Month: December 2021

Broken Spirit

Posted on by Geoff

 

I have had to take a pause in writing the past few weeks. Family issues have taken up a bit of time.

My father died last week. It was not a surprise. He was 90. He smoked until he was 70. He drank like a fish most of his life. He seldom exercised. I don’t think any of us expected him to live this long. Still, you are never fully prepared for the death of a close relative.

He will be interred with other veterans at Riverside National Cemetery. It is quite lovely there, as you can tell from the photo above.

We had been driving out to Riverside quite frequently as my Dad deteriorated over the last year, as soon as we both got vaccinated. He began suffering from dementia. The last visit with him I don’t think he knew I was even there most of the time. A couple of days later he had another fall, and they took him to the hospital, where they discovered he had esophageal cancer. He got to come home and had 24 hour nursing care. He only lasted another three days.

My brother flew out to be with Mom. He stayed with me the first night. Right before this my Internet provider forced an equipment upgrade that would discontinue my Internet service right before Christmas if I did not install the new equipment. I have almost everything on Alexa- TVs, heating and cooling, lights, plugs, and much more. It is a complex web of automation, and almost every single device has had to be reconfigured. I only got about halfway by the time my brother arrived.

The only last minute flight right around Christmas that he could find was on Spirit Airlines. If you ever have a choice between a day-long root canal or flying on Spirit, go with the root canal. It will be a lot less painful.

They are the worst airline in the country. If you have any doubts, check out their online reviews and consumer complaints. They are not quite the Economy Minus as depicted in the Amazon sci-fi series Upload episode 8, but pretty darn close.

This is an airline that tried charging passengers to use the bathroom, until the flight attendants got fed up with being handed cans and glasses filled with warm liquid. They continue to charge for water so they at least make a profit on the front-end if no longer on the back-end.

In my magic days, Belle and I performed on a sideshow. They had what were called “dings”, extra ways to extract money from the rubes. They pitched Magic Mice that were sure to disappoint, but could be had for the one-time special of just 2 for a dollar. You could pay extra to see Chloe, the hermaphrodite (fake, of course), or to look down into a box where you were expecting to see a young woman in a far more revealing condition than the actuality. This is described in more detail in my book The Greatest Adventure. You never really got what you thought you were paying for.

We need a different word for what Spirit does, even though their extra charges are in the same spirit as those on the carnival. They charge you extra for literally everything, and in many cases, you have no choice but to pay. They charge a seat fee. These seats have no legroom and make no accommodation for actual human anatomy. My brother is an experienced flier, and this was the most uncomfortable flight he had ever been on.

They have their own unique take on a frequent flyer program- you have to pay a membership fee. You also have to sit through a long pitch for this program with no choice but to listen as they have you trapped on a plane, like a timeshare pitch in the sky, without the free vacation.

They dumped him off in Ft. Lauderdale at gate 1 with a transfer to gate 15 with just a few minutes to get all the way across the terminal. My brother ran, and they were already closing up when he begged them to let him board. He made it. His luggage did not.

I picked my brother up at LAX at 2 am in the morning. We got out of the terminal around 3 am, which was how long it took to learn that they did not know where his luggage was. Supposedly, we would hear first thing in the morning. By noon, we were trying to call them. There is just one phone number for lost luggage. They do not answer it. Ever. You can leave a message, as my brother did countless times. They do not call back. They have few ways to actually get in touch with anyone. If you can find a number, no one answers. We tried the chat window, but I think it was either an AI or someone in another country who could only use canned answers. They offered no help at all.

By the second day my brother drove over to the airport, and trust me, the last thing you want to do is drive to LAX the day before Christmas Eve. They informed him there that the luggage was being delivered to my house as they spoke. It never showed up. I think they flat out lied to him about delivering it.

It had been awhile since my brother had flown anywhere because of covid, and he was upset, and he packed his CPAP machine in his luggage. That turned out to be a bad decision. Spirit takes little responsibility for lost luggage. You can file a claim, but on their site it states most things you might put in luggage are disqualified for reimbursement.

They eventually called him the next morning and said the luggage would arrive that day, Christmas Eve. They offered no time window, and we had to leave at 6 pm for our Santa visits.

Even before we learned the luggage was coming, maybe, we left to grab some lunch. The key would not go in the deadbolt. The deadbolt was toast. We did not have a key for the doorknob.

Although we live in a gated community, we are a bit paranoid about locking the front door. That began when I came downstairs from my office one early evening to find unfamiliar luggage on the floor near the front door. It was beat-up and ratty looking. Belle arrived shortly after that and had no idea about the luggage. We searched the house, and no one was there. After about half an hour, we gave up and went into the living room.

