Luggage That Moves Itself

Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has created a most amazing character - a wooden box called the Luggage - which appears several times in the Discworld novels that feature Rincewind the Wizard. The Luggage is alive, it has hundreds of little legs, it is slavishly dedicated to its owner, and it follows Rincewind wherever he goes, even to hell and back.

Modern travelers can buy luggage with wheels so that they can pull it behind or push it in front, but they don't have quite as much luck keeping their luggage with them. It can and does often go missing.

But the last two people to board the commuter jet at Dallas/Ft Worth on Wednesday for the trip to Springfield, who sat behind me at the very back of the plane, each had a carry-on that carried itself on. They caused quite a stir among the passengers as they came down the aisle and arranged the carry-ons under their seats. 

"They can't bring them on the plane!" one said. "Oh yes they can," said the flight attendant.

These carry-ons were two drug-sniffing dogs on their way home from the Dominican Republic with their handlers for more training.

One was a chocolate-colored Labrador Retriever, and this dog, Kito, a Golden Retriever mix..

They were excellent passengers, although the handler explained they had been given sedatives to help keep them calm. Even so, toward the end of the flight, I felt a tail hitting my foot.

The Wall Came Tumblin' Down...

According to a program I was watching the other night about chocolate, pirates once seized a ship headed for Spain expecting to find gold or silver in the hold. Instead they found what looked like dried rabbit droppings. They burned the cargo, not realizing that they were burning cocoa beans that were worth their weight in silver back in Spain.

Sometimes I wonder if a stranger coming into my house would recognize one of the most valuable things that I own, which is sitting in plain sight on one my bookshelves.

For Christmas in 1989 I received in the mail a small package from Germany. It came from Elli, a woman who started out as a customer of our mail order business, morphed into a translator of our materials into German, and in the process became a friend.

She sent some wonderful chocolate, a cassette tape of German Christmas carols, and in a small box nestled in cotton, a small piece of concrete painted orange on one side. I was somewhat puzzled by this painted concrete, until I read the note.

A piece of the Berlin Wall.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall ceased to be an official barrier between East and West Berlin, a prelude to the reunification a year later of the country that had been divided since the close of WW II.

The images of German citizens on the wall celebrating their freedom stick in the mind similar to the image of Nelson Mandela leaving prison in South Africa. They began attacking the wall, and eventually crews came to dismantle it. Not quite as neat and efficient a Joshua marching the Israelites around the walls of Jericho, but to me every bit as much a miracle.


For Elli this piece of concrete had deep symbolic meaning, because it was her country in which history was being made. I was deeply touched that she thought to send it to me.

Since 1989 it has sat on the bookshelf, propped up against my battered collection paperback books.

To the casual eye, just a bit of rubble that likely would quickly be thrown away; for me, a small symbol of freedom of immense value.


Sometimes people are confined by internal prisons of their own making, sometimes they are victimized by external prisons of concrete erected by others; and sometimes--just sometimes--those prisons are dismantled.

Twosie Balls

My folks id not feel comfortable using in front of their children the words other people used to talk about bodily functions involving the toilet. They did not say urinate or defecate, or pee or poop, and most definitely none of coarser or the even worse four-letter words.

Instead, we went "number one" - or "onsies" -- or "number two" - "twosies". And of course, in our minds, those words became the equivalent of the four-letter variety and our response was usually furtive giggling when anyone innocently said those words in another context, such as hopscotch.

Our folks have an old-fashioned metal food grinder that clamps to the counter, with a hopper in the top and an auger and discs with different sized holes. When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was help dad grind cranberries, oranges, and apples for the Thanksgiving Day dinner relish. The cranberries made a wonderful popping sound.

Then he found a recipe for a very healthy confection consisting of dried dates, figs, prunes, and walnuts, mixed with a little orange juice and rolled into balls, and then the balls were rolled into powdered sugar. They looked a lot like... you know what... and we all called them twosie balls.

 
I hadn't thought about twosie balls for a long time until I happened across a similar sounding recipe on A Vision Splendid, another blog I enojy.

I made her recipe, except I fashioned it into balls rather than square slices. I agree with her assessment: very tasty indeed.

I'll fly away.... this morning

In a few minutes we will be leaving in the pre-dawn darkness for the trip to the airport in Springfield and I will be flying away to Los Angeles to celebrate the life of my mother, who symbolically flew away on Oct. 13. This time I will only have to negotiate the Dallas/Ft Worth airport.

I won't have internet access to the blog from my dad's house, but thanks to the magic of "scheduled posting," there will be a few installments here over the next week.


I'll be back!

