Road Trip: Florida! Teeth! Sushi! Cigars!

From Jekyll Island, Dan & I drove to Florida, and FINALLY got to put the top down on our little, ol' Mustang convertible! Those of you who know me, know that I haven't been able to smile my silly, toothy smile for almost 2 years, as my teeth were so pitted and stained (from decades of grinding, coupled with dastardly red wine and coffee) that they looked terrible. Dan had what I thought was a Crazy idea: that I try to find a dentist I could see the one day we'd be in Miami! I went on the internet and found Dr. Mereos of Precious Smiles and called- and found that he'd actually be able to see me on that Saturday morning! I had no clue what he'd be able to do in a day- but what he did in a hour was nothing short of amazing- he drilled & filled and literally gave me back my toothy smile- and he made it affordable for us! I was SO happy that I made a small video testimonial for him, and it's on the Precious Smiles Facebook page! We HIGHLY recommend him! My only regret is that he's not in West Virginia!

 

Elisse, showing off her apre-Precious Smiles smile, celebrating with Dan, having saki & sushi in SoBe! 





Elisse & Dan having pedicures at SPAe



Fab SoBe Miami window dressing

We immediately went to a drugstore so I could get a night guard to hopefully protect my new teeth from further grinding damage, and vowing to lay off the red wine, we celebrated with sushi & (white) saki at a Lincoln Road cafe restaurant! We spent the day walking around and window shopping the wonderful SoBe stores (and thrift shops!), having pre-cruise pedicures at SPAe, & Dan had his chocolate fix with a rather amazing chocolate-strawberry sundae at Ghirardelli! We wound up the evening with drinks & cigars at Deco Drive Cigars on Lincoln Road, and a birthday celebration dinner with friends at La Lupa di Roma!



Dan, cigar, & hookah: Deco Drive Cigars



We stayed for two nights at the historic 1906 Miami River Inn, an interesting "old Miami" property near the port. Our guest room was cute and "shabby chic", with period furnishings and antiques, and we enjoyed our stay. the location was perfect for us, and we had a great Cuban dinner nearby, too! 

Road Trip! Jekyll Island or Bust!!!

We had a great Inn-&-puppy sitter, and so Chef Dan and I were acually able to escape a Truly crazy, snow-and-ice-crusted WV winter for 2 whole weeks and flee south!

And BOY did we need it, as you can see from the Sheer, Unadulterated JOY on Dan's face! Our first stop was the J&R Outlet, a 'must' for any road trip south, and where I got Dan to take a photo of me with one of their hilariously over-the-top "street signs"...

J&R Outlet



Turtle Rehab: Jekyll Island

Elisse, LOVING our guestroom patio (& champagne!) at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel!

Dan, Jekyll Island Club Hotel

Arriving at Jekyll Island...

We made it to our first destination that night; the elegantly lovely & historic Jekyll Island Club Hotel in Jekyll Island, GA. If you truly want to feel like a Rockefeller, this is The place! I expected the ice to finally fall off our car (our little, old eBay V-8 Mustang convertible that I refer to as the BoomerMobile, & that makes "go faster" noises when it hits 98 mph!) somewhere in the Carolinas, but when we got out of our car at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel we had to chip the ice off the back of the car to open the boot- it was THAT cold! We got in after 9p.m., and nothing was open and there was no place to eat, but the Wonderful man at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel check-in desk hustled us straight to the bar :-) for warm-up whiskies, they made us lovely sandwiches, and though the Facebook Special guestroom we had booked was lovely (and had a bucket of champagne and strawberries waiting for us for our 6th Anniversary!), when he told us they had guestrooms with patios we happily upgraded to one, and had THE most romantic stay!

Dan & Elisse: St Simons Lighthouse

St. Simons USCG Lightstation

Jekyll Island pier



Jekyll Island- & Latitude 31- view!





Elisse & Dan at breakfast: Jekyll Island Club Hotel



Looking up at our guest room: Jekyll Island Club Hotel

Elisse, Jekyll Island Club Hotel





Dan & Elisse (!), on the St Simons pier



Dan, St. Simons Lighthouse





Dan, St. Simons pier xylophones



St Simons USCG Lightstation



Jekyll Island Pier Sunset!



