I'm going to quit smoking.

Again.

I have a proven method. Quitting, though extremely difficult, is really the easiest part. This I think is misunderstood by those lacking firsthand knowledge, and forgotten swiftly by those who sucessfully banish nicotine from their lifestyle for an extended period. I know a hiking trail in the Appalachians that makes an eleven mile circle over remote, rugged terrain (actually if you have a mapping GPS, and you're an overweight, out-of-shape smoker, you will show a covered distance of nearly seventeen miles. Evidently staggering from one side of the trail to another in exhaustion significantly adds to the trip.) If I don't want to have a heart attack, I take three days to walk this loop. It's friggin' torture. Also, for some reason, it is my idea of a good time.

Three days without cigarettes, gives me a significant investment, and then making four, is easier. And then making five is easier. And so on. It is the staying stopped that proves my undoing. My life is littered with smoking people that I love and with whom I interact. About nine or ten days into a stab at quitting, I'll smoke a cigarette. Go figure.

Now, if I haven't had a cigarette in 10 hours, and I smoke a Marlboro, I catch a pleasant euphoria. It is mild, and brief, but Ive been doing this since I was 12. My body recognizes this old friend, and the pleasant associations imprinted in my recall. After a day or two this euphoria is no longer mild. As my system withdraws from nicotine and my tolerance is diminished, this euphoric effect increases in intensity, becoming so over powering it borders on unpleasant... Definitely an acquired taste.

Did you know tobacco was sacred, to Lakota (and possibly other tribes...I wouldn't know.) Indians? It is that potent. An old Indian I know will use tobacco in ritual religious observances. It is a powerful herb. After even a brief abstinence, it is a sledghammer blow of altered consciousness. And I love that. I always have. In any form (It made for an interesting youth).

So cigarettes become vice, with buzz as it's object. (An insidious drug, nicotine. Addiction is not so much about getting high...a chronic smoker like myself smokes to stave off that feeling of need, of badness, of wordless discontent that lurks behind everything in my life. It's always there. Soon, it will make me go outside. In certain company, I will be ashamed. ), It seems I have almost gotten two addictions for the price of one.

I begin to have a cigarette every couple of days. They're AWESOME. Somewhere in between booty and ice cream. If you have one with some good coffee, it moves leftward on the BIC scale. I think about the cigarette I'm gonna have that evening, or whatever. With my 30 year history of smoking, plus the additional conditioning I give myself, with these little nicotine trysts, I am painting myself into a behavioral corner. My psych text calls this a powerful reinforcer, as opposed to the normal kind, which is most every other time it is used in the book.

Of course, a bad day is coming. isn't it? A shit hit the fan day. Life is good, but these days are sprinkled among them. The wisdom of the years is slow coming to the likes of me, but some things do sink in over time. I know these days are inevitable, and five or six cigarettes into one of those Days, and I'm well and goodly hooked all over again.

I am afraid that these things will kill me. I am going to try again, during the fall break. I have tried patches, pills, lozenges, dip, gum. Everything. Nothing has ever given me that three day head start I can get by going for a walk in the woods. And since I'll be alone, I won't have to kill somebody. Cause they breathed.

Here goes...

Boots

Boots, originally uploaded by use2blost. Larger

Are still wet. They've been wet since Thursday night. I to had wear sneakers to work today. I have the ankles of a six year old girl, so I don't like this much.

Now, The bench was on the side of the road. When I found it it was weathered to the point of complete exposure to the elements. The wood was black and the back and two sides were unattached. The slats were loose in a jumble on top of the three pieces. I'm not plugging my refinishing job... I'm just a little impressed with myself because the junk only sat in my back yard for two or three weeks. That's moving like the wind compared to some of my other projects. I like old weathered wood exposed, and raw (Oh, boy! now a lot of pornseeker hits are in store for this post! Yeah! It's all about the traffic, baby.) and black with mildew. It excites me.
Anyway, I sand away the mildew, but I stop short of taking her down (I know, I'm shameless) to virgin substrate. I try to straddle the plane of demarcation between the aged and unblemished. When I get the look I want, then I slap on about 4 coats of high gloss exterior polyurethane with a progressively lighter hand sanding between each one. Before the final coat I lovingly caress my project with some extra fine wore out sandpaper, then rub her down using a soft lint-free cloth lightly dampened with mineral spirits. What I shoot for is a build up deep enough to fill every last dimple of grain leveling the surface, with a finish smoother than baby booties.

Wow, I really got sidetracked. My point was, my boots have been wet since Thursday. We have gotten an enormous amount of rain. Check out the puddle In the front yard of my jobsite. I got a big kick out of the Sumrall's front forty looking like a bass lake.

