WhimsyLand

Well, hell, you have to blog at some point.   Might as well be now. 

Christmas was pretty terrific, including my sons and Cath and Cath's guy and Ky's gal.  We were missing Junie but you can't have everything.  The trade was respectable and equitable among our inner circle.  Gifts from outside our little circle tended to reduce the get-to-give ratio substantially, however.  Not to name names, but one of the siblings to whom I directed a Balinese drum sent me a ball cap and coffee mug.  Verizon was running a phone special if you re-upped for 2 years, which I was going to do anyway.  Junie and I got new phones that were the equivalent of sensible shoes, if you ever read any English murder mysteries.  The boys got these ridiculously cool Samsung Jukes with cameras and MP3 players and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to receive instructions from the owner telepathically.  The Jukes are slim and elegant and fold open like a high-tech jackknife.  If you own one of these, you have to grow a small ponytail and answer "Talk to me" like some famous director.  Cath got me an immersion blender, which I badly wanted.  Of course, so did Junie, but I knew what Cath was up to from the Sons' Intelligence Network so I ungifted and regifted the first immersion blender back to Junie and it was all good again.  I got Cath a selection of Spanish culinary things from www.latienda.com, which actually has absolutely everything I've ever eaten in Spain except perhaps fresh seafood.  The pièce de résistance of the Spanish collection was a quarter leg of Jamon Serrano, which is the wondrous cured pork product that I have as the first course any time I'm in Spain.  For 50 years, the Other White Meat lobby managed to keep it out of the country, and for that matter, prosciutto too.  Not that that kept John, the president of the US foundry, from importing it when we had copper processing operations in Bilbao (see a former post on how he smuggled Bordeaux in under 100 tons of slag).  John would just order one of the returning Americans to purchase an entire leg of ham from El Corte Ingles and pack it in a suitcase surrounded by green coffee beans.  I guess he figured if you can smuggle dope in that way, why not ham?  It worked, actually, and for good measure John would tell them to put a couple of dozen Cuban cigars in the suitcase right next to the ham.  As far as I know nobody went to jail until the EPA indicted the top 15 people at the Illinois plant that John owned, but that was for creating a 10 mile-wide plume of heavy metals beneath the plant illegally over the course of 15 years.  John of course got off without even an slap on the wrist, as he had bribed all the proper Illinois judges and contributed heavily to both sides of the state reps and senators.

But, I digress.  Christmas was, as I said, pretty wonderful and a break from the insane work that has occupied my time of late.  The good part is the work on Many Mountains Moving.  Malinda is the managing editor of Number 18 and doing a bang-up job.  My support role at this point is proofing the copy coming back from the person who pours Word docs into InDesign.  I also write the scripts that manage the email traffic to our contributors, so that they get galley proofs and their responses (contact information, desired correction, that kind of thing) get back to Malinda and her crew (Jeannine, if you're listening in, you're next up for galleys).  The somewhat-less-than-good part has been all the work I've been doing on SlowDown.  This is the algorithm that stretches out audio books.  I have been close for 8 weeks now and the bad news is that I promised to do this in 2 man-weeks, which is all I'll get paid for.  I actually don't consider it a project now, I think of it as a hobby.  I know way more than I ever wanted to know about PSOLA, WSOLA, attack, pitch detection and the like.  I've read the technical papers of everyone who's anyone, actually spending $100 in fees to obtain back presentations and US patent filings.  I'm close, but then, I've been close for a month.  This is really getting irritating.

On another front, I've almost completed the second of two poetry book reviews for A Major Literary Journal.  The first review was terrible and wonderful and very difficult to write, mainly due to the unusually somber subject of the work.  The second review is going a lot more easily because I like the work and I like the poet.  My biggest problem is that (of course) I've read all the blurbs and the few reviews that are extant.  Every one of them shoehorn the book into some Grand Theme and deduce what must be the narrative arc.  Hello!  What if there is no narrative arc, I'm thinking.  What if it's just a great collection of poetry, like the old days when we didn't have to write 60 poems keeping in mind that the only way they would get published was if someone could find the Grand Unifying Theme in all those poems about came to mind in the fertile imagination of the poet over the course of a year or two?   I'm probably sensitive about this because the lack of a narrative arc is the usual complaint about my manuscript, which is after all, just a collection of poems I wrote over a number of year about whatever struck my fancy.  And I'm a guy who gets bored easily and changes the topic frequently and likes to experiment and so you can imagine the challenge in making up a manuscript from poems published in a wide variety of litmags on a wide range of topics.

