The unexpected guest

The teenager at church likes to go what he calls “herping” – hunting through the woods and bottom land for reptiles and amphibians. Had we been teenagers together, we would have been good friends, I think.

Not too long ago he was lamenting that it has simply been too cold to have much success at finding these creatures. Although there is a frost warning for tonight, it has most certainly warmed up in the last week.

It is unfortunate he was not at my house yesterday afternoon. We could have done a bit of herping together and would not have had to go far to do it.

At about 1:15, I had said goodbye to a friend who came to eat with me on her lunch break and took the Mollynater for a walk. We got back a little before 2:00, and when I walked through the kitchen and reached out to turn on the light in the living room , I did a double-take and changed my mind (the brown square is the light switch).

This is not the first time I have found one of these on the counter. Fortunately, he was just checking things out and did not try to entice me to eat any forbidden fruit.

Unfortunately, when a photo opportunity like this presents itself, one doesn’t have time to dust and remove clutter and set up the subject so the perfect shot can be taken. Had I taken the chance of turning on the light so the color would be better, I am not sure he would have continued to sit there.

And on the off chance that anyone might be worried about the outcome...

the story has a happy ending for all concerned.

If a daffodil blooms and nobody sees it…

Once upon a time, we took the train to Los Angeles, and the tickets were arranged by a man named George, who operated as a travel agent out of one of the businesses in town. We paid him to drive us to Jefferson City, where we caught an Amtrak train to Kansas City, where at about 2:30 a.m. we caught another train coming from Chicago, and so began our great train adventure traveling across the Plains and through a corner of Colorado, where the aspens in the river bottoms were golden and glorious.

George’s house is not too far from our house, perhaps a 10-minute walk, and I usually walk by it with Molly Wog at least once a day. He built on to the corner of his house a really nice, round, sun room, and bundles of shingles were delivered to the roof so a new roof could be put on… and then… George vanished.

He abandoned the house… he never finished the sun room, and he never had the house reroofed. We heard he had moved to Springfield, and we never saw him again.

So for the past 20 years or so the house has set empty, slowly deteriorating under the relentless onslaught of nature and periodic vandalism. 

I found a name matching his, for a man who would have been about his age, who died in Springfield in 2003. I don’t think George will ever return to his house.

George had built what once must have been a very nice flower bed lined with rocks (which we have plenty of here) for an assortment of daffodils. The normal, garden-variety “wild” daffodils have already passed their peak and are fading away, but other varieties are just how at their peak, including the ones in George’s back yard that have been on their own now for many years.

If one knows where to look, it is possible to just barely see a bit of the rock bed with its mass of daffodils as one strolls by. The rock bed has gradually fallen apart, but the daffodils are thriving and have spread over the yard, and are quite beautiful.

If one has already ignored the “No Trespassing” sign that was once hanging on a tree and is now on the ground on what was once the driveway, one could likely also bring clippers along on the next walk and return home with a beautiful bouquet. Couldn’t one?

If it ain’t one thing, it’s another…

Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it's always something--if it ain't one thing, it's another...

is how the late great Gild Radner would end her monologue as Roseann Roseannadanna in the early years of  Saturday Night Live. I don’t actually have a Roseann Roseannadanna tale (I mean, I didn't meet a celebrity who did something that made me sick) but yesterday really was one “for the books…”

We were supposed to go to Springfield today, but had decided to take the Divine Ms M with us to see if she would travel well for a longer distance than just a mile to town and back. We are contemplating bringing her along when we drive to California in the fall.

The main objective for the trip was to have lunch at the Macaroni Grill, one of our favorite places to eat in Springfield. One of my family members had sent us a gift card some time ago that we had yet to use and so we figured we would use it.

Richard had pared the stores he needed to shop at to four, and the plan was I would walk the dog around outside while Richard did the shopping. Worked for me. I do not particularly enjoy trudging behind him as he gallops down the aisles. When he goes shopping, he is a man on a mission and moves right along. But it wouldn’t work if it were raining. And the forecast was for rain today (and indeed, it is raining this morning in Springfield).

