Weekend Update(s)

Until we have more earth-shatteringly interesting news, this is probably what our blog posts will be: weekend updates.

 

10/15/11

My dad calls it our “apple safari.” 

The Tougas Family Farm in Northboro, MA is known for several things:

• The farm kitchen, where you can buy all things apple—homemade pies, turnovers, honey, butter, fresh pressed cider, fresh cider donuts, caramel apples, apple crisp, the list goes on. 

• The ingenious scheme of filling candy dispensers with goat pellets. All the kiddies clamor for quarters so they can buy handfuls of food to feed the goats that poke their heads through the fences in the petting zoo.

• Their high-density polyethelyne apple bags made of industrial strength plastic that hold 20 lbs of apples. To preserve all farm employees’ sanity, a printed copy of their apple guide is stamped on the back of the bag and answers all stupid tourist questions, including this one: “Which apple should I pick if I want to make a pie?” I’ve never been in an orchard before, so the apple guide was quite handy because I had a lot of stupid tourist questions. The recurring answer to all my questions: Cortland apples are best for baking.

Another perk of the apple guide is that it’s quite educational. It walks you through the five steps of apple picking: 

1) Make eye contact with the apple. Don’t pick it if you think it’s ugly, although a few blemishes won’t hurt you.

2) Grip your apple firmly, lift up, and twist because if you don’t, you’ll hurt the apple’s feelings.

3) Any and all apples that fall from the tree while you’re standing next to the tree are legally and lawfully yours. Put them in your bag.

4) Place the apple gently in your bag, as if it were an egg.

5) If you bite it, you own it. Also, please DON’T throw our fruit at each other, or stuff it in your pockets because that is called stealing.  

4.     The farm is also famous for its pumpkins that grow on trees. 

10/22/11

We went to the Rhode Island Antique Mall because I needed to find a wedding gift for Kirsten, my CUWP friend who is a history teacher and collects antiques. This is the kind of antique store that has display cases full of pincushions and walls of shelves lined with jars full of buttons and other random tidbits. The mall collects from over 130 dealers and people come from all over to find whatever it is they’re looking for, like items to put in their terrariums, or the couple the checkout clerk told us about who recently traveled from Pennsylvania to buy clocks.

I had limited options to choose from, since the gift is being mailed to Provo—glass, obscenely heavy objects, and pretty, but useless items were out. This eliminated 99% of the items in the store. So I had to go with boring, but utilitarian; I settled on a picture frame with a canvas print of Renaissance people of indeterminate gender posing austerely for their portrait. 

I’m guessing they’ll one of two things with the frame: put it in their bathroom or replace the print with this photo of their garden party reception:

As one of the oldest zoos in the country, Roger Williams Park Zoo is supposed to be a major tourist attraction. So we went there. The park grounds are spacious and perfect for picnicking and hosting events like “Puerto Rican Day.”

But zoos in general are uneventful and pathetic. The leopards squeeze themselves into the nooks and crannies of the rocks in the furthest corner of their cages and sit there all day. The wildebeests refuse to give you anything besides a view of their backsides. Occasionally, the bears take a break from hiding in their concrete caves to come out and restlessly pace a length of five feet back and forth.

But, we did see this: a squirrel infiltrating a wallaby cage to steal its food, and a gibbon monkey that got tired of people looking at it so it put a paper bag on its head and stayed like that for the rest of the afternoon.

I suppose it’s admirable that the zoo does lots of outreach and community education. I got excited about this announcement because, along with countless exhibits of animals doing nothing in broad daylight, it gave me an idea for a children’s book about what animals do at night after all the people leave the zoo. My aunt worked in the medical/biological illustration department at Perdue. She could draw the pictures.

NEW! Winter Tadpole Academy | February 22 - 25
Members: $100 / Non-members: $125

2011 theme: "Creatures of the Night"
What happens when we go to sleep? The world changes when the sun goes down and a whole new world of animals wakes up. Campers will explore the special nocturnal characteristics that help these animals survive at night using their own five senses.

