Running between the raindrops

The raindrops are metaphorical, meaning a sudden bunch of worries and a glimpse of the end of my tether after the year of no social life, no touch, not even an animal. Worries involving other things I can't fix right now, mostly.

Now I'm also taking on helping get my, finally eligible, frontline worker son vaxxed. He's very computer literate, far more than I, but has no computer access in his working day, so he'll never manage without an assist. My heart sank as I started the process again, stressful. 

Anyway outside, the neighborhood kids have invented a new game. You throw a football, and it's batted away with a badminton racket. No rules, I think, but loads of fun 

And a further lift to my spirits came in the mail from Mary Anne, from Magpie's Mumblings.  She's a fiber artist, temporarily sidelined by surgery, so it was all the better to receive this lovely postcard artwork.  Thanks so much!

And an art card from honorary granddaughter next to it, lifting me up further.

This is my favorite place to sit, make art, knit, read, do business, and the side of the furniture is a useful bulletin board for notes I have to keep handy. Post-Its work best.

More knitted squares are happening, though that red one on the right fell prey to my general anxiety and I didn't decrease right. Ended up at first with a weird paralellogram. I ask you, simple knitting and I couldn't get it right. Shows how jangled I was. Am. It's fixed now.

If you're wondering if all those trailing threads are another symptom, no, they're on purpose. They'll be handy when I come to attach the squares into whatever they end up being.

Another nice thing: the state has reinstated a special program of real estate tax relief after several years of not being able to afford it (!) and my next quarterly tax bill, I just heard, will be several hundred dollars lighter as a result. Since NJ has the highest real estate tax in the US, we're Number One, yay!  this is good.

Especially since the Feds have still not started reimbursing seniors with the third covid-19 relief $$. A lot of  NJ people didn't get the second one either. Can't help being darkly suspicious about whether this is yet another blue state issue 

Appointees from the former guy are still employed at the irs and SS..one of whom finally admitted, under pressure from northeastern members of congress,  to delaying the handover of the vital files to enable the payments. I have my congressional rep, the blessed Rep. Bonnie (Watson-Coleman) on it now. Her caseworkers are in touch. 

But moving on, I finished reading Home by Marilynne Robinson, and it was really great. So intense that I may not venture into the others in the saga, at least not for a while. I do recommend it though.

And now that my pounding allergy season headache has abated, my spirits are doing better, thank you, sitting up and taking nourishment.

Blueberry Newtons, mitered knitting

Slow start, cool rainy Sunday, reading Maisie Dobbs An Incomplete Revenge, knitted another square 

while listening to p g Wodehouse audiobook, Galahad at Blandings, then finally had to get to today's task.

I started last night, making blueberry jam, ready for a filling. The idea is a fruit filled soft cookie, like Fig Newtons, but I had blueberries. 

Dough mixed, some reserved for topping, the rest pressed into parchment lined dish. The parchment is important here if you ever plan to get the finished product out again. Soft rich dough.

Base baked, now the filling is spooned in. I made a lot of jam, using all the blueberries, so there will be extra.

That extra bit I rolled out and kept in the freezer until ready to put the lid on. I had just guessed at the size of the top, because the rest of it was in the oven, couldn't measure.

When I peeled it off the parchment paper, it was exactly like taking handmade paper off the felt, same process, same attention to edges in order to retrieve it in one piece.

Pretty good guess about size. Now it all goes back in a 350°f oven to finish baking.

It better be good after this performance. Now it has to cool in the pan for two hours. Two hours. I'll have forgotten baking it by then.

I cut into it while still warm, no harm done and here's the result

And here's the extras

Jar for the neighbor who's driving me to my second vax, and one for home consumption. I had some for breakfast, on toast, pretty good.

This may be one of those recipes that turns out well, takes ages, you're glad you did it, you're not hurrying to repeat it.

