Month: July 2006

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Who’s Cookin’ at Home? ………. If you don’t learn, you’ll never enjoy this great Seafood Gumbo!

ZEE Best Seafood Gumbo!!!

All too often today, busy and scattered families don’t sit down to 1 meal a day together, let alone 2 or 3. This is unfortunate, since usually the only conversation that takes place in the family is at the main meals.

What complicates mealtime is that fewer and fewer people know how to really cook. Being able to press the popcorn button on the microwave does not constitute enough knowledge to get you around a major meal. If more and more young men and women are abandoning cooking in favor of fast food or microwavable dinners, it spells disaster for future generations who have little understanding of nutrition or balance.

In our little group, we made it a fun activity to learn how to prepare everyday simple meals as well as those that might impress. Besides the feminine arts of weightlifting, martial arts, hunting and fishing… I wanted my daughters to learn how to cook. They do this very well!

So, back to food!

Here is my favorite recipe for seafood Gumbo! We developed it after a lot of helpful conversations from a variety of great folks. I hope you enjoy! By the way, one of the great things about extra gumbo is that you can freeze it into about 8 two serving portions!

So Here it is CLICK here for my recipe! Bon Appetit! Make it for someone you love!

 

Roger Freberg

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How to be happy…. make your first decision well!

Sweet Old Married Couple 

For those folks around my age can look back on the first half century of our lives with some amusement. Yes, we were supposed to be the ‘leisure generation’, our biggest challenge was how we were going to take care of ourselves in all of our ‘spare’ time? Well, a lot of those delusions have been laid to rest over the intervening decades. It is interesting to note that few of the ‘truisms’ from the 60’s and 70’s have any ‘relevance’ today.

A lot of what permeated popular culture via the media from those years has been resoundly repudiated either through research or from one’s own practical experience. The ‘alternative’ lifestyles from this timeframe have virtually dissolved …. and their ‘purpose’ seemed to have provided no useful service to society other than to delay procreation and the much feared ‘over population’ tsunami! Our population has grown, but from immigration alone.

In any event, the much abused ‘institution’ of marriage is making a comeback. The reasons are very simple:

“the data are clear: you’ll live longer, stay saner, get richer, and be happier.” — Maggie Gallagher

Maggie makes a lot of good points. I liked her point that the longer you are married the better the marriage and happier it can become. Obviously, the cynic will say that this is because each individual has more to lose as time goes by, basically, more to divide in half. However, She brings out the obvious, that any two committed people can resolve their issues over time… yes, there will be conflice, but with conflict comes resolution and with resolution comes greater love and respect for each other.
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Soccer: Give them 1 point for effort… but it’s not enough to keep me awake!

 Soccer only requires a ball

Americans have just never caught soccer fever or ‘World Cup” mania. This has lead some advocates to believe that this failure is due to some shortcoming in the American psyche rather than soccer’s lower sex appeal. Many cried over the failure of women’s professional soccer, but it’s demise wasn’t totally unexpected. Even today, there is a certain amount of drum beating to try to develop support for reintroducing U.S. professional women’s soccer, but unless they compete in the nude, it’s not likely to fare much better.

Soccer has a tough road to hoe in a country that invented or popularized many of the great sports in the world. My impression is that baseball addressed the shortcomings of cricket and American football and rugby evolved from socccer by reshaping the sport to better engage the spectators and participants.

Soccer marketeers are working hard to capture American’s imaginations. Articles about the world’s greatest athletes are soccer players or the fittest athletes are soccer players just don’t ring true to fans who watch Reggie Bush and Justin Gatlin. It doesn’t seem likely unless the criteria include running around for 90 minutes or so and not do anything interesting. The world’s best athletes are in sports that captivate the fans and pay their players like gods.

What do average Americans know about the last World Cup? They know some French guy head butted some Italian guy. It seems rather ironic that two countries that can’t win any wars would be competing for any kind of World Championship.

Soccer is not the ‘safe’ sport for kids that it is marketed. Statistics reveal that head injuries are one of the most common forms of injuries and they occur in about the same frequency in soccer as in American Football. In case you were dozing off… the quote was “In soccer, concussions make up 2-3% of all injuries. This is the same rate as for American football!” All that contact, and soccer still can’t keep me awake.

It is also not hard to understand why in many less economically developed parts of the world, locals have embraced a contest that requires only a ball. Ask any Division I AD about which sports cost the most and the least.
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at $300 an hour or so…. being a Professor Ain’t too bad!

The Challenge of today's universities -- getting Professors to Teach their subject and stay on topic 

San Luis Obispo is a small college town with a modest university. 

However, as is true in so many colleges and universities around the country, some professors don’t realize how good they have it. Recently, a couple of local professors complained about the Cal Poly football coach’s raise. They felt that they had to settle for crumbs from the table and were justifiably (in their minds) unhappy.

The head coach’s raise certainly reflected the very recent success Cal Poly was having in football. Making the playoffs was a striking improvement over decades of mediocrity. The coach’s salary — as head coach’s salaries go — won’t roll anyone’s eyes; Cal Poly is division I double A after all. To put it in perspective, if Oklahoma was nice, they’d roll over Cal Poly 77-0 in a bad year.

So why all the fuss?

Well, the professors who wrote to the Tribune obviously felt that they are ‘underpaid’. However, let’s take a closer look at what they really get. First, many of them have the biggest perk of all — a job for life. In contrast, coaches go to work every day with a guillotine blade hanging over their necks. 

Professors here teach a whopping 12 hours a week for 30 weeks a year. As for health benefits, a state job is hard to beat. This works out to something like $300 an hour.

Football Coaches — especially head football coaches — seldom have a life. They work constantly throughout the year and seemingly 24 hours a day. The hourly rate of a Cal Poly football coach would be something around $30 an hour. In addition, coaches can be fired for any reason.

Oddly enough, I suspect both underpaid professors report more to the IRS than the much maligned football coach.

Roger Freberg

 

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Handguns are worthless… Until you need one!

 My Browning automatic

Have you ever had to defend yourself or someone you love from an intruder?

Part of the worries of a modern world is waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of someone breaking into your home. What will you do? Call 911 and hope someone comes along to save the day?

Unfortunately, all too often today, some people expect that someone else will teach our kids what they need to know, help us through our interpersonal relationships and defend us from the nasties of our world. Too few rely on themselves or take responsibility to solve their own challenges.

Part of this naive thinking is that if we some how control guns then violent crime will disappear, people will use words and not their fists and the trains will run on time.

Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report on children’s deaths due to firearms. In 1999, 88 children died from firearm accidents. One article summarizes: “Far fewer children die each year in firearm incidents than from car accidents, fires, poisoning, suffocation, or drowning.”
Continue reading “Handguns are worthless… Until you need one!”