A Little Vacation

The recent lack of posts here is due neither to lack of interest nor lack of ingredients. I was unable to post for the past five days because A., L., and I were in Bradenton, Florida visiting my parents, my brother, my sister, and my sibling's families. This in and of itself would not have kept me from posting had the trip not overlapped a particularly nasty sinus infection which had me home from work for two days before the first day of vacation. When the doctor gave me antibiotics, he assured me that the advice (i.e., not to fly) given to people in my condition was not because flying with a sinus infection is medically dangerous really but because it's extremely unpleasant. Fortunately, I got the antibiotics on Thursday afternoon at 5, and the flight wasn't until Friday morning at 7:15, so they'd had time to begin to work, and the flight was really not nearly as unpleasant as that time that I came down with the flu and started to have fever and chills in the middle of a root canal. It was, however, more than unpleasant enough, though I will admit to having been distracted by the lack of appetite, a phenomenon sufficiently rare for me that I remarked -- to myself -- upon it perhaps once every seven seconds.

Anyway, while the day of the flight itself was decidedly miserable, most of the rest of the vacation was splendid, and it was very good to see my brother and sister (and their families) who live in Texas and Seattle, respectively, and whom, as a result, I see with decreasing frequency as time passes.

I have little in the way of culinary insight to offer from the trip, except perhaps to note that having regained one's appetite in time to accompany one's extended family to a Hunan buffet is, at best, a mixed blessing. I have said several times here before that most foods do not translate well to a buffet setting, but I suspect that Asian foods translate less well than other cuisines, though I'm certainly willing to listen to anyone's tales of buffet horror if he or she can think of a cuisine that has suffered a greater diminution of quality through the augmentation of quantity.

While I didn't get a chance to hunt blackberries on this trip (and I had to listen to my sister tell me how incredibly easy they are to find on the base where her husband is station and where her family lives), I did establish my clear superiority as the family sand dollar and shell hunter, and I returned home with some very nice specimens that I gathered myself. I also went fishing for the first time in perhaps twenty years, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I did not catch anything, but I got to spend several hours sitting on the pier next to A. and my sister, telling old family stories and remarking on how similar the two of them are. That was really the best possible result. In practice, I have no trouble handling bait; in theory, I have no trouble cleaning fish, but it's a theory I'm just as happy not to have tested.