In hanging around with people and trying to feed myself I learned a couple of interesting tricks for improving my life with food at home.

1. Use old eggs for hard boiled eggs - Sarah and I had been thinking that there was something wrong with the high-end eggs that we purchase from Whole Foods. We just couldn't seem to shell them after boiling them for hard boiled eggs and they would disintegrate because the eggs were attached to the shell. As it turns out Sarah's mom discovered, learned, or knew that using older eggs a few weeks after purchasing them generates an egg that is simple to peel after cooking. Something about the eggs changes to separate the binding between the shell and the egg over time. So it's good to wait before boiling them.

2. Save fresh bagels by slicing then freezing them - The folks down the road from us at Rosenfelds have superb bagels but we stopped buying them because they would turn into rocks on the shelf after about 2 days. Microwaving them softened them but also made them rubbery. Nick suggested that the best thing to do with fresh bagels would be to freeze them but to be sure to slice them first. This week we enjoyed some leftover bagels with a quick toasting and they turned out great.

3. Freeze old bananas (peeled) for treats - As bananas get old they get very sweet. I like those fruit popsicles like Banana flavored ones and it turns out that if you peel a banana that is over ripe instead of throwing it out that it makes a great ice cream like treat.

4. Put avocados in the fridge when they are ripe - Avocados are a fantastic food but a pain to get in the perfect state for eating. We noticed that you can refridgerate them once they reach the ripeness stage and they stay ripe. We also eat them in our frequent low carb dinner dish - Chicken Caesar salad w/avocados (a recommendation from Linda) so we always need fresh ones.

5. Half bottles of wine provide good luxury - Sarah and I like to drink wine with dinner but it is tough to drink a full bottle, well sometimes it is just too much wine for a Wednesday night. I have a preservation system but it is a pain to remember to do so we usually end-up drinking too much wine in an effort to satisfy my need to not waste things and finish the bottle. The half bottles sold locally cost about as much as a full bottle, about $10, but they are much better wines due to the lower volume. So we have bought some stock of these and use them with dinner. We also have taken the mini-wines that are about the size of a wine you would get on a plane on hiking day trips.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had a chance to walk over to Gari, the new sushi fusion restaurant on Harvard Street. I had been imagining something wild because of the description of them as fusion but from what I could tell the food on the menu was mainly just another japanese restaurant. I ate a lunch there which was the sushi lunch special and it was $9 before tax and tip so it was really $11. That was fine and the food was great. I just wish they would do something crazy like put jalapeno peppers and plum sauce onto the sushi somewhere in the menu and highlight some wicked saki drinks.

Their main advantage for me is that they are around the corner so it is a very short walk so they will start to get the business I had been giving to Jae's. They have a liquor license so they can't compete with Tsunami as a BYOB place where you can get good value for your liquor dollar.

It is a good replacement from the Greek place for me. We almost never wanted Greek food while it was there. I remember seeing someone load a dead lamb with the head on into the back of the greek place. I am not opposed to lamb but that is how I'll remember the place. I also remember thinking that the whole family, father, daughter, and mother worked there and that the daughter seemed to want to branch out.

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At about 9:30 PM on a Friday night I was sitting alone at the SeaFire restaurant feeling awkward in a fancy resort alone. I had exhausted most logical activities such as reading through the menu to review the prices of steaks. A filet at the SeaFire costs either $42 or $46 depending upon your appetite for meat. A woman walked up to me and asked “Is she all right?”. My first response was “She is hopefully going to come back soon as soon as the baby calms down.” At that point I recognized the woman and why she was asking me the question. She was the water woman from the beach the day before.

On Thursday we had decided that it would be good to get Madeline some experience with the warm teal Caribbean water. So we took her to the beach and found some of the chaise beach chairs with the shades that go over the top. These are the coveted items on the beach and we only obtained them because the people in them had inherited theirs from a pair of early risers who had gone for a walk and never returned. Sarah and I were lounging happily with Madeline sitting first with Sarah and then Madeline was moved over to sit with me for a while. I had her sitting facing away from me so that if she fell backwards I could catch her. But I wanted to see her face so I pointed her back towards me. I mentioned to Sarah that I felt this was a less stable configuration. At about this time the people in front of me started having an interesting exchange. A pair of New York women were being picked-up by some resort cruiser guys and I wanted to listen in on the outcome. It was a little drama to be had on the beach where otherwise all there was to do was stare at my baby or stare at the many scantily clad teenagers wandering about looking for the resort cruiser guys to pick them up while their parents were away getting drunk on $11 Bahama Coladas.

That was when Madeline fell backwards, rolled off of the chaise and before Sarah or I could catch her, fell face first into the sand. Sarah must have read a book that sand is among the most dangerous of elements for a baby since she immediately proclaimed that it was her worst fear of coming to the beach that this would happen since Madeline could be permanently blinded by an incident of this gravity. I tried to help Madeline who was not too happy having fallen and done a face plant and was helpful in trying to explain to Sarah that it was better than Madeline falling into concrete. I was brushing off the sand from her face but it wasn’t easy to do. Apparently baby faces when covered with suntan lotion are infused with some form of sand glue that allows sand to attach and bind to the face. So Madeline was just crying and Sarah rushed off in a panic to acquire water.

While Sarah was gone to the bar the water woman appeared along with the woman from New York who was getting hit on by the beach cruisers with their water bottles. The water woman was a mother, whose child didn’t appear to be traveling with her, who knew how to help out in this situation. She let me know that I needed to tip Madeline’s head so that the water didn’t go into her nose while she poured water down Madeline’s face with the water in her bottle and got a large part of the sand away from her eyes. She recommended going to the shower by the beach to finish the job and when Sarah returned with a glass of ice water I continued to apologize for my lack of diligence and let Sarah know that we had been helped by an experienced mom who knew how to handle this sort of situation. The mom did reinforce the gravity of the situation by mentioning that it is quite possible to get a very painful scratch on the cornea from sand in your eyes.

So we finally went to the shower and spent time washing out Madeline’s face and body to remove the sand and parted ways with the water woman. We decided that the beach was too dangerous for the rest of the day and moved to the zero entry kid wading pool to swim in shallower water but it was closed due to a fecal matter incident that was not our fault. Think Caddy Shack and Bill Murray.

So the water woman was now dressed in her finest resort casual dress looking at me oddly as I sat alone in my 30th minute staring at the menu waiting for Sarah to return. She had to be thinking something along the lines of “Boy – these are the most incompetent new parents that have ever walked the face of the earth.” We chatted for a minute or two and I informed her that Sarah was just outside nursing the baby because Madeline had been unhappy about the situation at the restaurant. The water woman went outside to say hello to Sarah.

