Chocolate pierogi!

I bought these at Deli 4 You in Schaumburg a couple months back and finally pulled them out of the freezer and lovingly bathed them in boiling water. Served with plain yoghurt.

The choco-filling was gooey goodness with a bit of grittiness from chocobits. Good stuff!

Quest for Pączki '25

I was reminded that Fat Tuesday approaches as I was grocery shopping last weekend at Woodman's when I saw pączki for sale.

They were from Clyde's Donuts which is in Addison, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago.

Believe you me, I was sorely tempted to buy a box but didn't. I am unfamiliar with Clyde's and, though they may have been made by a Polish baker, I wasn't impressed by the flavor selection. Bavarian Cream? Really? And why do you need to add artificial flavor to a raspberry paczek? Besides, I am fan of the more traditional flavors: prune and rose hip.

The odds of me finding these flavors here in Madison are slim. Maybe prune.

I have heard various people from Poland lament the pączki in these parts as being "Americanized" and little more than a jelly doughnut instead of a proper paczek. Although some of these people have turned their noses up at some less than traditional fillings, I think these folks are referring to the dough. It's just not authentic. But I am unable to figure out what about the dough they're referring to.

Somebody at the Polish Heritage Club here in Madison must be able to explain this to me. Otherwise I'll just have to take a pre-Lent trip to Poland.

So, if you're not going to Poland for Fat Thursday, where can a Madisonian get something almost, but not quite entirely unlike pączki?

Bloom Bake Shop is offering strawberry and Bavarian cream for pickup on Fat Tuesday.

Festival Foods has carried them in the past, including prune, if I recall correctly, but a search at their website came up empty.

I've read that Greenbush Bakery has made them in the past but their website and Facebook page don't mention them.

Ditto for Rolling Pink Bake Shop.

Ditto for Metcalfe's.

The Ugly Apple Cafe makes them as well but they're not open on weekends. However, you can order a batch to pick up at Pasture and Plenty. Unfortunately, they mostly come in fancy flavors: Dark Chocolate Custard, Bourbon Vanilla Bean Custard, Raspberry Rosehip and Brandied Plum. Well, at least there's rose hip and plum, even if the latter is brandied.

Beyond Woodman's, I haven't actively sought any pączki out this year but perhaps I will stop by a bakery or two this weekend to seek out the elusive prune paczek.

Jeff Bezos' minions do kołaczki

I have fallen into the habit of occasionally grabbing lunch at Whole Foods and have noticed kołaczki in the bulk cookie case just across from the pre-made salads. They've tempted me for a couple months now but I've always figured that there's no way Amazon could make good kołaczki and resolutely walked past them with my nose in the air. But I finally gave in to my curiosity last week and bought some as I had neglected to do so when I was at the Deli 4 You in Schaumburg last month. There were apricot and raspberry on offer.

They weren't bad. But they didn't taste like there was any cream cheese in the dough. It tasted very wheaty instead of having that rich, dairy backbone. Still, I am not above eating them even with the limited flavors available.

Feeling my Slavic oats

I went grocery shopping yesterday and couldn't resist buying pączki. I have to go into the office on Tuesday and this prevents me from being able to stop in at the Ugly Apple Cafe, which seems to be the best bet for pączki in town. The ones at the grocery store were from suburban Chicago. No classic flavors - prune, rose - were on offer so I went with apple, apples not being a tropical fruit nor Bavarian cream.

While it's not as easy to find pączki here in Madison as it is in the Chicago area, they are much more common today than they were, say, 10 years ago.

After a stressful couple days, I decided to run with the Eastern European thing and made gołąbki soup.

I decided to use buckwheat instead of rice as the buckwheat in my cupboard wasn't going anywhere fast. It turned out rather well, if I do say so myself. Perhaps a touch more paprika next time and a dash of oregano, but I was pleased with how it turned out.

I finished the trifecta with some rye chocolate chip cookies.

