Monday, August 31, 2009
Happy Almost Birthday To Me
To all the childless friends I have who've thought they're "too old" on their 37th birthday, or thereabouts: FUCK YOU. Try it with two whining toddlers and a sulky ten-year-old. When you realize how far you have to go before your real "adult life" can restart, then you feel really old.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Three New Poems Up
... on Here & Now, the poetry blog of Allen Itz. My poems are about 1/3 of the way down the long page. The last one, "These Fourteen Years," I wrote about my grandmother about an hour before she died--she in Texas, me at home in Washington. I knew she was going any day, but still the coincidence gave me chills.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Fascinated with Parenthetical Remarks
Well, it was a productive if exhausting and somewhat frustrating day. Got up at 7 to see Gabe off, and had just sat down to coffee and computer when a little voice called clearly: "Mommy! Up!" Jez has learned a ton of new words in the last week or so, "Mommy" among them. (I prefer "Mama," but she's headstrong.)
[Brief interruption in typing for first ice-cube-clinking moment of the evening. Deep breath.]
Still, this morning I managed to get off a blog post for The Swinery--as of yesterday I am its new business manager (!!!)--and publish the third issue of Eat Your Words, which I think is pretty good. And fold two loads of laundry--oh shit the red sheets are still on the line--strain and freeze the 3 quarts of chicken stock I made yesterday, and probably some other crap I can't remember.
Frustrated by kids all morning but, uniquely, this time mostly by Noelani. She seems to want to be dragged to chores by the hair, kicking and screaming. I am fed up to here with telling her to do them. Her computer cord broke, or I'd take that privilege away. I hate to take away books. Finally I made it clear she would not be going to Wild Waves with my sister on Monday if I had to tell her again to either do the chores or improve the attitude. Things changed miraculously after that. Too bad we can't afford to dangle Wild Waves in front of her every week.
Productive afternoon, too. During Jez's nap even I got an attitude shift. Put Rhone in his favorite spot--the couch in front of Curious George videos from the library--and went out to the garden. After a week of picking blackberries on the sides of roads, fighting nettles and thorns, I found they are dangling like grapes over the fence into the garden. Picked over a gallon, plus a few blueberries. Then Rhone came out to the garden and helped me stake up three tomato plants which were lying in the dirt.
(Rhone's newest word is "fascinated," but he uses it backward. "Those little chicks are fascinated at me," he said today. "And soon they're going to hatch," he added, at which I laughed because he's talking about the rockery plant called hen-and-little-chicks. Did you know the word fascinate has its root in magic? From the Latin fascinare, to bewitch, to cast a spell on.)
This evening I made cream of celery soup for dinner, because I accidentally bought too much celery. It was remarkably tasty, and I froze 5 cups for future use after we ate it for dinner. Washed and froze the blackberries I'd picked, talked to my mother-in-law on the phone, bathed the kids, and got them in bed. Ahhh.
[On cue. Brief interruption to soothe Jez and check on Rhone, whom I found half-under his bed trying to get hold of a kitten. Fresh cup of water. Goodnight, again. It has now been over 40 minutes since I put them into bed.]
I've been on quite a utilization kick this month. Comes from being too broke to frequent the grocery store much. Normally if I found that I'd accidentally bought two whole--heads?--of celery, which is far more than anyone needs for bloody marys and potato salad combined, I'd shrug and say "huh" and shove the second one in the back of the fridge. I'd find it a month later and discard it. Now my first thought is, "how can I use that?"
Goddamn dog is barking his bleeding head off again. When I started this blog I really wanted a dog. I should have looked into breeds' barking habits. I found him barking at an airplane the other day. No wonder.
It's going well, though. Overall, that is.
Oh, there's Jezebel again. "Mommy" is off the clock, kiddo. Yeah, right. :)
[Brief interruption in typing for first ice-cube-clinking moment of the evening. Deep breath.]
Still, this morning I managed to get off a blog post for The Swinery--as of yesterday I am its new business manager (!!!)--and publish the third issue of Eat Your Words, which I think is pretty good. And fold two loads of laundry--oh shit the red sheets are still on the line--strain and freeze the 3 quarts of chicken stock I made yesterday, and probably some other crap I can't remember.
