Holly-Daze

It all really starts in October or maybe August when the first gleams of Holloween goods show in the stores. Candy, costumes, orange and black anything, arched back cat cutouts et al. A whole month and half ahead of the unofficial holiday itself. Yes, no day off for hard working Americans to celebrate the eve of The Day Of The Dead. Lots of beer and booze is consumed though and tons of sweets are distributed to tykes to the age of 21 apparently. All is well though and it is a good break from the chill of the fall after all. As a holiday it brings office parties, haunted houses and many unofficial days off as well. I give it a 7 out of 10 for being a "good" holiday.
Then comes Thanksgiving, Turkey Day, Harvest Festival etc. Again the stores bring down the black cat decorations and garish costumes and haul up turkey symbology, dried ears of multicolored corn, scenes of feasts and more orange and red leaf motiff
visuals. Gads. With a whole month to go this magical appearance overcomes the blatant commercialism of Halloween by a factor of at least 2. Groceries get involved by stocking cranberries, piles of yams and sweet potatoes and brussel sprouts, and, of course turkeys by the gaggle. All in preparation for the very real (days off!) Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday of November. The level of commercialism is heightened by the growing displays of Christmas goodies yet!
As a Holiday, Thanksgiving is a 9 simply because of the family and food centric-ness of the day and the days (and leftovers) that follow.
Christmas is coming and boy can you ever figure THAT out! Christmas tree lots are blooming, artificial trees of plastic and aluminum and even paper. Piles of popular toys are found near the doorways of every kind of store. Red and Green rules the season. I don't subscribe to the commercialism at all...nor does my darling wife Kelly. We try to ignore it as best we can and give verbal butressing to ur friends and neighbors. I handed out fresh baked bread to neighbors last year and will follow suit this year as well. I like the UNTIED WAY to distribute meager cash amounts to those in need...don't give it to a middle man to hand out in dribs and drabs, go to an atm near you and withdraw 20, 40, 60 dollars or more. Find a down and out looking street person and hand him/her/them a bill and move on to the next. Don't go home with anything left. Now...don't you feel better? No reciepts to keep track of for the tax man, it's quick and efficient as well. Another great thing is go to a lower cost grocery store and pay for the persons purchases in front of you. Same thing, it feels great! Do it for a break from the damnable commercial side of the holiday. Do this for a perfect 10 holiday experience.
Bye for now!
And HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Roast Turkey! No...BBQ Beef! What? Outrage!

The #$$#@! Stove Story, well it goes like this...I personally with malice and forethought killed the lovely self-cleaning GE Signature in-wall stove by totally FRYING it's gas igniter device to the point it could not even be replaced! No shit! The self=cleaning feature always worked so well, I didn't do it often but maybe once every two months. I LIKE evenness in stoves so had inserted a large 18" square 1.5" thick ceramic kiln shelve as a heat sink. I did this on the very bottom and it was the maximum size I could fit in the box that was this particular stove. I enjoyed it very much as it was capable of >500 degree temps within a 1/2 hour and at that temp I could do quite good homemade pizzas and breads. The large ceramic surface was the cooking surface and heatsink for the oven little did I know that it had blocked the heat vents from the gas burner underneith. I used it often and did the self-cleaning feature about every other month to cleanup my messes. Last March I made a terrific mess in the stove with a lassagna thaT OVERFLOWED IT'S DISH and thus did a cleaning cycle afterwards, the one that fried the ignitor and left the stove unable to light at all. Damn. I called in a repair guy when I couldn't free the ignitor from it's receptacle. He worked for 2 solid hours trying to extracate the bloody ignitor thing to no avail. I paid him his 70 dollar fee and gave up on it. So we went to France knowing we would replace it when we got back. In the first week of October we orderred a new replacement oven, one very similar to the now dead GE only made by Maytag. It was to come from Michigan. It arrived about three weeks after it was orderred and upon Kelly's inspection the rear corner was bashed in, not just a little, it was totally uninstallable. So we refused the thing after calling the company and reporting the damage and the trucker left with it. Goodbye stove, goodbye pizzas. The company reassured us that a new one was being orderred and we would see it in about three more weeks...in time for Thanksgiving. Sure I thought and thus planned the meal I told you about BBQ'd beef instead of turkey. Time went on, two then three weeks and then another big rig arrived. This time was different, the driver saw the box from the hydralic lift gate and said himself..."You gunna refuse this one too I imagine", sure enough, the entire front end, glass doors and all were smashed and hanging inthe crate. Shit. (French word Merde...mare-duh). So I signed the slip of paper he presented and wrote as I did a few weeks before "Refused" across it. This time I called the company and asked them to personally inspect the bloody thing there before it got here...and double crate it and I would happily pay for such, the reassured me that the WOULD do these things THIS time and here we are. I will BBQ the beef tomorrow and hope the damned thing arrives sometime before Christmas in one piece. We shall see.