This year's Winter Institute took place in Kansas City, MO, a place I've never had reason to believe I'd visit. Spending a few days there reminded me of what non-destination cities have on Miami; with so much to recommend it, The Magic City doesn't try all that had to impress. When you've got hundreds of cities above you on the "must list" of places to visit, you work a little harder to move up that list.
In the few days I was there, this is Kansas City, putting in work.
5: Rainy Day Books
Rainy Day Books is in Fairway, a suburb of Kansas. It's gorgeous inside; beautifully displayed, full, and well-mapped. The staff knows what they're doing. And what's a place to visit without a decent bookstore?
4 is for $4 Guinness
I don't know from whence you're reading but to a guy living in Miami, paying less than $6 for a beer is a revelation. Most times, it's $7-$8 ($9 or $10 if you're stupid enough to go to a club). At $4, I almost expected to see a wee shot glass.
I won't say every bartender knew how to pour it perfectly, but the search for a perfect Guinness pour is a rant for another time.
3: Cab Scholars
A cab ride in Kansas City is like a free history lecture. You want to know which mob boss rode FBI bullets to the great beyond in front of what building? You want to know where Lewis and Clark bought slaves for their journey? You want to know not just the historic landmarks and the lay of the land, but how the landmarks became historic and why the land is laid out the way it is? Take a cab.
2: This is Not the Library
It's the garage next to the Central Library, called the Community Bookshelf. It's a solid indication of how Kansas City celebrates literacy and the arts. Fountains, sculptures, galleries, bookstores; it's all happening.
With all the snow when we visited, tracks told us which books people posed in front of the most. Least surprising? Gabriel Garcia Marquez got no love.
1: Burnt Ends
You know the edge of the meat that got crisped up on the grill and captured all the flavor? Smoky and delicious, charry-chewy on the outside and juicy-tender on the inside, Burnt Ends have all of that, and nothing else. One bite and I wanted to move to Kansas City.
After breakfast at the Treehouse Hotel, our first foray was to Ecoglide for a zip line tour of the base of the Arenal volcano. I lost track of how many platforms they had, but thankfully Becky took a picture:
Becky and I registered at Deposit a Gift. We wanted to go to Italy for our Honeymoon, which not only sounded romantic as hell, but would be a nice cushion for turning halfway to heaven (a phrase I only recently discovered and instantly hated; for all I know, I was halfway to heaven at twenty and I’ll die next year choking on an M&M).
Even with the generous gifts of friends and family, Italy turned out to be more than we could afford. Becky looked closer to home and came up with Costa Rica. Which is great, because Costa Rica looks like this:
Living in a culture were everything is the "Best. _______. Ever." makes it tough to call something your best experience without it getting swept up with the rest of the hyperbole. I'll take that risk and dub my wedding day the best day of my life.
A nice surprise from the folks at Onondaga County Parks and Recreation greeted us on Thursday.
My sister's wedding gift was renting Camp Brockway on Thursday so we didn't need to rush the day of the wedding.
A good thing, since it took us six hours to put together everything we've doing over the last few months.
Becky and I drew and labelled place settings. Becky and her sister made dozens of flowers from book pages. That's 10 pounds of Starbucks Espresso Roast holding them in place (whole bean; we have coffee for months). We wrapped the books so they'd match and printed labels so our families would know what they are. Those are Proust Questionnaires in lieu of a guestbook, which led my seven-year-old 2nd-cousin to say, "Why do we have a test?".
Our troubador, who performed Bob Dylan's You Ain't Goin' Nowhere.
Our troubador, canoodling our officiant from the First Nation Church.
These folks are also known as Becky's parents.
Sometimes you need a little help getting dressed.
It might even be a two-parent job.
But it's worth the effort when this is your ring-bearer.
When getting married, try not to have too much fun.
I DO!
Our menu was pulled pork sandwiches, mojo chicken, tomato-cucumber salad, mashed potatoes, and cornbread.
I love me some Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. You can order the sauces and spices to your home, or you can make them yourself. Their cookbook recipes are the same recipes they use in the restaurants, and they taste just as amazing.
