By popular demand, here is the recipe used with my molcajete for summer BBQ’n -

• 3 Haas avocados, halved, seeded and peeled
• 1 lime, juiced
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 1/2 to a whole jalapeno, depending on spice preference
• 1/2 medium onion, diced
• 2 small tomatoes, seeded & diced, preferrably home grown! But that’s later in the season
• 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
• 1 clove garlic, minced

Ground the garlic and onion and salt first into the molcajete, this  coats the entire thing with yummy goodness.

I should add a pic to this, because it’s a beautiful dish served in the pig-head-molcajete :O)

Over Memorial Day weekend, the hubs and I took a boat tour to a formerly private island in the middle of the Hudson River, which has become a state park with tours available. Go Go Go!

The castle (a series of 7 warehouses) was designed and built by a Scotsman turned Brooklynite who needed a less dense and safer place to store his stock of arms, gunpowder, military related gear and general detritus of the early 1900s (one room was dedicated just to wagon wheels). He bought the island, and without any building permits or even plans (ah, early 20th century) constructed a Scottish castle/warehouse for his business and stone home for his family. Due to an explosion, a fire and neglect, it’s now in ruins, but the state is trying to restore it.

Show me the pics! OK–

the warehouse/castle from the boat and dock area

From the island, you can see it’s in pretty bad shape. The castle used as warehouse was built to look big from the shores of the Hudson, specifically from the Hudson Line train that runs along the eastern edge of the river. The turret columns actually got wider on the higher stories. So, not really meant to be sturdy like a real castle would be. But at one point we were told they had a  moat and drawbridge!

The Bannerman Family’s home on the island, used as their summer home away from The City

Well it was a hard hat tour after all, chunks could crumble off those structures at any time. This was the view from the family house, looking south over the Hudson. West Point would be on the right just past the first ridge that juts out. Would’ve been much nicer on a sunny day, alas.

I’m sure the “Wee Bay Steps” didn’t used to go off into scrub bushes and poison ivy, but they do now! There was a pretty elaborate formal garden there that the Parks people have tried to recreate. Didn’t make for a good pic though.

But there were informal gardens everywhere!

If you go, depart from Beacon rather than Newburgh. It’s a really cute artsy/historic rivertown with shops and cafes perfect for an afternoon, and also the renovated Dia museum that moved up from NYC a few years back (you can also use their bathroom while waiting for the boat if you drive uphill a half mile or grab some grub and sit in their outdoor patio to chill a bit).

At least we know who the carrier is…

Just not in my blog’s inbox. Perhaps with this gap in posting, the spammers will have moved on to a bigger and better blog to spam through Comments.

I do recommend spam, the tinned meat, as a topping on homemade pizza. Mmmmmm the national dish of Sealand!

Does one wear this skiing or during robberies? The creepy ski mask for both!

joke's on you

I wrote myself an email a year ago (which you can do from FutureMe or Futuremail) when I was in a mood influenced from Seasonal Affected Disorder plus job and personal life disorder. While I’m actually no better off one year later, juding by my life’s highlights, for some reason I am just mentally in a better place, I care less about all the impending doom and gloom. To be honest, I didn’t even read the letter from PastJo, since I basically know what it said and I really don’t want to dwell on the negatives, as large as they may seem. Maybe I needed to give myself more than a year to get my situations in order. Maybe I’m just a more balanced person right now. The “fundamentals” of my life are strong even if some circumstances suck, and for that I’m happy.

It was pretty wild to have the past show up in my Inbox though. I’ll probably give it another whirl, maybe sending both shorter term and longer term messages to my future self, to see if I can inspire myself and just have an intimate personal record of my thoughts, unlike this here public record.

You can make the letters public on FutureMe. Some are quite compelling, but it’s also interesting to see that my problems are not unique, the same themes run through most peoples’ lives. I do sort of wish this existed when I was a teenager, so I could have, say, an annual letter to myself, like the state of Jo, or some such. It’s a neat idea as a way to publish your memoirs, if you have a good enough span of time to see how your voice changes and life experiences shape you over time. Now there’s an idea.

A lot of attention has been paid to the low- and no-carb diets, and I won’t go into the whole debate here except to say the diet with the coolest name is by far the Paleo Diet and the hardest one to stick to by far is the CRON diet, nay lifestyle adopted by hard-core life extensionists. I used to be real skeptical of the uber-popular Atkins diet and still am to some degree regarding the benefit of ketosis. But last winter I tried the South Beach Diet and it really worked for me, even though I plateaued early in Phase 2 never to lose much more. I lost a lot of that oft-mentioned inflammation - my watch all of a sudden was loose; the wrist isn’t usually the first place I lose weight, y’know. It didn’t work for my husband, and I recognize that it’s not a one-diet-fits-all, especially without exercise included in the regime.

