Posted in Fab Fotos, Ha-P 2 B in OG, tagged Jersey Shore, Murray Head, Ocean Grove on August 13, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Ooooh the bad press, the distortions, the drama, the caricatures, the drinking, the Governor even!!!! So to set the record straight at least in this blog’s point of view, here are some real Jersey Shore photos!
Gone Fishing
photo by Murray Head
Soaring Over the Water
photo by Murray Head
Here I go!
photo by Murray Head
Gone for a Swim
photo by Lori
Low Tide
photo by Lori
Posted in BY THE WAY, Thursday's Top Ten, Uncategorized, tagged Shmendrick, Yiddish on August 12, 2010| 10 Comments »
TEN TIPS THURSDAY
If you live in New York City, these word are already in your vocabulary! However, sometimes even I forget there’s a world out there that doesn’t just toss out Yiddish words in their everyday conversations – BUT everyone can…it’s not like dropping French phrases which might make you seem pretentious – you know like with sangfroid!
With a little practice, these words will be rolling off your tongue in no time.
Shmendrick
Posted in Six Word Memoirs on August 9, 2010| 2 Comments »
This is the BEST Six Word Memoir Monday EVER!!! I’ve got a free pass – many of you have sent in YOUR own Six Word Memoirs and I am so pleased to present them to you.
Sick, Scared, Unstable, Ocean, Renewal, Peace – Susan
Tired of Working, Bring on Retirement – Susan H.
Too Many Clothes, Too Little Time – Helen
New Job – Too Tired to Write – Weez
Peace in our time? Let’s Hope! –Gail
Off beach, in Shower, on Porch – Trish
Aren’t these great? Thank you, THANK you, Thank YOU! –Me
The Six-Word Memoir project was the first in a series of several “Six-Word” reader driven projects on the SMITH Magazine website. Six-Word Memoirs are simple stories told in six words (no more, no less) that describe anything from the mundane details of someone’s childhood to the most private events in a romantic relationship. For example, Six-Word Memoirs book series editors Larry Smith (editor) and Rachel Fershleiser’s six-word memoirs are, respectively, “Big hair, big heart, big hurry” and “Bespectacled, besneakered, read and ran around.”
Once asked to write a full story in six words, legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Posted in BY THE WAY, Everyday Food, Friends, Ha-P 2 B in OG, Tasty Tidbits Tuesday, tagged Cucumber, food, Jim and Judy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Peter, picnic, President Kennedy, recipe, Sarah Palin, Squash and Cantaloupe, supper on August 8, 2010| 3 Comments »
If you recall somewhere in one of my blog posts I said I was going to make a couple of the recipes I put up last Tuesday! I know, I know, you THINK I have already made a recipe before I post it, thereby attesting to its goodness. Well….confession time and truth be told-NOT ALWAYS! But don’t turn away so quickly in disappointment-I said not always. I would say the percentage of recipes I haven’t tried first is less than 1%!!! So small I probably shouldn’t have even admitted it because now you may doubt my creditability. Well don’t; I’m going to toot my own horn here, however if you want letters of reference, I can get them, lol. Besides being a very good cook, I also have this uncanny ability to look at a recipe and know intrinsically whether or not it will taste good and if it will be too difficult to make. I don’t purport to be a gourmet cook, I am just a really good cook.
Well now that we have put that to bed, let me tell you the real story of this blog. Last night we had supper under the stars with our next door neighbors, Jim and Judy. The invitation was casual enough; Saturday morning and we are each on our front porch, drinking coffee and reading the morning newspapers. That is what a summer weekend is all about right? Well, that and cleaning, and going to the grocery/hardware/home goods/pet food stores, watering the plants, filling the bird feeders, weeding, going to the beach, mowing the lawn and washing the car/changing the oil/getting gas. Whew! I’m already hot and sweaty! But, I think that’s from vacuuming the porch rug, the bedroom carpet and under the bed(that was scary!) and making Peter some bacon and eggs. He’s on a kick to gain 10 pounds; I don’t know why he thinks it’s so hard….I told him just eat what I eat and he’ll be there in no time. Oh the digression just goes on and on.