Tadpole Academy is a great way to introduce your 4 – 5 year-old to camp at Roger Williams Park Zoo!  Each day is only three hours long and includes stories, crafts, games and Zoo exploration in a safe, small group of only 10 campers per week. 

Due to this small size, campers may only register for a maximum of one week. Each camper receives one complimentary ZooCamp T-shirt that must be worn daily. Note: All Tadpole Academy campers must be completely toilet trained (requiring no assistance in the bathroom)!

Technically, I could qualify because I’m potty trained, and I’m used to wearing ugly t-shirts (remember “Butcamp”?). 

More pumpkins growing on trees as part of the zoo's Jack-o-Lantern Spectacular, an exhibit that involves some 5,000 carved pumpkins accompanied by an inundation of useless pumpkin/pagan ritual trivia.

Jesse and camel posteriors.

Picture this monkey, but with a grocery store-size paper bag on its head.

I'd never seen one of these before. I thought it was a cross between a fox, the Chessire Cat, and a raccoon.

 

Ignore the annoying audio. It's called a red panda. I would like one please. 

 

But maybe not.

Birthday month

Where did September go? Where have the last 27 years gone?!

October 4

Confession: I got drunk.

Kind of.

Not really.

But just you wait for the anticlimactic ending of this story.

The idea came to me in a dream about peaches: since September was Roald Dahl month, and earlier in the week I had sent a virtual peach to Jesse as a token of my undying affection, I would make a peach cake. As a surprise for Jesse. So as soon as he left for work, I drove all over the greater Warwick area in search of a cake pan.

The cake was inspired by James and the Giant Peach, but ended up looking more like James and the Giant Butt Crack, if you’re in a puerile mood. I made a Sculpey James too, but he didn’t get painted in time before Jesse got home, so I’ll save him for next year.  

I emailed Jesse and said I had a surprise waiting for him when he got home—the butt crack cake. I knew he would find it amusing.

And then he came home with a surprise for me—red velvet cake and roses. Ha ha. So now we have a fridge full of cake. I’m going to eat it for breakfast for the rest of the week.

We went to Portofino’s, an Italian restaurant that got lovely reviews in last week’s paper. Here, the waiters bring you complimentary limoncello after they take your check. I gulped mine down without a second thought as to why it tasted like nail polish remover, or the fact that it was served in containers that looked like skinny cousins of the shot glass. Then we wondered if it was alcoholic. At home, Google revealed all. Every limoncello recipe online calls for vodka. Whoopsie!

October 7-10

We went to New Hampshire.

We saw the beginning of a late New England fall.

 

Wouldn't you be sad too if your 28-year winning streak had been shattered?

We played checkers twice. I accidentally won a game. Which means Jesse lost at something. We had to document this historic event.

We went to Chipmunk Lodge where the Bisports—my dad's cousins—treated us to belated birthday dinner! Corn “chowdah” and apple crisp.

After dinner we got a tour of the field behind the lodge. When we were told turnips had been planted there this summer, or spring, or whenever turnip season is, Jesse and I pictured two or three rows neatly planted in one corner. Instead, the turnips had popped up all over the field, and were planted for the sole purpose of feeding the deer and bears that hang out in the woods.

Since most of the turnips would end up rotting anyway, we plucked one out of its spongy bed and dubbed it the "Birthday Turnip Monster."

Neither Jesse nor I have eaten turnips before and are wondering how best to cook it. To celebrate the momentous occasion of picking the turnip, Jesse did 500 pushups, and I did some research. My question: “Who the heck eats turnips?” Apparently, everyone does.

Pliny the Elder thought highly of turnips, rating them “directly after cereals or at all events after the bean, since its utility surpasses that of any other plant.” Indeed.

