No.'s 3, 4 & 5

No. 3: Heavenly Onions & Jarlsberg on Tuscan white bread.

No. 4: Turkey, Green Bean Casserole, Mashed Potatoes & Mozzarella on Tuscan white bread.

No. 5: Ham, Spicy Mustard, Swiss and Gruyére on French roll.

Francine Turk: BADASS

Inspiration Board

Shine Until Tomorrow – Detail.

God is a Concept by Which We Measure Our Pain.

You Right Me When I'm Wrong.

You are Made of Gold & Can't Be Sold – Detail.

You are Made of Gold & Can't Be Sold – Detail.

You are Made of Gold & Can't Be Sold.

A couple weeks ago, I went to the opening for Francine Turk's BADASS at Gallery KH. It was fantastic. These new portraits were unlike any of her work I'd previously seen. They remind me a bit of Francesco Clemente's from the movie Great Expectations. The show is on display until January. Go look.

North Mississippi Allstars.

Saw a great show at House of Blues last night with Tony. Our friend hooked us up with box seats just over the stage, and all access passes. The North Mississippi Allstars were great. Two encores. Ended the night at Country Cup. I can't remember the last time I said that.

No. 2

Pesto, tomato and mozzarella on crusty Italian bread. Tomato from Steve & Katy's garden.

These Trees.

There's a stretch of road on Hwy 23 that runs past a small pasture that looks like a tree burial ground. These are not just trees that lost their leaves this autumn. They look like this all the time.

It's Back.

The Panini Press is officially back on the counter. First up: Gruyére & Balsamic Onion Marmalade on Buttered Tuscan Bread. Don't even.

Hiking on Buff Pass.

Stonehouse on Cedar.

I went to the best little store on Saturday. Everything in it was perfect. The house itself was perfect. The weather outside was perfect. The woman who owns it was delightful.

As I browsed around inside for a while, I thought to myself, I bet I could buy all my Christmas gifts in this one place. I didn't want to leave. I need to go back. As I drove away I couldn't believe I didn't take any pictures.

Stonehouse on Cedar, St. Charles, IL – for antiques and simple objects.

The Deck.

I should know myself better by now than to just go with my gut when choosing a stain or paint color. I absolutely need to test anything before I apply it full-blown. But the weather was so perfect this weekend, and I didn't want to waste a day of it "testing", so I bit the bullet and just went for it. I should just ignore the fact that I about fainted when I opened the can and this was what it looked like.

So I went around the side and started applying it in an inconspicuous place and when it dried I thought, that doesn't look so bad. Man it's a pain to paint spindles. It took me over 2 hours just to do that little section. As I was painting the spindles, I kept stepping back and looking – I didn't hate it. It was the right tone if not exactly the right tint, so I kept going with the floor.

You can see here why I almost fainted a second time as I was applying it and this is what it looked like going down. After I did the short spindle section, I got panicky about how much of it I was going through. I wanted to at least coat the main floor with it before I ran out – I only bought one gallon. That's all the paint guys said I'd need. Thankfully, my trusty neighbor Jim was there to let me know why it didn't max out on coverage, "You went through a whole gallon already?? That dry, neglected, previously-never-treated wood is really soaking that up!" Thanks, Jim.

Anyway, you can't tell from this picture, but as it dried it got better. When the sun isn't beating down on it, bringing out the blue, I don't hate it. It looked okay this morning, but I don't love it at all. In fact I feel defeated a bit. But I have a plan. I'm going to trade in the $45 gallon of Benjamin Moore clear coat for a second gallon of stain to finish up the areas where I ran out and touch up some of the bad blends on the floor next weekend. Then I'm going to let it weather all winter, only semi-protected, and revisit this project again in the spring.

Breaking Bad.

I. Love. This. Show.

I'm obsessively watching episode after episode. After episode. It's streaming on Netflix. I'm almost done with Season Two, and every time an episode starts I'm relieved to see there's another one after it. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out.

I also love the "kid". So cute!

Power-washing.

Power-washing may have just replaced vacuuming as my favorite household chore. Except I'm not re-staining the deck on a regular basis – nor do I have a power-washer at my disposal for use on a whim. But talk about gratifying! This is what the deck looked like when I started:

It's so precise! The water shoots out of a little wand at 4000x pressure so exact you could write your name with it (see the swoop below). So it takes a while to cover a surface, but the results are like instant.

I remember when Dave got one a while back and called me to tell me to go get one – that I'd love it. He was right. Now I want one. Check out these spindles. The ones on the right are done, the left not. One straight concentrated swipe up and bam! practically new lumber.

I really can't get over the results. I want to power-wash everything! It already looks like new. I can't wait to see it with the stain.

Pizza Party.

We had a "build-your-own" pizza party on Saturday night. The idea was to bring ingredients and roll out/build pizzas for everyone to sample. Lindsey kicked it off with a truffle oil/truffle salted crust topped with arugula and pear and walnuts. Clay made one with carmelized onion and fennel, goat cheese and tomato. Another good one had sausage and gorgonzola, and another was a classic – pesto, garlic and tomato.

Steve made one with eggs, peppers and cheese, dipped in salsa (good, but we all sort of agreed it needed some meat). Katy made her spinach dip with parmesan cheese appetizer pizza. I loved Lindsey's dessert pizza: mascarpone blended with honey and spread over the crust, then topped with apricot, cranberries and pine nuts. Wow.

