mornings

 

The best time to take photographs these days is 5:30 in the morning. This is also the best time to hang up the bird feeders, refresh the water troughs, trim a set of hooves, cart a hay bale out to the paddocks for distribution, and switch gates so that all the goats have a fair crack at the hay for a couple of hours, without fisticuffs. 

I confess I don't always have a tremendous amount of get up and go at that time of day, but knowing full well how much more uncomfortable it will be a couple of hours later, I generally get out there and do it.

Not everyday though. That's why today the picture above was taken closer to 9:00 AM, after a late start on chores, with sweat dripping off the ends of my hair and bouncing off my eyelashes. I felt a bit more like this day lily:

Still colorful though, right?

Stay cool, friends.

~~~~~

special delivery

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:

I believe it's a foxglove, which I don't recall ever seeing here before.

Exciting stuff! 

Especially since it's in a place where the animals are not, so I don't have to try to transplant it to avoid accidental poisoning.

And so interesting:

This morning I also walked up the road a hundred feet or so, to check on a little patch of columbines in front of my Upper West Side paddock. Some years I've seen two or three colors of columbine there, but this year I saw only one color - a lovely purple. Today there are just three blossoms remaining, Here's one:

I hope you've got some flowers blooming wherever you are.

~~~~~

batch batch cooking

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.

~~~~~

more

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.

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.

~~~~~

garden snaps

 The "Egyptian onions" or "walking onions" are on the move at last.

It took several years to get these established here, despite their mint-like reputation for vigorous spreading. This year they are looking very healthy, and are already dropping their heads to the ground to create more plants.

Two varieties of pole beans are starting to come up.

Some of the plants have already been destroyed by an unidentified critter.

Very unfortunate.

Also unfortunate is that something got into the terrace garden in the last 48 hours and munched off the top couple of feet of many of my thornless raspberry plants, which I've spent years encouraging. Based on the height of the browse line it almost has to be deer damage, which has never been an issue here before.

In happier news, there are a few more spiderworts blooming up by the barn:

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:

Hang in there, little tomato plants!

This last one is not really a garden picture, but under the category "Reasons to Carry a Hand Lens" here is Prunella vulgaris, the very common little "heal-all" plant, growing along one of my paths between paddocks and house:

I hope your gardens are doing well.

~~~~~

update

Lately we've been having rain.

Lots of rain.

For everyone whose gardens or lawns are going totally wild:

I see you.

Most of this happened in one week:

 But! This week we had a forecast of three days in a row with only a minimal chance of rain - yesterday was the third day - and I've tried to make a bit of progress on the many seasonal tasks that are way behind schedule. Not just because of the weather. My Occasional Helper has been unavailable for many of his Tuesday/Thursday visits lately. This means that when he does come, the priority is just the heavy lifting that's piled up; not the seasonal tasks. I'm glad he gets here at all, of course, and he has often stepped up for an unforeseen or unusual task, even if not on his regular workdays, which I'm very, very grateful for. But my gosh, am I ever feeling this gardening season slipping away from me. It's already too late for some of my carefully planned projects, and I've reached a point in my life where "I'll have to get to that next year" doesn't sit well.

Oh well, all I can do is all I can do, and today I am planting beans before the rain that's expected this afternoon, so there's that!

Thank gods for the perennials planted over the years, like this amsonia. It grows naturally in a tidy clump which has helped it remain upright despite all the 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!)

Celebration time: yesterday Moxie and I put up the little screentent again. Now there's a chaise that the biting bugs can not - for the most part - reach. Huzzah!

Since the return of rain is predicted, last night after chores I brought in everything I had dragged outside to air during the Three Magical Days of Dryness. Including all seven drawers from an old wooden dresser. Anything stored in that dresser always smells musty to me, no matter what I've tried. If anyone can suggest a way to get musty smells out of old wooden furniture, please, please share that knowledge! I don't have many storage options in the house, and I don't want to have to turn that dresser into a workshop tool box.