Among the things to keep myself entertained while waiting alone for my wife and child to return was the birthday song that was being sung on a regular basis. The Bahamians must equate volume and excitement with luxury since they were practically yelling while they clapped a happy birthday each time at a volume that could be heard on neighboring islands. The wait staff was also trying to figure out what to do with me since I was this guy not ordering food at a fancy restaurant so I let them know we were having a problem getting the baby to calm down. Sarah had mentioned after I had tried to calm Madeline with a bottle that she wasn’t going to ruin people’s evenings who were paying through their teeth for a fancy meal with a crying baby. This seemed to especially apply to the local Bahamian couple sitting next to us that had a long discussion with the waiter, who they knew, that they had finally been able to come out to the restaurant after all these years. The Bahamian man leaned over to ask me at one point “So – no dinner for you.”.

It was after this that I decided to go out on my quest to see what Sarah was doing. I found her outside of the restaurant sitting in some outdoor waiting tables nursing Madeline. It looked like Madeline was about to go to sleep but there was a problem. Apparently at 9:30 at night on Fridays the streets at this resort are filled with entertainment. The entertainment was a parade including a marching band blasting music at volumes loud enough to drown out a Bahamian birthday song at the SeaFire restaurant. It was also loud enough to prevent Madeline from easily sleeping since every time Madeline started to dose off the rough equivalent of a person crashing a pair of cymbals over her head occurred. I had to laugh at the oddity of the event and given the two evils of the loud parade or the restaurant we opted to place her carefully into her carriage and stroll into the restaurant to order dinner.

When we sat down Madeline was sleeping and we had some cautious moments discussing the current scenario. We were sitting on a bomb that could go off at any moment but were going to eat our $42 steak and $40 tuna along with a Caesar salad, Merlot, and desert. We were on a mission to enjoy a nice meal while on vacation. That was when we learned that the Bahamian couple next to us was celebrating their birthday. The color from Sarah’s skin drained out of Sarah when the clapping, shouting, birthday singers arrived at our table. The nearby tables of knowledgeable parents looked on and were sympathetically mortified as well.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I realize that I missed the Zombie march in Davis Square this afternoon. But how often does your aunt come to see your new daughter (her great neice?) for the first time. So we drove out to Marshfield and my dad convinced me that it would be good for us to clear all the leaves around the pool so that when it opens at the end of the week it won't immediately fill with rotting stuff. Marshfield was in a bit of disarray and my mother was less than pleased to find that the entire NIMH mouse colony had spent the winter happily munching on a giant stash of dog food and sunflower seeds while sleeping cozily in dishtowels and linens. Spring is a time of rotting things.

But it is also a time of fresh things. I am a huge fan of fresh baked goods. I don't just mean baked goods cooked today. Fresh to me is that the food reaches my mouth within 5 minutes of when it leaves the oven. A fresh baked good should have steam coming off of it or out of it. For example - The popovers at the Jordan pond tea house are rarely handled by hand by the waitstaff for fear of burns and when you poke the top of them a happy burst of steam shoots out. They then melt the butter you spread on them as you are spreading it. On St. Maarten they have a french bakery where you need to go there at 8 AM but if you do you can purchase a croissant that has just finished it's trip in the oven. For more mundane fresh baked goods I used to go to the Mall in Natick with Stephanie and while she would shop I would monitor the Mrs. Fields cookie vending area for the exact moment when the cookies left the oven and then would make certain when I ordered the 6 cookies I planned to immediately eat that I would only take the fresh batch that was still hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth even if they made me sign a waiver that I wouldn't sue them.

So today we were at Brueggers at 9AM and I could see as we reached the front of the line that the everything bagels were rotating in the oven. So I asked when they would be ready and I pulled Sarah and Madeline out of line
to skip over to the coffee and then proceeded to watch the bakery area and everything bagel bin like a hawk for signs that they had arrived from the oven. We did manage to get some excellent bagel sandwiches made with the super fresh bagels.

This brought me to the conclusion that the ultimate futuristic bakery and bagel shop must provide better visibility to roaming tech geeks and teenagers with adequate knowledge of their home computers and cellular phones of when each baked good will be exiting the oven. What I imagine, and I'll bet they already have this in Finland or something, is that the bakery could track batches of baked goods throughout the baking process and with known stages they could forecast the time when the everything bagels would come out of the oven. As the consumer I could subscribe to this information either interactively through a web browser (since all bakeries should be internet enabled) or by subscribing to the information through an RSS feed or SMS message publishing service. Then as I am planning my morning walk over to Breuggers I could leave when the SMS message hit my phone that my favorite bagels would be ready in 8 minutes. Anyways if the Brueggers folks don't like this idea then I think I'll have to start my own high tech bagel concept bakery just to show everyone how much consumer supply technology for perishable foods can improve the freshness of baked goods.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I decided to escape Madeline's tyranny and go out to dinner for an evening. We did take Madeline with us despite her many attempts to sabotage our exiting the apartment including the destruction via milk spit-up of the I love sushi outfit that had been specifically been selected for a night out of raw fish. We decided to go to Tsunami in Coolidge Corner. We have grown fond of Tsunami for one major reason - It is BYOB. The BYOB scenario is perfect for us because it cuts down on the crowds of people who want to overpay for alcohol to impress their internet dates (Fugakyu) and allows us to enjoy a meal where the main cost is the important stuff - the sushi. We stopped at the liquor store around the corner and grabbed two 22 oz. Asahis and were nice and early for dinner. On the way to the restaurant we noticed that the chinese seafood restaurant near Boca Grande was going to be replaced. Plastered on the many walls were advertisements for the new intended tenant that will likely be opening in a few months. Finale, the high end dessert place that was originally downtown and then added a location in Harvard Square is now going to have an outpost in our locality. I am very positive towards this new addition despite my general boycott of decadent sweets. The main benefit is variety and options when wandering about on a walk. Our meal was great and I had to grab another beer before the sushi arrived because we had already downed the original two Asahis. Madeline wasn't too pleased with being awake past 7:30 in an unfamiliar venue so we negotiated with the very nice petite asian female waitstaff for a half of a banana to distract our baby while we ate. Madeline ate banana off of chopsticks and we had a meal replete with a super dragon roll, a one up on the caterpillar roll because it has a sweet potatoe inside of a roll with eel and avocado.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We recently started purchasing avocados from Trader Joes. It started when we were at Linda’s and she had served a Caesar salad with avocados in it and we were struck that we could buy these wonderful treats ourselves and do what we wanted with them. The two basic uses for an avocado around the house are in a salad or in a quickly made guacamole. In general if an avocado is on a menu somewhere at a restaurant I will go for that food. At fancy restaurants the avocado likes to live with the best foods. My favorite tuna tartar from Cuchi Cuchi comes jumbled together in a cylinder with avocado. A burger is always better with the southwestern style adding the avocado. Even the lowly working class burrito makes itself a staple with the thwack splattering green onto an abstract canvas of black, brown, white, and red before the canvas gets rolled and covered in modern silver foil. I can’t have a tailgate football party without the guacamole from Whole Foods and it is my sincere hope that as I experiment in my own home with the avocado that I can create a fresh and tasty food as good as the plastic containers full. Even this morning, during brunch with Lynne and her friend Dave at Lineage, I ordered a breakfast dish with eggs over black beans with a nice mound of avocado in the corner of the dish.