And there are various versions of why Newtons, ranging from Isaac to a town in Massachusetts. That usually means nobody really knows. Probably some colonial Mom, Mrs Newton, making a treat for the kids to use the ripe blueberries. Oh no, that was me. It's supposed to be dried figs. But who's counting.

Daffodils that take the debris of March with beauty

Shakespeare mangled, but oh well. High winds yesterday brought down wires and trees, but it was just foliage debris that flattened these daffodils on the patio. 

So, though I don't like picking flowers, I rescued them and they smell wonderful, like fruit and almonds.

Here posed in front of the prunings from the indoor begonia which is again taller than I, and looking a bit ragged. These leaves will root in water then maybe I'll start a new plant.

And outside again, here's henbit, one of my favorite spring wildflowers. People call them weeds, despite their medicinal value, but I will bet dollars to donuts that if they saw them potted up at the nursery they'd seize them for borders.

And here's that container of pansies, now starting with a second flush of bloom, outside in the ground cover.

No flowering cherry yet, and I hope the recent wild rain and wind haven't knocked the blossoms off. Dogwood soon.

Trees budding now too. The local Indian lore is that when the oak leaf is the size of a squirrel's ear, it's time to plant, I think, corn, not sure. 

It sounds like an easy rule. But it does assume you know which tree is an oak and what size is a squirrel's ear. And what to plant then. Some knowledge needed for old established planting traditions. 

Like knowing the phases of the moon for planting, when it's waxing and waning. And remembering which is the right planting phase.

Interested but not always knowledgeable, that would be this plantswoman.

The Staff of Life and its sidekicks

My mother was very big on quoting the staff of life as a reference to bread. Mainly homebaked, I never heard her say it of storebought. Here's the current Staff, showing up, nice crumb, nice crust, too.  Not as crusty as if I'd used oatmeal, but good.  About two thirds wholewheat one third ap flour.  Caraway seeds scattered heedlessly in, too.

And lunch today was butternut squash soup, and the first chives of the year with a few bits of dandelion leaves included. They grow in the chive pot, so I get to have them without searching for unsprayed leaves.

And another of the broccokopita pasties, a bit more filling still available for the very last of the pastry next time I'm up for it. Not yet eaten, plans for this pasty.

Today was Misfits day.  I think the Fedex has a new driver, excellent guy, delivers promptly, kindly leaves the heavy box far enough from the storm door that I can get the door open to retrieve the box.  Sets it down, doesn't drop it from a height.  

Delivery people who don't understand about the sweep of the door across the step have occasionally left packages too close.  This means I had to leave by the back door, the patio, run to the end of the street, career round the houses to the front street, and chug up the sidewalk to my own house, to pull back the box far enough to open the door and insert the box within.  You can't push a heavy box with a relatively fragile storm door, at least I can't.

And here's today's haul, complete with insulating blankets and a freezer gel pack, which looks like this

Safe for drains or garden.  I put mine on the earth to melt and drain, no harm done to any plants. Most of the packing material is biodegradable or recyclable.

And here's the  spread for this week.  The tiny potatoes are fingerlings.  Several kinds of apples.  Blueberries for future plans about a sandwich sort of dessert thing, like fig newtons only not.  Halved walnuts, I add walnuts in to practically anything.

And here's the pasty for tonight's supper, with its fresh salad, all today's Misfits in the bowl.  Romaine, Roma tomato, celery, scallions, carrots.

As a p.k.* friend of mine used to say, when asked to say grace before a meal: Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub!

*preacher's kid

Art is life is art

Gloomy weather at the moment, low energy, but here I am anyway. Nearest I can come to my best self today.  Ninety per cent of life is about showing up.  Also eighty per cent of your agita comes from twenty per cent of the people.  Small business owners will recognize this truth instantly. Likewise eighty per cent of your successful outcomes come from twenty per cent of your projects.  I'm not sure what this means you should do, to be honest.  It's like the old saying that half our marketing is useless, but we don't know which half. Anyway, let's get to a wise person:

wise words from Amanda Gorman.

