Alecto's Ophelia

When we all still lived in the castle

OK, I’ve been a total slacker and the Typepad editor is still unusable by me. We’ll see if I can stand the formatting issues that come with a copy paste from Word.

Anyway, Total Slacker has been hanging out over on Facebook like a total addict. It’s OK, I have plenty of company. I’ve been hanging with Cielo and her husband too! There are a few more of you out there but for the sake of anyone wishing to remain anonymous I’ll leave that alone.

I’ve had a Facebook account for about fifteen months. I set it up at the request of friend from middle school who is currently expatriated just outside of London and it seemed like a good way to keep in touch. I didn’t have a lot of hope for it though and even mentioned in my profile that I was more likely than not to forget my user id and password and then that would be the end of me. Or at least the end of my Facebook presence.

Little by little I accumulated ‘friends’. Not too many and I didn’t do a blasted thing with them either. I kind of got it about this ‘wall’ thing and I had myself a vampire and a werewolf and knew how to send a virtual gift. Most of my friends were self selecting, they found me. If I knew them I said ‘yes’. If I didn’t know them I deleted the friend request (I did get some weird ones in the beginning).

Last April when we were in the Au Pair selection process I had this year’s Au Pair set up an account so that she could get to my account and look at pictures because I had been unsuccessful sending her anything. That was as useful as it ever got with the exception of being able to post family photo albums that nobody got to see any other way.

This October, just six months later, the nanny is jettisoned from the house (she was given 48 hours to retrieve her belongings properly chaperoned) and I needed to remove her from my Facebook profile. I needed to remove her, my daughter needed to remove her and last years needed the boot as well. In this process of discovery I clicked something called Friend Finder and boy did I go to town. So, less one nanny and plus forty old friends. Yeah, you read that right. 40. And I don’t like people, remember?

Not all of them are intimate friendships. Some have become passing acquaintances. All of it is worth networking value and the entertainment factor has been very high of late. I have reconnected with people I barely remember from high school, people I can’t believe I forgot from high school and people I can’t believe I ever walked away from at the high tech company.

I found my old best friend. The one I had when we all still lived in the castle and Jeffrey wasn’t anywhere near dead and four of us ran in a pack (we’re still missing one and Jeffrey, well, he’s kind of dead) and the world was young and good and we were all gods of the burgeoning virtual world. And nothing really awful had happened to any of us yet. As adults that is.

And then all hell broke lose and the four of us split right down the middle and I didn’t see her again, well, until yesterday.

And all I want to do is find a way to tell Jeffrey it’s all right now. I found a way to stop being alone. I found a way to get back home.

I Have A Dream (1963)

I can't even speak.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that

America

has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation,

America

has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind

America

of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in

America

until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in

Mississippi

cannot vote and a Negro in

New York

believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends - so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of

Georgia

the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

And if

America

is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of

New Hampshire

. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of

New York

. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of

California

.

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of

Mississippi

- from every mountainside.

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

About those fermented bananas

OK, Cookie Crumb, here it comes:

I have a banana problem. I buy them on sale for .39 per pound and then I let them sit on my dining room table until they're so rotten and fermented they leak onto the glass (if it was a normal wood type table I would put paper down, honest). Once leaking I pick up the whole mess (careful not to disengage from the stem) and throw the entire lot into the freezer and forget about it. This can go on for YEARS before I get around to dealing with them. This year was a little over the top because I feel a bit squirrelly lately and kept buying those .39 per pound bananas and throwing them into the freezer and it was even better when we had more freezer and then that damn half a cow showed up and I had to, um, do something about it.

