Alecto's Ophelia

Friday morning and I'm still feeling all right

Every day, against my better judgment, I look at the Yahoo Finance front page and watch the market go UPPPPP and DOWWWWN and I read the headlines that blare off the page like some crusty old dude selling National Enquirer copies in his bathrobe and slippers with a nasty old cigar stub in his teeth and a racing form in his pocket on a street corner in Queens (I'm thinking Long Island City by OTB specifically in case anybody's interested).

I am reading headlines that could only have been written by Captain Obvious (specifically my almost eight year old, Little Girl, in case anybody's interested because that's what third graders and Yahoo Finance (or any media now that I think of it) have in common). This morning's headline reads:

US Stocks Set To Open Lower After Housing Data.

And following in smaller print:

Wall Street is headed for a lower open after the government said new home construction dropped to the lowest pace since 1991.

Duh. (and halleluiah while I'm at it)

Every day there are one or more DUHs on the finance page and every day I read them, smack my head and think, why the hell didn't I think of that? Yesterday it was the decline in retail sales, the day before it was the unemployment rates and last Friday when the market jumped something like 700 points (UPPPPP) it had something to do with that elusive and possibly imaginary money. There's nothing rational or even slightly reasonable going on here folks. So why am I looking? Train wrecks. It's all about the train wrecks.

This is almost as mind boggling as the sign I read each day on my walk from the train to work. Passing under an overpass where the city bus terminal hunkers like a diesel belching nine headed dragon I see a sign that reads:

WHEN your car is towed, call xxx-xxxx.

WHEN your car is towed? Not IF your car is towed, but WHEN. Maybe they should just do away with parking spaces altogether.

All righty then, on with the morning. I have not had an entertaining travel story in months. Nothing entertaining on the train other than the stalker I dispatched with a few weeks ago (I did not push him off the platform but I thought about it, is that bad and wrong?). Nothing entertaining on the periodic occasions where I find myself having to navigate an actual automobile from home to work (gak). Until this morning. This morning was a doozy. Still trying to figure out if I want to cry or laugh my ass off.

I was driving my husband's car. I do not like to drive that damn thing because it's embarrassing and I have this unreasonable fear I might break it or something and then he might just crawl under a rock and die over the potential sadness of it all. I drive old cars. Not bottom feeders but old cars. Cars that I drive until they go no more. I'm funny that way. My husband has one of those three letter acronym cars he bought off lease when his truck got smashed about a year ago. It makes him very happy and honestly I'm OK riding in it now. I can pretend I've been taken prisoner or I'm somebody's cosseted princess, whichever fantasy suits my mood in the moment. I can't pretend either of those things if I'm driving it.

So I'm cautious, nervous, all those things I never am in my own car. And I do my level best to stay calm and unruffled no matter what lest I make a big assed boo boo and destroy the thing. Oh, and that would be bad today because Cletus has my car, Nanny is out and I have to pick up Nomans from the airport at 5:30 and then we go to Vermont and then we pick up the puppy on Sunday and then we come home and you see I need a car for all four of those events. Not having a car would be bad and that's what I'm thinking when I'm trying to make a right turn off Dudley onto 33.

There's a very small person driving a late model Subaru and she's not pulled all the way up in anticipation of a break in the traffic and I think we're going to be here for awhile but lets just be patient and wait it out. Sure enough, break after break occurs and she doesn't even pull forward. I practice thinking Zen non-thoughts while staring at the back of her head (well not really because she's so short I can only see the back of her head when she leans into the passenger seat to drink water below dash level which she does frequently). Then a school bus turns left from 33 to Dudley creating a perfect path for three to four cars to scoot right onto 33. She's drinking water below dash level when this occurs and I start laughing at about the same time the woman in the big hair and sunglasses driving one of those behemoth SUVs lays on her horn AND DOES NOT LET UP. Eventually Subaru turns right and I ride her wake onto 33 and SUV leaves rubber on Dudley cutting off a fairly large truck as she pulls out behind me.

At the next intersection we wait for a left turn arrow to follow the Route 7 corridor but when the light turns green three or four vehicles are still running the red in the opposite direction so there's really not much Subaru can do but wait it out but SUV lays on the horn anyway and won't let up. I can feel a head ache coming on which I partially deserve for consuming three quarters of a bottle of Pinot all by myself because I was home alone with the remote last night.

