Author: Dale

The Milk Root (a new drink)

Posted on by Dale

Last  Christmas, my son gave me a bottle of Root, a liqueur.  Lovely bottle, chic label design. The flavor was, as described on the bottle, very root beer-like, not at all unpleasant although I’ve never been a fan of root beer.  Still, as a mixer, it was a puzzle: such a strong flavor didn’t really call out for anything else to enhance it.

Friends gathered at our house this weekend for eating and drinking purposes—and by that I mean came on Saturday and ate and drank for 24 hours—and on Sunday morning I was pulling out all kinds of liqueurs for tasting and testing.  We came upon Root, and all agreed that it was tasty, but what to do?  Several combinations that I attempted were poured down the drain without even being offered to the group.  It was a tough one to crack. (The liqueur’s own website seems a bit at a loss as to how it might be used in a cocktail.  Their suggestions are kind of slack.)

Then one of us applied his analytical skills to the problem: what does one do with root beer anyway?  A root beer float!

And thus the problem was solved.  Behold, the Milk Root!

The Milk Root

  • 1 oz Root liqueur
  • 1 oz brandy
  • 1/2 oz Tuaca or other vanilla liqueur (optional but recommended)
  • 2 scoops vanilla ice cream (we prefer Kroger’s Private Selection Double Vanilla)
  • 2-3 oz milk

Put it in the blender, smoosh it up, and serve.

(You’d probably be mixing more than one at a time, of course.)

We debated about whether it needed anything else, but finally agreed that it was lovely just as it was.

Science: How does it work?

Posted on by Dale

There is a lovely little church on GA Hwy 16 between here and Carrollton, and recently I noticed their little sign board had changed. I don’t mean to be mean, but the snark is unavoidable.

The sign says, “WHY DOES THE ASPIRIN THAT WORKS ON MONDAY MORNING NOT WORK THE SAME ON SUNDAY?”

I think it means, “SO, YOU GODLESS HEATHEN DRUNKARD, YOU CAN DRAG YOUR ASS TO WORK ON MONDAY BUT CAN’T BE ARSED TO GET UP TO WORSHIP THE LORD THE MORNING AFTER?”  I think that’s the point.

But my inner self wants to answer, “Well, actually, given your crowd’s usual understanding of science in general and of biology in particular, IT MUST BE A MIRACLE!”

I regret my unkindness.

The superior rich

Posted on by Dale

One of the most gobsmacking brainfarts on the part of the conservative side of America is the inherent contradiction in their positions on a) tax cuts; and b) social welfare.  In a nutshell, it says that if we give the rich more money, they will work harder (with undoubted benefit to all of us), but if we give the poor more benefits (even if temporary, as is the norm), they will just get lazy.  We laugh, but the right wing believes it.

How, you might ask, is this even possible?  The answer is essentialism, a term I encountered recently in this Slate article.  As amateur philosophers, we all recognize that things can be grouped into categories, and often we base those groupings on the essence of the individuals.  For example, as the article says, dogs are “doggy” and cats are “adorable, fluffy little jerks.”

The philosophical trap we fall into, however, is that we start to believe that many surface attributes are in fact essential when they are not.  This would include some physical traits, such as sex, race, etc., but it can also include social traits or abstract traits, like gender (not the same as sex—see what I did there?) or religion.

Or economic status.

The researchers in the article devised statements to test peoples’ sense of essentialism with such phrases as ““It is possible to determine one’s social class by examining their genes.”  In other words, that’s just the way “those people” are—they were born that way.

Rich people were found to be much more likely to believe that their class status and that of others is determined largely by essentials.  Poor people are poor because they’re… you know… poor people.  People like us, on the other hand…

None of this surprises me at all.  I’m just glad to have a name for it.  Now if we could just find a cure for it…

A new anthropological term

Posted on by Dale

So recently the lovely first wife decided to have some rooms painted.

The main impetus was the condition of the Child’s room: it still had a fighter jet border around it, plus all those little smudges from plasti-tak adfixtures all over the place, plus all the wear and tear of boarding that particular human being over the years.

I was supposed to do it because I actually enjoy painting.  This was back when it looked as if I were going to be retired rather than unemployed, but when I was suddenly back at work we decided to go pro.

And then we decided that we might as well paint the den, which I specifically remember thinking seventeen years ago that we might as well wait to repaint it until one member of the family had grown up and left the premises.

And for some reason we decided that the kitchen needed freshening.

All of this is for differing values of we.

But all’s well that ends well, other than some frustration with choosing colors here and there, and now we have three “new” rooms. It’s lovely.

—

Have you ever been to an estate sale, or perhaps have been looking to buy a home, and you walk through the house thinking, “Jeez, they haven’t done anything to this place in years”? There are several valid reasons why that would be so.

First, of course, is the expense.  Maintaining a home is not cheap, and most people in the last decades of their lives don’t have a lot of extra cash to pay others to paint rooms, for example, and certainly don’t want to be clambering about on ladders themselves.

Second, you reach a point in your life where whatever extra income you do have you would rather spend on other things: travel, weddings (!), art, or quality gin.  Who cares whether there are smudges on the wall that a Mr. Clean eraser won’t get off?  Who cares that the breakfast nook chairs are beginning to loosen at the joints and will one day collapse?  Who cares that the nice hardwood floors betray your daily traffic patterns or long-gone pets’ bathroom habits?  Feh—I’d rather drive across the country.