Before I go any further I should give some credit to the stolen and seriously bastardized recipe:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Banana-Bread-108415

(That's how it started but you'll notice they don't say jack shit about fermenting and freezing your bananas first which would explain a few things). Anyway:

Fermented banana bread:

1. Buy some bananas. You need about 7 for a full double loaf recipe.
2. Let 'em rot on the counter until the skins threaten to burst and the fruit flies gather.
3. Throw them in the freezer and walk away.
4. When the mood strikes you or the bake sale people come knocking at your door or it's Christmas and your boss happens to like banana bread and has no IDEA it doesn't have to be dry and tasteless or you're just hungry, take 7 frozen bananas out of the freezer and set them on the counter to thaw:
    
5. While your bananas are thawing have a drink. OK, maybe not. Instead throw 3 and 1/4 cups of flour in a bowl along side 2 teaspoons baking soda, half a teaspoon salt and some cinnamon. I like loads, feel free to indulge in anything else that seems nomable. Make sure you mix it up, OK? I'm not going to tell you to sift, I'm going to trust that you realize you need all the powdered parts equally distributed in the flour vehicle.
6. When your bananas have thawed to the soft and won't freeze off your fingers stage, extrude them right into a bowl making sure to squeeze out all the excess banana liquor (yep, it's probably about 150 proof at this point).
   
7. Here comes the magic part. I discovered this the first time I made brownies 30 years ago (omg) when I was working my way through the Joy of Cooking and followed my first not in a box brownie recipe (I want you to know I was TWO at the time and very precocious)and got to the egg and sugar part. See, if you beat the bejesus out of eggs and sugar this really amazing base forms that you can mix some kind of flavor (chocolate, fermented bananas, citron vodka, whatever), add in some flour and a rising agent, bake a bit and wallah! True moist, tastiness. Noms. You get my point. Anyway, take four eggs from four different chickens (OK fine, if you don't have chickens in your backyard use what you can get your hands on although I strongly suggest fresh and untouched by government hands):
    
   Throw these eggs in a standing mixer with two cups of sugar and set to high. Come back ten minutes later (you don't need the stand mixer, you can use a hand mixer but you can't walk away or you can use a whisk and then you REALLY can't walk away unless you can get the dog or kid or husband to do it). When you see magic:
    
   
8. You should add 1 cup of veggie oil, the bananas, 1/4 cup sour cream or whatever, two teaspoons vanilla or half the bottle if you really like vanilla (I do) and mix it up a bit more.
9. In the mean time, please make some bread for tomorrow so the kid has something to eat for breakfast:
    
10. Mix the dry ingredients with the wet stuff and divide into two buttered and floured loaf pans. Pop into a preheated 350 oven and walk away for another 60 minutes. You'll know when they're done when the knife you stick in the middle comes out hot but still sticky. Not cold and sticky, not hot and dry (in which case throw it the hell out and start over). Also, you'll notice I make no mention of nuts. This is really nomable banana bread. Why hose it up with nuts?
11. While you're waiting go to the monster dog rally and see if your oldest (still at home) can still dance around the kitchen with the ten week old beast which has (finally thank you god) figured out how to go up and down stairs.
     
12. When the bread is done let it sit for a minute or two in it's pan (really, JUST a minute or two, don't over cook it now, you're so close) and then turn it out onto the wires:
     
13. Package and sell at the election day bake sale. Or just eat it and don't answer the phone next time.

(Screw the fired nanny. I don't even want to talk about that little piece of Euro Trash. We're all doing much better now, thank you very much.)

Three years might not seem like so much...

  Typepad is still almost unusable. Therefore you get no story, only pictures. Madeline told a great story and she doesn't use Typepad.

  

 

 

Adventures in raw food, or, I feel better now, thank you.

I'm feeling much better now, thanks.

In an effort to distract myself from the absolute panic over an impending 5 solo days I ordered up a juice fast. Actually, I think they call it a cleanse, but whatever. This is nothing I've ever done. As a matter of fact it goes against every grain in my belief systems in terms of what we should or should not put in our bodies and how. It also goes against my belief that we should have an intimate relationship with the food we consume. I am also late to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma but I appear to have drifted in that direction anyway. 

The whole purpose of the cleanse (I thought) was to create enough physical discomfort to mask the emotional drama because I'm well known for creating physical discomfort to mask emotional drama. Or trauma. Take your pick. As it turns out I wonder if it was something else all along.

