Microsoft has ended their two year marketing affiliation with Leon Lebron James wherein he served as a spokesperson for their products.
I was curious about how Microsoft came to the decision to use an overgrown athlete to peddle software to a customer base, many of whom are geeky, 98 pound weaklings. My answer came in the last sentence of the article. To quote the newspaper report, ” The Microsoft executive who struck the deal resigned as head of the company’s media network.”
Yesterday, I did two different sessions on the treadmill, walking for 6 tenths of a mile each at a speed of 2.5 miles an hour. No world record but…
This morning, for the second time, I took a shower by myself, being careful not to get my healing incision wet. Woo Hoo.
Susie, who is death on plastic and styrofoam containers bought this huge plastic bottle of liquid Irish Spring for me to use. I have been a proponent of bar soap since FDR was president but Susie says that the residue of soap scum on the ceramic tile generated by a bar of soap far outweighs the harm done to the environment by an empty plastic bottle. I disagreed vociferously but to no avail.
On our last trip to the barn, I brought my bottle of Head and Shoulders from the camper. I have used this brand (albeit, the generic version) for as long as I can remember. Susie is trying to wean me from this, concerned that prolonged usage might damage my hair. Again, I disagreed vociferously and once again, to no avail. She stocked the shower in the condo with this smell good stuff that just didn’t feel right to me.
Me and my hair were glad to get back to my H & S but it won’t surprise me any if that bottle disappears. I have hidden a whiskey flask full of my shampoo under the mattress just in case.
It fell to me this morning to make breakfast and my first thought was to have eggs and grits. But when I opened the refrigerator, what to my wondering eyes did appear was an eight inch long, three inch diameter roll of Amish made mush. Susie had purchased it in hopes of jump starting my appetite and it surely did the trick. There is nothing better than dropping a slice of cold mush into a very hot skillet containing a dollop or two of scalding olive oil. There is a lot of water in Amish mush so the oil and water spatters like the dickens so I’m always prepared to suffer a little when I fry it.
It is worth all the trouble, however, when you let one of those crispy, golden, piping hot cookies of mush melt in your mouth. Chances are I’ll end up with a scorched tongue but its a small price to pay.
Mush figures prominently in my early days although I have no idea if my mom bought it or made her own. I’m under the impression that mush is made from grits only the mush is a bit less mushier in its consistency. Hence the name mush.
Mush was invented and served at the very First Thanksgiving after Miles Standish accidentally invented this delicacy while trying to perfect a turkey stuffing made with pine cones and corn. Christopher Columbus was so impressed that after dinner, he asked for the recipe and took the list of ingredients (mashed corn, more mashed corn) back to Queen Isabella in Spain. She subsequently served it at a State dinner and was later stoned to a pulp by a enraged crowd of commoners after refusing to turn over the recipe. Again, Hence the name mush.
Tomorrow, we’re going to sit down to turkey and all the trimmings. I wanted to write something that woud convey the thanks I feel at just being alive. Susie and I have now spent 45 Thanksgivings together and we have come a long way in that time. To illustrate this, I am going to paste my Thanksgiving column for 2006 into this post. Have a great holiday
g2
It was 1964, just barely a year after the assassination of President John Kennedy. My wife, Susie and I were living in Lansing, Michigan having arrived there three weeks earlier for a new job. We had been married 5 months and found ourselves facing our first Thanksgiving together away from home and families.
Michigan was a different place than I had ever been in. There was snow on the ground when we got there and there was even more snow on the ground as Thanksgiving approached. I was beginning to have second thoughts about the new job.
The best thing to be said about this job was that it offered opportunity. On the other hand, it didn’t, initially at least, offer much money. We found ourselves living on a shoestring and the optimism of youth. We were also in the throes of a housing crisis. Students at Michigan State University were occupying all the 1 bedroom apartments in town; the only kind of place we could afford.
We were forced to rent a whole house with 3 bedrooms. Luckily, the place was out at the edge of town so the rent wasn’t much more than the apartments in the city. Of course, there was no snow removal and we had no shovels so we constantly tracked the stuff inside.
The little bit of furniture we had acquired in our short time together seemed lost in the house. We had no kitchen table so we made do with a card table. The 2 chairs we had acquired were too high so the card table rested on our legs when we were seated. We had to make sure everything we needed was on the table before we sat down because the balancing of the table only worked with two people, one on each side.
Also, there was a slight problem in that the house had no refrigerator and neither did we. There was no money to buy one so we solved this dilemma by leaving items requiring refrigeration on the back steps. It was cold enough outside to preserve our milk, lunch meat and a few condiments and we congratulated ourselves on our ingenuity. However, once the neighborhood dogs stumbled upon our hot dogs and bologna, it was obvious we should have given this more thought.
