Whatta Fiasco

The third in a series of mysteries set in the White House kitchen and featuring the executive chef. This book takes one more step in complexity. It also feels as though the author is taking her characters a little more seriously. It still feels more like a television script.

[powells]

The second in a series of culinary mysteries. This one is more developed than the previous. Still not quite my thing.

[powells]

A culinary cozy detective story set in the White House kitchen, complete with recipes in the back. It’s a simplistic story but it gets the job done. In an ideal world, this is the sort of book I would have “read” as an audiobook.

[powells]

This was one of those books where I was glad to get it done so I could go read what other people were saying about it. Yes, an interesting book. My biggest complaint is that the beginning of the story, the coming of age of Green, doesn’t meld well in my reading with the rest of the book.

[powells]

I really wanted to like this book. It had some characters I liked and characters I loathed and some cool word building… and then the ending just mucked it all up. Either this book is broken or it’s just not the book I wanted it to be. Eh, you can’t like them all.

[powells]

Because of some pending infrastructure changes on my home server, I decided it was time to get my own domain name for this site. Lo, you should now point your bookmarks at whattafiasco.com. The old address won’t be going away any time soon, but the new one is nice and neat. Also, there’s a new page listed over the right, Me, Elsewhere, listing some of the other places I have content out on the web.

You’d think that a week stuck on a slow-moving houseboat on a river would be an ideal time to get some reading done. Not so. The best places to read were on the forecastle (the shaded front deck of the boat) and the top deck. A little sun, a little wind, a gorgeous view. The boat rocks under you, the seagulls shriek, a pelican flaps by, and suddenly you realize that you’ve read only two pages in the last ten minutes because your eyes keep wandering to the river and the boats, and the houses on the shore. But that’s ok. Two books in one week of vacation is just fine. I get plenty of time to dive into books. It’s not often I get to enjoy the constant experience of being on a river.

It was a much prettier river than I had expected, even though the leaves weren’t in full color yet. The water was much clearer than I had expected, and the level of visible pollution wasn’t as great as I had expected either. Sand everywhere. And large fish jumping out of the water at dusk. Waking up to a pink sky reflecting in silky water and a hot cup of coffee. Mostly it was a week of just soaking up the experience. In short, it was just the sort of vacation I needed.

The were only two thngs I missed. One, I never took the opportunity to learn how to steer the vessel. If I end up on another similar trip, I’ll correct that oversight. The other item was a lack of physical activity. Other than hiking around on sand, sometimes piles in precipitous slopes, and the occasional stroll through a town, there wasn’t much exercise. If I do one of these trips again, I’ll be arranging to have at least one kayak along. It would have been a lot of fun to paddle around some of the islands we landed on for our evenings, but it also would have made a decent, fun workout.

Back to fencing again! The new location is not bad. It’s in an old
gymnasium with a stunning end-grain wood floor (which is about to get
refinished) in midtown. It has offstreet parking. It has decent restrooms
and a drinking fountain with cool water. It’s also well located for after
practice dinner and beer. The only downsides so far are a lack of
airconditioning and the gym not being handicap accessible. On the other
hand, we’ve also been given permission to use the cafeteria (which does
have airconditioning, but we have to move all the tbales and chairs out fo
the way and then put them back when we’re done) which is accessible and
will also make for nice overflow space when holding tournaments. The gym
just isn’t big enough to do more than three full strips at the absolute
maximum, and the KC Open really needs at least six strips to run
reasonably. We’ll get it worked out.

So I fenced again, and I fenced like crap. More accurately, I fenced the
way I used to fence. Regression sucks. But by the end of the evening the
fencing brain was starting to work and the body was beginning to remember.
It’s coming back, slowly. Part of the slowness is that, in spite of a
three week break, my foot still isn’t healed. It’s better than it was but
it’s not back to full strength and that’s very frustrating. So I get to be
patient a little while longer. At least I get to fence while I’m being
patient.