Mr. Wanda, a tall African man with a deep voice, a square high hairdo, and a curly beard was our traveling chef on the safari we took in Tanzania. Among the many things he provided us to eat from park to park were large salads filled with avocados, onions, and tomatoes. A perfect vegetable can be purchased hard in an African marketplace, then tied to the roof of a Land Rover, only to be removed strategically to always have the perfect soft flavor each day for a week. That was one of the luxuries about being on safari. We had a personal chef traveling with us and most meals included a very generous portion of avocado in the salad.

I have lately noticed that watching Madeline grow reminds me of our trip through the Serengeti, Ngoro-Ngoro crater, and Lake Manyara. At first when we would see a bird or animal we’d get excited and try to take pictures, and stare for an hour. It didn’t matter too much whether Kennedy, our guide, actually knew the proper name for the birds. The important thing was to see some amazing thing we had never experienced before and to observe it long enough that it could become a part of our experience. So with Madeline I have a buzz inside where I am looking every day for something little in her developing process that I hadn’t seen before. At first it was just to see her at all, a real human developed out of nothing, the latest rung on a ladder of evolution above me with everything back to the original primordial ooze descending into the distance behind us. But as she develops we could anticipate an intentional smile, standing up, rolling over, walking in the Bjorn, walking in the woods. This last week I got to see the first giggle and her first solid food going into her mouth.

On our safari in Africa the first time we saw a lion in the tall grass and hot sun it was amazing. We looked for almost an hour. As we drove about we kept seeing the lions each day for four days. After seeing a hundred lions you start to say to yourself – ‘eh, another lion, I’ve seen one of those’. The same is true with the elephants, giraffes, and pelicans – amazing creatures but they appear mundane after four days of spinning around a giant open field. Instead we go off looking for rarer creatures like the cheetah, leopard, or rhinoceros. It is almost impossible not to get sensitized to the novelty of the current wonders and instead go moving towards the next new wonder. So lately Madeline has been smiling often but I am looking for a second giggle, a new tooth, and a purposeful roll. I have to catch myself to stop and just appreciate how far she has come and smile back at her for an hour because happiness in a five month old baby isn’t assured. Plus the best way to get that second giggle is to give a smile a big workout.

I wonder how Madeline sees the world as well now that she has become so aware of things. The smiles must, in part, be due to her own safari of what is now so mundane to me that I have become completely sensitized to it. I can only try to experience the amazement of seeing things for the first time vicariously through her. It is spring now and the crocuses are rising from the ground for the first time in her life. She experienced a cold snow storm as we walked through the windy blowing blizzard to Zathmary’s for a breakfast only a month and a half ago. We eavesdropped on a group of college girls gossiping about an affair that one of their friends was having with a married man while tasting the Zathmary’s breakfast food. Last month suddenly, Zathmary’s closed in all locations. But something new will replace it. We have so much to show Madeline as it gets warmer out. A trip to the zoo to see the giraffe, the gazelle, and the lion is a likely activity.

But while it is still cold out I am guessing that we will move past the banana and rice cereal that we have been feeding her for the past three days and introduce a new food. I saw two foods pictured in the Good Housekeeping guidebook on raising your baby listed as ones to introduce to a baby that I can’t wait to see her eat. The first one were pieces of cheese cut into interesting shapes like a star or triangle. The second one was a light green slice of avocado.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Friday night Sarah had made plans to do a girls night out at 28 degrees in Boston leaving me with Madeline. So I decided the night was a perfect time to call in some reinforcements and had Dave and Zoe come over for dinner. Since Lineage, the replacement for Lucy’s opened last week I scheduled us to go out to eat there to check out the new menu at a bistro. Stepanie happened to be in the neighborhood to do her taxes so as Sarah was waiting for her cab expecting the buzzer to call her out for her girls night out people kept arriving at the door. I assured her that the 10 kegs being delivered were not for a party while she was out and she was off for her night out and we were off for a walk around the corner to scout the new cuisine.

I am happy to report that my first experience with Lineage was a positive one. There was ample seating area for Madeline even if we had to park her in the route that the wait staff walk through from the kitchen to the dining area while we waited to be seated. Madeline was happy the whole time falling asleep after fifteen minutes into the wait. We ordered a number of appetizers including tuna tartare, a pizza with porcini mushrooms and truffle oil, goat cheese/mesclun salad with walnuts, and cod cheeks in a sauce that had mini-onions and raisins. I would highly recommend any of the appetizers but I was most surprised by the tomato sauce that the cod cheeks were in. It was tastier than most sauces.
For the main course we split two entrees, a perfectly cooked medium rare steak with cheesy mashed potatoes and those thin string beans that you usually get at a wedding. The steak came with an excellent mushroom sauce. We also got the gnocchi with mushrooms and it was also very interesting with high quality mushrooms in it and a great consistency for the sauce. They offer the gnocchi for about twice the price with lobster but we abstained. Our wine was a Multepulciano that went well with the food. Since we had left room for desert we ordered the chocolate mousse and Pancetta with blood orange sauce and caramel. Both were quite good. I thought the ’smores were a bit of a silly idea for six bucks but some people probably have a different response to the idea of getting a ‘smore. In general I think that Lineage on Harvard street is as good of a bistro as the Washington Tavern and has the advantage of ample dining space and convenience to a nook in Coolidge Corner.

At dinner Dave mentioned that he had found a great Turkish diner tucked away on the street that the police station is on. I had never thought to go there before and had been whining plenty about the lack of a good diner near city hall. Martin’s doesn’t really cut it because it is very cramped and Sarah has some bad memories of morning sickness there. The Turkish place is called something like family diner and had an interesting mix of ethnic Turkish food and standard American style diner fare. I ordered a Turkish breakfast as a mystery foreign food that turned out to be was a sub-par Cobb salad like thing but with Turkish food. It basically was a collection of bread, cheese, feta, cucumbers, and olives with some jam. But Sarah and Amanda ordered eggs that looked like they were satisfactory (despite the mushrooms in Sarah’s omelette coming from a can). It isn’t really a sit-down diner set-up but operates close enough to the Paramount’s breakfast scenario without the big lines and scramble for seats that it is still a very good option.

