Saturday, August 12, 2006

P.S. Here's daytime Hartford from the air. (Tall buildings near center.) It looks small, doesn't it?

Posted at 1:59:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

My ear hurt yesterday, but it's all recovered now. My in-progress airplane playlist is fantastic. I started it on the way back from Provincetown Wednesday, saving all the songs that sounded good over my headset as an on-the-fly (er, On-The-Go) playlist. It's weird how some songs are really hard to hear, but others sound nice and clear. (Most Bob songs sound bad, unfortunately.) Thus, the special playlist. Weird but cool criteria for selecting songs. My headset only plays music out of the left ear (radio communications stay on the right), so that affects what makes a song airplane material or not. I'll post the finished playlist here, maybe.

I love listening to music in the dark, flying. All the lights below. Hartford with arms stretching out like a giant star. Real stars and other planes up with us. And the bright moon, making the river glow. Tonight it was so orange, like a big pumpkin. We always seem to see fireworks displays, from far up above. Every weekend, and I am not exaggerating. It's cold now. Especially in New Hampshire, but here too. I like my new striped wrinkly shirt. Dean says it's officially called the cushion shirt, because it's the same colors as the cushion that came with our plane.

This morning I had a great dream where I was a Ld. H kind of guy. (It was the late 1800s.) He got in trouble flirting with the ladies at a party and one of them, a Rubenesque beauty with absolutely amazing skin, was reprimanding him and poking him in the ribs repeatedly because he hadn't been able to keep his hands off her. He good-naturedly agreed he quite deserved it. She took his slippers to use as blackmail, and they looked exactly like my slippers (mauve velvet).

Posted at 12:26:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Hm. It's difficult to research oysters. But now I think I'm probably not allergic to oysters (good!) but that I got mildly poisoned by them. I didn't get sick or anything (just sort of nauseated) but I did feel feverish last night. And dizzy, and really tired.

From my notebook, at Napi's:

"Wow--look at your eyes! Your eyes are bulging out."

I LIKE RUSSIAN OYSTERS!
taste of the sea
WOW.
best food ever
gulp.

To waitress: "This is officially my new favorite food ever."
Waitress: "'Officially', huh? I like that."

--

Russian oysters = five big raw oysters on the half shell, all swimming in their brine, with a tiny mound of sour cream on top, piled with black caviar. And they are heavenly. But dangerous. :-(

I felt the exact same way (but more intensely and for longer, lying awake tortured for hours and hours) several times when we were in Block Island (years ago), but I can't remember if I had oysters then. Not anything like these, that's for sure, but maybe they or some other raw shellfish was part of a dish I ate. I don't know. But that's one of the reasons I hate staying overnight in BI; I always seem to feel sick. And I never feel sick, so it's very, very weird!

Anyway, I LOVED the oysters. Dean kept trying to take cell phone photos of my rapturous expressions while eating them. Provincetown itself was just okay. But the restaurant was fabulous. They had a million vegetarian things for Dean, great coffee, and a huge menu of interesting stuff. Everything we ordered was great. I wrote in my notebook, "I already want to come back!! & order 3 plates of Russian oysters!" Maybe not.

I will have to try raw oysters again during a month with an R.

Posted at 12:43:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Why is it that just about every week, the item in "What is the grossest thing you've ever eaten?" is one of my favourite foods?
In past weeks, we've had soft-shell crab, caviar ("It was the most disgusting thing I've ever tried. It tasted like salty dead fish."), escargot, sea urchin, and, of course, good old beef tongue, not to mention tripe and jelly fish. (I'm jealous of the chick who got to try sea anemone.) I'm really surprised no one has said anchovies.

I almost forgot about the other entertaining thing about Race Point Beach: the nice cold & clammy codium fragile I found on our long walk to nowhere, and my crab claw pal, who kept talking to Dean, pointing out all the delicious "hot & smelly" things he noticed on the beach (like big filleted fish with only their heads, spines and tails remaining, brains being picked out by appreciative gulls). Um, yeah, having a talking disembodied crab claw pal does sound like something Murdock would do. So?

Posted at 9:43:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

According to Michael Cunningham in Land's End,

The light in Provincetown rivals that of Paris or Venice. Being in Provincetown is like standing on a raft moored fifty miles out to sea. Its light is aquatic; it falls not only down from the sky but up again from the water, so that when you stand there, you do so as if between two immense platters of mirror.... If you go there on a sunny day, you may imagine that you've been wearing tinted glasses all your life and have only now taken them off. Painters have been drawn to the light of Provincetown for over a century. Edward Hopper lived in Truro, and his paintings of Cape Cod will give you a good idea of the slightly terrifying purity of the light, its capacity to be exquisite, dazzling, beneficent, and merciless all at the same time. Like most things of great beauty, it is not entirely gentle and not merely pretty, not in any way.

