#133 - ninety.

i'm pretty lucky in that of my four grandparents, three are still alive & kicking. my mom's mom passed away a few years back, but her dad turned ninety last weekend. he's always been the liveliest of my grandparents. he grew up in brooklyn, worked the same job for years, raised three kids & was active in both his church & community. he's the kind of guy who gives you a extra firm handshake when he sees you because he sees the humor in giving an extra firm handshake. he has a place in a retirement community now & whenever we visit him & go to the dining room for a meal, pretty much everyone there is his best friend. he has jokes for all. during one visit a couple years ago, we were standing in the dining room entrance waiting to be seated, so i checked out a bulletin board featuring pics from the community halloween party. my grandfather was in a few. he had gone as a vampire in drag that year.

my parents hosted a gathering last sunday in celebration of his ninetieth, so i spent the weekend at their place up in good ol windham, NH. it's always interesting to be home & see how my parents respond to the stressful task of satisfying a houseful of guests. in addition to the six of us in the immediate family, they were hosting fifteen other relatives, so it was one of the biggest gatherings they've hosted in at least a decade. luckily, nowadays they have three semi-responsible, somewhat helpful adult kids (hell yeah i'll prep the deli platter!) & a level-headed teenager, which means they don't have to do everything, so i think that eases a little bit of the stress for them.

for me, the gathering was an opportunity to catch up with a few relatives i hadn't talked to in ages. there were my two cousins, one of whom i haven't seen since the clinton administration & who is now all adult & married & living in pamplona & shit. as two of the four people eating bean burgers, we totally bonded. four of my mom's cousins were there as well. i remembered them from when i was a kid & they were teenagers, so it was interesting to see how they all turned out. one of them lives in alaska & worked on the pipeline until she was laid off. another has two adopted girls, one of who noted that "the jonas brothers' music sounds stupid." yeah, little girl. a third was wicked excited when i said i helped with nickelback's website. i can't remember much about the fourth, but she was nice.

i also learned that back in the day, my aunt (a baker chef who is my mom's younger sister & the pamplona cousin's mom) had baked a cake for president ford. somebody made a comment about it as she cut my grandfather's birthday cake, a white cake with white frosting & fresh raspberries on top that she had prepared. auntie definitely has baking skillz. as everyone got a piece & stood around consuming it & chatting, i couldn't help but feel a wee bit wistful. my mom had organized a successful gathering for twenty some people, my dad got to give tours of the yard & his gardening & my grandpa got to be with three generations of his family on his ninetieth birthday. the best part? on the way out, my grandpa & i promised to do it again in ten years.

#133 - ninety.
snack: pumpkin whoopie pie
drink: manchester brewing the devil's rooster märzen



on saturday, my dad picked my brother, his girlfriend & i up in boston & after dropping the bro & girlfriend off at various locations, my father & i drove around the greater windham area for a bit. i'd informed him about my quest to try tons of pumpkin beers, so first, he took me to the drink shoppe in hudson to see what they had in stock. after i had dawdled around in there for a little while, we tried to hit up a sandwich place he likes. unfortunately, when we arrived, they were closed. turns out they'd closed just three minutes earlier. sorry bout the dawdling, dad. he was still hungry for a sandwich, so we headed back to windham & stopped at the kitchen at windham junction, a cutesy lil small town place just down the street from the parents' home. i smoked a cig whilst sitting at the picnic table in the picture on their website!

my dad & i stood at the counter whilst he waited for his food & chatted up the woman behind the counter. at one point, he looked into the glass case next to the counter & noticed a tray of treats. once he determined that they were pumpkin whoopie pies, he looked at me, the professional snacker & decided to get two. then he tried talking to the woman behind the counter about my blog, leading to me having to explain this here blog to her. she seemed quite confused about the whole thing.

when we got home, i tried one of the whoopie pies & WHOOPIE was it tasty. it was crazy sugary sweet, so i had to take my time with it, but it had cream cheese frosting on the inside & cakelike outsides dusted with powdered sugar & DOGGAM! i'd also picked up a piece of chocolate cake, but my my dad, figuring i wanted both of the whoopie pies for blogging purposes, ended up eating that chocolate cake instead of his whoopie pie...so i got to eat two of them last weekend. since those whoopie pies were damn good but are now hundreds of miles away up in NH, i'm seriously considering making some of my own. so many baking ideas, so little time!

