Travels of a Coal Miner's Daughter

The coolest made up animal ever made up

2012-01-05T07:18:00.000-05:00

Writing for me is not a task, a chore, a verb. It is an animal inside my being and scurries and scatters, digs and climbs, uncovering emotions, burying thoughts. It lays dormant for hours, months, long winters of internal time. It wakes slowly, stirs, tries to find a way out here or there. I fight against it. External time has constraints. I feel compelled to keep the animal in stasis from guilt. There are things to be done. What things? It doesn’t matter. It’s the doing that matters. Do things. Do more things. Can’t writing be a thing that you do? No. Because. Or when acceptance has finally been come around to by force or pain, the animal scraping and digging fiercely for escape, for breath and the guilt of occupation has been won over there still remains stifling obligations. There is the subject matter to consider and the audience. You should apply yourself to writing about x or y or z not n! and may all social constructs forbid that your composition be addressed explicitly or implicitly to p or q. Much safer to broadcast to the set of m=[a, a+1,…h]. But it doesn’t take much to trace this back into the former guilt of a thing to be done. This is writing as a verb. A verb is not wrenching my insides out in the panic of a dark tomb.

The current dilemma is one of theme. Squalor. I question myself. Why do you choose the dismal? Or let me be more clear, why do you choose the dismal when your life is so obviously and clearly on the upswing? Is it healthy? What with this or that human think? What do you know of fetid existence really? What right do you have to speak towards such things?

I imagine the slant towards the miserable has something to do with the most recent selections in reading material. Whether up beat or beaten down the backdrop of my most recently visited fictional worlds have been painted in hues of grey, brown, poverty, sickness, pain and steely blue. I recognize also that the atmosphere of any selected story, place or occurrence trapped by the strokes of a pen will be colored intimately by the specific pile of words wrestled into the line of a sentence. A sewer filled with vagabonds and ruffians can be papered over with the warm and festive feel of a fair just as halls lined with gold and silver gilt can be transformed into a prison given the appropriate cadence and tense. The written word is dangerous and powerful.

However, my literary intake can only account for so much of the shift towards stagnant puddles in my mind. No, I have become convinced that the largest compulsion comes from the hours I’ve been awake, the flavors of the company I have spent my time with, and the shades and tones of the building in which most of my conscious time has played out. Nocturnal. Police. Emergency Center. Dispatch.

Over and again the questioning of my obligation to write or not write this or that phrase. By what right? I feel the claws sink deeper into the unprotected internal flesh.

I suppose that the best writers of fiction are in fact the best liars and they are the best liars because they approximate most accurately the elusive phantom of truth. So it goes.

I crack open the den. I write.

Opening Day (PA edition)

2011-11-30T10:52:00.003-05:00

I stand atop a shipping container which is stacked on a shipping container that is in turn resting on another and another. And this stack is fastened to another of equal height beside it. We are 42 feet off the ground counting the concrete pad supporting the stack. But as our tower of seaworthy metal blocks is on a hillside, to the south the drop off puts us at something more like 64 feet. The tower is painted and industrial military shade of green to match it's purpose. Someday snipers may train in this very spot with a rifle much more powerful and accurate than my own. We are 3 sentinels guarding this tower from a theoretical onslaught of deer.

I stay at the East side of the stack. My focus is on a field that is visible for 300 yds before it dips and any deer disapear from view. In truth even in the open field they will be hard to spot because the brush in places is nearly 3 feet high, so too are the deer if they drop their heads. More than half of the field is encircled with a thin stand of timber marking property lines and parcel edges. Though only 10 feet wide in most spots it is enough to offer a deer the illusion of cover. I regularly check these potential avenues of travel especially considering that the deer have worn a path directly beneath my perch. in the north there is thick timber from which we expect our quarry to come. It is state land, publicly huntable and filled with rifle bearing men in orange who we hope will shift the deer in our direction. I occasionally look south at a triangle shaped bench along the hill. It is thick with brush but it in a deer pushed upwards my try to catch his breath before continuing to ascend.

My nephew, a year my younger, guards the western flank. His view is wider, more interesting, harder to manage. Straight west is flat for a piece with a line of rotting machinery at the edge of the trees. it then slopes slightly, crests and drops off at 400 yards. But along the shallow traverse there are dips which will hide a deer from sight. A few clumps of pines also dot this section. To the south his view drops off much more rapidly. The hill is steep and we are high so most of it is in view. And arm branching off from the peak is the tipping point of sight but it many places it is 300 yards away.

The bottom of the hill is marked by a dirt road running east-west. Beside it and on our side but mostly out of view from our perch is the 1000 yard range increasing west to east. It is marked at 100 yard intervals with mounds of dirt growing ever higher with distance from the targets. It was seeded with clover and grass after construction this summer and the part that is visible to me is a verdant green even now. Our tower is roughly between the 7 and 8 hundred yard mounds. On the other side of the road the terrain again rises, a low hill that happens also to split a creek and become an island in the process. This island is surrounded on 3 sides by swampy brush and timber and the far side is better than 1200 yards from me as the crow flies. The terrain rises again beyond the island, thick trees for a while then another "open" field with a strip of trees surrouding it, marking pipeline-east, property line-west, and crest of hill-south.

My brother is at an intersection of paths at the bottom of the hill. Treeline, creek, island corner and dirt road meet beside him and very near the 600 yard mark. He paces like a caged animal around the cable spool which is supposed to remain his home base. He covers all directions. Protected from our view and our rifles by a hump in the hill are 2 friends of my brother and father, Sam and Ross. One is on a cable spool above 1000 yards and the other on a spool above 200.

My father for his part walks between us like a commander checking on troops. He has a rifle, loaded, resting on the makeshift plywood table. But he would rather we shoot first. As we wait he points out orange dots and names them, describes the owner of each stand and the stand itself. Talks about how he knows them and the deer they are likely to take. Across the field from me is a party of 4 hunters. They take turns sitting 2 in a tree stand and 2 driving deer. They are shooting for meat and likely have doe tags. For them anything goes. Along the pipeline a party of 2, unknowns to us. Near the edge of the far trees tucked into a fox hole covered with tin is ---, barely visible. His friend sits in the middle of that far field. Every other year --- takes a trophy buck. He will hold out for glory until the final days of the season. His friend, we suspect, will shoot the first shootable deer.

Shooting light comes and goes without incident. By some design of the state, it is not yet light enough to see through a scope until 5 minutes after you are permited to fire. As it was we wait nearly 10 minutes before the first shot christens the season in earnest. It is followed by a volley from all directions and a lull. This patteren continues until an hour past lunch. Five to ten minutes of regular shooting from every which way and then silence for half an hour or more. It is as if the rifles are calling to one another from distance hillocks and checking in to maintain the pack formation.

The tree stand hunters have luck early, within the first hour of light they take something. We cannot tell from our vantage point if it was buck or doe but it never crossed within our line of sight so it probably doesn't matter much. Across the island, friend of --- makes a kill. This is unfortunate as the pair is old and the deer is far from a road. It takes them over a hour and a half working together to drag their beast up the hill and into the back of a faithful pick-up. They do not stay to fill another tag.

My brother takes a shot. It makes contact but does not kill. He calls to inform as he gears up for a hike through swamp. An hour later we here a shot from his supposed direction and half an hour past that we get another call. Among other things he is wet waste deep from the failure of a beaver dam he was crossing. His deer is now cooling in the creek while he seeks dry clothing. One of the pipeline brothers saw him and bored with his station wandered down to investigate. Obnoxious and unhelpful. Why the deer did not drop immeditately is beyond us all. The first shot was accurate, true and more than enough to end things quickly. Perhaps this deer found a methamphetamine stash this morning.

Kurt has a doe tag but wants to save it for a snow covered day. His plan is 5 buddies on the tower and a doe crossing the island at 1200 yards. The stuff of legends. He joins us for a while on the tower while his deer cools in the creek.

While he is hiking we see a buck too far away to shoot let alone count points. It is headed for Sam and his failure to shoot tells us that is was not legal. My father sees a doe come and go quickly. For a long time my nephew watches a buck, well within range. He is perhaps a year and a half old. The same age as the pair we took a few short months ago in Idaho and every bit bigger for having grown up here. He is a 5 point, 3 on one side including the brow tine and 2 on the other...no tine. For a man who has only 5 hours to shoot before he has to travel home, this is more than large enough to take and in most of the state it would be legal. However, on our side of the state, where deer grow larger faster, we are constrained to only shoot deer with more than 4 points on one side...or rather 3 points off the main beam and you can skip the brow tine (so goes the rule new this year). The buck pauses for him more than once as it makes it's way down the hill. Until next year good sir. I dare you to walk this way again.

Time comes and goes. My sister comes. She and my nephew go. They fix my father's tire before they head for Indiana and in turn have tire trouble of their own crossing Ohio. A pothole of epic proportions blows one tire and bends another rim. The police tell them "We know, we know. File a claim with the state." They are home in time for my sister to start her shift at 10pm.

We pack up and head home. There has been no volley for over an hour and we suspect there is no one left in the game lands to drive us deer. Rain fell in torrents throughout the morning and continued to pizzle down for the duration of our stay. We are cold, wet, hungry and unenthused.

At home we each scavenge in the fridge for food to heat. Top this off with a hot drink and spirits lift slightly. We reaquire wet gear from piles on the livingroom floor and step out of the house for round two. This time I mount my fathers tree stand in the field below our house. He circles behind and tries to drive deer my way. His first and second loops return nothing. His final kicks up a doe, shot in the back leg and limping. She puts some weight on it but not much. I burn with anger at whatever fool did this. If there is a chance that your hit will be half that bad you do not bother to flip off the safe. There is no honor in a wound like that, no respect in causing suffering. The goal is accurate and therefore quick and painless. I have no tag to exchange for her life as she limps up the hill as quickly as she can manage. She will bed down in the trees beside my uncles house and his boys are flush with doe tags. I will see them tonight and tell them where to go.

Thus ends opening day. With rain, pain, and a twinge of sorrow. I shower immediately. I found a solitary deer tick on my hand and my mind has convinced me that I am covered in wee beasties. My dinner of leftovers is heart-warming, though I skip the stuffing, please pass the potatoes (and forgive the pun if you happened to pick it up). I sleep quickly, soundly and late. Tomorrow (now yesterday), according to weather forecasts, a horrible day for hunting.

Today I am in bed equally late. The world is shaddowed in full blowing blustering white and wind howls through cracks in the windows. This is supposed to stop in a few hours at which time I will gear up and remount the tree stand. But at the moment my thoughts wander to eggs, ham, coffee.

-Jn

Between a dumpster and a concrete place

2011-11-14T13:56:00.002-05:00

I intended to write through breakfast. To my surprise, when I stopped it was past lunch. Unintended consequences of observation.

No dear reader, these words were not for public consumption. But this was more than reassuring as only last night I was considering my lack of inspiration among friends. Yes I have left my preferred canvas of aspen and tamarack at daybreak but apparently garbage trucks, smoking stylists, and exhaust fans on a grey drizzly day can be prepared in a manner worth of ink and paper.

So it goes. I do not want to do my homework.

-Jn

Montana, the sunrise state

2011-11-03T00:59:00.000-04:00

My father by some unknown power managed to drive 11 hoursstraight through the night last night while I slept fitfully in the back of thetruck. He turned the keys over to me shortly after 6 am local time, just eastof Billings. This, my friends, presented me with a glorious treasure. A sapphireso blue that you stare into it until you lose your mind. A sunrise on acloudless Montana morning. Pure, graceful beauty.

For a space between Billings proper and the outskirts ofmention there is emptiness. No lights brighten the road. A few souls flew pastto open some store for the future souls who need stores open before their 9-5sbegin. A couple of truckers were also on the road. Likely team drivers who donot need to lie about sleep in a log book. My body had long since grown numb tothe bumps and bustles of the road beneath the tires turning steadily homeward.In the darkness I might as well have been flying through space in a hover car,a rocket ship, the vehicle of the future. And there on the horizon out of thedarkness is an alien constellation. Lights that would outshine the sunsurrounded in clouds of mystery and wonder. Mist threading here and therebetween stacks and domes with a few torches, flames for dramatic effect. Thesebrilliant gems, Montana People’s Power and Light, Conoco Phillips, and ExxonMobil. A coal fired power plant churning all night to fuel a pair of refinerieswhich not only burn but also process the midnight oil. An ethereal dream,wrapped in wisps of steam. This is the lifeblood of Montana. This is a steadystream of income for a populous. This is the beauty of production. But I canonly hold the lights for a few moments. The darkness swallows even those lightswhole as I churn eastward.

A first for me. A wolf hit by the car on the side of theroad. “Good dog. It’s a little chilly at 17 degrees but I know you will bequite comfortable in that ditch.” There is a season for wolves in Montana as inIdaho. One state to the east, and my next destination, has no such privileges. Thesun will crest the hills mere moments before I breech the state border but I donot know this yet.

I am flying quickly through the darkness as dotted linestick under my tires. But there is a change in the inky black. I sense it. APainter is on the prowl. Somewhere in the black, a black tipped tail twitches.The tawny lion, the dawn is hunting. Swiftly and silently it is coming, diligentto its purpose. So many fools wandering now are unaware of its coming. It willtake them before they know it. But I am awake and keen to watch the sunapproach.

The first signs of an as yet non-existent light come in thefaint outline of what might be a horizon. If asked, even if hard pressed, bothsky and land are as black as black can possibly be. But somewhere in thedistance, where the edges of the earth reach toward the infinite, a black isslipping in to blue. The stars still shine with all the brilliance and honorthe million year journey of light deserves. Punctuation marks across anotherwise immutable glass ceiling of darkness. No, the next shift toward alighted heaven is hinted at on earth. Each pond, puddle, lake and lagoon isgathering up every stray ray of the infantile dawn and reflecting it to anybeing that will see. In the black on black the name for this color is shimmer. Crayolahas yet to dissolve it into a 4 part formula in wax and I hope they nevershall. Hiding in the havens of shimmer are small black forms in comfortable,irregular clumps. Waterfowl, hoteling. They are headed homeward south as Ipress towards the east. And then as at the ends of the world black shapes startto appear against the black earth, silhouettes on silhouettes. Here there areforms of beasts, cattle. There the forms of bales, hay.

And there to the east is a change in shade. Out of theblackness, the colors of the rainbow spread from ceiling to floor but in mutedcharcoal tones. These are not quite colors. There is a hint of yellow, perhapsgreen. But no it is just grey I suppose. Is that pink on the horizon? I thinkso, but no…it is only more grey. This continues for an odd hour or more. Blackgives way to pale pastel in ever lightening washes of grey without becomingsomething of a complete color. No color you would stake a dollar on at anyrate.

Somewhere in between the not quite indigo and essence ofblue the stars wink out one by one. The almost shades of rainbow are driftingupwards, westwards around the dome. To one ill experienced with a nascent sun ormore comfortable with the close of day this might seem to signal a new wave ofbrilliance, for is not a sun rise merely the opposite of a sunset? But this hasnever been the case. An aged day is cocky, flamboyant. Raging mad with sparksof color to highlight the insanity as the sun plunges towards another death.Purples intermingle with oranges and gold shines out with neon flare againstpreposterously pink clouds. And even as the sun struggles downwards it thrustsout final rays in hopes it will not be forgotten. But as an infant the daycomes wrapped in layers tenderness. The soft shades of new skin. Pink lines theedges of the buttes for a time and you sense that the sun when it first appearsmust certainly be pink. Imagine the disappointment then when colors neveractually appear. Pink slides softly out of existence, kissing the contours ofthe hills at your back before disappearing completely.

As yet there is no sun but the sky is full light and itseems so too is the earth. From black on black into light on light, for all ofcreation is covered in snow. This color too is best described as shimmer andagain it is dotted with dark forms. However, these are the black bodies of rangecattle. The plod onward in whichever direction their whims take them. Theygraze, then they wander, then they pause to chew, and all the while they praisetheir Creator for their darkness as they soak up any light that reaches them.All heat is precious when the air hovers near single digits.

To my right I spy a pack of wolves. They are running in aline and like me they are pointed towards the east. This part of the country ismuch more open than the one I left 12 hours earlier. These wolves are in seasonand exposed. And so they are on the move. They are less than a handful of milesfrom the neighboring state where they are still protected and this is wherethey are bound with all haste. Their feet are faster than mine, but they are nomatch for the speed of my tires and they are out of sight in seconds. I catch aglimpse of a sentry prairie dog searching the new day for something to fear.His wish will be granted in 5 minutes or so when the wolves pass through hisvillage.

I can see Wyoming’s welcome sign in the distance. Thensuddenly I can see nothing but light. The sun has finally scaled the hills andis present in full glory. A ball of fire that cannot warm the day soon enough.Though momentarily blinded the sun has also revealed a danger I’d not paused toconsider. The asphalt leading me eastward is coated in a shine of black ice. Iease off the accelerator and slow to what I consider a reasonable speed. I ampassed frequently, but then I watch the hasty slide as they cross bridges atwrong angles and I am reassured that my pace is perfect. It will be anotherhour before I drift above 51 and then only once behind an ash truck. Miles tickoff more slowly but also more safely and I am content.

Bad Air, Bad dog

2011-10-18T02:45:00.001-04:00

I will try very hard to explain the aura of the day.

The moon is waning but still above half. It’s setting about two hours past dawn and it’s mighty bright if the day is clear. Today on the way to my secret spot was no exception but clouds came in fast after I was settled. However, with the combination of the moonlight dispersing through the clouds and the first pre-dawn rays of sun doing likewise, shooting light came early. But if was as if the sun stopped rising shortly after I could see my crosshairs against the amber grass. It failed to get brighter than new morning for the duration I was in the woods. The yellows and golds which seem bright as they welcome the dawn became sickly, jaundiced tones as the hours progressed without a sun.

A few squirrels chattered from their trees, but too few. And why would they not come down? A few birds called but from the safety of heavy brush in the woods. Why all this hesitation? Only the crows were active and it seemed that they were out in force to compensate for the lack of other life. They purred, burbled, cackled and screeched above my head. Their wings a terrifying swoop with every beat, much more fitting of a pterodactyl than a bird of their size. They would not rest as if to taunt the other creatures, shut up against the day.

All I could think of was malaria – bad air. Yes. The air feels bad. Too thick. Too still. Too…I don’t know. I am missing something. This like a febrile dream. Some unknown horror on the horizon. Tension at every turn for the something that is chasing you. But what thing? A think unknown. You turn to run but time slows and you cannot will your legs to run. It takes an eternity to move and inch and all the while the unknown is closing fast.

The clouds above scraping their bellies on the mountain tops, thinning to wisps that cascaded down a contour line or twelve in places but always, ever impenetrably thick. Enforcing, reinforcing, the anxiety of the air. Not even a breeze to stir the mood. No laughter of Aspen leaves as they caressed the tree one last time on their winter decent. Only the foreboding voices of large black birds criss-crossing the heights above my meadow.

My inner animal whimpered. Domesticated man had her hand on a rifle, with full knowledge of every single fifteen plus one rounds in her sidearm. But the deep neurons, the few still wired for the wilds were alarmed. I was naked and I knew it. Some sense that told all of God’s creatures to stay in their own thick brush or hole-in-tree equivalent of home with locked foors was lacking in my toolbox. Lost to my genetic line from years of breeding towards domestication or atrophied from want of need. Either way, when called upon it was not there.

There was a collective holding of breath. Waiting, waiting, waiting and though my nerves wound to match the strung bow tension of this mal air I could not name the aggressor. I could not determine if I, the great white hunter, should tremble at the unknown terror or perhaps this unnamable horror was my quarry and my heart should race instead for thrill. Over and over I tried to read the signs. The air. The clouds. The birds. The squirrels. The air. The squirrels. The clouds. The birds.
I heard the neighbors hound first, joined shortly after by our rent-a-dog, Cooper. What did they know that I did not which stretched their tension to finally snap?

East – A lone wolf howls.

This must be my antagonist I begin to unwind. But something is odd.

North – A coyote yips, howls. This is something I have never heard before on my mountain. Then in short order from the South East – another bachelor wolf.
Why had every canine around me come undone? What could they hear? Smell? Sense?
To the west, my answer. A wolf howls and is joined by another. Still more join in multi-toned chorus. Voices mounting and echoing as counter point as time stands still. Clarity washes over me with each wave of voice on voice. One wolf can silence a thicket of deer, but a pack unnerves every creature on a covey of mountains- including their own kind. Their solitary brethren fear them too.

They are getting closer, moving south and east, traveling thick timber. They are hunting.
That this act is natural is unmistakable. Much more so than my scent destroying chemical, high velocity with penetrating plastic tip for tough game, laboratory proven camouflage patterned presence between stump, rock and cedar.

The animals, the pack, the song, the swift sure motion of the unit towards a goal. It is also supremely beautiful. But it is a stark cold beauty, formidable, vain. A vertical traverse up an ice covered stretch of slope, gleaming white and blue. The chance of death much greater than that of success. It is the beauty of evolutionary success in action. Lithe bodies running through thick cover, seeking scent of prey. The beauty of staring into the end of a life.

