Fighting nature

My garden makes kind of pleasant, innocuous blog material, but that's because I avoid telling the parts of the story that are slightly more interesting but definitely more embarrassing.

I'm afraid I'm one of those wackos who took survival measures when Y2K was coming. In 1999 we were still in NJ in our wonderful Victorian house with its nooks and crannies, and I piled canned goods and a huge sack of Sam's Club rice into an odd little closet I kept shoes in. Later, when a local food drive arranged with the postal service for carriers to pick up donations, I dragged the 20(?) pound rice sack out to the porch and our poor mailman hauled it away.

c. August 1997, just after we bought the house.

But, no, I have not entirely changed my nutcase ways, because I honestly think that the ability to provide ourselves with at least some of our own food could become a necessity rather than a hobby. If we never need a food-producing farmette, the kids just might. Or might want one. The current economy being the mess that it is, I wanted to begin my learning process now. This place we're in now is not very good for a sustainable life, but it's fine for a learning laboratory. We'll have some acreage eventually. Why be a novice in 5-10 years?

This is part of the reason why I'm trying things that are more difficult to grow. I like some of the easier crops like lettuce and cukes well enough, but, bottom line, salad holds limited interest for me. I want to be able to raise serious sustenance vegetables that keep better and have more recipe versatility. I'd rather fail more and learn more, than succeed at things I don't care much about. Ideally, I'll have a greenhouse too, and have a small but steady production of salad veggies.

I'm as complete a novice at this as one can be. I've never been into gardening for pleasure. I have to avoid sun, which means getting out there at 6:30 AM to work on it while the yard is still fairly shady. I'm also not a morning person, so this is a radical shift.

I'm also not a detail person. Gardening, especially organic gardening, requires some vigilance and attention to detail. You can't just decide to take a few days off. Nature doesn't.

So I'm not exactly a natural-born gardener. An online friend once told me that if I ever joined her role-playing group, they'd probably dub me The Goddess of Convenience Foods and Take-Out. I have to fight nature, and by that, more than the predators and the weather, i really mean my own nature.

While gardening is kind of calming and satisfying even for my temperament, for me it's more a means to an end, than an end in itself.









.
.
.
.
.
So! I planted my carrots and broccoli almost 2 months ago. We oughta be eating the stuff by now, but neither was the right crop for its location. They didn't die, they didn't grow. They all just sat there suffering in the too-long day of full broiling South Carolina sun.

Both are now in containers. I used to have ornamental trees in these two square planters, years ago. Each crop has a planter now, and both are perking up. Naturally, as soon as I put the carrots into a shadier spot, we've had nothing but cloudy days and downpours. I can move the planters to adjust for weather, so we may get some food out them!

The peppers are happy in the raised bed, though. They love this climate. We harvested 2 and had stuffed peppers, and Larry's (mumble...thriving...mumble) garden produced enough tomatoes for me to make a sauce that looked pink and wimpy, but that had the richest, most delectable flavor... o my! Home grown tomatoes demonstrate the blah-ness of grocery store produce to a mind-blowing degree.

And the rest of my big box garden is now an attempt at, believe it or not, a pumpkin patch. A weird but very sincere pumpkin patch. Larry had a couple plants that needed a spot and I thought I'd try it.

We're also dinking around with pest-discouraging companion plants, which is the reason for the marigolds, and the basil, which you see there to the left, between the pepper plants (and which contributed to my delicious tomato sauce). Nasturtium seeds are in those rectangular planters. Nasturtiums are supposedly good for discouraging certain bugs as well. We'll know a fair amount by the time we've got space for a mini-farm.

I'm learning in fits and starts.

Beware of your credit card company!

I'm sure my readers are all too smart to fall for this little -- I can't call it anything but a scam. But just in case you have not run into this, here's a caution.

If you pay bills online,

WATCH OUT for the date that the website defaults to, as being the "payment date."

Used to be that my credit card company's payment site defaulted to the current business day. ONLY if I logged on after business hours, or on a holiday, or weekend, would the default date flip over, to the next business day. And in fact, no earlier dates could even be clicked on the site.

But those were the Good Ol' Days.

Today I logged on to pay my bill. Just after lunch, at 1:00 PM.

If I had not looked carefully, I would have missed their little deception. My payment date was apparently .... Monday? August 3rd ??!

The bill was due today, and that meant it was about to mark my payment as late.

I thought : "Uh-oh! They've backpedaled the cut-off time to noon instead of 5 PM!"

They have this little drop-down calendar, about the size of a pea, next to the transaction. As mentioned, when their definition of "today" is officially over, that calendar has no previous dates. Your earliest choice is the next day.

But, those little sonuvaguns! (OK, that's not what I really said) ... Today was still coming up as an active option.

I had to arrow back to "Previous month" because, this being the last day of July, it had set itself to its August calendar.

Then I had to choose July 31st.

I paid, and I paid on time. My confirmation said so. July 31st was available all along, but they'd have levied some obnoxious late penalties if I had not noticed their scam and jumped through their little hoops to choose today's date.

Maybe readers are familiar with this practice, but just make sure they haven't snuck it by you !

Katherine

I got this faded and slightly damaged little photo in yesterday's mail, from my same-age cousin, Emily.

Until now, I had never seen a childhood photo of our grandmother. Not one. The most youthful photo I had was this one :


...in which she's certainly over 18, and probably 20-something. She and her sister are the two young ladies on the righthand side of the picture. She's standing, her arm affectionately linked through that of an unknown young man, and her sister is seated in front of them. The other members of this party - no idea who they are!

Of course I knew her only when she was well over 60, but the young lady she is in this outing party photo has always been as familiar as can be, in personality as well as appearance.

