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.

Dishwasher leak - soggy floors

There's
a lot that goes into a brand new house, including brand new appliances
and brand new leaks. This past Friday while Shirley was (thank GOD!) at
home, the dishwasher started leaking. It wasn't ON ....but some
connection in there went kaput! Oh joy. So she emailed me a picture of
the setup under the sink and I told her which valve to shut to stop the
water to the dishwasher. Then Shirley discovered that not only
was there a little water pooled on the tile in front of the dishwasher,
but there was also a very soggy carpet in the hallway. Oh double joy.
Fortunately the home warranty guy responded very quickly, and
within an hour or so the water damage expert was on-site. He pulled
(actually bashed) off the baseboard trim at the bottom of the cabinets
and set this blower to work drying it out.

In
the hallway, the warranty guy had already pulled the carpet back. The
water damage guy had some fancy gauge that he poked in all over the
place to see how far the water had gone, and then removed and discarded
the carpet padding for that area, set a large blower to work at the end
of the hall, and then hooked up a big dehumidifier with a hose draining
out into the bathroom. I was very impressed with the speed and the
quality of the response to our problem. But man, it was a drag
listening to those machines for a couple of days (it was important to
ensure that things were completely dried out. Later this week
the repairs will be done, and we'll (hopefully) be back to our normal
state of insanity as we continue to settle into the new abode.

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 :-)