Was cut short in welcoming a guest this evening but was able to eek out a couple of quick drawings.


Was cut short in welcoming a guest this evening but was able to eek out a couple of quick drawings.
This post is from an article I wrote on Quora, and people seemed to enjoy it, so I’m posting it here as well.
I’m not a chef – I didn’t serve a rigorous French training campaign with stages in order to earn a toque – which is that hat with all the pleats in it. I’ve heard each pleat symbolizes a way to prepare eggs, so a chef with a lot of pleats in their hat knows quite a bit about egg preparation. That’s what you need to become a chef by the strict definition of the term.
What I am is an avid cook and foodie, who sometimes takes pictures of his food and drink, and posts them here, and on social media.
What I can offer you a little advice that may help you cook.
I started cooking at 9 or 10 years old, and have cooked almost every day for most of my life. That’s about 40 years experience. I’ve learned a few things along the way.
Many home cooks cut and prepare their ingredients while they cook. What this winds up doing is taking your attention off of the food while its being prepared on the stove or oven and increases the risk of you missing a step, an ingredient, or overcooking your food.
There’s a reason why chefs do mise en place – it means everything in its place, and its where you cut up and portion your ingredients in advance before you start cooking and assembling your meal.
Many home cooks do not rotate their pantry frequently enough. That expensive olive oil you’ve been saving from your trip to Italy two years ago? Throw it out. Its rancid. Expensive ingredients like olive oil, balsamic vinegar, spices like saffron, etc have expiration dates even shorter than the cheap, processed stuff.
Use them, or lose them. The clock starts ticking even faster from the moment you open the jar, packet or container.
Get in the habit of checking jars and condiments in your fridge. Most of them have enough vinegar or other preservatives in them to have a good long shelf life in your fridge, but that doesn’t mean they stay fresh and tasty forever.
Many cooks have the stove kicked up too high. Unless you are specifically deep-fat frying or putting a sear on something, there is no need to have your stove cranked up to high to cook. It takes a bit longer cooking at lower temperatures, but you’ll also be allowing flavors a chance to build in your food.
Lots of cooks do not season or taste their food throughout the process. Seasoning needs to be applied throughout the entire cooking process, not just at the beginning, and certainly not just at the end so all your seasoning sits on top of your food and never gets the chance to work its way into your food. There are a lot of folks out there who under-season their food because the first time they taste it is when they are sitting down behind their plate. Get in the habit of tasting while you cook. I learned that one from reading and watching Samin Nosrat’s, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.”
If you are looking to improve your cooking, start by reading that book, and while you’re at it, get yourself some cookbooks and don’t just collect them. Read them.
Many cooks start cooking before they’ve read the whole recipe.. There’s a lot of folks who start preparing from a recipe without reading it, and either skip a step, find out they don’t have enough of an ingredient or improvise and find that the improvisation does not work with the rest of the recipe.
…and then sit, scratching their head, wondering why the food isn’t delicious.
Oh, and another thing – those beautiful pictures in cookbooks? They were prepared by food stylists, maybe embellished to make them look more tasty, shot under rigorous lighting conditions, and then the pictures were processed and color corrected in Photoshop.
Please take it easy on yourself when it comes to how your food looks, but also, take some time with presentation to make your food look nice, but don’t obsess over it.
At a minimum, consider having a clean, lightly soaped cloth nearby as you are plating, so you can wipe sauce dribbles and fingerprints off the plating edge.
Read first, then prepare. Once you’ve made the dish a couple times, then consider based on your experience where the recipe could be improved.
A recipe (except for baked goods) is generally not a chemistry experiment or a list of commands. You do have some wiggle room in there, so get to wiggling. Once you’ve been cooking a while, you know what tastes good, and where a little more garlic, or fresh parsley would be better than dried. Make the change to suit your tastes.
Hopefully this will help you make some tasty food.
We used to meet in person to draw, and I ran the Naked Drawing Group of Washington DC. Men gathered, and the artists and the model all stripped naked and we drew once a month.
We can’t do that right now. There were lots of members in the group who classified as High Risk for COVID-19, and in a small space, the risk is elevated.