Jekyll Island - & Latitude 31 Restaurant- Sunset View



St. Simons USCG Lighthouse Light



Elisse & WWII USCG Veteran, St. Simons Lighthouse

Jekyll Island Pier Sunset: Latitude 31 & Rah Bar





 



Elisse, playing the xylophone on the St. Simons pier, and then showing off both her Bad Hair & her fab Buckle "Angel Wing" jeans, after stuffing her face with oysters, at SeaJay's, Jekyll Island

We drank our Anniversary champagne on our patio, slept like lambs, had an elegant breakfast in their dining room, and with the Jekyll Island Club Hotel as our base, we got the got to see the turtles being rescued and cared for by vets at the truly wonderful Jekyll Island Georgia Sea Turtle Center; drive around the island to see the gorgeous land/seascapes, have an excellent dinner (with THE best sunset view!!!!) at Latitude 31 (Chef Dan & I totally LOVED their gourmet Georgia Shrimp & Grits, with the crispy-on-the-outside-meltingly-tender-on-the-inside "cake" of cheese grits, and a spicy Poblano Cream Sauce!), and have oysters, fun dancing to a live band, and got to meet some of the (lucky!) local residents at SeaJay's. We drove to nearby St. Simons Island, to play the really cool wooden & metal xylophones on the pier, buy yummy kumquat marmelade at the Farmer's Market, and (best of all!), climb the historic St. Simons Lighthouse, see the museum, the amazing light, the fabulous view, & meet with a WWII USCG veteran and USCG Auxilliary personnel! For a US Army Ret. guy like Dan, and an Official USCG Artist like me, this was a total rush!

SEMPER PARATUS!



Life goes on...



Chef Dan, the Latke King of Landgraff, WV!

 We did our best to have a wonderful Hanukkah...

Elisse, lighting the Hanukkah Menorah

Elisse wearing her Hanukkah present dress & shoes...

The Elkhorn Inn's Inflatable Holiday Decor...

Elisse & our 6' Hanukkah Menorah...



The NS "Pokey" in the Snow...



and a happy Christmas: We inflated all our decorations, including our 6' Hanukkah Menorah, and Santa in a plane, helicopter, train, NASCAR racing car with an elf pit-crew, & getting a ticket from a cop!

I took photos of the NS trains going by the Elkhorn Inn in the snow and posted them on the Elkhorn Inn & Theatre Facebook page for our "railfan" guests. We filled gift shop orders from around the country from our on-line gift shop http://store.elkhorninnwv.com and sent coal statuettes, books, jewelry, gourmet goodies, and vintage ornaments off to people around the country. Dan, THE undisputed Latke King of Landgraff, made his fabulous "two-tone" latkes (potato pancakes) with grated sweet and white potatoes, and we lit the Menorahs each night of Hanukkah & gave each other fun gifts. On Christmas eve we followed Santa around the world on NORAD's Santa Tracker on the internet, and cleared the embers out of the fireplace just in time for Dan to get an "Extreme Racing Package" from http://www.tryitracing.com/ and for Elisse to get massage slippers & Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds perfume with an adorable teddy bear! 

But, all in all, this has Not been a wonderful winter for us. Dan's sister Martha- who was brilliant, talented, funny, incredibly accomplished, and whom we both loved more than I can ever begin to say- died in November, and it shook us both up very badly. What shook me up the most is how she gave up immediately once the doctors told her the chemo "was doing more harm than good" (to me, "dead" is far more harmful than chemo...) and sent her home with a pain pill to die.

Their "care" was very effective: She was in a hospice within a week, made comatose on morphine immediately, and died inside 3 weeks.

I am still in shock- and so angry that words can't express it adequately.

There, but for the grace of G-d, go I. And You.

And I, for one, will NOT go gentle into that Obamacare good night, sent home with an "economically sound" pain pill to die, and so relieve "the system" of the financial burden I, as  a "Baby Boomer", would impose, by continuing to live, thanks to expensive medical treatment.

And as I have been under treatment for another antibiotic-resistant infection these last 7 months- and it's expensive, and I wound up in the hospital last month from it- I do not say that lightly.

What is ever in the back of my head is: when are they going to tell me that the treatment I'm getting is "doing more harm than good" or "isn't working" or "isn't cost effective", and send ME home to die?

What happens if my government insurance (which covers me as Dan served in the US Army for 21 years, including 3+ tours in Vietnam) decides the medication I've been prescribed is too expensive or "isn't working" and refuses to approve it?

And how about when they do it to YOU?  

And how if we do nothing but sit by & let our elected criminals (who are not required to use the same garbage, worse-than-3rd-world medical care that we must) foist this upon us, we are all doomed to early graves.

Dan couldn't go to Martha's funeral in Illinois as we were in the middle of an ice/snow storm here & lost our water; I've been fighting off that infection in my leg for 7 months and he didn't want to leave me alone without water, & then he threw his back out- badly- putting in a new a water line. Then we got hit- as did everyone else- by The Blizzards of 2010, & it's been snowing and icing up non-stop for over 2 weeks.

