Life Begins at Sixty-Five

Philanthropist

2010-07-22T14:46:00.000-04:00

I hadn't known of Julius Rosenwald until today when I visited the Montclair Art Museum's exhibit, A Force for Change, which features work by the recipients of the grants provided by him during the 20's, 30's and 40's.

The Rosenwald Fellows, all from the south and mostly (but not all) African-American could be compared to today's McArthur fellows. The grants were just one thousand dollars, but that amount went a long way toward allowing artists the freedom to work and study without financial pressure.

No photos were allowed but I also enjoyed seeing the work being done by children in the summer art camp downstairs. Much of it was based on or inspired by the Rosenwald Fellows' work.

Here, for example, (from the catalog), is a clay head by William Ellsworth Artis:

And here's the childrens' work:

And here's more of what the kids have been doing. Good stuff!

Oh dear

2010-07-17T18:48:00.001-04:00

You can see how parched the garden is after the drought and heat wave.

But look again:

Bambi begone! And where'd you come from anyhow???

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Tool libraries

2010-07-14T20:32:00.003-04:00

One of my many favorite blogs is the Tiny House Blog which celebrates tiny hand-made houses.

Today's post describes the building of this roughly cylindrical wooden "prairie schooner" on wheels, built by amateurs for under $2000 in under four months. What particularly got my attention was the mention that all the tools were borrowed from a local "tool library".

What a great idea! I googled "tool library" right away only to learn, sadly, that I live in a state that doesn't have such a thing. I guess my homebuilding days will have to wait.

The Meadowlands

2010-07-13T10:16:00.001-04:00

Current read. Brilliant writing, subject so close-to-home familiar yet so exotic. First sentence sucks you in as he describes boarding a Secaucus-bound bus at Port Authority equipped as for a wilderness hike.

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Paper sculpture

2010-07-09T22:42:00.001-04:00

Captivated this morning by the sprawling organic paper sculpture in the Amthropologie windows:

Later I get an email promoting a show at the New York Studio School:

Synchronicity I guess.

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Uncle!

2010-07-06T13:07:00.001-04:00

It's going to be 104 today, so i hear. Guess it's finally time to give up and turn on the AC. But why is it that setting the thermostat at 80 feels normal and comfortable? If I turned the heat up to 80 in the winter I'd be roasting! For winter, 67 or 68 feels about right. But if I were to turn the AC down that low right now I'd be freezing to death.

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2010-07-04T21:28:00.000-04:00

Getting much more control now. Understanding how to use layers and opacities and manipulate the various "brush" types. Addictive!

Brushes again

2010-07-03T19:44:00.001-04:00

Well it's not that easy. But i had to try. And I'm starting to get the hang of it. Like any software program you just have to buckle down and figure it out. So that's what I've been doing. Baby steps. Practice!

Supposedly Hockney did lots of his paintings before he got out of bed in the morning. So I tried that.

The dark vertical is the bedpost. I think i may erase it. Or maybe just lighten it up Easy to do.

Later I went and sat in McDonalds and did some quick sketches of people. One of the virtues of phone-sketching is that nobody knows you're doing it. It looks as if you're checking your email. I like that.

I don't have a link handy but on the New Yorker website there is a weekly fingerpainting blog by Jorge Columbo, including little videos of the process, which is a part of the software. They seem to me to be more magical than instructional. Worth a look.

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Brushes

2010-07-02T20:32:00.001-04:00

Boy am I ever late to the party. First of all I just started reading The Economist - my new favorite magazine for news and current events. It was on their website that I read about how David Hockney - one of my all-time favorite artists - had been "painting" with an iPhone.

He has since moved on to the iPad. This is all old news to the rest of the world, but it inspired me to download the Brushes app (he preferred the simpler original version) to see what it was all about.

It's a virtual cult. There's a special Brushes section on Flickr. At leat two New Yorker covers were created with it. Where have I been?

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Little Saigon?

2010-06-16T14:22:00.001-04:00

Nope. Just a quick lunch at home. I often get a craving for one of these refreshing Vietnamese salads. So I figured it was time to learn to make them. I'm pretty happy with my first effort.

