West Coast Tour

We are back from our eleven-day West Coast Tour.  Had lovely meals and grand reunions with lots of old friends and colleagues.  Cindy got to spend four days in Ellensburg, playing music, revisiting old haunts and getting her hair done (she looks great) by one of her favorite stylists.  I was in Phoenix chairing my first meeting of the NBCC Foundation Board, which went well - mostly because the board is so great and doesn’t need much leadership.

Interesting aside on the flight from Phoenix to San Diego:  On the way to the gate I had helped a flight attendant look for something she had dropped. I found it for her and we talked a bit and sure enough she was working my flight to San Diego. We were delayed by about fifteen minutes and after the flight took off I talked to her in the back of the plane and asked about the delay.  She said they had to go and find an extra seatbelt extender for a passenger. I asked how many they carried on this little 320 and she just smiled and said, “ When I started flying thirty years ago, we never had seatbelt extenders.  About twenty years ago every plane had one, ten years ago we had two, now we carry five and on this flight we had six passengers who needed them, and NONE of them were pregnant!”  For those of you who fly a lot, you know that you have to be really, really large to need a seatbelt extender and I’ll bet the way things are going, each plane will have to have ten by the end of this decade.

We met again in San Diego for another five days of a mixture of work and play.  We stayed at a Sheraton, which wasn’t really great but had a balcony overlooking the harbor and North Island, which is home to three carriers and lots of planes and which kept me on the balcony for hours.  There is always activity on and in the harbor and it was fun to watch cruise ships, naval vessels and recreational boats coming and going, while at the same time enjoying dolphins cavorting and fish jumping.  We mostly walked everywhere, sometimes for hours and hours and as a result got our big city fix that should last for a while.

We have been spending all of our ‘free’ time unpacking the 28 boxes that had been delivered from Moscow the day we departed on the trip.  For the life of me I can’t understand what I was thinking when we decided what to ship back from Russia.  Did I really think we needed six more Champagne glasses to add to the twenty we now have?  How many beer coasters does one household really need?  Certainly the large unopened jug of delicate liquid laundry detergent, that can’t even be used in the machine we have here, will prove indispensible at some point in our lives.  It is now official; I have more pairs of reading glasses of all magnifications and styles than Fred Sanford ever had!

It appears that it rained almost every day we were gone and has rained every day that since returning, which made the grass green and tall - and the arugula that Cindy planted before leaving is now ready for salads and pizza topping.  I’ll be able to make lots of pesto with the gloriously green basil and tonight the mint will marry some Cuban rum for a merry mojito.

I read today that Frick and Frack from Moscow will be swapping roles for the next twelve years insuring that the rich will get richer and the poor will continue to long for the good old days of Communism.  The Ruble is at a two year low, which seems to always happen when we leave a country, and the economy has stalled in Russia the way it has in Greece and Italy.  Not much to make the average Russian smile, but then again, they never were a fun filled lot. The average Russian citizen has many reasons to be glum.  “History has not served Mother Russia well.  In fact, the 20th century was disastrous for Russia.  First, there was World War I, which cost 2 million lives.  Then, the overthrowing of the Tsars in the 1917 Revolution and the following Russian Civil War, which cost 7 million lives.  Right after that was World War II, which cost 26 million lives.  Then Stalin purged 20 million of his own people.  Then the rise and fall of communism and the sudden shift from Socialist Republic to despotic kleptocracy under the Putin KGB-derived regime.  And, they have to fly Aeroflot all the time.   Hand me the vodka, dorogaya!”  This was quoted from a blog posted by a friend of a friend – here is the link if you’d like to read more: The Krez Chronicles

I had thought that I was done with traveling for a while but I’m not. I depart on Thursday for a six-day trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. None other than the charming Maria Louisa, Princess of Bulgaria, has invited me to the Twentieth Anniversary of the American University in Bulgaria.  You may remember that I met her on a flight from Munich to Lisbon and we had a grand conversation and it wasn’t until a week later that I found out she was a Princess.  It will be fun to attend this and it will also be an opportunity for me to advance some programming at NBCC.  So, Cindy will have to step up for next Sunday’s missive and I’ll try to send her some pearls of wisdom from Bulgaria.

As most of you know, I love to cook chicken and I thought I had tried almost all the time honored ways of preparing it, but I was wrong.  I came across a little clip in the NYT online dining section that was done by Mark Bittman, which has given me a whole new perspective on roasting a chicken. It is simple, elegant, and produces the best roasted chicken you can imagine.  You need a nice heavy cast iron frying pan, which you place in an oven and heat it until it is about 500°.  While it is heating, prepare your bird any way you like. Since we have tons of herbs, I stuffed the bird with fresh rosemary and sage and then I placed lots of sage leaves between the skin and flesh of the breast and thigh.  I rubbed the chicken with good olive oil and doused it with coarse salt and fresh pepper.  When the oven has been at 500° for about ten minutes, take out the pan, place the chicken in and get it right back in the hot oven for about fifteen minutes until it begins to brown. Turn the oven down to about 350° for another thirty minutes or so, depending upon the size of the bird - and bam, you have a perfect chicken. (Be VERY careful handling the hot cast iron pan).  While the chicken was setting up, I drained the juices from the pan and scraped up the little bits of chicken skin and then placed the pan on the stove top and added a bit of the rendered chicken fat and threw in about a cup and a half of parboiled chunks of potatoes that had been cooled and drained.  I added some herbs de Provence, a handful of chopped garlic and some salt and pepper, and in six minutes they were cooked to a golden brown.  I served the chicken and potatoes with simple boiled and buttered carrots and some bone dry wine from Burgundy and it was a meal to remember.