However, I noticed an interesting connection since then. When I didn’t eat sugar/carbs, I lost very little hair each day. Having long hair, I notice when I lose hair in the shower and maybe a week after I started the SB diet, my hair practically stopped falling out. And months later when I started slipping off the diet, bam! Hair loss in what I thought was “normal” amounts and what I now consider “obscene amounts” of hair.

Now I try to pay attention to my diet and the subsequent day’s hair loss. Beer is no friend to my hair, although moderate ice cream consumption isn’t too bad, yes!  I can’t figure out wine, apparently I never have any without having something else horrible. Guys, maybe this is something you want to explore if you’re starting to go bald. I have no idea if there is any connection to that, but I’d want to keep my hair as long as possible if it was starting to thin.

Tonight for me is not a party night like it used to be when I was younger. Oh I am drinking a fine Jockamo IPA from the Abita brewery, I just prefer a slower, more thoughtful pace these days.

jockamo

I’ve made no resolutions, although this time of year does make me reflective. Making goals is always beneficial, maybe I will over the next month or so as I ponder my next move. It certainly won’t hurt if I really plan the big changes that my career currently needs. But I take things one step at a time, and I’ve started up at the gym recently, a first for sticking to it even this long. I have some other things brewing which have been on my plate for a while. Maybe I’ll get over my online shyness to share, but maybe not. Even though I know my privacy is decreasing with each year, it’s still hard for me to accept and I’ve been fighting personal openness ever since us crazy kids moved to that military fort in the North Sea when privacy and security became our business.

I have no ground-shaking thoughts for your personal journey in life, but I do have a clever graphic from Sean’s, which is always a good starting point for reflection:

fish evolution

Maybe you’ve moved beyond the religion debates, I feel I have mostly, except when I catch myself pleading to the vapors that if I’m good could things just work out the way I want them to. But even doing something as simple as watching a movie called Slumdog Millionaire I remember that most people haven’t moved beyond this powerful, invisible force of destruction called religion. If you want to have beliefs, spirituality, a-ok but don’t organize or even participate in a system that punishes anyone for being different. It’s that simple. By participating, you give credence to the idea-set than any distributed identity espouses.

I wish us all a happy new year, and a long and prosperous journey.

With massive budget deficits looming due to our poor govt spending choices recently, we as a nation are going to have to cut the fat now so we won’t have to cut muscle or bone later. This is an excellent video produced by The Cato Institute describing why the Department of Agriculture has done us as taxpayers no favors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBZgyaA9Ryw

Some of the highlights include:

*Farming is the most coddled industry in the U.S. - the # of farms has plummeted from 1900 to now while the # of employees at the Dept of Agriculture has exploded. In 1900 there were 6 million farms and 3,000 Dept of Ag workers. Today there are 2 million farms and over 100,000 Dept of Ag employees.

* There are over 200 subsidy programs today, however 90% of which go to corn, cotton, rice, soybeans and wheat.

*The average farmer earns 28% more than the average non-farm U.S. family: $86k annually for the farmer vs. $67k for a non-farm family.

*In 2008 there were $95 billion in farm subsidies.

*US companies have left the U.S. (Brach’s and Lifesavers) because of the sugar import barrier. Sugar in the U.S. costs twice as much as it does in the world market.

Friends of mine casually complain about the corn mafia, how the producers of corn syrup have cost us precious dollars and much of our health, all with the Dept of Ag’s blessing and our taxes. We should eliminate farm subsidies and force the Dept of Agriculture to downsize considerably. The farm subsidies are not protecting our food supply when they are largely going toward that which makes us unhealthy. Anyone can grow vegetables in their yard, or in their community gardens, and increasingly, people are.

Those of you who know me well know that I’m all for most government downsizing, but this one seems to be a no-brainer. Why do we subsidize people who cost us more in the short and long run and earn more than us anyway? Corn Street needs to stand on its own as much as Wall Street does.

My most excellent niece, Jackie, works for an ad agency and was recently working on an ad for Coca Cola. They were looking for a photo of an irish couple to use, which has now resulted in this “Refreshingly Unchanged” ad with my mother’s parents. Apparently my family has a known history of coke use!

The full ad is in this Dec/Jan back cover of Irish America magazine. Now I have competition for being on a magazine cover from my dead grandparents ; - )