Night and day I’ve been editing video and audio clips for the Marshall Islands Story Project. Two weeks ago the Historic Preservation Office in Majuro told me they are expecting the Project to be finished by the end of September. I thought I had until January. The Preservation Officer said, “Look at the contract.” I wanted to laugh because it’s not like anybody has been looking at the contract throughout the project (see previous blogs for details).

Be that as it may, I’m trying to finish the website by the end of month. But here’s the problem: editing. Audio editing is pretty straight forward. You load the sound onto the editing board, you move the markers to highlight where you want to cut, then you cut. I’ve never had a problem with my audio editing software.

But video editing, oh, my god. Video editing programs are buggy! I’ve tried three now. I may have to try more. They work okay for a while but then they start getting irritable, like a mentally-ill friend who’s gone off his medication and starts making irrational comments and gestures. This goes on for a while — I try to be patient, I try to work around the gaffs and interruptions. But then, suddenly, the program crashes.

I reload it. I start the editing project over — it may take me an hour just to trim the start and end of a video because the program quickly gets temperamental. And then, then, I make a final cut, and, yes, the program freezes or suddenly loads in fragments of a different clip. I burn up hours and hours like this.

Here’s the added complication. A lot of this video — done in the field — needs improved sound (mostly the wind ruins it). So I have to overdub the audio clip onto the video clip. You might think this would be easy (I did.) Video runs faster than audio. So I have to trim the audio, sometimes every two minutes, cutting where there is the speaker’s pause.. Some of these tapes are over an hour long. Oh my god.

I’ve got interviews with two kings and all kinds of other important people. It won’t do to have them mouth a sentence silently, only to hear their words follow several seconds later. Still, I can’t be too fastidious. One clip today took me four hours to complete. The sound syncs in for a minute, then cycles out for a minute, then comes close to syncing for a minute, then cycles out for a minute, then syncs in for a minute. On my god. I’ve got 31 videos to edit.

Here’s yet another problem. Even after I save the edited clips, sometimes the file gets corrupted. I don’t know how. It has something to do with file transfers from computer to computer. In making the transfer at my office computer, I now have 18 finished audio clips I can’t access because the folder is “corrupted.” I do have back-ups. Always make back-ups.

The video-editing program I’m working with now, Corel’s Video Studio, costs $100 and I’m not asking it to do much. Really, the stuff I’m doing is very simple. I’d pay more for a better program, but I have yet to read a review of a video-editing program that does not crash or act out (unless I’m willing to spend $1,000 or more). At this point, I don’t have TIME to buy another program and work through its bugs.

It’s an imperfect world, we all know. It seems video-editing programs capture that fact better than anything else they try to do. No doubt years from now our successors will look back and shake their heads in wonder at our crude technology and ask. How did they manage? . By fits and starts, I’d answer But we did, we do, prevail.

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I’ve been making pizza for dinner nearly every night this week and last. I mean making it from scratch, trying to perfect my recipe. For twenty years I’ve been searching for the best recipe for home-made pizza. I started my quest when I was living in Iowa. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t settle in the Midwest – it’s a pizza wasteland. Chicago pizza? I don’t think so.

My problem is this: I lived for a time just outside New York City – I’ve tasted America’s best pizza and I want nothing less than that greatness. It’s a Neopolitan-style pie, with a light tomato sauce (canned, crushed tomatoes is best), a sprinkling of fresh oregano, fresh mozzarella (the ultra-white wet kind you get at the deli counter, called “buffalo mozzarella,” which is really made from buffalo’s milk and is really native to Italy, where Goths brought buffalo six or seven hundred years ago), and – most important — a thin crunchy crust that’s somewhat blackened on the bottom and has big air bubbles rising through the sauce. Nothing’s better.

When I tell people I make my own pizza, they nod in admiration and admit that they’d never be so enterprising. I assure them that making your own dough is no big deal. I’ve come up with a recipe that can put a very good pizza on the table within two hours. Just fifteen minutes of that is preparing the dough. The finished product is light, airy, and crunchy. Almost like pastry. Guests give it high marks. But it’s not New York style.

