Lake Powhatan

I went for a little walking hike around Lake Powhatan and Bent Creek yesterday. The weather was a little on the chilly side but once I got moving the chill actually felt pretty good. I’d never been to the Lake Powhatan area before and was pleasantly surprised by it. The Lake was very cool and peaceful and it had loads of biking and hiking trails crisscrossed around.

The bit of Bent Creek I saw there was cool too. There was an old mill in the area back in the day and you can still see some of the masonry flume walls around. Also saw a link from a very old chain slowly rusting away in a spring leading into the creek, so that was cool. Love finding little bits of the past in unexpected places like that.

Today’s already started out dreary and the next couple of days are supposed to be the same, so the plan is to stay inside and putter around the house wasting time. Should be easy for me to do.

Making a big meaty beef stew in the crock pot too, so at lest there’s something good to look forward to on a cold wintry day like today.



Pics.

New Year 2009

It's finally here, 2009. I'm actually looking forward to this year. Apart from turning 40, I have lots planned and hopefully some big things will happen. I didn't really do much to celebrate last night. Stayed home by myself and had a few beers, then watched some crazy guy on TV jump his motorcycle 10 stories straight up (then free-fall on the bike back down).

I'm making a couple of the traditional New Year's "good luck" foods for supper tonight. I have a big pot of black eye peas cooking and plan on boiling some cabbage to go along with it. Collard greens are supposed to be better for luck, but I can't stand the stuff so cabbage will have to do in its place. I keep an eye on my pork intake and try to keep it pretty low so I'm skipping the ham this time, but I put a bit in the peas for seasoning so hopefully that'll work. Gonna need all the good luck and karma I can get my hands on.

Chef T

I didn't really feel like doing something involved for my meal this week so I went with Honey and Orange Glazed Chicken, with baked potatoes and a Caesar Salad. I had everything for it already except for the orange and orange juice so it ended up being a pretty cheap meal too, which is always a good thing. No pics yet since it's still in the oven cooking, but making the glaze for it beforehand smelled awfully tasty so I'm hoping it turns out well.

Got an angel food cake for dessert (with strawberries). I've heard their pretty simple to make so I may try to bake one of those in the coming weeks.

Sunday Dinner

Making a huge meal for dinner (lunch) on Sundays was always a tradition in my family when I was growing up. Granny would start cooking early in the morning and by the time church was out there wasn't a spot on any counter top or table that didn't have some kind of food on it. And we're talking real food too, all of it made from scratch...fried chicken, corn bread, beans, biscuits, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, cakes, pies, and wonderfully over-sweetened iced tea (with saccharin!) to wash it all down.

And the people came. At least a dozen or more every Sunday. When you have as large a family as we had it's hard not to draw a crowd when everyone knew Granny was in the kitchen (dad has 4 sisters & 3 brothers, mom has 7 sisters). Imagine being 5-8 years old, having a half dozen or more cousins your age around every weekend, and all of you being hopped up on sugar and greasy food and then let loose in a yard surrounded by woods and pastures. It was heaven.

Of course things change, families grow up and drift apart, and those afternoons of running and playing for hours on end get filed away as fond memories. But there's always been something about having a big meal on Sundays that's stuck with me. I love to cook, but being single and living alone makes cooking a real meal for 1 person something of a bother at times. So odds are when I do cook something substantial it's usually going to happen on Sunday. That gives me leftovers for most of the work week, I have all day to cook it, and it lets me flashback to the days spent in Granny's kitchen eating all that wonderful food.

Last week was Chicken Tetrazzini from a recipe I found at the Food Network's site (here's a pic). This week I decided to get back to my roots and made a big pot of pinto beans, baked some corn bread (from scratch), and had some boiled cabbage. I found some uncured bacon that had no added nitrates or nitrites and about half the sodium of regular bacon, so I used that to season both the beans and the cabbage.

Very tasty.

Run Away!

I've been thinking about my current medical stuff quite a bit, and there's a part of me that wants to run away from it all. I feel like buying a carton of cigarettes and lighting up again, living off the saltiest, fat-filled foods I can find, and washing everything down with remarkably obscene amounts of Mountain Dew & alcohol. Forget about taking meds and altering my diet and exercise habits to be healthy, I want to be young and stupid again.

I'm not going to do any of that of course. It's time to "be an adult", "eat responsibly", "take care of myself", etc. All the cliché bullshit you hear from everyone else who has been forced to grow up, get old, and eat food that's good for you.

Granted I'm only in week three of my old age, but it hasn't really been that bad so far. The low-sodium, low-fat, no caffeine diet isn't as flavorless and boring as I'd been anticipating. Plus when I do allow myself to eat something bad, it feels like even more of a treat now than it used to be.