A call breaks out across the trees. Ten bleats of a cow elk, steady and pronounced. I take this as a warning. No elk pursued directly could call out so clearly, so evenly. “They have arrived. You cannot hide. To the swift goes survival. You must run. Run!”

Close on the heels of this message comes a renewed cadence of ethereal howls. “Yes we are coming for you. We ARE the swift. We will outrun.”

Silence follows for some minutes. All creatures turn an ear to the chase. Their very lives depend on the death of some other life.

Another bleat. This a cry of agony, a cry for help that will not come. They will have hamstrung the elk. Back legs worthless it tumbles and they close in. It calls once more, shaky, fading. They will start at the stomach, then the back legs, a fury of blood and teeth, while the elk struggles to rise on front feet only. Loss of blood will bring on shock and the elk will cease to feel as light fades to darkness behind its eyes. But the peace of death will take an agonizingly long time to come. I strain to hear but there is no more.

The fever has broken. The mountain wakes stiffly, slowly, echoes of nightmare still clinging to consciousness. Now gingerly it fingers the idea of food, drink, something activity other than waiting out a horror in the clutches of a dream.

As darkness crept in beneath the shadow of the mountain, I heard the pack again. They were hunting. There are half grown pups to feed and they are hungry. This will continue until the elk move to another mountain and the wolves follow. I was thankful that I could shut the door behind me.

____________________________

Idaho is one of a few states with a wolf season and they are currently huntable. 3 wolves have been killed legally (read: that were reported instead of buried in the woods) near here recently. One attacked a female bow hunter and she shot it with her side arm. Another was tracking a hunter closely enough that when the man went to shoot he had to wait for the other hunter to turn or risk shooting him. A third was taken in Bonner's Ferry, 7 feet long, 200 lbs. In unit 4 IN TOWN a wolf attacked 2 horses. Hamstrung one and did enough damage before it was chased off that it had to be put down. The other was severely wounded but they think it will survive. It is a miracle we survived the domestication process.

Definition of terms

2011-10-12T14:45:00.001-04:00

For them what live in cities and the otherwise uninitiated.

Feller Buncher (noun):

Opening Day

2011-10-10T17:54:00.001-04:00

Opening day eve. A constant flurry of internal excitement. The uncontrollable drive to have every detail under control, down to the order in which the socks are placed on top of the other layers that will keep me out in the cold longer. Persons drift off towards dreams one by one but I remain awake long after I hit the sheets. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Opening day. Tomorrow, you’re only a few hours away.

Opening day morning. I fight my alarm for unconsciousness but I am defeated. Just as well. For the first time since I arrived on the ranch I am the first human awake and active. I try to be as obnoxiously active as possible. Even so the persons scattered around the kitchen remain sleeping until others wander in from their respective beds. Customized sandwiches come together with deli-quick efficiency. Hot breakfast and coffee were ready before my feet hit the floor as a result of last night’s obsessive compulsive ducks-in-a-row frenzy. Breakfast consumed with breakneck speed and those still sleeping roused abusively. Cheese laid gently by the face brings a sloppy dog tongue which cannot be ignored in the same way as my reminders about the minutes passing and the need to leave “like NOW”. All outward tasks accomplished I slip into my dressing room for my costume. Long-johns layer betwixt socks, shirts on shirts, pants on pants, hats on hats. Bending and twisting becomes a challenge and I begin to sweat. Over it all a pack. Riffle checked and strapped to my chariot. Time to go.

I could count the past hours of today on one hand were it not gloved. The nascent morning is crisp cold and the air feels close with humidity. It is inky black. The sky would be overflowing with galaxies of stars were it not cloaked in clouds. We ride strung together until we reach the trailhead, where we are spat out in various directions. Into the great darkness we are balls of fire, color, and noise, a roman candle rolling out light.

Our headlights can do little to dispel the thick darkness, but even as we race through a small sphere of vision, the surroundings cast in black and white from our feeble lights, the trails are still comfortably familiar to us. Like the back of the hand? But who really knows one hand from another? Like the lines on a lover’s face? Sadly I fear even that cliché fails to find meaning these days. No, we know these dirt and grass freeways like the streets of our youth. The sidewalks that lead to friends’ houses, the way to the park, the road to the convenience store for penny candy or ice cream which become stories passed to our children when we return there on some distant day. Long hours cutting fresh lanes and clearing old log roads have imprinted each twist, ditch and fallen tree into forever memory. These tracks have been paved by mixing fine mountain dust with our sweat, our blood. We regularly fight the wilds for these avenues to upward meadows, landscapes, views, and game. We know them intimately.

My father and I are now alone on our chosen path. We are winding west-north-east-north-west but constantly climbing. Gaining ground heavenward and racing the earliest rays of sun. We turn a final left onto the long and rugged bench carved at the top of our meadow. The sun has not yet crested the eastern mountains but its light still sneaks our way by bouncing off the cover of clouds. We tuck our bright red horse beneath some small pines and separate, he to the east and I west. The refracted light is enough to define my path without artificial fire. We are late.

I am all down and stuffing heaped up against the cold. The success of my efforts is told in my sweat with each footstep but so also is the sound of myself, a foreign presence in these woods. It is impossible to step without snapping sticks, swishing grass, creaking slings and complaining buckles. I am a one man band disrupting the morning, a cacophony to all the ears of the forest. I give up on silence and focus instead on speed. The faster I arrive the sooner I can become soundless. I head towards the back corner of the meadow but stop short of my intended perch. There along the tree line, some ten feet above the trail, three high stumps as a fortress with a massive hemlock for a parapet at the rear. These stumps shall be my blind, my gun rest, my castle wall and the great reaching hemlock my throne.

I diligently remove all sticks and underbrush from my new fort. Twigs cannot snap when there are none. I adjust my layers for temperature and my body for the slow pivoting of head left to right, the imperceptible lifting of rifle when the time comes. I fidget restlessly after perfection of view, of angle, of body weight on roots for the first half hour. The sun is still long in approaching but my eyes no longer strain to see. My scope has more than enough light to paint me a pretty picture within the reticule. Crosshairs on rock, stump, tree. Yes, I have a good view of my corner of paradise. Now I take to the task of memorizing every shape in sight so that when the living shadows of the forest slide silently into view I will know that a change has come to my kingdom.

Squirrels chatter, woodpeckers drum, and crows call between mountain tops. The world would be in complete peace if not for the lumber operation proceeding at full feller-buncher speed somewhere below me and beyond my vision. Mechanical saws making me future meadows but disrupting my present quiet, my present chance at success. In time the shredding of trees becomes background noise, forgotten as one forgets the sound of traffic after living too long in the city. Into this pseudo-silence suddenly comes a sound of rushing., water pouring from heaven and being sifted through countless branches on the way to the ground. The clouds are moving towards me from the east. They are now over the meadow and coming quickly but I still have time.

I abandon my castle for something dryer. An ancient tree fell recently in a storm. Its roots pulled with it a ball of soil and left me with a perfect patch of dry. I maneuver into the sandy bowl and duck beneath my roof of roots, readjusting to new rocks beneath me. My rifle must now rest on my pack. Occasionally I bump a root with my head and cause a cascade of sand upon myself but not a raindrop reaches my person. I can still scan nearly the same stretch of open space and I am content in my new home. So satisfied it seems that I fall asleep for some unknown hours during which time the rain stops. I awake instantly to full alert but with no movement save the opening of my eyes. The squirrels changed cadence. I strained to see something brown as my thumb caressed the ridges on the safety. Ah, yes there is the brown walking along the trail, but it is a bipedal silhouette. At the edge of my vision my old man turns up into the woods for a new vantage point to finish out his morning. I elect to do the same, and I return to my previous accommodations. I find myself now fully conscious and again scanning with a slow pivot head.

The rain altered the strata of temperatures everywhere it fell which in turn rearranged the direction of the breeze. Every creek bottom was giving birth to clouds. Mist constantly gathered in the arms of stream-side trees. Over time the moisture would build into something of substance and break free from the bonds of the branches and began to ascend skyward following the tops of the trees toward the mountain summit. My head continued to swivel and I watched infant cloud after infant cloud forming and taking wing in every valley. Those clouds born of Grouse Creek at the foot of my mountain slowly found their way to and through my meadow as they sought the sky.

Now I see another cloud approaching from the southern slope of my meadow. It is full bodied above the trees but wispy mist near the ground. It fills in hollow spaces in front of my eyes. My landmarks blur and sounds become washed out and more distant. The cloud gives the allusion that stationary objects are moving. Do I see a deer? The scope confirms a stump. But outside of the cross-haired circle the stump seems to walk farther into the cloud and disappear. The temperature drops as the cloud thickens. I look down at my watch in hopes of confirming the current degrees but the watch only bothers to report the time of day. This is perhaps the fifth occasion I have sought the weather from my time keeping device. I swear I will not do it again. This is in fact prophetic.

I watch a bold squirrel leave the forest edge on my right. He bounds to a tree in the pasture and calls to any who care to listen. He scampers to a pile of leftover logs and weaves around and through the whole heap. Not finding any treasure he returns to the forest edge now to my left and circles a stump. He hears something that I cannot and stops half way round so that all I can see is his tail. It twitches nervously. So too does my thumb on the safety. Does he see brown? He cannot tell from his current position so he tops the stump for a clearer view. What he sees is alarms him greatly. He shouts a warning to his fellows and disappears into a pile of brush. The safety is off and my index finger is resting on the trigger guard. I am breathing more rapidly than I desire. I allow my conscious to take control of the pace of respiration and I strain my eyes for brown.

My index slides back up the side of my rifle and the switch is pulled back to safe. I see the alarming brown but it is a weary and overdressed biped with rifle over shoulder slung. I maintain my pose. My father walks along the trail searching for a familiar face among the trees. When a tree blocks his view I turn my head to catch him on the other side. He walks directly below me staring upward still unseeing. I move my head to look down. Now he sees. He is shocked. He laughs. He is cold, damp, bored. The loggers are too loud, too close. We will hunt again later.

We now walk the bench toward the east. I continue to scan all parts of the meadow for anything moving. My father stops walking. Does he see something? Ah yes, our 4-wheeler buried in brush. I’d walked right past it. We repack our red mule and turn towards home. Down we wind through the logging operation, past the beaver dam, through the muddy ruts left by 18-wheelers loaded with logs, below the low clouds.

We are the last of the hunting party to return. We are apparently the only two smart enough to stay out of the rain so that we stay warm.

I remove my costume and tuck it into a chest for another hour of the day. There are now men draped in seats around the cabin still variously camouflaged in what they never got around to removing. They are bored, tired and becoming reacquainted with warmth. They are all of them falling asleep wherever they’ve landed. I meander to the kitchen and fix myself a second breakfast. It is still early. Some folks in town are only seeking breakfast one.

What to do between hunt and hunt? I think I will sit down to write…

Ah yes and now the call from my father. It is time to think about a fresh ascent. Appropriate too because I am finished with composition…and it has started again to rain.

Dark comes soon and wet

2011-09-27T21:21:00.002-04:00

It is raining.

That is both a profound statement and an understatement.

There have been times this week where I have stood in the rain for half an hour without getting damp. You could see the rain leaving the clouds but by the time the drops neared terra firma the greedy air had robbed them almost entirely of themselves. And those lucky few who managed to keep themselves together long enough to fall the whole way down found themselves evaporated moments after they hit. It would rain for an hour without the ground becoming damp. But today the clouds seem to have forced every molecule of wet from their silver linings and the starving air seems to have gorged itself enough to finally be sated. On more than one occasion it was raining hard enough on the tin roof that I could not hear myself think. It was like one sustained roll of thunder. At these times I found myself as Noah in an ark. Outside the windows all that could be seen was water coming down. There was no barn across the yard. There was no yard. I meant what I said initially.

It is RAINING.

It rains very seldom here in the summer. Once spring skips merrily on making way for long days filled with Sol you may only get a few showers until Fall crashes in with frosts and golden aspen trees. And so, true to tradition, this Summer has been quite dry and as always, fears of fires run as wildly through the minds of the locals as they would race through the tops of the tinder-dry tree tops.

There was a fire about an hour away from here burning when we got here a few weeks ago. Hundreds of acres and millions of trees burning. Left to burn. So go the national forests when they are not leased for regular timber harvest, fuel removal and management. A heritage of hundred year old trees turned to smoke. Their ghosts gathering at the edges of the horizon in one final burst of beauty. Sunsets beyond the imagination as the thickened air gives perspective and depth to the sun slipping below the mountains beyond the mountains. This could perhaps be considered lasting beauty traded for temporary beauty and it is I suppose true. Except that I had never seen the ancient trees or sat beneath their shade and I will forever hold the sunset in my memory. And forests have always caught fire and always replanted themselves. I suppose that the Birthday Fire of Bonner's Ferry has finally burned itself out but my only basis for this thought is that the air has been less hazy.

The timber on our nearer mountains is managed. Most of it is national forests leased to this or that timber company. Companies are told how much they can take or how much they must leave and parcels are cut in patchwork fashion to maintain habitat and promote healthy regrowth. Several years ago a few large parcels were cleared out. Few trees were left standing save proud tall and healthy tamaracks. These sentinels are the genetically strong, spreading the seeds of the next generation. In 5 or 10 years they too will be cut but they will have left a heritage of wee western larch trees behind. In the mean time the cleared spaces have become meadows filled with huckleberry bushes and bear grass. Places for deer and bear alike to graze in preparation for the hard winter to come. Places for my family and I to wait along the forest fringes, to fill our freezer in preparation for the hard winter to come.

Over this now fading summer another timber company has been working to clear new parcels in the land above us. Men and machines travel daily into what should be wilderness. Whenever traffic increases on our humble dirt road so do the rumors. There is little else to discuss. No one wishes to think of fire and how can one talk about the weather when there is only always sun? Rumor has it that this particular company bought out the leases of another timber company that went bankrupt a few years back. And according to rumor that this company has also gone bankrupt. They are however, under rumor and perhaps something otherwise legally binding, required to continue to cut timber on the parcels. And rumor also suggests that the lease on the timber is up at the end of the year and they do not wish to renew it. So they are taking as much as they are permitted as fast as they can at which time they will leave the mountain. I've heard pieces of this story from more than a handful of people and not everything lines up into logic. But no matter. I can say with confidence that there are at least 9 machines scattered around the mountain and that is a lot of iron for an operation of this size. It is also a tremendous amount of diesel fuel to keep the feller-bunchers happily felling and bunching. And as the trees are cut, trimmed and stacked, they are as quickly shifted onto the humble backs of timber trucks and whisked away towards some good purpose in mill of some western state. The world will be kept long in telephone poles, toilet paper and pellet fuel. Log homes and cedar chests will be built as strongholds against rust and the moth that destroys. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

But for the present residents of the unpaved portion of rapid lightning road, we are spared the ashes and instead given a double portion of dust. The fragile soil of our mountain is really not so much soil as very well packed, talcum powder fine tan fragments of still older mountains. Shallow rooted grass holds the mountain together in any place where the roots of a tree cannot. And where there are trails or timber roads there is no grass. Rocks unfortunately have no roots to hold silt in place. Daily the timber trucks rattle quickly and empty up the winding trails and plod slowly and heavily down, each journey removing some tonnage of timber but also a tonnage of dust. It shakes off on corners and sprays up on trees such that by the time the truck reaches town it is presentable. A brush here, another there and the company logo is legible again. But on the trails behind our cabin the dust rests deceptively, pretending to be a solid floor when it is actually rather like 6 inches of air. And as we traverse the mountain seeking adrenaline through speed we find ourselves sliding sideways in unexpected places or falling in to holes that had not been there before.

Each resident recognizes that these parcels which are now ugly dusty wounds on our mountain will heal quickly into moose filled meadows in a year or so. And this is perfect timing because the existing open spaces are becoming less open. One can scarcely see a bull moose let alone a black bear. But even with the promises of greatness waiting for us in a few short months we complain ardently because it gives us something more interesting to talk about than the weather. Our cabin is a good distance from the road but this dust is pervasive and mobile. It has nary any substance to cause it to settle. It defies gravity and lands where it chooses. Everything I can see is cloaked in a thin powder. Wipe it clean and it will be covered again tomorrow.

But we've found ourselves in a bit of a hard place. You see this time of year we always pray earnestly and ardently for rain. Rain without lightning. Rain until snow can put the threat of fires to bed beneath a downy white blanket for a few months. But this year it seems our prayers are more timid. We are still as desperate as ever for rain but conscious of the fact that nothing is holding our mountain in place. I am afraid that in the morning I will look out and see a valley where once there was a peak...or I may find that I have been washed past the Pack River General Store in all the way in to town. The saying goes that everyone lives downstream. Perhaps tomorrow I will too.

-Jn

Something about a bear

2011-09-23T00:22:00.002-04:00

I am in the woods as I write this. It's after 6 and light will fade soon. This is hunting that isn't real hunting. In a blind made from stumps and old logs, the stream at my back. My 270 rests across my legs, 4 shells, one in the chamber, safe on.

I am not watching. This our primary predator sense. My most accustomed, most comfortable sense. At this place, in this time, it is no useful. The world is awash with various shades of green, staggered, layered, a phalanx of trees around a meadow. Infant trees sheltered here, racing to meet the heights of their fathers. The only punctuation in color comes in hues of brown. Straight, tall sky seeking brown of long straight and now laid down brown. The brown which is purposed to hold the greens in place from leaves to needles to mistletoe moss. until there is no longer life to hold. And carpeting the floor in the pungent yellow-brown shades of autumn are the fronds of ferns kissed by frost on an eve earlier this week. But there is no movement to speak of save the breeze twitching branches. No visual sign of animal life except the occasional bird. Eyes are not useful in this hour.

Instead I have my ears. Behind me the water mercurial as it passes over rocks and branches, yet rhythmic and constant. A backdrop on which all other sound is splashed. Behind me left and distant, the persistant thump of far away hammers at our cabin and at piercing intervals the small dog howls. He is tied on my account. Round about me from within the impenetrable green, the forest crackles with life. Small squirrels chatter one to another. They break sticks and rustle brush as they scamper, sounding far larger than their diminuative size. A flicker or more have called nearby. They've also drummed out dinner on failing trees. A yellow jacket went as quickly as he came behind me. And I've heard several quads traversing different trails on the mountain. And always the swift running flow at my back which I must cross to return home.

Light is fading and will continue quickly now. There have been no birds for some minutes and the squirrels, I sense, have turned in for the night. There is plenty of light here in the open but within the ranks of forest if is approaching full dark. The air has picked up a moist chill and I am thankful for my hat and gloves.

I am waiting for the lumbering carelessness of a bear, wandering from and to anlong this well worn train. A large noise in the darkness to proceed a large dark form. An instant to readjust, loose the safe, and take aim. But color is draining out of the forest now with the passing light. I am running out of moments as the world slips into black and white. Today it seems will not feature a bear. Only solitude in a place of beauty.

-Jn

(Transcribed from my field notebook.)

Again we come to mid-July

2011-07-17T21:47:00.003-04:00

The red line in the thermometer creeps upwards with the sun. Days are frighteningly long and the air doesn't cool until it is bordering on dusk and the mosquitoes are out. Either work is done frighteningly early in a race against the heat or beneath a ball of fire with skin shifting towards crimson and sweat rivers cutting through the dust on your face.

But the garden is parched and desperately needs tending. Somehow weeds have taken hold and are threatening to suck precious moisture away from the plants that matter. And the plants that matter are wilting, turning brown, fading, tired. The dirt was rich and dark at the onset of spring but now it too is tired- clumped and hard, unyielding.

And even now, under unending glare, it is time to plant. Yes there are already green tomatoes on the vines, some well watered peppers may even be ready to eat and you've already harvested the radishes and eaten plenty of salads until the lettuce turned bitter. But the summer is peaking. The Sol you presently curse is drifting downwards again and while the heat will persist, the hours for growing will not. This is the time to think of snow. For it is the seeds planted with hope, diligence and sweat NOW that will produce the best vegetables for the long winter hibernation.

Last year I kept herbs, a tomato plant and peppers alive through the winter. I not only had a tomato on Christmas but through the rainy spring when nothing else could be planted. True these were only cherry tomatoes and perhaps only one a week. But each globe turning red hinted at the life that would be possible when the white melted in to green. And this plant is still alive and still producing from a big blue pot tucked into a garden in NY. Not a heavy-yielder by any means but definitely persistent.

My impulse to put hands into soil has led me to gardens in three states this summer. Most plants were started in pots on a NH deck and moved to NY and PA. I last heard that the zucchini are ready...and fantastic. A late spring meant plants were still for sale in ID so with a fools ambition I put peppers and tomatoes in the ground with a host of perennial herbs and 100 feet of soaker hose. Perhaps I will only feed a bear but it was worth my time to try. Here I recently added more tomatoes because the store is eager to let them go.

And each time dirt slipped under my fingernails I saw analogies to my life. It is no wonder so many parables slant in this direction. As it is mid-July for my garden, so too it is mid-July for my soul. I've only a trowel to dig out the roots of long ignored weeds but I've tomatoes waiting to be lifted from pots and set into the dirt. Purple, pink and striped heirlooms, each with the promise of viable seeds for a new generation. I cannot wait to see this harvest and on this side of the sunburn I am confident that it will be worth the sweat.