I fed my brother Dave some of my pizza recently. He’s a fan. Chewing a piece, he held it up, eyed it with satisfaction, and said, “Alton Brown’s got the best recipe. You should check it out.” Alton Brown is a quirky chef on the Food Channel. Funny and smart, he explains really well why you should do things his way. But I didn’t have luck with his pizza recipe until I made a few changes.

The problem was the crust. It tasted too dry and cracker-like. Jill suggested taking the sugar out of the recipe. Don’t worry, yeast rises well without sugar. Flour itself is high in sugar (carbs). Also, I’d been using steel pans and well-seasoned cast iron pans for my pizzas. Alton Brown insists on a pizza stone. He’s right. For the New York crust, a stone is the way to go because it replicates the floor of a brick hearth. Alton brown lets his dough slow-rise in the fridge overnight. I let my new recipe slow-rise on the kitchen counter (oiled in a covered bowl and NOT in a warm place) for 6-8 hours. That means you make the dough in the morning. I like that better than making it the day before.

Jill was right about the sugar. It’s a leavener. Instead of helping the rise, it was hindering it somehow. Now, you may ask, why bother? why not go to the best local pizzeria and be done with it? I wish there were one good enough to warrant that kind of loyalty. If I lived in Brooklyn, I’m sure I’d never, or rarely, make pizza. As it is, I like having the ability to create a heart-stopping pizza whenever the urge hits. And the urge hits nearly every week.

I was five when I tasted my first pizza. My family was traveling through Norfolk, Virginia, not exactly the pizza capital of the world. I remember all of us waiting for Dad to return to the car with the pie, our dinner after a long day on the road. What is it? I kept asking. We were parked right in front of the pizzeria, a low white stucco building with a big plate glass window, through which you could see the t-shirted cooks tossing dough and shuffle-boarding pies into the oven. The glare of its lights illuminated the interior of our station wagon. When Dad opened the big white cardboard box, the smell of pepperoni filled my head. I had never smelled anything like it. A hot hammy aroma and so peppery it almost tingled in my nostrils.

Mom handed back a slice to each of us hungry boys. The first bite told me that life is full of surprises — goopy stringy cheese! salty-tart tomato sauce! wondrously sweet and spicy pepperoni! savory oniony oil! The possibilities of world opened before me and I knew that, if I managed to get my hands on this kind of food regularly, my life was going to be very good.

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Last night, Jill and I made our first apple pie of the season. I bought a big bag – thirty pounds – of mixed apples at the farmers’ market yesterday morning: jonogolds, ginger golds, granny smiths, galas, McIntosh, winesaps, and jonathans. Jill does the crust, I do the filling. She’s been making pies since she was a teenager – compelled, she says, by her mother’s terrible cooking. I’ve been making pies since college, first following my grandmother’s recipe for pan-fried apple turnovers.

When we’re feeling especially sinful, Jill and I will eat only a plate of salad for dinner, then finish with an entire apple pie. On occasion, I myself will eat an entire pie in a single sitting. Sometimes we make extra crust, sprinkling it with sugar and cinnamon before baking. This was something my grandmothers used to do. Both grandmothers were country cooks. They baked with butter and lard and never served a meal without a homemade dessert.

Apples are a near-perfect food, I’ve decided. They can quench a thirst and fill a stomach; they travel well and last long. They come in an astounding variety – 7,500 – and have been in the human diet since the time of cave-dwellers. But they are not native to the Americas (with the exception of crab apples). The Pilgrims brought the first apple seeds over. And it took a long while for the trees to flourish; in fact, it took the introduction of honey bees (the Indians called these “white men’s flies”) to make the orchards healthy.

Years ago, I was stranded at a small regional airport and found myself nearly dizzy from hunger. There happen to be one vending machine in the waiting area. Among its offerings was a large red apple. I’d never seen a vending machine that sold whole food like that. I deposited my coins, got the apple, and was amazed, nearly delirious with satisfaction, after the first, sweet, juice-spilling bite. Never had an apple tasted so good. Since that time, I’ve been fanatical about apples. I eat one or two, and sometimes three, every day. I seek out unusual varieties, like Baldwins, Priscillas, Daveys, and Bailey Sweets. Freida, our basset hound, is similarly enthusiastic about the fruit. They are her favorite food. She gets at a core a day and sometimes an entire apple. Here’s a link to a YouTube clip of Frieda eating an apple: Frieda’s apple.

