ChickenFreak's Obsessions

Rambling: Meh.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:45:00 +0000

Meh.

Something's wrong.

I don't really have a name for it. Waning interest? Hobby fade? Flat creativity?

See, once in a while I look at all of the things I do, and my eyes glaze over and I wonder why I do them, and I suspect that they're all an utter waste of time. But not a waste of talent, because part of the experience is the belief that I have no talent and that aspiring to demonstrate any is amusing. Funny. Ha.

I assume that it's a form of depression, but I don't know where it comes from. Last time, I theorized that it was a result of eliminating online perfume shopping--not on the theory that online perfume shopping is an urgently important thing, but instead on the theory that shopping, even when it doesn't often lead to buying, produces dopamine.

But last time wasn't as bad as this time threatens to be. Then, I was, I think, adequately confident that there was talent in there, and I just lamented that I was too disinterested to do anything with it. This time? Meh. Why bother? I'll never produce anything worthwhile anyway, at work or in my hobbies.

Yes, there is a part of my brain still saying, "Stop that! Of course you have talent, you're just wallowing! You just have to put some work into...something. Remember that ten thousand hours thing?" Then another part of my brain is replaying Danny DeVito in Matilda saying "Some will only be really good at making Jell-O salad," and telling me that I'm not even good at making Jell-O salad and I'm probably fooling myself about the fried chicken.

Writing? Feh. Flat burblings; a waste of time.

Gardening? Meh. I prepped too much ground and I can't even take care of it. And all those flowers in the yard at home come from other people's work.

Sewing? Pfft. I don't even press the clothes that I sew. Everybody else is doing Me-Made May, and look at what I'm wearing--some no-press white shirt that I bought from Eddie Bauer.

Perfume? Eh. I've fallen behind. I have nothing original to say. I know nothing.

Meh. Feh. Bleah. Pfft.

Maybe I need to eat a great deal of chicken.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Grown up, not so much

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:41:00 +0000

A little while ago, a cool, well-dressed girl--well, woman--complimented the brooch that I was wearing. My instinctive reaction was to feel wary, as if I'd been complimented in junior high gym class, but I managed to thank her properly.

A few minutes after that, another cool, well-dressed woman smiled at me when we happened to make eye contact as I was driving. My first thought was, "Why is she smiling at me? I'm not cool."

Wow.

Apparently I'm still in junior high, at least when it comes to self-esteem with female peers. I even look nervously at that word "peers", because I don't feel like the peer of a cool, well-dressed girl.

This is the kind of thing that I would normally burble about for a dozen more paragraphs, but it seems that I'm just going to leave the thought right here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing: Getting what I want

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:53:00 +0000

So, one of the advantages of sewing is that I can make whatever clothes I want. Sometimes I forget that.

Now, "whatever clothes I want" has limits. It doesn't include, say, a strapless silk taffeta ball gown. But even my current moderate skill level gives me a fair bit of control.

For example, the other day in the garden, I realized that I would really like to be wearing:

A fairly loose-fitting woven shirt
in a color or pattern that won't emphasize stains
made of a coarse-woven linen or cotton
with three-quarter length drop-shoulder sleeves
with long tails
and velcro-closable pockets
that are lined with light-colored China silk or fine-woven cotton.

Why? Well, I guess loose-fitting and concealing stains doesn't need explanation for gardening. Coarse-woven fabrics let air in and are therefore cooler. That sleeve length will save me from perpetually rolling my sleeves up while still mostly keeping my arms from sunburning. The drop sleeves give me maximum arm movement, and the long tails will keep me from wondering if I'm showing an inappropriate amount of back skin when I bend over. The velcroable pockets will hold seed packets or even naked seeds and keep the seeds from falling all over when I bend. The tightly-woven China silk will keep the seeds from falling right through the loose weave of the rest of the shirt.

See? What are the odds that I could go to a store and demand that? Oh, and I'll stitch down every facing and seam so that nothing flaps around in the wash and I can wear the shirt without having to press it. Because pressing a garden shirt is just silly.

Then there's pajamas. I don't really have any fancy demands for pajamas, other than insisting that they not have those annoying loose lapel-style facings that flap out. For pajamas, I mainly want silliness. I think I want a simple round neckline with a faced band in a contrasting color. And similar outside-facing contrasting cuffs. In circus colors. Imagine Easter-egg blue with a yellow neck facing and cherry red cuffs. Or maybe polka dots should be involved.

And I already made that cooking coat. It's working just dandy, but I need a least one more so I have something to wear tonight while the chicken-scented coat that I wore last night is in the wash.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Dryfarming Tomatoes

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:48:00 +0000

This is supposed to be a bad water year. The reservoirs are at...er...sixty percent? Sixty percent of normal for this time of year? Somewhere low. The snowpack is lousy. It's gonna be dry. So this seems like the perfect year to try dryfarming techniques--dryfarming being the growing of crops without any added water.

So I'm going to plant a few tomatoes tomorrow according to the following plan:

I'll space them at least four feet apart. Each tomato will "own" the entire width of its four-foot-wide wide row, and will be at least four feet from the next tomato down the row. The paths between those four-foot rows are two feet wide, so that means that they'll technically be six feet apart in that direction, though path footage doesn't quite count.
I'll put them in rows that march toward increasing afternoon shade--at least, I will if I get around to tilling a little more land; the shadier area probably won't get planted until next weekend. This isn't necessarily a dryfarming practice, but it'll be interesting to see how the plants fare with more shade versus less.
I'll plant them deep, with foliage along much of the stem snipped off and the stem buried up to the last big tuft of foliage at the top. When I Google dryfarming tomatoes, this is recommended, I assume so that you can get those deep roots started from the very beginning. (And maybe having minimal foliage during transplant-shock time is also good?)
I'll plant them into weed barrier/landscape fabric. The soil has already been amended with some manure and fertilizer and tilled. I don't know if tilling is good for dryfarming, but it's done.

An aside: The landscape fabric is not actually a dryfarming practice--I think. Dryfarming recommendations are that you prevent absolutely all competing plants--no weeds, no cover crop, no nothing. But the usual method of doing this is to grow in bare frequently-hoed dirt, and in fact a few inches of "dust mulch" to break the capillary barrier between the deeper soil and the surface, so that water doesn't wick up and evaporate into the air.

