Well, my definition of “fun” may differ from yours, but at least I’m easy to please. I woke up to a rainy morning, but that wasn’t going to stop me from making my first hike of the new year.
I had some business to attend to early in the afternoon: the annual Hash leadership meeting. All current officers were re-elected, the Hash made money last year, so there is no need to raise the fees, and we voted to allow drinking to begin at 3 p.m. instead of the current 3:30.
When the meeting concluded, I headed to Alley Cats bar and had some beers while I awaited Swan’s arrival. I didn’t make any formal New Year’s resolutions, but I do plan to buy a new set of darts and take up the game again. I won’t be a fanatic like I was in the old days, but playing in a tourney or two each week would be a nice addition to my other routines.
Swan arrived, had a glass of wine, and then we crossed the highway for dinner at Mango’s.
After our meal, we moved on to Gold Bar, one of the newer venues in town.
Some beer, wine, and a lady drink later, we moved down the road to Queen Victoria for our nightcap.
As days go, it wasn’t a bad one.
On to July 2016 in the LTG archives. In this post, I came to terms with where I was in life and also accepted the me I was. Looking back on it now, it was an acknowledgement that the life I had lived before was over, and the future life was up to me to build. And here I am.
Let’s check in with the Filipina Pea for today’s YouTube video. Pea shares twelve unique aspects of Filipino culture, although I hadn’t caught on to most of them even after all these years.
Hold on to your hat, because here they come:
That’s all I’ve got for today.
McCrarey’s brain is toast, cracker……he just posted that meme 2 days ago
Or did I accidentally mess up my commas? I meant to call him a “Toast cracker”
re: comma meme
You did that one on December 31.
This is when all the problems of aging start to come together into a perfect storm: the urge to crack bad jokes, the urge to repeat what you’ve said a thousand times before, and the inability to learn from experience thanks to ever-increasing forgetfulness. Yeah, it’s a good thing I don’t work in a nursing home: I’d be murdering patients. Until it was finally my turn to become one.
God, I remember one old guy at my church who would shake my hand every week as if it were the first time, then boom out, “Kevin! I don’t care what they say about you!”—and laugh at his own joke. Every. Damn. Week. I guess we’re supposed to treasure these behaviors as the old get older. I tend to be more jaded, seeing it as a sign of the machine just breaking down. And knowing that that’ll be my fate, too, one day. Unless I get smashed by a truck, fall down an elevator shaft, get hit by an RPG, have another stroke or heart attack, etc. I kind of hope for a sudden death.
Beached boats on the bay.
And trash day on the beach, it appears.
The beach at Mango’s with a busier than usual holiday crowd.
Spot the error!
And then it was time to go home.
Looking very sober.
…I came to terms with where I was in life and also accepted the me I was.
If you can accept your life and yourself, there’s no need for do-overs. Do-overs imply there are things you don’t accept and want to repair.
I don’t use much whipped cream these days, but I won’t be cowed from doing so, especially on pumpkin pie if I can ever find some here.
Whipped cream is easy to make at home. Got a blender or a food processor? Pour heavy cream into it, maybe 500 ml. Add whatever keto sweetener you’ve got (erythritol, allulose, monk fruit, Splenda, whatever)—it should be the sweetness equivalent of about a level tablespoon of sugar. Blitz the heavy cream on high speed for about a minute. Stop and check consistency. It should still be runny but slightly thicker. Blitz another 30-45 seconds. Stop and check again. Blitz another 30 seconds. Stop and check. Keep doing this until you’ve got whipped cream. Don’t go too far, or you’ll have butter. Whipped cream is absurdly easy to make. But feel free to buy sugar-free, pre-made whipped cream if you want. I think the unit cost is pretty similar.
