Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Baumgart’s

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A Chinese restaurant with a difference.

When we lived in Harrington Park, NJ, we discovered Baumgart’s, a Chinese restaurant in nearby Englewood. We ate there quite often during the 11 years we lived in New Jersey.

Baumgart’s isn’t your typical Chinese restaurant. First of all, it occupies the space once occupied by a good, old fashioned luncheonette — the kind with a counter and soda fountain. I’m not sure, but I think the old luncheonette had the same name. When we took my grandmother there for dinner one night, she told us that she used to have lunch there years ago while waiting for a bus to or from New York City, where she worked.

I’m not sure if it’s still true, but when we lived in New Jersey ten years ago, you could still get luncheonette food at the restaurant during the day — breakfast and lunch, that is. I’m talking about things like egg salad sandwiches and pastrami sandwiches and ice cream sodas. Mind you, this is a Chinese restaurant with Chinese — or at least Asian — people working at the counter, in the kitchen, and at the tables.

At dinner time, the menu is primarily Chinese food — but not the typical chow mein and fried rice you’d find in a Chinese restaurant. Instead, there are other dishes prepared in the Chinese way — in a wok with Chinese sauces and seasonings. On Friday night, we had noodles with sesame sauce (a Chinese restaurant standard) and a mixture of Chinese eggplant, chicken breast, squid, and shrimp in a tasty sauce. My favorite item from the old menu — it wasn’t on the current menu — was eggplant stuffed with shrimp. They also used to serve broccolli stems sliced into small chunks and marinated in some kind of garlic concoction. It was so different and tasty that most of the folks we took to eat there never even realized they were eating the least desirable part of broccoli.

Some years back, Baumgarts broke through the wall of the space next door and expanded the dining room there. They chose an art deco decor that included old movie posters and pastel colors. Not my idea of good decor for the 1990s and certainly not for the 2000s. But the booths are big and comfortable and the place is bright, even late at night.

We went for dinner at nearly 9 PM, hoping to stay on Arizona time (6 PM) for the entire length of our stay. The restaurant was just starting to empty out after what had probably been a busy dinner hour. Restaurants in the metro area don’t close at 8:30 or 9:00 — that’s when the night is just beginning for many people. The streets don’t roll up, either — outside was a continuous stream of people strolling past, the smell of Greek food from the restaurant across the street, and the sound of life.

After our meal, we shared a baked apple with homemade vanilla ice cream and real whipped cream. On some nights, they also offer fresh baked apple dumplings — if you go there when that’s available, I highly recommend it.

I miss restaurants like Baumgart’s — restaurants that offer more than just the usual fare. It was nice to go back.

But I do miss that shrimp-stuffed eggplant dish.

I’m Back

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I return from a long weekend in New York.

Just got back from a 4-day weekend in New York. Our activities included:

  • dinner at Baumgart’s in Englewood, NJ
  • a birthday party for my husband, Mike, in Glen Cove (on Long Island)
  • dim sum in Ft. Lee, NJ
  • an afternoon in SoHo and the south Village, including a quick look at the new MacBook laptop in Apple’s SoHo Apple Store
  • getting rained on just enough to remember the pleasure of a spring rain but without getting wet enough to be miserable about it
  • Italian pastries and coffee at a real bakery
  • a viewing of The DaVinci Code at a theater across the street from Ground Zero (my first trip down there since before 9/11)
  • tapas at a Spanish restaurant in Englewood, NJ with our old next-door neighbors
  • real bagels and lox at my mother-in-law’s apartment in Queens, NY

Seems like we did a lot of eating. We did. I’m still stuffed.

I hope to write a bit about some of the things we did — and show some photos — later this week. Stay tuned.

The Weather in Newark

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I get an e-mail for online check-in that includes a weather report.

I’m going to New York this weekend. It’s for a surprise birthday party for my husband, Mike. He knows about it, of course. His blabbermouth brother managed to keep it a secret for all of ten minutes.

Anyway, we’re flying out there. On Continental Airlines — their hub is in Newark. And I just got an e-mail message from Continental offering online check-in.

