Sculpin

Here I am with a wee bit of the flu and a cobwebby blog, so I’ll do a little catching up. In a nutshell: I’ve been domestic.

Most recent things first: rosettes. I’m a real vulture for going-out-of-business sales, and when Martha By Mail went under, I snapped up some fantastic Halloween rosette irons on the cheap. Finally we got around to trying them out. These are implements for making crispy little deep-fried Scandinavian cookies. You make a thin, simple batter, dip the iron in most of the way, then deep-fry. I think they’re best sprinkled with cinnamon sugar — imagine an airy, crispy essence of cinnamon toast. It took a little while to get the hang of it; you want to have everything at exactly the right temperature, or you wind up with rather abstract rosettes as the batter drips off the iron. Soon, though, we had it down. I hope to make crispy deep-fried pumpkins, spiders, and bats for my friends soon!

In body news, my hip still hasn’t quite healed, though I’m not gimping around too badly. Apparently I’ve got some kind of a problem with my right obturators, deep inside the hip; my rotation’s pathetic. This does not please me, though I’m a little amused by the horrible sounds that joint keeps making. I suppose I should go back to PT and/or find an LMT to work on them. (I love Mark the LMT, but crotch massage is past my boundaries for a male massage therapist. Maybe any massage therapist.) Ugh. In the meantime, I’m just rolling them out with some small Yamuna balls, which helps a good deal, and hoping the problem will magically go away.

I’d planned to replace much of our front lawn with a big vegetable garden this summer, but with one of my hip joints still in limited service, I decided that Combat Gardening was probably not in the cards for me. So I called the Seattle Urban Farm Company, who came out and installed a beautiful new raised-bed vegetable garden in two days flat. They even included automatic drip tape irrigation, with the line cleverly snaked under our walkway and the remaining grass. It’s marvelous. I can hardly believe how fast everything’s grown; I’ll be harvesting the first bok choy this week. (Pot stickers!) I’m definitely calling these guys again. For a few days after the garden went in, I felt slightly unmoored– there’s this great garden in front, and yet I am not sore. How can this be? Eh?

I’ll definitely be calling them again anyway, because once the fall planting season cools down a bit, we have plans to put a chicken coop in the back yard. (We’re getting ever closer to hippie paradise here at House of Cranks.) SUFC has a chicken expert on staff. Brad loves chickens. To hear him talk, you’d imagine that they are the sweetest, most wonderful animals in the world. I don’t know about that. Josh is still more pro-chicken than I am, but I’ve come around on the subject. I’m interested in the eggs, mostly, and I’m also a little curious about what I might be able to train a chicken to do. (Apparently, dog trainers often work with chickens to hone their skills. There are even “chicken camps” for trainers.) Plus, some of them can be very pretty.

Speaking of front yard changes, we finally had our alder tree taken down. It was in pretty weird-looking shape after the developers next door sheared off all the branches on the west side of the tree. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that I’m allergic to the thing; it’s either that or the birch, or both. In any case, we called up Seattle Tree Service and they came out and took the thing down. The process was fascinating. And I got to see it a little more clearly than usual because one fellow was being trained. Ours was his very first tree ever. At first I could hardly watch; he’d put on his climbing gear upside down, and I thought, “Oh no, catastrophe ahead.” But Mike, the certified arborist who’s the boss, corrected him without freaking him out (would that all teachers were that good) and got him ready to climb up and limb the tree. He was all ready to go when he looked up and said, rather tremulously, “Do you think there are squirrels in that tree?” The tree came down safely with no squirrel attacks or other catastrophes. Hard to believe that thing was just sixteen years old; some years it grew more than an inch in diameter. Alders are amazing.

We kept the wood for firewood. I was sure we were going to get a splitter. No way could we get that tree split ourselves. And by “ourselves” I mean “Josh”. You know, we all have our oddball gifts in this world — I’m a bizarrely fast and accurate collator, and Josh can pack boxes like a pro. And then there are our anti-gifts. Do not, on any account, give me an axe and a load of wood to split. Many years ago, at the peak of my physical condition, I spent ten weeks in the backcountry of Yellowstone doing trail work. Every day, I’d try to split some wood for the fire. And pretty much every day I was grateful for my steel-toed boots. I am world-class lousy at splitting wood. So, while I could help stack the wood, all the splitting was up to Josh. And Josh did it. The man is a machine. We’ve now got a woodpile that must be about 8′ by 6′ with some more left over.