Today was cleaning day, and my monthly leaving the house to the cleaners to get on with their work in peace.  However, the 24 hour total drenching rain which finally let up during the night wiped out a few of my ideas on where to be this morning, because mud.  Not that I have anything against mud. But I do try not to fall down if I can help it, this being a more serious transaction than it would have been a few years ago.

I did find I needed a new windshield wiper, since the driver's side one, it's always the driver's side one, suddenly was missing a big sweep right in the middle of where I needed to see.  The nice man at the garage would have liked to sell me two, but I pointed out that only one was busted, so he agreed to replace that one.  His buddy came up to supervise and suggested I buy two, whereupon Garage Man One said, no, she said only one.  Garage Man Two looked at me, and thought, oh, it's her,  not arguing with her, nooo.  So it was done speedily, and no labor charges, just the base rate for the wiper blade.  I could have installed it myself, but why not let him do it, he likes to.

Then after a trip to CVS for exciting things such as toilet paper, of which, since our local CVS has become a covid vax site, there are few examples.  They've taken a lot of floor space for the vax clinic, and display shelves have been pretty much denuded. 

One little package of what I thought was tp was snugged among the paper towels.  But the wrapper was all in Spanish, with not a word indicating what the product actually was. Just the maker's name, origin, size, measurements, etc.  I asked my friend Aaron at the checkout what he thought, explaining it's in Spanish, I  wasn't sure.  He examined it and said, hey, this is all in Spanish!  well, yeah, I said that, and he turned it over and over a few times and said I think it might be tp.  Whereupon we decided I'd buy it and see.

After this excitement I needed a decompression period, which consisted of sitting in my car in the parking lot of the nearby park. Whose entrance I missed three times, because I can never remember in what order places come. I know them separately, could have drawn this from memory, but could I find it?  Could I heckaslike. I kept on not going quite far enough and having to make the same uturns.  I got well acquainted with a couple of roads I don't usually drive. This is all within about a mile of home. Yes, I don't have a bump of direction. Finally realized what I was doing wrong, and arrived at the parking lot.  And found to my surprise it has WiFi.  I was able to access email, and various things. 

So here's the truly gripping scenery at Morris Davison Park.  The Davisons must have been local farmers, because there's this park, and there's George Davison Road, and there's Ancil Davison Road.  I'm guessing farmers because of Ancil, which I think is biblical and would fit in. This is about as light as it's going to get today.

And from inside my car, look to the right and see a nice little feature which is good for visibility.  Older drivers will remember the quarter light at the front of old cars, predating air conditioning, which you could open to get air in at speed so the driver could be cool,  without blowing out the rear seat passengers.  These are quarter lights, fixed, but nonetheless giving a nice extra bit of visibility right where you want to have it. A sort of historic touch. I bet a designer's grandma suggested this.

And with me, but I was reading rather than knitting, was my knitting bag, containing the makings of another square. But I didn't knit at all.  I've noticed this often, that unless I'm taking part in one of those Knit in Public or Stitch in Public days, or plein air artwork, where the point is to bring portable work to show people what fun it is to do, I hardly ever actually do it.

I talk big talk about portable work, and I take little sets of drawing paper and pencils and pens and things out with me, and kits of knitting and stitching I've assembled, and rarely remember to do anything about it. There always seem to be other things to watch, or read, or think about.  Indoors seems to trigger my need to make stuff.

So the bag, carefully packed last night with the needful, came home again unopened this morning. The current haul of squares is there. One of the features that will be nice to move around, aside from the blocks of color, is the miters.  They can go in various directions, to create inner patterns.  A bit like quilting, same sort of concept.