After a bit of research, and I'll be honest, it wasn't a lot of research, I eliminated all powdered mixes, cooked or processed in any way food (?) and focused on raw food. I found a very local vendor (NYC and Southern CT only and if you really want to know who and what, leave a comment and I'll send you an email and no, they don't ship) placed my order on the internet and then promptly put it out of my mind until Sunday at 3 PM when I had to drive 20 miles to pick it up. Now, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you probably have a good idea of what goes on in my kitchen on Sundays.  All the cooking for the week. That's right, all of it. Unless Nanny's cooking something in which case I'm off the hook (she's awesome, this one).

I started early Sunday morning with a trip to the farmers market for the stuff my garden doesn't give me enough of these days. I needed to slow roast some tomatoes for paste (thanks, Kitt, worked wonderfully), make a boat load of Sunday sauce to eat and to freeze, braise some frozen (I thawed them first) lamb shanks with a ton of leftover salad turnips (they're really sweet) some potatoes about to get too starchy and a mess of other veggies needing to be consumed (plus an entire bottle of Chianti, to braise in, not to drink) and then also some red beans for rice to sit and stew in hot sauce for three days in the fridge. We had a potato leak pie for Sunday dinner so there was that too.

In the middle of all this I have to pick up my juice. I leave Cletus baby sitting the roasting tomatoes and bubbling sauce and head out to parts generally avoided. Not a bad neighborhood, per see, just a bit snootier than I tolerate easily. I'm still having trouble with the Prada Moms in Escalades. I pick up my juice at a yoga studio. I am happy about this because I keep thinking yoga might be a nice thing for me to do I've just never gotten around to working it out. When I arrive the juice has not been delivered and there are several unhappy women milling about. It is not really that late, just twenty minutes and the poor guy is stuck in traffic.

I sit down to wait. I have found a book to read and the silence of the space is working for me. Until more women show up and the atmosphere turns a bit testy. After awhile the man is still not here and the women are demanding their drinks and the poor girl at the counter is beginning to lose her cool and I bury my nose deeper into my borrowed book. By the time the delivery vehicle arrives there is a swarm on the back of the truck reminiscent of Filene's Basement in the old days. I am not a pusher. I hate confrontation so I sit and wait. After awhile I get nervous because what if they don't have enough? What if a mistake was made or someone took what wasn't hers? What will I do? I wade into the crowd in hopes of grabbing my three green bags. One of the more irate women is blocked in by the truck. She yells at him to get out of her way. He cannot move his vehicle, there are too many women stuck head and torso first inside. I am suddenly one of them; I dive, I scoop, I bolt. I run like hell for my car nearly getting myself run over by one of the hostile ladies screeching past me and out of the parking lot.

I am terrified.

I go home with my juice, unload it into the refrigerator as instructed and promptly (again) forget about it. I finish cooking and baking. I am light headed with the smells in the house. I want to eat all of it immediately if not sooner. I am beside myself in anticipation of coming meals. I sit down to write the last post and I go to bed. 

In the morning I get up and remember that I am fasting. I am not too sorry yet. I pack literally half a gallon of fluid (properly contained) into my backpack along with my computer and all the other garbage I haul back and forth every day. I get on the train and go to work. The fluids were fine, I was not.

Eventually I learned about juice fasting. I learned this because I googled everything I could find to explain the current state of my body, which was in significant upheaval. I went to bed that night and slept very badly. In the morning it was a little better and off I went again with my fluids. At this point I want solid food so bad I'm ready to chew tree bark (city tree bark even)and need I mention the effect of the re-roasting lamb shanks and lingering scent in the morning?

The next evening, which was last night, I went to bed and slept better than I can remember only waking to disturbingly loud music coming from a disturbingly lingering vehicle at five AM. I didn't go back to sleep. Apparently my body was done sleeping. I can't remember the last time this happened either. I laid there for an hour wondering what was wrong with me and then I got up, went downstairs and ran like hell on my machine (which I'd been doing since Monday anyway in an effort to sweat out as much garbage as possible). When I arrived this morning, on day three of my fast, I felt unbelievably good, nearly euphoric. It is now nearly 4 PM and while I'm looking forward to my prescribed raw fruit and lightly steamed veggies tomorrow, I am not in bad shape at all. I miss my husband, he really needs to come home now but you know, I'm OK.

