HOT POT, MOONLIGHT FOREST MAGICAL LANTERN ART FESTIVAL

I am not arrogant enough to believe that I have a comprehensive understanding of all the cuisines of the world.  I hardly even have a comprehensive understanding of the cuisine of the food that I do know.  For instance, Mexican food.  I love Mexican food, it is one of my favorites, I would never turn it down, and yet, Mexican food to me is pretty much what I will almost always order: chips and salsa, an enchilada, a tamale, a chili relleno, a taco, Mexican rice, and refried beans (or sometimes black beans).  Certainly there is a whole lot more to Mexican food than that (despite how much I like it), and I read somewhere than Mexican food is considered to be one of the world’s greatest cuisines, and why not, especially when you consider that it would develop from the confluence of two quite alien cultures, the Aztec and the Spanish.  Just the cultural exchange of plants and animals between the Americas and Europe was momentous. 

Here are some examples of what came from Europe to the Americas:  bananas, barley, cabbages, chickens, coffee, cows, horses, lemons, lettuce, olives, oranges, peaches, pears, pigs, rice, sheep, sugarcane, and wheat. Think about that for a moment, especially the animals:  prior to 1492, the Americas did not have chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and sheep.  Rice is on this list…yet for us to have Mexican rice in our Mexican food, it originally had to come from Europe (and presumably, from the Far East to Europe, which, of course, was another momentous cultural exchange).

And some examples of what were brought back to Europe from the Americas:  avocados, beans, bell peppers, cocao (for chocolate), chili peppers, corn, cotton, papayas, peanuts, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins, rubber, squashes, sweet potatoes, tobacco, tomatoes, turkeys, and vanilla beans. Really, no potatoes before that time?  Yet years later, potatoes became so important that Ireland suffered greatly from a potato famine.  And no tomatoes?  We can hardly imagine Italian food without tomato sauce…but that, too, hadn’t existed in Europe prior to 1492.  Oh, and chocolate…some historians postulate that it was chocolate that ultimately killed Queen Elizabeth I.  Chocolate was such a rare and expensive delicacy that really only the Queen of England could have as much of it as she wanted, and she wanted it so much that all her teeth became black with rot and the resulting oral infections poisoned her. Hmmm.

I have a marvelous cookbook called The New World Wide Cook Book…I love how it is called “the new” world wide cookbook, because it was published in 1939!  But some of these old cookbooks are best, because they really do open one up to a world that is sometimes quite different from the “modern”.  As an example, I have another cookbook that I like a lot, it is a cookbook from England (published in 1963) called “500 Recipes For Cooking For One” (which, since I am “one”, that is really pretty cool…no days and days of leftovers or else wracking my brain to cut down the quantities of ingredients for a recipe intended for a family of six).  (Prior to Christmas, I wanted to make my own eggnog instead of buying it at the store, but all the recipes I found were for, say 30 people at a party. That, I confess, involved using a calculator.  Well, the recipe had a surprisingly numerous list of ingredients…and lots of separately whippingegg whites and egg yokes.  The result was worth it, but thank goodness for the calculator!) 

One fascinating feature in this “cooking for one” cookbook is that it is not only catered to a single person, but to a single person living in what they call a “bed sitter”, which essentially means living in one room (like a bedroom) and not having a private bathroom or kitchen.  In this book written in 1963, the bedsitter would not have a refrigerator, but for cooking, might have a gas ring or a hotplate.

I actually did live like this once for about three days (I was very young at the time), staying in a pretty frightening hotel in Manhattan that was down the street from the 42^ndStreet Port Authority Bus Terminal.  I had planned to live there for month until I found an apartment of my own, and the fact that it had a hotplate was supposed to be the extra feature that would make it livable.  (The more modern, and much better version of all that would be a hotel room with a small refrigerator and a microwave).  Everything was painted a very sickly green.  I quickly got depressed hearing people in adjoining rooms crying all night…but at least there wasn’t shouting and violence, which was how it all looked.  Don’t worry, I soon enough found an apartment subleasing agency where I found and rented what became one my favorite places I ever lived, with, of course, a bathroom and kitchen (although still very small).

But it is pretty useful to have recipes that are delicious, easy to prepare without a lot of equipment, and that you can eat all at once, since there would be no refrigerator to keep leftovers in.

But back to the World Wide cookbook, they feature comprehensive and detailed menus and recipes for 75 different country cuisines. Wow…if I actually wanted to try them all, I don’t think I would live long enough.  Although I would like to take a stab at it.

Just for fun, I will list all the countries whose cuisines are in this cookbook (feel free to skip this part if you want!)—how many of these have you ever had?  Me—a shockingly small amount of them when I see such a comprehensive list—well, I’ve had a third of them.  I am going to italicize the ones I have had:

England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Belgium, Holland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Roumania (that’s how they spelled it), Yugoslavia (when there was that country), Arabia, Armenia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, China,Japan, Korea, Philippine Islands (again, that is how they denoted that one), India, Indo-China, Netherlands East Indies (what is that now?), Siam(what they called it then, but now we would recognize it as Thailand), The Straits Settlements (this one intrigues me), Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, North Africa, Egypt, British Equatorial and West Africa (and now is?), Congo, Madagascar and Senegal, Union of South Africa, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico (those last three were identified as United States Territories, Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states then and Puerto Rico still isn’t), Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Equador, Paraguay, Peru, Uraguay, Venezuela, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti, The Lesser Antilles.  I have had food from Belize, but that wasn’t in the book, and if it had been, they would have called in British Honduras.

