Sukurz!

There, I said it before you could. These little finger foods were left in a box in front of the Marine Lab and the story goes that the bleeding-heart-white-girls took to them immediately. My wife being one of them, we volunteered to take them for a weekend feeding shift. That means carrying them around in a piss-and-poo-filled cardboard box everywhere we go so we can nurse them every 4-5 hours. That means mixing and warming powdered kitten formula and feeding them individually from tiny nippled bottles. And when I say taking them everywhere that includes a Korean wedding reception last night at the Sheraton where an apparently famous aging Korean rock-star was MC. He sang songs and wore a skin-tight black t-shirt with sparkling pink skulls on it. They also woke up with us at 4am today to go run a Valentine's Day 5k. That was fun. More on that from Sloan.

Being the bleeding-heart-brown-boy I am, I want the all-black.

An End to Christmas

We heard rumors of the auspicious Christmas tree bonfire a few months back, long before Christmas. "What!? You've never been to one?" Said Steve Skerritt, astounded that Sloan had not witnessed this fixture in Guam haole culture. We received an update email a week ago, prepared a pot-luck dish, and arrived last night, when we were told to, around 6:30pm.

We had expected a relatively small affair but cars were parked all the way down the dirt road off the main road. The coconut and corrugated steel shack at the center of the lawn was lit with colored chili pepper shaped lights powered by a portable generator. It looked like the party was almost over. The roasted pig was stripped to the bone. The aluminum trays of beans, pasta salad, couscous special and fish cooked in coconut milk had been picked through. A good hundred or so people with luxury lawn chairs, the ones with cup holders and head rests, had found spots on the lawn overlooking the beach. Packs of kids spun neon glow sticks tied to the ends of strings like Polynesian fire twirlers. A strange wooden contraption sat dormant on one side of the beach and a pile of brown Christmas trees grew steadily on the other.

We scrounged for some food. There was surprisingly a lot left despite first impressions. We sat on our towel amidst the towering lawn chairs and watched the sun set. Not long after dark, when 40 or so more people showed up, people were more appropriately inebriated, and enough kids had lost their slippers, two older gents, the "torchbearers" of this particular event stood on the sand and called for the attention of the masses. One was wearing a glittering black robe and had some kind of Christmas light crown on his head. He was carrying a long stick with a bundle of cloths wrapped around the end. The other was joyfully smoking a fat cigar. I can't remember exactly what he said, something along the lines of "Ladies and Gentlemen . . . etc." I was more concerned with the bundle of cloths being lit by the cigar. I could smell the gasoline thirty feet away. The long torch lit quickly, but instead of approaching the pile of dried trees the robed man did a showman's jog over to the wooden contraption which, as it turns out, was a homemade catapult. He lit some dried ball of something, maybe a coconut, in its harness, they told the children to step back, and the thing let loose, sending the flaming ball of whatever a good forty feet over the sand. Just fifteen feet too short. But these guys were perfectionists. Instead of prodding the ball over to the tree pile some young buck with a wet towel put out the first coconut and they tried again. This time it fell 5 feet short. Again the flaming ball was extinguished and again they re-loaded the catapult. With each attempt the crowd grew more comfortable and moved a few steps closer to the line of fire and mountain of trees.

With the third attempt the blazing ball landed just at the edge of the pile and quickly the flames ran up the edges of the trees. Within ten seconds the pile was ignited, engulfed in orange flame. It was windy and smoke and sparks blew in a long column towards the nearby trees. We heard stories that in previous years the pile had grown so big and the flames so high that neighbors on the other side of the beach-front forest had to hose down their roofs because the sparks had cleared the tree-tops. This year was a bit more modest, nonetheless, those seated within 50 feet of the pile had to move back because the heat was unbearable.

It was over in less than 10 minutes. The needles had burned to ash and only the skinny trunks glowed a dull red. Someone brought out bags of marshmallows. Musical instruments emerged from car trunks and the three-quarters moon lit the beach well enough.

Monolithic Dome?

I visited Area 51 this morning and was greeted kindly by Nathan. He came from Idaho. He works for a company called South Industries and they make these things, what they call Monolithic Domes. According to the website, these khaki colored balloons are Airforms (perhaps a patented fabric) that are inflated with generator-run fans until they are sprayed inside with polyurethane foam, supported by steel rebar, and then resprayed with a special concrete mixture. Supposedly these things are fire, water and wind resistant (like Captain Planet) but I can't tell if it's because they're dome shaped or because they're made of concrete, like everything else on Guam. I also can't tell if they're energy efficient because they are dome shaped or because they have so few windows. Some breakthrough. Or maybe I'm just not getting the whole story.