Remarkably, these also turned out rather well. The rye gives them a really nice nutty taste. I think the recipe needs tweaking as the dough was a bit dry and, while this sounds impossible, it called for too many chocolate chips. There just wasn't enough dough to accommodate them all. Still, very tasty.

How the Ottomans influenced Polish cuisine

The Chicago Tribune has a neat article about the influence of the Ottomans (via Turkey) on Polish cuisine.

Poland has had historic connections with Turkey for over 600 years...This connection remains embedded in classic Polish cuisine. Gołabki is like a larger version of dolma, but with a Slavic spin, featuring ground pork. Pierogi supposedly came to Poland in the 14th century with the Tatars, Turkic nomadic tribes from Central Asia...

...But the use of dried fruits, nuts and aromatic spices really illustrates Poland’s past exchanges with Ottoman culture: roasted duck or bacon with plums, hot soups with fresh strawberries or dried prunes with cloves and cinnamon, and baked treats like the poppy seed roll or keks cake with dried fruits and walnuts are just a few examples.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 79: Total Madison Retain

(mid-November 2022)

(Watch the prelude.)

Having done a fair amount of traveling in October, November is shaping up to mostly be spent close to home.

My Frau and I went to see progressive rock stalwarts Yes on the 9th. It was my 5th time seeing them live, 6th if you include an Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe show. The band formed back in the late 60s and, while a couple of the guys are a bit long in the tooth, some newer, younger members are helping to keep the flame alive.

Having been around so long with many, many albums to choose songs from, every fan is bound to have a tune that they really want to hear but doesn't get played. The band performed a couple songs I didn’t expect to hear along with several that I did and are, simply put, obligatory these days. The tour was to mark the 50th anniversary of Close to the Edge, their 5th album and so they performed it in its entirety.

The church organ section of the title track never fails to send a shiver down my spine. Similarly, the vocal arrangement in that section, called "I Get Up, I Get Down", is truly a thing of beauty. One autumn evening many years ago, I was driving down Bailey Road east of Madison listening to the song very loudly and, when that section came on, I felt surrounded by grandeur and as if I had been transported somewhere else. Perhaps to the land of Roger Dean's album covers where everyone talks impressionistically - like Jon Anderson's lyrics. It was simply a beautiful moment.

Still, I wish that there had been a bit more variety in the setlist. "On the Silent Wings of Freedom" was an unexpected choice and I enjoyed it greatly. This opened the concert and it was my first time seeing Billy Sherwood on bass. He played reverently but not in slavish imitation of Chris Squire, to my ears. Plus, they did a couple new songs from their latest album, The Quest. But it was really a show dedicated to a trio of their early 70s work - The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge.

With Geoff Downes in the band, I find it a shame that they included no Drama material or anything released since he rejoined the band in 2010. "Fly From Here" or a chunk of it would have been great to hear.

Despite my desire to have more eras of the band's history represented, it was still fun. They seemed happy to be onstage and played a spirited show.

Someone who sat 8-10’ in front of me shot some video and posted it online. Here’s most of the epic song “Close to the Edge”.

********

A few days later I donned my apron and headed over to a local church where the Polish Heritage Club – Madison was holding its Christmas Bazaar. I believe it was the first once since the pandemic took hold.

Although it was a bazaar and there were plenty of things to buy, I always think of eating when it comes to this event. This is because I spend all day back in the kitchen cooking. I think I grilled up a metric ton of kielbasa.

While I enjoy cooking at home and helping out the PHC, I am glad that I no longer work in a commercial kitchen having to feed hungry hordes.

As folks ate, they were serenaded by these fellows.

There was a room with information about Poland as well as materials to help people take their first steps into genealogical research.

If you need Wianek (floral headbands), we’ve got you covered.

There was a craft room for kids, lots of food for sale to take home including a plethora of tempting sweets such as Makowiec. Sadly, I neglected to get in line early and all of the tasty sweet treats were gone by the time I had finished my duties in the kitchen.

Polish pottery was to be had as well as all manner of amber jewelry.

Working in a hot kitchen all day is hard work and we needed to stay hydrated. And so we did. With Polish beer, er, piwo.

