Snake Surly

There’s nothing to get upset about. I know it seems a little weird, but I’m not makin’ this up.

I finished a pair of socks. You read it on the Internets, it must be true.

Need drinkie.

There’s nothing to make you feel cool and refreshed on a really, really hot day like apple wood smoke wafting through your house for hours and hours.

But then again, bacon makes everything better.

Well, gentle readers, I am in a pickle. I really, really, REALLY want to love this movie. The story is great, every frame of film is riveting, the acting breathtaking. Brando is perfect. Absolutely perfect.

But can I sit back and enjoy this? No, I am bogged down by Elia Kazan’s APOLOGIST FUCKING BULLSHIT. You are not Terry Malloy, asshat. You are not a martyr for a noble cause. You’re a dirty stinking informing rat. Dressing yourself up in art, no matter how beautifully crafted, will not redeem you for selling out your comrades to the HUAC.

This is giving me palpitations. I think I’m going to go watch some nice, inoffensive Disney movies.

So on my list of things to do is make some bacon. You all know what a big ole procrastinator I am, so when I read about Ruhlman’s BLT From Scratch Challenge, and I had JUST made some bread and finished watering the tomatoes and lettuce, it all clicked. It’s ON.

There’s no way on earth we’re going to win this thing, but we’re doing it. There’s tons of lettuce in the window box, the big tomatoes should be ripe in a week or so,  and I might even dig up some garlic for aioli. I have to think of some cool bread product to make. I think something with wild yeast is beyond me, but I might try some more ciabatta.

This little slab of delight is now curing in the refrigerator:

And as if that wasn’t enough, there was still a big slab of pork belly left over, and I just happened to have all the ingredients, so I put together some pancetta, too.

Smashing up all those juniper berries made me really, really thirsty, so I am now celebrating with a gigantic glass of nectarine/blueberry/strawberry shrub with gin and club soda. Aaaah, I feel so virtuous. Now I have to figure out what to do with the delicious slab of pork skin that I peeled off of the pancetta. Cracklin’s, maybe?

Aaaah, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Where the fuck has this movie been all my life? Seriously, gentle readers, this is some good shit.

Where to start? Okay, let’s start with the acting. Every major character in this movie got nominated, and deservedly so, for an acting Oscar. Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra both won Best Supporting. Duh. They were both wonderful. If you are an actor and you want to study how to do a drunk scene, watch this. Sinatra did it perfectly. Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift both lost to William Holden in Stalag 17, which I’ve never seen, but I’m guessing that neither one won because they canceled each other’s votes out. (I would have given it to the manly, manly Lancaster.) I don’t begrudge Audrey Hepburn (in Roman Holiday, one of her best) her win over Deborah Kerr because I adore her so, but it really should have gone to Kerr, who had a lot more on her plate, acting-wise.

And the story? Simple, totally character-driven, and quite unexpected. In Burt Lancaster’s first scene, he’s set up to be the villain of the film, but he’s not. I love that the real villain of the story is an ineffectual middle-management suckup. And the Japanese, don’t forget them, they’re bad, too.  But this isn’t a war movie, this is a movie about people who happen to be living in the time of war. When the bombs start falling on Pearl Harbor, these people can’t believe it. I mean, they have PROBLEMS and stuff, and now the Japanese are attacking them. The scenes of Pearl Harbor being bombed were brutally shocking, because they seemed so out of place. It was like, whoa, all of a sudden we’re in a war movie. WTF? It was kind of brilliant, because I’m sure that’s how people felt about it.

Anyway, I’m rambling. This was a terrific movie, and I’m a little annoyed with myself that I’ve never seen it before. I am agonizing over where to put it into my rankings list, because I might finally have to bump Rebecca from the top five.

Oh, boy. This was quite a doozy. So before we started to watch this movie I knew that it inexplicably beat out both High Noon and The Quiet Man for Best Picture, allegedly because Cecil B. DeMille was a supporter of Joseph McCarthy, and the producer of High Noon was about to be blacklisted. I knew it was a lavish production about the circus with a spectacular train crash, and that Stephen Spielberg was strongly influenced by it.

Holy crap, people, this is a bad movie. Charlton Heston was HORRIBLE. I mean smack-him-with-a-newspaper horrible. In his very first scene, he came blustering onto the screen in hysterics (manly hysterics, but hysterics nevertheless). I was certain right then (and I paused the film and said so) that he was going to have nowhere to go from there. He’d come out swinging, at full intensity, and I was right. There were NO levels. Every scene he was in was cranked up to eleven. It was exhausting to watch.

The rest of the cast was inoffensive but one-dimensional, except for, of course, Jimmy Stewart, whose performance as a clown with a deep dark secret was tender and nuanced and completely riveting. It was the polar opposite of Heston’s display and was a joy to watch.

I have to admit that the train wreck sequence was awesome and terrifying, and I did like the behind-the-scenes scenes, so this wasn’t as hard to watch as, say, Cimmaron, but it was pretty bad. It’s pretty offensive that this won Best Picture, especially considering what it was up against. This is going to be placed very, very low on my overall ranking list.

