Duck stock, craziness and boredom

As odd as it may seem, the hotel I work for has a CIA graduate chef who creates wonderful breakfasts that are outside of what most people would consider breakfast. Homemade biscuits with warm burrata and a sausage ragu, sunny side egg on top.  Pumpkin grits with heirloom mushrooms and a poached egg.  One dish has a panko crusted poached egg, deep fried!  Right now the winter menu has several delicious breakfasts, one of which is a confit duck hash.  It is served with three sauce blops on the plate and an egg.  It kicks ass.  When was the last time you had duck for breakfast?  Been a while, I suppose.

But with those duck legs come duck bones, and I brought some home the other day to make stock.  Dark, deep, delicious duck stock.  What does one do with duck stock?  Anything that you would do with chicken stock, only better. Last night I made a simple mushroom risotto with that stock and I must tell you, it was wonderful.  I wish there had been leftovers, but alas, no.  But there is still duck stock remaining, so I will add that to a stew I am planning on making tomorrow and it will add depth and taste and heft to the stew. I will report back.

As many of you are aware, I am in a totally bored funk state right now. The job is stupid, silly, easy and frustrating but mostly friggin boring. It uses no part of my brain except the small, tiny part that has to be nice all the time. GRRRR.  I was expressing this GRRR-ness to a friend yesterday and she suggested I start looking at craigslist for goofy things to occupy some of my free time.  For example, there might be an ad from someone who needs help herding cats, I could help out there for an hour or two one afternoon.  Today I read some CL ads and here is one from the Russian River area (of course) that made me laugh out loud. This is the gist:   would love to find people with whom to practice and learn static trapeze, acro-yoga, acro-balance and/or contact dance. I am a physical person and love using my body to do cool things. (Oh, my TMI) Working with other people is motivating and way more fun than solo (well, that's true of a lot of things!) and all of these things are best with a buddy (or two or three!).  (Menage a trois?)I have a static trapeze, a double, but will need to put it up somewhere. I hope to be able to do this in the woods where I will be living.
Is there a local circus scene? 
Seriously, except for my comments, that's the ad. A circus scene?  The entire north bay is a circus scene, just go to Napa or Healdsburg some Saturday afternoon and watch it!  And what is acro-yoga and acro-balance?  Yes, I could google those words but it's much more clever to create a description in your head.  Acro-yoga is like agro-yoga, in other words, yoga with animals.  I am sure that's it.  And the woman who posted the ad (she identified herself as a woman in her 30's) is going to live in the woods?  Where? In a tent that she will fashion out of branches and leaves?  And a static trapeze?  Yes, again, I could google it, but those two words, static and trapeze, don't seem to go together.  Aren't trapezes (trapezi?) by their nature non-static? Is a static trapeze like a chair hung from a tree that you hang off of but it doesn't move, or is it a regular trapeze with static electricity that shocks you every time you try and transfer to another swinging chair?  The possibilities are confounding.  (OK, I took the time out and googled it.  It still doesn't make sense in that it isn't static.  But whatever.)

So, in that one CL posting my small, cynical, ludicrous mind was jiggled enough to get me out of the boredom cycle for a few minutes.  That's good enough for me for now! 

So that's the craziness, the boredom and the duck stock. That's how it wraps up for tonight. I have on my little english muffin Roku the last episode of Downton Abbey that I will watch......with Shirley McLaine sparring with Maggie Smith and a little Paul Giamatti tossed in for fun, or so I am lead to believe by the previews. That will cure boredom for an hour.  Well, that and a static trapeze with monkeys munching on confit duck legs while building a hut out of pine needles and making a fire on which to cook monkey duck risotto.

.yumm.

An actual day off....

The schedule I have for work is crazy and it seems to change every week or two.  There are three of us at the front desk, two shifts a day, so 14 shifts in the two week period.  Three does not go evenly into 14 so we are all bounced around, morning to afternoon, three or four days in a row or, in my case, usually six days in a row and then a day off. Every two weeks I am supposed to get two days off in a row but because we switch shifts when necessary, that happens rarely.  Add to that the fact that for the past month I have been helping out a friend with his business while he was on a much needed vacation.  Thus any day I have had off since mid January was still spent working.