All of this was to bring us around to Chinese food.  I would guess that Chinese food is probably the most frequent and common international food in the United States.  I remember growing up that we must have had Chinese take-out, or else Chinese delivered to the house, as frequently as once every two weeks. There were some Chinese take-out places I feel like our family was solely responsible for keeping in business…at least, they were business-savvy enough to make us think so!

There was one Chinese take out in Menlo Park, called Yueng Yung, that when we first started getting food from them, it was strictly take-out, no eating there.  I was around twelve years old at the time.  As time went on, they became more successful and got so that they had three tables in there, then after some more time, had a small dining room.

By the time I was college age, they took over a space that had been a movie theater and turned it into an elegant and highly rated restaurant.  One summer, I took an accounting course at the College of San Mateo and recognized the son of Yueng Yung’s owner also taking that same class. He, too, was now grown up!  He told me that he was preparing to take over the running of the restaurant, as his parents wanted to retire.  Many years after I had graduated from U.C. Berkeley and was working as a computer systems analyst at the Stanford University Medical Center, I was a frequent diner at Yueng Yung and my friend who had learned accounting with me was always excited to see me.  One time I even had a big party there in their private dining room. Sadly, I just now looked it up and while Yelp still does a listing for them, it has one of those “permanently closed” notices, so now I have seen them gone full circle. 

While Chinese take-out was a common staple for our family, one of my parent’s top favorite restaurants was another Chinese restaurant called Ming’s, located in Palo Alto. Ming’s was for some of our special occasion dinners, and sometimes when my parents had out of town guests, they would take them to Ming’s.  I had my first alcoholic beverage at Ming’s; the family had gone there to celebrate my 21^stbirthday.  Having achieved that age now, I had earned the privilege of drinking alcohol.  I loved, and enjoyed, how importantly my parents had treated that, and it meant something to me, as well.

All this is to say that I feel like I have Chinese food flowing in my blood, so it surprised me to discover that there was a whole different branch of Chinese cuisine that I had never heard of.

The Hot Pot.  

And I think it is well worth knowing about!  Nick and Carmen introduced me to it the night we were going to see the Chinese Moonlight Forest Lantern Festival at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia.  Carmen said that we had to have Chinese food, of course, to stay with the theme of the evening!

Nick chose the restaurant, it is called “Boiling Point”, located at 206 S. First Avenue, Arcadia, CA 91006, convenient two-hour street parking in the neighborhood, but if you plan to go there (and I think you should, because it is really good), plan to wait outside for a while to get seated, since it is extremely popular.

Essentially what a hot pot is, is a large, wide bowl filled with an Asian soup stock which is in turn filled with apparently anything you can imagine—meats, vegetables, etc., all cooking on your personal flaming cooking stove, what they call “a mini wok on a box”.  What I chose to have was combination number 6, called “Milk Cream Curry”, along with a side of white rice.  Beyond the “curry” and the “milk cream” (whatever that is, maybe both milk and cream?) what the menu said was in my hot pot were napa cabbage, fermicelli, sliced pork, enoki mushroom, imitation crab stick, fish ball, fried tofu skin, corn, tempura, jicama, Chinese string bean, and sea salt cream.  I chose for it to be medium spicy.  All this is cooking as you are eating it, so I said to Nick, “I guess the ‘hot’ of the ‘hot pot’ is because of the stove, not the spices,” but he said, “No, I think it refers to both,” and I think he was right, because I now see on the menu that the choice of spice levels are “none”, “mild”, “medium”, “very spicy”, and “flaming spicy”.  If you are someone who wants to avoid “spicy”, don’t let this concept of “hot” turn you away, because you could choose to have no spice at all if that is what you want.

My own historical experience with hot spice probably began in the very first Indian restaurant I had ever been in, in Hollywood sometime in the late 1970s.  I don’t believe that in those days people were generally asked what level of “spice” they wanted…either that, or else the people who were treating me to that particular Indian meal were keeping me ignorant of that option.  I had never experienced anything so hot in my life as that first Indian meal.  This was “turn my whole face into a sauna bath” hot. I am surprised that I still had a tongue left after that meal. And yet, I loved it, even though I was head to toe sopping wet by the time I finished that dinner.

Years later, I learned how to do quite a bit of Indian cooking myself, and I learned how to moderate the amount of the spice.  After that, I then had the courage to attempt going to Indian restaurants again, but also by then, the restaurants had learned that they better find out from the diners how much spice they could tolerate.  I have always been a “medium” since then.

Thai food seemed to be all the rage in the 1980s, and, again, the kind of Thai food that I was exposed to was similar to that first experience with Indian food.  Just pure unadulterated HOT was my summation of it, so I carefully avoided going to a Thai restaurant for the longest time.

However, somewhere along the line, Thai restaurants toned it down to the point where now I want to learn how to cook Thai food myself (I wrote about that in my just previous blog entry).  

My experience with the Hot Pot was kind of funny because while I was really enjoying the flavors, I was also waiting for it to cool down to where I thought I would enjoy it more, until, duh, I remembered that there was a stove burning away right under my plate!  It seems that I hardly had that awareness when our waitress came over and asked me if I would like to have the flame turned off.  Wow, she read my mind!  But then Nick said that others in the room were having their flames turned off, so presumably one could ask for that at any time in the process. 

So, after that, I began to like the Hot Pot so much that I found myself craving it the next day. I have not actually had it again, but I told my sister about it and she said she had seen a Hot Pot in the town where she lives, but hadn’t really known exactly what it was.  She plans to check that out, now.

I have noticed then, that it seems that the foods I have been the most impressed by, namely Indian (in the past), Thai (recently), and now this Hot Pot, are also foods where the hotness of spice is a feature, so it makes we wonder if I ought to ramp it up a bit, that I am being too much of a baby by sticking with “medium”.   Yes, I do believe that I will need to try these foods a notch hotter and see how I feel about it.  Time for me to be, if not “more adult”, at least “more authentic”.

