At the leader’s signal, everyone would commence eating.  Did I mention everyone eats with their hands? Yes, the glass was the only utensil available, and you ate the food straight off the banana leaf.  In the past, whomever ate the fastest literally got the most, so in that sense it could get to be a kind of fight.  Today a roasted pigs’ head made an appearance at the table, it didn’t last very long!  In my handful of experiences with Boodle  Fighting, there has always been more than enough food.  Sometimes our hosts have to go find someone else to finish eating the food.  It’s certainly a fairly quick way to eat a lot of food. 

     Now for the food critic portion:  I usually eat the rice and the noodles.  The noodles are about like spaghetti, just cut shorter.  Today the cook put some sort of spice on them which tasted great! I like the adobo, but the cuts you tend to get here contain a lot of fat (not much goes to waste in this country).  Without utensils it’s difficult to trim the fat, so I didn’t eat a lot of the adobo today.  The fish and calamari was reportedly good, I didn’t fight very hard for the seafood, though. 

     I’m thinking about importing the Boodle Fight home.  I think I’ll use some sort of finger food to substitute for items we Westerners tend to eat from a dinner plate, though.  I’ll probably use pizza and finger sandwiches. 

     The second significant event today occurred while I was making coffee at the team house.  I’m not normally at this particular station, but I’ve been here several times a month or so ago, and I’m always billeted at one particular team house here.  As I poured water into the coffee machine, one of the guys who lives here more permanently asked if I’d looked into the reservoir before I’d poured.  

     "Of course I hadn’t," I said.  "Who does that?" I figured something was up, that seemed like an awfully odd question. 

     He then explained that last month they’d found a dead gecko in the reservoir.  Apparently it had become trapped, died, and it’s spirit had slipped away some time well prior, as the poor lizard was fairly well decomposed before one of them found it.  One of the co-workers complained of being sick for two days just due to the mental image.  One of my teammates mentioned there’d been a film on the coffee and a slightly odd taste.  No one really suspected anything, though; they thought it was just the water.    

     Naturally I asked if it’d been in there the last time I’d been here, and they assured me it certainly had been.  So there you have it, my teammates, co-workers, and I had all been drinking dead gecko coffee for who knows how long! 

     I think I’ve just developed another new habit–I’ll check the coffee machine before pouring the water into the reservoir! At least while I’m still in this country!

     The fried ice cream was pretty good, I don’t think it was a honey glazing though.  There were some fruits to the side, which was really tasty.  But the ice cream was coated with creamed corn! It wasn’t bad, but personally I don’t think of creamed corn as a dessert component.  Come to think of it, I don’t think of any vegetable as dessert, and usually not fruit, either.  I can practically hear my wife cringing right now. 

     Never mind the constitutional ignorance of the owner of the bumper sticker.  In very general terms, the federal government is responsible for national defense and for raising an army and a navy (and in modern parlance, an air and space force).  The states are responsible for public education.  It might be nice if everyone had all the money they needed, but economics being what they are, we have political constraints on who gets to choose to allocate scarce resources.  In order for the car owner’s fantasy to be fulfilled, he or she would need to ensure people elected to federal government would reduce defense spending and reduce taxes so that states and municipalities could then raise local taxes to give the schools more money.  I would then argue that while money is important, it’s not everything; when I was a substitute teacher back in the days I saw that bumper sticker, the schools I helped in needed discipline more than dollars.  Discipline is relatively free of cost, it just requires one or two teachers to stay late or on Saturday to monitor students in detention.  In retrospect I would have liked to have pointed all this out to the owner of the bumper sticker, but alas, the car didn’t stop and the owner didn’t jump out in order to strike up a political conversation with a dissheveled 20-year old wearing a cotton zip-up jogging sweatshirt colored to match his alma mater high school who aspired to fly anything for the Air Force, even a bomber. 

