It has been about ten days since I’ve written; I just went back and looked. Last time, I was on Saba, writing when I wasn’t able to sleep. Tonight, I am back at my dining room table, floodlights on, looking out over the creek, having just returned from Coyote Flaco with Pierre, sharing chicken fajitas.
When I reached the cottage this afternoon, I felt I’d been away for a week, at least. Monday morning, I went down to DC for some meetings for the Miller Center on the Presidency and then to New York last night to have a wonderful dinner with my friends, David and Annette Fox. It’s a quarterly event; we gather at their marvelous UWS apartment, order Indian and catch up on our lives.
It is very hygge. As was the dinner party I gave last Friday night for Fayal Greene, her husband, David, Ginna and Don Moore, Lionel and Pierre. Leek soup, sautéed scallops in a brown butter sauce, and carrots in a lemony oil garlic sauce, with a baked polenta to die for, followed by a flourless chocolate cake provided by Ginna and Don, via David the baker.
It was an extraordinary evening.
And I, at least, need evenings like this to keep me sane in these extraordinary times.
On Tuesday evening, in Washington, after an early dinner with my friends Matthew and Anne, which followed drinks with my ex-partner and his now fiancé, I watched the address to Congress by our President, Donald Trump.
To the great relief of almost the entire world, he did not go off the rails and sounded presidential. It was, Tuesday night, all about the delivery. Wednesday morning people started to parse what he said. Even the conservative writers that I read, and I do read some, found a lot of flaws with the speech.
Short on specifics.
Fact checkers found a lot of fault, pointing out Trump claimed as victories some things which had been in play for a year at some corporations. Ford isn’t keeping production in the US because of Trump; they are pulling back on their Mexican plans because those plants would have built small cars and people aren’t buying them. They’re buying gas guzzlers because gas is cheapish again.
When talking with David and Annette, I said that if Trump had not held it together last night, his presidency would have begun to unravel. He would actually be President but, in reality, his claim to power would have begun collapsing. Lots of people on his side of the aisle are slightly unhinged by his behavior. McCain and Graham are frankly, I think, apoplectic.
And he held it together and while he should have been able to take a victory lap, Wednesday morning brought the revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had said in confirmation meetings he had not met with any Russians in the run-up to the election, actually had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, one in his office on Capitol Hill.
Republicans are excusing while Democrats and some Republicans are accusing.
This is a wild ride and I’ve never seen anything like it.
Sessions has since recused himself from all investigations regarding anything Russian but there are those on both sides of the aisle who smell blood in the water.
While we were having political meltdowns, Amazon’s vaulted cloud computing world went offline yesterday for 4 hours and 17 minutes because of a typo in a command. OOPS.
It’s a little scary. 150,000 websites were affected. Amazon is the king of cloud storage and that’s a big oops for the King. I would not have wanted to be the head of that division yesterday.
And, before Tuesday’s Trump speech, we had the foll der wall of the biggest Oscar mistake in history. First “La La Land” was announced as Best Picture but it really was “Moonlight.” Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were humiliated and PwC, the accountants, were more than humiliated. They handed out a wrong envelope.
OOPS.
When it happened, I was safely in the arms of Morpheus, having strange dreams of Mike Bloomberg dating the pastor of my church, Mother Eileen.
Snap Inc. had a very successful opening on the market today; it was the biggest initial offering since Facebook and they have a rocky road to travel and they are a force to be reckoned with and it will be wonderful to see how it plays out. The next Facebook? Or the next troubled tech company, which is where Twitter is today.
It’s time for me to say goodnight.
By hygge. Regardless of your political persuasion, it will help us all get through.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter from Claverack June 30th, 2017 Beginning the weekend of the 4th…
July 1, 2017At some point, I decided this was the year I was going to get over my fear of grilling. Last night, I grilled a steak using a Bobby Flay recipe. And asparagus on the grill: c’est magnifique! Put the spears in a plastic bag with olive oil, salt, pepper, a couple other spices and grilled them for three minutes on high. I’m hooked.
So today I went to the market and got boneless pork chops and was going to broil them about half an hour ago but thunder rattled the house and rain fell from the skies. My mouth turned down. However, the sun has returned and I am going to try it, pork chops on the grill.
It is Friday, June 30th, as I write, the beginning of the long 4th of July weekend. As I ran an errand near the train station, I saw visitors piling off the train, bags in hand, being greeted by friends, relatives, lovers and others. Zagat, today, sent an email which had an article about 8 reasons to take the drive to Hudson; all of them being restaurants.
You can read the article here.
As someone who is here most of the time now, I took a bit of umbrage with the list. It included Grazin’, a diner restaurant with local beef and I will need to give it another try because when I was there, it wasn’t good and the wine was south of awful.
It included Fish & Game, which is, I’ve heard, a good restaurant and I haven’t been there because it opened with an attitude. I’ve been around the carousel too many times to need attitude. [Hey, once I had “my table” at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, which was cool while it lasted.]
It included, deservedly, Swoon Kitchen Bar. I don’t go there often; my ex left me for one of the waiters there; that has weighed on me ever since but it is great.
It did not include, and I think it should have, my beloved Red Dot, which is one of the hubs of Hudson nor did it include Ca’Mea, which I think should have gotten a mention nor Vico, which has upped its game lately.
We are a food town.
And now, in a break in the rain, I did grill but not the pork chops I bought as most of the recipes for grilling told me I should brine the chops and that takes some time so I grilled some sausage and finished my asparagus. Oh, so good.
Beyond my little world, it has been a bit mad.
Our President has created a twitter storm over his tweets about Mika Brzezinski’s “bleeding face lift.”
Even Paul Ryan found it too much.
Several news sources, including conservative ones, thought maybe he should have been in a meeting rather than tweeting. But no, President Trump was tweeting and creating a painful moment for his party.
And, today, NASA had to issue a statement it was not operating a slave state on Mars; it was NOT sending children there to be body parts for future colonists, a claim made by a guest on “The Alex Jones Show,” which airs on 118 radio stations. Alex Jones is most famous for claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and was interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her new NBC show, which isn’t doing so well.
As I sit here in my very hygge cottage, I am astounded by what is going on out there. We have a President who seems devoted to Twitter attacks more than he is about governing and who, according to a variety of reports, starts his day at 6:30 AM speaking to lawyers about that pesky Russian matter.
And he is going to meet with Putin at the G 20 Conference and has been asking his advisors what he can offer Vladimir Putin. What?
There are times I feel I am living in an alternative universe. And I know I am not the only one.
So, doesn’t it make sense I want to conquer my fear of grilling? That’s concrete in a world that seems spinning out of control.
Tags:Alex Jones, Bleeding Face Lift, Bobby Flay, Ca'Mea, Donald Trump, Fish & Game, G 20, Grazin, Grilling, Hudson NY, Mars, Media, Megyn Kelly, Mike Brzezinki, NASA, Paul Ryan, Politics, Putin, Red Dot, Swood Kitchen Bar, technology, Twitter, Vico, Zagat
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