Twinkie Report 2011

2011-02-02T12:29:00.001-05:00

First, Phil did NOT see his shadow. Praise the Lord the snow’s gonna stop fallin’.

Second, there’s been some confusion all along about the number of Twinkies and years left in this game. Let me clarify. The boxes of Twinkies were purchased in late January of 2004 and the first Twinkies were eaten during Levy's Organic Chemistry on February 2nd of that year. Since the cream filled cakes were at that time within their ‘fresh by’ range 2004 represents year zero. So it follows that 1 year later or when the Twinkies were 1 year old we ate Twinkie #2. Thus the year is always behind the Twinkie number by one. After today there are 2 years and 2 Twinkies left so we will wrap up the experiment in 2013 with a very stale Twinkie and a fresh one for comparison. I believe that neither Jenn will ever eat another Twinkie after that day.

Now for this years results:

I had to have the Twinkie mailed to me by my father because I left the box at his place accidentally.

At this point (Year 7, Twinkie 8) the “Pastry” was dry enough to be crumbling and patches of the outside had fallen off giving it a leprous appearance. The lettering on the package was also starting to smudge so I wasn’t in a hurry to jump in.

I couldn’t actually bite into the thing so I cheated this year and cut it (with a steak knife) in to slices- six slices each amounting to 2 bites. Here is the weird thing. Somewhere around year 3 the filling absorbed up into the Twinkie and became a sort of gooey mass in the middle. Last year that was all but gone…this year it is still there. There was definitely a core of post-filling goo throughout and some of it was still sort of kind of almost white. The goo texture is something like….maybe the nougat part of a Snickers but a little firmer? And then the outside ‘cake’ part was crusty and crumbly sort of in between toast and a crouton. As for taste….I swear to you it tastes like a Twinkie. Even without the cream filling the goo still adds that essence of vanilla and the cake still tastes like cake even though it crunches. I do want to reiterate from past years that the aftertaste is the killer. It’s something like super hyper saccharine mixed with extra evil. But it’s a delayed taste- maybe even 45 seconds- so if you eat the pieces fairly steadily you can get to the end before the nausea hits.

I personally don’t feel different other than the sense of accomplishment of having done this for 7 years now. I think the take home message at this point is that within the same package Twinkies will still degrade at different rates. Only two Twinkies Left…

(Pictures when I have proper internet. Or never if I forget.)

Pondering

2010-12-15T09:59:00.000-05:00

I am starting to wonder what we have lost. I wouldn’t really know that anything was around to be lost without my father but that extra generation back in time gives me periodic images of the past I could have known. For instance, his company was previously his father’s company and the company bank has to my knowledge always been the same bank on the same main street of the same town in which my father was born. The bank has changed names and people have retired and moved on but every person who works at the bank knows his name. While they process and file things for him they chit chat with him and keep track of each other’s lives in a neighborly way. They are known to each other and they treat each other as such.

My primary bank is an online bank. There is no store front. I will never see a human when I make a transaction. This brings with it a tremendous amount of convenience. I never have to rush to the bank before it closes as my father often does. I can transfer money at midnight. I can send money to most other humans I am required to pay with a few clicks and their routing number. I can even fill out a form and have them send my antiquated landlady who doesn’t own a computer a paper check. But even when I was a child living in a tiny town with a small town bank account I was never known by name until my number was somehow plugged into a machine and my name popped up on a screen.

My other example is travel. Once upon a time, air travel was a big deal. Humans dressed in their best when they moved from one side of the country to the other and people used travel agents to help them plan their journey. Think about it…who uses travel agents anymore? At this point I think people traveling in a large group and old people….my dad. If I need a flight to someplace I check Kayak. If I need a place to stay or a car…kayak. I can organize everything on one website, make my purchase using my online bank and viola! I am going on a vacation. Then for things to do I just search online until I get a list of restaurants and ratings. Ditto for museums, parks…whatever. I can even find coupons and discounts. All from the comfort of my couch. The most outside human influence comes via the for all intents and purposes anonymous ratings and reviews that visitors have given to attractions. But look at the convenience.

You might not get it from his appearance but Dad is something of a world traveler. He has been to Africa, Asia and Europe and I swear I will get him to South America with me before we die. He has always booked travel through the same agency. When he tells them about a trip they give him the cheapest deal and the most convenient. They also help him figure out a car and places he wants to go or see while he is there based on personal recommendations from their own visits, other customers and what they know of my father’s personal tastes. When he called them from Texas because his passport got messed up and he couldn’t make it to HN…they were on it. Dad called me the other day to tell me that after 50 jillion years, his travel agent was closing. They called him personally to tell him. Read that sentence again. They called him to tell him they were closing. So the last time he booked travel I logged on to his computer in PA from my computer in MA so that he could watch me and learn how to book travel online….which isn’t nearly the same thing.

Goliath Carrots

2010-11-20T18:46:00.004-05:00

I believe I mentioned many bad things about the garden over the summer. Once food started coming in I forgot to post what was going right.

Right now I am simmering down the last big batch of tomatoes to make sauce for lasagna tomorrow night. I managed to bring in all the plants loaded with green tomatoes before the frost and they have been slowly ripening up ended in our basement. There are a few still down there and I have my fingers crossed for Christmas. Also waiting for Christmas...on a whim I planted our 'left over' tomato and pepper plants against a wall pretty much in the yard. I then promptly forgot about them so they were never watered or weeded. Apparently they just wanted to grow and the day before the frost I rediscovered them and they are sitting in a sunny window in my house. There will be at least 3 hot peppers ready for Christmas salsa.

Other than the stuff we recently brought in, I don't actually know what we had for a harvest. However, we have plenty of jars of tomato sauce, zucchini pickles, green beans and other wonderfulness in the basement. We got maybe 15 lbs of sweet potatoes that are simple marvelous and even with the diseases running rampant we managed to bring in 4 pumpkins and 4 butternut squash (both of which ended up in the pumpkin cookies from the last post.

At this point all that is left in our garden are the carrots and the parsnips. These crops can handle the cold just fine and their tops are still the same green shade they have been all summer. Apparently this extra time in the soil is REALLY good for carrots. Allow me to illustrate with part of tonight's dinner:

The 3 carrots on the left are my rainbow carrots -orange, ruby, and yellow in this case- and the one on the right is one of our "normal" orange carrots.

When I pulled up the monster carrot we figured it wouldn't be any good but it is perfectly carrot flavored and textured. It is actually way more carrot flavored and crunchy than supermarket carrots so it is definitely a win. And....we still have like 40 this size in the ground.

Now for dinner.

-Jenn

This is going to be one of those recipes

2010-11-19T12:45:00.002-05:00

But I have figured out recently that those recipes are actually a huge pain in the ass when you want to go back and actually MAKE a repeat of the damn food in the first place…without the chaos that went in to it. I promise that I don’t always cook or bake in chaos and that I am a successful cook on days without chaos. But I apparently need chaos to convince me to write things down.

Pumpkin cookies go like this.
I received a recipe from Shuff Dog for pumpkin cookies as part of a recipe exchange. I hate these things. Just send me a damn recipe because you like the idea. Don’t make me copy and paste and jump through hoops and feel guilty and email 10 friends. If you love me…give me a recipe. If I love you I will do the same. Anyway. I recently and begrudgingly “participated” in the same exchange that Shuff sent me which either means he was responding to me or I got hit with it twice. Either way the first round made me immune. I only ended up with 3 recipes instead of the promised 30 and that’s only because I cheated. Whatever.

With this recipe resting daintily in my inbox and secretly calling me in my sleep I was faced with a choice at 9 pm (ish…I thought it was like 7) and with no supervision from Boyfriend…I could wash the mounds and mounds of dishes or grade lab reports. So I elected to make cookies.

I always gather my ingredients before I start out or I invariably end up missing something important so I gathered away without reading the process instructions. I was using left over pumpkin from a batch of muffins earlier in the week. I declared the muffins a failure but everyone else seems to think they are tasty enough. I am not a muffiness. I need desperately for someone to give me a whole wheat flour plus whole grains and maybe oatmeal and or mixed grain hot cereal muffin recipe as a base muffin recipe that I can add whatever fruit is in my pantry to and call it a success. I keep trying and failing. Anyway for the muffins I wacked 2 sugar pumpkins (one from the garden and 1 from TJs) apart, baked them, and removed their orange succulent goodness for my own purposes. I had less than a cup left over so I had to supplement my cookies with a few scoops of left over baked butternut squash from my garden. Orange and squash flavored. Perfect.

I am not content to follow a recipe so I elected to swap out the regular flour for whole wheat. I dutifully measured out the requisite amount of flour and suddenly was overcome with the feeling that I was not alone. We have flour moths! Cue horror music and shuddering.

To be fair I found 1 worm in 1 bag of old flour. However this spawned a panic attack which resulted in me shoving all baking products not in jars or Tupperware into the freezer. Then running out of room and becoming despondent. There was nothing else I could do…so I made cookies. (Actually we are like an hour in to the cookie making process at this point and if I hadn’t already started melting the butter I would have gone to bed. )

The all purpose flour was pure and white and both nutrient and worm free so I could proceed. Per usual I mixed all my ‘wet’ ingredients and all my dry ingredients separately. I then planned to mix the 2 sets of ingredients together but I paused to read the directions. I always forget that cookies are more high maintenance than other baked goods. You are supposed to mix the butter and sugar together then add everything else. Whatever. You can skip that. But you really do want a mixer to combine the pumpkin and the butter. Crap.

Luckily, Boyfriend’s mom gave me an old stand mixer from a yard sale. I fired that baby up and…nothing happened. At this point I began to suspect that Boyfriend had disabled the mixer either because he wanted me to stop making baked goods to prevent me from weighing 400 lbs or to prevent me from making baked goods and adding on to the huge stacks of dishes to be done. Or maybe the reason it was at the garage sale was because it was broken. Whatever.

So I used one of the mixer beaters as a hand held tool to combine the pumpkin and butter. I then tried to do the same when I mixed the flour and the gooey stuff but it was a no go. Fork…spoon…spatula…worthless. I had to result to hand mixing literally by hand. This worked amazingly well and resulted in me being coated with pre-cookie. I was forced to eat the pre-cookie before I could start my baking.

At this point the self control fuse was blown in the back of my brain. The doughy goodness was so amazing that about 5 larval cookies lives’ ended before I realized what I was doing and forced myself to stop eating the cookie dough like cereal.

I got the first batch of cookies in the oven, cleaned up enough to make space for the cookies to cool and made the glaze/frosting/icing. Right about the time the first batch needed to come out, Boyfriend came home and I was caught red handed filling up the cookie jar. It was also like 1030-11pm and the first time I had looked at a clock since maybe lunchtime. Which led me to ask the question “what the hell am doing baking cookies when I should be asleep?”

So I finished baking and frosting the cookies and went to bed. The end.

I figured out that the glaze goes on much nicer if you nuke it for about 10 seconds. After that you can drizzle and spread it on to the warm cookies with a spoon and when everything cools you will have a nice crusty frosted top on each cookie.

Boyfriend asked me the next day if the cookies were made with crack because they were so good. I could easily eat 5 in a row frosted or not but I would probably die of a diabetic coma if I tried. Moderation in all good things including cookies….and cookie dough. Which is why we are down to 6 cookies in 3 days. Don’t double the recipe unless you are giving these away. They are too dangerous to have laying about the kitchen.

The REAL recipe.

Pumpkin Cookies

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar (I used ½ brown sugar)

1/2 cup butter (1 stick) softened

1 cup pumpkin puree (canned or fresh)

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

Glaze (see below)

Preheat over to 350 F. Grease baking sheets.

Combine flour, baking soda and powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt in a medium bowl. Beat sugar and butter in a large mixing bowl until well blended. Beat in pumpkin, egg and vanilla until smooth. Gradually beat in the flour mixture. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto the prepared baking sheets.

Bake for 15-18 minutes or until edges are firm. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely. Drizzle glaze over the cookies.

Glaze

Combine 2 cups sifted powdered sugar, 3 Tbs milk, 1 Tbs melted butter and 1 tsp vanilla extract in a small bowl until smooth. (I added a healthy dose of cinnamon as well)

Yields ~ 36 cookies.

For the non-cinnamon types I would suggest substituting ¼ t of one or all of the following: ground clove, ground ginger, or ground allspice.

mid-July

2010-07-12T22:02:00.004-04:00

Any good garden book will tell you the same thing. When the snow flies for months of end and the wind is increasingly frigid, humans look towards the promise of green. Some hasten it any way they can, buying seeds, planning plots and dreaming dreams of fresh salads. Then the drifts finally drift away and ground is broken for the first time of the season. Hearty seeds are tucked gently in to hard earth with whispered prayers and fingers crossed against late season frosts. And after the first hits of green manage to push through the crust towards the sun, there is hope for flowers and a flurry of activity. The winter is now over and there is much to do, much to plant, and everything, everything, everything must be grown. The excitement of planting gives way to the first leaves of each crop, then the first TRUE leaves, then the long hopes for flowers. And as this growth is happening, sometimes doubling overnight, there is a fight against hungry vegetarians. There is transplanting, watering, staking, weeding, mulching, pruning, fencing and sweat. And it is all carried by the next new thing and the next. Time marches forward and thoughts move to the harvest, jars are purchased, recipes are planned and all is right with the world. Each day is one step closer to the harvest but to make it there you have to pass through mid-July.

Mid-July, when it is too hot for the plant munching beetles to fly, when it is too dry for new weeds to start, when the simple act of watering causes sweat to run down your back, and nothing new happens. Lettuces are going to seed and radishes are done and everything else is in an infantile state. Sure you can fry your green tomatoes or throw your squash flowers on a salad but that seems awful wasteful. Why garden, why grow things, why bother with all this time and money when the grocery store is air conditioned, why were you so ambitions, and why do you now have to go out into that hot sun to pull out the lettuce and replant radishes, beets, carrots and spinach? Why me? Why now? WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

Because you want spinach for your pasta sauces and you want your own radishes and beets for thanksgiving. And because if you get really really lucky, those late tomato transplants you just put in will bust out a few green tomatoes before the first frost that you can tuck discretely away in the cool cellar until two weeks before Christmas. Just think of the goodies Santa will bring you if instead of cookies you offer a toasted tomato sandwich with home grown tomatoes now ripe in December. It could happen.

Yesterday I did a bit of harvesting practice. I pruned down my parsley and chives and I yanked a beet to see how it was doing. After crunching on the beet slices I threw the beet leaves, chives and parsley in the dehydrator ($8 at a yard sale baby) and went in to Boston to see Old Ironsides. This morning I chopped up the beet leaves and threw them in to some tuna salad. I couldn't taste it but other reports said it tasted like dill. Maybe thats because it went in the dehydrator with the chives. Either way I will do the tuna salad thing again. It adds vitamin A, some B's, C and a compliment of minerals so why the heck not.

Canned Zombie Berries

2010-07-10T21:13:00.004-04:00

We picked strawberries at a pick your own place this year. The perfectest berries were set aside to make preserves only I screwed it up. Apparently with strawberries (unlike other berries) you need to soak them over night in a sugar solution. This will help to preserve their color and fill their internal airspace so they don't float. But since I didn't know this and we didn't do this we got several jars of beautiful bright red liquid with a mass of mushed albino strawberries floating on top. Zombie berries. Not exactly what I had in mind.

I have laid awake at night mourning the fact that I wasted the best of the best of our berries on a slimy worthless mess. You can't give these away. They are ugly and gross and hungry for brains.

I was super antsy tonight so I popped a box of lame $1-on-sale-with-coupon brownie mix out of our makeshift pantry to occupy myself. Instead of the oil called for on the box I used fat free plain yogurt because I had never tried it before. Then I figured "What the hell, I think brownies are gross anyway so it would be hard for me to make them worse right?" I scooped the mutant berries out of the jar and threw those in to the mix. You were supposed to add water but when I was spooning out the berries I also got a fair amount of the syrup that they were canned in which added more liquid than required. Oops. I had to add an extra 10 minutes on to the bake time to make up for this.

So now, picture if you will a chocolate covered strawberry. The fruit is perfectly ripe, red and sweet and it is cocooned in a thick chocolaty shell just waiting to grace your lips and dance across your taste buds. Now slowly transform that outer shell into a thick and fudgy chocolate cake and that is my contribution to the world.

The yogurt made the brownies fluffier and gave them a slight tanginess. This complimented the subtle strawberry flavor that infused into the brownies. And the undead berries apparently have every ounce of flavor of the fresh-picked sun-kissed fruit. And the left over syrup is pretty much just strawberry flavored juice which is pretty tasty in it's own right. But it is absolutely indescribable when mixed with an equal part gin. All grown up but still that same vibrant shade of red.

Now everyone will want a jar.

New "friends"

2010-07-01T15:56:00.011-04:00

Recently I started seeing little green "bubbles" on my tomato leaves. One maybe two per plant. Interesting color and shape and a satisfactory snapping noise when you pop them. They look like this:

And they will become this:

At which time they will do this:

SOOOOO....I spent 2 hours today going through my tomatoes leaf by leaf and plant by plant gently removing the little tomato hornworm eggs from the leaves and dropping them fiendishly into a Ball jar half filled with soapy water. Then giggling.

When I was done I proceeded to crawl around the rest our back 40 for oh ...3 more hours. The patrol was pretty damn successful.

In the process I managed to catch 3 pairs of these guys:

Doing the striped cucumber beetle salsa:

Which is something like a 30x bonus multiplier in terms of pest removal. I also caught umpteen hundred lonely striped cucumber beetles and more than my fair share of *#&#@# oriental beetles (See last post for image). Most garden web sites say that they aren't found in gardens and that they do little damage. BULL. They are as ubiquitous as the cucumber beetles and as frisky. They are as frequently found nibbling the outer edges of my cucurbits as digging around the roots looking for a place to lay eggs. Their cute little three pronged antennae fan out nicely in the water.

I also got one of these:

Thank God it was only one because a little part of me curls up and dies every time I see a Japanese Beetle. I must have had a bad experience as a child or something because Asiatic and Oriental beetles are the same size and shape and...consistency but they don't bother me all that much. I don't want to remember.

While we are talking about unpleasant bugs, I extricated a huge squash bug from a pumpkin plant (after which I smelled like slow death):

Who knew squash bugs looked like this when they were small?

I found squash buggies in excess sucking on the bottom side of my tomato leaves. They are way easier to squish than to pop into a jar when they are that size. Almost exactly like these guys:

We have more ants than blades of grass in the back yard but thankfully they haven't found the aphids yet. If they do they will start to guard them from predators and move their eggs around. Ants herd aphids like cattle which is wicked cool...as long as it isn't on one of MY plants.

Also on my kill list are two of these:

These have the awful extra crunchy exoskeleton of a Japanese beetle, the ability to cover you in an unholy stink like a stink bug AND they can pinch you when they back that thing up. If that isn't enough, they have teleportation powers that allow them to appear at random out of thin air. The Earwig is the officially insect of Hell.

A few garden sites claim that these buggers don't really harm plants. I put this in the same box as oriental beetles because I found them wrapped up in a wilted squash leaf that had been reduced to lace. They die in a rather impressively violent way when they hit the soap.

All told I only found two helpful insects and one of them got flipped into the soap when I grabbed a striped cucumber beetle.

Young two spotted stink bugs are beautiful, soap bath or no. Hopefully I see more of these. I promise to be more careful. They are fond of piercing caterpillars and sucking out their juices like a Capri Sun. I am going to need an army of them if I missed a tomato hornworm egg. Heaven help me.

I found a 14 spotted lady bird beetle that I managed NOT to kill. I will take more of those any day. Go ye forth and munch my aphids buddy.

We also had a robin camping out and chomping down while I was weeding my herb garden. I think cucumber beetles are like bird skittles and I am ok with that.

Someday maybe I will put up my own pictures. As before none of these are mine.

-Jn

Kerry Kerry quite contrary

2010-06-24T21:29:00.017-04:00

Kerry, Kerry quite contrary

How does your garden grow?
With plump white grubs
Snails and slugs
And seed corn maggots in the bean rows

Marmota monax visits for snacks
While cabbage butterflies flutter past
And the click beetles click
And wireworms squirm
As the oriental beetles plan their attack.

No seriously kids, stay out of our $*(&#$ garden or I kill you. And I live happily ever after.

The End.

> 10 grubs per square foot? Apply grub-x liberally
Slugs and snails on all your plants? Weed EVERYTHING. Place any molusc you find into an empty Gatorade bottle with lid. Leave in the sun on a hot afternoon then THROW IT AWAY
Seed Corn Maggots stunting your beans and allowing them to be infected with some type of damping off fungus? Let everything dry out for 3 days. Helps if you can make it stop raining. This will also help with wire worms.
Find a click beetle? Cool. These are adult wire worms. If you can catch the fast little bastards stick them in a container. Shake it until they are upside down and watch them do their thing. When you get bored, squish them.
Catch a cabbage moth or an oriental beetle? Squish it. Or stick them in a jar with plaster of paris so they dry out and die. Then you can shove a pin through them and stick them in a box.
Think of it like shrunken heads as signs of victory in battle.
Got groundhogs? Praise the good Lord for sending you target practice...or that the neighbors lab got loose and dispatched it for you. Whatever.

Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well. Ecc. 11:6

-Jn

(By the way, none of those pictures are mine.)

The last post caused this post

2010-03-12T23:24:00.003-05:00

A painting before dawn.

It’s single digits in the morning
With a subtle hint of spring
And I’m shivering.
It’s as much from lack of sleep
As the breeze blown off the bay
Humidity-thick, crisp and cold
From just passed rain that wet the pavement.
Small splashes accent my footsteps
And the smells of spilt oils
Mix with the sea
And my car burning antifreeze.

God, yesterday was years ago
All mixed victory and defeat
Every triumph met with tears
And not what I’d expected
Three half-hours ago
Let alone two odd years.
Why does all anger come this easily
Now all joy, now all despair?
Now you’re held high and always right
Now upturned and always wrong
And always looking towards another then.

I think I’m waxing philosophical
As I’m waning on awake
Retracing roads by muscle
And lost in sleepless thoughts.
It seems at every crisscrossed street
Sleepy traffic lights are blinking
Causing cars to pause.
Too many other humans
Out too early or too late
Turning on to Tree streets
Turning off of mine

How did I come to stumble here
All weariness and wanderlust?
Directions scribbled on napkins
Or maps from memory?
It’s misplaced sleep or loss of blood
Or rules of love rewritten
It’s the tattered edges of days gone by
And dreams pushed farther on.
Inward, toward, upward, forward
With every spent second
The future’s slipping in to past.

No right on red at Pleasant.
Left arrow at the next light.
Right. Left. Stop. Driveway.
And no light on the back stairs.
I’m all fumbling and far too loud
Knocking tables, dropping keys
Dropping in to darkened dreams
And still wearing my shoes
A strained attempt to disentangle
A wet and single digit morning
From the fringes of a yesternight.

- Jn
(3/11/10-3/12/10)

What is it about prime numbers and music in odd timing signatures?

My students

2010-03-10T17:18:00.003-05:00

Why do I care about my students and why do I run myself into the ground to do the absolute best I can by them? I have no idea.

1. Because it is my job and if a job is worth doing its worth using your whole ass.

2. In a very round about way, they pay me to teach them. It isn't their fault it is so round about and it also isn't their fault I am not paid enough.

3. I have absolutely no proof that anyone else in this university cares about them and dammit someone has to.

4. Some of them will end up being my friends post class

5. Some of them will even say Hi to me in the hall way

6. Some of them are brilliant even if they haven't figured it out yet and they will be amazing.

7. Some of them aren't cut out for this at least not yet but I know how to be gentler than I trust my colleagues to be.

8. Some of them are just dumb but honestly even if it is there fault that they are dumb (this means you stoner kid) they are still a human and they have certain rights as a human and those rights include not having me take all my anger out on them even if I want to

9. I am constantly learning

10. I am constantly being humbled

11. I am constantly being lifted up and told I am awesome

12. Because by whatever twist of fate they have been entrusted to me for a semester and I take real ownership on how they do

13. Because I am a student to and I know what it means to have someone like me as a teacher

14. Because I am trying to prepare myself for a future of doing this

15. Because I can't help myself, because I am me.

...class...

-Jn

16. For Sarah G who I forgot reads this on Facebook.

It's time

2010-03-07T21:26:00.002-05:00

This is me. I am growing my own munitions this year. Today was maybe the first warm day in forever soooooooo no planting yet. But I will let you know.

Dear Jenn

2010-02-25T13:50:00.003-05:00

Me: You have a Tea Addiction.

Me: I know. But there are worse addictions.

Me: That's true but it is still and addiction.

Me: I know and I am coming to terms with that.

`Well, I'd hardly finished the first verse,' said the Hatter, `when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, "He's murdering the time! Off with his head!"'

`How dreadfully savage!' exclaimed Alice.

`And ever since that,' the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, `he won't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now.'

A bright idea came into Alice's head. `Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?' she asked.

`Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: `it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.'

`Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice.

`Exactly so,' said the Hatter: `as the things get used up.'

`But what happens when you come to the beginning again?' Alice ventured to ask.

`Suppose we change the subject,' the March Hare interrupted, yawning.

Groundhog's Day Twinkie- As promised

2010-02-05T23:06:00.005-05:00

Last year I tried to document the essence of the Twinkie. This year I convinced AK to be my guest photographer so that the rest of the world could have some of the Twinkie eating experience. I mean if you aren't me or Jenn you will never completely understand what eathing a 7 year old Twinkie really does to you but these pictures may help. I was telling people it was something like 5 or so years this year but I am off by 2. It really has been 7 years and that disturbs me more than eating the Twinkie. 2 years vanished from memory. Oh well. The pictures...

Before I started I showed the Twinkie to AK for verification purposes. It looked normal but it was really, really hard.

This is obviously before the first bite. Notice the expression- a healthy mix of excitement and concern. "I wonder what this year will bring...I hope I don't die."

Still excited and trying to figure out the best place to take the bite out of the 7 year old rock hard Twinkie.

The first bite. I think this picture is before the taste buds kicked in and its all about the texture. It was hard/stale and super crumbly. Very chalky.

Now I can taste it. But it's so dry that it's hard to chew and swallow. I think the taste is pretty much old high fructose corn syrup. Super saccharine-y and overpowering. This picture is my favorite because it is pretty much spot on for the whole experience.

Yes. Yes it really is that gross.

If you are keeping track over the years you will remember that the filling completely changed in color and texture and last year it was pretty much all absorbed into the 'cake' and dried out. However, this year I hit a patch of that while absorbed, was still chewy and still sort of white-ish.

Somehow I look normal while eating a 7 year old Twinkie???

Just a few more bites. I am sending proof of the experience out to the team of people praying for me in Rochester.

A close up of the star.

El fin. The wrapper with a view of the water from the 8th floor of the UMB library.

I urge you not to try this, not that anyone else is this crazy. The report from Jenn is that her Twinkie was dark (multi-grain?) but everything else is pretty similar in description. Cheers

-Jn

Week 2

2010-02-05T14:18:00.003-05:00

Things are not well at UMB. I don't know a person who is not walking around stewing and furious. Things started out looking promising even perfect for pretty much everyone during the last week of Christmas break but by the end of week two everything had been upended. Those told they would not be teaching have been pressed in to it. Those told they would have days free for doing research or field work now have to come in. Everyone I know has been screwed in at least one way and most of us in several very large ways.

The problem now is that there is this pervasive undercurrent of anger. And from what I can tell everyone is trying their various ways to cool off and it isn't working. Tears, prayer, meditation, drinking, therapy, talking things out with others, trying to reason with the offending party. Everyone is still PISSED OFF and its leaking out in to the rest of our lives.

In the past 2 weeks I have been so angry I could not cry, so angry I could not stop crying, so angry I could not eat, too angry to be able to eat anything at all, so angry I could not speak, so angry I swore in front of my students, so angry I could not move or function or consciously think of the next reasonable step to take to move forward, so angry I almost went out and bought a shelter cat (I have no idea?).

I think part of the problem is that everyone is unhappy and everyone knows it and everyone does not have to be unhappy and we also know that too. BUT because of poor planning, last minute readjustments, miss communications and other human errors everyone got screwed over and now that the second week of the semester is drawing to a close the schedules are pretty much set in stone. Whatever you were dealt, you are now stuck with it. Suck it up and deal with it. But I think it is the overwhelming knowledge that it didn't have to be this way AT ALL that has everyone stuck. That and the fact that every other person you interact with has a similar story. Somehow that keeps fueling the angry and not letting it die out. Like an infection or something that keeps mutating slightly and reinfecting the host.

It also isn't the type of anger that is useful in fueling you to move forward or change things because you have to move forward in to the broken semester schedule and you can't change it. It is the "suck it up wuss" type of anger that requires rallying up more energy to throw at quenching the anger, It is energy draining, productivity sapping anger. And its everywhere I need to be productive.

I have a tremendous amount on my plate the semester and my ability to check off all of the boxes was tenuous at best when I signed up for it. Now the odds are stacked that much higher against me and resources that I need from other people are also starting to fail. Commitments are being broken, deadlines are not being met, expectations are not being made clear, and agreements are being invalidated to a shocking degree. While this comes off as a pity party it isn't meant to be. This is what I am facing and what I am seeing and what I am trying to figure out how to deal with. The majority of the people I rely on are facing the same problems and some of their problems are ME. I think that the general overall fuck-up has completely undermined everyone's trust. That is a hard hard thing and I think that is the root of why we are all stuck in angry gear.

A dear friend sent me this note last night. Then they told her she didn't have enough credits to graduate in June and would have to wait until December, long after they told her that the courses she took were approved. Now it looks like they might revert to the original plan but things are still painfully up in the air. (One step forward, two steps back, one step forward...)

Today she called me to get/give a pep talk and our homework is to get off our asses and move forward so our theses don't ruin our lives. So it is with that in mind that I post her list and my response...

AK's Life Decisions
1. I'm going to start painting. Sunsets, beaches, trees, water...all the things I love.

2. I'm going to listen to more Jazz...it makes me feel alive and sophisticated. (Download Eva Cassidy)

3. When I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. (Thesis, thesis, thesis).

4. I'm going to stop picking my mutha fuckin fingas!

5. I'm never going to eat a Twinkie again.

6. I am going to get a puppy and name him Mulligan and he will sit by my side while I do #1 and sometimes #2.

7. When I get frustrated with life, I am going to take a deep breath and thank God for all my blessings.

More to come...this was to wet your whistle (say it like Rabbit on Whinnie the Pooh).

I think I'm going insane.

Jn's Life Decisions
1. I'm not going to start painting. But I will write more. Sunsets, beaches, trees, water...all the things I love.

2. I'm going to listen to more Jazz...it makes me feel alive and sophisticated. (Download Eva Cassidy)

3. When I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. (Thesis, thesis, thesis). I am going to keep a CURRENT to do list so things aren't forgotten, misplaced or mismanaged in to the ground and so I get back to being dependable.

4. It is unreasonable to think that I will ever stop picking my mutha fuckin fingas! but I am really going to try. (AK and I share a frightening number of neurotic tendencies.)

5. I'm am not going to eat another Twinkie for 362 days. I am never going to enjoy a Twinkie. I am going to post the Twinkie pictures...soon.

6. I am going to get a puppy and name her Ruger and she will go with me everywhere I can possibly take her.

7. When I get frustrated with life, I am going to take a deep breath and thank God for all my blessings. There are more blessings than just "I can still walk" and "No one that I know has died this week" and I will actively look for them.

-Jn

Tomorrow is Groundhog's Day

2010-02-01T12:44:00.002-05:00

If you don't know what this means to me then you don't know me. For reference see this: http://jnkcmd.blogspot.com/2009/02/wheres-cream-filling.html

Aimee does not yet know that she is going to be documenting this tomorrow when we meet to thesis but she will. More on this tomorrow obviously.

Also, dear facebook readers I still cannot log on. I love you very much and you can email me. I will respond. Also my cell has not changed so you can try that too. (This is particularly directed at you Anna and MelKel and Misha. Misha I got your text and yes we need to hang out.)

Themes of the kitchen

2010-01-20T17:48:00.000-05:00

So we’ve been trying to do more with less. It’s a good moto when you have a choice. When you crunch the numbers and figure out that you cannot both keep a budget and cover your needs on your current income it isn’t really a moto any more.

I will go in to the details of how we are attempting the whole more with less thing a bit later. More than one step and each sorta deserves its own attempt to shine.

For now know that we had to eat our groceries in reverse order of priority after our last shopping trip. We had more frozenables than our freezer would hold and while it started out nice and frosty outside, it didn’t hold long enough. So we have been in a race to eat food before it went bad since we bought it and now we are at the end of the road and the few remaining fresh fruits and veggies were ready to sprout legs.

Today was all about using up every little thing possible before it was too late. Even if it things didn’t make culinary sense. There is also a birthday which needed tending.

Garbage Can Stuffed Peppers… Dos
(I don’t remember how I made uno any more but I know I used both WINE and KETCHUP in the same recipe. I have no shame.)
Ingredients
(whatever is going bad in the kitchen?)
6 Green peppers minus the one you already ate
1 Onion
7 very small vine tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic (or however many you can find in the corners of the fridge)
1 pound ground meat. Try turkey or beef or woodchuck if you have it.
½ C uncooked rice. I used jasmine basmati rice
½ a baby can of tomato sauce
An artistic amount of Ketchup
Worcestershire sauce
Feta Cheese (however much cheese you want)
Parmesan Cheese (ditto)
Spices: Chili Powder, Crushed Red Pepper, Oregano, Ground Coriander, Parsley, Ground Pepper, Salt

Start some water boiling in a big pot. Cut the tops off the peppers and remove any edible pepper pieces from the tops before you pitch them. Scoop the seeds and ribs from the peppers and cut out any bad spots. (Note: you really shouldn’t use peppers with bad spots because the goodness will leak out the holes. Damn) Drop the hollowed out peppers in the boiling water for 3 minutes (longer is NOT better here). Finely chop the remaining pepper pieces from the tops and set them aside. Use a slotted spoon or tongs to get the peppers out of the pot. Drain the water from the insides and set aside. Dump the rice into the water where the peppers just were and add a heaping helping of the above spices. Cook the rice for about 13 minutes or until it starts to get soft but not done. Finely chop the onion to match the pepper tops. Add some olive oil to a 12 inch, well seasoned cast iron skillet of awesomeness and throw in the chopped onions and peppers. When the onions start to become translucent add in the ground meat product. Drain the water from the half cooked rice and set aside. Dice the tomatoes. When the meat is almost completely browned add the garlic and tomatoes, then the tomato sauce and quantity of the above spices that you wish. Use the ketchup to sketch something interesting on top of the mixture and then use it to sign your name on your work. Throw on two splooshes of Worcestershire sauce and turn off the heat. Mix in the rice, feta and parmesan cheese. Place the parboiled peppers…in a muffin tin. Stuff them as full of the meat rice concoction as possible. Put any remaining meat/rice into a bread pan and pretend it’s a meatloaf. Bake everything for 25 or so minutes at 350 until everything is warm and gooey and wonderful all the way through.

Note 1: If I had more garlic I would add it. Then maybe some tomato paste and red wine in the meat mix .And mozzarella. Lots of mozzarella. I would even sprinkle mozzarella on top of the peppers so that it could get all melty and brown. For spices I would add garlic powder and basil to both the meat and the rice mix.

Note 2: I prepped and packed my parboiled peppers in my pepper pan and popped the peppers in the fridge for the present. I will bake them when I know what train my boyfriend is getting on.

1 Bad Banana 9 Good Cupcakes
Dry Ingredients:
1 C flour (Use whole wheat and pretend its healthy)
¾ C sugar (Brown sugar compliments the whole wheat pretty well)
¾ t Baking Powder
3/8 t baking soda (or ¼ and half of ¼ t since no one owns 1/8 spoons but me)
¼ t salt
1/8 nutmeg (or just give the shaker some authoritative shakes)
¼ t cinnamon

Wet Ingredients:
1 banana mashed to oblivion (~0.5 C)
¼ C milk and 1/8 t lemon juice
¼ C butter
1 Egg beaten
½ t Vanilla
¼ t Almond Extract

Preheat the oven to like 350ish. Combine and mix the dry ingredients. Do the same with the wet ones. Then thoroughly mix the 2 together. Slap some muffin papers in a muffin tin or grease the wells. Add the batter to the tin and bake for about 18 minutes. This made 9 muffins for me. You might also elect to make a mini cake. This should be the right size for a 9x9 pan…just bake the thing for longer. Feel free to double the recipe since that’s how it started.

DISCLAIMER: I have no idea how good these are. You tell me. I refuse to eat them. Last time I tried the original recipe I gagged. I can’t make myself like these any more unlike banana bread. Every time I make a banana baked good I think I am going to upchuck.

Posing as Healthy Cream Cheese Frosting
(I pretty much stole this one straight up aside from the fact that I added copious amounts of cinnamon as well)

Ingredients
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons butter (called for unsalted but whatever)
2 tablespoons brown sugar (called for light but goodness they were picky)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (do people really measure vanilla and almond extract?)
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 tablespoon honey
An over healthy dose of cinnamon

Melt butter and allow to cool. Or just melt it and toss it in. Why not? In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, butter, brown sugar, vanilla and almond extract. Beat with an electric mixer. Or since you don’t own a mixer use a fork. When mixture starts to stiffen, stop mixer fork and add honey and copious amounts of cinnamon. Continue to beat until light and fluffy. Do not over mix, or it will collapse (I can’t vouch for this). Spread immediately and store cake in refrigerator.

DISCLAIMER 2: Use extreme caution as the frosting is highly addictive and more than one coal miner’s daughter has become sick from eating too much at a sitting. I wonder if you could freeze it in to ice cream! Mmmm. Death.

-Jn

Been a long time since I rock and rolled

2010-01-20T17:47:00.000-05:00

I took a break to try to get my shit together. Turns out that to get your shit together properly you can’t actually take a break. Funny that. All I really got out of the repose was the revelation that if I am not actively writing I suck at it. I stutter in text. Can’t keep a thought rolling to a finish. And I tend towards not starting at all. If I can productively procrastinate enough the day is done and the writing isn’t…but I didn’t have to suffer through my own mediocrity. Which in turn breeds a new form of mediocrity.

Let’s try and be done with that.

In the coming months I need to write for a handful of scholarships and there is that whole evil thesis lingering…looming…lurking…waiting to grab and wrap my foot around a root under the water until I run out of air. I don’t think I will ever be in the mood for that but ima do if only because I have to.

And since my audience of 5 is primarily in tune via Facebook I thought I might pass along to you that Facebook and I are not on speaking terms. It’s not me. Facebook somehow dissociated all of the email addresses from my account so I can’t sign in. I still get some email notifications but I can’t do anything about it. I waste less time but boy is it a pain in the ass.

Also I had to re-pierce my nose today. I think things have reverted back to the way they were before the ring got put in, when everyone told me that it was a bad idea and that they wouldn’t like it and neither would I. But seeing as how it’s the only piece of jewelry that I wear that I can regularly see and the face happens to be mine, it’s my choice. And I still like it. Enough to withstand the involuntary blood and tears and near loss of consciousness that go with acute pain that close to the eyes. Maybe someday when I have a two year old, or an interview for a real job…

I spent most of the day in the kitchen so you will get the results of that shortly. Use it as you will.

-Jn

If nothing else- Pray for Haiti

2010-01-13T23:12:00.004-05:00

For updates on HAFF and the missionaries see here:
http://www.haffdetails.blogspot.com/

For a good charity see here:
http://www.missionaryflights.org/

Attempt one

2009-08-03T21:47:00.002-04:00

...at canning applesauce was sort of a half success. I make apple sauce all the time in the pressure cooker but it looks like more sauce in the pan than it actually is I guess. Instead of 2 quart jars, 2 pint jars. Instead of 2 properly canned jars, 1 properly canned jar and one that exploded all over the kitchen when I dropped it with the crappy plastic tongs that aren't made for picking up anything, especially not boiling hot jars. But what was left of that jar went great with dinner.

...at making yogurt was only successful in the learning. The most important lesson, do not drop the digital thermometer into the milk. Digital thermometers are not water proof which also applies to milk. Without a thermometer you have to guess at temperatures and I guessed high. Live and active cultures aren't so live and active over 55 degrees. Oops.

I am with Honduras

2009-07-06T08:55:00.001-04:00

Leave the country to govern itself by its own laws.

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/07/article-239-of-the-honduran-constitution.html

http://www.hondurasthisweek.com/editorial/1186-honduras-united-to-defend-their-constitution-and-democracy

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/honduras-removal-president-legal-constitution-has-vaccine

Technicoloring the treetops

2009-07-05T09:32:00.000-04:00

June was awash with rain and the clouds that ferried it from place to place. Colors were all muted in shades of grey and the world seemed out of focus from the fog. Flowers blossomed sparingly and mother birds willed their children to stay in the nest so they did not die from the elements. Basements got wet and rivers rose. All people seemed to be able to talk about was the weather. “Welcome to Seattle, Massachusetts.” “It is supposed to be 100 in June.” “I heard in a dream last night to build an ark.” But I suppose this was actually to be expected since the showers drowned out dreams of something more exciting. Weather seems to be the most neutral topic of conversation and so when the world shifts into greys and softer shades perhaps the neutral topic is natural.

The morning of the fourth found me in Ipswich after Isolating Thunderstorms had stalled our egress one or two hours longer than was safe for riding. The weather had turned overnight. There was a sun. It was a warm sun. And the breeze through my jacket vents was for the first time necessary to keep temperatures in check.

As we twisted between treescapes and river views it became apparent that the sky had never been this blue before and the clouds never so purely white. The greens were striving to be the greenest they had ever been and the red-browns of the forest understory were so vibrant they seemed as alive as the trees themselves. The world was soaked in pure earnest color radiating from all corners. Stone walls had cloaked themselves in green ivies and the river was made up in reflections of the sky and trees both refusing to maintain dull colors after the break in the weather. The only grey left on the landscape was that rightfully owned by the well worn road to anywhere. And even then, as the pavement wove its way through the colors and ducked out of site around corners or at the edges of the horizon, perspective took over and all that remained of our path was the vibrant yellow stripes guiding the way forward.