Next up for me will be on the Polish heritage front will be Pączki Day on 21 (or 23) February. Then on Palm Sunday, I will again be cooking for the Club’s Spring Festival.

********

Man cannot live on kielbasa alone so I took advantage of this year’s bumper cranberry crop and made some cranberry pork chops.

I thought they turned out rather well.

********

The UW’s main repository of human knowledge, Memorial Library, has an exhibit on display called “Press Play” which gives a brief history of recorded sound and draws from the library’s holdings. A friend and I stopped down there recently.

The first thing we saw was this:

Described as a “flat disc”, it dates to 1896 and features George J. Gaskin singing “Tramp Tramp Tramp” which was apparently on the hit parade during the Civil War.

Next to this was an Edison Phonograph from 1919.

The platter on that magnificent looking turntable features the earliest known vocal rendition of “On, Wisconsin”, which is not only the UW’s fight song, but also the State Song of Wisconsin.

Next to Edison’s phonograph were some of his wax cylinders.

At about this point, a young woman came into the exhibit who looked to be of undergrad age. She was smart and donned her headphones, scanned QR codes, and listened to the audio portion of the exhibit which allowed one to hear the recordings behind the glass.

I am not sure how to scan a QR code. Instead, my friend and I chatted away about what we were seeing. We had heard of these recording doodads but probably hadn’t actually seen many of them in person. One playback technology I hadn’t encountered before were these records that were 20” in diameter. Reading the card next to one, I was quite surprised to find that they played at 100(+) RPM. 100 RPM?!

“If that thing flew off the spindle, it could surely decapitate someone like Odd Job’s hat in Goldfinger,” I reasoned.

This display featured local (south central Wisconsin) history. WIBA is a Madison radio station while that marionette is Jim Kirchstein, the founder of Cuca Records. Cuca was formed in Sauk City, a town about 25-30 miles northwest of Madison, in 1959 and it released a lot of polka and other “ethnic music” of the area from European immigrants and their descendants, including the polkabilly stylings of the Goose Island Ramblers, a favorite group of mine.

But Cuca also recorded rock bands and is most famous for The Fendermen’s cover of “Mule Skinner Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers. The Fendermen, a.k.a. - Jim Sundquist and Phil Humphrey, were Wisconsin natives and met while they were both attending UW-Madison. The song was recorded in the basement of a music store in Middleton, a Madison suburb.

Before the records yielded to cases of 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and iPods, there was this handy guide for aspiring DJs and rappers on how to scratch.

Lastly, I’ll note that the exhibit also featured a record from the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey on the Paramount label. While I knew of Paramount, I don’t think I’d ever actually seen of one their discs in real life.

Paramount Records was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company which made, in addition to chairs, cabinets for phonographs. They got into the record business in 1918 and Paramount lasted until the early 1930s. Although they released music by a variety of artists in a variety of genres, the label is best known these days for the blues recordings it did from the late 1920s through the early 30s.

Contacts in Chicago arranged for blues (and jazz) musicians from all around, including the deep South, to head to a small town – Grafton – in Wisconsin, a bit north of Milwaukee. And so the vaunted label gave us recordings by such hallowed figures as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Meade Lux Lewis, and many others.

Rock star Jack White became so enamored of Paramount's blues recordings that he had his record company, Third Man Records, put out deluxe sets of the material called The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records: Volumes One and Two. This surely involved lots of time and effort simply spent tracking down recordings alone, not to mention that spent getting them cleaned up for the best possible sonic experience. These sets include vinyl records, tons more digital recordings, books worth of liner notes, and replicas of ads for the records that appeared in the Chicago Defender in the 1920s such as this one.

********

In a previous entry I related how I had finally read Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I figured in for a penny, in for a pound so I went ahead and read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I appreciated the vernacular language as well as the descriptions of the Mississippi River and environs, but I missed the more playful aspect of Tom Sawyer. That book had funny bits but this one is much darker. The humor is replaced by life or death gambits.

