After Robert Redford’s death last week, I re-visited my goal to see more of his films. I was able to find The Last Castle for free through my cable so watched it a few nights ago. As I was watching it, a couple of things occurred to me. First… while Robert Redford made beautiful and thought-provoking films, a lot of them are dark and depressing. Second… I really don’t care for jailhouse movies.
Yes, The Last Castle is a jailhouse movie. No serious spoiler alerts except to say that it is dark and depressing. And you know it almost immediately when an inmate, who clearly hasn’t done anything and is panicking in the jail yard, is killed by the prison guards. I did battle it out until the end, but it wasn’t a feel good scenario.
The realization that I avoid jailhouse movies occurred to me fairly early into the movie. I’ve never watched The Shawshank Redemption, despite MANY people telling me it’s the best. No Green Mile, no O Brother Where Art Thou, no Papillon (although I did read the book). I haven’t even seen Jailhouse Rock; my aversion to jail movies apparently goes back aways.
That isn’t to say that I’ve taken a pass on all of them. I have seen Cool Hand Luke, The Great Escape, Escape from New York as well as two other jail movies with Robert Redford – Brubaker and The Chase. Technically The Chase isn’t in jail but it’s the chase after a jailbreak, so I’m including it.
Not too sure why I don’t like jail movies although it might be tied to the fact that I don’t like a lot of movies in which the chips are obviously stacked against the protagonist. I’ve shied away from The Hunger Games and the Maze Runner – those kinds of things – for that reason. And no movies about gladiators at all.
Any jailhouse movies that you’ve liked? Any types of movies you shy away from?
My tomato and pepper plants are still putting out fruit, so I am out at the bales every day harvesting. If you’ve ever grown tomatoes, you know that you can’t pick them without getting a very pungent smell all over your arms and hands.
I’m also working with melting beeswax (Ukrainian eggs). It gets on my fingers and under my fingernails.
The tomato plant smell is easily washed off (if I remember when I come in) but the beeswax smell lingers not just on my hands but on my clothing, in my hair, probably in the air. Even after a shower, I can still occasionally recognize a whiff of it. A couple of times the last few days I’ve noticed that the tomato smell and the beeswax smell are duking it out to be the top dog. The beeswax always seems to win.
I don’t mind either of these aromas. Not like patchouli. This is an odor that I just can’t abide; in close quarters it actually makes me a little nauseous. Since there are people who seem to like it, I’ve always assumed that it was some sort of biologic response, kind of like how Jacque can’t stand the taste of cilantro. I haven’t found any science to back up my theory but I’m going to stick with it for now!
I’ll be done with the eggs in a couple of days and the tomatoes are slowing down, so assuming that the war of the smells will be over soon but it’s interesting while it’s going on!
Not much happening at the farm this week. I got a case of vertigo about Thursday, and I worked half day, and felt like crap the rest of the day. The weekend was pretty much spent in bed. Several years ago Kelly had vertigo for a few weeks, the plain old BPPV, positional vertigo. We tried the head exercises to reset those crystals in my ears, and last Friday they seemed to work. Saturday, oh boy, that just made me feel absolutely terrible. I remember being at the clinic with my Dad when he was maybe 70+. He must have been having dizzy spells because the doc laid him down on the bench and had him turn his head and I can still picture and hear him groaning. Dad, not the doc. And it wasn’t a good Sound. And Dad didn’t want to do that again.
Monday I picked up some motion sickness pills and they’ve helped a lot. Wednesday I was at about 80%, now I think I’m back. I’ve got too much stuff going on to lay around. To quote my favorite movie, ‘All That Jazz’ and the doctor telling Joe Gideon he needs to rest, Joe responds “I GOT A SHOW TO PUT ON! WILL YOU TALK TO THESE PEOPLE?? THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!”
Anyway, not much happening out in our countryside.
Most corn chopping has finished, and guys doing high moisture corn are working on that. Soybeans will be coming along soon. And from there it’s right into the fall rush.
