Today it was raining lightly, so breakfast was served in the little goat barn for the younger does.
"Please don't make us eat in the rain. Rain makes us sad." |
Sweetfern, Comptonia peregrina, is neither sweet nor a fern. It looks like something the dinosaurs would have walked through, releasing the warmest, spiciest aromas of imagination.
"Please don't make us eat in the rain. Rain makes us sad." |
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'
Writing a blog post after a gap is tricky, because I've got to start somewhere. Every couple of days in July and August (until my laptop died and doing anything online became a faint memory) I started to compose a post, then thought I'd "better wait" until something: an interesting discovery, an item checked off the task list, a happy event. If not a Beginning, I wanted at least a Middle and an Ending. And I was determined not to write about the relentlessly unpleasant weather, because it was already getting far too much airplay in my head every single day.
Yet here I finally am, on a borrowed laptop, writing about weather, because...it's raining today, and it rained yesterday, real rain, hours of rain, for the first time in many weeks. Huzzah!
I am choosing to look at this rainy weekend as an Ending to a very long, too-hot, too-dry, too-humid Middle. So I am writing. Trying to write. Is anyone reading? If so, please wave in the comments. It's been a lonely Middle.
In retrospect, there was a lot of repair work undertaken in July and August, much of it physical, some of it planned. Time spent with the eye surgeon, the dentist, the veterinarian. There were basically two kinds of challenges: expected and unexpected. Here's one example:
Expected challenge: cataract surgery in July. I did as much prep as I could, because I knew there would be several weeks of post-surgical limitations such as never leaning down and never lifting anything over 15 pounds.
Unexpected challenge: not having my Occasional Helper here at all during the cataract recovery period to do any of the necessary leaning and lifting. (Actually, he's been unavailable through much of the Spring and Summer, for various unforeseen reasons.) In desperation - and having a strong inclination to keep my goats alive - I called friends who sent their own Helper over one afternoon to shift feed sacks for me. Bonus: now I've met someone else I can hire - when available between his other jobs - as a backup to the Occasional Helper. So there's a Happy Ending of sorts.
Violet waiting for someone - anyone - to move feed sacks. |
squash blossom just before the rain yesterday |
How is everything in your neck of the woods?
I hope your July and August have been lovely.
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I get a lot of deliveries. Without a vehicle, it's the only reliable way to Get Stuff Here. Some of the drivers will bring packages to the top of the driveway, which I very much appreciate. But I don't blame the drivers who choose to leave packages at the bottom of the driveway, and that's why there's a little plastic lawn chair visible from the road. In the Winter, I leave a sled down there.
Walking down the driveway to pick up a package, I spotted this:
Tortellini pressure-cooked in sauce, ready for freezer. |
I've been doing "batch" cooking for nearly as long as I've been cooking, because it always made sense: make the effort (and the mess) once, eat well, and have a few servings tucked in the freezer for another day. When I started using a "multi-cooker" - mine is a Gourmia brand, not the famed Instant Pot - I also started cooking batches in a sequence, with two or three things different things cooked over the course of an afternoon or even a couple of hours. For example, the first thing could be plain pasta, followed by a pot of bulgur, followed by winter squash or a pot of soup.
The speed of pressure cooking is what many people seem to focus on, and it's true that once you've waited several minutes for the pressure to come up, the actual cooking times are almost incredibly short and presumably energy-efficient compared to other methods. But a major advantage for me is the kind of attention needed: intermittent. Compared to cooking in a regular pot on the stove, there isn't any hovering or stirring or keeping an eye on. This frees up bits of time for little tasks, such as slicing apples for the herd or dealing with a sliding pile of mail or folding the laundry. I'm still in the kitchen but getting extra things done in addition to restocking the fridge and freezer. It makes the entire cooking endeavor feel more efficient and productive, and I love that.
Speaking of pasta, have I mentioned my new favorite shape? After decades of rotini fandom, a trip through the Aldi markdown aisle a couple of years ago led me to cavatappi:
And because I rarely have the chance to shop in Aldi, I bought a few boxes. By the time I'd worked out the best way to cook cavatappi in the Gourmia I had also created a new way to eat pasta: with a spritz of oil, a dollop of salsa, and a sprinkling of shredded sharp cheddar melted in. I've been cooking this pasta for two years now and have yet to put pasta sauce on it.