The plan got changed because the weather yesterday was nice. So we ventured out into the rather uncharted waters of “spontaneity” and headed off for Springfield yesterday morning. About 7 miles down the road Richard realized he had forgotten something rather important – the money to pay any balance due on the gift card – so we turned around and came back and he got the money, and the mobile phone, and the glasses he needed, and we started off again.

And much to our dismay, as we drove past the distinctive Macaroni Grill building, we observed that the restaurant was obviously closed and there was a big FOR LEASE sign out in front. In stunned disbelief – how could a restaurant that good close down!! – we proceeded down the street and stopped at the first restaurant we came to, sort of steak/bbq place, and had lunch, which was expensive and not that great. We did not think it through very well. I mean, we could have gone to Panera, which is another place we enjoy eating at, even if it is fast food.

Aside from that, the rest of the day went well. While we were driving, she curled up in the back seat and went to sleep. We managed to get her through the Pet Smart store without her peeing on the floor or causing too much of a disturbance. She tends to greet people by howling, which I am going to have to stop her from doing.

And when we got home, Richard got out the Macaroni Grill card, thinking we would slip it into an envelope and send it back to California with a note, when he noticed that the card was also good at Chili’s, another place in Springfield that serves decent food. Had we gotten it out and looked at it yesterday we could have eaten there. Like I said, it’s always something…

The slime factor

Not too long ago Richard read somewhere that if everyone gave up meat for one meal a week that it would save…. Well, he doesn’t remember now what exactly it would save, but it made quite an impression on him at the time, so we have been experimenting with “Meatless Monday” for about 2 months now.

What is impressing me most about my husband, who will begin another decade of life toward the end of summer, is that he is becoming more open and more adventurous the older he gets. I am very pleased that he is turning into an interesting geezer who is not so stuck in rut that he can’t try something new. What is particularly thrilling to me is that he is now quite willing to try many of the vegetarian meals that I have prepared for myself for lunch for many years and which he wouldn't even taste to see if he liked it. In the margin of the page of one of the recipes from my Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook, which I use often, and which I had fed him once some years ago to an underwhelming response, I had written “Richard hates this…”

I fed it to him not too long ago, and he quite liked it this time around and said I should make it again.

 

For this Meatless Monday I fixed groundnut stew, a pleasing blend of sweet potato, cabbage, onion, ginger, chopped apple, tomatoes, some spices, and peanut butter… and chopped okra.

Okra. One of those vegetables is that is either liked or not liked... at all.  There is a slime factor with okra. The slime doesn’t bother me, but it bothers him. He will only eat okra if it is dredged in cornmeal and fried in oil.

I thawed the frozen, sliced okra and tried putting it in warm water for a while and then rinsing it in a colander to get the slime off, but there seemed to be a never-ending supply of slime… So I dished out his portion of the meal and added the okra to the rest of it and cooked it a little longer, and dinner was served..

That was really good. Let’s have that again some time…

Success!

Doritos and Kool-aid

 

We had a foot-washing service this afternoon at church. The foot-washing ceremony was not part of the faith community that I grew up in, but we have attended two churches since we moved to Missouri where it is practice, and it can be quite an amazing and moving experience. I note today that the new Pope washed the feet of inmates and women. That's what it is all about.

After we finished, the subject of communion on Sunday came up. The church pantry appears not to have any communion wafers. Sue wondered if I would be interested in making the communion bread and then said she would buy some if I did not want to. I volunteered to make it. Then we had a discussion about whether it should be leavened or unleavened, and did it matter?

Kim, who moved here with her family a few years ago and attends our church now, was the pastor of a church where she lived before they moved here. The Sunday service in her church was broadcast over the local community access cable channel in their town. She said she got into some trouble because in one of her sermons she told the people watching at home that if they wanted to participate in the communion service along with the congregation, and all they had in the house was Doritos and Kool-aid, then they should get the Doritos and Kool-aid and have communion along with them and that it would be OK.