I’m glad I read it but Huck Finn is a historical relic to me and not a piece of literature to which I shall return.

********

Bonus photo! Here is Grabby being very naughty and scouting for food on the kitchen counter.

 

 

 (Head to the postlude.)

The Corona Diaries Vol. 78: In the Halloween Spirit

(early November 2022)

 

(Watch the prelude.)

  

On my way home from up north, I made a quick stop at a liquor store to get some beer from the northwestern part of the state that is unavailable in Madison. Some of these brands were seen on store shelves down south in the past but no longer while others have always only been sold in their home region.

While it would be nice and convenient to have these brands at my local liquor store, I have really come to appreciate that some things are not at my fingertips and that they simply require travel to experience. I like regional variation. It’s fun and alluring to go somewhere and find different beers, different foods, etc. than I get in Madison.

I had hoped to stop in at Valkyrie Brewing but my schedule precluded a visit. Same goes for the Northwoods Brewpub. Still, the prospect of Northwoods’ rye ale and Valkyrie’s smoked Oktoberfest make fall treks up north all the more alluring.

Rather than jumping on the interstate as soon as I could, I took some back roads to Osseo where I would catch I-94. I drove through the small town of Cleghorn which is just a short jaunt east of the former site of Hadleyville, which I detailed in a previous entry. Cleghorn is surely home to a few hundred people at most and has one crossroads with no stoplights.

Up until recently, it didn’t even have a tavern, to the best of my knowledge. The main part of town is simply an abandoned building and a store which is now a bar. Here’s that abandoned building.

This was just one of those trips where I decided that I would pull over if I drove by anything that even remotely piqued my interest.

I have a weird affection for Cleghorn despite never having actually done much beyond driving through it. It’s like a ghost town for me because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being there. I’ve seen cars drive through it, seen them parked outside of places knowing there are living, breathing persons inside but I have never seen them.

It is like a little game I play. I take the back roads to drive through the town to see if there are actually any people around.

********

My initial plan had been to spend another day up north but things were changed when I recalled that I had a ticket to see the 1977 Italian horror film, Suspiria, on the big screen. But it was not to simply be a film screening. Claudio Simonetti's Goblin would be performing the soundtrack live! Simonetti was in the original line-up of Goblin that composed the music for the film back in ’77.

That’s not Madison as my phone is not capable of taking decent photographs under concert conditions and, sadly, I haven’t found any online.

It had been a while since I’d seen the original Suspiria and it was just a lot of fun to watch it with all of the super blood red reds and other brilliant colors that it’s known for. What a treat to have a live score!

After the movie was done, the band continued performing for another hour and a half or so. They seemed very enthusiastic – happy to be playing in front of an audience. Bassist Cecilia Nappo was bopping all around her part of the stage and Claudio Simonetti almost seemed content to play into the wee hours. He was proud of his music and thrilled to play for people.

This was a couple days before Halloween but the students were out in full force that night, lining up at bars and fully costumed. I had no problems except for the fact that the last bus had left 15 minutes or so after I stepped out of the theatre. Hopefully the new network redesign and the introduction of BRT will keep this from happening in the future.

A bit of the show is on Youtube.

 

********

The next day I indulged in more seasonal film goodness by going to see From Beyond.

Director Stuart Gordon was a Chicago native but he attended UW-Madison and became heavily involved in the theater scene. He founded Broom Street Theater in 1969 and it is still around today. I suspect most people know him as the guy that adapted a couple H.P. Lovecraft stories for the big screen including From Beyond.

It's a fairly typical mid-80s horror film with plenty of body horror. Like Suspiria, I hadn’t seen it in ages and I just had a blast watching it on the big screen.

 

********

The Halloween theme carried on after the holiday itself had come and gone. For starters, my friends and I began a game of the Alien role-playing game.

It is based on the film franchise with plenty of references to the movies. I played Leah Davis, the pilot of a freighter ship named the USCSS Montero. My crew and I are on a delivery run and were put into cryogenic suspension as the voyage to our destination would take quite a while.

