We are traveling by van for the next 10 days. We are going to a play therapy conference in Minneapolis. As we can’t bear to let produce spoil, we are taking along our canning equipment, jars, rings, lids, and boxes of ripening tomatoes. We must be out of our minds.
How do you pack for a trip?
I was happy to wake up on September 24 and find that the world hadn’t ended as David Meade, biblical numerologist, had predicted. I believe he recalculated after he found things were still the same on the 24th as they were on the 23rd, and predicted another date for our demise on October 15th. The rogue planet Nibiru, violating all physics principles, is predicted to collide with earth and set in motion all sorts of rannygazoo. We shall have to see what happens. I believe that is the date of Blevin’s book club. At least you will all be together.
It isn’t easy to make accurate predictions. Our world is so random that people search for certainty and cling to the idea that we can make sense of the universe. Consider poor Harold Camping, the evangelist and radio host who made multiple predictions of the Earth’s end in 2011, and who finally admitted in 2012 that he was sinful for even trying to make such predictions, falling back on Matthew 24:36 “of that day and hour knoweth no man”.
I am often asked as part of my work to make predictions regarding human behavior. Psychologists have a myriad of tests and ways of making such predictions, but it is never completely 100% accurate. I know that people who score certain ways on tests of cognition and memory probably have dementia. I know that people who score in certain ways on tests of emotions and personality probably have certain mental health diagnoses. I feel pretty certain predicting that parents with drug and alcohol use disorders who previously neglected and abused their children will probably do the same thing if they continue to abuse substances. I can predict, however, with almost 100% certainty, that if people are allowed to purchase machine guns, those guns will fired off. That is probably the easiest thing to predict, and you don’t need an advanced graduate degree to do so.
When have you been able to say “I told you so”?
Our town boasts two large grocery stores in addition to Walmart. All three places have terrible produce, especially when it comes to summer fruit. We waited all summer for Idaho, Colorado, and Washington peaches, but they never arrived, leaving us with the second rate California peaches which always seem to disappoint.
Husband’s paternal grandfather was a door to door vegetable salesman in eastern Ohio from 1925 until 1968. He drove his truck up and down the roads and highways around Bridgeport, Ohio, shouting “Vegetables!” and selling produce he grew himself or bought wholesale in Wheeling. Husband grew up with great expectations for really nice produce, which is probably one reason we garden so much.
All summer we keep a look out for the fruit trucks that come through town, usually on the weekends. The Peach Man (who also sells Flathead Cherries) always parks in the small parking lot by the State Farm Insurance office and the Music Store. He is a local guy who drives out to Montana and Washington, fills up his truck with peaches and cherries, and sells them here and in the little towns around us. His produce is terrific.
We only got to the Peach Man twice this summer, and were feeling deprived when I noticed that one of his competitors, The Fruit Club truck, was in town one last time last Saturday. Off we went, and we came back with 10 pounds each of plums, peaches, and pears. They all ripened Monday, so we are making jam and freezing pie fillings. Sometimes you just have to go overboard.
What do you find hard to resist?
Today’s post comes from Crystalbay.
A day ago, a couple of letters on my keyboard wouldn’t work, so I took it to the Apple Store, a twenty-minute drive. The tech said I’d need a new keyboard and their repairs are backed up, so it could be a week. A week without my laptop would threaten my mental stability, so he offered to call me when the repair backup was down to a day or two. I’d used the little keyboard drop down before, and since only my “o” and “l” weren’t working, I took it home and thought I could just muddle by clicking the missing letter on the drop down until the repair schedule opened up.
I brought it home and suddenly a half dozen letters wouldn’t work, as well as my “.” I rushed back to the Apple Store and they said that I could buy a new laptop, then return it after my keyboard was replaced BUT they’d have to transfer all my data to the “loaner” for it to be useable for me. I thought, “Wow! I’ll still have a computer while my old one’s being fixed!
I left the old laptop there all night, then went to pick up the new laptop with my data transferred into it. When I got it home, I had the very same problem as I had on my old one. The very same letters wouldn’t work. I again rushed back to the Apple Store to raise hell. On the way, I got a call from them saying, “Your computer’s fixed”. Huh? Did they get a new keyboard installed already???