In other news, Max learned a life lesson yesterday. About a week ago he
got tired of how long it was taking to walk around town, so a friend of
his gave him an old clunker bike. Max figured it was a crappy enough bike
that, so long as he didn’t leave it sitting too long, he wouldn’t need to
worry about locking it up. No such luck.

Luckily he decided not to go protest the opening of the Dole Center for
Politics. Why he’d want to protest it, I’m not sure. I’m no fan of the
man’s politics myself, but the center isn’t about the man’s personal
politics. At any rate, all his friends who did decide to protest got
arrested. And all that sympathy I might have felt for him from getting his
bike stolen? It all disappeared when I walked out of the house this
morning and found a bag on the front steps with stuff in it that would
have gotten him more than a simple arrest if he’d taken it to the protest.
Not enough to get him kicked out of the house, lucky him.

When I got home from the gym last night, I added up the numbers to find that I had exceeded my goal for the year. Since November 15, 2006, I’ve lifted the equivalent of the thrust required to lift the space shuttle one foot off the ground. (1,181,400+ pounds.) Go me! Now to set up a new goal. I need to consider it for a bit, but I think I’ll try for 2 million pounds total (including what I’ve added up so far) by the end of this year. It’s a little bit of a stretch, but not unreasonable.

When I got home form the gym last night, I also discovered that we’ve entered the world of digital cable. I’d been resisting it for a long time. I don’t watch all that much TV and I’d be happier watching even less, so why spend even more? The cable company offered the hubby free digital converter boxes, which will reportedly not be free after this month. So he took them up on it. (I knew this was coming, but the field of denial os strong.) So now we have a bunch of new channels, some of which might even have things I want to watch. And all the channels are (so far) looking clear of crappy fuzz. Soccer (or anything else) on Univision had been nearly unwatchable for ages now, with only fleeting moments of clear picture. Clearly the cable company hasn’t been investing any money in analog digital equipment given that the FCC will be transferring that segment of the spectrum real soon now.

It’lll be interesting to finally see BBC America, among other things. It’ll be even more interesting to see what this does to our monthly cable bill. Our total household telecommunications expenses are still less than our house payment, but more than the last car payment I made. The mind still boggles.

This morning when I left the house to go to work, I was confronted by two youngish cats I’d never seen before, both perched on our porch railing. They both glared at me as if I were interrupting a deep and private conversation, or perhaps as if fearing I might gobble them up. When their baleful glares didn’t result in my disappearance, they both made a dart for our garage, where a panel missing from the door let them slip safely inside. Oh great. I hope they’re just using our garage as a club house and aren’t strays that have taken up residence.

I got to spend a little time downtown by myself this afternoon. The rain had finally let up for a bit and I walked down to ZenZero to get Thai spring rolls and some thom ka gai. On the way, I noticed that the empty storefront next to the sushi place was now sporting enormous signs exhorting diners to boycott Wa restaurant. As close as I could figure, the complaint was that the facade of the building had been redone to match the Japanese decor inside and it no longer matched the historic look of downtown. As if enormous and ugly boycott signs were going to improve downtown business? Gah.

Dinner was lovely and I made it in before the Saturday night rush hit full on. I sat in the window eating my soup and watching the people walk by.

I walked back down the other side of the street and saw the response that Wa had to the signs. They were advertising a special Boycott Wa sushi roll with a little tee-hee-ing smiley face on the sign. I don’t get in there very often, but I won’t be participating in the boycott.

A little further down the road, there was a dirty hippy street musician sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Christian bookstore. He was playing a folk ballad rendition of Itsy-Bitsy Spider to a small crowd, including one cute-as-a-bug two year old. Clearly she had decided that this, this was the music she had been waiting for all her life. This was the music to make her dance. Hip-shaking, gyrating, sidewalk happiness. As long as he was playing his guitar, she was going to dance.