Nonpareils baked our cupcakes: Red Velvet with cannoli cream filling and ice butter cream frosting, Chocolate Espresso filled with espresso ganache and topped with mocha butter cream frosting, and nut-and-raisin-free Carrot Cake topped with cream cheese butter cream. Basically, you're looking at a lot of cream.
We weren't quite sure how we were going to pull off the cake-toppers, images of books we love cut from old publishers catalogs, and mounted on our cobalt blue. Jen from Nonpareils suggested spray adhesive on card stock, then attaching those cards to coffee stirrers. It worked like a charm. They're stacked on books from my parents' shelves, wrapped in white, cobalt, and black. I'm pretty sure Jen suggested that as well. She was awesome.
We let folks take the leftover barbeque, but we took the cupcakes for the road. I wish I had one right now.
After our first meal as a married couple...
We repped 305 during a Pratts Falls photoshoot.
When we returned, we found many in the family had already left.
These are my parents, trying to sneak off. Luckily, we caught them before they missed our first dance.
Becky thought we should do Judson Laipply's Evolution of Dance. If you're unfamiliar, check it out. You're in for a real treat.
We rehearsed for several hours and several Coronas one Saturday night and decided that, apart from "The Worm," we could pull it off. For the couple of weeks leading up to our wedding, we rehearsed when we could squeeze some time in.
As an introduction, Becky told our families, "We couldn't pick one first dance, so we picked them all."
I must say, we rocked the Evolution of Dance. Our families could not stop talking about it. For six minutes, Becky and I were dancing machines. Unfortunately, no footage of our efforts survive except for these grainy, poorly-lit, disposable camera shots.
The twist...
The Brady Bunch...
The Billie Jean...
The Robot...
This shot is clear proof that we know how to "Ride the Pony," but this next photo is a real shame.
We couldn't do The Worm, so this a picture of the up-rock grande jete salsa break we did instead. It's a sort of Bob Fosse meets break beats meets Cuban Casino. We couldn't decide on a name, we just called it, "that thing," as in, "Oh man, that thing you guys did? It was fucking awesome."
Dylan finally met his cousins, Rylee and Sophia.
In lieu of keg stands, they did trash sledding.
Also, I got to use "in lieu of" twice in one post.
Then folks got changed into casual dress for the after-party, and to get the place cleaned up.
While Becky ran around the mountain screaming, "I'm maaaaaaarrrrrriiiiiiieeeeed!" I stayed on the dance floor, rocking out to Becky's Ipod.
It wasn't a good look for either of us.
Ultimately, a good time was had by all. Becky and I got cupcakes, Dinosaur Barbecue condiments, and some awesome reading material in the form of our family's answers to their Proust Questionnaires.
Some people took home paper flowers in glass vases filled with coffee, some took paper lanterns, and everyone got a book or two.
At this point, the only Curtises left were me and my brother. . . and Becky.
A wedding doesn't make a marriage. A marriage is created day-to-day as you and the person you've chosen learn what your love will hold. Sometimes it means living in the moment. Sometimes it means putting the mistakes of past relationships to rest so they don't cloud this one. Sometimes it means having coffee brewed when your spouse wakes up.
But now is not the time for wondering about how our relationship will evolve, it's the time for enjoying each-other. It's been thirty-seven lovely days that feel like an eye blink. I intend to play the newlywed card for as long as I can.
You never know when banana bread is going to be part of your life. It's out there, waiting for you to leave your bananas out too long, then you notice there's a little too much black on the peel. A few more days they'll be completely unappetizing but a few degrees shy of disgusting, and it'll be banana bread time.
I'd forgotten that the perfect banana bread recipe requires three bananas rather than the two I had. We have more bananas for smoothies but they're entirely too yellow. Because you can't will a banana to rot (what an awesome super-power - ripening), I immediately switched gears into muffin land.
I don't want to think about how much seeing the video above played into this decision. Do I make my own decisions, or do I just react to stimuli? Let's just admit that Adaptation is one of the most brilliant movies of all time and move on.