So I draw in someone else’s group, now, but I’ve worked with the model before.
Very fit, handsome and generally charming (@gymn0s) on Instagram with the @gaymenssketch group.
Hopefully, I can make it work that we meet regularly, and maybe come up with a way that NDG gets to meet on zoom as well?
Some statues will be moved to parks and gardens, and have plaques attached, reminding people of the murder of indigenous people, the enslavement and murder of captured Africans after their histories, language, given names, and origins of heritage were erased, and statues placed by the Daughters of the Confederacy at times when Black people were beginning to gain wealth and power, before Jim Crow laws and riots, and white men in their wives’ good White sheets transformed into symbols of terrorism, on horseback, burning torches and crosses firmly established the state of oppression and the rules Black people were expected to live by if we did not want to expect to be murdered.
Men who were tasked with governing stolen land and decided they were not given rights to speak so they were granted rights to steal the land from the thieves who stole it first after murdering the indigenous people who occupied it and called it all “discovery.”
Oh yes, we blame it all on the South, but you really need to know where all the money ended up, right?
Essay in reference to this article:
Virginia Cities Now Have the Power To Remove Confederate Statues
A bunch of moneyed men lobbied to keep her from running it if they would allow it to be established, and the proceeded to write gaps and loopholes into the law, so that it would be toothless, provide no real protection, and as happens to a lot of good ideas that get in the way of the pigs running to the trough, it was dismantled or repurposed.
In this country, that requires something called “blood quantum” which is a percentage of Native American genetics showing up under testing.
Its funny now how some tribes are finding that aligning with a President who has no loyalty has a cost as tribes are having their status revoked and lands seized if their interests run counter to people who used to work for the current President.
She called him out, because she’s the kind of person who feels like slights and wrongdoing needs to be addressed while its still fresh so we can all move on, and again she was waived off and dismissed.
This happens to women all the time and frankly, I don’t know why they haven’t just picked up the nearest object and smacked the shit out of people when it happens.
The media saw Senator Warren as a threat and did what they do when threatened – they turned their cameras away from her. They refused to mention her name. They didn’t bother to look too hard at one of the old men who had the troubling habit of touching people and smelling people without consent, would get visibly rattled and start rambling when confronted with his history of collaborating the the GOP and his votes. Those votes started wars, helped the prison system grow, undermined our schools, made credit card interest rates soar, and made it impossible for private citizens to use bankruptcy laws to renegotiate student loan debt.
The other, with his band of entitled and angry followers, aggrieved by what they saw as theft of their rights in 2016, mixed in with a few angry Russian Trolls and bots set up to stir the pot, increase the anger, and further increase factionalism and divides in this country.
Sanders was and is able to see what’s wrong with the country, but when asked how to fix it, offers over-simplified solutions that don’t address the fact that we’d be throwing millions of Americans out of work to accomplish his goals.
They don’t address the fact that the country is gigantic, it would take time to switch over to a single-payer system, it would not happen without a fight, and that there are a lot of people in this country who can not go a single day without medical coverage.
Some existing laws on the books would mean that segments of the population would not have access to care, specifically women needing abortions, where we have laws on the books that prevent the Federal government from funding the process.
Again.
The White House tends to ignore anyone that questions them, and if they persist, they are attacked, and smeared, all in a misguided effort to undermine government.
The platform of the GOP is to destroy government. Steve Bannon announced this in 2017 at CPAC during a lunchtime speech.
People cheered.
Its funny how people are usually all ready to hate and vilify government until they realize that clean water, clean air, food that won’t kill you, access to medical care, access to education, working roads and bridges, oversight over the powerful so they do not abuse their power, and many other functions are only possible if the government is funded, supported, and working.
Pandemics require a coordinated response, staffed with qualified people to stop the wave before it hit our shores, and to contain it once its here.
Only last week, VP. Pence was asking hospitals and states to email in their pandemic numbers and testing results. There was no database set up to collect the information. No website to centralize the effort.
Nothing.