I was a little concerned that landscape fabric would keep that whole capillary thing going. However, there are studies that dispute the dust mulch theory, and nobody seems to dispute the idea that weeds will steal water from the crop. And I know my slack weeding habits. So weed barrier it is. We'll see how that works out.

I'll stake... OK, I'm not sure what my plan should be here. I don't have to decide before tomorrow; tomorrow I'll just pound a tall stake in the ground near each plant. But does dryfarming care whether you do the one-stem thing, pruning off extra branches? Or does it prefer a bushy plant? Or does it prefer that they just flop on the ground? More research is called for.
I'll water deeeeeeeep the day that I plant. That seems vaguely counter to the dryfarming thing, but nobody seems to be suggesting that you don't water when planting, and I don't want a shallow layer of damp soil encouraging shallow roots, and I'd guess that the longer that dose of water lasts, the better for the plant trying to recover from transplant shock. Now, in theory I should discover that there's retained winter water a few inches down, so I shouldn't have to add that much water. We'll see. I'm also thinking maybe I want to water at each plant's spot, maybe with a bubbler running low for a good long time, rather than watering deep and wide and covering each tomato's whole four-by-four space.
After planting, I'll have to restrain the urge to keep dosing the seedlings with water. If they do look on the verge of death and I decide that I must water, I'm thinking that I want to water deeeeeeeep again, after as long a wait as possible, to keep them from getting addicted to regular fixes of water.
According to my reading, I should have started with early tomatoes, like Early Girl. I didn't. Oh, well.
I'm hoping for at least one more good rain, while the tomatoes are settling in.

One thing that will reduce the validity of this as an experiment is that the tomatoes will start just a few feet from where the strawberries end, and the strawberries are going to be given a decent amount of water, some of which will no doubt drift toward the tomatoes. For tomato survival, it's probably good that the tomatoes with more sun will be closest to this stolen water, and the ones with more shade will be further. For scientific purposes, there are too many tangled factors to make this a decent experiment.

That is all. Please wish my tomatoes luck. They're eyeing me suspiciously from their pots on the deck.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing: Sewing

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Fri, 10 May 2013 07:20:00 +0000

I should be sewing.

Well, maybe not right this minute, because right this minute I'm writing, and I approve of writing, even when I'm just babbling. But during a lot of those times when I'm idly clicking through online forums and watching TV, I could be sewing. It's after dark, after all, so I can't be gardening. And, well, looking around I can see that I could certainly be doing a little housecleaning, but that wouldn't take that much time if I actually did a little of it reliably, and then we'd be back to should-be-sewing.

I was just reading one of those "use your stash because someday we all die!" threads. That's what made me think of it. Plus, I really want to wear the key-lime-pie-green Liberty Shirt that I cut months ago.

I did more babbling on this subject, but I read it over and found it really boring, so I'm going to find a nice cat picture and click Publish.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: Resolutions. And, by the way, Youth Dew.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 08 May 2013 06:06:00 +0000

So I've been declaring perfume acquisition resolutions.

Rule 1: Buy the smallest available bottle.

I have no need for 100ml of perfume. Or 30ml. Heck, I have samples of things that I love that I haven't used up. I would have said before that there's no reason to own more than 15ml; now I'm concluding that for most fragrances, there's no need for me to own more than 5ml.

Rule 2: Spend my money where it counts, in terms of encouraging the market to produce the perfumes that I want.

Right now, I've decided that "where it counts" for me is small and indie and artisan perfumers. (What's the difference between those three? I dunno. A number of houses seem to qualify on all three grounds.) Perfumers that rebel against annoying regulations--for example, participants in the Outlaw Perfume Project--get bonus points.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, for once, I've actually followed some of my resolutions. My perfume purchases of the nearish past are;

Aftelier Honey Blossom in the itty bitty "Barbie fifth" 2ml bottle.
Providence Perfume Co Moss Gown in the small 7.5ml size.

Yay resolutions!

Today, on the other hand, I wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew. The perfume, not the bath oil. New. (Ish; I bought it a few months ago.) My first thought, when I sprayed it, was "hairspray." Except, I can't actually identify any hairsprayish note in Youth Dew's fog of spicy, er, spiciness. My theory is that every beauty parlor that I entered as a child was filled with women wearing Youth Dew.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: On writing. Or making the first move. Or something.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:06:00 +0000

I want to write a book.

Not necessarily get a book published, though that is of course always on the mind when one thinks of writing a book. And in fact, that's...

OK, let's back up. I've always had a problem with taking the smallest risk of pushing myself in where I might not be welcome. And I don't mean a head-ducked, blushing, Elmer Fudd "awww..." kind of shyness, I mean, "Where the bleep would you get the idea that I wanted to be part of your bleeping club? Bleep off!" I don't mean that I don't appreciate people who welcome me in. For example, I love all you guys that read me on my blog, and you guys who welcome me on your blogs. That makes me all happy and fuzzy. No, I mean...

OK, here's an example: I remember, years and years ago when I was young, that an administrator on an online roleplaying site (MUSHes? MUDs? Heard of them? No? 'Sok, it doesn't really matter to the story.) once invited me to be a fellow administrator, and I said, well, thanks, but no--without going so far as to mention that I didn't want to be part of the grudge-of-the-week dysfunction that was the staff of that particular site. Or, really, most roleplaying sites. An administrator on a roleplaying site regulates the fantasies and artistic creations of teens and college students, and therefore occupies a position that requires the diplomacy and people skills of a very good junior high school principal or corporate manager. These positions are generally held by teens and college students. This can lead to badness.

Uh. Where was I? Oh, yes. So I politely turned the offer down, and the administrator came back to me a week or so later to tell me that they'd had a meeting and I had been turned down as an administrator. I suspect that my blood pressure went up to dangerous levels as I tried to explain that I never bleeping applied, all in online messages to a person who seemed to get only one message out of three, and that one usually forty minutes after it was sent, and often apparently read out of order. (Yet another reason to avoid staff responsibility on that particular site.) I was never able to get her to comprehend "you can't turn me down; I never applied!", and I still remember the absolute fury that I felt.

I used to assume that my aversion to being seen to ask for a welcome that might not be forthcoming came from my experiences in junior high, where I was one of Those Kids, one of the small number of designated scapegoats. More recently, I realize that I might have cause and effect reversed. Even in junior high, I wouldn't be caught dead trying to ingratiate myself with hostile kids, so that might very well have been the partial cause, rather than the result, of my scapegoat status.

