LittleJoe

My living will ...and please don't bury me!

There's been a lot of press for some time about the Terri Schiavo case. With that in mind, and not wanting to be kept alive by artificial means if my brain has already gone bye-bye, I have printed and signed a fresh living will. I signed it today in the presence of my son, Ben, and my friend John Vaughan, who each then signed the document as well. I've scanned it, saved it as a PDF, and emailed to my wife, son, dad, and siblings. The version I've included in the image here is the scanned document, but with signatures and contact info blurred out. I downloaded the template for this living will from a Florida Bar web page.

And just for the record, once I'm done with my body, I would prefer that folks listen to the John Prine song, "Please Don't Bury Me" (lyrics) ...and follow that sentiment with me. I'd prefer to be parted out to those who could use my abused remnants. Then take what's left of my corpse and give it to a medical school (if there are any desperate enough to take it) ...or have a bonfire and toast my @$$. Just please don't ever waste money and land by sticking my shell in a box in the ground!

Corona chicken

A month or so ago, we purchased a Weber Genesis Gold C gas grill (from Amazon of all places!). One of the very cool things about Weber is that they have a 24x7 grill line. So dummies like me can call at any time with inane questions to expose our incredible ignorance to the always polite and very patient and knowledgeable Weber folks. There's also a lot of good info on the Weber web site. This weekend I was browsing their site (not that I'm turning into a grilling fanatic, mind you ;-), and saw this cool poultry roaster. It's based on the idea of beer can chicken (also called beer in the butt chicken - follow the link and you'll see why). So we picked up a little device for about US$15, and tonight I took a chicken, a bottle of Corona, a lime, some salt and pepper, and some olive oil and experimented.

I rubbed olive oil over the outside and in the cavity, sprinkled lightly with salt, ground some pepper over the bird, then put almost a half a bottle of Corona in the container that ends up in the bird's butt. I squeezed lime juice into the container and stuck the bird in an unholy position, and decided to put a half lime up where the head should be ...to help keep in the steam (the rest of the Corona - and another for good measure - went to the chef). I grilled it on indirect medium, which means the front and rear burners were on half strength and the middle one was off.

After about an hour and 20 minutes, the bird was done. We only tasted the mildest hint of lime. The meat, however, was very tender, fell from the bone, quite moist ...pretty darn good all in all. Next we'll experiment with using garlic, clarified butter and red wine in the cup instead of beer. Lots of room for experimentation, and we've got a fairly nice starting point :)

Lobstah

Step 1: Make sure the lobstah is no longah movin'. Oh well.....have anothah mai tai and ya won't notice so much.
Step 2: Dead or alive, staht pulling the bug apaht and dip in buttah an' stuff and chow down.

So after the disaster of the dishwasher leak and minor flooding of Friday eve, we got together on Sat with Karl and Chris Ann for a feast and some drinks. Karl is one sick chef, whipping up all kinds of marinades and fancy dishes with no recipe books or any of that other crap that mere mortals need. Shirley's also posted about the eve ...since we were both quite impressed (again) with Karl's culinary skills, and of course had a hella good time downing a few (a few?!?) drinks and BS'ing the night away.

Cooking on the grill: Process Improvement

Last night I pulled a whole chicken out of the 'fridge (it was the body of a dead chicken, actually, and we had placed it there after purchasing it at the food store, so it wasn't a shock that it was in the 'fridge ...but I digress). Anyway, not knowing what I was doing - as shall become more and more apparent though probably not at all surprising - I cut the bird into pieces and proceeded to cook the snot out of it on the barbecue (to those in other countries, "cook the snot out of it" - or to do "the snot out of" anything - means to do it to an extreme). As the image here will attest (click the thumbnail to see the full-sized image if you dare), the exterior of each piece ended up a tad in the well-done category. Not well-done as in, "good job!", but rather well-done as in, "much time was spent with Satan". I may have been a little impatient and perhaps the gas was turned up a little too much.

Realizing that there might be an opportunity for process improvement, I had another go at it this evening. This time I first popped on the 'net and read how to properly cut a chicken into the standard pieces. I also took a moment to read some suggestions about how to cook the bird if one's goal was not to produce pure carbon. So this evening I started the grill warming up and put the cut pieces of chicken into a bowl with some Newman's Dressing, a little red wine (a cab/merlot blend), and some garlic salt. Once the grill was heated, I turned the front and rear burners to half, and turned off the middle burner. I sprayed the grill with some olive oil to keep the meat from sticking, and the meat was placed along the center so it would cook via indirect flame. This turned out much better. Every 5-10 minutes I turned the pieces and brushed on a little of the liquid from the bowl. There's still room for quality improvement, and in the best Deming tradition I shall continue in this pursuit. There is definitely hope.

Tomorrow I'll try grilling some mahi-mahi. Hopefully the first attempt with it will prove more successful than the first attempt at grilling chicken :-)

Sod should be down tomorrow

houseSod,
originally uploaded by Joe Litton.

Shirley was still at work when I got home (Yup, she started a new job today...back to TWO incomes - yay!) ...so I swung by the house site to see what was new. There were at least a couple of gents working inside (final work on texture/paint), so I didn't go in. I know *I* don't like folks looking over my shoulder when I'm working, so I prefer to let these folks do their job without me peering at their work. But I could see all this sod piled up (how could I miss it?) In fact, there was a little more stacked in the lot across the street. So I suspect that tomorrow evening we will see that a lawn has magically appeared. And that means I'll be needing to mow. My goal is to find a battery-powered mower and rig a solar panel in the back that I can use to charge it. THAT will be another blog post (or several) as I get that figured out :-)

Pool pad poured at house

They poured the concrete today for the pad around the pool. There's still a coating to go on top of the concrete, and a screened cage that will go around it. After we're in, the solar panels for the pool heat will be installed, and a salt water filter system (keeps the water clean without using chlorine). I think I need to go do another test on one of our tropical drink recipes :-)

Oh, and a few more pics are in the "house" category on my Flickr page.

Enjoying a glass of French syrah

Ahhhh..... As I write this I am sipping from a glass of deep red French syrah. I love red wine, and haven't really tried much syrah. But I'd slowly gone through the last of the cabernet and cab/merlot bottles that we'd had, so it was time to buy another bottle or two. We were in the local grocery store and I was specifically looking for French red wine. Why? Because I want to support French products. And I like France. We've only been to France once, but we found the people, food, drink, and general ambiance of Paris to be wonderful. And the countryside on the way down to Lyon  was beautiful. We definitely hope to visit again.

There are so many people who refuse to buy anything French because France was against the US invading Iraq. Well, I was also against invading Iraq. Bush fabricated reasons for invading, has massaged the rationale over the many months and thousands of deaths, and has now stumbled us into a rather nasty quagmire. That's certainly no reason to boycott France. Rather, it is time to acknowledge that they who opposed the war were, in fact, quite correct.

So the grocery store had, as far as I could tell, only 3 bottles of French wine: merlot, syrah, and chardonnay. I'm not a white wine fan and prefer merlot in a cabernet blend, so syrah it is! And this is a pretty darn nice glass of French wine indeed :)