Frustrated by kids all morning but, uniquely, this time mostly by Noelani. She seems to want to be dragged to chores by the hair, kicking and screaming. I am fed up to here with telling her to do them. Her computer cord broke, or I'd take that privilege away. I hate to take away books. Finally I made it clear she would not be going to Wild Waves with my sister on Monday if I had to tell her again to either do the chores or improve the attitude. Things changed miraculously after that. Too bad we can't afford to dangle Wild Waves in front of her every week.
Productive afternoon, too. During Jez's nap even I got an attitude shift. Put Rhone in his favorite spot--the couch in front of Curious George videos from the library--and went out to the garden. After a week of picking blackberries on the sides of roads, fighting nettles and thorns, I found they are dangling like grapes over the fence into the garden. Picked over a gallon, plus a few blueberries. Then Rhone came out to the garden and helped me stake up three tomato plants which were lying in the dirt.
(Rhone's newest word is "fascinated," but he uses it backward. "Those little chicks are fascinated at me," he said today. "And soon they're going to hatch," he added, at which I laughed because he's talking about the rockery plant called hen-and-little-chicks. Did you know the word fascinate has its root in magic? From the Latin fascinare, to bewitch, to cast a spell on.)
This evening I made cream of celery soup for dinner, because I accidentally bought too much celery. It was remarkably tasty, and I froze 5 cups for future use after we ate it for dinner. Washed and froze the blackberries I'd picked, talked to my mother-in-law on the phone, bathed the kids, and got them in bed. Ahhh.
[On cue. Brief interruption to soothe Jez and check on Rhone, whom I found half-under his bed trying to get hold of a kitten. Fresh cup of water. Goodnight, again. It has now been over 40 minutes since I put them into bed.]
I've been on quite a utilization kick this month. Comes from being too broke to frequent the grocery store much. Normally if I found that I'd accidentally bought two whole--heads?--of celery, which is far more than anyone needs for bloody marys and potato salad combined, I'd shrug and say "huh" and shove the second one in the back of the fridge. I'd find it a month later and discard it. Now my first thought is, "how can I use that?"
Goddamn dog is barking his bleeding head off again. When I started this blog I really wanted a dog. I should have looked into breeds' barking habits. I found him barking at an airplane the other day. No wonder.
It's going well, though. Overall, that is.
Oh, there's Jezebel again. "Mommy" is off the clock, kiddo. Yeah, right. :)
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Suddenly, After a Dry Summer
Sad sodden comforter on the laundry line;wading pool overflows
with unexpected rain.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Smaug Poems
I picked up The Best American Poetry 1999 the other day cause it's what the library had. I'm enraptured. It's edited by Robert Bly, and I read his whole introduction; it's made me look at these (and all) poems differently. Bly talks about poems having "heat," which he doesn't really describe but lets you get to contextually; I'd say he's talking about a combination of passion, intensity, truth, and somehow a window to the divine, all wrapped up in the guise of words. It's the heat you get when the poem "brings the soul up close to the thing," allowing the reader to bypass the normal physical, intellectual, and emotional hurdles humans have when taking in new information. It's as if these poems, and any poems which have this quality of heat, are the rare arrows which fly straight and true to that one tiny paper-thin scale on the immense bulk of the whole diamond-scaled dragon, taking each poem's meaning straight to our hearts.
Like this:
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
from Keith Richards' "How to Kill", written during WWII.
Or just this:
Outside, in the distance, the endless rain
of shells and sough of trains behind the hills.
The old world falling to its knees like an elephant.
from Chard Deniord's "Pasternak"
Or this:
Waving Goodbye
I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.
by Gerald Stern
Like this:
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
from Keith Richards' "How to Kill", written during WWII.
Or just this:
Outside, in the distance, the endless rain
of shells and sough of trains behind the hills.
The old world falling to its knees like an elephant.
from Chard Deniord's "Pasternak"
Or this:
Waving Goodbye
I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.
by Gerald Stern
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Done and Glad
Jezebel's going to turn two next month, and it occurred to me recently that she's already older than Rhone was when she was born. They look alike, but they are SO very different. Wow.
