Happy National Jet Lag Day

 I hate the d*mned Time Change....

That is all...

Happy Halloween

 

My Brother asked me for this Recipe

I start by sauteing a couple of cloves of garlic,
some celery and a couple of carrots. I add carrots to any tomato dishes like this because it takes the sharpness of the tomatoes down a notch or two. Then I add herbs from the garden,
in season, and spices to those ingredients.

Except that it is not a recipe. It is sort of a framework for soups, stews, and other sauce or liquid based foods.

Today I chopped sweet basil, orange mint, top onions and
oregano into the mix. In summer more herbs are available;
in winter jarred ones, such as below, are the best I can do. At this time in the process
you can change direction from the tomato based soup or sauce, and head toward a traditional meat and vegetable stew, by adding other vegetables
and directing your efforts toward gravy rather than tomato sauce.

I chopped some of these into the sauce, 
just because I have them. 
They add a little bit of fresh, summery flavor
but you can get along without them

I put grated parmesan both in the sauce itself and into the meatballs
Don't be afraid of it; it adds a lot of flavor. The jars contain sauce I make in summer, from roasted tomatoes, herbs and seasonings. I freeze it for use in winter.
The first year I tried it I used the glass pints, but now we have freezer safe plastic quart sized deli containers

Some of both of these go into the meatballs
Along with a little milk, an egg, or even a bit of mayo to moisten

My favorite meats for meatballs
I have also used straight venison, beef, or added lamb
or bulk sausage to them. Depends on
what is in the freezer

Fennel seed goes in anything with Italian sausage 
but not in the meatballs.

We took his family some Italian Sausage soup I made from it last week. This time I am making meatballs in sauce. The boss can't eat much in the way of carbs, so we will not be having them with spaghetti.  

Simmering now.
I like to simmer it for a good while but you can serve it as soon
as the meatballs temp
165 or so

Cheat code
I usually add a jar of this, along with whatever water
it takes to rinse it out good.
It extends the homemade stuff and smooths out the edges.
You don't really need it though.

One Ring

 

I am a lot like Gollum with rings. They fall off my fingers and such. I lost my wedding ring in a McDonald's latrine, one of my much loved Irish rings in the parking lot at the boat launch, and the other while throwing hay to the sheep a couple of years ago.

My dear brother stopped at the Irish shop in Durham and picked up a replacement Irish ring for me and I struggle to keep that puppy on my finger too.

A couple of years ago Becky got some trinket or object of interest delivered to the house from someplace like Temu, and as a bonus a little ring of fish line and tiny blue beads was also in the package. She gave it to me as a joke. I put it on below my Irish ring, as a sort of a keeper, or warning that I was about to lose them.

And it worked.

Until yesterday.

I was letting the water out of a sink full of soaking dishes so I could wash them.

Swoosh. The little bead ring vanished from my finger. I was heartbroken all out of proportion to its value...maybe five cents on the current market...and hunted through the sink for it.

Nope. Gone. Down the drain.

And sadly my Irish ring is really loose right now too.

Dagnabbit.

I proceeded to do the chore I had lined up for. Coffee cups and frying pans, bowls and milk glasses, down to the silverware in the bottom of the sink. I picked up a fork to give it a scrub and there, caught in the tines, was my tiny dark blue bead ring.

Ralph thought something was wrong with me as I cried out for joy. (Actually, something probably IS wrong with me but we won't talk about that.)

Anyhow, I guess I am a pretty cheap date. It doesn't take a whole lot to make me happy.

First Frost

 

We hit 31 a week or so ago, but nothing but the sweet basil was bothered. However, last night it got down to 30 degrees. Brrr....the car is covered with ice.

Impending cold weather sends me into a dither every fall. Which plants should come inside? Which don't winter well and should be sacrificed to the ice?

The decisions are always gradual. Heritage plants first. The Ida Hollenbeck Memorial spider plants and anything that belonged to my mom or Ralph's mama come in first. They have their traditional hibernacula and are well situated long before frost.

Then come the regular geraniums. This year I cut them back with a vengeance, well before frost, and they look the better for it. Many of them I started from purchased seeds several years ago and are colors that would be hard to purchase locally. They go upstairs on an old radio/phonograph thing where they sit in big east windows.

Then come the ones that give me pause. I have successfully wintered things that shouldn't survive indoor life. One pretty bronze petunia made the winter of 24 and was spectacular the following summer. It croaked as soon as I brought it in last year though.