Tomatoes and trees

2009-06-29T22:49:00.001-04:00

First you buy tomato plants. Then you gain permission from the land lady to put in a garden for which to plant said plants. Then you weed a small plot until the rain gets too rainy. Then you go buy more plants because if 6 tomatoes are ok then 10 should be fine too and some peppers and beans and cucumbers and zucchini shouldn’t hurt either. After that you pull up all of the not-grass that is in the “backyard” because now you can fill it up. Then you find yourself unable to requisition a shovel but it is raining anyway so it doesn’t matter much.

But now you have a shovel and a tray of plants that need planting. So you begin turning the soil and find lots of rocks and even more glass. But for every shard of glass there is a nice healthy earthworm so it can’t be all bad. The ground is moist and dark, full of nutrients and animals to shuffle them around. And while you work you even out the strangely sloped earth until you are about halfway through. This is when you first meet the tree. The tree quickly loses a few roots and you move on without much thought. But there it is again and again. And now the roots are growing around and through each other and now they are growing into each other. The first one is perhaps 2 feet long, then 5, now 10. And now for every solid shovel of dirt to turn there is another shovel that hits roots and stops dead.

This tree was planted perhaps before the houses themselves or at least at the same time. It is large but not regal. It is a city tree with boils and galls for all its shady branches. It grows at the junction of 3 lots. Above ground it is forced this way by a garage wall, and that way by a fence, and growth is limited on another side by a driveway. Restrictions and rules in place to keep it growing ever taller and straighter if not healthier. But beneath the soil the tree was given no tending, no direction. Roots were free to do as they desired, first up now over, now through left and back right. A driveway may limit direct nutrients but not the persistent quest for them. And so a sprawling net of subterranean hardwood has crept from the parent trunk in all possible directions.

What could be removed from the small plot in the small time allowed with the small amount of energy left in the shoveler, was removed with gusto. Now the vestiges remain at the edges of the land waiting to be turned. Perhaps this is ground enough for my chosen green things to grow. The possibility of sharing will be considered after the application of a tape measure in the morning sunlight. If a compromise cannot now be made a new battle will unfold with a re-energized shoveler. But the outcome of the war is not in question.

The trees will always win. Unlike fickle flesh, trees can afford to be patient. I will be around tending and toiling on my small plot for a few years more at the most. The ground left behind will be more rich, even, and aerated for the effort. And so the root edges will reclaim territory in a slowly meandering way. The tree is surely older than I am, and may outlive me by a number of years. The tree has time to wait. Trees always have time.

Pancakes

2009-05-24T20:17:00.002-04:00

2c trader joes multigrain baking mix
1c oatmeal
2T ground flax seed
2T oil
2 eggs
1.5c milk
cinnamon or nutmeg to taste

Serve with berries and real maple syrup.

Basically its the TJ's recipe plus oatmeal and flax seed and enough milk to make the consistency right again. But the bonus is that they are high in fiber and relatively good for you. I'm sure it works with other baking mix too or you could be less lazy and make them entirely from scratch. What intrigues me is that the TJ's box recipe is supposed to make between 12 and 14 cakes and I added a bunch of stuff and still only got 12. Shrug.

-Jn

4 seconds finished

2009-04-23T19:47:00.003-04:00

Night comes slowly to this city
Washed with clean spring rain
Grey, Grey-blue the clouds dispersing
In sunset pink the foremost framed
And the buildings, mirrored, reflecting
Green and steel, green and grey
Save the few sun's light directing
Gold on gold to end the day

-Jn
I-93N
4/23/09

I hate bananas

2009-03-02T11:10:00.004-05:00

We had nastier than usual bananas in the apartment this week so I decided to make bread with them. Keep in mind that the last time I made a banana inclusive recipe I gagged several times- pretty much whenever I could smell the bananas- so this was a big step. Also I had no pecans or walnuts, no coconut, no almond extract, no mixer, and a mostly white flour/refined sugar avoiding household. I knew mixing was going to be a problem so I made sure my wet and dry ingredients were homogenized before I put them together. That seemed to work well and I don't actually think a mixer would have made it any better (more to clean up and put away).

I was told that the bread came out perfectly and that I shouldn't change anything- no nuts, no coconut, no messing around with the flour or sugar ratios. I even had a few pieces and it was tasty which should tell you something.

(And as always 5L feel free to skip the DEATH ingredient.)

Jenn’s Perfect Banana Bread- adapted from Mom’s recipe

1 C White flour (I only use King Arthur Flour now for everything)
1 C White whole wheat flour
½ C White sugar
½ C Brown Sugar
1 teas. Baking soda
½ teas. Salt
1 T fresh grated orange peel (actually about 3 teas- more doesn’t hurt)
½ teas. Cinnamon (Didn’t actually measure this out)
¼ teas. Nutmeg (Didn’t actually measure this out)
½ C butter, softened (1 stick)
¼ C milk
1 C (4 small) mashed bananas
1 teas. Vanilla
½ teas. Amaretto (because we don’t have almond extract)

Preheat oven to 350. Combine all dry ingredients and mix evenly. Combine all wet ingredients and do the same. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix well. Turn into 9x5 bread pan which has been greased on bottom only. Bake at 350 for 60-70 mins- or when toothpick comes out clean.

Use this one if you are resistant to change...
Original Recipe (Mom’s)

1 C flour
1 C sugar
1 teas. Baking soda
½ teas. Salt
1 T grated orange peel
½ C butter, softened
¼ C milk
1 C (2 med) mashed bananas
1 teas. Vanilla
½ teas. almond extract
1 C flaked coconut
½ C chopped walnuts

Combine all ingredients except coconut and nuts. Blend at low speed- beat at med speed 3 mins. Stir in nuts and coconut. Turn into 9x5 bread pan which has been greased on bottom only. Bake at 350 degrees for 60-70 mins- or when toothpick comes out clean. I use 4 small pans and bake about 45 mins. Remove from pan immediately. Note: you can leave out the orange peel and coconut and even the nuts if you don’t have them.

Wrote this days ago...

2009-02-26T21:50:00.002-05:00

The east coast is unique in North America because the geological composition is such that we can build underground. It is understood that this changes the structure of buildings. For instance, you rarely see basements in Florida. However, this also effects transportation. In Boston we have, as a result of the Big Dig, a maze of roads beneath parts of the city. So large, ugly highways have been hidden beneath historic buildings, and the city is more aesthetic.

In addition to burying our cars we are also permitted underground trains. Phoenix has a train system resting gently on the fragile desert soil and Chicago has trains attached to buildings several stories above the ground. They have the light rail and the El….we have the T.

For what it’s worth I have been taking the T more often lately and it puts me in the mind of dystopian societies. The system is well designed and trains should come often enough so that rowdy crowds do not build up on platforms but not so often that they are empty and thus wasteful. However, the trains themselves are aging and break down with almost daily regularity. Conveniently for the state, the delays seem confined to rush hour periods when people are still groggy from waking to early or tired from the day’s drudgery. The crowds are thus desperate and frustrated by a need to be anywhere else save where they stand, but the lack of energy drives them into suspicious and hopeless passiveness instead of riotous action. Youth maintain more energy throughout the events, but they resent cooperation and lack focus. They respond to the situation with furtive vandalism and little else. Still the effects of such street art are not always empty.

Posters highlighting or perhaps mocking the grey dystopianism are sprouting around the city. The image is a stern but portly face something like the synthesis of Che with Buddha. The eyes are watchful and the expression borders on angry, but it is rendered in a way that it cannot be taken seriously. Many posters contain only this face while others are underscored with the word OBEY in large, bold letters. Big Brother has come in the form of an overweight man and he is watching you from bridges and from rooftops. He is with you while you are on the highway, crossing a pedestrian bridge, or shuffling through the train station. He sensors the mail you slide into the mailbox and he peers in to the coffee shop where you access the internet to check your email.

I assume few acknowledge this bit of vandalism. At best they label it poor street art and dismiss it. And again I assume that these same people fail to notice the cameras in the tunnels reading license plates and those mounted on building corners near busy crosswalks. Signs denote train cars under surveillance and train stations watched as well, but these notices are lost amid one hundred other signs, posters, and graffiti scrawls. If the overzealous person does manage to read and understand those words they will be translated as “safety” anyway for watched means protected to most.

But perhaps this is all tainted thought. A bias brought on by reading too many of the wrong type of books in my youth. Had I read cheerful sentences my outlook might reflect the same. Instead I am left with sad images from sad pages that are brought into alignment with the current situation any time I step into the underground.

The underground, where the color is always washed in soot or concrete grey and pigeons huddle against the breeze that must be coming from someplace outside or above. The underground, where people wait idle and wary and water seems to always trickle down the walls from some other place into another unknown. The underground, where ugliness of all types is hidden.

Where's the cream filling?

2009-02-02T11:56:00.005-05:00

The state of the Twinkies.
(One Twinkie a year for 10 years. However one of my Twinkies was stolen about 2 years ago so there should be 5 under that box.)

The Twinkie of the day above the sell by date that mysteriously lacks a year.

What I am theoretically still eating.

The guarantee that it will be good.
Twinkie number 6: Looks normal, feels like a cracker, crumbles like a cracker.
Like last year the cream filling has been absorbed into the cake. The outside is again crunchy but unlike last year the two ends are also pretty crunchy until you get about 2 bites in. The center right around where the filling would have been is still chewy and not as sacchariny. Actually it tastes a lot less like anything. Some residual nasty absorbed cream taste but everything else is pretty subtle.
Last bite. Crunchy.
And the clock resets.

Conclusion: Better than last year.

-Jn

See Also: Hostess Twinkies and Twinkie Recipes

Sort of like a snow day

2009-01-19T18:57:00.003-05:00

I am still on school break. I get well over a month to sit on my duff and get bored. Went to my parents, went to the boyfriends parents, went to my place, went to the best friends, redecorated and refunitured a pair of apartments, hosted a playoffs batch, all interesting things with interesting people. I also did a lot of procrastinating writing a paper and a letter of recommendation. Writing with a quality assurance checker. No good. I have one more week minus the time I have not used productively today to get myself squared away. I am sort of flailing and splashing a lot with no structure to my days. It is hard to get up and hard to get moving and hard to start doing things I don’t want to do. There is a nebulous deadline floating out there over my head that I can see if I squint but like the deadline all of the steps to get there are fuzzy. Starting school again will be good for me.

Today I was hanging out at the boyfriend’s and he was busy being boring doing interview related things pretty much all day. The house was pretty much immaculate due to preparation for the aforementioned football bash and so I had to go outside to productively procrastinate. I carried snow and thought about nothing. Then I carried snow and thought about more nothing. Then the neighbor from the squirrel infested house came home, talked to me for a while, and took his smiley pooch for a drive. So I carried snow and thought about a little more than nothing. Then the neighbor came back and fired up his snow blower to help me. He did laps with the blower and I cleaned up in between his lanes in a comfortable steady manner enveloped by snow blower white noise which was much more like silence.

We were done to the point of having to ask other tenants to move vehicles so that we could get the last vestiges of snow when the land lord showed up to shovel. The landlord proceeded to wrestle the blower away from the neighbor and conscripted another tenant to shovel which was odd all around. We were almost done anyway so why bother? Plus with 4 people walking around carrying snow and talking to each other and to me it was difficult to keep carrying snow while thinking about nothing. I started thinking about carrying snow and how I didn’t want to carry snow because it was wet and heavy and I was cold and sweaty. Consequently, shortly after I started thinking about carrying snow I also started thinking about not carrying snow anymore which is also about when I stopped thinking about carrying snow because I stopped carrying snow and moved back inside. Problem solved. I do however need to do something Normal Rockwell-esq and make some sort of baked good for the neighbor with the smiley dog named Christy who chases the squirrels that live in the eaves of her peoples’ house.

I also never wrote up the recipe for my pumpkin soup. Hmmm…

-Jn

January was so long that it lasted into March

2009-01-07T16:14:00.002-05:00

Have you ever wondered why we celebrate the new year in January. It hasn’t made sense to me when I was a child. I remember when I was young a made a comment to my mother about how it was strange that every year has two winters. She didn’t understand what I meant and corrected me but I wasn’t incorrect. Every calendar year is book ended by a winter either coming or going.

Why don’t we choose an equinox or a solstice, a changing of guard of the seasons. End at an established end and start with a true start instead of making up our own. I understand that these events are not set days but they stay close to each other and are bound by celestial movement not human designation. Other cultures and other times have used planting and harvesting seasons, or rainy and dry seasons, but nearly always season to demarcate the passage of time. We choose not to start at a season nor the mid-point of a season and this has been so for most places since before the Gregorian Calendar (the one you are most probably most used to) was introduced. But there is not a great deal of reason for why January 1st starts the year and not another first...or similarly why January 1 is in the middle of the front half of winter instead of some geometrically or celestially more logical place.

Apparently calendaring is not an easy business. It starts with the moon spinning round us out of sink with us spinning round the sun such that you cant always fit months with moons and not have seasons shift quickly. So there must be the extra days and the too few days chasing each other. And the craftsman must try to get all months to have a moon and to be odd numbered to pacify the gods and superstitions. Pagans and Christians and Republicans (roman) and Mathematicians all causing commotion if their holidays and symmetries are forced to shift. And the commonest man constantly confused by the push and pull of additional days or months by papal or pontifical decree such that his birthdays are never the same and letters come in the mail dated later then they were received.

While we are on the subject, why did we stick with the superstitious Roman choice of making February so short when the Catholics and other religious folk were clamoring for a proper calendar that didn’t lose days and shift important Holy Days around. We could have rounded out the months 31, 30, 31, 30 and stuck a leap day in any day we pleased. Why 31, 28(29), 31, 30 with a stuttered 31 later on. Perhaps at the mid year point. Why even give it a month. Make it a day outside the calendar. If at the new year point it would be a day between years. Name it after a king or celebrated figure.

This may seem strange for children born on that day but not really. Feb 29th babies are already forced into cruelties like being 1/4th their true age or celebrating their birthdays on off days. We other day babies have the same number of days in each of our years but face not the same issues because our dates don't drop of the map. Worse still for the Romans born in a month that was added or subtracted often at random to keep the seasons straight. How do they age. Better to have a true unbirthday, to be born outside of the calendar and never age at all.

awing

2008-12-04T21:58:00.000-05:00

Once a way and a way to away round the world with no dirty sole
Twice a trip and a dip and a skip and a tightly spun swirl
Third for a wing and a sing and a bird alight to extol
Four for slight sound, whispers settling down
Fifth flies on to safe, solid bole
Six rests, soft breaths
And seven keeps sleep
Until comes again a once dawn

-Jn

And then it was over

2008-11-12T23:44:00.002-05:00

I am finally starting to be back in control of the night time again. Last night I dreamed and it had the potential to be lucid except I declined conscious control. This was for the better.

It was a drawn out dream with many disjointed places and people but most of the people in my high school graduating class and others who left us along the way were there. And they were all this age but as if there had been no disconnect, no graduation and going separate ways and becoming married. Maybe we all had gone away but we still knew each other as if we were together daily.

We were in a bunker of sorts in the mountains outside of a city for a tour and dinner. Mid tour we met the president (who is actually one of the professors at UMB) and I spoke with him for a while. Then we had a really good dinner and were briefed on our mission.

It is one of those classic good versus evil struggles where most of the human populace does not know about the threat and does not care except that they DO NOT want the struggle going on. And if the good guys don't fight the bad guys the bad guys will ruin everything for everyone including the apathetic masses. And we got in to our aircraft that were shockingly like TIE-Fighters from star wars and just as agile. We met our foes (I have no idea who we were fighting? Aliens? Another race? Another country?) outside of the city, with a goal of keeping them from leveling it. There was a chaotic dog fight. They manned stealth bombers and flew in formation making them a solid wall. We flew at random but like a school of fish ever conscious of our proximity to the others so collisions were avoided. They had a distinct leader and plan. None of our pilots was designated leader; we moved as necessary and received suggestions from our base.

We were in control of the fight and they were being pushed back. Then they were running. And we realized that we were being drawn away from the city so that a few could sneak in behind us. I broke off from the chase with two others and met three enemies at the city limits. At first we were chasing them but somehow they looped back around and were chasing us. My ship started losing power and I managed to set it down in an alley by a park where some transient shops were set up. I snuch in to a pot shop and bought a AA battery from the dred-locked hippie who made the jewelry and other merchandise. $3.18 for one AA battery. I remember specifically. But none of the other prices stayed the same or made sense. Thats when I realized I was dreaming. I bought the battery and fired up my ship again. In that time my comrades had been trapped by the three ships and were hovering and spinning nearer and nearer to each other as the other ships closed in. Apparently I had been forgotten and I used that to my advantage. One ship was was sent skittering into a tall sky scrapper shearing off the top 10 floors as it went. Another spiralled down and out of the city into the mountains and the third took off after it with us in pursuit. And then I woke up.

And then it was over.

But TIE fighters run on one AA battery.

Coffee shops close too early

2008-10-30T22:04:00.001-04:00

And so one sits at a coffee shop, because a coffee shop seems like a nice place to sit when one has to wait. And it is Peet’s which means it is better than other coffee shops automatically. And it is in Lexington which means that it must be better than a normal Peet’s because zoning prohibits par chain stores from taking up space. And one sips a chai tea that begs to be swum in and slept in and hugged. And since you cannot do these things it does them to you instead.

I have been told that purgatory is a place of waiting. I wonder if purgatory is like a coffee shop. People sitting and waiting and sipping and chatting. And the book club going on mindlessly about some blather that wasn’t worth one reading let alone the nine it received. And the half Goth flirting with the baristas while the obnoxiously toned woman orders skim foam. The classical music piped in overhead being overcome by a ringing phone, a grinder, steaming milk and an oven timer. The people walking by in the half drizzle glaring angrily at you because you are warmer and drier and sipping more chai and they have a place to be and you are just waiting. All of these would drive one mad if one was wont to be driven. But the music is peaceful and the book club monotone and ignorable, the half-Goth awkward and interesting and the passersby colorful. And this is a warm waiting steeped in chai tea. Waiting is far from paradise but there are worse waitings and worse than waitings.

My Christmas cravings are on the shelves here. Myriad warm beverages and the tools to make them. Thermoses with tea infuser baskets. French press travel mugs. Tea pots. Infusers. Mugs. Coffees. Teas. Cocoas. In the moment, holding this chai tea, I cannot imagine anything else I could want for Christmas (except the ever present puppy in my mind). What else could one want for Christmas? Maybe wool hats, wool socks or another alpaca.

AH HA! The half-Goth WORKS here. That explains why he looks so familiar. That and he looks and awful lot like Wayne when you ignore the Goth half. And Makayla the barista not flirted with is now on break working on her novel…or maybe her geography homework. Maybe I should be too.

Desperation Meal

2008-08-25T13:18:00.002-04:00

1/2 Package of whole wheat spaghetti
1/5 a package of frozen cream cheese (more or less)
2 cubes frozen basil
4T left over pizza sauce that may or may not belong to you
2 splooshes of milk
a little olive oil
1 can salmon that has an unfortunately strong flavor

Make the spaghetti however. While it is draining in the sink use the already heated pan to try to melt the cream cheese and basil. Add in the pizza sauce when you discover the cream cheese starting to burn. Add in the milk and olive oil when you discover the pizza sauce starting to burn. Mix in the salmon at some point. You end up with this pinkish reddish paste eventually. Mix the spaghetti in with the paste and you have a desperation meal. Actually 2 or 3 of them.

Rating: Borderline tasty. Definitely ok. The salmon flavor is tamed by the other flavors and ends up more like tuna. (MUCH better than trying it with mac n cheese). Mom would still probably gag.

-Jn

(If I had a gun I would shoot all the gulls because they will NOT SHUT UP. AGH!)

Tell me a story

2008-07-01T21:14:00.003-04:00

I have been writing a lot lately but not for you. At least not for you yet.

In my selfishness I want you to write ME a story.

Yesterday after lunch I was wandering around behind the dorm building setting waders out to dry when I heard a snatch of Jazz music come over the bluff in a wind gust. I figured one of the sailboats had a radio up way too high but then I heard it again. When I climbed up to the balcony porch I could see a guy standing at the waters edge in shorts and a white tee shirt playing Jazz music from a saxophone. He never finished a song, though the little blurts and burst of music were good music. There were other people on the beach further down but no one was paying attention to him. I also don't know how he got there, from some other private access or from the public way about a half mile down the beach but not from our stairs.

I want to know why he was there and all of the other details about him. I have my own version that I am quite fond of and I will share it when I get around to polishing it and making a few lies longer.

