There were about 20 people. I used Susan Spicer’s recipe for duck & Andouille sausage gumbo – but I made it with chicken thighs and a local Andouille – this is Wisconsin, after all. I left the okra out, too.

I made vegetarian red bean & rice – they were a little spicier than the gumbo. I was worried about burning myself when I was browning the roux – everyone says it’s like lava. But it was the beans instead. After they were cooked, I was moving the beans off the stove with an old oven mitt, that had been burned itself and run through the wash so that the hand was nothing but a loop – that looped on the stove grate, and the beans sloshed over the top of the pot, my hand, and all down the fronts of the drawers under the cooktop, and splat on the floor. I ran my hand under cold water and no harm done. The rest was the kind of spill that took a long time to clean; had to open all the drawers and wipe the edges & use paper towel to get the beans up off the floor.

I used wrapped brunch leftovers to make a lagniappe – mushroom pastry. And sorta bananas Foster for dessert – bananas fried in butter and brown sugar, and served over ice cream.

Posted from my iPhone

Anyways, Ruth recently wrote a short post about the Gulf oil spill, that’s really chilling me. Ruth talks about how the oil spill won’t be contained to the Gulf of Mexico, it’s going to affect all the oceans on earth, eventually – and I’m pretty sure she’s right. It’s all connected.

No matter how mad everyone might be about the lack of government response, every set of words I have heard President Obama say about the spill has included phrases and sentences along the lines of it’s our gas and oil and automobile addicted society that is the underlying cause of the spill; that doesn’t get BP off the hook, but it’s our addiction to oil that has fed the oil companies’ greed and avarice. If there is any good to come out of this, it’s that it’s our wake up call that we can’t live like this any longer.

It’s hard though – I try to be good – but it’s hard to do without the car. My brother, Professor Dave, who lives in Seattle and teaches philosophy at Cascadia Community College, pretty much does everything most people do by car, by bike, including a 30+ mile commute to work and back. He says he’s not going to drive his car alone until they cap the spill in the Gulf. He does give those of us who have to shlep kids around an out – which I took advantage of today. I had a 7:30 a.m. meeting on the east side of town, that I was going to bike to, but it was raining really hard, and unlike my brother, I am not a fan of biking in the rain – nor do I own the attire for it. So I gave my middle schooler a ride to school, and drove to the meeting – and turned out I was able to give one of the other meeting attendees a ride back to his office. The plan of today is working at home  – there’s construction in the underground parking garage at my office, ceaseless drilling – if we all stopped driving so damn much, maybe they could call that off! – and I expect the cleaners to arrive and oust me at any minute. So I’m gonna pack up my computer and walk to Starbucks or another coffee bar.

A sign at the entrance to Pensacola Beach, Fla.