Having sampled some more foreign cuisines we returned to our home at Zaftigs this morning to find in shock that Zaftigs has taken down the DannyO art that had been there since I can first remember going to Zaftigs. They even took down the painting of a Zaftig. I will miss the art that was there before since I always secretly wanted to get rich and buy the collages of the car, the girl, or the bar mitzvah. All is not lost at Zaftigs for artwork. They replaced the older, large scale, DannyO art with new smaller items by DannyO including a cute series of cars that would look amazing in any child’s room and one of the prudential building at night. I tried to determine what had happened by inquiring with our waitress but she was unable to adequately explain where the older pieces went. She made it seem like all of the pictures in Zaftigs were for sale with a price tag and that DannyO had decided to rotate them. But it wasn’t clear if Zaftigs owned the paintings or the artist owned them or DannyO owned Zaftigs. We also didn’t receive our standard bagel chips with olive sour cream spread which could be an unfortunate indication that Zaftigs has jumped the shark.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At the end of a Thursday I was already feeling a little run down after finding nothing of interest at Hollywood Video in the new releases. They are still holding out on “The Man”. Any movie with Eugene Levy is bound to have some positive moments. I had decided to make a quick run over to Stop and Shop to grab some chicken to broil for our standard Ceasar salad. The shopping was quick and fine including some vindication of our tastes given that they have finally stocked both Newman’s Own Limeade and French Vanilla Yoplait after multiple fruitless incidents searching in the dairy section. When, haggard, I arrived at the checkout counter I picked a line that was so short that I could just place my items onto the conveyer belt to have them conveyed down to the nice cashier sitting awaiting them. I hadn’t researched before taking 8 individual Yoplaits onto the belt that the person currently interacting with the cashier was a type 1 supermarket line delaying disaster.

The woman ahead of me in line was probably 80 years old. As I looked over the latest periodicals to learn about key incidents like the break-up between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes or the secret meeting between Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey I noticed that the nice old lady in front of me was disputing a charge from the items rung-up in the register. Unfortunately she was having trouble, due to advanced degeneration of her eyesight, reading the monitor designed to allow you to read your receipt before it is published. So after she argued for a few minutes that she couldn’t read it another cashier suggested to my poor cashier to print out the receipt so that she could read it in print. He did so and she then burst out with the accusation that she had been overcharged for apple sauce. The apple sauce had been advertised at 10 for 10 dollars or one dollar per jar and it had rung-up as $1.45. The wonderful woman in front of me demanded a reason why the amount was different than her expectations. The cashier referred her to the manager who normally sits behind the counter where lottery tickets are sold but who was probably hanging out with the butcher in the deli area talking about frozen shrimp. So a bagger girl who looked to be about twelve ran to the customer service area, grabbed a circular, and let the woman complaining about the cost of apple sauce know that the problem was that the 15 oz. Size of Stop and Shop apple sauce is the one that is on sale and not the 25 oz. Size that the lady had placed in her cart.

The 12 year old girl didn’t realize that antagonizing the lady by pointing at the circular and huffing with an aloof attitude wasn’t going to appease an angry woman insistent on fixing the system so the lady become more infuriated rather than less infuriated and demanded to have the apple sauce stricken from her cart and order. The cashier complied and he offered her a new receipt without the apple sauce which she then studied to ensure that no hancky-panky had occurred from the Stop and Shop corporation trying to steal from her through bait and switch signage. She then finally managed to get the manager paged and the manager came over and committed to check out whether the signage was misleading on the apple sauce or if it was actually the woman’s mistake.

Since she had a tab to pay and a set of groceries to bag she decided to complete the transaction sans apple sauce on principle. The bill came out to $13.87. Her response was to write a check for $33.87 and to obtain a cash back of $20.00. While she was slowly writing out this check she then complained that customers don’t have all day to spend at the supermarket. This moment was when I realized that my thousand hours of zen relaxation training had paid off as I looked over at the frustrated cashier and didn’t even laugh.

So finally I was rung-up with my yogurt, chicken tenders, and limeade after about twenty minutes of watching the Stop and Shop drama. The cashier was highly apologetic about how patient I was and I mentioned to him compassionately that we will all get old some day. I wheeled my small cart full of booty out of Stop and Shop and on my way out I passed the woman and the customer service manager. The manager was placing a 25 oz. jar of Stop and Shop brand apple sauce, valued at $1.45 into the old lady’s cart and telling her that the mistake was theirs because of the mix-up of the signage around the apple sauce sale. I wheeled my cart out to the lot, drove home, ate a French Vanilla yogurt, drank some Newman’s own limeade with seltzer, ate some chicken Ceasar salad with freshly broiled chicken, and watched “The Sweetest Thing”, with Sarah as Madeline slept – But I had a craving for potato pancakes with about 25 oz. of apple sauce.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you who live near Harvard Street you may have noticed the under new management sign for the kosher chinese restauant around the corner. I wish I had known that they were going to change from kosher Hunan style food to kosher Beijing style food so that I could have a kosher chinese food taste test. Instead I'll have to carve out some time to order out there to see what the big fuss about new management is all about.

In other news for Harvard street restaurants; Lucy's is no longer in business. I wasn't ever able to fully appreciate the Lucy's vibe. It was a little too upscale and chique for my taste but without the real benefit. The location is going to be replaced by an actual replacement restaurant unlike the Captain's Quarter that became an MRI imaging center. I have a couple pieces of advice for the new owners for the property that once was Lucy's.

Suggestion 1 - Don't serve tofu bacon. I accidentally ordered tofu bacon at Lucy's and I would have been better off going to Stop and Shop for a snausage or going into the Oscar Meyer labs to try a meat fruit roll-up. The tofu-bacon experience was the last time I went into Lucy's based on my own decision.

Suggestion 2 - Make a good and affordable breakfast. Let's face it - we are surrounded by bagels including Kupels, Finagle, Brueggers, and Dunkin Donuts on three corners. So we don't need another bagel place. But the only places to get breakfast are Zaftigs and Martin's. We used to go to the B&D deli but it mysteriously closed due to some tax problems after about 80 years being in business. Zaftigs is awesome for breakfast but also comes with a three hour wait on a weekend morning. Nobody goes there anymore because it is too popular. Sarah won't go into Martin's because she had morning sickness there and vomited in their tiny bathroom. So we make our own breakfasts these days because nobody supplies a good menu filled with eggs, bacon, toast, french toast, and the other typical comfort foods needed for a good breakfast.

Suggestion 3 - Make a good $8 burger. Everything that I said about breakfast goes for burgers. Zaftigs makes the best burgers in the neighborhood but they have a long wait. The pizza joints can't figure out how to make a hamburger and the Coolidge corner clubhouse doesn't quite get it right. If you don't know what a good burger tastes like go down to Houstons and order one. It shouldn't be so hard!

