Wine and Cheese (and Miracle Whip)

Today is the last day of the Nantucket Wine Festival which has kept us busy the past few days. I don't have pics because we were working as volunteers. Today we get to go as guests... so it's a day of sashaying about with the upper crusties for us.

This coming week is the opening of the cafe and market I am baking for. Thursday is the big day. I just have to survive memorial day weekend and then things should settle down for a few weeks til the busy season hits us like a ton of cobblestones and soft shell crab sandwiches on July 4th weekend. I'll have Billy come down and shoot some images of the kitchen and my giant mixing bowl this week. It's this bowl that is going to give me big guns like Popeye before the summer is over.

Until then... a few more random ACK shots. I have to get get fancied up for our day at The White Elephant.

Rudy and I loitering in the front yard of some mansion on the bluffs at dusk.... I am wearing my thrifted Narciso Rodriguez cashmere coat. It's probably my best thrift score of this past year.

And here is Billy getting his Nantucket groove on.

We had dinner with a dear friend who is visiting the island from right next door on Martha's Vineyard last night whom we have not seen in a long while. Jaime can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear as my Gram always says and we had a lovely little date with she and her boyfriend Paul at their wee little cottage which is about twenty paces from our own door here in Sconset. She had nothing to work with but a cutting board the size of an emery board in a thimble sized kitchen yet she dashed off a gorgeous meal. We had a great time and Jaime... I did not detect a trace of soap on those olives. ;) But maybe it was just the tang of The Miracle Whip coating my tongue? (inside joke y'all)

Secret Way

This way is actually not too much of a secret. It's a pretty well trodden path here in Sconset.... but this little section always feels like a wee bit of magic is workin' on ya.

Roughage

Lots of hour glass sand effects coming from Rudy's hind end again these days. His diet consists of 70% dog food/30% beach. Because to dig a hole like this apparently involves eating a few cups of sand each time.

Ridiculous

I bet if I were to look back I probably have one or two past posts titled "Ridiculous." It is a word that is quite often appropriate and relevant in our daily lives. In this case it is appropriate because it accurately described the amount of information I need to relay in this post to get you caught up with what we have been doing. In a nut shell (one the size of Texas) we packed up and peeled out from Santa Fe, drove across the middle west to Illinois, our truck and trailer were both loaded to the gills with stupid amounts of stuff, we stayed a week with my family, stored the trailer and left my parents house with windows bulging under the stress of cookbooks, canvases and dog toys to head east to Massachusetts. We drove in a storm the whole way across, landed on the coast to visit with Billy's family for three days then drove on to the ferry for the 2 hour ride out to the island. Which island? THIS one. Nantucket. The scene of the original crime. This is where Billy and I met almost ten years ago. We are here for the summer to bake, paint and burn our bums on the beach as much as possible. It's one of our favorite places in the whole wide world and I am so stoked to be here again.

But! I'm going to take a few steps back to slap up a couple of shots from the visit in Illinois....

Being that we would only be in town for a few days we decided to host a brunch at my Mom's and invited just a few close friends over. People we wanted to be sure to spend a day hanging out with because we luuuuuurve them so much. One of my best friend's (Beth) came over with her two kids Oscar and Sully. Oscar made buddies with Rudy and they tore it up out in my Mom's enormous back yard.




Beth's youngest is Sully. And people.... let me tell you something about this baby. He is no normal baby. He is a V.I.P. Just take a gander and I think it comes across quite obviously.



We were handing him around like an action figure so that everyone could get in on the chubby baby lovin'.


Don't worry.... contrary to what it looks like no injuries were incurred during these proceedings.

It was such a joy to get to see both of these kids. They are some of my favorite people in the whole world. Also in that category is our long time friend Gordon (aka Cappy.) He cruised down from Milwaukee on his motorbike. And then he cruised all over the mid west on it after he left our party. He's cool like dat. The man packs Teddy Grahams and Glenlivet in his saddle bags. Who else do you know that does it? No one. Just our Cappy.



Our friends Art and Andrea and their kids Max and Gianna came as well but somehow I spaced getting a photo of them. I worked with Andrea when I was about 20 years old at a little Victorian revival jewelry shop in Illinois. We laughed at all the customers behind their backs and sometimes maybe even right in their face. Good times.

We had some beautiful weather while we were in IL and a nice spring full moon filled the sky with light. Until I snatched it down and made off with it.



I spent a full day hanging out with my Gram at her apartment. We chewed the fat and laughed and looked at old photos. She tells us constantly that she is our biggest fan and well, I have to say that it goes both ways as we are her biggest fans too. She is the one that gave me my start as a baker.... so there is that too.