For Nordic people, the turnip was the king of crops before it was ousted by the potato in the 18^th century. In Turkey, turnips add flavor to a cold juice made of purple carrots and assorted spices. Austrians serve raw turnip root in a cooled remoulade, and the Scotts made candle lanterns by carving hollow pits in the bulbs. Turnips came in handy at Celtic festivals when carved with faces to discourage evil spirits from loitering outside your domicile. In Iran turnip roots, boiled and salted, cure fevers. The Japanese pickle them and reserve a place for turnips in the ritual of the Festival of the Seven Herbs—the ritual involves chanting while cutting the herbs (one of which is called Nipplewort) to sprinkle over a rice porridge that purportedly wards off evil and promotes longevity starting every January 7th. 

My personal favorites: Charles Townshend, 2^nd Viscount Townshend and rather uppity looking British Whig politician with fake hair was made famous by the turnip.

His contribution to the British agricultural revolution was being the first to think of planting turnips on large scale four-field crop rotation.

And best of all, turnips were used in heraldry. The turnip remains an emblem of coats of arms. Among others, it's on the shield of Leonhard von Keutschach, prince arch-bishop of Salzburg. Dude. The turnip is so cool.  

From A DISPLAY OF HERALDRIE: by John Guillim (c1551 - 1621)

SECTION. III.

CHAP. XI.

He beareth Sable a Turnip Proper, a chief Or, Gutte de Larmes. This is an eatable and wholesome roote and yeeldeth great reliefe to the poore, and prospereth best in an hote sandy ground, and may signifie a person of good disposition, whose vertuous demeanour flourisheth most prosperously even in that soile where the scorching heate of Envy most aboundeth. This roote differeth much in nature from that whereof it is said: And that their should not bee among you any roote that bringeth forth Gall and Wormwood.





This research was not pointless, by the way—I could totally write a children’s book about the supposed origins of the Festival of the Seven Herbs being a magic turnip that saves a village of starving Japanese peasants…

October 15

We are going to an orchard in Northboro, MA to pick apples and pumpkins and pet baby animals with the Geigas.

 

October 16-31

Jesse has more surprises no doubt. In the words of the old man in James and the Giant Peach, “Marvelous things will happen!”

P.S. The comments permissions for our blog have been fixed. Whether you're reading in Kotzebue or Kazakhstan, you can now add comments.

Squirrels and bad interior design and lobsters, oh my.

Jesse: “Why did the squirrel cross I-95?”

Sarita: “Um, he didn’t. He got turned into a squirrel pancake before he reached the other side, ha ha.”

But not at the University of Rhode Island! This is the only place I haven’t seen squirrels all mashed in the road except for their tails flitting around in the breeze. If I were a squirrel in Rhode Island, I would live on campus where students could feed me french fries and Nutella and the only thing I’d watch out for would be cigarette burns from careless people flicking their butts in my general direction.  

On Saturday we drove to campus to show Jesse the two buildings I hang out in three days a week at URI. 

I teach in “The Castle.” It was built in 1928 and used to be an armory/gymnasium, where ROTC students made good use of the rifle range and shot machine guns at each other to prepare for duty in the armed forces. They also had military balls there. Unfortunately, the campus granite quarry ran out of rocks so Rodman Hall is only a castle from the front. The sides are made of brick the color of crusty Kleenex. 

From 1920-1948 that lovely chap Keaney down there owned Rodman Hall. Keaney supposedly invented "run and shoot" basketball and coached at URI and never had a losing season in 28 years. He was also a chemist and used his lab in Rodman Hall to concoct cures for athlete's foot, jock itch, and soreness. I wish he had invented something useful, like air conditioning. 

Now it’s called Rodman Hall, and it's full of classrooms designed by people who thought orange and yellow and green chairs would not clash with blue carpet. And it still doesn't have air conditioning. With 80% humidity and the odor of old cat stuck in the wall, it's a winning combination. The upside to all this is I have a “time-out” closet. I send people in there when they fall asleep in class (it happens a lot). 

Eleanor Roosevelt Hall is where my office would be, if I had one. This building used to be a girl’s dormitory in 1936. This is the only building on campus named after a woman.

Lots of things are kind of decrepit on campus. This lamppost was no exception. 
It kind of fell over after I leaned against it.  

 

Supposedly Eleanor planted one or more of these flowering Crab Apple trees that are in front of Roosevelt Hall.

