City Garden update

To make up for the foliagicide I committed a couple weeks ago I started new seedlings and bought some starter plants that were ready to be transplanted. I bought arugula, yellow bell pepper and a tomato plant, all of which are doing very well, thank you.

Arugula:

Tomatoes on (top and to the right) and cayenne (to the left, to the left).

And finally strawberries (top), blueberry bush (terracotta pot center/left), red onions (middle bucket), radishes (right bucket), a tomato plant (disappearing from the bottom of the picture) and a yellow bell pepper (bottom left.) 

opportunistic squirrel

Pizza is served by the truckload where I work. (Not to me, to overachieving med students whose tuition apparently includes lunch (w/ delivery but without the burden of having to tip, or pay, or even clean up after yourself!) but I have been known to help myself to the leftovers.) Unfortunately, it’s the kind of pizza that tastes like a paper plate with cheese and ketchup on it. I bet that it tastes fine out of the oven but when you order 40 of them at once that first pie has enough time to whither into pizza-flavored newspaper by the time it reaches your face. That’s if it was cooked all the way in the first place. I suspect it’s no more appetizing than the wallpaper soup that the the Jews had to eat when they were hiding from the Nazis. It seldom has toppings, unless it’s for a truly -special – event, in which case it’s still approached with hesitation and remarks like, ‘Pizza? I thought this was a SPECIAL event? Well at least there’s a green pepper on it.’

Because med students are sometimes in class and/or labs up to 8 hours a day they are fed this pizza on what seems like a daily basis, like it’s part of their curriculum, or maybe they are part of a broader nutrition experiment. Really, it’s just the easiest thing to order for a group upwards of 200 people. I don’t know how much this affects students’ tuition but I suspect it’s not so good on their plumbing, or the school’s. Or their skin. Of course, they’re overachievers so they probably sweat it out in the marathons they run in their free-time, between writing and starring in their own one-act play, building houses in New Orleans or constructing bikes out of paper clips and recycled soda cans.

Seeing how much pizza is consumed here makes me wish there was such a thing as a brick-oven lunch-truck, and that I owned it. It also makes me wonder why nobody sees the irony in feeding medical students the same three ingredients ten times a week in the middle of lectures about nutrition, obesity and diabetes in America. (As a sidebar to the ‘adventures in ironic catering’ a few weeks ago I taped an event called ‘Global Health Careers Day’ where the lack of suitable drinking water across the globe was discussed for almost eight hours straight. When lunchtime came and everyone was herded to the table of boxed lunches and drinks, they ran out of bottled water within three minutes. This was after an all-carb breakfast of bagels, donuts and muffins, no juice, and 175 people. They failed to see the irony in it, even when I pointed it out.)

Back to the pizza…
It shows up everywhere. Scavengers (myself included) come out of the woodwork for leftovers. However, I’ve taken a decent break from it to avoid what one of my co-workers refers to as ‘The Penn Ten’ (think: Freshman 15.) On one occasion a class was cancelled but the pizza delivery was not. There must have been 40 unclaimed boxes of pizza, it pains me when I think of the hungry people living less than a mile away. Two hours after delivery I saw one of the boxes in the arms of the FedEx delivery guy; a pro at scheduling his deliveries around high-food-traffic areas.

Because it travels it leaves a decent path of destruction. There are sauce spots ground into the industrial carpeting of the lecture halls, cheese gets flung onto the walls. The other day I even found pepperoni INSIDE a podium. Sometimes it makes it’s way outside, across campus. (Although I do suspect that other schools within the University have the same, limited menu selection.) But one day I saw a piece of it in the hands of a stranger and by god, to this day I wish I had a camera with me, or at least a witness. I was walking through the quad and I saw a squirrel, clutching a piece of pizza just the way I would if I were 6″ tall; with both of his squirrel hands, cheese side up, center point directed at his little mouth. The only thing that might have made it more comical is if he chased it with a drink in a red Solo cup then ran off to play hackey sack with his buddies nearby.