Tuesday afternoon I did manage to hook the tractor onto the haybine and pull it out of the shed. I need to get the oat fields mowed off before the weeds take over. The last few years, I’d been digging them up after oats, to stop the weeds from sprouting. Then I would plant cereal rye as a cover crop. This year, crop prices and finances being what they are, I decided not to spend the money on rye seed. The cover crop wasn’t a direct cash benefit; it was one of those bigger picture concepts where a person has to realize they’re doing this for the greater good. And I know that, but still… it was another $600 in seed and my time, and fuel, and I just decided to skip it this year. And now I have to mow off the weeds. They’re too big to dig up at this point, and I want to keep the oats growing until winter. The other thing about rye, it had to be sprayed to kill it in the spring. So, there was another expense I decided to avoid.
We got 2” of rain. Rain is always welcome, almost always, but it’s getting late enough in the year, and with harvest approaching, most farmers would rather skip the mud. It’s a tough alternative, rain or no rain. Good thing the weather isn’t left up to farmers.
I hauled in all the old tires I cut off the machinery. Plus a few others I threw on from the shed. There was a corner of the old shed full of old tires. One never knew which tire might be the one we needed to fit whatever it was that went flat. Including a couple tires with such an odd rim, there wasn’t a chance it was gonna fit anything except the 1949 International Harvester baler it came from. The one dad sold in 1968. But we still had a tire for it because you never know. And there’s an old pick-up tire that fell out from under the truck as I was leaving one day, that’s still leaning against the wall in the shed. Why? Just because. I still keep spare tires in that corner, but it’s not such a huge pile anymore. I have 3 or 4 plain old wagon tires, size 9L15’s that fit every wagon and just about every implement on the farm. I should have run the old tires to my favorite tire place in Millville, but that is half hour away and I didn’t have half an hour, so I took them into Rochester and they charged me $6.35 each. Dang. I was sure they had said it was like $6 for a set when I called. At least they’re gone.
The guineas. Remember when they hatched, there was 3 parents taking care of the 13 chicks. And then it was 12 chicks for a while, then 10, 9 for a week, 8 for a week, and now 7. And the other two adults have disappeared. Not sure what’s become of them, or why or how they managed to hang around long enough to get the kids mostly grown up, but they haven’t been spotted in a few weeks now. We were hoping maybe one was sitting on a nest somewhere, but usually we’d have seen them by now. Out behind the barn, near the pole barn, I did find a teenage chick missing a head. Which means raccoons. Did some of them move to the pole barn and raccoons got them out there? I don’t know; haven’t found other carcasses yet. But dang.
The guinea mom, she is a real bully. She chases the chickens away from her kids. Even the roosters.
Working on a show, the Dolly Parton musical “9 to 5”, opens at the Rep theater next weekend. The vertigo kinda messed up my schedule finishing theater projects and working on that show. It will be fine. Que sera sera.
REMEMBER ROLLING DOWN HILLS AS A KID? EVER ROLL IN A TIRE?
The other day our terrier came into the house with a large, green caterpillar in his mouth. We got it away from him before he could eat it but it was clearly dead.
Our deck off the back of the house has a pergola that is covered by layers of grape vines. It provides nice shade and also harbors birds who like to eat the grapes. A night or two ago I was sitting on the deck when the green wiggler in the header photo dropped to the floor right in front of me. I guess the vines also provide a nice environment for caterpillar development. The caterpillar was still alive, so I moved it into some bushes so the birds and dog would have difficulty finding it. I hope it gets a chance to form a cocoon.
One of my favorite memories from Grade 3 is finding a really big cocoon and bringing it to class. My teacher let me keep it in the classroom, and a couple of days later we came to school to find an enormous Cercropia moth flying around the room. I don’t know what kind of caterpillar our green one is, but I hope it doesn’t turn into a destructive moth.
Any idea what kind of caterpillar this is? Ever have an insect collection?
A couple of comments yesterday made me think that I have probably never explained the process of making a Ukrainian egg or “pysanky”. I’ll try to keep it simple!
Larger eggs are easier, although I did a fun series of three teeny eggs a few years ago. A rinse in white vinegar gets any residual grease off the egg. You work with a whole egg, uncooked and not emptied.
Ukrainian egg dying is a little similar to batik. You apply melted wax to the egg and then dip it in dye. You repeat this, from your lightest color to you darkest until you’re done and then melt all the wax off. A very traditional pysanky will be white, yellow, orange, green, red and black but there are plenty of other designs using other shades (blue, purple, pumpkin, brown, etc.) After you are all done with waxing and dyeing, you melt all the wax off the egg (carefully) to reveal your design in all its glory.