He really has been pouring it on. (Josh, you rock.) The new shelves he built in the shed are fabulous. I’m amazed at how much more space we have in there (using the opportunity to get rid of some junk didn’t hurt) and I’m excited to see that we can probably fit a workbench in there. Maybe I’ll even get that glass kiln I’ve been wanting for years but had no place to put. (Yes, because what I really need is more things to do.)

Josh went gonzo on those shelves the day after I made macaroni and cheese for us, his dad, and my mom. If that’s what a really good macaroni and cheese dinner does, well, heck, I will make some more. I used the Beecher’s recipe that was in the P-I recently. It felt like some pretty high-stakes entertaining: this was my first butter-and-flour roux (as opposed to an oil-based roux), my first white sauce, and my first cheese sauce. The next day, I read about a cheese sauce that had curdled. Boy, am I glad I didn’t know anything could go so wrong. Served it up with some salsa and some steamed local broccoli; for dessert we had some homegrown plums, roasted with a little Zulka sugar and topped with a dab of whipped cream.

In other food news, Josh and I learned to can last month. We’ve put up some rhubarb and strawberry-rhubarb jam, and still have lots left to can. I hope that someday soon we can have another canning day.

Whew.

Something out there likes cole crops as much as I do. I go out and find that they’ve all been gnawed to the stem, if not to the ground. Broccoli? Kaput. Kale? Gone. Collards? Well, the ones that were protected by wall-o-waters are doing just fine. The ones that were protected just by 8″ open-topped wire cages, though, haven’t fared so well; they get chomped as soon as they stick a leaf over the top of the cage. Damn you, varmints! So much for my plans for homegrown gumbo. I’m considering some plans for Varmint Stew, though, I can tell you. Grr.

The garden at home has pretty much gone to hell lately. It’s all overgrown with weeds. And I seem to have sprained my hip somewhat in yoga, so it’s going to stay overgrown for a while. Maybe I’ll get it together in time for fall planting. That’s coming up fast.

Today Josh and I helped build a cob oven with people from the UW Farm project. We put the final coat on and did some decorating. And I’m too tuckered out to say much more about it, except that it was fun and we met a whole bunch of friendly, interesting people.

Today I planted the collards. They’re transplants from Backyard Greenhouse via the Tilth sale. The variety is “Champion”; they’re supposed to be good eats for a couple of weeks longer in spring than other collards. I hope they become huge; I’ve certainly planted them with “huge” in mind. Grow, collards, grow!

These are some darn good-looking transplants, I have to say: sturdy, well-hardened, and just the right size for transplanting, not at all root-bound. If I were going to be anywhere near West Seattle on Sunday, I’d check out the Backyard Greenhouse plant sale.

If we were going to take wood to the dump anyway, we might as well take a full load, we figured. So today Josh and I took out the too-large frames for the raised beds at our place. I’m going to configure the beds in a whole new way, and then this time we’ll live with them for a year or two to make sure they’re really what we want before we build frames for them. So there was the digging and the prying and the hauling.

It’s been a very heavy load of work for me, this hardcore gardening, and I’m psyched that I’m able to do it. I’ve made a lot of gains these last several months; last week I was released from physical therapy on grounds of kicking ass. As I was leaving, I overheard Dan the PT saying, “Yeah, this was her last day. It’s great to see. I’m really happy for her. She’s been working really really really hard.” It’s kind of bittersweet: I’ll miss PT, because it was fun and I was very good at it. I’ve surprised everybody. Dan gave me a big hug and made me promise to keep in touch.

I’ve still got plenty to do, but I’m at a whole new level of physical competence now. For instance, I can walk up hills now. About ten days ago I powered my way up Virginia from the Pike Place Market to First. Not too many years ago I had a regular appointment about a third of a way down that block, and I’d have to pause a few times on my way up. Now, vroom. (Okay, maybe more like puttputtputt, but it was steady and, for me, powerful.) I hadn’t felt my lungs work like that in more than ten years; they seem hugely expansive now! It was fascinating to feel the ribcage expanding and contracting side-to-side. This whole medical-fitness thing has been mentally absorbing. The kinetic chain from the hips to the feet continues to interest me. I turn on a hip muscle so and abracadabra, my weight shifts back on my heels. Super.