When I got there (my 4th round trip), they told me that it was just a minor software issue and not a keyboard problem. I inquired about how this problem arose in the first place. They said that I must have held down the option key too long.
Then, I remembered leaving the kitten’s room, which used to be my bedroom, and coming back to find one of them happily sitting on my keyboard, enjoying the sounds it was making.
The next time my keyboard isn’t working, I’ll just take it in for a brief Genius Bar correction, but my first words will be; “Whatever’s wrong, consider that a cat sat on the keyboard, and take it from there!”
What have you had to tolerate from your animals?
As I look out of our front window, I see what remains of our late autumn garden. The quivering, pendulous poblano peppers hang from their branches like dark bats dangling from the ceiling of a cave.
Okay, Baboons, come up with some similes and other metaphors.
VS’s story about making pesto reminded me of the pesto fests that Husband and I had this month as we harvested the too large basil crop in the garden. Husband took the leaves off the stems, which I find to be the most tedious of chores, and I whirred up the ingredients in the food processor. We ended up with 54 jars.
Husband has gout in one of his feet, and he needs to shift his weight from one foot to the next pretty regularly if he has to stand for any length of time. I figure that he stripped about 110 cups of basil leaves off the stems this year over three pesto making extravaganzas. That meant a lot of standing at the sink. He said it would be easier for him if he had some music to listen to and shift his weight to as he took care of the basil. He thought that Celtic music would be good for the purpose. One evening we tried something by Clannad, but that was too dreamy and new age. We finally settled on a disc by Danu, a group we heard once at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. He shifted and danced his way through the basil stems, and it wasn’t too tedious for him at all.
I listen to music as I do paper work for my job. I typically choose classical music for work. We have music on most of the time at our house, and choose music accordingly for what we need to get done.
What music helps you work?
The header photo was taken September 12, mid afternoon, in New Town, ND. The site is the Four Bears bridge over the Missouri River, and the haze is smoke from Montana and Canadian forest fires. It has been a long, smokey summer. I believe that the smoke made it all the way to the Twin Cities, too. Tonight the visibility here is predicted to be about 2 miles, which is quite reduced from normal. I can’t imagine how awful it must be for people living in western Montana. All we can do is wait, and hope for precipitation.
A friend of mine from the Flathead Reservation in Montana says that the only thing that will put out the fires is snow. I am happy to report that snow is predicted in the higher elevations out there tonight. It rained here today and it didn’t dissipate the smoke at all. All we can do is wait it out.
This has been a summer of waiting on the weather-waiting for rain that never came, waiting for it to cool down (it was 98° here yesterday) and now waiting for the smoke to go away. It is a lesson in human insignificance and the power of nature.
What are you waiting for?
I have been greatly interested recently by pronouncements by certain individuals in the press attributing our recent weather disasters to homosexuality, gay marriage, Mitt Romney, Obama, and/or loose morals in New Orleans. The capacity of the human mind to find causal relationships between totally unrelated things or concepts is fascinating.
According to Wikipedia “In statistics, a spurious correlation[1][2] is a mathematical relationship in which two or more events or variables are not causally related to each other, yet it may be wrongly inferred that they are, due to either coincidence or the presence of a certain third, unseen factor (referred to as a “common response variable”, “confounding factor”, or “lurking variable“).”
There is a web site devoted to such correlations (www.tylervigen.com) where you can choose the variables to see how they may be statistically related. I always knew that there was a strong, positive correlation between the price of Jamaican rum and the average salary of Methodist ministers. Did you know, however, that there is a strong positive correlation between:
The divorce rate in Maine and per capita consumption of margarine
The age of Miss America and number of murders by steam, hot vapours, and hot objects.
Per capita cheese consumption and the number of people who died by being tangled in their bed sheets.
Total revenue generated by arcades and the number of computer science doctorates awarded in the US.
What alarms me is that some people will believe anything and will try to find relationships between things that can’t possibly be related, just to support their beliefs or prejudices. I, personally, try to remain rational and sceptical. I think I will go now and eat some bread crusts. I am trying to make my hair curly.
Come up with your own spurious correlations.
We have lived in our house for 29 years. During that time we reared two children, and coped with two Welsh Terriers, one Fox Terrier, and 4 cats. It is a modest, ranch style house of about 1200 square feet with an attached garage. The basement is finished.