Grandmother was charming, witty, bossy, and absolutely NOT someone you lightly chose to cross. I could imagine her easily as that cheerful young woman of the outing photo, in her element -- she and her sister were the Belles of every ball, and she changed not a whit as she aged, loving parties and, as long as she was in charge of things, enjoying the matron role only a little less than she'd enjoyed being young and sought-after.

As Emily and I approached dating age, she once remarked to us, "I can't imagine anything nicer than a nice boy." Remembering that makes me smile.

Grandmother had two sons (Here she is with my dad, who is uncooperatively blurring the photo, 1929 or so):



...but when those sons married and each produced a granddaughter for her within a few weeks, she at last had -- she thought! -- budding debutantes to groom for social success. Our tomboyish ways were a great disappointment to her, and I don't mean that in a particularly cheerful way. I think that, to some small degree, it broke her heart.

Even the shot of her at age 18-22 is "Grandmother." The woman I knew. Someone we all found a bit overpowering, so we fortified ourselves by putting her in a "box" defined by all the family anecdotes: tales of her funny quips, the things she found outrageous, her liking for control. But the childhood photo -- that wide-eyed little girl? That's Katherine, and it's the first glimpse I've ever had of her, and that's kind of scrambling my head. But I'm so SO glad to glimpse her at all.

Bowl of Plenty

This is not even the first harvest. We've enjoyed a couple tomatoes and an earlier Japanese eggplant. We actually just ate them without my blogging them first! OMG!

My garden gets credit for the peppers. The rest come from the gardens under Larry's care.

The gardening books lie. "Carrots are easy" says one book. "Carrots like full sun all day," says another. What I'm learning is that we live in a subtropical area in which the instructions given by most books aren't applicable. The Ortho book puts us squarely in what it calls "zone 8" and the book is wrong. At least along the coast, the Floridian "zone 9" stripe ought to creep upward. A few carrots are eking out an existence in the box planter, but 12 hours of South Carolina sun is way too much for them. I will NOT give up on carrots. I like them. They keep. They're versatile. This is a learning experience! More will be revealed.

Me and The Arts

I tried to take advantage of the cultural opportunities that college gave me -- never mind the uncultural opportunities -- with disappointing results.

Piano 101 wasn't so bad, but I think I needed to study an instrument while I was young, and by "young" I mean 6, not 22. My brain had a lot of trouble with the digital dexterity needed, but I was glad I gave it a try. Embarrassing though it was to plink "Thoughts at Twilight" for a faculty jury, since that was the standard final exam for music classes, I got through it, curtsied as required, and got an A for effort.

Art 101 was another matter. The biggest disaster of my college career. I don't think right for drawing. My brain rejects attempts to translate the 3-D real world into 2 dimensions. I struggled through the class and gave an immense sigh of relief when it ended.

It's kind of miserable to be able to form pictures in one's head and just not be able to realize them on paper (or canvas). But I lucked into living in the digital age, so I have access to Art For The Rest Of Us, i. e., manipulating clip art :





...with a photo program.

And if I were a real artist, I could probably do a better job of even that, since the final product can defy physical reality without my even perceiving it.
My calling this picture "final product" is probably inaccurate, since I'm sure I'll tweak it a lot more before I'm done!

Then it got interesting

Nude. By C. Cosentino

I was up very early shoveling garden dirt, my muscles are sore, I was tired, and I was not in the mood to go to Brookgreen Gardens, or anywhere, but Larry wanted to photograph a particular sculpture, so I decided to fight my general unenthusiasm, take my camera and come along.

A bright, sunny day is actually lousy for picture-taking in Brookgreen. Very little shows to advantage when its own textures are overpowered by sun-dappling. so I didn't fire up the camera in the gardens. But on our way back out, we stopped at the current sculpture show in the indoor gallery and there I found some cool stuff to photograph.
Background: Girl with Sweater. By B. Lucchesi
Foreground: WPA Guitar Girl. By N. Kaz.

Only something was very wrong. The LCD window on my camera blacked out. I could shoot, but I could not see what I was shooting until after I took a picture. Then I would get a playback.

There's a little viewfinder, but -- just to add one more obstacle! -- I was looking at this whole indoor sculpture show through very dark prescription sunglasses, because they were all I'd brought. With the glasses, the view in the finder was too dark and without them, it was too blurry.

I know! I know! 8~) Keep reading.

So to distract myself from freaking out over whether my camera was broken, I decided to play around with shooting through pure guesswork. And that is when things got interesting! No lengthy setups. No framing or fine-tuning. Just click click click, then see what got captured.

Many shots are just what you'd expect -- weird, blurry, a corner of nothing identifiable. But some were pretty cool anyway so here they are -- each picture in this post is exactly as I shot it. Sized down, but not sharpened, cropped, or contrast-manipulated in any way!

This photo is the biggest disappointment because you get no sense at all of the guy's facial expression. The title is Trust. Sculptor: LeaAnn Cogswell. He looks like he's scowling, but he's actually looking sideways and is very worried about something.

[Correction]: Girl with Dark Eyes, by S. Layne.

Projection. By R. Reutimann.

Sumo Wrestling Toads. By S. Worthington

~~
Once we got back outside I kept it up and did some garden scenery too.





Here (below) is Larry rescuing a large grasshopper, which you can't see because it's now under the leaves.


And yes, I figured out what had happened to my camera. Stuffing it into my purse pushed a button I never use. "DISP." Apparently you can turn the display off. Why anybody would want to, I have no idea, but it sure was a relief to push it again and have the display reappear!

A village Fourth

Murrells Inlet has a nice low-key Fourth of July celebration and the centerpiece each year is the boat parade. Locals decorate their boats with red, white, blue, and often gold drapery and flags, and make a traditional circuit through the marsh.

