C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 153

We got back on the ice and had a pretty nice skate…

I'm not nearly as sore as I should be, but I've been front-loading Aleve. And the effort it took to load 2 of the 5 fifty-pound bags of sand straightened out the kink between my shoulders that's been there for, oh, six months, so not all ill winds blow no good—and I quit before I had a heart attack, eh?

Today we thought we had a line on some good basalt, but alas, we drove out 18 miles, past Long Lake and up above Nine Mile Falls…and it turned out to be a gravel pit. Wah! However—we have 5 tons of rock arriving on Thursday, white river rock, which will do the dry stream bed, and will require a lot of wheelbarrow action. Most of them will be big rocks, too, head-sized to potato-sized, which you cannot shovel, so we will have to glove-up and pitch those up onto the lawn and hope to make a sort of a long-distance pile.

We were disappointed about the rock, and are about to conclude we will have to get that last bit of basalt we want the old-fashioned way: steal it. Once again the masked marauders in the silver Forester will try not to get chidden by the highway patrol for stopping on the highway and taking rock.

We maintain we are saving people who need to pull off from hitting a nasty fallen rock. It's odd—you have to get along the roadsides early in the spring, because the stuff has a way of starting to disappear about that time of year.

Up at 7 to poison weeds…

I broke 2—count 'em, TWO sprayers for Round-up, but got the essential job done. Moved about 500 lbs of red lava rock, between Jane and myself. Jane got the weeds out of the intended path, set some rocks, set some more rocks.

I went back to make a pot filter to get some of the algae out before we turn on the koi pond filter. The [bad language WAS used here, enough to make Bet Yeager blush] pillow stuffing I got, which has been infallible for years, has changed. It's in tiny fibers that immediately got sucked into the very expensive pump and stopped it. I unplugged it, disassembled the pump, reassembled the whole potfilter, fished all the loose floss out of the ice cold pond and put it all back together, and sank it in the center of the pond…with no retrieval rope. Knew I was missing something. And the pump wouldn't work. Repeat all the above. Including language. Jane found me taking the pump apart the second time, and wisely decided it was a good time to set more rock.

I got it working again, reassembled the filter yet again and sank it, this time with a retrieval rope—the last extraction involved a weathered and crumbling 8 foot bamboo pole….and because it had a retrieval rope, of course it worked.

Then I went to Lowes to get 5 fifty pound bags of play sand (dry) [they tell me the diff is whether it's stored inside or outside. Doh!]—and 30 terracing stones. This weighted the faithful Forester to the max. I played old and had them help me load same—lifting 2 of those bags onto the cart convinced me the help was a Good Thing. And I got it home, where Jane presented me with a dolly (I can never work those things) and asked me to put the stones in the area where we'll use them: 4 at a time, they went with not too much trouble. She, meanwhile decided to assemble the new handcart before moving the sand—and it proved to be the Kit from Hell, in which things didn't go together in any intuitive way. But I take it she moved it.

I came in, swept the kitchen floor, which is covered in small mud bits from our tennies—(remember how I'd begun to clean the kitchen yesterday)—and the main telly had a glitch and wouldn't come on. I hear it running, so I assume Jane, who came in, both moved the last of the sand and got the telly working. I meanwhile need to go into the kitchen, haul out the breadmaker and make a new loaf of bread. We ate the last one.

So that's today. And it's 1 pm.

Worried about Jane…

…she's undertaken the whole formatting/prep job for Closed Circle, which has gotten so arcane I don't remotely understand half of it, she's working late hours trying to get it all done, do the graphics, covers, tweak the covers so they display right; and every correction some e-mail reports sends her back through half a dozen different versions, all of which take hours to do, and she's not sleeping. Far, far worse, these problems are driving her writing concentration right out of her head. A writer is a partly insane and delicate creature, who needs not to be totally in the real world, and she's lying awake of nights, getting up at 3 am to apply some solution, do just a bit more work—but not the creative kind she needs to do: she's undertaken most of the housework and done every repair job around the house to try to get it done without calling a repairman, the front yard's a mess, and she's exhausted. Yesterday we moved about 3 car-loads (much as our springs would stand) of rock we found on the cheap, and she placed that, to try to define paths in our landscaping, we're ordering more, the pond needs to be drained and refilled and treated, and the bathroom still has a hole in it, the cardboard that needs thrown out is in a mass in the kitchen, and Jane keeps trying to save MY writing time by doing everything so I don't get in the mess she's in. Which is not damned fair. So I'm going to take a break and go tend the pond, move some rock and poison some weeds and I'm taking over the housework entirely. It's depressing, the state the place has gotten into, and neither of us needs that. So I'm going to start moving rocks, and doing all I can to get Jane some writing time and some leisure to get her concentration back—of all things a writer can't take, it's being cut off from writing. And it just ain't right.

My 21st great-grandfather is also my half 1st cousin 19 times removed…

through dear Aunt Ada.