i did find some pumpkin beers at the drink shoppe, but they were for another time, so i also picked up a bottle of manchester brewing the devil's rooster märzen. they had a rack of manchester brewing beers, all with nifty labels like the pentagram/rooster one on the devil's rooster märzen. satanic! they had one beer there called the "conspiracy theory oatmeal stout," featuring a guy whispering "did you hear about building 7?" into another dude's ear on the front of the label & another with soviet-style font & imagery (the koncord kombat ale). the second beer's named in honor of the city that's home to manchester brewing & all the communists in the state, NH's capital city of concord.

whenever i'm having a beer at my parents' house, i benefit from the chilled mugs they keep in the freezer. nobody in the house drinks beer, so i'm not sure why they have them, but i digress. i'm not a fan of the frosty mugs, but if i take one out for a bit before using it, it warms up enough to not ruin the taste. since the devil's rooster comes in a 22 oz bottle, i grabbed the biggest mug available & poured me a tall, semi-frosty one. it's an orange/amber beer with a brown sugar/toffee sort of taste. definitely something to crow about. devilishly good. i'm hoping that i'll get to try a few more of their beers next time i'm in NH. maybe the one with the dominatrix "naughty nancy" cartoon character on the label, although that one apparently "makes you say 'whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks,'" so i may have to opt for another one. i'm 95% sure my parents wouldn't appreciate that sort of behavior under their roof.

snack away! #5 - deez nutz.

growing up in new hampshire, the options for local professional/semi-professional/ being-paid-in-grade-F-meat sporting events were...well let’s just say they were limited. in fact, as i remember it, the only option was the nashua pirates, the AA affiliate of the pittsburgh pirates. the reason behind this was pretty obvious: new hampshire had a total population of about 36 ^{(citation needed)}.  it may have been slightly higher than that, i’m not sure. look, i’m not a "scientist."  the point is, we at least had the pirates, and my mom would occasionally take me and a bunch of my friends to catch a game.

OK...it was me and two of my friends.

OK...one friend.

OK...i’d go with just my mom. *sigh* let’s just move on.

the pirates only stuck around for three seasons, most likely because someone in the pirates organization finally figured out where the hell nashua was. i imagine it was a quick conversation that went something like, "hey earl, did you realize we had a minor league affiliate in new hampshire?!" "no i didn’t...why did we put a team in canada?"  after that there was a dark period in new hampshire pro sports known as "nothing," which was fine by me since i was past the age where i could be entertained by below average ballplayers, but not old enough to know how awesome sports were with beer.

that brings us to the present day. new hampshire has had a resurgence of marginal and minor league sports teams, led by the manchester monarchs (hockey – l.a. kings minor league team) and the new hampshire fisher cats (baseball – blue jays AA team). the "oates" to these "halls" of the granite state sports landscape are undoubtedly the manchester freedom. who are the manchester freedom, you ask?...seriously? you asked that? dude, i provided a link. do you need me to come over and carry you to your rascal too? dag.

the freedom are part of the solution to the sport everyone has been craving: woman’s tackle football! wow. and this isn’t anything like the lingerie football league, which I could see pulling in a few bucks (i mean just look at that professionally designed website!). this is full pads and they take themselves very seriously. a friend of mine attended their first home game...he said attendance was approximately 100 people. oops.

snack away! #5 - deez nutz.
guest blogger: jay wilkinson, nashua, nh

snack: hampton farms cajun creole hot nuts
drink: woodstock inn pig's ear brown ale

we started this thing off with baseball, so what better snack & drink combo to represent that then peanuts and beer? now, i know what you're thinking: here comes a poorly-executed and predictable joke about genitalia. well you're wrong. i'm not doing it. no way. i will not sully a great snack like hot nuts. i just enjoy the taste of a couple warm and salty nuts in my mouth too much to go down like that.

the hampton farms cajun creole hot nuts were a great little find for me about a month ago at the local supermarket. these things are ridiculous. i don't know what kind of sorcery the good folks at hampton farms are employing to make these little peanut wonders, but somehow the peanuts are coated with cajuny goodness while still in the shell. the first time i bought them, i ate a half a bag in one sitting.

about an hour later, i decided to take my contacts out. there was no hand-washing in the interim. for those of you without contacts, coating your fingers with any sort of hot sauce or powder and then sticking one of the aforementioned fingers in your eye is a good way to come up with new curse words. that night, i came up with "poopsticks" and another one i won't print here, as it's basically a slight to the queen of england, a large breed of dog, and a popular confectionary treat all-in-one. look, i don't know who reads this thing.

