Friday, 21 July 2006
I’m afraid our three-week absence wasn’t the best prescription for the tomato plants, but there’s still a chance we’ll get a couple of ripe ones before the season ends! These are Banjo B’s cherry tomatoes, even producing after transplanting mid-season! In fact, while I was trying to get this shot, I was probably becoming infested with chiggers! (Count is now nine; I HOPE that’s final!)
Thursday, 20 July 2006
This is how SeedMagazine.com shows the future of the petroleum extraction in a recent (and downloadable) “crib sheet? I’m confused about why the continental US is white/blank/reserve-less, ’cause I’ve seen the pumps out there on the Great Plains and elsewhere (including Michigan!), plus the Canadian Plains blob just dies at the border—and I think extends into the northern Gulf of Mexico…. And, is it true there are no deposits across the southern globe?
Speaking of Edward Tufte-inspired graphics and statistics issues: if the blobs are changed to density per area ranks (instead of by the overall volume of each), how would the map change? Would the hot spots move?
The same cribsheet also claims that there’s new hybrid automotive technology out there called a steel v-belt continuously variable transmission that will supplant the current type(?s?), and be even more fuel-efficient. A quick Google, and I’m none the wiser, except that Chinese v-belt manufacturers have a significant web presence, and v-belts seem to be an extant technology. I’d still like to think Seed’s doing a good job of reporting, though….
Reminder: Get over and ask the neighbor how she likes her Prius!
While I’m at it, another Seed page has a Bill McKibben article from their April/May issue where his answers to the question “What constellation of forces might shake up the American political system enough to provoke real, deep change?” seem to be at odds with those I heard John Dean espouse in a interview regarding his new book Conservatives Without Conscience.
Dean told Keith Olbermann that the strong followers of authoritarian leaders constitute about 23% of Americans (didn’t say percent of voters or of adults). So, if we’re to combat the block they constitute we must understand how they behave. These are the folks for whom it is an emotional and not a logical issue to “hate liberals, Hillary Clinton, or their current topic/person—cultist behavior, in short.
Here’s a bit of what Dean wrote in the Boston Globe:
Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, “enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral.” And that’s not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.
Authoritarianism’s impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they’ve often been supplanted by authoritarians.
Vocabulary: disjecta membra, a plural noun meaning scattered fragments, especially of written work. Not to be confused with flotsam and jetsam, although in certain circumstances disjecta membra may resemble what Anne calls shambling mounds.
Enough from me. Your turn.
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
There’s nothing like fresh spices for cooking. One I’ve never used, never found except in a semi-desiccated form, is lemon grass. Banjo B used it in the Thai food last night, and it’s a show-stopper.
Now that we’re home, I need to schedule a trip to Hastings Garden Center to see if I can find a pot of lemon grass!
Yes, dear Reader, we’ve completed the Great Loop to the Northlands, and we’re back in Big A-town, craving sushi (take out tonight!), and getting the pile of mail dispersed (thankfully, much of it to the trash), putting away the travel gear, figuring out the first (fast) grocery list, and piling up the dirty laundry.
Welcome home!
Tuesday, 18 July 2006
Good friends are the best! We enjoyed a great evening with M The Archaeo and Banjo B, and their lovely daughter! Among the best was M’s peaches and cream pie (sorry, no recipe), mmmm. M says the summer she found the recipe, she made it every week and had to quit when she gained ten pounds!
They’ve just moved into a new place, and somehow have found the time to begin transforming the back yard into a place of beauty. They transplanted all their favorite plants and veggie garden, and we found both tomatoes and peppers among the flowers, including dahlias, and several familiar ones I don’t know the names of.
The apparent downside of our lovely stroll: I seem to have acquired at least two chigger bites!
Monday, 17 July 2006
No moss growing on us! To take the sting out of a 390-mile drive (bye-bye UP!), we went sailing! On Lake Saint Clair! The open water was so exciting that I only have boat photos from when we were motoring out and in, sails furled. We saw all the wave action I’m interested in riding (measured in knots, of course, by jcb with the GPS), absent an emergency, and I even became accustomed to the occasional angle we tipped sideways.
Leaving the dock area, we also saw this gem of a boat name (a favorite of our hosts, The Word-Crafters), all the more precious with the little “poot�? graphic, no?
Sunday, 16 July 2006
Each summer when I’m staying at the Green Cottage, I await The Day, the morning when the meteorological conditions conspire to leave heavy dew on the orchard grasses, with a bright sunrise. I try and arise and view the spectacle camera in hand (or stuck to my face!), and obtain at least a few photos, because the potential for an outstanding one is high. The dew outlines the spider webs and the asparagus tops, not to mention the grasses, all in all creating a breathtaking perspective to the east.
