Food Fight

Hello World, Happy March! The last gasp of February was on Friday, and that was all she wrote, as the saying goes. But while it was here, it certainly was busy times for the shortest month of the year, and 2014 is not even a leap year, so we can't count on an extra day to help us along, no matter how much we might want to prolong the fun and frolic. There already was much that happened in the beginning of the month, then the days came by to honor our Valentines and Presidents, and the Olympics were not far behind. It all finally started to wind down as the month drew to a close, and then - ker-plop! - suddenly the new month is upon us, ready or not. In some ways, even the weather has started to improve, with some occasional warmer temperatures and a break in the snowstorms, so that we had even some snow and ice melting around town, which would have seemed unthinkable a couple of weeks ago. We may not be out of the woods yet, but perhaps enough to get people to believe in better days ahead at long last, which would be a welcome change of pace. In fact, I thought I saw a robin the other day, which at the time, I chalked up to brain freeze hallucinations, but then I saw a story in the local paper about how snow cover affects wildlife like deer, mice and birds, and it mentioned robins coming back from their winter layovers already, so I guess it must be true. No time to take a breath before Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras hit the heights on March 4, followed by Ash Wednesday on the 5th, ushering in Lent for millions of grouchy Christians around the world, and don't say I didn't warn you. I figure it's the least I can do, until those idiots in Congress finally come to their senses and pass a law making it mandatory for these people to wear a sign if they've given up chocolate for Lent, so the rest of us know what to watch out for. In other news, you would think that the media would have enough to occupy itself with - what with the weather, the Olympics, the economy, and political unrest around the globe - but apparently not so. The local press had a field day recently when the new Mayor of the City That Never Sleeps was espied in a local establishment eating a slice of pizza with a knife and fork, which in these environs, is a sacrilege of the highest order and a breach of cultural norms that is not to be tolerated. The locals will gladly look the other way at whatever foreigners want to call pizza, or how they prefer to enjoy it, but by golly, you better not come here and eat it with utensils and still call yourself a New Yorker, or all heck is going to break loose. This scandalous outrage played across the tabloid headlines in 6-inch letters, like the country had just declared war or something, as the 9-day wonder that it was, and this was the only news in the whole wide world worth paying attention to. Then, because these are the times that we're living in, the next chapter in the saga was when the eatery sold the blasphemed fork for $2,500.00, which is a further commentary on our society that speaks volumes all by its pointy stainless steel self. Hizzoner may as well just disband his re-election campaign right this second, because I'm not sure that his political career is ever going to recover from this catastrophe, and he should either just give up public service altogether, or move somewhere far away, where elected officials are judged on their merits and not their choice of flatware. As they say in college football, "You can stick a fork in this one, because it's done." On the even more local scene, I'm happy to report that our mechanic and his minions were a rousing success at getting the Aveo moving again at long last, with a brand new battery and a clean bill of health, to get back on the roads with the rest of mobilized humanity in the civilized world. Of course, it will come as a surprise to nobody that the car alarm went off when the new battery was installed and the electrical system had power once again, and thanks so very much not. This is old news to me and Bill, as we've already been down that road with the Chevy on several occasions, and we already know that the manufacturer makes it impossible to disable the alarm, even if you're the legitimate owner of the vehicle in question, and are fully prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences. No, you're stuck with that alarm system, like it or not, and you can just learn to live with its recalcitrant ways, or lump it. For his part, Bill said they should just cut the wires from the alarm to the battery and be done with it, but I said if this was "NCIS" and you cut the wires to the battery, the car would blow up, I shouldn't wonder. Once the car was extricated from its frozen fortress in the back yard, I took it for a spin around town with my new eyeglasses, and managed to come back safe and sound, in one piece, and with no collateral damage to the general public or community property, as impossible as that might seem to believe. So that was a big step that had been 4 months in the making, included a cast of thousands, and still required the heroic efforts and sheer determination of the elite few in order to finally turn the tide. At this point, I look forward to the day when getting in the car and driving, for me, is not noteworthy in any way, and it goes without saying, not the least bit alarming. Meanwhile, in our continuing efforts to get the annual congregational meeting out of the way at church, we finally had the rescheduled meeting in the middle of February, but once again, the joke was on us. Things seemed to be going along smoothly enough until we hit the financial reports, and suddenly people had all sorts of issues, as if this was something new and radical that we had never done before for some reason. We finally had to table the whole thing, and give up on passing the budget altogether, at least until our third try at this same darned thing in the middle of this month, which I can't ever remember happening before, even in the bad old days. Frankly I'm beginning to wonder if the name-calling and chair-throwing of yesteryear wasn't some kind of an improvement after all. Speaking of improvements, here we have the Spring 2014 course catalog of Lifelong Learning & Professional Development Division of Continuing Education from our friends at Westchester Community College, offering a glimpse into what's new and exciting in the realms of higher education these days. They provide studies in such diverse topics as: ========================================= Wine Appreciation (I'll drink to that!) Native Gardening for Bees in Crisis (they're obviously drinking too much already) The Truth About Mold (I don't want to know) How to Schmooze (awful lot of drinking going on in this place, I'm thinking) Envelope Professional (they need a course for that???!!!) (This actually turns out to be about building exteriors evaluation and repair skills, not stationery envelopes after all.) ========================================= One of my favorite courses is identified as Classroom-Based Home Inspection Training Program, which they describe as "hands-on," although how they inspect homes in a classroom is beyond me, I'm sure. They also offer a wide variety of what I would call "entertainment courses," such as walking tours of historic sites, and private cooking demonstrations and tastings at local restaurants each month, which I think is a great idea. It sounds like a lot of fun, a good way to meet new people, and also learn something along the way. There's one coming up at the Via Vanti featuring their signature ultra-thin crust gourmet pizza, and I was thinking of signing up Mayor de Blasio for it, but then it occurred to me that he might just bring his own fork and knife, and we'd be right back where we started. Elle