But right now I have two days off.  In a row.  It is rather odd, actually, to have no obligations so I created some chores for myself (clean off my card-table "desk", do some laundry, clean out the fridge) but I don't really have to do them if I don't want. So far I have spent the six hours I have been awake reading, mostly, and drinking really good coffee.  The coffee has not made me jumpy or even lively. In fact, I could probably go back to bed and go back to sleep. Maybe that's a sign: maybe I am tired!

My hotel job isn't difficult, but it is time consuming, as all day jobs are.  I also am the de facto dog walker here at home, and that takes up at least 90 minutes of my non-working day.  Like almost everyone who has a regular job, I always run out of time at the end of the day or I am left with such a small swatch of free time that I shrug and use it by reading or staring off into space or watching something on TV or cooking dinner. Therefore, on a day like this, when I can do anything I want, I am not familiar with doing nothing.

But that's my goal of the day!  Today I am doing nothing much.  I sort of cleaned off my "desk" and I am making some stock on the stove because I had some duck bones that had to get used up.  That's it. I have decided that I am not even going to cook dinner. If I am hungry, I am going out. I am going to be a total slacker today. Read, watch a movie via Roku, nap, open a good bottle of wine, perhaps walk the dogs later today.  That's it. It's a day off.  I like it. I could get use to this. 

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Too many at once? Feast or famine!

I know, strange, huh?  I don't write for a week and then I can't shut up.  But I had to share this.  I went back to the beginning of this blog, in November 2010 and started reading some of those posts and this one I had to share with you all.  I can't believe I actually wrote this, but I did, and it just goes to show you that sometimes we all have moments of brilliant clarity and we need to pay attention to those moments.  Re-reading this one made me happy and it made me realize I need to take heed of what it says.

Read on:

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Wandering Minds

This morning I read a little blurb about a Harvard study that said people who had wandering minds were less happy than those who didn't.  Instead of thinking about the past or the future, it seems that those who "live in the moment" feel happier. Now, some of this makes sense.  Constantly second-guessing one's actions, regretting the past, worrying about the future, dwelling on what happened instead of enjoying what is going on now, it is easy to see how that would get in the way of being happy.  But then I wonder what sort of an analogy this creates in my own life. (Yes, it is always about me.)   Here I am, wandering the roads, having few plans about what I will do two days from now, untethered, somewhat rootless (not to mentioned route-less) and if that isn't a product of a wandering mind, I am not sure what is.  What I am doing right now is wandering.  And not just physically, not just wandering the West Coast in my small car with my dog.  At the same time, my mind is always skipping from one thought to the next:  what should I do next week?  Do I think I can actually get a job in this economy?  When the reality of being slightly homeless hits me, how will I really respond?  What will I do when the money runs out?  Why are all the radio stations here playing only Christian rock and who actually listens to this stuff?

But wait! With all this wandering, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, I still feel happy!   In fact, I feel more grounded and "in the moment" than I have felt in a very long time. So you can see the conundrum here.  My mind is jumping around like a chihuahua on a hot skillet but somehow I have also figured out how to do this "live in the moment" thing.

I am not dismissing the Harvard study, of course. Paying attention to what is in front of us, to what is happening right now is very important.  To negate the present because of worry about the future or regret about the past is to really screw up one's sense of contentment and happiness.  But to only dwell on the present might mean ignoring the experiences that led one to this present moment and it might mean poor planning for the future.  I think our past and our future color our present moments and they should.  We are the sum of our experiences.  Yes, we can sweep some of those unpleasant experiences under the rug (and we should) but some of them create the fabric of who we are right now.  And without that fabric, without the flaws in that cloth, we would be, to continue the comparison, a plain white cotton sheet.  Without considering what colors are in our future, that plain white cotton sheet would stay that way: serviceable but boring. 

Perhaps it is just that I have had too much really good coffee this morning and that has led to this ramble.  But I really believe that sometimes we have to let our minds wander and get out there and get some fresh air and look over the edge of the cliff.  The moment is good, true, but without the bruises of the past and the shadows of the future, the moment is just that:  one dimension of a life.

Be happy.  Let your mind wander, then reel it back in.

"A Late Quartet" with Philip Seymour Hoffman

What a sad shock to hear that Philip Seymour Hoffman had died.  What an actor we lost that day. I don't know about the rest of you but he was one of my favorites and no matter what the movie was, he was always good.  Sometimes he was extraordinary, sometimes great but always good.

