Qmckenna’s Weblog

Today I bought dog food in Marin. I had to go right by a pet store. As I waited in line, a woman who, I must be honest, had that look who would be described in The South as being “touched.” She was about my age, short and with glasses and was buying a blue fish. She tried to set the fish in its puffed-up plastic bag on a dome-topped ice cream freezer a couple of times. It tried to roll off and she said something about that “being a cold place.” (No, I don’t know why they were selling ice cream sandwiches in the pet store.) As my order was being rung up she began fumbling through her large wallet. I assumed she was pulling money out to buy her fish. Instead she retrieved a business card and handed it to me, announcing that she was a pet sitter. I mentioned that she had given me three cards, but she said “that’s OK, you can pass them out.” She said that even though the card has a picture of a cat on it she is happy to house sit dogs too and she will “love them and spoil them to death.” She explained that she would charge $40 a day and she would live there, not just stop by. She also said we would not need to worry about her having anyone over at the house because she only had two friends, but they had both committed suicide, so now she was alone. I started to say how sorry I was but she interrupted and said “you see you don’t need to worry about me bringing people over.” Then she said that her mother had been a musician. She played the saxophone in a bar called Spike and Pickles and that she was going to name her fish Spike and Pickles in honor of the bar. It confused me a bit that there was only one fish, and she seemed to sense this so she explained that all of her fish were named Spike and Pickles. I have her card and think we should hire her right away…

We put Lila to bed on Halloween and went downstairs to have a glass of wine and watch a TV show. After a few minutes I heard quiet sobbing and went upstairs to check on her. She hasn’t cried like that in bed for at least a year, you know the way little kids sometimes do, when they’re scarred or over stimulated. I asked her what the matter was and she said, “I just don’t want it to be over…”. She stopped crying when we agreed not to take the decorations down for a few days and I told her she could share the necklace from my Dracula costume. Then in the morning she snuck into our room and put the necklace on my bedside table. I guess she felt better by then.

President Bush’s Library

The election and the inauguration are now past. Whether you were a supporter of President George W. Bush or not, now is the time to put that era behind us and reconcile the country to deal with the challenges we now face. What better way for the country to come together than around a civic project? My suggestion is that we all work together to provide books for President Bush’s Presidential Library.

Having spent eight years following the Bush Administration and completed extensive research I discovered the two books uniquely connected with the Bush legacy. My suggestion is to fill the library with them.
Unfortunately, the most famous of the two Bush books is “The Pet Goat” is part of a learn-to-read series and is not generally available individually. Amazon does list just over 1800 of them available used.

The Pet Goat

I think it appropriate to extend Mr. Bush’s Library to include other goat publications. A few suggestions follow:
The Pygmy Goat Pet Owners’ Manual

My Pet Goat (CD)

Goats Don’t Brush Their Teeth

Of course the other book closely associated with the Bush administration is Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Thankfully, this book is readily available. Here is another source.

In keeping with the Bush legacy you might prefer to send the Cliff Notes. This might be a good option if you think President Bush might ever visit his library, because as we know he does not like to read the newspaper and other written works. I make the conceptual leap to Cliff Notes which will represent all of the important themes of the actual book in a truncated easy-to-read format.

You can send your books to:
George W. Bush Presidential Library
C/O President George W. Bush
10141 Daria Pl
Dallas, TX 75229

Alternatively, you might prefer to send your contribution to the future home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library,
Southern Methodist University
Office of Development
PO Box 750402
Dallas, TX 75275-0402

We walked Sugar tonight with Lila in her new ski jacket. The balance of her outfit was a wife beater t-shirt, leopard print skirt and running shoes–no socks. Also, Lila insisted on wrapping her feet in baby wipes for the walk because she was “so injured” and otherwise she would limp. So she had wet baby wipes inside her shoes. There is nothing wrong with her feet by the way.
In a contemplative mood, as we walked, Lila said “see that star up there? That’s Grandma Devlin. She watches me and claps when I laugh and when I sing. And next to her is her sister and her mom and dad. And she is up there watching me all the time and she is dead and she is waiting for me to be dead and be up there with her. Thank you for calling me ‘Devlin’ because I love her.”
What do you say to that?