Finally, there is a certain joie de vivre in realizing that après moi le déluge, if you know what I’m saying.  Who cares if it all decays into genteel shabbiness?  That’s the next guy’s problem.

Now watch closely as I munge this idea with another anthropological concept, that of nesting.

First, here’s a bit of a poem:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

—from “Men at Forty,” by Donald Justice

 

This is what our overall emotional feeling was while starting this project: let’s go ahead and prepare our nest for the rest of time, and then we’re done.  We’re through.  There will be no more large projects.  Our money will go to living the good life, not getting ready for the Tour of Homes.

It is precisely a form of nesting, and I have named it death-nesting. Grim? I suppose, but it’s a whimsical way to admit what we all have to admit eventually: every door that closes now is to a room we will not be going back to.  Opportunities narrow; options blink out. We have to set our final course.

And that final course is one that does not involve keeping the house completely fresh.  Leave that for those who are young enough to have time to think about a “new look” for the living room.  We’re going to Burning Man.  For differing values of we.

(And wait until you see our estate sale!)

Lichtenbergian goals, 2014

Posted on by Dale

It’s that time of year again for me to explain myself: the Lichtenbergians had our Annual Meeting last Saturday night, and as usual we had to declare our creative goals for the coming year.

I was astonished to find that I had actually met some of my 2013 goals, mostly because I could not remember what they were.  (I was not astonished to find that I hadn’t even blogged about them last  year.)  Honestly, all I could remember was that I had once again listed the Five Easier Pieces and a song for John Tibbetts as goals, and that I had done neither.  Also honestly, “continuing to work on the Book of the Labyrinth” was not that arduous a goal, but after the year I’ve had, I’ll take what I can get.

But recently I think I may have gotten traction in my creative impulses, and so I’ve gotten bolder for my 2014 goals.  Here they are:

Five Easier Pieces

A set of piano pieces that serve as companion to and apology for Six Preludes (no fugues).  I actually struck a blow at these over the year, but I think now I’m ready to proceed.

A song for John Tibbetts

This one just gets tougher the longer I wait, because the longer I wait, the more he becomes friends with real, world-wide famous composers and the better taste he develops. I have written the text, so that’s a start.

SUN TRUE FIRE

One of the most common form of spam comments on blogs these days is the kind that uses a netbot to assemble random passages of text from the internet at large and then paste them into the body of emails in blocks of about 50 words, accompanied by links to dangerous places.  Mostly these are about one “paragraph” long, but recently the Lichtenbergian site received one that is magnificent in its length and in its poetry.  You can see it here.

I want to write a work for chorus, soli, and orchestra based on this text.  In 2014, my plan is immerse myself in the possibilities of the text and to quite frankly “steal” bits from pieces of music that appeal to me and to write fragments of music based on those bits.  It’s kind of a training year in that regard.  In 2015, perhaps, I’ll start to work on the piece directly.  SUN TRUE FIRE.

Waste Books

To that end, and to all these ends, I am going to embark on a year-long waste book project.

One of the things Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is famous for is his aphorisms.  (I would direct you to the Lichtenbergian website to see some of them, but the Quote Rotator plug-in broke on the last WordPress update.  Try here.)  His practice was to jot down in a notebook all the random thoughts that occurred to him, and then to transfer them to better notebooks later.

He got the practice from merchants, who would scribble the day’s transactions down in such a “waste book” during the hurly-burly of business, then transfer them cleanly to the account books in the evening.

This is not an uncommon practice, of course.  Any writer worth his/her salt does this anyway; many do it electronically these days.  But I’ve found that I can get more ideas written down and remembered if I use pen and paper.

The impetus was an email from a fun company in Chicago that linked to one of their brands, Field Notes.  Always a sucker for office supplies, I actually subscribed to their “Colors” year-long subscription, not because I thought I would be getting the coolest notebooks ever—sorry, Field Notes, that’s still Moleskine—but because it would force me to do it: to write down every thought that comes to me about the various projects I’m working on, or thinking about working on, and then expanding on those thoughts in project-specific notebooks.

I even bought the cool little pine box to store them in.  It comes with dividers and a calendar.

I will have to add that the Field Notes notebooks are very nice indeed, and the guys at the company are pretty generous: in addition to the things I actually ordered, they threw in extra notebooks, pencils, etc.  I’m starting the year with fifteen notebooks altogether, three of which I have already begun.

Burning Man

I turn 60 in May, and I’m determined that I am going to go to Burning Man Festival this year.  My friends Craig and David, also celebrating milestones this year, are planning to be part of the team.  (There may be others in the months to come.)

Part of the gestalt of Burning Man is that you have to be a participant, not an observer, and an image of what I and the team could do to contribute to the process came to me last week.  I’m using the notebook to flesh those ideas out, document the process as it were.  That’s all I’m going to say about that for the time being.

A Christmas Carol

In a meeting with Newnan Theatre Company’s artistic director Tony Daniel recently, I offered NTC a shot at William Blake’s Inn and also a revival of my Christmas Carol.  He seemed interested in CC so I said I’d try to reconstruct the entire show, since all those MIDI files from decades ago have vanished.