We awoke to discover that we were nowhere near the planet that was to take our delivery. Instead, the ship’s computer had re-routed us to intercept a scientific research vessel called the Cronus that had been missing for nearly 75 years. Our mission to deliver a shipment of Helium-3 had been changed by our corporate masters at Weyland-Yutani to recovering data from the Cronus' computers, rescuing any remaining crew, and towing the ship back to dock, if possible.

We found the Cronus in bad shape. No breathable air, no lights, and lots of destruction and dried blood. Although the ship’s synthetic (i.e. – robot) was mostly functional.

I got a bit anxious and nervous while playing it. One of the characters from my ship had a motion sensor and detected something for just a moment before we found the remaining crew of the Cronus in cryo suspension. So, there’s an unknown presence on the loose, we had to wait a while for the other crew to awaken from their slumbers, and the synthetic on the Cronus isn’t quite right and won’t answer all of our questions. It was only a matter of time before something bad happens.

Will we make it back to the Montero before all hell broke loose?

********

The final seasonal thing that I did was to make a visit to Exquisite Corpse, Madison’s home of surreal taxidermy, with a friend.

Exquisite Corpse was opened by Marcia Field last year after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. She died back in August. Originally from Chicago just like Stuart Gordon, Field moved to Madison in 2001 and it sounds like she always had something of a morbid curiosity which she parlayed into a love of taxidermy some 10-12 years ago, it seems. I can’t find an exact year.

This one is called “Sacred Heart” and she described it as a homage to her first pacemaker which she had implanted while she was in her 40s.

Most of her work was influenced by her illness, her awareness of how fleeting life is.

This one is “The Ascension or Tenth Life” and features a cat atop a Catholic Last Rites kit.

Here are some chipmunk bones in tiny vials set as earrings.

This one is still personal, I suppose, but also political – “Goebbels’ Wet Dream or The Exterminator”.

A commentary on anti-Semitism featuring a muskrat, a Zyklon B can, et al. It illustrates how the Nazis would portray Jews at rats in their propaganda. Note the 2 volumes of MAUS by Art Spiegelman on the right.

For a mere $40 you can have what looks to be preserved cow eyes as a paperweight, I suppose.

There was a trio of taxidermy dioramas by guest artist Angela Webster. Here’s “Lab Rat Revenge”. Poor cat trapped and at the mercy of a rat!

A very neat exhibit.

Since our visit was on a gallery night, other denizens of the artist spaces there also had their works on display. We stopped in at Mary Made It Studio down the hall.

We found the artist, Mary Gill, chatting away with another aesthete. Originally from Trinidad, her life there remains a huge influence on her art.

I really liked this once entitled “The Gate of No Return” which succinctly depicts the slave passage to Trinidad and the aftermath of slavery.

If I had a few thousand dollars to spend on art, I would have bought it.

She also had this wonderful triptych that was about 10’ long and depicted various Trinidadians talking to their loved ones who were incarcerated and awaiting trial. Ms. Gill described how these facilities have a scheme to charge the incarcerated and their families which makes it profitable to keep people locked up instead of giving them their day in court.

Ms. Gill was extremely friendly and very willing to discuss her art. I am looking into buying prints…

********

Lastly, I want to note that I cooked some bigos recently. This is Polish hunter’s stew. I didn’t do it up all proper and instead made a down & dirty batch. I used kielbasa that I bought at Andy’s Deli in Chicago plus beef, half a head of cabbage that needed to be eaten, onion, and sauerkraut.

When I had everything browned and all of the ingredients ready to be combined for a long simmer, I realized that we didn’t have any kraut. I scoured the refrigerator 3 or 4 times as I would have sworn that I had bought some on my last trip to the supermarket. But no. So I made an emergency run to the store for kraut.

It turned out rather well, I thought. Hearty fare for chilly evenings.

********

 
Bonus photo. Here’s a non-taxidermy diorama I stumbled upon while on a bike ride. It was next to a building whose peeling paint had revealed a ghost sign underneath.