On Saturday we went to the bookstore to buy a new calendar. Then on our bike ride today Lila and I talked about recent events and the change of year. She’s been very interested in it. She thought it was the absolute height if wit when on New Year’s Eve we put her to bed and said we would see her next year. She had a puzzled look on her face for an instant then laughed and repeated the joke a couple of times (and then muffed it the next day, when of course, it no longer worked).
Today as we rolled down Grand Avenue between Burlingame and San Mateo, just tooling around, she adopted a wistful tone and said, “I miss 2008,” then paused, and sounding resolute added, “but we’ve got to move on.”

My life long love of pizza continues—enhanced in the near term by Mary’s gift of a pizza stone and peel for Christmas.

This is my current pizza crust—it is an amalgam of the recipe from Nate Appleman’s A16 cookbook and the excellent King Arthur Flour cookbook. Make it today for tomorrow:
24 ounces water; 100 degrees
1 tablespoon active dried yeast
pinch sugar
17 ounces bread flour
17 ounces all-purpose flour
2 ounces olive oil
1 tablespoon salt
4 plastic bags (bread/food storage type)
Approximately ¼ ounce additional olive oil

Put water in mixing bowl of a stand mixer with dough hook, add the yeast, pinch of sugar and a pinch of the flour. Allow the yeast 10 minutes to rehydrate; it should be fully dissolved and beginning to foam around the edges. Add the flour and mix one minute on low. Add olive oil and salt, mix until well combined, but not yet a smooth dough. Turn off mixer and let dough rest 10 minutes. After the rest, knead dough 10 minutes on low speed. Dough should now be smooth. Allow dough to rise until doubled in the mixing bowl, 45-60 minutes. Punch down, turn out to a lightly floured surface and divide into four equal pieces. Put a few drops of olive oil in each bag and spread around. Place one piece of dough in each bag. Twist the neck of the bag to close it. The dough will rise in the bag—do not seal it as the bag might explode. Allow the bags of dough a slow second rise in the refrigerator for approximately 24 hours. The dough will keep for several days and is better after 48 hours.

To use:
Remove dough from refrigerator. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Drop dough out of bag onto a floured work surface. Divide in two for small 10” pizzas. Top with your favorite stuff. Bake on a pizza stone or the backside of the heaviest cookie sheet you have (if you could stack two together that’s even better—the idea is to get some thermal mass in the oven so that when the pizza hits it doesn’t cool too much).

Notes: Good fresh yeast is important. I buy commercial active dry yeast from the restaurant in 1 pound vacuum sealed bricks. I store it in a Lexan container in the freezer. I cannot use it fast enough and generally throw out about the second half of the brick when it is a year old. Maybe I’ll bake more this year. It costs $3 a pound and is more convenient, better quality and a hell of a lot cheaper than the little packets from the store. Date the yeast when you put it in the freezer—a year is all you get (date your baking powder and baking soda too—a year is good for them too. I baked a birthday cake for Mary a couple of years ago that didn’t rise, at all, and I think it was the baking powder).
You can change the flour to all all-purpose or all bread flour if you don’t have the other one.
Weighing baking ingredients is much faster, easier and more accurate than volume measures. A cup of flour weighs about 4.25 ounces (so this recipe uses 8 cups). A decent scale isn’t super cheap, but you can get one for $50. Make sure it is easy to adjust the tare weight (to zero the scale when you put a bowl on it to hold the flour). Spring scales allow you to turn the dial to reset to zero, it is fast and intuitive. You have to figure out digital scales…

One of the most anxious and exciting moments a sailor faces is coming into a harbor at night. Even if you know it pretty well, it looks different. Distances seem new, darkness foreshortens space and makes everything seem both closer together and oddly disjointed. When I learned to fly one of the most memorable exercises was the night cross country flight, largely for the same reasons. Visually, flying at night is simpler than during the day because the visual field is significantly reduced. If you trust that no one is flying around with out lights and that there isn’t a misplaced mountain nearby, lights distill what you need to pay attention to. It changes a little bit when you descend for a landing. Without real sight of land, you rely on instruments to tell you rate of descent and altitude. Let’s just say that my landing at Harris Ranch (for a steak dinner, no wine) was harder and a few seconds earlier than I expected.
I thought of harbors and night-lit airports the other night after adding a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to our home network. It’s bright blue LED (it would be a first magnitude star) was the one that made the bedroom just too twinkly–there must be 35 LEDs among the computer and peripherals. It was a bit much for a bedroom, so I got out the tape and hung paper covers on most of the lights, turning the bestarred harbor back into a refuge fit for sleep.