This is a rare real-time post. I can smell the muffins as I type. I woke up at five am, thought about my writing-work-dinner-wedding prep agenda for the day, and looked at the bananas in their now-or-never ripeness. My upbringing won over my longing to write. Wasting minutes I could've spent writing is intangible; throwing two perfectly usable bananas into the trash is real waste.
My posts have thinned out lately, and I expect them to get thinner. If you look over the proceeding, you can imagine why. I'm a bookseller. Unless you're Cory, there's not a lot of drama in the day-to-day. Well, maybe for those of us in the business. But Indie vs. A-Word, paper vs. ebook, dying industry vs. renaissance of the story - those posts can only go so far. I want to write about anything and everything.
The downside is that I sometimes end up writing about nothing.
I flatter myself that my thoughts on books, movies, parenting, relationships, food, and life are worth sharing. Still, I like to polish these thoughts up a bit before I share them. More importantly, especially for things I've started to write for reasons I'm not aware of, I want these posts to have some meaning. This sometimes means opening the same file dozens of times, revising, rearranging, looking for a point. Since Sweet with Fall and Fish doesn't have a unifying theme (apart from being the Official Blog of Aaron John Curtis), it's important to me that the individual posts try to have a point.
I have thoughts about Borders closing, and Amy Winehouse dying, and mass killings in Norway, but by the time I decide how I really feel and the best way to express it, those feelings are years out of date. Witness the post I've been working on about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, movies which came out in 2008. Not because I just got them on Netflix, but because I wasn't sure how to express my feelings about Heath Ledger's death. After all that microscopic consideration, the challenge becomes making someone care. But I suppose that's always the challenge.
Did you know I saw Patti Smith at the Miami Book Fair International days afterJust Kids won the National Book Award? As part of letting the standing room only crowd know about the upcoming (at the time) OMiami! poetry festival, I was one of dozens who helped P. Scott Cunningham perform Arthur Rimbuad's Vowels, a random act of culture about which Smith said, "I've never seen anything like that."
I've mentioned Hilldawg from time to time? That's her holding the sign.
Did you know Patti Smith performed three songs during the reading, and that the last one became a sing-along? Did you know I loved Just Kids? Did you know I met Patti Smith? Of course you didn't. I worried too much about capturing the magic on the page, I procrastinated starting, then so many months had passed that it seemed silly to try and remember how I'd felt at all. There have been many nights like this I've passed over, but I offer this as an extreme example.
There's a lot of pressure in my life right now.
I'm getting married in 32 days. The marriage doesn't stress me at all, but there's a lot of prep involved in the event which marks the beginning, especially since this is DIY wedding.
Also, I know in this economy I should be pleased to have a job, but the work load I'm saddled with lately is ridiculous. Our week's run Thursday to Wednesday, and I'm over 32 hours for the week. These thoughts occurred while I was baking and I wanted to share, so I'm pushing back biking in to get this posted. I'll probably take Wednesday off to be with Dylan - Becky and I are taking turns watching him this summer since we can't afford camp or daycare - but I can't be sure. I could live in my office and work there every waking minute and it would take half a year to get on top of things, and even then I probably wouldn't be on top of things because they'd find even more for me to do. Grawr.
Finally, I've had a setback in my writing life. The mighty Carl Lennertz has left Harper Collins to become CEO of the North American branch of World Book Night. This is excellent news for the world of books which is semi-devestating to me personally.
As I've written my stories and taken time polishing my novels, it's always been in the back of my mind that my first published essay was a given (I've had pieces published online and in print, so I guess I mean published by the Big 6). I know I acted like it wasn't, but I was fooling myself. I'm glad I chose not to shout State by State from the roof tops, but I no longer have that foot in the door, that significant set of eyes which has looked at my work and deemed it worthy and which invites prospective agents and magazine editors to do the same. I'm back to square one.
In some ways, it's good. It gives my morning writing time more focus. With the help of my writers group, I am polishing four or five of my best stories until they will knock a magazine editor on her ass, so that she'll share the story with her readers, and I'll have a nugget of something to put in my cover letter to an agent, something more substantial than hopes and dreams. I need a credit. As Laura Munson writes in This is Not the Story You Think it Is, "You can't put good rejection letters on a resume."