I wonder about balance, I really do. I also wonder how those women feel today. Better, I hope.

And the next time I feel the need to do this I can bloody well make my own.

The abundance of being alive

I didn't expect much of this garden after the first set of tomatoes more or less bit the dust and most of the carrots and onions didn't bother to do much of anything and the cucumbers turned out round and orange and the squash rotted on the vine and Audrey the pumpkin got out of hand and I did my best just to breathe because that's what brought me here in the first place.

The need to breathe.

I am alone today and tomorrow and two more sleeps after that (not in the car, CG, but I do think of it that way because it is hard to imagine any world that does not have he and me in it together) and I am the epitome of uncomfortable. I have not been alone other than for just one night since I came out of the hospital on Valentine's Day blinking into the sunlight and wondering how it got to be so hard to walk outside in the world. A few of you will know what I mean when I say that the world inverted in on itself and I walked around like some crunched up easter egg rolling off the edge of the universe. I miss MC most times like these because she knew too and it's hard to explain if you haven't had the top of your head come off because words don't come anywhere near doing it justice. It's just a state of being too far off the map for speech. Which might be part of the problem, this need to explain something that probably cannot be said in words. Just breath, maybe. And I'll tell you, neither therapist I've been intimate with for six months could even begin to navigate this paragraph. I just go and write the checks and come home because I am still a good girl in my little compartmentalized ways.

And if it is a good day it's all good and I do what I do and I am satisfied that I have a place in the world. And if it is a bad day I come home and crawl into Beloved's arms and find some amount of peace there. And if it is a very, very bad day and I scream and rail at the world he finds a way, most times, to bring me home again.

He's not here.

I am OK but OK and uncomfortable are coexisting which is a step or two in the right direction. I was never afraid like this. OK, once, when I was pregnant with my boy and I thought about how I would feel if my husband died and I thought, well I have this boy inside me (I knew) and as long as I can get him born all right I will have a piece of something to get me by. I have always struggled with being alone in the world and hold on with all my might when I find a place to put my heart.

And now, really for the first time, I hold on with all my might when I decide to be safe outside my own four walls. I cried last night and fretted up one side and down the other for weeks and finally worked out that none of this was about being alone for four days. It is about being alone forever.

Eighteen months ago we all went to this conference. Eighteen months ago I held Jeffrey's hand and we found an old friend and he confessed to a ten year crush and she blushed and he did and it balanced something and we moved on. We went to dinner, Nomans and Jeffrey and me and another friend who matters like air and is hardly seen at all these days and ate Tapas and drank Sangria except Jeffrey who was still trying to say alive. And we were together and we were happy.

And Jeffrey is dead and NoMans is in San Francisco and I couldn't bear to go without Jeffrey this year even if we hadn't suspended all travel and I didn't want to leave the girls alone for that long with just the nanny. And I know that not all rats bite but I am so very, very afraid that he will not come back the same way that Jeffrey just did not come back and I have no idea how I would even begin to bear that.

Sometimes there are land mines and sometimes there are craters and I'm sitting in one now but I think I can see the end of the other side and I can get there on my own. And that's a good thing.

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.

Sunday Mini Farm Report

I have no idea why I strung up the beans. None whatsoever. Can somebody please explain this to me (Mom?)? They're black beans, by the way. What I harvested today from what I planted awhile back from the pound I was about to cook up and eat.

Today was one of those days I went to the garden for celery, basil and oregano because I was about to cook up and can 30 pounds of farmer's market tomatoes and make some sauce for the week and I discovered so much extra unharvested yummies I squatted in the dirt using my skirt to hold what my bucket could not because I'm not one for going back and getting another bucket if I can just sit there and fill up my skirt and the holler until Nomans laughs at my ass and comes down to the garden with a bag and still I don't really want to give up what's in my clutches... 