We have our water back. We have plenty of firewood, rum, food, and water. Dan's taking Advil, & is making, as I type, more of his unbelievably delicious Vietnamese Spring Rolls, with the Chinese mushrooms & Vietnamese rice-paper wrappers I brought back from a fabulous Asian grocery in Virginia our friend took me to after my hospitalization there. (When life gives you lemons...). I've decided to take the offensive against my infection (as opposed to blindly following AMA medical care into the grave by simply continuing to take stupidly higher & higher doses of antibiotics against an antibiotic-resistant infection), and, after much research, am going to start taking Allicin garlic against my infections. (I have used garlic to knock out acute infections on 3 occassions in the past, so I know this works).  Dan & I are planning vacations in the hope, B"H, we'll live to enjoy them. In short, we are both trying to take the high road, "look on the bright side", push forward, "think positive", and look forward with enthusiasm, hopefulness and joy to the new year... but it's hard.

Very hard.

Love and best wishes for a HEALTHY, happy 2011.

Elisse

Garden Porn!

My tongue is hanging out and I'm exhausted.
After weeks of licking my lips over the Burpee and Park's seed catalogs, fantasizing over their color photos of Jumbo This and Giant That, dogearing the pages with my favorites, and then freezing up the computer with 25 pages (more color photos! OMG!) open simultaneously, I finally Did The Dirty Deed and ordered seeds and plants and cool gardening doohickies for the Elkhorn Inn's 2010 garden! Woo-hoo!
In the dead-cold of an unbelievably snowy WV winter, gardening websites and seed catalogs really Do constitute "garden porn"! One dreams and imagines how great this year's garden will be... or at least how much better than last year's... planning all the things one will do differently this time around (weed more, fertilize more, douse everything with bug poison Far more often, get the tomoatoes out in Cozy Cotes on April 1st...) I went browing the gardening blogs I follow, and found some things (Chinese Red Meat Radishes) I'd known nothing about, and great, new (to me) garden sites, such as Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (where I got Vietnamese herb & veggie seeds), and R.H. Shumway's (lemongrass, strawberries, etc.). Searching Google for Chef Dan's Purple Potatoes, I found the Maine Potato Lady, where I ordered both Purple Majesty & French Fingerlings. I posted my most pressing gardening concerns (black rot (I think) on our grape vines that shriveled our hundreds of grapes and nearly broke my heart, and the wormy thing that keep killing all our squash vines) on a gardening Facebook page, and got some cool tips; I have so many print-outs and info that I really need to make up a Gardening Binder... Every year I try to do more companion gardening, planting things such as basil and tomatoes together, and this year I WILL put markers by EVERYTHING we plant, so we'll actually know what is what! And I WILL get out there with Dan to spread manure as soon as the snow is gone...