(The picture is of where he was standing but at HIGH high tide. He was there at low tide, imagine lots of big rocks and tide pools...less water :P )

-Jn

A cormorant's green glass door

2008-06-11T07:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning when I awakened the world seemed to end at the bottom of the bluff. Everything had been white washed in a thick fog and the wavelets seemed frozen on the water. There was no definition to any landmark and no horizon line to give the eye perspective. The only visible features in this expanse of nothing were two pointed rocks, holding their heads above the high tide line. They were parallel to each other and slightly skewed from the bluff. Perched atop each rock was a single cormorant, gazing out at the world’s end. It seemed as though they were sentinels entrusted with guarding the passageway to another time or place. If the mighty, bold, or stupid could bring a raft thus far one bird would warn and the other encourage, and both would watch the soul slip through the gateway into danger.

You would have been able to feel the magic in the air. It was breathtaking. Then you would move to quickly to get a better view and get caught up on the air because it didn’t deign to move with you. That’s when you would realize that the world was cloaked not in a cool morning fog or misty after rain but the hanging, deadening cover of humidity that was impenetrable by the sun and impervious to the breeze. This is how magic dies.

I am told that yesterday it got up to 95 F in my area which those who keep track call a record high for the day. And while the previous day was warmer, ringing in at 99 F on my car thermometer, I was no longer in waders and the heat was less morally and mentally deadening. I suppose I should offer some space for the heat turning people stupid, but yesterday four people caught me in casual conversation and asked the same question. “Is it hot enough for you Jenn?” It took everything in my heat stroke damaged mind not to say, “No actually, I don’t start to enjoy myself until it is over 100 degrees and at least 95 F the shade.” This is rude and I did not say it. I told Meghan instead.

-Jn

Different Place, Different Weather

2008-06-07T21:18:00.000-04:00

The air is still on this side street as it is throughout this history laden town. The dishwasher is keeping time with the traffic, and I cannot hear the sound of my own typing for the sake of it. The steady background hum is occasionally overlaid with a hurried siren or the bwap of a motorcycle speeding up, but the dishwasher chinks dishes in reply.

I have most recently been mixing, mashing and chopping, making a green paste for my supper. Now I am composing for my benefit and consuming the thick salsa for the same reason.

Try this:
4 zabocayo (or avocados or paltas for those otherwise traveled) mashed
1 tomato chopped
¼ a large red onion finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic pressed or minced
Heaps of chopped fresh cilantro
The juice from at least half of a lime
Salt and pepper to taste
Chop, mash, season and stir together. Serve with anything that will scoop including crackers and spoons. It doesn’t keep well so either eat it all or pack it up in the following way. Find the smallest container that will hold all leftovers. Flatten the surface of the mole and cover it with lime juice. Press plastic wrap tight onto the surface and otherwise cover the container. Do not use metal.

Less recently I was painting a living room in the same heat conditions. Earlier in the day you could more clearly see through the hang of humidity; however, sweat chose to flow instead of kindly evaporating. Curiously enough the paint was still drying almost as fast as it was applied. We managed to even out the streaky spots, cover the cracks, and blend all of the dirty shades of Previous Tenant Quick Cover Up into a uniform presentation of Arcadia White. The calming effects of solid color walls are amazing. Before the paint went up I did not realize how stressful and distracting the ugly patches of poorly painted wall mixed with dust bunny dirt were to my eyes. Now if only we could buy the paint for the kitchen to cover up the Smurf-threw-up-on-the-wall paint color testing patches. And maybe procure and air conditioner. That would be good too.

-Jn

Promised rain never came...

2008-06-01T07:52:00.002-04:00

It is a few past eleven and a storm is rolling in. The winds are building in the tree tops and along the water. Down the bluff there are whitecaps seen by faint glints of light coming from neighboring houses. There is no moon nor are there stars. Unless the tide is out all of the way, water must be crashing against the rocks below, but it can’t be seen.

The storm is coming in fast. Fifteen minutes ago I walked from the other building and it was calm. I was temped to stay longer in the garden to look at the night blooming flowers, but there was an eerie feel to the air. It was not so much a chill in my spine as an overwhelming desire to be back inside. Perhaps the same unsettled energy is what hushed the frogs and halted the chirring of the insects. Or maybe what I felt was heard silence driving me indoors. Regardless, by the time I gathered my laundry and made my way upstairs the wind had begun. Now the sound of it against the cliff face and thrashing through the trees is drowning out the hollow iterations of the fog horn.

Scattered in patches of brush and trees between the well hewn banding trails mother cardinals and other nesters will be huddled against the coming rain. A night like this may promise respite from the dangers of sharp-eyed night fliers. And the rain will compliment the cranberry bogs and their swampy surrounds for the frogs. More water lends time for breeding and frantic tadpole growth. It will also pool in depressions too small for much else but healthy crops of mosquitoes. And while the adults feed on banders and other woods wanderers, they will soon become food for the swift birds, and any young that hatch in deeper water will supplement the diet of tadpoles.

But the rain is not as committed to this night as the wind. No thunder cracks through the trees or against the bluff as yet and no lightning has chosen to highlight the cloud edges. There is still time for the drops above to reconsider falling here before the wind blows itself into stillness. They may merely be waiting for a moment of peace and a vertical fall instead of a complicated, muddling sky dance. Or they may decide this watershed has not issued the proper calling and follow the wind further until they find a suitable resting place. Storms are fond of our befores and linger at our afters but they rarely pause here above us for long if at all. Who can know the mind of the rain? And who can map the lightning’s course?

5/30/08 Manomet

...The winds blew all the same.
-Jn

Sip it

2008-05-02T22:58:00.000-04:00

Some days are just made for nestling in a comfy chair with an oversized mug of tea and reading. Near enough to the windows that you can see the drizzly grey sky and the misty after-rain and watch the droplets race down the panes. Some days require driving to other peoples’ backyards in a van with a broken everything and a distinct potpourri of mixed molds. Then hiking through wet scrub to get to reach extra large puddles that may or may not be filled with special creatures and standing in cold water until you forget what feet feel like. The van was wet, the papers were wet, the range finder was wet, the people were wet, the waders were wet and the pools were dry-almost. I still don’t want an office job thanks.

My partner at arms is headed back to the frozen North on Sunday and today was my first day without training wheels. It also appears that my fearless leader has been incapacitated for maybe a week and unknown quantity = intern Matt comes on Monday afternoon. But I got a birthday pie, a grad school acceptance email, a perfect little spitfire birthday present, a jar full of tadpoles and planarians, left over Thai food for breakfast and a 14 year old kid who wants to volunteer with us. After we bailed when the rain started again I spent some time pretending to band birds (which I will do more of on Monday while waiting for intern Matt). Tomorrow should look like whales and sweet, sweet laziness.

That time of year

2008-04-24T21:19:00.002-04:00

My friends here follow bird calls- they are mostly banders by trade. They seem to know every which mating noise and from whence and who it came. And yes you wonder how such a small beastie could make such a big racket. But birds are flying machines and they are made to hold a lot of air- maybe it isn't so crazy that they could cause a ruckus.

But I follow a different set of romance songs. First and always it is the peepers. Then the wood frogs, then the green. Now the tree frogs and the American toads. Peepers are the smallest frogs around but they consistently make the biggest noise. Unfortunately they all sound the same on the surface except for the occasional excited trill. Wood frogs sound more like ducks and while tree frogs sound happy their burbles don't exactly inspire. My favorite songs emanate from the toads. Long echoing trills stretching in to minutes and all toads at a different pitch and timing harmonizing with each other. But I guess this makes sense too. Honestly if you want to get some action, you need to sound fantastic if you look like a Bufo.

"I have always liked frogs. I liked them since before becoming a zoologist, and nothing I have had to learn about them since has marred the attachment. I like "looks" of frogs and their outlook. And especially the way they get together in wet places on warm nights and sing about sex." -- Dr. Archie Carr

Jn has a Job and 2/3 of a place to live

2008-04-07T16:47:00.002-04:00

This post is for the uninformed which is most of my friends because I suck and the last week was also crazy busy. So was the week before that.

Two Wednesdays ago I had a phone interview about a job I had already kissed goodbye because it was supposed to have already been a week underway. Thursday I got coffee and then my motorcycle permit with JJ (I completely forget now why he is JJ in shorthand but I remember that he is). Later that day I got a call while buying high quality produce at Wilson Farms after visiting with the super pregnant, buck-toothed llama and the 2 super pregnant goats who like to bite chickens because I was locked out of my boyfriends house on the day before corned beef and cabbage day which I guess makes it the 27th and this a run on sentence. Regardless, they wanted me and I wanted that job more than any other job I have applied to during my lengthy term of unemployment. As I mentioned they intended to start work before they interviewed me which means they wanted me a week ago then...or about 2.5 weeks ago now which will be this Wednesday. We start from behind and race against time.

One Wednesday ago the Red Queen drove up from her castle in PA to help me pack (and go to a hockey game, a book store, an ice cream stand, and a reptile show-things that NEEDED to happen in order to pack properly I swear). We (NP included) shuffled most of my belongings in to a 5x10 storage room since I now have furniture and can't keep everything I own only in my car. However, it says in big letters on the wall in the office that you cannot sleep or cook or really have any fun at all in the storage space so this does not count as a place to live. The stuff I will actually need or desperately want to have with me is in Catsby who is reluctantly about 1/3 of a place to live. I will sleep in a dorm for the summer with 3 other people hence the other 1/3 of a place. We finished mopping the floor and cleaning out the fridge this morning and RQ and Gurgles were on the road this morning at 8am.

The Job:
I am working for the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences and I am doing this. If choose not to follow the link here is a summary. I will drive around to vernal pools on privately held lands in the Taunton and Charles River watersheds and them for presence/absence of animal species, test salinities, and take water samples that will be tested for fertilizers, pesticides, and road chemicals at another lab. The goal is to hit roughly 100 pools twice between now and when the pools dry up around mid June. Then I will hopefully get to help crunch numbers for data analysis. You should still chase the link because it has cool pictures and a video describing the project. They run out of funding to pay me in mid July sometime, at which point I move back to the north shore or someplace else and reacquire my belongings and a black and white cat.

-Jn

Variations on a Mango- Updated Recipe

2008-04-03T22:54:00.002-04:00

2 Large Ripe Mangos, cut in to pieces
2-3 Peaches, cut in to pieces (Optional)
Peach schnapps
Trader Joe's Multigrain Biscuit mix
Oil
Farm Fresh Whole milk
Cinnamon
Vanilla Ice Cream

Cut up the fruit and put it in a bowl. Soak liberally with schnapps and let the fruit bits get thoroughly inebriated. Make the biscuits according to the package (Oil, Milk, donno what else or in what proportions sorry) and add about a half of a cup of sugar (I didn't add the sugar I wish I had). Sprinkle with cinnamon and a little sugar before baking. After the fruit has floated for a few hours dish it in to bowls over ice cream with a warm, wonderful biscuit. If you make enough you can have the same thing tomorrow night too. Bonus!

Some of these events occur in the future

2008-03-28T14:35:00.006-04:00

1. I have a job for the summer and I am super stoked. 2. Yesterday was seriously the best day ever. 3. I bought corned beef and company for St. Patrick’s Day and never made it because I joined a Pub Crawl instead. Today is try-to-make-this-meal day and I have included the recipes for your perusal and future use should you choose to trust my culinary skills. Like most of my recipes what follow are compilations of other recipes modified for my good pleasure.

Tonight’s Menu:
Corned Beef and Cabbage (Made following the Ideal or Real World recipe depending on your particular universe)
Horseradish, Chive, and Dill Sauce
Farm Fresh Marbled Rye Bread
Farm Fresh Whole Milk (from a glass bottle)
Dessert- Variations on a Mango

Ideal World Corned Beef and Cabbage:
5-6 Whole carrots cut in large chunks
10-15 Small red potatoes halved
1 Med onion cut in wedges
1 Small Cabbage cut in wedges
1 hunk corned beef (~ 3 lbs)

Enough water to cover the goodness
2 T apple juice

3 Garlic cloves minced
2 Bay leaves crushed (3 small)
3/4 T cracked black pepper corns
1 t Thyme
1 t Paprika
1 t Yellow mustard seeds
½ t Whole coriander
½ t Allspice
¼ t Celery seeds
Pinch of crushed red pepper

Wonk the beef into the crock pot and surround him in with the friendly carrots, potatoes, and onion. Mix the spices with the apple juice and about 2 C of water and pour it over the pot contents. Add enough water to cover the beef and most of the veggies. Cook on high for 2 hours then drop to low heat for 7 hours. Add the cabbage about an hour before you plan to eat (sooner if you like it mushy).
Prep time: about 15 Minutes
Cook time: 9 hours

Real World Corned Beef and Cabbage
(Same ingredients list as Ideal World Corned Beef and Cabbage)

Start preparation at least an hour late because of weird weather causing traffic and talking to your mother. Realize that you left necessary spices at home. Wonk the beef in the crock pot and add the veggies. Add 3 cups of water and turn on high. Make a shopping list (Bay leaves, thyme, paprika, mustard seed, whole coriander, allspice, celery seeds, rye bread, sour cream, chives, whole milk in a glass bottle). Go to Wilson Farms amid hail and rain. Stare at spices for at least 15 minutes. Fail to find yellow mustard seed. Marvel at the size of the snowflakes that are now falling. Discover that pickling spice is primarily mustard seed and coriander. Purchase contents of basket. Walk out of the store into freezing rain. Return to store to purchase a chilly, red tulip and save it from the nastiness. Walk out of store into non-freezing rain that changes to ice pellets half way across the parking lot. Drive home. Place tulip on the window sill between the sprouting white onion and the wee prickly pear cactus. Begin to mix spices. Have an Oh Shit moment over the mustard seed pickling spice dilemma. Dump half of the pickling spice into an empty bay leaf container. Remove the cap from a curry container because it has smaller-than-whole-coriander sized holes. Hold the cap over the now pickling spice container because it is too small to fit securely. Shake mustard seeds and other riff-raff spices into a bowl. Measure out the soloized coriander from the make shift shaker and dump the excess back into the package. Gently shake the bowl containing the remainder of the spices to group the mustard seeds. Tip the bowl slightly to take advantage of gravity and the round properties of mustard seeds. Scoop separated mustard seeds into a 1 t measuring spoon using an inverted ¼ t measuring spoon. Repeat mustard seed separation process until the 1 t spoon is full or madness ensues. Return the riff-raff spices to the original package. Finally add spices to the crock pot two hours after starting the heating process. Eat lunch. Mix sauce to serve with the beef. Type up “improved recipe.” Discover that the tulip is so pleased by its current company and the warmth of the kitchen that it has bloomed. Leave on high for 3 hours total then turn temperature to low. Realize you failed to add the apple juice. Add the apple juice. Add the cabbage just before leaving to pick up your significant other from the train station. Eat when you are too hungry to wait any more.
Prep time: about 2 hours
Cook time: approximately 7 hours

Horseradish, Chive, and Dill Sauce
1 carton (8 oz) of sour cream
1 T prepared horseradish
2 T chopped fresh chives (Use the kitchen shears. It is more fun and faster)
½ t Dried dill
Combine ingredients in a bowl and stir well. Chill. x1 Bonus Multiplier: Return the contents to the sour cream container for storage. (This stuff is really good. I have no clue how it will actually taste with dinner but if it is not a good corned beef pairing is makes one hell of a good veggie dip.)

Variations on a Mango
2 Large Ripe Mangos
.:I will get back to you with the rest of the details when I figure out what the hell I am actually going to do:.

It's quite sunny today by comparision

2008-01-31T13:05:00.000-05:00

I ride the train. Other people ride the train. To note this fact is unnecessary. People have private cars, boats, jets, and even busses. Trains are for sharing. I ride the train.

I watch people. I listen. People interest me, their mannerisms, movements, modes of speech. In my opinion this is a better way of investigation than studying by nose. This is possible and it is done. Some do this as a vocation and call it research. Some have a passion. Some just have a misfortune.

Yesterday dulled the eyes and muffled sound. Yesterday chose to force scents. On train one a person nearby gave off the essence of cooked celery. Train two featured someone with the air of stale soup. Free Shuttle Bus air was overcome with the pungent and vibrant scent of ginger (as in fresh cut or candied- notably eatable, not a lotion or perfume). While this was a more pleasant olfactory gift, none of these smells mesh with the nature of a morning, albeit a bustling city morning. I think I would be more accepting or at least less begrudging of these intrusions on my personal space if the odors fit better with the time of day. Before 10:30 or maybe even 11 a day should have traces of syrup and coffee with perhaps some cinnamon or maybe citrus if it must carry a scent in the first place.

A home-bound train paused respectfully at South Station while another sluiced by on shared track. When I joined this train, one of my concomitants spread odors of soggy bread. I mention South Station specifically because during the wait at this junction a youth boarded the train and sat beside me. He deemed it socially necessary to cover whatever natural essences he might carry with his person in a cloak of cologne. The overzealous powers of his scent dampened the influences of any others in my vicinity for several hours afterwards. Perhaps he should be thanked, but at this point it can only be speculation. In fact, the only reason the prior soggy-bread air even remains in my memory is visual impression left on me by the smell bearer. It was unclear which of the people across from me actually held the mantle, but it was either the aged, nearly hairless woman with wan blue eyes or the aged Chinese man with mismatched leg warmers who was worried by the aforementioned woman. Both characters looked like they might be composed, at least in part, of moistened bread. Of all the day’s olfactory twinges, this one was not unnatural. It fit not only in excerpt (because of the physical presence of the bread beings) but also in the context of the whole day.

You may question my last assertion, for when does a damp loaf ever fit a day unless children feeding ducks is involved. Honestly though, it was just a soggy bread day. A cold but thankfully light rain came down on and off but always at a slant. People were walking in a stooped hurry with the speed of their bustle unrelated to the actual time and staring doggedly at the ground as if the concrete or pavement might share some secret of how to better resist the wind if their gaze pierced deep enough. The pigeons were also damp and malcontent, huddling in fluffed masses under eves amid the failed anti-pigeon measures. The only dry pair in the city, an iridescent and importunate groom and his antipathetic bride, reside in North Station and are therefore exempt from paying a weather tax. Surveying the day by eye, ear, and nose, one gets the impression that even a fine loaf of French bread would be flaccid at least in spirit and wonders if the crackers being tossed at the nuptial pigeons were really as crisp as their heritage scrolled on the package claimed them to be.

Some people need an IQ boost

2008-01-14T19:46:00.000-05:00

Nick showed me this today.

Gravity: Doesn't exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. Or the space shuttle in space should have the astronauts orbiting it. Of course, that's just the tip of the gravity myth. Think about it. Scientists want us to believe that the sun has a gravitation pull strong enough to keep a planet like neptune or pluto in orbit, but then it's not strong enough to keep the moon in orbit? Why is that? What I believe is going on here is this: These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down. This isn't the case for earth, where we see the impact of transfered sin to material objects. The more sin, the heavier something is.

I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie

several million years for a monkey to turn into a man. oh wait thats right. monkeys dont live several million years.

For more check here.

No title. Bah.

2008-01-10T15:48:00.000-05:00

As soon as I am healthy Ima buy myself some flowers.

Avoid the Plague

2008-01-09T21:19:00.000-05:00

Warning: This post is largely about the Norovirus of Death

I am slouching here writing because I am afraid of my soup. I am slouching because I can no longer lay down without going crazy but if I sit up any further it will take much longer to catch my breath. I am also out of breath. I am out of breath because I heated up half a can of vegetable soup donated by my ever-caring neighbor, soup which I am now afraid of. It’s not exactly that I am afraid of eating the soup, it’s the re-eating that’s not so pleasant and more fear inducing. (If the thought of reeating soup makes you queasy you might want to skip to the last paragraph and save yourself some pain.)

If you would like some graphic back story, on Monday at almost exactly 1530 and without even a remote bit of warning I became violently ill in one direction and shortly proceeded to be violently ill in the other direction with little enough time in between to maintain body hydration at an even barely reasonable level. My friend Murphy was around to hold my hair back while I expulsed the contents of my stomach, which is to say that with a toilet and 2 garbage cans in front of me I managed on more than one occasion to hit none of these and had to change clothes and wash a few rugs today when I could finally stand for more than two minutes. (This also makes me out of breath.)

On a positive note I am no longer afraid of the substance that would normally make up 70% of my body and ice cubes are not the coolest and most life saving thing ever invented. I don’t need the crazy cat to wake me up every hour and a half to have a few sips of water lest I slip into unconsciousness (which he strangely, lovingly, and punctually did all Monday into Tuesday). I have conquered my fear of crackers and I will eventually try this whole soup substance. Right now I am content to glance at it cynically and suspiciously out of the corner of my eye.

I also managed to do something today that no one should really ever have to do. When you are a kid your mom or dad takes care of it and when you are in college you have a roommate and when you are old enough (but not yet smart enough) and get drunk enough there is usually someone there smarter than you or you are at someone else’s house and you sort of leave it in their shower for their mom to find and fix. I have a friend who found the rose bushes outside of the Whitehouse to be a convenient self-clean-up free location. I have cleaned up after sick friends, cohorts, and campers and oddly in this one instance of nasty ex-bodily fluids, I feel that it is so much more demoralizing to deal with your own than anyone else’s. You clean up mine, I’ll handle yours. No one should ever have to clean up their own vomit, especially if they are still sick.