And, adding to my reading, I usually have several books going at once, is a rerun, which I've read before and just fancy reading again, yet another Maisie Dobbs

I'm still on Home by Marilynne Robinson, A Sinister Service by Alyssa Maxwell, a sort of slow mystery complete with costume and stately homes, and now I'm embarking again on Maisie. 

I didn't post yesterday, not enough psychic energy, but I did make a nice butternut squash soup, since, when I made yesterday's lunch pasty: potato, chicken, hardboiled egg, onions, the oven was at 400.  So, rather than waste the heat by letting it cool, I put in the squash for half an hour, all pierced, and it baked through nicely.  Butternut Boy Squirrel got the seeds and the leftover rinds. I saw him out there this morning foraging. In between bouts of really exciting activity on top of the fence with his mate, assuring the continuity of his species. No pictures, even a squirrel has privacy concerns.

Broccokopita, mitered knitting revised edition, blancmange

Sudden discovery of a total lack of soup in the house led to a pivot in plans for lunch. So since I did have broccoli, mushrooms, onions and feta cheese, that seemed like a good idea.  It's about the same filling as I used for my spanakopita, but since I had no spinach, this is broccokopita, and pretty good, too.  

Here's the broccoli steaming gently, and the onions and mushrooms in oil and butter and smelling really good.  In the background the dough is resting for 20 minutes, supposed to be an hour, but I didn't think of this in time.

 

And the feta cheese, crumbled and ready for the mixture

 

Here are the six bits of dough, each enough to make a large pasty, and the bench scraper I used to cut them.

I saved out one for today, then froze the other five, floured, in a piece of plastic, the whole folded and slid into a bag which Chris will recognize, knowing that nothing at all goes to waste around here.  The original contents, in the inner bag they came in, the masa harina, that is, in the freezer, still some left for another corn tortilla caper. And there's a container of today's filling now in the freezer, so I have five lunch kits ready to go.

This is a byway into the kind of baking pan I like very much when I can remember to get it out and use it.  It was more expensive than my usual supermarket ware, because it has a double bottom, with a kind of air cushion inside.  This makes it bake evenly, and anything you make gets beautifully brown, see below

Wrong way up, but see how nicely it browned

 Right way up, ready for action, garnished with Thai basil.

And, full disclosure, my DNA over came me as it does once in a while, and I was overwhelmed last evening with the need to make pink blancmange.  Pronounced blomonj where I come from, it's a cornstarch, milk, vanilla, sugar thing not always beloved of little English kids, but nonetheless forced on them when too young to protest.

Before I leave the enthralling subject of kitchenware, someone now and then asks about seasoning cast iron ware.  I did the full monty of baking with oil, all that, years ago when I first got them, but since then just swipe around them after cooking in them, and brush a bit of olive oil on.  That's it.  

 

Except today, when the onions and mushrooms made their presence felt, and there was a bit of debris which would not mix well next time I make cornbread.  So I scrubbed with oil and kosher salt until it was all smooth again, rinsed it rapidly under the cold tap, then set it on a hot burner to dry out completely.  Spritz of oil after that, and you're done.  What make them rust is if you forget to get them completely dry before you put them away.  There, worth every penny you paid for the advice.

Then the mitered knitting stuff redux.

I did four squares, and picked up stitches to attach them, all pretty much according to the pattern.  Which I then abandoned, because I realized not only that picking up stitches is more tedious than sewing parts together, the other option, and that the design idea was too rigid for my likes.  

I'd rather make a lot of squares then arrange them pleasingly into a design and then attach them together.  So that's what I'm doing.  Also this means that your current work is very portable, another good point.  Carrying one little square around beats carrying an every increasing blankie thing.

And this is what I went to the library to pick up this morning, and very good indeed it is. I've barely begun to read it, but I can see this is good. Not only very historically accurate and illustrated well, but funny as all getout, too.  And it has footnotes and a bibliography, which I'm definitely going to mine for more reading.

