Bartender Geek

Edited to Add: I realized that this post, made just a couple days ago, actually fits this month's Mixology Monday topic: Local Flavor. See, the Ward Eight was created in Boston's Ward Eight -- an election district containing Dorchester and part of the South End. It was for a victory party for a local politician from Ward Eight. It's significant to note that said victory party was being held on the night BEFORE the election . . . that's the kind of ward Ward Eight was at the time. So, since one topic for this month is a drink which was invented in my city, this actually fits right in. End of Explanatory Edit

Today being 08/08/08, there was a small party at my parents' house on that theme. I made up some Ward Eight cocktails for it.

Now, the Ward Eight is not one of the world's great cocktails. It's okay, but it's not spectacular. You make it right, and it's pleasant enough, but that's really all. Rye whiskey, lemon juice, orange juice, and grenadine (which, remember, means "pomegranite juice and sugar", not "red food coloring, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial flavorings"). It's decent, but it's the sort of thing that you make because you're going to an eight-themed party, or something like that, more than because you want a Ward Eight cocktail. Now, there's nothing wrong with lemon juice, orange juice, pomegranite juice, sugar, and rye whiskey, and they actually go together fairly well. But "fairly well" is not the same thing as "fitting together in perfect singing harmony", the way that, say, gin and dry vermouth do, or Campari and sweet vermouth, or rum and pineapple juice. . . you get the idea.

I made some up, and they went over about as well as could be expected, especially since, of the crowd who was there, the only one who actually is a drinker by nature is my mother -- and she's allergic to alcohol. (Well, she's alergic to SOMETHING that goes ALONG with alcohol, anyway. We've found occasional things that don't make her break out in a rash, but we haven't nailed down exactly what. But she drank an entire Americano -- Campari and sweet vermouth -- the other night with no ill effects, then had a sip of Chartreuse and broke out in hives all over her face. And when we were in Italy last summer, she could drink wine as much as she wanted. So we seem to have discovered that she can drink Italian things but not French things.)

My niece Winter was there, too, and she wanted to help me make the drinks. I had her juice the lemons -- I cut them in half, she juiced them, and we both worked on peeling strips off the outside of the lemons for garnish.

Now, as she is ten, she is not allowed to drink whiskey yet, but she wanted to try the stuff, so she mixed herself up a Ward Eight sans alcohol -- lemon juice, orange juice, and grenadine.

I taught her how to do the three-count free pour, and she poured 'em, and shook 'em. I opened the shaker and strained it out for her, because her hands aren't large enough for it yet, but she did the rest. She took the glass, twisted the peel to release the oils, and garnished the drinks.

Her version was more popular around the table than mine.

By, like, a LOT.

Since her drink was a success, I told her that she gets to name it, and that I'd blog it. She decided to just go with "Kids' Ward Eight."

So, here it is:
Winter Rose's Kids' Ward Eight
1 oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 oz orange juice
1 oz homemade grenadine syrup

Shake well over ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a fresh lemon peel.

I'm so proud of her. She handles a shaker like a pro.

I can lead off by mentioning Lis. Every day I see her and wonder how I managed to be lucky enough to end up with her.

And I am also thankful for all the rest of my friends -- all of you reading this (those of you I know in person, and those of you I know only through LiveJournal, too) -- those of you I've known for years, either online or meatspace, and those of you I've only met, meatspace or online, recently.

I'm thankful for my family. I'm one of a relatively few people I know without any family-conflict issues. Again, I don't know how I lucked out to be born into my family, but I'm thankful for it. That is why our family tends to adopt people into it -- a few of you are my siblings simply because my mother and father adopted you. My parents are like that -- if you have a rocky relationship with your own parents, or if you have a GOOD relationship with your parents, but they're too far away for you to see very often, or if you have a good relationship with your parents and you see them a lot but you want MORE parents, too, my parents will take you in and give you love.

And the rest of my family is similar. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins: everyone in my family is honorable, caring, clever, and decent. I don't know how I lucked out to be born into this family.

And then, Lis's family, too -- I managed to marry one of the only OTHER people I know whose whole family is honorable, caring, clever, and decent. I am as thankful for my in-laws as for the part of the family into which I was born.

I am thankful that we appear to have found a medication which controls my Depression, and is allowing me to restructure my life to be effective and productive. I am thankful that I am now in the process of making that restructuring, and that I feel like I am making some progress toward it.

