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No time for great prose, witty observations of everyday life or lofty ponderings.

But stuff has happened and I need to make the updates.

We’re having our house painted. We’re pretty sure it’s been the same color for the last fifteen years, but we can only confirm seven of them, the ones we’ve actually spent living in it.

It’s pretty bad off; the south side of the house has been shedding paint flakes for quite a while. It hardly took the contractors any time at all to scrape it off: the peeling paint was surely happy to be put out of its misery. They’re priming it right now and will start taping off and spraying tomorrow. It’s going from a drab, confused blue-grey to a much richer, solid deep blue. One that commands attention and respect. Given the non-committal olive-golden-grey-green sorts of house colors in the neighborhood, ours will most definitely stand out.

Michael’s pretty excited about the whole process. I’ve only had to rescue the contractors from his shrill interrogations twenty or thirty times. They’re good natured about it, though, answering his questions as best they can. And considering the standard obliqueness of his sentence structure, they did really well. I informed him, though, that they need to concentrate on their work and that he needed to stay inside.

I tried to work from home yesterday, hoping somehow he had advanced enough in maturity to keep himself occupied for long stretches of time while I pounded on my laptop keyboard in the other room.

Not so much. I don’t think I’d heard the phrase “Mommy… I mean, Daddy…” so many times in my entire career as a parent as I did yesterday.

Partly I stayed home in order to provide a proper send-off for my mom, who packed up and drove back down the road to Sacramento. And I didn’t want to put poor Mikey in the day care that he doesn’t like (“The School With The Little Door”).

While I did get some critical and important items completed, I could have been a whole lot more productive if I wasn’t fetching fish sticks, orange juice, letter fries and ketchup, and if I wasn’t getting up every twenty minutes to help free him from some virtual internet tidepool he’d become trapped in while playing his computer games. I tried to explain that if he’d make an effort to LEARN TO READ, he probably could avoid a lot of headaches.

The real clincher came just before I called it a day. At loose ends, for the seven hundredth time that day, he decided to surprise his daddy with a “gift”. He placed a soda can, from which he’d taken maybe three sips, into a medium-sized cardboard box and closed the flaps. “Daddy! I have a surprise for you!” he called as he picked up the box and began jogging toward me. He checked his motion in mid-stride and looked down. From his sudden change in stride I could tell something wasn’t right. “Oh, great…” he says, as brown liquid seeped from the corners of the box.

It was here that I finally noticed what he was doing, and the reality of the bits of imagery that had snuck into my vision’s periphery finally connected with my parental sensibilities.

Needless to say, when I saw just how much of a mess 12 ounces of caramel-colored carbonated soda can make when they’re distributed from within the confines of a cardboard box, I was not pleased.

I informed him that he was done, and needed to consider his behavior from the sanctum of his own bedroom. In not so many words.

Swimming lessons were not much better. He did well in his practice, showing great progress in his ability to do various strokes and to push off from the wall. But despite my admonishments he repeatedly splashed his classmates when the teacher wasn’t looking.

Bedtime came early yesterday.

School will be starting soon. He can’t wait, and I can’t say I’m not just a little bit excited for it myself.

Here we are back in Hawaii again for another dish that was borrowed from another Pacific Rim culture. Poke (pronounced “poh-KAY”) is raw fish that has been marinated in an acid, such as lime juice and/or vinegar.

The acid basically “cooks” the fish. Both heat and acid denature proteins, so in a sense, this is a cooking method. Since it doesn’t kill bacteria, though, it’s important to start with clean fish. And you’d never do this with chicken. No way!

Oh – and there’s a mainland version of this dish. I tweeted that I was going to be serving raw fish cooked in lime juice for dinner, and a blog friend reminded me that around here it’s called “Ceviche”. So if you’ve had that and liked it, you’ll like this too.

Technically poke is an appetizer or a side, not a main course. Thus I had a few other goodies to serve along with it: coconut shrimp, fried plantains and ginger chicken.

It was a pretty ambitious menu.

The chicken was my back-up protein to appeal to the kids in case they turned their noses up at the shrimp or tuna. This was pretty simple: marinate 2” cubes of chicken breast meat in seasoned rice wine vinegar and salt for one hour, sear, reduce heat to low and stir in some green onions and grated ginger to finish. This I served with a pineapple rum sauce I’d made a few days earlier, one that was actually intended to complement the shrimp.

To make the tuna, I started off with a 1 lb tuna steak. I couldn’t find Ahi at the store I chose, so I went with whatever tuna they had. It looked good: vibrant pink in color, reasonably firm and not a lot of sinew. I washed it thoroughly and cut it up into ½ inch cubes, then put it in a bowl along with the juice of three limes, two green onions and two tablespoons of grated ginger.

The coconut shrimp was prepared by following a recipe by Alton Brown. I’d made it before and it turned out really good, though this time I skipped the peanut sauce that goes with it since peanuts aren’t a Polynesian thing.

The fried plantains I have done before, just a few weeks back.

All in all, a decent meal, though it would have been nice to have some vegetables in there aside from the starchy plantains.

The Poke turned out to be great, aside from all of the poking in the side I received by Michael’s mommy during its preparation. While the flavor of lime all but drowned out the taste of the tuna entirely, the fish was edible and quite good: not tough and not mushy either. The flavor of the ginger and the onion came through just slightly. Checking a few other recipes online, I discovered one that I believe I’ll stick with from now on: instead of using four ounces of lime juice, just use two tablespoons, along with a tablespoon of seasoned rice wine vinegar. And blend in some cubed mango to balance the tartness of the lime and vinegar. The dish should be light and flavorful without being overpowering. It goes well when served as an appetizer along with chips of some kind. I’m thinking taro chips will be good with that.

The shrimp was okay, though I’d forgotten to season them first so they came out rather bland. The pineapple rum sauce didn’t help them much.

The real surprise was the ginger chicken. My wife discovered that drizzling the chicken with the pineapple rum sauce made the flavor of the ginger pop out (I hate using that term, but it actually applies here) and made for a very pleasing finish. I was amazed just how well that pair teamed up, so I’ll be keeping that recipe on hand for future dinners.

The pineapple rum sauce is sort of a throw-together, so in order to relate it in an actual recipe form I’ll need to experiment with it to get it consistent.