Oh, heck, it's not that important.  Next Wednesday, Der and I will be driving to Linda and Roy's ranchette for this big post-Christmas Christmas where my siblings and my parents and the Little Brown Babies will be in attendance.  My dad called last night to say he wanted to pay for a "big SUV with all-wheel-drive and lots of metal around you to protect my progeny" or something so who am I to complain?  I rented it today.  We'll be seeing Der's roommate Max in Las Vegas and maybe staying overnight with his parent and maybe not.  Max is a nature buff and suggested that while we are in Las Vegas (which is the most outrageous place on the planet and should be in the top 5 on everyone's list of places to visit before they die) we should see the desert or go rock climbing.  Omigod.  You have to be kidding me.  There are frigging rocks and deserts damned near everywhere, but there is only one Las Vegas and Der is going to see the shrunk down Paris and New York and Venice and the Luxor and the lights and the size of the gambling area at the Hilton and all the unbelievable wonderment of Sin City.  Then, we travel to SLO by mostly Blue Roads (if you ever read that book by William Least Heat Moon, which I thought was the strangest combination of Native American and physicist monikers I'd ever encountered), and land at Casa Rawlings.  On the way back, Der is going to spend a day and a night in San Francisco while I visit client in The Valley.  I've suggested the usual:  Chinatown, City Lights, North Beach, oh you know. 

I hope you all had pleasant holidays and continue to do so.  I'm having dinner with Dima and Tanya tomorrow night, which is always a pleasant surprise from a culinary standpoint.

Be good.

Posted by jbahr at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I can't say that I actually understand Facebook, but I am a member.  I think Suzanne invited me to be a friend, which I would like to think I am already, but I wasn't an official Facebook friend, so I joined.  I think one of the points of Facebook is to acquire a lot of friends, judging from the profiles of others I have noticed.  I'm not sure you actually have to know someone for them to be a Facebook friend, but it probably helps.  I suppose I don't really know Kasey and Ginger and Simon and Laurel, but I feel like I do so that's enough for me.  If you're not familiar with Facebook, Wikipedia calls it a "social networking website", and the venture capitalists (who have invested over $25 million so far) declined an offer of $750 million for its acquisition (the buyer is unknown, but assumed to be either Yahoo, Microsoft or Google).  You can ask your friends questions and play poker and deal blackjack and join groups and such.  I don't do much of that, so I guess I'm a bad Facebooker.  I've been poked a couple of times, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do about it.  But, that's OK, sign me up as a friend anyway.  I promise not to come to any of your parties and drink all the good wine.

I mentioned some time back that I received a book for review from Zone 3 Press, Houses Fly Away by Leigh Anne Couch.  The title and the cover art (a small bird perches on the hand of a reclining arm) led me to believe that this would be just the kind of poetry book that I don't care for.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I like this book, with its strange domesticity.  Some lines:  Beast: "I have good friends and a family / only slightly perforated";  Goldfinches:  "The day was a goldfnch / beating wings/ against a dirty cotton sky"; Tideland:  "Fly away blackbird. Nothing ends / once it's over.  Split open / the clam to rude saucers:" ; Obsolescence:  "Precious is the crackslam of metal buttons in the dryer"; Short History of White Flight:  "Gun barrels shining, huge in their arms, / deer-blood smudged their teacup faces".    Ms. Couch knows how to get in, do the poem, and get out, which I quite admire as that is also my overarching strategy.  She is currently the managing editor of the Sewanee Review, which has rejected my work countless times, but I won't hold that against her.  This is one of those rare books of poetry that if I were in Boulder Book store thumbing through it, I would most likely buy it to read it again.

