Saturday, June 01, 2002

Register to donate bone marrow. You might never need to donate. All registering means is that information about your marrow is stored in a database. If a leukemia patient needs a transplant, and doesn't have a family match, then they look in the database for a match. If you ever do get called to donate, you know it'll be because one particular person needs it. Really worthwhile thing to do. 3:13:24 PM

In the basement, in a clear plastic storage bin (labeled "RKB Junk") I found four books, printed between 1984-1987. Some of the content I re-discovered makes me cringe. But I guess you might expect that when you read stuff you wrote when you were 15 years old. It got better by 1987. Heh. Thanks to Lisa Purdy for reminding me that these books existed. And thanks to whatever warning flag in the back of my brain kept me from tossing these years ago, during any of a number of cross-county moves. You won't yet see one of the poems I'd published in that senior year tome. Maybe later. I had a pretty good run in early January of 1987, when I sat down every afternoon for one week with an old manual typewriter and cranked out a poem or two each day. Maybe had ten poems when I was done, all first drafts (things that you forget how to do with a word processor), all pretty decent work. Called it The Citation Collection, after the brand of typewriter I was using. Nope. What you'll see here (reprinted without permission (yet)) is something that Lisa wrote about yours truly, back in the day. I'm glad she was persistent in her internet search for me. Here's a little something called Perfect Tommy, taken from Mesopotamia: Between Two Rivers, a collection of poetry that you won't find on Amazon anytime soon. And, frankly, I deny ever having bleached my Levi's, or having worn pastels. I guess Lisa must have taken some creative license ... umm ... or ... umm ... something... 2:45:28 PM

In hindsight, we don't use the steak marinade nearly as often as the chicken. I'll go ahead and blame the economy. Here's an equally tasty half-hour marinade (I tried doing this one overnight once, without any demonstrable increase in quality): First of all, I'm never sure how much marinade to use with how much chicken, so I've figured out the right ratio of ingredients. If there's not enough marinade to cover most of the chicken, then I just make some more. It also depends on if you're using only chicken drumettes (popular with the girls), or the whole chicken. Put one package of chicken into a glass bowl, then start the marinade in a large Pyrex measuring cup. You'll have two liquids: soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce, and the ratio is 2:1. I start with one cup of soy sauce and 1/2 cup Worcestershire. Next add 1 tablespoon brown sugar, 2 tsp minced garlic, 1 tsp pepper, 1/2 tsp rubbed basil, 1/2 tsp rubbed oregano. Mix everything well (still in the measuring cup) and pour over the chicken. Repeat, if necessary. 8:07:06 AM