(More) Cheese and Beer (to be thankful for)

Today is Thanksgiving. We sit on the couch as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is going by on TV. Pilgrim Man and Pilgrim Woman have just gone by to pay tribute to those pilgrims that celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Chris Issak is now lip synching to "Great Balls of Fire".... Just when you thought it couldn't get too much better the Texas University Strutters are ... strutting their stuff, making the state of Texas very proud and yes, you can get all the music from the parade at iTunes. Here comes Kermit! He has become the family ambassador to New York City, so he's got a lot to be thankful for.

OK, maybe I'll break off the commentary there. Seems a few things have happened since the last entry here. We went apple picking. Seems that most of the people from Columbus chose to go the same Saturday as us and we sat in traffic trying to get to the country for what seemed a very long time. We got there though and got our pick of Winesap and Roma apples (the Fuji's were going fast in another field and sadly the Honeycrisps weren't quite ready or were already gone, I don't quite remember).

There was also the opportunity to select your pumpkin in time for Halloween. As seen above... Yes, that is a man with a cart (trolley) in a bumpy field out to select his pumpkin(s).....  

On TV, Don Mclean has just mimed his way through "American Pie" while people dressed as park rangers awkwardly danced and sung along with the back drop of North Dakota's Mount Rushmore. 

Obviously it being Thanksgiving means being thankful for stuff and I'm sure you've all been closely following my quest for decent Cheddar here in America. You'll be pleased to know a new American effort has emerged that I am very thankful for. Step forward Vermont's Grafton 4 year vintage Cheddar.   Now I just need to work out a place to find it that isn't 2 1/2 hours away in Cleveland!

Lastly a quick note on something else that isn't available in England; New Holland's Dragons Milk. America has definitely turned me into someone that appreciates a good Oak Aged Stout and this is indeed one. At a hefty 10%, my ping pong skills haven't benefited from it's tasty oak, bourbon and vanilla notes.

The President and Pumpkins

It's been two months, so maybe time for another post.... Seems that fall is very much here in central Ohio. How do you know? Maybe something to do with this fairly sizable mural at the end of our street and the small matter of a presidential campaign. The president has been here a few times already this year and he'll be back again on Tuesday. In the last 70 years, whoever has won in Ohio has won the election, so some reason as to why either the president or vice president has made a visit on average every three weeks since they took office.

Oh and of course another reason you might have an idea fall is here... A whole load of pumpkins.

So, yeah the election. On this last Wednesday Ohio boys the National put their time and effort towards re-electing the president by spending time on campus getting voters registered. They the stuck around to play a show at the Newport, just across from campus. It was free, if you could just commit to volunteering some of your time for the campaign. Kristen did, but as I'm not a student I used my "having to work full time" to get out of it. Maybe not quite the attitude required to re-elect the president,  but I did promise I'll encourage all my buddies to get out and vote, maybe that'll do it.

Other election commentary comes from Snoop Dog who detailed just why he won't be voting for Mitt Romney here (Parental Advisory warning for language: Mum, this means you.). My personal fave is his dislike for Romney's (wife's) dancing horse. 

Fried Food and Farm Animals

Last weekend I experienced my first state fair. I had heard a number of different things I was to expect, though mostly people talked about fair food.

The Wienermobile was what greeted us upon entering the fairgrounds. I got to taste the new brand Oscar Mayer Wieners and they went down pretty well.

Compared to prize-winning jam and banana bread the title of best brillo pad artist was.... not quite as keenly contested, but a whole lot more fun to look at.

We made sure that we got in early for the pig racing, almost getting a front row view. There were four rounds, the final one pictured above featuring not the fastest pot bellied swines.

I was told to catch the butter cow. We did. We were impressed. We wondered what becomes of the butter when the fair comes to an end.

We decided against a donut burger. Just in case you were wondering, the meat between those donuts has never been frozen and there is lettuce in there somewhere....

These guys were the undoubted highlight of the petting zoo.

I got some lemonade from here. I didn't get any cheese on a stick.

Fireworks, Guided By Voices and a Bear

This blog entry is a bit late in coming, but it seemed necessary to share my first 4th of July experience and all that it entailed. We decided we would travel back to Pennsylvania to see Kristen's family and because there was work to be done on the freezers at Jenis, I wouldn't have been able to work anyway. We had one of our more pleasant drives east this time, helped by stopping a couple of times; in Zanesville and in the PA state capital of Harrisburg. The trip was, though, even more exciting for the sighting of a black bear on the PA Turnpike. He seemed pretty unconcerned with the speeding traffic alongside him, as he just watched it go by and then scooted off into the woods.