As trick-or-treaters, my friends and I hated getting apples instead of candy. What spoil-sport, ninny-loving, fun-crushing, goody-two-shoes household would dispense apples when everyone else was handing out Baby Ruths and Milky Ways and Pay Days and Sugar Daddies and min-boxes of Good-n-Plenty? But, then, if somebody was handing out caramel apples or candied apples, man oh man, word would race prairie-fire fast through the neighborhood and there’d be a run on that house and then you’d hear about it all night, how that house was handing out candied or caramel apples but now they’re gone. To hell with the rumors of razor blades hidden inside, it’s not every day you’d get caramel or candied apples. Even now, if I have the chance to buy a candied apple, I do it.

Apples are so readily available, and travel so well, it seems a waste to eat those rubbery, barely digestible earlike bits of dried apple we find in the grocer’s bulk foods bins. Why bother? Actually, I confess that well after apple season – in late spring – the pickings aren’t so good on the apple shelf. Either we get apples that have been warehoused for months and taste it or we get the guilty pleasures from New Zealand and Chile. Guilty pleasure because, in buying these imports, we’re wasting too much fuel and expelling too much carbon. No apple, no matter how fresh, is worth the cost.

Sometimes I like nothing more than to stand among the piled-high apple tables at the farmers’ market and steep in the punky-sweet scent of apples. By the season’s end, I will have bought bushels and Jill and I will have baked apple betties, apple cobblers, apple sauce, apple strudels, apple dumplings, apple turnovers, apple cakes, apple muffins, and, of course, apple pies. God love an apple.

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“It is what it is,” Tim, my roofer, tells me. He and I are squatting on my garage roof, surveying its slope. I worry that, despite my recent repairs, rain water will pool in one depressed area where the roof has sunk over time.

I’ve spent a week tearing off the old roof to replace two broken joists. I hired a helper to assist me. We got the 22-foot joists onto the roof, then jacked up the other beams from inside the garage. It took longer than I thought it should – like all house repairs I do. Now it’s time to get the roof wrapped in rubber.

Tim has done all my roof work in recent years. He’s a short, bulky man whose gee-whiz demeanor, tousled hair, and close-set dark eyes make him look like a storybook character – a neighborly hedge hog. “You got at least two tons here,” he says, eyeing the pile of tarry shards and blackened gravel that my helper and I tore loose -– the many layers that roofers laid down over the last hundred years. Because of water damage, and those snapped beams, the roof sank so far the ceiling was pressing down on the tracks for the garage door. I had ignored it as long as I dared.

“A lot of weight,” Tim continues. “What’re you gonna do with all that?”

I think he’s joking. I grin. I say, “I thought you’d take it away.” It’s hot up here, a cloudless September afternoon. Working all week on the roof convinced me that roofers have it bad. After a ten-hour day I was covered with tar dust and grime. I got sunburned and battered and so bone-weary I still feel hung over.

“Might be cheaper just to get a container.”

A Dumpster, he means.

“Twenty yards?” I ask, letting him know that I know something about containers. “Thirty?”

“Fifteen will do,” he says. He pulls out his cell and calls a friend who owns a container company. He gets me a good price, then snaps his cell shut with satisfaction. Tim has always given me a good deal. But this time, I’m thinking, maybe he’ll stick it to me. Times are tough. I’m adding up the money, dollar signs buzzing past my head like bees from an overturned hive.

Tim keeps staring at the sloping, messy roof. “We’ll clean it off,” he says, “then take a look” I half shrug. He says maybe I’ll have to raise the roof and put in yet another new beam. It took me a lot to get this far but now I’m thinking I should have gone farther. “There’s a wasp nest under the flashing over here,” I remember to tell him.

“We’ll take care of that,” he assures me. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal, right? It is what it is.” In other words, I’ve got no choice. One way or the other, I’m putting the roof back. Tim says he’ll call me tomorrow with some figures. We clamber down the ladder. “We can get to it right away,” he tells me. Still he hasn’t mentioned a figure and, in my mind, it keeps rising. We shake hands. He climbs into his big pick-up, where his two workers are waiting, then speeds off, and I think it must be nice to solve people’s problems. Still, I wouldn’t be a roofer for anything in the world.

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