After our much-enjoyed meal at the Hot Pot restaurant, Carmen, Nick, and I then went to the Moonlight Forest Magical Lantern Art Festival and it was spectacular.  I describe these as being various dioramas made of cloth and colored lights, and some of them huge, such as the very large and long dragon or the three-building pagoda:

Probably the most spectacular one for me was a complicated high wall ocean scene that involved several dolphins and other sea life leaping over each other in the waves, again, all shaped by cloth sculptures and lights.  But each and every thing was worth seeing, such as various zoo animals:

 and forests and baby pandas cavorting on a children’s playground:

 and a myriad other creative things such as this underwater pass-through with a cool octopus:

Something about all this made me think of Rose Bowl Parade floats, although these dioramas weren’t moving down the street.  It certainly had taken an immense amount of time and skill to fashion these and it took us probably two hours to see them all, so it was quite extensive.

In addition to the dioramas, there was a stage where groups of male acrobats alternated with female dancers.  I particularly marveled at the acrobats who did all sorts of group leaps and somersaults in and out and around hoops and performed complicated juggling with hats and later with several juggling pins thrown back and forth among them all and even doing that standing up on each other three guys high, I can’t even understand how they are able to get up on each other like that.  Each one was young, small, and slight, yet quick and strong and controlled and certainly extremely practiced and rehearsed.  So many of us in the audience (me) felt just the opposite, heavy and weak and wondered what it would be like to reverse that ratio, all useful, able, responsive, lean body mass and virtually no fat at all. Anyway, it was entertaining and amazing as well as somewhat inspiring!

It did become a very cold night though, to the extent that all three of our cell phones that we had been using as cameras began to fold up.  At first it looked like the batteries had been used up, but if you put your phone back in a pocket for a while, it seemed to “thaw out” for a bit.  It was odd in that once I was home and had downloaded the photos I took onto my computer, near the end there were a few blanks where a picture had supposedly been taken, but no image showed up. Despite there being no visible image, the phone kept the blank space as if it had in it a picture.  Well, I just deleted those blank spaces.  I wonder if for cold nights it would be beneficial to have some of a “jacket” for the phones?

Once we were all back home, Carmen, Nick, and I shared among each other all the photos that were taken and they were really beautiful.  It had been a great evening.  I am thankful for Carmen having thought of it in the first place and for Nick to have found the Hot Pot restaurant.  I now have been much culturally enriched!  Now I think I need to get busy with some of those 75 international cuisines.  There is still so much to explore! 

The Depth of the Nows

I feel like I have been complaining and moaning and fearing, lately, but despite myself, these past few days have been pretty wonderful.  Fearing, you say?  Well, I think it is a typical thing.  Makes my think of my friend Jim, who told me way back when I was a freshman in college living in the same dorm (that’s where I met him), that he planned his whole life out—that he was going to get a government job and retire early with a big pension.  And, as it turned out, he actually did do that, got a job with the County of San Francisco, and then retired with a pension when he was 50.  And he bragged about it, it seemed that way to me, anyway, but after a while of such retirement, he started to complain that now he couldn’t do things like he used to.

He said he used to go to the opera, and he used to go out to dinners in elegant San Francisco restaurants (of which there are an infinite supply), and he would travel to Europe, but now he couldn’t.  Why not, I asked?  He said, “Because I don’t have the same amount of money I used to.”

I figure that maybe the pension he was receiving after having worked about fifteen years less than the “normal” pattern (or, comparing him with me, now, he worked twenty years less), I didn’t really feel all that sorry for him, thinking (admittedly unkindly), Well if you need more money, maybe you should get a job!  I didn’t say that to him, of course, that would have been rude and actually none of my business.  And anyway, he does deserve points for planning his life and actually sticking to it, and I don’t think he can be blamed if he later discovered that some of the details ended up being different from what he had expected.  That is life, right?  That happens to all of us.  Any anyway, he still remains a brilliant, talented, and hilarious guy that I always liked.

But for me, lately, in what has now been my three months of retirement, I have now finally experienced and understood Jim’s feelings.  It isn’t whether you have the money or not, but it is that you can’t be quite sure that it is enough.  If you are actually living on your pension, or, in my case, on your retirement fund and various investments, while that may be sufficient for maintaining your previous lifestyle, it isn’t really the same as having a regular paycheck come ringing into your bank account.  I would love in when I would be working on my computer and there would be a signaling “ding” and on the lower right hand side of the screen would be a notice from Wells Fargo saying that a direct deposit had been deposited in my checking account and it would tell me my new balance.  Twice a month.  And I knew that that would come to a stop and I would surely miss it, but that didn’t mean that I was now going to be destitute.  And I absolutely am not.  And my licensed financial adviser underscores that.  And it is not that I am not planning on generating an income from hoped for published books, monetized YouTube travel videos (once they get way better than they are now!) and other ideas.  It’s just that none of those are as secure as a regular paycheck.

So now I am “Mr. Conserve”, running around turning lights off (my father would be proud), only having on the ones in the actual room that I am in, not going out to eat as much as I had been, and cooking at home, instead, and not even taking any major trips (not yet) until my retirement finances are all fully set up (my advisor, Cheryl, tells me that will be somewhere in the middle of January). (P.S., Carmen, if you are reading this, “I am not Cheryl’s only client!”)  But we had a very productive day yesterday, a two-hour phone call discussing my “risk profile” that was generated from a 25-question questionnaire that I had done last week (sweating bullets while doing it).  That was amazingly useful, and essential according to Cheryl.  Based on how you answer the questions, you end up with a “risk tolerance” score, and then Cheryl goes over each question with you to find out why you chose each choice so that she can get a better understanding of your emotions and also set up the most appropriate plan.

