July 2007

Cut adrift by CBS

Movies & Television /

Have you heard about that reality TV show on CBS this summer called “Pirate Master“? Well you might have heard about it but I bet you haven’t been watching it. Not many people are watching it. But, TW and I were. We weren’t loving it but we were watching it every single Thursday night at 8pm. And then last week it was on at a different time, which was frustrating but we still watched it. Now, we don’t watch it. We’ve been cut adrift by CBS and we didn’t even have a chance to plead our case or ask for mutiny!

You see, CBS has moved Pirate Master to Tuesday night at 10pm. I discovered this completely by accident last night, while surfing blogfeeds. The folks at TV Squad post this thing “What’s on tonight” and I usually don’t bother looking at it because we don’t watch much TV. For some reason, I didn’t scroll past but stopped on that post and when I saw “Pirate Master” on the list I was confused! Had I been working all day on the premise that it was Tuesday, when it fact it was Thursday?

What the hell? Way to confuse me, CBS. And way to lose two viewers of a show that doesn’t have a whole lot of viewers. 10pm is not prime TV watching time for us. No we don’t do Tivo, either. It’s nice that you have the episodes available online but that’s now how I like to watch TV, so I won’t.

Mutiny seems like a good idea right now. Maybe we won’t come back to CBS in the fall for Survivor.

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Fine Charleston Dining – Part 2

1 Comment / Daily Dose, Family Funk, Foodie, Travel Log /

I don’t know what in the heck is going on with my template all of a sudden – do any of you in firefox see weirdness? I pulled the last post because I know it was fine yesterday, before I published. But pulling that didn’t seem to solve the issue. And I don’t think I did any fiddling with the template yesterday. Weird. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, more Charleston dining experiences. Last weekend we hit two more restaurants that were new to all of us. Both were very good and worthy of future visits.

First, we hit the Sunfire Grill & Bistro for dinner on Saturday evening. It’s just over the old Ashley River Bridge if you’re coming in from the North Area. I believe it is in the old Steak & Ale building. We arrived at 6pm and it wasn’t the least bit crowded, but it wasn’t empty either. It’s a dark restaurant, “date atmosphere” but there were quite a few large groups and just a few couples.

Jenn ordered Shrimp & Grits and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. She ordered a chocolate something or other cheesecake for dessert and ate almost the whole thing. Which means it was good since she was stuffed from the main course. Michelle ordered some sort of seafood combination platter with Tilapia and shrimp and she ate a surprising amount (Michelle rarely does more than pick at her food at a restaurant), TW ordered the crap crab soup as a starter and was pleasantly surprised by it and a grilled cheese for her main dish – unfortunately they brought her the child’s grilled cheese instead of the special gourmet grilled cheese but she was happy with it. For dessert she ordered some sort of chocolate chip cake that she liked very much. I ordered a black bean burger and potato salad and both were very, very good. TW forced me to order a slice of strawberry cake and everyone enjoyed it. There was some mango syrup drizzled around the plate and it was a nice touch.

For breakfast on Sunday, we drove around the corner from Jenn’s apartment (and when I say around the corner, I mean it – she could walk there almost as quickly as we drove) to the Sunflower Cafe. Typical breakfast fare and everyone seemed to enjoy what they ordered – everything from Beignets and country ham to pancakes to omelettes. (One thing to mention – when they say something is dusted with powdered sugar, they don’t mean dusted – they mean coated. If that troubles you, then you should consider asking them to go easy on the powdered sugar or leave it off entirely.)

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Driving in Panama

Daily Dose, Family Funk, Memories, Travel Log /

When I saw Marvia’s post about driving in Panama I laughed out loud and then I sat back and let the memories wash over me. There is NOTHING like Panama driving and the only thing I’ve found that even comes close is driving in the Philippines.

