Mmmmmmm

There is no smell better than fresh basil.

Just prepared some leftover spaghetti and whipped up a quick sauce. Olive oil, sweet onion, minced garlic, fresh basil, Roma tomatoes from our garden, nutmeg and thyme, pat of butter, pinch of salt and pepper all simmered together in a large frying pan.

Wife and kids should be home momentarily, and in the meantime, decided to check e-mail. That's when I smelled the basil on my fingers. Ahhhhh.

Too early and too warm

Despite this warm weather, the leaves are still falling rapidly from the trees. On the way to school this morning, my five year old son, Grady, asked, "Do leaves pray?"

I asked, "What do you mean, Grady?"

He said, "Leaves are dying as they fall. I think they pray before they reach the ground."

After seeing the the shape the pumpkins are in, I expect he'll ask if the pumpkins prayed.

Owl

I don't know what it is about. Whenever Colleen is out of town, I can't seem to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Almost 1:00 a.m. and I will be up by 6:00 a.m. and will drag all day tomorrow.

The Staircase

I HIGHLY recommend renting the 2 DVD documentary, The Staircase. Colleen and I finished watching it early last week and not a day has gone by since that I haven't thought about it.

You'll learn to love, despise, trust, distrust, and respect so many real people in this documentary.


It's an inside look of the prosecution and defense of Michael Peterson who was accused of killing his wife in 2001. He insists he found her after she fell down a narrow staircase in their ritzy home in Durham, N.C.

Riveting.

Rosa Parks

I'm sad to read the news Rosa Parks has died. I'm happy, though, that she lived for 92 long years. At college (University of Virginia), I studied the civil rights movement for several semesters and those classes are some that I remember best and most fondly. Rosa is commonly lauded as as a lone crusader who sparked the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama. In reality, it was a bit more orchestrated; she was an active member of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and it was the leaders within that chapter that planned Rosa's civil disobedience on December 1, 1955. In no way does that diminish her bravery or the impact her actions had, and, truthfully, I always found it comforting to know she had that support system behind her.


She came to speak to a small gathering of faculty and students my third year (I think) and I was priveleged to be one of the students in attendance. While I was waiting to enter Cabell Hall Auditorium at the opposite end of the Rotunda on The Lawn, I saw a frail white-haired woman being escorted up the steps. Clearly it was Rosa, and she received warm but quiet applause from the people waiting and even the students walking by on their way to classes. She acknowledged the gesture with a quarter turn and a quick wave. I honestly forget the particulars of her speech inside, but remember well her no-nonsense style of speaking. Seeing her and hearing her voice gave me an existential experience, easily putting me in Montgomery on that late day in 1955. It was a powerful.

Good bye Rosa.

Just Keep Swimming

My five year old, Grady, is in the middle of some swim lessons and my three year old, Liam, is crazy jealous. We've tried to explain to Liam that his gymastic lessons equal Grady's swim lessons, but he just doesn't buy it when he's sitting poolside fully clothed while Grady is splashing around with his class.

So, I sat him down today to show that we've indulged him in swimming not too long ago. That's when I pulled up the CD with all of our San Diego pictures on it, and discovered that I had shot a couple of movies on my digital camera. I'd never seen them, so imagine his and my delight at the two shorties below. (Click the thumnails to download the 3MB clips. Requires QuickTime.)

Will he get the crab? It was Liam's first solo trip into the water:








Is he having fun yet?

Bugs!

The outside of our house has been overrun with beetles the last week. They seem to love bright sun because they're only on the back of the house, which is southern facing.

Close up. They are about 1/2 inch long and have red bodies with black wings and appendages. They move eerily like a spider when they walk. And, they're flat enough that some work their way into our house every night, but thankfully they must miss their gaggle since they stay against the back windows.



One section of the back of our house. Uninhabited (darn it!) bat box visible in upper right hand corner.


Bolstering my theory that they are attracted to the sun and bright colors, our neighbor's house, which is white, has them twice as bad as us:


We have a large population of Purple Martins that seem to have gone to warmer climates already because I'd expect them to feast on these beetles if they were still around. By the way, if you have mosquito problems, try to attract these gems to your yard by buying Purple Martin bird houses. They do wonders in our neighborhood, and are really fun to watch swooping over head all summer long. They are a type of Swallow and if you've ever been to a night baseball game, you have seen them swooping up the insects flying in the lights.

