One morning last week I was putting away the dishes, and noted that the light was catching my largest stainless steel bowl -- just so.

I can remember buying it -- it's huge, and I use it when I toss two torn loaves of bread with simmered celery and onions for turkey stuffing; Bernie uses it when he makes meatloaf; we employ it when we pick grapes or pomegranates.

None of those scratches were there when it came to our house. Each silvery line, each dark line represents the touch of a potato masher, a fork, a wide spoon, a mixing blade. Thirty-five years or so of beloved use.

Far from accenting marring marks, the light made the bowl more beautiful, made me remember all the many delightful foods that had collected in its embraces.

All of us, in aging, have these scratches and mars. We get scraped in life, we get used for work at jobs and at home, we sprain muscles and find ourselves so tired some days that we tremble ourselves to sleep.  We think ourselves wretched, but in reality, every wrinkle, age spot, ache and lameness, we're being made into something even more beautiful, more unique, than that spotless stainless steel bowl.

To be useful, to be used for good -- what higher calling could anyone ask?

I want to be like this bowl.

This is not the way a morning in early September is supposed to look in the Central Valley.

Nevertheless, it was highly entertaining to awaken to thunder and a cloud-clotted sky yesterday morning. Howie and I scrambled from the tent, and I shouted for Bernie (who had been up a bit earlier than I) to pull the cover over the mesh roof.

After donning sweaters, we retired with coffee and tea to the garage studio, door open, to watch the lightning and clouds drift across the sky until just before lunchtime.

There was more rain than I thought there would be, but not so much as to endanger local crops. And it was truly a comedy that while rain poured down, and thunder boomed, that the weather service online claimed we had clear skies.

Eyeballs can be good tools when ascertaining the current weather conditions.

Change of Season

Just as in the Spring, before it is nominally Spring, the season clicks over from Winter to Spring, so too has Autumn arrived, even though the calendar doesn't say so.

The light is different, the air is different, and in spite of the late heat wave, the nights are now suddenly CHILLY, as in You need a comforter, dum-dum. Yes, that chilly.

Tonight's low is supposed to be 56 degrees, but as it is already 59, I think that we may see 40's by daybreak, which is good snuggly-together weather, but will stop tomato production in its tracks.

I feel that I'm seeing too many clouds sweeping through at this time of year, as seen in the photo. Makes me uneasy, though God knows we were too dry last year.

May the Life That Guides the World give us what we need this coming Winter season.

Tired But Happy

That's the heat for the coming winter.

My riding buddy, Cathy the Mad Horsewoman, lent me her truck so that we didn't have to use the Vibe and the Corolla to pick up two cords of wood. You can load the two cars with 1/4 cord -- we've done it before, and it's ugly and messy, but do-able. With the truck, it took four trips only.

256 cubic feet of wood.

I stacked a little on Saturday, just to define the length of the stack, Monday Alex stacked some, and then on Tuesday, Alex and I went at it in earnest, working quietly side by side, not too fast, enjoying each little zing of satisfaction when a piece of wood fits just where it should, making an anchor for the chunks around it. Little Joan Maria dozed in her stroller nearby, seemingly soothed by the musical clunks of the wood.

There is no doubt that my arms and back and legs were tired by the time we quit for the morning, but I had no soreness today, and Bernie and I were able to finish stacking the wood by 9am. Work goes a little quicker with him; he's not into the meditative part of wood-stacking, he just wants to get it done. The less-measured pace is more tiring, but the task IS done, which is a good thing.

Here's a detail of the right end, where the wood is carefully built into a structure that keeps the rest of the chunks from tumbling off.

It felt so good to work so hard. I haven't been able to do that in a while, and though some may find it odd, I missed being able to exert myself to the limits of my ability, even though wood-stacking is pretty dirty work. You can shower off the dust and spiders, but nothing is going to wash away the rich feeling of satisfaction. 

Look At the 'Maters on That One!

These Marglobe variety tomatoes are undoubtedly the most beautiful tomatoes I have ever grown.

Far from being in full sunlight, as the seed packet suggests, these have only limited sunlight over the course of a day, a bit in the afternoon, and then shade the rest of the day, morning and evening. Each of these lovelies weighs more than half a pound, with the biggest at .75 pounds.

