Nay, we are but men. Rock!

You all know that I love bacon. It is the king of breakfast meats–it laughs in the face of Queen Italian Sausage (and her wicked stepsister Maple), while Jester Jimmy Dean whimpers in the corner, and Servant Ham shovels the latrine.

If I could, I would carry some in my pocket everywhere I go. Who am I kidding? I would take a bacon shower (only if it’s cooked first).

That said, here is a great way to start the perfect day! And by perfect day, I mean any that starts with bacon!

And I will never have to worry about burning my foot on the George Foreman again.

(Honey! Can you come rub Vaseline on my foot?!?)

So today is my wife’s birthday and two of her best friends came over to bring her ice cream and apparently talk all of the oxygen out of the earth.  It was good times for a while we were all joking around and I felt like I actually live here.  Then the subject changed to the diva cup.  It was this point in the conversation that I was banished from my own living room.  I’m not talking about a civil, “Hey Ben I know you live here and I respect that more than you will ever know.  Could you please leave so I could discuss something that could make you feel a little uncomfortable?  I know this is a little inconvenient so feel free to get a little more ice cream as payment.”  That is what I would expect, or at least that is how the conversation would go in my head.  What I got was, “Go check your email so that we can talk.”  

You need to understand the level of trepidation I am feeling right now.  Every time these women get together something bad happens to my life.  When they first became friends I had to start washing Ziplock baggies.  Later I had to leave the kids’ bath water in the tub so that I could use it in the washing machine or on the garden.  Then I started using a rock as deodorant.  Something bad always happens whenever I get kicked out of a room.  I’m afraid when I walk back in there they’re going to tell me that I can only brew and drink soy beer or something.  

The jokes on them though.  I’m not checking my email. I’m writing this post and I’m eating the rest of the ice cream anyway.  That’s right ladies you can’t control my life.  I’ll do what I want when I want to do it in my own house.

Whoever first said, “You can’t get blood from a stone” was an idiot.  I just got back from the hospital with my one-year-old son where he had to have surgery to remove a stone that was lodged in his right bronchial tube for 10 days!!!  About a week and a half ago my family and I were camping and white water rafting/kayaking with three other families, more to come on that trip in a very near post, when my youngest son put a handful of pea gravel into his mouth.  This is not an uncommon occurrence.  The cat would eat a pile of radioactive scorpion tails tied together with barbed wire and soaked in vermouth if he could get his hands on them.  I walked over to him and did the regular, “No, no, spit it out” routine and he did, for the most part.  He must have missed one in the expectorating because he started to gag and cough pretty vigorously.  I looked in his mouth and saw a little piece of gravel in his throat.  So I did what anyone would have done at that point, I put my finger in his throat to try and get the choking hazard out.  This had roughly the same effect as poking a feeding rhino in the eye with a flaming baton.  He didn’t like it much and showed me by nearly dismembering one of my fingers.  This, as you can see, wouldn’t have made much sense because then he would have had a piece of pea gravel, which was only pushed farther down by my attempts to remove it, as well as a finger blocking his airway.  I am glad he thought better of biting my finger off and just decided to swear at me in baby language instead.  He cried for a couple of mintues and then settled down so my wife and I thought he had swallowed it and would deliver it back to the soil in a couple of days.  

The camping trip regrettably ended and we headed home where we noticed a little bit of a rasp in my son’s breathing but attributed it to the dust and camping.  Over the next couple of days his cough didn’t get any better and it didn’t get any worse and he had an appointment with his doctor in a couple of weeks so we decided to keep an eye on it and just wait and see.  Well a couple of days ago he developed a cough that kind of sounded like you where choking Elmo while kicking him in the giblets repeatedly.  At first it was only an isolated incident but when it kept happening over the course of two days we decided to take him to urgent care.  Here we got an X-ray on his chest and found an almost almond-sized piece of pea gravel lodged just at the top of his lung in the bronchial tube.  We were off to Children’s Hospital and the land of teensy little operating instruments.