I don't have any other family pics... we got lazy with the camera this time I guess. We did have a great time cooking our asses off with my Mom (and my Dad when he was off work) and ate good food every single night. One night my Dad and Billy ate four pounds of mussels and a whole loaf of bread between them which was getting a little bit gross I thought... but they seemed to be having a blast. My Mom stayed home with Rudy so we could head out dog free a few times. It was a great visit and we came away feeling happy as heck that we got to hang out for the week.

Thanks to Patty for my hair spa day and to Ralph and Susie for taking us out for a grand dinner and a night of belly laughs.

I'll post some pics from our stay at Gail's (Billy's Mom) next time along with tons of island pics.
I am about to be fed a big plate of some sort of fabulous dinner so I am going to leave you here for now. Well, I'll post a couple of Nantucket pics just to get the ball rolling for next time. The town harbor and Brant Point Lighthouse and a shot of our beach where we live out in Sconset.

Tribe of Three Chapter Two

First off let me say how amazed I am that none of you offered me any cheese to go with my whine yesterday. I feel much better today.

So... my friend/coworker Sara and I went that night to Billy's art opening at the Artist's Association. I had not been to many of these affairs and did not really know anyone there other than Sara so we sort of hung tight and wandered through looking at the artwork. It was I think a three person show and one of those people was Billy. At the time he was still painting abstracts sort of in the vein of Rothko. I had no idea the work was his. I thought he just worked there as assistant gallery director and had invited me to an opening in general.... not to see his actual work. And being the brilliant mind that I am .... "William McLane" written on the hang tags for the paintings did not register as "Billy" who asked me to the show. Thankfully I did not make an asshole out of myself. I actually told him that my favorite painting in the show was "that blue and white abstract one on the middle wall over there," and he said "That one is mine!" Whoa! You have to remember that at this point the only conversation we had had was "Do you want mayo or mustard on that turkey sandwich?" And things of this nature. I knew nothing about him or what he did.

When the show was winding down he said everyone was going to The Bamboo Supper Club and then to the Chicken Box for drinks, he invited us to come along. At this point in time I was no stranger to the Chicken Box. Being that I lived in a house with a single Irishman and neither of us had a whole lot going on socially I found myself there many nights a week getting plowed and dancing to whatever live band or dj they had that night. I had recently weathered my toughest St. Paddies Day ever with a whole troop of kids from Ireland at The Box. I am not sure I have even been so drunk (before that night and definitely not since that night) in my life.

So we went out and had a great time... the group we were with are all really good people and I managed to not get embarrassingly drunk (I saved that for a week or so later.) Afterwards we discovered that we lived about one block away from one another downtown. So we walked home together. We sat around outside the house I lived in (it was The Black Eyed Susans restaurant employee housing) which is a pretty lonely spot in the winter since the restaurant is closed and there are no employees around. We talked for an hour or so and it was all giddy and stupid feeling (for me anyway) and it was hard to part ways. We actually kissed goodbye on that very first night. I was excited and terrified all at once. Having been alone for awhile on the island it had been a rough winter (my Grandma was killed in a car accident about two months before this) and I had been doing a lot of soul searching. I was just starting to feel like a sane person again. Which was actually a pretty unfamiliar feeling for me... I had not had too many sane moments in my adult life to date. Now here I was on this little island out in the Atlantic in March... I had been gone from Illinois for almost a full year and things were starting to look pretty good where they had been really, really weird before.

Billy was an utter mystery to me in the beginning. I thought maybe he was a trust fund baby... or an international James Bond type spy... or maybe even a hologram. But he was just Billy. It took me a few months to realize that. Things got pretty ridiculous right off the bat. Since he only lived about a 45 second run away from my front door I would frequently jump out of bed at three in the morning, run down Orange St. in my pajamas and throw rocks at his second story bedroom window until I saw the light click on and his face appear in the window. He would then stumble downstairs and be all "Yeah... (rubbing the sleep out of his eyes) are you OK? What are you doing??" And then I would feel dumb and have to say... "I just had to see you for a minute, I couldn't sleep." It's a miracle he did not think I was out of my mind. Maybe he did actually... but on some level he liked it enough to let me get away with acting like a real ding dong. He even put up with me getting so drunk on vodka the following weekend that I threw up at his house. That's pretty. That's a desirable new girlfriend. It was in truth the grand finale of my "drinkin' days." Since Billy is not one to indulge in anything other than good food I naturally tapered off my habits until I stopped drinking all together. At this point in time a half a glass of wine will cause me to pass out.

I will tell you this too... I cannot imagine a better place on this planet to find the boy of your dreams than Nantucket just as spring is about to kick in and then you have summer ahead of you. It was absolutely magical.



It was magical all the way through until we decided to leave the island and spend the coming Winter in Key West, Florida. Then.... well, things took a turn. A turn toward cockroaches and crazy people. But that is for Chapter Three....