DOG DAY IN CHARLESTON





A very gentle giant

Last Saturday it seemed like every dog in Charleston had its day in Marion Square. The 11^th Annual Charleston Dog Show was held in the midst of and alongside of the Charleston Farmers Market. It was a breezy, blue-sky day and everyone was in a great mood. The people were smiling and the dogs were behaving themselves.    

These were for little girls, but we saw one on a large dog!

That day, as every Saturday, there were lots of farmers and their wares – from eggs, veggies and herbs – lots of herbs and annual plants – and meats and things like honey, cookies, beignets, and, of course, lots more stuff to eat. Then there were the artists – jewelry, glass, pottery, leatherwork, photo work, fabric things of all kinds, woodwork, and, what I especially wanted to acquire: the sweetgrass baskets.  Mixed in with these were purveyors of all sorts of things dog: from fresh-baked treats to leashes. You could even arrange to adopt a greyhound. At many of these booths the vendors had set out large bowls of ice water for thirsty canines. Very thoughtful of them – very clever too.

Two of a kind

What struck us as we strolled through the market, watching all the passers-by, was that not only was every dog was well behaved, but that we saw no two of the same breed of dog unless an owner was walking two of the same kind.  There were every breed we could think of from a diminutive Italian Greyhound to a charming Great Dane, from a Pomeranian to an Alsatian, a Basenji and a Beagle. The list is loooong. Thinking about all the breeds we knew, we realized we’d not seen an Akita or a Standard Poodle. They may have been there but we didn’t see them.

The Princess and the Dragon
A Purple Dragon!

Just our luck, we got to the show area just as they were judging the costume class. Some of those folks were very inventive. My favorite was the Princess and her Dragon.  I am a sucker for dragons, and I was delighted when she won a prize. There were many more classes to come and prizes to be awarded, but we had more places to go and things to do that day.

 

Who wouldn't want to take him home?

HOUSEWORK REVISITED

Originally posted in January 2012 - I've just returned from an extended weekend visit to Charleston, South Carolina, of course, and I'm in the catching-up phase. I'll have a few Charleston related blogs in the future.  Meanwhile, this blog is still au courant as far as my life is concerned: the dust was still there to greet me when I returned from the trip.

I hate dust. I dusted once – why is it dusty again?  I know, I know – it’s just a rhetorical question.  I hate dusting.  To be truthful, I hate housework.  You’d never know it if you took a quick look at my house – it is almost always neat and picked up.  Few people believe me when I tell them that’s because I’m lazy. I don’t want to have a big pick-up-and-straighten job to do so I neaten as I go. But the dust does accumulate.  Don’t come here wearing your white gloves, otherwise I’ll make you use them to do the dusting.

Spruce pollen cloud

I didn’t have to think much about dust for about a quarter of a century. We lived about twenty miles from the nearest city in upstate New York, out in the clean air of the country where the dust didn’t accumulate very quickly. Well, I must admit that during pollen season in the middle of the woods it could be a bit (a bit?) messy. And it didn’t come all at once: maple, oak, beech, evergreens – they took their turns. Brush past a spruce and it would explode with pollen. The mess stayed mostly outdoors on the porch and patio furniture.  A good hosing took care of it.

Here at SCCL I’m starting to think there are little dust elves sprinkling the stuff around when I sleep.  It isn’t as bad now as when they were building new houses around us, but it almost seems as though I could dust every day. It also seems as though I am less and less inclined to do any housecleaning at all.

On one recent sun-shiny day the angle was just right for the light to reflect off the floor into some of the neglected corners, and on to some of the kitchen cabinets – egad! I hate that kind of sunlight almost as must as I hate dust.  Well, I embarrassed myself into getting out the floor mop and the cleaning spray and sponges and I tackled the job: not just the mess so blatantly lit for me, but the whole floor and all the cabinet fronts. Counter tops too while I was at it. I did draw the line at washing the walls and pulling apart and cleaning the appliances. I mean enough is enough.  I do realize that I felt soooo much better for having done the job – but no one was there for me to brag to. Ah, well. I’ll get my reward somewhere later on in life – I hope!