where was i? oh yeah...hot nuts are the nuts of the gods and go great with beer. i chose a local brew that i tried for the first time this weekend, woodstock inn pig's ear brown ale. i'm not ashamed to admit i chose it because of the name. i'm a simple man, but it was actually a fine beer and i'll likely go back for more in the future. the hot nuts are not local, though, and i urge you to go out and find some if you enjoy the whole peanut-in-the-shell experience.

jay wilkinson is a 34-yr old new hampshire native who has lived there his whole life. except for that year in the circus where he cultivated his love of peanuts and his legendary hatred of clown culture. seriously, anyone who becomes a clown is just masking underlying and disturbing sociopathic tendencies. get help, freak. did you know that penn of penn & teller went to clown college? i know, right?! i bet you that dude has killed a few drifters in his day.

#49 - i want to be anarchy.

it's official. these days, film degree be damned, i prefer tv to movies & here's why. tv gives the show's creator(s) greater freedom to meditate on an overarching storyline, stretch it out, pass it off to various directors, highlight different characters, kill people off, introduce new people, etc etc. with the exception of sequel films, which often suck, stories told by film are generally limited to a static 1.5-3 hours of story. that just doesn't do it for me these days.

i just finished watching the seventh & final season of the shield, which means i watched about 70 hours of storyline with that show alone. as david bianculli noted in fresh air's 12/24 segment on the top ten tv programs of the year, well-executed tv can be like a novel, with a starting point, an ending point & a journey in between. when he said this, it was in reference to the shield. screw the sopranos. the final episode of the shield might just be the greatest series finale ever made. it was directed by clark johnson, who also directed the pilot for the show & also directed the pilot & final episodes of the wire (in addition to playing gus haynes, the baltimore sun desk editor in the wire's final season). seriously, it's worth watching the series straight through just to get to that final episode of the shield. for me, it also helped that unlike with the sopranos, i had no prior knowledge of how the show ended, which allowed me to experience something with uninfluenced expectations, a rare opportunity.

in addition to the clark johnson example, with my growing love of tv, i've discovered that there's some serious tv incest going on. fx's new highest rated show, sons of anarchy, is created by kurt sutter, who wrote for the shield & also played armenian hitman margos dezerian in the 1st & 3rd seasons. he's married to ms peg bundy katey sagal, who plays one of the leads on sons of anarchy and also had an occasional role on the shield. sons also features a major creepyass storyline with jay karnes, who played dutch on the shield.

sons is impressive. i watched the first season while i was in new hampshire at the parents' house for the holidays. there are shakespearean undertones, religious undertones, reflections on aging & paths taken & not taken, copious amounts of punching and hot biker babes like the characters played by maggie siff (who you may also know from her hot work as rachel menken on mad men) & taryn manning (who you may know from her hot work as a prostitute). heck, i'll go as far as to say that katey sagal's hot & the main character, played by charlie hunnam, could definitely knock johnny depp from the title of "dude i'd most prefer to sleep with." turns out he was on the uk version of queer as folk. well there you go then.

i found myself about eight episodes into the season on wednesday night when i decided it was time for a snack run...

#49 - i want to be anarchy.

snack: t.g.i.friday's quesadilla snack chips
drink: shock top belgian white

...but being that it was 9pm on christmas eve in new hampshire, the places open for snack purchasing were at a minimum. i hopped in the car with my teenage brother & we tried the shaws supermarket in windham (closed), the 24-hour wal-mart in salem (closed. wha! commerce closes?) & eventually settled for the hess gas station in salem. people always need gasoline & cute mini tankers round the holidays. here's what i could get my hands on:

for snacking, i picked up a bag of t.g.i.friday's quesadilla snack chips. i've seen them before & always avoided them but had to go with them given the low uniqueness/appealing nature of the hess snack selection. i have no idea what gives t.g.i.fridays the right to qualify these snacks as quesadillaesque other than the shape & them calling them "quesadillas." basically, the "quesadillas" are puffy crackerlike things shaped like quesadilla wedges, with a bunch of powdered cheese on them. eh.