You may imagine my astonishment when I was told at the Lichtenbergian meeting that indeed NTC was announcing my CC for next December.  Well.  It seems one of my goals for 2014 is to completely reconstruct the score for the show from my original hand-written score from 1981, since there’s nothing else to go on.

Over the years we did the show, it grew from a piano and cello kind of thing to a full-scale MIDI orchestral accompaniment.  The Overture, in fact, was never written down but developed completely in the sequencing software I was using at the time.  I’ve decided to go back to live accompaniment: piano, synth, cello, clarinet/flute, and glockenspiel/bells.  Essentially I’m having to approach the thing as a new work, and we all know how well I respond to that.

Still, it’s a public performance of my music and I mustn’t sneeze at that.  I’m really looking forward to it, because in reviewing the piece over the last month I was super-pleased to find that it still held up, and when I mentioned it on Facebook there was an immediate flurry of reminiscensces and quotes.  Heartwarming and encouraging, it was.

So there are my goals for this coming year.

Cras melior est.

A shift in need

Posted on by Dale

Last week, during the unfortunate production of Sound of Music, there was a commercial that caught my attention.

I’d show it to you, but it does not seem to have been posted online anywhere.  It had cheerful Salvation Army types loading toys out of a truck into a kind of community center, then stocking the tables with all the toys.  Then it followed a nice lady as she walked the tables and found exactly what she was looking for.  The final scene was the lady and her husband watching their little boy’s delight on Christmas morning as he found the perfect toy under the tree.

So, do you have that image in your head?  Do you see the nice lady and her home and family?

I am thinking that you don’t.

The nice lady was white and well dressed; she would not have been out of place in a Toy R Us commercial.  Her home was well appointed, and her family was plain vanilla, stock photo white middle class family.  There was not a trace of “neediness” about them.

Does anyone else find this a bit alarming?  The state of our nation’s economy is such that the Salvation Army thinks it is a good idea to market their services to the very people they would normally be hitting up for donations. Considering that three years ago they were still focusing their ads on the homeless and needy, I regard this as a dispiriting development in terms of national prosperity.

With corporate profits at record highs and wages at record lows, though (see here and here*), it should shock no one. This is the new normal, folks, and my only question is whether the nice Republican family in the commercial will continue to vote into office those people who crashed our economy and continue to suck the nation dry.

———

*Fourth paragraph: “Workers who rely on paychecks for their income have been running in place, financially speaking.”  As opposed to… hedge funds?  You see the problem we have here??

A new unnamed cocktail

Posted on by Dale

It is perhaps indicative that my first post since the Cross Country Trip should be about an alcoholic drink.  Since that time, I’ve started a new job, gone on Retreat with my Fellow Lichtenbergians, hot-tubbed with my friends at a mountain cabin for  Thanksgiving, and come up with two really snarky Liberal Rants, which I hope appear shortly on this blog.  And yet I haven’t blogged until I invented a new way to over-imbibe.  Hmm.

to_have_and_have_another_coverAnyway, in the living room I have a recent book, To Have and Have Another: a Hemingway cocktail companion, which is great fun, mostly of a handful of recipes and a great deal of literary attribution, history of legendary bars, and just plain gossip.  What more could one want?

On p. 236, we get the Villa America Special, named for the French Riviera home of Papa’s friends, Gerald and Murphy, who hosted anyone who was anyone of the period,

Gerald Murphy’s signature drink was the Villa America Special, although as the book points out, it’s basically a Sidecar.  That’s OK—I’ve rung a change on his basic recipe that I am refraining from naming because I cannot believe anyone hasn’t already done this and named it.  I’ll keep googling it.  (In the meantime, bookmark savoystomp.com.  Wow.  They hold forth at the Alembic in San Francisco, which, if you’ve been an Attentive Reader, you will remember is where the lovely first wife and I went on Haight Street on the second day of the trip.  They’re the ones who could not make us a Cinnamon Twist because they didn’t even have the ingredients.)

The Sidecar, of course, is just brandy, triple sec, and lemon juice.  Gerald Murphy gave his recipe as:

The Villa America Special and/or Sidecar

  • 1.5 oz Cognac or brandy
  • 1 oz. triple sec or Cointreau (or another liqueur of your choosing)
  • 3/4 oz. lemon juice

Rub the rim of a cocktail glass with lemon, then dip it into coarse sugar.  Shake ingredients with ice, then strain into the sugar-rimmed glass.

It was the parenthetical “or another liqueur of your choosing” that got me going.  As part of my on-the-job training, I have been developing an online course about vintage cocktails, and one of the objectives of the course is that the learner become so comfortable with the “chemistry” of cocktails that he/she is able to invent new ones.  And this one would seem to be simple.

So I surveyed my liqueur cabinet—as one does—and chose three to start with.

The first is a liqueur that I think I bought last Christmas to inflict on my friends: Mama Walker’s Glazed Donut Liqueur [MWGDL]. It is as nasty as you are imagining.  It tastes exactly like a Krispy Kreme, but it finishes with a horrible artificial-flavoring/Aspartame aftertaste.  Not even the 20-somethings who are attached to my household would take it and give it to their friends to finish off.  (You can also get MW’s Bacon and Pancake liqueurs, FYI.)