I can remember when it took months to get used to writing a new year on a check or a letter (and yes, I remember writing those). But now I’ve been through enough iterations of the drill to have become pretty quick at the adjustment. But after all of these years I am still conditioned to look at the new year as a fresh opportunity to reassess my condition and seek improvement.
Improvement falls in a pretty narrow range. Drink less, eat less, get in shape. Usually my new physical fitness attempt centers around the pool. I have a visceral understanding of how swimming works to get me in shape. I understand how hard I can push myself, when I need to back off. But this new year I had to admit that there were just too may obstacles preventing me from making it to the pool often enough. I need something simpler.
I decided to try running. We have a lonely treadmill that I could use and there are far fewer excuses between me and the backyard treadmill than the pool. First time out, I strapped on my Nike “cross training” shoes and went for a walk/jog. I didn’t realize for the first few minutes that “cross” referred to “angry” which comes straight from the shoes, which seem to have a solid hardwood arch support or something like that. Hard to imagine what they might have been good for and easy to appreciate why they still look new and have sulked in the closet for years.
So, I went to Road Runner Sports . Armed with advice from Mary not to get cheap shoes (and full agreement from my feet on that) I entered the store, not knowing what to expect other than that I was ignorant about running shoes and prepared to be taken. I am old enough to remember when choice in “tennis shoes” meant high-tops or low-tops. This store was bewildering. Like the cold medicine selection at a big drug store, they all promised great things, but how do you tell one from another? A 19-year-old marathoner offered help. In short order he had asked a few questions, had me barefoot and standing on a pad that showed where I placed weight on my feet and then filmed me jogging. He recommended 3 pairs of shoes and had me try them on. 2 felt good and I chose one. Quite a bit different than choosing between high-top and low-top Chuck Taylors at the Army-Navy store when I was a kid.

Lunch today came from Molinari’s in the Ferry Building.

Let me set the scene for you: 3 guys behind the counter, covered with tattoos, varied facial hair and 2008 versions of Buddy Holly glasses (they look a bit like the Hansen’s from Slapshot). The sound system is belting out what I presume is The Beastie Boys Christmas Album. I didn’t know they had one, but it seems like that’s what it is. Based on the chorus, the song that dominated my experience was likely called “Merry Motherfucking Christmas”.

The small deli is festooned with handwritten signs providing the “rules” you must follow to get a sandwich–they’re not onerous, but it isn’t intuitive. “Take a number.” “There is no line.” You “PICK your own bread” from a plastic box, but must “NEVER Touch the Bread With Your Hands”. If you want everything on your sandwich you are advised to “Order it All the Way”. You need to be prepared to tell them the name of your sandwich, how you want it and if you want cheese, which type you want. Nothing unusual. However, there is a very specific order you follow and if you deviate from it, you will be met with a roll of the eyes and a subtle but effective admonition. For example, the lady after me made two mistakes–first, she tried to hand the clerk her piece of bread before her number. He stopped that cold. “Number first.” Then she said she wanted cheese, but didn’t know which kind. He rolled his eyes then recited the list of available cheeses with a studied lack of enthusiasm (it’s 6–not 25–if it was a huge number you could understand the frustration a little bit better). The guy two before me did something wrong and the clerk put up his hands in a “stop” gesture, turned away and had a private discussion with another counter guy leaving the customer to cool his heels for a minute before returning and initiating the order over again saying, “OK, go on.”

Thankfully, through careful observation, I was able to negotiate the order process without angering my clerk and received no admonition. It is one of those places where, if you are not a regular and don’t know the routine, the staff gets off on making you feel like an asshole. The sandwich was good. I will not go back for awhile.

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