Connie Talbot

Now and then I'll stumble upon a video that makes me cry. This is one of those:



Of course, it touched my heart because she is only six years old and her voice is exquisite. But it's more than that, what does the future hold for this baby? If she were mine, I would be torn between sharing her gift with the world and saving her. I am frightened for her. Think, Britney Spears. Think Charlotte Church. She smiles at six. Will she smile at 16? Or at 26? If she were mine, I think I would say, "your loss, world, is my child's gain," share her with family and close friends and buy her a nice karaoke set.

But her mom did not choose that for her. So, I suppose she belongs to us now. Poor poor beautiful baby.

Feijoada

(Sherry, ask and you shall receive.)

FEIJOADA

1 16oz pkg. dried black beans
2 bay leaves
1 smoked shoulder roll or daisy ham (about 2 1/2 lbs)
1 cup finely chopped onions
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 (8oz) can tomato sauce
1/2 cup orange juice
few drops Tabasco sauce
1 Polish sausage (about 1 lb
cooked rice
sliced oranges
cooked kale greens


Wash beans. Soak overnight in plenty of cold water. Drain. Place in heavy pot and cover with water. Add bay leaves and ham. Cook on low, covered, about 2 hours, stirring often. If they become dry. add more water.
Remove pork. Discard bay leaves. Saute onions and garlic in oil. Put 1 cup of beans on a food processor or blender. Process until smooth and put back into pot along with onions, garlic, tomato sauce, Tabasco and orange juice. Cut sausage into 2 inch pieces and place on top of beans. Simmer about 20 minutes. Serve the beans, ladled over the cooked rice with the meat on the side. Be sure to serve the sliced oranges and kale greens with the feijoada.


feijoada is the national dish of Brazil. The original recipe has about 15 kinds of meat and various ingredients not available here.


I found this video over at youtube. This guy's recipe is a bit different than mine, but it gives a good idea on how to put it all together.

Living Room Furniture & Portuguese Soup

I am spoiled well beyond rotten. I would be ashamed of it except it has been going on for so long that I've become, well, used to it. Not that I take it for granted; in fact material things have never meant a whole lot to me, but, nevertheless, I am spoiled.

Today's event is not the exception to anything, it is the rule.

"Hey, let's go to the furniture store." John said to me out of the blue.

I had my shoes on and my purse slung over my shoulder before he finished his sentence.

Once at the store, he stood back and let me loose.

"It's Christmas, Beej. Go choose what you want."

I have simple tastes. Don't give me ornate, I prefer simple. I'll choose Danish over Baroque, anytime. So I laid my eyes on a Seafoam colored living room set., with chocolate piping. I looked up at John, and pointed at it.

"I just want the love seat and the chair." I told the sales lady.

"No no, Beej. Get yourself the entire set." John said. "Order her the entire thing." he instructed the clerk.




We head home and take long, lovely naps. I awaken well after John, who is downstairs in the family room, watching tv.

"Mornin'" he says. (It's 6pm.)

My plan was to make him a nice dinner but my sleep had cut into the prep time so I skedaddled into the kitchen.

John lived in Brazil for quite a long period of time and came away from there with a strong love for Portuguese food. His favorite is called Feijoada, which is a dish with beans, kale, a variety of meats and sliced oranges:



But time is unforgiving so I settle for a mock Portuguese soup that is incredibly easy and one that we both love:


PORTUGUESE SOUP


1 whole smoked sausage link, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 tbsp butter or margarine
1 large box or can chicken broth
1-2 cups water
1 large package raw coleslaw greens
2 cups instant potatoes
ground pepper and salt (to taste)

melt butter in the bottom of a large pot. add sausage pieces and brown well. Add broth and water. Heat. Add coleslaw greens. Stir until well mixed. Add instant potatoes. Stir. Reduce heat and simmer until slaw cabbage softens and instant potatoes thicken broth. (the longer it simmers, the better it is.)
Enjoy.

Jessica Rabbit

I was amusing myself just browsing along over at youtube.com and happened upon this. I hadn't seen it for years and years but it still impresses the heck out of me. Enjoy:




(I read that this was all done without the use of computers. Amazing. And brilliant.)

The Phone Bill

I added my son to my phone service early last year. The agreement was that I would buy him the phone and put him on my plan and he would pay the monthly bill of $79. This went as it should for a while. He responsibly put a $20 bill in an envelope every week for that first month.

The second month's bill came, however, and when I opened it, I went into a slow burn when I saw the total of $162, twice what it should have been.

" Hey, um, I think you need to put more cash in for your phone bill."I informed him, keeping my voice at an even pitch.

"Can't" he answered in between bites of a sandwich.

Maybe I heard him wrong, I told myself. It was kind of hard to make out the exact words of a 19 year old guy who has every crevice of his cavernous mouth stuffed with a ham sandwich.

"Huh?" I replied.

"Can't mom. I don't have it."

I stared at my boy before I let him have it:

"Tgioug kfeoe49g fogigtoiffrr hiyr ve#$%$%$#GDF!!" I screamed.

He stared at me as if I were a martian.

"Ma! Calm down!!! I can't understand a word you're saying!!"

Calm down. Calm down?? I will try as soon as I get my head unstuck from the ceiling!

I finally landed.

"I need you to pay this bill."

"Ma," he smiled at me in a condescending manner that made me want to bop his head against the wall. "Peace out. It's all good."

"So you're going to pay it?"

"Can't. Don't have it." And he strolled away with another sandwich in his hand.

I am a believer in tough love. So this is what I did. I phoned the altell people and paid the bill with my card. Then I instructed them to suspend his service until further notice, which they did immediately.

An hour later I saw a blur fly down the stairs. After the dust settled, I recognised it as my son. His eyes bulged out of their sockets. In his fist was his cell phone.

