Virtually Home

Moments ago, I experienced a tragic data loss in transferring photos from my iPhone to my computer. I guess nothing better was to be expected, since the trip started off with my forgetting my camera -- an unforgivable failure. The photos posted here are the few that survived iPhoto's latest travesty. They may or may not be misrepresenting the order of events. For instance, the picture at left was taken on the flight home. Ahem. We, on analyzing the forecast for Thanksgiving Day, decided to skip town early and, when I had succeeded in attending the appointments I'd made for my "two" days in Tulsa, we all converged on the airport and took off for Florida. The way out of town was bumpy, and we were cutting through alternating clouds and clear sky all the way up to 10,000 feet. Each time we broke through the clouds, we were surrounded by towers of cloud. It was cavernous. Water streaming over the windshield and the wings from the condensation in the clouds. I couldn...

This is a photo of the chicken I cooked tonight, posing with Charlie, the inflatable turkey my parents mailed me a week or so ago. For scale, that inflatable turkey is 16" long. So, in the absence of a (real) turkey (and really the absence of ambition to make a turkey), I decided to roast a chicken, which I'd never done before. By the time I got my plans for roasting a chicken together, it was already 6 p.m. and I was beginning to get hungry, so I decided to just put some olive oil and rosemary and garlic under its skin and go with that. For some reason, it always looked really easy to do this kind of thing when I was watching my mother do it. What I didn't take into account is that chickens have skin that doesn't float freely over their muscles. I'm not really sure how I even thought that was possible -- maybe I just always missed the part where my mother must have spent several awkward minutes pulling the skin loose and listening to the fascia tear. I'm ...

In a country without Thanksgiving, there's not even a pretense of delaying Christmas until its allotted time. Decorations have been going up for weeks now -- lights hung from the sides of buildings and wires strung overhead were the first go show up. Yesterday they started putting up huge trees in Place de la Victoire and by the cathedral near my house. Also coming to Place Pey-Berland is what appears to be an ice-skating rink? I'm interested to see how this is going to pan out. I was told that it will rain all winter, which I interpreted to mean it will never get cold enough to freeze. I guess I didn't expect ice-skating. Although I've never been fond of even the idea of ice-skating -- all that strapping blades to your feet and gliding about and falling on your face seems to lend itself pretty handily to getting digits cut off. But since Thanksgiving is finally upon us, I'll stop feeling weird about seeing Christmas decorations. I'll even be posting pictures...