It is hard to say what the bread was like that they ate at that last Passover meal before the crucifixion. Most of the ingredients in the communion bread I will bake  -- wheat flour, olive oil, honey, molasses and salt -- could have been used to make the bread in that last Passover supper.

We won’t be having Doritos and Kool-aid on Sunday, but it would be OK.

Rubber butter and other oddities

A string of sometimes peculiar, bewildering, funny, even somewhat alarming events that began with the strange photograph of the basketball homecoming queen have continued on and which I have had some trouble writing about. Several blog writers that I enjoyed reading very much have abandoned their blogs in favor of Twitter or Facebook or perhaps they didn’t intend to stop writing, it just sort of happened. I can see it happening here, and even if not another single person ever read the blog again, I read it and it has become a valuable memory keeper, so I really don’t want to let it lapse. As I have complained about more than once, I have been struggling since well…. since… trying to get some sort of balance back in my life and have not been very successful. At any rate… before too much more time passes: 

The magic microwave…

For about 2 weeks our microwave took on a mind of its own. When we opened the door of the machine to heat something, it automatically turned on and the rotating plate began to rotate. It was very disconcerting. When the item had finished heating, we had to be rather quick to open the door and grab what was ever in there so as not to expose ourselves to the microwave radiation, although I am not sure how dangerous an unshielded microwave really is (except I know they are not good for people whose heart rhythm is controlled by a pacemaker). Eventually the microwave died, and we struggled without it for 1 day before Richard high-tailed it off to the nearest major retailer in the area to buy a new one. I grew up without a microwave and my mother functioned just fine without one for many years, but my goodness, they are so convenient.

Rubber butter...

Without giving it too much thought, I stuck a piece of light-colored cheese (Havarti or Gouda) in the cubicle where we keep the butter. It wasn’t wrapped. My main guilty pleasure is a tablespoon of butter on my popcorn at night. Yeah, yeah, I know.  Sometimes I use olive oil instead. One evening I grabbed what I thought was about a 1-tbsp piece of butter and melted it in the microwave. It didn’t look quite right as I was pouring it over my popcorn, but I didn’t think too much about it until after I sat down and discovered that wherever the butter had landed, the popcorn was stuck together with this rubbery glop. I thought something was seriously wrong with the butter, so I told Richard I this rubber butter and did he have any ideas? He couldn’t figure it out either at first and then he said, “That almost looks like melted cheese….”

Of course. Once I realized it wasn’t mutant butter, it was quite tasty.

One in 20 people…

Having watched me slowly recover from a rather stubborn bronchial infection over the Christmas holidays, my husband began reminding me that I really needed to get a pneumonia vaccine. After he got pneumonia twice, he got the vaccine and has not had it since, and was very concerned that I might get it. So having become tired of being nagged, I made an appointment with the County Health Department to get the vaccine. While I was filling out the paperwork, I handed him the CDC handouts on the pneumonia vaccine the clerk had given me and he began to read it and then said:

“Did you realize that 1 in 20 people who get the vaccine will die?”

WHAT?!?!?!

Ooops. I read that wrong. One in 20 who get pneumonia will die…

TV these days is filled with commercials for prescription medicines for which they are required to list all of the adverse effects of taking the medicine, and sometimes death is a side effect. That is not a particularly funny fact, but something about the situation tickled both of us and we burst into laughter, which perhaps caused some confusion amongst the clerks behind the counter; fortunately, the waiting room was empty.

So I am duly vaccinated. And as an aside, I have nothing but good things to say about our County Health Department. They provide a wonderful service.

Melted...

Not only were butter and cheese melted. I had put my ski mask into the microwave to warm it up a bit because it was very cold out. Unfortunately, it was damp around the top because I had washed it out the day before and it had not yet fully dried. The heat from the microwave cause the damp parts to melt. So I cut those parts out and left the house and then got yelled at when I returned for not saying anything to Richard about the melted hat. The smell of the melted hat had convinced him that there was an electrical fire somewhere in the house.  .And now I really must wear another cap in addition to the ski mask to keep the top of my head warm, and very conveniently, my cousin in Hawaii sent me a new one.

