Scraping the Bottom

In a lot of ways, Facebook is a fiasco. Certainly it allows contact between large groups of people, and it allows you to find long-lost acquaintances, often by chaining to other acquaintances. Of course, there are some acquaintances you would rather forget, but that is a slightly different problem ...

I need to stay more up to date via blogging. The advantage over Facebook notes is that there is less distraction from the trivia that oozes to the surface of Facebook on a constant basis. The disadvantage is missing out on the trivia. Thus, at times a disadvantage is an advantage in disguise. Next I suppose I will discuss the genius aspects of an oxymoron.

The garden is producing. Saturday I picked a pile of cucumbers -- note that I just skipped the opportunity for onomatopoetic excess -- and several tender little zucchinis. The latter I sliced into 1/2" wafers and froze on a cookie sheet, and then stored them in a baggie. Today I treated another threesome the same way.

I tried some of the bok choy a week or so ago and was disappointed, because it has failed to head the way the picture on the seed package showed. In fact, one of the plants began to bolt, so I yanked it and whacked off the top portion. On a whim, I brought the remainder into the house, not sure what I would do with it. This evening I chopped it into chunks and boiled some of it. With butter and salt and pepper it was actually acceptable.

The remainder has been cleaned and is currently in a colander waiting to go into the refrigerator. Between the cucumber salad and some Swiss chard at supper, and now this cabbage snack, I may be offsetting a good bit of the rat poison in my system. Wednesday we shall find out.

As for Uncle Emil's artifacts, I have to say that the bundle was not quite as advertised. There are some WW2 memoirs -- I think he was putting stuff together to try to write a book and basically only got as far as the outline -- and a series of letters from 1957-1959. What is there is an interesting picture of life at sea, but there is not the detail that I was hoping for to fill in the stories that Uncle Mike and Dad told. One thing is certain; Uncle Emil was a stickler for detail, and had both a flair for drama and a wicked sense of humor.

He also had the dreaded Hrubik temper. The notarized statement accompanying his official resignation of command on 24 October 1945 contains an apology for what he had "written in the heat of anger".

So I suppose I need to catalog the stuff and then create a blog page just for that. For now, I'll just post this : Capt. Emil Hrubik, on the flying bridge of his new post-war command, the S.S. William A. Henry (Matson Lines), 1946.