By the way, the soup (and everything else that isn’t red bush tea) tastes awful. But I have Murphy tied up and gagged in my like-a-closet and so help me this soup will be properly digested. I am done with little virus demons.

Special shout outs to the neighbor who checked on me whenever possible, strongly encouraged the hospital (advice which I did not listen to mostly because I had no carriage to take me), gave me soup, etc. and to the friend who found me ginger ale as soon as he got off work and drove to the hinterlands to deliver it.

Currently

2008-01-04T14:43:00.000-05:00

Currently bewildered
Currently unemployed
Currently enjoying the rampant honesty of the Burnside Writers Collective.

I wonder if they'd take me.

Special notice to the 151 psalm.

Reflections

2007-12-22T23:21:00.000-05:00

I saw myself on the train yesterday.

I was taking the red line from Alewife in, sorta sitting to the front of the middle of a car. We weren't too many stops in so not many people. I was looking around reading what was posted for me to read because I figure me reading the ads keeps the prices down right? and people watching in such a way so as not to be staring at any one person and then mostly just staring off into space. (This is what I do on the T. I enjoy it. You don't have to. You can read your book or play games or music on your Ipod. Leave me be and I will pretend not to watch you.) I was staring frontwards and I could sort of see in the car in front of me and I realized that there was someone who looked shockingly like me staring back at me from that car but it wasn't a reflection because the person was wearing a blue coat with a fluffy hood and I had on my black wool coat. Now I took this in all in half a second and instead of locking eyes with the person staring I looked away slowly cause I am not an blatant in your face people watcher like some emo kids (just daring you to look them in the eye so they can think mean thoughts at you because you must hate them and you surely dont understand). And in an appropriate bit of time I looked forward again because damn, I am in that car. And that person was definitely still there but the car went around a bend as I looked up and I got to see the head, the shockingly me like head, detach from the blue coated body and hover staring at me beside a round Chinese face bundled in a blue coat. And to be truthful I sucked in a quick breath when my head got pulled off. It was me...but it wasn't me. And I know it was just reflections but it was still pretty creepy. Sigh...the existential.

I saw myself on the subway yesterday.

My clock says 8:20

2007-12-07T20:19:00.000-05:00

Windshield wipers
…and on that account windshields
…but we will stick to the wipers for the moment.

The other day I was driving and the sun was shining and everything was going great…and unlike most stories that start with the sun was shining and everything was going great, everything continued to go great and I thought to myself…I am really glad that I have windshield wipers that work. Pause with me for a minute.

That was a pause for a swig of beer. Now think that through…why on God’s green earth does one think of windshield wipers when its not raining and they are in perfectly good condition but not needed at all. I don’t know.

But it got me to thinking…what else am I not using or not needing right now that still works and I take for granted? See its easy to complain about something when it stops working (like the other day when it was snowing and the wipers were part frozen and the part of the windshield right in front of my vision wouldn’t come clean) and when you are using something lots of times you still remember to be thankful about it (Like when I didn’t have good wipers for a couple of months and then I put new ones on and the next day it POURED). But what about all of the stuff that works and works well even when you don’t need it.

Like how about that clock. Yeah the one you just looked at. You probly hadn’t looked at it for a while until I just mentioned it and you probably didn’t need to look then. But it’s still working. And boy, aren’t you glad it works even when you don’t need it. Because if it stopped keeping time when you were in another room it wouldn’t be much good.

Windshield wipers.

More better than a cover letter

2007-12-04T14:43:00.002-05:00

Not Every Café (Ipswich 12/04/07)

There is love and there is life and place to sit down and write and places that cant help but to be wrong.
I watch people walk and people talk and people watch each other going by.
And billboards scream commercial things. Did you know I can do anything if I just buy that lipstick cherry red?
Down the city streets a machine sweeps and discarded pink-orange cups go down the drain.
Meanwhile, my coffee cup keeps filling up by the window where I watch the rain come down.
And I think that maybe love and life dance upon a razor knife. It isn’t like a fairy tale at all.
Each step hurts and each spin cuts. Lovers, livers all are nuts, but they keep dancing lest they fall away.
And maybe to love true and deep you have to callous up your feet, walk barefoot nearly every single day.
But before I tease it in to sense my breakfast money is all spent and cream cheese clings to my finger tips.
Yes there is love and there is life and places to sit down and write, but as for this café, I’m moving on.

-Jn

From the chilly apartment

2007-11-27T20:58:00.001-05:00

:::Editors Note::: Blogger keeps screwing up the formatting on the poem. It tells me there will be indentations and then it takes them away. Lo siento. Thats the way it its. ::End Note::

I fear this one is a little dark. Or a lot dark. I have been running around with a cadre of artists lately. Working for them rather. Raking leaves. Ripping apart quilts. Doing other peoples dirty laundry. Normal stuff. There are proper polished portraits in the studio. Children laughing on a bench together. A dignified gentleman. Normal stuff. Then there are the bizarre ones. Hubcaps with wires and a crucifix in bronze and black. A nude burgeoning attached to the roots of the earth. A portrait of a girl in a green dress who is beautiful at first look and second look and even fourth but the fifth shows her to be bound and blindfolded. Normal stuff.

This kept coming whilst walking back and forth from house to out buildings on one or another task. I polished from the poet throne. (Which is not a toilet- it's a longed for chair. Pictures eventually…when the cat lets me put the bed down)

While the Christ Hung Dying in Mid-day Night (Ipswich 11/26/07)

Two boys there (small)
With stones in hand
And cornered, a cat (cowering)
And the stones flew
For in the market they had seen it
Their fathers doing justice
Following the Law (perfect)
Purging the sinful from the world
Calling out the sins as sentence (stones) fell
And are not all guilty of sin
Thus this mother cat (unwed)
Must have secrets (lecherous)
Must be removed
But for the (troublesome) bent woman (ancient)
Who came cackling
Rebuking the boys
"Wanton killers
Untamed beast children
Fear you not God (omnipresent)
Or the Law (perfect)"
And they ran- but laughing
And they laughed- but also they ran
And they did not mock the hag
Away the (broken) cat limped
Into the alley (shadowed)
Where the soldier (former)
Deserter lurking
Watched the beauty (girl-youth)
About to pass by
As on previous days
Grabbed her (virginal) (screaming)
Fulfilled his deed
Ran
Fearing God (omniscient)
Fearing the Law (perfect)
Fearing the sobs (post virginal)
Fearing men (fallen)
All while the Christ hung dying
(Agonized) eyes closing at "finished" to mark the stop
God-Man (naked) perfect and dead
And the great God (omnipotent)
Closed His eyes impossibly– curtains rent
Counted to ten– children wailed
Ever so slowly– dogs howled
Opened them– (mid-day) night ended
And all could be forgiven
Though the cat (girl)– alone
Did not outlast the darkness

-Jn

Picture = Acadia

2007-11-18T13:46:00.000-05:00

My world is working its way into rights now. I have a wee apartment and a parking space off the street. The front door is cranberry to match the juice in the fridge. I have laundry and dish cleansing machines for my personal convenience and I can make tea any time of day. My clothes have homes in drawers and on hangers which is better than suitcases because it is easier to find items and remember that they are owned and loved and should be worn more. I have pieces of me scattered everywhere to remind me of who I was and who I will be and the walk between the two places. I have a chair to sit in and ponder and write about the journey. Every time I turn around I find something new that I needed or wanted or missed that I didn’t even know was lacking but I can now claim for myself again. My soul makes little happy sighs and life is good. It’s like little waves brushing up against the beach of a cove when the tide is coming in, small push-pulls taking away the stress of hundreds of days homeless and leaving scattered treasures for a shell seeker. I know things now about what I can and cannot do and I more deeply know friendship, answered prayer, comfort, and love. And now I can scribble my collected know’s down for keeps in the battered yellow poet-throne that I have been waiting on for countless days. It’s coming back home though I’ve never been here before. It’s rebecoming human.

Look a penny!

2007-11-01T17:20:00.000-04:00

Dirty Feet (Ipswich 10/31/07)

The world. The world. It swirled, the world, and white was black was white was color. And then the words in twos and fours impatient came and called names, laid blame. And the silence was violent and empty and the stillness was full of sounds. Alone was undone and I was the one put paid to for dirty hands.

Why? I didn’t understand.

And I righted what was left I thought and I begged and I bought but the prices were high and I couldn’t fly anymore. Dirty wings.

Oh the things I would sing and I would sing and sing and the people would bring flowers and gifts and children with fits would calm and give alms in the streets.
No.
There were taunts and jeers and I fled in tears. Streaked face, my face, my dirty face.

The colors used to dance for me in this magic book and the words would flow in to steady rows and salute. I’m destitute. I’m alone. And I go and I go. I’m trying to grow. To be bigger. To be stronger, branches get longer. Why can’t I just leave?
No.
Dirty feet.

Feet wont walk. Mouth wont talk. Eyes won’t see. Hands grope and hands touch. Hands sense and hands feel. “What is there? What is there Dirty Hands?”
Dirty hands.

“Be clean. It’s a dream. Wake up. Please wake up.” And I tear at my skin. Let me in. Let me in. Let me out. Get me out of this place. A well? A hell? A falling for sure. A down without out but not nearly the end. No final amen and a choir on high. I wont die.

“Colors stop coming! Where are your lines? Who stole the designs of this life?” A knife to the pages or better a torch. A threat in a flame. “Say my name. Say my proper name Words. I am good, though I’m sullied and not to be bullied and I know I know how to sing.”
Dirty face.
Dirty wings.
Dirty life dances in cold rain. Pleads for clean. And I spin and I spin and focus comes in for a moment, an instant and the tempos they match. Words line up as they hatch.
Exhausted.
I collapse. Still dirty. Now dizzy. But the bitter is sweet for my dirty feet.
Dirty feet washed little more clean.

Space

2007-10-21T18:26:00.000-04:00

I have a place to live for 6 whole months…almost…and sort of…I can’t move in yet because its not done…but it will be…I hope.

Now I have to find the job that goes with the rent payments and the etc. that comes with actually living some place. That’s gonna be a bit tricky.

What I really want is a space that belongs to me. Kinda like the Ground Hog gets his own little old oak stump. I don’t have a place really…just bits of space in other people’s homes and bits of time when they might not be home. I never feel alone. I never get the type of rest that comes from sitting around in your favorite chair with a cup of tea or a beer with a worn out book or a notebook. It’s not the same when you are surrounded by other people’s comforts. Other people’s treasures don’t shine the same way. You can’t tell other people’s guests that they are ugly or ignorant and that they should leave because you are one too and maybe its better you step out.

I get weighed down by the fact that I am stuck living in places that don’t feel like home. I am tired of temporarily setting up shop and living out of suitcases, tired of lugging all of my food around in a laundry basket, tired of my car acting like a giant closet. I want a window to put plants in and I want a bed to put my quilt on. I want a closet for my stuff and a kitchen that I can keep my dishes and pans in. I want to be able to come home to silence…or to have people over or go out if I want. I am tired of being forced in to being social when I am not a social person by nature. The more stretched and stressed the harder it is for me to function like a person is expected to and the more often it seems to be required of me. I understand 5L a lot more lately. Space is precious.

Catch Up

2007-10-21T17:58:00.001-04:00

A list I meant to post ages ago. We went up to Maine. We went to Acadia National Park. It is a wee little park compared to some of those other national treasures out west. It has a wee little tourist town associated with it known as Bar Harbor. We finally started keeping track of license plates we saw on the island when we were driving around because there were more other plates than Maine plates. I have included a map mostly so you can see who isn't cool. This is what we came up with…

States we saw:

California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin

Canadian Mini-Nations or whatever:
Quebec
British Columbia
New Bruswick
Manitoba
Ontario
Nova Scotia

And the outlier:
Washington D.C

i bid thee rise from thy indolent ass

2007-06-15T06:44:00.000-04:00

There is some bad wiring between my ears. Most people I guess know this but it’s a certain sort of bad wiring in particular that we are talking about here. There is this little twinge that builds up as stress mounts and the increasing urge to move things around…like furniture for instance. And it triggers the reward center of the brain such that a sort of frantic calm or peaceful chaos becomes the dominant mood. However, like many other drugs the feeling wears off if doses are not increased and a melancholy, malaisc indolence sets in. This drive is a great tool to have in your closet for certain occurrences like moving out by the end of the month. Awesome, the closer I get to the deadline the more likely I am to pack and move and organize and scrub clean things because the stress grows. This is not so good around times like finals. When what is required is to sit down and pound out a paper it is less than helpful to have an urge to rearrange a room. This happened all too frequently in school. Sigh. At this juncture I am stressed but not the one project deadline stressed or the finals will be over in 2 days and it will be ok stressed. This is the sort of generalized, everything is unsettled stress that lingers about and pools in certain areas and generally coats the whole being in a thin film of slime. Solution 1 – Move in! Great that took all of 5 hours including unpacking and folding clothes. This is what you get when you fit all of your belongings into a car. I’m not complaining about the car sized amount of stuff…just the lack of doing it got me. Solution 2 – Have your boss place you in a small shed with cones and sandwich boards scattered about and myriad road signs hanging from screws in the walls and say go. Cones destapled, sorted, tallied. Sandwich boards destapled sorted and tallied. Road signs sorted, tallied, and organized via excel spreadsheet just for shits and giggles. Good thing that business only took 2 days…oh…wait….now what the hell am I going to do. Sigh.

After this overnight I am taking a nap, a shower, and a drive in that order. Then I might get to do something cool like smash walls. That would be exciting.

-Jn

Themes for the evening

2007-04-19T20:43:00.000-04:00

Episodes from the evening that are asking for words but I am waning poetic.

There was almost no sun left and there was still a chunk of rainbow.

I took a walk with a pair of cats tonight. Grey cats. The only colors left in the sky were chasing the sun. Dirty orange and and purple fuzz. If you have ever walked with cats you haven't. Unlike dogs they don't actually check back in on you occasionally. They will chase after you when you get too far away but they maintain at least a 5 meter radius away from you at all times. By the time I was walking home it was nearly dark and I had to phantoms following me. Liquid shadows.

The wee cat wouldn't walk with us. He hunched himself down in the center of the driveway. When we came back he perked up and sauntered over to us. He really wants to be a dog. He tries.

A neighbor was burning something this evening. The air smelled something like the taste that lingers after cheap rum.

Quote: "I could hear the speechlessness" - Aunt Nora Lee

Go turtles go!!!

2007-04-17T21:58:00.000-04:00

I've picked my turtle. Have you?

Months

2007-04-15T14:26:00.000-04:00

Month- depending on which time frame you are using, a great deal of living and breathing and in this case far too long. I will skip on the apologies and go on with the writing. Note that I have been reading… just not putting my own thoughts down.

There is this sciency term, Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, and it is very logical and important for eco types. It rambles around and comes back to this more or less. If your world doesn’t change enough things like predators or boredom eat you. If your world changes too much things like stress and too much fast food eat you. I planned on having a lot of free time after the summer after college and I thought that some travel would be in order and that I should work on seeing friends and getting my life sorted out so that I could start pretending I was a proper adult enough to fool most other proper adults, or at least those planning to hire me. Things went according to plan- meaning that what little plans I had scribbled down actually happened or at least I think they did and I can’t find the scraps of paper to prove otherwise…but I am not where I thought I would be. And it seems that I am either frantically on the road spending a few days in as many states as possible or…cleaning house and playing with cats. Everything from my love life to my future plans have either stabilized or exploded in a remarkably exceptional way. Too many things to write about with no time to do it or all the time in the world with nothing to say, which spins up a bit of irony into the moaning that maybe I was never meant to be a scientist, that I was after all these years in fact born to write great things. Yes. Moving on.

I saw an eagle a very few days ago as I was driving home from MA. I was not too far into PA, and the bird was not to far from my car. It looked, it lurched, and it lifted in front of, beside, then over my car. Everyone should have an eagle, except then they would not be as spectacular…then again if you have that type of wing span with that general mouth shape and claw length…you would still win a lot of bar fights on intimidation factor alone. It was either a baby bald or a golden eagle but I am not up to snuff in 5-second, freak-encounter bird identification so just know that it made my day.

I also got around to seeing the last on the list of people one graduated with that one must see in the year after one graduates or lose them forever in the abyss of time. This was also a freak encounter and also made my day…or my life as one wouldn’t want to loose a friend of this caliber to the abyss of time.

For those monitoring my progress...or progressions:

Yellow- States I have been in at one time or another
Blue- States I have been to at least once since September
Green- States I have frequented twice or thrice
Purply Pink- States that I inhabit enough that one might assume I live there
Red- The road-artery that connects me to the places that are most likely home and that I drive frequently enough that I can put Catsby on cruise and crawl in the back seat to make a sandwich
Extended stay states (1 week plus): Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Missouri

Something else. One should always make sure ones compatriots are paying attention when one starts tossing the word subpoena around. It just makes things work better I think.

Also my fortune from last night: "If the cake is bad, what good is the frosting?" Lucky Numbers: 5, 20, 38, 40, 24, 8

It stopped snowing for a while

2007-02-03T10:09:00.000-05:00

Anyone want a kitten. They are wicked cute.

Eternity of Days (02/02/07)

How long since I've felt your touch
The warmth of your body near mine
The scent of your breath when you speak an 'I love you'
It must be eternity
Maybe I can't tell time

I miss you like aching and always and final
I crave the contours of your face
The glint-blue of your eyes with a mischievous smile
The calendar says measure in days

I'd rather measure in miles
Those tend not to grow as fast
But any distance is to far to far
When this much time has passed apart

I don't know when I can see you
When I can escape this place
And the weather keeps coming to bar me from running
Damn this eternity of days

-Jn

The Quiz

2007-01-03T19:58:00.000-05:00

As promised, a quiz on what you have learned. The answers are at the bottom but try and see what you can do without peaking. Let me know how you scored.
1. This one should be pretty easy...you tell me
2. This little guy is white but look carefully.
3. This one might be a little tricky because you can't see the head very well but you can do it.
4. Look at this face. She's all about eating the camera you can tell.
5. Don't think too hard.

Answers:
1. Sheep!
2. A cow
3. Black Sheep!
4. One happy goat
5. A Moose. Mr. Moose, my former basketball coach in fact.

Amendments

2007-01-01T21:27:00.000-05:00

I was recently informed that a friend has...trouble distinguishing sheep and goats. I figured it would be nice to help her and anyone else with similar difficulties as best I can. What follows are a series of pictures comparing the beasties with a few extras. Tomorrow...or when I get around to it...I will post a pictures quiz and we will see what you learned.

First some Sheep.

Note that they are a uniform color and have curly hair. When they are shorn the hair is very short but is still very curly as it grows back in. They also lack horns and generally look pretty dumb.

Next, Goats. They come in a host of colors and even when their hair grows it remains more or less straight. Both males and females have horns though the males' horns can get much longer and spirally.

Here is a wee goat and its father. The male goat has whiskers on his chin. You can't see his horns but trust me they are pretty impressive. Also note the curiosity in the younge goats face...he thinks...most of the time.

This would be an alpaca. It is a close relative of the llama. In general alpacas are a solid color while llamas can be many different colors (this one is atypical) Llamas are much bigger much more misanthropic- they will spit at you for no real reason. Like sheep, they can both be shorn. Unlike sheep they have some inborn intelegence and a long neck. Neither llamas nor alpacas grow horns. (Bonus- they are related to camels)

One large beef cow with her friends. I'm not sure what to tell you...it's a cow.

A cow moose, aka a female moose. They share a reseblance but your mama moose is much larger and has a bigger nose and stick up ears (not stick out ears). Plus moose don't live in fenced fields...they go through the fences as they pass by.

There you go....Someday soon I will update with a little quiz. Hopefully this helps.

Oh look....A Recipe

2007-01-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

Apple Cranberry Pie That Even My Mom Likes
2 Pillsbury Pie Crusts (If you want to make your own, more power to you. It would taste a whole lot better…provided you make good pie crusts in the first place. Maybe you should stick to the dough boy.)
¼ C White sugar
2 T flour
¼ t Salt
¼ t Allspice
1/8 t Nutmeg
½ t Cinnamon (5L you can skip this and not miss too much)
½ t Lemon Zest
1 T Lemon Juice
2 T Honey
1 ½ T Brandy Jim Beam Bourbon
1 t Vanilla
½ C Dried Cranberries
A quantity of Apples (I think I used about 6 Empire apples, which are smallish, and a pair of Granny Smiths)

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Use the nifty apple slicer to core and slice apples for you. Peel the skin off and cut into smaller chunks. Toss in to a microwave safe Corning ware dish that you find in the clean dishes side of the sink. Microwave the apples for 7 minutes and drain off the juices in a colander that you also find on the clean dishes side of the sink. Put the apples back into their very warm Corning ware and add the dry ingredients and cranberries. Go on a search for brandy in the liquor cabinet and finding none use bourbon instead. Mix all of the ingredients together and take your time figuring out how to zest a lemon. Do it wrong anyways. Roll out an oval shaped pie crust into a glass pie dish and dump in your mixture of apple-y goodness. Roll the second pie crust on and crimp the edges. Make sure you cut off the extra crust so that you can re-roll it. Cut a shape or two out of the crust to make a fun design and add some slits so that the steam can vent. Pop your baby pie into the oven for 35 minutes or until the crust is crispy and brown. Don’t eat it with freezer burned ice-cream that your father finds in the freezer. Avoid the temptation.