Harper's has an interesting Annotation (a two-page exposé) on the "exaggerated threat of food allergies".  Apparently, it doesn't matter how many times the CDC announces that very few people get sick from food allergies, the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network continues its campaign to ban a growing list of food items from school cafeterias (with a focus on nuts).  Lewis Lapham is back with Hearts of Gold, characterizing the current batch of presidential candidates as items for purchase (Obama comes with no directions in the box; Rudy Giuliani makes strange clanking noises).  Interesting article on Brasília at 50, principally focusing on its failure (architecturally and as a symbol of a new Brazil).  From Harper's Index:  Number of states John Kerry would have won if only poor, or only rich people were allowed to vote:  40,4;  Chances that red lipstick has dangerous levels of lead:  1 in 3;  Average amount of meat consumed by wealthy and poor children, respectively:  1.7, 2.1;  Portion of the US population that has lived only under presidents named Bush or Clinton:  one-fourth;  Estimated number of tons of CO₂ released on New Year's Eve from champagne bottles:  8.

~~~

I have received another wondrous volume of ZYZZYVA, whose cover art appears to be an uncharacteristic member of the French Foreign Legion.  The first 20-odd pages are, as usual, decorated with advertising from San Francisco's finest:  Pier 23 Cafe, Barrish Bail Bonds, Skylight Books among others, and I relish this section as much as the actual literature.  Howard notes that the Editor's Notes have been replaced by entries in his blog.  Check out the post of July 23d, in which the "Editor reports an unfortunate incident with a writer of no literary merit".  I haven't read any of the fiction and non-fiction (an endeavor reserved for the half-hour before sleep in my Belgian bed), but the poetry is pretty good.  It's all a bit narrative for my taste, but I think I liked Escaping the War by Wing Tek Lum best.  More on that topic when I get a little farther in.

I've been plotting the actual route for The Trip to California today:  mapquest, google, AAA.  Getting to Las Vegas is the easy part and everybody agrees that, barring icy conditions in the Eisenhower Tunnel at the Great Divide, it's a straight shot to LV.  They all seem to believe, however, that there is no good way to get from Las Vegas to Central California.  AAA would have me drive nearly to LA and then north on 101.  Mapquest and Google seem to think I need to take Route 58 to Bakersfield, and then west on Route 46 to Atascadero.  There's no way to zoom in enough to see if these are 2-lane roads or 4-lane highways with a median, but I'm assuming closer to the former.  Also, somewhere along the way they have to cross the Sierra Nevada's so that might be a little exciting. 

Posted by jbahr at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I got rid of 600-700 spam comments this morning, and another 3,000+ that Movable Type had already identified as junk.  It's a little like ridding the Weasley's back yard of garden gnomes.  The comment spam engines must be working overtime, because I had 11 more when I was finished ridding my blog garden of the first batch.

I said I was finished with my Christmas shopping, but I actually have not yet gotten around to ordering Mémoires de M. Le Duc de Saint-Simon for Richard, who recently asked for same in a blog comment.  All of the gifts are now safely in the possession of their intended recipients, except those Balinese drums which have of course a much longer way to travel.  Novica (the National Geographic store) has been emailing me almost daily with their progress:  the drums are being packed up, the drums have left Indonesia, the drums have cleared customs, the drums are in the FedEx facility.  It's really quite amazing.  I know more about those drums' location than I do my own sons.

Speaking of whom:  Kyle is getting another raise and promotion (or something like that, he's famously blasé about it), which is either his second or third in his first year as a software engineer (counting the one he got immediately upon being hired).  Der actually played in two of the bands that competed in The Columbia Urban Music Associations's "Rock the Mic" competition:  Down and Dirty Blues Band and Color Radio.  Color Radio placed third and DDBB placed first (!) performing a song that Der wrote.  That's my Dylanesque son to the left.  I'd post a picture of my son Kyle, but I think he believes that taking his photo steals his soul or something.

When my sister Lin and her husband Roy dropped by for a few days last month, Roy mentioned that he had rented his yellow Chevy for $50, which covered two days and all mileage.  Wow, that's quite a deal, particularly mid-week, I thought.  It turns out that Roy had just googled something like "denver car rental" instead of moseying on over to Travelocity, which is what I usually do.  As I'll be driving to California in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd try the same trick and googled "cheap rental cars", finding a number of sites, including carrentals.com, which connected me up with a full-sized Taurus-or-equivalent for 7 days at a cost of $183.  The renting agency was a Budget Rental down the road in Boulder, and the price was 40% less than what was quoted on Travelocity, so this seems like a pretty good deal.  Budget confirmed my rez and even enrolled me in their FastBreak program so I didn't have to wait in line.

Der and I will be driving to Lin and Roy's house for a post-Christmas family bash.  The little brown babies are sure to show up, accompanied by my nieces and nephews.  Also my siblings, Mom and Dad, and probably a couple of neighbors if past bashes are any example.  Also Max, Der's apartment-mate in Chicago, who we will pick up in Las Vegas. 

More about the trip later today.  My new theory is that if I start a blog entry in the morning, I will be compelled to finish it in the evening, thus avoiding blog-gone-dark embarrassment.