It also occurred to me, just now, that the last full 22 months I went without being pregnant began in 2003. Just wrapped up another... the beginning of a long string, you might say.
I love my children. I love being a mom: more specifically, the mother of three. Exactly three.
I know the nostalgia for babyhood will come later. It's not here yet.
It also occurred to me, just now, that the last full 22 months I went without being pregnant began in 2003. Just wrapped up another... the beginning of a long string, you might say.
I love my children. I love being a mom: more specifically, the mother of three. Exactly three.
I know the nostalgia for babyhood will come later. It's not here yet.
Squirreling
I am enjoying one of my favorite summertime snacks: cold cottage cheese (Nancy's cultured) with a whole warm tomato chopped on top, then salt, loads of black pepper, and a generous sprinkling of tiny homemade bacon bits. Damn, it's good.
Cottage cheese. Nancy's contains skim milk, cream, nonfat dry milk, cultures, and salt. Darigold, of which I like the flavor also, contains cultured pasteurized nonfat milk, nonfat milk, cream, whey, salt, maltodextrin, citric acid, guar gum, carrageenan, carob bean gum, dextrose, polysorbate 80, acetylated mono- and diglycerides, natural flavor, enzymes.
Why? Is it somehow cheaper for them to make it with all that extra stuff? In the container, they seem very similar. Nancy's has a sharper flavor, and of course it costs more.
I want to be making my own: cottage cheese, sour cream, butter, mozzarella. (I bought some mozz from Costco the other day and it was just awful. Beautiful little pearls that tasted like cardboard.) Am I ready for a cow? I don't think so... I don't have a fence, for one thing--minor detail--or a barn. And I'm not sure if I can commit to milking every damn day. But I'm getting closer.
The plastic that's piling up in my recycling area is part of it, too. Out here we can only recycle #1 and #2. Cottage cheese containers and the like are usually #5. So I stack it all up and take it to my mom's, because their municipality (Lacey) can recycle all the different types. Even so, not using the stuff is a lot better than using and recycling it, anyway.
We bought a book several months ago called The Encyclopedia of Country Living. There's a section in there on raising cows. I think I'll read up on it.
Speaking of Country Living, I am starting to feel like a squirrel: there's so much to do around here before winter.
Gabe's been bringing home some of the scrap wood from the remodel of the store. Today Noelani and I started removing nails from the thin little laths and breaking them up to kindling size, filling paper bags with them. We got two full bags--I figure each one might last two to three weeks if we are making a fire every day, which I anticipate doing. We barely made a dent in the pile of laths.
There are more berries to pick. The blueberries are still coming, which is good because I don't have any in the freezer, and now there are blackberries on. I'd like to make another gallon or so of jam, then start doing pies for the freezer.
We don't have enough firewood to last the winter and I don't want to buy it. There are many big snags on the property, several close enough to the meadow that we could take them down and have most of the sawing-up take place in the clear area. This is not something I can do myself, though, at least not with the kids around! I need someone to help me take down several of the trees, and then I could cut them myself at times when Noelani could watch both of the little ones. Except that I only have Noelani here for a short time longer. School starts all too soon and then she's back to her dad's the majority of the time.
There's a hazelnut tree on the north side of the meadow, just at the edge. I want to clear all the brush around it so that it will be easy to gather the nuts. Like a squirrel.
Before I start more brush-clearing, I need to finish what Gabe and I have already started. A few weeks ago, just as the weather was spiking up to that record 103 degrees, he whacked down the blackberries, nettles, and other brush behind the play structure and the chicken house, an area about 5 yards back toward the woods and maybe 50 feet wide. Since then I've been hauling all the downed brush into one big pile behind the compost. (I don't want blackberries in the compost, they'll just grow up in the garden later.) As soon as I get that project done, I can buy a few fence posts and expand the outdoor chicken run area, and then we can get some more chickens. The birds we have aren't laying worth shit right now, and Negro is STILL broody, sitting on her nest most of the time and not laying.
(Brief rooster update here: Babe-raham Lincoln, the new rooster, is still not crowing and still lets the hens chase him around, so I can tell I'm not much closer to getting fertilized eggs. He'd better start earning his keep pretty soon or I'm going to start calling him Coq au Vin.)
