Today. . .Don’t want to get out of the habit

Sitting here wishing I had a) trimmed my fingernails and b) got things cleared away enough to use a regular mouse. I hate those little slide pads, and Windows 7 seems to keep making decisions about what it thinks I want to do. But I’ve been reluctant to disassemble the clutter of old computers that eats up my upstairs desk until I was sure everything was working, Tomorrow I’ll try to set up the new wireless printer. Then I might get my office back.

English-style meat pie in the oven, and I’ve 15 minutes or so before I have to go feed the fire. Ben’s good about keeping it fed, but when I’m baking I prefer to do it myself. I don’t know if the English actually eat anything like this or not, but that’s what we call it–meat and veggies baked in a crispy crust. I learned it from a crazy woman who grew up in Corvallis but learned it from her English mother-in-law. Oops, there’s the bell.

OK, to quote Tom Paul Glaser, I’ve “put another log on the fire.” The pie is starting to look pretty darned good and smell even better. So I’ve a few more minutes, anyway.

We’ve had some pretty massive cold weather. The Big Elk froze clear across for the first time in about 35 years.

The plus is that we keep both fires going pretty much all day, so I’ve been doing a lot of baking and roasting–breads, pies, a standing rib with roast potatoes yesterday, piroshkis on Christmas Eve (a bit of a tradition in our house), cinnamon rolls, blah, blah, blah.

I must admit I’m very partial to being retired. It suits me. And I got an order for four more of my books today, which suits me even better. . .;^}

But now I need to go drool around the kitchen and set the table. Ciao.

Return to the green place

I’m home. Everything changed while I was gone, and the differences are breathtaking. Being gone only 8 days and having the landscape so different really gives me an appreciation of how fast the seasons pass.

Of course, we didn’t really get a spring this year, just several months of really crappy weather. So it’s like the last few weeks of spring and the first few weeks of summer compressed in on each other. We’re eating lettuce, radishes, spinach, and chard from the garden. But most of the hot weather plants look like they’ve gone south, so we’re planting some backup tomatoes and corn. The fruit trees look great, most of them loaded. But the brassicas (cabbage and the like generally planted very early) are depressing. Some of the cabbage and all of the broccoli just got to about 8 inches high and bolted. Total loss. The berries are at least a month late.

But the Japanese irises and foxglove are blooming like crazy, the grass is that soft spring green and smells fresh, and the trees are fully leafed out so that the light filters through them in that wonderful summer way.

The convention was fun. I got 5 top-ten finishes in the 39 categories of poem that I entered, so I’m happy. If that doesn’t sound too impressive, you should know that most categories had from 200 to 300 poems entered.

Now I truly must go move some sprinklers. No deep thoughts today, just gratitude for a return to the NW. Much as I enjoyed the convention and the different landscape, there’s no place like home.

All the little plants seem snug in their beds

Woke up to snow on the ground. The morning offered more snow, hail, rain, and occasional sun breaks.

Mid afternoon we got one break long enough for me to get brave and dash down to the garden to check things out. Everything looks fine, if a tad rumpled in places. I think some of my sunflowers have sprouted, although it also looks like in a place or two the mice found the seeds. I’ll know more in a week or so, assuming that it doesn’t snow non-stop until then. Maybe even if it does.

I made chicken and dumplings for dinner. I can’t remember the last time I did that. I used the White Lily flour for the dumplings, and they were superb–light, fluffy, and flavorful. I am so bummed to hear that their plant is closing. I even got a nice note from one of their employees on my White Lily post. I think that post has drawn more comment than almost anything else I’ve written.

That’s tonight’s update. I would write a note or two about politics, but the whole thing is just too depressing to deal with tonight. Are there any other fans of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” out there? That’s the only time of the week I feel routinely like laughing at the news (which is the only truly sane approach).

There was a great “stupid crook” story on this morning’s show. Seems a guy in Chicago decided to rob a store. The employees told him that no one but the manager could open the safe and the manager wasn’t there. This mental giant said, “No problem.” He left his cell phone number and asked them to call him when the manager returned. They did, after first calling 911. There were a few extra people waiting when he returned to get the manager to open the safe.

Now, that really is it. . .

Well, this just chaps MY hide

I’m getting darned tired of this stupid weather. Spring officially arrived a week ago, and the next day I planted most of my early garden–brassicas, lettuce starts, green onions, snow peas, sunflowers, a few potatoes (the rest have to wait until we can till the bed again). I also planted another dahlia and four lilies.

Every day since then, it has rained, hailed, snowed, and otherwise generally misbehaved. If this is leading up to an April Fool’s Day blizzard, I am going to be really pissed.

I checked the starts yesterday and they looked fine. I’m afraid to go back and look again after a morning of snow and hail and a full afternoon of monster hail storms. So I’m ignoring things, at least for the moment.

