Sculpin

A few years ago, we decided to put in a more useful hatch to the attic so we could use it as storage space. There’s a ton of room up there, all unused. My mother was moving from a three-story house to a two-bedroom apartment, and I assured her that she shouldn’t worry, since we’d have plenty of room to store her extra stuff. “Sure, bring it on by. No problem.”

Hah hah. And thus began a long, stupid saga of not being able to get it done. But at last we had the spot all picked out; we had some pull-down stairs; we had some expert help. There was just one thing. Josh wriggled up to the attic to move one puny light fixture, and realized that the wiring here was kind of bizarre. We decided to hire someone.

And thus did our troubles really begin: we’d call people who swore they’d show up to give us a bid, and they wouldn’t show; we’d get bids from people who swore that they’d have to rewire half the house (which is not so bad, as we’ve meant to do that anyway), and then they wouldn’t return our calls. It was almost pleasant, by comparison, to deal with the people who simply never returned our calls in the first place. Meanwhile, I was often heard to mutter grouchily about living in a storage depot. Clutter can make me crazy.

The Electrician Problem became a running joke, because pretty much anything we wanted to do around here was stymied by all the junk we own getting in our way, and getting that out of the way had reduced to an electrician problem. (”Hey, let’s make ravioli! Well, first we’ll need to get an electrician…”)

So finally we joined the Home Owners Club, which I’d heard some good things about. It was a dream: they sent out a very nice electrician (Current-Flo from Snohomish) who showed up on time in a small time window, took a look at the problem, and just went ahead and fixed it (without rewiring half the house, thanks). The Home Owners Club called us within a few days to be sure we were happy. I’m pretty sure that the membership has already paid for itself. It was incredibly easy and hassle-free.

Next Tuesday we’re scheduled to start working on getting the stairs in. Hot damn. We might actually be able to eat in the dining room again by Christmas.

I’ve been in a crafty mood, and I was idly thinking about making some birdseed ornaments. This came as a surprise to me:

“Birds have no salivary glands,” said Lee Amigh, an environmental educator at Lancaster County Central Park. That explains why birds can choke on peanut butter, said Amigh, who prefers to mix the bird seed with cornmeal (for traction) or with lard (it’s slippery.) With birds peanut butter is a real danger.” — a Gardenweb forum comment

I don’t know the original source of that. Now, some birds definitely do have salivary glands. (Consider birds-nest soup; the nests in question are made of hardened bird drool.) But I’d be willing to accept that most backyard-feeder birds have less productive salivary glands than we do. The Key to North American Birds says, “These structures… vary extremely in their development. [...] In most birds, however, the salivary glands are small, simple, and and less distinct from other mucous crypts that open into the mouth.”

That’s enough to make me reconsider the old trick of coating a pinecone in peanut butter and rolling it in birdseed. It’s not like there’s any shortage of substitutes; suet, lard, and maybe coconut oil are looking better to me.

Today’s lack of fun:

1. Get on the bike, fail to gain momentum fast enough, fall off shrieking.
2. Try again. Get on the bike, fail to gain momentum fast enough, fall off shrieking.
3. Give up for the time being, because there’s no point rubbing my nose in failure.

On Saturday I biked with Josh on the tandem to Wallingford. On Sunday, we took the tandem up the hill to the Blue Saucer, which is near the second-highest point in Seattle if I recall correctly. For me, this is a hell of a lot of hill-climbing, and my knees feel it. I’ve even got some minor limping going on. Maybe that’s why I failed today. Failed failed faility failed, friends. I was more or less on the flat here, with a very slight uphill grade; next time, I’ll point myself downhill.

I’m not sure that this forty-pound bike is the best thing to be learning on, either. I could turn on the motor, but OH HELL NO am I adding a motor to this learning process. Like I don’t have enough to think about.

I was about to add, “And I can’t find the charger anyway,” then turned to the right and saw it where it has been sitting there looking at me for months. Seriously. I can’t find anything in this house.

What I need is an electrician. Can anybody recommend an electrician?