Just thinking about how my mother and her mother kept house makes me ache all over.  My mother’s mother’s house shone from top to bottom. It will suffice to tell you just that she washed all the walls in her house at least twice a year. Though, like her mother, she did take apart and wash her refrigerator every Thursday, which I think excesive, my mother must have thought her mother's wall washing was the excessive thing. Most of Mom's walls were wallpapered, and the painted walls in the kitchen and bathrooms got washed perhaps once a year, and when I got older sometimes they were washed by me! 

I’ve lowered my standards even further. I take after my other grandmother: I’m lazier. That gal was one of the original liberated women: her house was, as they say, “Clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy.”  She had places to go, people to see, and go and see she did. 

And so do I! 

Amen to that!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILLIAM

I don't suppose anyone will want to try to fit 450 candles on

Shakespeare's cake.

There's a good, brief bio you may want to read over at The Writer's Almanac

ELECTRONIC ATTACHMENT

Up until about seven years ago our phone – just one – was hardwired to our house. We went all over the country, all over the world, without it. We never planned to go across Death Valley or other deserted stretch of road, so we didn’t need a phone.  If we’d had to stop by the side of any road we believed that sooner or later someone would come along to help.

Today we were talking about this and admitted that we’d feel naked if our cell phone wasn’t on our person. We don’t plan to wean ourselves from our cell phones, but we were a bit surprised to realize how much a part of our daily ‘dressing’ they’ve come to be. You know the routine when you’re about to leave the house: purse (soon more men will need them!) or wallet, car keys, cell phone. I know the younger generations need to be almost surgically attached to their phones, and in the case of our own family’s younger generations they have to have not just ‘ordinary’ cell phones, but iPhones or iPads, i-yi-yi-yi-yi! Everyone needs to know where everyone else is every minute of every day. Everyone needs to be able to know what’s going on in every corner of the world at all times.

Frank and I are planning a long weekend away.  We were talking about all the extra things we need to pack nowadays versus what we packed years ago. Seems like the list gets longer and longer. We’ve always been sure to remember the vitamins and extra film for the camera, and that was about it.  Now we’ve got prescription medicines to add to the ‘must pack’ list, and chargers for our phones and camera batteries. (I do acknowledge that it is lovely to have the little memory cards for the camera – they take up so much less space.)  And, above all, we can’t forget our cell phones – yes, we’d feel naked without them.

 

This is the vintage of our cell phones - older versions, just like us.

BRUSH UP YOUR SHAKESPEARE

April is the poet’s month. It provides them with inspiration: everything from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Chaucer’s shoures soote, his sweet showers. (In college I took a course on Chaucer. We even had to take a language lab in it to be able to pronounce the Middle English properly. That course was a pip. But I digress!)

April is also the month when lots of good people were born: my husband, my sister, the Queen who will be 88, and William Shakespeare. We celebrate his 450^th birthday next Wednesday, the 23^rd. Time to brush up your Shakespeare, as Cole Porter said in Kiss Me Kate.*

Shakespeare: poet and playwright, contributor of many new words and idioms to our language, and bane of the existence of high school students.  I’m not going to go on and on about the lists of his plays, poems and sonnets, there are lists of those universally available, or the everyday language we owe to him – and we would hardly be able to express ourselves these days without him. I am going to moan about reading his plays in high school. Aaaaarg!

I’m hoping that high school students these days are introduced to Shakespeare live: stage plays, movies, TV, on line. Back in the late 50’s, reading his plays was, for me, a chore. To this day I have a hard time reading a play, so hard that I don’t read them at all.  What gets to me? It’s the names of the characters that get me – see this from MIT’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare, a great source for the written word.

THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK    ACT I

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

BERNARDO

Who's there?

FRANCISCO

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

BERNARDO

Long live the king!

FRANCISCO

Bernardo?

BERNARDO

He.

