Sculpin

What I meant: “Is the stove on?”
What I said: “Is anything on fire?”

David Smith Co. is having its spring sale. Josh and I headed down there yesterday very briefly. It’s not what it used to be: no fantastic loss leaders, and the place as a whole seems to be changing — more garden furniture, less random neat stuff. Still, I got a handsome statue for the garden at a good price. But that’s not why I’m an acquisitive idiot.

I’m an acquisitive idiot because I bought a 2-foot-wide shallow wooden bowl. I’d been coveting one of these for years — they were wildly expensive — because they’d be perfect for serving mieng kham, my favorite munchies. According to the David Smith employees, the thing was originally used in roasting small batches of coffee — you roast up your coffee and then pour it out into this wide, shallow wooden vessel to cool quickly.

Thing is, I had been coveting these things for so long that I’d forgotten why I wanted one. My brain fritzed out when I saw they were on sale, close-out, 70% off.

The roasting bowls they had before were really more like trays — flat bottomed with raised sides, fairly light. I can imagine holding it and tossing the coffee around in it gently to help cool the beans. But this thing is in a different style: enormous, heavy, and more concave than flat. Unless you were very strong, you’d have to rest it on something and toss the coffee with some sort of implement. It’s not really good for a mieng kham tray. And it’s non-returnable. Beautiful, but where the heck am I going to put it and what the heck am I going to do with it?

There’s nothing for it. My dignity demands it: I must learn to roast coffee.

Right after the garden’s put in.

That’s the web for you. You go looking for poetry class syllabi, and you wind up finding photos of a cat stuck in a tissue box. You go looking for potato recipes, and you wind up finding “Latke vs Hamentash: A Materialist-Feminist Analysis”. An excerpt:

Based on my fieldwork and on in-depth interviews with non-market-oriented Jewish cooks, I will demonstrate that when one takes into account the gendered division of labor, family power dynamics, norms of sociability, and the structural conditions of participation in a late-capitalist, post-industrial economy, the hamentash is far more suitable for incorporation into the feminist vision of an egalitarian and nonoppressive future than is the latke…

The material conditions of latke production are stressed in the best-known analysis of the latke as a factor in the oppression of women, Emma Goldman’s famous “blood of our foremothers” speech (with which I assume many of you are familiar). In it, she asked, “How much of the very blood of our foremothers’ knuckles have we battened and fattened on every Chanukah, for surely their lifeblood is invariably an ingredient in our latkes? Could oceans of applesauce or mountains of sour cream ever fully mask the salty taste of the tears of our ‘onion-grating sisters’?”

A recipe for Liberation Hamentashen is available. I’ve never had even one hamentash, so I feel very unliberated indeed this evening. (I’ll feel a good bit more liberated when Josh has come home from the store with a package of mint Newman-Os.)

Gardening, that’s where. Almost all my energy has been going into turning lawn into garden, and I’ve been too zonked to write much of anything. But it’s going very well. I’m feeling like the Michelle Akers of combat gardening. I should take some photos of the progress.

Our friend Ian helped us get a bunch of bark for the paths last Saturday, in one of the last trips in his enormous truck before it’s sold. It’s a good thing that we’re roughing out the paths in bark and trying them for a few years instead of going right to stone; I’ve already had to move one path and may have to move it again.

Most of the work on the garden so far has been mine, I think, but because I’m not a complete idiot I’m leaving the heaviest work to Josh. He’s going to have quite a time getting those forsythia bushes out of the yard this weekend. The plan for that space: a big bamboo trellis and some thornless cultivated blackberries. Awesome.

Oh, and we bought a bed. It is a delightful and cozy futon from the good folks at Soaring Heart. And there was a bonus: the nice maple frame came in a bunch of large boxes. If I had this grass-killing-through-sheet-composting to do over again, I’d go to an appliance store and load up on large boxes rather than using those pesky layers of newprint.

Btw, here are some nifty folding tomato cages — they could use a few minor design modifications, but they look pretty good to me.

