Sculpin

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.

I hope I’m not jinxing anything by saying this, but even as hot as it’s been outside, it’s been surprisingly okay here. Our thermometers say that it’s over 93 F outside, but only 77.5 in the house. I think that the solar-powered attic fan that Josh put in last year is doing a lot of good.

Another wonderful thing: linen sheets. (Cissa tipped me off to these; thanks again, Cissa!) I think I bought these as an anniversary present for Josh last year. It’s taken about a year for them to be broken in enough to suit me, but now I’m loving them. They breathe, they absorb, and they don’t cling like cotton does. With linen sheets, a cotton futon, an all-cotton mattress pad, and (believe it or not) a wool comforter, I slept like a rock last night. I’d say they were worth the investment.

Josh and I made some soap last December that I’m enjoying a lot. To a 3.75 lb batch of soap, we added these essential oils: 2 t lemongrass, 2 t lime, 2 t coriander, 1/2 t ginger, 1/2 t basil.

I made up the scent blend to work well with Josh’s skin; lime scents work well on him. It’s pretty nice on me, too, and it makes me feel cheerful and vigorous. The scent’s holding and aging well.

It’s hard to guess how these experiments are going to work out. There was a batch of ginger soap a couple of years ago that smelled like dirt. Literally; you’d sniff that soap and think, “Wow, that smells filthy.” Several months later it’d mellowed out, but it was never really fantastic. This, on the other hand, smelled great to start with and still does.

Oh my God. I just soldered a component onto a scrap of circuit board. Neatly and effectively. On pretty much my first try. It’s not perfect, but it’s acceptable. This is huge!

You have to understand: soldering in middle-school metal shop was, for me, not just a failure but a thoroughly humiliating failure. Big blobs of solder everywhere but the joint, is how I remember it, and getting shouted at by the shop teacher for being such an incompetent and unteachable klutz. None of us were good at it, but I was notably bad. I think I may even have cried over it, though I was no crier; I was that frustrated. Soldering went on my list of things I’m disastrously bad at. Like juggling, I figured, it’s an anti-gift.

But with Josh’s new soldering tools, it’s easy. It’s just plain easy. It almost happens of itself. My mind is thoroughly blown. Now I feel like the guy in Richard Condie’s The Big Snit who goes around sawing everything, except that I want to solder everything.

Take that, seventh grade! Hah! And now I must go solder something.