There are a few tools for making pysanky. The most critical is called a kistka and it is the tool that you use to melt the beeswax and to apply the wax to the egg. I have two kinds of kistkas. The traditional kistka which is held over a candle to melt the wax and an electric kistka, which keeps the wax cone hot without having to use a candle. Both traditional and electric have a variety of widths, depending on how thick or fine you want your wax lines. I tend to use both during a project. The beeswax has a black additive these days; without it, the wax is hard to see on the egg if you’re using electric – no carbon from a candle flame!
After you’ve melted off the wax, that’s when you add the varnish. This is an important step because it not only makes the egg shiny and pretty but it adds a bit of strength to the shell. If you are making pysanky that are being displayed but are not ornaments, then you are done. Eventually the insides of a Ukrainian egg will dry up and you can hear the dried yolk rattle if you shake them. (If you break one before it’s all dried up – get a clothespin for you nose!) If you are making ornaments, you’ll need to blow them out and add a finding to the top so you can thread it with twine, floss or some sort of string.
The most frequent question I get is how long an egg takes and it depends entirely on the complexity of your design. This year’s egg, if I did one at a time, from beginning to end would take about 75 minutes, but since I’m doing several at one time, that cuts down the time to about 55 minutes each.
Of course, there is plenty more I could say, but I’ll save that for when you ask me!
The egg table is up. And it only took two hours to completely torpedo this year’s design.
Many years ago I started coordinating my holiday crafts to a central theme. In addition to the Ukrainian egg ornaments, I also make the cards as well as kid ornaments and 6×6 decorated calendars. I try to tie all these items together every year. One year I did a snowglobe theme, one year the theme was “branches”. Peppermint, polar bear, gingerbread men, birds have all been done. There are a few themes that get repeated – holiday trees is one of those and also poinsettias.
This year’s theme is Santa. The card, the kid ornament and the calendar were seriously easy but the egg has been difficult. First off, there just weren’t many idea out there to start with and most that I found were painting on eggs, not traditional wax/resist. I had one idea and then when I sketched it out the first time, I realized it would be too hard to get all Santa’s proportions correct on an egg. Then I turned to clipart – a surprisingly good way to generate ideas for Ukrainian egg design. I messed with the idea for a couple of weeks and thought I had a good design.
Suffice it to say that drawing curvy lines in hot wax on an egg isn’t an easy thing to do. Then add fiddling around with mixing different dyes to get Santa’s skin right. Leaving space for his eyes was a pain. But the biggest issue was just too much white and a bit of red then a black background; it was just — blah. And I didn’t like the side border either, although that could have been remedied. I completed two of the design and then abandoned it.
I spent about an hour going through my egg design books and a couple of online places and finally found something that I could alter. There is no actual Santa on the egg, but it has a lot of red and white, with a black background and I was able to add “ho, ho, ho”; that’s as close as we’re going to get. This design is more complicated than the failed Santa image, but much more satisfying. I managed to get three done before I just couldn’t sit on my hard chair any longer – the design is solidified so now I’ll be on a roll starting this morning – after I feed the bad Santas into the garbage disposal!
Have you ever had to abandon what you had initially thought was a good idea?
It’s the time of year that I start to think about hand pies. When I was a kid, Nonny would occasionally make an apple pie (no other kind that I can remember, just apple). Depending on how many scraps she had left over, she would make either cinnamon pinwheels or every now and then “mini pies” (what we called them). I didn’t realize until I was well into my adulthood that the rest of the world calls these hand pies. And they are my favorites!
In my early years of hand pies, I just cut out the hand pies using a knife – triangles, rectangles and even circles. Then several years ago I purchased a set of molds that make a rectangle shape, a “pie” shape and an apple shape. These aren’t actually any easier than just cutting the dough by hand, but they are a lot more fun.
