Monthly Archives: December 2005

Ham Line

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My wife maintains a family website/blog on Baby Home which is based in Taiwan (and therefore in Chinese). It’s primarily about the kids growing up.

One of the unintended side effects is that several Taiwanese mothers located in Arizona have “found” each other and formed a sort of offline group of acquaintances (I believe the old-world term was “circle of friends”.)

They, their kids and husbands get together roughly once a month and eat (a lot.) I generally avoid them because, being predominantly a Taiwanese gathering, it’s just like being in Taiwan at one of those awkward social gatherings where everyone speaks Chinese and occasionally tries to throw me a bone by speaking English.

I like to think of this as Irene’s time to spend with other Taiwanese unfettered by English and the kids’ opportunity to play and absorb their second language.

I can’t always avoid the gatherings and on the 24th we had one at our house.

15 years ago I had a Honeybaked Ham at a work Christmas party and it was the best ham I ever ate. Since then I’ve been looking for an opportunity/excuse to buy one. This seemed like the perfect opportunity!

Never having purchased one, i didn’t know what to expect, and, nothing could have prepared me.

When I arrived with, what I thought, was plenty of time to stand in line and pick up the ham before the gathering, I was stunned to find a line of over 400 people winding around and around the store and the parking lot. They even had Sheriff’s Deputies out acting as crowd control.

Luckily the line moved fairly quickly, and I was 12.5 pound ham-laden in only about an hour and a half.

It was exceptionally good, but the Taiwanese people also brought enough food to feed themselves three times over and we only made a small dent in the ham at the gathering, despite the fact that I had three plates full.

We’ve been having ham for days, but finally the ham-bone has been exposed and I’m going to have some happy puppies this weekend, once I can figure how to split it in two pieces for them.

HoneyBaked Ham: Really, Really good.

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Fun With **** and Jane

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I had to go to DMV the other day to transfer title on a new car and get my drivers’ license photo updated. As you can imagine, I had a while to enjoy the ambiance of the west side DMV.

One of the things they added sometime prior to 1998 (the last time I was at DMV) is a news-ticker in the lobby. Not only does it show headline news, but it also boasts about being part of some interstate DMV news network, connecting (I believe) 8 states. Why such a dedicated DMV newswire is needed as opposed to just a plain, ordinary newswire is not immediately clear.

Perhaps it is because the DMV network censors their news?!

Yes indeed, it’s true, and thank goodness, too. They protected me and my innocent children from seeing the name “Dick” used, in context, as a person’s name.

According to the DMV newswire, the top three movies last weekend were:

  • King Kong
  • The Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”
  • Fun With **** and Jane

Just to make sure I hadn’t missed some clever piece of marketing, I double-checked the Fun With Dick and Jane website to verify that there’s no punctuation or substitution for the name Dick. There isn’t.

I wonder in the Bureau of Vital Records ****s out the name Dick on children’s birth certificates these days?

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Pier 49 Pizza

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Here’s another half-review.

I was taken to lunch the other day to Pier 49 Pizza, a new restaurant, somewhere in the Phoenix/Tempe borderland.

I didn’t get a menu, and didn’t notice the prices, so I don’t have price/quantity information, but as for the pizza, here goes…

I gotta say, I completely agree with Alton Brown that the crust of a pizza is the essential foundation of a pizza and the toppings are just a covering, sometimes disguising the underlying problems with the crust.

That said, I love bread, any kind of bread, but not every kind of bread should be made into pizza dough.

The list of inappropriate bread doughs is probably endless, but for the purposes of this review, let’s start with this one: Sourdough is not pizza dough.

The flavor and the texture are just wrong, and so Pier 49′s pizza gets off on the wrong foot.

As for the toppings, both the cheese and the pepperoni were unremarkable. In fact, the pepperoni tasted like the pre-sliced Hormel pepperoni you can buy at the supermarket.

The sauce was tasty, and I quite liked it, but the pedestrian toppings and light, airy, odd-flavored crust just made for a passable, but easily forgettable pizza experience.