     Fast forward to yesterday, when I was standing at a table in the foyer of the Commissary with a couple of other volunteer Boy and Cub Scouts and their parents. . . hosting a bake sale.  At an Air Force Base.  At which I fly jets that carry bombs. 

     The really scary thing is that my wife made me give that sweatshirt away to the needy a couple years ago, and if she hadn’t, I’d still have that sweatshirt!

     The bake sale was actually for the local Order of the Arrow section.  Surprisingly, the OA got some help from one of the local Cub Scout Packs.  This was a really good thing; someone pointed out that Commissary patrons were more likely to be unable to say no to a Cub Scout asking if they’d like to buy a treat than they would to a teenager or an adult.  This turned out to be largely true.  So next time the Cub Scouts need help setting up their Pinewood Derby, it looks like OA is going to have to do the heavy lifting! Rightly so, of course.

     Another couple lessons we learned (actually, I was probably the only one there who had never run a bake sale before and therefore was probably the only one who didn’t know this) was that the Japanese love to buy whole American cakes (9"x9" seems to be the preferred size).  However, the bulk of Commissary patrons are not Japanese, they’re American.  Americans would rather buy cookies or brownies at a bake sale; they’re simply looking for a snack.  The Japanese folks are looking for a big treat to take home to their entire family; the Americans aren’t really even looking for something to eat, they’re mostly just helping out what they consider a worthy cause.  The first lesson then was to know who your target market will be, and talk to the folks who will be baking the snacks to ensure they’ll bake something that will sell.  We did pretty well, but we ended the day with about six out of twelve cakes leftover. 

     A second lesson could be drawn from the type of baked goods needed for sale.  We had several people make their favorite type of cake, brownies, or pie.  These didn’t sell very well.  What sold best were plain ol’ chocolate-chip cookies, then other types of cookies, then plain chocolate fudge.  I’d like to explain this by way of a real estate analogy.  Stay with me, it really applies! Say you’re in the market to buy a house.  Two houses, actually.  One house will be the one you want to live in.  You’ve always wanted a two-story Victorian with a huge porch, an in-ground swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a four-car garage, and an atrium.  The other house will be one to rent out.  So when you go shopping for the houses, you would buy one Victorian with everything you always wanted, and one plain ol’ three bedroom, 1.5 bath ranch house with a minimally furnished basement.  You wouldn’t buy a second Victorian.  Why not? It’d never rent (at least not in a neighborhood where the prospective tenants are looking for the area with the best schools).  The simple fact is the Joe and Jane Renter family is not looking for your dream house.  By the same token, the target market for your bake sale is like the Joe and Jane Renter family; they may find cheesecake-covered brownies too rich or too esoteric for their tastes.  They just strolled by on their way to the Commissary from the Food Court and were not expecting to see a bunch of Scouts selling baked goods.  They’re just going to want something relatively small, simple, and tasty. 

     One pleasant surprise was the number of people who walked by, handed us money, but refused to take a treat.  I figured one or two people might do that (and I figured they’d be the parents of the Scouts).  I didn’t keep count, but it was actually probably close to one out of every 10 people that did that.  By the end of the day, I was practically begging some of these generous donors to please take something, we were running out of time and didn’t want to take the baked goods home with us if we could avoid it.  As I mentioned, we ended up taking home many of the cakes and some of the brownies. 

     I’d just like to say a quick "Thank you" to the Scouts and their families who participated and made it a successful sale; and also to the local community of people who enjoy tasty baked goods and don’t mind forking over more than a few pennies per item!

     I’ve only got one question for everyone:  Is it just me, or do most people write up a six-page after-action report after they’ve held a bake sale (and then publish selected revisions on their web logs)?

     She’s a German gal, and since turkey isn’t native to Germany and they don’t celebrate the day the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, she’d never baked a turkey before.  She did a great job! She whipped up a tasty 11.5 lb bird stuffed with a cranberry/minced-meat stuffing, and it was delicious! She topped it off with an apple cake, too.

