Progress Is Our Most Important...Product?!

Maybe not, having time off to think about what we are trying to do or accomplish is important too. We have lots more work to be done at the Morgan Street house, more painting, more tiling, more details AND we have work to do in The Swamphouse too! The carpet in the office downstairs and in the upstairs bedroom (mine now as I'm in exile from The Marriage Bed by mutual agreement) too. Then tow new floors get put in place, a wood one like the other upstairs bedroom and here in The Office a continuation of the terracotta tile that is everywhere else downstairs. These are NOT small projects and will take at least another month to complete AFTER we are done with the Morgan Street house. France this year? I really don't think so, it wouldn't make much sense (financial or otherwise) to go and stay only a short time as we refuse to spend the winter there at all anymore...to !#$#$#@! cold, brrrrrr.
So we will just continue onward and upward on the two houses and rent this one when we are done and enjoy that one afterwards.

My son Michael, my grandson Jordan and I went to see the King Tut exhibit at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park yesterday afternoon. We had a great time gawking at all the treasures, reading all the liner notes and being jostled by the madding crowd. We spent a bit of time looking thru the souvenir shop for something for Jordan to remember this good day by. Satisfied by a hieroglyphic chart after looking through the wide array of gizmos and goo-gahs we ambled off towards the car and our dinner at Gino's Pizzeria on California Street. It was crowded and noisy with diners at this dinner hour as is typical of most restaurants in SF on a Friday evening. We orderred 2 beers and a Sprite and were seated at the counter in anticipation of the repast to come. A delicious and very fresh salad came first which we all shared eagerly, then the beautiful individual pizzas, a sausage and mushroom for Michael, a pepperoni for Jordan and a pepperoni, olives and anchovy one for yours truely, they were wonderful! A nice thin crust, blistered throughout with just the right amount of sauce and mozzerella, they were excellent! We wandered back to the car and drove north through the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, tony Marin County and to Petaluma where they dropped me off at the truck which was loaded with a three panel door purchased earlier in the day. I drove home feeling satisfied that we'd had a great time and shared time with each other, it's a too rare event that I'd like to do far more often. We aren't getting any younger!

Pizza to die for: L’Auberge de la Tour owners Patricia and Moez Bounafeck! The BEST pizza I've had in France to date comes from the kitchen of this small hotel/restaurant. Delicious on every level starting with the almost thin crust, lightly toasted on the bottom with bubbles in the crust, a fine red sauce over mozzerella and a great sense of all the ingredients, just the right amount of toppings, excellent in all respects. Mr. Bounafeck served the magnificent pizza himself. A very thrifty and satisfying meal with a large pitcher of a local red wine and a drizzle of hot oil, this is a stop not to miss when you are in the Burgundy region. On the corner of Rt D926 and Rt D951 in the city of Beaulieu-Sur-Loire, 22 Euros worth of superlative pizza. Try it! It was my birthday lunch. Our next table guests were from Paris, he a salesman for a batimat (stone, cement, gravel) company and she was a dead ringer for Brigette Bardot complete with rhinestone high heels and a short skirt! Terrificly funny and wonderful they invited us to share another bottle of the local Gienois pick, delicious and crisp as well as fruity as we laughed and Fringlished our way thru the explanation of our life here in France.
It was great fun, we shared email addresses and said our goodbyes and headed for Bourges to acquire needed things for the Maison Blanche.

Happy B-Day MacKenzie! and a Great Bonding Activity for Fathers and Daughters and Others

Today is our little 2 year old GC's B-Day. She is a most cute, most bright, most engaging little character. Born to Aimee and Joe she has her Mum's good looks and the energy of both of them.
Her sister, Kaylee, loves her dearly. She just about didn't visit this world though as her Mum developed Preeclampsia and it was progressing rapidly about 7 weeks from her Real B-Day to be. They used to call this condition something else but I've forgotten that too, precious...aging, just precious. Anyway here's a link to get the real low down on this most dangerous and potential killer of new Mum's and babies.
http://pregnancy.emedtv.com/preeclampsia/preclampsia.html
So they took the baby by C section and though small at 3lbs and with the effects of the preclampsia, hospital bound for several weeks, she is a wonderful gift today!
Anyhow we will all eat Pizza at Mary's Pizza Shack and have a cake and all the mess that means. Great for kids and fun for us too.
___
The rest of the few days I've paused from the blog have been spent reading about sourdough bread, the starter in trivial detail and modifying what I am doing somewhat. I sent a self-stamped envelop to Carl' in Maryland and he's returned to me a small package of his live starter. It looked pretty flat in the clear plastic bag but once freed and into a small bowl, warmed a bit and with a tablespoon of flour and a slightly shyer amount of H2O added and mixed well it came to life, burp! That was 5 days ago. I've divided the Mum Starter in two, forming a working starter that will actually become bread while preserving the original Mum, it's safer that way and less likely to end up getting polluted with some other ingredient. Mum stays a virgin, get it?
The Baby gets played with and will become a loaf, not today but probably tomorrow after I feed it two more times. To get Carl's famous starter stuff here's what you do; go to his site, read the blurb and ship off your SSAE, you won't be disappointed. Here's the link:
http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/
___
Then yesterday...Audrey came over as Kelly left as I needed the help of a strong woman with the mattress swap onto "my" man-bed (HA!) to try out our old marriage-bed mattress instead of the one that came with the bed frame. Audrey dragged and I pushed, Ooof, up the stairs we went with it and plopped it down on the box springs and wow, what a difference! A decent bed! Any you know...I didn't wake up once last night! Not once! And that had gotten to be a regular thing. Mattresses make a difference. Then in an ultimate step-father - step-daughter bonding moment we took on the task of changing the oil in her Toyota Echo some 13,000 miles since it was changed last...by guess who? Yes, me. 13,000 miles no less! Synthetic oil it was but ever so black and well contaminated now. I found the drain again (it was a year ago since I climbed under the beast, cute as it is) and proceeded to use a breaker bar to get enough leverage to pull the damned thing loose again! Grrrrrr. Loose, I unscrewed it and placed the old black lid from a boat battery box underneath to catch the black goo in all it's glory. Soon it was well draining and...what's that? Oh no! A FLOOD of oily mess...EXON VALDIZ!!! In our driveway!!! Shit! Merde! Something! A bag? Audrey rushed off to get some plastic bags, the mess continued to pour out onto the concrete of our previously clean driveway. Another container (no), rags? (no), paper towels (no), damnit...what a mess...and it has to be stopped before it gets into the drain system and reeks havoc with the local sewer system! (Think EPA, Corps of Engineers, State Lands Commission, City Hall, Barrack Obama!) Oh my God, this IS a disaster. So cat litter to the rescue! Having moved the car down the driveway and into the street...yes,yes with the plug IN and the filter changed and new oil added, the now thoroughly blackened driveway is fully exposed for my dear wife and Republican neighbors to see! So for the next two hours we scrubbed (more bonding), power-washed, soaped, scraped and removed MOST (but not all) of the slimy black goo. Such fun on a Sunday afternoon. And along comes my sweetie Kelly, all cheerful and pert, took no notice of the dark stain and pulled her car right in and covered the 20 foot long spot. Nice. And she's not even mad. Bonding activities are so very rewarding.

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.