Eventually SUV lets up and I drive like a little old lady behind Subaru (whom I am beginning to believe is indeed a bona fide LOL (hey, that's actually funny)). We make the turn onto the connector to the connector and I pull into the left lane to get around the LOL, turn left onto the connector and I am behind another LOL doing 30 while my Subaru LOL goes zooming by in the right lane doing 50 and people, this is a highway. I get behind Subaru LOL and mind my Ps and Qs.

I was late this morning. I was late enough that the line at the on ramp to I95 should have been nearly non-existent. Instead it is terminal and I scoot around to get off and bypass all of it. Subaru LOL remains in line like a good girl. I am thankful because she makes me a bit nervous. All that below dash water drinking.

The middle and left lanes are backed up too. This means something bad has happened. As it turns out, Something Bad has JUST happened. By the way, this is where I seem to witness the most tragic accidents and where NoMans had his truck vaporized by one of those three letter acronym vehicles except it was the other end and I digress...

This is a four car pile up. Two cars are pulled off to the right. One is a big SUV (I'm guessing not the original SUV but who knows, she did go around us). There is an older red sedan in the road. There is a fairly new Mazda3 at an odd angle to the red sedan. The front of the red sedan is gone. I mean GONE. The door is open and a young person is on his or her knees in the road speaking intensely to, as if to wake up, the driver of the of the red sedan who is another LOL, probably in  her eighties and she looks dead. I tell myself she's just in shock and I must not pull over because I can hear the sirens and she will be all right and I pull onto I95 and I am sobbing because I'm pretty sure she's dead or worse because somebody just couldn't wait on a Friday rush hour morning and played chicken one too many times.

I merge into traffic and pull myself together because I'm driving the special car and I take deep cleansing breaths and prepare to let it all go. Then this LOL in a humongous SUV wearing a humongous cowboy hat pulls off the shoulder right in front of me just missing my front right quarter panel. I scream like a cut moose and manage not to hit her. She sees me screaming in her rear view mirror and shakes her middle finger over the back seat at me at which point I laugh so hard my head hits the steering wheel and traffic comes to a complete halt and I am afraid she's going to get out of her big ass SUV and beat me within an inch of my life she's so mad but I. Cannot. Stop. Laughing.

Eventually we move again and I see LOL Subaru cruising by me in the middle lane and if that just doesn't reduce me to a fit of hysterical giggles and LOL cowboy shakes her middle finger yet again and careens back off the highway and into the truck stop.

I proceed with great caution to the parking garage and make my way into the building.

And here I sit. Have a great weekend. I'm turning the keys over to Nomans post haste. Just as soon as I fight my way though Friday night traffic heading North toward Hartford.

I sure do hope Cletus remembers to let the chickens in and out.

Passing by the open windows

It is really very easy to get yourself lost in the world and wind up serving your soul sunny side up to some cosmic parking lot attendant at the train station. I was sitting in my car at the station this morning, not feeling all that balanced, staring at the platform and thinking, what the fuck? My ears and throat hurt and I've yet to recover from the lost sleep incurred during the trip into the city Tuesday night with the big kids to see one of the final productions of Rent (I'm still crying over that one).

And then I got out of the car and approached the platform. I'm reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road from the original scroll which means it's like reading the inside of my own brains at nine thousand miles per hour minus any sort of punctuation or spell check. I rather like it a lot. The rest of you might get to feeling a bit sea sick as most people eventually out grow the desire to be hung upside down by ones feet and spun around until the world forgets the lie of linearity. After awhile I forgot about the soul sucker in the parking lot and got lost in Kerouac's version of reality (I quite like it).

None of this resolved the soul sucking and its really just a bit of a bandaid. Sometimes I need to come home and just get hit upside the head with the desires and textures of my own life. You know, the real part where I operate under the illusion that I'm making up at least a good portion of my own rules. So you know how this goes; I take off my monkey suit, pour myself a glass of wine and head out into the great and mighty jungle which calls itself my back yard.

Some of you might remember this little guy in a prior iteration when he was quite a bit smaller and I questioned Audrey's ability to keep him hanging off the deer mesh. Well, here he is and I suspect he'll hang here, slug free, for quite some time. This is food people. Through the garden walls and into the mini jungle, this is food. It's awfully hard sometimes to find a way back to something real and true in all the muck of soul suckage out there. And to reiterate an earlier point, I do actually love this thing they pay me money to do. I LOVE it. However, it is still corporate america, not my life and a bit of a soul sucker all the same. I need grounding, people, and here it is.