-Jn

End of Year Game

2006-12-31T18:56:00.000-05:00

I don't really think I like this game. I don't know if it is actually fair. Maybe it is. Randomness of break followed by the suck of the month of Febuary that slowly builds up to the goodness of Summer and then all of the sudden my life explodes into traveling. Hmmm...

Go into your archive and copy the first sentence from each month of this past year. Skip pictures and memes. Only copy sentences which you actually wrote. This will give you a miniature review of your year:

January
A story by request. Among other things it includes: An East Coast Beach Resort, A Washed-Up Anchor Man, and something similar to water melon rinds.
February
What exactly am I quitting you ask?
March
Remember, you are dust and to dust you will return.
April
So I spent most of yesterday in a sewer pipe.
May
(The first thing was a poem about dead some deer and a car and a smattering of pictures)
As much fun as scheduled events and parties and dances are...sometimes those spontaneous ones are just that much better.
June
So as a part of class today we were asked to write for a bit about something along the lines of Salt Marsh Elegy by Aldo Leapold.
July
-I should be sleeping but I cannot
August
My head crunchified then fireworked and now its pretty stellar.
September
I got to play miner today. Sort of.
October
It's good to be home.
November
Um. Life is nuts and I am moving around so much that my muse keeps getting lost.
December
But can I have puppies???

Mini-Pig

2006-12-27T22:32:00.000-05:00

So anyways I got a llama for Christmas. Llama does not live with me and I don't get to name him/her though I am hoping they name it Elmo. I was under the impression that Elmo was going to live in Peru but after some research I think Elmo gets to chill in Bolivia. That is fine with me. Elmo can help herd the guinea pigs. While I am on the topic...would you consider eating a guinea pig. If I have a guinea pig roast in the future would you attend. I mean think about it. You could try several different flavors of roasted pig sauce. Think about it. Also think about the heifer project. They are a solid program that works at a grass roots level. They not only provide animals; they provide training in animal husbandry and veterinary care and also how to provide the best food for the animals. That sort of thing. They are also big on gender equality and they like to turn the programs over to the people as soon as possible so it isnt some overstuffed american college student telling Sancho how to raise his chickens. It is neighbor...and brother, Pedro. My favorite part is that they require people to pass on animals. They frequently give pregnant animals and the first offspring of a heifer animal is passed on to someone else in need who lives in the area. So really when you buy one llama...its more like you get two...or at least 1.5. And in all honesty who doesnt want a llama?

Forget Hippopotamusseses

2006-12-22T23:25:00.000-05:00

I got a Llama for Christmas! I don't think I hate Christmas. These things a vaguely related in ways other than they both feature Christmas. More on that later...

Magnolia

2006-12-12T22:44:00.000-05:00

There is so much but so very little. When your whole life has become one big exercise in procrastination the little bits of procrastination that used to be so relieving sort of drag on you. Hence the spate of unblogging. And you would thing that simply not posting is really something neutral except that I would think things to write, even start to write them…and walk away consigning them to never-never land. For words this is not a happy place of eternal childhood nor is it like limbo. It’s the slow eating deathof beyond apathy sadness. Poor words. I wish that I had cared more…kind of.

So I am coming and going and never quite slowing, the bodies starting to wear and clothing to tear and someday soon I will crawl home again. Or I will run out of places. This is more like it. My plans end after Christmas. Normally these black holes of future bother me but I’m so mellowed and road bumped by the past, oh, six months, that nothing just might be a 4 dimensional place where I can visit for a while and then continue passing through. I still want a puppy. Eventually I will learn how to sit still. Promise. Then I can get the puppy and teach him the same. I want a dog that can do the cool flip the bone off the nose and catch it trick. I tried it with Spanky but it never worked. Iguanas and hermit crabs are nice but they are a little too endothermic to take hiking with you. It will eventually need to be a dog.

So while I’ve been running helter skelter and inadvertently refusing to stay in my house for more time than I spend elsewhere I’ve settled in a little sea-side town in MA where I can cook amazing things and bake nothing. That’s not entirely true because I have baked masterpieces. The problem is that I have to hire out mercenaries to track down things like flour. There is no flour in this house. (Nor are their flowers in this house but that seems like less of a staple.) So baking takes place in stages in several places with borrowed equipment. I forgot how much I enjoyed cooking for me and not worrying about others tastes and letting experimentation rule in the kitchen. It doesn’t ever seem to work this way at home. I have a great idea. How about post-christmas when I am destinationless you invite me over. Fill your kitchen with pre-foodstuffs and I will cook for you. In a few days I will wander elsewhere to others with well stocked kitchens and in such a way I won’t really have to settle. I can car train my wee pooch as I go. Sounds amazing. Lets do it.

(eventually I will poem again. Stagnation is the rule right now)

2006-12-04T18:58:00.000-05:00

But can I have puppies???

House Bouncing

2006-11-10T17:17:00.000-05:00

Something more pathetic than most things: A declawed cat trying to sharpen its claws on the corner of the couch.

Where's Waldo

2006-11-08T17:45:00.000-05:00

Um. Life is nuts and I am moving around so much that my muse keeps getting lost. In the past 23 days I have been in 13 states, some more than once. I think what happened is that (s)he fell off the truck in South Dakota because I seem to have picked it back up on the train in to Chicago. I am guessing it would take a muse about 2 weeks to make it from South Dakota to Chicago in fair weather. It is still a little bruised and shaken. Hopefully it follows me home from here and doesn't get lost on the way again because as far as I am concerned the states between here and there are something like a black hole on non-existance.

I did the Idaho thing, the grad school search thing, the leisurely drive home thing, the madly unpack and repack thing, the MA thing, and now I am doing the Chicago thing. In my travels I have I have committed to alpacas and guinea pigs, seen lopes loping, created an extensive list of reasons why Indiana is patently wrong, galavanted through cemetaries, delivered hermit crabs, and been snuck into the bowels of a building.

One hundred people moving to the sound of the train on the tracks
Far off stares, distant cares, not quite unhappily bored
There is work, there is worry, and hurry and hurry
To the train, and the rythmn that idle thoughts mask.
Doors will open, Mind the tracks, tickets ready, Click-clack,
The steady approach to the city thats calling
Each stop adds one more to the rythmn that goes
Children on foot, bags in hand, on the tracks on the tracks on the tracks

Waldo lives in coconut bark on Haskel Street...I think.

Sad Things

2006-10-28T10:53:00.000-04:00

My car hurts. I don't want to talk about it.

I leave for ID tomorrow.

2006-10-16T21:23:00.000-04:00

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.

...I may not come back.

Good things...

2006-10-06T22:46:00.000-04:00

So I got in a letter in the mail...

Chestnuts are falling

2006-10-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

The Last Holyhock
Pears that never get ripe
Some Plums
An afternoon's foraging
It's good to be home.

-Jn

hehehe...

2006-09-27T19:08:00.000-04:00

Lz sent this to me today. Reminicent of the death by cheese-grater days. Mmmm those were good days.
-Jn

Back

2006-09-26T19:02:00.000-04:00

I don’t know that I realize it before I start but every time I come home from a while away I play the same game and I think something similar before I leave. And I always look for the same things first though they aren’t the same any more. When I spin into my driveway I am waiting for a spunky puppy to come tearing around from the back of the garage or when I am not met there at least a stiff old one to sheepishly haul her arthritic self off of the couch. But there is no dog. Instead there are puffball kittens and half cats and a lithe and lanky yellow eyed wee-beast waiting for me mowling. And I wander around back to check on the trees I know and the garden growing things. The pond is nearly empty and only has 3 frogs and no ducks. Strange. There are chickens. There are always chickens. Sometimes more sometimes less always different colors. Chickens. Check. And then I look to the last patch of sun on the back porch for the orange tripod that never really quite acted like a cat anyways. But of course he is not there. These two are buried side by side like they slept near the rock pile at the edge of the woods. If you were some how wondering, this is what I meant (It’s like coming home in the twilight when everyone else is gone.) though I suppose there were twinges of amber and orange. Let's call them ghosts. Welcome Home. -Jn

Caryatids are not Katydids

2006-09-22T05:27:00.000-04:00

A Beast Called Sorrow (9/22/06 RRC)

Deceptions become repetitions
To perpetuate the hurt received.
Never finding peace
But searching all the while
In a style recognized by gangsters cowboys and the like.
It’s an open mic.
Tell me your fears and dreams and then
I’ll share mine
Just like every time.
Except I don’t expect a solution to the problem
I’ve come to love as me,
And what I do and what I see is
Tainted by the sorrow I claim only as my own.
It’s like coming home in the twilight
When everyone else is gone.
Slightly bruised pride purple splashed against the walls
And an echo in the halls,
But though you want to run,
It’s where you need to be.
Please don’t try to take from me
This beast that I have tamed
Even named
For sorrow is sweet,
purposed,
meet
When the leaves have fallen away
And on special gray days
When the flowers mourn
Because they’re not quite as bright
And on those nights when the hurts are remembered.
They’re dying embers,
But child still don’t touch.
Meddle in the fire too much and
You will be burned in the self-same way.
Maybe then we can share this pain.

-Jn

I forgot about her

2006-09-19T12:50:00.000-04:00

A Daughter Of Eve
by Christina Georgina Rossetti

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:--
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

Hehehe...

2006-09-13T08:08:00.000-04:00

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Antigone

2006-09-12T15:43:00.000-04:00

Coal Miner’s Daughter (9/12/06 - RRC)

Pondering what it means to be a coal miner’s daughter
I can’t help playing in the water
And I like to watch it as it goes
Coming down in rains and snows
And piling up in pools behind a beaver’s master piece
Filled with water-weeds for the geese
And I like to watch the trees turning red
Before they are forced to disrobe in the cold
It shows what you know
When you name them by feel
Makes them real
And I like their hidden rings
Because there’s beauty in seldom seen things
Like the dark bands round the earth
That fuel the lights of the night
Globe round and in your town
And the water shouldn’t turn rust-brown
But you find a better way
It’s not to say that I don’t care
I know what’s there
And what it means to take away
I know how red blood can be
When you fell a beast
But in the least I’m thankful
For the chance to understand
For these hands to know the textures of a life
And the colors to be seen beneath the skin
Maybe it’s a sin to dig to the earths black
But stand back and tell me
How you keep your hands clean
When you tell them they can’t cook
Or have lights to read
Because there is no steam
Have you ever thought it through?
And what do you do to make acid rain?
We’re all stained- guilty for living
And for passing around the blame
Really we all stand the same
Though you choose to look away
Or shake your fists at my father
But what do I know
I’m just a coal miner’s daughter

-Jn

You mean I don't live here?

2006-09-11T04:29:00.000-04:00

Interesting....I like the Beverly house. I dont think I want to leave ever. It is prudent that I leave on Thursday as that is the day that my itty-bitty lease runs out. Maybe if I buy them some beer. Work is bouncing between overnights and days and split shifts which are just my gosh awful favorite. It's getting about time to go home. Pitty. I have lots of people to play with up here. I'm around for another week or so, then this homelessness business will end. I do miss PA. I just wish there was a more direct route from Boston to my end or that maybe it wasn't quite so far away. I should visit ALL the time. I should get a car that runs on H2O while I am at it. Silly financial instability. My Saturday went like...taking a nap after work then making blueberry pancakes and having uber stimulating discussion over breakfast with one NP moderated and mediated by Tybo then meeting up with MelKel to play in the tide pools at her "cute little beach." I got to ride on the shiny but yet unnamed bike and we found critters of all types. When we couldnt catch any lobsters the 8 year old kids got us some to play with. Those kids were awsome and this is not to say that Tybo is not awsome because he could not catch the gianormous lobster. He put in a damn good effort and he still earned himself a beer because he caught me a fish barehanded. The ride home was something like stimulating because we were in a slight hurry to beat impending death and large coastal thunder storms. We only got a wee bit wet. Then we went to Kitty's and met up with some other just-happened-to-be-in-town types and had a spectacular night. Sunday we made ammeretto french toast and hit up church then they let me watch football ALL day yesterday!!!! By they I mean the networks and the oldschool tv and the boys. This is not to say that the boys watched football with me all day as well, just that they didn't complain. I even get to watch my Steelers play on Monday because they are going to let me come back. Must make sure I am not working that night. That would be tragic. Hmmm....

Things you dont want to hear while I'm eating

2006-09-07T12:51:00.000-04:00

I mean while you are eating.

Normally when your mucus makers kick into overdrive this is a bad thing. You spend your days woah-is-me-ing (woad-id-me id more what id souds like) and nose blowing. However, in my uniqueness, this seems to be my bodies way of telling me that I am quickly approaching better.

See evil guerilla germs infultrated my mucus factories in force in an attempt to change my personal autocratic government into a dictatorship bowing to the whims of the head germ leader. All factories were forced to close and production ceased, crippling the traffic infrastructure. The coup was nearly successful as the powers that be were too stuborn at first to call for help and unwilling to admit that Immune System First-Strike had been overwhelmed and colapsed instantly. But when militia armies of Chicken Soup and OJ made were ineffective and Na-Cl monoxygen-dihydride gargle-bombs were scoffed at, RN peace keeping troops were called in. After a mere 24 hours of constant battle the guerilla forces have been pushed back. A monitoring RN force is in place to ensure that the rebel forces are irradicated and there is no chance of a second attack while militia units are brining relief to the state forces. The mucus peasants are showing their support by redoubling their efforts in mucus production and outside critics are wondering if this was all staged by the government to receive support from other nations. What remains to be seen is how many other nations have been infiltrated by escaping rebels as the nations borders could not be sealed during the initial irradication.

(I worked ~20 hours and attended a recital while contagious...oops)

In other news I am moving away from the cat house and into a princess suite this evening. Whilst there I will be waited on, hand and foot, by 4 strapping young gentlemen....or something like that anyways. Who ever said it was bad to be homeless? -Jn

I didn't take pictures

2006-09-02T19:47:00.000-04:00

I got to play miner today. Sort of. I was helping 105 dig a basement with a ragtag crew of some pretty random people. I like this idea of friends helping friends do things like build decks and basements and whatever. People should do these things and friends should help them. Free sweat, dirt, and well worked muscles with pizza, beer, and pop for lunch. Yes. This is why the Amish can do those cool barns and houses and quilts.

I learned fun things too. Like dirt comes in all colors, textures, and even smells. When you are all shoveling from different places into one big pile its beautiful really. Rocks are the same way even if all the rocks were granite. But regardless of all the myriad cool things about geology all rocks and dirt are heavy. And man is mortal. And my arms dont work anymore from betwixt the shoulderblades and decreasing in functionality down to the finger tips.

This is a good tired. Not like those other tireds I have been this week.

-Jn

(Tybo can come too)

HMoCZ and finches

2006-08-25T09:10:00.000-04:00

I have been running around with crazy people all week. I saw Frog and then Tybo and Mel Kel and we went bookstoring and talking and breaking and entering and vintage shoping and eating a lot of eating. I also got to hang out with JJ for a bit. Oh and I got a pen. I think I mentioned it before. I mention it again. I got a pen.

Yesterday I saw everything and that is a lie. We went into bean town (well cambridge anyways) to the Harvard Natural History Museum. There was and amazing photograph exibit that what worth our student discounted admission all by its lonesome but then there was the museum of comparative zoology. We spent so much time running around in there that there was only about 15 minutes for the glass flowers exibit and they kicked us out before we ever got to the minerals and the history section (and they had a thing about anceint peruvian culture). Silly closing time. But we were never gonna leave otherwise. Then we went and found and idyllic concrete bench on the side of an asphalt path and munched on a rather late lunch. Is it dinner when you wait until after 5? Maybe. I started feeding this cute little finch some of my sandwich. Then there were like 4 more little finches so I was feeding them too. Then there were 100 finches and they ceased to be cute and comenced to be a little creepy and opressive. Mel Kel accused me of pushing buttons. She was right. She is frequently right. I told Tybo he would get $2 for a finch but he never caught one. We also talked about a million good things on the way too and from. Homesteading, farming in general, keeping all industry in village, travel, our honeymoon, books, people, and many many other things. And we made it home with no problems. That was exciting. Then Kt came over. We ate a lot of pizza and talked until I almost fell asleep. Life is good.

It is my day off and I am going in to work. Orientation. Freshmen. I love freshmen.

My favorite I think is that it is move in day and it rained all night and it is stlil raining on and off. Life is good.

I have pictures of yesterday but once again they are trapped in a camera...whose batteries are going dead. Hmm....

(it mentions fish!)

2006-08-22T06:12:00.000-04:00

When I lost my computer 20 times a day I would stumble over the fact that I would show someone something (a picture a poem whatever) if I'd had it. The same is true about the camera. This time see I have the camera but no way to transfer the goodies that live inside of it to a more public media. I am told the way is coming via mail. My thought is that like the computer the immediate, essential uses for the camera will disapear when it isn't out of service. Had I a camera I would show you the pen. For now you have to wait on the USPS.

As an update, I am homeless again in a little over 2 weeks. No worries. School starts in days which equals friends with floors and an over abundance of meal points.

Also I do NOT like silverfish. This is promted by the silverfish crawling from out of no-where in the office and suicide jumping off of the desk onto my pants. I like house centipedes and they live in drains and have an unusual number of legs and strange appearance so its not that exactly. Silverfish are just...just...shudder. Thats all. Period.

-Jn

Nothing More (finished 8/22/06 RRC)

I’d mourn you if I thought you’d mourn me
More than lost fate and too little too late.
But then, I haven’t given up on us enough
To write you off as gone for good like I should
And learned how to grieve the twice deceased
And love almost had. Though it’s not quite too bad,
And I can live half-widowed before I’m promised wed
Or ever met in bed and I never have to know
That it wouldn’t have gone beyond a kiss or two
Under a moderately romantic moon before
You left me for whatever seemed better at the time.
But pity’s not my line. This is just the mess I guess
That could be in my head. Instead I sip here waiting,
Cold beer in hand, anticipating the day you’re on this shore.
Only this, and nothing more.

With Love and Squalor

2006-08-16T07:47:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite shorts. I don't exactly know why. A few typos but I think that's what keeps it free.

yup, gate's still broken

2006-08-16T06:21:00.000-04:00

I was going to post about my new dog but apparently I don't have a new dog and it was a dirty rotten lie the whole time.

For the record The Wall has been chosen and and while many have been sentenced no one has been sent...yet.

Pictures I promised sometime

2006-08-15T03:19:00.000-04:00

I planned on leaving you with better pictures of my rainbowhead and adding some of camp but I left my camera cable at home so this is all you get for now. The hair pictures really only show how nuts it is not the actual colors...sorry.

The really cool bug.

The hands that killed Barney...or dyed my hair

A little more blue than it should be

A little too pink

-Jn

icteo-thesaurus your mom

2006-08-15T02:52:00.000-04:00

abrupt, acid, acrid, acrimonious, awkward, bad-tempered, base, bearish, bellicose, bitchy, bleak, blue, blue funk, bluff, blunt, boorish, brief, broody, brusque, cantankerous, captious, caviling, chapfallen, cheerless, choleric, chuffy, churlish, cloddish, clodhopping, contentious, contrary, crabbed, crabby , cranky, crestfallen, cross, cross-grained, crotchety, crude, crusty, curmudgeonly, curt, cussed, cynical, dejected, depressed, desolate, despondent, difficult, disagreeable, disconsolate, discourteous, dismal, disobliging, dispirited, disputatious, dour, downcast, downhearted, dragged, dreary, eccentric, eristic, faultfinding, forbidding, forlorn, fractious, fretful, gloomy, glum, grim, grouchy, gruff, grumpy, hard, harsh, hasty, huffy, ill-humored, ill-mannered, ill-tempered, impatient, impolite, irascible, irritable, joyless, jumpy, loutish, lowbred, malicious, mean, melancholy, menacing, mirthless, miserable, misanthropic, miserly, moody, moping, mopish, morose, mournful, mumpish, nasty, nasty-tempered, oafish, obnoxious, obstreperous, odd, offensive, oppressed, ornery, peeved, peevish, perverse, pessimistic, pettish, petulant, prickly, put out, queer, querulous, quick-tempered, ratty, rude, rustic, sad, sarcastic, saturnine, scornful, severe, sharp, short, short-tempered, snappish, snappy, snarling, snippety, snippy, solemn, sour, splenetic, stringent, sulky, sullen, surly, tart, terse, testy, tetchy, touchy, tough, trying, twitty, ugly, uncivil, uncivilized, uncultured, unfriendly, unhappy, ungracious, unlikable, unmannerly, unpleasant, unpolished, unsociable, unusual, uptight, vexed, vulgar, waspish, waspy, weary, whiny, woebegone

Can I ask you a question?

2006-08-12T06:37:00.000-04:00

To the guys I met at the gas station off 84 in NY at quater to 3 last friday night. Normally I am more talkative, I was just really tired. Lets get coffee or something.