It's easy to improvise. You need some cooked and cooled rice noodles of some kind. Something green and crisp - lettuce is fine. Some cucumber slices are good to throw in. And some fresh herbs. I used basil, mint, chives and Vietnamese coriander - all from the garden. The "Everyday Pickled Carrots" from the book pictured are essential. I used a good handful of these:

Mix equal parts white vinegar and sugar (3/4 c each) and add 1 1/2 c water and 1 tsp salt. Cook 3-4 m to dissolve the sugar. Cool, then add 3/4 lb grated carrots (use food processor for this). Set aside 20-30 m. Keeps up to five days in fridge.

The protein can be anything or nothing. I had a little grassfed flatiron steak that I brushed with a mixture of soy and fish sauce and hoisin and grilled.

Other ingredients that I could have included: fresh lime, roasted peanuts, Ginger, bean sprouts, hot peppers in some form....another time!

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Monet

2010-06-15T09:40:00.001-04:00

Spectacular show of Monet paintings at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. Such a striking change from the early smaller and more controlled works (c1907-1909) to the later (1916-1919) much larger and more exuberant pieces. Worrh a special trip.

Chelsea always offers serendipitous art. Right next door was this:

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New shoes

2010-06-14T12:11:00.001-04:00

Arche - my favorites. From eBay. Just arrived! My kind of shopping.

Outside.

Inside.

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Bargain

2010-06-12T14:23:00.001-04:00

If this thing actually works it will have been twenty-five cents well spent.

Cheerios

2010-05-30T22:07:00.004-04:00

I've barely mentioned the youngest family member. Here he is, playing tiddly-winks with the last few Cheerios... What a cutie!

Note that the video was taken on daughter H's iPhone, emailed to me, then transferred by me from the email to Blogger. Isn't technology (when it works) amazing!

Van Vleck Tennis Court Garden

2010-05-30T19:11:00.000-04:00

Still struggling with getting photos to post from the Mac. These were done using Picasa as an intermediary. There must be a simpler way!

The formal garden that occupies the site of the Van Vleck family tennis court must be one of the town's best kept secrets.

Fine with me if it stays that way.

The little trees that anchor each quadrant seem to be rhododendron standards of some kind. Fitting, since rhododendrons are the theme of the garden as a whole.

Looking toward the wisteria-covered arbor. I imagine that was for the tennis spectators once upon a time. A lovely place.

Harvest

2010-05-29T21:32:00.002-04:00

As part of the ongoing lawn reduction program, a large round strawberry bed was created last year in the back yard, at the bottom of the steps to the deck. The broken bluestones from the sidewalk repair were used to create a path through the middle.

Today - my first harvest! Delicious.

A cool saw

2010-05-27T15:03:00.001-04:00

Both neighbors are having their houses painted. On the west I'm being subjected to the noise of an extremely loud radio. It's a one man operation and it's been going on for several months now. I'm used to it.

The job on the east just started this morning. There's a big crew and one of the first tasks was to clear away a lot of overgrown shrubbery. What got my attention was the battery-powered saw the guy was using, which made very fast work of it all.

The photo you see was snapped through the window above my desk. Later, when I was outside, I asked the guy about it. It's a Ryobi from Home Depot, and it has interchagable "bits" that allow it to do other things. He even showed me how to use it.

I think i need one of those!

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Gardening by mail

2010-05-26T10:56:00.001-04:00

Feast or famine, right? No posts for months then two, back to back. Well I was on my way to check things out on the garden, which, by the way, is looking remarkably spiffy so far, when I spotted the Bluestone package by the door.

You know about them, I hope? They're somewhere in Ohio and they have an enormous inventory of perennials and shrubs - more every year. And right now they're having their famous 50% off sale.

The plants? Well the three-pack is the impossible to find verbena bonariensis that I've been lusting for. It's going to send little lavender flowers on almost invisible wiry four foot stems floating airily over the roses.

The other is clematis terniflora, or sweet autumn clematis. I had almost been WISHING for a nice dead tree for it to wander through when - ta da - the redbud at the base of the hill in back chose to oblige.

Won't that look cool?

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Running out of excuses

2010-05-26T08:47:00.002-04:00

Well, maybe it is finally time for me to get back on the blogging bandwagon. Not only is it a cinch on the new iPhone, but an even newer shiny white MacBook has replaced the clunky old Dell. Plus there's another blogging daughter to keep up with now:

http://isabelbreeze.blogspot.com/

Take a look, especially if you want to know about what's hip in Austin and environs. I'll add her to the blogroll as soon as I remember how. If she can take photos like that with the iPhone just imagine what she'll do when she gets herself a "real" camera!

