10 Month Comparison Photos
My So Called Life
Yer a wizard, ‘arry!
For Halloween this year, we had a bit of a theme going on: we all dressed as characters from Harry Potter.
From left to right: Hagrid, Norbert the Dragon, Harry Potter, Severus Snape, and Draco Malfoy
Aside from a couple of wizard’s duels, Halloween went more or less swimmingly.
Oliver was wearing the Gryffindor scarf I knit a few years ago, and Evelyn was wearing a brand new Slytherin scarf that Evelyn, Sara, and I have been working on lately. Evelyn would often knit in the car on the way to Billy Elliot practice, and then Sara or I would take over in the evenings.
Unfortunately, Norbert didn’t quite make it all the way through his first Halloween. Luckily, Hagrid knows about the Care of Magical Creatures!
Billy Elliot Opens Tonight!
Evelyn is ready to SHINE tonight at the premiere of Billy Elliot! You only have three weeks to come and see the show, so get your tickets now!
(I can tell you from sitting outside 10 weeks of rehearsal, it is going to be AMAZING!)
“The Brush”
I wasn’t very close to my Uncle Lenny growing up (although I did forget that he lived with us for a while while he worked on our house). I remember seeing his “Brush” logo on magnets and his van, I remember he was always wearing paint-splattered clothes, and maybe he used to have a thing at his house in the summer and we played volleyball? I don’t remember.
I don’t think I could really “see” Uncle Lenny until I was an adult.
In fact, I remember the exact moment: we had gone over to his house to pick pears, and he was showing us around his place. Evelyn was playing with the kittens, and at that time I think he had his turkeys? Anyway, it was one of the few times I was ever over to his place without a big crowd of people. He was showing us around, showing us around the barn. He just seemed so happy, and proud, and just…in the moment. Like he was where he was supposed to be, you know?
And I remember I just had this lightning bolt moment, like “Uncle Lenny has got his life set just exactly how he wants it.” I mean, most people spend all this time working and saving and striving, and we never really get there. But Uncle Lenny had cracked the code: he was more or less satisfied with his life. (This must have been in 2006, because I briefly mentioned it on the blog, so Evelyn and the kittens must have been later.)
I don’t think most people wanted to live Lenny’s life, and so they might have looked at it and said, “He must have been unhappy.” And as I’m typing this out I can almost hear him saying, “I don’t give a shit about what most people say.” And he’s right, because most people will never feel as content as Lenny felt when he was sitting out back of his house at a bonfire. Never.
I can’t even tell you how enraptured I was with Uncle Lenny’s yard, and it was 100% the catalyst for buying our property up in Michigan. In 2011 I wrote:
My Uncle Lenny’s yard has always been something of an inspiration to me. He’s got some awesome fruit trees, a little pool with a waterfall and actual, flowering lily pads, and a nice little cozy yet open area off the back deck. However, this time I got to see an awesome new (to me) feature, which I never knew about before.
A large section of his yard is densely wooded, and through this area winds a series of paths. You enter through a trellis-framed door, and if you follow the main path, you wind almost 800 feet to the little cleared camping area in the back. On the way you pass through a spooky wooded section, a more open back section, and even come upon a pine-tree-fairy-ring. I cannot tell you how cool the whole thing is! I enjoyed the first trip through so much, I took a second trip. Oliver apparently found it relaxing as well, since he fell asleep on my head.
The first thing Ollie said when I told him about Uncle Lenny was, “What’s going to happen to all the Santas?” Christmas was Uncle Lenny’s season. Whether it was decorating his house for the Christmas party, sneaking an unexpected gift into the dice game, or dressing up as Santa and giving the kids toys, he just had this grin on his face. I mean, who would have guessed the quiet guy off to the side in the cowboy hat had a house full of tiny Santas?
Lenny was kind of a man of contradictions. On the outside he was rough and tumble, but on the inside there was nothing he liked more than bringing joy to someone. If you didn’t know Lenny well, then you’d probably be surprised to hear it, but if you did know Lenny well then you’re not surprised at all.
Rest in peace, Uncle Lenny. World lost a true original.
Like Bacon, But Not
A while back, someone (several someones) alerted me to the fact that there was a “Bacon Critic” job up for grabs. Not one to pass up an opportunity like that, I went ahead an applied! Alas, I did not get the job. However, as part of the application, I did need to write “a short essay of fewer than 600 words recounting your favorite bacon-related memory”.
Favorite bacon-related memory…how can I pick just one? These are the tough questions that only a dedicated Bacon Critic can answer.
I now present to you, “Like Bacon, But Not”, my first (but probably not my last) bacon-flavored essay:
After college, my future wife and I spent a couple of weeks kicking around Italy. In general the food was the best I’ve ever had…with one significant exception.
We were staying at some out of the way hotel in the Italian lakes region. It was close by an Italian lake, but not THE Italian lakes, if you catch my drift. Very remote and un-touristy.
“No problem, we can do this,” we oh-so-naively thought. “The natives gotta eat, right? We’ll do as the Romans do.”
We asked at the front desk and they told us about the “restaurant on the island”, so we set off vaguely in that direction. We found a dock and stood there with no one else in sight until an old guy in a fishing boat pulled up. “Ferry?” he said. “Restaurant?” Despite the fact that those two words seemed to be the extent of his English, we did want to go to the restaurant, so we climbed on board.
About this time we realized that we were completely off the map, and getting further away. We tried asking about return trips and timetables, but this level of detail was completely beyond him. However, he did use hand gestures to insist, repeatedly, that we should take many pictures of each other in the boat. We did it too; no sense in pissing this guy off. Nobody knew where we were, we didn’t know if the restaurant was even real, and this guy didn’t have enough English to say, “I am not an ax murderer.” For all we knew, these pictures could be the only evidence they find when they inevitably dredged the lake for our bodies.
When we finally made it to the island, the menu was naturally in Italian. Eventually we managed to get a hold of the owner’s wife, who had taken some English in high school. She ran down the menu giving us our options: “fish from the lake”, “fish from the lake”, “fish from the lake”, and “like bacon, but not”.
Now, the way I figured it, you could literally not go wrong with “like bacon, but not”. I mean, best case it’s delicious bacon, and worst case it’s delicious ham.
When our food came out, I was presented with a plate of what appeared to be thinly sliced provolone cheese. “I don’t think this is what I ordered,” I whispered to Sara after the waiter had left. I slipped the menu back out and scanned to the item identified as “like bacon, but not”.
Lardo. Literally, a plate of lard.
Now, I didn’t exactly want to eat a plate of lard, but when in Rome, right? More specifically, we were trapped on an island in the middle of nowhere with a ferryman who may never show up again. This might be our last meal.
Gamely, I took some of the bread from the table and made a lard sandwich, spreading the lardo with a butter knife. I gagged with every bite, but I managed to choke down about half of the plate before finally throwing in the towel. I can only imagine that the wait staff was watching from a window, laughing at the dumb American who thinks that lard is something anybody ever consumed on purpose, much less ordered from a restaurant.
Adding insult to injury, it turns out lardo, being a delicacy, was expensive.
The moral of the story is, when it comes to bacon, settle for no substitute! If your bacon is even a little “not”, best to go with the fish from the lake.
Shane Halbach 