Hot, Cold, Hot, Cold, Sweaty

If this January has taught us anything, it’s that snow beats mud, anyday.

This month we've seen both ridiculously cold and unseasonably hot weather.  With the cold, hot, cold, hot cycle, I finally know what my wife feels like in the car.  It’s not fun.  She’s right – it is uncomfortable.
  


Cool snow fort with tunnel entrance
that even Dad could squeeze through.
Status: Melted.

We’ve made the most of things, from a family leisure perspective, not sure when the next deep freeze or spring thaw will hit.  We’ve gone sledding, of course, and built giant snowmen, and gone ice skating – once at the downtown rink and once on a natural pond. We made a radically cool snow fort, with tunnel entrance.  And next to that, we put in the first few rows of an Igloo.   Of course, that construction took place two days before a heat wave, so all we have are the memories.

Among other lessons, I learned that building an igloo is really hard. If I needed to build one for survival, I’d be dead.  

More importantly, I’ve learned that my kids really love winter, and all the fun stuff we get to do around here for just a few months each year.  Between December and February, we expect it to be cold and to snow.  We want it to happen.

We just can’t take this warm winter weather.
 
And yes, to those shaking their heads in disbelief, it has been warm here in Syracuse.  Despite the reputation, Syracuse isn’t the coldest place on earth.  Just the snowiest.   And when it warms up for a few days, like it has done everywhere in the Northeast repeatedly this January, all our beautiful snow melts and becomes – mud.  And that makes us all realize even more how much we prefer a cold winter to a mild one.  Because mud sucks.

Think about it:  You can’t make a mud man, you can’t have a mud ball fight and you can’t go mud sledding, not without ruining your clothes.  The only time mud performs better than snow is when it comes to building shelter.  I’m certain a mud thatch hut would be easier to build than an igloo.  But we are not about to take the kids out in the yard to build a mud hut.  For one thing, while even a partial igloo can make one the envy of the neighborhood, a mud house would likely mean a visit from the code enforcement officer.

So this warm weather has us stuck inside, waiting for an Arctic blast to set us free.

We wait.  And we wait.  Today it’s January 29th, and it’s 40 degrees out.  Tomorrow, the high might break 60.  Ugh.

Nobody is happy about it here.   The only good news: Snow in the forecast.

Fish, I View

When I started this blog I promised not to write too much about fly fishing.  I promised myself, anyway.  I even joke about it in the heading of this blog, saying no one really enjoys reading about fishing.   But that’s not really true.  For one, I like to read about fly fishing.   In fact, of the three magazines that come to our house with my name on the address, two are dedicated to the pursuit of fish – Trout magazine and American Angler, the fly fishing authority.   The third is National Geographic.  I know, kind of cliché, but I like it.

The real challenge in writing about fishing is that, for some reason, almost all the best writers in the history of the world liked to catch fish with a fly rod, and it seems each took the time to write about it.  For me, writing about fly fishing is an intimidating endeavor.

But for some reason, I feel compelled. 

The desire to do so struck at an odd time.  Over the holiday break, I was taking a moment to process the year that just past, looking at all the photos of my children taken on my phone.  Seeing my kids as they went through the seasons, growing a bit with each frame, was bittersweet – a strange, aching kind of joy that all parents know.  Precious moments, frozen in time, but gone forever.   As has been said by every adult with children in their lives, they just grow up too fast. 

Amongst the many picture of my kids, about every ten photos or so, I found a photo of a trout.  Looking at the fish as the seasons changed, that was a lot easier.   And they too, change with the season – leaner in the spring, plumper in the summer, more colorful in the fall, more sleek in the winter.  (I don't take a lot of pictures of the fish I catch, and usually only break out the camera phone for a very colorful one, or the occasional lunker).

Plump little brown caught in May.
Loved the color on this fish.

As I savored all the memories made with my kids, I thought too about all the time I spent out on a river or a local stream in the past year, seeking these fish, and when luck would have it, bringing them to the net and then releasing them.  Cold early mornings, lazy weekends, the occasional summer afternoon, moments when the pressure of work and home receded for a bit, and I was able to just be. 

Some people I know wonder why I spend so much time standing up to my waist in cold water, fiddling with invisible line and accidently pricking myself on occasion with tungsten steel hooks, only to return the fruits of my labor to the water in which I found them.   There is a simple answer, and it’s not because I need fish.  I fly fish because I love the art of catching them.