I wanted to experiment with the texture of leather and wood with a pronounced grain. The Puddle of Enchantmentwas a happy accident.

Interestingly enough, This Client has had me paint several times. The last time, fifteen months ago, my Father died. So this was little weird. When he passed away, They made me Aunt Judy's guardian. My first day on the job this time, Aunt Judy's doc called. Wanted to know where I stood on the resuscitation issue, cause she wasn't doing so hot. That was a wild phone call. (Auntie got out of the hospital Monday)

Corncob Graveyard

Corncob Graveyard, originally uploaded by use2blost.

I don't do much B&W. Possibly I suck at it.
However, as I apply for nursing programs, it will help if I've been able to publish in the school literary magazine. Which is printed in black and white.
Since a lot of literary analysis is crap...

Large On Black

The Eggs of a Scorned Woman. AKA Seven Pepper Quiche

Well, the financial aid has not arrived, and it is time to begin studying for finals...but as a change of pace I thought I might try posting a Food Tutorial before swearing off flickr, the blog, and the internet in general for a couple weeks. I have a little work going on, and cheese was on sale. OMG. I love cheese, and hadn't bought any in a month. I'm talkin' pepper jack, sharp cheddar, all kinds of cheese, 8 oz packages 4 for 5 bucks. I mighta overdid it.
So I came home, stocked my many packets of cheese in the fridge, grabbed a colander, and strolled through the back yard, and came up with this.

I managed to get a couple zuchinnis, squash, and cucumbers before some type of fungus wreaked havoc in my garden, but lately the only thing I seem to be harvesting are cherry tomatoes and assorted peppers. I'm still learning about the whole gardening thing, but cherry tomato plants are amazing. With a little work I am sure we could engineer biological weapons from them. One tiny green leaf hanging out of a dixie cup, halfway nurtured will grow to cover 35-65 sq ft. The peppers in general are also doing very well, and I've got one habenero TREE. It must be some kinda mutant. If you saw it you would think Chris and the Habenero Stalk.

So this colander situation happens a couple times a week, and seems to be picking up speed. As well as drying, freezing, and giving stuff away, Ive been making a lot of quiches. At least that's what I call them. If you research quiches on the web, it seems the egg mixture isn't just eggs, but eggs and other stuff and they call the mixture "custard". So don't be thinking this is a legitimate recipe or that this is a blog to be taken seriously. This is good stuff though, and it will put hair on your chest.



This quiche has seven peppers:
bell, chili, poblano, jalepeno,bannana, habenero, and black pepper.
It also takes cheese, and of course eggs. About a dozen'll do ya.
There is one small eggplant (Everything is organically grown...you can walk in my back yard and lick plants. No harm will come to you.)
Some onion, garlic, broccoli... you can put in anything you want,even meat, but the whole point for me is to use up some of these tomatoes and peppers, so I left some room.



first start with a couple no-stick pans. (Praise God for No-Stick Cookware.) sprinkle some grated cheese in the bottoms...you really can't overdo this, but a thin layer, that you can see the bottom of the pan through, is adequate. It'll be fine. This Cheese will melt into a thin, oiled crust.


You can even be so extravagant as to line the sides of the pan with slices...but I'm on a budget.



Then you add your structural stuff, try to make a layer of slices of the firmer vegetables along the bottom (this is simple chris-quiche theory. I believe it makes it easier to get pieces out of the pan). I've actually never messed with eggplant. In my illustrious youth, I was the night chef at an Italian restaurant for a while. We served eggplant parmigiana, but it was already prepped. Often, I imagine, you get more hands-on cooking experience as the lunch chef. The eggplant color and texture tickled me to death :). They just feel funny.

So with this quiche, I started with my slices of eggplant, which I distributed as far as it would go, and filled in the bottom layer with some onions. Poblanos and bells are pretty big and firm, and I use those as well (If you take the trouble to grow stuff to eat, you really oughta save a little corner by your tomatoes to plant some basil, sage, oregano, rosemary and thyme.... that stuff practically grows itself, and hopping out the back door to snatch a few leaves off a plant and throw them in a pan always makes me grin.) Now is a good time to throw in your herbs, black pepper, and maybe a little chopped garlic. I skipped it this time, but a little finely chopped celery gives a great flavor, especially with some chicken chunks.



Getting back on the subject, when you've got a good bottom layer going
You can fill it in with some broccoli, lots of tomatoes, and of course peppers.



Just a few chilis, with a couple jalapenos and a banana or to will be more than enough for a lot of people. Not everyone will want to add habeneros, but if you should, you'll wanna wash your hands thoroughly before you touch your face, or pee.



I almost forgot... as your doing the fill in, sprinkle in plenty of cheese. Tomatoes have a lot of moisture, and the cheese really helps out with firmness, and tastes good, too. It is on sale.



