Hey Halloween, we cool?

"This could be love - Love for fire"

Happy Halloween, everybody! It’s not my favorite holiday; in fact it just barely sneaks into the top 5, but it’s still a good time. And it might be Stacia’s favorite, so I should be careful what I say. Anyway, it’s Halloween, I have no idea what we’ll be doing to celebrate, and as usual it is rather unpleasant outside. It always seems funny (and a little sad) when the trick-or-treaters have elaborate costumes covered up by their winter jackets because it’s so cold out. Hey, at least it’s not snowing! So with nothing new to discuss about Halloween, here are some of my favorite memories from Halloweens past.

Interestingly enough, I lead off with an unpleasant memory. I couldn’t have been much more than 5 years old at the time, and I was dressed in the frog costume. For those unfamiliar, my Mom made a batch of really awesome costumes when I was young, including a penguin, a lion, some clowns, a frog, and maybe some others I can’t recall. The frog was noteworthy for having a homemade mask/helmet so the face couldn’t be seen, and it was more realistically froglike. So, as a frog, I was trick-or-treating with my Dad and brother when we got to the really elaborate house.

In our subdivision, there was one house that always had a really neat setup for Halloween. There were spiderwebs everywhere, creepy lighting, a fog machine, and a big cauldron on the front yard that was stirred by someone in a witch costume. We walked up, said trick-or-treat, and held out our plastic pumpkins for some candy. Unfortunately, the witch lady was a bit too in character, and said something about how a frog would go just perfectly in her brew. My dad and brother laughed it off, but I was really scared. I figured I looked too much like a real frog, and I’m pretty sure I walked the whole way home holding the frog head.

Of course, once I got a little older I wasn’t quite as terrified by our neighbors, and had some good times. I remember the time my brother was Luke Skywalker, using an early model glow stick as a lightsaber. For some reason the stick was sold with a rigid clear plastic tube. The idea was you crack the glow stick, slide it into the tube and fold over the ends of the stick to hold it in place. Well, it didn’t take long for us to realize that simply unhooking the bottom fold and snapping your wrist resulted in a launched glow stick, which was, naturally, awesome.

We were in the “on our own” stage of the trick-or-treating night, where our younger siblings were already home for the night and we were just racking up the candy and goofing around. As we switched off playing with the lightsaber, my brother gave it one particularly vigorous snap, and off it went. It sailed up into the night sky, gently arcing in a nice parabola and finally landing… on the roof of a house. Well, there was no getting it back at that point, so we just went on, needing to provide just a big more costume explanation to those who asked.

I can’t forget the Star Trek costume my Mom made for me in 6th grade, and which I wore every year until I literally couldn’t fit in it anymore. I already had all the gear, with the communicator, tricorder, and phaser, so being in uniform to match was too cool. And not to be too full of myself, I only applied the rank pins to make myself a commander, not a captain. Besides, the commander got to go on all the really fun away team missions. This was my all-time favorite costume, and I even have a picture of myself in it hanging on my wall at home (thanks Mom and Dad!).

Then there’s lots of fun memories walking my younger brother or sister around as they trick-or-treated when they were younger. We never went far or late into the night until they got a little older, but just the time spent together between houses was really nice. I enjoyed our candy recycling program, where we’d make periodic return trips to the house to dump out what we’d accumulated. Then we’d quickly sort it to find the less desirable candies and put those in our outgoing candy bucket. My parents always bought lots of good stuff in the days leading up to Halloween, and it was up to us to make sure that it lasted the night!

There was the faceless ghoul mask, the cat nose and the mardi gras mask I combined into what I still think was a pretty neat costume. There were the fun glow-in-the-dark vampire fangs we all used to love. Trick-or-treating in the mall the day before Halloween. And who could forget the year we dressed up as the cast of Little Red Riding Hood? I know whomever played Grandma certainly can’t! And there’s a lot more that keeps coming back as I write this, but not enough time for it all.

Looking back, it seems like I’ve always had a fair amount of fun on Halloween, especially when you consider that I never used to be a huge fan of chocolate (which has since been rectified, incidentally). I don’t think there’s any way it can overtake anyone in the all-important holiday rankings, but it has its place. Don’t think that a low ranking means I don’t love you, Halloween. And we’ll just see – maybe we’ll find something fun to do this year too.

A Letter to Splash Seafood

Splash is the preeminent seafood restaurant in Des Moines. What follows is a letter I sent to the management at Splash. If anyone is interested in contacting these gentlemen as well, their email addresses are jeffstegeman@yahoo.com and lucyhomey@yahoo.com.