I don't know where this pumpkin above came from. I come in and out of these rows just about every day and somehow I flat out missed this bugger and isn't he just delightful? I have this supermarket idea of how sugar pumpkins should look and this ain't it. I'm pretty much OK with that. And below, can you imagine the tenacity it's going to take to support that thing on the fence as it grows? It's like taking pictures of a new baby, once a week and still you miss all the changes.

  Here are some gratuitous chicken pictures (speaking of new babies). This one makes me think of the movie Chicken Run where they turned all the chickens into pies, sort of like Cruella De Ville (except you have to face it, chickins is yummy).

And here she is (Belinda) on her way into the hollow that became the perennial garden to mess with the flower bugs. We know she is Belinda (even if she isn't) because she's the only chicken willing to jump the fence these days. Speaking of which, we've been keeping the girls in Homer's old puppy crate locked up in the shed and it took only a few days before they decided that was home and refused to come out of it in the morning (until they're good and ready).

We have done two things (I'll discuss the second later when I've found her). The first was to purchase a pellet gun. I'm not much of a gun fan and that's really about where I live, not what I believe on the whole. Also, I've spent a good part of my adult life believing I'm too trigger happy to have one in the house. I think I'm a little more sure of my ability to survive these days (I used to keep an electric chain saw by the bed when I slept alone but I don't much expect to be assaulted in my sleep these days). In any event, we have this thing in this residential neighborhood and Nomans is currently using the old pitch back as target practice and later he's going to put a donut in the middle of the yard and do his damn best to take out a couple of raccoons who will not leave well enough alone (having made one fresh chicken meal they'd just as soon have five more and they are PERSISTENT sons of bitches). If I do what I'd like (which is skin the bastids and hang them on a pole as a warning to other rodents of unusual size) I'd be run out of town so I'll make an attempt to behave myself (yes, we put the dog away before he started shooting at that thing from one level up).

Lastly, these sweet things I photograph in the early evening light mean everything.

Speaking the unspeakable

I have been asked if I'm going to blog this and I'm not sure I can. There are two things and the second is much easier to write so I'll write it first. Last night one of my six chickens was murdered savagely by what can only be raccoons. I'm not exaggerating the brutality of the death. She was dragged from the coop (I think they lifted it right off the ground), over the fence, across the lawn and into the swamp shrieking the entire way and leaving a swath of blood and feathers that will have to be cleaned up before Little Girl comes home this evening. I was afraid NoMans was going to sit out there in his bathrobe for the remainder of the night throwing rocks but we put the dog in the pen instead and despite his diminutive size (he weighs all of 22 pounds) he sure does have a deep and ferocious sounding bark. And before anyone gets up in my face about it, yes I do know what those raccoons might have done to my dog but they didn't and he won't have to stay out there again.  Tonight the remaining five girls will stay in Homer's old puppy crate in the shed (which is fort knox) and the new fort knox will be delivered by fork lift on Tuesday of next week. There. That's that and I just wish I wasn't so damn upset about it but I am because I should have known better.

Here's the other part. The first part. My son came home last night. I called him on Tuesday because it was Cletus's birthday and he actually answered the phone. I asked him to come to her party but he was working and I asked him to come to dinner last night and he said he would and he did and I kept my judgmental mother mouth firmly shut and it was lovely. 

Doesn't sound like such a hard thing to write does it? Well, unless you're me and you were beginning to believe you were never going to see or hear from him again (it's been 17 months) it wouldn't sound so hard at all.

I can barely breathe and if I start crying now I will probably never stop. So listen, any of you out there not speaking or being spoken to by someone you love maybe now would be a good time to get over it. Seriously. We are all any of us ever has. Good, bad or indifferent.

p.s. there are a boatload of little baby eggs. we are eating all of them as fast as we can.