I mentioned the Boston party. Of course visiting the Newton gang in the new This Old House (speaking of blogging daughters!) was part of the agenda. There was a baseball game to watch, and a soccer game, and a most delightful afternoon spent at the De Cordova Museum in nearby Lincoln.

Uh oh! I was about to show you a photo or two. But uploading from iPhoto to Blogger seems to be a little tricky. How do I figure out what the file name is?? I'm sure it will be easy as pie once I work it out. Patience!!

Time freeze

2010-05-24T23:24:00.002-04:00

It's been almost 5 years since I started this blog. Do the math. I'm not sixty-five any more. But I'm still here! This year all of my college classmates are "celebrating" a Big Birthday. It's not an official reunion year, but we decided to take action. There was a party in Boston, and another smaller one in New York. I went to both of them. Some observations:

If you are married to a gazillionaire, subtract fifteen years from your real age.

We are survivors, those of us who remain. It's as simple as that. Many of us who didn't know each other 50 years ago feel close simply because of having shared those four years in the same place. I mentioned to one person: we (my roommates and I) were a little afraid of you and your roommates. You wore black. You went out in the night to mysterious destinations. She laughed. I suspect we will become closer.

For me, the Boston party was more about reconnecting with old friends. The New York party was more about making new ones. Good things, both.

A trick

2010-03-15T00:56:00.000-04:00

What can't this iPhone do, anyhow? Well, WRITING, for one thing, is a little subpar. Oh, I'm plenty used to one-finger typing on the tiny keyboard, and the self-correcting that goes on is remarkable (it "learns" what you are apt to type, and sort of fixes things as you go along). Still, long blog posts aren't as apt to happen.

Unless... well here's something to try. I can type what I intend to say in an email on the clunky old laptop - just as I'm doing now. Then I can send it to myself and open it in the iPhone. This will be practically instantaneous. Then all I have to do is PASTE the text of the email into the iPhone blog software.

Tada!

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Wind

2010-03-13T22:31:00.001-05:00

Winds are howling, roof is leaking. Power is out all over town. It was a good day to stay inside and play with a grandbaby who is learning to walk.

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Mirage

2010-03-12T22:02:00.001-05:00

Having a hard time putting down this fascinating and well-written book - about Napoleon and his 1798 invasion of Egypt with fifty thousand troops and 150 engineers, doctors, and scientsts.

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East West Market

2010-03-12T19:03:00.001-05:00

Quick stop for Asian vegetables on the way home from bridge.

I really ought to buy fish there too. Just that it's a bit daunting

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Looks like it's about time ...

2010-03-10T11:14:00.001-05:00

...to tackle some of that garden clean-up.

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Senior ticket?

2010-03-09T12:10:00.000-05:00

Um - no thanks.

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A little taste of what's ahead

2010-03-09T12:01:00.001-05:00

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Good old cornstarch - ice cream?

2010-03-07T15:19:00.001-05:00

Does any one even make good old cornstarch pudding any more? It was certainly a staple of my childhood , but I barely remember making it for my own family.

What brought me back to it was reading Mark Bittman's suggestion that it could easily pinch hit as an ice cream

base -as a substitute for the richer, more traditional egg yolk base.

What a revelation!

It works perfectly. I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for vanilla pudding using 1/2 half and half and 1/2 "skim plus" milk.

Freezing it in these little individual cups was my own idea. Easy portion control.

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There may be no stopping me now

2010-02-19T18:34:00.000-05:00

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Testing

2010-02-19T18:14:00.000-05:00

Is this actually going to work? Sitting here at the bookstore playing with a new toy...

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Neti Pot

2010-01-30T18:11:00.003-05:00

If there's anything good about getting older, it might be that you don't seem to catch as many colds, since there's a point where you've pretty much had them all. Maybe that's why I might be one of the last people on the planet to learn about the Neti Pot.

Some of you already know about how it's a little pitcher that you fill with lukewarm salt water (any kind of salt - just no iodine or additives). You just poke the spout attractively into one of your nostrils, lean over the sink, sort of downward and sideways, and pour the solution in so that it drips right out through the OTHER nostril. Presto! Like being able to wash out the inside of your head!

