I like to think that I have a pretty good imagination. After all, the fantasy genre is one of my favorites – give me a good dragon story any day. So it wasn’t out of character that yesterday, when I stumbled upon a show called “Mythical Beasts”, I didn’t automatically change the channel. I won’t go into the ethics of the Science Channel in airing this stuff, but suffice it to say the way they lay out these shows isn’t using exacting science.
It didn’t take long before I was down the rabbit hole. I started looking for the iconic Loch Ness photo (which was debunked decades and decades ago). This led me to the Lagarfljot Worm, an ice serpent in Iceland. It’s supposedly been terrorizing the countryside for centuries, often cited as being responsible for harsh weather and crop failures. This led me to Nahuelito, another lake-based monster in Argentina, similar to Nessie. This led me to the Windigo, which I had heard of but didn’t know about. Apparently it can influence people into greed, murder and cannibalism. This led me to a book called “Abominable Science: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids” (yes, then I had to look up cryptids)! Of course, I have requested the book from the library. If I hadn’t decided to go downstairs for lunch, who knows how long I would have been trolling the internet for made-up beings.
If you had asked me last week if I would be looking up mythical beings this week I would have laughed out loud. You can just never tell where my bring wants to go.
You all know I adore my mom. And for the most part, we do quite well when we spend time together but the 9 days I spent in St. Louis did stretch our patience a few times. The place where we have the most friction is the television. I’m happy to leave the tv off most of the time but Nonny has habits that she doesn’t want to relinquish. This starts in the morning as she likes to watch the news. I prefer my news in short, concentrated bursts and would really just like to read my news online. Both the tragedy of the falling condo and the Bill Cosby reversal were in the news while I was there and both stories got re-hashed and re-hashed. I was working in the morning so pretty much tried to tune it out but it was difficult.
The evenings caused more tension. Nonny likes the Hallmark movies, especially the romances and the holiday films. And I’m sure I’m not giving any of you news when I say that I detest the Hallmark Christmas movies (which are playing 24/7 beginning two weeks ago and through July). This is not a secret to Nonny but despite my saying so more than once, she filed this fact away. After a couple of nights we decided to switch back and forth. First I would pick a movie, then she would pick a movie. You’d think we’d both be adult enough for this solution, wouldn’t you?
She didn’t like Ant-Man and the Wasp at all. I thought she might because the Ant-Man movies are much lighter than some of the other Marvel universe movies. I was wrong. She had trouble following the storyline and got impatient pretty quickly. Then she chose one of her Christmas movies, although I know she’d already seen it because she recounted the plot to me in the first 10 minutes. I pretty much ignored the movie, but she kept muting the tv during the commercials to “talk about it”. I was more testy than I should have been.
I chose the old Woman in White with Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker and Gig Young. How could this go wrong? Well, the thought the Sydney Greenstreet character was too creepy and complained that she just didn’t like movies where the bad guys held so much sway over the good guys. She got quite crabby. But not as crabby as I got when she chose another Christmas movie. I will admit that I pouted and decided it was a good time to do laundry; that took me out of the condo (laundry machines are across the hall) several times. Unfortunately she was convinced that I needed to hear the song at the end of the movie and called me to come back to the living room. Twice.
Luckily I found How to Marry a Millionaire with Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable – this turned out to finally be something we could agree on. It was funny (with great costumes) and since Nonny had seen it before, she already knew the plot line. It was nice to have something we both enjoyed as our last movie of my trip. I’m not sure what would have happened if I had stayed in St. Louis longer. Is there such a thing as bad-movie-induced-matricide?
What’s the worst movie or tv show you’ve been subjected to lately?
I have spoken critically in this forum about my mother’s cooking. She was a typical 1950s Midwestern housewife cook, and I fear that isn’t a flattering standard. Unlike my classmates at college, many of whom grumbled bitterly about the food service, I thought I’d never eaten so well. But my mother took desserts seriously. I can forgive her those Jello desserts she served so often, for her cakes and pies were tasty. Relative to other areas of cooking, she did desserts well.
Her social world was centered on bridge clubs. The hostess of a bridge club meeting was expected to serve a dessert so special that club members would be talking about it for days. At one bridge club meeting, Mom’s chocolate devil’s food cake was a huge hit. Someone called out, “Charmion, this cake is wonderful! You have to share your recipe!” Mom didn’t have the nerve to admit that the cake began life as a Duncan Hines box mix. Her embarrassment doomed her to spend many hours one week researching library books for made-from-scratch chocolate cake recipes. She had to find a recipe that was both tasty and credible as the source of the cake she had served.