 In 25 I bought a pretty hanging basket from an Amish lady up on Logtown Road. It had pale purple lobelia, dark pansies and babies breath in it. It was so nice that I chopped it back and brought in last winter. The babies breath and pansies vanished but the verbena struggled through. Last spring I trimmed it up and put it on the sitting porch. The verbena flourished and the babies breath came up from seed. I stuck a couple of pansy plants in and it was...

Very nice.

However this fall it was pretty bedraggled and I debated....

Same with several others. It simply kills me to let anything freeze. I stuffed all the petunias into the little portable green house on the porch and zipped it shut. I dragged a gigantic elephant ear that I had decided to let go into the kitchen well after dark last night. The deciding factor was the thick white roots I discovered when I tried to pull it up and a teeny tiny foxtail fern seedling in the same pot. I vaguely remember picking a red berry off Peg's old plant last spring and looking for some place to tuck it in. Guess it decided to grow. 

And then I was out with my headlamp picking the last tomatoes before bed last night as well. You would almost think I hadn't been processing tomato sauce and foisting tomatoes on friends and family for the past couple of months or something.

And, yes, I dragged that tired old verbena upstairs and set it in the east bedroom.

Now I will have to dig the cannas. That is a miserable job, but they are worth the bother in terms of hummingbirds which visit the big red flowers all day long once they bloom.

At least I will have the winter long comfort of lots of greenery from all the plants I have dragged indoors. 

Undue Diligence

I made Grape Jelly.

It took two days.

My feet hurt. 

Mack the Dog A Locked Room Mystery

 

The setting-an 8X10X6' high chain link dog run with a concrete floor.

Cast of characters: Mack the Dog, Jack Russell Terrier extraordinaire. The thief or thieves.

The missing object-a stainless steel dog dish used to give him his kibble breakfast each morning out there in the dark, where I deposit him each morning in summer and from whence he is extracted at eventide to come into the house to continue his marauding ways.

The puzzle-about three days ago, even though the kennel is closed and the gate solidly latched at night so the deer don't go in and drink all Mack's water, said dish vanished. 

There has been an extensive search, but so far no sign has been found.

Did a night prowling owl take a liking to it, thinking to use it as a mirror in her tree hollow abode?

Did a bevvy of errant raccoons climb the fence and take it home to employ it as a wash basin in their humble hollow tree?

Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick? 

Or...dum da dum dum....did Mack bury it so deep in the straw in his Dogloo that no one can find it?

Only the Shadow knows. 

Remember

 

This was written in 2006, but I have not forgotten

Since September 11, 2001, when one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center turned south just east of here over Amsterdam, it is hard not to notice the rattle of the kitchen windows when a jet passes by. I still stop to listen every single time I hear a plane. In the first days after the attacks it was estimated that more than five thousand people died in the assault. As bodies were counted and some of the missing found, authorities finally decided that only 2996 people actually died.

Only.

As if any single one of the souls who were lost that day, heroes and homebodies, doctors and stockbrokers, firemen, policemen, cooks and secretaries, could be encompassed by a word like only.

They were not only.

They were not some incomprehensible count of the dead and missing.

They were our friends and neighbors. People loved them. People wake still wake up today missing them and mourning them and go to bed each night bereft because they are gone.

One of those 2996 friends, neighbors and loved ones was 27 year-old Carl DiFranco.


This is to honor Carl on the fifth anniversary of the nightmare that took him from his loved ones. Raised in Huguenot, NY and a lifelong resident, Carl was assistant vice president of Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., located in the World Trade Center. He graduated from Monsignor Farrell High School and cum laude from St. Johns University. He liked to bowl, play tennis and jog. Married a short time before the attacks he was widowed within months, when heart problems while awaiting a transplant took his longtime sweetheart, Loren Bosso.

Carl must have been a wonderful person. He supported his sister through the birth of his niece, then helped through the difficult weeks that followed. The day he died his mother’s car had a flat tire, so like the decent son he was, he offered her the use of his truck. This made him a little later than usual, but not late enough to be saved. He also took his mother on “dates” and surprise trips. He pitched in willingly to help her with projects around the house and yard. In a New York Times article she said, “I keep thinking I hear him coming in the door, that I'll have a chance to help him get through it," (referring to the loss of his beloved wife.)

From what I read in many tributes from people who knew him, his kindness and caring for his mom reflected the way he always was. Friends remember him as someone who was brave and confident, kind, generous and quick with a joke. There are many poignant references to him by the people who knew him to be found all over the Internet. They make hard reading, but they put a face on what our nation lost that terrible day.