Today was its last chance before it becomes a libation—as in “poured out to the gods”—at the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting.  I mixed up the drink, gave it a good stir and sipped it.

Almighty Cthulhu, it was awful.  Down the drain it went.  (I should mention that I’m using an inexpensive brandy for all this.)  And so MWGDL will meet its demise as Corroborative Evidence in the flames of the Ash-Bound Brotherhood.

The third liqueur was Creme Yvette, a violet-flavored liqueur that was all the rage a century ago, but I never got to test it.

Because the second liqueur was Swedish Punsch, also a favorite of our immediate ancestors.  Trust me, it’s not common.  I had to order it online somewhere.  (I think there’s only one brand available in the U.S.)

So I made a Sidecar using Swedish Punsch, and for the sugar rim I used a Salted Caramel Sugar that we picked up at Pier 34, from spiceandtea.com.

Sidenote: This sugar is very very tasty stuff but quite expensive, and so one cannot just pour it out in a saucer and swirl your glass through it like margarita salt.  Here’s my devisement: take a saucer and a large serving spoon.  Pour your lemon juice—fresh, if you’re really serious—into the saucer, and a teaspoon’s worth of the sugar into the serving spoon.  Swirl the glass through the juice, then nudge the sugar in the spoon.  Not as fast as ye olde margarita salt, but you end up with less waste.  And sweet Cthulhu, it’s tasty.  [I have not been able to find a recipe to make your own.]

Swedish Punsch Sidecar, until I find a real name

  • 1.5 oz Cognac or brandy
  • 1 oz. Swedish Punsch
  • ½ oz. lemon juice

Rub the rim of a cocktail glass with lemon, then dip it into Salted Caramel Sugar.  Shake ingredients with ice, then strain into the sugar-rimmed glass.

I cut back on the lemon juice a bit; it might be with fresh lemon juice you could bump it back up to 3/4 oz.  I’m thinking if one used fresh lemon juice, you could start by paring off a wide swath of lemon peel to use as garnish.  It would look swell.

As far as adjustments, it might be fun to experiment with 1/4 oz of simple syrup or agave, or perhaps a dash of blood orange bitters.  More work is required.

Final verdict: not bitter, as so many artisanal concoctions are these days*, and not sweet like the old vermouthy things.  The salt and caramel of the sugar gives a great finish.  I like it a lot, which in practical terms means I’ve had three to make sure.

update: I cannot find on the intertubes this recipe.  I claim it as mine.  Now for a name…

_____

* A whole ‘nother post to be done on Cynar, current darling of mix-meisters of the past few years

The Great Cross Country Caper: The Day After

Posted on by Dale

In which a Woman fulfilled her Dream of Driving across This Great Land of Ours, accompanied by her Husband, who Hates to Drive

Starting a new job* sure eats into blogging time…

It’s been a week since we got home from our Great Cross Country Caper, and I think it’s time to do a post mortem.

It was amazing in the extreme.  My claim of hating to drive is true, but all that discomfort dissolves in the face of the incredible landscapes through which we drove.  Okay, in Texas that became an issue, but on the whole I was not going mad.

So let’s look at our itinerary and evaluate.

San Francisco

Do it.  It’s a great city with tons to do.  We only scratched the surface.  Plan ahead for hotel rooms and Alcatraz.

Fisherman’s Wharf is fun.  Don’t miss the Musée Mechanique.  You can skip Ghirardelli Square: it’s a puny shopping mall, and you can actually get the chocolate cheaper at the Walgreens at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Don’t miss the sea lions at Pier 39!  Shopping/dining is not bad there, either, although of course it’s all touristy.

Do drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and go up to the headlands overlook.  Be advised: you have to pay a toll going south back into the city, and they no longer take money.  Go here and link your rental car license plate with your credit card.  You can set a time limit on that, e.g., I set it for the two days we were in SF.

Cable cars are fun, but plan better than we did.  Riding the thing all the way from one end to the other is kind of pointless unless you have a destination; if the ride’s the thing, consider going up and down a couple of hills, then hop off and catch the next one going back.

Things we’ll do when we go back: Alcatraz; the Science Museum; The Presidio; Chinatown; art museums; the north headlands (which we would have had time for except for rescuing Chinese tourists).  Also, we’ll make it to Yosemite.

Muir Woods

It’s an hour north of the city.  Go. Just go.  Plan to spend 2-3 hours exploring this beautiful spot.  (Remember you have to pay the toll on Golden Gate coming back.)  Send me a banana slug postcard!

Las Vegas

Unless you’re with a group of great friends with whom you can yuk on America’s Gomorrah, you can skip it.  Really.  Trust me.  If your goal is the Hoover Dam, there are hotels between Vegas and the dam that would work just as well as Vegas and probably be cheaper.  I think we would have done better to use that two days to visit Yosemite/Sequoyah/Death Valley.

Hoover Dam

Go.  Its size and beauty make it an imperative.  Take the full tour.

The Grand Canyon

Go, and stay at least three days.  The lodges in the park require planning at least a year in advance—if Congress doesn’t crap all over your plans—but the hotels in Tusayan (right before the park) are fine.