This is a little hard to see but it's one giant mutha of a sugar pumpkin (they are supposed to be TEENSY) resting in a bed of corn. I'm just going to wait and see what it does despite the fact that the slugs (that I thought I didn't have) have finally moved in and consumed the first of my ripening sugar babies (bastids).

When Little Girl shakes this pumpkin it sloshes.

Here is a butterfly stuck in the meshing. We freed him without contact and he flew away...

  To the tiny cupola on the roof top. You can see him, he's the little beige spec, on the peaked roof of the cupola.

  You can see the bottom of the new chicken coop behind Little Girl who is doing her own version of geeking the camera (does anybody out there besides me recall the origin of the word geek and it's relation to chickens specifically?).

  And then there's this seven nearly eight year old version of peace. Yeah, I do actually buy it.

In the light...

And finally, I know it's kind of hard to see, but this tobacco type plant I bought two of that got no more than 18 inches high at any point in time suddenly makes this gianormous offshoot that's nearly four feet tall (not that you can tell because those cone flowers are nearly eight feet tall now) and he stands up like some porn star out of the seventies and says, come 'er, babe. let me show you what I've got...

Have a great weekend. I'll be rolling about in the dirt and other such scandalous things.

Friday Crop Update

We have been eating out of the garden again, greens and greens and greens. There is grass in my greens because a good bit of last years bolted lettuce bolted right over the fence and turned up half an acre away in the compost bin. OK, it's not half an acre, it's ten feet, and it's not in the compost bin, it's right next to it. But it sounded good. In any event, just because it's not confined to the garden walls does not mean I'm not going to eat it. I just won't tell the kids. The kids would use this as further ammunition to support their argument that ALL THINGS ARE WEEDS and none of them should be consumed ever under any circumstances. That's not entirely true either but it's Friday and it sounded good.

I mangled the radishes. If I'd been just a little more willing to kill the crowds I would have had more of a harvest before they bolted and the virtue went no more to the root bulb but up and out to the flower. Oh well. I'll be more mercenary in the fall. I can plant more of these in the fall, right?

The arugula never made it inside to a salad. I, um, ate all of it. In the evenings in my nice suits and pink crocs I kinda squatted out there and grazed and before I knew it I'd eaten my way mostly down that one row. And then I came back the next night and the night after that until I reminded myself of pregnant Rapunzel's mother who snuck into the witch's garden each night to eat the greens she craved so badly until one day the witch took her price. On the other hand, it's my garden, right? And who likes bitter greens more than me? No one, not in this household. Also, there are a few stragglers left and I will probably not share those either. The rest are bolting and I think they're absolutely lovely.

I found out that alpine strawberries are tiny. Also, they produce a little bit each day all season long. This is my excuse for eating every one of them as they turn red. I have just recently admitted to this transgression by informing my seven year old that if she wants to eat alpine strawberries from the garden she'd best beat me to it. Given the fact that she gets home hours before I do, I'm not expecting to see another this season. Serves me right for the arugula.

Two of the sugar pumpkin plants that I planted with the corn have grown so big that they cast shadows over that section of corn. I snarl at them and consider planticide because I love corn more than sugar pumpkins, unreasonable or not.

I seem to have lost my mind a bit with the beans. I no longer have any freaking idea what I planted and where. I only know that suddenly there are beans EVERYWHERE. Best I can recall I planted at least six different varieties at six different times which was usually when I was buying them from Whole Foods to eat and a handful always went into the garden instead of the pot. I am very hungry just thinking of it.

The surviving and replacement tomatoes are going to live. I don't expect much out of them in terms of rapid growth for another few weeks. I just check every day to make sure they're still breathing. It may take me a few years to get over this one.

My potatoes. Let me tell you about my potatoes. They are beginning to scare me. Kitt calls her raspberries the Audreys because no matter how much she cuts them back (and they cut her) they just come back stronger. And if any of you are missing the reference think...'Feeeeeed me Seymour!' In any event, that's kind of how I'm feeling about these potato plants at the moment. Not that they've done anything to me but remember that potato lust I had going on a few weeks ago? I'm feeling very, very dirty at the moment.

This is also growing in my garden and it makes me very happy every single day.