I am thankful that we have a house, for which we paid a reasonable price, and which allows us to have rental income. I am thankful that we rent to good people who I like having as neighbors -- marquisedea and her boyfriend Josh upstairs, and vonbeck downstairs. I am thankful that our house is warm and dry, and comfortable. I am thankful that I have a kitchen in which I can cook, and that we have bookshelves full of books. I am thankful that we have plenty of warm, comfortable, and reasonably-good looking clothing to wear, warm jackets, shoes that keep our feet dry.

I am thankful that we have a washing machine and dryer so we don't have to go to the laundromat -- it makes life a lot easier. I'm thankful that we have a dishwasher. I'm thankful for our standing mixer, our electric kettle, our rice cooker, our Henkel's and Wusthoff knives. I'm thankful for our refrigerator, and our pantry, full of food.
( Read more... )

Lis is in Washington DC for a conference, Elizabeth Bear(matociquala) is in Boston for a signing at Pandemonium Books (pandemonium_bks), and I just went with my parents to visit my grandmother and grandfather in Marblehead.

My grandmother has Alzheimer's, and I don't much like it. My grandfather is dealing with it okay, all things considered, but their kids who are reasonably local -- which is most of 'em (the farthest one away is Providence, Rhode Island) do try to make sure to visit a fair bit to help take some of the stress off of Papa. Besides, they like their parents, and Nana is still Nana even if she does get confused as to where she is, when it is, who you are, and what you just said.

She mentioned several times that she wanted to go home. She asked Papa to complain to the manager because she didn't like the room we were sitting in. She told us several times that she didn't feel comfortable entertaining in someone else's house, but she'd LOVE it if we came over to HER house in Marblehead, because she had a GORGEOUS house. At another time, when Papa was explaining that this WAS their house, that they'd lived in it for fifty-two years, she said, "Oh, yeah, big shot rich man -- says he owns a house."

Have I mentioned that Alzheimer's terrifies me? Well, it does. I'm hoping they come up with a cure for it before Mom gets it. And I'm REALLY hoping they come up with a cure for it before I get it.

Anyway, it's funny what Nana does and does not lose track of. She ALWAYS knows that she's married to Papa Tunny, who is a good man, and adorable, and whom she loves very much. She doesn't always RECOGNIZE him, although she almost always does.

The weird thing is -- I think she only vaguely recognized me, and only intermittently. But she wanted to know where my wife was, and when I told her she was at a Christopher Marlowe conference in Washington, DC, she said how my wife was SUCH a smart girl, and so pretty, too. I couldn't do anything but agree wholeheartedly.

See, I think she doesn't always remember ME, but she remembers Lis. Even though I was there and Lis wasn't.

It's possible, of course, that, in her mind, Lis got conflated with one of her daughters, since I guess you could see some similarities -- all of her daughters are black-haired Jewish women, as is Lis, so it's possible that Nana just remembers Lis as among her daughters, and thinks of me as "one of the guys who married one of her daughters," rather than me being the grandson and Lis being the one who married in. Which would explain why, at family gatherings, Nana always seeks out Lis to tell her that she and her husband should come over and visit, rather than telling ME. It really is kind of adorable -- I guess there's not much of a question that Lis is an integral part of our family.

Lis noticed that, in two years, Talk Like a Pirate day will fall on Rosh Hashana.

When we informed my parents of this, my mother, who typically runs High Holiday Services at her community, got very thoughtful and said, "Remind me of that a month before, because I'm not going to remember, and it ought not pass without recognition."

My father thought a moment, and said, "Arrr! Who by cannon, and who by cutlass. Who by scurvy, and who by walkin' tha plank. . . "

So, I was just thinking about my own emotional and mental health.

Seems to me that one's psychic health (using "psychic" to mean "emotional and mental", not, y'know "ESP-like") is partially genetic and partially from experience -- that is, it's both nature and nurture.

A bunch of my friends are psychically less healthy than they ought to be, because of incompetent parenting, or because of traumatic social experiences growing up. A bunch of my friends have had reasonably-decent childhoods, but are genetically predisposed to poor psychic health.

Now, I'm not THAT great mentally and emotionally -- but I think I'm better than my genetics would indicate. I have my problems, biochemical in nature, but I am more stable and able to form trustworthy friendships than I'd expect, given my biology.

So, that suggests to me that my parents did something right. And I've been trying to think about what lessons I learned from them that have led to me being as sane as I am.

One of the big ones, I think, was that my mother, whenever she yelled at me or punished me for doing something wrong, would ALSO explain that, "Just because I'm mad at you doesn't mean I don't still love you." So, for me, "conflict" =/= "abandonment".

One of the other things we learned back on the 21st was that the 22nd was going to be a train-strike day. Only a few critical trains would be running on Friday.