In August I saw an ad online for a cat shape/dog shape set of molds from Sur La Table. They are incredibly cute but way too expensive for an addition to my kitchen equipment that can only be called whimsical. Now that we’re getting close to apple picking (or apple picking up, depending on my knees), I’m thinking about hand pies. So yesterday morning I looked up the cat/dog molds online to see if anyone sold them less expensively than Sur La Table. Nope.. didn’t find them. HOWEVER, thanks to my search, my online world has suddenly been flooded with ads for hand pie molds. There are a lot of different companies out there selling lots of designs.
I’m currently seriously eyeing a holiday set and have looked up some more filling recipes. The three top new contenders are Lemon Cream Cheese & Raspberry Jam, Walnut Cinnamon Sugar and Nutella Hazelnut. In an age of trying to rid myself of stuff, I’m thinking I need my head examined thinking I need more hand pie molds. We’ll see how long I last….
It was on this day in 1869 that the opera “Das Rheingold” by Richard Wagner premiered on the stage at the National Theatre Munich, Germany. It is 150 minutes long and is the first of an epic four-part drama known as Der Ring des Nibelungen. Rheingold, although it is the beginning of Wagner’s famous cycle, Rheingold was the last of the texts to be written. Wagner didn’t want any of the Ring to be performed until all the parts were complete. King Ludwig II of Bavaria thought otherwise and ordered the staging of Rheingold in 1869. It wasn’t until 1876 that the entirety of Ring was performed at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria. These days, Bayreuth still stages the entire Ring epic each year, a total of four operas that add up to about 18 hours of stage time. Other opera houses tend to stage the Ring over the course of a few years.
Although I recognize some of the music instantly,
I didn’t have a clue what The Ring is all about. The plot is EXTREMELY complex and begins with the theft of gold that is then made into a magic ring Lots and lots of Norse gods and goddesses; truly I didn’t even know there were that many. In the end, Brunhilde (who had been a goddess but was stripped of her immortality) returns the ring but not before Valhalla and the gods are destroyed.
Now that I know more about The Rheingold and The Ring, it doesn’t increase my desire to ever see it. Certainly not 18 hours of it. I’m not a particularly big fan of opera to start with but that much plot to keep track of might make my head explode?
Kelly commented one day she didn’t know why the handle on the drawer holding the kitchen garbage can always had streaks of something on it. I knew immediately it was probably from the egg I crack every morning, but I didn’t offer that up at the time. She might read it here…
I was making daughters egg cup the other morning. The first egg cracked perfectly, opened perfectly, and I plopped the yoke right into the cup. Went to crack the second egg and the shell pretty much disintegrated, the contents splashed onto the counter and slid right off into the garbage. (Over that handle of course). At which point, as I flailed, I knocked the egg cup with the first egg onto the floor. The dogs were right there for clean up. With luck, Kelly won’t know about that either. Course it was kinda funny so I’ll probably tell her. … at some point…
A few weeks ago, I saw a postal truck dead on the side of the road. The next day I saw it being towed. A few days after that I saw another one being towed. Jeepers. Then there was the semi carrying mail that caught fire on Hwy 52 outside Rochester. I do have to say, mail service to our house seems to be getting better. We’re getting mail before noon, whereas it had been 7PM for a few years. And often now, they’ll bring the mail and a package right to the house. Those of you who’ve been to the farm know that’s not a light task; it’s a long drive out of the way to bring a parcel down to us.
And then just the other day I saw one of the new postal vehicles.
Uh… it’s…. something!
It’s called the ‘Next Generation Delivery Vehicle’. NGDV.
I did some internet searching on them. Here are various headlines and descriptions:
-U.S. POSTAL SERVICE’S UGLY DUCK MAIL TRUCK
-U.S. POSTAL SERVICE’S EV TRUCKS ARE STILL FUNNY-LOOKING, NOW HARDER TO KILL OFF
-The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.