A chicken carcass is simmering on the stove. I roasted a chicken tonight, made mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy, and as we were stuffing our faces Ben looked over and said, “That chicken cries out to be made into soup.” And I started visualizing chicken and dumplings.

After a week of crappy weather I am really tired of feeding fires, but I told Ben if he’d feed the stove so I could do something else, I’d cook the chicken down and make something wonderful. He agreed, and before too long I’ll be able to set it off to cool and deal with it tomorrow.

I met all the poetry contest deadlines only to discover some other writing challenges. I’m working on a Malayan pantoum at the moment about a funeral. The pantoum lends itself wonderfully to ritual, and I suppose that’s what’s on my mind now. A week from tomorrow is Tom’s wake, and I’m running out of energy to deal with the emotions (other people’s, not my own–I’m just tired) that are surfacing around that.

So that’s what’s going on here tonight. Even the hummingbirds have been fighting all day. But I did re-engineer my feeder today and it works much better. It was prone to developing an airlock, and you had to go up every so often and give it a good whack. But as I was refilling it today, I found a spot that was obviously supposed to have a little air hole but hadn’t been punched all the way through. So I got a push pin and fixed it. Now it works great. I’m quite smug about that little piece of problem solving.

But I’m still going to be grumpy until I get some sunshine for more than 10 minutes at a time. . .

Josh B., where are you when I really need you?

Buster and I are back. We had a grand adventure, as promised.

Buster is my little truck. I’ve never named a car before, but I’ve never had one wink at me in the dealer parking lot before either. It felt like he deserved a name.

Buster is the first car I ever bought all by myself (I mean without the help of a male person of some sort or other). I got a good price without assistance, and after somewhat over 100,000 miles, I think I got a pretty good little truck, too.

For the last 10 days, I’ve been a “residency assistant” at my old MFA in writing program. One of the blessings of being retired (and there are many) is that you have a lot of freedom in arranging your schedule. So when the call went out for program graduates who could come for the 10-day residency and do assorted stuff, I raised my hand.

My responsibilities were nebulous, mostly introducing writers at their readings and doing a little airport ferry duty. Buster becomes important in this part, because the airport runs were all on Sunday and Monday. You may recall that we had a little snow and ice those days.

Buster performed like a champion snow car (frankly much to my surprise), slipping occasionally but getting us safely from here to there past spinouts, head-on collisions and rolled-over semis. I never even had to chain up, which hurt my feelings not at all. The Monday morning trip to the airport over Hwy 30 took nearly 4 hours. The return trip, when things were thawed, was just over 2 hours.

In exchange for these light duties, I got to attend 10 days of lectures and readings by world-class writers, drink a LOT of Keoki coffee (just what my bronchitis needed, I’m pleased to report), and eat fresh seafood for a week or so in Seaside. I’ve OD’d on Dungeness crab and razor clams. The paying folks spend about $2,000 for this experience. I got it for free.

Long days of readings and writing craft discussions were topped off with evenings of sincere discussion of the curvature of space/time, Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems,” games of Catch Phrase, and other really important matters.

So I’m back. One of the things I found in Seaside was my Mario hat. I was sure it would improve my power star accumulating ability by leaps and bounds. But the truth of the matter is, even with my magic hat, Major Burrows is still kicking my butt. And I thought we had mole problems on the golf course. . .

So, Josh–what do I do about this guy? Several times I’ve had him running down the trail holding his rear in pain. Then he turns around and offs me, and I seem helpless to prevent it. Any suggestions?

The forest damage from the December storms around Seaside and Astoria is mind-boggling. Picture a hillside of a couple of hundred acres with a half-mature forest on it, thousands and thousands of trees 20-25 years old at a rough guess. All but about 50 of the trees are simply blown over, lying flat on the ground. The “survivors” are all broken off about halfway up. There’s not a single tree intact. It was like a massive explosion or meteor strike or something. It was one of the saddest things I’ve seen in a long time.

I’ll write more tomorrow, but after all that fun and frolic, I’m really bushed tonight “and so to bed.”

Josh, I’m counting on you to tell me how to finish off Major Burrows before I throw the Wii controller through Ralph’s TV set.

The perfect snow

The perfect snowfall is something like this:

You tuck yourself into bed and pull the down comforter up around your ears. You fall asleep.

At some point in the night, you awaken briefly. The world is silent, totally silent, that peculiar silence that only comes with a heavy snowfall. You smile to yourself and go back to sleep.

Somewhat later, you awaken. The skies have cleared while you were sleeping, and a full moon is in the sky. The unusual brightness in the windows tells you that everything is white outside. You go back to sleep.

In the morning, you awaken to find the sun shining and the landscape covered in white. It’s pristine–no footprints, no cars moving. The fir branches are drooping with the weight of this heavy magical snow.