We solved the problem by moving our refrigerated products into the smallest bedroom and then opening the window. This created a huge refrigerator when the door was closed. It required a little experimentation to keep our milk from freezing so I became quite adept at regulating the room temperature by varying the size of the window opening.
The Thanksgiving holiday was a big deal in both our families and we wanted to continue the tradition. However, what with there not being much money to spare, we found ourselves just a few days before the holiday still having no idea what we would eat. There was just the 2 of us so a whole turkey was much more than we could eat or afford. A ham was also out of the question for the same reasons. We needed something smaller and cheaper. We were in a quandary as we walked through the supermarket aisles until we came to a freezer case where we came across a frozen duck.
. A duck, eh? What with being from meat and potatoes families, neither of us had ever eaten anything as exotic as a duck. It seemed a good time to become sauve and debonair so we took that duck home to what was probably Lansing, Michigan’s largest refrigerator.
Susie spent the better part of Thanksgiving day, basting that duck with an orange and honey glaze that slowly turned the duck a golden brown. She captured the drippings from the duck and turned them into a wonderful looking gravy.
When we sat down to balance that card table on our legs, we gave little thought to what lay ahead in our lives. Children, careers, good times and bad times. None of that mattered. All we knew was that we were about to share our first Thanksgiving together by eating a roast duck.
It was awful. It was as greasy as the floor in a quick lube station and the gravy made from the duck drippings was so sweet, it made the mashed potatoes taste like duck flavored ice cream.
We lasted in Michigan only a little more than 3 months. My job depended on good transportation and we didn’t have it. Shortly after the New year began, our 8 year old gray Volkswagen Beetle gave up the ghost. The thing threw a rod through it’s little engine, stranding me 50 miles away from Lansing with only 30 cents in my pocket.
It was a blessing in disguise. The heater never worked anyway, an automotive trait that was not unusual in those days but one that was intolerable in the frozen wasteland of central Michigan. We found ourselves with no transportation nor any resources to acquire any. It was time to go back to Indiana and lick our wounds.
I rode a Greyhound bus to Indianapolis, borrowed my father-in-law’s car and returned to Michigan to pick up Susie all in the same day. The optimism with which we had entered Michigan with was gone but life has a way of working things out and it did for us.
Now here we are preparing to give thanks for our 42 Thanksgivings together and for our lives working out better than we ever dared to dream they would. Also, we’re not in Michigan; we’re in Florida. There is no snow on the ground nor will there be any. The only thing we will track into our camper is sand.
In our oven will be an 8 pound turkey breast basted only by butter. It’s still too much for just 2 people but chances are we’ll find somebody to share it with.
* * * * * * *
G2 note: Last summer, Susie and I went to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and we drove through Lansing on the way. We made a valiant effort to find that house on the edge of town but we had no luck. As a matter of fact, we never even found the edge of town. It was just as well. I would never have recognized the house anyway without 2 feet of snow piled up around it.
about the Christmas season being nigh, it was erased this evening when I saw my first Chia Pet commercial of the season. Can the Clapper lady be far behind?
The Chia people are still pushing the scooby doo model. How long ago was that dog on television and how old would you have to be to even know who he is / was?
Personally, I think it’s time for some new figures. Richard Simmons, Don King and Barbra Striesand come to mind.
A fourteen year old girl’s parents are suing Bloomington south high school to force the school to let her play boy’s baseball even though a lawsuit is not necessary.
You know, one of the unseen pitfalls of growing old is having lived through three or four of these social revolutions and still not understanding what it is that drives people to do this sort of thing.
Barring an operation of some sort, girls are still girls and boys are still boys.
Yesterday we retrieved my old Sears treadmill and its in the back of the truck. It’s also very heavy. This morning, I had the bright idea to call the office of the codo complex to see if a couple of the maintenance workers who work on the complex could lift it out of the truck and get it in the house for us.
Susie reminded me that if we could get someone to help, I probably should tip them. I don’t know why, but this struck me the wrong way. I had envisioned the request as a neighbor helping neighbor kind of thing and I suppose that was a naive way to look at things. Maybe it’s unreasonable for me to expect people to help out someone in need without expecting something in return. My God, it sounds like I may be a closet liberal. Then again, maybe it’s just that I was raised in a small town where helping out when it’s needed is just assumed.
Anyway, I just forgot the whole thing and I will wait until my son gets off work to do it for me.
If you are interested in my new book, there is an order form at
One of the views I have taken with this bypass surgery. Cklick on link below.
http://www.reporter-times.com/stories/2008/11/18/opinion.qp-1716209.sto
Today was the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, an unbelievable event in which the reverend Jim Jones convinced 900 people who had followed him to Guyana to kill themselves with cyanide. Anybody else out there old enough to remember that? 900 People!!
Thank God he wasn’t a television preacher.
