the magic of restoration. Go to the new blog: Sunnyside

I think I'm done with the blog. I've lost interest..call it the scourge of Facebooking. I don't have a lot to say anymore that you haven't heard in previous posts. Readership is down to a bare minimum and so I think that my readers are losing interest too. I've thought about this for weeks and weeks and everytime I feel like I should blog something, it becomes more of a pain in the ass. So, I am leaving it here. At least taking the summer off to do other things. Find me on facebook.

Tah!
Seth

Oh my, 11pm and I am not sure I can move much. That could be due to the 1/2 a little blue pill I took to help me sleep, or to the food we had tonight as the result of two days of cooking. This is a long story and I am just buzzed enough to tell it.

New friends have just moved to town and recently bought at house up the street from us. We wanted to invite them to dinner to celebrate their arrival here, and one phone call spawned a slew of emails and.....well...we had twelve for dinner tonight. I wanted to make sure new and old doctors met and socialized, and so we had a good, interestingly tame crowd for dinner.

I didn't know what to make , couldn't decide on anything and then decided on a bunch of different food that had no link to any other dish, so I cooked up a storm and hoped for the best. I have a feeling that the two best things on the menu were the shellfish stew and the Japanese curried potato croquettes. Other food making an appearance included an asparagus alfredo pizza, roasted cajun chiken bites, a fresh green salad. The chicken sate sucked!

Dessert was a trip, i got the idea from one of the woman at Hannaford. She was offering up a quick dessert using Hannaford croissants, melted brie, and Recese Peanut Butter cup sandwiches, baked in the oven until melted. I decided to serve them for dinner with vanilla ice cream and berries. I don't think my guests liked it as much as I thought it was a riot, but hey, they were all eaten!

You know you are spoiled when you are sitting out on your back porch and all you can see through the darkness is a light on an island a mile or so away and all you can think is "shit, the summer people are here"

Opponents of gay marriage in Maine pay a Michigan firm 81 cents a signature to try and get 55,000 signatures to overturn the gay marriage law in Maine.

Let's hope that hiring outside firms to come to Maine and bully people into signing this petition totally backfires. Let the people of Maine decide for themselves whether they want to uphold gay marriage in the state. So far we have a group from Michigan hired to get the signatures and then a group from California hired to do the PR. The PAC that is behind this is getting money from the NOM. AND, the petitions are being folded into Church programs!!! Whatever happened to separation of Church and State??? Why can't these churches do something worthwhile, like spend time feeding and clothing the poor of Maine??


Gay-marriage foes hire California firm that ran Prop 8 | Portland Press Herald

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Here is my letter to the editor of the Portland Press Herald:

Dear Editor:

Leave it to the opponents of gay marriage in Maine to spend as much money as they can hiring out-of-state special interest groups to run their campaign to "protect traditional marriage." In MATT WICKENHEISER's story, "Gay-marriage foes hire California firm that ran Prop 8," he states "Filings with the state Ethics Commission show that the group has spent $45,000 hiring a professional signature-gathering company, National Petition Management Inc. of Michigan, to aid in the people's veto effort."

So, not only have the opponents hired a California PR firm, but is also paying a Michigan business at least $45,000 to gather $55,000 signatures? That's 81 cents a signature! I bet they could've paid a Maine bible study group 25 cents a signature and kept the money here in the state.

Allowing the gay marriage law to stand will bring millions of much needed dollars to small businesses across our state. Everyone from fisherman to gift shop owners to inn keepers will benefit. Tollways and airports would see more traffic. Florists, caterers, and others might be able to keep their doors open in this tough economic climate if they had 2 or 3 more orders; orders that would come if gay marriage were allowed to stand. Our opponents don't understand this and they would rather contract to out of state firms to do their work rather than let all Mainers reap the benefits of gay marriage.

Respectfully submitted,

Drove to Burlington Vermont and back yesterday, with auction stops along the way. 15 and a half hours and 688 miles or something like that. I got to the auction house in Vermont at 3:30, stayed until 4:00 and drove home. Why? Cause it was still light out and too early to go find a hotel. My cousin in NH never called me back when I left a message that I wanted to drop by and spend the night....oh well, she is probably traveling. I went all the way there to see a chest of drawers that the auction house is selling. Its a fairly rare form from Connecticut and their photograph of it showed that the cherrywood was nice and red in color. Well, that musta been the flash, cause the chest was as brown as brown furniture gets. Yuck! The back feet were replaced, the top had issues, and the whole thing has been through at least one dealer and his "restorer." The auction house has no idea where the chest came from...but I do. I spent three days researching it and traced it back through a museum collection, the collector who gave it to the museum and the dealer from whom he bought it in 1942! I was excited to see it, but was just flat our disappointed.