And, I do it whenever I can. Which still isn't enough. Usually, it’s squeezed around the edges of regular life – before the world wakes up, or when the wife and kids are doing something else, or the rare occasions when the lawn is mowed, everyone is content, and there are no work deadlines in sight.  I joke that someday I’m going to write a book about the great lengths people like me go to get their fishing fix.  The working title, “The Other Woman is a Trout.”

Rainbow brought to net in September

The allure of fly fishing is easy to understand.   But the true joy of the sport is almost impossible to sum up.  Maybe that’s why so many better writers than me have spilt considerable ink writing about it.  For me, though, the joy is in the supreme challenge of it all – a challenge that is ever changing.  Sun, wind, water temperature, flow, clouds, time of day, season, all are variables in constant flux.  No two days are alike, no two moments are alike.  And each one presents new challenges and potential rewards.

To catch fish with a fly, you have to do your best to understand nature.  You have to become an insect.  You have to think like a fish.  You have to observe, and learn, and change.  And when it works, and that elusive trout sips your little bug off the surface of the water and tightens your line, you get your reward:  the heart pounds, adrenalin surges, your mind celebrates, and then focuses on not snapping the leader as the fish begins to fight.   Because, getting the trout to take is often just half the battle.  Maybe two-thirds, but there is work to be done.

Beautiful Brookie, took big fall streamer

And for some reason, the very second that the fish is taken off the hook, admired, and released, your whole being wants to catch another.  It’s relaxing and addicting all at once.  It teaches patience and problem solving.  It delivers calms and demands focus, like yoga combined with chess, all on a river -- with cool gear to boot.

On good days, when everything is working, and you are thinking like a fish and acting like a bug just right, it can be beautiful.   On those days, as time ticks by, and life and responsibility beckon, you can't help but think, just one more fish.

 

It’s beautiful, too, when it doesn’t work just right.  Standing in a river, surrounded by nature, trying to solve the problem in front of you.  Frustrating, but beautiful.  And on those bad days, when nothing's working, you keep telling yourself just one more cast.  Even as time passes and your need to get back home encroaches, you can’t help but think it again and again, just one more cast.

Me, holding a 18-plus inch Rainbow.
Of course, it was dusk so you can't
see the fish. You'll have to trust me.

As I think about it, there is a deeper reason I love fly fishing.  For me, it is about slowing the world down just a bit, stopping time and doing something pure, if only for a moment.  And, while my wife has no interest in the sport, I can’t wait until my kids are old enough to truly enjoy it too – if they choose.  If they do, and if we go fishing together, I can’t imagine what if anything will force us off the river, short of the setting sun.

But, for now, all I have to show the world from the many hours I've spent pretending to be a bug and thinking like a trout, is a few photos on my phone, scattered among the photos of my beautiful children.  And that will have to do just fine.     
  

Et tu, Legos?

I love Legos.  Correction:  I love old-school, random piece, let-your-imagination-go Legos. The new-style of heavily-engineered, piece specific, commercialized Lego packs, I could live without.

Don’t get me wrong.  I truly enjoyed building the Lego Friends Café© with my 6 year old daughter this Christmas.  It was a quality hour-plus of child parent bonding and building, including a stretch of time I spent alone cursing the microscopic plastic cutlery while she ate lunch.  When we finished, the family adored our creation, and my daughter played with it pretending to be the waitress.  And when her younger sister joined in, she moved up to the café owner, and the younger one became the waitress. 

Lego Friends Cafe - note the missing front railing and the
paultry amount of flowers in the window box.  

The whole Friends Café fun – construction to grand opening -- was a lesson in engineering, hard-work, cooperation and, apparently, growing a small business.  All with minimal creativity required (other than the imaginary play part). 

Then, of course, our 2 year-old decided to do his Godzilla impersonation. Lego people screaming.  Café parts everywhere. Total construction/play/destruction time: two and a half hours.   Eventually, we cleaned up and put all the Café pieces back in the general population Lego bin, a collection we’ve been growing for a few years. 

The next day my daughter wanted to build it again.  And we tried.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find some of the pieces.  I know they’re in there, somewhere.  Still, it was only a few days since we got the Lego Friends Café package set from Santa.  And parts have already escaped.  A year from now, I’m sure the Café will have gone the way of the Lego Cottage we got a few years ago, never to be built again due to specific missing pieces and lost directions.