The e-mail included a graphic image with the weather forecast. Here it is:

Weather in Newark

Should I be upset that they’re forecasting rain the whole time I’ll be out there?

Or should I be glad to feel the rain on my face and in my hair (and down my back) again? After all, we haven’t had any significant rainfall here in a while and I rather miss it.

Will report back next week.

It’s Not Just Sand

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I have to explain to passengers that the desert is more than sand dunes.

I had some passengers on a helicopter flight a few weeks back who were just visiting the Phoenix area from somewhere back east. At sometime during the flight, they told me they were hoping to see the real desert.

My DesertI was confused. Wickenburg sits in the Sonoran desert. That’s the desert with the big saguaro cacti all over the place. It rains, on average, less than 8 inches a year. The desert can’t get any more real than that.

My passenger clarified. “Well, where’s the sand?”

The sand, unfortunately, is all over the place. In washes, in my front yard, in my shoes and cars, and in my hair and eyes during a dust storm. Sand (and dust) is a part of life here.

But not the kind of sand my passenger was thinking about. He was thinking of sand dunes. You know. Like the kind in movies that take place in the Sahara desert.

I began to understand. His mental picture of the desert included the rolling sand dunes from the movies. The same sand dunes that had hazards like quicksand and oasises with palm trees and ponds of water.

I explained that there were sand dunes in the southwest desert, but they were only part of the desert landscape — not the whole thing. I told him about the big sand dunes west of Yuma on I-8, and the small sand dunes west of Blythe off of I-10 (I’m not even sure if you can see those from the road, but I see them from the helicopter when I fly that way), and the medium sized sand dunes in Death Valley.

Then I put on my tour conductor voice and gave him a summary description of the Sonoran desert landscape, including information about its cacti, trees, animal life, and other features.

Of course, all this has me wondering how many people think the desert is just a big sand dune.

Monument ValleyOne of the things I love about the desert is its diversity. There are so many kinds of desert, each with their own little ecosystem. Drive 50 or 100 miles in any direction and you’re likely to be in a whole different kind of desert. For example, if you drive up route 93 from Wickenburg, you’ll enter another kind of desert where there are no saguaro cacti, but plenty of Joshua trees. Drive up to Monument Valley and you’ll see the layers of underlying rock exposed in magnificent formations, with scrubby trees and bushes hanging on for life in the fine red sand.

Just don’t go down to Phoenix. There isn’t much of the desert left down there, with all the asphalt, golf courses, non-native plants (like palm trees, for heaven’s sake!), and irrigation.

Mexican Labor

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Why we need immigrants.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I’ve been sitting on the fence about the immigration issue. But yesterday, something happened that gave me some more food for thought.

The phone company sent a pair of Mexican laborers to my house to do some work.

My house sits on the side of a hill. Between it and the telephone pole that brings service to my house is a large wash (dry river bed that sometimes isn’t dry) and my paved driveway, which curves up a pretty steep hill. There are no overhead wires going to my house. Electricity and telephone service are underground (the way they should be).

When we first moved to our home 10 years ago, Mike and I each had a home office. To handle home, business, and Internet (ISDN in those days) service, we needed six telephone lines. The phone company only had two lines in the conduit that ran under the wash. So they brought in a team of Mexican workers and a ditch-witch to dig a 3-foot-deep trench from the pole, across the wash, up the side of the driveway, and to our telephone box.

This worked fine until my neighbor, while playing with a backhoe in the wash, severed the phone lines. Mike and I spent half the day sitting in the wash under an umbrella, splicing in a new segment of phone line to restore our service. We didn’t want our neighbor to get hit with a bill from the phone company.

I think Mike did severed the lines next. (What is it with men and heavy machinery?) This time we had the phone company come in. We no longer had the offices in the house, so we didn’t need that 6-pair. Could they just use the phone lines in the original conduit? Sure. And they did.

Time passed. Those phone lines went bad. The phone company fixed the line in the wash and routed service through two of those pairs.

More time passed. Now phone service isn’t working reliably again. Sometimes it’ll be fine for days. Other times it’ll have a cracking sound that makes it nearly impossible to use. Once in a while, the lines will be dead. We called the phone company.