–The Oshkosh Next Generation Delivery Vehicles might look like background traffic in a Pixar film
-You can tell that [the designers] didn’t have appearance in mind
-SO MUCH FOR LOOKING COOL WHILE YOU DELIVER THE MAIL*
-It looks like a robot Beluga whale—built by the East German government.*
-Our Grumman mail trucks [The old trucks] look like they were supplied by the government of East Germany and they sound like the tortured exhalations of a hungover water buffalo—hhhhggggggggmmmmmggghhhh. Honey, the mail’s here.*
-Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles … are getting rave reviews from letter carriers
–The side cargo door allows for direct delivery onto the curb
The drivers really like them. They have AC (Can you believe the old ones didn’t?), airbags, back up camera’s, a 360° camera, collision warning, and most importantly, the tall box allows drivers to walk through without ducking. The current vehicles, made by Grumman, came into service in 1987 and was scheduled for 25 years. They outlived that predicted life. But they are failing. And they seem to catch fire fairly often. Prior to that vehicle was the Jeep DJ-5. The USPS used them during the 1970’s and ‘80’s. I bought a used one from my friend Thom, and he had bought it used from someone else. It was dark green. I drove it for a few years in the mid 1980’s. It was standard left side drive, and I used it when I was a field reporter for the Department of Agriculture. With the sliding door, it was great for holding a measuring wheel out the door and driving around a field. It was just 2-wheel drive, so that wasn’t an option for every field, but it was still kinda cool looking (well, ‘Different’ anyway). Even with the bungee strap holding the back door shut (because if you went over a bump, the back door would pop open) and the steering was so loose you didn’t dare drive over about 55 MPH, but it was fun to drive. Thom had mounted a stereo between the seats, and bolted speakers to the back wall. The metal dash was pretty rudimentary.
Not my jeep, just a representative photo. I wonder why I never took a picture of mine?
Not too much happening around the farm. I did get the 630 carburetor back on and had it running! It’s quiet enough I could actually hear myself think! It’s not done, I have a few more things to replace. Saving up for the next ‘Old Tractor Part’s Order’.
I got a township call from a sheriff deputy about some junk that had been dumped. Turned out to be two large commercial pizza ovens. Those things are heavy! I called a couple neighbors to help load them. It was all we could do to just tip it up and tip it onto the trailer.
Pizza ovens on the trailer
The next day was a sectional couch and mattress to pick up. Just more ditch clean up. Part of the job for a township supervisor. The couch and mattress I haul to county recycling. We know them on a first name basis there. We’re regulars. The pizza ovens I added to my scrap metal trailer.
I finally hauled in the old tires I had cut off those wagons. Took them to a local auto shop and paid ___ for disposal.
Got half an inch of rain Thursday night. More predicted.
Here’s a picture of a chicken because the green shades look so pretty.
From a distance, they look black. But they have more colors than you’d think, and they are really pretty.
My summer Padawan has been out working on his car a few times. I helped him for an hour one night and rolling around underneath looking up, down, left, and right acerbated some vertigo I was beginning to get. The next day I sat very still. He’s learning a lot—I hope. He’s certainly at a disadvantage because he’s being self-taught, which is good, but it can be frustrating and it all takes longer. And he’s not quite in the right mindset for that. He’s eighteen so he knows everything already. And he gets frustrated easily with the car. I tried to tell him it’s all part of the job and if he’s gonna get frustrated, he’s in the wrong job. Monday he starts as an employee at a REAL job. A 7AM to 3PM job. We’ll see how that goes. Cross your fingers for him. I give him about a 35% chance of sticking with it. He just has no idea. And it’s going to take a few tries, and I suspect he’s gonna be one of those kids who must hit bottom to figure it out.
On Monday I let my administrators know that October 3rd will be my last day of work. I have been gradually reducing my work load. I conducted my last two psychological evaluations last week, and now my main tasks are to write up the reports for those and three other evaluations I conducted in August. I stopped seeing clients in March.
I wanted to be a psychologist and play therapist since I was 12 years old. I was able to do a huge amount of testing for all sorts of issues for clients through the lifespan, and learned how to use a plethora of different tests. I had a wonderful play therapy room and also did family therapy and individual therapy with children, teens, and adults.
I was quite calm and happy as I finished my last testing session last week. I love to do evaluations, but I am ready to not do them anymore. I will miss doing play therapy with preschoolers, but I won’t miss picking up the toys. (It is a cardinal rule that the therapist, not the child, picks up the toys after each session.)
It has been a good run. I am very proud and satisfied with my professional life, but ready to move on.
If you are retired, what do you miss the most from your old jobs? What do you miss the least? What age children are the most fun for you to be around?
Trail Baboon 