FRANCISCO

You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO

'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

FRANCISCO

For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

Those BERNARDOs and FRANCUSCOs stop me, and I get involved in who is saying what. My eye just can’t breeze past the names. If I were watching the play I’d have a visual of Bernardo and Francisco. Bernardo or Francisco would not name their name and then speak their line. Am I making myself clear? Of course it would be chaos for the actors learning a play if their character’s names were not given. Whose line is it anyway? (?)  Anyway.

 

How 'bout The Tempest?

The plays we had to read in high school were Julius Caesar and Macbeth - not the most interesting to high school students.  Why didn’t they choose A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Taming of the Shrew?  Perhaps something really powerful like King Lear. How ‘bout The Tempest?  How ‘bout any of the many Shakespeare plays I’ve seen since then? I remember a seeing Henry V, with the opposing sides, the French and the English, done up in silver and blue, wearing football helmets decorated with wicker baskets. Now that would interest the students: Henry V done as a football game. Yes, I do hope they make Shakespeare a visual these days.

*See that?! Kiss Me Kate: The Taming of the Shrew made interesting and painless.  Odds bodkins!

WAS IT A SENIOR MOMENT?

 

On Friday night we were treated to a fabulous wine-tasting dinner at one of the area’s upmarket restaurants. Let me tell you, there was everything from Scottish salmon to baron of beef, with things like octopus, truffles, nori, and black rice along the way to a desert plate with several delectable offerings. I ate every little morsel, drank every drop of wine. It was wonderful!   

 

My moment? Oh, it was just that in the light in my closet I had pulled out and put on my dark navy slacks instead of a black pair to go with my black shell and black-and-white printed jacket. I didn’t notice it until I stepped out of the car into the late afternoon sunshine. Oh merde!

But was I dismayed?

No. Years ago I would have died a thousand deaths, not just knowing but knowing for sure that everyone would be looking and laughing at me.  I’m past all that now. I know that no one noticed – the three I was with hadn’t noticed – and if anyone  noticed they weren’t going to come up to me and chide me, tsk tsk,  for my faux pas.

 

 

It has taken decades, but I finally realize that in this day and age, what people notice, what they think of me, matters little in the long run. I’ll never know about their thoughts, and they, to my delight, will never know about mine.

 

So - was it a Senior Moment? Of course not: it could have happened

to anyone. It was my turn.


 

NICKNAMES

 

 

My father’s nickname was Bud. “Hey, Bud!” You too would probably want to be a Bud if your given names were Oliver Osborn. My mother had no nickname. Her name was Dorothy and she absolutely hated, hated!, to be called Dot or Dottie. My granddaughter Victoria is Victoria, never Vickie or Tori, and outside of the house please don’t call her Sweet Pea, her mom’s nickname for her. She and her sister Elizabeth, Liddie to us, have a great but sometimes annoying doctor who insists on calling them by names they hate. He calls Victoria Vickie, and Elizabeth Bitsie. Bitsie!? It gets their attention all right, but not in a good way.  Why would he want a kid annoyed by him? My five nephews too use their whole given names – no nicknames please.

Nicknames given by parents are usually loving; given by friends, they can be fun - my husband’s nickname in the army was Johnny, for Johnston – or often cruel. In grade school there was a kid we called “Boogie Nose” because his nose was always running or he was picking it – eeeew!

I wouldn’t dare to begin on all the famous nicknames for historical, entertainment or sports figures. You can do that for yourself by googling ‘nicknames’. All I can say is that after doing that and reading further, I am absolutely amazed and sometimes appalled at the origins of many of them.

My mother’s nickname for me was Lee Lee. I just love it when I know the crossword puzzle answer to “actress Sobieski", and I wish I were her age and know what I know now. 

 

 

 

FOR A MINUTE THERE...

This Gahan Wilson cartoon sparked an idea for today's brief blog.