I can’t recommend the place.


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Dr. Milker

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This was just too priceless not to take a picture of.

Incidentally, despite the awful name, Dr. Milker is the most normal tasting milk I found in Taiwan.

I’m not an expert on pasteurization, but I couldn’t help noticing that the description of the process on Taiwanese milk usually involved phrases like, “Ultra high temperature flash pasteurization.”

Consistent with that, most of the milk tasted scalded. We couldn’t get Michelle to drink the milk in Taiwan, it tasted so bad.


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Leftovers

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We’ve been awfully busy/sick lately and just haven’t had much time to post… besides, when you’re sick/busy, there’s nothing much really to tell.

I offloaded my cellphone photos tonight and discovered I had a few leftovers from Taiwan.

This was one of my favorites. As we were waiting in the airport terminal, in the food court, getting ready to leave, I chanced to go to the urinal.

In some of the toilets in the airport, they have airplane identification guides pasted over the urinals so you can learn about some of the fascinating jets that ply the skies of Taiwan. (I have to wonder if providing reading material doesn’t increase the puddle on the floor, though.)

However, in the food court restroom, they have signs like these.

Certainly, while visiting the restrooms in the food court, while taking a leak, in the airport terminal after you’ve already entered the country and passed though immigrations and customs, is just the right time to remind you not to bring scorpions and cockroaches into the country, right?


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Humbug Tree, Part Deaux

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You see? It really is for the kids.

When I came home today Michelle was all wound up, wanting to decorate the Christmas tree. We had to make her take a nap she was so jittery in anticipation.

All the while it was being decorated she’d look at each new decoration, or each change in the tree and exclaim, “how pretty!” (In Chinese, as it happens.)

It’s a simple tree, but everyone seems happy with it.


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Humbug Tree

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OK, so I’ve never really come up with a good, non-religious name for the good old fashioned Christmas tree. “Holiday Tree” just doesn’t have much pizzazz.

Did you realize that Christmas Trees are really not all that old? The first known one in England was Queen Victoria’s. In fact, that whole Dickensian Christmas thing was a cynical ploy to try to stop poor people from rioting at Christmas time.

The New York City Police Department was established because of such Christmas riots. (It really sucked to be poor during the Industrial Revolution.)

There’s a fascinating documentary on the History of Christmas that comes on the History Channel (or one of those) every year about this time that really puts the whole thing in perspective. It’s odd how dispelling all those Christmas myths actually puts me in the holiday mood.

In any case, he we all are with our holiday festive season tree, completely unadorned as we just brought it home today.

It’s for the kids, really, and it is a live tree.

In our back yard, we have two other surviving holiday trees. Irene’s and my first tree, and Michelle’s holiday tree.

The tree on the table behind us is James’ first holiday tree.

You know, looking at this picture, I realize I should have had everyone stand on boxes. (Actually, Michelle is on a chair.)


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Considerate People

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I haven’t been feeling well the last few days, but we managed to get out for a while today and take Michelle to the park. It was such a nice day that it felt good to get out of the house and breathe some (almost) fresh air.

When we arrived at one of the playground areas it was empty except for two older people (one of whom is pictured here) going through the sandpit with metal detectors.

When I was a kid, my dad had a metal detector and, on one occasion, at a park near our old home in Tucson I found nearly $14 in coins. That was at least 25 years ago, and I suspect I was the first person to ever search that park because it certainly never happened again.

In any case, these people were going over the whole area diligently.

Of course, I’m not mentioning this to congratulate them on their perseverance. I’m mentioning it because as they detected things, they had nifty sand filtering shovels that made it easy for them to dig up the items and clean the sand off.

They didn’t find anything of value, just trash and such, which they promptly tossed back into the sandpit. The inconsiderate SOBs!

I went around after they left and picked up all the stuff they’d uncovered and put it in the trash. It would have been so easy for them, but it probably never occurred to them to do something for somebody else.

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