Back to the Saturday morning porch scene; I lean over close to Peter and whisper that the meal I want to make tonight probably is more than enough for just the two of us and I think we should invite Jim and Judy to a casual summer supper in our backyard tonight. So we did – or rather I left the inviting up to Peter stressing that he make clear it is really casual food (read it is DEFINITELY not steak), it isn’t even hot dogs and hamburgers which is probably summer’s most casual food. Oh let me back up a little, I had it in my mind all along to have guests for dinner which is why I sent Peter out REALLY early to get my requisite Grande Americano, cat food and corn – except instead of 3 ears, I told him to get 4. I wanted to say get 6 or 7 but if the dinner plans didn’t work out I didn’t want to have leftover corn. BECAUSE if you know me, you know I only eat fresh corn picked that day! It’s not weird, it’s sugar….once the corn is picked it begins to turn to pure sugar immediately. Okay well, we’ll have to do a nutrition blog another time.
So now that we have established guests, time and place, I know what prep work I need to do so that I can go to the beach and when I get home not have to knock myself out. I am going to make the Squash, Cucumber and Cantaloupe side dish. As you may remember, this dish requires the cucumber, squash and melon to be shaved into ribbons. While not the best sous-chef (but the only one around) I commandeered Peter to do this because he isn’t afraid of the mandolin. Thank God, he did it with the patience of a saint that he doesn’t believe in. The cantaloupe was SO RIPE that it just kept falling apart so instead of mandolin, I made the thinnest slices I could. Those items got refrigerated. I made the yogurt lime dressing and put it in the fridge. I looked at the rest of that recipes and realized this was NOT a meal you could prepare much in advance. So we went to the beach!
He's Not Afraid of the Mandolin
Fast forward to 6pm and I am putting some hors d’oeuvres out on the front porch. When Judy asked what could she bring I said dessert – they arrived with a BOX of fruit tarts, a raspberry, pear tart, a monster bottle of red wine, a bottle of white wine and a bottle of Absolut. YIKES – they aren’t even getting cooked food!!!
I visited for a while with our guests, but I knew if we were going to eat I had to work in the kitchen and ALONE. Several times Judy offered to help but I refused because a) I like to work alone, b) by the time I thought of what she could do, I could no doubt do it myself and c) I had never made all of this before so my timing was all off and I was winging it and you can’t both be winging!!!
I drained the cucumber squash mix and the cantaloupe, I peeled and cut up two avocados which were too ripe to slice so I just scooped out the pulp, sliced a tomato, got the pot out for the corn (and thankfully remembered to take the corn out to Peter to shuck), lined the broiler with foil, made the blue cheese vinaigrette dressing. At this point, I was ready to put corn in the pot, fry the turkey bacon and slice the rustic bread to toast in the broiler. You know a cook and/or a mother make the best project managers in the world. Why companies hire men who hardly ever do two things at once I’ll never know. I set the table outside, got the candles, and was almost ready. A quick survey of the food told me more dishes were going to be required. I could see that you couldn’t or maybe shouldn’t put the yogurt dressing on the melon, cukes and squash and stir it up, so I put some in 4 bowls and dropped a few dollops of dressing on each, put out the hokey (but oh so in the period of my kitchen) plastic corn plates, (you know they look like an ear of corn lol). I quartered the iceberg lettuce, drizzled the vinaigrette over the wedges and sprinkled a little more blue cheese on top- Mmmm they looked good! Finally with corn steamed, I assembled a few sandwiches with sliced tomato, bacon, mashed avocado and radish sprouts on the excellent Tuscan bread, cut them in halves, put them on a platter and I’m done!!!
We sat outside for hours under the stars; after supper, it was dessert and coffee and hours of conversation – to Peter’s delight our neighbors are liberal Democrats, intellects and well-read; they know Sarah Palin is stupid and that Lee Harvey Oswald was NOT the lone assassin who killed President Kennedy.
Posted in BY THE WAY, Six Word Memoirs, tagged Allison, Betty, Carole King, Don Draper, Gerry Geffen, Mad Men, Roger on August 2, 2010| 4 Comments »
I think Monday’s Six Word blog is going to have to share space with….MAD MEN. Soapy as it is, lines and characters predictable – I love it. And to think I almost forgot to take charge of the remote in time to see it – we all know Peter was well on his way to watching CONFESSION on TMC!