And these cafes and cottages are the easy ones.  The Lego aisle at the local toy store has a whole host of ridiculously engineered, pre-fab Lego fun – many of these sets mysteriously packaged in pinks or blues.  There’s the Lego Star Wars, the Lego Ninjago, the Lego Harry Potter, the Lego City series, more Lego Friends … it goes on and on.  And all have intricate specific pieces designed to serve only a single Lego purpose.  But what happens to the Hogwarts castle after it’s built.  Do you display it somewhere?  Hopefully, some place out of reach of the children.

When did Legos become like this?  And what happened to the old Legos?  Remember them?  Back then, we used random blocks to build random structures.  We didn’t care that the house we built didn’t have a flower box, or shutters, or shingles even.  It was a house we imagined and we created.  And we certainly didn’t care that the Lego people we built didn’t have utensils.

Now, most Legos are just disassembled toy models.  Really disassembled.  And once painstakingly put together, you can’t play with them, because if you do they will break and you will lose a critical piece.   

Well, this year, I saw all this coming.  I had an inclination Santa was going to get our kids a well-engineered Lego set with great specificity and limited future creative worth.  So I also found and bought the kids a pack of 650 regular old Lego pieces, called the Lego Creative Building Kit. It has lots of colors and shapes, with a few wheels and a handful funky pieces, but all are versatile and none have any specific, pre-ordained Lego fate.

Ahh. That's more like it. Lego animals created, then caged. 

And guess what, the kids love them.   My eldest daughter has spent countless hours playing with the plain Legos – far more than the pre-designed ones.  She has built cars, houses, people.  She even built really cool animals.  Then, of course, she built a zoo to house them (sorry, PETA). 

All the kids have played with the plain old Legos far more than the Friends Café set.   And it cost about a third as much.

I’m sure the people at Legos will keep engineering, awesomely complex new designs.  And we will keep buying them.  But at least, after each is built and destroyed never to be constructed again, we will have some regular, old-school Legos to fill the void.

The Santa Debate: To Wrap or Not to Wrap?

Ah, traditions. You know, Christmas is a time for many things. And all families celebrate the holidays a little bit differently. Some of these differences are small, and some are, as the kids say, ginormous. This is a fact you become acutely aware of once you get married. 

At first, the differences in our household were minor, like whether to use white mini-lights or big multi-colored lights; when to go to church (Christmas Eve or Christmas Day); and whether to eat turkey or ham for Christmas dinner.

But the real humdinger of a difference came along once the kids were born and Santa started stopping by our house each Christmas Eve. It was then I realized the Christmas-celebrating world is divided into two distinct camps: Those for whom Santa wraps the gifts he leaves behind, and those for whom he doesn’t. (Bear with me, my kids read this blog). 

To wrap or not to wrap, that is the great Christmas debate. And I am a proud to say that I was raised as a member of the no wrap club. Over time, I learned this puts me in the minority. In fact, I am sure there are some people reading this blog right now who never heard of anyone who got unwrapped gifts from Santa. Well, now you have. And we are just like you.

See.  See everyone.  Unwrapped toys. 
I rest my case. ... Mic Drop.

On Christmas morning growing up, my brothers and sisters and I would wake early and run for the tree to find toys, roller skates, and big wheels scattered around the living room in little, neat child-distinct piles.  Hopefully, not too little. Under the tree were all the wrapped gifts, from our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, and a few from our parents, which had all been accumulating there throughout the month and would be opened later in the day. But Santa’s gifts were just out there, unencumbered by wrapping paper and ready to be enjoyed. And we loved it, looking around that room at our gifts from Santa and taking in everything our siblings got, as well. Pure joy.

Now granted, I was one of eight kids, and it has been argued to me by some members of the “wrapped Santa gift” majority that maybe Santa was just too tired to wrap all the gifts for our brood. Or maybe he was just lazy in general. (Careful now!  I know what you're really saying.)

As shocking as it may be to some, there exists a whole population of families for whom Santa does not wrap his gifts. Don’t believe me. Start asking around.  You could also just look at pictures of the back of Santa’s sleigh or his bag if you need hard evidence. Notice how half the gifts are unwrapped?