And this:

And this.You are correct if you assume I don't spray anything on these babies, I just don't. Every year they come back (the yellowish climber is new this year) and every year I am surprised and delighted.

And lastly, my cat, she is still a slut.

Cheap Dates, Miracles and Gifts

There is not a lot of work to be done in the garden of late. All the dirt has been moved, the beds laid out, the seedlings installed (for better or worse), the early seeds planted and the fencing erected (if that's what you want to call what we did with it). However, I still come home every evening and head straight out there. I don't even bother changing clothes anymore except I trade my work shoes for something a bit more suitable for mud. Pantyhose in pink crocs. Allow that to disturb you for a moment.

Anyway, that wasn't my point. My point is the garden and my experience of it now, when it and I are poised on the precipice of something or other and my only job is to bear witness. And I don't even really need to do too much of that but I do because it holds my feet firmly against the earth's surface and meshes who I am with the radishes. Go figure.

Here is something amazing. I showed you this potato plant on Sunday. Now look at him today, on Friday. He gives me goosebumps he grows so fast. The squash are doing this too, by the way, I'm just more enamored with the potato because he's new to me and I'm a cheap date apparently. All you have to do is grow fast and you have my complete and undivided attention.

On a more sobering note you'll also recall that I killed nearly all of my 29 tomato plants last week. I've been in mourning too. I stopped by a local nursery on the way home to purchase some Alpine Strawberry plants and while the tomato plants sang their siren songs in my general direction I could not bring myself to give them more than half a look. Plant pornography; I'm not ready yet. But tonight here is what I found. Eight of these (that would be the miracle part of this post):

If you look closely at the photograph above you will see what remains of the once thick and healthy stalks of my poor babies. Coming up to the left is new growth I had no business expecting and certainly no right to. I am overjoyed with this sudden possibility of abundance from disaster.

And finally, just yesterday (and today I took the pics) as I squatted with the radishes, pruning the smallest and eating their roots right out of the dirt (an act that causes NoMans no end of freak out) I saw this:

THAT is Butter crunch lettuce inside and outside my fence come up volunteer from last years garden. I've never had lettuce of any kind do that before. I've never had greens do that before. Just tomatoes and corn, now and then. Makes me wonder what would have happened if I hadn't added the new topsoil after having turned the old soil. How beautiful is this? It was all I could do not to gobble it up on sight.

And then this, which is blurry but took my breath away because I love it so. This is broccoli. Come up all by itself. How freaking cool is that? There's a bit of lettuce back there too. And see, the thing of it is, this has all come up in what used to be the celery and basil bed.

Sometimes I want to lay myself face down in the good clean earth until I can hear the corn grow and the potatoes plot to overthrow the world.

Choir Fest '08

I hate Choir Fest. I hate it so much I spend the entire year looking forward to hating it. Here is why I hate Choir Fest (you knew I would tell you, right?):

The parents, siblings and possible grandparents of 139 students are crammed into the old middle school gymnasium along with said 139 students. Parents, sibs, and grandparents are herded up into the antiquated bleachers that were constructed at the turn of the century (I'm making this part up) for midgets (this part is true, I'm sure of it). By the time we are all packed in together, knees jammed into backs, hips and shoulders disjointing in the heat the farting starts. The farting doesn't start until it gets really hot either and then it just hangs there, stagnant and deadly and you pray you don't pass out and fall forward into the beehive hairdo in front of you. Or maybe you should, it might be more comfortable and she looks sturdy enough to withstand it.

Choir Fest is kind of like the rainbow bridge. Not like when animals die but when brownies turn into girl scouts and there's this cute little ceremony where they walk over a decorated bridge and are greeted by their sisters in fascism (did I just use my out loud voice again?). In any event, this is the High Schools way of making sure the enrollment doesn't drop off when those eighth graders move on up and music stops being compulsory. So they do it in the middle school to make the middle school students feel something or other (I have no idea what because those 40 year old squishy seats in the High School Theater/Auditorium are LOVELY and the acoustics are just fine) and we all suffer. Also, it is purgatorial in it's length.

This thing starts at 7:30 and you might get out by 9:15 if you're lucky and it's Friday night and all most of you want to do is get home and commence with the Friday night drinking. As it is no longer politically correct to consume any form of adult beverage prior to any school sanctioned event no matter what time or day of the week, there have been no cocktails either and you can see a fair number of the congregation sweat. Toxicity is not fun.