~~~~~

ayran time is here again

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!

~~~~~

today

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.

sketchbook revival

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.)

~~~~~

ai

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.

~~~~~

well sprung

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?

~~~~~

Hazel Catkin

 

Well this is a hard one. On Monday I had to have the vet come out.

The sad result: Hazel Catkin is gone.

She had just turned 6 on March 17th.

The baby of the herd.

Only Bud is younger, by one week.

When Bud was born, big sister Hazel was so sweet to him.

Here's Hazel and mama Azalea on Day 10:

the traditional day for tackling Goat Mountain.

A teenager in Autumn 2021, showing mama her fancy dance moves.

Winter 2023.

As she grew up, Hazel looked more and more like her mama.

As Azalea's last kid, and a single birth, and a doe who was never bred, Hazel has been strongly bonded to Azalea for every moment of her life.

The whole herd is now in disarray and will continue to be for some time.

But it's a pure loss for Azalea.

This will always be one of my favorite photographs:

Hazel, three days old.

Hazel Catkin, I don't know why your time here was so short, 

but I'm glad you always made the most of it.

~~~~~

then and now

That was 10 days ago. It was the third snowfall in two weeks.

This is now:

The bloodroot is up.

And it's cashmere combing time.

'Tis the season of Everything Suddenly and All At Once, and time is getting away from me on a daily basis. But tonight I was determined to at least post a few snaps and say hello before falling asleep.

Hello!

~~~~~

with feathers

We've had two more snowstorms which have been pretty to look at and certainly more comfortable to work in than several days of rain. Now the snow is gone, the rain has stopped for a couple of days, and we've even seen the sun.

But it's been very cold again - in the low 20s when I get up - and windy. 

Biting winds.

Here's a hungry chickadee, back turned to the wind.

Brrrrrrr.

 My birdfeeders have never been busier than in recent months. I haven't totted up how many pounds of feed have been purchased, but I consider the cost to be my Entertainment Budget. And well spent.

Goldfinches are such scrappy little birds. They'd rather argue than eat.

And now the goldfinches are starting to color up. Spring is near.

This little nuthatch was perfectly still for about two minutes.

Lost in thought?

Mourning doves are so colorful.

Understated, but colorful.

Speaking of color...

Fingers crossed the bluebirds will continue to visit a while longer.

~~~~~

happy new year

I've never felt the year turn on January 1st; always in the Autumn. Possibly a remnant of my way-way-back Celtic ancestry.

But last year, April 4th was such a watershed moment it overshadowed the rest of 2024. And the disruption of ordinary life caught a second wave with the shoulder injury in October.

So when I woke up yesterday and thought "April 4th...that seems like a significant date..." it only took a split second to remember why.

Update: the barn has still not been brought back to original condition, but most of the parts that have been replaced are much better-built than the original. So it's a matter of taking the rough with the smooth. (Oh, a bit of humor there, since the barn is built of roughcut lumber.) The barn served most of it's purpose fairly well through the Winter. Now that it's Sort Of Spring, there is plenty of time for more work to be done on the barn before next Winter.

It's so much harder to get things built or rebuilt when I can do almost none of the work myself these days. I just have to accept that, I suppose.

That last sentence suggests that I have not accepted it, doesn't it? Oh well. Anyway.

Since the 4th of April 2024 was such a dramatic day, I've decided to look at yesterday, April 4th 2025, as a turning of the year. Why not? Happy New Year, blogpals!

I rarely make New Year's Resolutions, and don't need to do so now because since the shoulder injury on October 8th, there has been a great deal of rethinking what I'm doing and how I'm doing it, mostly in small, everyday things. And small changes have been made, so...functional resolutions, one might say. 

All that's left to do now is to celebrate!

~~~~~

triangle

Today is the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, which left 146 dead. Ultimately, the Triangle fire was a major catalyst for changes in US labor laws.

It's difficult to write about this, not only because it was a heart-hollowing tragedy, but because of the complexity and sheer volume of contemporary accounts. Once I started reading, it was difficult to stop. 