I do strange things when trying to multitask

One of several things I have noticed about getting older is that I cannot so easily do more than one thing at a time without messing one or more of those things up somehow. I have recently been exchanging e-mails with these two women, Rhonda and Sue, who came to visit my father...

and had their photo taken standing in front of his truck.


That truck has quite a history. I began to learn to drive in it, learning how to operate a clutch and the gears, with my dad teaching me, but I think I made him a little crazy -- I know I made him a little crazy (and we were just in the parking lot of a big factory). Eventually my mother took over, bless her heart.

But the best memories are that when we were younger, in high school, these two were often among the group of kids my dad would invite to hop in the back of the truck on a Saturday for a trip to the beach.

Sue passed on to me a recipe for wonderful pumpkin soup that she says her boss gave her. I guess reading about soup on his blog is perhaps a bit tiresome, but just one more soup recipe for a while and I'll give it a rest. Promise.

Pumpkin Ginger Soup

2 lbs of pumpkin or other winter squash
2 tbsp of unsalted butter
2 cloves of garlic minced
6 inches of ginger peeled and minced (approximately 1/4 cup)
1 stalk of celery finely chopped
1 carrot finely chopper
1 yellow onion finely chopped
4 cups of chicken broth
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Melt butter in a soup pot and add the onion, garlic, ginger, celery and the carrot. Saute for about ten minutes or until the onion becomes translucent.
2. Skin the pumpkin (or squash) and cut into cubes about 1 inch square.
3. Add the cut pumpkin and chicken broth to the pot and bring to a boil.
4. Simmer until the pumpkin is soft.
5. Let the mixture cool and then put in a blender or food process to puree.
6. Re-heat to serve.

So, there I was at the kitchen counter dishing up my lunch and ladling pumpkin soup into my bowl -- and at the same time talking to the LOML who was sitting at the table eating his lunch -- and I reached in the pot, got a scoop of soup, turned to say something to him, and then dumped it into the dishwater that he had prepared to wash the dishes after lunch.

Cup of tea, anyone?

Yet another very rainy day in the Ozarks, and I return home from town after having run some errands, without an umbrella,  feeling rather damp. Time to get into something warm and settle down with a cup of tea.

Would you care to join me? Not too long ago, I went nuts in the salvage store and I can offer you many varieties of tea. What kinds?

I am not supposed to drink a lot of caffeine, so the The "California Orange" can contains caffeine-free orange pekoe, if just regular type tea is what you want... 

And this is not even all of them, which I am somewhat embarrassed to admit (I am in good company, the LOML once accumulated 42 tubes of toothpaste that he found on sale)..

And I have a lovely teapot.

I can offer a variety of cups to drink it from....

And some Honey-Lavender biscotti, which is perfect for dipping if you're a "dunker"...

which I found out about at the food  blog written by Sidewalk Shoes (and I even copied the way she took her photograph) who had a link to it. And she is right, it is about the best biscotti I have ever made. Biscotti is a wonderful form of cookie for eating with something hot and fluid, because it can be made without any added fat, which helps to keep the calorie count down.

So, shall we have a tea party?

Magic Under the Cedars

After what seems like days and days of rain (have we magically been transported back to Oregon? I think to myself) ...

enough rain that even the most cheerful people are beginning to complain just a little bit about it,

even though we are probably in a drought, and need every drop....

the clouds finally blow away and the beautiful blue sky of fall returns.

We take a walk through the field to see if our little pond is full (and it is!),

and there at our feet, springing up under the cedar trees,

are these amazing jewels of mushrooms, rivaling the most beautiful fall colors...

.

on the trees around the house...

I become a geezer?

Upon awaking this morning, I realized that I have turned another year older and I may now be a geezer. Possibly. The LOML says I won't officially be a geezer for another 5 years, and he may be right, but most of the commercial establishments in these here parts offer a discount to people my age. It is now cheaper for me to see a movie. Today (or tomorrow) I believe I will take our boy to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which is playing at a cinema in the next town down the road. He remembers me reading that story to him when he was a little kid.

I have not made up my mind about what I want for my birthday dinner. Either homemade macaroni and cheese, or meatloaf with mashed potatoes. I am also wrestling with what sort of dessert I will feed myself and the men to honor me on my special day. Either an apple pie with ice cream, or a chocolate cake layered with pudding, whipped topping, and Heath bar bits.

I know at least two of the presents that I will get--the CD Dreamboat Annie by Heart and a lavender-scented diffuser with a nice pottery bottle--because I picked them out myself. A package from my sister sits waiting to be opened, and there are some cards, too.

The first birthday I remember celebrating was when I was 3 years old. My mom and dad got me a child-sized fishing pole that came in a metal tube.