The time varies from year to year, based on the hour high tide occurs -- this photo was taken at about 6 PM -- and the boats are spaced so far apart that you can't get many in one shot. Actually, if you look beyond the boat in the foreground, you'll see (dimly, I'm afraid, because zooming with my camera fuzzes out the quality) other boats ambling around in the harbor awaiting their turns.

They never come down as far as our neighborhood -- the water isn't deep enough -- but we watch from my parents' porch, in between conversing, laying down placemats, eating fried chicken and just lazing around with (in my case) a Pepsi on the rocks, and a book.

And after dark, fireworks will issue from the same place up the inlet, where a cookout and celebration are going on at the harbor park. We might go out to the front porch and watch them pop above the trees.

Hope everyone else is having as enjoyable a weekend!

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part IV: Marauder

We have a mystery marauder. Something dug my garden out one night. And I mean dug it out.

We managed to trap a raccoon, but that's not the end of the story. Possibly, the garden was raided by a raccoon, but while raccoons will dig, they generally dig holes. This destruction indicated a bigger and a less precise animal, which threw out half the dirt, destroying most of the seedlings.

But another clue is that something bigger and tougher is preying on raccoons. Something big enough to make a thorough meal out of one -- Larry found the few scraps it left -- and to take off the lower leg of this little guy we caught in our trap (who now lives in Brookgreen Gardens).

There are stray dogs around, often abandoned in the state park across the creek. Coyotes have been spotted in the area, though a little further inland. So far. The species of the marauder is still unknown, but I'm in recovery mode with the garden.

I lost all but 2 little carrot seedlings, but they are hanging in there. And so are the peppers; doing well, in fact!

I'm restarting the carrots, this time in starter pots, and fencing the garden when I get them in. Raccoons climb fences, but we also employ cayenne pepper and Critter Ridder [TM]. This is a real learning experience!

No news is bad news

Wow. This is what I get for getting busy and leaving a blog entry in draft mode for a couple of weeks, without doing a final edit and posting it.

2 weeks ago (the draft is dated 6/16), I started a blog entry which, among other things, mocked our local newspaper for what I call the "Baptist Of The Day story." If it keeps the paper alive, I said, then OK, but I think this dumbing down and pandering is killing it, not increasing revenue.

Today the paper took it further, with a new policy to give over the Monday front page to a feature topic. The entire front page. Guess what topic they started with. (It's not featured as heavily on their website : here's the Sun News site.)


You'll need to zoom these, I'm afraid. OK, these articles really could be good explorations of our community and our society, in an appropriate part of the paper. But ... the front page? The whole front page??

My 2-week-old blog entry follows:
--

The local newspaper keeps shrinking and TV news gets stupider, and I watch the changes and the debates about how the public can get the information it needs, but I tend to stay out of them since I have no solutions. But then a related topic that I've always been vocal about pulls me in anyway.

I ran across this kind of nifty website the other day. It's called Banned Books Online, and has links to some (but only selected) famous censored books that are now available, full-text, online. Most are easy to get anyway these days, but I thought it was a great example of what's good about access in the world we live in. And not everything about it is good.

Then I spotted the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Blue Ribbon Campaign button, there at the top, and clicked it.

Library school turned a lot of us into ardent anti-censorship banner-wavers, and in 1981 it was a very cool thing to be a near-absolutist about it. Back then almost anything could be published by somebody somewhere, but access points (libraries, bookstores, mainstream media, any entity that selected what to offer) had more gatekeeper-type control over availability. People had to work a lot harder to find out on their own whether a book, a point of view, an idea, existed, much less to get it in-hand. They were more dependent on our judgment, and it was drummed into us fledgling librarians that libraries had a particularly heavy responsibility to understand and apply the difference between being selective, and censoring.

Once upon a time I would have jumped onto any "anti-censorship" bandwagon that rolled by. But as I read through the Electronic Frontier Foundation site, something stopped me in my tracks.

The first item reads:

You Have the Right to Blog Anonymously. EFF has fought for your right to speak anonymously on the Internet, establishing legal protections in several states and federal jurisdictions, and developing technologies to help you protect you[r] identity. With your support, EFF can continue to defend this right, conducting impact litigation to establish strict standards to unmask an anonymous critic in more jurisdictions.

OK, if bloggers are to act as "citizen journalists" they need to be able to expose corruption and post material that offends, without getting Molotov cocktails thrown through their living room windows. So I read this and I thought, Cool! I can get behind tha--

Wait a minute.

The ability of journalists to protect sources has always been important. But there it is. Are bloggers sources, or are bloggers journalists??

Kind of both (See Item 2), and the question that comes to my mind is: isn't this a conflict of interest? "I can publish allegations like a reporter does.... but I get to hide my identity for my own safety, like a source."

The accuracy and value of information from sources, anonymous or otherwise, depends on their coming through an identifiable, accountable source. "You have it from [Joe Reporter; The Daily Observer; Cable Spews Network] that this isn't just a claim, it's verified." Or, "This is only an allegation, it is NOT verified at this point."

I live in, o gawd, South Care-o-lina. Where, when you find Harlequin [TM] romance readers, you've found active minds.

(See? I'm not a journalist, so I can stereotype to my heart's content. There are educated people and a university and everything around here. You can buy Richard Dawkins and D. H. Lawrence in the bookstore down the road, but if I make this area sound like The Republic of Gilead, some readers really could get an impression that's way-exaggerated, though not entirely falsified.)

I had a talk with a couple of locals the other day as I paid for a sackful of books at a thrift shop. "You must love to read," smiled one very pleasant lady, leaning on the counter. "Yes, I do," was my noncommittal response, since, though I keep too many, I really do list most of them for sale.

The checkout lady contributed: "I hate to read. I quit when I got out of school."

"Me too," agreed counter-leaning lady. "I don't like to read. Except my Bible. I do read my Bible every day."

Larry quietly exited the building, to resist expressing himself.