There are 8, count 'em, 8 different choral ensembles. We have the 8th Grade Chorus, the Jr. Chamber Singers, the Women's Choir, the Concert Choir, the WesTones, the Chamber Singers, Women's A Cappella and the Bittersweet Harmonies. Cletus, by the way, is in two of these so there's no release in sight. There are, on the program, 22 pieces to be gotten through. I mention this because our choir directors have been known to mix things up a bit and add a song or two in between. Everyone in the bleachers counts the songs down. Everyone breathes a small sigh of relief as we pass the mid point. Some of the larger men use the mid point as the breaking point and bolt for the hall, sweat stained shirts billowing in the imaginary breeze.

It isn't that the music isn't beautiful. It is. These children are talented, devoted and well led. It is the conditions in which we sweat, wriggle, and smell. There are high points, like when the Jr. Chamber Singers sang Adiemus and there was this one tall voice in the second row that brought the house down and all you could think was, 7th grade, she's in 7th grade, will she make the Chamber Singers before my kid is off the circuit 'cause God I do want to hear her again. And it isn't as if your kid isn't spending more than her fair of time belting her lungs out. This is all good. This is the stuff that dreams are spun of, this is the reason for being. Except somebody just let out another of those silent but deadly things and good lord! is that woman really breathing into her handbag? Why yes she is.

And then it happens. All 139 of them, less the 4 who have become the band called The Fireflies, take the makeshift stage and the anticipatory hush washes over the bleachers creating that single moment of stillness when you can almost hear your heartbeat because you know that what is about to happen will never be recreated but will happen again and again, year in and year out and you know, right then, that you will cry when it is over and wish for one more chance to sit in the middle school bleachers.

This year it was Let it Be. I don't remember last year because that's the day Cletus left her father but the year before was Bohemian Rhapsody. I remember that I cried during Bohemian Rhapsody, that I could not believe what I was hearing and seeing. I remember wondering how they'd got all those kids to sound that way together in just three short hours (the only time they'd been together as a complete group). Last night I positively wailed. I clutched my gut and let the tears wash over my tired face and I let the music lift me up and carry me to heaven.

I can feel it in my middle, even now.

Institutional "Food"

It is time to discuss food again, one of my all consuming passions (Happy Food Fridy is back!). I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd had a bit of an experience consuming hospital food for six days. Had I been confined to anything other than lockup I might have had some options. As it were, the only options were prepackaged sealed goods like cookies and bags of chips and other such atrocities I don't much care to ingest. What I ate wasn't quite so bad as the picture but then again, maybe it was. I have two points to make.

The first is really a question. Do you take your freedom to feed your body as you choose for granted? (lets keep this to food, please, I could get oh so out of hand) Imagine, for example, that you are locked away and can only eat what is placed in front of you or nothing at all. Just think about it, that's all I'm saying.

The second point is really more of an epiphany. I've spent most of my life with a really bad relationship with food. First there just wasn't enough of it (I'm not saying I wasn't fed three meals a day. Oh wait, that is what I'm saying, and it wasn't for lack of food funds or maybe it was for lack of food funds? who knows, I think of it as neglect) and then when there was it was really bad food (I'm not kidding, it was bad enough a lot of the time to make a hungry kid think twice). And then I decided it was mostly unnecessary and then only to fuel the body and then finally as a source of unbridled pleasure that got me in way too much trouble.

In the last year everything changed. I'd have to go back and read my entries to track the process but somehow, bit by bit, we eliminated 90% of the processed foods we used to eat and 99% of the hormones we used to ingest. It's all gone now, out of our systems and nearly forgotten, as if it never was.

Until I spent six days with the white food. The white food was loaded with fat and salt. The veggies were terrifying but I ate them anyway out of desperation (I ate LIMA BEANS for heavens sake! I have an ISSUE with lima beans). For the first few days the only thing I noticed was that my mouth, feet and hands swelled. On about day four my breasts grew nearly a cup size. I am not kidding. With me it's painfully obvious, I go from a neat little A to a B. After that the let down reflex started. Any of you ladies out there probably know what I mean. I haven't nursed a baby in six years. What's up with that?

I talked to my doctors, I talked to my nurses, I talked to my case worker and the mental health helpers. I talked to my husband and I cried. My face broke out (not that it wasn't doing that any way for what turned out to be an ongoing bacterial infection) and my voice changed a bit. It dropped an octave. And a number of other bodily functions ceased to occur.