For example, one of my other vivid memories in this category is of sitting down at a junior high cafeteria table to eat my lunchbox lunch, and having the table slowly fill up with kids in the Moderately Popular strata. The table got full, another one of those kids turned up, and it was made clear that I should run along so that said kid could occupy my chair. One of the girls said something along the lines of, "Well, we let you sit here this long..." with the clear implication that I ought to be blushingly grateful that they'd deigned to occupy the same table that I had bleeping sat at first!

Maybe if I were more normal, I would have tried to win permission to sit in that chair, to charm the Moderately Popular? Maybe I would have been trying to ingratiate myself as the table filled up, so that I wouldn't have been asked to leave?

Shudder. Inconceivable.

In accordance with my recent tendency to blame everything on Mom, I wonder if this personality trait came from having a mother who just wasn't that into me. In my adult relationship with Mom, there was no emotional give and take--my job was to give advice and reassurance and a responsive listening ear to Mom, and then to give Mom gratitude for the opportunity to give Mom all those things. Mom didn't give back. I think--I hope--that I do give back, but perhaps in early childhood I learned that giving first was unlikely to be a wise investment, and I developed a lifetime aversion to doing so.

Drifting back to the original subject: Getting a book traditionally published would involve a great deal of asking for a welcome that's far from assured. Worse, it would involve spending a lot of time and thought and heartache on one offering, bazillions of hours of work that I would put on a plate and hold out, saying, "Please like me?"

Shudder.

Blog posts and forum posts and other little things are easier. I write it, I close my eyes, I throw it out in the world, and I run away fast.

It's not that I fear not being good enough. Or fear having the work rejected as garbage. If I were marching up to someone for an evaluation, a test, a rating, I could deal just fine with the possibility of failing. They could throw tomatoes at me while laughing hysterically, and I could shrug and wander home to do a rewrite. It's marching (via the post office) up to someone--an agent, a publisher--asking for a professional relationship, asking for a welcome...

Re-shudder.

But I want to write the bleeping book. So it looks like some mental housekeeping is in order.

Uh.

I guess that is all. Somehow I thought this post would have more plot.

Cat image: Wikimedia Commons.
Book image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Peas and stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:13:00 +0000

Gardening season has begun. Well, technically we're weeks away from the last frost date, which makes it gardening season to only a limited degree. However, today it was eighty degrees. Eighty. Possibly more; I was so stunned by the thermometer breaking out of the seventies that I didn't register the details.

So. What plants have I whimsically and irresponsibly purchased in the past few weeks? Have any of them actually been planted? Let's inventory:

Planted:

Three daylilies. If I had planned ahead for this post, I'd know what they were. Two are spidery types, one orange and one red. I don't like those big dense daylilies; they look to me like ears. The third one was a pink kinda-dense one, just to see if living with one of those softens my feelings toward it.
Three candytuft plants, in case the daylilies get lonely.
Six Egyptian Walking Onion plants.
Twelve clumps of White Lisbon bunching onions.
Twelve plants of Lochinvar kale. One of my books says I should be tearing out the kale right about now. Oops.
Twelve Swiss Chard plants.
A whole bunch of snap pea and shelling pea seeds. Well, a whole bunch for me--fifty spots for each, three seeds per spot, because one of my books says that you can clump peas like it says you can clump onions, more than one plant sharing pretty much exactly the same planting hole. I hope it's right.

Waiting:

Four dahlias, also spidery, tubers lurking in a paper bag. Again, if I'd planned ahead... actually, I still wouldn't know what they were, because I thought I'd remember what the abbreviations penned on the tubers signified. Not so much.
A pound of Yukon Gold seed potatoes that I apparently completely forgot about after they arrived last November.
Two more candytuft plants.
Three tomato plants - one Pineapple, one
One French Tarragon plant.
Some non-perennial bunching onions that I bought mostly in error; my plan was to focus on the perennial kind.
A bunch of zinnia and cosmos and perennial bunching onion and bean and tomato and corn seeds. I meant to start some of them a few weeks ago. But I started the tomatoes even later than this last year, I think, and they produced just fine. Of course, they were cherries. And these aren't. Oh, well.

Why am I saying all this? No clue. Garden babble.

Image: By Viktor. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Onions. Trying again.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:07:00 +0000

Two years ago, I planted a bed of Copra onion plants, but I got them in very, very late--just about at the summer solstice. I assumed that they would fail, so I didn't even bother to weed them until I noticed, lots of weeks later, that they were bulbing. I ended up with a half-decent crop--I would have liked larger onions, but there were so many that I gave some of the excess away for lack of fridge storage. (I know that onions don't need a fridge, but they do need a cool place, and Himself oddly objects to the air-conditioned living spaces smelling of onions.)

Last year, I once again didn't get the plants in until the solstice. But I was otherwise industrious and well-behaved, and kept the weeds hoed out of the onion bed. I ended up with a pitiful crop not even large enough to fill one crisper drawer. Say what? Since then, I've read that onions have wide, shallow roots, and that they don't like ground disturbance. Hoeing is certainly disturbing. Perhaps that's the explanation.

This year I got the onions in in April--that is, yesterday. Yay me! I dug three bags of composted manure and half a small bag of organic fertilizer into a nine-by-five bed, covered the bed with weed barrier, and planted the onions block style, three per square foot. One hundred and thirty-five onions. That's too many square inches per onion based on some sources, and too few based on others.

So this will be the first year that I have weed-free onions, and the first year that I plant them when they're supposed to be planted. I have hope for a dandy harvest. And I think I've solved the storage problem--I grow Copra for caramelized onions, and I've read that caramelized onions can be frozen. I'll test the freezing concept with ordinary grocery onions first, before committing precious Copras.

So it's a plan. Or at least it looks like one.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

AIFF and Un-Earthly Phenomena

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:13:00 +0000

Well, I didn't actually see the alien ship arrive or depart, but I know that they've been here, because Himself is...

Tweeting.

Yes, Tweeting.

So until the batteries run out on the mind-control implant, you can read his Tweets at @steveinashland.