I'm back

1. First, you have to check out The Sneeze's new Steve Don't Eat It. Hilarious, if not a bit racy.

2. I'm headed to D.C. on Thursday with my youngest son to visit my parents and my sister's family, which now includes the beautiful Cole. I'm very excited to meet my godson. And, Liam seems to fully understand what the trip is all about. Besides getting frothy about the peanuts he'll have on the plane and that we'll get to see our old dog, Coltrane, he does mention "meeting my cousin, Cole."

3. After 5 months of unemployment, I have finally settled on what I'm going to pursue. I'm going to be a real estate broker. Yeah, yeah you say, they are a dime a dozen. But, I am confident I will be part of the million dollar club within a few years. Everyone who knows me well and hears of my plans immediately tells me I am perfectly suited for this. And, I have a friend in the real estate business and a friend in the mortgage business. They are both surrounded by realtors every day and if they tell me that I'm going to, and I quote, "Run circles around all the brokers out there," then I'm confident I'm going to succeed.

I'm in the middle of studying for the licensing exam by way of an online school. It's a lot of dry material -- contract law, real estate law, forms of ownership, foreclosure, taxes, and the like, but I'm really enjoying it. And doing quite well, I might add. I have a knack for this. I'm gunning for the November licensing exam. I've already been recruited and accepted by a very dynamic, and small, real estate agency that is expanding rapidly on the west coast. Exit Acclaim Realty. What's so nice about Exit is that the commission split between broker and company is much better for the broker, and there are no desk fees (which run between $20,000 and $25,000 a year at places like Re-Max and Century 21).

4. My good friend, MSL, who visited briefly last month, brought us a bottle of wine that Colleen and I drank on Friday night. 2003 Gerard Boulay Sancerre Chavignol. Imported from France. It was wonderful. Here are my tasting notes I shared with MSL:

We opened it during the last hour of simmering for the Bolognese sauce, as we
turned on Star Wars for the boys on the computer, and kicked back to watch the
Red Sox begin to dismantle the Yankees. About 15 minutes later we poured
two glasses of it and returned to the game.

The nose was strong and bold– and just a tinge too much alcohol. I was expecting for it to be very sharp. When it hit my lips, all I could think of was silk. It
was the “wettest” red wine I’d had in a long, long time. And that was a
very good change in pace for me. The top note was very sharp, as I
expected, which I wasn’t too fond of, but within less than a second, my mouth
was enveloped in an earthy curtain of flavor. Simply wonderful! As
the wine opened up a bit more with subsequent glasses, that sharp top note all
but disappeared.

Colleen’s short, but spot-on, description: “It’s fruity but not sweet.” She tasted berries and chocolate. She compared it at first to Pinot Noir, but then thought it was a bit bolder.

5. Why is it that when people put decals on their back windows (college, bands, slogans, etc.) that they don't take the time to center it? Often I'll see someone displaying something they're proud of, but it's two or three inches off center, or tilted, or sometimes both.

6. I'm a recent convert to Craigslist. I was not having any luck finding a bigger dresser for Liam's room on eBay, so I checked out the Portland portal on Craigslist.com. Whoa! I had about 75 dressers to choose from. As a result, we got a big dresser in perfect condition for $200. New it would have been $750. I'm also intrigued by the "Wanted" section on Craigslist. People post what they need, often asking for the items gratis. I love it! And, I've given away our old, but perfect, answering machine to a young lady who moved here from Philadelphia, and an old bookcase to a musician who just moved here from Athens, GA. They were both SO appreciative, and it made me feel so much better than getting a few bucks for the items on eBay or at a garage sale. And, Craigslist is how Exit Acclaim Realty found me. I know I'm so late getting on the Craigslist bandwagon (heck, I even met Craig at Web 2.0 in San Francisco about a year ago), but I can't sing it's praises enough.

7. LET'S GO RED SOX!