I had other things to worry about.

When I got out on Valentine's day the first thing I did was eat real food. It was wonderful and amazing and you never saw anybody (except maybe CG's family) wolf down whole wheat bread that fast. I ate real food and I drank real water (like out of the ground) and I got a good amount of exercise. And then I blew up like a balloon. It was the damnedest thing. Up eight pounds in a matter of weeks. I went back to see the doctor. I showed him my intake chart (I track my intake when I'm worried) and my exercise chart. He did not believe me. He accused me of gorging myself on processed foods and sugars. "There's no other way", he said, "this is not possible".

I have a new doctor now.

And... it was mostly water weight, residual, brought on by the shock of the bad stuff in and the bad stuff back out.

Food. Think about it.

Adventures in no knead bread making

Happy Food Friday, All!

Here is the link to Kitt's no knead bread. I'm going to tell you about my experiences with this method and even give you the recipe but Kitt's got this documented with wonderful photographs and I haven't seen it done better yet. Also, the comment section on that particular post is very useful. Plus, mine is a three page essay; Kitt's is an actual recipe!

I have always been leery of change. Give me something known and true and I'll stick with it until the wheels fall off. Therefore I dragged my feet on the no knead method, being the crazy purist and feeling the need to knead (pun intentional) for two hours straight every Sunday morning. I might actually need that part but I'll come back to that later, there are alternatives to burning excess energy.

I had two major issues with this Sunday bread baking. The first being that I just couldn't accurately forecast the household's weekly bread requirements. Some weeks we'd be breadless by Thursday and other weeks, way too many of them, the bread was wasted. I can turn a lot of it into bread crumbs but there's only so many of those I need. Also, the Rat Terrier was putting on some serious weight and while it was funny for awhile it's not really good for him. The second was that there was just no way to keep the bread fresh for an entire seven days. This didn't bother me so much as the girls because quite honestly (as much as I'd rather not admit this), I'll eat just about anything. The problem was the bread would get old and they'd just avoid it and then I'd have more waste than I might have had it been fresh.

So. After months of consuming mass quantities of yeast or sour dough starter (which really will keep going and going and going if you remember to feed it) I hauled out my computer and worked my way through Kitt's very clear instructions. The result was nothing short of astonishing. Here's how you do it:

First, wash your hands and remove your rings if you wear them. I should take off my watch but I don't, plus I can do this one handed now so I just leave the rings on too, but that's me.

Second, locate a cooking pot and set it aside. You'll need this tomorrow. The madness behind this method is that your bread is going to steam itself into a hard crunchy crust when it finally gets around to cooking. The recipe wants a cast iron dutch oven with a domed lid. I used a 25 year old corning casserole dish - 1 3/4 quarts - because that's what I had. It worked brilliantly. My lovely brother gave me a 2 quart cast iron pot for Christmas that works just as well. The point is that the pot must be small enough to contain the bread for a tall rising and have a lid that will trap the moist air.

In a medium size bowl mix together 3 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of salt and 1/4 teaspoon of yeast. Yup, that's it, folks.

Add 1 1/2 cups cold water. Don't use warm, you don't actually want to jump start the yeast. Mix this up with your hands, a spoon or mixer won't cut it although Kitt has had success with (I think) a silicon spatula. I tried, I'm too impatient and don't mind the gunk on my hands. Some of you will think you can't mix all the flour in. Any of you who have made bread will want to know why you can't have two more cups of the dry stuff. 1. you can mix it all in, just keep turning it in the bowl, and 2. you don't want more flour, trust me.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a rubber band unless you know what the good stuff is because I'm not so good with plastic wraps and they only seem to stick to each other. Set the bowl aside for a day. Yes, a day. You can experiment with actual time but I think mine is out for 20 to 24 hours before I can get back to it. Maybe it's closer to 20, but no less. If your house is hot, try putting it in the refrigerator because you want the yeast to ferment very slowly. Kitt works to keep her bread at 70 degrees, I think 60 would be OK. My house is cold at night and during the day, only really warm between 4 and 10 PM.