Dear Sirs,

I love seafood, and I want to be able to love your restaurant. Geographically, Des Moines is about as far as we can get from the oceans in the US, so an upscale fresh seafood place is a great and novel idea. However, I have deep concerns over the many unsustainable options on the Splash menu, so that I cannot in good conscience dine there.

Sustainable seafood is a complex issue, with worries ranging from overfishing to environmental damage to bycatch of endangered species. As the world’s desire for more and more seafood continues to grow, these issues become magnified, and we see that continuing with the status quo is not a feasible option. A prime example is bluefin tuna, listed as an option on Splash’s appetizer menu, which has been overfished to the point that it is listed as critically endangered (IUCN).

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program is a helpful tool in guiding consumers and restaurants to more sustainable options. Species are neatly broken out into Best Choices, Good Alternatives, and Avoid. The guide is even available in a handy pocket version for reference at the store and when dining out. Sadly, many of the menu items at Splash are in the red-listed Avoid category (Bluefin Tuna, Russian Caviar, Chilean Seabass, Red Snapper, Atlantic Salmon).

Splash is in a unique position as the prime seafood restaurant in Des Moines - able to take the lead in sustainability on a local level, joining national personalities such as Rick Moonen, Alton Brown, and others in this mission. Menus can change, and making an effort to shift Splash from unsustainable to Best Choices would have a very real impact. I implore you to please consider the future of our oceans when selecting seafood for your menus, so there is a chance our children will be able to enjoy seafood as we do today.

Sincerely,

Gregory Zink

Former (and hopeful future) Splash diner

Figuring myself out

"Sorry I misspent so much of your time. Now I'm trying to put your riddle to a rhyme."

Let me tell you a story. For about a year and a half of my college career, I was a terrible student. I dozed through class, hardly studied at all, and did all my homework at the last minute. A brush with some really bad grades provided the wakeup call I needed and I kicked some ass during the rest of my time there, but that’s not the story I’m telling today. During those first years, I lived on the same floor in the same dorm, with a crowd of characters ranging from the nerdy to the obnoxious to the awesome, up to and including my wife. Although that’s also the fodder for lots of interesting tales, it’s again not the story I want to tell.

The story I do want to tell begins with me, during those lazy years, lounging around in the parlor of the dorm until the wee hours of the morning. This was nothing unusual; at this time of my life, it was in fact my usual routine. But as I was lying on a couch chatting, a friend of mine had to leave to go study, commenting on the way out “Greg, you need a hobby.” It was intended as a joke, to point out that there were obviously other things (like schoolwork) that I should be doing with my time, but for some reason it really stuck with me.

More recently, after I graduated college and transitioned over to a “9-to-5” life, I began to think about this a little bit more. I didn’t have homework anymore, and there weren’t intramural sports or club meetings filling my time in the evenings. Add in Stacia discovering knitting and deciding to pursue an online Master’s degree, and I was going to be stuck either watching TV all the time, or actually finding a hobby. I’d never had a hobby before, so I was going to have to think pretty hard to find one, but I was determined.

In the beginning I had no idea what I was looking for, so I tried almost anything. I began to build a model kit I’d had since I was a kid, but it just got boring and tedious. I thought about learning to draw, but never had enough desire to pick up a pencil and work at it. I tried writing fiction, but never really could get going with a great story idea. I went running a few times, but, let’s be honest, running sucks (I had been on the track team in high school, but I didn’t even like it then, always finding excuses to miss practice). And one time, I even let Stacia try to teach me to crochet.

After all these failed attempts, I was a little disheartened. So one evening Stacia and I spent our usual workday wind-down cooking dinner together, and I was griping about not having a hobby. She then pointed out what should have been obvious all along. “Well, you like this, don’t you?” I thought about it a little, and realized that, actually I really kind of loved our cooking adventures. Oftentimes it was my favorite part of the day, and while a large part of that was just us spending time together, the cooking itself was something I really enjoyed.

Quickly I was able to come up with all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t work as a hobby. “It doesn’t leave me anything to do after dinner.” “I don’t have any training and I’m not very good.” But after thinking about it some more, those excuses started to sound lame even to me. After dinner was over I could always work on meal planning, look up recipes and learn about nutritional aspects or new techniques. Stacia was entirely self-taught with her knitting, so I could learn on my own too. If I wasn’t very good to begin with, the best way to improve would surely be to practice.

And on top of all that, I found myself becoming excited about the whole idea. Which, when you think about it, should have been the key all along. Stacia knits not because she actively sought out a pastime, but because she tried it and had a blast. Who cares what I call it; if I really love cooking, that should be how I spend my spare time. So now it is. It’s an ongoing process, one that I’ll probably talk about on here more than you’d care for, but why not? After all, cooking is my favorite hobby.