I found a new way to eat sardines today. Laura brought home some salt sticks from her nephew’s high-school graduation party. And just on a whim I cut one open and put two medium sized sardines along the length of it. To my surprise this little sandwich tasted fantastic. I guess if anybody has a salt intake problem, they could just scrape the salt off of the stick. Wow what a wonderful way to eat sardines. It was so good that I had to use the rest of the sardines in the can and make another salt stick sandwich. I washed them down with a half a bottle of Gatorade and I was set to cut the grass of two houses and rotate the tires on my truck. The sardines were almost all protein and I got my carbs from the salt sticks. I am pretty sure that everybody knows the taste you get when you eat potato chips and pretzels together. This usually occurs at parties when people have dishes of chips and pretzels laying about for the guests. This always reminds me of past parties when I ate this combination. I think this particular flavor is great but Laura does not like it. With all the snacks that we have here in America I am not sure why anybody has not made a snack with this combination of flavors. Maybe I am in the minority in enjoying this flavor. This brings me to the subject of spices which is behind all flavors. I had a discussion at union school class, with a beer expert who claimed that coriander was the same spice as nutmeg. If you ever drank Blue Moon beer or any Belgian beer, coriander is the spice that gives this beer its distinct flavor. There is nothing finer than getting drunk on a beer that tastes great. I would recommend any Belgian beer to serious beer drinkers. Well, coriander is not the same as nutmeg they are two different spices with totally different classifications. Nutmeg is the spice found in commercial eggnog. I think I could spend a great deal of time just studying spices. Oregano is one of the things that gives pizza its distinct flavor. Or for people who grew up in the 70’s some people tried to pass off oregano for marijuana.

Somehow we always seem to take our annual vacation in May. This year we took it in the second week in May. The easiest place for us to go and still get some exotic surroundings, palm trees and warm ocean is Florida. We usually rotate every year the between the Keys on the Atlantic side or Dunedin/Clearwater on the Gulf side. We have been to some of the islands in the Caribbean but the added distance and the tourist traps in some of these places makes Florida a more ideal choice. Especially if we are only going for a week. A four hour flight to Aruba each way kills one day of your vacation. Either coast in Florida takes only two hours to get there. That’s a long nap and you are there. In past trips I have taken notes to keep track of what we did for this book/blog/journal.
This year I decided not to keep any notes and just enjoy myself. Writing from memory can be hard because recall can be weak. After getting our traditional Danish and reading the paper at the airport with a cup of tea, we caught a 10 a.m. flight. We were in the Tampa airport by around 12:15. We were on the road with our Chevrolet Impala by 12:30. This was the fanciest car we have ever rented. We try not to drive too much on vacation but there are a few choice places we like to go to. One of them is Tarpon Springs where you can get authentic Greek food and wine. They have an authentic sponge industry there also. We always eat at a place called Mikonos named after a Greek city. This trip I had lamb shish kabob. And Laura had feta cheese shrimp. They always give us so much food that we take the leftovers back to the hotel and eat the remains for lunch the next day. They downplay their tourist attractions because a lot of locals come to eat at their establishments. They also have some amazing bakeries that sell some amazingly rich tasting pastries. We always splurge on these because we figure its vacation and anything goes. Back on the side streets we always find the old world coffee shops that are welcome only to men. Laura always gets a kick out of these places. They are not meant for the tourists. That’s what I like about this place. They are friendly to the tourists but they have their own culture and activities that makes them not solely dependant on tourism.