What this doesn't bode well for is Sweet.
Of course this comes as my gradually-increasing readership reached its zenith in July. I should be writing more to keep you guys coming back, but something's got to give. I'll try to take a day to myself (if I can find it) and automatically schedule a bunch of stuff I've been tinkering with so it looks like I'm active while I take a break (or maybe it will be like today's post: write it, look for glaring errors and hope I didn't miss any, then publish post). Just because I don't see the point doesn't mean you won't, right? Reading is a relationship, and finding a piece's moral and sharpening it to a point is just me trying to bully your reaction. Of course, you might just get nothing but this for a while. We'll see.
Meanwhile, WLRN's Under the Sun released a CD of the last Lip Service event.
"What's this? A CD of a live Lip Service event recorded for broadcast by Under the Sun?"
"And who is that at #5? Why, it's me. Remember when I freaked out over the edits...
Wait, I never blogged about this, either? Fuck me."
As I sat in Books & Books cafe, reeling from the realization that Carl Lennertz left Harper Collins before he could publish me, a favorite customer approached and told me he enjoyed hearing me on NPR. Co-workers told me they'd heard and enjoyed me on the way in to work. It's the only thing that kept me from a meltdown that day.
Since then, strangers have come to the bookstore looking for me. One asked, "Which one of you is Aaron?" while I happened to be there. She didn't shop, but just stopped off on her drive home to tell me how much she enjoyed the piece (thankfully, I wasn't in the buying office at the time). Customers have congratulated Becky on her upcoming nuptials (which I mentioned in the Q&A after the reading). Apparently, I also "sound cute" on the radio. I feel like my writing career is foundering, but more people are aware of me than ever. It's fairly surreal.
So take heart. Even if you don't see much of me here in the coming weeks as I prepare for my nuptials, you may hear me on the radio.
And the muffins? They smelled better than they taste, but they are solid, moist, and they put two rotten bananas to good use. Here's to a morning well spent.
I wasn't totally off. My last post also made it clear that the business was a bakery. So, yeah, this place:
Making Delicious Happen.
Becky and I purchased one chocolate cupcake and one red velvet cupcake, ate them on site, and then left. Realizing we might never encounter another cupcake so delicious, we turned around after half a block. This delighted the staff, who sold us two more red velvet cupcakes while we tried to sell them on the idea of a Donna Bell's Miami.
We got about ten feet before we returned, this time for a single red velvet. We want a Donna Bell's in Miami because there is no cupcake in this entire city which can hold a candle to them.
"Wait, what about Misha's Cupcakes?" I hear you Miamians saying. Blah, blah, blah. Yes, they're great. But you know what? Homemade cake is great, like the one about sex and pizza.
Male propaganda.
I'm not saying Misha's are bad, at all, but one bite from Donna Bell's and I knew I wouldn't be able to eat another Misha's for at least a year. It's like reading James Salter'sLight Yearsor John Irving's Cider House Rules; you know other fiction will pale for a time.
"Some Chick from CSI" is actually actress, singer, and philanthropist (and if IMDB and Wikipedia are to be believed, director / photographer / producer / poet / spoken-word artist / writer) Pauley Perrette:
I IMDB'd her. I've seen her in Frasier, Almost Famous, and The Ring, and I've heard of NCIS, but I didn't know who she was. NCIS is a number one TV show. This year's Harris Poll ranked it America's Favorite Television Show of All Time. Perrette's Q Score (yes, that's a thing) ties Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman as the number one Performer. She's also 5'10", black-haired, and badass. You'd think I'd have celeb-crushed on her like I do on Eva Mendes or Angelina Jolie, or at least that I'd recognize her.
But really, does it matter how big of a star she is? I'm sure NCIS is a fine program, but I'd have to guess Perrette's voluminous fundraising efforts, monetary donations, and charitable contributions - be they time or using her celebrity status to raise awareness - are of much more importance to the world.
Well, all that and sharing her mother's baking recipes.
This is a clarification post but if you want a love-letter to Donna Bell's a good example can be found here, with pictures of the offerings AND the girl who rang Becky and I up. If you're in New York City around the Theatre District and Hell's Kitchen, do your day right and stop by Donna Bell's Bake Shop.