"That's right," said checkout lady. "I read my Bible."

These are the people who probably still get the newspaper (See? If I were some kind of Citizen Journalist, I'd have thought to ask!) because it's still on the list of Everyday Things People Do. And these are the subscribers whom the Sun News tries to keep by dumbing itself down and down-er, with a Giant Color Picture of Something Unimportant, which takes up most of every front page, and with its pandering to Christianity by means of what I call the Baptist Of The Day story. You can just hear the newsroom briefings: "Got to feature a Christian doing something Christian in every issue! FIND something!"

If these were just smart tactics to keep the paper selling, I'd applaud them, because the paper also puts things that those subscribers will not seek out, but that they very much need exposure to, in front of them every day, and persists in running both points of view on issues. Even as the staff undoubtedly wince when another "You pinko liberals!" cancellation comes in.

But the tactics are not working and the paper keeps shrinking. I mock it, but I shudder to think what we'd do without it.

Because if blog journalists take over the job, my Bible Ladies won't be reading them, but they still vote.

And because there will be a verification problem. Even the smartest, most proactive local reader who seeks out independent online reporting about what our officials and business moguls are up to, will have no way of sorting the good self-appointed journalists from the bad. Some obviously incompetent writers will fall away, but those who can craft prose like a pro will be judged as responsible and trustworthy, unless someone could really call them on facts.

And what the bleep will we do then? The issues this raises go way beyond the blog Bill of Rights, but on that facet of blog journalism, I have to voice serious qualms. Doesn't the top layer -- the user-interface layer -- of news publication have to have a known name and address? If you're going to be a journalist, don't you need to be willing to allow oversight by somebody? If you're a lone self-appointed journalist, even a responsible, truth-seeking one, to whom do you answer?

Liberals and conservatives alike have crossed the line, have believed that getting the public to hold the "right" opinion on some issue was vital, and suppressed or fabricated evidence to make it happen. If other investigators expose your story as fake, how do we find out about it and "fire" you?

These issues are there even if anonymity is not granted to blog journalists, but if it is granted, accountability becomes that much harder. If you won't identify yourself, how much more abuse of reporting power does this allow?

Yet it's undeniable - blog journalists are vulnerable, and can risk every harassment, from having the local Founding Family quietly arrange for a rotation of Sheriff's Deputy nephews to follow them 24/7 and ticket every gum wrapper they drop, to mailbox bombs. But how can we guarantee them safety and freedom to investigate, and still guarantee the readership some accountability? The EFF statement seems to acknowledge that unmasking is sometimes necessary and urges only "strict standards," but that's one heckuva hard standard to set if you want truth maximized.

All I've got is the questions, no real answers.

A surfeit of dragonflies

Yes, this really is a photo of something, which you can see if you click it to enlarge -- i have uploaded the biggest version! -- but sometimes a photo just is NOT adequate.

We're experiencing this delightful and sort of baffling phenomenon. A dragonfly population explosion.

This was taken at about 2 o'clock this afternoon, prime dragonfly time. The air is so busy with them that it is very likely that the shot contains more than 20, though my beloved but basic camera turns the more distant ones into specks. Go outside and you are surrounded, but at ground level, they just don't show in a photo against the foliage, which is why I aimed at the sky.

To stand outside is to stand in a wonderland, like a very busy metropolitan hover-port in a futuristic animation. They are various colors, also not discernible in the sky picture. They land on everything. They land on you. They weave and crisscross and gorge themselves on gnats and mosquitoes, and chase each other, lacing the air with their paths, thousands of them.

It's been very rainy and possibly the mosquito population has also exploded, providing the dragonflies an exceptional buffet. I dunno. But there are ten times more dragonflies out there than I have ever seen at one time, in my life.

A song for Jenny

Pet Project

For previous posts in the WHTTWOT Pet Project, look here and here.

Don't cry, it's only literature

I don't know exactly what possessed me to buy this book several years ago. I guess, after reading Books and Readers in the Early Church, I got interested in early Christian writings or something.

So I sprang for this thing. It's called Early Christian Latin Poets. I found most of the poets rather uninspired, same old rewording or imitating psalms, blah blah. But the intro to the selection from Paulinus (b.353 CE, Bishop of Nola from 406 CE) intrigued me, when the editor said that one poem "gives an amusing account of three miracles involving farm animals selected for slaughter in fulfillment of vows to St. Felix, set deep in the Campanian countryside."

This is now, officially, one of my least favorite "miracle" stories, ever.

I wish that I could just hate the poem, without getting all emo and genuinely upset by it, but that's what happened. I tried the self-talk technique :

Look, it's only a legend. Check out the iconic Christian literary elements: biological miracle, willing self-sacrifice, even a no-room-at-the-local-inn subplot.

And if something real did inspire the story, this pig has been dead for, like, 1800 years (the stories were old by the time Paulinus wrote about them). Most farm animals become dinner for somebody, including you, hello? and sacrifices fed the poor, so don't get bent out of shape about one pig who's probably fictitious anyway. Is this half as bad as the Abraham and Isaac story?

It didn't work.

Part of this book is on Google Books, including most of this poem (only the first 2 lines are missing), so here it is, if anybody wants to know firsthand what I'm talking about. Start with page 64.

But if cruelty to animals upsets you, I invite you to skip it. Here's the story it tells. Farmer fattens up this pig to a huge size, to make his sacrifice to St. Felix more spectacular than anybody else's, and then sets out to walk him to the Felix shrine, apparently a long journey away, since they have to lodge there someplace.

Only the pig is too enormous for his legs to bear him up. Great planning there, guys, positively failblog-worthy. Anyway, the pig collapses almost immediately and can't get up, and they can't lift him, so the farmers go back for a bunch of small pigs to make an equivalent sacrifice and take them off to Felix's shrine, having no choice but to leave Superpig stranded in the road.

