The Backstory, Part 1

One of my first memories of Amy is when she brought a cesar salad to a pot-luck, and I asked her if it was homemade. Having some culinary interest, I am always looking for new recipes I could "borrow" from friends. Her response? The burst of air that comes deep from your lungs that slightly resembles a horse sneezing. We all know it, that gesture/sound that has become accepted in our culture to substitute the sarcastic saying, "Yeah, RIIIIGHT..."

Now that I better know Amy as my mother-in-law, that really was a silly question to ask her, as I've learned that the only real cooking she tackles are what she calls "event meals," like the Christmas dinner we had last week. She does a fabulous job with them; she just doesn't like to cook but 4 or 5 times a year.

Rewind 30 years to the year of my birth, the year of the Monkey, 1980. Greg and Amy are newlywed Marines, celebrating their first Christmas together. I'm guessing Greg didn't really know Amy was an event cook only, and bought her a Betty Crocker cook book for Christmas. An otherwise great idea and a great gift, but a mistake Greg still can't shake to this day. Every Christmas, there's some joke thrown in Greg's direction about how he bought Amy a COOKBOOK for their first Christmas! A running family joke I suppose but to Greg's defense, that cookbook has been well used over the last 30 years and remains in their kitchen cupboard!

Now, how all this relates to my blog's backstory is this: Julia Child and Julie Powell, the two characters who inspired the movie Julie and Julia, which happens to be one of my wife's new favorite. So much to her liking, that it made it's way to her Christmas wish list. Being the smarty pants that I am, and a life-long wannabe comdeian, I thought of a great gift idea for our first Christmas. A la newlywed McLeods circa 1980 I bought my wife Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Coupled with her real desire, the movie, it was a great gift/joke for the whole family to enjoy...and a way for me to exercise my creativity. My penalty, I had to sit down and watch the movie with her. Well, not really sit down because I was mostly in the kitchen making a Caprese salad for the family's Italian-themed Christmas Eve dinner. On a side note, I just now realize...my wife (Anna) claims to be like her mother (Amy), and lets me do a majority of the daily cooking, because she does the "event cooking," but she didn't really do that either this year...either she's really good, or I'm really dumb. I prefer to believe that it's a combination of both.

So yes, I guess my desire to blog is somewhat inspired by Julie Powell. Besides her inspiration, I am looking forward to the opportunity to fine-tune my voice as a writer, as I hope to someday write a screen play. Not a movie about me like Julie and Julia, but a screen writer nonetheless. I've been reading Syd Field to help me shape my characters, dialogue, and action. I guess you can say that I am on a constant prowl for creative outlets. Surely, that's why I like to teach. Each class brings it's different needs and I love finding new and different ways to teach kids Geometry. Sounds gross? I love it! I also like to write songs, paint paintings, sketch sketches, draw up new football plays, and re-draw old ones. If I don't have a creative outlet, I go crazy. Hopefully this blog will sufficiently quench my cravings to create.

Now we know why I'm blogging. I'll save the story as to why I'm writing what I'm writing about for blog #2.

Until then, my sign-off will not make sense to you...

To Health and Wealth!

Isaac