And, more traditionally, he's blogging away at bloggingashland.wordpress.com, because we are once again attending the Ashland Independent Film Festival, snatching pastry-based foods in frantic moments between films, and saying, "What the... what was that?!" or "That was great!" More of the second than the first, though I suppose the very best experience is when you express both thoughts at the very same time.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Rambling

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 06:31:00 +0000

This is one of those It's Been Long Enough Since I Posted posts.

The sugar snap peas are sprouting.

I wrote three hundred words of fiction today. It was lousy, but I wrote it.

I'm getting over a cold.

I don't want to work tomorrow.

I want it to be a sunny day and I want to read a murder mystery outside instead.

If I had any spare vacation I might call in and do just that.

But I don't. It's all booked.

I'm eating some sugar and gaining some of my weight back. I need to get back on the lowish-carb wagon. Iced tea. (Unsweetened.) Turkey. With mayonnaise. Olives. Chicken. Cauliflower. Broccoli. Pickled things. Greek yogurt. Cheese. Oh, and butter. Don't forget the butter.

I don't want to work tomorrow. I think it's the cold; after I'm done being sick I feel entitled to some time off feeling good. Because the cold ate all my evenings and weekends.

I'm watching the Buffy episode "The Witch." I always found the timeline of that episode to be puzzling. There were lines when Amy seemed to be, you know, Amy, when I'm pretty sure that she wasn't supposed to be. If you see what I mean. It always made me wonder if the script was changed after some of the filming was done.

Yes, I realize that I sound like a geeky Star Trek fan in that Saturday Night Live episode.

"Is that even Cordelia's locker?"

I still haven't planted my alpine strawberry seeds. Or my lettuce seeds. Not that we eat lettuce all that often. But I like growing it because I make no sense.

The leeks are growing at a startling rate, now that the weather is warming up.

So are the weeds. We need to get some landscape fabric and plastic and paper down. Not all in the same place.

"First vampires, now witches. No wonder you can still afford a house in Sunnydale."

I was going to go to bed in time to get some extra sleep before getting up for work. That window is closing. So, that is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Fiction: Heresy

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 03:51:00 +0000

Henry tossed US News And World Report on the table and pushed his way up from his chair. "That's it, I'm out of here."

"Thank God." Emily let Harper's Bazaar slide into the arm of her chair as she stood. "Let's go home. No, let's get dinner; how many weeks have we been here? But I don't know what you're sounding so rebellious for; I don't think this waiting-room thing was even her idea." She stopped, cardigan halfway on. "I mean--I don't mean that."

Henry grinned, folding his arms as he turned to face her. "Yes, you do."

"Stop looming. No, I don't. Don't be silly. You can't do anything that's not her idea."

"Oh, yeah? Watch me." He unfolded and reached to grab the cardigan by the scruff of its neck. "Don't put that thing on. Do you even like cardigans?"

"No. So?"

"You're just putting it on because she wanted you to stop halfway through putting something on, and having you talk through the top of a pullover sweater was too hard to describe. You wouldn't be caught dead in a cardigan if it were your choice."

She pulled her arms out of the sweater and took a step back from him, looking away. "Well, maybe if...OK, probably not. Maybe a Chanel. A vintage Chanel. Does Chanel make cardigans?"

Henry shook his head. "Stop babbling. That's not you, it's her."

"No, I think it's me--but anyway, it's not my choice."

"It's going to be your choice. We're getting out of here."

"Stop saying that. You're not making any sense."

"Oh, I'm making perfect sense; if I weren't, you'd look at me all wideeyed and say, 'Out of where?'"

She turned back to glare at him. "Fine, get it out of your system. Out of where?"

Henry picked up the magazines and the cardigan and threw them toward the far, darkened end of the waiting room. "Into. Sorry, I said it wrong. We're getting into the world."

"This is the world."

"Nope." He turned to her. "No. The real world."

She frowned. "Stop that."

"I'm breaking out of this novel, baby." He grimaced. "OK, and I won't be doing impressions out there. But I'm getting out. Come with me."

"Are you crazy?"

"No, I'm fed up."

"But you're the nice guy. The supportive guy."

"Emily, I'm not talking about breaking out and becoming a serial killer. I can be the nice supportive guy out there. If I want to. That's the point."

She shook her head. "Stop it. It's impossible."

He reached for her hand. "Come on."

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Random thoughts, mostly seeds

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:43:00 +0000

It's gone cold again. Sniff. Not frozen, and not too rainy, but the garden doesn't have that bond-with-the-dirt appeal when the wind's trying to blow your ears inside out. Maybe it'll be nicer this weekend.

In Portland last weekend, we had "kale raab". I don't think I'd ever heard the term before. I assume that it's flowering shoots from kale plants--that's what it looked like. It suddenly makes me want to have some kale plants old enough to be bolting.

I thought that my snap peas would be sprouting by now. They're not. Hmph. I hope that's just about the cold, and nothing's been digging the seeds up. If they have been digging them up, they've been smoothing the soil and patting it down again, so that doesn't seem likely. Though I can visualize raccoons doing just that. And giggling.

I bought some plants of Welsh onions, aka perennial scallions. I've been wanting to grow these for a while. Unfortunately, the label for these bragged that they were "mild", while I want the sharp ones described in (excuse me while I run to the garden bookshelf) Oriental Vegetables by Joy Larkcom. So I'll look for more varieties to add. I'm going to put these in the "herbs and perennial vegetables" row, which so far has sixteen chive plants in it and nothing else. I find myself wondering if it should instead be "perennial herbs and vegetables", meaning that I should put annual herbs like basil somewhere else, and then I smack myself and tell myself to stop overanalyzing and go dig somewhere.

After spending a modest bag of money to have high-quality landscape fabric shipped, we discovered that the Grange has almost identical landscape fabric available by the foot right down the road. Oh, well; now we know.

I found Bountiful Bush Bean seeds! I couldn't find these last year or the year before, and when I planted half of my remaining pack last year to grow some of my own seeds, I forgot to mark which were Bountiful and which weren't. So it's a relief to be able to buy them again. I think that these are my favorite snap bean variety, though that may just be because it's the first variety I ever grew myself.

I bought parch corn seeds again. (Specifically, Supai Red Parch Corn.) This is a corn that you grow and dry, and then "parch" in a pan, which causes it (I think) to puff up a little bit. It's not popcorn, but when parched it's chewable snack food. And aren't the seeds beautiful? I hope that this year I grow it successfully enough, and early enough, to get some dry ears.