~~~

So, The Trip.  It's been a year since Der strolled around Casa Rawlings (high in the mountains overlooking the wine country southeast of San Luis Obispo) improvising on his guitar while Lin and I made dinner for the masses.  What with the number of family showing up, it seemed like a good idea to make the drive.  We could fly, but Max needs to be in San Francisco later in the week for a rock-climbing gig and this way I can see Las Vegas again for a few hours.  I used to visit LV a lot, attending COMDEX every year or just driving up from LA for a day or two to gamble.  My first dissertation was on the statistics of Blackjack, so I also spent considerable time there researching (the dissertation proposal was rejected, BTW).  Las Vegas was outrageous 10 years ago, which I think is the last time I was there.  I can only imagine what it's like now after 10 billion dollars in more casino building and a population that has tripled since then (actually, having recently seen Ocean's 13, I can imagine).   But, I digress.  Lin and Roy's ranchette has guest houses and an apartment at both ends of the stables, so sleeping accommodations isn't a problem.  Last Thanksgiving I made paella, so I will have to think of something new this year. With the availability and variety of seafood, I should probably dream up something aquatic.  Maybe a bigass bouillabaisse with some nice firm fish (monkfish?) and mussels and red snapper and fennel bulb and garlic and orange zest and leeks and of course saffron. They say it can't be made outside Marseille, but I'm gonna try.  In the Provençal version, there's also eel and local fish that won't be available, but I may figure out some interesting substitutes.

I swapped out two more huge monitors for LCDs today.  That makes 7 or 8 altogether and I have a back room filled with 17 and 19-inch CRTs that are perfectly terrific except for all the room they take up on a desk.  Dima and I generally have 5 or 6 projects going on at any one time and another 2 or 3 that are on hold, and each of them ends up dedicated to a workstation with a monitor.  LCDs take up so much less room, and they've gotten so cheap that replacing the old behemoths is affordable, particularly the conventional-format LCDs, as we're not exactly watching DVDs on them anyway (I bought a 19" conventional format LCD today for $149, for example).  

You know, maybe I'll just get Richard a nice shrubbery.

More tomorrow, mayhaps.

Posted by jbahr at 06:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I got yet another nice rejection notice from a poetry book contest, this one noting that my manuscript was "ambitious".  I suspect that means the judges believed that my reach exceeded my grasp.  As it took 5 years to write the 100 poems that got whittled down to 65 for the manuscript, I don't think I will be fixing it in any significant way in the short term.  So, I suppose I should just get back on the horse and send it out.  Maybe I'll try some of the (few) publishers who still read manuscripts that get thrown over the transom, so to speak. 