A summary from the Cornell website, which was my starting point:

The fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

This incident has had great significance to this day because it highlights the inhumane working conditions to which industrial workers can be subjected. To many, its horrors epitomize the extremes of industrialism.

The tragedy still dwells in the collective memory of the nation and of the international labor movement. The victims of the tragedy are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed.

The anniversary of the Triangle fire is marked with events each year, and this year I signed up for a project organized by Tatter. One hundred and forty-six volunteers each embroidered the name and age of one victim on a piece of white fabric. The individual pieces were then stitched together by other volunteers at Tatter, to be displayed as a banner during the annual commemorative event at the site of the fire.

As suggested by the Tatter organizers, I tried to learn a bit about Yetta Rosenbaum to personalize her embroidered panel. She had been in the US for 3 years and 9 months, so I began with her hometown (in current-day Ukraine) and soon got lost in its very complex history. Moving forward, I found maps and street photographs of the lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, and marked the routes Yetta could have taken to the factory. Did she take a streetcar? Or if the weather was nice, or she needed to economize, did she walk? Did she ever catch a glimpse of the Washington Arch before entering the factory? Was she excited when a movie theatre opened in 1910, right down the street from her home at 308 East Houston?

It's a fine line between feeling sympathy for a person one has never known, and feeling empathy for an imagined version of a person one can never know.

Many bits of documentation I found about Yetta Rosenbaum - even her age (21 or 22) and the spelling of her name - were contradicted by another account. Which is why I'm not including all those bits which would certainly add dimension but possibly with false colors. Does it matter? I'm not a 1911 reporter, repeating gruesome details and selling newspapers. Nor am I participating in the subsequent legal proceedings, presenting information with the sole intent to blame or exonerate. But when I found myself imagining the walk to the factory, I felt I was crossing a line into creating a fictional person, not learning more about the real woman who travelled to America and worked long hours at a factory and who died, tragically and horribly, at a very young age.

In fact, I cannot know much about that real woman.

But at least I can say her name.

~~~~~

sticks and string

"Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises."

- Elizabeth Zimmermann

The self-striping yarn above is "Bullfinch" from the British Birds series created by West Yorkshire Spinners. The socks were made BSD (before shoulder dislocation) for a special New Years gift, then not mailed til February 22nd because I got ridiculously derailed trying to find the card (a painting from Yosemite) specifically intended to accompany the socks. After I finally put them in the mail (with a different card, an ink drawing of one of my daylilies), they were bounced up and down the eastern seaboard for a week before arriving at their destination, 50 miles east of my house.

Here are the next British Birds cast on as soon as I could start knitting again PSD (post shoulder dislocation) in mid-January:

"Wood Pigeon." They've got some pretty birds in Britain, haven't they?

And here's the waffle-stitch leg of one of the socks I'm knitting now: "Owl." If you've never seen self-striping yarn, there's a peek at the skein beneath the zipper:

This yarn series has become a favorite since I discovered the "Mallard" and "Pheasant" colors a few years ago. There are still a few more British Birds I may knit with someday, including Kingfisher and Green(!) Woodpecker.

The sock pattern (using the word loosely) I've come up with for simple distraction knitting: a ribbed cuff in either the stripes or a contrasting solid, a cushy waffle-stitch leg, a slipstitch heel (striped or contrasting), and a smooth stockinette foot. The toe design varies: a star toe (as in both pairs above) if there's a chance I'll have to rip it back to resize the sock post-gifting and/or if I want to have stripes right to the end; a grafted/kitchener toe otherwise.

Here's a close view of one of my favorite things about knitting socks:

After making the 90-degree "turn" at the bottom of the heel, three directions of stitches blend the heel and the foot together in a continuous fabric. It's so functional and elegant.

I imagine there's a lot of "through all crises" knitting going on these days. Not exclusively in the US but we're doing our share. At least I hope we are. It's a productive  form of distraction. From pain, from sleeplessness, from worry.

Emphasis on "productive."

Onward.

~~~~~