You perk and pour a cup of hot coffee, put on parka and boots, and step outside into the magic.

You don’t have to go to work. All day you play in the snow, admiring its the alien landscape. Then you go to bed.

The next morning you wake to find that all the snow is melted and the world is back to normal–no slush, no dirt, no nasties. The snow has come, and it has gone just as quickly.

This is the perfect snowfall. We didn’t get one.

Instead we’ve had 15-20 serious hailstorms in the last couple of days. The ground is white, but it’s white with ice. The road is slippery. The paths are slippery and crunch under your feet.

But the lentil soup (made with leftover prime rib, no less) is simmering on the stove and bread is warming in the oven. Christmas has once again come and gone. We all survived it. It’s a pretty good evening, snow or no snow.

Hope yours is as nice.

Chilly, and chili (no Chile, or maybe just a little)

The subject line I just typed in reminds me of my current recent episode of insanity. Ben and I between us are trying to shore up the U.S. economy with a spate of consumer buying. Here is my most recent excursion, but probably not the last tonight. Later on we’ll be logging into Cabela’s Web site, which is probably going to be very expensive.

A couple of days ago, I ordered the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve coveted this for years. I have a real fetish for dictionaries, I think, that matches my fetish and focus on words. It’s not a minor purchase. Each time I’ve been on the verge of buying it, I thought, “Well, perhaps next week.”

But right now it’s on sale. I’ve never seen it on sale before. The price is 15% below what I’ve ever seen, and the sale price includes the CD version with full search capacity. I don’t want to be limited to that. I want the print version. But I’m curious to see if they have actually used hyperlinking and other modern innovations to provide more robust capabilities.

I’ll soon know, I guess.

It’s coming by UPS. We have an agreement with UPS to leave packages on the neighbor’s porch, since our gate is always locked. I can’t wait to hear Kenny’s call when he discovers boxes weighing 150 lbs. on his doorstep.

The post office has called nearly every day this week to let me know they have a box “too big for the mailbox.” I really appreciate the heads-up. It lets one of us be down to greet Betty when she arrives instead of having the package sit beside the county road until someone thinks to check the mail.

We awoke this morning to a skiff of snow on the ground. It was lovely. Most of it melted by noon, which is a perfect snow day. What I’d really like is to awake to six inches of snow, go out and play in it, and have it all gone by the end of the day. But that isn’t how things work.

The wind is picking up, as is the rain. So perhaps the promised hurricane is going to materialize too. I took down the doorbell tonight (a hanging clanger powered by a scultured maple leaf) so we wouldn’t have to listen to the wind knocking at the door all night. It will stay down until the storm passes.

So, it was chilly all day. Now I have a big pot of chili on the stove, with cornbread soon to follow in the oven. I’m slowly assembling the topping mix for a batch of olive crostini for tomorrow’s hors d’ouevre potluck at Donna’s house.

The only thing I can tell you about Chile at this moment is how much I love most of the works of Isabel Allende. What a fine writer.

But the chili is a bribe. Ralph’s hooking up the Wii tonight.

Storm watch

I can hardly believe I’m about to write about the weather again. The simple fact is, this time of year we get a lot of it.

Whether it’s global warming, 20-year cycles, or other strange phenomena, this forecast is just plain weird. Possibility of snow tonight. We generally get a little each winter, but this seems very early. But it’s Sunday’s forecast that really boggled my mind.

The weather scrutinizers are predicting that the first ever cyclone/hurricane warning is about to be issued for the forest where I live.

It seems the two recent typhoons in Asia have combined to send a monster storm headed right at Oregon–sustained winds in the 90-100 mph range with pelting rains and flooding. So we can anticipate power out, trees down, roads impassable, and other fine stuff. None of this affects us too much (except I’ll probably lose my DSL until they get the emergency generator up and running at the repeater). We’ve always got a couple of weeks worth of food around, plenty of gas for the generator (and chain saws), and today Ben refilled all the firewood racks in various places in and around the house.

Also, I got about nine new books today, a new New Yorker, and two newspapers. I also replenished the wine and Scotch supply, so I think we’re set. We could run a little short on meat and milk, but I’ve plenty of beans, rice, nuts, flour, and yeast, a fair amount of butter and evaporated milk, some fresh and dried fruits and vegetables, and almost all of last summers canned goods, onions, and winter squash.

Let it snow, rain, blast away, I say. With a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, a good book, and hours of indoor stuff that needs doing, it’s probably a good thing.

I’m supposed to go to Portland Monday morning for a series of medical appointments–nothing serious, just the annual routine. It took great effort to get them all booked on the same day, then they had to be changed once, and now this.

So, if the storm materializes, I may just declare myself healthy this year and put all this off a bit longer. I’m very good at that.

Besides, we’ve got three new Wii games that need playing.