Sculpin

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.

At long last, we’ve bought a woodstove! An insert, actually, lined with soapstone for extra fabulousness: the Hearthstone Morgan. It’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Hooray!

If you ever wonder, “Why has Cam stopped getting her hair cut?” it’s largely because for the last several months I’ve been gauging purchases in terms of percentage of woodstove cost. (Oh, I’ll get the ends hacked off at Rudy’s one of these days, but I’m done with fancy haircuts for now.) See also, “Why have Cam and Josh finally given up DirecTV?”

He Thanks His Woodpile

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once
lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.
You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to

typewriter.        woodpile.        stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!
can’t stop opening up the door!
can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and are

        Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man

        (which is not, at last, estrangement)

 
– Lew Welch

About a year and a half ago we asked Qwest to knock it off with the phone books. It worked. I’m hoping it works as well with Verizon.

It was, again, surprisingly easy. I called Verizon’s directory department at 1-800-888-8448 and gave my name, number, and address to a slightly surprised-sounding customer service rep. (”You don’t want phone books?” he clarified carefully.) I encourage anybody who’s tired of the big paper phone bricks to give the companies a call. They do have ways to ensure that you don’t get the phone books; they just don’t advertise the fact.

The hold time wasn’t even that bad. Really, the worst part was having to physically handle the phone books themselves. They smell awful. Ugh.

“Oh, this area is a priority. We think you’ll have power by Wednesday.” So say the Seattle City Light crews in Lake Forest Park. My mom has been out of power for almost three days now. She’s putting a brave face on it, mostly, but she’s looking pretty stressed. I’ve pressed extra firewood and Duraflame logs on her, given her a place to take a hot shower, and bugged her several times to come down here with the cat and crash. Not much more I can do, I think.

Next time we have a long winter outage, I want it to go like this: we have a woodstove, and we invite all the neighbors over for coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies. Blackout party at Sculpin House. I wish I had thought to knock on neighbors’ doors with a thermos of coffee during the outage. I could have made the day of some coffee-addicted owner of an electric stove.

Today I dragged most of the downed branches and twigs out of the front yard and piled them in back. They might act as a windbreak for my sage bush, and small birds might enjoy hiding in them.

Update 12/19: At last, my mom has power. She toughed it out for almost a week, through below-normal temperatures in the darkest time of the year. Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s storm doesn’t cut the power right off again.

Power’s back on, after being off for about nine hours. That’s the third not-entirely-trivial outage we’ve had in the last couple of weeks. And thunderstorms are on their way this afternoon; maybe we’ll have Outage #4.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but now I’m thinking more strongly about getting a little woodstove to put in the fireplace, or possibly an insert.

Buying a hand-cranked coffee mill has turned out to be a surprisingly good idea. No electricity? No problem. No coffee? Problem.

Josh and I went down and got our Xmas tree today. I’d seen an announcement in some email from Seattle Tilth: it turns out that the UW Forest Club grows noble firs organically in power line right-of-ways. They were taking orders until Friday, cut them yesterday, and sold them today. My eco-hippie sense went all a-tingle.

I would have mentioned this before, but in addition to being a lazy blogger, I kind of figured that they’d probably tend to be a little, let us say, natural-looking. You know, rustic. What with UW students not being experienced, professional Christmas tree farmers and all. We biked out at a very cold 8:15 a.m. to pick up the Flexcar and zip down to the Center for Urban Horticulture in time to be one of the first in line and get the pick of the bunch. But damn if they weren’t the best-looking trees I’d ever seen; every one looked great. I waded in, grabbed one, gave it a good look, said, “Good enough,” and we strapped that sucker to the top of the Flexcar.

It was a nice scene down there, too. Friendly folks in line, with sort of a Mountaineers Club vibe. It was nothing at all like the manic, sharp-elbowed crowd that I remember from the old days buying cheap trees at Chubby and Tubby.

Maybe next year we’ll be able to get our tree home on a bicycle trailer for the Quadruple Hippie Score. This year, no. It’s all uphill from the CUH, and I had my fill of hills yesterday. We took a trial ride up to the View Ridge PCC on the tandem, and got a pretty good idea of where our reasonable limits are when it comes to hills. Severely short of that, is where they are. But we’re getting obviously stronger; in a few months we’ll give it another try.

Josh and I biked down to the University District farmers market on Saturday, thinking we’d buy half a dozen bunches of greens and make a big batch of Gumbo Zeb. There had been lots of gorgeous bunches of greens the week before; I had happy thoughts of coming back with a trailer full of local collard greens. I wasn’t thinking straight.

The farmers market was missing maybe a third of its farmers because of the floods, and many more had been affected. There were no dahlia farmers at all. Willie Green’s is said to be entirely under water. So is Growing Things. Full Circle has root crops but its lettuce is a total loss. “They’re free. Just come back,” said the Full Circle guy when we asked for the bunch of rootless beet greens that he’d just offered to the previous customer. I couldn’t let him just give us beet greens and then walk away, so we bought carrots, too. He sounded worried and exhausted.

I came home thinking that this was the year for me to learn to enjoy borscht, if only so I can support local farmers through a hard winter. (Well, that, and it sounds tasty.)

I wound up buying some greens I’d never heard of before. “Perpetual spinach” is a sort of spinach-like chard. It tastes to me like a mature spinach crossed with a little sorrel. The market was fairly picked over when we got there, but there were still lots of beautiful bunches of this mysterious stuff that nobody was buying, presumably because they’d never heard of it either. I also got some kale from Whistling Train which is notable mostly in being so delicious that I’d eat it raw. Seriously fantastic. And it’s kale, as in “I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.”

The gumbo is killer. It’s worth buying this book just for the gumbo recipe. I make it over three days: day 1, make the roux; day 2, prep the vegetables; day 3, assemble the soup base and make the first batch of soup.

The car is gone at last. I’m a little sad to see it go. It was a good car for a while there. (And then, not so much, and eventually not at all.) Even if it were easy to make it run again, it wouldn’t make sense to pay to keep a car that’s driven less than ten miles a week most weeks. And reading The Weather Makers is doing wonders for any lingering regret I might have.

Our jack-o-lanterns are all carved and glowing. I’m happy with them. And we grew all the pumpkins ourselves!

When Josh said he wanted one of the jack-o-lanterns to be a skull, I all but raced to my computer to bring up a gallery of work by Artemio Rodriguez from La Mano Press. There’s a lot of neat stuff at the La Mano Press website - check out the gorgeous “Muerto Rider” art car.

In my constant urge toward more eco-friendly living through accessories, I’ve acquired a clothesline and some clothespins.

But here’s a dumb question: how do you choose where to hang up a clothesline? Do you hang your clothes in the sun so they dry faster, or do you hang them in the shade so they don’t get sun-bleached?

We have heat again! “Cleanest flooded furnace I’ve ever seen,” reported the furnace inspection guy. We were very, very lucky. A little more water, and we would have been replacing the furnace.

This may be just in time to have the power go out if the winds hit again later tonight. I’ve been trying to get stuff done in anticipation of 60-mph winds — cleaning up the patio, pruning, cutting down an outdoor screen before it twists off its hinges, and doing laundry and dishes while we still have hot water. There’s more to do, though, than I’m going to get done.

And while I’m mucking around with these old WPA posters: the more things change, the more they stay the same.