The National Geographic Visitor Center there in Tusayan has a nifty iMax movie on the history of humans in the Canyon.  It’s both fun and awe-inspiring.

The Pink Jeep tour is fun—book it at the National Geographic center—and the Sunset Tour was especially handy for us since we planned a too-short stay, but if you have a couple of days you can find your own way.

In the park itself, start at the welcome center (which we didn’t get to) and then just meander.  The El Tovar Lodge is a good place to start, but make sure to go out Hwy 64 to the Watch Tower.  That’s a good spot to watch the sunset, but also consider Moran Point, which is where we were taken.

Save your pennies and go on a helicopter ride.  There are no words to describe the canyon as you fly through it.

Things we’ll do when we go back: hit the visitor center; stay in the park; raft; hike; take the 12-hour helicopter ride and land on the canyon floor to drink champagne.

Monument Valley

This is Navajo Nation property, so your National Parks card won’t get you in, but it’s cheap.  Again, staying at The View hotel would be great, but you have to book way in advance.

If you don’t have four-wheel drive, I wouldn’t risk driving the valley on your own.  Take one of the tours, preferably at sunset.  Tell someone you want to end up at the last Artist’s Point for sunset.  Dress warmly.

The gift shop is a good one.

Things we’ll do when we go back: camp overnight in the valley (not with my lovely first wife, but with my fellow Lichtenbergians).

Santa Fe

Take it easy here.  You really are going to be hit by the altitude.

Get a hotel close to the Plaza.  Ours, Las Palomas, was beautiful and convenient.  From there, most everything was walkable.  There is also an on-demand shuttle which will take you practically anywhere in the downtown area plus Museum Hill, although we didn’t use it.

The Georgia O’Keefe Museum is worth seeing, although as I stated before, all her iconic works belong to other museums.

The Plaza is fun, although it’s trending upper scale.  The galleries are fun to visit, especially if you’ve won the lottery or embezzled on a grand scale.

Canyon Road I’m going to recommend sight-unseen.  Just driving down the street was enough to convince me to come back and take an entire day poking around all those galleries.

The Museum of International Folk Art is by itself worth the trip. Do. Not. Miss. It.

Things we’ll do when we go back: Canyon Street galleries; more of the museums downtown and on the hill; more walking about side streets.

New Orleans

Again, try to stay 2-3 days.  There’s a lot of the city we didn’t get to see, and it’s worth seeing.

Bourbon Street is great fun.  Take ones and fives to distribute to the street performers: pay for your art, people!  Royal Street (one street over from Bourbon) has fun shops: antiques, arts, some entry level souvenir stuff.

The famous restaurants are famous, but our best meal was on a side street.  Don’t be afraid to get off Bourbon Street.

Jackson Square is OK; the street art sucks, but I highly recommend the fun of having a Tarot reading on the north side.

RiverWalk will probably be finished by the time you get there, but my guess is that it’s not going to be anything other than a mall.

Things we’ll do when we go back: the Arts/Warehouse district; more French Quarter; the cemeteries; neighborhoods of historic homes; actual jazz clubs.

Amtrak

We cannot praise Amtrak’s Crescent enough.  It was comfortable, convenient, and clean.  The food was excellent, and the staff was first-class.  We’re already planning our next train ride.

General advice

The two weeks we traveled were a very good time: no crowds, moderate weather.  I highly recommend early fall.

As you calculate the cost of the trip, remember to consider gas, tolls, admissions, entertainment, meals, postcards, postage, souvenirs.  It adds up.

Get a comfortable rental car.  We ended up with a brand new Ford Explorer.  If you’re going to Monument Valley, you will need four-wheel drive.  Ask if it has USB ports to a) charge your phone; and b) use your phone as a GPS device and as a music device.

Ask also for the driver’s manual for the car: there were things we never did figure out how to do on that car.  Make sure you know how the buttons and levers for the lights and the windshield wipers work before you leave the rental place.

Buy a National Parks Pass. It’s $80, and it gets your car and its passengers into every park and recreational area on your trip.  You can pick one up at Muir Woods and at other parks.  There’s a list of places on the website.  If you buy it ahead of time, it can take a couple of weeks to get, so plan ahead.

Check the 10-day forecast on your Weather Channel app as you pack.  It’s more the highs and lows you’re packing for, not necessarily rain.  It was a high of 90°-ish in Vegas and New Orleans, and a low of 28° in Grand Canyon and Monument Valley.

Whenever you’re driving, charge your phone.  Also, if you’re in an area where there is no signal, switch your phone to airplane mode so that it’s not draining your battery by constantly searching for a network.  Hint: major swaths of this country have no cell phone service at all.

Before you start your day’s journey, fill your gas tank.  There will not be another exit over the hill, and if there is, it will have no development attached.

When you arrive at your starting point, go to the nearest grocery store/Walmart and buy a case of bottled water to keep in the car.  Snacks are also a good idea. You can also save yourself the headache of flying with liquids by buying everything you need once you get there, especially if you’re not flying back.  Save plastic bags to clean out your car every day or two.

Make a plan for getting photos off your phone/camera if you don’t have enough storage for the whole trip.  Dropbox [dropbox.com] can make that automatic for you.

iPhone tip: Form the habit of swiping up from your lockscreen to get directly to the camera, rather than swiping open and then tapping Camera.  Saves precious seconds when that elk is standing right there.