"Don't you think that was a bit radical, mom?"

Obviously he had just discovered he had no service.

I did not look up at him, and focused instead on the book I had been reading.

"Peace out. It's all good." is all I said.

After he pulled HIS head out of the ceiling and landed, I informed him that as soon as he reimbursed me for $162, I would have his service reinstated. He was a very unhappy camper but he knew that God (me) had spoken and would not back down.

It was amazing just how quickly he came up with the cash and his phone was turned back on. This has not occurred again all is good.

Until yesterday.

I pulled the mail out of the box and saw there was a new phone bill. I didn't give it a second thought until I opened it.

$212.

That's two hundred and twelve smackaroos.

Am I angry? No.
Am I ready to rip his ears off his head? No.
Am I ready to take the phone, set it behind my rear tires and back over it? No.
Am I ready to take my son, set him behind my rear tires and back over HIM? No.

And here's why:

"HAYWARD, Calif. -- A Hayward man is hoping his cell-phone service provider will work with him after receiving a massive bill for over $21,000 largely made up of charges incurred by his son after the teen was added to the family account, KTVU-TV in San Jose reported.

When he first got the bill in the mail, Ted Estarija couldn't believe his eyes.

Estarija said he thought adding his 13-year-old son to his cell-phone account would cost him an extra $50 a month. Instead, the recently unemployed Hayward father now owes Verizon $21,918.

"I was completely caught off guard," said Estarija. "This is outrageous. It seems like it comes to almost $100 a minute."

Estarija said he asked Verizon to restrict his son's usage to phone calls and texts, but the bill shows his son downloaded about 1.5 million kilobytes of data with his phone.

"This is not completely his fault," said Estarija. "I put more blame on Verizon than anybody. They shouldn't allow this to happen."

A Verizon spokeswoman told KTVU-TV she couldn't comment specifically about the issue while it is being investigated, but said the company planned to work with Estarija to resolve the problem.

Estarija admitted there may be a lesson to be learned here, but at almost $22,000 it comes at too high a cost.

"There's no way I can pay this, so (I'll do) whatever I can to get this resolved," said Estarija.

He said his biggest concern right now is not how to pay the bill, but helping his son. Estarija said his son has become despondent over causing his dad so much financial and emotional distress."





I feel so blessed. So very very blessed! (and as it turns out, my son has the cash to pay his $212 bill..)

Whew.

Vincent van Gogh

'Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he
finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.

In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.


In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself "for the good of all." During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.'



biography courtesy of Van Gogh Gallery
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/bio.html.

Click on post title to go to that site.

Crumbs on a Plate

There is a little game I love to amuse myself with. Sometimes, when things are quiet in the bookstore, I'll look around and imagine what might go on when the day is done and the lights are off. This is what I imagine...

All the characters in all the books come to life as soon as the key has turned in the lock. They rub their eyes, shake a sense of awakening into their heads and stretch their arms to the ceiling. Then the nightly social event begins.

Rhett Butler has sauntered over to the Biography section where Marilyn Monroe is squeezing out of the pages of her book. Her sequined dress sparkles as she watches Rhett approach her.



"Happy birthday, Mr. Butler, happy birthday to you." she finishes her song and giggles. "Did you like that, Rhett?"



Rhett raises one eyebrow.
"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

Just then, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom dribbles a basketball out of the Sports section, running past them on his way to meet up with Emma Bovary over in the fiction department. On the way, he is passed by Alice's friend, The Frantic Rabbit, who is rushing off to the children's section to meet with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Peter. Rumor has it that the berries have all been picked and cleaned and there is a bowl of them set in cream, awaiting him.








"Where you rushing off to?" Rabbit asks, not missing one beat with the basketball.

"I'm late, I'm late. For a very important date. No time to say hello good bye, I'm late, I'm late. I'M LATE!!!" And off he runs.


Harry finds Emma Bovary over in the cafe talking to Scarlett O'Hara. Alice is there serving tea and cakes to her friends. Scarlett offers one to Harry as she turns back to Emma.





"I may have an 18 inch waist, "She says, cramming another cake into her mouth, "but as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!"





Just then I catch a movement coming out of New Age. There is Nostradamus walking with determination over to the card game section.


Mother Theresa runs out of the Christian Living section to catch up with him.

"Where are you going, my son?" she asks.




"I'm going to pick up some Texas Hold em partners, Mother. I know I can win!"

"Do you think that's ethical, my son?"

Just then Tinkerbell flutters by. her usual bright light blinking and fading.
She soars over to the Musical Scores shelf. She flits over the rows of books and finds one called "Applause." and opens the cover.




"Clap! Clap or I will die! " she begs and a loud burst of applause comes from the pages.

Meanwhile, Peter Pan is over in the Home Repair section. He's tossing books on the floor until he finds one that will tell him how to repair a stuck window.




Back over in Fiction, Anna Karenina is strolling arm in arm with the conductor for the the Little Engine who Could.'




"I think I have strong emotional issues."she confides.

They head over to the cafe where Isak Dinesen is sitting at a table with Thoreau, talking about Africa. Noah, who has just come out of the Bible department is pulling up a chair.







"Wild animals? You want to talk about wild animals?? Oy do I have a story for you!"







Suddenly there is a click at the front door. All of my literary friends turn and look. The sun has come up and there I am, unlocking the door.

"RUN!!!!" they frantically scream out in unison. By the time I enter my bookstore, there is nary a soul in there but myself.

I glance around to make sure everything is in order for the new day and see a plate with cake crumbs on it lying on top of a cafe table. "Hmm, wonder who left that out."i think to myself.

I swear I heard a little girl's giggle coming from the Marilyn Monroe biography.