The risk tolerance score goes from 1 to 100; a 1 would be a person who was so afraid of risk that they would hide every penny and dollar they owned under a mattress, not even feeling safe with having their money in a bank.  A rating of 100 would be the kind of person who would take their entire retirement fund, all $500,000 or a million or whatever it is, and maybe even borrow money, and go to Las Vegas and put it all on one number on a roulette wheel.  Me, I scored a 55, which means that I am in the risk tolerance band of anywhere between 50 and 60.  I am to make a decision as to exactly which number to apply to myself in that range.  What that will mean will be, suppose I choose 60, then that means that Cheryl will create my portfolio so that 60% of all that I have will be invested in a variety of equities, and 40% in a variety of fixed income investments.  Fixed income investments are those that pay a definite amount, such as 2.5% percent a year (or decades ago, 10% a year), whereas equities can grow in value (or diminish), the typical stock performance of going up or going down, fluctuating the whole time based on market forces and so on.  I think we all know about that.

There’s way more to it than that, though, and that is Cheryl’s software has all the performance histories of types of investments from 1970 onward.  I liked the use of that particular date (which is scientifically based, I am guessing based on that being the year that Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and cycles started to change dramatically; another type of benchmark might happen to be when the Federal Reserve system was begun), but I like that date of 1970 because that was the year I graduated and suddenly felt that I had stepped out into the real adult world, which meant I was no longer in college and supported by my parents.  It was from 1970 and on when I more or less now had to be earning money to live on.

That wasn’t the beginning of my getting a job or earning money—I had been doing that since I was 17, at first having a “taking your trash to dump” in my pick-up truck service, for which there was an immense demand in the neighborhood where I lived, and I really gave them their money’s worth by filling the bed of that truck sky high with stuff.  One summer, I was paid by my parents to paint our house (and boy were they demanding professional quality…and go it), but they were also cool about it and allowed my girlfriend, Becky, to come be with me while I painted.  I got so tan in the sun that summer that I can hardly believe it (I know Becky liked the shirtless view; ah, how nice to be teenager) and apparently I worked much better (and quicker) when I had someone wonderful like Becky to talk and joke and sing, etc., with. Her presence wasn’t a distraction but an energizer.

While in college, I got a job working in the dishwasher area of the dorm, and my friend, Jim (mentioned above) worked by my side.  He was stationed at the window where the students would put their finished trays and dishes.  Jim would scrape off in the garbage the left over food and hand each plate to me, where I would give them a good rinse and hand them to the guy on my left who would put them into the conveyor belt of the dishwashing machine.  It was noisy enough in there that Jim and I could hear each other, but nobody else could hear us, so we had wonderful conversations and hilarious jokes (he could choke you with laughter) and sing songs and dream our future lives.  On Sundays, the dorm dining room was closed, so I worked in the snack bar cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, serving chili, frying French fries, and whipping up milkshakes.  So I already had my so-called “McDonald’s” job when I was in college.  I loved all this, because it was filling my pockets with money and it was all mine to do whatever I wanted to with it.  That money was total gravy, not like once you are out of college and now you have to make a living.

So, Cheryl matches the historical investment performances with her client’s risk profiles and comes up via a multivariate analysis what investment vehicles would get the most money based on a client’s tolerance for the risk of getting that level of growth. 

So having that conference got me feeling a whole lot better yesterday!

That evening, I was going out with a friend I’ve known since high school, Ted, to see at the Lemmle Movie Center in Santa Monica a movie of the recent London play of The King and I.  I actually had never seen the Deborah Kerr, Yule Brenner movie, so this story was new for me.  And it was glorious.  Never before had I seen such a beautifully put together film of what was really being performed on stage.

It’s interesting, because I am currently studying a book written by a movie maker named Steve Stockman, entitled How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck”, and Steven Pressfield, who wrote the The Legend of Bagger Vance, a book and then subsequent movie that made me wish I had taken up golf, said Stockman’s book was “like two years of film school in 248 pages”.  One thing Steve Stockman stresses (and stresses and stresses and stresses) is that you plan your video!   Don’t be like the goofball man who goes to an elementary school concert and stands there the whole time and simply videos the whole chorus by going back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, back and forth over and over again, not even thinking to focus in on his daughter.  Or, what I definitely am guilty of, don’t just randomly video things you see while on vacation trips and expect strangers, or even friends, to sit down and watch more than four seconds of that very boring material.  I sort of get the idea from him (so far) that “vacation videos” are the worst, and yet I somehow expect to make money from posting YouTube videos on just that kind of video.  Well, some amazing people are making tons of money doing just that, and there are several of them whose videos I watch every day as do tens of thousands of other people, so there is still some hope.

So watching that London Palladium film of the play of The King and I was clearly film utterly planned out, perfectly.  Clearly, the filmmakers had to watch that play many times in order to do such a great job.  They couldn’t possibly just arrive one day and figure they could sit down and film that.  You just know that it would be absolutely horrible.  They would have to know when they needed to do wide shots and when they needed to zero in on one particular performer, “et cetera et cetera et cetera”, so they wouldn’t miss anything that would be essential to catch.  Otherwise, they would always be getting to the good scenes after they happened, not before.

I imagine that everybody reading this has already seen the movie of the King and I, but I was like what I think of (affectionately) as “the country bumpkin”, what I often do like to be, which is a sort of “hey, maw, would you look at that!” feeling I get which lets me be flabbergasted by something really wonderful that so many others are already bored with by now.  Kind of like, “Yeah, we actually do have automobiles, now, people just don’t get around with a horse and buggy any more.”  “Well golly!”  Okay, admit it, if you, are sometimes one of those bumpkins, reflect upon how great it is to experience something wonderful for the first time.

