I woke up this morning at about 3:30 with a real stomachache. The pain came in waves and basically I wasn’t able to sleep for the rest of the night. I’ve not done anything today, just stayed in the house despite it being a lovely day, and did laundry and rested. It is most likely just a flu bug or something since Cindy felt fine, so it wasn’t in the food we had for dinner.
When we were coming back to the apartment yesterday we were noticing how everything is getting painted, everywhere in Moscow. Three days ago they installed some pipe that goes from a manhole in the middle of the dirt area in front of our apartment to some other manhole about thirty meters away. I watched them doing some welding and yesterday I noticed that they had painted the pipe a bright blue. I couldn’t help but notice that the welded joints were really sloppy and I told Cindy that my father would have been very disappointed in the quality of the work. My dad taught welding, as well as doing a lot of welding during his career in construction. At one point he had a welding school and almost all of his graduates would be hired by Electric Boat in New London, to work on the construction of submarines. He used to volunteer to teach welding one night a week at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. It was a long commute but he enjoyed teaching mostly young first time offenders a skill that they could use when released to secure good paying jobs. He even had G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate fame, cleaning his floors and my dad said he did a fine job. He quit doing that after a few years when he would see some of the men he had trained coming back to prison after he had already gotten them good jobs. They tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, the skills they learned from him helped them get involved with bigger crimes! We still have some of the rather creative gifts the prisoners gave my dad when he left.
He, of course, taught us all how to weld, but it never really took with me. My brothers became rather good at welding but I was reduced to cutting, as opposed to joining. I could use an Oxy-Acetylene torch well enough to cut I-beams and rebar if the tolerances were within an inch or so, but I never had the finesse to do any arc welding. It was yet another example of my lack of construction skills that my father used to make sure I got an education that would allow me to work indoors without tools.
Easter Dinner was fun to make, but it again involved chicken. We went shopping for lamb but at about $21 a pound for chops, it just wasn’t worth it. We don’t eat beef or pork or veal, and fish is just too expensive and usually not fresh, so we mostly have vegetables and chicken. Most cooking, like most music, is simply a variation on a theme, so last night I did several variations. I changed Cypriot Eggplant into Italian Eggplant. I still sliced the eggplant the long way and roasted it for fifteen minutes with a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper and herbs. Then I took it out and placed sliced tomatoes on each piece, more oil, oregano and topped it with slices of fresh Grana before placing it back into a 400° oven for another fifteen minutes or until the cheese was brown and bubbly.
I cut up lots of carrots, potatoes and onions and placed them in the bottom of a large roasting pan. I coated them with olive oil, salt and pepper and herbs de Provence and placed pieces of chicken on top of them so that they were all covered. Earlier I had taken the cloves of two heads of garlic and soaked them in water for about thirty minutes, with skins on. Now I tucked them under the pieces of chicken so that we could have a modified Easter Egg hunt, but with garlic, when everything was cooked. We had stopped at the real French bakery on our walk so we had wonderfully fresh bread to go with dinner. It was a lovely Easter Sunday feast.
I just looked out the back window and low and behold, all of the children’s playground equipment has been painted bright reds, yellows and blues. No signs are up so I hope it all dries before the kids get back from school. So, it is off to the kitchen to see what I can make for Cindy’s dinner.
Best wishes to all, Cindy and Wm.
No comments:
Post a Comment