 

Not even for a minute, only for a second or two has it all made sense. It's happened to me a few times in my many years: a flash of brilliance, what they now call the "ah-ha moment".  Only rarely have I been able to grasp the thought and not instantly forget it. Even more rarely have I been able to use it, to act on it.  It's frustrating.

PHROG

                          

 

“I’m in love with a big blue frog, a big blue frog loves me” - Ah, yes, I hear them in my mind’s ear: Peter, Paul and Mary singing about that big blue frog. Even the Muppets got in on the act. Of course that was inevitable: the most famous frog in the world is a Muppet. It ain’t easy bein’ green. Perhaps that’s why Kermit was sometimes blue. But I digress.     

 

April, as all of you should know, is National Frog Month. This link speaks for itself:  http://blog.nwf.org/2011/04/national-frog-month-6-ways-to-tell-if-you-are-a-frog/  I took the test – I’m not a frog, alas in the grass (no, that was pigeons!)  But I can appreciate frogs no end.   As an indicator species on our planet their recent disappearance is alarming. They range in size from one no bigger than a housefly to those huge cane toads plaguing and unfortunately not disappearing in Australia. Yes, all toads are frogs but not all frogs are toads, so let’s not split hairs – of which they have none, unless you count the hairy frog whose hair isn’t hair at all. But I digress yet again!

Frogs are associated with witchcraft, with longevity, with fertility (just think of all those tadpoles) and, of course, with enchantment. They’ll even levitate in a magnetic field. Kids love them, ladies collect them in their various ceramic or metallic guises, and the chocolate variety at Hogwarts is toot sweet.

Boop! Boop!

 

Enough of this silliness. Go out and find a frog to kiss today.

 

 

 

 

STILL AWED

When pigs fly!
 

My husband tells me that his mother, born in 1895, never believed that the astronauts landed on the moon.  She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was just staged.  What absolutely amazes me is there is more computing power and memory in my old flip-top cell phone that I still insist on using than those first astronauts had on their trip.The invention in any field you care to name over these last, say seventy, years could just bowl you over.

The Writer’s Almanac today tells us that on this date in 1951, Remington Rand signed the government contract to build the second UNIVAC. The essay tells us the computer was the size of a one-car garage.  My first data programming was done for a Burroughs computer the size of a large refrigerator. Its computing power could fit into a virtual sugar canister in the home laptop I’m using to write this.  Unlike my mother-in-law, I do believe all this, but I still shake my head in amazement and awe.

 

 

CAFFEINE AWARENESS MONTH

There are lists out there for all the things we should be commemorating or celebrating each month. One of those is this month’s nod to Caffeine Awareness.   I’ve been aware of caffeine for over twenty-five years. I found out then that if I didn’t have any coffee before setting out on a three-hour trip where I didn’t want to have to stop for a pee, I’d get a beaut of a headache. My sister, a coffee-lover supreme, clued me in to the cause and gave me some caffeine pills to combat the headache.

About fifteen years ago I discovered that if I drank regular coffee after dinner I would be awake for hours.  I’m aware that it’s a ‘different’ kind of awake than just being awake with my ‘wheels going round and round’. I know it’s because that waitress gave me regular instead of decaf. That’s happened a time or two. I have to watch eating a lot of late chocolate too. I get very particular about any after dinner coffee these days. Most times I do without it in a restaurant – it’s not that I don’t trust them, but I don’t trust them.  I can go home and be sure of a decaf cup.

I laugh when I see notice on ginger ale or root beer that they’re caffeine-free. There never was any caffeine in those, but these days there’s so much caffeine in soft drinks that people are wary. All these new energy drinks are pumped chock full of caffeine – and, to extend the pun, they’ll go nuts when they start to withdraw from it. Headache? Ooooh la la, it will be a beaut.

 

 

Are you old enough to remember Mr. Coffee Nerves?



 

NOT QUITE EGGS BENEDICT - FOR TWO

I absolutely love Eggs Benedict, and I’ve recently acknowledged that it’s the Hollandaise that I love – the rest, for me, can be anything that resembles the ‘original’ assembly of component parts.