Teaching here is just like at BYU, but with more coffee and beards and tattoos and shorter shorts and better architecture that isn't as well maintained because nobody has any money. On my first day, one student introduced himself like this: "Hello professor, my name is Louis and I have Tourettes." 

I thought he was joking. 

But he wasn't. He sits in the back and has convulsions and sounds like he's got a perpetual case of hiccups, but he's the nicest student I've ever had. So I forgive him.

This is our mascot. All who behold his gaze quake in fear. Obviously.

There's a farmer's market near campus, so we stopped by there on our way home and Jesse bought me squash and fingerling potatoes for my birthday. He was going to get lobsters too for $8/pound because they were ginormous and perched on top of small mountains of ice. But then one of the lobsters twitched its eyes at me and I didn't want them anymore.

"Hahvahd" Friends: A Funetic Adventcha in Boahstun

Now that we have Rhode Island driva's licenses, weah pickin' up tha East Coast accent too: Harvard = Hahvahd, we pahk tha cahs in tha garahge, or, we would pahk tha cahs theah if we had a garahge, look, theah's anutha squirral's got run ova in tha road! (cause theah's lotsa roadkill everywheah heah, with all tha trees)...etc.

On Satuhday, we went ta tha Boahstun Temple. It's a byootifuhl building. Then we drove ta some a Jesse's forma CRA friends' house. Theah names a Dave an Liz Geiga. Dave got inta Hahvahd Lah School, cause he's real smaht, an stuff. We have ta see these guys while we can, cause someday theah'll be fabuhlusly wealthy an wea'll be too poah ta hang out wuthum!  They took us ta tha Nath End wheah we walked aroun Hanova Street and tuk lotsa pictchas a us in tha same poses.

This heah aint tha Geigas' house. Theah house looks much betta. Weah standin' outside a tha Paul Reveah House. Since it looked so lame, we didn't wanna pay $3.50 ta poke owah heads in 'na doah.

Instead we stood aroun by tha Paul Reveah statue, just aroun tha corna, fa free.

We ate lunch in Little Italy at tha Floruhntine Cafay, an then we walked ta Mike's Pastry. It's a bakery tha reminds ya a little a Seinfeld's Soup Nazi, wheah people line up all tha way outside tha doah and down tha street. Mike's makes 15 diffuhrent canolees, pistasheeo macaroons, an cream puffs tha size a ya face. I asked fa an ecleah; they gave me a haht dawg.

We carried owah blue and white boxes a mile from Mike's and got cat calls from people walkin down tha street. A troop a fat boy scouts oggled tha boxes too. Jesse said he should a toldum he'd givum a merit badge fa untying tha knots on tha box. 

Afta tryin ta scahf up owah doh, we wawked off five a six calories on owah way ta tha U.S.S. Constatooshun Museum. Moah pedestriuns whistled at us (oah, ratha owah boxes, since we didn't finish all tha dezaht), and we almost got run ova by this idiotic-lookin group a people takin' scenic tours of Boahstun on segways; cleahly they smelled residual traces a puddin an grease through tha cahdboahd.  

We ended with a self-guided touah uv tha oneanonlee Old Eye-un Sides and shootin fake 2-D cannons in tha museum. Thanks Geigas, yuwah oahwsum!

Welcome to Rhode Island!

Just so you know, I’ve had a hard time answering my fan mail because we won’t get Internet access in our condo until September 14th. On a more positive note, our car and all 100 boxes of our junk are arriving on our doorstep tomorrow, so we won’t have to camp out anymore.