We’ve created a monster…

We thought it was funny when the Molly Wog tore into a hole in the ground to get at whatever small creature was living there. Tree root in the way? Not a problem, she would just bite down on it and rip it out. On warm days, I would hook her to a cable and let her dig out there for an hour or so in the afternoon and then bring her in and clean her up.

And then she caught a mouse in the garage. She was very proud of herself, and carried it around for a while but didn’t eat it.

We have always had a mouse problem in the house – especially in the first new room we added on. This was Richard’s office, and there are quite a few small holes in the walls for cables for phone lines, Internet access, and the television, and the like.

After Molly Wolly Doodle got the smell of mouse in her nose, I guess she realized there were mice all over the place, particularly out there. Whenever anyone went out there, she came too, and for a while, she was content to sit out there and stare at the wall. And then one morning, perhaps a mouse actually did stick its nose out of one of the holes, but she went berserk and started to dismantle a book case that was in front of the hole, and then the DSL line was in the way, and so she just grabbed it and ripped it in half. Richard knew immediately something was wrong when the Internet suddenly went dead, and so we went running out there in time to stop her from doing any more damage or grabbing an electrical wire and electrocuting herself or burning the house down.

Shortly after we got her, we bought a wire crate for her, and fortunately, by this time, we gotten her quite used to going inside crate to eat her food and get treats. We keep the door shut to that area of the house, but unfortunately, there are several areas now in the living area where she thinks there might be mice. Now we don’t trust her to be by herself in the house, so she has to be locked in the crate if we both leave the house. Whatever hunting instincts were built into the big version of the Schnauzer breed have not been downsized in this smaller version…. And that's the truth... pbbtttt

Behind the scenes

I did not have the privilege of raising a daughter, and if truth be told, I was terrified at the idea that I would give birth to a girl because I did not think I would be a good mother to a female child. Even so, I think I can do a fairly reasonable job of imagining what these parents of this young woman might have felt recently.

Your attractive daughter is a high school senior, and she is popular enough to have been nominated to be the Hoop Queen and will be crowned at the upcoming homecoming basketball, game. I am not sure how this is done at the local high school; perhaps the boys on the team pick the girls who will be candidates… or the entire senior class, or a committee, and then they are voted on.

Excitement and/or dread have been building for several weeks, getting just the right dress for the occasion, getting her hair done, and finally the big day arrives. You go to the homecoming basketball game and during the half-time ceremony your daughter is indeed crowned Hoop Queen. A photographer is taking pictures as she is crowned and photographs of the homecoming court, and you eagerly go to the newspaper office the following Tuesday to pick up extra copies of the paper to send to out-of-town friends and family.

And are in for a big surprise. The photograph of your daughter being crowned Hoop Queen is indeed in the paper; in fact, it is on the front page, at the bottom. There she is… a lovely picture of her back, and admittedly, the back of the dress that was chosen with such care does have some very interesting details. There is a perfect shot of her boyfriend, who is happily placing the crown on her head and grinning from ear-to-ear.

Richard informs me that it would violate the copyright law if I put this very strange picture on the blog without permission, so I guess “1000 words” will have to do. The newspaper redeemed itself a bit by at least printing on an inside page a picture of the queen and her court so their faces can be seen – just barely -- but we just could not figure out “what were they thinking…”

We do not hold ourselves out to be experts on newspapers or what makes a good newspaper, but we did publish a community newspaper for some years in Southern California, and there are just some things a good newspaper is supposed to do… and this was definitely not it.

It could be worse...

Threats of a very bad storm overnight prompted our grief counselor to reschedule to yesterday the session that was supposed to happen this morning. We had some routine shopping to do in town. The stores were very crowded with people, likely stocking up, just in case.

Richard filed up the generator, just to make sure it would work.

We hunkered down.

This morning we woke up to a very thin coating of ice only on the the cars and the porch steps. The ground was mostly clear.... then as it got lighter, sleet came pelting down, which was followed by thunder and about 5 minutes of pea-sized hail.