Chickin Poop

I am not making this up. I did not photoshop that thing into my garden and yes, that is my garden (and that would be the tentacles of Audrey slithering past the bolted romaine) and no, he is not smoking, um, anything, that's a butterfly on his finger. It just sort of looks that way. The truth is I've wanted one or more of these things since that scene in The Full Monty where they 'borrow' the garden gnomes and drive that man pretending to still have a job just a little bit more bonkers than he already was. So this is my garden gnome. I haven't named him yet but I'm open to all sorts of suggestions. Yes, that was an invitation.

Here are the rest of my potatoes that I dug up on Saturday after the rain stopped and the heat wave came back and I did this in an effort to not have my husband throw any hammers in my general direction as we were beginning the process of erecting the chicken pen.

I haven't quite worked out what's going in the potato bed for the remainder of the season because the concept of succession planning is still a novel one and I'm just not that organized. My guess is I'll work it out by the weekend. Also, open to suggestions.

So Saturday morning rolls around and I'm supposed to be 75 miles north at the funeral of one of my best childhood friend's mother. Unfortunately it was a bad night and I was most assuredly not fit for human consumption. I will note here briefly, and I do mean briefly because I don't much want to go on about it, that I can have any number of bad nights that leave me feeling physically beaten to smithereens. Not sure what it is, suspect a readjustment of meds having just come off (completely) the heavy stuff I might be in a period of deep detox. Anyway, I woke up, had Nomans call one of the girls and then laid there on my back trying to work out how to get on with the day.

I can get on with the day in a state of extreme physicality and little to no human interaction and come about just fine in a handful of hours. Lucky for me it was Saturday and all I blew off was a funeral. That didn't come out well, did it? I got into the car with NoMans and we drove to the local Agway.

Gosh I sure have missed the local Agway. Haven't had any reason to visit one in years and I must say this one smells just delightful. Only it doesn't want to be called Agway anymore. It wants to be called a garden center but you can't fool me, it still reads Agway right up there on the window and since when can I get vet tape at a garden center? I digress.

A few things happened at the Agway.

1. NoMans saw a real chicken coop (bahahahahahahah)
2. I told him he couldn't buy one (bahahahhahah)
3. We purchased just under 100 feet (they only had 89 feet in stock) of galvanized 36 inch 1 inch mesh fencing.
4. Weensy little u-posts that aren't going to be worth a damn and will have to be replaced with probably cedar posts.
5. And a gate.
6. And some chicken implements of destruction (and when I said that I SWEAR he knew exactly what I was going on about - you know, those nifty little chicken feeders that hold nine bazillion pounds of chicken feed ok I exaggerate maybe five pounds and hang from the inside of the coop and that nifty water thingie that gives a good supply of water WITHOUT letting the delicate little ladies POOP in it - have I mentioned that the delicate little ladies POOP EVERYWHERE BUT MOSTLY IN THIER WATER SOURCE?)
7. And 900 more pounds of chicken feed because have I mentioned all the POOP? What comes out must have an equal source going in.

(I'm sorry, the font is about to do something truly heinous but I don't have time to fix it now.)

While NoMans worked out a thing or two without the benefit of said know it all wife, said know it all wife took some nifty pictures (after digging up all the remaining potatoes).

This is the inside of my compost bin. Boy do I love this compost bin and my raccoons love it too. Can't tell it's a compost bin, can you? Looks more like a potato and squash patch, doesn't it?

Here is the squash that escaped the bin and is wandering about the wild buttercrunch (which has been reseeding itself all summer long and I can't tell you how happy that makes me) getting ready to make something interesting. I thought you had to have a male and a female of the same species to make a fruit and maybe I really do have two of these but this is the only flower so far and it sure does look like it's about to be squash like. The only things I can think of that might have been tossed in there are either an acorn or a butter nut. Ideas? What's it look like (besides pretty)?

Look! Corn! Skinny corn, but corn all the same.

And and and and... THIS!!!!!

And finally, the moment you've all been waiting for (OK, humor me, it's the moment I've been waiting for), THE CHICKIN PEN!!!

Like I said, those u-posts are next to useless. More later on the roosting habits and general lunacy of chickins.