Suggestion 4 - We have had some successful food come to Coolidge corner in the past for years. The mains one I can think of are the Vietnamese place - Pho Lemongrass and the fancy Italian place - Pomodoro. Ask them what they did to make their stuff work well in the area as new restaurants.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chef Who’s House

Last night as I was leaving my Brookline Adult Education class on Macromedia Flash I discussed with Sarah what we wanted for dinner. We decided on Chinese and that I would walk to the restaurant to pick-up the food on my way home. So Sarah ordered dinner as we had discussed from Chef Chang’s. So when I arrived at our neighborhood Chinese restaurant to pick-up our standard order of crab Rangoon, moo-shi chicken, scallion pancakes, and Peking ravioli the folks at Chef Chow’s didn’t recognize my name as an order they had taken. So I figured it was a case of mistaken Chinese restaurant identity and called Sarah. Unfortunately she didn’t answer. I didn’t want to have to go back to the condo empty handed just to ask Sarah where she had ordered our dinner and then have to go back out again so I took a guess that the order was from one of the restaurants on Beacon street towards Washington square. Little did I know that the restaurant I was thinking of, one that I could only remember as the one with crappy crab Rangoon, is called Lucky Wah and not something related to a chef’s name. I had even thought that Sarah could have inadvertently called the popular MIT hangout in Cambridge but that place is called Royal East. Luckily I did stop to buy some wine at Best Cellars and nearly stopped to drink a bottle while calling Sarah’s phone every fifteen seconds. As I was walking out of the liquor store Sarah called to tell me that she ordered, as discussed, from Chef Chang’s. Chef Chang’s is down Beacon about ten minutes from us and close to Kenmore square. So I carried my three bottles of wine down there, picked-up the dinner, and took the T home back on Beacon.

The moral of the story is that Chinese restaurants need more distinctive names.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I woke-up this morning with bad onion breath. Sarah and I had taken stock of our spending habits in a minor joint panic attack on Friday night after a dinner at Vintage in West Roxbury that cost over a buck fifteen. We self prepared a thrifty taco dinner last night. Initially we forgot the onion at the local Stop and Shop but I made a special run on my bicycle back to the market to pick-up one good looking white onion. We split it in half diced for the meal and I probably ate a third of it along with my tacos and salad. The bicycle was handy because we had to move the bikes out of the basement where they were fumigating for mice and they were going to throw out anything in the basement in the morning. I ate a big second portion of the taco stuff because Sarah had gone into the kitchen to see a mouse run away from the counter top. The mouse was probably a refugee from the fumigation. They don’t normally bother to come to our apartment on the second floor both because there isn’t much food and because it is easier for them to hide, nest, and munch on garbage in the basement. So I ate the taco mix in fear of the possible terrible diseases that a mouse could cause for a pregnant wife balanced against my extreme love of taco meat and extreme fear of food wastage. I’m going to wait a few days to see whether it is worth declaring war on the mouse population. For now we cleaned up any scraps that might interest the vermin.

We spent the day catching-up on sleep after a session of apartment work with Sarah’s parents. They had come over to do things like set the dimmer boxes better in the holes in the wall, put together the bed, and help to add to our window coverings. I managed to use the time to put the second high tech shade up in Madeline’s room. Sarah had changed her mind that she wanted curtain rods back in Madeline’s room so I needed to put them back in. We also spent some time putting a shelf above the desk in the bedroom and used the laser level that Sarah’s parents bought me last year during the holiday season. It wasn’t very helpful since level is a relative term in an old Brookline apartment and level with the floor, ceiling, desk, whatever is just a matter of making something look level. It is always fun to play with lasers.

I was doing fine until we moved on to putting a valence over the shades and curtains already in the bedroom. A valence is a decorative piece of fabric that is used to piss off men who want nothing to do with putting shades and other crap up on their window. It was the harder of the many items to put onto the window so I got stressed out about it and was ready for a six hour nap by the time Sarah’s parents left.

The nap was going ok until Sarah decided to read my high school yearbook. It is almost impossible to ignore your wife when she is paging through old pictures of you, your friends, and possible past crushes and lovers. So I took Sarah through the yearbook. With the yearbook and past relationships all stirred-up in my mind we rented Grosse Pointe Blank to watch while we ate our tacos.

It was a good day in the end including sleep, cheap food, hiding out in our little world, and some productive work.

Posted by Melody at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Wednesday night I met with an influential potential business partner and Aaron in Concord over dinner by the bar. It was unfortunate that I had to skip out on my Improv group practice for this occasion but it was a case where prioritization worked out. The guy was the number two person at a start-up in California with venture financing and their CEO was on the cover of Newsweek last month. At dinner Aaron and I learned all sorts of interesting stuff about our potential business partner. He was an eccentric man including a stint in military school as a child, then becoming an Olympic jujitsu fighter in Korea, getting shot in the gall bladder as a paramedic, working as a recruiter for Cisco stock per hire when Cisco had 35 employees, owned a fight gear clothing company, and finally became a good buddy of the venture community by rescuing some failing start-ups. He also would go crazy if he didn't work 20 hours a day, said "GOT IT" whenever he understood something and loved the restaurant we went to in Concord because to him it was the Cheers of Chinese restaurants.

Upon arriving the partner was drinking a fruity looking beverage in a tall blue Chinese restaurant mug with a naked woman embedded in the side of the mug. I asked him what it was called and he called it a "One of these". This was the name that had been given to it by Paul the bartender, a tall Asian man with large Elvis sideburns who had created the drink for my new friend the partner eleven years ago when the partner was just a kid. The partner used to come in with the most beautiful woman he had ever met but they then moved to California and she had stumbled into a Less than Zero situation before marrying a biker. The partner was now married to a Dolche-Gabana Japanese model who he couldn't love any more and is now living atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco. He only was attracted to Asian women and spoke fluent Japanese. At one point he picked-up his Treo phone and answered is "Moshi Moshi" because the ring was the one for a Japanese country code call. It turned out to be an engineer for his company working in Japan who didn't speak much Japanese. He was sending his kindergarten age kid to a fancy school that cost $30,000 a year and the partner thought the kid would be getting the same education back in Concord. That's why I got in touch with the partner. I filled out a form and despite there being a lot of forms being filled-out on the web site, mine came with a 781 area code. So I guess I won the lottery?

I decided that I had to try the unique concoction in the girly glass so I ordered a "One of These" as well. The "One of These" was a potent drink and despite it being a unique concoction for the partner it was very similar to a Scorpion bowl in an embarrassing Chinese restaurant mug. Aaron arrived and soon we were all drinking these beverages and chatting away about the adventures of the partner, who he knew in common with Aaron. We did talk enough about business for me to get that the partner felt we had a good shot at success but that we should raise some money to execute faster. "GOT IT".