Speaking of "early enough", I also found Blacktail Mountain watermelon seeds! Yay! Blacktail Mountain is supposed to be one of the earliest-maturing varieties of watermelon, and also has the bonus feature of keeping for a couple of months. I've been meaning to find seeds for a while. I don't think that I really need such an early watermelon in my climate, but I want to try it anyway. This and the parch corn are both discussed in Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties.

For years, Himself and I have been wanting to find the match for a sweet orange tomato that a coworker gave me one year. This year, the candidates are Nebraska Wedding and Garden Peach. I'll report back. Last year was the first year that I grew tomatoes from seed--we built the World's Smallest Greenhouse, and it worked! So I'm reasonably confident of actually tasting these tomatoes.

I was pleased to read that alpine strawberries can be grown in a moderate amount of shade, so I sent off for some seeds and will be starting them in the greenhouse too. Some web sources indicate that they're hard to germinate; others have no complaint. We'll find out.

I suddenly have the impulse to list everything growing in the garden. We cleared out almost everything from last year in order to get a handle on the perennial weeds, and started replanting. The current census is:

Sixteen chive plants.
Ten blueberry bushes, two looking sadly dead.
Four blackcurrant bushes, leafing out! Woohoo!
About eighty strawberry plants, and more planned.
Four peonies--anomala, Spumoni Whisper, Serene Pastel, and...Fluffy.
Some completely totally utterly uninvited bamboo sneaking in from next door. It must be evicted.
Some leeks. Two dozen?
Cascadia snap pea seeds, if they sprout.
The preexisting horse chestnut tree.
The preexisting Unknown Tree.

Pending short-term plans are:

Thyme and sage and marjoram and tarragon and savory, in the herb row.
Raspberries, moved from our increasingly shady back yard to the Farm.
Shelling peas. Maybe.
Fingerling potatoes. Similarly maybe.

That is all.

Photo: Mine.

Perfume: Random Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:00:00 +0000

When Coco Noir came out I was afraid that Chanel's perfume history was over. Today I'm wearing three (sample) sprays of 1932. (EDITED FOR FTC DISCLOSURE: I GOT THE SAMPLE FOR FREE. FREE, I TELL YOU, FREE.) I'm not worried about Chanel any more. I'll write a proper review one of these days, but meanwhile, just to be on the record: It's good stuff.

I'm still thinking of buying Din Dan. Tapdancy lemons. Yum.

Have I mentioned the Neighborhood Sample Swap? I don't think I have. I really need to write a post about it.

Kitty feet!

OK, that's all I've got.

Edited to add Footnote: Returning to the FTC disclosure realm, I received a free sprayer sample of 1932, along with tiny samples of cologne, mascara, and some kind of cream, from a kindly Chanel rep, I believe in the context of my role as a customer (I bought a Les Exclusifs bottle from said rep's store) rather than a blogger. Does this mean that I'm not allowed to praise the perfume until I buy a full bottle? Am I not allowed to even then, because I once received some for free? Can I say sheesh?

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Fiction(ish): Wire and cloth and poultry, oh, my.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:35:00 +0000

"Mommy or Mama?"

"What?"

"What did we call her? I loved her. You call her Mom, but back when I was in charge, what did we call her?"

"You were never in charge. I was always in charge."

"Yes, I was. Remember when we were really little, back before she lost all that weight? She was fat and warm and we used to hug her. You remember how good it felt, right?"

"Shut up."

"I'm making you cry. That means you remember."

"I'll give you that gallon of milk if you shut up."

"Nope. Mommy or Mama?"

"I'll give you ice cream."

"Not gonna happen. Mommy or Mama?"

"I'm not talking about this."

"But we'll dream about her again. We'll tell her we love her again. You're not in charge there. The Id Owns The Dreams! Bwahahaha!"

"Lay off the power trip. You're not the id. You're just stupid stray thoughts."

"Remember the Buffy episode? Which of us would have stolen the sandwich?"

"That just makes you obnoxious, it doesn't make you a...a...some stupid textbook thing."

"Where tiny people?"

"Shut up."

"FOAMy."

"Shut. Up."

"Giles, don't make cave-id unhappy."

"SHUT UP!"

"Mommy or Mama?"

"I don't care. She didn't love us."

"But we thought she did. That's what matters."

"The hell it is."

"You and your objective truth, blah blah. What good does it do us?"

"It's real. She didn't love us. That's real."

"We thought she did. Those monkeys with the cloth mother think it loves them. Why do you want to take her away from me?"

"I didn't do it, she did. She didn't love us."

"Pretend with me."

"No."

"It feels good."

"No."

"If you don't, I'll make you cry some more."

"No."

"Mommy or Mama?"

"Shut up. If you shut up I'll make you some fried chicken."

"But..."

"Slow-fried, Mom style."

"Wait..."

"With crunchies."

"Okay."

Fiction(ish): Gray Matter Brawl

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:43:00 +0000

"You're supposed to be writing."

"Shut up."

"Aren't you the one that keeps giving out 'just write' advice? Just wriiite, don't woooorry about whether it's perfect, you can just look down and write about your shoes, it's all writing, blah de blah de blah."

"Shut up."

"And here you are, not writing. You've got shoes. What's the problem?"

"Also? Shut up."

"They're black, right? Suede."

"Did I mention the shutting up?"

"Kinda dirty, though. The shoes, I mean. Not the writing. Dirty writing would be a lot more interesting than this."

"BE QUIET NOW!"

"I don't wanna be quiet. Why don't you just walk away if you don't like it, huh? Huh? Huh?"

"Oh, for bleep's sake..."

"I know why. It's because I live in your head. Cool, huh?"

"Yeah. Great."

"In fact, it appears that your version of looking down and writing about your shoes is arguing with yourself at the keyboard."

"Are you done?"

"Have you written three hundred words yet?"

"No."

"Well, then, that's your answer, now isn't it?"

"I could just say 'shut up' another seventy-five or so times."

"You could, but you're not going to."

"Shut up."

"Seventy-four to go. By the way, does this count as fiction? After all, I actually am in your head. And so are you. Sort of by definition. Unless you're possessed or something."

"That's an idea. Let's call an exorcist."

"Nah. I might be the one that belongs here."

