Chicken, microseasons and the Land of Abeyance

So yesterday the chicken, only two pounds but a lot of meat on a little frame, did me proud.

There's a lot more meat for various plans involving chicken salad, soup, potpie (thanks to Debra). Definitely doing this again. 

Tender, very good quality. I roasted it slowly for juiciness, don't care about crisp skin since I don't eat it anyway. Basted with the butter I'd dotted about. The herbs on top are sage flowers from my sage that tried for world domination during the heatwave last summer. 

Today is marginally warmer but the icy wind kept me down to a couple of recycling and mailbox walks, not the real one I hope for this week.

I noticed I just missed the opening of the Japanese micro 72 season year.

You may remember a while back, I started a microseason log, to try to deal with the upcoming winter.

I used a book I'd made, with, appropriately,  a Japanese stab binding construction, and set up sections for each microseason.

I tapered off when the entries seemed to be too repetitive. It's in abeyance, maybe once the change of season gets under way more evidently, I'll resume it.

Also in abeyance is my Arabic study.

This is the result of the Striking Virus which did a job on my thinking ability, just fog. When I get to where it comes back, I'll be back, too. The spirit is willing but the brain is tottering.

The Land of Abeyance is an old joke dating back to a convo with an artist wondering why our artist group hadn't exhibited or even met recently. I said "I think it's in abeyance." 

Whereupon she said indignantly, straight faced, "Nobody told me they'd planned a trip! Why wasn't I invited? You  seem to know all about it!".  Really upset, total FOMO on display.

I had to explain. 

Speaking of Arabic, when I mentioned my brother Kevin recently, I searched unsuccessfully for a picture, must have given it to Handsome Son, but in this repository of special stuff, literally the only thing I inherited from my parents 

Found this, 

Left, Kev's self teaching of Russian. He must have been a teenager, since he died at 20 in the Fleet Air Arm, ww2.  I wonder if this urge to self teach, especially foreign languages with different alphabets, is in the DNA.

On the right is a bit of fern from sister Rita's wedding bouquet, from 1953.

The book itself was a standby in my house. My mother bought it on weekly payments, because she believed a house needed a dictionary. This was in the 1930s, when the older ones were all in school. She couldn't afford both a vacuum cleaner and the dictionary, so she went for the dictionary.

I think that was heroic, considering her workload with a large family and no appliances, not even a washing machine. Walking the walk.

I read this dictionary cover to cover when I was sick in bed, which probably helped develop a vocabulary out of all expectation from a little kid. My older sisters told me I was reading at three, so by six and seven I guess I was equal to at least going for it.

Anyway if we've recovered from the Great Tiebreak Debate, are you up for a puzzle?

And speaking of little kids and winter

I remember the roast chestnut man coming around in winter, roasting the chestnuts on hot coals in his vehicle thing, selling them in a wrap of paper, gosh they were hot, and so good.

Happy evening everyone, may you manage to pull your chestnuts out of the fire in good time, metaphorically and literally, big dictionary words..

Micro seasons, butterfly migration, America's test kitchen,

So we're up to page two, season three, in the microseasons journal.

Just making deliberate observations each day, enough for a few words for the day, is proving to be a great focus, little pressure and a lot of pleasure. This might suit me better than those rambling narrative journals some people love to keep.

So today's observation is of a flurry of activity in the butterfly bush, many small cabbage butterflies, tiny brown ones, several species of bees,  and, spectacularly, two monarchs dancing and feeding all day. 

Since they will be migrating in a few days, I expect they're fuelling up before the thousands of miles they fly south. They fly high up in the air for migrating, like flocks of birds. 

The first time we went to Cape May, in early October about fifteen years ago, we were in a seafront hotel, four floors up, and there were thousands of monarchs flying over the sea,  resting all over the building facades as far as you could see, all over our balcony. It was a rare, unforgettable experience. Total silence, just movement, a moving blanket of orange and cream and black.

Cape May is a good resting place for migratory butterflies and birds, both before they take on the open ocean south and when they return in spring. 

They follow the coastline south for a long way before heading inland toward their south American destination. On the trip north in spring, it's a sheltered and  food rich environment, with both salt and fresh water marshes, plants and insect life.

We don't get the enormous flocks we used to, so we treasure the sightings we get.

Swallows, swifts, hummingbirds, left weeks ago. 

Closer to home, America's test kitchen book is proving to be a mixed blessing. There are some good food ideas and tips, a useful section on equipment, see, someone invented a tea machine!

And sources for tools and foods. Including the notorious cinnamon..

But, big but, it's too big. Very heavy to handle. The type size so tiny I really can't read it, and the printing ink they used, no doubt very ecological, smells so bad I don't want it near the kitchen. 

Open a page and there's a waft of something between rotten eggs and boiled cabbage. It's truly awful. If you owned this book perhaps you'd leave it in sunlight to deodorize.  

I did get a few ideas as you see, then it's back to the libe. A good idea that didn't work for me. I wish it had come in a couple of volumes, to be more manageable and readable, but I expect there were production and shipping considerations in the way of that.

So there's the House of Boud today.

The 72 microseasons and other discoveries

Yesterday was eventful. I discovered the Japanese concept of 72 seasons in the year, rather than four. On the grounds that four was an inadequate number to convey the reality of the year, it's a division of the year into about five day sections. 

No sooner seen than signed onto, I looked out a book I made years ago, to start my own nature journal entries. This is a sentence or two a day at most, enough to mark sightings.

Front cover

Back cover

 Colored pages

Some quick and no doubt inaccurate calculation tells me I can fit two microseasons on each side of a page, filling the whole book. So here's the start, in silver pen. My year started yesterday, why not. Season one, with five planner entries, season two in waiting.

The binding is a Japanese stab binding, seemed appropriate, and the cover is an old print on canvas with stenciling over a monotype. 

Various colored pages. And it finally has a  project. It's a nature journal made simple, my speed right now.

Then the mail brought the rest of my lovely fabric for spring and summer wear, winter sewing.  

Lovely patterns, just what I was looking for. Firecracker Fabrics sale.

Look at the drape there. I'm going to be so well dressed I'll charge $ to talk to me. How smug I look!

I checked the lengths the old fashioned way -- nose tip to outstretched finger and thumb. It's a handy way to measure when you don't have a tape measure right there. You measure the distance between your nose tip and outstretched index finger and thumb, as if holding the fabric. 

That's your personal base unit, and it's pretty close to being your inseam measurement, too, handy to know. Mine, nose tip to finger tip's 27", inseam a shade more. Then you do it moving along the fabric, then do the math to determine your total yardage. And they gave me a few extra inches on the yellow material, always a nice touch by good fabric sellers. The batik's pretty exact.

On other paths of discovery, I found out several things about our mystery plant. One is that I'm even more absent minded than I realized, and should compensate with labeling my planting. 

The other thing I found out, when I lifted out the mystery to see what it was growing from, and found I'd also broken another seedling which was  about to break ground, was that these were the sprouting  moringa  plants I'd started from seed. Blurry picture, best I could do, but you can see the seed

I'd been watching  the wrong pot to see if they were growing! And used another handy filled pot which I thought was empty of occupants, to transplant the philodendron. This happened to be the one the moringa    seeds were actually in. Doh!  Note to self: a simple label could have averted this little debacle.

Anyway the baby moringa is now in the pot I was watching, and now I know the seeds are germinating nicely. I'd only planted a couple to see if they were viable. They are, so I will plant a couple more. And label them. I will label them. I will.