Over the years we have upgraded the kitchen and done some cosmetic flooring changes. We made the house and yard functional for our needs without much thought about the future. Well, the future is upon us, and I feel daunted by the things we need to undo and change in order to sell the house when I retire in 4 years. My main thought as I survey the house and property is “What were we thinking?”
The terriers dig up and consume the asparagus? Put a fence with steel posts and hog panels around the asparagus bed. Who cares if it disturbs the flow of the yard space and makes the back yard ugly. Don’t worry how you will remove the posts and haul away the hog panels when it is time to dismantle the fence.
Need more garden space? Just dig up the front yard and grow veggies there. Who cares that no one else in the region will appreciate that scheme and will want a grass covered front yard to mow.
Need book space? Just attach brackets and shelving to an entire wall in the basement family room. Then fill all the shelves with books. Don’t worry one bit about what you will do with all the books, or the damage to the walls when the brackets are taken down.
Closet doors in the entry way don’t slide well and get the way when you want to access things stored there? Don’t hire a carpenter. Just remove the doors and store them in the furnace room for 20 years. During that time, cannibalize the door slider hardware from them to repair other closet doors. Now, figure out how to put the entry way closet doors back on and find replacement parts for the missing hardware.
I figure we are looking at remodels of two bathrooms, wall repair and new carpets in the basement, lots of yard restoration, and the help of a patient carpenter who can just bite his tongue and not judge. I am glad we have several years to put things to rights.
What have you done, or what trends have you followed, that made you say “What was I thinking?”
The tomatoes are ripening. Due to the extremely hot temperatures this summer, the pole beans are only now loaded with flowers, and, if we have a late frost, we will be inundated with green beans and shell out beans. The third spinach planting is getting bigger. Husband just ordered two lambs from the butcher shop in Newell, SD. One lamb will eventually go to son and DIL, but we will need to store it until we can transport it to them. We currently have the largest basil crop in our history, and it all will go into the freezer as pesto. I estimate we will have 30 jars of pesto before we are finished. We give lots of pesto away to friends and family, but it all needs to be frozen and stored until it can be distributed.
Husband and I have three and a half freezers in the basement. We have two large uprights, one small chest freezer, and the top freezer of a refrigerator. There is really no reason for us to have so many, but that is just how it has turned out. Friends tell use that they will camp out with us in the event of a national disaster since they know we well be able to feed them for months.
Our freezers are usually full to overflowing. I can most of our tomatoes or turn them into canned salsa or sauces, but sometimes it is more convenient to stew them and freeze them. We haven’t figured out how to cook for just two, and so we have leftover soups and casseroles that have to get frozen as well. I make a wonderful, all-purpose stock from turkey wings and ox tail, and we store the stock as well as wings and tails for future batches. It is not easy to find either turkey wings or ox tails in town and when we find them we buy them. We freeze our garden veggies and seal them with a vacuum packer, and the frozen packets spill all over the shelves. We have lots of greens and beans left over from last year. Due to overcrowding and poor organization, it was hard to see exactly what we had in the freezers, so we bought twelve pounds of ground round this summer when we didn’t really need it, and we have pounds of ground veal, lamb, and pork as well. I will make lots of meat balls this Christmas.
It has been too many years since we defrosted the freezers, and the frost has been taking up too much space. As I thought about the new produce and lamb coming in to the house in the next couple of months, I knew that the freezers had to be defrosted and reorganized, and that was what we did last weekend. I purchased bins to contain the plastic veggie vacuum packages and ground meat, and tossed anything that had been there too long. Why, if We had many jars of grape jelly, did we need a large container of our home grown grape juice to make more jelly?
I really dislike defrosting freezers. It is messy and gross. It is a trick to keep what is frozen from thawing while the ice melts. It is so easy to just wedge a container in, and shut the door, and go upstairs, and try to forget about it. Imagine my surprise when, after all was done and mopped up and cleaned and organized, that we had freed up the space in one entire freezer. I told Husband that we are not moving all three and a half freezers when we leave here after retirement. We have to learn to minimize and cut back. I give us 5 years to figure it out. The freezers will need defrosting by then, so it will be a good time to downsize.
What tasks have you left undone that need your attention?
Trail Baboon 