Taking this to heart, I prepared a Quick Sunday breakfast using 

Toast instead of English Muffins

Fried eggs instead of the fiddly poached variety   and

Canadian bacon – I did have this, but I could have used any variety of ham

     or bacon that I usually have on hand.

Bread toasted, Canadian bacon in the pan, ready to be heated, I prepared the ingredients for the sauce and had them ready. Then I began frying the eggs – two for each of us.   Then…

In one small bowl I whisked               then in another small bowl I

3 egg yolks                                      microwaved half a stick of butter

2 Tbsp. Lemon juice                          for 30 seconds –

Pinch of salt and pepper                    just enough to melt it.*

Using my immersion blender, I gradually poured the melted butter into the whisked yolks until I had my sauce. * Note that this is Julia Child’s Blender Hollandaise recipe – very lemony, which I love, however, because she used a whole stick of butter. The whole stick makes for a thicker sauce, but neither of us needed that extra butter.

I heated the bacon then began to assemble the dish – bread, meat, eggs, sauce. There was more than enough sauce, and I had the three egg whites too, so I am planning to use them, along with a few more eggs, for a scramble egg breakfast one day this week.  

I didn’t take pictures of this preparation – I’m not ready for pictures on a Sunday morning – so I’ll google the topic and see what I can find to decorate this post.  As Julia said: “Bon Appetite!”

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY - RELATIVE TO ME



My parents' wedding day in 1939



I read this in this morning’s The Writer’s Almanac: The founding meeting of the Republican Party took place on this date in 1854, in a small schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. Former members of the Whig Party gathered to voice their opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, which repealed the terms of the Missouri Compromise, allowing settlers to decide for themselves if their respective territories would be a free state or a slave state.

The Writer’s Almanac is a dandy source for inspiration for writers like me who are stuck for a topic. Today’s bit about the Republican Party reminded me that if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be here. You see, it’s like this: My Uncle Fred squired my mother, his sister of course, to a party at the Queens, New York, Republican Club, and that evening she met my father. I’ll never remember all the facts about the dates and places for the founding of the G.O.P., but I do remember the dates and places that, among other things, resulted in me.

Today is also the anniversary if the day that Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity. 'Relatively' speaking this date is relatively good.

CASSOULET MY WAY (CASSOULAY MY WEIGH?)

It’s all in the pronunciation.

One afternoon last week, Frank and I were watching Rudy Maxa, the Savvy Traveler, in Carcassonne and southern France – one of our favorite places in one of our favorite regions.  Needless to say he included two of our favorite foods: Roquefort and cassoulet.  After that we both knew what we wanted for dinner. We had no Roquefort on hand, but cassoulet? That I could do. Cassoulet is usually a slow-cooked mélange of white beans, pork sausage, maybe duck or goose (I usually use chicken) and other meats, along with the appropriate herbs and spices. There is no one definitive recipe – as I said, it’s a mélange you construct with the ingredients at hand.

So – I had too many cans of dark red kidney beans (free when Harris Teeter doubled dollars) so they substituted for white navy beans.

I had pork sausage, but it was the sweet Italian variety, not French saucisson. I had more pork in the form of thick cut bacon, so I cut that into nice chunks. Onions? I’m never without them. Garlic – if not fresh, then chopped from a jar (but don’t overcook it!) Some thyme, some winter savory, salt and pepper. A good squeeze or two from a tube of tomato paste, a slosh of white wine. I let it sit for a while to ‘flavor up’. (I even thought to take a quick picture for a blog entry.) Voila!

I do so love it when I come up with a tasty dish from what’s on hand – this was enough for four meals, so I froze half. I served it with a spinach salad, and it was excellent.  

PI DAY

In this morning's in-box comes an email from Ace Hardware telling me that today only I can "Take a slice off our price with a 1 day only Pi Day coupon" Pi Day - who knew? Well, many mathematicians would know because today is Albert Einstein's 135th birthday. If you are really, truly interested in all this, relatively speaking of course, you can learn more at Pi Day.org.