Marglobes don't have the *BANG!!* taste that the wild tomatoes do -- they're a bit mild. But for consistency of later-producing fruit and prolific production, wow, I love them.

There are two other Marglobe plants, seeded at the very same time, in the garden on the north bank. They are weedy and feeble-looking. Unlike the producers of these huge tomatoes, they are in full sun. Will they produce this year? I doubt it very much. My corner garden by the fence is too much full sun, too hot, not enough ventilation.

Live and learn. Next year all my tomatoes will have shade in the afternoon.

"Take It Out and Shoot It," I Instructed.

Last Friday night, my glitzy Bosch high-efficiency washing machine decided it was too good to run spin cycles any more. Apparently it felt that three and a half years was long enough to suffer through the annoyance of wringing dirty water out of clothes.

We called the preferred repairman early Saturday morning, but after looking at the last repair bill for the Bosch dishwasher when it crashed, I had to ask myself: Do I want to spend that much money to repair a machine that I actually hate?

The high-efficiency machine uses less water, they say, and less electricity, making it a bargain in the long run. The high purchase cost will be offset over the life of the machine in energy and water reduction. Indeed, the little tags say that the HE machine costs about $18/year in electricity, while an agitator washer costs about $52.

Yeah, right.

What they didn't bother to mention was that if you don't use a chlorine bleach cycle, your clothes smell like dirty socks after about two weeks of use of the machine. And that if you do use a chlorine bleach cycle (only good for bleachable whites, of course), the wash cycle takes well over an hour.

Now if you don't want to bleach everything, and you don't want your clothes to smell like dirty socks, you have two options: you can use a heavily perfumed detergent (not an option in this household) or you can buy a "high efficiency washer cleaner" to use every three weeks at $8 a box. (A box contains three uses.) So instead of $18/year to use, we're up to $36, or more depending on how many bleach cycles you have to use, and we can now add in the cost of the bleach, because EVERY white load has to be bleached if it isn't going to turn out brownish-gray-tinted.

And even with the "high efficiency washer cleaner," the clothes still don't smell "clean," even if they don't smell like dirty sweaty feet. You wear them half a day, sweat a little, and wow, stinko. Wash the clothes more often, more energy cost.

The Bosch front-loader HE machine also insisted on full loads of clothes. There was no setting for Small, Medium, or Large loads. All of them had to be Big-Ass loads, or else the machine would not spin the water out, requiring extra spin cycles ... at an added energy cost, of course.

So when I saw that a new GE agitator model would cost only about $200 more than a repair of the Bosch (if we were lucky on the Bosch repairs), I poured out my heartfelt venom about the Bosch to Bernie, and we scoped out some reviews, and then went an bought a GE agitator, which matches my GE dryer perfectly, in looks and capacity.

Amazingly, most of the five-out-of-five star reviews of the GE were from people who were replacing their greatly-hated HE machines. When a friend of ours heard that we'd gone back to an agitator, he envied us. "I wish ours (an HE) would break down. I hate it. Nothing ever gets really clean."

Tonight, five days of laundry have been done since the installation of the machine at noon (and that's with time off to sit in the mister for a couple hours.) OMG, every batch smells so good! The basket holds more than the HE did, and I am able to adjust the water level to the size of the loads. The spin cycle drives out MUCH more water than the HE, which reduces drying time.  (Hmm, that's less energy use, isn't it?)

Now I have heard that the top-loader HE machines work much better, but they're fairly pricey, and I'm not willing to take that chance. I do know that the GE agitator model I bought is selling like hotcakes, and serendipitously, Home Depot had a sale on, so I was able to get the machine I wanted for less than I was willing to pay, and got a 4-year warranty for the price of a 2-year plan.

When the delivery man asked me if I wanted him to haul away the Bosch, I said, "I want you to take it out and shoot it somewhere."

I'm a happy little laundress tonight.

Surfing Time's Curl

In the evening sunlight, this year's red dragonfly perches on a bamboo stick over my Goliath tomato.

