It is the 4 day home from work and school. I am very glad I bought the new heat pump since the old one would have frozen up by now and we would even be colder than we are now. I am not too sure that I am crazy about heat pumps. We have had a hard time getting the house over 63 degrees. It is a 5 ton 15 SEER unit,but does not seem to do much better than the old one did when it was new.
I am really glad that I do not live somewhere that it snows more than a couple of times a year. It is novel for a day or two but by the fourth day, I am ready for the summer. My kids on the other hand, enjoy the change and the cold. My middle daughter Anna, loves the snow. She really loves life in general. She is as competative as she is friendly.
It is seems indiscriminate how people come into your life and influence the way you see others and more importantly, yourself. It is also interesting how joining one recreational club in college could change your life. The Texas A&M Moo Duk Kwan Club is one such club that has served to influence and guide me in both my collegiate and professional life. This being said, my good friend and martial arts teacher Fred Hackett just deployed again to Iraq. He is one of those people, along with Greg Caplinger, Steve Hunter, Dr. Michael Trulson, Tony, Trulson, Carl Dixon and a long list of other martial artists who helped me hone my martial art skills and more importantly my life skills. It really is remarkable how physical training influences the other areas of one's life. I was lucky enough to learn with and from these gentlemen.
If I never told youThanks Guys!
Below is a short video that was put together from footage taken of Fred over the last 20 plus years. It was assembled by the martial art school that Fred works out with when he is not serving his country or working in corporate law. I just wanted to put it up on the site and say thanks to Fred for all he does for his friends, family and country.
Sometimes things just don't go as planned. I bought a faucet a couple of years ago that I expected to solve all my dish washing needs. It swiveled and had a cool water wand that pulled right out of the center of the spout. This looked really great and further cemented my view of the evolution of modern man. My illlusion was quickly dismantled by a tempermental applicance that only worked correctly for a couple of weeks. Deciding that we did not want to replace the faucent again until we could afford to replace the sink. Come to think of it the cabnet where the sink resided was looking old and outdated. We decided to just wait until we could afford to remodel the kitchen. In the mean time we were unable to swivel the old faucet or pull out the new fangled sprayer since they think always had to be manually refeed back down the spicket arm. In other words, our faucent was pretty useless and made workin in the kitchen a real pain. My wonderful wife never complained but visitors to the house reminded me that this was not an optimal sollution to my dish washing needs.
More to come. I am testing my comment section to see why I cannot make it work the way I wish.
On Sunday morning after church my wife informed me that our garage refrigerator and freezer were not cooling properly. Upon further inspection, I realized I had unplugged them on accident the evening before, thus all the frozen meat had defrosted and needed to be cooked. My wife being a wise woman decided to make the best of the situation, Lemonade from Lemons as the phrase goes and convinced me to have friends from church over for dinner. They were very pleasant guests and helped us eat much of the chicken, fish and some T-bone steaks. I greedily horded the deer meet for me to consume at some later date. That brings me to the title of my blog post, deer and chutney. I began cooking the back strap and skirt steak around 8:00PM. It was rather late and I was not happy with the way the back strap was cooking so I brought in the meat for my wife to work her culinary magic upon it. As any good southern woman knows, few things are bad dipped in flour and pan fried in oil. This is what she did and they were very tasty. As I savored the first bite of venison, I knew that the experience could be further extenuated if I had the right condiment. Getting up from my favorite eating spot (the ottoman in front of the TV) I went and rummaged around the refrigerator. That would be the inside refrigerator which will be the focus of a future blog entry. Upon inspection of what might add the perfect accent to my deer, I found some chutney given to me by my dear friends Butch and Laura Hall. They sent us a wonderful Christmas care package full of all sorts of wonderful items. From Kokopelli wine bottle corks to Anasazi beans. The Halls are truly wonderful people. In the refrigerator, I found the magical missing ingredient for my dinner to be complete.
Even though the kids had lost the controller to the satellite and I had to listen to Sesame Street, I was very content to eat my dinner and ponder how fortunate I was to have a wonderful wife, dear friends and 3 healthy children. God is good and I am a very blessed man. Sometimes I do not see it until I step out of what my own expectations are for my life and look at how God always gives me more than I needed much less deserved.
