My Birthday and All Sorts of Fun Things

Chapter I

It was my birthday yesterday, Flock! I was one day older than I had been the day before! However, almost every restaurant being closed on a Monday, we made a filet-mignon dinner instead.

This photo comes nowhere near to doing it justice, but there was juicy medium-rare filet mignon, cast-iron fried "dice" (I call them that because they're potatoes cut to almost the same dimensions as dice), wild mushroom Mercy sauce (because it's so good that it's torture when it's gone) and corn. Odd combination, maybe, but your mouth would heartily disagree.


If I had been , say, fourteen years old on my birthday and wondering what dinner I would be having fifty years hence, I wouldn't have been able to imagine that I would some day have the power to create a meal of such decadence. That was the kind kind of food . . . uh . . . old people ate.

Chapter II


I was roughly roused by Brigitte at 6:30 this morning because I had to make a phone call to Japan. It was 8:30 p.m. there.

In this phone call I was informed by my ex-wife that there was "no possibility" of her letting me pick up my son for Christmas because of a letter I was forced to send (she has no landline and can't receive long distance calls and no Internet, so everything has to be done through her parents, who quite frankly wish I'd tumble under a bus, the sooner the better) with a mild threat of legal intervention if she didn't let me talk to him at least once a week;  thus, after all these years of supposedly amicable communication, she has gone and done the official deed of kidnapping him. Stay tuned, folks -- this could get Mel Gibsony.

(Japan, a so-called first-world nation, is the only so-called first-world nation that does not observe the Hague convention regarding custody of children. Thus even if my ex-wife was a drug addict who beat my son every day and had multiple boyfriends, there is no court there that would allow me even to appear before it to plead for custody. In 99% of cases, regardless of circumstance, the custody reverts to the mother. Now you know why I wrote the post directly preceding this one.)

Chapter III

Filet mignon sandwiches for dinner!!!!!!