Captain's Log, Stardate 83676.0

For the Star Trek fans in our blog reading audience, that would place this entry in the second quarter of the year 2406, around mid-April I'm guessing. But I digress. I saw the number minus the period on some paperwork I had to do this morning before I opened the office, and it got my brain running. That, along with Yael's motorcycle on the Axis Tour, a cross-continent race among twenty fiercely competitive youth in Ryan Graudin's alternate history novel Wolf By Wolf (ISBN 9780316405126) where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won and split Europe and Asia roughly between them and Yael the former concentration camp inmate gained the experimental ability to "skinshift" or make herself look like anyone she wants and is impersonating a contestant to get close enough to Adolf Hitler to kill him and start a revolution ... my son Jeffrey's right, I need to keep track of my punctuation!


I helped Jeffrey with a heritage assignment (essentially, what is a food distinct to our ancestry and how is it special to our family) last night and chose gravlax that I could trace back to my great-great-grandfather in Sweden who served in Napoleon's armed forces. Gravlax is easy to prepare and even though the original recipe uses raw salmon -- you cure it by burying it on a sandy beach for twelve hours, so you had to adapt it being on the move -- if you're not into or can't catch fish he adapted it to use any handy meat (I guess we would say any protein now) and set it and season it on rye bread. We've adapted it over two centuries for our household now, of course ... we're not fans of rye bread so we usually use white or even crackers instead. It's a texture thing. Today you hear of gravlax as more of a hors d'oeuvre (until a few years ago, I though that was spelled "orderb" because that's what it sounded like to my untrained in Romance language ears!


Yesterday after bringing Sarah and Jeffrey to school (I just typed "to work" and had to clear that) I drove our Lumina over and had a patch put on the right front tire at Harley's for twenty-five bucks. And then came the class act; the man who rang me up realized he'd overcharged me by mistake -- thirty instead of twenty-five -- and put the five-dollar overcharge back on my card. I love that he told me and I didn't have to point it out, because I probably wouldn't have due to my frustration at having put air in the tire every day for the last week or so. I hate to say it, but automotive engineering, even routine preventative maintenance, is something Martha and I each assume the other is doing or has done. So it doesn't get done and that's something we need to change ... and for me, I need to not commit the facecrime anymore of looking like I don't like when Martha goes out of town for state bowling (I DO, I just think while having fun you ought to be able to improve your game too)!


That's this weekend. This morning after bringing the kids to school and taking a nap -- not at the same time -- I stopped at church for Coffee With The Boys and came in on the middle of a recent history lesson on Chile. Ivan one of our new members is originally from that country and I caught something about readjusting borders between that nation and Argentina and Peru in the ... seventies, apparently. It got me thinking back to a paper I'd written for Latin American Politics class at Stetson in the fall of '93 about a 19th century war that set Bolivia's current borders. A Chilean port city called Antofagasta comes to mind as especially prominent in this conflict -- by the way, if you check a map Bolivia is the only landlocked country in all South America. And the discussion went on to Brazil and its leaps and bounds in technology, coming close to but not quite Israel's. (Seriously, in the USA we've taken pages from them on desalinization. So they're not all encouraging Pollards there.)


But I digress,


David