See, once upon a time we were going to have a hatch put in so we could store things in the attic. For my birthday, my mother gave me a few hours of handyman time from the husband of someone we know. That was last October. Hooray. Josh bought attic stairs and everything. We tried and tried to get on the same page with the handyman, but he had this and that, hernia surgery, extra work, a family reunion, etc. So that took about seven months. Then we realized that the only place we could put the stairs was in the hallway. That meant moving a light. “I’ll do that this weekend,” said Josh, and then he took a good look at it. Oh, God, it all goes down the rabbit hole from there, but the upshot is to do much of anything to the wiring, we’ll need a bunch of electrical work done. We took bids, accepted one, and the guy put us off for weeks before admitting that he was really too busy to do the work.

Meanwhile, no attic storage space. And my mother has moved from her three-story house into a two-bedroom apartment. I, foolish only child, have said, “Oh, sure, you can store that in our attic.” Which we will have any day now, right? No. No. I live in a storage depot. Not to mention that she’s given me about fifty pounds of random papers and photographs to sort through. (”This is yours!” says Lady Bountiful, dumping another load of old report cards my way. Oh joy.) It doesn’t help that Josh was laid off in spring, and the contents of five years of clutter buildup in his horrible office has now taken over the dining room. I am going mad, I tell you, mad.

And because I live in a storage depot, I don’t have enough room to do my Pilates exercises. Basically everything has gone to hell here.

I’m going back to bed.

Delaware, May 21:

Delaware today:

I need to get some falconry gauntlets, or at least break out the welder’s gloves. One of our chickens, the Delaware — we’re calling her “Trouble” — likes to hop up on your arm. And when Trouble wants something, she’s hard to stop; “want” hardly covers the ferocity of her desires. It’s not so much because she loves you. (Chickens, as far as I can tell, are not cuddly. At most, they’re docile.) It’s because she wants out of the box, and you are her ticket out of the box.

I haven’t seen any physical signs of her being a rooster, though I’ve wondered. As far as I can tell, she’s just a hen with an oversized personality.

So every time I reach into the chick box for something, there she is, running for my arm at top speed. This was adorable at week 1 or so, but now that the chicks are almost four weeks old, it’s beginning to become a problem. And when she reaches her full six pounds or so, it’s going to be a problem indeed. Chickens, it happens, are sharp. My forearms are covered in scratches; it looks like I’ve been raising a dozen kittens. Which is to say, it looks like I’ve been sticking my arm in a food processor.

I bet Trouble would be a good trained attack chicken: very aggressive, extremely fast and agile, tremendously food-motivated, an excellent flyer. Perhaps I should consider taking up chicken falconry.

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.

“Best pumpkins ever!” said some of our trick-or-treaters. Here’s the whole set of jack-o-lanterns.

I did the cat, skull, and big-mouth jack-o-lanterns, as well as the vaguely Balinese-ish one on the left. (It’s a self-portrait. Sorta.) Josh did the tiki, the rabbity one, the cyclops, and most of the gnawer/gnawee pair. (I figured out the gnawer’s eyes.)

My thanks to the artists, whoever they are, who did the original art on which the cat monster and sugar skull jack-o-lanterns are based. Those images had been kicking around in my files for a while and now I have no idea where they came from.

This sugar skull took me about six hours to carve.

Previous jack-o-lanternery: 2006, 2005, 2004.

Before this week, all I knew about woodstoves, I learned from a poem by Lew Welch. He seems to be right about the bark.

As the weather cools down, I’ve been spending some time learning how to operate our soapstone stove-insert. It’s kind of tricky to light it when it’s cold. Those soapstone panels soak up a tremendous amount of heat, and it takes some patience (and a whole lot of kindling - always more than I think it’ll be) to get it up to a good operating temperature. When it’s going, though, it’s super cozy. Next time there’s a blackout, it’ll be party time at my place!

The stove has an electricity-powered blower to help warm the room. The blower’s nice, but I wish it could be crank-powered like this fabulous lamp. Hook it up to an old bicycle… that’d be neat.

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.