The hysterical fun of genealogy, or—kissing cousins and worse. It seems 2Oth-great-grandfather Ralph's father Henry was also related to 20-times-removed Aunt Ada's stepfather or something like, and the genealogy program wants to take the blood relation of Aunt Ada as more important than the relationship between my 21st-great-grandfather Henry and his own son Ralph, because, yes, 19 times removed is one mathematical step closer than 21 times removed, even if he's a half first cousin at that remove, rather than a direct great-great-great, etc.-grandfather in line with ME.

Making matters EVEN worse, that's my

father's

side of the family. On my MOTHER's side, at several centuries' remove and completely unexpected, we located a line of ascent going up from one Mary, sweet child, daughter of Captain Humphrey, wife unknown, who is HIMSELF a direct descendant (through another brother of a large family at generation 6) of the SAME 21st-great-grandfather Henry.

Not only that, but Henry is ALSO himself my 20th-great-grandfather in yet another line, because of cousin-marriage, and that line, over centuries, tending to procreate just a little younger than the other one. [You have two grandparents, four great-grandparents, 8 great-great [or 2nd-great] grandparents, and by the time you get to the 20th-great, your number of 20th-great grandparents is quite large—somebody want to work that out? Neighbors married neighbors, people stayed in the same villages, and it just got worse and worse, my friends, until it became a complete tangle. I believe in five more generations, ie, by the 25th, I am likely related to everyone in England.

Jane and I are, by best calculations of the same program, 20th degree cousins…BOTH of us related to Ralph and Henry, or at least to their ancestor Humphrey, not to be confused with Captain Humphrey, but then—we haven't gotten the Pierces we're pretty sure we have in common.

Jane's got the Gate of Ivrel graphics up on her site.

I am here to tell you—the 'American' diet is not for sissies.

I'm getting a little allergy. I took a generic Zyrtec. I'd taken a little dose of diuretic last night, considering 4 pounds of water weight from our foray to Scotty's. I was feeling a little malaise before I took the ice. I skated 10 feet and was shaking so badly I wasn't sure I could make it back—must've not laced my boot tops tight enough. Got back to the hockey box, sat down and laced tight. Skated out and was shaking worse than before. I got off the ice. Jane kept skating…SHE apparently can tolerate generic Zyrtec, and SHE didn't take the diuretic.

I sat in the lobby in my civvies, reading a newspaper while Jane skated, began to get a rapid pulse, and decided to go after Jane to get home and lie down. I had a little dose of some electrolyte stuff, which helped.

We left, went over across the street to pick up her routine meds and essential groceries, and by then—well, shall we say, I was chilled, wobbly, and not feeling well at all. I put on a loaf of bread to bake, then caved and went to bed. I've been worthless most of the day, chilled despite it being warmer; and I am here to tell you I never want to try generic Zyrtec [allergy] again. Particularly in combination with the other stuff.

I think what happened—we have been way low-sodium; we had that killer high sodium stuff two days running; and right now I swear I can feel my whole system rebelling at the sodium level and the screw-up of my electrolyte balance: high salt, high fat, and, I'm willing to swear, some sort of seasoning salt that contained MSG, which just finished the deal. I'm sensitive to that stuff, and more than one restaurant has resorted to it and meat tenderizers when on the skids. Not only that, MSG is, yes, sodium.

I'm feeling better now, though still wobbly: took my vitamins, my minerals, electrolyte stuff, and I've been, shall we say, shedding water weight fast, while drinking fluids like crazy. You can, I swear, 'feel' a meal of really high cholesterol, high-sodium stuff, like a lead weight on your system.

I can no longer even imagine living on a diet of those hamburgers, fries, etc. If this isn't enough to turn us back to the virtues of the straight-and-narrow diet, I don't know what it takes.

Well, we went to Scotty's—-

…and discovered via OSG that part of the backstory involves a car accident and lawsuit. Sad.

Then we discovered, via our scales, the penalty of regular American food.

We each gained 4 pounds from the two days of wine, hamburgers, fries, and nachos. But we said a proper goodbye to the dishes we used to love.

Part of it, I'm sure, is a flavoring salt they use, and will rapidly leave. But even discounting that, there's, the fat and carbs and calories; and it's going to take us into April to diet off this culinary adventure: I'll launch us on a regime of chicken Caesar and such for supper.

My Chicken Caesar: we use the regular dressing, precisely measured, on the salad. For the rest: take frozen chicken bits (we cook chicken in bulk in advance, with salt and pepper, on a George Foreman grill, dice it and freeze it for fast meals later)—and cook them with 2 tbs of olive oil, and if you think you need more oil, pour in a dash of Swanson's chicken broth instead. Don't make things sop up more and more oil!—add a liberal dose of black pepper, fresh-ground, and basil, as you cook; then cut the heat, set the pan on a cool burner, and liberally dust on Parmesan cheese. Let set, while you arrange the individual salads.

Then put the Parmesaned chicken atop the salads.

Also works for salmon.

Serve with hot, fresh-made bread if it can be had.

We can lose weight on that, with salad for lunch, and a slice of bread and low-sugar jam for breakfast.

