Category: Hawaii

Ramble On

More Unconscious Mutterings free association fun for the post-Easter Monday morning blahs.


  1. Squid :: When handed to an experienced chef in an Italian restaurant and made into Calimari frittata? Yes please!


  2. Wife :: A descriptor I still can’t get used to.


  3. Promising :: On Friday I had to renew my driver’s license. The DMV I went to was dull, gray and windowless. That said, there were plenty of young kids in line to take their written tests to get their learner permits. For them, those government gray walls held something rather promising. For me…drudgery.


  4. Tingle :: What happened when I used The Good Man’s “invigorating body wash” containing peppermint oil. Peppermint oil + lady parts = no


  5. Off balance :: Me. Daily. Gravity and I don’t get along.


  6. Nice :: What everyone calls me. “Oh that Karen is so nice!” If they only knew the evil that lurks within my mind. I’m just too polite to act on any of it. Which is why they call me nice.


  7. Honor :: One of those phrases you hope you never have to respond to: “How do you plead?” Always reply,”Not guilty, your honor.”


  8. Emphatic :: Helps if you are rather emphatic when you say it, too.


  9. Siren :: Here’s something I don’t miss from back home in New Mexico: the tornado siren. It freaked me when they even tested the damn thing. My family’s tenure in Carlsbad was fraught with that sound. brr!

    When I visited Hawaii, I didn’t know they tested the Tsunami siren once a month. I’d taken off at a sprint before a nice bystander told me the deal.


  10. Plated :: With this whole boom in the celebrity chef, one term that’s now in the vernacular is the term plated, as in “oh I love how the chef plated this entrée.” It seems like an abomination of the English language. Not that I’m above abusing the language a little now and again. Can’t explain why this particular use just bugs me. Though doesn’t annoy me as much as “yum-o,” which should get the speaker of that phrase summarily kicked in the shin.

Ok, done rambling, verbally shambling, and linguistically wandering.





That there’s a visual pun…it’s a Rambler. The 1968 version. My folks used to own a Rambler. It got stuck in the mud up in the mountains of Cuba, NM. Good memory.


And so…what exactly is this creature? Vol. 2

You’ll recall I first asked this question back in November.

The answer then was: persimmon.

Today, in my continuing quest to understand what in the sam hell is growing in my own backyard, I bring you the next installment in the series.

Ladies and Gentlemen…ask you. What exactly is *this*:

(no fair answering first, Natalie!)

I have a tree laden with these little guys. The birds fight over the fruit that bears a color and skin resemblance to an apricot.

The neighborhood squirrels will come running up the power line, put their little paws together over their head, and swan dive into the tree to sample of these fruits.

The bugs love this tree so much, a spider has moved in and built one hell of a web. This allows him to freely sample of the bug buffet. There are bug carcasses strewn all over the place. I haven’t seen a spider web like that since Hawaii!

The fruit on the tree looks a little bit like a small peach or a big apricot. But they aren’t.

Curious, I pulled one that looked ripe from the tree and split it open.

This mutant fruit has not one but TWO stones at the center!

Another I opened had not two but THREE stones!

What the hell?

I didn’t sample the fruit right away. The saliva-evaporating tannin in the under ripe persimmon I ate first and asked questions later taught me a huge lesson.

Nope, I was going to do some research before biting in this time.

With a little help of another overheard conversation between my landlord and his elderly father, I remembered them discussing the old man’s love of something called a loquat.

Hmm. Loquat. It sounds like a concatenation of a couple other words…like lemon and apricot. Or lemon and kumquat.

Is this one of those weird hybrid fruits? No. It’s not.

Loquat is actually an Americanized spelling of a Cantonese word, lou gwat, or the words mean “reed orange.”

This is another tree that is found mainly in Asian countries and was brought along to the Bay Area. It’s a very hardy tree!

Evidently the fruit has a mild sedative effect.

Evidently the seeds have a mild bit of cyanide. Yay.

Note to self: eat the fruit, not the pit.

Okay!

So today I dove in like a squirrel and picked a couple ripe samples.

It’s very tart like a citrus fruit but a consistency much like an apricot.

I like it!

Ok, mystery solved! Off to find recipes for loquats!

Oh, by the by, I also have this creepy creature in my backyard:

It’s almost a foot across and it looks like it could devour small animals.

Fortunately, I know what this bad boy is….

It’s an artichoke that my neighbor grew and forgot to pick.

If it gets any larger, I may have to move.

Just sayin’.

When being thrifty throws you into the wayback machine

So I was at Target the other day, picking up many items on my household list.

You know, toilet paper, dish soap, etc.

On my list was a need for some new razors. You know, the weather is warming up a bit, might need to take a weed whacker to the ol’ winter legs…

TMI, I know.

So anyhow…razors are expensive! Dang expensive. So being a child of depression era parents, I did what any overly fiscally conservative girl would do.

I grabbed a pack of razors from the clearance bin.

Hey, they are Schick Xtreme 3! That’s a good brand!

So tonight, I decided to take a long soak in a bath after a chilly rainy day, and I broke out one of my new razors to get some smooth skin happenin’.

Suddenly, my bathroom smells like Louie’s Backyard on South Padre Island at the high tide of Spring Break.

You know, that odd chemically tropical combination of Malibu spiced rum and way too much Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil?

Yeah.

That’s weird.

Why does my bathroom smell like that?

Turns out the clearance rack razors come with “Scented Handles by Hawaiian Tropic”.

Ew.

Apparently I’m not the only one that thinks a scented handle on my razor is weird. Hence the very deep discount in the clearance bin. Schick’s weird marketing idea is my gain!

With three, count them, three blades, my legs are super smooth.

Spotty memories are but a small down payment on the steep price of beauty.

Alternate spelling, alternate universe

You may recall from a post a while back that I use my secret agent 007 stealth first name when I order coffee and they ask for a name to write on the cup.

My secret agent name is Lucy. I use that name because it’s:

1) easy to pronounce

2) easy to spell

3) heard clearly over the whooosh whooosh sounds of an espresso machine

I copied this from a friend (who has my same real first name), even borrowing her own made up nom de bebida, because of the ease of use.

Until this past week at the Honolulu airport.

They asked my name. I said Lucy. They nodded and wrote the name. I got my beverage and it wasn’t until I was on the plane that I noticed.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A real mind bender

Yesterday at 1:15pm local time, as I was boarding a plane in Honolulu, CNN was reporting that “the polls in the east will be closing soon”.

When I got off the plane in Oakland, The Good Man told me it was a done deal, Obama was president.

That sort of blows the ol’ brain pan!

I’m still wrapping my mind around the fact that it’s over, it wasn’t a dream, and a new day has begun.

Just. Wow.