Monday Morning Recap
It was painful to watch Roger succumb to the demands of a haughty, self-aggrandizing client and put on the Santa suit. Oh those of us whose income depends on pleasing on a client rather than the use of our own intellect and talent… Hey isn’t that all supposed to go together??
And then there’s Don – so true to form! We can count on him to get drunk and screw some skirt that happens to pass by in his visual field, impaired as it must be considering his state of inebriation. Props go to the nurse who so outrageously flirted with Don, but scooted away safely when she realized there was nothing to be gained there. Too bad Allison, Don’s secretary couldn’t think past the drunken attention she was receiving from her boss!! She presented an unflattering depiction of an attention-starved woman, an over-giver and worst of all, a pathetic embodiment of a naive, although I think she should have known better woman who believes that if a man fucks you, then he must really like you! Too bad Carole King and Gerry Geffen’s hit, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? hadn’t been written and recorded yet!!! AND what’s really telling about that song (all women take heed) is that Gerry wrote the lyrics!!!!!!!
Talk about PAIN – poor Allison felt like a $100 hooker the next morning and Don… well, and we thought Betty was made of ice lol lol. The laugh’s on us – he was one cold bastard the morning after the night before!!! I wrote six words describing despicable Don: womanizer, unfeeling, cold, angry, drunk, selfish. Pretty harsh I know and I like him – although truth be told I think my feelings have more to do with his looks than anything else – oh yes I know how shallow that makes me.
And he looks so charming too, Who knew?
However, one possible explanation for Don’s dismissive attitude towards Allison in the office was that he had a blackout! Oh how redeeming that would be as well as damning because who needs an alcoholic who blacks out in their life???
Posted in Friends, Six Word Memoirs, tagged A Shimmy in My Spirit, AARP, Dani, Gail, Larry Smith, Six Word Memoir Project on August 2, 2010| 11 Comments »
What do you think of starting the week with a six word summation of your life? The gauntlet was thrown down, the challenge put forth AND this week I have THREE more contributions from my readers!!! YES I am EXCITED!!
I know this sounds like a daunting task; when I first read about it in an AARP magazine, their challenge was a Six Word Memoir – Cheating Death. NOW that’s hard. From there I looked up Larry Smith who is the founder of the Six-Word Memoir Project which led me to: http://www.smithmag.net/ (you will have to cut and paste because for some reason I am not grabbing a live link) and there, is a whole world clever witty memoirs sent in by people all over the world.
So here published for the first time anywhere:
The dog ate my homework – Gail
Memoir? My life isn’t over yet – Dani
There’s a shimmy in my spirit – Cynthia
Many of the readers of this blog know who Dani and Gail are and I think they deserve props for so graciously sending in their thoughts. Cynthia is a SITS-za who happened across my blog through the wonderful bloggy world of SITS-The Secret is in the Sauce. You can read all about this Northern Californian kindred soul who is a photographer and loves to dance, eat chocolate and go to flea markets – YES this is my kindred spirit, you know it. Here is a link to her blog – A Shimmy In My Spirit.
Posted in BY THE WAY, Ha-P 2 B in OG, Uncategorized, tagged Smokey Robinson, The Great Auditorium on July 31, 2010| Leave a Comment »
I have spent so much time talking about the heat and NOW that the heat wave is OVER and today was just as pleasant as yesterday, I have to bring up the HEAT one more time. Today is Saturday and the sun was warm and the breeze light. A perfect summer day! Not so last week.
Last Saturday was brutally hot, sticky hot and just hot hot! Walking, moving at all was painful We had tickets to see Smokey Robinson in the Great Auditorium which is NOT air-conditioned. It was extremely uncomfortable; couldn’t figure out what to wear that would not stick to me – how silly, everything stuck to me including me to me. I also forgot my fan and for the first time that I can remember, instead of giving the fans away, they were selling them!! The fans cost a dollar each but well worth every penny. The entire audience was in motion. Fans were waving all over – it was sea of sweaty people waving hot air over themselves and sweating from the energy expended to wave the fan.