My only hope is to get invited inside one of these things once they are done and the neighbors move in. Maybe if I can get Sloan to make some of those filled pancakes we can head over there with a gift basket and talk about what Captain Planet did while he was in those kids' rings all day.

Castles in the Sand

If you're a Google Earth Goon and take a look at 13'' 16' 48.25 N 144'' 39' 46.20 E you will see the two circular cement platforms to the right or south of where our home should be. The lot hosting those two platforms is cleared of trees (thereby visible from space) but had otherwise remained undisturbed for the duration of our stay. We returned to our rental after holiday house-sitting for two weeks and there were trucks in the lot, spotlights, a Genie lift and men in hard hats like the end scene of Close Encounters. I noticed the structure but kept hushed so as not to disturb Sloan's fragile sense of domestic stability.

A few hours later she went out for a run and returned with her discovery. We had to see it before it got too dark. We walked over the new and crunchy white gravel the landlord had spread over the driveways. We neared the ditch and low lying shrub that separated our housing area from the next and heard voices. A man was still there in his white hard hat, talking with someone hidden behind a tree. We panicked and ran away.

We approached from the ocean side but the rough coral and recent landscaping (aka. fallen coconut trees) prevented us from getting too close. Sloan said she could just barely see it. The sun had set. We were walking back to The Container when we heared the truck pull out of the lot. We resumed our approach, hopped over the ditch and there it was, like a lopsided grandmother's beige bra'd bust, what the hell is that?

to be continued . . .

Fiesta Plate!

I remember fundraisers in elementary school. Sometimes it was those tasty chocolate covered almonds. Sometimes it was Pizza Hut gift certificates. In the old youth group it was car washes or service auctions. But we are an adult volleyball club and had to make serious money fast (for the sweet uniforms with collars). What do grown ups do for fundraisers? We make fiesta plates. Now, you kiddies out there obviously don't know how to make a fiesta plate or you would have been doing it in kindergarten to get money for those Apple IIE's. Here is a simple guide to a successful fiesta plate fundraiser.

Step 1: "Write off" a good ton of frozen chicken thighs, 5-20lb bags of rice, and 4-gallon jugs of soy sauce from your job at army supply store.
Step 2: Thaw chicken in steel sinks in the back yard.
Step 2b: Call members of volleyball team and tell them to show up at 2pm.
Step 3: Convince your Uncle to supervise, your brother-in-law to make the marinade, and your auntie to make two cauldrons of red rice.
Step 4: Borrow barbecue setup from your cousin which includes: oil drum split in 2 lengthwise down the middle, custom made steel frame, steel fencing, tongs, and two-handed industrial grill brush.
Step 4b: Text members of volleyball team at 3pm and tell them to hurry the hell up.
Step 5: Rally all present volleyball members with ragged trucks (1) to come haul 4 Rubbermade bins of marinating chicken and barbecue equipment to fundraiser site.
Step 6: Spend 45 minutes discussing barbecue set up location considering wind direction, customer traffic, location of nearby offices, too many aunties with opinions and possible rain.

Step 7: 4:30pm, call late volleyball team members and tell them to pick up 6 family-size trays of pancit, plasticware, bottled water, napkins and get change for $200.
Step 8: Get cousin to show up at fundraiser site to start coals. No need take coals out of the bag, just light the bag.
Step 9: Educate volleyball team members how to collect money and put food on plates.
Step 10: Tell volleyball team members to put more rice & pancit on plates because chicken is taking too long to cook.
Step 11: Take lots of eating breaks.
Step 12: Tell Steve to stop flirting with the volleyball girls and help serve food.
Step 13: Make $400.
Step 14: Take it all down in the rain.

Simple. Now everyone can do it.
And if enough people are curious maybe I can convince Auntie to give me the marinade recipe.

Filled Pancakes

Now this makes no sense to me but some people, Sloan included, like foods filled with other foods. This genre of food delicacies includes the jelly doughnut, stuffed mushrooms, Turducken, and most recently the filled pancake. I don't want to appear ungrateful for Aimee's incredible Christmas gift -- she did send us all the ingredients and a special pan for pancake production that looks like a mancala board -- but these little nugget punk bastards are a lot of work. The instructions include such cooking prep gymnastics as forming stiff peaks, folding, and turning over with two wooden skewers. In the end though, they were delicious and all that Sloan could have ever hoped for in a new years breakfast food. Thank you Aimee.