So, the singing…people don’t seem to sing like this anymore.  How beautiful that was.  And it was enlightening to know so much of the music, but to have had no idea that this was where it came from. Even a more obscure song (that I hadn’t heard in about forty years), “My Lord and Master”, but also better known songs, such as “Hello, Young Lovers” and “I Have Dreamed”, I didn’t know they were from The King and I. 

There were so many wonderful songs, and I kept thinking to myself, Well, yeah, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and you like Stephen Sondheim so much, you know Oscar Hammerstein was Sondheim’s mentor.  Okay, I am so glad that Ted is way more sophisticated than I am, it was his idea that we go see this, I doubt I would have on my own.

The song I actually liked the best was “Getting to Know You” and I swear that if I were a teacher, I would sometime in the first trimester sing this song with the students and have them learn it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvnGaZRpj8  I remember when I was in elementary school, all the teachers sang (remember the little note or tone whistle thing, whatever that was called) whether they considered themselves to be good signers or not.  The point is to do it and have fun with it, you don’t have to be Barbra Streisand or Frank Sinatra.

So, the play was great, but also was the dinner we had before hand.  We chose a Thai restaurant, Thai Dishes on Broadway, only a couple of blocks away from the Laemmle.  I really loved it.  They had a nice outdoor patio, but we ate inside.  The service was excellent.  The waitress came up to ask us for what we wanted to drink but first saying that they had something new, “Ice milk green tea”.  I have lately been reading how beneficial green tea actually is (to the extent that people are recommended to drink a cup of it at all three daily meals), so I decided to have that.  I said to the waitress that I normally would order a Thai iced tea, and she explained that this was like that but with green tea.  It was out of this word delicious, surprisingly so.  Up to now, I had felt that green tea didn’t really have any kind of a taste, but wow, something about that combination with the milk absolutely ramped the green tea taste up to utter fresh goodness.  So that was truly a hit with me.

To eat, I had a yellow curry (chicken, carrots, onions, and potatoes in a yellow curry sauce) along with white rice, and the curry dish came in a heated bowl.  Again, a total winner, I kept thinking about how amazingly delicious it was.  Ted had some complicated-looking bowl full of various kinds of seafood and vegetables, which was a lot of food, but he certainly ate it all.  After we finished eating, we still had half an hour before time to go to the theater, so I asked the waitress if we could stay a bit and she said, “Of course”, so I ordered a coffee drink but I can’t say what it was called…it seemed to be like a chai tea but with coffee instead of tea, and had a sense of chocolate involved.  Anyway, it was yet another winner.  I walked out of that restaurant really happy and planning on going back there again very soon.

As we walked to the theater, I saw a couple of other restaurants that I would also like to try out.  I may be making my way down to Santa Monica quite a bit more.  Ted suggests taking the Metro to get there, but that would be about a two-hour one way trip from Tarzana.  He likes to avoid paying the high price to park in Santa Monica.  To get to this movie theater, he parked at the Metro station at Bundy and Olympic for $3.00 and took the train down to the last stop in Santa Monica.  I had parked in the city garage right across the street from the Laemmle and since the movie was three hours long and we had met down there two hours ahead so that we could have a leisurely dinner, we were there a total of five hours and that cost me $14.00 to park.  Oh well, it is all very convenient, though, and I like how when you come down the elevator and get out to the street, there is a crosswalk right there in the middle of the street takes you right to the Laemmle.

Oh, to to ad the magic of that evening, after I crossed on that crosswalk, who should I see waiting there at the theater but a man I hadn’t seen for 20 years, a man whom I had met doing extra work on movies and television, and who lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood where I lived before I moved to Tarzana.  He was there to see a movie that was starting in a few minutes, so we couldn’t visit with each other very long.  But I take those kinds of chance meetings to be “good omens” of some kind.

One more thing before I post this blog entry.  I said that I had been doing more cooking for myself instead of eating out.  For years, I had been trying so many various diets, none of which seemed to really work all that well.  What worked best was fasting for seven days with only water…but then the weight still quickly came back on afterward.  The eating out was not due to laziness, but because nothing I cooked really tasted very good due to all these diets with what you can eat and what you can’t, which mostly is all you want of what you don’t really care for (or get sick of) and nothing of what you really like.  So I would go out to eat just to actually eat something that I wanted and that tasted good.

But now that I am retired and really wanting to eat more at home, that has made me take off the shelf some of my cook books and do a different kind of “reset”…why not eat things that I want to and actually taste good, but just greatly reduced portions.  Usually the way this has worked out is that I end up having only one, and sometimes two, meals in a day, which ends up being a kind of modified fast by default, and all the food tastes really good.  I don’t yet really know how well this will work “diet wise”, but it sure does make me happy and that seems to be much more important at the time being.

I have been playing around with a marvelous cookbook set that is the Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cooking, in 12 volumes, 2,000 pages, 1,500 colored illustrations, 8,500 recipes!  Printed in 1966, the year I graduated from high school and then started college.  I don’t know if that had been my mother’s, or one of my Uncle Ham’s (I have books from both of their collections).  Both of them were wonderful cooks.  I will always crave my mother’s cooking, as well as the cooking of both of my grandmothers.  In the latter years of his life, my Uncle Ham would write about cooking for various European magazines.  He would devise menus for various parties and occasions and then make gorgeous photographs of the dishes in amazing settings, such as an Italian feast photographed in a lay out on the Rialto Bridge in Venice with the Grand Canal flowing underneath.