Smokey Robinson was superb and how he performed in a suit, I’ll never know. We were like limp rags and he was jumping around the stage. The only two items allowed in the auditorium during a concert are fans and WATER ! The fans cost a dollar, the water cost a dollar and I think the Camp Meeting Association made more money from the sale of those two commodities than they did from the ticket sales!!!
See what I mean….
Recycle Me
Photo by Susan Taylor (Blackberry phone)
Posted in BY THE WAY, Ha-P 2 B in OG, tagged Day's Ice Cream, full moon, Nagle's, Peter, Vic's Perroni on July 31, 2010| 1 Comment »
No, no it has nothing to do with Snookie and the rest of the Guido Gang….I’m talking about…………
First of all it was a glorious day and I was still alone at the cottage with the cats (my choice) and so I did some running around. I even drove to Shrewsbury because I was sucked in by a persistent ad that has been running on the radio on The Breeze from Shrewsbury Bicycles. I want a pink beach cruiser or mint green or yellow or well, you get the picture. Too far to go to find out all of their bikes started around $325.00!! Oh well….
I picked Peter up at the train station around 4pm and he was glad to be back; see his wife and his cats (hopefully in that order) and finally be able to sit on his porch and enjoy a martini, something he has been unable to do because of the dreadful heat wave which made going outside a chore and not a pleasure.
That’s how the evening started and around 6:30pm we took the Metro (so cute and so much fun) and drove to Bradley Beach to Vic’s – NOW that’s a Jersey Shore kind of place and we love it. Pasta the old-fashioned way with gravy you know. A bowl of shells and meatballs and a Perroni, sitting on the restaurant’s patio and I was in heaven. The breeze was delightful, the food was exceptionally good that night-we even shared an antipasta salad.
My plan was to come home and leave the car and talk Peter into walking over to Day’s because I had been abstaining from ice cream all week and wanted a treat tonight. Here’s what I forgot; It was Founder’s Day in the Grove and hundreds of people went to the Great Auditorium at 7:30pm to hear a concert and they got out somewhere around 9:00pm and MOST of them headed directly to Day’s for ice cream- this is how we live it up here in Ocean Grove. In all the years I have been coming to Ocean Grove this was one of the longest if not the longest line I have ever seen. It literally was back to the corner of Pilgrim Pathway and Pitman Avenue. Even a junkie like me was deterred. Plan B: I suggest we go over to Nagles where hopefully the line won’t be so long. So much for Plan B. Trying to keep up good spirits and chatter so my companion who never wanted to walk anywhere at this hour, would not say “Enough is enough”. So I suggest we walk to the boardwalk and wait for the moon to rise – an experience my Brooklyn-born, City bred husband has not yet seen in his life. The breeze was delightful, so soft and cool but not cold and this is the kind of summer day and night we have been hoping for all through July. Hot day, not humid, cool evening-God is good (after all we ARE in Ocean Grove)!
We sat down on a bench facing the ocean and watched the waves gently lap at the shore-no crashing waves tonight. You could smell the ocean which by the way does NOT smell like any candle claiming it’s name and scent as Ocean. The stars were out, however we couldn’t really see the hundreds that were dim spots overhead because of the lights on the boardwalk. Still, seeing as many as we did is a treat for us city folk who have to view the night sky through thousands of ground lights. We thought we saw Mars, that is until Mars started to move North. Oh well, astronomers we’re not. I knew the moon was supposed to rise at about 10:07pm and like a child wanting to know “Are we there yet?” I kept asking Peter the time. Finally the clock moves to 10:05. 10:06, 10:07-nothing. 10:08, 10:09, 10:10 and “Look, there it is”! The slightly larger than half moon popped up above the horizon as big orange beach ball, albeit a misshapen one. Beautiful bright orange, a fiery imitation of sister sun. And it kept rising, faster than I thought it would. Lucky for us we happened to be near one of those put the quarter in telescopes on the boardwalk. In went the quarter and I got to see the bumpy topography of Mr. Moon. Lots of people were walking along the boardwalk this spectacular evening and many remarked on the orange orb floating in the night sky.