He doesn't worry about how many days he has left -- by the time winter gets here, he'll be toes up in some shrub, his life drifted away in some shallow respirations at the end of his mating season. He doesn't care. He lives, eats, flies, mates, eats, flies, lands on his stick to survey his kingdom. That's good enough for him.

I know that I don't have all that many years left (or days, truth be told) and I want to get to that dragonfly's mentality.

I don't want to worry about the future; that leads to broken sleep and miserable nights.

And in the time that remains, while the wave is still sweet and strong and carries me and my board to exhilarating speeds, I want to live, write, eat, write some more, play with the Press, and hold my newest grand-daughter. Then write some more.

Yet I see the ceiling of water hovering over me, and fret.

Lord, make for me a dragonfly heart.

The Morning of the Day She Did It

Last Friday, while I sat in the garage studio with the door open, letting the amazingly cool air into the house, I watched Lillian play on the sidewalks.

It was significant: the day before, while I was out at the reservoir riding the horse, Lil took her bike out ... and began to ride it.

She had a teeny bike years ago, tried it, didn't figure out the dynamic, ignored it. Then this bike, a couple years ago, same thing.

I'm not sure what made her leap out in intuition, but she got her bike out and declared she would learn to ride it. And she did.

On Friday morning, she was wheeling it like a scooter up and down the sidewalk, when suddenly I heard her call, "Hah! Gran, I'm riding my bicycle." And so she was.

A bit later, the little girl from next door popped over, and I heard these beautiful words from Lil: "You want to ride bikes together?"

In the course of their morning zooming, they visited a yard sale down the street. Lil, in red, assists Kendra in securing a purchased plush pig to her handlebars.

Bernie thinks that me helping Lil learn to ride Dink made a difference. I think so; riding without stirrups probably helped her gain that sense of balance she needed. And now, riding the bike will help her learn how to adjust for speed when the horse trots.

Truly amazing, truly wonderful.

Lucky

This crawling piece of crap was not on any of my tomato plants, a circumstance for which I am truly grateful. 

Instead, it was on my experimental potato plant in a garbage can -- in the late spring, I'd put several sprouty russet potatoes in a garbage can, covered them with a few inches of dirt, and have been adding decorative bark to the growing stems.

It's a failed experiment -- the stems showed little or no interest in making tubers. I may have started the experiment too late for success. Perhaps I'll try again next year.

Odd that this hornworm chose the potatoes instead of the tomatoes, but I'm glad it did. My ire was much less. How I wished that I had a chicken to eat this bug! But since it was on a worthless potato project, I merely clipped off the stem and put it in the City garden stuff recycle bin, where it can be fertilizer for one of the many excellent City compost utilizations in the future.

Haha, hornworm, you lose.

Past the Hotness

The heat wave has rolled past, off to trouble the Mid-West, no doubt.

Last night, we shivered as the cool night air poured in the bedroom windows, snuggling close to stay warm. The mattress topper and the comforter were stacked by the closet while the hot weather made the nights miserable, but we didn't try to use them because Howie was sleeping on top of them.

"Just tell the damn dog to move," one might say, but Howie isn't a "damn dog." He's a sweet old gent at 11 and we don't want to trouble him. Today I washed the comforter, but wrapped the mattress topper in an old, clean king-sized sheet, and put Howie's clean travel blanket on top of it.

We're not going to need the mattress topper until probably November, so How can rest his creaky old bones on it. He's not a stinky dog, and has no fleas, so no worries.

Tomorrow we go to a family party for a six-year-old (six in the pic, see?) at which there will be limited seating and much heat. I plan on taking a couple of our folding quad chairs and a spray bottle of water to mist myself down at intervals.

The comforter is clean -- I hope tonight is as chilly.

Hundred Degrees Days

When the air outside is as hot as a bad fever, and what you can afford to air condition indoors is still too stuffily hot, and your front lawn (such as it is) is dying from dehydration, The Thing is what you want to efficiently cool your body, gently water your lawn, and make the heat wave a Resort Experience.

It can be a hundred and five, and when that mist hits you, your hair on your arms will stand straight up in total coolness-plus.

You will gasp, and your lawn will thank you.

Why This Blog Is So Sparse These Days

Joan Maria, sleeping in Dziadzy's arms.

