This has been an awful week for bad news. In times like these, I think it is helpful to focus on whatever good things are happening in our immediate settings.
Our son let me know last night that his West Highland Terrier had successfully excreted the leather shoe laces and leather slipper he had ingested last week. There was concern it could have provoked an intestinal crisis. We seem to be in the clear. I have received excretion updates all week. I am relieved the terrier is ok.
Our daughter informed us that her work evaluations are stellar, and her place of employment is investing a lot of money to train her in three very expensive therapy modalities in the next several months. She is supremely happy.
What are the positive things that have happened in your life this week? How do you cope with bad news?
I hadn’t thought about Hector P. Valenti, Star of Stage and Screen, since the last time I read one of the Lyle the Crocodile books to our children. Given that our youngest is 26, it has been a while. Husband mentioned him the other day as one of his favorite literary villians.
The House on East 88th Street by Bernard Waber was one of the first books I read all by myself as a child. I loved the water colors and the storyline, about Lyle the Crocodile, a caviar swilling reptile who is abandoned by his owner Hector, a down and out performer, and who becomes a beloved member of a human household in New York City. In all the Lyle books, Mr. Valenti tries to get Lyle back into show business with him in various nefarious ways, only to have virtue and love win out in the end. I just reread The House on East 88th Street, and it is a fresh and lovely as when I first read it in 1963. Hector is a good villain indeed.
Who are your favorite literary villains? What children’s books would you like to read again? What is your opinion of Turkish Caviar?
Husband continues to volunteer every Thursday at our local food pantry. He helps distribute meat, and then cuts up the boxes that all the food comes in preparatory to taking it to the city cardboard recycling bins.
Husband is the only male volunteer on Thursday who drives a pickup. They depend on him to help cut up the boxes and take them to the city cardboard recycling bins in his truck. They often get large boxes of Twizzlers from Walmart and the local grocery stores. He says the Twizzler boxes are really hard to cut up due to their shape, construction, and design. They are about the size of shoe boxes. The volunteers hate to deal with them. I find this fascinating.
What is your favorite candy? What have people depended on you for in your family or at work.Ever driven a truck? What do you recycle?
Sunday night and yesterday we were in a winter weather advisory and got 4 inches of snow that blew around and actually drifted. People assume that because we live in ND, we must have scads of snow all winter. In our part of the state we are semi-arid the best of times, and since we are currently in a drought, our snow fall has been negligible. Our snow is typically light and dry.
There are times when snow removal is necessary, though, and this recent snowfall was one of them. Husband went manfully out into the bitter cold yesterday afternoon and attacked the drifts in the driveway and between the garage and the front steps using three of the five snow shovels he has in our garage. They differ in the volume and weight of snow that can be thrown from the particular shovel. You can see them lined up in order from least to greatest volume in the header photo. He insists his numerous shovels and judicious selection of shovel to weight and volume of snow is ergonomically sound and the reason he has not had a serious injury or heart attack clearing the snow. He has not succumbed to the lure of the Dakota Roller, a shovel with wheels.
When I clear snow, I grab whatever shovel I can find and push the snow around to where I want it. Tossing the snow seems like too much work. I sort of share the philosophy of our municipal street department. If it isn’t too deep to drive through, why bother with it? It is going to melt by the middle of May.
How many snow shovels do you own? What is your philosophy of snow removal? Do you drive through through drifts and puddles just for the fun of it?
Well, we learned something new this weekend. Husband and I are pretty facile navigating our way around Tex-Mex and Mexican cooking, but we ran into a spice mixture we had never heard of-Sazon. It is a combination of Achiote (ground annatto), ground cumin, ground coriander, garlic powder, oregano, and salt. We made a Dominican red bean recipe in the Instapot that called for it, and, what a surprise, there it was in Cashwise grocery store! Unfortunately, the main ingredient in the Goya version was MSG, so we decided to make it at home. I wasn’t disappointed, as I don’t like the Goya company’s politics. I also don’t like MSG.
Who else but us would have a jar of sorely neglected annatto seeds in their cupboard? They ground up well, and we made our own Sazon seasoning, and the beans were delightful. Further research indicates it is a staple in Puerto Rican and Cuban cooking.
What new things have you learned lately? What Tex-Mex or Hispanic recipes are your favorites? How do politics influence your purchases?
The weather is all over the place. One day it’s 5° and windy and a little bit ugly out. One day it was 30° and almost sunny. I was seeing some 40s in the forecast but they’re gone now and it is teens and single digits, which I thought we were past. I’m ready to be done with winter.
Not much happening here on the farm, still finishing up bookwork, doing a few tweaks on Spring planting needs, and I am as boring as a one armed Lighting designer with post it notes covering my sling. Recovery still goes well, I’m off the pain meds, I’m tired of the sling already and I have over a week to go. At least it’s not five weeks to go. (The sling kinks a little at my wrist and that was bugging me. I solved that by stuffing a hotpad in there for more padding) I am moving slower than molasses in February but at least I have two legs to stand on. And I’m not wrestling ducks with one arm.
The bottom fell off one of our birdfeeders, it got to swinging in the wind and simply unscrewed. And squirrels, trying to get at the corn in the feed room, chewed through the cord of the tank heater down by the barn. The cord comes out through a crack in the feed room door, so it was in their way as they attempted to gain entrance. I took the cord back up to the shop and put a new receptacle on it; I can do that pretty much do one handed, then we fastened the cord higher up so hopefully it’s out of their way. We use this tank of warm water to thaw ice in the buckets that have froze. (The chickens like water out of a bucket better than the water in the heated water bucket.) We seem to have a lot of squirrels around this year. It’s driving the dogs nuts. Here’s a picture of Humphrey gazing out the window.