We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: “Sincerity is not enough.” We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it’s true doesn’t make it true.

At last, a religious movement I can get behind. I’m trying on “Sister Flaming Hand of Equanimity” for size.

Or maybe I’ll take something from the First Reformed Unitarian Jihad Name Generator. (”Reformed” because it’s server-side, and there’s a JavaScript one that’d come out a few hours before. And besides, doesn’t every movement need a schism?)

Every time Federico writes about food, I want to go live at his house. And Oralia sounds like some kind of cooking genius. A creamy soup of broccoli, chayote squash, walnuts, and Roquefort cheese? Wow.

I’ve managed to twist my knee and ankle in my sleep, so I’m gimping around a little. But that’s not as bad as what happened a few years ago to my mom’s friend Peter, who broke his ankle in his sleep. (I reckon he wasn’t asleep for long.) He had a footboard with spindles that were just the right distance apart… *wince*

Today my mother and I went out to Maltby and found Flower World. (We’d looked for it before unsuccessfully. Finding Maltby without the aid of maps is something of a tall order.) I thought, “Oh, ‘Flower World’, what a dumb name; it’s probably all cutesy and icky,” but in fact it is gigantic and magnificent. I wished I had all my garden plans together so I could load up on plants; instead, I wound up getting some good-looking herbs. I am knocking myself on the forehead for not bringing home some cardoons, even if I don’t yet know where they’d go. Guess I’ll have to get out there again, plan in hand.

Really nice selection of ornamentals, particularly roses.

Update: Okay, Emery’s Garden gets a second chance. I got a lovely hand-written apology in response to the email I sent expressing my annoyance. “I had a conversation with the salesperson,” wrote the general manager. “I am certain he has learned from the experience.” It will be a surprise to nobody that I cackled a bit at this point. Good, I thought.

With the apology came a small gift card, and I suppose I’ll visit Emery’s Garden one of these days and spend it. And maybe spend a little more. But I won’t go near the bark department. If I ran into Mr. Snooty Bark Salesman, I’d still want to bare my teeth at him.

Note to self: never shop at Emery’s Garden in Lynnwood.

So, we’re converting our rather spacious backyard from lawn to garden space, and I’ve been looking for some good mulch suitable for paths — something slow to break down and evenly shredded. We’ll probably do the paths in stone sooner or later, but first I want to be quite sure that the paths are in the right place, and what better way than by roughing them in and living with them for a year or two?

I just got off the phone with some fellow at Emery’s who treated me like pond scum for choosing not to buy the organically-grown bark mulch with added nutrients. (Added nutrients for paths? Ridiculous!) Apparently they don’t even carry ordinary bark mulch. He told me — his voice dripping with thick disdain — to go to a gas station.

The message came through loud and clear: I am a smelly plebian, unworthy of shopping at Emery’s. And therefore I won’t. There are plenty of fine competitors, large and small.

For crying out loud. The correct response is a respectful and sincere, “I’m sorry, but we don’t carry that.” If Emery’s doesn’t want to devote space to less exotic bark mulches, that’s no skin off my nose, but I hardly expect to be treated like a lowlife for trying to shop for the stuff.

It was a bizarre and repellent interaction. I shake my head.

It’s just so stupid to be rude like that. If Josh had called instead of me, had gotten the same weird sneerage, and had written about it on elsewhere.org, Emery’s web presence would be squashed flat. His blog has that amazing Google PageRank mojo, and the Emery’s Garden site does not.

In this town, you never know who’s a tech millionaire; it’s plain old good business practice to be respectful to everybody, no matter how raggedly they’re dressed. Similarly, you never know who’s got a blog with a large local readership and a hefty PageRank. It ain’t the old days; these days, everyone’s a reviewer. Small businesses in particular had better figure that out.

Hey, Frankie Genotti! One of these days I hope you will google yourself, find this page, and drop me a line. I miss you, and so does a certain furry, nocturnal, long-eared annual visitor of mystery and madness.