Paul, the bartender who has the Elvis sideburns, is an amateur singer. The partner had taken his Dolce-Gabana Japanese wife to this restaurant and Paul had sung for her and she had cried for three days. We had gotten there at 5PM but by about 7PM we had already imbibed two "One's of these" and were ordering dinner including a the partner special and an Earl special. Earl was the guy that the partner brought to the restaurant when he owned a landscaping company in the area eleven years ago and was cutting his teeth in business. Earl's claim to fame, other than the aforementioned Earl special was that he could drink 48 beers at a sitting. Now this is quite impossible and he would likely die. Earl's secret was that he would drink them and would throw-up in the middle of the drinking multiple times in a Romanesque vomitorium style. Both of these dishes were off the menu and had been created those 11 years ago when both the partner and Paul the bartender were just starting out and the restaurant had just opened. The Earl special was a seafood dish with scallops and shrimp in a viscous sauce with vegetables including mushrooms and chinese broccoli. The partner special was a fried chicken dish also with vegetables in a viscous sauce.

When the third "One of These" arrived the glass was changed from the blue naked woman to a flesh colored Fu-Man-Chu bearded guy mug. The drink itself was getting stronger and Aaron dropped off drinking, his 50 years experience kicking in. We were chatting a bit with some executives at a table next to ours and it was fun to see the partner talking to an executive who had never heard of their company. That was when I learned about the Newsweek article. The partner convinced Paul the bartender to serenade a woman drinking at the bar and he sang what seemed to be an Elvis song with a great southern twang to his voice. Around 9PM Aaron brought the leftovers home to his kids and the partner and I moved to the bar.

We chatted a bit more about life and getting married. I could tell we weren't birds of a feather because he thought he would slit his wrists or jump off a bridge without working for 20 hours a day and wasn't that involved in his home life. I gave Sarah some glowing marks for having her head where mine was and us both wanting to chill out and enjoy being parents a bit. After the fourth "One of These" it was 10PM and time for the restaurant to shut down for the evening so we parted ways. Paul gave the obligatory warning to drive home safely and I walked out to my car smelling like I had just raided a liquor cabinet. My calculations were that I had four drinks in five hours so I was probably not so drunk to drive but might be close enough to play it very safe.

So as I started to drive home I felt nice a paranoid that I was going to get pulled over by the local police out hunting for DUI cases to throw in jail. Because of this I switched to the slow lane on Rt. 2, which was the only route I could figure would lead me home. Being in the slow lane is an interesting experience because you see more police in the slow lane. They hide in the bushes, pass you in the fast lane, and generally make a very good appearance when someone is up late and night and praying to not get pulled over. One of the police cars that looked like an SUV drove in front of me and then pulled himself over to the side to form what looked like a speed trap. I sighed a good sigh of relief because if he wasn't there when I passed then he probably wasn't looking to catch me speeding or swaying like a snake on the road or whatever else I might have been doing to alert someone that it might be fun to make me blow into a DUI tester or walk a straight line while touching my nose. I don't think I can do that sober. But the same police car appeared behind me only thirty seconds later with lights flashing to pull me over.

I have seen the show Cops many times and I always wondered why any criminal when pulled over by the police for an unknown reason, except for Timothy McVeigh, would get out of their car and run as fast as they could into the woods of Lincoln. The answer was suddenly clear to me as I was pulled over, not for speeding, with alcohol coming out of my sweating pores. Adrenaline! I don't often get shocked with an extreme dose of adrenaline but this was a case of pure fight or flight super-high. I was ready to pop someone in the face, run away from the saber tooth tiger, do whatever it took to get out of that situation as fast as possible. My life could be ruined. This was going to be the most embarrassing incident of my young and foolish life. There goes the presidential nomination. I had just been thinking about how I could try to run for president as an atheist and I could at least say that I didn't have DUI charges like George W., wasn't a coke addict, and after eight days of marriage, hadn't proved to be a serial adulterer. Granted all of those traits actually qualify you for the presidency so I shouldn't have been worried. Now here I am, my own deep throat admitting everything anyways.

So I fumbled my license out of my wallet and tossed the wallet into the seat beside me, grabbed the registration from the glove compartment and greeted the officer when he arrived at my rolled down window with a smile while trying hard to hold my breath and control my breathing. This would be easy if my heart rate wasn't around 205 from the adrenaline but most people appear a bit fidgety when they get pulled over so I may not have seemed that off to the officer. At the window of the car he asked me a question and I was sure it would be "Sir, have you been drinking this evening". But somehow those words had morphed through an act of science fiction into "Sir, do you know that you have a broken tail light?". I answered "Yes." He wanted to know how long I knew it was broken and I said that it had been about a month. He then let me know that I should get it fixed as soon as possible and then turned back to his vehicle to write me either a ticket or a warning.

The return to your vehicle for a cop with this mystery ticket or game show warning is always an interesting experience as the driver. It is basically a horror game show. Will you get a ticket that will effect your insurance premiums permanently or a warning that will make you want to hug the officer? In my case I still wasn't sure whether I was being observed for signs of drunkenness so I was just sitting on top of the brick underneath me that had been extruded from my anus and was staring into the mirror trying to see what the officer was doing. The new jumbo LEDs that have been installed into emergency vehicles are very compact and very bright. They are bright enough on a dark new moon evening to cause significant temporary blind spots in your vision. So as I looked back in the mirror my field of vision was slowly turning into a fun, 60's fantasy world of lights and colors no matter what direction I looked in. My cell phone rang and I decided to ignore it, knowing that it was probably Sarah, my pregnant wife, wondering when I would be home. I didn't pick it up figuring that the police probably think of calls by waiting pulled over drivers to be calls for the gang to ambush the officer or spot legal consultation suggesting guilt. I considered closing my eyes to avoid the blindness and pondered how I would drive off blind and potentially DUI in front of the officer if he did let me go and imagined ending-up in the blinking ditch twenty feet in front of the car.

When he returned to the car I smiled again as he gave me the "warning" for the broken taillight. I nodded and gave a guttural OK to continue my policy of not breathing on the officer. Finally he turned back to his car and I pulled out in front of him. Cops love to follow you for about a minute while you drive the speed limit and then pull off ahead of you approaching the speed that a Delorean uses to go back in time. He did this and when he sped into the distance I called Sarah back.