Only last week, the Pentagon admitted it has 4,000 ventilators ready to be shipped to hospitals, but they were waiting on the White House for weeks to tell them where to send them.
Only last week, stockpiles of expired masks were found and had to be thrown out or the rules changed that could potentially jeopardize health care staff, the first line of defense in an epidemic, because the office in charge of verifying and rotating out stock was dismantled and never replaced.
Businesses can run just-in-time inventory.
Governments need to be prepared in advance, so their responses can be coordinated and pro-active.
Being reactive means more people die.
I love that people are stepping up and innovating solutions, and I admire that in people.
This is humanity at its best and most generous.
I am infuriated that we had and have multiple opportunities to be proactive about this and preparing for what’s coming, and our President continues to gaslight and do nothing unless forced to act.
He will be signing a bill, but only because its passing with a veto-proof bi-partisan majority.
If he weren’t so busy covering his own ass in January by calling Senators to coerce them into not hearing testimony, maybe he might have read the WHO report, the intelligence reports, and the Lancet Paper that informed him of what was coming two months before he finally admitted it was a serious matter and then proceeded to take minimal steps to do anything about it publicly, while privately trying to profit from the oncoming disaster.
I said this earlier to a friend – every President until this one, even the ones we really didn’t like, operated from the standpoint that you can’t do a thing if it even has the appearance of wrong-doing.
Of all of the faults of our current President, the one that was the most telling of how he would operate and the most damning of him is the fact that he has always lived his life pushing limits, and not in a good way.
Most people, when they push boundaries are looking to reach higher goals, and to achieve what is not usually thought to be achievable.
In this President, he pushes limits to see how much he can get away with and then tries to push even further in all things.
He can’t just marry one woman. He wants every attractive woman he sees, and feels like wealth and fame allows him to violate boundaries and take what he wants. He disposed of wives, interlacing his path with porn stars and strippers, often before divorce was even offered to the women to whom he was still married.
Then there’s the alleged rapes and alleged pedophilia that have swirled and swirls around him and those close to him.
In business, he pushes and pushed boundaries, allegedly taking money from oligarchs to run his businesses after burning every financier available to burn, and pocketing the proceeds, licensing his name and slapping it up on properties. Negotiating contracts and then stiffing people who did the work and forcing them to accept a percentage of the already to the bone agreed upon rates, causing many businesses to fail since they couldn’t cover the cost of working for him.
He used and uses the law like a weapon, and where he demands loyalty, he is inconsistent in being true to people who have sacrificed for him.
…so people out of their own pockets and time are having to scrape together things to save loved ones, families and total strangers, because that his the human thing to do.
While right now, in the White House, the President of our country and the leader of his party is likely trying to find a way to get his hands on taxpayer cash for his own profit.
Stories like these are a trap.
We are lulled into our feelings by the admirable qualities of human beings being kind and generous to one-another, which draws focus off the problem – specifically that our government and corporations knew there as an oncoming problem, as many donors were notified of the seriousness of COVID-19 in meetings with their Congresspeople and Senators just before those same folks dumped a bunch of stock.
…and then for months, they sat on the information, while the President stood behind his podium, on site at disasters in his disaster costume of MAGA hat and Teflon jacket with Presidential seal, no tie, and golf-khakis, so after the photo opp, he could fly off to another one of his golf courses and play a few rounds and soak the taxpayer for the bill.
In essence waiting for people to go to Mardi Gras, and Spring Break, and Winter Parties and conventions, and then after everyone mingled, hugged, shook hands and kissed, then announced that it was a pandemic after the illness had maximum opportunity to spread.
Was it a conspiracy? No. Was it people failing to act independently of each other creating the perfect conditions for global contagion to spread, combined with that less than admirable character trait of human beings – the desire to say “fuck you, I do what I want” in the face of being asked to exercise caution, restraint, and selflessness.
Yes. It was most certainly that, because had people been paying attention, where the White House was lying because that’s what it does, the rest of the world was telling you the truth if you had bothered to stop self medicating and self distracting and picked up or clicked on some actual news sources.