There's too much to know and too little time, so I am saving time today by reposting this piece from last May. I'll go now and learn something new.


YOU'D GO CRAZY

TOO MUCH STUFF - TOO MUCH INFORMATION

 

Once, when I annoyed someone because I knew the correct answer on a quickie quiz, they muttered “know it all!” Well, I do have a lot of relatively useless trivia – such as where we get the concept of trivia – stored in my (alleged) mind. But it’s been said that if you knew it all you’d go crazy.

Just think of all there is to know – everything from the exact amount of pi* to the last time your neighbor went to the bathroom; the bloom time of every daffodil to the time of the next eclipse; the function of the microorganisms in your body to what is in the center of a black hole. There is too much to know.

 

Recently I read an article in Foreign Affairs on The Rise of Big Data. The article says that if all the available information today were put on CDs there would be five piles of them reaching up to the moon. TMI, TMI. Even knowing that TMI means Too Much Information is TMI. Like spiders, they are saving everything that hits the web, from learned essays to the latest tweets. I’m so glad that none of my own thoughts about day to day happenings will stick to that sticky web – I don’t post on Facebook and I don’t tweet. To me this is all ‘evidence’ junk: evidence of something done, something won, or a presence somewhere thought significant to someone.  I’m not social enough for social media. I know that the vast majority of people care less about what I do, though this blog will probably make the cut.

I suppose all this stuff has to be saved because one never knows when a biographer might want to know what his subject wrote about the events on a certain day, or what plans a mad bomber hatched, but really, all that stuff is junk.  Would we be better off now if Einstein or Hitler or Alexander the Great had tweeted? How ‘bout if Lucretia Borgia or Thomas Jefferson were on Facebook? We’ll never know – and I’m so glad.

 

*Pi, I’ve now learned, is infinite. Around the same time I read the article on the rise of big data, I came upon an article from Slate called Your Life in Pi. Speaking of TMI, the Pi article tells me "Pi is an infinite, nonrepeating decimal - meaning that every possible number combination exists somewhere in pi. Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is the name of every person you will ever love, the date, time, and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe. Converted into a bitmap, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is a pixel-perfect representation of the first thing you saw on this earth, the last thing you will see before your life leaves you, and all the moments, momentous and mundane, that will occur between those two points. All information that has ever existed or will ever exist, the DNA of every being in the universe, EVERYTHING: all contained in the ratio of a circumference and a diameter."  Whew!  Let someone else convert things into ASCII – I went pi-eyed just googling that.

I can’t begin to know when or even if our store of information will outgrow our ability to store it, but I think I’ll not be around to worry about it.

MY MANDARIN CHICKEN FOR TWO

I had a bowlful of those little Halos – nice mandarin oranges – and the thought of chicken for dinner.  I went searching online and came up with very few ideas for anything but chicken with tangerines or mandarins done Chinese style in pieces with broccoli, mushrooms maybe, and rice, of course. I finally adapted a recipe for Tangerine Chicken from food.com

Prep: using a rasp, grate the peels of two mandarin oranges. Peel the oranges and pull apart the pieces.  Filet a large chicken breast into two pieces.  Cook two servings of rice.

In a medium size pan sauté the chicken filets in 1 Tbsp. of butter and 1 Tbsp. of olive oil; sprinkle with salt and pepper

Remove the filets from the pan and sprinkle in 1 Tbsp. of flour, whisking it into the drippings for a minute or two.

Add ½ cup of orange juice and ¼ cup of water, stir until the sauce is smooth and thickened.  Add the grated peel and a pinch of cinnamon. Add more water if the sauce is too thick. 

Stir in the tangerine pieces and then pour the sauce over the chicken and rice. Serve with a nice salad.