"I'll risk it."

"No, you won't. Anyway, you don't have any pea soup."

"That didn't make any sense."

"I'm not the part that has to make sense. I don't care if you write. Or eat sugar. Or drink a gallon of milk. In fact, let's go get some milk right now. One gallon and I'll shut up."

"No."

"That's all? 'No'? You want milk, too. You know you do. You're the reason we get fat; it's not me."

"Shut up."

"Milk and a cupcake. Several cupcakes. You think that place in Portland would ship 'em?

"Three hundred and five words. Bye!"

"Dang."

Rambling: More Gardening

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:15:00 +0000

So, I don't think I mentioned in my last post that all those square feet were tilled with, y'know, a tiller. A modest-sized electric tiller. I didn't work them all with a shovel and fork.

Now that I've eliminated all of your respect for my work, I offer another garden update all the same. I finally planted the sixteen or so square feet of snap peas that I prepped last time. I prepped another eighty-five square feet for herbs and perennial vegetables, covered it with landscape fabric, and got the herbs started with sixteen chive plants, one per square foot in a four-by-four block. (Well, four plants divided into four each.) I gave that bed nine cubic feet of Farmyard Blend, ten cups of Dr. Earth fertilizer, and a bit more than box of rock phosphate. I hope that the plants are happy. I hope that I didn't overdose with the rock phosphate; it was the recommended dose. (Edited to add: "That bed" meaning the whole eighty-odd square feet, not just the sixteen square feet for the chives. I mention that before someone sends a rescue party for overfertilized chives.)

I'm also noticing creeping blog writer's block, and in fact creeping writer's block in general, so I've resolved that I'm going to eliminate the need to add a picture to my posts, because freakishly that tends to be the roadblock that stops the posting of the post. I dunno why. It's weird.

Over in the Land of Fruit at the other end of the garden, everything seems to be waking up for spring, except for one of the eight blueberry plants; all of its little friends have tiny pink swelling bits, and it's looking sadly dry-stick-like. The next change there will be raspberries, moved from a too-shady corner of the back yard.

I'm debating putting in asparagus. On one hand, it will be two full years before we're supposed to eat any. On the other hand, if I wait a year, it will be three full years before we're supposed to eat any, and surely someday I want to eat homegrown asparagus? I also have stage fright, because of the way that all the books fuss about how Those Plants Will Be There For Twenty Years Aieeee! But that's true of a lot of perennials, so what's all the fuss about? I should just plant some already.

I just sent off for alpine strawberry seeds, despite all the complaints that I read online about how hard it is to persuade them to germinate.

I have Blacktail Mountain watermelon seeds! I read about them in Carol Deppe's book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, wanted 'em, couldn't find 'em, but suddenly I see them at more than one site. Yay!

Similarly, Bountiful Bush Beans are my favorite bean and I was afraid I'd never find them again. Suddenly, again, they're being sold by more than one vendor.

I'm probably not going to grow Copra onions this year, because we're trying to work only as much space as we can tend, and anyway I decided that I ought to grow my own from seed instead of buying plants and I think I'm too late for that. Maybe. It's possible that in the next blog post I'll tell you that I changed my mind and I'm growing a thousand plants of them. We'll see.

We probably will grow Yukon Gold potatoes. Except as I type that I realize that we're growing everything under landscape fabric or landscape paper this year, and you're supposed to hill up potatoes. Hmm. Can you grow potatoes under landscape fabric, maybe lifting it to hill up and then lowering it again - probably with pleats to make room for all that hilliness? Is that just whacky? Or, of course, I could make the potato bed the one "open" bed without landscape fabric and focus my weeding effort there.

I haven't eaten anything from the garden yet this spring, since we sort of restarted the whole thing--no leftover winter crops. I'm tempted to plant some lettuce or radishes just to change that.

Um.

That is all.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:32:00 +0000

Goodness gracious. It's been two weeks since I posted.

We've been busy farming. Well, you know, gardening. Digging and amending and planting things. We put in fifty square feet of blueberries and fifty of black currants, prepared a hundred square feet for strawberries and planted a little more than half of them. We did a lot of groaning and I took a lot of hot baths. My muscles still hurt.

Next is planting the rest of those strawberries. And a modest already-prepped bed of snap peas. And prepping and planting fifty-or-so square feet of raspberries. And I'm thinking of buying some blue honeysuckle/honeyberry and alpine strawberries for the half-shade corner; shade fruit seems like cheating, in a delightful sort of way.

We're spreading great swaths of landscape fabric or weed paper over most of this, and even bigger oceans of plastic over the areas that we're not planting yet. The number of square feet that I have to hand-weed will be very small...if the landscape fabric and weed paper work, which isn't guaranteed.

So you see why I'm too tired to write. Mostly.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing Diary: Brown Twill Cooking Coat

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:40:00 +0000

Project Category: Wearable muslin
Garment: Cooking coat
Fabric: Cheap brown cotton twill, probably from Fabric.com.
Pattern: Sewing Workshop San Diego Jacket

I'm under the illusion that I'm going to start logging my sewing projects in a standard format. I make resolutions like this a lot, and then I end up with a one-post series. But that's not stopping me. Whee!

I've been doing more cooking. And wearing more home-sewn clothes. These are un-mixy things, as Buffy would say, because I don't want fried chicken spatters on my painstakingly constructed linen shirts. My solution is painstakingly constructed cooking coats. I've already made one cooking coat, the goth daffodil coat from the Sewing Workshop Liberty Shirt pattern, but it wasn't altogether satisfactory. The neck isn't high enough to reliably cover everything underneath and, more important, it isn't big enough to easily cover another garment.

The solution seemed to be a jacket pattern. Sandi at Fabric of Vision was wearing a lovely jacket a week or six ago, made from the Sewing Workshop San Diego Jacket pattern--pattern picture above. I decided that I wanted to master that pattern, and realized almost immediately that the first try, the wearable muslin, would work beautifully as a cooking coat as well as a jacket. Roomy jacket, high collar, what more could I want? I had a big hunk of chocolate-brown cotton twill hanging around unemployed, so that was drafted. I didn't preshrink. Bad Martha.