They make the trip, they offer their pigs, they participate in FelixPalooza, they go rent lodging for the night.

Meanwhile, somehow, the huge pig miraculously, with divine intervention, struggles to his feet. And further, he manages to hike this whole long way to Felix-tropolis where this ritual will take place, without getting lost, stolen or eaten by wolf or man along the way. More miraculously yet, his master has taken a lodging out in the boonies because the big crowds made lodgings near the event hard to find, and the guy comes out of his rental hut to find that his pig has tracked him to this obscure place off the trail and is greeting him happily.

Why couldn't this poet be as dull as the others in the book? Because he vividly describes the sheer joy that this pig expresses on finding the jerk, licking and nuzzling him. You'll undoubtedly note that I work up no empathy for the substitute pigs whose emotions aren't described.

Then the poet exults about how the pig's joy ... um ... was actually because it longed for the fulfillment of its Holy destiny. It was overjoyed to be sacrificed.

And I find myself cussing out some asshole farmer who lived 1800 years ago if he was even a real person at all.

A good academician could read it dispassionately. "Symbolic literary elements, blah blah, oral folk traditions, blah blah, early-Christian era transition from pagan practices, yadda yadda." Maybe even find it amusing. Me, all I could think about was this gentle, intelligent animal, indulged to the nth degree all its life and thinking it's a beloved pet, abandoned to die in the road and struggling up to go find the master with whom it was strongly bonded. Only to get a knife to the throat. I tried to switch from calling the pig "he" to referring to him as "it." Didn't work.

Here's my idea of a miracle story : how about, as soon as this twit farmer coos, "Hey, look, my big ol' buddy made it here! You want to be sacrificed, yes you do!" God (Who exists in Eternity and can access sporting goods of later centuries) drops a bowling ball on the farmer's foot and thunders, "Betray this animal's trust and you'll get it on your head next time."

The book's on eBay now. New, it would retail for 35 bucks, so maybe someone will find it a bargain. The rest of the poems may be by other poets and be totally unlike this one, but somehow I couldn't find the desire to pick it up again.

INSERT CELEBRITY NAMES. RUN PROGRAM. LOGOFF.

All attempts to make this a single image, and still make it legible, have failed. You'll need to enlarge each of the three images.

Sorry.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part III

On Monday morning I went outside, looked at this thing, and thought, This is absolutely hideous. A vampire would sleep in it. What was I thinking?!

And that was even before I saw the photos of Sherwood and Diane's beautiful, and productive, gardens.

Out came the pad and pen, and I started redesigning it (yet again!) into several lovely little terraces. Then I kind of came-to and remembered that what I wanted it for was growing food, not decorating the yard. Lots of lovely terraces would take up more square footage with stonework and leave less actual growing space.

Larry suggested we simply build an attractive adjunct with just a few pieces of the pricier decorative stone. Thus the new half-circle broccoli bed you see here:


It still looks like a tomb. But a nicer tomb. One with a place to leave offerings.

And with some hi-tech irrigation equipment, we're good to go.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part II

It's bigger! It's better! It took 15 bags of soil to fill it up and I'm starting to think this project has become slightly ridiculous in its grandiosity, but there's no turning back. Two little green pepper plants await their spots, and the carrots will go in next. And I'm trying to make this vegetable bed as organic as possible. Thank you, Thomas Supply (for concrete blocks) and Home Depot (for soil and seeds). I haven't even got the growing started yet -- the photo is from this morning, and lugging in the dirt was today's project -- and I'm already realizing that concrete block is going to absorb more water and not hold it in the soil as well as wood would have. I may line it with stone after this year's crop is done with, finances willing.



Long long ago, I copied this Once and Future King quote from a brochure that promoted a library reading campaign (You can click it, for a readable enlargement). It moved from bulletin board to bulletin board with me and then, when wall space was limited, to a file folder labeled "bulletin board type stuff," which I've just perused.

I have very little to be sad about. Everyone and everything is doing OK. My tendency toward melancholy is mostly brain chemistry, and mild at that, and what triggers it lately is more a matter of seeing "the world about [me] devastated by lunatics." But that's a big one. The lunatics are attacking on so many fronts.

On ronniecat's recommendation, I'm in the middle of reading Three Cups of Tea, and finding it very soul-lifting. The fact that it's won prizes and sold so well bodes well for many of the things it has to say; one of which is that fundamentalist, violent Islam is not all of Islam. The people of these villages embrace a Western stranger, and support education. For their daughters. For all their children, for everyone's future. Their ranking Muslim cleric supports the effort.

As I read it, i think, Good! the more understanding this book and this project brings to people who equate Islam with violence and oppression, the better.

Then I wonder, Why can't such an understanding of Christianity come about??

Why is only the fundamentalist brand, the brand that calls for the beliefs of fundamentalist denominations to be imposed on all, why is this the very definition of "Christianity" in the minds of so many people? Not just simpleminded, lazy, or mediocre intellects, but highly intelligent people?

In part, it has to be because we've let the narrow version of the faith co-opt the word. Those of us who honestly believe that the message of Christianity is one of love, not sweet sentimental gooey luv, but healing, feeding, building-for, lifegiving love, a message of offering, never forcing .... we've been too quiet. We've let it become synonymous with a politics that seeks to force the tenets of particular denominations on the most personal aspects of every person's life and heart.

It's something to work on.

All of which leads back to the garden. Learning really is a terrific therapy for being sad, but I'd add one. Another good thing for being sad is to build something.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part I

Larry is growing the squash and tomatoes. I wanted to make a raised bed, for carrots and maybe something else. I tried raising carrots back in New Jersey 10 years ago and found that they are quite picky about soil conditions.