Born on June 14, seven pounds, seven ounces, she has a faint drift of reddish-brown hair; her eye color is still indeterminate. She has the most graceful little fingernails I have ever seen.

When she and her mother came home from the hospital, Sebastian was all a-tremble with curiosity and concern. He very carefully had some quality sniffing time -- matching up Joan's scent with the strange smell that had been on John's shirt after his visits to his wife and newborn daughter. Now Sebastian parks himself by the baby's little sling-chair when Alex brings her out to doze among the bustling rest of the family, and he has a different look in his eye than he's had before; I would heartily advise strangers not to approach that baby too flippantly.

Howie was really intrigued by the carefully-held bundle that was brought into his house, too. Did they bring a cat in? Another dog? He sniffed her, and his expression changed from What is this? to what looked like a big goofy grin. Aw, it's a Baby! Howie has explained in no uncertain terms to the cat that The Cat is not allowed near The Baby.

Now while John and Alex have their hours full with Joan's care, and Lillian can hardly bear to be off doing her own thing in favor of helping with the baby, the household is really not all that disrupted. Joan is amazingly peaceful, still mostly eating and sleeping, only squalling when her diaper is changed.

So then, why is this blog so sparsely posted these days?

Simple. My friend Cathy the Mad Horsewoman has got herself a trusty little steed again, so I've been riding with her three times a week, and it's wearing this old woman right out. So much so that as I looked at the weather this morning, and saw that the temperatures for the next three or four days were going to be well over a hundred degrees, I was relieved that it would be too hot for riding.

I can stay home and snuggle the baby!

P.S. "Dziadzy" is Polish for "Grandfather" and is pronounced judgie.

The Thing

Over a decade ago,  I worked at a big hardware; I was rummaging through the hose fittings on my break, looking for a way to make the north side of my house look less like the barren desert that it was. And as it was coming on to summer, I had also in mind the little pvc stand misters that were so wonderful for keeping one's personal space cool on hot dry days.

Then I saw this.

Super-Mister!

After work, I bought it with my employee discount, and took it home to try it out. Unlike the sweet little pvc stand mister, this fiend put out a four-foot high geyser of drenchiness -- too vigorous for the back patio.

But I reasoned that the output might drift along on our prevailing west wind and soften the hardpack clay soil of the north side of the house. Using some wire, a hose, and a tomato cage, I built a rig to float that mist about three feet off the ground.

Unfortunately, the pressure acted like a jet and kept knocking the tomato cage over, and there was the problem with eddies of wind gusting the spray onto the windows (the water is so hard here that water splotches on the windows are verboten.) Also, the dog, though he loved water and being sprayed by the hose, was not at all amused by a high-pressure cloud of soaking mist. Failed experiment.

The Super-Mister Thing was put away in the shed and subsequently lost under piles of junk. I even forgot where I put it, until we had a spate of 100+ degree days last year. I began looking for it as we cleaned the garage, got rid of tools we no longer used, cleaned out the accumulation of dusty junk in the shed ... and there it was, coated by gunk that had leaked out of some can above it. I scrubbed it up and put it away in a safe place, and forgot where that safe place was.

We found it again this spring (it had been carefully tucked into a basket of miscellaneous art supplies,) and when the temps spiraled up to 106, we put that Thing on the end of the hose, draped the hose across the top of our Stanley sawhorse, and put our chairs about twelve feet downwind. While the rest of town roasted in a convection oven climate, we were cool and refreshed -- and the dry spot on the front lawn got some badly-needed water.

Home Depot, Lowes, Ace, Orchard Supply -- none of those hardwares carry it any more. But I did find it here. And I'm not going to misplace the Thing again.

Fly

Although Flickr has entered a sucksome phase, new-and-improving itself into suckicity, I uploaded pictures of flies today.


Fly Portraits (which didn't work as a set in my Flickr gallery because of a lack of instructions for the new-and-improved suckicity) was inspired by Pete McArdle's cover story for the Piker Press this week, "Shoo Fly." I love Pete. He's so warped that my own weird penchants seem mild by comparison.