There are lots of easy to find YouTube videos that explain and demonstrate this better than I can. But aside from making you (you with a cold, that is) feel instantly MUCH better, it can prevent the cold from becoming a sinus infection. Also it can be important to use when you think your immune system has been compromised, such as having been on a plane, or a crowded subway in flu season, or in a room full of people sneezing. It washes those nasty germs right out before they can "take hold"!

I got a really ugly plastic one from CVS. You can get artful ceramic ones. Or official Himalayan ones. Or one of the videos I watched shows a kid just using a funnel - once you get the idea that you just need a way to channel salt water through your sinus cavity you can pretty much do as you please.

I'm happy to have learned a new trick, and the cold is pretty much history now.

ipad envy

2010-01-27T17:49:00.003-05:00

Judging from the buzz, I guess I'm in the minority. I think the new ipad gizmo sounds great! I've held off on getting a smartphone because for me it would just be a toy. I don't really need ANY kind of phone, much less a smart one, but I do love the idea of the 3G connectivity.

There's a lot of joking about the name. It does seem that the product will be more useful to women than to men, since most of us already lug around some kind of bag that the ipad would easily slip right into. Guys, on the other hand, are more used to sticking stuff in their pockets, no?

People are compaining that there's no camera included. But I already have a perfectly good camera! And I ought to be able to load photos onto this thing pretty easily, right?

I have been waiting a while to figure out how to completely re-vamp my electronic life. I have a land-line phone that I rarely use; but I need it for the DSL internet connection. On top of that, I pay a monthly charge to my ISP. All this being said, my laptop is slow and frustrating to use - defintely time to upgrade to something else. (Ongoing excuse for sparse blog posts - they take TIME!) My cell phone is really just for emergencies (though free on weekends); for that I pay a minimum fee. No cable here, because there's no TV. My favorite gizmo to date is the little portable DVD player that lives under my pillow. I can envision a future where the ipad is my ONLY computer, the land-line phone is a thing of the past, and maybe I upgrade the cell in some way? Remains to be seen how it might all work, but I'm optimistic.

I think it's all right down my minimalist alley.

Freezer housekeeping

2010-01-26T14:02:00.000-05:00

Everyone tells you to label and date everything you put into the freezer, right? But then what? How do you keep it all from getting LOST in there? It's a little premature for me to post this, since it just happened yesterday, and this is FAR from the final resolution. But I do think these baskets (5.99 at the Container Store) are going to help me keep things in rough categories. At the very least, I can pull out each one and rummage through it. And there won't be stuff getting lost in the back.

I suppose that if most of your freezer contents are of the commercial packaged variety - neat boxes that stack - there would be less need for this. But I'm a saver of dribs and drabs - things that make cooking easier and less wasteful. Cubes of pesto and lemon juice. Blobs of caramelized onions, sauteed mushrooms. Bits of leftover wine to deglaze a pan. Chopped herbs. Single servings of brown rice, various legumes (a snap to do in the Crockpot) and pasta (don't knock this til you've tried it).

Most of the top shelf consists of various forms of animal protein. For the last two months I've been working through this, trying to get it used up. You can see I still have a long way to go. Reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals made me aware as never before of the evils of factory farming. So I'm not buying any meats or poultry that aren't from small-scale sustainable sources - and even these I expect to cut way back on. Still, it doesn't seem right to discard what I already have, does it?

Why didn't I do this thirty years ago?

Books

2009-12-09T10:46:00.002-05:00

Today is the monthly meeting of the Read What You Want Book Club (not its official name!) so I need to review my recent reading and try to organize my thoughts. I missed last month - so there's a little more than usual to deal with. Here's the essense of my "report".

Fiction:

Generosity, an Enhancement - by Richard Powers. I've always considered myself to be a huge Powers fan, and will continue to read whatever he writes. Maybe my sort of lukewarm reaction to this was colored by James Wood's New Yorker piece, where he suggests that there is something a little too formulaic about his books?

Invisible - by Paul Auster. Ditto, in a way. I always THINK I love Auster while I'm in the midst of it, but at the end, it's sort of - wait! - what was that all about anyhow?

Push - by Sapphire. The book behind the movie "Precious", which I haven't yet seen. This is an astonishing read. Not to be missed.