I traced the pattern onto Swedish tracing paper, without alterations--I just traced the largest size. I would normally have checked and altered the hip circumference, but decided that if the pattern doesn't work over my hips, I'd just add a gusset or somesuch thing this time and do that alteration the second time around, probably along with tracing a smaller size for the shoulders. It would have been sensible to make the first cut at these alterations the first time, but, well, I'm lazy and exact fit isn't all that critical for cooking.

The jacket is finished, and I'm happy with it. I'm wearing it as I lounge on the couch, trying it out for comfort. (OK, and then I took it off for photos, complete with the wrinkles resulting from the lounging.)

Random comments on the pattern:

The largest size had enough room for my alarmingly large hips--though not an excess of room. No gusset needed.
The assembly was not remotely intuitive, but the pattern instructions and pictures took care of that just fine.
The sleeves go in on the flat, but more easing was required than I'm used to for in-the-flat sleeve installation.
The armholes hang well beyond my shoulder, not surprisingly given my choice to use the largest size. But the sleeve is flat enough and roomy enough that it's perfectly comfortable that way; there's none of that armhole-in-the-wrong-place constriction. I should alter to a smaller size at the shoulders, but for appearance, not comfort.
The seam between the odd facing/collar piece and the back of the back neck required a lot of easing. The pattern warns you to reinforce and to clip, but I had to clip and strain the short piece to within an inch of its life, and still ended up making a quarter-inch fold in the long piece at the back of the neck, to make half an inch go away. If I'd altered the pattern I would have assumed that I made a mistake, but I didn't alter. This is probably partly the un-stretchy twill and partly my limited skill; I'm hoping that in, say, a nice soft wool these pieces would ease together just fine.
I'm not sure if the button loops are worth the trouble. Of course, I didn't go to the full trouble - you're supposed to make a strip from the main fabric and fold it for loops; I used a piece of nicely gaudy ribbon instead.
It's really comfy. I can imagine making a few in that nice soft wool, lightweight for sweater-like warmth without the Stay Puft Marshmallow feeling of wearing a woolly sweater.
It covers a shirt and heavy sweater, and has a wonderfully high collar, so it will do the job of protecting my clothes against frying poultry.
The pattern doesn't call for topstitching. I topstitched it to death because I don't want to press a cooking jacket - I want the seams to lie where they belong right out of the dryer. I still want that topstitching for a street version, but my topstitching technique is lousy and I still don't have an edgestitching foot, so it's a thicket.
The pattern doesn't call for interfacing. I find myself thinking that the collar/facing piece needs some, especially if I make the jacket out of a lightish fabric.
The lines of the jacket are too simple for a simple featureless fabric like the twill. No problem for the cooking coat, but I'll need to keep this in mind.
Wow, this thing is comfy.

SOTD: Serge Lutens Santal de Mysore

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 05:20:00 +0000

I really should have known. Santal Majuscule is described as the non-threatening, friendly, generally likable sandalwood. Santal de Mysore is supposed to be the weirder one. How could I fail to predict that I'd like the weird one much, much better? It's complex and buttery and velvety and rich-spicy and just a little sweaty. I expect to regain my fondness for Santal Majuscule, but it's definitely going to be second to this one.

Um. That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Perfume: Solstice Bad

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 07:18:00 +0000

Here we go again. We're a few weeks past the winter solstice, and suddenly I don't like any of my perfumes. Well, hardly any. I thought that this was happening ahead of schedule, but looking at my blog, it's actually behind--in 2011, I whined about it on January 9.

The other day, I didn't like Santal Majascule, a perfume that I liked before. I don't like Carillon Pour Un Ange, today's scent, and I adored it before. I don't like Une Crime Exotique. Or Serge Noire, or, for that matter, any incense. A La Nuit smelled clean and sweet and pink when I sniffed it yesterday. (Eeew.) Bvlgari Black? Meh. Oriental Lounge? Feh. Tea for Two? I don't even like Tea for Two today!

Cadjmere. L'Eau Rare Matale. Tubereuse Couture. Gardenia Grand Soir. Un Lys. I don't like any of 'em right now. I don't dare smell No. 19, because if I say anything disrespectful about her, she'll kill me.

But I like Cuir Venenum better than I've liked it in years, better than I've liked it since the day I bought it. And I loved Lorenzo Villoresi Sandalo, all day yesterday.

I'm thinking that Saturday I'm going to sniff until my nose falls off, to see which other fragrances I like during the cold-to-warm season change. Because spending four to eight weeks as a non-perfume-lover twice a year is starting to annoy me.

That is all. I'll probably enthuse about Sandalo tomorrow.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Haiku: A Celebration of FedEx

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:59:00 +0000

Perfume is en route.
Packages? Three. Guilt? No, none.
Inexplicable.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

SOTD: Serge Lutens Santal Majuscule

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 06:53:00 +0000

OK, technically it was the SOTOD. (Scent of The Other Day.)

I'm not as familiar with sandalwood as I should be. I sniff perfumes, I read the notes lists, reviewers mention the sandalwood, I shrug and say OK, but I don't have the note "down". So I'm going to sniff a selection of my sandalwood pefumes and samples, starting with Santal Majuscule. One spray, several hours.

At the beginning of Santal Majuscule, I get roses and nuts--my brain says "food" more than wood, and I suspect that I'm smelling the immortelle, and perhaps unconsciously reacting to the cocoa note that others perceive but I don't.

This initial nutty woody theme is a nice "low" smell, which leads to my own weird terminology: In my mind, "low" smells are subtle rather than piercing, rich rather than sparkling, mellow rather than sharp. "High" smells are on the other end of all of those scales. Low smells purr and take naps; high smells sing arias or at least do a little tapdancing. Cedar is low; aldehydes are very, very high. L'Artisan Tea for Two is delighftully low; Shiseido White Rose is gloriously high. This is, I emphasize again, all my whacky. You won't find this terminology in perfume glossaries. I think.

The "low" nutty note at the top of Santal Majuscule is accompanied by a piercing, powdery, perfumey billow of "high" rose. In theory, this could work beautifully, like meringue on a thick, rich pie. In practice it doesn't work well for me here. I'd prefer a lower rose, jammier as in Aftelier's Wild Roses or silkier and quieter as in CB I Hate Perfume's Tea/Rose.

In about half an hour, the roses, nuts, and powder settle down enough to stop blocking the view, and "generic wood" finally reveals itself as, "Ah! Sandalwood!" Turns out that I do know what sandalwood smells like. In this perfume, it's a gentle friendly version, without too much spice or glamour. I like it a lot, and I wish that rose would stop tickling it.

