Seal of Approval

 

We decided to spend Christmas at the beach this year.  It was glorious.  We rented a nice oceanside beach house on the Outer Banks, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, taking advantage of off-season prices.  I took a number of sunrise photos. It was only natural because I got up early every day.  I took the photo above the last morning.  Nice, huh?  Look on the left side, near the waterline.  I didn’t see this when I first took the photo.

As I admired the view, I finally noticed it.  At first, I thought it was a large piece of driftwood.  Then I figured it was a large dead fish.  Then I noticed what looked like whiskers.

The is a zoom-in from the previous photo. 

“Oh, great,” I thought to myself, “A dead seal on our last day!”

I kept trying to comprehend what I was seeing; then it happened.  The tail flippers moved ever so slightly.

“Even better, a dying seal on our last day.”

The tide was coming in. I checked it on-line.  High Tide was in about an hour.  I could see the waves extending a little more up the sand every few minutes.  The seal raised its head once.

Then a flock of seagulls came up and started a wide circle around the deck and the shore, including the seal.  In my mind, they were focused on the body.

“I’m not going to stand here and watch breakfast being served.”

So I tromped out into the sand, in my shorts and croc-style clogs; not my sand footgear of choice. I was intent on at least inspecting it with a bit more detail before I called somebody.  It was a bit chilly and the sand at the end of the deck was deep and loose, so I made my way toward the body with some difficulty.  Somewhere between fifty and a hundred feet from it the status changed.  Forgive me for being less-than-accurate because what happened next greatly diverted my attention.

My approach caused the seal to suddenly perk up. It looked up, then turned toward the water. It looked back and then started its funny seal-walk toward the waiting waves. It wasn’t dead or sick … it must have been sleeping!

I fumbled with the phone in my pocket and quickly fired up my camera, and caught these shots of the rush for safety.

The entire sequence of events took maybe thirty seconds.  It was a rare and remarkable nature sighting and for me, it seemed to last much longer.

Finally, all that was left was this:

I saw it one more time, about twenty feet out, its little head poking out of the water, probably wondering what the heck happened and who the heck had barged into the room.

Since then, I’ve learned a bit more about seal sightings along the North Carolina coast. In the winter, seals move south, down the coast. A few go as far as NC, some even make it down to South Carolina.  It’s a rare thing to see, but not unusual. A lone seal like this is not unusual either. The young ones, probably teen-agers in seal years, often take off on their own.  Being on the beach like this is not unusual either.  It’s termed “hauling out” … and it is considered quite normal for seal behavior.

I did the wrong thing by approaching him. I had no idea. It turns out there is a number to call to report sightings … they would have told me what to do: just keep back and watch.  This one was probably waiting for the tide to be the alarm clock.  I did report the sighting after the fact, which is another thing they say to do.

Anyway, it was a great last day, and it was an awesome bookend for the year 2019.

Happy New Year.

BTW: Here’s a link with resources;
… I wish I had this available at the time:  NOAA Link

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in North Carolina.  Make 2020 the year you catch THE FEVER … read it and the other two books in the trilogy.  You won’t be sorry.
http://thefensk.com

 

 

The Pie!

If we were having coffee today, I’d offer you this piece I wrote on The Pie.

In the early 1990s, I was a moderator on what was called a USENET newsgroup; the newsgroup existed specifically for users to share recipes.  Before the web, USENET was basically THE internet. It actually worked a lot like facebook does today, with forums, posts, immediate access, and worldwide access.  But it was all text.  It was pretty much self-regulated too, by a cadre of computer professionals who helped form the early beginnings of the internet. It was a fascinating time to be internet savvy.

Anyway, a guy who was starting up a new recipe web page contacted the moderators and asked us to send him some recipes so he could flesh out the beginnings of his website, recipezaar.com.  He wisely did not want to just steal recipes, he was looking to create a recipe sharing site where people could freely exchange.

Sometime before that my wife Gretchen had seen an intriguing “Amish” Buttermilk Pie on a recipe segment of a local TV station.  All she managed to do was copy down the list of ingredients.  I used similar custard pie recipes to figure out the procedures and baking specifics.  We loved it.  But shortly after that, we lost the list of ingredients before we had recorded them elsewhere.  They were scribbled on the back of some envelope.