I've been to The Doctors more times in the last week than I have in the past couple of years.  No offense to my buddies CDY and Peter, but I generally avoid MDs (PhD's and Doctors of Divinity are OK, I suppose).  My general theory is that if you don't go to a doctor, then you won't get diagnosed with anything awful.  So far, this has worked splendidly, for the most part.  Just yesterday, this neurology specialist said I didn't look anything like my true age and guessed that I didn't smoke (I did for30 years) or drink (you apparently haven't seen my wine cellar).  There are, of course, some symptoms that are difficult to ignore.  Like being catapulted out of bed with an off-the-scale, localized, momentary jab to the upper leg.  There I was dreaming about finishing this damnable Slowdown Algorithm when someone took a hypodermic needle, held it in a Bunsen burner until it was the color of that poker in the first Indy Jones movie when the bad German who looks like Karl Rove was threatening Marion, and jabbed it in my right leg, just below the hip.  Naturally, I shouted something obscene and leapt out of bed, waking Emily downstairs and scaring the bejeezus out of Junie.  I then received two or three more jabs from my invisible assailant in rapid succession.  Being a guy, I said to myself (and to Junie, who wasn't buying it), "Huh, must have been dreaming" or something.  That was 1:30 in the AM and at 2:30 it happened again.  Invisible assailant, sudden pain like a sumbitch, very surface feel to it, same spot, maybe 100-200 milliseconds in duration (you see, I was being very analytical about this), 3-4 times in succession with a little time in between to get ready for the next one.  From 2:30 to 4-ish, Junie followed me around like a devotee of someone with Tourette Syndrome, which is surely what I sounded like since this thing would hit me without warning and I was endeavoring to use the full extent of my magnificent vocabulary.  Junie, of course, dragged me to the ER (which is, but don't tell her, one of the many reasons I love her).  Between the shivering (it's damnable cold here now) driving there and the long wait (the ER had actual people with real serious problems to deal with before me), The Bug didn't bite me again until we were Officially Released with the vague diagnosis that it was something "neurological".  The Bug bit me on the way home, but I'm one hell of a driver on ice and it only gave Junie the slightest of heart flutters.  I had a couple of episodes where I jumped out of my chair (I was doing company accounting) and then decided to read what was on the ER Expulsion Report or whatever they call it and it said "600 mg of Ibuprofen".  I almost didn't take it because I just hate when people tell me what to do, but I do just happen to have this bottle the size of a large bottle of olive oil so I slammed down a couple.  One more little Bug Bite and that was that, it retreated to the snarky place it came from.  The next day, having had not actually a lot of sleep actually, not to mention Sweet Junie who had even less, we visited the GP to whom I described the circumference of the attack area (less than an inch), the duration (about 100-200 milliseconds), the average number of rapid successive events (3-4), and the ghost of the pain I could feel in that small area.  This is my New Doc, who is a very nice young lady who actually seems to be listening to me, unlike my actual registered Primary Care Physician who is my age and probably figures that whatever I've got, I deserve.  Well, anyway, the New Doc Young Lady (who has very nice calves, BTW, an observation I made to Junie with less than enthusiastic response) sprinted off to consult some computer or other and decided that I had a nerve that originated in my lower spine and wends its way down my right thigh and there you go.  I then made an appointment with the neurologist who had Not Left The Building, so to speak, somebody that all the other docs in the joint are morally compelled to recommend, I suppose, since they share the lunch room with him.  He was almost exactly my age and asked me why I seemed to be in such good shape in a number of subtle ways and I was actually hesitant to burst his bubble and tell him that I had led a ruinous life and still looked a lot better than he did, but I think he may have subconsciously known this because that's when he asked me to take off my socks and started sticking pins in my arms and jabbing sharp things in the soles of my feel, all of which elicited the same response, which was excitable, but not scatological, so I thought I passed the test.  Then he told me that this MOMENTARY EXCRUCIATING pain that I had had on numerous recent occasions could not possibly be neurological, and I should see a urologist, which is a neurologist who has somewhere along the way tragically lost an N and and E, I suppose.  For pity's sake.  Have you seen those commercials on early morning TV where the 40-50 old guys are all riding down the freeway in a convertible or fishing in some nice bass boat or whatever and one of them them has "weak stream"?  Well, that's not me and this isn't urological, dammit.  Sheesh. 

