Sculpin

Thanks to everybody who gave me recommendations on happy material for reading and doing while I had the flu. (The last of which I’m still trying to get over. God damn, this has been something.) Here’s my addition to the pile: Seb and Mimi (via Siderea.)

On an entirely different pile: Racialicious.com. I’ve been reading over some of the reactions to the latest Amanda Marcotte — I don’t even know what to call it. The latest Marcotte-generated what the fuck?! moment, this one with the spearchuckers. I mean, actual spearchuckers, no kidding. So plenty has been said, as you would imagine, and there’s plenty to chew on here. But if there’s one thing that I personally got out of it, it’s an introduction to Racialicious, which, from what I’ve read so far, is pretty consistently thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Well, shoot. I have a favor to ask of you all.

Josh is a lot better; I, on the other hand, have picked up something nasty. Possibly the same nasty thing, but very possibly some other nasty thing. I dragged myself in for the last day of my SP gig today; by the end of the day, the faculty member evaluating my part of the test, an experienced physician’s assistant, was asking me pointed questions that seemed to be circling around the possibility of pneumonia. So that’s all a great deal of fun. I came home, went straight to bed, and am seeing a doctor on Thursday.

Grrrr.

So I’m going to be an irritable coughing person for the next few days, and that’s going to be very dull. So what I was thinking was this — if you have any recommendations for Neat Stuff On The Web, I would be delighted to know of them. If you use Google Reader, maybe you’d like to add me, eclarios, to your contacts list and share neat things there.

Otherwise I’m just going to play Desktop Tower Defense again and again and again.

Ye gods, is this ever one hell of a flu season.

Josh came home from work early on Wednesday, dazed and exhausted. I paid the cab driver and packed him off to bed. It was an amazing thing to see. He’d overheat in bed, then try to stand up for an exciting trip to the bathroom (so far away!) and immediately his body temperature would plummet and he’d shake visibly. Plus the joint aches were driving him crazy. At one point he was using a cane to get to the bathroom, just for a little extra stability, and I’m pretty sure he would not have turned down a Zimmer frame.

“This is what it’s going to be like when I’m 80, only all the time,” he kept saying.

“No, it’s not,” I kept replying. “We’re going to be tough. Like those old birdwatchers at the Audubon Society. We’re going to start taking walks every evening, and by the time we’re 80, we’re going to be unstoppable.”

“Grmph.”

By Thursday, he seemed to be on the mend, and then Friday more or less kicked him in the head. Friday night his temperature started spiking fast, from 99.2 to first 102.8 and then a bit over 103. He was starting to get pretty well cognitively addled. I decided that we were going to the ER, figuring that if his temperature had kept rising the way it’d been rising, he could be well over 104, maybe close to 105 by the time we got him in to see anybody. I felt like something of a Nervous Nellie, but it bothered me that he had a very stiff neck, headache, and sudden fever spike; I couldn’t help thinking of the kid I knew in college who got bacterial meningitis and didn’t get it treated with appropriate swiftness. (The kid lived, but I understand he’s stone deaf now.) I called Josh’s mom, who lives half a mile away, and away we went.

Well, Josh’s temperature dropped on the way to the ER. Blood tests were run, strep cultures were collected, and the verdict is that he’s got something viral. About what you’d expect: rest and fluids. (”Oh, she’s keeping me hydrated,” Josh said to the doctor. And I am. He’s starting to protest that his back teeth are swimming.) The ER staff was awesome and, it seemed, generally sane and well-balanced, so this did not much resemble any other trip to the ER I’ve ever taken.

Josh is tottering around the house today — he even managed to walk up and down the block once, though he regretted it afterward. It’s such a beautiful day, and I know he’s got a good case of cabin fever. Oh well. No bike riding for Josh today. Only rest and fluids, fluids and rest.

Personally, I’m wiped. I was pretty wiped anyway from getting up early to go to the UW. “There’s not a whole lot of slack in the system here,” I thought a few days ago, and here I am feeling that non-slack. I sure as hell hope I don’t get this bug, and if I do, I hope it’ll hold off a few days until I’m done with this stint as a standardized patient. Gah. In addition to taking care of Josh, I’m trying to get the house and garden in order so that I can be sick for a week without having the full-on Den of Filth and Plague experience. I think we’re all ready for this to be over.