Random Crap

A few weeks ago I decided I didn't like how I signed my name. So I sat down with a pen and a pad of paper and started experimenting with new ways to do it. It took me a bit to do...you have to make it legible but at the same time you don't want it looking too textbook. Then there's the whole "how does it feel when I write it" factor that I had to consider. I finally managed to come up with a nice mix of the old style and enough new flair to appease myself. I've been signing it more or less the same way for a couple decades now so it's taking me a bit to get used to doing it differently. It does give me a sense of something "new" every time I pause and remember to use the new signature though.

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Went to the annual October Birthday Extravaganza at the parents' house this past weekend to celebrate my dad and sister's birthdays. Everything went fine and I had a good time; it was a typical birthday visit. My oldest nephew is in the midst of puberty and is changing dramatically every time I see him. It's cool to see the beginnings of what he's going to look like as an adult. You can definitely see my brother in his emerging face and body type, with some of his mother's features mixed in as well.

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I had supper on Monday night to celebrate Lisa's birthday. Her mother and older sister drove up from Florida to surprise her and she invited a few of us over for food. Her sister made her from-scratch sauce and meatballs served over mini-penne pasta with a nice salad and bread, and we ended the meal with Mark's homemade tiramisu. Everything was fantastic. We managed to work our way through at least 4 bottles of wine between the nine of us (not to mention the wine vinegar dip for the bread and salad and the wine & rum in the tiramisu) so things were getting a bit giggly by the end of the evening. I gained at least 5lbs, but it was all worth it.

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Had lunch today at a little hole-in-the-wall fast food Chinese restaurant near work called "New 1 China". The food is excellent and very reasonably priced. The fortune in my fortune cookie read: It's time to bring out your dreamy, loving side. I know it's just a random phrase in a cheap cookie, but considering the direction my thoughts have been heading lately it's creepily appropriate.

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Of Raccoons & Fast Food

I had my first sighting of a live raccoon "in the wild" this afternoon. I was over at the Smith's pet sitting and had stepped out into their back yard, heard this weird whining/grunting kind of sound, and saw this guy. He climbed up the tree as soon as he saw me and stayed there long enough for me to run grab the camera and snap a shot. I was a little concerned about him since I'd had a nice conversation with the Smiths before they left on vacation about rabid animals and a black bear that's hanging around nearby. Rocky scampered down the tree and ran off pretty quickly after he posed for the picture though so I don't think he was rabid. Still, a close call...I almost died.

A few days ago I was sitting in the drive-thru of Hardee's staring at the interstate exit nearby, and had a flashback of sorts to childhood. Back in the 80's, we used to drive through this area of the state on our way to my grandparents' house in Alabama and would often use this exit as a pit stop on our way to, and back from their place. There's a McDonald's, Shoney's, and a Waffle House here, along with several gas stations, so it's a good place to stop on your way through the mountains. Little did I know that I'd be living off this very exit 20 odd years later, but that's a topic for another time.

I remembered sitting at one of the places we'd stopped at on a trip through as a kid, and staring at the interstate like I was doing now and having the same thoughts. I watched all the cars zipping by, noticed the people around at the restaurant and the exit, and wondered about who all these people around me were. I thought about the thousands of decisions and circumstances that had to occur in all of our lives to bring us together at this one particular point on the road at this instant in time. For a few brief moments all of our lives were connected to this one tiny little spot in the world. It made me realize how intricate life is and how all of us are connected to each other in some fashion, even if it's only for a few seconds as we pass each other on the road heading in opposite directions. It doesn't matter who we are, where we're heading, or what we're doing at the time; our lives all touch each other in some way.

Then I took my Hot Ham 'n Cheese combo (with a coke) and went home.

Free Food

Today was one of those unusual days...it started out extremely sluggish and I just knew it was going to be a slow one. It was the kind of morning where you stay in bed as long as you possibly can before you have to get up and start the morning processes. And even when you do pull yourself out of bed and get moving, you're still going in slow motion. But somewhere along the way time seemed to slip by and the day was suddenly over. I wasn't very busy either, so it wasn't a case of getting caught up in something and losing track of time. The day just kind of happened.

Work was a typical day; phone calls, faxes, and idle chit-chat until 5:00 rolled around. We have what they call a Lunch-n-Learn scheduled for Wednesday. Someone is coming in to discuss contract document changes for some construction stuff that the State now requires, and they'll be telling us about it and providing lunch. Extremely boring stuff and I'm not really looking forward to it, but hey it's a free lunch. I can sit there for an hour or so and listen to someone speak for a free sub and chips. I also have a lunch meeting planned with my boss on Thursday so that means a second free lunch this week. Yeah, I should probably be focusing on the work aspects of it more, but I really enjoy food.

And speaking of food, I enjoyed grilled steaks this evening with the Smiths. I'm watching their pets for them again over the next week and a half while they're vacationing, and Nancy was kind enough to have me over for supper. The steaks were perfect and it was a nice evening spending time with them and their kids.

For a day that I started out dreading, it ended up being not so bad.