Well, as it happens, my wife came from a wrapped family. And, thus, as Santa's first visit to our house neared, after our eldest child was born, our household's first real Christmas tradition clash ensued. Now, I am a reasonable person -- I like to think so, anyway. And there are many things on which there is room for compromise. The wrapped vs. unwrapped debate is not one of them. Luckily, I convinced my wife it was the better, and easier, way to go. 

So, when Santa comes by our house this Christmas Eve, he will be leaving the wrapped gifts in the sleigh. And when the kids wake up, they will find around the tree toys, dolls and cars, unwrapped and unencumbered, in a few little child-distinct piles. But hopefully, not too little.

(Let me know if you too are from the unwrapped minority.  We must stick together.)



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Roger Daltrey's Chest vs. Kanye West's Skirt

Every once in a while, something happens to remind you, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you're getting old.  It happened for me rather acutely while watching the 12/12/12 concert for Sandy relief.

Don't get me wrong. It was a phenomenal concert for a great cause, that made me proud to be a New Yorker and thankful for all I have.  But something in particular about it made me feel old.  Like, really old.

It wasn’t when all the cool, brash rockers of my formative years took the stage one-by-one looking wrinkled and worn and hobbled by time.  It wasn’t when I took a moment with each to look them up on Wikipedia, as they worked their way on stage without assistance, to see their actual ages … 67, 68, 69, 70.  And it wasn’t even when my 9-year-old daughter said, as Roger Daltrey’s shirt came unbuttoned, that he looked pretty fit for a grandpa.


Roger Daltrey strips down to Oldies but Goodies.

All those things could have made anyone of my vintage feel a bit old (and out of shape).  But it didn’t.  Seeing all of them hop, and jam, and do windmills on their guitars made me think maybe 70 is the new 40.  Which would make me like a teenager.

No.  Reality crashed the party when Kanye West took the stage and started “playing” music.  And all I heard was noise.  It hit me:  this must be the same noise my grandparents heard when the generation before mine started listening to those crazy English chaps.

I turned to my daughter, sounding like a Jackie Gleason character, and asked, “What is this junk?”  She stared at the television, purposely ignoring me so I didn’t tell her again that she was up past her bedtime.  But I didn’t care about bedtimes anymore.  I was obsessed with the infernal noise.

“Do you listen to this stuff?” I continued.  And she continued to stare.  As each noise-filled song ended, another one would begin.  I kept waiting for a song I enjoyed.  I mean,  he's had four number 1 albums and he's sold 30 million digital downloads, which I think is a lot.  He must play something I'll enjoy. 

Then I thought, maybe it was not him that was the problem.  Maybe it was me.  And that's when I decided to do something about it.

I hit mute.

At that very moment I realized exactly how old I am, or at least how old I am becoming.  Not on the outside, mind you, but on the inside.  On the outside I’m not all that old, relatively speaking.  But on the inside, I am ancient to the core.  And I’m not terribly hip, either -- although that was well established before.

So, what can I do about it?  Well, I have decided to embrace it.  It just seems like the old-person-type thing to do. 

Yes, I admit it: I like The Who better than Kanye West -- and always will.  And yes, I’m going to yell upstairs to my kids to turn that racket down when they play it, and I might even hit the ceiling with a broom.  And yes, when I have the chance, when I see an opening, when the opportunity presents itself, I’m going to hit mute.

If that makes me old, so be it.

It Ain't Christmas Till the Fluffy Guy Sings

What’s the single most celebrated Christmas decoration at our house?  

 

The tree, you might surmise.  Or maybe the stockings?  A valiant guess.   Could it be one of the two hand-carved wooden nativity sets we humbly display?  Or perhaps it’s one of the many decorative nutcrackers that have been a staple gift from Santa to the kids over the years?  (The big guy tries to mix in a few wooden, traditional toys).

 

Surely, one of those holiday standouts that we parents hold in such high regard has become the favorite of our offspring, forming a foundation for fond memories of Christmases past.  Certainly, it’s one of these titans of the holiday décor realm that causes the children to clap, parade and dance each year as it is revealed and ceremoniously displayed.  

 

But, no.

 

Based on our childrens’ collective reaction to the mix of various traditional garb and accumulated holiday tchotchke that we scatter through the house for little more than a month each year, the Christmas decoration they get most excited about is a bit less traditional, a little less wholesome, and not exactly an heirloom (yet).   It’s an oddball, really.

 

But without a doubt, their favorite is the piano-playing Singing Snowman.   Hit it.   