Time check – we still have time to get ice cream and surely the line can’t be as long as it was at Nagles, which was the closest ice cream venue. I would have preferred Day’s BUT I didn’t want to push my luck. The line wasn’t too bad and it was almost 10:30 – I can’t imagine how many scoops of ice cream were sold in Ocean Grove last night!!! By the time I got my cone (coffee mud pie) and we were walking home, our moon had risen high enough through the atmosphere to become a creamy white. It followed us home, the end of a perfect evening. The photo below is not what we saw last night since the moon is waning and is at about 68%, but isn’t this a better photo anyway?
Full Moon Rising
Posted in BY THE WAY, From My Point of View - Personal commentary on Movies and Books, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged Christophe Nolan, Inception, New Yorker review on July 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »
If you Twitter and follow the Trending Worldwide list you know that Inception has been on the list for more than a week!!! That in itself is pretty unusual, almost unheard of in this day of today you’re hot and tomorrow you’re yesterday’s news – however the unknown number of Tweets devoted to this science fiction fantasy designed to mind-fuck the viewer, has to be in the thousands. That kind of statistic should be enough to blow your mind never mind having to watch a movie that you’re never sure you’re watching anyway.
The Dream is REAL
Maybe I didn’t see it after all – it could have been a manufactured dream by Christopher Nolan or was I just a projectionist in Leo’s mind. Well if I didn’t see it, I hope I wake up soon-hey that was one of the best lines in the movie! “Wake me up, wake me up”!
A gazillion dollar mega-movie designed to capture the insipid and the imaginative summer movie goer’s mind. Well the timing couldn’t have been better. I ‘ll bet there were more people going to see this movie in the Northeast than anyplace else. Perfect formula: heat and humidity hovering in the 90’s for weeks, summer mind set as you wait for a two week vacation or regret that it’s already come and gone, supply several movie houses all icily air-conditioned and playing Inception and whammo, you’ve got a full house every day.
Let me share with you what some of the professional reviewers are saying:
Inception,” is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly. Nolan has devoted his extraordinary talents not to some weighty, epic theme or terrific comic idea but to a science-fiction thriller that exploits dreams as a vehicle for doubling and redoubling action sequences. He has been contemplating the movie for ten years, and as movie technology changed he must have realized that he could do more and more complex things. He wound up overcooking the idea. Nolan gives us dreams within dreams (people dream that they’re dreaming); he also stages action within different levels of dreaming—deep, deeper, and deepest, with matching physical movements played out at each level—all of it cut together with trombone-heavy music by Hans Zimmer, which pounds us into near-deafness, if not quite submission. Now and then, you may discover that the effort to keep up with the multilevel tumult kills your pleasure in the movie. “Inception” is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/07/26/100726crci_cinema_denby#ixzz0v5DYs7Fz
Are they handing out joints at the box office for this?
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Don’t Pass (up) the Salt!
Posted in BY THE WAY, From My Point of View - Personal commentary on Movies and Books, tagged Angelina Jolie, Evelyn Salt on July 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Two Movies in Two Days! INCEPTION and then SALT. They may have been seen only one day apart BUT they might as well be worlds apart.
Evelyn Salt, is she a Russian spy? Or a double agent? Or just a CIA agent or a Russian sleeper agent like the ones booted out of Montclair, NJ! It’s all about her cool and her unending stare. She is the iciest of the ice maidens, I mean killers. Her character seemed to me to be a combination of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Wonder Woman and Kung Fu. She is an exquisitely trained fighting and killing machine. You know we have been seeing computer digitization and computer generated special effects for so long that the fact that any character can do anything is just not special anymore. We’ve been overexposed to feats of great skill and strength performed of course, by stunt men and the computer. Okay, putting the obvious aside, one cannot discount the great shape that Angelina Jolie is in. She electrifies the screen and dominates it completely. As I said, it’s all about the cool un-blinking stare!
I have no idea how long the movie was because it was so chock full of action and I mean ACTION! I’m sure you’ve seen the trailers, read some of the reviews, Evelyn Salt IS a super woman who can leap from the top of a moving truck onto yet another moving truck, she can rappell down an elevator shaft, kill mercilessly, find her way through the bowels of any building she is in and has the most uncanny ability to think on her feet and land on them too.
Evelyn Salt
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