 

The Corona Diaries Vol. 50 - Supplement: Pączki

The Corona Diaries Vol. 50: April Is the Cruellest Month

(Guess Which Month 2022)

T.S. Eliot was onto something when he wrote that poem of his.

This time around, we truly have a corona diary. April began with my Frau breeding Covid. Her test result with the dreaded positive came back a day or two before she was to leave for Montgomery, Alabama. She has family down there and, sadly, one of her aunts had recently died so she was keen on being a comfort to her dad, who was already down there. In addition, she was looking forward to seeing some family she hadn't seen in years, despite the circumstances. Alas, it was not to be.

Even after she'd been sick for a few days, I was still feeling alright. I got up one day and noticed that the white stuff was falling so I availed myself of the opportunity to stop by my favorite urban woods on a snowy morning - Acewood Conservation Park. The temperature was in the low 30s so the snow was heavy and slushy and clung to everything.

It was just lovely there. A horse-drawn sleigh would not have looked out of place.

I noticed that an area on the north side of the park had been cut back rather severely. Now, I'm no forester so perhaps this is straight out of Maintaining Conservation Parks 101, but I was sad to see so many bushes trimmed into oblivion and so many trees felled. That area was thick with greenery in the past but it looks like it'll be a different scene ere long.

My suspicion is that removing all of that brush near the path will mean that more noise from the highway will make its way to the shoreline. We shall see, or hear, rather, how that turns out in a couple months.

Making my way to the pond, I saw that it had a smattering of mallards but was rather quiet overall.

I walked out onto that little peninsula hoping to get to the tip of it so I could get some panoramic pictures. Granted, my cameras don't exactly mimic Ansel Adams, but getting out into the pond a little way would afford me some nice views.

Approaching the end of the peninsula, I had my eyes to the ground trying to avoid stepping in standing water when a shrill cry scared the living crap out of me as a Canada goose flew out of a clump of empty stems just a few feet ahead of me. She landed out in the water a few yards away and was squawking out in alarm which caused another goose some 50 or so feet down the shoreline to get excited and start honking his own goosey klaxon.

I walked ahead a little way and discovered why I had two pissed off geese nearby who were closing in for the kill.

Once again, a mother goose had built a nest at the tip of this little peninsula. I did not envy her sitting on those eggs in the middle of a snowfall. But I suppose there wouldn't be any geese in the world if they simply gave up because of a little precipitation.

I could hear dad hastily approaching and he sounded none too pleased with the intruder so I beat a retreat back to the path. Eventually the parents-to-be quieted down after having cleared the nesting area of the pesky human.

I saw only one person walking the path so I basically had run of the park to myself. Despite the din of the highway lingering in the background, it was still rather serene and I allowed myself to just spend some time enjoying the scenery.

********

That night I began to feel unwell. Our half-hearted precaution of having me sleep in the guest room was a failure. Waking up needing to go to the bathroom, I got out of bed and realized that I had the chills and felt slightly nauseated. Come the morning I had body aches and a headache. I presumed that I had contracted Covid and this was confirmed a couple days later when I got my test result.

I took some time off from work and worked a few short days. When I wasn't sleeping, I got to enjoy lying around on our new couch which sat on our newly refinished floors. At some point the original owners gave up on the fine red oak planks and covered them with carpeting. When we tore up the ancient, ugly shag, this is what we discovered:

Not only was the original finish in rough shape, but it was of a fairly dark hue with a reddish, ambery tint. In anticipation of the floors getting a makeover, we (i.e. - my Frau) decided to paint the living room. The renter's white, which had been applied liberally around the house seemingly just before being put up for sale, was replaced by a light tan paint called Bauhaus Buff. Walter Gropius would have approved, right? I then figured that, as long as we're emptying the living room, we might as well get new furniture instead of stowing the couch and love seat which didn't fare too well in years past with kids jumping on them. We also tossed the old entertainment center. I rationalized the purchase by saying that buying new furniture saved me the cost of having to rent one of those storage pods.

So my Frau, the cats, and I moved into a hotel room for 3 days and returned to this:

Much better. The rooms are lighter now and I do not miss that amber glow that the old floors gave off.