At one point I put out a request for buttermilk pie recipes on the newsgroup.

I bet I gained ten pounds testing the various recipes that were shared but not one was as good as that original.  Just when everything seemed hopeless I opened a cookbook and … there was the envelope!!!!!!

I did two things … made a pie to verify that yes, this WAS better than all the others, and then I wrote it down in several places.  By some serendipitous accident, this was the precise time this gentleman was requesting recipes so I submitted it, as sort of a fail-safe. I forgot about this for about four years until a friend of mine noticed it on recipezaar and asked me about it.  He said it had a bunch of positive reviews.  I hadn’t even registered as a user yet … but I got signed up and got the recipe attached to my profile. Fame at last.

This has continued to this day, but recipezaar was sold at some point, at least twice and possibly three times.  The original recipe has survived intact, along with all the reviews.  It is now the foundation of food.com.

All through its life, it has generally turned up first in searches for “Buttermilk” or “Buttermilk Pie” … and there is a reason for this.  Food.com no longer prints recipe numbers but the previous websites did … this recipe is #56, which I am sure is used as a unique database identifier (I am an IT guy). A search with no other criteria will turn them out in numeric order.  This is still the case.  If you look at the link I provide below, you’ll still see “56” … this is 56 out of over five hundred thousand recipes.

Now … a couple of years ago I concocted a free promotional cookbook … a companion book to my novels and I decided to include the buttermilk pie recipe (with minor modifications).

In the past month, I have heavily promoted the cookbook, most of that on Twitter.  So a few days ago when I received a message on Twitter about the pie I assumed it was from one of my thousands of new readers (seriously, this promotion month has been pretty good).

I probably confused her with portions of my response because I referred to other recipes and asked for a review.  After a few messages back and forth she informed me she got it from food.com!  With my big promotion, I didn’t even think about that location!

I call the recipe in the cookbook “The Best-Danged Buttermilk Pie” and it is listed as a customer favorite in the fictional cafe.  I even mention that fact in the latest novel, LUCKY STRIKE.

I’ll tell you this … get it from the website or get it from the cookbook, I don’t care.  Just GET IT.  This pie is that awesome.

The food.com link is https://www.food.com/recipe/buttermilk-pie-56

The cookbook link is https://www.amazon.com/Mossback-Cafe-Cookbook-Thomas-Fenske-ebook/dp/B071XRC8MP

An alternate for the cookbook, with links to Nook and iBook and Kobo: http://thefensk.com/cook.html

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Thomas Fenske is an author living in NC.

WeekendCoffee Video

If we were having coffee today, I’d pull out my phone and show you my latest book trailer.

You’d probably say something like, “Book trailer? You mean, like a bookmobile?”

No, it is a video promotion for my upcoming book release.  Book trailers were all the rage a couple of years ago, but I haven’t noticed too many of them recently.  I have two trailers for both of my other books, one I bought, the other three I cobbled together. The first one I put together myself was made by putting tother music and text in a PowerPoint presentation.  I made the last two using the same app I used this time. Like I said, all of them have just been cobbled together.

It’s a good metaphor.  Generally, I gather a number of static images that hopefully relate to various themes in the book, then assemble them together with brief phrases that hopefully convey content.  I can’t take credit for the production. It’s all part of an app on my iPhone called iMovie.  The music, the backgrounds, and all the timing is part of a “trailer template” they offer.

The “free use” photos I used were chosen because I thought they reflected aspects of specific book content. I began by inserting them into the template. There were already words in the storyboard but those are easy to replace. You have to be careful with content as the splash phrases need to fit together but you can’t be too wordy or the text size is reduced. Brevity also helps with visual appeal … a viewer has to be able to read it quickly. You can play it at any time while to see if it works or if you need to tweak.  There is a lot of tweaking. I try not to overthink it.  Most of my tweaking is with the text content.