And I didn't want to use wood. Untreated lumber will rot. Treated lumber - I just do not want the chemicals around. I know they aren't as bad as they used to be, and i know that they don't leach all that far into the soil.

I don't care. I wanted concrete block. Also unnatural, but it'll have to do.

How to abuse a compact car.

Larry could carry two blocks at a time. I could only carry one at a time, plus I kept stopping to take pictures.


But I did almost all the building!

The Building Inspector

And .... this bed is too small.

So I redesigned it. It's now larger than the version in this picture.

Stay tuned for further pictures.

And for our negotiations with other interested parties:

Because an informed public is crucial to democracy:

Before CNN was there to keep us up-to-the-minute on the world's most vital issues, whatever did we do??

The Decline of Western Civilization

RS1, 11-09-67 * ......... 16.75 inches
RS252, 11-17-77 ........ 13.75
RS338, 05-05-81 ....... 12.5
RS1039, 11-15-07 ...... 12
RS1078, 05-14-09 ...... 10.8

--
* Only a replica, darn it!

Ruth ... is Twitter-impaired

... is just no good at this quick-line thing. I either want to write some longwinded Meaningful Essay, or to accumulate the brief updates and post them in a big batch. It's kind of the same thinking that created the Variety Pack as a marketing device. Packaging a statement with a collection of other statements means any one reader is more likely to find something interesting in it. I'm also just no good at expressing even brief thoughts in 140 characters.

... and Larry had our 12th anniversary on April 25th, but spent it at a cousin's wedding and didn't do anything for our own until yesterday, which was a day-trip to Charleston, SC, lunch at Earth Fare, and a couple of hobby store stops. (189 characters. Disallowed.)

... bought a couple puzzles to play with and work kinks out of her brain. The tangram puzzle is kind of fun.

... found out weeks ago that my novel didn't make the next contest level, but had to wait another month to get the reader reviews, and can now fix some things in it. And found some of the entries that did make the semi-finals so appalling that I don't feel too bad about being out. Which is possibly a case of Sour Grapes that means I'm rather immature. (283 characters. Error.)

... wishes it would storm. It keeps clouding, rumbling, and then clearing, without raining. We need it badly.

... wishes that the alarming number of friends I have who need jobs would get good ones where their knowledge and skills are appreciated.

... didn't know that the metal titanium was actually found in nature. I thought it was a manmade substance. Yeah, really. I discovered this by happening across an eBay listing for a book on mining titanium ore. (170 characters. Fail.)

... wonders why the Farm Town game on Facebook does not offer a gate for the barnyard fence. I mean, what good is a fence that has no gate??

... thinks maybe I'm too involved in Farm Town.

... thinks M&Ms Premiums were invented just to torment me.

... finds having to refer to herself in the 3rd person in order to match her status statement up with the 3rd person default intro is ridiculous, and notices that nobody else does it either. (153 characters. Hang it up!)

... is going to get offline and clean up her office now.

Just to tie two previous entries together....

Sue me. I love Peyton Place.

Our friend Leila often spends holidays with us and brings interesting videos when she comes. On Christmas day this year, after the Big Dinner with my folks, we came back and watched an episode of David Halberstam's documentary series, The 'Fifties.

Specifically, we watched the episode about Grace Metalious and her phenomenal bestseller, Peyton Place.

I'd never before felt any interest in Metalious or her book, but her personal story grabbed me. Her complete lack of emotional or educational background for writing, and her determination to do it anyway, drew me in. And then, she didn't just do what her soul longed to do, she did it successfully, at least in terms of sales and celebrity. And never had more than a moment's happiness from it.

Possibly because of the endless TV series, which seemed to be on nearly every night when I was a kid and bored me then, I'd also never had any desire to read the novel. My assumption was that it was both trashy and tame, an artifact of its time that may have been an "adult book" in 1956, but had neither the wickedness nor the literary merit to make it interesting reading now.


I was wrong.

Not entirely. The book is amazing and often awful. It's a crazy-quilt of the lurid, the overly campy, and the insightful. Some of the vignettes in it delighted me, and the best of those are the smallest, not big plot points.

In an early one, two friends, twelve-year-old girls, spend an afternoon together. That's it. Allison is from an (outwardly, but with secrets) proper home. Selena is from an abusive home in a tarpaper shack on the wrong side of the tracks. Their friendship depends on their shared dream of a someday in which each can control her own destiny. But on this occasion, Allison wants to share with Selena a previously hidden aspect of her inner life. She wants them to take, not the usual walk downtown where they buy Silver Screen magazine and dream of pretty dresses in store windows, but one to the wooded glen where Allison goes to daydream about a bohemian literary future. Allison and Selena both feel like outsiders. The glen, outside of and above the town, is Allison's symbol of how outsider status can be superiority, a breaking away. Selena wants to achieve insider status, and can't relate at all to this place or its meaning for Allison.

The afternoon is a disaster. They wander back downtown. In a little chapter in which the pacing is crucial to the depiction of these two mending their friendship by reentering the part of their lives that they can meet in, Metalious nails it. Through ordinary window shopping and ice cream, they gradually find common ground again and part as friends, but as friends who have grown up a small notch by confronting their separateness.

This isn't the only passage in the novel that Metalious handles with intelligence and delicacy. Sometimes she takes you through a character's thought processes, as he or she wrestles with a big inner conflict. The town doctor, a good man, has to help the completely innocent Selena, who has been raped by her stepfather, and faces the ugliness of both of his choices. The nurse he enlists to help him has a little chapter of her own, the only few pages she gets in the book, but the whole interplay of her religious faith, her professionalism, her admiration for the doctor, her astute perception of his conflict, her knowledge that she's made a decision herself and can't pin it on anyone else -- all this makes her real.

This isn't a book review, in the sense of my trying to be Fair and Balanced. I'm neglecting the novel's flaws. It's intentional, because they are well-known, its reputation bad and its merits neglected.