I’d never seen Josh this sick before. Yow.

Late last fall I put the worm bin in the shed, gave it a fair amount of food scraps, and more or less forgot about it. Josh put a stack of very heavy chipboard sheets in front of it so we couldn’t really get to it. (Those sheets were supposed to be moved and used in October. That’s another story.) It wasn’t until the other day that I got a look at what was inside.

A whole lot of very fat and healthy-looking worms, that’s what was inside. That worm colony came through with flying colors.

So, if any of you Seattle folks want to start your own worm bin this spring, I have a few handfuls of worms to give away.

The box where the mail to sculpin.com lives is the same one that some of you know as eldorado.elsewhere.org, and it is toast. Right now I hear Josh muttering direly to himself in the other room as a hard-drive makes a sort of fluttery, stuttery, high-pitched grinding noise. It doesn’t sound good. Characteristically, I predict doom.

So, if by chance you want to reach me, my gmail username is eclarios. Mail at sculpin has been so overwhelmed by spam anyway that it’s probably better to reach me there all ’round.

So! It’s taking a while to get everything together, probably because we’ve ordered some fairly obscure chicken breeds, but our chicks will be shipped to us on May 19. Hooray! Much as I wish they were coming in April, having them show up a little later may make it a bit easier. When they’re ready to move outside, it should be nice and warm for them.

I ordered seeds without looking at what seeds I had left over from last year and the year before. Uh, I guess I’ll be planting a lot of carrots this year. Fortunately, they’ve got a pretty good seed life, though I haven’t been storing them in anything like an ideal situation — just a box in the south bedroom.

Besides carrots, veggie plans for the year include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, Tom Thumb lettuce, chard, lacinato kale, cilantro, green beans, and a couple different varieties of basil — one for pesto, the other a giant-leaf variety that I hope to use for mieng kham wrappers at least once. We’ll also be harvesting the garlic and shallots I planted last year. And then there should be grapes, strawberries, blackcurrants, plums, and perhaps some blackberries.

This turns out to be the year I start to get the seed storage thing together. I’m using old glass half-gallon jars, each with a cloth bag containing about a cup of silica desiccant. It’s not clear to me that the jars are as airtight as I’d like, so in a couple of weeks I’ll try to remember to check the desiccant color. I might have to rework things a bit there. But meanwhile, I’m commandeering the vegetable crisper for the seed storage jars. No loss, that — vegetables go into those brown crisper drawers and usually come out as compost. Nearly opaque crisper drawers are not a great idea for this household. Really not. Not for vegetables, anyway.

Another promising thing in the fridge right now: shiitake spawn. I’ve got some decent garden spots for mycoculture. (Also known as “not good for anything else”: dark and damp and out of the way.) Unfortunately, the logs I originally had in mind are a little older than is ideal, but I can trade for some freshly-cut elm that should do just fine. Mushroom growing turns out to be fairly intriguing to me. Did you know that you can grow oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds?

Speaking of mushrooms, I don’t see any morels yet. Maybe they’re all out of go. Aww. I still have a bunch of dried ones in the freezer, though, so there’s something. It turns out I like them best when used almost as a sort of spice, dried and crumbled into a tomato-based soup or sauce, much as I’d use porcini.

Right now we’ve got 232 square feet of raised bed, not counting the herb garden, various berry beds, or paths. I’ve got plans for another 132 square feet for a total of nine beds. (After that we’ll have to tear up the driveway and/or do some terracing to get much more in the way of garden space.) Keeping records of all that could be pretty confusing, so I thought I might buy some dog tags or other bits of engravable metal and physically label each bed. My first thought was that I’d just call them plain old “A”, “B”, “C”, but on second thought, I’m tempted to name them, much as Cissa has named her beehives. (A is for Aldo… H is for Hayduke…) Just like a server farm, only more farm than server.