Time Will Darken it, by William Maxwell. I didn't really discover Maxwell until the last couple of years. He would have been a contemporary of my father's, and grew up in a nearby Illinois town which he frequently writes about, as he does here. Maybe this connection is what I feel so strongly in this work? A quiet, funny, sad, insightful and wonderful book.

Leap Year, by Peter Cameron. A comedy of manners. NY yuppies in the late eighties, and a precocious 4-year old girl who has to be one of the best children in fiction ever. I wasn't familiar with Cameron - a friend recommended this. I look forward to reading more.

A Pugilist at Rest. Thom Jones. Short stories. Unusual, great writing.

Non-Fiction:

Born Round, by Frank Bruni. Hadn't really planned to read this, but it jumped into my hands from the fifty cent table at the library. Superficially it's about his lifelong battle with food addiction and fat. But wait - he's only 44 - and what a life he's had! This is also the story of a "golden boy" who had every advantage. You end up wanting to know what he'll do next.

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers. I'd call this a must-read for everyone. The true story of a Syrian-American painting contractor and his nightmarish, Kafkaesque experience with Hurricane Katrina.

The Bolter, by Frances Osborne. A history of the author's great (great?) grandmother, Idina Sackville - outrageous, glamorous, rich, promiscuous, careless - but also, in some ways, a sympathetic character. Much of her life was spent in Kenya, in the "Happy Valley" - where her group of impossibly spoiled friends and lovers cavorted and caroused in the 1920's.

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. I will mention this amazing book only in passing since I think just about everyone else in the group read it several years ago. Larson juxtaposes the story of a psychopathic killer with the story of the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder. Remarkable story of Deogratias, a medical student who flees the horrific civil war in his native Burundi and arrives in New York with $200 and not a word of English, or any human contacts.

Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder. This is the story of the incredible Boston physician and anthropologist, Paul Farmer, and his humanitarian work in Haiti and Peru and elsewhere. There is a tie to the previous book (Deogratias ultimately asks for his help in Burundi) and it's an unfinished story. Farmer's work continues.

Cancer Vixen, by Marisa Acocella Silvetti. Slim, fashionista, successful New Yorker cartoonist about to be married to the guy of her dreams is diagnosed with breast cancer. And she has no insurance! This is a graphic novel about her experience - sparing no detail.

How Not to Act Old, by Pamela Satran. A quickie - and an ongoing blog. Hilarious.

Current:

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The case for vegetarianism, and against factory farming. I'll perhaps speak about this later, when I've finished it.

Remontant Irises

2009-11-14T13:03:00.005-05:00

I don't grow irises; that's my excuse for not knowing before about these "remontant" , or re-blooming ones, some of which, apparently bloom in November.

A little like having fresh raspberries in March. I can't decide whether or not I approve!

Megabus

2009-11-14T11:18:00.002-05:00

I wanted to do a quick up-and-back to Newton to view a day of This Old House filming - my last chance, since they're wrapping up next week. A lot of driving for such a short trip, so it seemed like a great time to try the Megabus. Here's how it works: you go on line and tell it what day you want to go, and where. It tells you what's available and how much. At first, for any route, all seats are $1. As the bus begins to fill, the price begins to go up, but I think that it doesn't go past $20. From NY it comes and goes from Penn Station, which makes for a super convenient train connection for me. Clean, fast, and straightforward. Plenty of people were taking advantage of the free wi-fi, and there were electric outlets at every seat. Megabus, I know I haven't seen the last of you!

Jamie's Secret

2009-10-08T12:15:00.005-04:00

Today's NYT gives us a sneak peek at an article on celebrity chef Jamie Oliver that will be in the weekend magazine section. The piece describes Jamie's visit to a West Virginia town that's statistically the unhealthiest in the US. He's there to try to get people to learn how to cook.

But there's an interesting subtext: Jamie was an abysmally poor student - dyslexic, and always in the "special needs" group. Almost magically - perhaps because he was able to help out in his father's pub - he discovered his interest in food, and (the article mentions somewhere) is now - as the result of TV shows, books, restaurants - worth over $65 million.

The simple lesson he provides? Know what you're good at and stay away from what you're bad at. That's it. Food for thought.

The prescient cook

2009-09-28T13:46:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you start cooking with the idea of using up random stuff that you have on hand and you can just tell, before it's even halfway done, that it's going to be good.