In other news, today I noticed my first gray hair. I’m 35, so I’m well overdue. It’s a pretty nice gray, I have to say — shiny and light — but it also makes me recognize even more strongly that getting off my ass is exactly what I ought to be doing right now. I got squashed by chronic illness for the better part of a decade. For somebody who had severe CFS for a lot of that time (I’m talking Bell 10 to 30, possibly less), and moderate CFS for a great deal more, I did pretty damn well for myself. But I missed out on a whole lot of moving around, is what I’m saying. I feel that I’m entering a sweet spot between illness-related decrepitude and age-related decrepitude, and I want to make the most of it while I can.

After tidying the house with me yesterday morning, Josh went down to the P-Patch to work. I joined him about an hour later and worked with him there for three hours, grubbing out weeds and rotten wood trash. I think we’ve finally gotten most of the quackgrass out of there — I was down on my hands and knees for most of that with a cultivator in among the raspberries. My hands were protected, but my arms are thoroughly scratched up; I look like I could be a worker in a kitten factory. (And wouldn’t that have been an interesting “Picture Picture”.) We took out a garbage bag and a half of noxious weeds, and grabbed a bunch of raspberry volunteers to transplant to our place. On Monday, with any luck, we’ll rent a Flexcar and take all that trash to the dump. I hope to have the place set up for planting by Saturday after the Tilth plant sale.

Came home, stumbled in and out of the shower, settled down to watch Real Genius. (Thanks, T and Spiff!) Hours later I reached up to brush some hair out of my eyes, and I recoiled: ohmygod what’s wrong with my head?! Oh. I’d been so tired that I’d forgotten to wash the conditioner out of my hair. I failed showering.

When I said, “Don’t get me started on the rotting wood,” I thought that Josh might be writing about our P-Patch too, since he took some photos. And since he hasn’t, let me point out that he hauled out a big, heavy load of rotting wood on his bicycle. I don’t know how heavy it was; it was too heavy for me to pick up at the time. So a metric shit-ton of wood went on one Xtracycle wide-loader, and some peonies went on the other one. It was wildly unbalanced. I had to help push the bike up the path out of the garden; it was definitely not rideable. Which didn’t keep him from trying.

That was a long day. I was tuckered out.

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched a beehive being installed at the Picardo P-Patch. It’s amazing to watch somebody dump several thousand bees out of a box. The sound is tremendous. I got a lot closer than I was expecting to!

I’d heard of “re-queening” but didn’t know what exactly it involved, so it was interesting to watch Thane the bee guy put the queen in. It’s not the queen from the original hive, so it takes a few days for the bees to get used to her. She started in a little screened wooden box with a stopper, and he replaced the stopper with a mini-marshmallow. By the time the bees have chewed through the marshmallow, they will have accepted her.

After they’d settled down from the indignity of being shaken out of a box, you could see the newly-installed worker bees hanging out in front of the hive fanning the air vigorously. Thane said they were sending out pheromones that say, “This is home!”

It was during the bee dumping that I became exquisitely aware that my borrowed beekeeper’s mask was a little problematic. It had gotten severely squashed in storage, and I wasn’t quite able to unsquash it, so it kept touching my ears, which suddenly seemed like landing pads for angry bees. But while there were a few folks who got stung that day, I wasn’t one of them.

Later on I retreated a ways and took off that problematic mask. It’s weird to get bees stuck in your hair. They seem really, really loud. It takes a couple of seconds for them to untangle themselves. A few times they ran right into my sunglasses. POCK!