Here's hoping it will be there every time I'm in town.
At her event with Books & Books, Gabrielle Hamilton claimed that as much as she would like to write a novel, she could not see herself writing fiction. I've no reason to doubt her, but my wish to read more of her voice makes me refuse to believe it. It would be a loss.
There are many things to love about Blood, Bones, and Butter. The stories, the writing style, her lack of pretension, Italy, Greece, New York City, the way she effortlessly deflates the worship of celebrity chefs. I pull this quote because I like what she does, flirting with run-on to help communicate that feeling of being forced from bed and into life before you're ready, culminating in my favorite metaphor for grogginess that I've ever read:
He was not yet awake when I called at seven thirty and had that funny sleeper's defense where you pretend that you are wide awake in spite of having just been roused and you want to sound like you know exactly where is where, who is who, and what is what when in fact you are still wearing a narcotic brain helmet of cement and foam.
Read it. There are a lot more riches where that came from, I promise.
If you looked closely at the pictures on this post about the Bottega Challenge, you'll notice a certain five-foot-one Cuban with a luscious booty lurking about. This picture wasn't uploaded, but it was a preview of things to come:
Cristina, an excellent event co-ordinator but evidently not the best cook, had deveined the inside of the shrimp. I set about deveining the tops of the shrimp (ie, the part that matters) and Becky stepped in to help. We joked that they'd be the cleanest shrimp ever eaten.
The post didn't go up until October, well after my marriage separation was underway. I was right in the thick of the mess when this was snapped. The man in this picture... little did he know.
Becky and I are basically strangers in this picture.
We wouldn't share a kitchen again until we made chocolate chip cookies from America's Test Kitchen, otherwise known as the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever, at her parents' house. Making those cookies was the moment I knew.
I love this picture because it fills me with wonder at life's unpredictability. I love it because it shows how well we worked side by side, long before that became the reason we enjoy our lives so much. I love it because Becky and I are in it, together.
People travel from all over the world to attend the South Beach Wine and Food Festival (and I’m not just saying that- accents abound, and my favorite customer of the year was a restaurant owner from Greece). If you tried to book a hotel room within a hundred miles, you’d never know we’re in a recession.
As we have since the festival’s inception, Books & Books sells cookbooks at the Grand Tasting Village. Not the bargain basement Kidz Kitchen ticket for $20 at Jungle Island, or an $85 Lifestyle Seminar or $150 party at a swank hotel, not the $200 Bubble Q or Burger Bash, but the hot ticket: $225 of all-you-can-eat-and-drink fun, right on the sand.
Here’s what I don’t get. Folks shell out upwards of $400 dollars to eat and drink, and then not only protest when presented with a $30-$40 cookbook, but actually get offended by the suggestion that they should purchase a book to meet their favorite chef and have him or her sign it.
“I’ve spent $540 dollars on this weekend,” one woman told me, “I’m not spending another $40, that’s ridiculous. I’m sorry, but it is.”
Um... how much can you eat and drink between 10:45am and 6pm? If tapas and sliders flowed over you on a river of vodka, you still couldn’t consume twenty bucks a minute worth. Yet a cookbook your grandchildren could use one day is the rip off? The phrase more money than sense comes to mind.
You could try to explain that the cookbook money is not going to The Food Network. You could explain that the money they spend on Rachael Ray’s Look + Cook (“Isn’t she rich enough already?”) doesn’t actually go to Rachael Ray. But these folks are slugging back wine faster than the sun can dehydrate them. It’s not the ideal forum for a discussion on independent book selling.
But it is fun. Folks come to have a good time, and they’re high on the atmosphere before they imbibe a thing. When the gates open, people actually run across the sand like children on a playground who want to get the best swing. How can you not love that kind of enthusiasm?
The food is unbearably delicious. From gunpowder cocktails made with actual gunpowder to a simple barbecued beef brisket sandwich, I wish every plate came with a logo so I’d know who to thank for some of the amazing creations. Instead, I’ll just say thanks to everyone who cooked.