 

 

 

That’s right.  Each year I haul down no less than four ginormous boxes, each filled to the brim with garland, ornaments and heirloom-worthy trinkets.  These items, some meticulously wrapped, are unveiled one-by-one, with trembling anticipation and utmost care by us parents, each to be placed on the tree, or the mantle, or the coffee table or another easily visible flat surfaces.  And each year, as we partake in this annual tradition, with boxes half empty and newspaper wrappings scattered about our entire first floor, the question begins.

 

"Dad, where’s the Signing Snowman?"

 

A nervous silence falls over the room.  Then comes the sound of newspapers rustling as the children overturn the paper wrappings, dive into the boxes and scour the partly-decorated landscape.  Their voices eventually crest, in a high pitched whimper, “Where is he?”

This year, the Singing Snowman was actually missing.   He was nowhere to be found, not in any of the giant boxes, nor the accompanying bags.

 

He must've gotten lost on packing-away-Christmas-junk day last year.  But how?  Did he hide out and find his way to the basement toy repository?  Did he end up with the Easter box?  Or, did I subconsciously discard our fluffy little Liberace?  Did I bag him up “accidentally” with the yearly Christmas garbage, a collection of boxes, wrapping paper and tiny plastic harnesses used to keep dolls in their packaging, and take him to the curb?   Could I do such a thing – even subconsciously.  (Yes.  Yes I could.)

 

But, alas.  I didn’t.

 

Finally, in the attic, behind one of the box of retired décor – the one I consolidated on a particularly ambitious January day a few years ago and have refused to move since – the Signing Snowman was found.

 

Thank goodness.  Christmas can happen again.  And the children can sing, dance and parade around to a bad rendition of "Let It Snow."



Central Casting Called, They Want Their Bad Guys Back

Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks as political pundits wax on about what the GOP needs to do to appeal to more people.  Apparently, the party just now realized that cornering the market on the old-rich-white-dude vote is not a recipe for national success.

So they are engaged in a public conversation about what they can do to appeal to women, Hispanics, the middle class, and, generally, non-old, non-rich, non-white, non-dudes.

Here’s one quick idea.  Maybe Republicans should stop anointing leaders who seem like they were pulled from the “bad guy” central casting file.   It’s just a thought.  

And, no, I’m not talking about Mitt Romney, necessarily, who we now have renewed fondness for since he became harmless again.  Though he certainly fits the bill, too.  Sure, on paper it seemed like the right year to run a CEO from an equity firm that displaced workers through outsourcing.  But it just wasn’t to be.

I’m referring to the current crop of congressional leaders who have emerged in the post Romney-era to carry the torch for the Grand Old (White Dude) Party:   Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

You might remember them from their stellar bad guy performances in earlier films, "Pre-Existing Condition" and "Nightmare on Main Street."

So, my Republican friends, are you saying you couldn’t find anyone who came across as even slightly sympathetic?  What about Paul Ryan.  True, he was rumored to be a vampire and is politically to the right of Attila the Hun, but at least we got the impression he's a nice guy.

Boehner (sadly pronounced BAY-ner) and McConnell make us miss the cuddly Newt Gingrich, or that lovable Trent Lott. Sure, Newt and Trent were described as the epitome of evil back in their day.  But in hindsight, we know better.

Here's other articles you may enjoy: Government Shutdown Edition - A Fox Leading the Hen House, The Father, The Son and President Obama, and First of All, on the 1st Amendment.

Holiday Trip to NYC ... Take 2

Last year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, our family decided to try something new and traveled into NYC to take in the family-friendly holiday happenings around Midtown Manhattan.  We found a dream line-up of pre-Christmas fun that included FAO Schwarz, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, the American Girl Doll store (have I mentioned I have three daughters), followed by dinner in Little Italy.  The kids just loved it and talked about our NYC trip all year long.  

The only snafu was finding a place to eat lunch around 5th Avenue, and of course the crowds in Little Italy.  Still, we had such a fun time we decided to make it an annual part of our holidays. 

This year we set out to repeat the fun, improving on our plan by packing a lunch and having better dinner options.  We decided to start at FAO Schwarz, then stroll through Central Park to the Holiday Market at Columbus Circle, take a train down to Bryant Park to take in more shops and enjoy the skaters, after which we'd go up 5th Avenue to the American Girl Doll store, and finally back to the car and home.  It was foolproof.

What happened, however, proved definitively that a year of anticipation and months of preparation are a sure way to ruin a perfectly good time.

