Sculpin

Pansy was not my dog, but she was a famously good dog. I can’t make it to her wake this weekend, so I offer this poem by William Stafford instead. I ran across it the other day and thought of her.

Choosing A Dog

“It’s love,” they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.

The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for awhile
but then maintenance gets to you.

When I get old I think I’ll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal –

My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what’s really there by the smell.

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don’t really want you to know –
it’s too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone,
but they don’t say anything.

Cissa has created a syndicated feed of House of Cranks: houseofcranks. Thank you, Cissa!

Which reminds me — most of you don’t know Cissa. I met her through Dreamingcrow, I’m pretty sure. She’s a jewelry artist who keeps bees. (Check out the scent lockets.) She’s also a person who knows a whole lot of stuff. You know how you’re going along in life and you come up with questions about this or that, and you smile a little as you think to yourself, “I bet X would know,” because you have thought that same thought a thousand times before? Spiff is one of those Xs; Cissa is another.

Chicken content lives over at our new household blog, House of Cranks. This evening, Josh videotaped the chicks playing “capture the flag” with a piece of paper towel. They’ve been a delight.

I think I’ve finally got a fix for the minor problem I’ve been having with my homemade cinnamon rolls. There’s so much cinnamon in the filling that sometimes its consistency seems to me to be slightly on the powdery side. Well, between batches 1 and 2 yesterday, I ran out of ground cinnamon and had to grind my own. The second batch was noticeably better than the first, and I think it’s mostly because the home-ground cinnamon particles were a bit larger. I should try to replicate these results very soon.

And so, a question about freezing rolls. Do you find that it’s best to freeze them after baking them fully, after baking them partly, or before baking them at all?

The chicks are here! They all arrived in what looks like good shape, without signs of paste-up, though I’d like to see them drinking more water. They are adorable, lively, and very stupid. I’m surprised that the one that I think is a Buff Orpington seems to be making a play for Top Chick status.

My goodness, what an exciting couple of days. Josh has gone from highly paid Unix/Mac guru to unemployed chicken rancher in less than 24 hours.

Pardon me. I have to go hover over the chicks some more.

ETA: Photos!
ETA2: Uh-oh, one of them seems to be running to paste-up a little. They won’t be out of the woods for a week or so — I think they got somewhat chilled on their way here.

These are my links for May 2nd through May 19th:

• The Lost Art of Writing About Art - WSJ.com - Fans of the Postmodernism Generator may be happy to see that empty, impenetrable artspeak is getting rightly trashed by some art insiders. (More.)
• Spokespeople - Short, monthly neighborhood rides that start in Wallingford.
• The Champagne of Blogs » Makin Bacon - Make your own bacon at home.
• Compass Roses - Links - I’ve had a fondness for compass roses for as long as I can remember. Since elementary school, at least.
• Recovering Grey - I’ve been thinking about taking up chip carving, but nothing like this. Monumental, beautiful, mysterious, enticing thing. Or as Josh keeps muttering, “Man, that’s nuts.”

This year I ordered tomato plants from Territorial Seed. Uh-oh! They arrive tomorrow. And is that bed ready for them? Will I be home much of tomorrow? Will I have enough time and energy to get that area prepared? Are they going to go in promptly? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gahhhh.

I’ve been gardening like a fiend, though. I’m putting in a path to and around the chicken coop and basically regrading a significant part of the backyard, which involves moving a big hill of dirt that’s full of vile buttercups. (The buttercup is my nemesis. Or maybe I should reserve that title for the morning glory.) Can’t just drop ‘em on the compost heap, because they’re acting like noxious weeds. Can’t just drop ‘em in the yard waste, because the yard waste is close to its weight limit already. It’s a pain. I’m hoping the hot weather lightens the yard-waste load.

Alternate names for Ranunculus repens: devil’s guts, granny threads, ram’s claws, meg-many-feet, setsicker, sitfast, tether-toad. And then there are other buttercup names, some of which R. repens is likely to share: crazy, guilty-cup, blister-flower, blister-weed, hell-weed, pissabed, cursed crowfoot. (Thank you, Albert Brown Lyons!) Apparently I’m not the only person who’s ever disliked this stuff.