Here's what I did: Sauteed a lot of sliced fresh mushrooms in a little butter and olive oil in big deep cast iron pan. Tossed in a couple of blobs of frozen caramelized sliced onions (I prepare batches of these - just cook onions slowly til they have a rich, brown color - and freeze in "blobs" on foil, then wrap the blobs individually in plastic and put in a ziploc bag). Stirred in what was left of my big bag of frozen chopped spinach (quite a lot) and a well-drained large can of wild salmon. Stirred it around a bit and seasoned (being careful with the salt as the salmon I used was quite salty).

Meanwhile I am cooking a big batch of brown basmati rice. When it's done I'll stir in as much of it as seems right, then I'll mix it all together and put it in a pan and grate some swiss cheese over the top. A few minutes in the oven or under the broiler should be enough to finish it off.

Almost sounds like something Betty Draper might cook, doesn't it? Except, come to think of it, she'd have used Minute Rice, and I think that frozen vegetables only came in those little rock-hard rectangular packages then. Oh, and I suppose canned cream of mushroom soup might have been involved. Well, progress!

Where were you in 62?

2009-09-28T10:59:00.005-04:00

Like quite a few others I am mad about Mad Men, though (also like quite a few others) I came late to the scene. I saw seasons 1 and 2 on DVD from the library, and am going to have to catch up on Season 3 as time permits at the kids' house (they have one of those fancy TV's that let you save stuff).

I graduated from college in 62, and then worked in Manhattan that summer and fall in magazine publishing and advertising. Revisiting this time through the eyes of those who weren't even born (to them it might as well be a 1776 costume drama, I keep thinking!) is pretty heady. Yes, people DID drink and smoke like that! Yes, women WERE treated that way. Worse, we accepted it. assumed that it was OK!

Last night I watched American Graffiti for the first time. Don't ask me why (OK I'll tell you - I had recently seen Francis Coppola's wonderful film, The Conversation, and had been curious about his other early work. ) Coppola produced American Graffiti because George Lucas (himself still an unknown, before Star Wars) needed a "name" attached to the project. Coppola had just made The Godfather. Harrison Ford has such a small part in this film that he doesn't even get a mention in the star credits. Richard Dreyfus was unknown. Suzanne Somers is on screen for about ten seconds. Ron Howard had to audition for his part.

I loved this movie. Though it took place in 1962, it is really about the end of the fifties - just as Mad Men (so far) is. This is the high school perspective. But it's just as real to me. Almost as in the Peanuts cartoon, adults barely appear.

It's about cruising, which is what teenagers did in the fifties and very early sixties. Oh how I remember that! Driving with a carful of friends through the Steak-n-Shake lot just to see who was there! Then deciding to go check out the OTHER Steak'n'Shake. This involved driving back down Main Street, another chance to see who was there, and with whom. How important it all seemed!

Another world.

Looking for Josephine

2009-09-22T17:29:00.004-04:00

Saw this charming musical revue at Montclair State College over the weekend. Loved it!

Hoppel Poppel

2009-09-21T22:23:00.004-04:00

In the September Gourmet (page 20, if it's handy) there's a photo of something called "Hoppel Poppel", apparently a Wisconsin breakfast specialty. I figured it was another of those strange Wisconsin food things that the rest of us know little or nothing about - things like brats, Kopps, supper clubs, fish fries, cheese curds ....

Benji's, the Milwaukee deli where it was photographed for the magazine, sounded as if it might be pretty close to Supermom's house, so I asked her about it She knew the deli, but not the dish.

Anyhow, it was on my mind, and it got to be dinnertime. Benji's provides a recipe, both for the regular and deluxe versions, so I didn't really have to improvise. Really, it's just a skillet of fried onions and potatoes and salami chunks with some eggs scrambled in at the end. But the salami wasn't going to happen. Would bacon work? I always have cooked bacon in the freezer (but that's another post).

Here's my adaptation:

Cut a red potato in big chunks and nuke, covered, in a little water for 5 minutes, or til cooked. Meanwhile, fry half a roughly chopped or sliced onion in a little olive oil. When soft, add half a yellow pepper, sliced, and 3 or 4 mushrooms, sliced. By now the potatoes should be done, so drain them and add to the pan, continuing to cook a few minute more til everything seems done and the potatoes have browned nicely. Now stir in a couple of cooked bacon slices cut in biggish pieces and a big handful of frozen chopped spinach (straight out of the big bag in the freezer). As the spinach cooks, season with salt and pepper to taste. Now whisk together 2 eggs with a little salt and add them to the pan to scramble among all the rest of the stuff. That's it! Have a slice of whole wheat toast on the side to provide a little texture contrast. Serves one hungry person or two regular ones.