So, we let everybody back at the house know this, and suggested that this made an excellent excuse to just chill and take it easy.

See, my grandmother is an Italian Catholic (not hugely practicing). My grandfather is Protestant, at least technically.

They run the family business together, along with my father, his brother, and his brother-in-law. Plus other people, too, but the point is, what happens when you add the Italian temper and temperament to the Protestant work ethic?

You end up with a situation where, when you suggest to my generation the idea of having a day just hanging around the beautiful villa, lying out by the pool, maybe wandering down to the village for a beer or coffee, and generally taking it easy and hanging out, they react not only enthusiastically, but with genuine relief. Lis and I hadn't been in Italy when everyone else took the day trip to Lucca, but, frankly, I'm GLAD we weren't there. Everyone agrees that Walter is an AMAZING driver for being able to take the ten-person van down the medieval streets in which they had to fold in the mirrors on both sides in order to fit, but nobody seems to really dwell on the fact that they were only IN those streets because everyone was completely ignoring Patrick, who had the map and was saying, "Um, we need to turn left here to avoid going into tiny little medieval streets in which our van isn't allowed. . . "

In any case, Fabio, who is the owner of the villa we are renting, came by and asked if we all wanted to go on a car tour of the area. He'd take his van, we'd take our van, and he could show us cool things in and around Bucine.

This seemed like an excellent, low-key plan, and we did it. We drove over a bridge in which the structural part was Roman work, and above it was medieval work, and then they put modern pavement on it. We stopped at an apiary to watch them extract honey from honeycomb. We went to a partially-restored medieval castle, which is now a village with five families in it. We went to the winery that Fabio is part-owner of, then went to Fabio's father's farm, and saw the more traditional setup with which his father-in-law makes and bottles HIS wine. As well as meeting the gentleman and wandering around his farm. And then we went out to dinner.

That's the overview. Let me now zoom in and tell you a couple cool bits from here and there around the day. . .
( Read more... )

So, did we make it on time?
( Read more... )

Winter Rose is staying at my parents for the week. She and her brother have been getting weeks at "Grandparent Camp" and "Auntie Leila and Uncle Bear Camp" this summer -- going to Wayland to stay with my folks, and going to Florida to stay with my sister and her fiance. Just one kid at a time -- they don't have to share the experiences with their sibling -- doing stuff with your sibling is good, too, but getting your grandparents and aunts and uncles to your self is better.

So Winter is in town this week, and I went over this afternoon to see her. She's a wonderful person. One of the first things about her is that she's really well-behaved. And, y'know, there are some kids for whom being well-behaved comes at least SOMEWHAT naturally. Not Winter and Drew -- they, by temperament, are little devils, but their parents have actually instilled manners and behavior into them. That's why it's worth mentioning -- this is something that is an effort for her, that she nonetheless manages. I'm always impressed by that whenever I see her -- and the same is true for her little brother.

Another thing about her is that she is really talented at math. And by "math", I do not mean "arithmetic" -- she's good at arithmetic only because she actually UNDERSTANDS how it works. She was having fun being annoying at me with the "Why?" game, and we'd managed to get to "because you're nine" "why?" "Because last year you were eight" "why?" "because eight is one less than nine, and if you add one to it, you get nine" "why?" "because if you define the set of non-negative integers as set S, and define 'zero' as the cardinality of the empty set, and we define 'addition' as. . . " "SIMPLIFY YOUR ANSWER!"

I would have, too, if I actually understood what I was saying, instead of trying to spew a half-remembered lecture that a friend gave me a while back. But note: Winter's genuine reaction to that is that, if I did even a halfway competent job of EXPLAINING what I was talking about, she would have understood it. And she's right. She would have. She has an excellent logical mind and can grasp mathematical relationships very well.

So I taught her one of the card tricks I know that is based on noting positional differences of cards, which she understood immediately.

We also went out for Chinese food, and the people at the next table complimented her on how gorgeous her hair is. And the same thing happened at Ben and Jerry's where we went for free cone day. She gets so annoyed at that, but does her best to accept the compliments gracefully. Yes, she does have piles of red ringlets on top of her head, and, yes, it IS adorable, but she gets so tired of hearing it all the time.

Okay, Leila and Kent, and Mike and Erin -- you have GOT to see this.

I know you're both arguing about how to work in Princess Bride to your weddings, as is the family tradition, but I think, after seeing this, you'll agree that we need to add in THIS tradition, as well.

Check out the link on the story about "Traveling Dentists Help Kids who Need It".

The dentist in question, Dr. Todd Belf Becker, is my cousin.

http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Health/