Tips for Public Speakers, from your friendly AV technician

Lesson 01: When wearing a wireless microphone (aka, Lavaliere) do not turn it on until you are ready to begin your presentation. Conversely, if you do turn it on, do not wear it into the bathroom.

Garden update: Fatalities among the seedlings

Things were going very well in the city-gardening experiment. The cold frames were finished, soil was bought (it’s already been bought-en), seedlings were healthy, the weather was warming up; then I mistakenly put the seedlings in the cold frames on the hottest day last week – and closed the lids. That’s when I learned the true meaning of the term ‘cold frame’. I came home to find the bodies scorched and brown, in dire need of air and water. I’ve been referring to the cold frames Dachau and Auschwitz for the damage they did to my lettuce and tomatoes (carrots, jalapenos, all the herbs, green beans, cucumbers, red and green onions.)

So, this weekend I bought a few starter plants since it’s pretty late to (re-)start seeds, and I started potting. I bought arugula, cherry tomatoes, a red bell pepper and a bunch of red onion bulbs. A few of the earlier seed-pods were salvageable because they weren’t in the cold frame with the others but it was really stupid stuff like cayenne peppers and brussel sprouts that I was basically doing to ‘see what would happen’. Oh and radishes, which I can’t wait to eat.

I don’t have any pictures of the seedlings, out of respect for the dead, but I plan on taking a few shots of the garden center when I get home tonight.

The good news, I’ve heard, is that the cold frames will at least be effective for growing things like lettuce, well into the winter.

Aging

My grandmother celebrated her 88th birthday this weekend. She tells this joke whenever the subject of old age and/or hearing loss comes up…

One elderly man was telling his friend, another elderly man, about the wonders of his new hearing aid. “Oh man I love it, it works so well, I can hear everything around me now. I can hear my grandkids without having to ask them to repeat themselves. You should get one, it’s just amazing how much better I hear with this thing in.”

“Oh really. That’s great. What kind is it?”

“4:30.”

I never cared about aging until I started doing it. Last week I had to change the font size on my laptop so I could read without squinting.

Macho, macho man

While Puddin’ and I were driving home from the outlets in Lancaster I pointed to an exit sign for Paoli and mentioned that my brother used to live around there. Puddin’ added, “Oh really? My jewlery teacher was from Paoli…

Wow. THAT’S the gayest thing I’ve ever said.”

damn you!

Boy that liberal media can be such a Debbie Downer.
I’m pissed, Facebook was supposed to save me from My Space.
I can’t wait to find out that Scrabulous is owned by Scientology…

migraines

they’re like three-day-long mini-strokes.

Naivete or pure genius?

excerpt from my funny journal, January 2005, Pittsburgh

“During a relatively mild winter atmospherically, and a rather tiresome one emotionally, I was dreading go to work one Monday. However, I was encouraged that the overnight flurries were snow-day-worthy. I sat down to watch the school closings early in
the A’s:
“Allegheny this.
Allegheny that.
Aliquippa this,
Aliquippa that.

moving on to the B’s:
“Beaver area…
wet conditions.”

Hearty laughter ensued and I couldn’t wait to go to work.”

Rockabilly retard

excerpt from my funny journal, January 2005, Pittsburgh

I met some rockabilly guy at the Lava Lounge on the South Side last night. His friends made him tell me this story…
He was with a band in New Orleans, walking around Bourbon St. and something happened to his t-shirt. The group that he was with dared him to replace it with the ugliest shirt he could buy. He wandered in and out of a few stores empty-handed until he found a white sweatshirt, sequined x-mas tree on the front, hole in the sleeve. It was March. He was a large, the sweatshirt was a small.
Strutting his stuff in his new shirt, on Bourbon St., some drunkie started picking on him for the sweatshirt. Drunkie’s special lady friend interrupted saying, “Honey, don’t make fun. he could be retarded.”