I am aware that some of my readers are either still sequestered in their homes or, being mindful of their community, are minimizing their out-of-home interactions. Consequently, and because TravelPimp isn’t doing much traveling at this moment, this article (and I expect a few more in the near future) will talk about things that have helped me pass my time during isolation – which really means streaming entertainment, books, food and a bit of drinking.
Let’s start with drink, because you need to have priorities. When the Governor of Guam issued her shelter-in-place (it wasn’t exactly that, but that description will suffice for this conversation) I was sitting on a small hoard of vodka. I also had a bit of spicy V8 tomato juice, so it was only proper that I consumed my fortuitous inventory in the most appropriate medium – Bloody Marys. My Bloody Mary recipe is substantially similar for morning drinks, versus evening drinks, but not exactly. Because morning drinks are to nurse the hangover from the previous evening I use a one to five ratio (one part vodka to five parts tomato juice) in the morning and a one to three ratio in the evening – so the flavor of the vodka adds to the complexity of the taste. Otherwise, my recipe also includes two tablespoons of lemon juice, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, a teaspoon of salt, and copious amounts of Tobasco hot sauce or ground hot chili peppers. You can experiment with sizing of the ingredients to suit your tastes, since minor adjustments change the flavor profile of this yummy and versatile drink.
Speaking of drink, LOL, I stumbled into an Amazon Prime program called “The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague”. It is interesting and is taught by the very informative Professor Dorsey Armstrong. I loved it, not just because of the appropriate and timely subject matter, but because Professor Armstrong made her lectures equally fun as a drinking game. Okay, perhaps a side bar is in order. The lectures are clear and understandable, but it reminded me a bit of the “Eddie Van Halen” game - sort of. If you do not know the “Eddie Van Halen” game, it highlighted the guitarist’s popularity in the 1980s. It usually involved significant quantities of alcohol and required participants to start and end each sentence with “Eddie Van Halen” or they'd have to take a drink. This was before the internet and cell phones, boys and girls, but there was a good bit of giggling involved.
Eddie Van Halen, so what part of Professor Armstrong’s lecture reminded me of the Eddie Van Halen game you ask, Eddie Van Halen? 😊
Despite the spoiler concern, I’m going to tell you so you can enjoy the game from the word “go” – Professor Armstrong tends to use the word “indeed” a little more frequently than you might hear in normal conversation - at least in the first episode. It didn’t take me too long, holed up in my man cave, deprived of human contact, to take a drink each time the word was spoken. I’m not even sure if the word is used in later episodes because I was generally sauced pretty early into each that I watched. And, to be fair, I might have also been drinking randomly when other words tickled me. Ultimately though, the lectures I watched were very informative, the games made the passage of time without human interaction more tolerable, and if graduate school was this fun I might never have left. The lecture series is free on Amazon Prime until July 1, 2020 – enjoy.
Let me leave you with an amazing story that ran in the Christian Science Monitor, entitled, “In each other’s shadows’: Behind Irish outpouring of relief for Navajo.” If that doesn't warm your soul we may need to find you an electric blanket. See you soon my friends.