Thane’s doing some sort of project with a bunch of kids from U. Prep. “My goal is to get one new beekeeper a year,” he said; he sounds very committed to small-scale apiculture. So he looked intrigued by my interest in the bees, and I’m sure intrigued by his interest in teaching beekeeping. I’ve been interested in beekeeping for — sheesh, must be coming up on twelve years now, but there was always something keeping me from getting involved. My concerns these days have been (a) would I get freaked out by thousands of agitated bees? and (b) can I physically perform the required movements? But in fact I felt cautious but unfreaked, and the Picardo bee yard is a very handy place for me to further acclimate to the presence of tens of thousands of bees. As for (b), Thane has some possible technical solutions for my problems with lifting heavy things.

Thane mentioned some neat art one of his friends made. The guy’s a ceramic artist; he made a big bowl, glazed it, and put it upside-down on top of the hole in the top of the hive. It sort of functioned like a super, in a way. The bees came up and made a fantastic city of comb in it. At the end of the year he took it off and turned it upside down, shooed out the bees, and there was his art.

More bee art: a bee-made vase. (Updated to add even more bee-altered art.)

“The forcipules… of Lithobius centipedes are too small and weak to penetrate human skin.” You know, I always thought that too. But it turns out that if a good-sized one nails you right in the relatively delicate skin near your fingernail, it can draw blood. And then the itch comes. I’m not quite as pro-centipede as I was yesterday.

Josh and I adopted a P-Patch plot in Picardo Farm. I wanted to have somewhere to garden while we slowly rearrange our own garden beds, and I thought it’d be a good way to meet more of our neighbors, get good gardening advice, and perhaps apprentice to one of the beekeepers. In a fit of ambition, I reserved one of the year-round plots, and it turned out to be a pretty good mess. The guy who used to have the plot was pretty old and perhaps not particularly vigorous — certainly not particularly tidy. I think he just plain gave up sometime last summer. Quackgrass is everywhere, in thick stands, and there’s a ton of morning glory with big, juicy-looking roots. Out of a 10×20 space, Josh and I took out a full garbage bag of plastic trash and a bag and a half of the really nasty weeds. I don’t know how many bins of non-noxious weeds we’ve taken out to the compost there. And don’t get me started on the rotting wood. We put in several hours this weekend, and there’s still plenty of quackgrass to root out of there.

But there are also raspberries (lots of raspberries), blueberries, some huge rhubarb plants, and tulips. The light is great, and the soil’s fantastic.

I’ve been busy with physical therapy lately. It’s about what you’d expect from me: weak VMO, internally rotated femurs, sub-optimal hip muscles… if I’d realized how much of the body’s well-being comes down to the muscles of the butt, I would have been a lot more careful after being tossed through the air by a van and smacking my derriere on the pavement a few years ago. (”You’ll be fine in eight weeks,” indeed.) Fortunately, I don’t seem to have done myself a whole lot of real damage — no torn ACL or anything.

It’s been sort of fun working on the VMO part of all this — I get to run a small electric current through the VMO while flexing it. It feels like I’m ripping Scotch tape off the skin there. Dan the PT also has got me doing little tiny interval training: I boost my heart rate to about 135 for thirty seconds or so, then cool back down to below 110 for a minute, and repeat.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with oddball resist-dyeing methods. So far, my experiments have not been particularly successful.

Yesterday, Josh and I dropped by the open house at Two Cranes Aikido, which has moved to my neck of the woods. We’re thinking about giving it a try, starting probably in April.

A minor rite of passage: I had my first bike wipeout on January 13. Out on the tandem a block and a half from home, we hit a patch of ice and went down. My thought on the way down: “Oh, man, I really don’t want to have to tell the physical therapist about this.” Because, really, being out on that road that day was plain crazy. But I’m glad to have the first wipeout over with. I’d been fairly afraid of falling on the bike, especially since it’s a tandem—I’d imagined the combined force of bike, pavement, and captain all working together to snap my femur. But no, I just jarred a few joints.

I placed a super order at Raintree Nursery a few weeks ago during their winter sale. Arriving in the mail at some point are two kinds of strawberries, three kinds of lingonberries, two kinds of thornless blackberries, two kinds of blackcurrants, and a Stevens cranberry. (Oh boy oh boy oh boy….) I’ve gone plant-mad. I want to rip up the parking strip and plant it with raspberries. I want to train apple trees on wires into a living fence in the front yard. I want a greenhouse. Yeah, it’s January, all right.