Oh, geez, I haven’t done a lot on my 1001 Things list lately. There’s a bunch of partially finished stuff…

3. Thanks to the completion of the new old cupboards, the bookshelf went into the library and another box got unpacked. There’s still more, so I can’t cross it off.

4. Nathan really has gotten the garage under control. Maybe we can cross this off.

5. We did work on the basement, but it’s nowhere near “organized”.

9. I washed the cloak again, and the kitten badness seems to have evaporated. When I wore it last weekend on a gloriously rainy day at Valhalla, it didn’t stink at all. It still needs to have a better clasp put on it, so I’m not crossing this off.

12. It’s pretty raggedy-looking, but I’m going to cross this off. There’s all sorts of great edible stuff growing where the junipers were.

(I don’t even want to talk about the knitting. I’m in a huge knitting slump, although I did work on the second blue sock today.)

25. ONE MORE kitchen cabinet and I’m done. I saved the hardest for last, and I’ve been painstakingly picking paint off of the glass-paned doors for a week. Nathan thinks I should just paint the suckers and call it done, but I know it’ll drive me nuts if they’re not perfect.

31. This is getting done, although we’re stuck in the middle of the loathsome The Greatest Show on Earth. Yack, dog food.

…and it goes on like that. I must focus. Clearly I need a glass of blueberry shrub and soda.

So there was that one time we moved into this house and ripped out the really ugly 70’s cabinets. After we’d done so, we realized that although the room looked better, there was no place to put the food. Eventually we got some base cabinets in, but there were no upper cabinets anywhere. We had to store our canned tomatoes somewhere, so even though I hate them with the fire of a thousand suns, we stuck one of our Ikea bookcases in the kitchen and unpacked our pantry. It’s been there for ten months.

Well, kiss that ugly bookcase goodbye. After months of incredibly tedious paint stripping (never try to strip 90 years’ worth of paint off of beadboard), we finally have the new old cabinets in place! Huzzah! I know it doesn’t look all that exciting, but I assure you, it is.

Now we just need molding, a new cutting board, and another coat of paint. And now I have room in the garage to work on the narrow upper cabinet that’s going in the service porch, and Nathan can get started re-assembling the other upper cabinets with glass doors. This kitchen is going to be AWESOME.

p.s. Crap, the floor wants mopping.

So my parents came over yesterday. My mom and I went down to Berkeley and I took her to Stonemountain and Daughter and the Berkeley Bowl, neither of which she’d ever been to. “I can never go to Jo-Ann again,” she sighed. While we were gone, the men got a bunch of stuff done.

Remember how our front yard looked a year ago? Yucky!

Then we mowed the lawn.

Then we watered the lawn, and it looked better.

But I hated that Euonymous, and there was this crazy-ass fence behind it.

It all had to go. I had roses to plant, after all.

But all those roses have to have somewhere to climb, so there had to be a new fence. Good thing my dad has a post-hole digger.

This morning, armed with beer and new knowledge, Nathan got to work.

Seriously, dude. This rocks so much. I love the copper caps on the fenceposts. Now we just have to get to work on the other side of the yard, and this place is going to start looking like we actually mean it. Sigh, if only we could rip out that craggledy concrete sidewalk and put in a nice brick path that matches the path to the steps, and if only we had a new gate, and if we ripped out the privet and painted the house…Oy. More beer, please.

So last week was International Cocktail Week (as opposed to Every Day is Cocktail Day). Nathan and I went to an amazing class taught by Jeff Hollinger and Neyah White, which was all about making house-made ingredients. Since we already make our own tonic syrup, brandied cherries, grenadine and what have you, we figured this would be right up our alley, and it was.

One of the amazing things that they taught us all about was making shrub. I’d never really even heard of shrub. Apparently it’s been around for hundreds of years, then over the last century people stopped making it. Basically what it is is fruit and sugar and vinegar, which makes a syrup, which you can then add to soda water or a cocktail or anything you want.

So of course we stampeded to the store the next day and bought the ripest strawberries we could get our hands on. Nathan carefully measured equal weights (a pound each) of sliced strawberries and sugar and popped them into a plastic container. The next morning, the container was full of juice.

Macerating Strawberries

We let the stuff sit for about three days at room temperature, and the strawberries eventually gave up every last bit of juice they had. Then Nathan added 16 ounces of plain old cider vinegar, and we let that sit on the counter for a couple more days.

Last night we put an ounce of it in a glass with a shot of gin, ice and soda water. HOLY CRAP, people, this was the best thing I’ve ever had. It was like the most refreshing, grown-up strawberry soda pop in the whole world. It was sweet - the very essence of strawberry, with a firm but not overpowering tanginess.  It was a good thing I didn’t have a straw, or I would have sucked the whole thing down in three seconds.

Anybody know where I can get some good cherries?