After running out of the Aldi boxes, I started looking for cavatappi online and couldn't find it anywhere. It seemed impossible, so I visited the Barilla website and started scrolling through pictures of their many pasta products. Behold:
Here's what cavatappi or cellentani looks like when it's been pressure-cooked for 3 minutes, then frozen, then thawed:
This week, in the interest of eating cold things, I've branched out from my usual salsa and cheddar method, and used the thawed pasta for a salad with tuna and mayo. If I'd had celery or frozen peas or corn, they would have gone in also, but it was good anyway. So good. This form of pasta just seems perfect to me: thick enough to have a good chewing texture but hollow, so not overly dense. Spiraled and ridged to hold whatever is added - salsa or mayo or even just butter. If you like rotini, I strongly recommend trying this. Hot or cold. Except today. Today is definitely a day for more cold pasta salad, at least here in Massachusetts.
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Sambucus watching the rain from a cozy nest in the Peace Pavilion. |
Another rainy night and day. So dark in the house that lamps are needed to see the other end of a room. Since morning chores it's been an indoor day, with my main responsibility being toweling off Moxie and Della every time they come in after brief forays in the saturated underbrush.
The barncams pay for themselves in terms of safety every single day, and on a rainy day (or night) they save me many uncomfortable trips just to check on the herd. Plus there's the entertainment value. After moving the cameras around from the laptop to check on every goat, usually from an overhead angle, it's always fun to suddenly have a face pop up right at lens-level.
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Violet on her bench of choice. |
Sorry to keep on and on about the rain.
It's the element underlying everything else here at the moment.
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And for everyone who has been sharing pictures of their tomato plants, here are some of mine, seeded directly into one of the tall metal beds back on the 19th of May:
Lately we've been having rain.
Lots of rain.
My spiderwort plants, which do not grow in a tidy clump but rather seem to fling themselves all over the garden, have been sadly flattened by repeated rainstorms, despite my efforts to prop them up. Yesterday I was thinking there might not be any spiderwort flowers this year, but then I happened upon this one, supported by surrounding tall stalks of tansy. I'll bet that tiny bee was relieved to find at least one flower where there are usually dozens:
And here's some of the "wild lettuce" which seems to weather anything, and also seems to grow a foot overnight. I'm taking it out near the gardens because each plant produces roughly 2 billion windborne seeds and it spreads like crazy. I'd never heard of letting goats eat this - and it's got a very sticky sap - but another goat person, my long-time blogpal Leigh, saves this plant to use as a component of her homegrown goat feed, so I'm going to try drying some this year. (Are you here, Leigh? Please check me on this!)
We're back to hot and sunny again, after many days of rain, and the mosquitoes are elbowing the blackflies aside to get to the local blood supply a millisecond faster. I'm watching the water trough and the wilds basin closely for signs of wrigglers, because that's when I start emptying them completely and refilling every day instead of just topping them up if the remaining water looks clean.
Speaking of water and mosquitoes...have you ever tried the mosquito "dunks" designed to be placed in water to keep wrigglers from growing up? Supposedly harmless to every other lifeform?
(Photograph from Chewy.com) |
Here's the product info, condensed:
For use in any standing water including rain barrels, bird baths, koi ponds, tree holes, stock tanks, planter reservoirs and rain gutters. Each dunk covers up to 100 square feet of water, regardless of depth for 30 days or more; for less water a portion can be used.
Deadly to mosquito larvae but harmless to other living things with the active ingredient Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti). When females lay their eggs in water treated with the dunks, the larvae will hatch and eat the bacterium.
I bought a packet in hopes of reducing the mosquito population in the Pocket Paddock, which is adjacent to my tiny wetland. The goats can't browse there for more than very short periods of time, because the hordes of biting bugs are unbearable. Unfortunately, it's also the best mixed browse on my property - a variety of herbaceous plants and also shrubby stuff like bittersweet; the things goat love, and which are very good for them. I'd love to be able to put the herd down there for half-days, without having to first spray them with bug stuff which we all hate.