Another place that we like to go to is Clearwater Beach. They have, in my opinion one of the best beaches in the world. The sand is soft and pristine white and very easy on the feet. The swimming is great and the surf always interesting. The things that make our vacations so enjoyable is that we take our routines with us. Like when the sun gets to be too much we will take an afternoon and still go to the library and get in some reading in the air-conditioning. Then we get back to more important things like drinking beer and going to minor league baseball games at the stadium is near the hotel that we stay at. This year the first day we took a ten mile rollerblade to a lake near a place called Largo. And the only thing that we ate to and from the lake was one banana each. It felt so good to get out of the work routine and eat according to real hunger instead of the lunch bell. Man, it felt so good to really physically exhaust myself and feel real hunger again. At the lake we saw a couple of big alligators sunning themselves. Something I noticed this year were that there were a lot of eagle nests all over the place. It seemed like everywhere that we went we could hear baby eaglets chirping shrilly like they do. A eagle’s nest is huge thing. Its great to see these magnificent birds flying everywhere. I could not take my eyes off of them while I was rollerblading. Many times I saw them swoop down and snag a fish. During the whole week down there we would be physically active all day and then start drinking light beer around 7 p.m.We would drink on our way to dinner or on the way to a minor league baseball game. Sometimes we would walk along the bay and stop to watch the sunset. This worked great for three days but then I got careless and laid down on the bed nude with the air-conditioning blasting and I got a sore throat. We came home that night after a game and dinner. And I started watching two Spanish films on the Turner Movie Channel. They were dubbed in English. I came down off of the beer and thought I would work on my Spanish a little because they were good films and I always look at movies like these as a challenge to learn something new. Going to bed that night I was feeling good but I lapsed in judgment not turning the a.c. off. I dreamed that I had sore throat all night. And sure enough I had one in the morning. I did not think to much of it because it was so hot in Florida in may but it morphed into a full fledged cold. I kept swimming and moving but it took the edge off of the great time that I was having. I just chalked it up to the Judeo Christian religion from my youth, that you cannot feel too good for too long without suffering. I still drank beer at night but just not as much. And I laid off the rum. We found a new restaurant near our hotel. It was called “Sammys” and they had great food. It turns out the place is owned by a fisherman. And when I asked the waitress how come the lake perch was so big there she said Sammy catches it. The perch filets were enormous. And just as good as the little ones I was used to eating up North in Lake Erie. They had some really good side dishes like collard greens and beans and really nice coleslaw. Most of the people who came here were locals. Which made for a comfy atmosphere. On the fifth day of vacation the cold was starting to peak in me so I rented an umbrella at the beach and just read all day while Laura swam and walked up and down the beach. This is something I always say that I am going to do on vacation and the illness forced me to do it. And it was not so bad ,I enjoyed it. It must of worked because the next day I felt much better. And my appetite came back with a vengeance. So after hiking for a while in Hammock Park, I suggested going to lunch at a Mexican restaurant that was near by. Its nice to break the routine by having lunch. We usually eat light throughout the day and eat big at night. We went to a place called “El Zarape”. I got the taco and burrito platter with shredded beef. Laura had quesadias. And since I was dehydrated as well as hungry I ordered a large Coke. Something I hadn’t had in a long time and did it taste good. The food and the Coke made me feel giddy. It was a lot of food with chips and salsa and rice and beans on the side. After eating we walked some of the meal off by walking back to the hotel. I stopped a to look at an air-conditioning unit behind a bar that had recently been replaced. And the old one was rolled over on its side and I had to look at it. The new one had been replaced crooked like the old one because the base underneath it was crooked. This is really hard on the bearings when its not straight. I could not believe whoever installed the new one did not take the time to straighten the base out so that the thing would run vertically. This is why you need labor unions to do this kind of work right. Florida has nice scenery but that’s about all it has going for it. They don’t have many labor unions and it shows in the shoddy work practices that you see going on there. They don’t pay their school teachers anything so this shows up in the lack of community. Half the people are transient, moving around constantly just to find decent work. You would think the government down here would spend some of that 40 billion in tourist money the State gets to help its own people. And I cannot understand why a State where the sun shines almost every day is not perusing solar energy. Even on vacation I can’t help wondering about such things. These right to work states is just another excuse to screw exploit the middle class. Yes, the American middle class, the most powerful force in the history of the world. Well I have to remember that I am on vacation. Anyhow as I am writing this I want to throw in another tidbit about writing in general and that is: since I am writing this from memory I did keep a small smattering of notes from this Florida trip. And just having them sitting on the desk next to the computer gives me confidence in writing this diatribe. After eating at the Mexican restaurant we went to the beach the rest of the day. And we stayed there until the sun came down. Since we ate a big lunch we were not to worried about dinner. I never thought that a cold would last in the hot Florida sun but it gave me a pretty good fight. This was one cold where I did not lose my appetite and I could still drink beer. I found a throat spray to ease the sore throat. And I sucked on lozenges also. This gave the beer a funky taste. The cold virus and I refused to give in to one and other. I just could not give into a cold in 88 degree weather. Somehow it would not let me from its clutches. I always believed that activity was always the best strategy to fight a cold but this one was proving me wrong. It started moving around in my body. From my throat to my back to my head and then my chest where it lingered long after the vacation was over. Another highlight of the vacation was we ran a 5k road race around the city of Dunedin which made for a good day. The race started at the stadium for the minor league team for the Toronto Blue Jays. And it is the same stadium that the professional team uses for their Spring training. Everyone got their t-shirts and were putting them on, mulling around waiting for the race to start. Once the race started we headed into town and then along the shoreline. We passed my favorite spot in this town, Schiller International University. And an eagle pair had built an enormous nest in a tree above the lawn of the school. And the chicks in the nest were squawking loudly. I’m not so sure that you can call them chicks they were pretty big birds.