ASSISTANT CHEF

My handsome assistant chef

Once again I've found a very interesting photo. A while ago, I started a project to scan in some of the better photos from the two dozen or so albums I've got going back over 40 years. This one is from 1988, and I'd think it was around the winter holidays because Frank was creating in the kitchen - a thing he loved to do around that time of year. I can see the condensation on the stove window, so that means he was about to bake something - perhaps his usual croissants or a tarte, though surely not whatever was in the Waring blender. I can also see that he has the recipe taped up to the cabinet door - clever him. I asked him about the picture but after all these years he doesn't remember it at all.  And he surely doesn't remember wearing that apron, that's for sure!

OWLS - GIVE A HOOT

This post is dedicated to my wonderful Canadian friend.

The Owl Court O.W.L. - do you see it?

I am grateful for owls. If the short-named owls didn’t exist I probably would be living on the long-named Carolina Wren Court. That’s the name the builder originally gave to our street.  By the time we’d moved here they’d changed it to Owl Court.  Evidently the Carolina Wren had flown to another part of the development. Lucky us.

A recent early morning was cold and quiet and the full moon was still awake when I heard an owl’s voice as I did my constitutional here on Owl Court. Some owls here must have a southern drawl because the call was a new one to me. It was probably a Great Horned Owl, but instead of calling four notes: hoo-hoo-ha-hoo, this one called five: hoo-hoo-ha-hoo-hoo.

This year, March 7^th to the 9^th will be the International Festival of Owls*, in Houston, Minnesota. I’d love to be able to go for two reasons: first, a trip to Minnesota in the winter would be an adventure, and second, because owls are fascinating birds. The website says “The mission of the International Festival of Owls is to: spark a personal connection to owls and the environments we share with them.”  My personal connection was sparked many years ago when we moved to great owl country in upstate New York. Surrounded by woods – we couldn’t even see a neighbor’s house – the owls were very much at home.  An ornithologist friend of our neighbor told us we could add any owl we heard to our life list if we could identify the voice. That meant we could add the Great Horned Owl, the Barred Owl, and a Screech Owl. In this much more suburban area here south of Charlotte we’ve not been able to add too many more birds to our life list, but further south, in Congaree National Park, we finally got to see a Barred Owl. That was a rare treat.

 

The Barred Owl at Congaree National Park

 

*They’ve even got a Kids Hooting Contest. I’d be good at that – I am a hoot!



 

 

 

GASHOUSE EGGS

Just after adding the eggs

I love eggs. I panic if I have less than two dozen in the fridge. This week I'm in heaven because Harris Teeter had a BOGO on eggs and I stocked up. I was flipping through one of my recipe binders and my eye just happened to catch the sight of the an old cutting from Saveur - all about Gashouse Eggs.  The have many catchy names, but by any name they are delicious.

The ingredients - lots of butter and as many eggs and slices of bread, homemade in my case, you'd care to devour. Be very, very sure to have the eggs at room temperature. I forgot that this morning and when the eggs finally set the bottom of the toast was a wee bit too dark. But we ate them anyway because, as I said, they are delicious.

The method - butter both sides of the bread, then use a muffin cutter, cookie cutter or even a glass to cut out the circles. Fry the slices on one side until they are nicely toasted. Flip them over, take out the circles and nestle them elsewhere in the pan. Put a dab of butter into each hole and then crack the eggs into the holes. Continue frying until the eggs are set. 

Salt and pepper the eggs - serve them forth. Add what?  Bacon, Canadian or regular, some cut-up fresh fruit, the choices are yours. 



ONE MORE TIME

A picture I took in France while walking the walls of Aigues- Mortes

 

O.K. Here’s an odd topic for a blog: going to the bathroom. Recently, my cousin and I have been corresponding about our family, filling each other in on all the stuff the other one never knew. I wrote to him about the few things I remember about our grandfather, and it’s really not too much. Then this morning I remembered a little thing about him: he always went to the bathroom before he left anywhere. Wanted to be sure, I suppose, by 'using the facilities' one more time. I recall that one day on our way to somewhere, after I’d hit the bathroom on the way out, my mother saying to me that I was just like her father who always did the same thing.  I suppose I should be proud. One never knows.