for drinking, i scoured the beer cooler for something unique or barring that, tasty. if i'd gone for a single beer i would have been drinking bud or some equivalent & i wasn't having that, so i had to decide on a six-pack. the one that looked most unique was the shock top belgian white, with its mohawk-wearing orange mascot on the label. i took a six-pack of it out of the cooler & started to examine it when a female employee of the gas station came out of the back room & as she walked by, said to me, "shocking, isn't it?" well played, gas station lady. well played. when i got the six-pack home & popped one open, i glanced at the label & discovered that shock top is a michelob beer, one of anheuser-busch's attempts to create microbrewlike beers with some semblance of flavor. eh. the sons of anarchy drink michelob round the club, so that makes me cool by default. sure they aren't drinking the belgian white, but i suppose it'll have to do.

by the time i left nh on saturday morning to head back to brooklyn, i had finished the first season of sons of anarchy & the quesadilla chips. one amazed me & made me wish i was in a motorcycle club, or at least living the free lifestyle & babes that come with it. one did not. the six-pack of shock top remained unfinished. for me, there's a limit to how many beers i feel comfortable drinking when home at the parents for a three-day holiday stretch, especially when it's basically just slightly better than michelob michelob. that limit? five.

#42 - trapped in the closet.

so i'm staying in nh at the parents' house for a few days for the thanksgiving holiday. when i visit them, i usually stay upstairs in the bedroom that i shared with my younger brother for 13 years or so. these days, the room is now painted greenish-blue, is much cleaner than i ever remember it & is now referred to by my parents as "the guest room"...& i am now a guest.

since i left home at the end of high school, my parents have been nice enough to store a ton of pack-ratted junk from my childhood. through the years, my mother has got me to whittle down my horde of childhood possessions, but there are still a good amount here & there around the house--some boxes stored in the attic, a few boxes down in the basement & a number of random things in the closet of my childhood bedroom. a quick glimpse into the closet reveals:

bank pseudo-collection - there's a shiny silver piggy bank & a ceramic, hand-painted owl bank, complete with sad owl eyes (that i am amazed never got broke) & a square silver one that pretty much never got used. these banks are where i stashed my occasional scratch & the varied coins from around the world that my dad gave to me throughout the years. this tradition has apparently continued, as this thanksgiving, i watched my 16-year old brother sort through my grandfather's stash of quarters to find alaska quarters for both he & my grandfather's state coin collections.

polaroid camera - during my freshman year at b.u., they had a housing fair, where students would go & visit people at various fold-up tables, checking out the housing options & other campus services. one of my floormates, who was likely tipsy at the time, swiped this polaroid camera (& a porkpie hat that you were supposed to put on & then take polaroids of yourself wearing) off some table...& somehow i ended up with it. the whereabouts of the porkpie hat are unknown at present time.

1984 windham soccer association trophy - i played soccer, baseball & basketball every possible year of my childhood, up until high school, when i became too old for the town recreational leagues. i liked soccer & feel like i was fairly good at it & going into high school, i was planning on trying out for the team...until i discovered that i had to get a physical & for some reason that freaked me out & i didn't go out for the team...end of career...but in 1984, i was still riding high & i (& every other kid in the entire league) got a trophy for my skillz.

hardy boys books - the hardy boys books were the first series of books that i can remember getting excited about. they had intrigue, mystery & titles like the secret panel, the witchmaster's key, the secret of pirate's hill & the tower treasure. reading them eventually led to me writing a short mystery titled "mystery at skeleton's groove," starring all my friends & featuring both a fight scene with our nemeses--the shlack gang--and a concert in the final chapter by our mystery-solving band, the rock-its.

strat-o-matic games - strat-o-matic creates board games based on actual statistics from actual sports pro & college sports teams, with cards for all the actual players, based on how good or bad that player was in the previous sports season, so you could, if you took the time, recreate the 1986 baseball season, for instance. i tried to do this, keeping score of every game & compiling the players' statistics. because of this, i became really comfortable with numbers & learned how to do a good amount of math in my head, as i figured out players' batting averages & stuff like that.

random box containing - roddy roddy piper & the junkyard dog action figures, a new england patriots ticket stub, europe's wings of tomorrow on tape, topps cereal series baseball cards including the much-bearded trio of bruce sutter, greg luzinski & bill madlock, a calculator watch, a view finder reel from jim henson's muppet movie, a valentine from "jenna" (jenna moeckel?) telling me that i'm a great friend & urging me to keep being myself, a third place ribbon from the windham recreation department's family festival, a transformers booklet for evil insecticon shrapnel, a laminated photocopy of jake the snake roberts' autograph, a sketch of a croissant that was supposed to be colored in but wasn't with "33%" written on the sheet in turquoise blue marker...probably the grade i got for not coloring it in.