I don’t know that any of my trailers have generated sales, but I have to admit that they are a lot of fun to put together.  With the book release coming up, I’m excited to have it up on youtube to use in pre-release promotion.  You know, like this posting!

Oh, the link!  View my trailer here:  https://youtu.be/yMXbZoBdIx8
Be sure to leave feedback and if you like it share it!

How about you? Did you do anything creative this week?

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in NC.
His latest novel, LUCKY STRIKE, is coming out in a few weeks.
Get more information on it and his other works at http://thefensk.com

WeekendCoffee Buzz … and Neil!

If we were having coffee today I’d be pretty vocal about recognizing the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing. I have privately noted the date every year since then.  It is hard to believe it has been fifty years because  I remember the events of Apollo 11 quite vividly.

In fact, I have followed the space program closely since the first flight of Alan Shepherd.  My fourth-grade teacher, Miss McGrath, dated some guy who worked for NASA (I grew up in Houston so he was part of the fledgling Manned Spacecraft Center) and he came in and got us all fired up about the whole thing.  We watched the entire flight of John Glenn on TV in school!  Big deal, you younger folks might think, but in 1962 it was indeed a big deal!

Even from the first days there were complaints about the spending of money on this entire effort.  These complaints continue today.  Improve things on earth first, they say.  I say, look around.  Chances are you’re reading this on a computer or better yet, a tablet or smartphone, based on information that was transmitted over the internet by wire or by wireless communication.  These weren’t just natural progressions in technology.

Look at the 20th Century:  most “advances” were slow, almost cosmetic, and this continued up through the 1960s.  It was after the space program that things really took off.  This is because of the huge investment in technology, which created new industries, and a lot of jobs, along with a lot of new ideas solving problems that people hadn’t even considered before.  This served to make people more interested in pursuing educational goals to advance various fields of engineering, that is, as opposed to more traditional trade pursuits.

All of us have been affected by the amazing advances in electronics, medicine, engineering, metallurgy, chemistry, manufacturing, robotics, heck, I’m running out of fields but there are more — I just can’t remember them all — you can trace all these things back to the initial investments in the lunar landing project.  It wasn’t just an investment in achieving a singular technological triumph, it was an investment in all of us that continues to enrich our lives to this day.  Maybe these things would have eventually happened, but I assure you the progress would have happened at a snail’s pace compared to the way it worked out.

You want a really good example? In May 1977 we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.  Think about that.  Yes, air travel had advanced, mostly due to wartime necessity, but that’s pretty much it.  Television?  It existed in concept at the time of Lindbergh but wasn’t even crudely available for another twenty years.  When did things really start to take off?

To the deniers, I have to ask, where is the motivation for such a conspiracy — one that would involve hundreds of thousands of people?  The money?  It really wasn’t that much in comparison to the rest of the Federal budget … remember it was funded piecemeal over a period of years.  It still is.  The thing I hate about the deniers is this: at the core of their denial is that they deny humans are even capable of doing something like this.

Here are some common claims.  No stars in the pictures.  It’s daytime!  There is no atmosphere and no ocean to reflect blue, but it’s daytime and it’s really bright and the cameras must be f-stopped really tight.  I’ll tell you this, if there were stars in the pictures, that would be proof of a fake.  The flag?  It had a spring to make it unfurl.  Hanging limp would have looked really lame.  We weren’t entirely without class in the sixties. The danger of the Van Allen Radiation Belts?  It’s a phenomenon. Really, there’s much more danger from solar wind (which is where the radiation in the belts comes from).  We know about these things … there is layered shielding.  Most of the time you get more radiation from the electric burner on your stove. I saw some guy post once about “how did they take off from the moon without an engine?” … where did he get that?  Of course there was an engine.  Lordy.

In my opinion, two events precipitated these conspiracy theories, both of them were movies.  Star Wars and Capricorn One.  Capricorn One came after Star Wars … it was about a similar sort of conspiracy but involving a Mars landing.  Pretty low budget and forgettable movie but some people didn’t forget and it cemented the merest idea of a conspiracy in their minds.  The other, Star Wars, heralded a technological leap in movie special effects that continues to this day.  Note: before Star Wars, space special effects were pretty darn awful.  You have to think about this in context.  I think a lot of deniers consider the issue through the post-Star Wars special effects revolution, not before.