Don’t get me wrong.  We had fun on our second annual tour of the NYC tourist traps.  And someday we may even laugh about it.  But we also learned a few things. 

First, we learned that the tall buildings in New York are not only excellent at funneling modest breezes and turning them into wind tunnel like gusts, but that these same buildings are also especially skilled at blocking out the lower-in-the-sky winter sun.  These two attributes can apparently work in tandem to make a typical 40-degree November day feel like the forecast for the Iditarod.  And while my coat was able to keep out the cold, I had no covering for my ears to block the constant complaining. 

Second, we found out that the Christmas Market at Columbus Circle doesn’t open the weekend after Thanksgiving, bucking the trend of holiday shopping centers.  No, these particular shops open a week later than that, after the initial holiday crowds have dispersed.  Of course, we learned this little factoid after dragging four children (three were actually dragged, one was on my shoulders) on a trek along the southern end of Central Park to the place where the market’s buildings stood empty, waiting to be filled with holiday commerce and joy.  It is worth noting that the journey along this end of the park is a lot longer than it looks on a map, and also smells of equine urine and droppings.  


Huddled Masses enjoying picnic lunch
on floor of Time Warner Center as
well-heeled holiday shoppers stare.

Third, we discovered that, should it ever be too cold to picnic outside in the Columbus Circle corner of the park, there aren’t many indoor places to eat a packed lunch.  In fact, there isn’t even one single bench within the mall-like Shops at Columbus Circle in the Time Warner Center around which a young family can gather to eat their pre-made sandwiches that were caringly placed in bags with their names on them.   The only real option is for the family to huddle in a corner of the mall and eat the measly sandwiches while hoping to avoid the unwanted attention of the mall’s crack security force.

Forth, we found out that if you are in the area of Columbus Circle with four children and a stroller, and you hope to take the subway to Bryant Park – a short jaunt on the 1 Line Downtown -- you really should not take just any elevator down to the subway platform.  Because there is a good chance that platform only serves trains going Uptown.  And if you find yourself on the wrong platform, you and the stroller and the children will take another four elevators, connecting countless platforms and dark passageways, before you arrive at the platform for the 1 Line train bound for Downtown.

Fifth, we learned that the bathroom line at the Bryant Park plaza and skating rink is about 40 minutes long, that the hot chocolate sold there stains almost anything, and that children really do not enjoy watching other people go ice skating.  A taste of what the time at Bryant Park was like:  Please can we go ice skating. No.  Please can we go ice skating. No.  Please can we go ice skating. No.  Please can we go ice skating. No. ... I have to pee.

Sixth, we figured out that the many workers at the American Girl Doll store on 5th Avenue have no possible way to clean the floors of said store once the doors open and the constant parade of spoiled brats spills in for the day, as they all beg their weak-minded parents for overpriced dolls.  By the time our children arrived at the store around 5pm and commenced begging, the carpet resembled the floor of a movie theater after a food fight.  It was certainly no place for that one two-year-old boy to show his exhaustion and disinterest in dolls by rolling around between shoppers and crawling like a dog.  His poor parents!   Did I mention that it was our two-year-old boy.

As a final lesson, we learned first-hand that there actually are bad restaurants in Manhattan.  Like, really bad.  I know it’s a shock. All the talk of how good restaurants are in NYC I was certain even the bad ones would be okay, especially for a family of Podunks from Syracuse.  It turns out that isn’t true.  In fact, a bad restaurant in Manhattan is probably worse than the typical bad restaurant someplace else.  We learned this one at a quant-seeming irish pub/restaurant within a block of 5th Avenue when we had the worst meal we've ever had in our entire complete lives.  To top it off, it was expensive.  Really expensive.   Like, did I miss the lobster course, expensive.   We could’ve bought an actual American Girl doll, plus two tacky outfits, for that price. 

Of course, the leisurely post-meal walk up 5th Avenue, past the windows at Saks, past the scaffolding-clad tree at Rock Center and under the hanging star on 59th street, made it all worth it.  Truly, the kids loved it, and will surely talk about for a year.

Our second annual holiday trip to Manhattan was certainly one for the ages.   Heck, someday, my wife and I may even learn to laugh about it.  And next year, we’ll be sure to do it even better.  If anyone has suggestions on how, please let us know.

