Kaimusailing

When I was in Crisfield the ladies wanted me to wear appropriate footwear, not the open toed flip flops that served me so well. While pressure washing the back steps my flip flops failed and I was left with only one working flip flop. I had a pair of Aqua-Sox but they proved to be breeding ground for smelly bacteria or something. I tried laundering them, but they just kept on getting smelly. I finally ended up being marched into a cheap shoe store where I got some attractive slip on loafers. I wiped my feet with antibacterial hand wipes and put on the new shoes.
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Later it looked like the new shoes were causing my feet to swell up. The ladies scolded me on buying shoes from a cut rate place. I ended up getting a pair of open toed flip flops that I tried on in the store. Felt nice. Later my feet were even more swollen. People noticed. Concern about my health.
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A few years ago, (many), my doctor put me on blood pressure medicine, amlodipine, and my feet swelled up. He changed my prescription, reducing that drug and introducing another. Now with my blood pressure getting erratic and a little high again, he increased the amlodipine and my feet are swelling again.
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My older daughter skyped me and we planned to get together somewhere in Florida near Ocala, we had met at Shalom Park a few years ago and I have some nice photos. There is an art museum there.
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Overnight I woke up at about 3:30 AM and had to pee. I had trouble getting back to sleep so I reviewed the sailgp footage from Sydney. These boats F50 foiling catamarans are amazing, and were traveling at up to 50mph. It’s a wonder no one gets killed. In the start melee of Race 3 the GBR boat crashed into the Japan boat, cutting off one of its bows. No one was seriously hurt. The Japan boat was out of racing for this event. GBR later gave their still functioning boat to the Japan team and they did very well with it racing the next day. I was still running to the loo every 20 minutes or so. What was going on? Later in the morning I found my swollen feet were now normal size. I had been retaining water for some reason.
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I was feeling better, definitely overcoming some sort of flu bug. I continued working on the beam covers, added Wet/Dry 700 epoxy putty to fair some of my boo-boo’s. After the epoxy set up I ground it smooth and having found a 3/8” round off router bit, worked on the edges.
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Cuddily called me about several things including purchase of one of Eve’s paintings. I called Eve and we were all set. I texted “Very Merry Christmas”. Cornelia Marie sent a photo of Sunsplash at the Somers Cove Marina where she is now working. Sunsplash is in good hands.
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I heard from my daughter that she had tested negative and could fly into Ocala. I reserved a car to go meet her at the Appleton Museum of Art. I will go to the airport with Robert on Tuesday after I clean up my pizza mess. The pizza preparation today is stymied by someone taking my mixer and prep knife out of the communal kitchen. I found kneading the dough by hand from scratch was rewarding and maybe the dough will be even better. It is chilly and overcast today so I put my little heater in the kitchen so that the dough would rise properly, while am aboard Kaimu shivering.
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Pizza Night was bereft of some of the regulars, but a new face showed up from up North, a friend of Robert. He seemed happier, but not as happy as some people. I was busy making pizza and realizing my pain again. Fair weather friends, but I was the snow bird going South, I was the fair weather friend. The chasm in my heart is just another brick or block that makes up my overall being. The renter of the Breezeway brought out a frozen pizza, “All Meat”, and asked if he could pop it into the thousand degree oven. It was like an ice cube on a grill, burned on the bottom, somewhat thawed, taken out and set aside. I taught him how to light the oven and set the temperature. He set it for 400 degrees for his half cooked frozen pizza. I made one more pie and tried to bake it. I had to turn the oven back up. It was down to die hard pizza cutomers in the Breezeway. Strange how no one wants to leave a conversation, we were all coming up with memories of cold nights and who could come up with the baddest coldest night.
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When I opened my zip-lok bag of leftover pizza I found I had grabbed slices of the burned frozen pizza. Well, why not try it, anyway. One good reason is that it was horrible. The crust was mushy unbaked dough, the toppings were store bought pizza toppings, and to top it off, the bottom was burned black. Ugh.
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I went to the airport with Robert and picked up a Kia for tomorrow’s drive to Ocala. Back at the boatyard I had to clean up my pie pans and other debris. In the morning I had my usual breakfast and hit the road. It might take 3 hours to get down there. The roads were open, no wrecks or tie-ups, I set the cruise control for 10 over. I arrived at Ocala at the Horse and Hounds restaurant. I was 45 minutes early. I had a glass of merlot.
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My daughter was looking well, nervous about the coronavirus and how it could throw a wrench into her travel plans. The restaurant was excellent. I decided I had had too much wine, so she drove us to the Appleton Museum of Art. It is a medium sized museum with excellent pieces. A gallery full of beautiful paintings of flowers and plants called Garden Party was amazing. The artist, Susan Martin, is prolific and her paintings are of the super realism genre. She has 20 paintings on loan to the museum. She paints in acrylic and it was hard to get a photo of a painting without getting glare off the surface. With my reading glasses I could see her actual brushstrokes and the amazing detail of line and color she achieves.
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There were other exhibitions in the museum that were impressive, two were off limits for photography. We were going to have tea in the cafe area, but it was not in service except as a place to sit, with a view of the courtyard. We traveled through the courtyard with its fountains and went to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for pick me up drinks and I left to drive back at sunset. It was more busy on the road as it got darker, and more difficult for me after a long day. Still, I thought about stopping to shop, I was almost out of coffee and my bread was not just sour dough, it was sour mold dough. I passed a Winn-Dixie in one of the towns 301 passes through. Maybe the one in St Marys would be open.
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It was around 8 o’clock and the store was open, I got my coffee, bread, water, and ingredients for ole mole pork soup. Picnic roast, spinach had been pulled from the shelves for some reason, orange marmalade, a medium jar of medium salsa, and soon I was back in the boatyard aboard Kaimu.
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The morning was very chilly. I had to return the car with Robert’s help. When I got back I began making the soup. The recipe has appeared here several times, but this time it was a half recipe. I let it cook 2 hours this time. I whiled away the time watching a couple of the Curse of Oak Island shows. This intriguing story has gone on for a long time, it’s one of the mysterious lost treasure stories. Fortunately I could also figure out a way to move the huge group of museum photos from the phone to the computer. It turns out I had been fooled by the long time it took for the computer to load the phone’s pictures folder. Once I realized I only had to be super patient and let it load, it was easy to mark and transfer the photos to a folder on the computer.
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It was time to work on the soup. Someone had taken not only my dough mixer, they had taken the colander that I used to make soup, They had taken my fat separator. How can you make pork soup without separating the fat, and it’s difficult without that simple plastic cup like tool, but you can do it with a small wine glass and a spoon. Let the fat rise, take your time, the more the better. Discard the fat. Keep at it. It will take a while, but the soup will be relieved of its fat.
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The pork was cut into strips way back when, and now the strips were cooling on a cutting board, cut into smaller strips, stripped of any stuff that we should pare off and discard, and cut into medium dice, and thrown back in the pot. Meanwhile we had poured the salsa into the soup, drawn of some of the irresistible broth to pour into the salsa jar and get all the rest of it, back into the soup. Mix and taste. The pork was further processed, eliminating any of the unwanted stuff, diced, and returned to the soup. I had a bowl of it, raw soup, needed more time, like a day, but like beaujolais, it’s character was evident.
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The image is a photo of Kris Kringle from the Appleton Museum.