We always have blankets on the couch, and now they were in a strange pile. Underneath we discovered a disheveled woman hiding there. She looked a little crazy. Belle went all mama bear and got her out of the house. Ever since that we always keep the door locked.

Instead of resting up before the Santa show, I spent the time trying to fix the door. Since we had been planning on getting a smart lock, I grabbed one of those. It was incompatible with our door. I had to go back and get a regular doorknob which I knew I could install quickly. I did, and we could now lock the door, but now it was time to get into makeup and costume without any rest. I did finally install a smart lock and I love it. I lover never having to worry about whether I locked the door, and I love the magical way that it detects my smartphone and automatically locks the door as I walk up to it.

If I can give you one Christmas gift, it is this advice: Never ever ever ever fly Spirit Airlines, unless you want your own spirit crushed.

Knife Fights and Carving Turkey

Posted on by Geoff

I spent a long time on my knife fight sequence. I did tons of research on knife fights, had it all written, and I realized that while the end of the fight made sense, it lacked impact. It just ended, and in a not particularly surprising way.

As I was writing the next chapter and dealing with the trauma of what had happened, I thought about Hector and how arriving at the jail cell after Maggie was finished dispatching everyone was upsetting to him. Yes, there are a lot of bodies, but what if I amped it up a bit?

Maggie is locked in a cell with bad guys. She is suffering from a loss of impulse control. She is also highly trained and basically a killing machine. As she is focused manically on the one guy who is left who she dislikes the most, how horrific could that get?

And here is the thing I realized. Writing a novel is more like writing a radio play than it is writing a movie. You have to conjure the images in the reader’s mind. Nothing I could write could be as horrific as a reader could conjure in their imagination when I refer to it as horrific and a bloodbath.

The answer was blindingly obvious. End the scene as Maggie is going in for the final kill. We know whatever she did to this guy is very bad because Hector is having nightmares from having seen the aftermath of it. Here I decided to use the power of the reader’s imagination rather than my own, and rewrote the entire ending of the sequence.

What’s Up With Us

Cooking Thanksgiving dinner has long been stressful for me. I want to turn out restaurant quality food, in the same amount of time that a professional chef and his team would have. This is not possible, of course, and only leads to frustration. This year, it all went much better, thanks to better technology and tools.

The major change was the turkey. I’ve tried smoking a turkey in the past and was not that happy with it. The secret to smoking a turkey, in my opinion, is spatchcocking. You take out the backbone and open the turkey like a book. Since it is flatter, the smoke flavor is more evenly distributed, and it cooks faster and more evenly so that the dark meat is done without drying out the white meat.

I cooked it on a pellet grill, which makes the whole process trivially easy. It took six hours to cook, but I just walked away and waited for the app on my phone to get the signal from the thermometer telling me it was done. It was the best turkey I ever made, and now the only way I’ll roast a turkey.

I smoked the turkey the day before, let it cool, then made perfect thick slices of the easily removed breast meat with the deli slicer. I used to use an electric knife to carve the turkey, but the slicer worked so much better.

Of course, the stuffing was made separately, as actually stuffing a turkey with stuffing is a terrible idea. The stuffing sucks out the juices making the meat dry, it is a breeding ground for salmonella, and makes the roasting take a lot longer. You might be wondering about what you do about aromatics, which smart cooks stuff into the turkey cavity. In this case, there is no turkey cavity, but sprigs of fresh herbs like rosemary and sage can be slid underneath the skin.

The turkey slices were wrapped up and gently warmed the next day using the steam feature of an  instant pot (which many people wrongly call an instapot, including me, and I continue to do it even though I know it is wrong- I am a rebel like that). I also used the slicer and the instapot for the prime rib. The instapot was also a hero with the Honey Baked Ham we bought. The ham really is best served cold, and heating it has a tendency to just melt off the glaze, which is a lot of what you are paying for. The instapot warmed it gently enough that the glaze stayed on and it came out perfect.

Afterwards, I made stock from the turkey carcass, and used the turkey leftovers to make a quite tasty turkey soup, which I have been making since my teens. I also used the ham bone to make stock, then turned it into a terrific potato and ham soup. The secret is lots of bay leaves, as they do magical things with pork. An instapot can be used to dramatically shorten the simmer time on stock, and this can be very useful when you need to make a quick stock from leftover turkey parts from trimming before cooking. That stock is very useful when making gravy.

With Alexa making sure I did not cook things too long, and the other equipment in the kitchen, I turned out a very elaborate meal with less effort than probably any Thanksgiving meal I ever made. Having the right tools makes all the difference.