I’m having trouble washing my hands, it’s hard to wash ‘hand’. Dictation on the Mac laptop works pretty well. As does dictating to my phone. Trying to hit “Control, alt, delete” on the computer has proven difficult. Some of that is simply the keyboard being too far up on my desk.
Kelly has plowed the driveway, filled the birdfeeders, does chicken and duck chores morning and night, feeds the dogs, drives daughter around, drives me around, and tries to get some work hours in when she can. She is pretty impressive.
HOW DO YOU HANDLE HOT THINGS FROM THE OVEN?MITTS? TOWEL? SILICON CLAM THINGS?
We now have all our seeds for this summer’s garden. Husband told me last weekend he wants to grow 24 sweet peppers plants and 9 hot pepper plants. This alarmed me. I took him to the basement to show him that we currently have 30 pints of red chili pepper sauce in our freezers, made from a combo of both hot and sweet peppers. We use it in enchiladas and other Southwest dishes.
I asked him to imagine just how many peppers we could potentially harvest with 33 pepper plants. Last year we only had 15 plants. He assured me that he would use up most of the sauce in the freezer by the time the new peppers were ripe. He would bring extra fresh peppers to the Food Pantry next summer. I am doubtful. I remember churning out all that sauce last year, and I really don’t want to be making sauce all summer and fall. We renegotiated to 21 pepper plants. I still think we will have way too many peppers, but we shall see.
What do you have too much of? What is your favorite pepper dish? What are you growing in your garden this year? Any favorite sauce?
Because we are sustaining members of MPR and the pledge drive gets tedious, and because we always have some sort of music playing, I put a random CD on the other night, The Child Ballads by Anais Mitchell. I learned about it from Dale and TLGMS and Radio Heartland, and I was somewhat surprised to see Husband’s reaction to it. He was entranced by the music and stories. He charged downstairs and brought up a massive document he had printed off after purchasing the right to do so, of English Folksongs of the Southern Appalachians compiled by Cecil Sharp and Olive Campbell. Some of the Child Ballads were in that compilation.
Husband has always been fascinated by any music that has come from the British Isles to the Appalachian region, as that is the region his mother’s people from Scotland and the north and west of England, settled. We have a vast collection of old and obscure hymnals and song books that he has found on our travels and brought home. We both love folk music, but that music from that time and region holds special meaning for him. He took the The Child Ballads CD with him this week to his job in Bismarck so he could revel in it in the drive there and back.
What are you listening to in the vehicle these days?What folk music are you drawn to? Did you know Anais Mitchell wrote the lyrics, music, and book of the Broadway musical Hadestown?Why is folk music important?
I’ve always been a reader. I have a photo of myself “reading” to my little sister when I was about three. I knew all my books by heart, even when to turn the page; many folks thought I was reading well before I actually was. For all of my school life, I was reading above my grade level. When I was in fifth grade, I pulled “Hunchback of Notre Dame” off the school library shelf and the librarian told me it was “too old for me”. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
I’m also a serial reader; there is a book on CD in the car, audiobook on my laptop and assorted books in the bedroom and the living room. Right now I’m reading Eragon by Christopher Paolini (dragon book – thanks for the nudge MiG), Elementary She Read by Vicki Delaney (murder mystery), I am Thinking of You My Darling by Vincent McHugh (science fiction recommended by our Steve), Selected Poems by Amy Lowell (she was a fairly well-known poet in her day, writing at the turn of the 20th century) and finally The Peacocks of Baboquivari by Erma Fisk (memoir of a woman who lived alone for five months banding birds for The Nature Conservancy – I have NO clue where I got the idea about this one).
But why am I verklempt, you ask? Because I did not raise a reader. Saying this out loud is a little like committing hari-kari. I read to her constantly when she was young, she had a good library of books, she learned to read easily but to no avail; she has just never wanted to read. Right after Christmas I was amazed to see her toting a book around the house. Some kind of inspirational/self-help/current events thing. I teared up a little. Then three weeks ago she came to me and asked if she could use my Amazon account to buy.. wait for it… books! Now what you need to know is that asking to use my account is YA’s code for “will you buy it for me”. “OF COURSE YOU CAN USE MY ACCOUNT” I yelled as I hugged her. When the books showed up on Friday I was so excited — as I was taking the photo, you could have heard her eyes roll from a block away. She did tell me that I could read the books as well if I wanted to. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had already read two of them.
Have you infected anybody with the reading bug? What are you reading right now?
Well, I must confess that I am becoming an increasingly fussy eater. I find myself being very picky at potlucks, and I never eat fast food. I wasn’t always like this, but time, experience, and my non-existent gallbladder have changed my preferences. I will no longer eat for the sake of conviviality.
I have to go to New Orleans in April for a regulatory board conference, and I am dreading all the shrimp I imagine that will be available. I despise shrimp. I heartily dislike its texture and flavor, and I equally despise the environmental impact of shrimp harvesting. I imagine there will be other things to eat there, but I am anxious. I may have to survive on beignets. My absent gallbladder may protest, but I can live with that. At least beignets are sweet.
I have tried to be an open, accepting person in my life, but there are times you just have to put your foot down and say “Enough “!
When have you uttered the ultimate “No!” How hard is it for you to put your foot down? Any suggestions for dining in New Orleans ?
Trail Baboon 