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Blessed are the Cheesemakers

The rise in the popularity of local foods, specialty farms and artisan producers spurs one recurring thought: I should have been a cheesemaker.

Oh, but what kind of cheese, you ask. And that's a good question.  With milk, salt, cultures, rennet (have to look up what that is) and time, a well-skilled cheesemaker can produce any type of cheese imaginable. There are the basics: Cheddar, Gouda and Colby. And the Semi-basics: Asagio, Feta, and Chevre. There are the blues, and the spreadables. There are hard, soft, semi-hard, semi-soft. You can add semi- to pretty much any description and there is probably a cheese out there that fits. Semi-funky? Yep.

A whole world of local, artisan cheeses exists out there. It’s a world my wife and I explored recently as we traveled the Finger Lakes Cheese Trail.

Artisan cheeses from the Finger Lakes, made by the brave few
who followed their cheesemaking dreams. From this photo you
can also surmise, despite dreams, I am not a photographer.   

Of course, the day trip through New York’s Wine and Cheese Country was done under the pretense of a birthday gift getaway for my beloved.

We stopped, tasted and bought cheese at the Muranda Cheese Co., the Lively Run Goat Dairy, and the Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese Co., among others. We also popped into a few wineries and ended our day at a distillery where people stand around “tasting” shots of whiskey. My wife enjoyed the trip. And she did not once suspect that I was actually scoping out a drastic life change.

Drastic may be overstating it. All we have to do is trade in the house for a farm and a bunch of cows, goats, or even sheep. Get the equipment. Learn the trade. And in about three years or so we may just be able to enjoy our first raw-milk, artisan Gouda-style cheese. Not smoked, though. My wife doesn’t like smoked cheese. And I always do what she wants. Of course, the first batch will be a prototype. Once we’ve sampled it, we’ll tweak the recipe, change the feed-stock we give the cows, goats or sheep, and maybe add in some scallions to half the second batch. Then, voila, we’ll have the perfect artisan cheese ready for sale.  Once we do a little clever marketing and break into one of the major grocery chains, we’ll be off and running. I figure in about 12 years, we’ll break even.

Hmm.

Being a cheesemakers sounds tougher than I first imagined. Of course, we could just go on the cheese trail once a year, and stop by the farmers’ market on the occasional Saturday. But where’s the adventure in that?

For those not interested in making the quick buck as an artisan cheesemaker, you could opt to just start a vineyard. Good vines can take a decade to reach full production. That’s even before the grapes are pressed and the wine aged. Although our trip along the southeastern shore of Seneca Lake makes me think that market may be getting a bit saturated. A decade from now, who knows.

The important thing is that each and every one of us turn the local food craze into our own unrealized dream, so we can enjoy artisan local products with a sense of longing and brimming regret about our own career decisions.

Ah, Gouda. I could've made that.


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Dad, the Spider Assassin

I have nothing against spiders. Honestly. But you wouldn’t know it from the scores of carcasses I have discarded down the drain in the past few months.

It’s not personal. I am but a hired gun – or at least a hired paper towel, which is then pressed firmly between my thumb and fingers to finish off the little buggers. I have grown accustomed to the work. Though, you never really get used to the “pop.”

I used to try to convince my clients that spiders really aren’t that bad. Good luck with that. A four-year-old girl will never believe that the spider she found on her ceiling has no qualms with her. It doesn't matter when I remind her that spiders could even help keep other bugs away. She's not buying the spider's side of the story. She just wants it gone.

“Daddy!” she shrieks. “Spider!” And I go to work.  

Dangling from the ceiling, crawling along the window sill, scurrying across the floor -- no spider is safe. I grab my trusty paper towel, napkin, or, in a pinch, toilet paper. And I begin the hunt. 

“Where is it?” 

The child points, and cowers beneath the covers. I have to squint to even see the darn thing. I swear my kids are exceptional at noticing spiders. They must get that from their mother. With a quick swipe, squeeze and flush, the job is done, the client relieved.

Certainly, I don’t want to live in house that is “infested” as my wife describes it during the months when spiders seem to just appear. I just don’t notice them. What is that small black spot on the crown molding? I really don’t care.  In fact, I usually hope it’s a spider. Better that than chipping paint or evidence of a leak. Those jobs are much tougher on the soul than killing a spider.

But, I swear,  I have nothing against them. It is just a job to me. And as much as I’m good at it, there is one part I will never quite enjoy. 

Pop.


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