I don't know why flies are funny. I remember being about giggled to death over Gary Hockenberry's capture of a fly in seventh or eighth grade; he pulled one wing off (not the capital crime it is nowadays) and named the fly "Charley the Diving Fly" because he'd allow the fly to climb up his fingers and then take off, only to land abruptly on the floor by Gary's desk. I think Charley lasted through two classes, both American History and Math.

And of course there was my mother's take on faith formation during the Canon during Mass at church when I was young and impressionable: a fly landed on the pages of our hymnal, and she snapped the book shut on the insect with a loud retort, squishing it between the pages, her facial expression unmoved like a deadpan statue of an Aztec bystander. Did the priest notice the sound, or the tears of hilarity that poured down my face in lieu of laughter? I never knew.

Leap forward thirty years, and imagine with me the flies of Manteca, California, where we lived for eleven years. I swear to you, and don't even care if you believe it, the flies in that area would land in front of you, and do this really rude hoocha-hoocha thing with their legs, rising and falling in a dance that never failed to enrage my emotions. Why did they make me so angry? Why did they dance like that when the flies we have here in Ripon, only six miles south, do not?

I had as much fun photographing flies on the back patio as I did snapping pics of "Things on the back of trucks."

Yes. I am easily amused at times.

Crammed Days

John and Alex put together Joan's crib today. It's lovely, and soon it will be inhabited by a howling Joan-like creature.

I have fabric (a dusty blue flannel and a light cotton beige floral) cut and washed for baby blankets -- tomorrow or Monday I want to sew their hems and have them ready.

Time is so compressed -- Alex is scheduled for a C-section next Thursday, but from her energetic cleaning the last couple days, I would not be surprised if she went a few days early.

A friend of hers offered a loan of a baby swing (you can see the stable legs of it in the pic), a carseat, a baby bathtub, some baby gym equipment, and many other things that poor Alex didn't have the advantage of when she was born 36 years ago. (Alex had to tough it out and listen to me read to her, rocked in my dad's best friend's grandmother's rocker. No wonder she turned out odd.)

Between digging up the potatoes (OMG they are so tasty) and exercising the horse, and keeping up with the laundry and the Piker Press, days have been nuts.

Wasn't I supposed to have two novels done by this time?

This Story Begins --"It Was a Dark and Culinary Day..."

We woke to forming clouds this morning. By the time breakfast was ready, it was already overcast, and the temperature was dropping. We didn't much care, as the eggs from the commercial egg place out the road were surprisingly all double-yolkers and the bacon was "ends and pieces" scored from a supermarket in Modesto -- with the best flavor we've found in years at half the price of name brands.

By ten, it was raining, and CHILLY! Freakish weather for June here, and lending itself to indoor pursuits. Alex pulled out a lemon granita experiment for a brunchy snack ... it was heavenly. Shaved ice, melt in your mouth, not too sweet, deliciously flavored by our own lemons. Score!

Bernie worked his lunchtime magic with the griddle and a cabbage,  making us juicy hamburgers and home-made cole slaw. The temperature outside was dropping steadily, and we'd all donned sweatshirts and long pants, and closed the windows as the wind rose. "Do you want me to make a fire in the woodstove, too?" he asked.

When I was done putting up the Piker Press for this week's issue, I printed out Lydia Manx's recipe for spanakopitas, a kind of Greek spinach pie. She's got an article on it for next week's Press, and when she was telling about it at staff meeting, Cheryl raved about the dish and how good it was. I just happened to have an extra bag of spinach in the fridge, and it was still overcast and cold, so what better way to heat up the kitchen than with an oven-baked project?

Instead of using a baking dish, however, I played with another method and made little phyllo triangles stuffed with the spinach/feta cheese/onion/garlic mixture, baked on a cookie sheet. They are dangerously tasty, if a bit time-consuming to make for a novice.

Bernie once again before nightfall charged into the kitchen and made a whipped cream cheese/herb spread for crackers that kicks the ass off the store-bought stuff for about 1/3 the cost.

Seriously, we are going to hurt ourselves.

You Did Not!

At the supermarket, Bernie guided me to the outdoor racks of vegetable plants. He did this.

