blogfromafar

Rich, Bittersweet thoughts from this year’s Fig Harvest at the Krabill/Reed/Gates/Childress family tree:
1. Nothing gold can stay; you can’t hold on to ‘em. They bow out slowly, ripen all at once, and then fade away.
2. Figured out where the idea for wine came from: fruit that falls from the tree (vine) and gets trampled underfoot starts to ferment. Smells almost like I’m doing a little fig moonshinin’ out there.
3. Sweet summer smells under sticky leaves reminds me of hot East Texas summers spent with my grandparents.
4. Making fig jam, feeling like I’m standing in the footsteps of my pioneer ancestors, keeping that outrageous bounty of the harvest, holding it preserved in time, a little summer sunshine for those cold winter months.
5. Loving the pop-pop sounds of the Mason jars as they finish their task. Fig jam, anyone?

Michelangelo, St. Peter, and a Heavenly Meal!…..

We love to go behind the scenes, and now thanks to Nancy’s Facebook friends, we’ve got two new recommendations that we will follow when we’re back in town this fall.

First, secret messages: This post in a Scientific American blog (one that a novice can actually understand!) theorizes that Michelangelo left secret clues in the Sistine Chapel that give away his fascination with anatomy, a forbidden science at the time (along with other heretical ideas like the earth is round, things like that). Read the blog and then for more, order a copy of Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel by Andrew Graham-Dixon that gives an in-depth view of the political and social scene at the time of the painting, along with an explanation of the panels on the ceiling. Or, you can borrow Nancy’s copy that she picked up at the Roma airport for a long flight home.

Next, we’ve become intrigued with the excavations under St. Peter’s in Rome. Here is a website that gives you a virtual tour of the underground necropolis, or city of the dead, Story goes that when St. Peter was crucified upside down, it was at the obelisk that now stands in the center his eponymous square. The obelisk was originally found on the street underneath the piazza, covered up, along with the necropolis, for centuries.

Finally, and importantly, where will we dine? We can’t wait to go back to Roscioli ristorante – best Carbonara ever and deconstructed hamburger to boot. Click here for our review from April.

Did you throw a coin in the Trevi fountain last time you were in Roma? If so, that means you’re returning to Rome, so we’ll see you there!

Back in the day, Galveston was “our” beach. We went there, brown water, brown sand, and all, before exotic spots like Padre Island and the Florida Panhandle caught our attention and held it. Today, Galveston, still reeling and riddled years after Hurricane Rita, boasts cute resorts cut-and-pasted between abandoned buildings with roofing still flapping in the wind. We found it tarball-free as it ever was; tarballs were a phenomenon before the “BP Disaster” but none were evident on our visit.

So we took a trip to visit our old friend, to find its soul. Galveston’s got all the elements; it’s got history (including a storm in 1901 that followed the same path as Rita with much the same effect), a historic downtown filled with interesting stories and carefully preserved architecture, it has an authentic food culture with dashes of Cajun thrown in. (more…)