The plan is to place a "donut" at the upslope end of the little drainage into my puddle. Today would have been an excellent day to do that, but an innate resistance to tinkering with a biological system has kept me from going forward. This sort of thing has always been a tough decision for me, personally and professionally, in part because the "cons" of such tinkering are so often nebulous beforehand and sometimes downright regrettable in hindsight. So I would love to hear from anyone who has used this or a similar product, or anyone who can speak to the biochemical safety - or risk - of this approach.
Meanwhile, now that it's hot again I am back to shaking up a daily jug of ayran - just plain yogurt, water, and salt - to enjoy in the heat of the afternoon. Such a refreshing beverage! If you make your own yogurt, it's also a great way to use a batch that didn't thicken as much as expected. This year I may even be able to add fresh mint to the ayran, as I am trying again to grow a supply of mints, both from seeds (again) and also from gifted plants (again). Is it beyond belief that mints, which always come with a "Will Take Over" warning, have a hard time establishing here? Many years ago there was spearmint growing wild right next to the house, but that went the way of the hens and I've never managed to coax it into settlement anywhere else. Not giving up though!
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When I've posted my markmaking efforts over the years, often someone will mention in the comments that they would like to try - or get back to - watercolor or sketching or such. So when this crossed my screen it seemed like something that may be of interest. It's called the Sketchbook Revival Binge Fest, with free access from May 27th - June 9th to video workshops by over 100 artists.
I know there is an upgrade option for longer access than the two weeks, but personally I know that a 2-week free access window would make me much more likely to look for a workshop I'd like to see, and then actually watch it in hopes of finding a useful tip or inspiration.
Anyway, I thought it might be of interest to someone, so here it is. And it starts tomorrow, so I think today is the final day to register.
(And in case you are wondering with recent posts if I'm having camera issues at the moment...yes, very much so. But this post in particular seemed to need some sketching, so I looked in my photograph files and came up with this rough little video of a sketchbook from several years ago. It was, of course, an experiment, not meant for publication. But now? Send for the Understudy! It's time has come! I hope this works.)
There are so many aspects to Artificial Intelligence.
Here's one you may not have heard.
Professor John Hopfield and Professor Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
This is Hinton's banquet speech in Stockholm, 10 December 2024.
It's less than three minutes long.
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Spring has lasted a long time this year. Possibly because so many things that were going on in April and May made time seem to stand still. Hazel's unexpected and rapid decline. Two drives halfway across the state that each meant several days of physical recovery to get back to baseline levels of pain and fatigue. A fostered rescue dog who was here for 10 very unfortunately goat-targeting days and 10 gruelingly sleep-fractured nights. And days of rain. Lots and lots of rain.
This year I waited so long to hear the first chirping of spring peepers during evening chores that I finally wondered if my increasing hearing loss meant I was simply unable to hear them: a thought that immediately led to scheduling a new hearing test. By the time the test rolled around - yesterday, in fact, and my hearing has indeed deteriorated further - the peepers were here and I had heard them, at least faintly, while walking the fosterdog at night.
The period of the annual leafing out of deciduous tree species felt delightfully long. It seemed as though a great many weeks passed between the first hints of color high up in the maple branches, and the pointillistic effect of entire mixed-species forests beginning to leaf out; one of my most treasured views each year.
But now the bloodroot flowers - which tell me that Winter is over - are just a memory, and the bloodroot leaves have grown into their remarkable sizes and shapes that seem just as fanciful and unlikely no matter how many times I see it happen. Jack-in-the-Pulpit has popped up in expected and unexpected places. The sugar maple leaves are still drooping a bit but are already far past the softest stage that always makes me think of the most delicate leather.
And two days ago we arrived at the point where looking out any window in my little house creates the feeling of being submerged in a wide sea of trees and green foliage. A bit like a kelp forest, but much brighter and more varied. I always look forward to this, even though it also means that the structural details of the forest canopy become largely invisible again until leaf fall, many months away. Something lost, something gained. Isn't that always the way? Maybe not always. Maybe just when we're lucky.
Now how are things in your neck of the woods?
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That was 10 days ago. It was the third snowfall in two weeks.
This is now:
This little nuthatch was perfectly still for about two minutes.