A few notes:

1. On August 26^th we beat Hurricane Irene to Rhode Island by 48 hours. This was our first hurricane, and because of the incessant media hyperbole commandeering all local news channels, we went to Wal-Mart to stock up on Mexican pseudo beer (for Jesse) and Milk Duds (for me). But all the Milk Duds were gone! I wasn’t sure if Rhode Island was just not aware that Milk Duds exist, which made me wonder if it was already time to reevaluate our decision to move, or if their conspicuous absence was due to hurricane warnings. Since there were no Milk Duds to be found, I bought several dozen boxes of Dunkin Donuts. DD = king in RI (there are 124 of these disgusting establishments), where you can buy them, to my delight, around just about every street corner. And I ate them all by myself on Saturday night, went into a hyperglycemic coma, and slept through Irene on Sunday. Before falling asleep, we had been watching one of those random cooking shows where each contestant has to create a dish using the same ingredients. The ingredients this time were goat brains. Therefore, I dreamed that my 7th graders at Elk Ridge were barbecuing goat brains in the aftermath of a hurricane that wiped out the school's foundation, and one kid got food poisoning because he ate his goat brains without cooking them all the way through.

2. I have it on good authority that among other merits, Rhode Island is noteworthy because of: “zip codes beginning with zero! hurricane warnings, eastern algonquian native american names! ridiculous nasal accents! provincially inbred xenophobic paranoia! racist leanings!” To illustrate: last week I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Welcome to Rhode Island! Now get the hell out.” So, we kind of did get the hell out, for Labor Day weekend.

3. If we had been in Utah, this is would have been our agenda: sleep in until 10, go to Target or Ross, write some lesson plans, take a nap/watch all the Lord of the Rings movies/win all 5 games of Facebook Scrabble simultaneously, go to bed.
          

4. Here, we’re far away from everyone, except my Aunt Kathy; haven’t seen her since 2002. So we drove for 3.5 hours and found ourselves at her house. My cousin Jason-the-quantum physics-enthusiast was home for the weekend from the University of New Hampshire, too. He and Jesse had lots of deep philosophical discussions about string theory, the pros and cons of Jason applying to early decision Ph.D. programs, why Rick Perry is mentally deficient, and how to best diagram the routes for water-gas-electricity to three different houses on the same block without crossing any of the lines (Jason is a fan of those mind-bending puzzles and riddles that give me headaches). I spent most of my time petting Fat Daniel, the latest feline addition to the household (Nimmy, Poe, Harper, and Cinder are his roommates). Daniel has a shoe fetish and loves to flop his girth on top of any shoes that are lying around the house. We don't know why. Adopted as a stray, maybe he was born in a shoebox? He also climbs up and down ladders and has kitty asthma of some sort. So he needs lots of attention. 

5. We also celebrated Jason’s 21^st birthday at Chimpunk Lodge. We picked three bags of blueberries the size of grapes at Grandma Helen’s house, where my family lived during 1998-99. And I made Jesse take me to Echo Lake and Goldhouse Pizza and Chutter’s General Store, famous for having the Guiness Worldbook of Records’ Longest Candy Counter—all the places I loved when I lived in New Hampshire. And since Jason was willing to teach me all about it during a two-day thunderstorm, I learned how to calculate distance from lightning. It was a good weekend.

And P.S., today was the first day of school at URI. More on that later. Maybe. 

 

Fat Daniel and his guilty indulgences: New Balance cross trainer with ABZORB foam and synthetic mesh upper; ASICS running shoe with rubber outsole for maximum traction, flip flops in black from Pac Sun. If you throw a ball of tinfoil into a shoe, it takes him a few seconds to process what's happening, but he'll poke his head inside and try to retrieve it.

The Turkey Run. These guys hang out in the woods across the street from my aunt's house. They come running to her back door when she empties table scraps out by the porch. I think we're having Thanksgiving at her house...

Jesse is so excited he doesn’t know where to start. He got hung up in the section with 14 jars of black licorice, among them Anise Bears and Black Licorice Scotties. Other items of interest to us were the jars of “Gummy Brains” and “Gummy Fried Eggs.”

Chutter’s reminds me of Roald Dahl’s autobiography, Boy, especially the chapter with the “Great Mouse Plot,” in which the candy store that is every kid’s dream is plagued by the lady who dispenses the candy, the devil incarnate, Mrs. Pratchett. If you need a good book to read, check it out, or any of Dahl’s books, for that matter. 