I gave her the scoop on the situation and she offered to come out to pick me up but instead I decided that I was fine driving but totally freaked out by the experience. So I held Sarah on the line as I was driving home, recounted the story, and let her know about the two hundred cops that seemed to be out on the empty roads leading all the way home on Route 2 including two motorcycle cops who kept stopping at lights next to me for three straight red lights. I was happy to catch the red lights for a change and one of the lights freed me from my motorcade of unrequested police escorts. I just dragged myself through memorial drive, storough drive, comm. ave., and Saint Paul Street, until a breathed a heavy sigh of relief upon arriving in the driveway of a private property at which point I yelled into the phone to Sarah that I was free. She was probably home rubbing her belly the whole time wondering why she was on the other end of the line of the late Hunter S. Thompson reincarnating himself in me for some fear and loathing on the way home from Concord on a Wednesday night.

She welcomed me home and let me know that I smelled like I had raided a liquor cabinet before we went to sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wedding Memories
I got up early on the wedding day around six thirty. I had been playing with the music downloads from Yahoo! Unlimited down to my media PC and was trying to get some key staples for dancing like Baby Got Back and Milkshake in case we were able to pull off the dancing side of things. I also was simultaneously working on the photo slideshow by arranging the pictures into a more logical order for chronology.

I kept clicking on and off at the Weather.com web site to review the strange predictions for Bedford. According to the forecast it was a 20% chance of rain for the whole day but hour by hour there were supposed to be 60% chance of showers every hour until a mysterious clearing between 3 and 6 AM. So when Jeff, our justice of the peace, called on the phone to check with us on any potential edits to the ceremony I told him that we might have to push the ceremony back a bit to catch the rays of sunshine since we preferred the outdoor setting. He told us that he had to leave at 3PM to make his next appointment so we realized that we were going to have to go with whatever nature dealt us in the cosmic rain or sunshine shuffle. Sarah considered praying for good weather and I told her that she should be responsible for that since I don’t believe in God.

At around 9 we began to gear-up for the wedding in Brookline. I called my dad to let him know that I had a sudden vision of guacamole from Whole Foods for the wedding and since Sarah and I aren’t near a Whole Foods that he might have a better shot at getting it. I had made arrangements with Zaftigs for a deli platter for 20 to be ready for us that would be ready at 9:30 AM. At first we had been thinking that it would make sense to get the deli platter first and then return to load the car but since we were wide awake we got to loading the car with the various things we needed to take in the car. The contents included the Media PC from the living room, a giant 19” monitor (not a flat screen), the old Dell Latitude laptop, a mouse, a keyboard, a camera battery charger, a set of computer speakers, a tripod that didn’t have the top to it, a card table, an overnight bag for the bed and breakfast stay, a recently printed copy of the ceremony, a tuxedo, and my recently dry cleaned suit in case my tuxedo either didn’t fit or spontaneously combusted.

We had recently taken a bunch of boxes and removed the peanuts from them and taken them apart so I couldn’t find a box suitable to carry the small stuff. I tried to reconstruct one of the boxes but there was only scotch tape to hold it together so I figured I would just be careful with it. As I went to place the components into the box and rushing I knocked a Medieval Manor glass over that had survived many purges of glassware and it shattered on the floor after cracking on the lower lip of the coffee table. I yelled Mazeltov and kept gathering goods to stuff into the car.

By the time we got to Zaftigs at exactly 9:30 AM the deli platters were tricky to cram into the mix. The Zaftigs platter was more types of food than I had intended to get. I probably should have just gotten deli meats because it came with cole slaw and potato salad in a huge bowl. Sarah was worried that my mad quest to add more Jewish food would offend her mother and it had been somewhat subconscious. I had asked my dad to pick-up a bunch of bagels with lox and cream cheese and to grab a lot of deserts and pastries from the local bakery the day before.

Throughout the ride to Bedford passing through sunny patches and deep rainy patches the contents of the back of the PT Cruiser needed to be carefully monitored to not fall through the edge from where the seats folded down allowed items to fall into. So I was driving slowly through the country roads in Bedford. We arrived finally around 10:15 expecting to see a bunch of folks soon to run through the rehearsal of the ceremony around 11AM but in general it was a quiet day in Bedford where not much was going on.

Sarah’s dad was carting the rented folding chairs into the yard to a back corner where the ceremony could point. He did this by attaching his gardening cart to the back of his John Deere mower with a full stack of chairs held on the back of the cart. Since I wasn’t dressed yet I helped to move the chairs from the cart along with him to make some rows starting in the back. We quickly realized that we were going to be wrong about the chair arrangement no matter what we did so we just kept unloading the chairs. Eventually Sarah came over to help us and we built our own little rounded seating system with an aisle down the middle with the chuppah that Matthew had built as the stage in the center that we used to orient the chairs to.

I also was responsible for Canon in D and Dance Me to the End of Love to play in the background during procession and recessional walks. To do this I had placed both of these onto my laptop and was planning on hooking-up the laptop to the speakers. Matthew, Sarah’s brother, retrieved a power strip for me that he hooked through a window. He was exhausted at having worked on a new bathroom all week and having MIT finals. Upon setting-up the laptop I learned that the laptop wasn’t that happy with playing the Dance Me version I had loaded because it had some form of protection on it that prevented it from playing. I hadn’t anticipated this and I started cursing myself for not having picked-up an iPod shuttle when we were at Costco buying liquor. But someone had mentioned that they were getting Sarah and iPod for the wedding so I had been reluctant to get a second one. The laptop was better designed for playing the slide show so I decided to make the switch to the full set-up with the media station PC, full 19” monitor, mouse, and keyboard in a station behind the aisle of chairs. Matthew helped with it and we covered it with some plastic to keep the monitor from rusting from the rain. The music played a bit but it had been choppy all night on that machine when I was loading it with music. How does an MP3 skip? But at least it played the right version of the songs.

I then went inside to set-up the slide show but now I needed a monitor to connect to the laptop. Matthew was moving back into Bedford for the summer and hadn’t set-up his computer and he had a great Dell wide screen flat panel monitor that I could set-up in the living room with the laptop. But as soon as I set it up I realized that it didn’t work very well with regards to staying live and the screen was stretching pictures to make them look very unappealing. At that point my dad had entered with my mom and Rosie. Lisa and Dave had arrived and were in the yard worried about the effects of the rain on the amplifiers they had brought since if either broke or even a microphone broke they would be out a thousand bucks. My dad wanted to fix my mom’s memory card with the laptop so I set it up for him to play with the memory card but that didn’t fix it.

When Jeff, the JIP, came he arrived at 11 instead of 10:30 and didn’t arrive with his partner as he had suggested before. He wanted to know if we wanted the two hundred pound trellis behind the chuppah. I thought it was worth a shot so we dragged it over. We could hear children playing the yard behind us after having heard what sounded like a leaf blower having made noise all morning. My dad walked over to ask them if they could do something to keep things quiet during the wedding but the reality was that the neighbors had planned a birthday party for a group of four year olds where they had rented a Spiderman trampoline.