After I get all my goodies in, with lots of cheese, I throw a couple handfuls of sun-dried cherry tomatoes across the top. I know I got lotsa 'maters already, but SDT's have a different flavor. You can't get it any other way.



Just prior to baking, before I put my eggs in, it looks like this:



For beating the eggs, I use a Ryobi 18volt lithium-ion drill, with a paint mixer, kept aside in the kitchen. I have no blender, ( I lost it in the divorce, and haven't gotten around to replacing it) but I'm sure that would work better. These jokers need to be fluffy. Really. A big wad of yellow foam.



After pouring up my eggs. I throw both pans in a preheated oven for about twenty minutes at 405-415. Then it's time to pull 'em out for a second and throw a layer of cheese slices on top. I used slices of pepper jack here, but anything will do. Sprinkling parmesan on top gives a little crispy, cheesey, brown crust, as the parmesan sinks/sticks to the underlying cheese slices and slowly starts changing color...

(I can"t believe I forgot to shoot a bracket for this picture. You'll just have to use your imagination.)

I put it back in the oven and keep an eye on it. Another Ten minutes or so makes it look like this.



These will cut up into 12-14 lunch-sized servings of quiche, that I'll individually wrap (after eating a couple), and freeze. I'll pull a piece out as needed and nuke it for 1-2 minutes, and eat it without guilt. I'm sure it's healthy, though I imagine it packs a pretty good cholesterol punch.

BTW, these are high dynamic range images, for those who care. High Dynamic Range technology was first developed and used to photograph Mushroom Clouds It lets you combine multiple exposures into one image, and tone map them. Each picture in this post is the result of combining Three to Five separate images. once I started I was kinda committed. Unfortunately, a couple of thee composites are substandard. I have never seen it done with food... remember you saw it here first. The software is a free download, and even with only one jpeg to work with you can fake it and transform a picture-



You can get a better look at the difference Large
Probably the most noteworthy aspect of these food shots is the lighting...under my kitchen cabinets over the breakfast bar, I've got a couple grow lights where I'll start seeds and cuttings. I tell myself that it helps early picked vegetables ripen... it also truly jacks up your reds, when you hdr.

Jim

Gazing Away, originally uploaded by use2blost.

Jim called me last night for a ride. After posting about the cigarette thing, I talked to my IRL buddy, Scott. I also played around between my ears, thinking a little harder about Jim than I have been. I am almost positive he lies a little, and he has a couple of behavioral thingies that stand out. I have some questions about the disability/ physical address issue, and a lot of details in general are sorta foggy. I plan to start paying more strict attention (I mentioned Jim to a guy in my small group about a month ago, but my attendance is spotty when class is in session, and nothing has come of it). Over a few more run-ins, I may develop a little more clarity, about Jim’s life.

So, I drive out to meet Jim, and it’s dark. There is about a half a mile stretch of bad neighborhood that is one of three likely parts of town for Jim to request a rendezvous.

The last time I was here I had the chance to (there’s a whole post in here, but jeez, I’m wore out!) buy some crack. I think it was the eye contact (note to self… don’t be eyeballin’ the crack man!). I meant to speak to Jim about some other options. Evidently I dropped the ball. Jim is nowhere in sight. Damn. I turn around, and make another pass. I’m getting a little grumpy…don’t forget, I’ve been on steroids for a week and I don’t have my glasses.

OK, I wanna mention a few things:

1. At this time, I am in a painter’s van, no question. I got paint-spattered ladders strapped to it, big “SPRAY TECH” sticker on the rear window.
2. Umm…of all the construction trades, with the possible exception of roofers, none is better represented in the general crack-smoking population than painters. FYI most guys don’t get into house painting because they were a smashing success somewhere else.
3. Appearances matter, at 10 pm as you fly through the local crackport waggling your wings for the third consecutive pass.

I can’t believe I didn’t get a chance to buy some crack, this time. I was plenty stressed when I finally spotted Jim through the gloom. I swung in, he threw his bike in the van, and we split. I was still riding the warm fuzzy feeling from Jim’s earlier generosity and I had gotten paid for a small job. I wanted to hook him up, so we Taco Belled and got some smokes, and I gave him a little cash. When I let him out, I may have still been a little agitated. I was agonizing about the whole shower thing and suddenly rediscovered my testicles. I decided to offer him a shower.

He told me he was nervous, no thank you

It was uncomfortable. He probably thinks I’m a homelessguyophile (that's sorta funny, to me...but I'm strange). I have decided regardless, to have greater intentionality trying to impact this guy’s life in a good way.

Oh, and I told him I blogged about him…that was bothering me.