Yes, people have died.  Space has always been a dangerous endeavor.  So is the freeway and air travel. In times past, people would go off on ocean voyages and disappear without a trace.  Did they stop sailing the ocean? Nope, they built newer and better ships.

You might note that I used Buzz Aldrin’s name first in my title … that was both for aesthetics as well as to give Buzz a big shout out.  We all remember Neil Armstrong first and foremost; he stepped out first, after all.  But you know what?  They landed together; they were a team, and I think they thought of themselves as a team of three.  Success depended on all three of them … including Mike Collins, the man in the tin can up above.  So to all of you, Buzz, Mike, and Neil … thank you for helping us realize what is no doubt the most awesome technological event yet created by our species.  Think of it, yeah, America did this, but more than that … humans did this!  Let’s go back!

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in NC … find more information about him and his writing at http://thefensk.com
NEWS!  His companion cookbook, The Mossback Cafe Cookbook, is now FREE on Amazon!  Take a look >>> HERE

Touching All The Bases

If we were having coffee today I’d be in a good mood.
“Why?” you might ask.
I’d tell you that I finally finished all the identified corrections on my latest manuscript.

Getting a book published is a process and you need to know you can’t skip any component parts of that process.  Well, to be more correct, you shouldn’t skip any of the steps.  If you’re lucky enough to get your manuscript accepted by a publisher and are offered a contract, the publisher proceeds to edit your manuscript. This is humbling because you, as an author, have been pouring over your own manuscript with a fine-toothed comb, striving to deliver the best possible work. When you get the manuscript back you find out just what a fumble-fingered oaf you really are.  I’ve reviewed some of the corrections wondering to myself, “who the hell wrote this crap?”

Yes, you get your manuscript back with hundreds of corrections, each of which you must review, and accept or decline. Sometimes you have instructions to rewrite a sentence or paragraph. Those must be flagged for the editor to review. It’s a process, usually involving two, three, or more rounds of correction/review.

At that point, it goes to the copyeditor, a process that can take several weeks.  This is a period of waiting, a chance for an author to revert to lazy habits. Or, sometimes, a really good author might take this opportunity to work on the next novel. I’ve done both.

When the copyeditor is finished, the publisher proceeds to package the book into something close to the final form and sends you a test edition, called a galley.  My publisher concentrates on ebooks so my galleys come in the form of a PDF file. This is the author’s most important step in the process. We’ve written the book.  We’ve spent months, sometimes years, revising the manuscript, crafting it into the product we sold to the publisher.  Now it is our turn to painstakingly read our own work. I mentioned a fine-toothed comb earlier. At this stage, we really need to sift the work for any errors we can find. I generally go to the library and sequester myself into one of those little study rooms for this process.

It is surprising, after revision, editing, and copyediting, I always find several dozen errors that need to be corrected. The corrections are listed with the full line, then on the next line, you put the full corrected line with the correction highlighted. You double-space after the correction. This allows the editor to easily find the exact line in the text and differentiate between corrections. Note: some of the “errors” are spacing corrections since the fully justified text sometimes results in inordinate spacing between words. This is your last chance to be creative.  For Lucky Strike, I submitted five pages of these corrections.

Once this stage is completed, the publisher applies the errors you found and sends you a corrected PDF.  You’re finished, right?  Nope. There is one more base you need to touch.  You need to double-check the corrections.

With my first novel, I neglected to do this.  I trusted them.  I was writing part-time, it was a busy time at work. I was new, I didn’t know what I was doing.  If I had checked even a few of those corrections, I’d have immediately realized that they had somehow not saved any of the galley corrections and the “final” version was, in fact, the uncorrected galleys.  Two weeks after publication I started getting reports of errors … very familiar errors.  The enormity of the problem became evident very quickly but I had a heck of a time convincing the publisher what had happened.  This is a story for another blog entry, but in short, I learned a very valuable lesson … double-check the corrections.