Greg had a beading party the other night. A friend is getting married and Greg is making her dress. He wanted to bead the train with Austrian crystal and so put out the SOS and we had about eight people here beading. They got it done in about four hours. I made food for them and came up with a delicious curried potato and meat croquette that I will probably serve again on Sunday night when we have the doctor crowd to dinner.

My dream property might be for sale. I was told by the owner that he would entertain any offers while they decide what to do with it. It's 2 acres on the water with a old Arts and Crafts cottage on it that needs a ton of work...I have to figure out how to afford it....and I may think about putting the Bayside cottage up for sale to do it.

The Bayside cottage is almost full for the summer....I have friends who have cottages in the same neighborhood who have not rented a week yet and others who are very down on their weekly rentals. I have only had to discount once, and I waived the dog fee as the incentive to rent to a family with a show dog...they also got an extra day out of the deal, but it works for me as they leave on a Sunday and I have a Monday to Saturday free rental that I gave to friends as a wedding present.

I have one week left at the end of July, which is a strange week to have open because it's high season there. Well, I feel confident that I will rent the place for that week. My goal now is to discount for the next two weeks in June to fill the place...June is hard, but the 'hood is so quiet and peaceful that it would be a perfect place to decompress for the week or a long weekend even. I don't believe that I had any renters at all last year until the 4th weekend.

It is cold and rainy here again today. It's a good day to weed the garden, or cook. Last night I made a spicy turkey sausage pizza with a whole wheat / cornmeal crust. and last week I made a delicious curried leek and butternut squash soup with pears and fingerling potatoes....that was amazing.

Auctions are starting up again and there are a few good things for sale. I have a couple of emails out to clients about painted boxes and a beautiful 18th century NH high style marble topped table that is coming up for sale down south somewhere.

I need to get down to my case of goodies for sale in Southern Maine...I have not been in about three months and I bet the case looks terrible. I am waiting for local clients to get back to me about consigning some things to me.

Had an amazing experience the other night when I went to have a massage....the woman I go to said to me..."well, you have experienced a few massages, now I want you to consider having treatments in what I was trained to do." I thought..."honey I'm gay, so you might be barking up the wrong tree!" Turns out that she was trained to realign energy fields. So, for an hour, she made me relax and breathe deeply bringing in light and expelling all my bad shit....I think it worked pretty well as I feel that I am getting back on track and coming out of my several months long stupor. Greg told me that I was acting like the Energizer Bunny on Crack when I got home that night and he wanted me to calm down. So, I think it worked! I will try again in a few weeks, though I miss the massage, which really was lovely!!

SAAB MAY GO BACK TO FULL SWEDISH OWNERSHIP, WHERE IT BELONGS

FRANKFURT — General Motors is close to a deal to sell Saab, the Swedish carmaker, to Koenigsegg, a manufacturer of high-end sports cars that is also from Sweden, a person close to the negotiations said Thursday.

“We are still working on the deal,” the person said, requesting anonymity because the agreement was incomplete. “It is not the done deal that some people in Sweden seem to think it is.”

Swedish television reported that a group of Norwegian investors was involved in the deal.

Saab separated from G.M. under Swedish law in February as G.M. embarked on the restructuring that led to its bankruptcy filing this month. Saab then announced its intention to seek new investors who would take it over.

In contrast to the help that G.M. has received from the United States, Canada and Germany, the Swedish government has been cagey about supporting Saab with the upfront loan guarantees and capital injections that kept G.M. assets working elsewhere. It prefers to wait for an actual sale.

“We have always said that when there is a new owner of Saab, the debt office could be commissioned to negotiate about loan guarantees, if such are needed,” said Goran Hagglund the state secretary in the Swedish industry ministry, Bloomberg News reported.

A purchase of Saab would bring Koenigsegg, a small-volume maker of high-performance sports cars, into a new business. The company was founded by Swedish entrepreneur Christian von Koenigsegg in 1994, and is known in the automotive world for its super-fast cars and attempts to break speed records.