This image gives some idea of how dramatic the backlit dew can be, and of the brilliant pink blotches the sweet pea blooms provide.
So The Day was yesterday. Today has been a total surprise, meteorologically! We awoke before five to a fresh breeze from the south and west, the vanguard for a coming rainstorm, that after blowing and blustering, has brought us, for now, an all-day rain—the kind that when I was little would have had all us kids banished to the front porch with decks of cards and stacks of board games and puzzles, told to keep ourselves occupied while the door remained closed!
Apologies for entries referring to the day before—hazards of travel and irregular access to the internet…. This should change soon!
Saturday, 15 July 2006
K.’s creativity was unbounded yesterday. Even with a poorly equipped kitchen and a difficult-to-adjust apartment-size oven, she undertook to make not one but two apple tarts as our contribution to dinner with the Hunter-Gatherer and R. Two, K. felt, was necessary because the guest list was long enough that with only a 9.5 inch tart pan, the size of the pieces would have been too meager. We all moaned happily and involuntarily as we forked morsels into our no-longer-hungry maws.
This particular recipe (sorry, I don’t have it) has a shortbread crust, a cream cheese custard with small apple bits, and spiced sliced apple top layer, and I think K. got it from a B&B somewhere (not Helmer).
She’s willing to go to considerable trouble for not only desserts, but also any other dish. Me, I’ll fuss with main dishes, but I generally do fairly simple sides, etc., and, okay, get “fancier�? desserts from the bakery—not an option up here!
Consider: to use a single tart pan to make two tarts, you have to convince the first one to part company from the pan so you can reuse it. Consider: a shortbread crust is very fragile for such an operation!
And, yet, with considerable application of ingenuity, we did it!!!
Postscript: as the second tart was in the oven and the heat both in the kitchen and outdoors was becoming oppressive, we finally!! got a rainstorm, which cooled everything down, although even on sandy soil, the moisture only penetrated an inch.
Friday, 14 July 2006
Yesterday’s adventure was a picnic and beach wander based at the mouth of Hurricane Creek, in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. I find it difficult to pick one image to carry the beauty and loveliness of this place. We also walked down to the lighthouse, and checked out several shipwrecks along the shoreline. Looking at the size of the now water-warn timbers and the robustness of the metal pinning them together, it’s difficult to imagine the power of water and ice that incurs such damage.
The breeze was light, but enough to keep the insects away on the beach although not up in the shade where we ate at the picnic table (stomp stomp from those wearing shorts!). There wasn’t enough to make the water noisy, so the beach seemed almost quiet. I walked a ways out on the sandstone that’s beneath the water in that area, and marveled that the Lake kept it clean of cobbles, pebbles, and even sand.
As a bonus, when we were headed south bound for Seney, we passed through a downpour. As is often typical, however, the cell didn’t extend south of town (Hemingway was here!), so the farm remained dry.
Thursday, 13 July 2006
The Green Cottage in all its majesty.
For something like seventy years, the cottage was wrapped in green tarpaper, and even though it’s now clad in stained siding, the old name survives, a palimpsest and souvenir, and perhaps a badge. There’s no plate for the upper story; instead, the two-by-fours, which really are two by four, extend from the bottom plate at the level of the first floor floor to the roof, even on the end walls. Nice long straight trees made the donation!
The trees were probably pines, and would have come from the sandlands nearby (don’t know the technical term). Much of the terrain in these parts is sandy, and similar to the tropics in that the bulk of the organic matter is in the plants and not the soil. The Botanist has a program to increase the soil quality in the field, by not removing the grasses that grow there, although at least one fellow came by hoping to glean the hay. The B says the field’s already in better shape than it was several decades ago, when it was hayed every year.
There are also sizable areas across the eastern UP with darker soils that support hardwoods, especially groves of hard maples. When they are large enough to canopy over, very little light gets to the forest floor, so it has a few wildflowers and small non-woody plants, but often no real undergrowth, which means you can see across the shady landscape for quite a distance.
Along the margins of bogs and swamps (pardon me if they’re the same!), the vegetation can be thick thick thick. And the flying insects are also thick thick thick, in the summer anyway, so it’s not the best place to try bushwhacking: prepare to accumulate pine sap on your hands and mud below the knees, and lose track of which way is north!
Wednesday, 12 July 2006
I know I recently did a sunset picture, but we’ve been having spectacular skies, and we were out last evening perambulating around the field, and caught this fine cross-field perspective.
Sorry for the run-on sentence….