So, after I completed my corrections for the Lucky Strike, I double-checked the file and found a handful of errors that were either missed or were miscorrected.  In most cases, these were instances where there were multiple corrections in the same sentence. We call the corrections errata, so I sent a new file of errata errata.  This is what I just finalized. I got the new corrected PDF.  Yes, I checked it again.  Done!

But you know, it isn’t over there.  On publication day, an author should actually order all versions of their own book, just like a normal reader.  It is in our best interest to do this, so we can again spot check the published versions and also determine delivery times and availability.  Again, if I had done this with the first book, I would have discovered the error much earlier than my readers.

So, like the title says, touch all the bases!  Is it going to be perfect? Probably not.  There are always things that slip through the process.  How do other publishers do it? They do the same thing.  I used to never see errors in books, but after going through this process, I spot things all the time.  I don’t fixate on their errors, I just take a moment to feel the author’s pain.

What publishing nightmares have you survived?

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Thomas Fenske is an author living in North Carolina. His latest novel, Lucky Strike, is due out in October.  Now is a great time to catch up on his Traces of Treasure series … get more info on his web page.

The Reviews are NOT In

The third book in my Traces of Treasure series is coming out this October and I’m looking for new reviewers of this book and the other books in the series.

Why would anyone be interested in these books?

The answer is: I seriously don’t know.
I just write them and hope people find them entertaining.

But what I do know is this: the people who’ve read the first two books in the series really like them. But hey, not enough people have read them yet.  I also know that although the subject matter seems a bit male-oriented, seriously,  these books appeal to women as well as men. Check out the current reviews on Amazon if you don’t believe me.

These are mysteries centered on a sense of adventure,  with a good dose of obsession.  The hero of the series (so far) is Sam Milton.  He’s a bit of a loner and loser in the first book, The Fever.  He’s obsessed and he can’t help it.  He got arrested at nineteen and while in jail he helped a sick and dying wino who rewarded him with the riddle. It, the broken little man said, would help Sam find a long lost gold mine out in west Texas.

The Fever is a bit of a what-if scenario.  What if this happened to you?  Well,  you’d think about it, first dismissing it has hogwash. Then you might wonder to yourself late at night … what if? This is where the title comes in.  Eventually, you can’t help it. You catch the FEVER, gold fever.  When the book opens, a very tired and frustrated Sam is hiking out of the wilderness after yet another fruitless search. It’s dangerous terrain, the home of rattlesnakes and mountain lions.  He’s trespassing.  He sneaks in and out and drives the eight to ten hours back to his regular life, only to plot and plan his next trip. He’s careful. He has a set routine of procedures designed to keep him safe.

Then, after this latest trip, he stumbles upon the solution to the first clue in the riddle. It’s something he missed for years.  It was so simple. Yet, he’s at the end of his hiking season; or is he? The book is about his rush to get back into the field to check out his hunch, throwing out many of the safeguards he had built into his past searches.  Love? Family? Job? Who cares … this is gold we’re talking about.
A riddle and an obsession … what could possibly go wrong?
The second book, A Curse That Bites Deep, follows closely on the heels of The Fever.  Sam has relocated to the area, relieving himself of the strain of those long drives.  I’m trying not to add spoilers here, but suffice it to say, he’s much happier than he’s been in a long time.  He’s in love with a cafe owner who befriended him in the first book. Things are finally looking up for him, well, that is until people start dying.  One-by-one, people close to Sam seem to pass away.  Some deaths can be explained as accidents, but others are obviously murder.  As the situation continues to get even more complicated, he must take the initiative to confront the killer before the circle of death tightens around the love of his life.  Is it just a random homicidal maniac or is it the curse he had earlier been warned about?

The third book, Lucky Strike, due out in October, definitely proves that Sam’s lost gold mine is not the only treasure-oriented mystery in this small west Texas town. But our friends have a problem: something is definitely wrong but the details are not obvious.  They must claw and scratch their way through a bunch of muddled clues to put the pieces together. All the while they are facing a ruthless villain who seems to be everywhere at once.   It is a top-notch mystery, sure to entertain. This story is as much about Sam’s girlfriend Smidgeon Toll, as it is about him. See that image on the cover? That’s not blatant sensationalism–she does that more than once in this story.