Apps I was glad I had

  • TripIt: You can store all your reservations, plans, maps, etc. in this one app.  Needs internet to do its thing.  Trips are shareable with fellow travelers.
  • Hotel Tonight: Every day at noon, participating hotels in major cities (i.e., not Amarillo) dump rooms they’re trying to get booked for the night.  You can get some really good deals.  If America’s Cup is in town, it will let you know that.  They classify hotels as Basic, Solid, Luxe, or Hip.  You can book from within the app.
  • Hotels.com, Kayak, etc.: It doesn’t hurt to be able to check on reservations, book new ones, etc., especially if you’re really going to just wend your way across the country without a schedule.  We used these and Hotel Tonight once we got past Santa Fe.
  • SimpleResize: If you’re blogging and need to upload smaller, optimized photos, this will do the trick.  Once you’ve adjusted the settings for width, etc., they stay that way until you change them.  The program saves back to your Photos app as a duplicate; you have to do a little eyeballing and mental tricks to remember which ones are your duplicates when it comes time to upload. Protip: save a bunch at one time and the duplicates will all be in a row. The app takes you back out to the list of folders after every save, but that’s a minor annoyance.  (iPhone only, not iPad)
  • FTPOnTheGo: Only if you’re like me and prefer to upload photos directly to your own location on the server rather than let your blogging software put it where it wants.  Simple to use, but set it up and test it before you hit the road and realize all your server settings are on your laptop back home.
    Protip: develop a naming system for your trip photos (mine was cc + day number+ underscore + location + ordinal number); as you upload the first one, rename it and copy the stem, i.e., cc5_canyon.  That way you can hit the little x to erase the gibberish name, then slow-tap to bring up Paste, paste in the stem, and then just type the next number on your list.
    Also protip: I had a miniature Moleskine notebook in my pocket, and I wrote down each of those numbers and a reminder of what the photo was.  Made it a lot easier to write coherently and insert the right photo without fumbling.
  • DropBox: For storing excessive photos.
  • StarWalk: OK on your phone but phenomenal on your iPad.  (You need this one whether you’re traveling or not!)
  • iWant, AroundMe, and Yelp: We tended to ask our hotel people for recommendations for dining, but on the road it helps to know how many hundreds of miles away the nearest food is.
  • AAA: Didn’t help me any with the Chinese tourists because my phone was dead, but boy it would have been useful!
  • Forecast: I use this all the time anyway because it’s phenomenal: it compiles data from weather radar maps and tells you how much it’s going to rain and when: light rain in 3 minutes; medium rain for 26 minutes, then clear for 15 minutes.  It’s not an App Store app; it’s a web app.  Go to forecast.io on your phone.  It will prompt you how to save it to your home screen as an app.
  • Wonkette.com: Because snark-deprivation is a terrible thing.

—————

We—my lovely first wife and I—are among the fortunate: we could afford to do this, to fly to  San Francisco and then take two weeks to drive back.  If I hadn’t had to start the new job* we would have taken three weeks.

It was expensive, but here’s a lesson we learned when we were a lot younger about travel: it’s worth it.  True, had I still been unemployed I might have held back on buying a few things, but probably not.  I had a charge card, and I was prepared to use it.  And to pay it off for months if necessary.  If you see something that really speaks to you, buy it.  You will not pass that way again, and if you do, it won’t be there.

Even if you’re on a budget, plan to splurge on a really nice meal every two or three days.

—————
* I have not blogged about this, but the Monday after we got back from the trip, I started at my new position as director of Online Faculty Develoment at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton.

The Great Cross Country Caper, Day 13: The Crescent

Posted on by Dale

Up by 5:00, showered, revamped clothing plans—since my quick-dry travel clothes do not dry overnight if you’ve actually soaked them—in the cab by 5:30, at the Amtrak station by 5:45.

On one of his old blogs, Mike Funt has a great rant about train vs. plane.  I will now steal shamelessly from him.

Two bags checked for free.  Two carry-ons.

No security line.  No taking off of shoes and unpacking of CPACs. (In fact, I checked my overnight bag.) No photo ID.

Wide seats, only two on a side.  Footrests, because your legs can’t reach the seat in front of you.  Legrests that you can pull up from your seat, which of course reclines.

Large restrooms.

Dining cars.

The fact that it will take eleven and a half hours to get to Atlanta instead of seven driving or an hour or so flying is largely irrelevant.  Let’s keep our eye on the main idea here: I  don’t have to drive the final leg of this CROSS COUNTRY DRIVING EXTRAVAGANZA.

So we’re seated, rolling, cleared Lake Ponchartrain…

…and have stopped at our first stop.  Next up: breakfast!

—————

I mentioned the dining car, did I not?  That is separate from the lounge car, which serves snacks and that kind of thing.

The dining car, on the other hand:

Yes, tablecloths, cloth napkins, full menu, full service.  I like the carnations, don’t you?

—————

After lunch, we asked if we could see the sleeping cars and one of our hosts showed us to the front of the train to look at a couple of empty ones.  The ‘A’ and ‘B’ sleepers are fairly tiny but will sleep two, plus they come with their own toilet.  The ‘H’ sleepers are a bit more like the Orient Express, though still spartan, and come with a shower.  Quelle luxe!