So with this book series, when they say encyclopedia, they mean it.  It isn’t just a book of recipes, but it teaches about food like you just can’t believe, but also includes poetry and essays about food.  Where I will be going Christmas, while it isn’t a pot luck, they do like if you bring a dish.  So I looked up in the encyclopedia under the entry “Christmas” to see what I might want to make.  I’m not sure, yet, but I got entranced by some of the essays regarding food and the Christmas season.

One woman, named Jean Hersey, I don’t know if she was a famous writer back in 1966, or a person who worked on the staff of Women’s Day, wrote an essay entitled, “Twelve Days Before Christmas” which was about how every year she makes a loaf of bread every day of the twelve days before Christmas.  Some of the loaves she and her family will eat, others they will give to visitors during the Holiday season.  And can she make the idea of baking bread appealing!  Now, I have a bread-making machine, that I like to use (so easy!), and I can make bread that is healthy because I can choose the ingredients, but of course Jean Hersey would make her twelve days of bread by hand.  I am tempted to make at least one loaf of bread her way.  Here’s something that she wrote:  There is something so solidly satisfying to me about making bread. Is it perhaps, because, after all, yeast is a plant and it is always good to feel any plant grow in your hands?

Or this, The baking time is when the fragrance reaches its peak of delight.  Ask a friend over for tea just to sit there beside your glowing fire, with the bread baking.  Simple pleasure, but oh so delightful.  I can understand now how I so often feel that I have completely missed the feeling of a particular holiday.  One has to really get into it in whatever way strikes you.  This woman, essentially anonymous writer who nevertheless used her skill that inspires a person 52 years in the future, puts a whole different perspective on the meaning and power of a life.  It’s the depths of the nows that matter.  One of the things that I am learning from retirement is to stop the habit of rushing forward, and instead, experiencing each particular moment as being the whole thing.  It certainly gets rid of the complaining, moaning, and fearing.

I swear, one could even be hanging off a cliff 2,000 feet above a rocky gorge, holding onto a tree root for dear life, scared to death and thinking that in a few moments you will be falling to your death and you just can’t hold on any longer, when suddenly you will notice the awesomeness of your surroundings and be amazed that you are there to witness such spectacular beauty.  I will bet that at the very next moment, you will happen to see a previously undetected toehold that is enough for you to use to get yourself back up to the safety of the ledge above you.  That’s not a miracle, it’s that the answer is right there right in front of your nose, if only you will stop long enough to be able to see it.

If It Isn't Saturday, Then It Must Be Sunday!

Don't get mad at me, but one of the aspects of retirement (that is entirely understandable) is that I keep thinking it is Saturday.  And then when I realize that it isn't, the next day I am sure it is Sunday.  And sure, it is wonderfully nice that every day can feel like a weekend, because it mostly is like a weekend, at least, emotionally, and also how nice it is to be able to do weekend things on a week-day, such as take my car in for the service that was due on it like I did last Monday, instead of having to reserve ahead for a Saturday. I was able to make an appointment for 7:00 AM, when they opened, and even though it was a more "major" check-up than a routine oil and filter change, the dealership was not so packed and jammed like they would be on a Saturday and therefore I was out of there in an hour instead of needing to ride the shuttle home for that day.  (My service writer told me that would be the case, so I went to have breakfast at the restaurant across the street and hardly had to wait in the waiting room at all.)

I have also realized that can I go to movies at a matinee and receive a discount even on top of the senior discount, which I will be taking advantage of tomorrow when I go see the documentary Quincy, about one of my favorite musicians, Quincy Jones.  It's only playing at one Laemmle theater, all the way over to 2nd Street in Santa Monica, a normally so-heavily-trafficked distance that I rarely would choose to go there after work.  But in the afternoon, not much a problem.

Doctor's visits are a snap, too (unfortunately, I am needing those), because I don't have to wait for the next "first thing in the morning" visits which I would always want as the most time-efficient way of handling those visits on a working day.

However, peculiarly, I haven't seen any advantage to grocery shopping; the stores just seem to be crowded all the time no matter when I go.  And the truth be told, in most ways it seems in Los Angeles, there are just so many people who seemingly never work at all.  I used to marvel, for example, at all the people I would see walking their dogs as I crept along in my daily morning commute.  It makes me think of Claudio and Arianna, my friends from Italy whom I met when I was in Fakarava, who stopped in Los Angeles for a couple of days on their way back home from another French Polynesian island that they had gone to after I had fun with them for five days in Fakarava.  I had offered to give them a tour of Los Angeles when they came if they would like and sure enough, they called me and took me up on my offer and they really loved Los Angeles, so it had been hugely fun to take them around to everything they wanted to see.

But one of their comments was, "Doesn't anybody here work?" because, as I could see through their eyes, everywhere we went, there were hordes of people out and about, and this was on a week day (I, myself, was on my vacation).  Beyond the people walking dogs, the beaches were packed, Venice was loaded with tricksters and crowded stalls, the sidewalks always were filled with people (but to Arianna's happiness, Hollywood Boulevard had a movie premier in front of the Chinese Theater so she could see some celebrities walk the red carpet), and traffic everywhere was very heavy.  I had chosen for us to go to Paradise Cove in Malibu to sit at tables on the sand and have drinks and lunch, and they were so surprised when we were presented a "buzzing lobster" to let us know when a table would be ready, that the wait for a table could be up to an hour.  Claudio said, "A special technology just to let us know when there is a vacant table on a weekday afternoon?"  They could hardly believe it!  (Also, they could hardly believe that the houses in Bel Air really were houses, but I think I finally convinced them!  "Yes, Claudio, even that one!")

