Sculpin

Every time I’d tried doing Anantasana, it was downright ignominious. The pose is a side balance that’s a heck of a lot harder than it looks. I fell forward. I fell backward. I squawked and yelped and flailed. It’s a wonder I didn’t knock out a tooth. I’ve been one of the more assured students in the class this year, but you wouldn’t have known it from my anantasana.

But in today’s class, no problem. I hadn’t tried that pose for months, so I was surprised to be able to do it. I don’t know what happened, but I’m guessing it’s about core strength, neuromuscular training, and better turnout. Sweet!!

I’m still struggling to keep up with all the stuff I’ve committed to doing, and I have to remind myself sometimes that I can and should ask Josh to do stuff that needs doing. (There’s no way I’d be able to do all this without Josh ferrying me around and doing extra chores. His supportiveness is outstanding. Thanks, Josh!) Even with the struggle, I feel that I’m getting it together. No more involuntary five-hour naps, anyway. I think the corner’s been turned.

I’m reading The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense and I keep being reminded of a brief conversation I had in college. A Theory-minded woman had written an obscurantist article that boiled down to, “Elitism is bad.” When I questioned her decision to write that article in such a way, she didn’t deny that her writing was unnecessarily obfuscated, nor did she claim that her ideas were too difficult for unspecialized language. Instead she told me, quite unselfconsciously, that you mustn’t write about elitism with clarity and precision, because if you do, the people who matter won’t listen to you. That seemed like a good time for me to get a drink.

It’s art; it’s taxonomy. It’s the Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects.

In introductory biology, Dr. Flora had the class declaim, “Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis!” and “Anthopleura elegantissima!”, instructing us to revel in the names’ beauty and complexity. Imagine if we’d had to cope with Nelifrag Buildistabscratch metalipointisharpebiggerlik or Onliwhol Parkecrecrawli yelosymmecruncunlik.

Don’t you hate it when you get down to the end of a bag of pistachios and you have only the closed-shell ones left? Maybe, if you are a cheapskate pistachio freak like me, you try to crack them or smash them open. That’s always messy and unsatisfying.

A better sorting machine has been developed for pistachios. The “Pistachio Blaster” drops nuts one-by-one onto a steel block and listens to the sound each nut makes. If it clicks like an open-shell nut, it’s allowed to pass, but if it clonks like a closed-shell nut, a blast of air shoots it into the reject bin.

The thing is about 90 percent accurate, processes about 25 nuts per second, and is probably the coolest pistachio sorter ever invented.

“That’s my new futurist name!” is a game that Josh and I sometimes play, based on a conversation I had with McJulie many years ago. (What’s your futurist name, Julie? I can’t remember. Something like Prissy Turpentine?) “Heavenly Whack-a-mole” was my futurist name yesterday, from a conversation about hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Today, it may be “Pistachio Blaster”. Or possibly that’s my new space-opera hero name — imagine a dashing Zorro-in-space figure as played by Bruce Campbell, with a zap gun in one hand and an épée in the other.

The rules of the game are these: when you see this, quote a chunk of Shakespeare in your own journal. (Via a lot of folks, but Vorona was first I saw.)

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Bless Canada. They provide us not only with the magnificent Virtual Gramophone, which I think I’ve mentioned before, but also the Textile Museum of Canada. It features beautifully photographed textiles from around the world, from a Kuna mola to a Pakistani kurta to modern Kaffe Fassett quilts. I look forward to seeing the online collection grow. (One gap in the collection: no NW Coast button blankets.)

Did you know that Kazakh and Uzbek nomads liked felted rugs better than woven ones when it came to yurt covers and big floor rugs? There you go.

Speaking of the Virtual Gramophone, do check out “Hey you want any codfish?”, which is valuable for its mind-numbing dumbness. It’s possibly the dumbest vaudeville song ever.

I’ve been thinking I’d keep track of some things that you can make with only ingredients found in the Northwest. I’m not half as hard-core as some folks; I’ll include anything you can find at the farmer’s market here. I’ll cheat and use some spices and oils that don’t grow here, but probably not if the dish is built around them. (Eggplant oop, for instance, really requires that turmeric, imho.) More cheating: I reserve the right to include canned tomatoes. After all, tomatoes do grow here, and in a better world I would have canned some. (In a much better world, I’d have a lot of homegrown ripe tomatoes instead of this deluge of crummy green ones that probably won’t ripen.)