So. I love Metalious's affection for her main character, Allison, yet her willingness to make gentle fun of Allison's earnestness, immaturity and melodrama.

I love the dialog between Allison and the repressed, pale, poetic boy she likes, on a picnic, where their conversation is about beliefs, plans, picnic garbage, sex information from a secretly-purchased mail-order book, all braided together with skilful naturalness.

The violent and awful passages can range from so-so to ghastly, but Metalious did know how to weave such passages over and then under again, with a quiet aftermath. Selena has worked hard to make their poor little shack into a home, and places a fresh log on the fire one winter night -- then gets attacked by, and kills, her stepfather. As she comes out of that trauma-induced altered state, she notices that "the fire made a crisp, crackling, friendly sound as the log she had placed across the andirons began to burn," and that this was all the time that had passed.

There aren't a whole lot of such nifty little passages. She was no Harper Lee, and the weird and grotesque in this little town don't come off with anything like the insight or compassion that a better novelist could have brought to it.

The deck was stacked against Grace Metalious from an early age and still she fought to become a real writer, and had the brains to do it. She set out to be sensational, and succeeded, but she also set out to write well, and did in places. She understood both description and dialog, and how to flesh out character and event using both. I read this thing and it nearly breaks my heart, the "if onlys" of her life and her achievement. With the support and direction that guide and train a writer, she could have been absolutely fantastic, and it shows in her awful-yet-wonderful, rather amazing novel.

So maybe I don't love Peyton Place so much as I love its author for her determination to be who she wanted to be against all odds, and for her even succeeding at it, not in fame but in the novel's Yes! moments.


OK, maybe I really do love Peyton Place.

Because they can.

In 2002 I had an abdominal cat scan. It cost 900.00.

In 2006 I had the exact same scan. (I'm fine. The conclusion is arthritis in my hip joint.) This time it cost 3600.

Why? Because they can. Pricing is not based on what the market will bear. No, wait, it is, actually, but when you are faced with a threat to your life, what price, exactly, will you not "bear"?

And that's if they let you go into debt to pay it.

Our older daughter, who has Crohn's disease, needs 16 pills a day to keep her stable and able to lead a fairly normal life. Because she has been on low hourly wages, and in fact is currently unemployed, we pay the 500 or so per month to keep her on them. Without that medication her colon will ulcerate. She will become infected, anemic, dehydrated, malnourished. Untreated, she will die.

Ulceration happens within days of interrupting the meds. Once the disease flares up, that does not simply end when she resumes meds. Instead, a course of steroids is needed to transition her back onto the regular meds, and a lengthy healing of the damage must be accommodated with more medication and nutritional help. And that's if the ulceration does not require hospitalization.

A year ago, her medication refills ran out and she phoned her doctor. His appointment staff informed her that he could not renew her prescriptions unless she came in for an office visit. This is the responsible practice of medicine -- the patient should be seen so that adjustments to treatment can be made. The right regimen last year may need tweaking this year. She asked to make an appointment.

No, she was told. She had an outstanding balance of about 500.00, and he would not see her until it was paid. No one knew better than he that this would put her in crisis within days.

She was paying Long Island rent of 1200 a month on an hourly-wage job. She did not have 500.00. She had visited the office several times for lab work, which she paid each time, and had never been told of this balance or given a chance to pay it over time. Now, unless she made a single full payment, she could not make the appointment. Without the appointment, she could not have the meds.

Without the meds she would become dangerously ill quite fast. We took it out of our account, along with the Overnight Express fee.

So do I want some silly government that can't even make its own form fit into its own return envelope running my health care system?

Such questions are an outrage. Lose your insurance, and then have a serious illness or an accident. Watch the doors slam: Medicaid, no; partner's employer, no; Disability, no. Watch your provider refuse care. Does National Health look a whole lot better now?

Like many things, it would be better than our daughter's situation, and worse than the situation that the people who still have good plans are in. If we were a sane nation, we'd be finding a good solution under which nobody would get lousy care or no care at all. Waiting until crisis mode creates emotion-fueled, hasty implementation of flawed cures. Didn't we learn squat about the dangers of that in the past? But again we're keeping the status quo on life support, again we're delaying.

And conservative bloggers are helping that happen with their affectedly precious garbage about how government can't do anything but screw up folding questionnaires and build Bridges To Nowhere.

Those of us for whom health care horror stories aren't just newspaper feature articles but living realities will be, I think, forgiven by humorous bloggers for not having much sense of humor about it, but mocking extremes is a time-honored humor tradition and even I really do understand that.

My problem is that I know, and am surprised that more people do not know, that it's not just benign humor. It's unpaid labor on behalf of BigProfitHealth.

BigProfitHealth needs for the status quo to go on as long as possible. They make sure that only the extreme scenarios of health care reform get talked about. If you want a particular answer, then make sure you control the question:

Do you want no-choice totalitarianism? Delays while tumors grow? Forced abortions? Politicians will set your leg, bureaucrats will cut you open, pharmacists will no longer know the difference between benedryl and belladonna!

Am I being just as silly and over-the-top as the conservatives? Sure, paper-pushers will create a bureaucratic mess, but no one has explained why doctors won't know medicine as well, or why pharmacists will be more likely to make mistakes.

Does anybody really have such a naïve lollipops-and-gumdrops view of for-profit health care as to think it doesn't exert plenty of pressure for fewer people to do more work on longer shifts, to pander to the Sacred Bottom Line? Causing nasty mistakes? Could anyone not know what a blind-maze runaround of bureaucracy people get thrown into right now, to get into programs for which they're technically eligible?

But sincere, good people become convinced that Big Socialism is coming and is a danger to their loved ones. And then those sincere, good people work for BigProfitHealth for free, circulating the cute memes for them, which helps keep the general public wary of change and slows reasoned reform to a crawl.