#42 - trapped in the closet.
snack: mrs smith's boston cream pie
drink: ocean spray cranberry & blueberry juice

a holiday at my parents' house always features a few pies. as far as pies go, i've never ever liked dry-ass pie crusts. eating them reminds my mouth of the feeling i get when i cut my fingernails too short & then pull on a fresh pair of socks, scraping my newly-exposed fingertips against clean cotton. pie crusts are akin to licking a paper towel in my book. you can put all the warm cinnamony apples you please on that pie crust, but it's still fingernails cross a chalkboard, people.

boston cream pie plays by a whole different set of rules though. for starters, it's more cakelike than 95% of pies, which means no dry-ass pie crust getting in the way of dessert time fun & there's just something about the texture of the creamy junk that drives me wild...& how can i not love that chocolate. my mom knows this, so she's always made sure to get a boston cream pie every holiday. tonight, all three present family members asked me if i wanted a piece of mrs smith's boston cream pie. i was all "chill, people. i'll get to my pie." eventually i had one. mmm, obviously.

& there's always some form of cranberry juice in my parents' fridge. i finished off the bottle of ocean spray cranberry & blueberry juice with my boston cream pie. tastewise, i'd have to say it's one of my favorite cranberry blends--not too sweet, not too tart...& it probably helped partially clean out my urinary tract, which is always a beverage bonus.

#27 - my spicy home state.

at the age of four my father & i took a trip from my parents' chelsea, ma apartment up route 93 to windham, nh, where my parents (then aged 25 & 27) were in the process of building their first & only house. as i remember it, he & i walked around on dirt through the shell of the house as men hammered around us. you could still see through the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms would eventually be. a house had become more of a priority for my parents, as my now-28-year-old brother was on the way, upping the kid total to three. we would move in soon after & that's where i lived from then until i moved 45 minutes back down route 93 to boston for college. new hampshire sweeping upbringing assessment...good education, boring surroundings. a few nh facts fo yo mind:

- new hampshire has no sales tax, so people from massachusetts come over the border to shop, particularly at our state liquor stores, located both close to the border & directly off the highway, they're like rest areas with no place to pee but a wealth of "the cure for what ails ya"...very convenient for mass area fraternities looking to purchase grain alcohol for tubs of punch...i'm jus' saying is all.

- we host the first state primary, which i think makes us a skew corollary to the color red. bonus political fact...if it wasn't for arizona, we would have been the last state to declare mlk day a holiday.

- we've begat one president...franklin pierce...yes, his actions did result in the creation of the republican party & he is the only elected president to seek the nomination for a 2nd term but not get it & is often referred to as one of the worst presidents ever. thanks for noticing.

#27 - my spicy home state.
snack: lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bar
drink: v-8

turns out that lindt & sprungli (lindt usa) is based out of my home state. stratham, to be exact. just southwest of portsmouth. i'm snacking on one of their lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bars. i've been all about the fancy gourmet chocolates these days. in my book, i figure if i'm gonna need to consume chocolate to remain sane, a fancy imported chocolate bar beats a lame-o possibly-been-melted-in-the-bodega hershey bar any day of the week. gourmet chocolate (& specifically dark chocolate) is the future, people. if you've invested in clean technologies, i'm sorry to have to break that news to you.

omg. so i had been feeling guilty about drinking so much soda & thinking of what i could replace it with & thought about drinkable chili chocolate complements & went for the "tomato/vegetable goodness" of v-8. tomato...chili...sounded right to me...big mistake. i couldn't even get past the half way point of a 12oz glass. v-8 is nasty. i mean, on one level, it is only one letter & 32 numbers away from being a toxic lubricant. at first, i told myself the reason why i couldn't drink it was because i was in the middle of watching true blood (specifically something that happens in the 2nd episode) but it goes deeper than that. i will say it once...tomato juice is good for nothing but creating bloody marys. you can try to tell me that it's good for me. you can try to tell me it'll make me straighter (as if that's possible!). you can call it "splash" and pair it with berries. you can lock me in a room with nothing but v-8 & yoo hoo and i will choose yoo hoo every time.

that is how awful v-8 is. it almost ruined this blog entry...i originally wrote 95% of this on sunday night, but my life was thrown into such a whirlwind by the awfulness of the v-8, that i just couldn't finish it until now, three days later...new slogan = v-8...tastes like puke, but without the vodka & tabasco.