Unfortunately, being ill meant that I missed out on a lot of fun. With gathering and mask restrictions being lifted and life continuing to return to normal, I had a busy April planned. First, I was unable to go see the band Nektar in concert. This disappointment was followed by missing all 10 or so movies at the Wisconsin Film Festival that I had purchased tickets for. I was to again judge processed meats at the product competition at the Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors convention but I was in bed cursing whoever it was that gave my Frau Covid instead of sampling bratwurst and large diameter luncheon meats. The day after that was Palm Sunday and Madison's Polish Heritage Club was holding their Easter bazaar for the first time in a couple years. Again, I was an achy mess huddling under a blanket when I could have been having fun, enjoying kielbasa and good company, in this case.

Speaking of Polish things, we celebrated Fat Tuesday with not only pączki, but also pączki beer.

Hinterland, a brewery up in Green Bay, brewed a beer that mimicked a raspberry pączki. While the pastries were tasty, the beer was gross. They started brewing it in 2020 and used 1,200+ of the tasty bundles of fried dough goodness in the brewing process. I don't know if they actually added the pastries to the brew kettle for this year's batch but I sure tasted a lot of raspberry flavoring.

********

Last autumn I heard that the rock band Jethro Tull, of whom I am a great fan, was soliciting tales from fans for a book that tells a history of the band from the fans' perspectives. I submitted a piece and a few months later I was told that it had been accepted for publication! And so a short essay of mine will appear in this book come September.

A brief excerpt:

"The next step for me on my journey into Tull was to return to the source of many a musical discovery for me – my older brother's tape collection. Eager for more flute-laden proggy goodness, I scoured it and eventually found a tape with 1982's The Broadsword and the Beast on one side and Thick as a Brick on the other. I immediately took to Broadsword with its loud guitars sharing space with synthesizers plus the flute and occasional mandolin. Thick as a Brick took longer but I eventually fell under the spell of its bouncy folk melodies and crazy time signatures."

********

Back in February, a friend came up from Chicago and ran a game of Call of Cthulhu. It's a pen and paper role playing game like Dungeons & Dragons but instead of a medieval fantasy setting with dwarves and elves fighting orcs, Call of Cthulhu is all about regular people trying not to succumb to madness when faced with cosmic horrors that remind them that mankind is but a puny, insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things. Storylines generally feature eldritch gods and the cultists who worship them along with the odd squamous half-man, half-fish hybrid thrown in for good measure. Oh, and all manner of unspeakable evils are loosed upon us poor humans.

We played a scenario that took place in the 1970s and I played the captain of a mission whose purpose was to land a crew on the moon to investigate a research station near the Shackleton crater which has stopped communicating with NASA.

Curiously enough, our shuttle craft looked just the like one in the TV show Space: 1999. Hmmm...Since it took place in the 70s, we made sure the men had very wide ties on at the conference they attended and I think most of the characters were smoking in the shuttle en route to the moon. One of the astronauts was Canadian and brought an ample supply of freeze-dried poutine on the mission.

My friend spared no expense in setting the right mood with a fantastical light show when we entered the cavern at the bottom of the crater, met the strange, unearthly creature there, and descended into madness.

My friend had also been a friend of my brother. After our game finished, we hung out for a spell and chatted.

About 10 years ago, he ran a Call of Cthulhu scenario called White Leviathan which was based on Moby Dick. It takes place from 1844-1846 onboard a Kingsport whaling ship. He, my brother, and crew were play testers.

My friend said that he'd been in touch with the game's creator. Since my brother had been one of the early players, he will be immortalized in the final version of the game. Likely his name will be that of a whaling captain on the wall of a New England tavern next to a harpoon. A fitting way to memorialize my late brother.

********

 
Bonus photo: we got a new ottoman that holds the cat toys and is in front of the picture window so Grabby and Piper can sit on it to watch birds and catch the evening sun. Here's a photo of Grabby enjoying it and it also features our lovely new floor.