We got some drinks to take to the sand while we waited for the lobster to vibrate, but then I saw a parent from the school where I work and his two little girls, enjoying the beach.  I stopped to speak to them and introduce my friends from Italy and I complained about the long wait, when the man said, "Here, take our lobster, we gave up waiting and decided to get lunch from the snack bar, instead!"  How wonderfully generous!  Almost as soon as he gave the lobster to me, it began to vibrate, so we got to get a table right away after all, plus I got to prove once again the adage that one will always run into our school's parents, no matter where in the world you go!

But, back to my confusion about days, one of the fall-outs of this always thinking that it is a weekend is that I find myself craving to go out for a weekend breakfast, which had more or less been a normal habit of mine for years, but which would not be so good to do every single day.  And now, coming along with that, is a sense of nostalgia for formerly beloved breakfast places that are no longer around.

One of them, whose name I sadly can't remember at the moment, was a place I went to for years and years, and not only for breakfast, but other meals as well.  A friend of mine who I did extra work in films with, and had been in a play with, even took me to this place to celebrate my birthday, and beyond the specialness of that, a man sitting at a nearby booth had overheard that it was my birthday and before he left, he handed me a Happy Birthday card in which he had written something extremely nice.  How amazing is that--I wondered what does he do, go around with birthday cards in is pocket and if he sees somebody who is having a birthday, he whips out a card and writes wonderful wishes to give them?  That seems like a really great idea, actually, especially when you go out to eat, there often is a table there where somebody is having their birthday celebrated.  How cool is it to not only sing along and clap with the well-wishers, but to even provide a birthday card!

A couple of years ago, I had gone to The Mission Inn (one of my all-time favorite hotels) in Riverside   as a quick and easy get-way which happened to be the weekend of my birthday.  For dinner, I chose to eat at Duane's, their marvelous steakhouse.  I overheard a man sitting near me say to his wife, "This is where I would like to celebrate my birthday," which led me to say to them, "Good idea; today is my birthday!" so they were nice and said, "Oh, Happy Birthday!" and gave me their fond good wishes, which I enjoyed.  Well, then later, after I had finished my wonderful dinner, the waitress brought me this, which was a surprise that made me very happy:

I said, "How did you know?" and she said, "I heard you tell the couple near you that it was your birthday, so...!"  So if you are like me and actually like your birthday, speak up!  I am shameless in this regard....

Back to the restaurant where the man had given me the birthday card, I happened to go there to have breakfast one weekend, and to my shock it was closed for good.  What?  At that time, I used to get my hair cut by a barber whose shop was across the street from the shopping mall where that restaurant was, so I asked him if he had any idea why that place was now closed. I told him that I had eaten there regularly for years and it was always very popular.  By then, I knew the name of every waiter and waitress and many of them knew my name.  There was a steady crowd of diners (like me) who liked to have breakfast out there on their covered patio.  (I had been semi-amused by a sign that they had posted out there.  Inside the restaurant, there were normal booths and sturdy wooden chairs around tables, but outside the chairs were those white plastic molded outdoor chairs.  The sign said, "Maximum capacity of chairs is 225 pounds.  If you weigh more than this, ask the waiter to bring you a heavy-duty chair."  The nerve!  I guess maybe somebody did happen to sit down and collapse one of those chairs, I don't know, but in my view that really wasn't a sign to have posted--just get some sturdier chairs!)

Anyway, I couldn't believe such a long-term and popular restaurant like this would suddenly go broke.  But the barber said it had nothing to do with the success or failure of the restaurant, but that the owner of the land was beginning a process of evicting tenant after tenant once their lease was up, because he wanted to do something else with that property that he thought would bring in more profits.  What happened to be there on that land (that I remember) was this restaurant, a Trader Joe's market (the only one I have ever been in), an Indian restaurant, a Mexican take-out, an aquarium shop, and a shop renting and selling Russian videos.  There might have been other stores, but that is what I remember...plus a large and very convenient parking lot.  Yeah, probably not the most profitable mix of stores, but this was an aspect of having a business that I hadn't thought much about. The owners of the land have an ancillary stake in your operation as well as you have an ancillary stake in theirs, so it is hoped that each have a mutual success.  If it doesn't happen, both are in trouble.

I used to have an auto mechanic who was forced to leave his leased repair shop because the owner of the land raised the rents way too high for him with the next lease renewal.  My mechanic felt that the land owner was greedy and would regret that decision.  All I know is that space still has an auto repair shop in it, just another one, whereas my mechanic ended up moving four different times after that, having a lot of trouble making a go of his enterprise and that is too bad, because he was an excellent mechanic.

Yesterday, I suddenly wondered what "awesome" thing had finally taken the place of the restaurant I had liked.  I "toured Santa Monica Boulevard" via Google Maps, but could not figure out exactly where that location was, as the area had undergone quite a bit of changes in the last decade or so.  I could no longer recognize much of that area, at least, from seeing via Google Maps.  I realized that it required to actually there in person.

So much of all that was when I lived in Hollywood, but when I moved to Tarzana, Hollywood was no longer my neighborhood so I have rarely gone back there since.  But now with this sense of nostalgia for many of those places that I enjoyed in the past, I decided to have breakfast at The House of Pies on the corner of Franklin and Vermont (when I lived in Hollywood, I lived on Franklin), which, I was glad to see, is still in business.  I even did my "bad thing" of eating the same breakfast that I used to have when I lived in the area, what in those days they called "The Western Breakfast", but what they now call "The Ultimate Breakfast Combo":  two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, ham, hash browns, two slices of toast, and three pancakes (or a Belgian waffle).  Carbs carbs carbs, it's so wonderfully negatively indulgent that it is a slap in my keto face--hash browns and two slices of toast and three pancakes (or Belgian waffle) PLUS all the fats and protein of sausages, bacon, and ham--I said to the waitress, "That certainly covers all the bases!"  I ate outside on their patio, as I always did back then, and really enjoyed it.  I was kind of worried that I couldn't finish all that food, which if you order something like that, you have to eat it all or you are stupid...well, I needn't have worried about that, I certainly did finish it all and also had three cups of coffee and completely drank the very large glass of water that she brought me.  Okay, so I can fast tomorrow.