Anyway, it's been 12 hours without Ibuprofen, and Junie left for Wisconsin and I'm pining away, but no damned bug has bit me lately.  Not that it wasn't something, but my theory continues to be that if you ignore something, it will eventually go away.  It's like those movies where the hero or heroine warns everybody that the most dangerous thing you can do is Name The Thing that is the movie's antagonist.  Meanwhile, the National Geographic people have been keeping me up to date with the drums coming from Bali destined for my brother and sister.  Also, my older sister got my check so that her adopted local children get a nice Christmas.  Also, Der took my gift of a bunch of AMEX reward points and told me what he wanted, mostly gift cards to The Gap.  And all the new little brown babies (well, they're not brown, but it's such a great line by Ingrid Bergman on The Orient Express) got their Einstein toys and farm animals that sing Christmas carols when you squeeze them.  And my mailman got his Starbuck's gift card and I even sent holiday cards to most everybody, though one bounced to Die Cloud because I used the wrong address.

~~~

Sometime in the last week, among all the excitement, I made Sherried Onion Soup with a difference.  The difference being, of course, that I was out of something, which is how the best and worst of recipes take form.  Junie and I did a mega-run for provisions at Safeway and I forgot to get sliced almonds.  So, naturally I improvised and made the soup by substituting the toasted almonds with pistachios that I shelled and threw into a hot pan for a while until I could smell their pistachio goodness.  These got thrown into the soup the appropriate time (you just have read the recipe) and the whole mélange got blenderized with this wonderful standup-self-contained blender stick that Junie got me for Christmas, and since this was our time together is was, after all, Christmas for us so I opened it.   It was quite excellent.  Four days later, I redid the recipe, substituting the onions for about 6 shallots and a half-onion and adding back the almonds that I had forsworn in the latter version.  Also pretty damned good.  Neither were at their peak, however, because I was adding 4 Big T of this really mediocre sherry which was all they had at the local liquor store.  Tonight, I bought some Sandeman's, which is quite delightful, but I hoped they had Tio Pepe, but they didn't.  Maybe I'll try Tio Pepe, almonds and shallots next. OH!  I just remembered that my recipe seems to forget that you need to throw in a teaspoon of good paprika with the sherry.  I use the delicious Hungarian kind that comes in a tin and actually isn't any more expensive if you can find it.

That's all for today.  I'm thinking I may have more tomorrow.  You just never know, do you?

Posted by jbahr at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Junie made me promise to stop working 14/7 on this damnable audio slowdown algorithm.  I decided last week to do all my Christmas stuff in one day.  Saturday, I got up at 4 AM and got all the e-Presents out of the way.  I found these cool Javanese drums for two of my siblings.  I ran to the 24-hour Walmart to find more wrapping paper, even though I ended up getting most of the good stuff later at Target.  I found boxes and prepared FedEx stickers and had some breakfast.  At this point, everything was open and I hit the stores.  My list included baby toys, as my 3 nieces/nephews all have small children.  I found these excellent furry action figures that sang Christmas carols in their native tongue when you pressed on their tummy.  The duckling actually does most of Jingle Bells in quacks.  I decided not to drag out my giant tree and opted for a new 2-foot variety that fits on the end table next to the OED.  It's just the size to put Junie's gifts, which are all really small.  Mom and Dad got one of those picture frames that rotate among images loaded from a USB stick or WiFi, complements of Best Buy.  By the by, I'm not worried about telling you this because my family never reads my blog, no matter how many times I give them the URL.  By noon, I had a whole car full of gifts, wrapping paraphernalia and Christmas decorations.  It was time to wrap to Windham Hill's December.  Two hours and a lot of gold foil, ribbon and bows later, I was done.  Mind you, I wasn't drinking wine yet.  Next came the corporate Xmas cards.  I had bought some dandy serious-but-fanciful cards that I could write something on, stick in my biz card, and send to my best clients.  I also had bought some funny Xmas cards (picture reindeer with bumper stickers) that I sent to friends and family.  I had cards+cash to integrate and place in the two Main Boxes that were destined for the NoCal Clan and SoCal Clan, who are having separate but equal Christmas celebrations this year.  The cards+cash were actually Xmas cards with a note and an American Express gift card.  I figured, why would you get someone a Starbucks gift certificate when you can get them Amex or Visa and they can get what they want?  These, of course, were for my nieces/nephews in the 18-to-25 year range, an age occupied by people who can always use money or its surrogate.  My older nieces/nephews in the NoCal contingent, plus my sister Lin opted to have me lump all the present money in a check to Lin, who would buy presents for the children of a family they know and help.  That's so Linda and Roy, actually, who have this ranchette in Central CA and a half-dozen horses.  But, I digress.  I still had to box everything up, slap on the FedEx Ground sticker on the two gift megashipments, and relax with a glass of wine.  It was something like 8 PM at this point, and everything was done:  Christmas ornamentation was complete, holiday cards were out, gifts for 20+ people were done, corporate clients were bribed rewarded for their loyalty, shipments were ready for the FedEx guy, and I still had time to make dinner.  By this time, I was listening to the new Norah Jones CD.  I opted for whole wheat spaghetti with a sauce of artichokes, capers, garlic, asparagus, red pepper, green onions, fresh tomatoes, and herbs.  Also Clos du Bois Chardonnay.  Heck, I deserved it.

Posted by jbahr at 05:59 PM | Permalink