Each member of my family had a strong dessert preference. Dad thought nothing on earth could be better than apple pie. My mother loved her Graham Cracker Pie, a simple dish made from Eagle Brand Condensed Cream mixed with eggs and lemon, served in a crust that was smooshed graham crackers. My sister came to favor French silk chocolate pie. On my birthdays I always requested a white angle food cake that was heavily frosted with chocolate-flavored whipped cream.
When I tried to teach myself to cook I thought the logical thing would be to collect recipes. When a recipe appealed to me, I’d type it out and add it to my personal recipe book, kept on my computer’s hard drive. I see now that I collected about a hundred dessert recipes, of which I only ever used two. I’m actually not much of a dessert person. The really big sections of my cookbook are salads, chicken and soup dishes. My erstwife was a fine cook, but she too cared more about main dishes than desserts, so I failed to learn how to make good desserts from her.
While I’ve mostly ignored desserts most of my adult life, now and then something catches my fancy. When my erstwife and I traveled in the UK, we discovered a tiny London cafe that served crème brûlée, and I was totally smitten. Still am. I once won a writing contest whose reward was a free trip to the Florida Keys to flyfish for tarpon. While I never caught a tarpon, I sure made a pig of myself with Key Lime Pie, something I’d never encountered before. The dessert I’d now request on my birthday would be pecan pie served with a generous scoop of cinnamon ice cream.
What’s your favorite dessert? Which desserts do you remember most fondly? Do you have a recipe to share?
Last month Bill asked “How do you judge a cookbook at first glance?” For me the first thing a cookbook has to have is a great photo on the front to initially catch my interest. Then it needs to be a niche that I’m interested in (vegetarian, ethnic, baking). That’s enough to get me to request it from the library. Once I get the book, the quality of the production is key, how easy it is to follow the directions, how many recipes appeal to me, will the ingredients be do-able? Probably 50% of the cookbooks that I peruse from the library go back and I never think about them again. Then about 49% might have a recipe or two that I’ll copy for myself (I have a big white binder for these). Then there is the rare 1% that I feel I would to have my own copy of and then I try to find it as inexpensively as possible. And then I have to get rid of an existing cookbook. Cookbook shelving unit is cram-packed!
All of this quantifying led me to another thought. How do you judge ANY book at first glance? How do you decide to read a specific book? And if you choose badly, what do you do about it?
For me, great titles are key; it needs to be interesting, maybe some word play. “Dragons” in the title is a gimme. The phrase “mercenary librarians” on the cover of a book was too tempting to pass up last month. It’s a toss-up whether author or subject matter is the next ingredient for me. I’ll pretty much read anything by my favorite authors. I even read Michael Pollan’s LSD book last year. Only a very few authors have failed to keep my interest. Poor Barbara Hambly lost me between the vampire books and the nasty ice queen series. If a book has an author with whom I am unfamiliar, then subject matter can draw me in. Of course, I’m curious about so much stuff that pretty much anything can work in this respect. I’m not a romance fan and I get irritated pretty quickly with historical fiction but even having said that, I will still occasionally read something in these genres. I prefer fantasy to science fiction. I’ve read my fill of WWII titles the last few years but if something comes well-recommended, I might put it on the list.
There is another category of “what do read” for me because I’m one of those folks who reads multiple books concurrently. At any given time I have a book on CD in the car, an audiobook on my pc and a variety of books piled up in my bedroom. When I decide I want to read, I have to decide WHICH of those books to pick up. Most of the time, it’s my mood that decides, but if a book is coming due soon and I can’t renew it, that factor often takes precedence. Now that the library has re-instituted due dates, I have to think about this more.
I am also a book-abandoner. I decided about 15 years ago, after struggling for weeks to finish Blood on the Snow by Tunstall, that life is too short. There are so many books published each year that no one could read them all so if I don’t finish a book, it won’t doom the publishing industry. I once quit reading a book on page four; I already had the feeling that I wouldn’t enjoy the characters or the plot. Authors beware – you gotta hook me fast!
So the answer to Bill’s question is complex.
How do YOU decide what to read? Can you abandon a bad choice?
Last week of June – The crops are looking better. Still need some rain, (all day rain on Saturday only gave us about 1/4 of an inch), so better than nothing, but keep it coming. I say that carefully.
Corn is finally tall enough and filling in enough I can’t see all the bald spots.
Soybeans are looking good and starting to get bushy and fill in.
Oats is all headed out – looks pretty good, looks like there will be a lot of grain out there. Knock on wood.
