VirusHead

I just did a creative thing in the kitchen and it turned out fantastic! This doesn’t happen often. I needed to use up a can of spinach. I hardly ever use canned veggies and I didn’t want to eat it straight. So I looked around for things we had and it came out so great I’ll tell you how I did it.

Beat 4 eggs (that’s all I had, but I’d do five next time), then add the drained can of spinach and a good dollop of half and half. Salt and pepper. Throw in about a tablespoon of leftover honey-mustard dipping sauce that often comes with chicken fingers (or at least that’s where I got mine – Ben won’t touch it so I take it home). Pour into a glass meatloaf pan. Get out the little plastic round of Camembert cheese that came in some holiday package and you haven’t opened it because it doesn’t look very good. Put glops of it down the center of the spinach mixture, poking it down into the mix. Open up some fresh salsa – the kind where you can still identify the ingredients in it – and spoon a line of it on each side of the cheese. Bake at 350 for….um….I think it was about 45 minutes. Let cool a bit, then try it. It has a spongy texture and it tastes really, really good! As you might be able to tell from the above narrative, I’m not really much of a house-wifey – but this is GOOD.

In other news, the trip to Florida was pretty fun. On the first part of the journey I was looking at all the life…There were plants and birds and rocks and things…oh no, that’s the America song “Horse With No Name.” On the first part of OUR journey, we drove to Jacksonville and stayed with our friends Sharon and Ray. Sharon had invited an old friend John E, who had also moved to Jax from Atlanta and we all had a big dinner, drank a lot of wine and swayed around the room to the accompaniment of Tori Amos, “The Beekeeper.” Sharon and I spent a good part of the next day on the sunporch trying to identify plants in the yard – they haven’t lived there very long – and catching up on all the girl talk and mutual support.

That afternoon we went to visit Bob N, a childhood friend of John’s who is very smart and interesting. He had all kinds of astronomy-related equipment around the house. One of his cats – Zero – plopped his not insubstantial self on my lap and refused to leave it. Bob took us out to dinner at an amazing place called Clark’s Fish Camp. It was in the old Florida style, and had all sorts of strange stuffed animals inside. It was perched over an open stretch of the river, at a place where the swamp surrounded the water. There was a boat ramp, and you could hear the frogs – looked like a good place for alligators to be near. I made an absolute pig of myself and ate an entire seafood platter of fried scallops, shrimp, clams, oysters. What a great meal.

Then we headed out for my grandma’s place about two hours away on the coast. My grandma looked terrific – in fact she looked better than she did on my last two visits. I hope I’ve got the tough genes from her family working for me. Neither my mom nor my brother Roy and his family could come, nor my Aunt Ute, nor my cousins Micaela (and her family) and Aletta. So who was there, anyway??

Well, of course my grandma Evelyn was there – the gathering was in honor of her 88th birthday. My Uncle Ronnie drove all the way from Massachusetts and he was just as fun and wonderful as ever – he was my favorite man on the planet until I met John. My brother Michael was there with Dotty and Baby Eric. John and our son Ben and myself were there, of course.

We spent some time at the beach, and drove up the first day to St. Augustine. In all these years, I had never been there. We looked at the fort and went into the church/basilica, poked around in the artsy stores, had some good coffee (very important), and checked out things to do on future dates. There was good music and food, but the day was incredibly windy – bikes were getting blown down, and debris funnelled down the alleys like tumbleweed.

We were late getting back, and for the first time that I remember my grandma was annoyed with me. She had evidently started dinner (she eats early) by the time we got back, and we had already missed lunch. Oops. Uncle Ronnie was there by then, and Michael Dotty and Eric arrived not long after. We spent a couple of days all together, and it really was relaxing and fun. My grandma even gave me a bunch of ferns and assorted plants to bring back to Atlanta. I’ve finished planting them in the yard today.

I missed my grandfather Hans though. I still can’t get used to the idea that he’s dead, although he died in 1988. Grandma got going on some stories about her youth and the early days of their marriage, and I found out a number of things I hadn’t known before.

All I really knew about Grandpa’s parents is that the family had a kind of outdoor Octoberfest back in Massachusetts, serving 5-cent beer and knockwurst and things like that. “S Grove” was closed down in the forties because of anti-german sentiment, because they didn’t bribe the police, or because of the stream of drunk drivers departing the place (take your pick).

I had always assumed that my mother converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses when she was in High School. She told me that they had celebrated Christmas, and things like that – perhaps they were in and out of the religion? I’ll have to ask her about it. I know my grandmother wasn’t crazy about it and my uncle is pretty much an atheist like John.

But Gramma and Uncle Ronnie said that my grandfather’s family had not only been JWs, but also that my great-grandfather Josef Michael S. was in at the beginning for the group here in the states. I’ve been looking to see what I can find out about him. My uncle seems to think Josef might have known some of the biggies like Rutherford, Franz, etc. Looking at some of Russell’s early books, I wonder if they were members of some secret order as well. Lotsa pyramids appear in discussions of God’s Plan. It’s all fascinating to me. If anyone knows anything about any of this, please comment or email me at heidi {at} virushead {dot} net.