But for sure the show stopper was Dave's Fried Chicken Pizza.

On top of the crust he put a layer of provolone cheese, spread a layer of gravy, and heaped on a pile of mashed potatoes.

Then he added the shredded fried chicken, and finished it off with a layer of cheddar cheese.

After it came out of the oven, we garnished it with cole slaw. I've had cravings for it every day since. YUM!

Infinite Jest - Attempt No. 2.

So I'm about 160 pages in to this monstrosity. That's 30 pages past the point where I gave up last time. I'm going to tell you what this book is about (to me*).

There's a family who runs a tennis academy/boarding school in New England for elementary-through-high- school aged students. The family has three boys. One is a professional football kicker in Arizona, one is currently enrolled in the school and a pretty decent tennis player, and the other is mentally disabled somehow, but allowed to live on campus and seems to be a bit of a pal to everyone at the school.

The father has died and the mother and uncle took over the operation. He was apparently raised by an alcoholic, failed, pro-tennis player father who began teaching him, at age 10, a little bit about tennis while sipping whiskey. They lived between Arizona and California, depending.

There are a bunch of drug addicts that live in and around Harvard mugging people for their fixes. One's a transvestite. One dies during an overdose of something (drano?) while the rest watch. Then they put him in a dumpster.

There's another group of seemingly very uneducated, possibly drug-addicted other folk, but I thought they were Southern?

There is also a drug treatment center and the character who started it, in a run down neighborhood outside Boston.

One of the kids at the academy lived in this neighborhood. He is talented and does not come from money, like many of the other students. Almost all the kids participate in some form of drug use, and this kid deals in clean urine to keep them all eligible and enrolled.

Ok, now up in Canada, some Prince's Eastern European physician is comatose after watching a video that arrived in the mail. Everyone that goes to rescue him also finds themself fixated on the looping video in the playing device.

There's another dude that gets massive quantities of weed and locks himself up in his apartment to smoke it until it's gone. I forget the quantity. Maybe he smokes like two ounces in a weekend? Something insane like that. He keeps trying to quit but then goes back for one more bender. You might imagine he's a little paranoid.

Finally, there's a couple of guys sitting on a mountain outside of Phoenix. One's undercover dressed as a woman. The other is in a wheelchair. They are sitting and observing something. They might be in the military or some kind of police force. They sort of seem to work together but not.

Sometimes it seems like maybe the tennis academy is in the Southwest also, not in New England, but I'm pretty sure it's in New England. There is a big tournament discussed that IS in Phoenix.

This middle kid (youngest?) of the family, the one who can play pretty decent tennis and is an upper-classman at the academy seems to have had some kind of mental breakdown. He's a secret pot smoker. It's often unclear whether he (and his disabled brother) can actually talk – or if they are just imagining their conversations. He was of the sort of smart where he can memorize an entire dictionary and recite definitions, including the page number where they appear (depending on which dictionary you'd like him to reference). He's trying to gain entrance to a school in Arizona, when he cracks under pressure.

*I really have no clue if any of this interpretation is accurate. At this point I just keep reading when I can, as much as I can. Sometimes that's just a few paragraphs – before I get overwhelmed and have to close my eyes.

Corn and Brat.

Went up to Wendt's place for the annual Corn and Brat festival in Williams Bay this weekend. Caribbean steel drum band, all the corn and brats and beer you can consume, fireworks, DJ, bands, beer pong... What more can you ask for? Except, of course, kicking the whole weekend off with dinner at Mars.

There was immediate seating on the patio, but how can you choose to do that when the alternative is to wait an hour for a table in the elegant dining room while you enjoy your first cocktail outside on the water? Um, not us. You need this in the background while you enjoy your ribs:

The SAME LADY is still playing the damn piano bar?! This lady was entertaining this joint when I was 10 years old.

Saturday it was grey and rainy. After a drive-by in Lake Geneva (town) we opted for a more local and lower key lunch at Gordy's. Bloody, beer back, tortilla soup and lunch followed by... a nice, long, 2 hour... NAP! Perfection.

So after numerous drive-by's of the C&B all weekend, it was time to hit it. But first, we loaded up our roadies and walked a couple blocks to Gage for the Caribbean band and party before the fireworks. Nothing like a band set up on a platform with a boat as the background to get you in the mood and watch the sun set.


When it seemed the kegs had run out at Gage, we made our way down to the madness of Corn and Brat.

This is where you got your ears of corn. As I got my second (sorry it was so good!) ear of corn, I realized that they weren't taking them out of the large tin cans that were lined up – stuffed full vertically on the grill with their husks sticking out – and THEN dipping them in butter...

Nope. On closer inspection (see the shiny, greasy husks?) it appeared they were literally heated IN the butter. And then you got to take your drenched corn to the shaker section and spice it up. Holy goodness.

The crowd was amazing. This t-shirt was a favorite.

A 12-oz beer was 2 tickets (2 bucks) and a "pitcher" was 7. No joke there was a table of people playing flip cup by the band/DJ that had, not exaggerating, a tower of at least 50 pitchers stacked empty on their table. We ended up beating it out of there, after dying laughing with two women who were convulsing over their 30 terrible i-phone self portraits, and joining some failed beer games – "If this is a beer drinking game when am I supposed to DRINK?" – around 11. Both nights had the most amazing, see-your-shadow, full moons that I've seen in a long time, too. Layed out on Pier 301 for a few hours and stopped by the Farm Stand on the way home. Super weekend.