At the end of the first rise, push the sticky mess back down. It will be very lively and full of bubbles and want to stick to everything. I leave it in the bowl the whole time. Let this sit, loosely covered for another 90 minutes. At the end of 90 minutes, turn your oven on to 450 degrees with the pot and lid in the oven. It is imperative that you warm your pot and lid slowly and that you let it all come to temperature for the entire 30 minutes. I cheated once and only waited 20. I had gummy bread that wouldn't unstick from the pot.

During this last 30 minutes, while the oven and pot are heating, take the bread dough out of the mixing bowl and place on a plate or board that has been covered in whatever you want to top your bread. I use a mix of about 80% wheat bran, 19% sesame seeds and 1% sea salt (if any of you get anal about these measurements, do tell). Drop the glop onto the mess of stuff and roll it about so that the toppings are good and stuck to what will become the top of the bread.

Next, fold the dough in three like an envelope. Rotate it 90 degrees and fold in thirds again. This will result in some of the toppings inside the bread and if that's going to bother any of you OCD types out there, do the folding first on a floured board and then move it over.

When the oven and pot have been heating for 30 minutes, open the oven and take the lid off the pot. please do not burn yourself. I do so at least twice a week. My knuckles are atrocious. Drop the bread glob into the pot so that the topping is on top where it belongs. put the lid on the top and close the oven door.

Bake for 30 minutes and then remove the lid. Bake for another 20 until brown and quite cracked. Remove from the oven and turn out onto a rack to cool. It will continue to cook for some time. It should also pop right out if your pot is seasoned and hot enough. Turn the oven off. You're done.

Now. This actually takes about 3 minutes of prep and then a total of another 6 minutes the next day. We have fresh bread every day. You can use whole wheat or white or a combination. If you are a white bread eater, start with white so that you understand what's occurring in the process and then try slowly working your way to 100% wheat. You will be amazed at the results.

A few notes:  I received an email the other day from my mother. It read (in the subject line) 'What not to do when making bread'. The body of the email read simply: triple the recipe. Apparently it escaped the bowl in the middle of the night, took over her kitchen and attacked the Macaw in his cage. Harley wasn't right in the first place so no harm, no fowl. Second, it might not be a good idea to add sugars or fats unless you chill the hell out of it. Sugars and fats jump start the yeast and pretty much bypass the fermentation process, which is what gives us that yummy, stretchy, full of wholes bread (EVEN with whole wheat). If you want to add herbs you can do that in the beginning. If you want to add other things like olives or raisins, do that in the last rising.

Go to town, folks, this stuff's awesome!

Cyber Space - or - Born for Fun (take your pick)

In the day we sweat it out in the cubes of a runaway upgrade dream
At night we ride through servers of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out in Cyberspace,
Chrome racked, RAM injected
and steppin' out over the fire wire
Baby this room rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get done while we're young
'Cause geeks like us, baby we were born for fun

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your code and sequence
Just wrap your scripts 'round these filter rims
and strap your ports across my engines
Together we could break this trap
We'll run till we drop, baby we'll never go back
Will you walk with me out on the wire
'Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely coder
But I gotta find out how it feels
I want to know if sql is wild
girl I want to know if sql is real

Beyond the Palace cosmic-powered blades scream across the overhead
The geeks comb their hair in cabinet doors
And the veeps try to look so hard
The Cyber Center rises bold and stark
Security is huddled on a bench in the mist
I wanna die with you Wendy in the racks tonight
In an everlasting list

Cyberspace is jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power play
Everybody's out on the run tonight
and there’s nothing left to save
Together Wendy we'll live with the madness
I'll share with you all the Cat5 in my soul
Someday girl I don't know when
we're gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go
and we'll walk in the sun
But till then hacks like us
baby we were born for fun

- again, apologies.  This time to Mr. Springstein.  The good news is migration is going swimmingly after two corruptions and one trip running screaming out of the building, down the street, into the mall and around and around four times until I thought I could go back into the office without crying and slobbering all over anyone who came within six feet of my cube.

Nannyville

Having a nanny has not made my life one bit easier, not even slightly, anywhere, no how no way no where. It has, however, broadened the lives of my daughters significantly which was the primary motivation in the first place. I forget that sometimes.

Here is how it has broadened my daughters' horizons:

Little Girl has discovered the fine art of six year old bossiness. Sometimes I cannot believe what I hear coming from the kitchen or the bedroom or down the hall if I happen to be home while Nanny and Little Girl are following the dotted line we have laid out for them. The dotted lines are there because without them absolutely nothing gets done. And I mean nothing. So much for providing goals and hoping Nanny and Little Girl will grow in working out how to achieve them.