 This enabled me to go fishing with my father.

 
 I remember turning 16 and 21, but the rest of them are sort of a blur. I think I will no doubt remember turning 60 because of its association with our family's recent bereavement. But, I have made the decision that this will be happy day, and so it will.

Mixing It Up

For many years we have purchased certain spice mixtures from Penzey's, among them, jerk and Herbes de Provence.

And then I came upon a wonderful recipe on a blog for homemade tomato soup - Provence Tomato Soup. I would send you to the original source but I am not able to find it again, for some reason. We were buying some rather expensive commercial tomato soup, but this tastes far better, with the additional benefit of no additives, except for sodium, which is impossible to escape if one uses canned tomatoes.

Provence Tomato Soup

Olive oil for sauteeing
1 large onion, medium diced
2 large cloves garlic, finely diced
1 small can tomato paste
2-3 tbsp Herbes de Provence
1/2 cup white wine
4 14-oz cans diced tomatoes (with liquid)
2 quarts chicken broth (home made, canned low-sodium, or bouillon cubes)
Salt and pepper to taste
Soft goat cheese for each bowl.

Heat a few tbsp of olive oil in a large soup pot, add the onion and garlic, and saute until nearly translucent. Add the tomato paste and the Herbes de Provence, and wine. Stir. Add the tomatoes, including the liquid. Cover and bring to a boil and simmer for about 15 minutes to blend the flavors, you don't need to cook it to death. The LOML says adding a bit of brown sugar to the soup improves the taste.

This makes 8-10 serving. The soup freezes well.

Penzey's is a good company to deal with - when we first began ordering from them, they always included a sample of another spice along with the order -- but their spices are rather expensive. The recipe requires quite a bit of Herbes de Provence, and we were going through it at a remarkably fast clip after the LOML decided to begin making this soup and eating it for a bedtime snack every night. So, I decided to see if I could make my own. In past years, before the Internet took off, it wasn't so easy to track down recipes for spice blends, now there are many to choose from.

So we took a trip to the bulk food store....

and came home with bags of spices and I began to assemble a version of Herbes de Provence as close to the Penzey's blend as I could find.

So I measured out the herbs...

And ground them up....

And here they are...

And at about the same time, we also ran out of jerk, so I went looking for a recipe for that. There must be 15 or 20 different jerks out there, all with mostly the same ingredients, but with slightly different proportoins.

And now we are good to go...

Oh Where Is My Squirt Bottle?

I used to clean house for a woman who had a bunch of kids, which she homeschooled, so they were usually there when I came to clean the house. And on more than one occasion they watched the Veggietales movie when I was there, and I saw parts of it as I moved in and out of the various rooms. I was already somewhat familiar with this song, because I had heard other children singing it on occasion. They let me borrow the tape. There were two songs we particularly liked "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" and this song about the missing hairbrush which we often sing to each other when we have lost something.

I have a small green squirt bottle that serves various function depending on what I am doing and where I am when I am doing it.

In the summer when the window is open where I sit working away at my job, I keep the squirt bottle handy to aim a stream of water through the screen at the squirrels that show up to gobble down the sunflower seeds. It doesn't really stop them, but I like scaring them and watching them leap out of the way of the water.

Once it get too cold for the back door to stand partly open, then the cat will start to bother me. The typical scenario is: she is outside and wants in, so she leaps up on the bird feeder to meow at me and I get up to let her in. Then about 5 minutes after she comes in, she wants out, and then she leaps up by my computer and sits by the window and  looks out. Then she will leap from there onto the printers and put her little kitty paws on certain buttons that make the printers go bezerk. Where was I. Oh yes. I occasionally squirt her with the water to make her leave me alone.

Then, when I am baking bread, I will put fresh warm water in the bottle, turn the nozzle to mist, and put a thin film of water on top of the dough. That makes a nice chewy crust that the LOML likes. The last time I used the squirt bottle, I left it sitting on the ledge in the kitchen, and it was perfectly happy to be sitting there, but the LOML decided it was in the way and he wanted it put up someplace. I argued with him about it for a bit but decided that was not a battle I really wanted to fight. So he said "I"ll put it here...."

So this afternoon when I went to mist the top of the buns I was making, I could not find the spray bottle. I asked him where it was and he couldn't remember where he put it either, but "I know it is in a logical place," he said. A logical place would be in the cupboard in the kitchen where I keep the white flour, or in the pantry where I store the baking pans and the whole wheat flour . It was in neither place. So we commenced the great Squirt Bottle hunt. And we found it, finally, in a totally illogical place -- in the cupboard where I keep ingredients that I never ever use when I make bread.