I had asked Sarah ask Nick and Christina to bring their wireless router to see if it could give us a network to download a fix for the music onto the laptop but that wasn’t something I could focus on since the time was ticking towards the time for the rehearsal run through. Lisa and Dave were looking for a screw driver which I asked as a relay for Nick to bring and by the time he brought it they said they didn’t need it. Then the trellis fake flowers weren’t lined-up correctly so Jeff asked for a staple gun. I asked Nick to find one of these for me which he did but by the time we got back with it Jeff had fixed the trellis himself somehow without the staple gun.

With things stabilized with a stage it was time to rehearse. I couldn’t rehearse and fix the slide show so Nick worked on the slide show with some vague instructions while I started to corral the crew for the rehearsal with Sarah. We did OK trying to get the crew together to rehearse but were unable to get Matthew because he was taking a shower and we kept looking for Falkoff who had decided to take a nap in his car and was nowhere to be found until I saw his profile in his Volvo. The herding cats then led to the who is in charge problem as we went to line-up for a practice of the processional. Lisa and Dave were still working on the sound set-up. We decided to make some changes to the ceremony as printed including placing Matthew on the start button for Canon in D and the processional. This meant Nick was to take his place. Jeff, who was being a little anal about marking everything on his chart of the procession slowly took out a pen to mark the various aspects of where people would stand and then proceeded to call me David a few times as he talked. During the rehearsal we realized it was already past 1:15 and we were running out of time but that didn’t stop Jeff from trying to read long paragraphs very quickly (as if that would have helped him) or my dad from stating that a light bulb would make a loud popping noise. I snapped at my dad that now was not the time to debate the physical results of a light bulb vs. a wine glass. After that we ran quickly through the procedure again while guests began to arrive and key guests in the know were instructed to ferry them into the house instead of the backyard lest they get confused that they were late and missing the actual ceremony. The whole time as we practiced the entrance, ceremony, and exit, Robert was following us with his camera to either take practice photos or to plan the shots he would take.

So Sarah and I went upstairs to get dressed and Sarah was already miffed because she wasn’t going to have enough time to become beautiful in her dress. I went to put my tuxedo on and realized that I have great difficulty placing a cumberbund and bow-tie on even when they both include simple latches. Robert tried to capture this for posterity as the wedding photographer. At this point we also needed to get flowers placed on us and there were some friends of the Carvey’s with the flowers. I got mine pinned onto my lapel and was ready to go downstairs. On the way I asked someone whether drinks were already being served since I could see a hungry and thirsty crowd gathering downstairs. I was told that it was my option to drink so I figured I could forgo the drink if nobody else would have one. I then was put in charge of locating Falkoff so that he could get his official flower as the best man but he was once again nowhere to be found. So I kept bumping into guests to quickly greet them and then ask them if they had seen Falkoff anywhere. One woman figured out who Falkoff was when told that he was Zoe’s husband and they got him pinned.

As I wandered about it was already about twenty minutes past two so I could feel the time flying by with Jeff needing to leave at 3PM. We couldn’t start until Sarah was ready since a wedding doesn’t start without the bride. I looked around downstairs for Molly and Yuval and found Ami and Ilana instead. Ami had said they wouldn’t be able to make it for the ceremony and I suddenly worried that folks had come all the way from California and wouldn’t be there to make the wedding. It made me remember how Ami and Ilana had missed a part of Yuval and Molly’s wedding because they drove down to Connecticut too late.

I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to see Sarah since I apparently wasn’t supposed to see her until a certain point but we all needed to process together. Assorted in the know Carvey family helpers gathered the guests into their chairs and we gathered behind the back deck in our little phalanx attack procession formation. Sarah finally came down looking beautiful in her wedding dress through the back patio door. I asked her if she had the rings and she had forgotten them upstairs. So someone went to get the rings for her and Christina held onto them by placing them on her fingers. There was a rush to do this since Lisa and Dave started playing as soon as Sarah was sighted in the doorway and we didn’t want to leave a lot of time in the middle.

The music queued fine by Matthew and since I was first-up with my parents I took a good look at Matthew as we passed by. Canon in D didn’t do too well with the Media PC by skipping. I learned this Tuesday, two days after the wedding, after I took a look at it that the media PC was infected with a spyware worm that was probably causing all of the performance trouble. Headline: Hacker screws-up backyard wedding. Sarah was calm once she had walked down with her parents and her father offered her properly. Things went silent for a moment and we could hear a very loud cardinal enjoying the break in the rain to call for mates and the children giggling and laughing as they bounced on Spiderman. A plane flew overhead and low coming from Hanscomb airfield that we credited ourselves as having hired to do a flyby. I did a duck and cover in the chuppah to protect myself and Sarah from the plane.

The wedding ceremony itself was lighter than expected. It was hard not to be silly with all of the serious stuff going on. Mom read three pieces of poetry and Bruce Nickerson read a passage from the Song of Songs. Jeff seemed more nervous than anyone else on stage and had trouble reading the ceremony as he rushed through reading it. Lisa and Dave sang a customized version of Wherever You Go with the lyrics changed based on Sarah and me. Sarah and I sounded like the cone heads during the part where we had to speak together. At one point during the vows I sounded like Darth Vader claiming all of hers would be mine or something like that.

Finally the ceremony drew to a close as we were announced as Mr and Mrs. Daniel and Sarah Housman and we tried to go out slowly to Dance me to the End of Love but it was very jumpy music and we were excited to be married so we did a little dancing in the aisle on the way out. That lasted until the music crackled out because the media PC wasn’t very healthy and Matthew quickly drew the song to a close.

We then were greeted with the long receiving line which seemed to take about an hour. It was nice to see and meet everyone in the line but I could see people wandering about with glasses of champagne slowly fizzing. I was worrying that we wouldn’t get to see Ami and Ilana but they cut into line to say hello.

After the receiving line Falkoff gave his toast. I remember that he was happy to not have me interrupt him and that we would probably debate what he said for quite some time. He also thought that Sarah was the perfect woman for me since I am such an optimist, exemplified by a tennis game at 5:30 AM on a summer morning when Falkoff told me to meet him first thing in the morning for tennis. What Sarah had to combine with this was that she had chosen to get married outside in May. Falkoff’s toast was well received and then folks started to wander off to the bar and eat the food.

Sarah and I got a chance to mingle with guests but we were quickly separated and wandered about saying hello to everyone present. People knew where to go, where to be, how to have fun, and we just hung around with them. Sarah’s feet were cold from having stood in the wet grass as were many of the guests. Kate had invented in her mind a tool to place on the bottom of a stiletto heel to prevent them from sinking into mud during receptions in May.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)