I need reviews, so I am willing to provide PDF review copies of all three books to people who are willing to read and review them. Books 2 and 3 do have a bit of exposition so they could probably be read standalone. Of course, any review for Lucky Strike would be an advance review but if I get good taglines from an early review I can use that in the book. I have an early August cutoff for that.

I’m wanting to sell books, of course, so if there is a massive rush to the box office I might need to be selective.

So if you are looking for something to read, like to leave reviews on Amazon or even better … are a book blogger — help a guy out and drop me a line.  You can get more information on the books at http://thefensk.com — My email info is there as well.

WeekendCoffee Punctuation

If we were having coffee today, I’d be in a tizzy about punctuation. Not just any punctuation, mind you, but specifically colons and periods.

I keep getting zinged by editors on my enormously bad habit of spacing twice after colons and periods. I am currently using great effort to force myself to space singly right now as I complete every sentence.

The habit dates me. I learned to type on a typewriter. It was a standard rule I was taught. TWO spaces after colons and periods. TWO. If not, you’d get that big ruler smacked across your knuckles. I told you, it was a long time ago.

Somewhere along the line, as word processors came into being, the rule changed to a single space. I believe very large numbers of us didn’t get the memo.

It is a habit that is almost as hard to quit as smoking. It’s automatic, especially when I am on a two-thousand-word writing spree.

How many of you still double space after colons and periods?

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in North Carolina. You can buy his books on Amazon. Handy links are available here: http://thefensk.com

His second novel, A CURSE THAT BITES DEEP is on sale through June 2 at Amazon, the ebook is only 99 cents.

 

It Might Curry Your Flavor

If we were having coffee today I’d be skipping the sweet roll. Can’t do it, I’d say.  A1C is too high, the doctor said the last time I was in there and he mentioned the dreaded D-word.  I was ticked off.  I admit it.  No, I wasn’t ticked off at him. I wasn’t ticked off at fate or at life. No, I was ticked off at ME!  I knew better.

I’m being a good boy. My glucose numbers are stellar. I’m dealing with the random sweets part of this much the same way I dealt with drinking when I realized that was a deep dark hole I didn’t want to go farther down. I’m changing.  This is harder.  There are only two liquor stores here, but there are three donut shops.

I’m watching carbs.  I “did” Atkins a number of years ago so I have a good handle on the relative carb counts of food.  That is a big part of this.  I’m also exercising.  Regarding foods, it is easier than Atkins. I can have that occasional biscuit as long as I work it into my overall meal carb count.  Same with tortillas.  That covers at least two of my major food groups.

I’m still playing with a few things.  Like, take spaghetti squash. Some people tout it as a replacement for pasta.  I like it as a vegetable but I never much liked it with Marinara sauce. Ah, but I was hungry for Chicken Curry one day and wondered about making some rice, my usual accompaniment. I can eat rice in small quantities.   But sometimes it doesn’t fit in with other things I might have eaten that day. At the store, I saw some spaghetti squash and I wondered, “what if?”

I’m here to tell you today that curried chicken over spaghetti squash is a revelation! The slight sweetness in the taste is a perfect accompaniment to a spiced curry sauce.  Who knew?  I also found something else.  It seems to actually lower my glucose.  Anecdotal evidence, sure, but I’ve noticed it every time I’ve tried it. This combination is definitely in the mix now, an accident like my sweet potato secret. Ah, but you have to get my cookbook to get that.

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in NC.

For more information:  http://thefensk.com

 

#WeekendCoffeeShare #NoScam

If we were having coffee today I’d be inclined to warn you about a new telephone scam that is making the rounds.  This one is designed to prey upon helpless old people.  They hope.  It centers on the “new” Medicare card. I must be on some heavy hitters list because I get calls for this one almost every day.

I generally try to be polite on the phone.  Even with telemarketers and scammers.  This one is obviously a scam because it starts out by asking if the one has received the new Medicare card.  They will then explain that they are here to help you to activate the new card.  Since I only recently joined Medicare I knew this was bogus.  It told me immediately they wanted to use this ruse to get unsuspecting people to divulge their Social Security Numbers.  In some cases, they want to charge a fee to help you activate your new card, which was already activated the moment you received it.