Marvia is right – turn signals aren’t to be bothered with. Brake lights and head lights are also not important, (except I did get pulled once by a nice Panamanian police officer who spoke no English and wanted me to know my right brake light was out. Gee thanks dude – the other 300 cars on this road right now don’t even have brake lights, but hey, that was nice of him.) Also, the honking. Honking can mean 50 different things and usually something like “hey dude with the flowers, or the bags of oranges – I want to buy some and I’ll stop right here in the middle of the road while you bring them over, we haggle over some money and then I’ll take off without looking to see if anyone is attempting to go around me because I’ve sat here so long – and then I’ll honk the horn again because my mom’s auntie lives over there and she might have seen me driving by.” Horn honking in the US means nothing and is just an annoyance to me – at least in Panama, it meant something interesting.

That traffic she talks about, hahaha, oh yea. Bad. One of the worst experiences of my life was sitting in the middle of The Bridge of the Americas for 2 hours during dry season. I can’t describe it. It was. not. good. Thankfully, I did not have a child with me at the time. I’m pretty sure I’d have abandoned the car and walked home.

Marvia followed a bus to the bus terminal, hoping she’d get to where she was going – I’ve done that! Though actually it wasn’t a bus, it was a nice American couple and I figured eventually they would drive to one of the military bases and from whichever one it was, I could get home. It worked – took me 20 minutes out of my way, but hey, at least I was not lost.

Ah Panama, how I miss it.

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Original Sins

2007, Books in Bed, Feminism, Fiction, Queer /

I finally finished Lisa Alther’s Original Sins. I’ve only been reading it for weeks. I can’t remember when it has taken me so long to finish a book but it wasn’t the book’s fault, it was mine – I was distracted. So, about the book. It was much better than Kinflicks but again, very doggone long. I liked the characters quite a bit better. I liked watching them move from childhood into the adulthood – figuring out how to navigate through racism and feminism and a wee bit into orientation. And, I liked the ending.

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Miss Liberty

2 Comments / Family Funk, Holidays, Melissa Ferrick, Sights & Sounds /

I woke up this morning to find Maria had a great piece about patriotic music and I knew immediately what my favorite would be! Melissa Ferrick doing Dayna Kurtz‘s Miss Liberty! (I took this video last winter – it’s not complete. You can find a complete video here)

Here are the lyrics:

I’m Miss Liberty
Give me your junkies
your irresponsible drummers
I’ve swept my halls clean of clean
Your kitchen raiders your wingtip dayrunners

Go plant your flags and make your
Promise to my promised land
And we’ll make love to the new frontier
In the hot beach sand

You’ll hold me like a drowning man
And come at me too human and then
Drag me down again and leave me

Broken like a spine
Split open like a melon that’s been
Dropped from a high high place
Broken like a spine
Split open like a melon that’s been dropped

I like this country she’s like a whore
Who loves her junkies
Who loves all her sad outlaws
Lifts up her skirt to tease and flirt
With the wretched who have washed up at her shores

When we die i hope someone’s god
Takes us in like immigrants
And we’ll make love in the leftover light
Of heaven’s tenements

You’ll hold me like a drowning man
And come at me too human
Drag me down again and leave me

Broken like a spine
Split open like a melon that’s been
Dropped from a high high place
Broken like a spine
Split open like a melon that’s been dropped

Yes
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yes

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Job Changes

2 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

What an odd feeling. I woke up this morning and had absolutely no idea what to start working on. I had a wee bit of this feeling on Saturday and on Sunday but since we were traveling, it was easy to just move through my morning and not get fixated on the jobs I was no longer doing. But this morning, that was odd. More than odd, but difficult to explain.

For more than six years I’ve been following a very specific routine. As soon as I wake up, I feed the animals, nuke a cup of day old coffee or a fresh cup of tea, I read my email and then visit a certain website and read a dozen or more message boards. Six years. The number of days I’ve deviated from that can be counted on two hands. Six years is a long time.

I’m not sure I can say that I miss those boards. I obviously miss some things about them, like hearing about the “regulars” and their lives and venting with my coworkers (though it is nice to not feel a need to “vent”.) It’s the change in routine that I was missing more than anything else this morning. I am a creature of habit. Now I have to create some new habits. That’s weird. And challenging. And interesting. Did I mention weird?

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