We’ve left Birmingham behind—next stop Atlanta.

I have to say that if we have enough time in our travel plans, the train is definitely to be preferred.

—————

We’ve crossed the border into Georgia. (“Do you heff your peppers ready, hm?”) Having traveled through the absolute wastelands stark landscapes of northern Arizona and New Mexico, I find myself wondering what the residents of those places would make of ours?

All that green!  Even on the hills and mountains!  And sometimes lakes, big ones!

And everywhere, little towns—with houses!   With grass and flowers.  All of them connected by many intersecting roads.  With grocery stores!

And 3G/4G networks almost the entire way, even on the train.  It’s insane!

—————

And yay, Atlanta!

And as you can see, we made it safe and sound.  O you doubters!

The Great Cross Country Caper, Day 12: New Orleans

Posted on by Dale

We returned the car this morning to Budget, including gassing it up and confessing that we had no idea when, where, or how the front left fog light had gotten busted.  (We noticed it in Santa Fe.)

Eerie coincidence of the day: while driving to gas up the car, we crossed Claiborne St.  As in Delores Claiborne, our semi-failed opera back in San Francisco.

Then we hopped the streetcar back down to the River Walk, which is mostly just a big outlet mall and is under renovation/construction.  So we just walked up and down the river for a while. I was checking where we were vis-á-vis Jackson Square on the phone when I saw that we were standing directly in front of the Museum of  the American Cocktail:

NOOOOOOOOO! THE VACATION IS RUINED!!!!1!!

The website says nebulously that they’ve packed everything up for the move to their new location elsewhere in NOLA “next spring,” but there’s no date.  The only clue is a sidebar invitation to celebrate World Cocktail Week, May 6-13, 2013, so maybe they mean the spring of 2014, which means I don’t have to be grumpy about not knowing about the place until it was too late to track it down.

Also, Alert Readers will have noticed the most important thing here: both World Cocktail Week and World Labyrinth Day fall within the orbit of My Birthday.  Just sayin’.

Then we hopped the streetcar again went downstream towards Jackson Square.  We got off and began walking, stopping at only a few spots on the way.

There was this:

Well alrighty then.  It’s good to know that before renting.

Jackson Square is where the street art folk display their wares.

All of it was schlock, just plain out tourist art, mostly “voodoo” related, and almost all NOLA postcard material in varying low-grade styles.  You see the same thing outside the Metropolitan Museum in NYC.  One website referred to all of this as a plein air artist community. I suppose.

Here is the Cathedral of St. Louis sitting on the far side of the square:

If you walk around the square to the cathedral, you will find the psychics.  I had proposed to my lovely first wife that we get ourselves a tarot card reading just for kicks, and so when we came across these people with their small tables and lawn chairs, I took us to the first one we saw.

This is Michelle:

I don’t know if you’ve had a tarot reading from a gifted reader.  Of course everything about it comes from you—there’s no “magick” about them—but the synchronicity can be gobsmacking.  I used to have a friend on America Online way back in the day who did readings in one of the chat rooms, and she was amazing.  I have a tarot app on my iPad, and occasionally I’ll pull it up to trigger some thoughts about issues that bother me.

Since you’re pulling cards at random, it’s pretty clear that your brain will make sense of whatever turns up, but it’s astonishing how apt most of the cards turn out to be.

Michelle’s method was to give you definitions of the six “realms” your reading would address, and at each one you would take the deck (the blue one in the above photo) and select a card from it and give it to her.  She built this stack of six cards, weighted against the wind, and then she spread them out, again weighing them down with little glass stars.

She went through each card and its meaning within its assigned realm.  I don’t know which deck she was using—there are many—but each card had interesting details.  She pointed out some, and asked if you had questions about any details which jumped out at you.

She was very good at connecting the cards to each other, and, again, the synchronicity for each of our readings was pretty amazing.  (Both fit neatly into where we are in our lives/careers at the moment.)  Great fun, and a lot to think about in each case.  It just now occurs to me that my lovely first wife drew The Moon for her first card, while I drew The Sun for my last.

The only thing that didn’t make sense to me about my reading was her insistence that I was destined for, absolutely must decide to enter politics.  For the greater good of all.

Can you imagine me running for office?  I chose to decide that my manipulative, problem-solving abilities are meant to be used to assist the faculty at West Georgia to realize their potential in online instruction.  That’s got to be it, right?

Michelle was skeptical.

Nice long session with Michelle, who was articulate, educated—she was reading a book on language and its structures when we walked up, and she constantly alluded to literary and Biblical topics—and soothing.  We liked her a lot.  Look for her if you’re in NOLA.

After our encounter with the cosmos, we walked into the cathedral.  This is the altar:

And here is the barrel vault:

Kind of austere, I thought, for such an exuberant society.

Repaired for lunch there on the square.

It is raining off and on as Tropical Storm Karen bears down on us.  My decision to end our trip here and take the train back to Atlanta has been smarter than I thought.  I knew that I didn’t want to drive another two days after this, especially if we did Bourbon St. again tonight (we’re about to do Bourbon St. again tonight), and I especially didn’t want to do it in a tropical storm.  So yay, Amtrak!

