Getting ready to go to my Dad's wake. I am spending the night at Harris Ranch - full report next week.

TRAVELING FANTASIES



Love the description:
I'm Maki, I seem Like an ordinary girl, but out of the blue an experience that made me different!

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today....

I was in the hospital with acute pancreatitis, detoxing off of alcohol with vast quantities of Valium. Happy as a clam to be ridding myself of something that had turned out not to be such a good friend, after all.

Interesting to think that there is not one TNSC member who ever saw me with a real drink in my hand, although many of you have seen me with a beverage. People in my last 6 or so jobs have never seen me with a drink, but I have partied down with all of them.

Tonight I am going out with a fellow "friend of Bill W", who is celebrating 2 years. We and several of her friends are chowing down and then getting "chips", little plastic or metal pieces with numbers imprinted on them to represent years (or months, at first). I haven't been to a meeting in 7 years, since a different fellow friend took me to a lunchtime chip meeting to get my 13-year chip. But I remember the amazement I felt, and the hope, of seeing someone getting up to get their 20 year (or more) chips when I was still new and fragile. I want to repay that favor and maybe give another fledgling that same hope.

Please, have a really good drink tonight for me (I never got to have a Cosmo or a Mojito) - I still like to drink vicariously through my friends!

So I guess it is the end of an era.
Thanks for putting up with my rantings all these years - maybe we'll get to do it some more.
So, Cushie, good luck!
Keep in touch.
and...

LEAVE 'EM GAPING


P.S Buster is a year old today!!

My new passion is cooking. I am addicted to the website ecookbooks.com (Jessica's Biscuit) and the Food Network. My mission this weekend is to get some new pans. I have bookmarks on my computer for smoked salts and exotic sauces. I was a devotee of The Next Food network Star (my favorite won) and am currently avidly following Top Chef (my fave is in the top 3). I love watching knife skills, and turning food just by doing that little wrist-flip to the pan. I have always liked to cook, but got re-invigorated for some reason I'm not real sure how to pinpoint. Was it eating something really great and thinking, I need to know how to make this? Was it the Anthony Bourdain Les Halles cookbook that I got just because I like him but made me want to find veal bones for a demi-glace? I don't know. But I am rediscovering the joy of cooking (and I don't mean the book, even though I am glad it is in my library in case the world as we know it comes to an end and I need to learn how to skin and cook a squirrel). One really great thing is that my mom loves to cook, too, and we are planning some culinary adventures together. I still need to work on my organization, though. The other day I semi-burned a bunch of ingredients because I lost my can opener and had to run upstairs to figure out their electric one. I still haven't found my can opener.

SHE-MALE CHEFS