Come the 4th of July, we decided that instead of heading downtown to the main Bethlehem fireworks display we we would drive over to see a more intimate display courtesy of friends of Kristen. PA law states that you are not allowed to launch fireworks that leave the ground and so all the fireworks we had the pleasure of seeing were "grounders". As much as the noise and colors they gave off was fun, even better was the introduction we were given to each by name, before they were lit. Examples included: Wrath Of The Beast, Moonlight Madness, Frog Prince (the one shaped like a frog's head in the picture above) and my personal fave, "One Unbelievable Fountain". The display was a fun time, enlivened by some sort of spinning effort that sent a few rockets towards the crowd of neighbors sat a good distance back on lawn chairs.

Another reason for heading back to PA was to get to see Dayton, Ohio's Guided by Voices... in Philadelphia. Around 10 years ago when I picked up a used copy of "Do the Collapse" in the Replay records in Bedminster I didn't really know what I was starting. I also didn't know that they were about to break up and stop playing together a couple of years later.... and then a few years later that Kristen and I would be living in Columbus, OH an hour or so away from Dayton. After gathering a mere fraction of their back catalogue I was pretty excited that they reformed a year or so ago and waited for them to come over to England. They never did, apparently Robert Pollard isn't too keen on flying. Finally they re-united and started playing shows a couple of years ago, and this year started in releasing new albums, two of three so far.... this year! There seemed no reason not to see them when they announced a summer tour, even if we couldn't make it to any of the three Ohio dates they were due to play.

Even with them playing a bunch of songs from the two of their three new albums, there was still plenty of room for them to play "the hits". Shocker in Gloomtown came early and made me very happy indeed. They came back two or three times, and played something over 40 songs which is certainly value for money. Even though he's pushing 55, Bob still busted out a good few high kicks (here at 1:33) and put away a fair amount of Miller Lite. One thing he couldn't keep up with though was Mitch Mitchell's cigarette smoking ability. I didn't try to keep count, but that he had a cigarette roadie to supply him between, and sometimes during, songs might give an idea of how many he got through! Hopefully it won't be another 10 years before we see them again.

The Power is Out, Save the Ice Cream!

We were making the best seller, Salty Caramel on Friday and our supervisor had just commented how quickly we were going and how this should always be the way it is. Then the lights went out. The power didn't come back all night. In between a lot of sitting around and waiting, people that get paid more than me tried pretty hard to come up with ways of saving millions of dollars worth of "artisan" ice cream. There was a freezer team and a number of refrigerated and freezer trucks and we tried pretty hard to load them up as quickly as possible. I got off about 1am and found out that the power returned the next day and the ice cream was saved, excellent. 

Houses and businesses either side of the ice cream kitchen were fine and it was only when I got home and had to pull a huge branch from our parking spot that I realized the storm might have been quite a big deal. It transpired that the storm winds had hit heights of 80 mph. On the Saturday morning we went out for a walk around the neighborhood. Some streets not even a few hundred feet away from us had huge trees down and here and there a few crushed cars too. While walking around we talked to more people than we have in the 8 months since we've been here. We stopped by one of the record shops (the sign above) and we stopped by a store with one of the owners standing on the street corner advertising the free (melting) ice cream, we both picked up a Twix. We continued stepping over branches and crossed different streets, and turned around in a few places as we couldn't get around the 100 year old fallen tree. We eventually got to Lost Weekend Records and had a good long chat with the owner. He seemed to think that it was only him, the Hustler Store and the supermarket that had power in their section of High Street. As we walked towards home we said hi to a load more people in a sympathetic kind of way and overheard the two men with chainsaws being offered "cold ones" by some chap on his porch watching the clean-up.

The Crew game was delayed by an hour while they tried to get power to all parts of the stadium, much to the chagrin of one caller to a local radio station we were tuned to. "Why do they have power crews at the stadium?.... 85% of Americans probably don't even care about the game on the pitch (as they call it)..... there are old women without power..... it's wrong I tell you....." Or another caller; "this storm is God's wrath on us for the decision of the supreme court to uphold Obama's health care decision...."

Back to the game and the guy above was doing his best to be a part of military appreciation night, or just a bit early on the 4th of July. Real (ahem) Salt Lake looked much the better team and passed the ball really well, but failed to convert any of their chances and before they knew it they were 2-0 down to the Crew. That was how it stayed, the fireworks went off and we walked home in the rain, thankfully without the 80 mph winds.