Anyway, there's all this to do and much more before it starts to rain. Soon the apples and grapes will be on, and I'm sure I'll think of more in between. Also I think I want to start baking our bread instead of buying it. And there's the book to write... Clearly I sleep too much. Think I'll make another pot of coffee.
No, I will never go locavore enough to stop drinking coffee. I know, and I'm sorry; I recycle and reduce all the more to make up for it.
Cottage cheese. Nancy's contains skim milk, cream, nonfat dry milk, cultures, and salt. Darigold, of which I like the flavor also, contains cultured pasteurized nonfat milk, nonfat milk, cream, whey, salt, maltodextrin, citric acid, guar gum, carrageenan, carob bean gum, dextrose, polysorbate 80, acetylated mono- and diglycerides, natural flavor, enzymes.
Why? Is it somehow cheaper for them to make it with all that extra stuff? In the container, they seem very similar. Nancy's has a sharper flavor, and of course it costs more.
I want to be making my own: cottage cheese, sour cream, butter, mozzarella. (I bought some mozz from Costco the other day and it was just awful. Beautiful little pearls that tasted like cardboard.) Am I ready for a cow? I don't think so... I don't have a fence, for one thing--minor detail--or a barn. And I'm not sure if I can commit to milking every damn day. But I'm getting closer.
The plastic that's piling up in my recycling area is part of it, too. Out here we can only recycle #1 and #2. Cottage cheese containers and the like are usually #5. So I stack it all up and take it to my mom's, because their municipality (Lacey) can recycle all the different types. Even so, not using the stuff is a lot better than using and recycling it, anyway.
We bought a book several months ago called The Encyclopedia of Country Living. There's a section in there on raising cows. I think I'll read up on it.
Speaking of Country Living, I am starting to feel like a squirrel: there's so much to do around here before winter.
Gabe's been bringing home some of the scrap wood from the remodel of the store. Today Noelani and I started removing nails from the thin little laths and breaking them up to kindling size, filling paper bags with them. We got two full bags--I figure each one might last two to three weeks if we are making a fire every day, which I anticipate doing. We barely made a dent in the pile of laths.
There are more berries to pick. The blueberries are still coming, which is good because I don't have any in the freezer, and now there are blackberries on. I'd like to make another gallon or so of jam, then start doing pies for the freezer.
We don't have enough firewood to last the winter and I don't want to buy it. There are many big snags on the property, several close enough to the meadow that we could take them down and have most of the sawing-up take place in the clear area. This is not something I can do myself, though, at least not with the kids around! I need someone to help me take down several of the trees, and then I could cut them myself at times when Noelani could watch both of the little ones. Except that I only have Noelani here for a short time longer. School starts all too soon and then she's back to her dad's the majority of the time.
There's a hazelnut tree on the north side of the meadow, just at the edge. I want to clear all the brush around it so that it will be easy to gather the nuts. Like a squirrel.
Before I start more brush-clearing, I need to finish what Gabe and I have already started. A few weeks ago, just as the weather was spiking up to that record 103 degrees, he whacked down the blackberries, nettles, and other brush behind the play structure and the chicken house, an area about 5 yards back toward the woods and maybe 50 feet wide. Since then I've been hauling all the downed brush into one big pile behind the compost. (I don't want blackberries in the compost, they'll just grow up in the garden later.) As soon as I get that project done, I can buy a few fence posts and expand the outdoor chicken run area, and then we can get some more chickens. The birds we have aren't laying worth shit right now, and Negro is STILL broody, sitting on her nest most of the time and not laying.
(Brief rooster update here: Babe-raham Lincoln, the new rooster, is still not crowing and still lets the hens chase him around, so I can tell I'm not much closer to getting fertilized eggs. He'd better start earning his keep pretty soon or I'm going to start calling him Coq au Vin.)
Anyway, there's all this to do and much more before it starts to rain. Soon the apples and grapes will be on, and I'm sure I'll think of more in between. Also I think I want to start baking our bread instead of buying it. And there's the book to write... Clearly I sleep too much. Think I'll make another pot of coffee.
No, I will never go locavore enough to stop drinking coffee. I know, and I'm sorry; I recycle and reduce all the more to make up for it.
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