…So while the lion’s share of the blame for the Trump Virus lies at the White House, many of us share the blame as well for inaction, for not paying attention, and for being less than generous to each other as human beings when given ample opportunity to do so.
https://wjla.com/news/local/13-year-old-uses-parents-3d-printer-to-make-masks-hes-now-donating
Masturbation is a part of life for most sexual beings. Most times, we do it alone, to take the edge off. It’s perfunctory. We know where the buttons are, how hard to push, what to gently stroke and when, if we want it soft, or rough, and what selection of porn, whether it’s on screen or in our heads will move us from the stroke, to the shortness of breath, to the brink, holding our breaths until we tip over, our joyful brains overwhelmed and jizz just shooting, or spurting or oozing as the orgasm washes over us.
Then, we either rub it in and go to sleep, some eat their own jizz, or you find a cloth, an old sock, that roll of paper towel to wipe it all away, and then pull up your pants, tuck in your shirt, flush, go wash your hands and get back to work.
…or take the disk out of the blu Ray and hide it in that book on the high shelf nobody reads, pull up your sweats, and stagger back into the home office…
…or grab the soapy cloth you prepared before you started stroking, wipe your hands, grab the dry hand towel and dry off, shoot a shot for the laundry basket in the corner, pull up the covers and be out like a light before 20 breaths were taken.
…but let me ask you a question.
What if you took your time?
What if you looked into buying yourself a toy, or a few?
What if the toys did more than go up your butt?
More than wiggle and buzz?
More than able to be controlled by your phone.
What if the toy or device stroked your dick for you?
What if it did it exactly how you like it?
What if the toy operated like a video game?
Or, what if the device had wires and light electrical impulses that made if feel like someone was stroking your dick?
From the inside out?
What if there were ways that you could orgasm that would roll through your body at an intensity and length of time to make you wonder if you should call 911, because it. just. won’t. stop.
Do you realize that now, as a solitary gay male, once you get your work done, walk and feed your pets, and get through all the tasks, you have an opportunity while everyone has to stay in their homes to explore you?
Yes. You.
A chance to look online for something you haven’t tried, but were always curious about.
A chance to pull your bookmark list, or your box of old DVDs, or Blu Rays…
Or dusty old VCR tape?
To play with the porn you haven’t watched in ages?
To spread out on the couch, on the floor, on your bed, in a quiet corner of the garden, wherever you’re alone and have some privacy, and to fully explore your body?
To get out those old toys and devices, or to order something you haven’t tried, to see what it feels like to stick your dick in that? Or there? Or to play with your tight pucker. Nobody ever does that for you, but secretly you like it.
You like it a lot.
Or you’re tired of all the focus on your hole and you want to let your kind roam over what it would be like to bend over the chef, the plumber, your boss, and fuck him while he begs for it. You may be a bottom, but sometimes you’d like to top.
Or your a top, and sometimes, you really just wish that man you’ve been splitting like cordwood for years would just grab you, flip you over and put all of it in you.
Well, you have time now.
Take some time for you.
…and explore.
…and enjoy.
We are living in interesting times.
This week, COVID-19 – a Coronavirus believed to have originated in a live animal market in Wuhan, China – was declared a global pandemic earlier this week. It came in at a time of the year where people’s allergies in the United States are beginning to play havoc with peoples eyes, sinuses, and lungs, resulting in sneezing and coughing.
We also have a few versions of the flu that appear to still be active, but are on the decline.
All of these ailments have combined to change simple, taken for granted tasks like going to the grocery store, going to see a movie, heading out for a drink, even congregating in public or religious spaces into moments with underlying dread, tension, and a light-motif of terror.
We’re seeing the news reports scrolling through our feeds about how other countries who responded quickly and proactively to COVID-19, with public drive-thru easily available testing, multiple weeks of government subsidized quarantine, and tax dollars spent to hospitalize people who were suffering the more dire effects of the illness.
We know, here in this country, we don’t have public health services. We have a President who seems to think that a pandemic is a hoax created by the party that opposes him to undermine his re-election in 2020.
Its been left up to businesses, piece-meal, to decide if they will stay open to serve the communities, or close to protect them and their businesses.