    We ended up eating dinner with some friends, so we shared our delictables with others, and got to sample some other varieties of turkey, ham, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc, etc, etc.  It was all good. 

    We spent the next day in the gym.  I probably ought to have hopped on the treadmill a bit longer than I did, as it was I only really gave myself a good legs workout. 
 

    Although I could eat fast-food all the time, I’d rather make a couple trips to the grocery store to buy some salads, soups, and sandwiches and get the refrigerator stocked.  Getting the essentials into stock at the house is, well, essential.  But there’s more to it, of course.  The salad wouldn’t taste good without croutons and some sort of dressing, and since I couldn’t ship any of that from my last household, I had to buy replacements for all the things that were in my refrigerator in Germany.  

    Yesterday I had the satellite dish installed.  Yet another first for me! I’ve never had to have satellite-related equipment installed before.  I’m not sure anyone else in my family has ever had satellite TV before. 

    I’m told that in Germany, the satellite dishes are more prevalent in poorer areas than in more well-to-do areas.  Most of the genteels have cable TV.  Satellite is apparently for immigrants who want to get a broadcast from back home, wherever that might have been–Russia, Turkey, Romania, etc.  I pointed out that the little American enclaves we tend to live in all have satellite dishes, too.  Why criticize poorer immigrants, we Americans don’t bother trying to assimilate into the local culture, either.  I guess the difference is a DEROS!

    In what little spare time I have, I’ve been trying to read Crime and Punishment.  It’s pretty lengthy, and I haven’t quite figured out what’s going to eventually happen to the anti-hero.  If one of my literary friends wants to e-mail me and converse regarding the deeper meaning of this book, by all means, get in touch!

    I need to wrap up Don Quixote as well.  It was too big to carry from Germany to Japan, and I was only halfway finished reading it when I departed Europe.  I like it a lot, maybe because I feel like I sympathize with the good Don?

    I should have Internet access within the next week or so.  Until then, blogging will be somewhere between ‘virtually nonexistent’ and ‘I won’t be doing it.’

    Oh, did I mention I tried a mini-Triathlon last weekend? It was a 400m swim, a 10k bike race, and a 5k run.  I finished in 1:07:02.  It was something like 21 minutes slower than the guy who won.  I did alright on the swim, I was in the end of the middle of the pack.  But the bike race killed me.  Now, I had to use my wife’s steel-frame mountain bike (I don’t own a 12-speed or a racing bike or anything, and my aluminum-frame mountain bike was down for repairs that I couldn’t perform).  I did okay going uphill, which constituted the first 1 km of the bike race, but once we got to the level, quite a few people went racing on by me. 

    I said "participants" because since I’ve never tried a Triathlon before, my goal was to finish.  Most of the rest of the folks were "competing."  One of the folks told me I ought to try competing next year, and an easy way to start would be to get a racing bike!

    This evening Nitro, Tonka and I hit an Asian restaurant near
loop 101 and 67th Ave.  If I remember correctly, it was called Pei
Wei.  I wasn’t very adventurous, I went with sweet and sour chicken,
and it was good (the rice was a bit dry).  The chicken was surrounded by tasty, crunchy fried batter and was nice and tender. 

    After dinner we
stopped at the Cold Stone Creamery next door to the restaurant.  I
picked up a small cup of butter pecan.  That triggered a lot of fond
memories of our summer camping trips when we were growing up.  The
local Jaycees always had chocolate, vanilla, and butter pecan, so if we
wanted something other than standard flavors, we got butter pecan.  The
Cold Stone ice cream was good, but it lacked actual pecan chunks.

    If you’re in Phoenix and you’re in the mood for Korean, Hannibal and I tested Seoul Jung restaurant, it was in the vicinity of 67th Ave and Olive, but check the address before you take my word for it.  It was the best Korean food I’ve ever had, and I lived in Korea for 16 months once upon a time.