Also: Filipino kalabasa/calabaza is a great replacement for pumpkin, so you can make pumpkin pie at home. And an easy crust to make is a graham-cracker crust (or whatever sweet crackers, wafers, or cookies you’ve got in your part of the world). Just put your crackers/whatever into a Ziploc bag, then gently bash/crush the wafers until they’re reduced to a coarse powder. Mix with sugar/sweetener and melted butter (about 200 g powder to 90 g melted butter and about 70 g sugar/sweetener, but don’t add sugar if you’re using Oreo-style cookies) until you have something roughly like wet sand. Lump into the middle of a pie plate, then use a glass with a flat bottom (or a measuring cup) to smoosh and tamp out the crust until it reaches the edges and goes up the sides of your pie tin or pie plate. See here for what I’m talking about. Pre-bake this crust for a few minutes if you want (you might need a second pie tin to hold the crust in place; it’ll slump and shrink otherwise), then pour in your pumpkin-pie filling and bake your pie. It’s not a lot of work; it simply takes some time and patience. I’m sure Swan can figure it out if you’re unable or unwilling. There are tons of pumpkin-pie recipes on YouTube; Swan can look for a recipe that uses kalabasa (known as kabocha squash in Japan and America; it’s called dan hobak in Korea). Or just click here.
Damn, I even got the comma MEME wrong. But I repeat myself. Anyway, it is funny that I first used that meme in a post called “A Tuesday to forget,” then repeated three days later. I guess it was a forgetful Friday.
Yes, there is no denying that I’m on a downward trajectory when it comes to brain power. But I don’t care what they say about you, Kevin! I’ll just count my blessings that you won’t be attending to me in the nursing home. I’m sure they’ll have a hot young Filipina for that duty!
Beached boats on a bed of litter authenticate that this is indeed the Philippines.
The beach at Mango’s with a busier than usual holiday crowd.
It would have been better to write it as: The beach at Mango’s was busier than usual with a holiday crowd. Does that fix it?
I think calling my dream for the afterlife a “do-over” is a mistake. My fantasy is to more about wanting to relive my life. For example, if I could go back to the 1970’s, I’d enlist in the Army after graduating from high school. That would be the beginning of an entirely different life than the one I’ve lived. Yeah, I’m sure I’d fuck things up along the way, but hopefully in new and interesting ways. Oh, and I’d be sure and buy some Microsoft shares at their IPO.
Thanks for the tips on making whipped cream, but these days, I prefer a heaping scoop of ice cream on my pie. That pumpkin pie alternative sounds interesting, though. I will definitely share those links with Swan, who has much better kitchen skills than I do.
It would have been better to write it as: The beach at Mango’s was busier than usual with a holiday crowd. Does that fix it?
The original sentence had “busier than usual” as a phrasal adjective modifying “holiday crowd.” Your change is fine, but all you needed were hyphens.
The beach at Mango’s with a busier-than-usual holiday crowd.
As for this:
I think calling my dream for the afterlife a “do-over” is a mistake. My fantasy [is more] about wanting to relive my life.
I don’t even know what you’re talking about here. Neither of us mentioned an afterlife. You’ve been going on and on about “my do-over life,” and that’s what I was responding to: the contrast between expressing self-satisfaction and still wanting to relive part or all of your life. Are you content, or are you not? You can’t have it both ways.
You sound at war with yourself. On the one hand, there’s all of the “I am who I am, and I’m never gonna change” rhetoric. On the other hand, there’s the “If I had the chance to do things differently, I would” rhetoric. You need to pick a lane and stick with it. Either really be content (in which case, stop talking about reliving life) or really go all-in on the regrets.
So: if you truly are who you are, and you’re never going to change, then any do-over life would end up being the exact same life. That’s the inevitable logic of your situation.
Kevin, sorry for the confusion my ramblings created. The “do-over” thing started as my thinking about what the ideal heaven for me would be. I liked the concept of reliving my life better than an eternity in that pearly-gated place I read about. But as you pointed out, a do-over isn’t really changing anything if you just repeat the same mistakes for eternity. What I really want is to go back and live a different life, choosing paths I didn’t take in this one. So, it is not so much a do-over as it is a second chance. Anyway, none of it makes sense, and the concept wouldn’t work without changing the lives of everyone I encounter. Maybe in a Matrix or multi-verse, but it’s still a bullshit idea.
It is not a matter of my not being content with who I am. To be honest about it, what I want is to be young again. I’m struggling with the limitations that come with being elderly. It really is as simple as that.