Except for the free food tent for employees, “catered” this year by Dominoes. No wonder the volunteers left early and no-showed in droves.
In the portable bathrooms out front, I stopped for one last pee break on Sunday before it was time to pack the books up. In the lowest denominator of male bonding, the dude next to me slurred, “That was totally worth it, huh? I wasn’t sure going in, but that was a lot of free stuff.”
He wore khaki shorts, a button-down, short-sleeved knit shirt, and leather loafers. His body was buffed and outdoorsy. He looked like a chiseled, blonde, happy J Crew ad. I was wearing ratty jeans, sneakers, and a sweaty black ABFFE t-shirt which said, FREADom.
I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I said as kindly as I could, “I work here. At the Books & Books booth.”
“Oh,” he said, facing forward hastily. I looked down and saw I was peeing on the front button from someone’s pants. Either the guy was in such a hurry to relieve some of the booze that he ripped his pants open and lost a button, or he ate too much and it popped off on its own.
The voiceover playing during the “before” shot of a woman with a nice butt in an ill-fitting bathing suit says that with Hydroxy-cut, women can have the hips of a ten-year-old boy in just four to six weeks (the “after” shot is hot, if you like young boys). A guy and a girl wearing the bare minimum of black spandex with abs I could bounce quarters off tell me that with Bowflex just ten minutes a day, I’ll see results in only six weeks. A fairy-tale princess with Tori Amos hair and freckles tells me that if I want my nasty, yellow teeth to glow like hers, it’ll take whitening strips. A stunningly gorgeous young brunette in a business suit says if I have a painful yeast infection slowing me down, I should do what she did and get Monostat-7. A tall, thin, impossibly gorgeous black girl tells me that if I want skin like hers, all I need to do is scrub my face twice a day with some foamy stuff that looks like cottage cheese.
Then there’s the celebrity group assault. Brook Shields, Jessica Simpson, Vanessa Williams, and P. Diddy all let me know that they used to have faces like a DiGiorno frozen pizza before they started the exclusive three-step system of Buy This Product Now Before You Turn Into A Leper. Now, people come up to them all the time and accuse them of drinking baby blood to stay young.
Even if your problem (which is always physical, and therefore easily fixable with the right purchase) has nothing to do with age or weight, the person trying to sell it to you is young, thin, or young and thin. Whatever’s wrong with you that three easy payments of $29.95 will fix, there’s two underlying messages throughout; you’re too old, and you’re too fat.
Nacho Man is history, and don’t tell me about the satellite TV guy- the Michelin Man is a pile of tires and it somehow went on a diet. The Pillsbury Dough Boy lost weight and he’s a dough boy. Not only did the Kool-Aid pitcher lose weight, its arms got thicker. How does a pitcher get buff? IT’S A FUCKING PITCHER.
Maybe I am too old. The Brook Shields telling me my acne problem makes me John Merrick? She’s not the nothing comes between me and my Calvins hot girl I grew up with, she's a thing with no baby fat or eyebrows, a latex mask stretched over good bone structure. Who knows what a beautiful woman she might have been, if she wasn't so obsessed with looking young. Vanessa Williams? Same thing. She may still be hot, but there’s a desperation to her, a need to look not just younger than she is, which she already does, but to really look science fiction younger than she is, which she doesn’t. What she looks like is inhuman. That's what they all look like, and we're so used looking at these flesh masks that we barely notice.
Who's next? What will Jessica Simpson look like when she’s forty-something, being tortured by pictures of herself in Daisy Dukes for longer than she’s currently been on the planet? Will she grow old gracefully, or become another plastic person?
The joy is the meltdown. Buy so many copies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album that the sales record will probably never be equaled despite the increasing population, then sit back and watch him carve himself up.
What do I want? Health, which includes a positive self-image. It doesn’t include a nineteen-year-old kid I work with who walks around with one of those little wrist-flexers to build up his forearms. From the waist up he has the body of a Greek God. Meanwhile, his calves are boney and he smokes a pack a day to keep food intake from covering his ten-pack stomach. That’s not health.
Me wishing I had his body is not healthy, either, but that's another story.