I changed some field boundaries this spring, so I’ve got one corn field that used to be two separate fields. This particular corn field was corn last year on half of it, and the other half was soybeans last year. (Normally crop rotation: soybeans last year means corn this year. Corn becomes oats, oats becomes soybeans. That helps with weeds, soil pests, and erosion.) But what’s really interesting is the corn on corn looks better and is taller than the corn on soybeans. And the only difference is the corn field was plowed up last fall, and the soybean field wasn’t. Is it soil compaction? Root structure? I will dig some up and investigate the roots. It’s very interesting; I need to ask more questions about why this looks so different.
I dug these up when the corn was about a month old. Notice the seed still down in the roots. And the other seed that just never sprouted. That was our spring.
Been fixing stuff. Picked up parts. A bunch for the corn planter (new fertilizer disks and bearings) and some belts for the lawn mower, a new mower bearing, and other odds and ends. The lift bracket on the corn planter, the thing that actually raises and lowers the planter, was just wore out.
Replaced the pin and bracket, added some weld to the hole in the cylinder end so it’s more ‘round’ again. Then I ran into something and broke a big chunk out of the lawn mower hood so had to buy a new hood. I told Kelly I could just take the hood off and we could go ‘red-neck’. (And I did for a day while working on other parts) A friend put it best when he said, ‘You go redneck and pretty soon you’re judging yourself’. Yep. Good point. No trip for parts is complete without a stop at DQ.
Then the electric clutch that starts the mower wore out so replaced that. I’m also trying to get an older mower running again to use for around trees and to mow in the random areas. I’m mowing more area than I used too; behind barns, up in a grove, all in an effort to keep the weeds down.
I mentioned the barn swallows that have two nests by our front door. Here’s the kids’ double nest.
The parents’ condo is on the left side of the door. The kids took flight the day after this was taken.
My chicks are out in the world now. Of the 45 chicks we received on April 14, a few died as chicks and we let 36 out into the open. So far so good out in the world.
I’ve ordered 30 ducklings of mixed breeds. Be here July 27. I really do enjoy having the ducks around, but my goodness are they messy for the first month or so. Water and muck everywhere. I have a bulk bin down by the barn where I store cracked shell corn for the chickens and ducks. I toss some on the ground and I have some in feeders. They prefer it off the ground, I think. Course that also attracts squirrels, rabbits, birds, and, in winter, the deer and turkeys.
When I was milking cows I had protein supplement stored in this bin. It feeds from an auger into a box inside the feedroom and I fill buckets from that box. It holds maybe a week’s worth of corn in the box. A few weeks ago, when it was so hot, I just got corn from the box and I didn’t run the auger at all. Never really thought about it. And then when I did turn on the auger, no corn came out. Well, sometimes that happens as the bin gets low; cracked corn doesn’t always ‘flow’ very well and sometimes I get a hollow spot. I climb up on top and I have a long stick that I use to knock the corn loose. (I do not get inside).
And what came out was this brown, liquid, sludge! Ewww! I don’t know what that was!! EEEEWWWWW!! It was really gross. There was a fair amount of it, like maybe a couple gallons. Here’s what I think happen: Sometimes when I get corn delivered, the previous load may have had liquid molasses added to the feed. I used to do that when I had calf feed made. And I’m wondering if maybe there was some of that old feed / old molasses down in the bottom, and it go so hot, the molasses all melted and sank to the bottom. Could that be a thing?? Because I’ve never seen it happen before and this stuff didn’t stink like anything rotten… Once that slug was out, it was back to corn and it hasn’t been a problem since. But I run the auger every few days too, now.
Weird.
Wild black raspberries are out; they’re early this year. But just as yummy especially early morning when they’re still cool.
A former college student has been coming out to help on the farm lately. I enjoy the company and It helps me focus and get some jobs done. He’s also applied for a new job and the hours won’t be compatible to here. Such is life.
Got some big summer plans? Making any progress on them?
I lived in St. Louis for many years, including my formative “learn-to-drive” years. In high school I drove all over the west and south county burbs. No GPS, no “directions” printed out from a computer. And no problems.
But now that I’m back in the city to assist my mother, I am completely lost. Nothing looks familiar even when I’m absolutely in a place I know I’ve been before. In the last few days I’ve mastered the way from Nonny’s condo to the grocery store and back but everything else, I’m using my phone to guide me. There just isn’t anything that pings my memory as I’ve driven around doing various errands. As I was driving yesterday to pick up a shower seat from a friend of my mom’s I realized that if my phone went out, I would have NO idea how to get home. I’d have to stop at a gas station and ask!
Is it just me or can you really not go home again?
Trail Baboon 