Running early in the morning is really hard for me because I am a night person but when your done it feels so good and you are glad that you got out of bed to do it. After the race there were bagels, juice and bananas. There were also volunteer massage therapists giving away free massages. I grabbed a bagel and sat across from the massage tables and watched people getting rubbed. Watching a massage is almost as good as getting one for me. I did not feel like standing in line to get one. There was one man and two woman rubbing away on the tables. Later Laura and I won a couple of prizes in the raffle that they had. One of the prizes that we won was a large pizza gift certificate at Deluis pizzeria….
I think that I just figured out why that cold got a hold of me. I think that too much sun and the ultra violet rays weakened my immune system. Because I was not tanned coming off the winter, the sun attacked my skin like it does and I know that those ultra violet rays suppressed my bodies ability to fight the cold virus. The excruciating thing about a subtropical vacation after being in gray Pittsburgh for 6 months is those first couple of days in the sun, which can be punishment. Even though I tan easily. The sun takes its toll. Yea I am almost certain that the sun and the air-conditioning reeked havoc on my immune system. The alcohol probably added to this situation.
I was just reviewing the few notes that I jotted down on the trip and I pretty much remembered the bulk of the trip without looking at the notes. Two things though that I missed were, when we first got to the hotel we rollerbladed over the causeway to Clearwater and watched the fish jump. And one day when we hiked to Hammock Park. We laid under a park shelter to rest and we saw a raccoon and a couple of snakes. And while Laura was reading, I watched a wasp and a chameleon vie for territory. On the food front we always had a 12 pack of Busch Light in the fridge, and bananas and yogurt….

I remember when I was a kid I could eat my mother’s homemade bread until I had to lay down on the floor from being so filled. My food obsession is at times driving me crazy. That is why I have to write about it. At times I think that I am going mad. Because I love it and I hate it. And good bread is at the foundation of my mental illness with food. The thing about baking your own bread or making any food in the kitchen is that the experiment that unfolds makes life so interesting in the moment. Forget about the brownie mix and make those brownies from scratch. I have to take my own advice because its easy to buy the box of Pillsbury brownies and make them the easy way. But it is not that hard to make brownies from scratch. And you feel like you have accomplished something when you make the effort. And you can add as many walnuts as you want to them. Walnuts, that’s the secret ingredient. Actually just about any nuts taste pretty good in brownies. And then you can add some extra cocoa and sugar if you like. Then as always I have to add something healthy like soy flour or oat flour – just enough so that you cannot even taste it. But I can justify the gluttony of eating these chocolate treats. Is it my curse to always put healthy together with decadence. Maybe at 2:00 in the morning when I cannot sleep and in the dead silence of the night some wisdom will come to me. All the memories of the food and the experiences I have had around food will help me to write this book. You have to stay up late once and a while to really appreciate the silence of the night. And when I go to bed when I am hungry I will dream about food….