We picked out a six-pack of Hungarian wax peppers, and then Bernie called my attention to a sign that said all the plants had been reduced in price, and to a gnarly-looking shelf of unwanted tomatoes. "Look at them," he cooed. "Aren't they cute? They want to go home with you!"

"I suppose they have cute little black toes and adorable spots on their bellies," I replied, picking up a six-pack of Big Pinks to look at them more closely. They all had thick stems, but were plainly rootbound and looked like they'd been beat up a bit with last weekend's weather. "Fine. I'll find a place for them."

I'm still finding a place. Two of them went in near Alex's eggplants and my onions; the other four are still in their pack. Two more will go in beside my Marglobes out in front of the house (That's going to be a jungle!) and the other two ... I'll find a place for them. I will.

Bernie thinks my tomato-collecting is funny.

He's an enabler.

Eclipse and Storm

Not being particularly astronomical in nature, I didn't make it a point to note the time of the solar eclipse the other day. In the back of my mind, I suppose, I figured I'd know it if I saw it.

The evening of said eclipse, we were watching TV (the ever-engrossing Food Channel) when I noticed that the light outside had gone a bit odd. I grabbed a piece of cardstock from the studio, punched a hole in it with a pencil, and ran outside. My pinhole was really ragged, so I punched another (that's why there are two images in the shadow.)

Having been followed outside by most of the rest of the family, I was able to take advantage of Lillian's wits, as she recommended I use the garage door as my "screen." There it was, the eclipse, imaged.

Our neighbors across the street, who were also viewing the eclipse, ran over with some amazing filtered "glasses" with which one could look directly at the sun and see the eclipse. They have been cleverly spending time at our local branch library, where the librarians were giving out these paper-and-plastic eyeglasses for free. It was truly amazing technology, and I wish everyone had access to it.

And then, yesterday, which was the date of my father's birthday, just two weeks before my own, we had a thunderstorm with about 40 minutes of pouring rain. This may not seem like much, but we can go for years here in the Central Valley without seeing a thunderstorm, and certainly any rain at all after March and before November is unusual.

Bernie and I sat in the garage with the door open and watched the weather come through, the ominous dark clouds, the dancing rain, listening to the peals of thunder.

The very first instance in my life that I began to lose my fear of thunderstorms, my dad was standing out on the front porch, watching the lightning and the rain. I hovered at the front door, wanting to be with him, in terror of the loudness of the thunder. My love and belief in him won out, and I crept to his side, seeing how he reveled in the power of the storm.

From then on, I was a storm fanatic, and have loved them so much that a mere peal of thunder during the day draws me to a window to watch the wonder, dropping everything else, and at night, sends me into a deep and peaceful sleep.

So hey, Dad, happy birthday, and though it was two weeks in advance, I'll accept that storm as being my birthday gift, too, and nothing pleases me more.

Something So Simple

When I was working on a cover image for the Press this morning, I looked at images of fishing boats and rowboats for about an hour, not seeing anything that I could use.

Finally I gave up and drew my own sketch with graphite pencil (deliciously soft and intense).

The sketch and scan and upload took about 15 minutes.

I like the way it turned out, although I treated it in Photoshop for the cover, making a mirror image of it and then filtering it with "colored pencil."

Sometimes I frustrate myself, wasting so much time looking for someone else's work to use, having so little confidence in my own.

Topsoil in the Wind

I dodged a bullet today with minutes to spare.

The morning was rather cloudy, not bad at all, and I was scheduled to give a horsey lesson at ten. As Providence would have it, the mom called and said they couldn't be out there until noon. No way am I going to blunder around a hot and dusty arena in full heat, so I told her I'd catch up with them next week.

Then I zoomed to the ranch, dusted off the horse, flung the saddle on, and off we went for a short ride around one block of orchard. He was his usual perfect self (even when we inspected a new ditch dug to repair a leaky irrigation pump) and I was on my way home by 11 am.

How fortunate for me! The wind began to rise before I was even out of the shower and was a dirt-laden roaring hell. Lots of plowing being done; lots of dust being hurled.

Just going from the movie theater to the car got me coughing; the mountains are invisible, and you can feel the dirt on your skin in a matter of seconds. A very good day today for seeing The Avengers for the second time.

Hope the wind calms in time for us to open up the house tonight.