We were admitted overnight and the surgery happened at about 10:00am the next morning.  Now I know this was probably a traumatic experience for the little guys but I do not think I have ever seen anything so funny as a one-year-old coming out of anesthesia.  When we walked back to the recovery room we could hear the nurses laughing before we even got there.  Think back to high school parties when you were a senior.  Remember the freshman that would always show up and drink too much trying to impress the seniors but end up naked on the pool table mumbling incoherent song lyrics while others at the party prodded him in the stomach with a yard stick because it would make him giggle?  It was kind of like that but without the hangover and, I’m sure, much more expensive.

The surgery itself lasted a grand total of about 16 minutes and the doctor gave us the piece of gravel in a cup.  The only dilemma  I am currently facing is what to do with the pebble.  I am thinking that I may have it set in a chunk of amber and mounted on the end of a cane.  It would be my pimp stick but I am open to suggestions.

As I have mentioned in a previous response to one of my fellow bloggers I am a novice gardener.  This is the first year I have had a garden of my own for many reasons.  This is the first time I have had a yard big enough to have a garden and I have always been around someone who had a garden so I would just help with theirs.  I am growing, with good success so far, jalapeno and green peppers, roma and sweetie cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, red and yellow onions, cucumbers, lettuce, zucchini, carrots, raspberries, marionberries, blueberries, strawberries, basil, cilantro, mint, chives, and parsley.  I have been growing most of these plants in my house for some weeks now and have started moving them into the outside garden.  Up until this time all of my gardening has been pretty theoretical in nature.  Almost like I have been playing acting the farmer.  Now that I have put plants into soil I have broken myself makes everything a little more real somehow.  

However there is a little flaw to my plan.  I have found myself becoming more and more obsessed with gardening and gardening techniques.  I have added four or five different plants to my garden/herb/berry garden since the first till and this does nothing but divide my attentions more and more.  I feel kind of like I am playing a progressive game of Whack-a-Mole where the longer the game last the more moles are thrown into the mix.  On one hand you want more moles because they deserved to be whacked and who better to whack them but you but one the other hand the more moles that are added the more places you have to give your attention.  Right now I feel like I still have a handle on the number of moles that are in my game but if many more get thrown at me I may just keel over.

Anyway the reason I titled this post the way I did was because I made pizza tonight for my family’s pizza and a movie night, Lion King in case you were wondering, and I was able to harvest some fresh basil to put on one of the pies.  There is nothing like fresh basil, especially when all you have to do is to walk out your back door and yank some off a bush.   

The other day I was introduced to a world that I knew existed but had never explored.  It is a world full of unfathomable depths that can make the mind swirl and the mouth become numb with anticipation.  It is a world that I had never thought could hold so many possibilities for someone like me.  This is the world of home brewing.  Over the years I have drank my fair share of beer and have always had a decent palate that would require a decent quality.  Since moving to Oregon I have really been bordering on the edge of beer snobbery, which I am alright with because it means I don’t buy crap.  I also roast my own coffee which I find is a similar, yet less time consuming, endeavor and I am also a novice gardener.  There is something to be said about being able to consume something that has been forged by the sweat of one’s brow, or in the case of home brewing after hours of spending time with close friends and drinking.  Even if one was able to find a higher quality product than that which was brewed, roasted, or grown by oneself it still wouldn’t measure up because whenever you take part in producing something part of yourself goes with it.  Every morning when I wake up with my three-year-old and grind my coffee beans there is part of me that takes a little extra care to make the end product perfect.  I do this because I enjoy good coffee and I also want to preserve the part of me that is in the mug.  I have been hooked on home brewing.  I will never be able to go back.  Don’t get me wrong, I will drink other beer in the future, just as I will drink other coffee, but it won’t be the same.  I haven’t even tasted the beer that we started the other day but I can tell you that the first glass will be the best glass of beer I have ever tasted.

“…there is only one game at the heart of America and that is baseball, and only one beverage to be found sloshing at the depths of our national soul and that is beer.”
-Peter Richmond

“We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old.”
-Martin Luther

Much more over here.

If God had not intended us to drink beer, He would not have given us stomachs.
–David Daye

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
–Benjamin Franklin

You can find more here.

Holy Taco presents us with a list they call The 11 Manliest Cocktails In The World.  Some of the highlights are:

• Irish Car Bomb
• Rusty Nail
• Jagerade
• Nuclear Waste — keeps Keith Richards alive and … can you consider him “well?”