We don’t have mandatory paid sick leave in this country, so that means a lot of people are going to lose the better part of a month’s pay.
We don’t have subsidized art support, so a lot of contract musicians, actors and artists are not going to be paid for all of the shows and events that have had to close out of an abundance of caution and so not as to be a vector for contagion.
After I turned 50, a lot of my work prospects dried up.
I’m a graphic designer by trade, and I have a few clients, but I’ve seen my salary drop to about a third of what I used to make, and that’s before taxes.
I have friends who help and one who had to move back to the Midwest who passed the 50+ threshold as well, had a house, and asked if I’d cover the mortgage and upkeep and in exchange I have free reign over what to do with the 1919 Craftsman 4-square house with a finished attic and basement.
I put a sewing room and archives for my art upstairs in the attic. The basement, I clawed and scraped money, used some of my skills as an amateur furniture designer and decorator, and turned the finished basement into a small suite of rooms, and jumped into the rental bed and breakfast market to try to cover the gap, to stay off public assistance, and to pay down those student loans that were the result of a career change, from Credit and Collections analyst to, now, senior graphic designer (freelance.)
About 4 months after I opened, I achieved superhost status (yay!)
Then, we started hearing about a strange ailment in China sometimes towards late December, then it got a name: Coronavirus, a scientific name which indicated it was in the same family as SARS, and then the name the media is now using : COVID-19.
Around the same time this was happening, our President was being investigated and impeached for coercing a foreign government, Ukraine, into investigating a political opponent by withholding financial and military assistance while they were in the middle of a hot war with an adversary (Russia), who also, strangely enough, has been implicated in interfering in and assisting with the same President’s election campaign.
The President then actively obstructed justice by intimidating witnesses, and coercing his own staff not to comply with subpoenas.
The House voted to impeach.
COVID-19 went global.
The Senate Trial began.
The White House allegedly was in contact with various GOP Senators, coercing them to vote not to hear witnesses or they would be primaried – candidates more likely to align with the President’s point of view run against those who disobeyed, so they’d lose their seats – or as stated by Rep. Adam Schiff, “Their heads would be on a pike,” as indicated by unnamed sources.
Around the same time this was happening in January, the World Health Organization was passing out testing kits in order to track the spread of what would later be declared a pandemic.
The White House refused the test.
There’s a few theories as to why:
He didn’t want to be seen accepting help from the UN after vilifying them for years.
He allegedly owned stock in a company that makes testing supplies and saw another opportunity to make money off the American people.
He was distracted and afraid of being removed from office, and was paying more attention to covering his ass than he was in paying attention to the job at hand.
He knew that if you have numbers to report, the outbreak looks bad, and a President never wants things to look bad in an election year.
Particularly since parts of the Mueller report, and investigations out of the Southern District of New York would indicate that if the President loses his re-election bid, he very well could be indicted by two separate places on multiple charges immediately after leaving office.
All of that is in the news.
In the meantime, tourism and the hospitality industry gradually became more aware, and bookings started to dry up. Then, the President pulled from his limited toolbox of things he always tries to solve problems and closed our borders to guests from Europe which resulted in even more cancellations.
I have some domestic travelers booking for now, likely because renting a suite in a house with low-contact with other people sounds like a much more attractive venture than staying in a hotel with a bunch of guests, and having to push buttons and turn knobs that other people have touched, and ride with potential vectors in elevators.
That meant reviewing my cleaning protocols for the space, and it turns out, based on health and safety standards out there, were already good before COVID-19 came along.
Nitrile gloves go on.
Guest trash goes in bags and out to the garbage cans.
New gloves go on.
Bedding is stripped – all of it including mattress covers, duvets and pillows – and all are sanitized with Oxy-Clean
All surfaces wiped with Barbicide solution in the bedroom and common area.
All towels and bath mats sanitized with Oxy-clean.
The entire bathroom, all surfaces, wiped with bleach based cleaning solution.
Light switches, door handles, and TV remotes wiped down with Barbicide solution.
Bed lightly misted with Barbicide and steam cleaned with Barbicide solution once a month.