After lunch, we wandered Royal St., popping into one gallery or the other depending on what appealed to us.

I bought art:

The artist is named Darrell George; the work (oil on canvas) is Ingenuity Pathway.  It’s about 14 x 20.

Not a very good photo, but that was my reference photo as we walked on down Royal St.  Once we got to the end and I realized nothing had appealed to me as much as that piece, we went back and got it.  We had a nice visit with the young man staffing the place, and then the owner came in and we just relaxed in the chairs and had a fun chat with everyone.  It’s being shipped for us.

On down Royal St., we came across punk zydeco:

You can’t really see all the tattoos and the piercings, but they’re there.

Again I can’t embed video, but here’s a link: http://dalelyles.com/crosscountry/dalelyles.com/crosscountry/cc12_nola14.mov

One more comment about art/nonart.  In one of the tonier galleries on the street, the window was taken up with a large work, painting, using enamels of some kind.  Very abstract, very drippy and pool-ly.  And not at all art.

Detail of upper left corner:

I had to stop and look at it and puzzle out why I thought it was offensive a) that someone should produce this thing; and b) that someone should put a huge price tag on it and put it in their gallery.  I finally decided this: Jackson Pollock used his media to create pieces of complexity and depth;  this guy was content to let the medium do the work.  I know that’s not clear, if you saw this crap up close and live, you’d understand.

We walked back to the hotel, pausing to snap a couple of iconic photos:

So yay, Mississippi.

A piece of public art about Katrina, right next to our hotel:

Made from salvaged materials.

Now we’re back at the hotel to recharge our phones and our bodies.  Here it is October, and it’s still sweltering.  We’ve been dressing in layers almost the entire trip, but honey let me tell you, here in NOLA I’m only wearing one layer, so when it’s time to take that off, it’s time to head to the room.

—————

Yes, we went back to Bourbon St.

The first thing we saw when we go there was yet another parade:

We picked up a couple of beads without having to work for them.

Here we are before going in to Jean Lafitte’s Old Absinthe House:

We had stopped at the Old Absinthe House last night, but the service was terrible (only two bartenders when they could have used one for each side of the rectangular bar), and when I selected La Fée for my hit, I was told only then that they were out of it.  We moved on.

But if we were going to partake fully in the debauchery of NOLA, I needed the absinthe, so we returned.  This time I was more aggressive in being served and settled for an absinthe that I saw on the bar and which of course I already possess, Grande Absente.

Here it is:

Absinthe, besides having a ridiculously high alcohol content, is all about the ritual.  There’s the slotted absinthe spoon, upon which you place a sugar cube.  Pour the absinthe over the sugar cube and light it.  When the sugar cube goes out, pour cold water over it to dissolve it.  The absinthe turns cloudy, or to aficionados, louche [LOOSH], which in French means literally “cross-eyed.”  Possibly because of its association with the wickedness of absinthe, it has taken on an extra meaning, “disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way.”  I like this.  I shall aspire to this.

We walked down the street, stopping at one or two bars along the way.  Having eaten lunch fairly late in the day, we were in no hurry to dine.

Street performers were rife:

This was a team of four break dancers who were not only fun dancers but who also had a hysterical and polished schtik to go with it.

The violinist and guitarist are playing Pachelbel’s Canon.  The tuba player is scatting to it because of course why not?  When he finished to general applause, the girls launched into a jazz version of the piece.  Awesome.

At some point, one of our party took a photo of an extraordinarily healthy young man dancing on a bar—we did not actually enter the establishment; this was from the street—whose broad chest and firm, tan buttocks might have been the cause of the ladies stuffing cash into his precariously worn nether-garment.

It’s because of things like this that we enjoyed New Orleans far more than we thought we would.  Having been dismayed by the life-draining energies present in Vegas, we were prepared to be on guard for the same energies in this, America’s other Gomorrah.

But quite frankly, New Orleans is life-affirming.  Yes, Bourbon St. is over the top, but on the whole it exudes fun and naughtiness, more corset and tutu than tasseled pasties, if you see what I mean.  The food is better, the drinks are fine if you avoid the frozen slushy ones (avoid the frozen slushy ones), the music permeates the night, and the fact that the culture has developed over centuries means that it’s all on a human scale.  In Vegas, you meander down a four-lane divided highway with neon lights.  In New Orleans, you are the street, along with all the other revelers.

New Orleans invites you to partake of the pleasures of the senses.  Vegas just wants your money.

We also detoured onto Royal for a while, and several stores were still open.  One was Goorin Brothers Hats.  We went in.  I do not need another hat.  I have every hat I need. So did I buy the excellent suede fedora that is truly Indiana Jones’s father’s hat?  Yes.  Yes I did.

We were on Royal St. mostly because we were looking in vain for a restaurant that one of our party remembered bookmarking on our walk from the Jackson Square to Bourbon St., a nameless restaurant on a street that did not exist.  After we finally gave up on that as a bad deal, we found the Orleans Grapevine Wine Bar & Bistro.  It was an excellent meal, and far better than the slice of pizza I had set out expecting or the po boys for which we had been fruitlessly searching.

After that, we walked back down Bourbon to Canal and caught a cab back to the hotel, ready to be asleep by midnight so that we could arise at 5:00 a.m. to catch our train.