Cletus Marie has discovered the fine art of over-scheduling, over-extending and double-booking herself. A girl after my own heart, we consider this year the year of learning time management. Or being introduced to the concept of time management.  Oh forget it.

And me. Oh my.  I don't get to leave my office at 5 PM two to three days a week anymore. Now I work until 6 every night.  While this makes my entire batch of business partners happy as little piggies in poo, I am bloody well exhausted. Most of the time we eat by 8.  Most of the time.

I want mommy. Happy Friday!

Kisses...

Success!  No one called me at 3:22 PM today. I fantasize that I may have them trained and shall live well inside that fantasy right up until, erm, next Friday.  There you go.

Cielo has gone in for knee surgery.  Please send your collective well wishes in her general direction. Anybody with a spare virgin chicken, feel free to sacrifice.  Send the entrails to MC for reading (sorry, MC, I think they'd go great with the current state of your, erm, barn). 

CG's family is learning what life on the farm looks like when Momma works. This won't go on much longer but please send some chickens and wishes to CG as well.  Scratch that, send them to her family, life lessons and all. 

Amy has gotten into the car with her sixteen year old son behind the wheel.  'Nough said.  Bless you Amy, for you are crazier and gooder than the rest of us. Now get out of the car and back away from the boy. People can be hired to do this for you.

Well gee, I hadn't meant to be doing a state of the union but it kind of looks that way, doesn't it?  I'll stop now before I get wrapped up in the argument RW and I have been having about StupidTom's poor cat's unmentionables and what they may or may not be reasonably referred to (I WIN I WIN I WIN!!!).

Moving on now...

I was blog surfing again today.  I was doing this because I was bored senseless.  I was bored so senseless I redesigned my site and allowed that heinous butterfly to perch in the upper right corner.  Something about the juxtaposition of the swirlies and the butterfly and then the statement about shooting the tails off squirrels really appealed to me today.  Probably this will pass and I'll put something else up there or figure out how to put up my own banner. Cletus argues that it is not silly to think you can solve things by shooting the tails off squirrels.  She says that even if you still cut down the peach tree because the squirrels are not dead and still biting the peaches and throwing them in your ghetto pool, you can make a nice necklace out of the tails.  There.  I (she) said it and it's been that kind of week.

Still not on topic.  Blog surfing. Here's what I do sometimes.  I sit on the Typepad home page and watch the recently updated blogs scroll by.  Periodically I select one for perusal.  This is often happening when I am waiting for a database to stop doing something so that I can inflict additional pain and discomfort in it's general direction. Sometimes I find some good stuff and sometimes it's exactly what you'd expect and I just move right on.  The point is that I just move right on.  I do not stop and read an entire entry and then leave a note telling the author that he or she has just posted utter and complete drivel.

WTF, please?

What is the point?  Is this dog kicking taken to it's lowest possible level?  I read her entire post, not because I liked it (although I did and it was about canning and her experience of it and I thought it was lovely) but because she'd started the post by stating that she was a little bit afraid to post because of this comment she'd received and that she'd reply to it later when she could work up a bit of snarky. Well good for her and I hope she does but that still doesn't address the issue of this brave (or not so brave) world we're currently inhabiting and the willingness to speak.

Speak.

Too few people say or write profound things. Too many decisions and discussions are made by few and lived with by many. Too many are too afraid to make a peep.

Believe me, truly, we are far better off creating an environment where people can write and say thought provoking things than pounding them down. Consider this part two of last night.

And now that I'm done with my sanctimonious rant I'm off to gorge at some fish place.  I give myself permission to do this because for some bizarre reason I am still losing weight. I am not doing anything to cause this.  I am currently not getting much exercise since my hours have increased due to the added benefit of having Nanny with the girls. I am not eating any more or any less than I was eating when I decided 132 pounds on a 5'6" 43 year old body was perfectly freaking fine. Somehow I have managed to jump start my metabolism and it's literally roaring at the moment. While I am delighted to have regressed into the 120's I am a bit annoyed that my new pants are too loose again. I will take them in, I am not buying more; this is ludicrous. But... I am going to eat fishies tonight!  In great quantity!

Happy Blogging and surfing.  Take the time to write something encouraging to a blogger you don't know.

xxoo - Alecto