettuce! i revolted yesterday by thieving- that's right, thievery!- three meyer lemons that we would've thrown away. apparently meyer lemons are the lemon bomb, and to prove it we sell them at $5.99/lb. i must see what this lemon craziness is about.

that is all. i will make it to the mancave/local coffee shop more often and post about my life in hopes that i will indeed one day get an emmy.

GE, don't bring good things to life

honey, let's have a nice baked chicken with LL601 for dinner tonight.

onions

from "Federal Tests Find No E. Coli in Green Onions" in the ny times today,

"At the same time, the New York State Health Department retracted last week’s announcement that its more sophisticated tests of green onions from a Taco Bell on Long Island had found the virulent strain, E. coli O157:H7, believed to have sickened more than 300 people in New York.

Instead, the agency said, that sample was actually white onions that had been mislabeled, and the strain of E. coli found was not the same as the one that had caused illness."

so was it the agency that mislabeled the onions or taco bell? and who can't tell the difference between a green onion and a white onion? even scarier- how many strains of e. coli are living at taco bell?? unless the NY state health dept. is seriously stupid and getting their lab results all screwed up. or maybe they didn't and tabo bell is paying them off to say that their information was wrong, due to a ridiculous, department-wide mislabeling malfunction that made everyone think they were testing white onions instead of green ones.

frugality

as much as i'd like to think i'm a frugal person, i know better than to pretend that i'm not a child of the eighties and that true frugality is beyond me. for example- i was unemployed for a month, so the funds ain't exactly at a comfort level. i've asked my parents for money. and yet, i need paté. i don't want it, i need it. i also need goat cheese. and i need to go grocery shopping before i get my discount card from work. in just two short days i'll save 15% on all my groceries, paté and all. but no! must have it now! and it's not like i'm hurting for food stuffs. you might remember that i am well-equipped for the soviet invasion by way of pickled beets, canned tomatoes, peach jam, and squash. i also have a lot of garlic. but none of these thingscan mimic the livery creaminess that is delicious paté.

i also need to buy beer and wine. because even though i'm broke and ignoring my cell phone bill, i require a twelve pack of heineken. not pabst or some other low-cost beer that i know i'd enjoy. nope! frugality be damned!

does this mean that my mind is unable to grasp what it means to really be needy? alas.

the apocolypse

is upon us. we fill up theaters on make-believe main streets to watch mel gibson's latest display of mel gibson egotism.

seeing a black panther was cool, though, even if it was alternated with a hand puppet during the face-eating scene. that could be such a cool moment in a period piece about civil rights.

wesley willis

you are my harmony joy music!

sausages!

did it have something to do with sausages?? i honestly can't remember what the hell was going through my head that seemed so important, because it's been quickly replaced by an intense craving for preserved meats and i'm now preparing a dinner which involves both sausage AND bacon. delicious. i blame the book i've been reading about civil war army diets. and yet i don't have a craving for hard tack. this tends to happen every year- winter comes and i want to read about the civil war, and as a result develop cravings for corn mush and salt pork creations. maybe it's a subconscious trick my body plays to get me to eat more fat for winter.

maybe i'll blab about my new job. i stack produce. i'm a produce stacker. one day i'll move on to ordering produce, but for now it's just stacking. the accountant on high came down today to give me my official clock-in number and i promptly lost it. so i had to sheepishly ask him to write it down again and he returned with four tiny post-it notes, all with my name and number on them, and said, "here you go, magna cum laude."

wuh

i had something perfectly blogable just now and have forgotten what it was. something important, some compelling, something that would spark commentary from the married folk in missouri. what was it..... we just don't know.

sans trans

my borrowed wireless connection is flighty, so i'm hooked up at the mancave via a 100-foot ethernet cord and now dividing my time between trying to make up for being a bad resident of shleydom, tending the fire, and checking the bird. i'm decidedly distracted, despite my effort to sit and write, and will switch erradically from subject to subject as a result.

how come there isn't a fucking taco bell meltdown freakout in the press because of the e. coli outbreaks? and if there was some national taco bell recall and signs posted on all taco bell restaurants saying "no yo quiero taco bell" or something, would people make the ridiculous link that ALL bean burritos are nasty like they did with the spinach? we had a serious problem selling our spinach during the relatively minor outbreak (in comparison with all the e. coli DEATHS per year as a result of delicious ground beef patties and whatever nastiness they're putting into taco bell creations). people didn't even want to see spinach, regardless of my explanation that it didn't come from california and wasn't irrigated with shit water. i don't think taco bell will suffer very much from this outbreak- i think people are really that disconnected from their food to rationalize that taco bell remains safe because it's so unfood and spinach is unsafe because it's unprocessed.

trans fats ban in NYC? ok, well-intentioned but misguided. it's ultimately up to the individual what they're going to put in their bodies and banning all trans fats in restaurants isn't doing anything educational. it's simply making it unavailable in that sphere. people should know what they're putting into their bodies- you don't die from having one serving of fries at a restaurant. you die because you get heart disease from eating the shit every day and not knowing why you feel like hell as a result. banning trans fats in places like mcdonalds does not encourage people to stop eating there, which is what they SHOULD do if they want to be healthier- it only makes is slightly less disgusting. but people will continue to eat there four or five times a week and therefore continue to put whole shitloads of corn syrupy, feedlot whatever into your system. yuck.

banning alcohol didn't help anything! let us remember this day, the day of the 21st amendment!

i think our chicken is done.

sowing me oats

to clarify: i am an up and coming assistant produce manager and will have these things known as benefits for the first time in my life. unless you count the free drugs in grad school... all bow to her royal shleyness! reports of jobdom to follow, but first let me regale you with stories of getting drunk at the irish snug in the daytime before traveling through sobriety and ending up at a motorcycle fashion show at night. during these short days of the year i find that to be quite an achievement.

so we have: employment- check. apartment- check. man cave- check. kitty cat- check.

jobjobjob

gotta job job job

beirut

i have nothing to say- except that i have been alerted to a scheduled outage on my blog and i thought it said 'scheduled outrage'. oh, and beirut is my new favorite indie balkan band.