Back in Flushing, NY in the early 1970s I was an Aggie- at John Bowne H.S., the only Ag H.S. in the City of NYC! I was FFA and actually made it up to Chapter Farmer- I still have my Extremely Cool blue FFA jacket with my name embroidered on it in gold! Our school's "Land Lab" focussed on strawberries and chickens (and although I loved the pink & blue eggs from the Polish Game Hens, I learned enough about raising chickens to NEVER want anything to do with them ever again...), but what fascinated me was plant genetics; Gregor Mendel was my teen hero! I poured over seed catalogs all winter, dreaming and scheming of what I could sucessfully grow in pots and window boxes on our apartment terrace in LeFrak City! My dad hung Gro-Lamps in my bedroom, and when my mom and I moved to a house in Rego Park, we constructed a real walk-in greenhouse in our attic where I grew gardenias and even propogated African Violets! (Lugging gallon jugs of water up to the attic was the bane of our existance...) Although for college I went to the Cooper Union as an art student, I "kept my hand in the soil", as it were, working on Kibbutzim in Israel (mostly picking rocks out of the fields, but also packing live fish, and one glorious day on the tractor checking cotton bug traps...), but gardening took a backseat in my life- and my thumb got browner and browner until I couldn't even keep an herb plant alive on a windowsill- until Dan & I bought our WV property. Then we had a true need to "landscape", and the desire to grow veggies came back, full force! Dan literally trucked in 100s of pounds of topsoil - truck-load after truck-load- to create our little gardens, and even rented a tiller to make us a bit of a corn field! The first year we planted our veggie garden in 2003, cars literally stopped and trucks honked as they went by- we were obviously quite the novelty, weeding tomatoes on the highway- and we were both surprised to find that almost no one in our area planted a garden- 'cause that's what you do when you're lucky enough to have a little plot of land, right?
I actually started this year's garden when I ordered Dan his Valentine's present: a fab composter from Gardener's Supply Company. I actually did a cover illustration for them back in the 90's, and so they have a spot in my heart; while not "cheap", they do have very good stuff, and after following composters on eBay for months, the Eco Stack Composter I got from GS was not only cheaper, it promises to be so Easy-Peasy to put together and use that even I may be able to deal with it. (!) We have tried DIY composting (a.k.a. as "making a big pile") and it didn't work the way we wanted; getting a real composter has been on high on our to-do list for basically the last 8 years. (Yes, I know this seems about as romantic and sexy a present for a guy as getting a woman a vacuum cleaner, but I like to think of it as "Honey, I love you SO much that I want to recycle your eggshells!" I'm gonna put a big, red heart on it, and trust me- I'll make it up to him somehow!) Since due to shipping costs ordering just one thing feels stupid, I hunted around and landed on some other cool stuff, such as a."vine trellis", in the hopes of getting more than one melon and one cucumber, and two heated seed-starter trays... Last year's garden was Not Good (to put it mildly), and a deep and frustrating dissapointment, but our 2008 garden was Fabulous: we had great crops of corn & tomatoes, & so many peaches that we gave them away; we literally harvested a 5 gallon drum of basil leaves and made 6 quarts of pesto! Although we enjoy our garden and Chef Dan gets a kick out of cooking with the fruits of his labour- which taste FAR better than the tasteless stuff one buys at WalMart- I'm always amused when I read about how people put in veggie gardens to save money, because ours is Definitely a Money Pit! At some point I really should do the math and figure out what one of our tomatoes actually costs us to grow, but I'm afraid to learn that it's a $60 tomato! After 7 years of gardening here, I can state catagorically that we do Not garden to save money! We garden because nothing compares to the tatste of a sweet grape tomato in the sushine or pasta tossed with homemade pesto. Because when the tulips flower in April it means that spring is here. Because Chef Dan's fresh-oregano-stuffed roast  turkey is amazingly delicious. And because that's what you do when you're lucky enough to have a little plot of land...

Surreal Seurat Pokey-RR-in-the-snow pix...

Yesterday, in the midst of our newest snowstorm, I ran outside on the front porch as the Pocahontas passed the Elkhorn Inn and snapped pix thoughtout the day... even in the dusk... When I downloaded them, the "dusk" ones were totally black- you couldn't see a THING! The flash on our pokey (forgive the railfan pun...) little Wally-World Kodak digital doesn't carry more than 2 feet... So I got "Creative". I opened them in Picasa and began to lighten them and lighten them... and play with the colors... and all of a sudden I got something Very cool and rather "Seurat pointellist"! Enjoy!

Below is what it looks like in "real life"...  I rather prefer the "Pink Pokey"!

Cardinals (& other things) in the Snow!

We came back from our mini-getaway at Glade Springs & Winterplace just at the start of Another snowstorm, and woke up in the morning to be greeted by cardinals and songbirds too numerous to count at the feeders right outside the Elkhorn Inn's dining room window! It's been non-stop bird-watching, and I've been madly snapping photo after photo while Lucky Kitty sits in the window bird-watching with me! Having experienced Kitty's transformation from tender kitten to killer-cat where birds are concerned, it is Too funny to see him sitting at the window avidly watching the ornithology parade- you can almost see the cartoon "thought bubble" over his little head! Dan is So cool about remembering to refill the feeders, and the birds have been having WAY to much fun dashing to and fro, eating & hanging out on the trees & bushes surrounding the feeder!

I always remember with a laugh how people told us- back in 2002, right after we'd bought the building- that there were "no birds" in McDowell County due to coal mining- when we've woken up to and from bird song, winter and summer, for more than 7 years!

The photos below were taken on our ride home from Glade Springs the other day: the Pocahontas Railroad in all her glory, chugging thru McDowell County in the snow, the red caboose and adorable Post Office in Elkhorn (& Dan with Jeepy, our wonderful 4-wheel drive), the frozen waterfalls, and finally Home: the Elkhorn Inn & Theatre and Elkhorn Creek in Landgraff, WV... Our wonderful inn-sitters left to try to beat the storm home, Dan got the fireplace roaring, and made us an Amazingly delicious dinner of pan-grilled pork chops drizzled with a balsamic reduction and figs, and then we snuggled up with Pittie, Kitty, & Lab! It was good to get away, but it's good to be home, too!