Sigh.  I started out telling them I wasn’t interested in whatever they wanted to offer me.  They try to scare you by telling you, through their heavy accents, that they ARE Medicare.  Medicare doesn’t initiate any kind of call.  I generally ask to be taken off the list.  One woman told me that she could not take me off the list until I answered all of her questions.  I told her I was reporting them to the FCC (useless since the phone number is spoofed–not valid) and she responded by chanting “bless this call, bless this call, bless this call, bless this call” … I just hung up.

So the next day I got ANOTHER call.  They have a lot of information, name address, obviously phone number.  Affirm NOTHING!  On this latest call, when the guy asked if I received the new card I answered “No. I’m not on Medicare.”

Obviously, his script had some component for that answer and he started, “Okay …” but before he could continue I just went off on him.

“I don’t have Medicare or Social Security. I don’t pay taxes and I don’t have anything to do with the United States Government whatsoever …” I was just rattling off anything I could think of.  I hesitated, and the line was silent for a long interval, and he said, “Uhhhh,” and hung up.

I’m tired of not being able to answer my phone.  I’m taking it back and proceeding to have a bit of fun in the process.  I know someone who just puts it down on the table and walks away and comes back later and hangs it up.  I know someone else who blasts a loud air horn.  I think I’ll stick with crazy.  Nice but crazy.  They want to mail you a packet? Say you don’t get mail anymore, that you opted out.  No Social Security, no Medicare, no Credit Cards, no Banks.  Money?  You don’t use it, never have.  You don’t even know whose phone this is … You don’t even know where you are.

Be alert and aware and let’s take our phones back.
Uh, since I don’t use money, could you pay?

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Thomas Fenske is an author living in North Carolina. You can get more information on his books at http://thefensk.com./main.html

Retro Green Beans

Did you know Thanksgiving is in just a couple of days?  While shopping, I am always amazed at the huge stacks of green beans and mushroom soup and of course fried onions.  Did you ever wonder what people ate for Thanksgiving before this dish showed up? Read on for I one clue.

I’m here to tell you, I hate this “classic” green bean dish. I guess “hate” is a strong word. It’s not that it is bad, it’s just that it could be so much better.  How do I know?  When I got married, my darling bride turned me on to the dish her mother made at Thanksgiving for years and years.  After I started collecting cookbooks, I started looking for it. Yes, it exists.  I found it in two (I have thousands of cookbooks). One was a Gladys Tabor cookbook from the 40s.  If Gladys was alive today I have no doubt she’d be on The Food Network.  I also found it in a 1960s church cookbook.  So my hat is off to my wife’s late mom, Martha Cook.  Wherever she got this recipe, she cooked it every year and when I got married, she saved me from “other” casserole.  It is THE standard recipe at our house.

It looks harder than it is. I’m all about easy at Thanksgiving, and this is a type of homemade dish that is still easy.

Swiss Style Green Beans

2 Tablespoons Flour
2 Tablespoons grated onion
7 Tablespoons butter or margarine, divided
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white pepper
16 ounces sour cream
8 ounces grated Swiss cheese
4 – 5 Cans French Style Green Beans, drained well
1/2 cup crushed corn flakes

Lightly saute the onions in 4 Tablespoons of the butter and stir in the flour; stir until it is smooth.  Add sugar, salt, and white pepper; blend well.  Slowly stir in the sour cream and mix well and cook until smooth, and it begins to thicken, stirring occasionally.

Add the drained green beans and mix well.  Pour the mixture into greased casserole.  Top with Swiss cheese.  (this can be made ahead and refrigerated at this point)

Melt the remaining 3 Tablespoons of butter and stir in the corn flakes and mix until well coated, toasting lightly.  Spread on top of the cheese.

Bake at 350F for 30-40 minutes.

Trust me, once you eat these green beans,  you never go back.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in North Carolina.

His books make great Christmas presents: http://thefensk.com