From CC 18 Sept:  San Diego is such a delightful city and we are having a ball reliving old memories and catching up with friends.  In the meantime I had a lovely 3 days in Ellensburg Washington while Wm worked in Phoenix.  If Ellensburg weren’t so difficult to reach I think we’d seriously consider moving back there – we still get coffee sent to our house from there, so think of the money we’d save on shipping!

I’ll admit that I have to keep reminding myself why we left San Diego, aka Paradise, but the fact that we sold our house there at the optimum time is a good way to assuage any regrets. In addition, I remind myself that we wouldn’t have had the grand adventures in Bahrain and in Moscow if we’d stayed in San Diego.  Life is full of choices and nothing is ever perfect, and we all have to make the very best of whatever we encounter.

Best from Charles Town, Cindy and Wm

Ten Years Later

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Why does that date sound familiar?  We are in San Diego, exactly where we were ten years ago.  All of the radio stations and TVs seem to be hell bent on examining every little detail of that date.  All I remember is that my first thought was that I needed to get to my office immediately and make sure that our Muslim students at our language program were safe from the yahoos that I knew would be coming around campus in their trucks and SUVS.  We all made sure everyone was safe and arranged for counseling for anyone in the college that needed it; none did, and we continued to do what we normally did.

We landed in the mid-afternoon yesterday and had time to take a lovely walk along the harbor and for the life of me I can’t understand why we ever left.  This has to be one of the most magnificent cities in the world.  It is a typical day here in San Diego.  The weather people on the radio and TV have the best jobs in the world.  Every day they only have to say, “Sunny with blue skies, high in the mid-seventies, lows in the mid-sixties, no chance of rain, snow or hurricanes.  

We are here for two days and then I head to Phoenix for meetings and Cindy to Ellensburg for meetings with friends.  We’ll reconvene here on Thursday for another four days before heading back to Charles Town.  We had five days of rain and I had to mow the lawn in the rain since the grass was as tall as corn on the fourth of July.  I finally figured out that I had an attachment for just such mowing, but it took me half a day to figure that out.  Things went much faster after that.

We had a marvelous time in Florida for Megan’s wedding.  We now have a new son and two new and beautiful granddaughters aged 13 and 16 and we couldn’t be happier.  Everything went like clock work and we were able to find some quiet time to be with the grandkids and with Valley and Kent.  The wedding was at an old chapel on the beach in Boca Grande.  We all had a ball and the reception was just delightful with no drama and lots of laughs and great dancing.

Our trip to Florida taught me that when it comes to hotels, sometimes less is much more.  Our little hotel in Punta Gorda came with free Wi-Fi, bottles of water, great coffee in the lobby and more smiles that you can imagine.  Everyone was so helpful and genuinely happy to be of service, all for $72 dollars a night for a lovely room with a balcony overlooking the marina.  Our first night was in a grand hotel in St. Petersburg, which turned out to be one of the loveliest cities I’ve ever visited, at least the water section was.  I’m told that downtown can be a bit raunchy but we had a ball.

We, and a few hundred others, had a lovely run along the harbor this morning.  There was an awareness race for Crohn’s Disease and there were three or four hundred folks running in the early sunshine to the driving rhythms of a rock band, who judging from the way they were playing, had not seen sunshine for years.  We got off the beaten path and while Cindy continued to run, I walked along the park where the USS Midway is based.  It is now a lovely museum and there are tons of great planes on her deck.  I walked near a family - father and mother and two-year-old girl.  All of a sudden the little blond girl stopped walking and pointed to the ground yelling for her mother who was a few steps ahead.  I had thought that perhaps she had seen a bug or something but the mother said something to her in a Slavic language and then called to the father who came back and stood next to her making motions with his hand and talking in a funny voice.  Well, it turned out that the little girl was afraid of her shadow and he was showing her his shadow and how it moved when he did.  She was fascinated and began the same arm motions and began to laugh with excitement.  Cindy had seen most of this but didn’t know what was happening until I explained it at coffee.  She then said that they must have been from some northern Slavic country were the sun never shines and this was the first time the little girl had seen a shadow.  That cracked me up!

We had dinner last night with our dear friends Beffini and Gladys, and like all good friendships we took up right were we left off three years ago as thought it had been three days.  There are no signs of recession in the Gaslamp area of San Diego.  The bars are filled, the restaurants are filled, and people are spending lots of money on good wines and food.  They are all beautiful people dressed to the nines and you would have a hard time convincing anyone that the country was going to hell in an economic handbag.  So we are going with the flow and heading out for lunch. 

Hope you all have a lovely Sunday, Cindy and Wm.