Becoming a bit more American and Making Ice Cream

Finally we are on the way to becoming a bit more American. Firstly, we enjoyed our first Memorial Day weekend in 90 degree plus heat stood on a friend's porch drinking beer and eating BBQ. It helped that the hosts were grilling aficionados and slow-cooked two massive lumps of brisket for something near 16 hours. I may or may not have suffered from something called the meat sweats. I definitely suffered from being bitten by bugs.

As you may guess from the picture above we have also gone a long way to fitting in here in the midwest by becoming owners of a 2003 Honda Civic, with an amount of miles one might laugh at back in the UK. 144,000 sounds a lot, but when people don't consider driving a few hundred miles for an afternoon out a big deal and still try and sell stuff with over 200k, hopefully it'll see us through our next two years here in Columbus.

In the last couple of weeks I have graduated from the labeling department into production at the Ice Cream kitchen. The handmade nature of the product even extends to taking a pint of ice cream in each hand and "tapping" them on an upturned cooking pot. Tapping is important as it gets any air bubbles out of the ice cream. One of the more unpleasant side effects of tapping is the danger of getting ice cream in your eye. You certainly get it in your face, depending on how quickly it is melting will determine just how much of your face and glasses are splattered.

Since tapping, lidding and boxing (the latter two probably not needing too much explanation), I have moved onto "machines". The machines make the ice cream and you (the operator) give it the ingredients to do so. Even though it is pretty hard physical work, the process is relatively straightforward. Basically, pour a bucket or two of ingredients in and tell the machine how long to churn away. What makes this task a good amount more challenging in certain flavors of ice cream is the presence of flecks of white chocolate that have a habit of clogging the machine. Also, making "White House Cherry" involves hand mixing "sugar syrup-plumped cherries" and "roasted whole pistachios". While mixing, though, you need to be sure that the ice cream isn't melting and that it is staying white and not turning purple as a result of the cherries. Fortunately this is a limited editor flavor and will be done with when the president is inaugurated in the fall.

Nuns and Breck Shea's Hair

Call for the Nuns; our home record is pretty poor

Saturday saw us make our way down the road for our first game of this 2012 MLS season. The Crew hadn't given too much reason to be hopeful of three points so far this season, beating two pretty poor Canadian teams and either drawing or losing the rest of their games. After paying $10 last season and enjoying our $5 food voucher, it seemed only right that this season's student tickets were available at $8.... still with a $5 food voucher, can't be bad. The signs were good upon entering the stadium, in that the first people we saw were the ladies above. 

As the teams got around to lining up for the anthems, our buddies in the Nordeke got their various banners in place. It took us until after the game to work out what all the LH's were about. Lemar Hunt passed away a couple of years ago, but a bit of (Wikipedia) research confirms he was a pretty important chap in US sports. As well as coming up with the idea of a "superbowl" he set about founding the NASL in the late 60's, which his Dallas Tornado team won in 1971. After playing his part in setting up Major League Soccer, he took ownership of the Kansas City and Columbus teams, a few years later he bought Dallas too. Think there are probably rules against this sort of thing in most countries. The section of fans near us seem pretty grateful for him and his creating their team and the stadium we were standing in.

Have some of this Brek Shea!

K and I were accompanied to the game by two of our friend's that had never been to a soccer game before. They loved it. And exclaimed, "It's like the fans do the job of the cheer leaders!" I think I was struck anew this time by just how positive the Crew fans are. Overhearing the lady behind me telling her friend why Emilio Renteria was her favorite player: "He just really hustles and tries his hardest, and I just really like him." What didn't seem too important to her was the fact that as a striker he hadn't scored in all nine games this season and could probably have had a hat-trick before he was subbed off in the 83rd minute.

Brek Shea?

Rooney Mara?

At Half Time they were probably lucky to only be one behind. The defenders were pretty much all over the place and with better finishing from Dallas it might have looked a bit gloomier. Brek Shea and his hair were looking lively, but not long into the second half Dallas had a man sent off and the momentum shifted and it was all Columbus. After a great finish from outside of the box to draw level, there was a pretty remarkably headed goal from about 20 yards out, kind of think the keeper needs to take some of the blame for being beaten from that far out. But we didn't care. The Crew closed out the game pretty well and we came home to an ice cream feast.