I hope this small tribute will help to remind us of Carl and the many other special people who were taken from us on September 11. I will try to think of him and the good life he lived when I hear planes overhead, instead of reflecting on the terror of those days.

Coats on Coats off

 

Tis the season.

You wake up to a brisk fifties morning. The rising sun glints gently off fog rising off the river and drifting up toward the sky. The grass is thick with dew. The mosquitoes are still sleeping (if you're lucky and it's in the low fifties. Any warmer than that and they just plain love you.)

You could probably survive without a sweatshirt, or a flannel, or a hoodie, but it's a heckin' lot more comfy with one.

Then the sun muscles its orange way on up over the horizon, dragging a short return to summer in its wake.

Gradually your warm snuggly thing becomes cumbersome and de trop.

So you take it off.

If you are a certain farmer I could mention you dump it wherever you are.

BITD when we were farming and those warm-ups found us on a tractor or nailing up fence, that is where the shirt or coat came to rest. Many of them are probably still out there, fading away on a fencepost or tucked behind the seat of some tractor we sold years ago.

Nowadays they are dumped behind the seat of the car or the pickup, gathering there until there is no room in the backseat and someone drags them in for me to wash. 

Oh, well....

I love this time of year, the delightful mornings and the not-too-hot-but-just-cozy days.

Alas, I don't love what's to come, when you don't even want to take your coat off indoors!

It won't be long now. 

Happy Heavenly Anniversary

 

Mom and Dad

The Erie was a'Risin'

 

Sorry, no Gin.

I was 8 when we moved to the Mohawk Valley. Theretofore unknown to me, it became a talisman.

 From the old limestone abutment at the bottom of the driveway where we first discovered Painted Turtles to Molly's Hannibal, a beloved book about a canal mule, I have loved the canal most of my life.

We learned the canal songs in school. Rome Haul could be found on the shelves of the folks' bookstore. (I have only ever read part of it...guess I should try again.) Mom took us to swim under the Schoharie Crossing aqueduct back when that was possible. (You couldn't pay me now.,)

Nowadays, I bird the banks of the Schoharie, the area around the aqueduct, the surrounding fields and the edges of the Mohawk almost daily. I've submitted 880 checklists from there so far.

We stopped there today on the way home from one of Ralph's doctor consultations (IYKYK). It was late enough in the day that birding was not exactly scintillating, but it sure was an interesting visit.

I was peering through the binoculars at the cattails under the aqueduct, looking for herons or migrating shorebirds (I need several common species of the latter). To my considerable amazement, there on the little beach they made last year, sticking up through the foliage, was what appeared to be a horse's head.

Not a live horse, but a beautifully crafted fabric creature.

Color me intrigued.

Indigo Bunting photographed at the crossing
We'll just color him blue.

I slow-footed over, not wanting to intrude on anyone, to find a man taking photos of the coolest canoe you could imagine. I waited until he paused and asked if I could photograph it...I knew you would want to see it... 

He pointed to a pair of young women who were approaching, and said, "It's their canoe, you can talk to them."

And talk I did, for a heckin' long time. They actually interviewed me, a first in my sheltered life so far. 

I am normally about as introverted as a particularly shy bivalve, but they asked me about birds. You cannot shut me up about them once I get started.

Anyhow, they are doing a canoe trip up the Erie to Buffalo, interviewing people and visiting canal-related sites along the way. The horse is in fact a mule; the trip is called the Mule's Passage. From Waterford NY's Facebook page "The Mule’s Passage launches from Waterford, where artists Z Behl and Kim Moloney (Baloney Steel) will begin an extraordinary four-week, 350-mile canoe journey upstream to Buffalo. Along the way, they’ll meet people, collect stories, and create community-centered performances exploring the Erie Canal’s history, ecology, labor, and culture. "

They gave me a little bottle of bug repellent, which I promise I will try, as I am a well-known mosquito magnet, and a newspaper, describing their goals and philosophies. As an old Boomer, I do see the world a bit differently than they might. However, I loved reading of their experiences during some major events, such as 9-11 that touched them a lot closer than it did up here in the more northern bits of the state.

If you would like to see their extraordinary craft or perhaps get a chance to meet them, they will be stopping in Canajoharie tonight, and traveling to St. Johnsville tomorrow. You can find the rest of their itinerary on the Waterford NY Facebook page.  

I was glad we stopped at the boat launch today even though there were no herons.