I’d also like the media to stop portraying eating as an activity, because it isn’t. “Don’t just sit there and watch TV,” these commercials scream, “EAT SOMETHING!” That’s why you never see people just sitting in a McDonald’s in their commercials any more. Sedentary is bad because it leads to fat; the food has nothing to do with it. People are dancing and leaping while stuffing their faces with Big Macs and french fries. “See?" these commercials scream, "McDonald’s isn’t something that barely qualifies as food, it’s ROCKING YOUR BODY, BABY!”
Finally, it would be nice for plastic surgery (including Botox and whatever other crazy nanobytes or microbiotics they come up with in the future [because We're Science]) to stop. A bomb blew your face off? Fine, get a new face. You've got a new movie coming out and you need to look like you did twenty years ago? You don't, you won't, and my daughter's self-esteem matters more than how your face looks in Hi-Def, so deal. The way advertising plays on our insecurities sucks, but these body modifications are a plague. I've seen where it leads, and it's not pretty.
There's a lot more we could do, but let's start with these three and see what happens.
The house we're renting was built in 1928, impressively old by Miami standards. Some months back, Becky and I decided we should remove the decades of accumulated paint before we chose our own pallet.
Okay, it was my brilliant idea. Blame me 100%. But the windowsills are flaking without our help, and previous peeling has obviously been painted over. None of the doors close because of the accumulated layers. The crown molding has no detail, and the corners sag with frozen drips. Apart from the floors - oak in the front rooms, pine in the bedrooms - the house's wood energy is suffocating beneath years of latex and lead.
Little did I know how difficult it would be to remove.
Five days of work spread over several months later...
Work is nothing without a deadline, so we invited Becky's family for Christmas brunch at our place. Dylan stayed with his Abuelo and Abuela. Becky and I could work all night if we wanted.
"So we'll be tired," I said, "so what?"
Well paint-scraping tired is not writing tired, or internet-surfing tired, or drinks-with-friends tired. It is where-did-that-cut-come-from, aches-in-muscles-and-tendons-you-never-knew-you-had, making-a-fist-hurts-like-hell strung out exhausted, especially after a few hellish weeks of holiday retail.
This hurts.
We worked until three AM Thursday night then popped up at eight Friday morning. We scraped until we physically and emotionally could scrape no more, until no amount of willpower would force our muscles to obey. One cabinet is better than nothing.
We hit one cabinet with chalkboard in a can and painted the walls Chianti (Behr S-H-150). The other cabinet, baseboards, and trim will wait for another day.
Through dividing and conquering, we managed to get the dining room not just presentable but lovely, while picking up paychecks, cleaning, and grocery shopping for the brunch. We also learned that even exhausted at three am, we're a great team.
Yum.
Oddly enough, the red is so rich that it makes the last few layers of paint to be scraped look like a deliberate attempt to be distressed and antique-looking. We were praised to heaven for the look. It's a nice thought but I doubt we'll go with it, particularly when only one more day of work will give us a finished room. Well, maybe two days.
Now I know how Becky felt going up north for Thanksgiving. There's one picture of me which survives from my first Noche Buena last year, a group shot of the whole Quiroga clan. Since I tower over everyone else, there's no mistaking the terrified look on my face.
Meeting someone's family for the first time is always nerve-wracking, especially when there's a whole bunch of them presented to you at once.
Terrifying individuals.
Even though there were a slew of folks I didn't know or had only met once, this year I stopped freaking out and felt like part of the family.
I think Jose's Coquito was only partly responsible.
Pictured: Jose. Also, Becky's sister in Coquito haze.
We ate delicious food, laughed, and welcomed family from as far away as California. We enjoyed live music around a fire outside on a night which can only be described as perfect. No one got too handsy when in his cups. No one puked or passed out. Every dish tasted sublime. Tia New One's homemade pies were like little slices of heaven. Ninety-something Dora grabbed my face and unleashed a slew of Spanish (I caught "fine gentleman" and figured it all had to be good). I have no idea why I was so nervous last year.
Not so terrifying individuals
It's tough being away from my family for the holidays, but the Quiroga clan made me feel right at home. The love of a good woman helps, too.