It took them about a month to admit that all the lines going to our house were shorted out. They couldn’t find two good pairs of wires in the ten pairs available. They needed to run a new cable.

They sent a guy in to check out the situation. He wanted to run the lines up the back of our property, up a 60° solid rock hill covered with desert vegetation. I was doubtful, worried about erosion in the new trench over time.

Yesterday I stayed home to rest (trying to speed recovery for my surgery). I was filling the hummingbird feeders in the backyard when I spotted the phone company truck trying to zero in on my house. (My house is hard to find and we like it that way.) They visited every house in the neighborhood before they finally climbed up my driveway.

“You finally found us,” I said.

The man in the passenger seat of the truck looked at me blankly and showed me a piece of paper. It was a work order for our home. I looked at him and realized he was Mexican. I looked at the driver. He was Mexican, too.

“Do you speak English?” I asked the passenger.

“A little,” he said.

I looked at the driver. “How about you?”

He laughed. “No Ingles.”

Great.

“I’ll call the phone company,” I said.

They understood that. They parked the truck and I went inside to use the phone, which was working well that day. I finally got through to someone. By that time, the two Mexicans were checking out the side of the driveway, where the old cable was.

“You sent two guys who don’t speak English,” I said. “I think you need to send a supervisor or someone who can communicate with them to make sure they do what the guy who was here yesterday wants them to do.”

A while later, the guy who’d been at my house the day before called. He confirmed with me where he wanted the new line to go. By this time, the Mexicans had shovels out and were digging in various areas alongside my driveway — not where he wanted the line to go. I told him this. “You want to talk to them?” I asked. “Do you speak Spanish?”

He told me he didn’t speak Spanish but he’d call their boss.

By that time, I was pooped. It’s the surgery recovery thing. I’m glad I stayed home yesterday to rest. I went back into the house, closed the windows, and turned the AC on. It was 10:30 AM and already about 85° in the shade.

The Mexicans continued to work. They pulled out their ditch-witch and dug a trench alongside my driveway right where the old trench was. I don’t think they hit the old cable because my telephone service was never interrupted. Around noon, one of them came to ask me to move the cars. We have a parking apron at the top of the driveway that was added after we moved in; they wanted to slice along the concrete seam to sink the wires there. I moved Mike’s truck, his old Mustang, and my Jeep.

I caught sight of their big, orange water bucket, which they’d put on top of my pop-up camper for easy access. Right out in the sun. I know how much I hate warm water, so I asked one of the guys if they wanted some ice for their water. I also offered them the only soda pop we had — diet Coke. (Mike drinks it; not me.) They accepted. I went inside, removed the ice maker’s bucket, put two Cokes on top, and brought it outside. When he opened the water bucket, it only had about 3 inches of water left in it. I dumped in all the ice, then told them to fill it at the hose spiggot at the side of the house. “Take the hose off,” I told them. “The hose water is dirty.” I don’t know if they understood, but I wasn’t about to hang out with them to find out. By this time, I was over 100° in the blazing sun and I wanted to be inside.

But those two guys didn’t seem to care. They worked away in the hot sun for the rest of the day. At one point, I looked outside to see one of them sweeping my driveway. At another point, they were down at the telephone pole digging with shovels. These two guys worked their butts off. I don’t know if they took any breaks or if they had lunch with them. All I know is that they were done by 5 PM and rolling back up the road when Mike got home from work.

Mike and I talked about it later. I told him that I couldn’t imagine any American working as hard as these two guys had worked in the hot sun all day long. “I hope they’re getting paid a decent amount of money,” I added.

“Probably about $15 per hour,” he told me.

Do you know any American laborers who would work like that for that kind of pay?

And therein lies the problem. We (Americans) have come to rely on immigrants for cheap labor. They’re willing and able to work. In fact, they’re eager to work. And they’ll do it for far less than most Americans would consider getting paid, without labor unions, strikes, or unreasonable demands for benefits.

What would happen in we suddenly cut off the inflow of immigrant labor?

What’s the answer to the immigration problem? Damned if I know.