The other thing they don't know is that BigProfitHealth does not give a tinker's damn about them. A simple change in life circumstances is all it takes. BigProfitHealth will pulp its beloved blogger supporters into Soylent Green the day they can't get any more pecuniary benefit out of them. Seriously, lose your job. Sit in that miserable desert with your sick child and strike that goddamned rock till you're blue in the face, and see if BigProfitHealth issues you one crapping drop of water from it. You've defended BigProfitHealth, even if you thought you were only questioning total socialism, and now they. do. not. care.

The world is particularly scary right now, with jobs evaporating and the possibility of losing everything far too much on the minds of people who should be secure, whose hard work and responsible living should pay off in a decent well-earned life.

In a scary world we get overwhelmed and focus on the bad-enough problems on our own plates. We want to make easy choices between either/or scenarios.

The reality on the ground is that those of us who watch suffering and death happen at the hands of medical price gougers don't want stupidity, inefficiency, "rationing" or any other alternative that will merely hurt different people. And believe it or not, we know that to oppose universal or government subsidized care doesn't mean someone wants us and our children harmed either.

The free market is a good thing. It works pretty well for almost any commodity that gives consumers choices. They can choose among competitors, they can say no. And the value of a commodity or a service can find its level that way.

Health care may be the one and the only commodity that can't be free-marketed. How do you value health care?

The question is, how do you value your own, or your child's life? Because THAT is the "commodity" that they are selling to you. Is there any amount that they cannot ask? They price it all the way they can. Because they can.

What exactly are the choices? In a case in which you must have the money in a lump sum, do you even have a choice?

If you have the choice and can get treated with a resulting debt that will bankrupt you, should you "choose" to say no and die?

Do. not. ever. tell me that there's anything remotely humane or decent, much less "Christian" about the idea that any provider is entitled to immense wealth -- I'm not talking fair profit, I'm talking obscene riches -- and to let someone who can't fork over die when that provider has the knowledge to save them. If anything besides Big Government can stop the price-gouging, let's hear about it, but don't tell me that health care pricing right now is one whit different from selling disaster victims 50 dollar gallons of water.

No excitement here

News of 16,000 acres lost to a wildfire just north of us has friends emailing and ringing the phone to see if we're OK, and in case you've seen it in the news, the answer is yes - we're fine!

The fire is about 30 minutes' drive north of us, plus it's on the other side of the Inland Waterway, and has little effect on us, except to create anxiety among all the animals when the wind shifts and blows smoke this way. There's some serious devastation up there though, some people losing everything. The fire seems to have spared a posh, tree-denuded, pseudo-Mediterranean horror of a development, and swept through wild areas and middle-income housing instead, which bites. This is a nasty one.

In the unlikely event that it should come anywhere near here -- or that a similar fire should start nearby -- we're ready with hoses and packing lists and cat carriers.

Hope they're getting the thing under control.

It's Helen Forrest's birthday

I looked up Helen Forrest's birth date (April 12, 1917 - July 11, 1999) quite awhile ago, so I could do a blog post for it, and didn't realize at the time that it coincides with Easter this year. Well, a happy and blessed Easter to all, and if you like the Big Band sound, consider this a holiday treat that has no sugar or calories. If you're not into Big Band then go listen to something else. 8~)

Helen sang with three of the greatest bands. She found Benny Goodman rather a pill to work for, as did quite a few others. She thought Artie Shaw was a terrific boss, and she was in love with Harry James, though she lost him to Betty Grable. Her bio is here.

In honor of her birthday, here's my Helen Forrest YouTube playlist of some of the best that they have. There's not much to see in most of these, just music to listen to. Several use the same slideshow for their visuals, or have no visuals at all, though a couple have nice footage.

These are old recordings. SOUND QUALITY VARIES from track to track, and I'm sorry for it, because it would be nice to be able to just "play all" without the volume variations, or the scratches and pops.

Because some of the rougher tracks have pops, scratches and hum that some listeners might find painful, I've made a second "short list" that leaves off the ones with the poorer sound quality.

I found that starting with the volume control at about 75% makes the rougher tracks listenable, and allows the low-volume "You Made Me Love You" to sound clear enough -- but that one is better if it's jacked up a bit. I couldn't resist putting it in.

Here's the full playlist, 11 tracks. The red asterisks indicate tracks with quality problems that have been left off the 7-item "short list."

Perfidia - with Benny Goodman

I've Heard that Song Before - with Harry James

All the Things You Are - with Artie Shaw

You Made Me Love You - with James

Then a two-fer, 2 songs in one Goodman/Forrest clip:
* Taking a Chance on Love (SCRATCHY, but I like it so much!) and
* Cabin in the Sky (equally scratchy)

I Don't Want to Walk Without You - with James.

*Deep Purple - a Shaw/Forrest standard. This choppy clip leaves something to be desired, but I thought it was the better choice. The only other complete version I could find on YouTube is a 78rpm that has such a jarring skip that I couldn't stand it. So I used this very good but truncated version from the film Symphony of Swing (with a silly bit of film drama. That lady would have to be 100 years old in 1939, to clothe her reminiscence in that antebellum dress, but Gone with the Wind imagery was the big thing that year.)

Comes Love - with Shaw. I love this song! "See your dentist right away."

Skylark - with James

*I Had the Craziest Dream - with James. Terribly scratchy, but with some great "G. I. Jive" broadcast material. I wanted to close with this one because Forrest used it as the title of her autobiography.

--

If you have time or desire to listen to only one, I'd say, make it Skylark. A less perceptive singer would have overdone that plaintive quality, but she uses a subtle hint of it, and I find it kind of haunting. And she makes it sound easy, which it ain't!