Had a lovely chat with this nice
gentleman as well
but we talked fishing and my favorite lake

The Popsicles were right There

Come along with me for a quick bit of time travel back to the early nineteen-sixties. We Montgomery kids spent the summers and most of our weekends hanging out around the folks' two stores, Montgomery's Antiques and the Tryon County Book Store. We were downright feral in those days and went pretty much wherever we wanted to.

BITD kids had to get creative to acquire cash even in tiny amounts. We had been known to check out the alley behind the row of shops where ours were located for stray dimes and nickels lost from the pockets of the patrons of certain now long closed establishments. Sometimes there were even quarters.

We also sat in the bookstore while Mom and Dad worked in the antique store, and either sold books ourselves or called them to help when things got interesting. 10% commission folks, plus all the ancient books you could read. Tarzan, Hardy Boys, Roy Chapman Andrews anyone?

Despite these excellent sources of income, when the Newberry's Five and Dime up the street got in a little box of horses like the one above, I had a rough time finding enough cash to buy him. It took weeks.

After all, saving was hard for a kid. In those days Collins' Market was just two doors east (the dime store was around six stores west). 

Popsicles were right there! 

And only a nickel. Grape was my favorite.

That oh-so-desirable red horse was priced at 29 cents, a veritable fortune's worth of Nehi, or Royal Palm or Double Bubble (two for a penny.) Six Three Musketeers at a nickel each!

The store also had cheaper horses, mere dimes and nickels in price. I could have had several for the price of old red. 

Somehow though I turned my back on sugar and cheaper temptations and bought him, plus a black one and a white one that were posed a bit differently. The bay markings, blaze and stockings are courtesy of a paint by number set I cannibalized (he was born a chestnut) and there is the tiniest trace of modeling clay stuck to one leg. I used to make bridles and saddles of same for my many toy horses.

Today this little horse is the only one left. The rest of a cardboard boxful, which I carted wherever I went, was lost somewhere along the way. However, he still lives in the China closet in the dining room, along with antique fishing lures, rocks, minerals and actual China and stuff. 

I don't play with him any more, but I wouldn't trade him for a dozen grape popsicles or a case of Orange Crush either.

***we searched Google and eBay for similar toys and didn't find a single one. Wonder where they all went.

Summer 26

Weird summer here for sure. Long dry spells interrupted by sometimes days of torrential rainfall. It's been cooler than normal for the most part and I'll take it. 70s beat 90s, mercury down.

Birding has been fair to middling...mostly middling. Our usual haunts offer the usual birds to the point that I have to drag myself out to chase them. Lots of babies though. The Rose-breasted Grosbeaks that summer here have brought, I think, 3 kids in to feed at the feeders. They chirp all day and sound EXACTLY like Eastern Bluebirds to the point that they even fool Merlin. They drive me nuts (!) as I cannot for the life of me stop looking for bluebirds. 

We got a new dog in May, from Ayres Shelter, an Aussie I named Marieta, Rita for short. She is a fascinating puzzle...where did she come from? She was found running down the road in Auriesville. What name or names did she have before? She answered to Rita right from day one. What weird or unfortunate things happened to her before? I am sure we will never know the answers to these questions, but we fell in love with her right promptly and put up with the nonsense as part of the deal of having her.

We were able to rent our favorite cabin at Peck's Lake this year and had only 1 1/2 days of less than great weather, although that week it was pretty hot. On my very last cast of the year I caught the biggest fish I have ever hooked in my life. It jumped over a low-hanging fir branch, tangling the line there, and I had a heckin' time getting it landed. What a thrill!

On the downside I took a terrible fall in the camp driveway while walking "my 10". Large, crushed stone makes a lousy landing pad. My face smashed into the ground; why my glasses didn't break I will never know, as they impacted hard and sharp right on a rock, and I hurt stuff. Ribs, wrists, face, soft tissue here and there. Stubborn old fool that I am I elected to tough it out. 20 days later it's mostly down to dull aches and lingering pains. Guess what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Still walking my 10 so...

Not yet, my fine feathered friend
Not yet

The garden has done pretty well. Lots of lettuce, some nice garlic, plenty of herbs to dry. I fear for my tomatoes though. There maybe some blight taking hold out there, or it may be just the uneven watering due to the weird weather. A few of them are getting a little curly on the edges.

Anyhow, it feels more like September than July here and that is fine with me. Hope you are doing well and enjoying the outdoors....

Watch your step!