• 1/2 cup apricot preserves
• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• cheesecloth bag w/ 6 whole cloves + 3″ cinnamon stick
• 1 lime, blanched in boiling water for 2 minutes, seeded and chopped
• 1 firm pear, peeled and diced
• 1 apple, peeled and diced
• 3 cups cranberries, washed and picked over
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

Combine preserves, vinegar, sugar, curry powder, ginger, spice bag and 1 1/2 cups water in a non-reactive pan. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar dissolves.

Add lime, pear and apple. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Add cranberries and raisins. Simmer 20-25 minutes, or until thick, stirring occasionally.

Remove from heat and remove spice bag. Add walnuts.

Put in a non-reactive bowl. Let cool and cover, chill overnight.

This is best if made a few days in advance, so the flavors can all come out and blend together. It will keep easily for a couple of weeks if you store it divided into multiple containers.

Some things only change a little, so the sense of Nostalgia is more like a haze that lingers over the current reality. Coney Island Hotdog in Worcester is sort of like that for me. The place is close enough to being the same as when I was a kid that I can picture the ghosts of waitresses that would call you “hun” and banana cream pies, just an old layer that has been peeled off or faded away.

Nantasket Beach / Paragon Park is one of those more painful incidents of nostalgia. All you see is the dirty broken ghost of a layer left. The heart of things is long gone. There is little reminder of what once was, leaving you doubting that it ever really was at all.

I used to got to Nantasket Beach and Paragon Park every now and then when I was a kid. Late seventies to mid eighties. I think I went the most in my mid-teens. My father and I would drive down in the evening. Convertible top down. Play some pinball or video games. Get a box of salt water taffy and eat most if it on the drive back.

Arcades lined the whole strip there in front of the park. There were tons of games. Lots of them were pretty beat up, but the depth in time that they represented was amazing. There was just so much going on and it was teaming with life.

I would go again just after Paragon Park had been shut down. Rode out there with my dad and other friends on our motorcycles. I think my girlfriend (now wife) was on the back. Things were shutdown, but it was all there still at least.

This past weekend I made a trip down to Nantasket Beach on Sunday morning to see what it was like. And this is basically all that there was to it:

Nantasket Beach strip in 2010

Now admittedly I had been here before in the past years, but I always made excuses like “Oh, maybe I am just here too early in the season, it will be much more active later on.” But this is the start of August, and all there is to show for it here is one limp arcade, a food stand, a crappy gift shop and a boarded up arcade home to who-knows what. It is basically what it was when I went there over four years ago.

Same photo from 2006

The only good thing is that nothing has changed in these last four years. The bad thing is it is all just as depressing now as it was then. I can only hope that it was a case that the old amusement park and arcades were just losing money hand over fist and couldn’t survive in the times, not that someone with a bit more money decided that the world would be better served by yet another big ugly condo complex. Perhaps the residents of Hull like it better this way. Their town is quieter now and it can be a little sleepy seaside town with a few shops, some ice cream and hot dogs and a carousel. That bit of nostalgia in me hates them for it either way.

I have had a bit of a bug lately to get something pen or pencillish, so yesterday I decide to act on it and popped into Bob Slate while I was in the area. I was feeling more pencillish I guess, so I bought a pencil, pad of paper and the above sharpener. Thrilling eh?

There were plenty of sharpeners to choose from, but I was attracted by the simplicity of this one. It is cute and small, but has a warm practical feel to it. It seems right to sharpen a wooden pencil with a little wooden block. It is certainly $1.49 worth of happiness.

Anyways, I had to pop in to Bob Slate Stationer today. On my own. I probably shouldn’t do this too often. I think at least 50% of the time I end up in a shop with pens, unsupervised, I come home with something. This time I escaped relatively cheaply with a new pen, a Pelikan “Pelikano Junior”. Here are some pics:

The pen was $10.35 and came in a variety of colors, at least green, orange a blue ones were available (I picked up a blue as well, but sent it straight off as a gift to someone). The pen is all plastic (except for the nib of course) and translucent in color, but seems quite sturdy. The yellow grip is somewhat rubbery. The nib has an “A” on it, the meaning of which I do not understand (I should have checked if the blue one was similar), and I would say it is roughly a medium size. Slightly larger than the medium on my LAMYs.

I like the pen. It is a sturdy little guy that I think I will be able to just throw in my bad without too many concerns. Fun and chunky with a simple design.

So I have decided to go over to WordPress from Movable Type. It is GPL and all other sorts of good stuff, plus a friend of mine who uses his own blog far more frequently described it as moving from “Outhouse to Flush Toilet”. That seems like qualifications enough to me.