Our previous local pub is closing…

We'd been out to the fish store, which is in a neighboring small town, down I-90, and as usual, when coming back from said place, we decided to stop at Scotty's for lunch. Scotty's was our regular pub when we lived in the Valley, and we've kept up familiarity with the place and the staff, one of those extra-home-on-a-weary-evening places you go out to eat at when you've had it and don't want to cook dinner.

We hugged the bartender—hadn't seen him in much of a year—and he said, "So glad you came in. This is our last day."

Huh?

Well, actually today is, but his last day was yesterday. And we called OSG, who used to join us there, and told her; so all of us are going to go to the Valley for lunch today, have one last round of the best nachos in town if they can find the makings—we ran them out our wine yesterday: they were down to a glass. It was like that. SO we don't know what there'll be to eat, but we'll go and find out, and help eat up the last of the food.

Tomorrow we diet.

La Commedia della Pizza…or…plan aheadddd….

Never launch into baking while you're preoccupied.

So I start out. Cannister of wheat, white, and wheat bran—which puts back into flour what the Romans had and what's censored out of our white flour.

Cup of each. Dash of olive oil. Pinch of salt. And I got too much water in. Add more flour; and more flour. Damn, I forgot the sugar. Can't find the honey. Out of sugar. Well, —blackstrap molasses will do. But the dough is already made. I add too much. It's everywhere. Well—fingers were made before spoons, or mixers. I squish it in and it's kind of a yellowish brown. I go on squishing. I have to add more flour until I can handle it: good mix should NOT adhere to the mixing surface, or to your hands.

Ok, I knead this awful mess for about 3 minutes. More can make it tough. But by now it looks like dough again.

I plop it in a bowl. Look for a warm spot. None to be had. Damn. I take it to the bathroom and turn the heater on for 30 minutes.

Now I stretch it out by flattening it and 'hanging' it in midair and letting it stretch—not risking trying to throw it: it's too heavy; I lay it on a pizza peel [don't do that!] heat up the oven to 425 and add the pizza stone. [Another mistake] compose the filling. Mmm. Layer of pizza sauce, check. Layer of spinach, check.

Then—I find Taste of Thai Peanut Bake, comes in a flat packet in the Oriental Foods section. Great stuff, a little sweet, a little spicy. I toss frozen chicken bits in a pan, add this, add a little olive oil, until the mix coats the chicken. Using wooden spatula, rake it onto the bed of spinach, add cheese and raw mushrooms.

I didn't have any cornmeal; I'd used wheat bran to try to create a sliding surface. But it's absorbed the bran and I can't get this heavy thing off the peel and onto the stone. An attempt dumps inertially-determined cheese onto the sizzling hot stone, which will take me forever to clean, and right now I have a time-critical mess—our supper— on my hands. What to do?

I extract the stone with a heavy glove, and think of the iron skillet.

It becomes Chicago style. I set the peel on the counter, set the skillet on the stone, which is on a burner because of its heat—and I start trying to transfer the pizza to the skillet. Here is where elastic dough is my only help. I fold it up toward the center, then get my hands under it (without glove) and manage to center and plop the whole mess into the skillet. I put the skillet in the oven, then take the stone to the sink and try to get the cheese off it. This takes me maybe five minutes, in retrospect, before I remember to set the timer for 20 minutes.

Well, it bakes. It makes a deepdish green pizza. I got the stone clean. And 3 minutes before 'done' I look in, find it all baked and brown, and haul it out. Now, I am still distracted [plotting does this to me], and I did forget to use the glove when bracing the 425 degree skillet for the cutting of the pizza. That hurt. Fortunately it only seared two fingertips before the message got to the brain. I put on the glove, held it firm, and cut it down the middle, then lifted it onto plates to let us handle it with knives and forks.

The result, after all this—I think it was pretty good. The crust was great whole-wheat bread, and if only I'd heated the skillet bottom on the burner before putting it in, it would have been thoroughly crispy instead of a bit soggy (the mushrooms and spinach) on the center bottom, but the flavors were great. Next time I think I'll try it with only the sauce, chicken, peanut mix, and cheese. Sort of Thai pizza that's very low-fat, pretty low cal, pretty low carb, high fiber, and quite filling.

The fingers got the cold water treatment and are fine. Jane says it's a do-again.

Master of improv, that's me.

Spam, it's not just for lunch any more…

"You are a professional person .Therefore, we have a patent pending method that will help you be more professional and have happier worshippers. First, this is NOT some get rich quick scheme!! Ready-For-You allows you to communicate with your flock by text message. For example it would allow you to notify a parent in a worship service to return to the nursery to pick up a child. It is similar to the vibrating devices used in restaurants but the range is the range of the person's smart phone…In other words almost everywhere! Perhaps you would like to inexpensively develop your own data base.Ready-For-You automatically builds a data base for the place of worship that can be used over and over to notify the congregation of significant upcoming developments …."

example of spam from Seeking North. See what we save you from?

Some aren't readily printable. I think I should do dramatic readings from them at the next con.