Smoothie Disaster in Van Nuys

[niki]

no,no,no....joe is not allowed on the truck....he can't do ANY mixin.........but you,mike, are now the official driver...you and tom can run the smoothie truck..niki 

[TNangela]

I love that we keep getting more volunteers for the ranch!! Welcome aboard Tom and Mike!!
ANG

[joecaracappa]

One of the great things about living on Matthews Avenue (for you Regis Philburn fans out there, yes it was the same block "Freak'in Frenelli" lived on)in the Bronx (just off of White Plains Road) was that everything you could possibly need came rollling down the street in some kind of vehicle.

There were three ice cream trucks, Good Humor, Carnival and Bungalow Bars (the truck had a brown roof on it). For heating fuel you had a choice of oil (the old homestead still uses it) or coal. To keep your lettuce nice and crisp the ice man would show up about twice a week. There was a knife (sharpening) man, a junk man (horse drawn) and of course as I once mentioned before the fruit and vegetable man who would cry out "Bananas, ten cents a pound". The block (New Yorkers live on "blocks" , someone may say to you "Oh, he lives on the next block over" e.g.), was a beehive of activity for six days a week, on Sundays you could hear a pin drop.

Although most families owned a car (that's A car, not three) nobody drove anywhere (gasoline was expensive at 23 cents a gallon), we walked. We walked to school (Our Lady of Solice), to church, to the Safeway, the poltry store (Yes Niki, with LIVE chickens), the bakery (Conti's), the shoe shop, the ice cream parlor (for an egg cream), to Carvels (one thing we never ran out of in the Bronx was ice cream), to the candy stores (remember "penny" candy) where a nickel could buy a Mars bar the size of a deck of cards and a Chunky was a dime (we thought that was such a ripoff).

Our subway station was at 180th street, that was a bit of a walk, I got to do that when I was older (ten).

We ate pasta till it came out of our ears, fatty meats (Italians love their pork products) and Italian pastries and no body got fat! The only person I could remember back then that was remotely heavy was Grandma and she was a type II diabetic.

Lifestyle is everything when it comes to our health, times have changed. Back then when people got bored they went dancing, bowling............one of my fondest childhood memories were the walks my dad and I took to the Bronx Zoo, today I have difficulty believing that dad and I did that, it was not around the corner! It was way the heck over on Fordam Road for Pete's sake.

Many years later in Jersey, my dad was still walking (not so much because old habits die hard, Dad didn't drive, Mom did). But I believe it prolonged his life even though he passed on about 15 years ago at 72 from complications of ma-labsorbsion syndrome.

Well I've rambled on enough, oh by the way I weighed myself this morning and lost 15 pounds in 30 days (half a pound a day, not too shabby).

Joe

[Suezq]

Congrats on your weight loss. 

[tcasola]

Bungalow Bar fans repeat after me ... Bungalow bars, taste like tar .. The more you eat .. the sicker you are !!

More later

[niki]

BRAVO joe...........i'm so happy to hear that....
    but,didn't you forget about the fuller brush man?
          niki   

[tcasola]

Joe,

Congrats and way to go !! Keep up the great work !! You, Mike and Rich are very inspirational to me (please don't thing I am excluding the lovely women on this board too).

And thanks for the walk down memory lane.

Back then when people got bored 

... we played stoopball, stickball, handball and/or jack-queen-king-ace, Johnny-on-the-pony (guess who the one holding onto the telephone pole or Johnny-pump), skellie (a bottle cap game for those befuddled), “I declare WAR on”, red light-green light 1-2-3, “Mother may I”, freeze-tag, hide and go seek.

The way we cooled off on those hot humid summer days was to have a sprinkler cap (or a coffee can when the super - Mr. Johnson - wasn’t around) on the Johnny-pump.

Niki,

There are two train museums I know of in Pennsylvania. Steamtown in Scranton, and Strasburg Rail Road (where you can ride a “life size” replica of Thomas the Tank – I went last year and had the greatest time riding on Thomas). 

[joecaracappa]

We have been to the one in Strasburg, PA. There is a killer rail museum in Sacramento, CA.

Joe

[joecaracappa]

In my I'll spent youth, I was a hump clerk of the Lehigh Valley.

Joe

[niki]

boy,i remember all those things and very fondly..in the summer,noone stayed inside..we were all outside doing all that stuff...........
  not the one in scranton...i was at the other one...i have pictures i have to look for one of these days......
  yes,thank you for the stroll down memory lane.......niki 

[joecaracappa]

Well another LDL related disaster has struck La Casa Joe & Delia.

Before we left for the Boy Scout camp this weekend, Delia decided to make our son Mike (age 24) a pot of bean and chicken soup (her own concoction). At some point (details are sketchy at this point) the boy decided to put the pot on the stove, heat it up (the whole pot) and promptly forgot about it.

Now it probably would not have been so bad had he not decided to leave the house for some reason or another.

Well by the time he returned home the whole house was full of smoke, alarms going off, dogs hysterical and a pot of charred beans and chicken on the stove.

A lot of air freshener later, the smell is still in the furniture, the bedding, the drapery and our clothing.

Well I guess it could have been a lot worse. Mike is an animator (he is currently auditioning for a job on The Simpsons feature) and when he gets involved with his work a little switch turns off in his head and the dogs don't get fed for three days..............anyone else out there related to an artist?

D'oh!

Joe

[niki]

ok...i could say either of 2 things......#!..being a disaster in the kitchen is genetic.....or.....#2..the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.................you pick............niki
ps..HE won't be allowed in the kitchen when he comes to visit the ranch......... 

[niki]

WHAT?...and let them near a hot air popper?....ONLY prepackaged snacks...........................niki

[joecaracappa]

My grandmother had a saying which roughly translated means "If your kitchen is perfect all the time is means you aren't doing anything". A friend of ours has a kitchen most of us would die for.........SUB ZERO appliances, high end convection ovens, the best pots and pans, all professional kitchen tools, a fortune in Spode and Waterford............................doesn't cook, the only thing this woman makes is reservations.

Can't live like that. Got to get into the kitchen and create a disaster just to have some fun and maybe create something wonderful.

In our house the kitchen is SUPPOSED to look like that.

Joe

[niki]

i've always admired people that have that kind of ordered,perfect life....wherever i go seems to go that well lived look....i admire women also that have that perfect look...perfect hair..perfect makeup..perfect clothes...ALL THE TIME.....alas....it's just not me....
  and on let's do lunch,i need to cook...i can't alternate between going out to eat and living on takeout..although before let's do lunch,it was takeout more than anything else which is an easy lifestyle to live where i live(surrounded by takeout places).........
  well,it takes all different types of people to make a world...someone like mary would LOVE a kitchen like that and would hate being away from it for any length of time.....actually,you're describing the kitchen at our ranch.........................niki

[tcasola]

I always say you can eat off my kitchen floor ... If you're lucky you'll find a chicken leg, celery sticks, maybe an old tuna sandwich.

Here is a picture of LDL farm’s kitchen after Joe cooked:

[rhernan216]

like the old saying to have dirty dishes in the sink daily and and food stains on the stove..translates to the Good Lord blessing us with more than half of the world eats in a month. I have no regrets about my kitchen especially after the creative LDL juices get flowing and I am a man on a mission.

rh