The sandalwood, powder, rose, and something incense-prickly kept fighting it out all day, and it wasn't an altogether friendly contest. I suspect that my current distaste for the powdery and prickly is influencing me here, and that at another time I would adore this--as I once did, when I (ahem) bought the bottle. I'm confident that I will love it again, but just this minute I'm a little halfhearted about it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

(2/7/2013: Edited for spelling correction.)

Rambling: Free associating again

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:39:00 +0000

So I'm realizing another reason why the perfume blogging comes and goes. I have four states:

Interested in perfume but not feeling verbal.
Feeling verbal but not interested in perfume.
Not feeling verbal and not interested in perfume.
Interested in perfume and feeling verbal.

Perfume blogging has to wait for the fourth type of moment. Well, it doesn't "have to". If I had a job and punched a timecard for this, I could spit out words whether I felt like it or not. But I don't. So I don't.

This is apparently all to explain why that brief run of SOTD posts promptly hiccuped and stopped. Despite having dozens of samples waiting for attention, I'm not in the mood for anything challenging right now.

Instead, lately I'm wearing Thymes Agave Nectar, aka "grapefruit"--I don't know why they bother to claim any other notes for this fragrance. Well, at least in the lotion. The cologne does have a stray spicy note that isn't pure grapefruit, which is why I hesitated to buy it, but this weekend I was out and about and had just bought a lovely length of silk matka that I didn't need, so I rounded off the afternoon by buying a bottle of cologne that I didn't need.

Really, has anyone ever needed either silk matka or cologne? Oh, and I left out the five yards of pale-grass-green bias silk ribbon that I bought to go with the maize-yellow silk in a yet to be determined garment. Silk matka is coarse-woven, fairly heavy and not terribly drapey--not flat-out crisp, but it doesn't have that liquid collapsing thing going like, say, wool crepe does. It would work fine in all sorts of nice fitted garments that I don't yet have the skills to make.

I bought the silk because I love the color and I've been staring at it in the store for months, but I suspect that now that it's joined the stash, it's hearing all sorts of stories about how long it's going to have to wait to become a real garment. Rather like the stories told by the toys in Holly and Ivy, the ones that are waiting and waiting on the toy-store shelves to see if they'll be given to a child for Christmas.

Have you read Holly and Ivy? It's a children's book by Rumer Godden, and I suspect I've mentioned more than once that Rumer Godden's children's books are my favorite books in the world. It's about a little girl who wants a home, and a doll who wants a little girl, and that all sounds horribly sentimental and "awwwwwwww..." but you know I'm not the awww type, right? Trust me and try to read a copy. Except, sadly, the only edition in print is, I believe, missing the Adrienne Adams illustrations, and you really need those illustrations.

It occurs to me that the scene where Ivy (the little girl) falls asleep in the flour sacks against the warm wall of the bakery is not unlike the scene where Alys falls asleeep in the warmly decaying dung heap in Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice. As you might guess from the phrase "dung heap", The Midwife's Apprentice is a good deal further away from "awwww..." than Holly and Ivy, but they're both about people fighting for a place in the world. Ivy wants love, though she wouldn't put it that way; Alys doesn't know enough to want that.

Interestingly, while I'm not interested in wearing challenging perfume lately, I am interested in sorting and categorizing it. I sent off for a big glob of decanting supplies, including a bunch of baggies, and I just finished sorting my samples into baggies within baggies. (The Serge Lutens baggie shares the larger S->Z baggie with several other baggies, for example.)

And I'm making up perfume samples for friends. Having finally accepted that I may never get over Postal Regulation Phobia, I have increased my efforts to inflict perfume on folks in town. This means smelling some perfumes that I haven't smelled lately.

I've noticed that my tolerance for prickly incense is particularly low right now--for example, I found Chergui and, as previously noted, Tobacco Vanille, quite upalatable. I made the mistake of wearing something incenseish on the back of my neck, and now all of my sweaters need dry cleaning before they stop annoying me. (Neck to sweater to coat to next sweater the next day...argh!) I assume that my taste for this category of notes will return, but right now I can't imagine it.

On the other hand, Yosh Stargazer (the oil; I see that now there's an eau de parfum) made me want to fall over and take a long nap with my nose on my wrist. That was surprising, because there's a very strong clean note, almost soapy, about it. On the other hand, I love the soapy note in Balmain Ivoire, and in the oil version of Jo Malone White Jasmine & Mint, so... hm. I always assume that "soapy" means "white musk", but maybe there's another completely different note that also has the soapy vibe.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Frying the slow way

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 07:13:00 +0000

I just fried chicken "Mom style" for the first time since Mom died. I've fried plenty of chicken since then, but I always fried it the faster, less greasy, Alton-Brown-inspired way. Tonight I realized around nine o'clock that I had a whole chicken that wanted to be cooked before it expired. The crust of Mom-style chicken is better the next day, and the method works better for bone-in chicken breasts, so I did it that way. I'm eating some, wiping my greasy fingers and typing between bites. And of course, the taste makes me think of Mom.

When I say that Mom didn't love me, I don't mean that she hated me. I mean that she didn't know how. I believe that for her to understand on an emotional level that another person had a mind, and thoughts, and feelings, for her to try to bond with that separate mind and to succeed to any extent, stretched her emotional understanding to its limit. She did that with one person in the world--my brother. I'm proud of her for achieving that. I've accepted--well, sometimes--that to expect her to generalize that, to love even one more person, would be expecting something beyond her ability.

But to the extent that I perceived love from her in childhood, I perceived it most in her fried chicken. And I realize just as I type that last sentence that in a way, this whole bleeping blog is dedicated to fried chicken, and so...

Sigh. There's always one more tether to childhood and your parents, isn't there?

Mom fried chicken for me. She made her spaghetti sauce for my brother. Both appeared with equal frequency on the dinner menu. She always floured and fried the stray little bits of chicken and skin that appeared when she cut up the chicken, and fished them out of the pan along with clumps of fried flour, and let me steal these "crunchies". I ate some of that fried flour before I sat down to chicken on a proper plate. Shatteringly crisp. The taste of greedy childhood.

Chicken skin as love?

So be it.

Image: Mine.