Usually when it hails it is during a summer thunder storm when it is hot and the hail melts within minutes. Today it is very cold, and the wind is biting, and so the hail remains on the ground.

I was able to don my cleated shoes and walk Molly Wog down the driveway, crunching through the hail and sleet, so she could do her business. I don't think she understands why we won't be walking 3 miles today.

We are very relieved the storm was not any worse. Conditions may deteriorate if it warms enough so everything melts and then it freezes again, forming a sheet of ice, but it isn't too bad so far. I could be worse...

The Carousel of Time

While we were living in Oregon I noticed an announcement in the newspaper that the local community college was going to offer an adult education class on “Folk Guitar for Beginners.” I had bought a rather cheap classical guitar and an instruction book before we left California but had not made very much progress in teaching myself how to play it, so I signed up for this class.

The class went well, overall. I inherited my mother’s short, stumpy fingers, which are something of a drawback when trying to make some of the chords on a guitar, so although the F chord was elusive, I managed to lean how to play the rest of chords that were taught.

One evening Richard was not able to take care of Nathaniel and so I took him to the class. He was about 3 years old at this time, and not long after we walked into the classroom, he spotted the fire alarm button and before I could stop him, he had raced over to it and pressed it. The alarm began ringing throughout all of the buildings on the campus. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to it and it was quickly shut off. Fortunately.

At the end of the class, we were asked to learn a song and present it to the others with the words and the chords. I learned to play Joni Mitchell’s song The Circle Game… 

And the seasons they go 'round and 'round

And the painted ponies go up and down

We're captive on the carousel of time

We can't return we can only look behind

From where we came

And go round and round and round

In the circle game

Today is the day in 1977 that the seasons began going round and round for our son as he made his way into the world, in the usual way. The carousel of time he was riding made 33 revolutions before it stopped, on January 13, 2011, almost exactly 1 month before the 34th turn. So he will forever be 33 years old.

And we can’t return, we can only look behind. In thinking back over the 33 birthdays we celebrated with him, I remember very few of them. One was very much like another as the years passed.

The warehouse in Orange (near Disneyland) where our newspaper office was located was right next to train tracks. And it seemed almost inevitable that every day when I brought him, as an in infant, to the office to see Richard, that a train would pass by, and we would rush out to see it. Thus it is not surprising that he became obsessed with trains very early. I think the first sentence he spoke was “Go bye bye car. Train?”

We moved to Oregon when he was about 18 months old, and as it happened, we lived near train tracks there too. I remember making at least one “train cake” for him for a birthday. I baked a flat sheet cake and cut it in various shapes to resemble cars in a train, mixed different colors of icing for each car, used pieces of licorice to couple them together, and used cookies for the wheels. It was a mess, of course, because I am not skilled in this sort of thing, but he didn’t care. He loved it.

That might have been the year I took him for a train ride on his birthday. It was either his third or fourth birthday, but I am not sure which. We got on at the depot in Albany...

and rode to Salem, and then got off and waited in the depot for another train to take us back to Albany. It was one of the best birthday presents ever.

In later years, one of his favorite things to do on his birthday was go have pizza. There is a restaurant in town – not a franchise – that serves very good pizza. And today we will have lunch there and remember…

 

What’s wrong with this picture?

I am taking Miss Molly Wolly Doodle for a walk through town. It is a lovely warm day, and the sun is brilliant. In several yards I notice freshly laundered clothes have been pegged out on clotheslines and are flapping in the gentle breeze. Storm doors are propped open, and windows are raised to let in the fresh air.

And back at the home front, bees are busy working the crocus in the front yard.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Nothing, exactly, except that it is after all, the beginning of February. It is supposed to be winter.

It was winter this time a couple of years ago…

Yes, we are used to “yo-yo” temperatures in the winter, so this is not all that unusual, and it is very likely that within a week there could be 3 inches of snow on the ground.

I am not complaining, mind you. Just reminding myself not to be lulled into a false sense of security; after all, Winter is the season when Nature is out to get us…

All this lovely-ness makes me a little wary.