I wanted to bring some of this back to Warwick to the "Friends of Colon Cancer" meetings held on Thursday nights at our public library. I'm not sure why this group of elderly people wants to be friends with cancer. Or colons. 

Chipmunk Lodge is a piece of family property built on 60 some acres (I think) in 1935—so named because one year my Great Grandpa Herbert left a pair of jeans hanging in the basement, and when he found them the next summer, a family of chipmunks had built nests in the pockets.

The Birthday Boy! He just blew out his candles with theatrical flare, upon which he regaled us with the history and physics of the air vortex cannon (a.k.a. the air bazooka).

Echo Lake on a windy day. We didn't do anything here except use the restrooms.

OLD LADIES SAVE ESPINOZA WEDDING

Merella Shuster and Dario Espinoza were wed in the Salt Lake City Temple on Tuesday, August 16, 2011. The two met last summer in Beijing while Espinoza was completing an internship with the American Embassy and Shuster was practicing her Chinese for her Asian Studies minor. It only took one date to realize that they had each found “the one.”

Fiscally prudent wedding preparations ensued after Dario’s April 4^th proposal. The Espinoza nuptials featured a flare for homemade decorating and cost-cutting manual labor with a cake, bouquets, centerpieces, and cake toppers all made by the couple’s friends and family. The bride’s morale was only temporarily devastated when her dress, a bargain purchased from a questionable Chinese internet website with grammatically incorrect text, arrived in Provo. “It was droopy and the sleeves were too big and it looked like an old shower curtain,” Shuster said.

Fortunately, one of Espinoza's acquaintances, a seamstress for the BYU Living Legends team, completed the alterations to make the dress a perfect fit. Too perfect, in fact. Nobody anticipated the catastrophic events that would unfold on the wedding day.

Salt Lake City on August 16^th was favored with sunny weather in the high 80s. Guests from the wedding party traveled from Germany, China, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and Alaska to witness the ceremony. The unprecedented number of relatives on Shuster’s side of the family promised an auspicious event, but happy celebrations were delayed when the bride and groom did not make their triumphant exit from the temple doors on schedule. The wedding party waited. And waited. They waited so long that Willaby, Merella’s youngest sister and the most scantily clad bridesmaid, suffered minor sunburn.  

An hour later than planned, Shuster and Espinoza emerged after an alleged “dress malfunction.” Older sister and temple escort Sarita Rich was on site in the bridal dressing room to confirm allegations of said malfunctions. Apparently the bridal gown’s zipper, after being zipped and fastened, split, leaving a half-inch hole six inches from the bottom of the zipper. “We all stared at the back of the dress and told Merella not to move,” Rich said, “And as soon as I touched the zipper, trying to pull both sides together to relieve some pressure where the dress fit the tightest, the whole zipper split from top to bottom.”

Rich explained that audible gasps of horror--"Oh no!” and “Oh dear!”--issued from temple matrons as they gathered wide-eyed and open-mouthed, staring at the bride’s exposed back. “I admit, right then the thoughts going through my head were not temple worthy,” Rich stated. Shuster, always cool under pressure did not break down in hysterics. Instead she merely laughed it off, saying, “Well, that’s what you get for ordering from China!”

Temple matrons simply told Rich that she would have to “sew [Merella] in,” i.e. sew up two feet of stressed zipper by hand as fast as she could. When Rich reported that the cotton thread kept tearing, Merella inquired if there was any dental floss to be found in the temple. None of the elderly ladies had any, but they did procure some heavy-duty thread. Rich and Shuster's temple attendants took turns threading needles, stretching the zipper in place, and sewing the stitches. Only one temple matron’s finger was pricked with a needle in the process.

Other than the dress malfunction, all went as planned. The couple enjoyed lunch and open-mike toasts in the Joseph Smith Building and then invited all to join them for an open house in their new apartment in Provo from 7-9 p.m. After exiting the temple, Shuster was instructed not to eat, breathe, or sit down until the dress could be cut open with scissors at the end of the evening. 

Preliminary photos here. More to come! Someday.