I noticed that there is still in the area a BOOK STORE, so hooray for them.  Also, catty-corner on the street is still a Masonic lodge and I realized that I have certainly heard of Masons that their lodges, for heaven's sake, yet all these years I never actually knew just what they did.  So that's another thing good about retirement, you can actually make the time to learn about things that you somehow managed to miss previously, if you want to, that is.

After my great nostalgic breakfast, I made my way to Santa Monica Boulevard to go see what had happened with that poor old strip mall that had the restaurant and the Trader Joe's.  And what I found knocked my socks right off.  The owner thought he wasn't getting enough profit!  Well I guess so--this guy had foresight or ambition far beyond anything I ever could have imagined.

Remember what was there before, nothing above a single story--three places to eat, a Trader Joe's, an aquarium shop, and a video store...and a wonderful large parking lot.  Oh, and what was (had been) across the street (just to give you a reference) was a barber shop, an acting studio, and a boxing gym.

What is there now, here is the front view (see it covers that whole block):

and here is one of the side views:

These are the Avalon Apartments, Hollywood, which essentially take up an entire block and cover almost every square inch of the original land, and is six stories high.  It still does have a Trader Joe's!

Think of how much more each square foot of that land is earning now compared with what it was earning before.  It's understandable, but also scary when you contemplate these kinds of differences.  I saw a lot of that on today's little trip through my old stomping grounds, quite a few new immense apartment and condo complexes, as well as more large hotels.  I, myself, would not want to live right on a very busy street like Santa Monica Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard, but apparently (some) people really do like that.  That is sort of "New Yorking" Los Angeles.  Also making it way more densely crowded.  I saw that was so much easier to get around in the Valley.

The most dramatic change of land use that ever touched me happened in North Miami Beach (they call it Sunny Isles Beach).  I had stayed in a cute little Days Inn there (three stories high), right on the beach (not across the street), had a nice big swimming pool (I really enjoy going back and forth between the ocean and a fresh water swimming pool), a convenient parking lot, and my room had a useful balcony with outdoor furniture on it (I could eat out there) and had a front and center ocean view.  There was a man who had a bar set up on the sand right there at the hotel, very convenient, and the people sitting there drinking (whom I joined) were very friendly.  This was as affordable as it could get and it had all I really needed.  It was a nice family-friendly motel in a very good location for enjoying the sand and warm ocean water.  It was a trip I would be happy to repeat, and, in fact, planned to a couple of years later, but was having some trouble finding the listing for the Days Inn of Sunny Isles.  The Days Inn website kept leading me to another Days Inn in a different location.  I finally checked out some other websites and learned that Donald Trump (ha ha!) had bought up that hotel plus the ones on either side of it, all of which were similar in being small affordable family-friendly beach hotels.  The more expensive beach hotels were in Miami Beach and probably pretty much out of reach for quite a lot of people.  But, like that strip mall in Hollywood that had the restaurant that I liked, somebody knew that that land underneath was useful for something much, much, much more profitable.

This photo from several years ago still blows me away:

This photo is what was being built on the land that had once had those hotels that Trump had bought. Huge difference from what was there before.  That is progress, but it still does make me sad, since I had enjoyed my trip and my stay there and would not be able to repeat that experience.  In other words, I was being pushed out by greater money interests.  On that same trip, the hotel where I stayed in Key West was also on the water, and it, too, was bought up and torn down so that something much more expensive could go there in its place.

Here's something ironic:  I was on a flight to Maui that I saw the movie War Dogs, starring Jonah Hill.  It was a story about two Miami guys mucking around not making very much money--one of them was an outcall masseur--and the other one had his brain tuned on "easy success ideas" a bit too strongly.  They got involved with an armaments deal in Iraq that was worth something like three hundred million dollars, and well, oh boy do they get in trouble, not only with some exceedingly dangerous characters, but also the federal government, but meanwhile, it was a phenomenal ride of financial success beyond anything they had dreamed.

The masseur guy and his wife bought an amazingly beautiful condo high up in a skyscraper on the beach somewhere in Miami with multi-story glass windows and infinite ocean views and many phenomenal, top of the line features.  I am not exactly sure what it was that clued me in (but I do have an eye and a memory for certain details), I had wondered where there actually was such a place like that to live and ultimately I discovered where or what it was.  I am pretty sure that where they filmed this condo was the "Porsche Design Tower"--the main unusual feature of the Porsche Design Tower (despite everything else it has going for it) is that there are two automobile parking spaces at the level of each and every condo no matter where you live in this 60 story building.  This also makes me think of a thrilling chase and fight scene inside a mechanical multi-level parking garage in the movie Mission Impossible 4, which is in my favorite movie series.

Having a condo unit like the Porsche Design Tower, which is so futuristic in its design and lifestyle, is something to lust after that you can't help but admire its existence whether or not you as an individual are able to have such a thing or not.  I don't envy or hate people who can have this or things like this and other things; I am just glad that that such things do exist.  The irony is that the Porsche Design Tower was one of the buildings that took the place of the Days Inn that I had enjoyed.    I was pushed out by greater money interests, yet I admire what those greater money interest bought in.