I cannot always make it to the farmer’s market, but I can work on learning to cook the things I’d find there. Eventually I’ll have a decent list of locavorous recipes, and perhaps our household will have Local Food Thursdays or something.

Previous posts that’d fit the bill: roasted beets,onion soup, simple vegetable soup.

For most people, the quintessential west-of-the-mountains ingredient is probably salmon; for me, it’s hazelnuts. Almost all of the country’s hazelnuts are grown in the Willamette Valley, and most of the rest are here in Western Washington. I usually get mine from Holmquist Hazelnuts, a farm up in Lynden.

Here’s a simple baked apple recipe good for a rainy fall day. I usually use organic Gala apples for this sort of thing; they are a nice manageable size. Every so often I’ve run across a really good organic Golden Delicious that hasn’t had all the taste bred out of it, and those are wonderful baked.

Baked apples with honey and hazelnuts

baking apples
roughly chopped hazelnuts
honey
cider (or water will do)

Core the apples, but don’t go all the way through the blossom end. Remove a strip of peel from around the top of the apple to allow more steam to escape. Stuff the apples with chopped hazelnuts and drop a generous dab of honey on top of each apple.

Place apples in a pie pan or baking dish and pour cider into the pan to a depth of about 1/2 inch. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes to an hour, basting the apples occasionally, until the apples are tender.

You could, if you liked, toast the hazelnuts before stuffing the apples with them.

I always wind up chopping too many hazelnuts. That’s okay; they’re great on oatmeal.

So, I’m in physical therapy these days. My first appointment was on Tuesday, and it was sort of fun, even with all the poking and twisting and testing. The PT seems to think that much of the root of the problem is in the hypermobility in the lower lumbar. And then there’s the hypermobility almost everywhere else in the spine, and elsewhere. I am a big pink sack of wobbly, wonky joints, plus a few stuck ones.

Joint hypermobility sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? It’s not, for a lot of reasons.

The immediate problems are that my left glute hasn’t been coming on when it ought to, the left piriformis is trying desperately to take up the slack, and there are some paraspinal muscles on the left side that are messed up, too. The difference in thigh circumference is measured at 3 cm. I have a beginning set of exercises to do daily.

I also have a set of exercises from my massage therapist, yoga, and Pilates. My daily minimum is getting maximal. I’ll probably be pretty foggy-headed for the next couple of months, because I’ll be working near my physical edge. My grammar’s already shot. Eh; I know my friends love me even when I seem dumb as a box of hair.

I’m glad to get a chance to beat this problem. If I’m right, strengthening and stabilizing my back should help me get around town much better, both directly and indirectly. I believe there’s a feedback loop between the CFIDS and the hypermobility problems. If I put my shoulder to it, and am guided intelligently, I think I’ll get that feedback loop going the other direction.

Meet our Northwest FEMA chief: John Pennington, a former four-term Republican state rep with a diploma-mill “degree”. The guy was hired despite his having no real disaster management experience — but he was Cowlitz County’s Bush campaign co-chair in 2000. GOP star Jennifer Dunn, the state chair of the Bush campaign that year, helped snag the post for him.

At least this guy is said to have bothered to get a decent staff. Perhaps one of his decent staff could replace him. Like, tomorrow.

King County Emergency Services Director Eric Holdeman: “It’s important that you be a professional emergency manager. Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor. Likewise, you want the people overseeing a disaster to know what it’s all about.” No shit.

Here’s a crazy thought: how about we don’t fuck up the agency devoted to responding to disasters? I understand that the Bush administration hands out plum positions right and left to the party hacks and their roommates, but are there really so many useless GOP weasels that there’s no more space for them elsewhere? Yes? Then I propose a compromise: simply start up a federal Department of Sinecures and leave FEMA (and the FDA, the EPA, and the rest of it) to people who can actually manage the work. It’d be expensive, but not as expensive as what we’ve got now.

I don’t knit. Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve made the ugliest little dishcloths you can imagine — every row in a different gauge, and some stitches so tight that the dishcloths could almost stand up by themselves. It’s just not my thing. One of these days Dyslexia and I are going to have a Crappy Knit-Off to determine who is the crappier knitter. Smart money’s on me.

But if it’s your thing, you might want to knit this cute little bear, a scarf, a sweater, whatever, and send it to people who’ve lost just about everything in Hurricane Katrina. There’s a new yahoo group, katrinaknitting, made up of people who are working on this project.

Via Pocket Farm.