Posted at 4:02:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Listened to Themetime Eyes last night in bed. Do I like it? What do you think?

Posted at 1:11:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

I think I'm allergic to my New Favorite Food. That is, OYSTERS. I actually feel dizzy. (Unless I just have eyestroke.)

Posted at 11:49:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Monday, August 07, 2006

!! I got Hawaiian black sea salt at Trader Joe's! It's very black. I wonder what makes it black? Lava?? [Edit: Yes, lava!] Forgot to mention on Saturday: Dean and I went to Rocky in the afternoon, before our trip to N.H., and the store manager was working at the cash register, so when she got out one of those little tea cups for my cappuccino, I spoke up and asked if I could have one of the bigger cups instead. She immediately switched cups and said she'd wanted to ask me which kind I prefer. I told her I like the bigger ones better because there's more room for foam. So, good deal!! Straight to the source! I bet I won't be getting any more weird cups now.

Posted at 5:37:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Plum Island and Great Gull Island = extreme weirdness!! (1, 2, 3, 4). I am not surprised. I had very similar theories, seeing them from the air!

Posted at 1:05:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

We took my dad and my nephew Thomas for a ride in the plane this afternoon, and the visibility (and new guest headsets, x 1,000!) was great! Flew over UConn and the lake and had some pretty decent views of my Gs house from the air (it's very hard to see, because it's so nestled in the trees). We tried to spot my Grandmother's old house on Moulton Road, but it was impossible.

My mom waited on the ground since Thomas was visiting from Poughkeepsie (he has a summer internship at the IBM campus there) and it was a special opportunity for him, whereas she'll get a chance another time. It was nice to see Thomas and get to know him a little better--I enjoyed talking to him at the Gs'! It was really neat how relaxed and family-ish everyone was together, even though we rarely see Thomas and I've only met him a few times. I liked it.

We had to meet Dean back at the Windham airport by 6:30 because the electronic gate code thingy wasn't working since it was struck by lightning, so the visit at my Gs wasn't that long (we stopped for pizza on the way back to the airport, since there wasn't much time to cook dinner, and I rode with Thomas in his car), but it was still nice. (And I got some blueberries!). My Gingers weren't surprised that we bought a plane. Ha! My mom said my dad predicted we would, although they didn't expect we'd do it so soon.

After we took off to fly home, and were nearing MMK, I said to Dean, "It's still so early... since we're up here anyway, we should take advant and not just fly straight back!" So he asked me where I wanted to go, and I said, "I don't care! Anywhere!" We flew along the Connecticut River down to the ocean (past the Goodspeed Opera House and Gillette Castle and all that stuff), then flew over the Sound and out by Plum Island and Great Gull Island, off the tip of Long Island. Great Gull Island was swarming with birds--we could see them from the air. And the water near it was full of birds diving for fish--from the air, they looked like those waterbugs that scoot around on the surface of ponds. The coolest thing was that as soon as we reached the end of the river and started flying over the ocean, I could SMELL it. Dean was flying really low--only 500 feet above the water (the neat thing about water is that you're allowed to fly low over it, since there aren't any buildings or etc.), and it just instantly smelled so oceany. Mmmmm. The sunset was really pretty reflecting on the ocean, but I didn't have my camera since I hadn't thought I'd need it just for a flight back to Meriden. Ha.

This has been such a fantastic weekend!

Posted at 10:06:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Driving home from the airport:

Dean: "I want--"
Laura: "One of those Mexican sodas?"
Dean: "Yes! How did you know??!"
Laura: "I don't know; I just did."
Dean: "What the heck! How did you really know??"
Laura: "ESP?"

We flew to Newport, New Hampshire yesterday evening and had our anniversary dinner at the Mexican restaurant there. I am not a huge Mexican fan (it's Dean's fav) but it was really good. I will be writing a full review on The Flighty Flyer, natch. The best thing of all were the imported Jarritos sodas! Dean made me pick out the flavs, so I ordered Tamarind and Grapefruit. I asked the waiter what Tamarind tasted like, and he said, "You'll just have to be bold and try it," so of course I did. It reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on what. Horehound drops, maybe. It was good, but the Grapefruit was fantastic.

Posted at 12:57:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

100% great 11th anniversary. I had to be a lineman! Parlin, 52°! Home, 72 (night). It was COLD! Love love LOVE our plane. And DWP.

Posted at 1:42:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.