Week by week, more and more of the basic garden structure becomes a reality. And there’s actual soil! When I come inside from shovelling, I’m actually filthy! This is great news, because the dirt out there used to be a mixture of fine clay dust and sand with hardly any humus. It couldn’t even really get you dirty, just very dusty. I’ve been dumping organic matter into this place for years. At first you could hardly tell; I’d dump a load of compost and dig it in, and what I’d get is slightly darker, heavier dust. Now things are starting to hum along at last. The soil’s physical structure is finally getting to the point at which I’d consider it worth testing the nutrient balance and monkeying with it.

Sometimes when I garden, it strikes me that I’ve been making something that may well live on after me. Not the rocks or the vegetable beds, but the soil itself. It’s like I’m constructing and feeding an enormous quiet creature. Sometimes I take a moment and try to imagine/sense it as something like a living tissue.

Speaking of the P-Patch, last year we planted two artichokes there; then we dug them up in fall and brought them home in a tub, intending to transplant them. Instead, we forgot about them, and the tub sat on the patio for six months, cold and dry and completely ignored. I was shocked a few days ago to discover that the artichokes were still alive and putting up leaves. So I transplanted one today. What do you want to bet I kill it now? [ETA: Yeah, that thing’s looking like death warmed over, if not worse. Weird.]

Over at Ozarque’s place, people are engaging in haiku about hostile language and verbal self-defense. Here’s my batch:

Now, dear, we all know
Exactly what’s wrong with you,
So don’t you worry.

I believe in you!
I know that if you just try
You’ll be adequate.

We all have a gift.
It’s just that in your case, dear,
Nobody knows what.

Remember one thing
And you can never go wrong:
I am on your side.

I’ve dusted off that Twitter account I’ve had kicking around for a while. You can find me there as “sculpin“, unsurprisingly.

Savannah linked to a ridiculous thread about the safety of mineral oil.

As I said in her journal, I learned all sorts of things from that thread:

1. Mineral oil causes miniaturization, or rather the illusion of miniaturization.
2. Shooting yourself in the foot can kill you, but will probably just make you look stupid.
3. Crackers don’t breathe.
4. Some people swear that mineral oil can turn your eyes to coal.
5. Which is funny, because coal is actually caused by old bush fires.
6. Even smelling mineral oil kills children.
7. Mineral oil is THE #2 CAUSE OF ELDERY DEATH.

I suspect that the person who thinks that the smell of mineral oil kills children is repeating something garbled about lipid pneumonia; probably they didn’t quite have a handle on what “aspiration” meant in that context. It’s true that mineral oil in the lungs is bad news.

This is one of those ridiculous ideas that I might actually put into practice. You know, in all the copious free time not taken up by practicing other ridiculous things.

In Mexico, there are buskers who have trained fortune-telling canaries. They’ll take out the canary from its cage, greet it, and set it down on a tiny stage; the canary flutters over to a little box, rings a bell, perhaps drags a little hat around, and selects a slip of paper with your fortune on it. Josh and his dad saw one in Guadalajara last year, which pleased his dad no end; apparently, training a canary to tell fortunes is a dying art.

I can never resist a dying art.

We don’t have a canary, but three day-old chicken chicks are being mailed to us on the 19th. And chickens, it turns out, can be surprisingly well-trained. (1, 2, 3.) Animal trainers have been using chickens for decades to help them learn to shape behaviors with clicker training. There’s at least one DVD about training chickens, and you can even go to one of several chicken camps.

Will we train our chickens to ring bells and pick up little slips of paper? It could happen. It seems like a shame to have such a trainable animal around and not train it to do something, and I think it’d be fun to learn to train an animal to do something interesting. There’s just one thing — we’d planned to eat the chickens once they’d stopped laying well. I’m not sure I can bring myself to eat a trained chicken.