I've read a number of Lurie novels, haven't we all, but I wasn't familiar with this book.  Highly recommended to anyone who likes fashion, social history, wit, anecdotes and great old photography, or all of the above.

Ginger Rogers, conspicuous theatrical consumption

And this little kid in grown up clothes, I remember seeing this sometimes in Wisconsin in the early 60s when we first came here, and was astonished.  Mainly I think it was going to church wear. This picture is from the 50s, note the New Look influence on the mother's silhouette and skirt length. The little boy doesn't look too happy about his suit and cap. And while we're there, get his mother's platform t-straps!  She must have had great balance to manage them.

And here's a late nineteenth century demonstration of the influence of Japanese design on western fashion and interior decor.  Then thought of as fashionable, now considered at best appropriation, at worst, theft of cultural capital.

And the New Yorker got into the act of examining the meaning and cultural weight of clothes for men.  Speaking of which, there are New Yorker cartoons here and there in the book, which speak to the fact that you can only really get New Yorker cartoons if you are familiar with the context. Which she explains in her text, anyway.

Just see if you can get this book. It's old now, over 40 years, and may not be so easy to acquire, but if you like this sort of exploration, this is for you.  It's certainly for me.

Sudden urge knitting, but first, a surprise

 One of my containers, the kind I give baked goods to neighbors in, came back yesterday.  Accompanied by this:

Beautiful arrangement of pansies, which we think will work out of doors, too.  What a treat.  I know the convention of never bringing back a container empty, but this was a five star response.

Then later I succumbed to an attack of mitered knitting. I saw this happening a while back on The Last Homely House East of the Sea youtube channel, the beloved Kate Jackson, and have been fancying trying it, but thought I had no yarn other than what I'd spun and used. Then I found a small stash of commercial yarn I'd probably been given, and thought, aha, here's my chance.

And about eleven o'clock last night, cast on to do this

Finished my first square, then, first thing this morning, still in bathrobe, continued, interested to know how to continue with the second square.  You knit these together, no sewing or crocheting together later.  So you're making the whole throw as you go. And you have to follow the geography of the instructions to get them right way out and right side up.

And here are the first two, the camera angle making them look a bit distorted, but they are squares, honest. And now I have to learn how to attach the third one, to be exact, where, and which way out.  Once my fingers are not so tired.  I'll use up a lot of bits of yarn balls with this.

So, the weather being spring like, I went for a walk, and found a couple of white breasted nuthatches surveying a likely tree, with a nice hole in the side, maybe a nesting site. They were quite undeterred by my scrutiny, so they must be seriously househunting. 

Then a bit further on, down the belt of trees, here are a couple of my favorite, beech trees, with the pale gold leaves which stay all winter, and the lovely shadows on their silver gray bark.

And here are the first of the daffodils further along, part of the masses Handsome Partner, Son and I planted the month after 9.11 as a family memorial for the event and for the many local people, some of them kids in their 20s who worked at the top of the WTC,  who never came home that day.

The oak leaves make a good mulch, and the daffodils push through anyway.  That was a funny day, Handsome Partner wanting to memorialize the event in some peaceful way that signified life, but not able to balance and dig at the same time.  

So he was on his feet still, and we came home with a huge sack of daffodils, including his favorite King Alfreds, which he claimed were the real ones.  He pointed, Son and I dug, and dug, and dug, and finally everything was planted.  Some have been picked over the years by people who don't understand they're cultivated, but that's okay, it gives them pleasure. 

And I do like to see them recur year after year.  When Handsome Partner was dying ten years later,  he asked me to pass on his wishes that people commemorate him the same way: plant daffodils.  And people did, in many countries where they can grow.  It's lovely to think of the gardens, and people probably having no idea at this point how they came to be there and why.  Just enjoying them anyway.  He will be gone ten years in August this year, and the daffodils for everyone are still surviving and blooming.

Now back to figuring out the third mitered square.  Later I get to choose this week's Misfits box contents.  It's all go!