I had on my library list this movie, "A Late Quartet" for several weeks before his death.  Ironically, I picked it up just a day or two after he died.  It's a small movie, made in 2012.  Four musicians face the break-up of their world-famous quartet which has been playing together for more than 20 years.  Hoffman is the second violin, his wife Catherine Keener plays the viola, Christopher Walken plays the cello and Mark Ivanir plays the first violin.  It was amazing to see Walken in this role, he is usually rather crazed and often borders on being a sociopath. He's very subdued in this film. But all four actors are excellent. They are so connected to each other and to their musical history that this impending end of what has held them together for so long wrecks havoc with each of them in very personal ways.

Hoffman is brilliant here.  Quiet and determined, focused and yet almost insecure, he is a master actor to watch. It is worth the entire movie just to see the scene in the taxi, which lasts just a couple of minutes. Watch his face.  Watch his body language throughout the entire film. So much is given to the audience without him even saying a word.

I wish we could have had him for another 40 years.

Too long, I admit, but still.....

Honestly, I have so little to say these days. It's amazing, if I am on the road, or on vacation or even just spending the night in an adjacent town, I have lots of things to say.  I can rattle on and on, jotting down thoughts and opinions and random observations and I never get tired of it.  But in the midst of the day-to-day routine that we all experience, I have nothing to say. It's simply boring.

(I do have a movie to tell you about but I will put that in a separate blog. No need to spoil this one with something decent.)

I appreciate anyone who tunes into this channel now and then and I apologize for the black and white static, like we use to get on television after regularly scheduled broadcast shows ended.  It's sort of like that..... the regularly scheduled broadcast doesn't have anything running right now.

What I need is a road trip. Or an airplane trip.  Or a train trip.  An acid trip, not so much, but even that might break up the ennui.  What I will get will not be on the road or a plane or a train, but more of the same: work, come home, sleep.  Rinse and repeat.  

It's no wonder I like to go home and have a cocktail or some whiskey neat. It sort of blurs the edges of the day. That's not always a good thing, of course, and too much blurring gets to be a habit. But still, sometimes it's the high point of my day and I shock even myself by admitting that. Don't tell anyone.  

Alright, that's enough of this nonsense.  I do have a couple of ideas of "what to do when I grow up" that I have been tossing around inside the narrow hallways of my mind. Yes, I know I need to do more than tossing those ideas, I need to set them up in residence.  Will keep you posted if you promise not to laugh.

The Ex. And the Why.

Everyone knows someone who has a very terrible, no good ex.  Husband or wife, the ex factor comes in both flavors.  Those exes are often crack-smoking, meth-dealing, gin or whiskey drinking  cons who sleep with ferrets and wear the same clothes for a week, never sleep, hit people, panhandle and at the same time always have enough money to gamble.  Men or women, we all know exes like that. Or close enough. Some might just go to church a lot (which is sort of like gambling) or who are addicted to other things (can we say "golf") or who even pretend to be good but are, at heart, quite bad (Dodger fans, for instance.)

So, yes, there are bad exes out there. Hey, I even had one! So it's not unusual and nothing to be too ashamed about. (However, a little shame is appropriate, just hang your head a tiny bit, it will work fine.)

Actually, I have the opposite. I have a Good Ex.  I am not sure how this happened because I was not a good creator of the ex.  (Sordid tales you do not need to know, trust me.)  But with the realignment of the planets that happened around the late 1990's and then the whole scary millennium travesty that we all had to live through, my ex turned into The Ex.  (Hey, not really sure of the time frame there so don't quote me.)  Zut Alors!  My Ex is actually a really good guy. Nice, smart, kind, generous, funny and low-key.

But wait, you say!  What about the Ex's Wife, the other woman?  She is not the other woman.  She is The Woman. She is nice, smart, kind, generous and funny. (She has to be because she lives with (and married) the Ex.)  I like her. A lot.

All this is to say that I just spent a day and a half with the Ex and the ex-Wife and we had such fun.  We laughed, talked, had teary eyes a couple of times, hung out, talked, ate, drank, ate some more, drank a teeny bit more (enough was enough) and then they were on their way. 

We should all have such good friends. Friends that will put up with anything, friends who sleep over, who let you sleep over at their homes, who share, who give, who care.  It's what friends are all about and the fact that these friends are my Ex and his lovely Wife.... well, it's the best.

Thank you, John and Diane, for being who you are. You carry me with your love and generosity and kindness and you should fear this:  someday, I might just take you up on your offer and come up there and hang out for longer than a weekend!

I love you.  Long Time, Big Time.  xoxo

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