There’s probably more I could do, but that’s a whole lot more than you usually get between guests at a hotel, or at most guest spaces.
Then, the space airs for a day while the laundry goes through the machines.
Next day to prepare for guests, a lightly perfumed atomizer is run to scent the bedroom. A candle is lit to lightly scent the common area. I make a few pounds of cookie dough and freeze it so I always have some on hand. A dozen freshly baked cookies await the new guest. Milk, filtered water and juice stock the room fridge. A coffee and tea bar is set up with mugs and glasses, and an electric kettle for tea.
The room is checked for dust an hour before the guests arrived, and lights left on low to welcome them.
Sometimes there’s even foil-wrapped chocolate left in the room if I have some on hand.
There’s always going to be someone who is required to travel, even under pandemic conditions. Sometimes they need a place that feels safe, and comfortable, like home.
I try to provide that for people.
If you’re ever in DC, and you need a comfortable, quiet place to stay:
https://airbnb.com/h/cozy-brentwood-md-retreat
George HW Bush wanted too much to lead, and interfere in the desires of those who controlled the party and the party didn’t like that, so he was held to one term.
George W Bush returned the GOP to a Presidency in which he just read the lines and signed the bills, while the apparatus behind the scenes ran the machine, promoted the wars, and subverted the policy to enrich the few.
When our country was at its strongest, these ideals were in place.
Sometimes you have to work for people who are less than honorable to keep the lights on.
Sometimes integrity is a luxury that people with resources can afford, and the rest of us wish we could.
But for those of us once stuck in that machine, and those of us now “free,” but much more poor and wounded for the experience, there for me was once a comforting thought I had after it was confirmed I was losing that job.
There was a young man who had been in a similar job within the same company for years. He saw the work I did and occasionally came to me to ask how was I able to design for causes and people I found detestable.
I confessed to him, some things I created made me physically ill. Pounding headaches and nausea and I had to sit in the dark to create them and try not to be eaten up by disgust and self hatred.
But two things allowed me to get through it.
Reserving funds from their work and donating to the opposite cause.
…and being a grain of sand in the machine.
I did my work and provided quality design but often on one of my comps, I designed in the truth they wished to hide, and if you were looking for it, you could see it. In meetings, I would ask the questions that would make the project managers realize the people we were trying to mislead were our family and friends, and the energy in the room would drop, and I’d forward ideas on how we could do that, each with a tiny grain of sand.
A grain of sand is tiny. It really can’t do much but be subtly annoying, but over time, that grain of sand can ruin the smooth working of machines.
I told him, if you find yourself in the same position, keep yourself alive, but find a way to lodge a tiny grain of sand in the machine.
You’ll be surprised at how this can alleviate despair.
So the end came a year ago or so, and I packed my things, and declined to go out for that final drink, because I said my goodbyes to those I liked, and it was a bridge too far to ask me to smile and be kind to those I really detested, so I put my things in my car, and despaired on the drive home since I knew it was going to be harder to keep the lights on.
I was underemployed for almost 7 months, doing everything from delivering booze, to taking small design jobs from friends who probably could have done the thing themselves.
Friends took care of me in big and small ways and to those friends I am grateful and often feel amazed and undeserving of their kindness and care.
More clients came. Not quite the same as before and never as much money as before but the lights stayed on.
…and occasionally I hear from the other designers each inside their own machines in various degrees, occasionally asked to make the thing that kills their souls just a little bit to keep the lights on.
…and I remember the little grains of sand.
So I told him my secret, and he smiled a smile that should never be on a face so young, so I know he understood me.
So, if you are stuck inside a company, and they ask for the thing that is detestable and you do not have the privilege to fight openly or decline, focus your despair, your rage, your disappointment. Distill it down to a tiny point, no bigger than a grain of sand. Do the best you can so you can keep the lights on, but make sure that grain of sand makes it into the machine.
Because a grain of sand is tiny. But too many of them over time degrade and eventually destroy the machine.
…and in doing so, in feeling a little less futile maybe you can save yourself.
Sometimes my rants on here are like little grains of sand…