I'm adding this to the "see again" list.

Woodchuck

2009-09-09T22:35:00.005-04:00

I suppose I'll remember this summer (to distinguish it from others) as the summer of the woodchuck. I think I brought on the troubles myself, by thinking I could plant a few vegetables near the front door where they'd be safe. We've had woodchucks for as long as I can remember, but they have always, until now, stayed out back. That's where their holes are - far from the house, near the glen.

The broccoli shoots were growing nicely, along with the chard and tomatoes, interspersed prettily with the herbs and flowers. Until one day they weren't. They were gone. Eaten to a stubble. And that was when I spotted, from my bedroom window, a woodchuck peering out from the hole he'd made by removing a few loose bricks in my front steps.

It was hard to explain the problem to the masons I called for estimates. Was there a danger of sealing the animals IN, in the course of repairs? Should I try to get rid of the woodchuck FIRST? But then how do I know another won't appear? And how many are there anyhow? I had a few nightmares about woodchucks destroying the foundation, getting into the house....

Ultimately the woodchuck was dispatched, and the steps repaired. Plenty of his brethren remain. And they're getting bolder. I saw one just today outside this window, in the neighbors' driveway. I'm told it would be hopeless to think of getting rid of them permanently, living, as I do, adjacent to woodland.

But it's safe to say that my broccoli-growing days are over.

Notes from the kitchen: crepes redux

2009-09-02T12:26:00.003-04:00

I didn't do much cooking this summer. (Summer? What summer?) Anyhow, maybe it's the Julia thing, but I've made a few things worth noting. I started to describe them in one long post, but it began to look a little daunting, so I've decided to break it up. Blog readers are said to have short attention spans.

This morning, crepes. I've written about those before, but A NYT article opened my eyes to an entirely new technique. Before: scrounge around for the recipe, then put the stuff in the blender. Then wait the requisite half hour for the flour to "rest". Now: no recipe, no blender, no resting. Just whisk an egg or two (one egg is fine for one person) in a small bowl, then whisk in flour to make a smooth paste - about 1/2 cup is about right per egg. Half can be whole wheat for a nice nutty version. But no need to measure. Now the flavorings: a pinch of salt, and, for a sweet versioin, a teaspoon or so of sugar and a little vanilla. Now thin it out with milk til it's a perfectly smooth thin batter. I didn't even have any milk so I used a little cream to get it started, then finished with water (!!!).

Now, to cook:. Get your crepe pan (I used my official French iron one) hot, and add a knob of butter. Swirl it around for a second, then dump the blob INTO THE BATTER, and stir it in. You have now buttered your pan AND added melted butter to the batter in one fell swoop. Make crepes as usual, using the additional hint (apparently from Jacques Pepin) of putting the blob of batter in the pan at 4 o'clock rather than in the middle. A commenter also brought up Julia's 2-pan technique: when you are ready to turn the first one, turn it over into a second DIFFERENT pan on an adjacent burner (I used my omelet pan), so that you can immediately start another one in the crepe pan. Fast fast fast!

I've been making crepes for nearly 50 years, but this is the best technique yet.

This Old House

2009-09-01T11:18:00.003-04:00

There have been no visits to the kids in Newton for a while. The house is in an uproar, undergoing major renovations. But thanks to the miracle of the webcams, I can check up on things whenever I want.

Webcams? What's with that? It seems they and their house have been chosen as the subjects for the Fall 2009 series of the long-running PBS "This Old House" TV program.

I'm looking forward to checking out the "stairway" webcam on Thursday. That's the day they'll be filming the removal of the existing bookshelf wall on the landing, breaking through to what will be the new "library".

Click here for more information about the project, and daughter G's wonderful blog about the experience. The actual show will air in early October.

DeepLeap

2009-08-31T11:12:00.002-04:00

Heard about this addictive time-waster? A word game that's a cross between scrabble and tetris - you make words out of disappearing tiles. I just played for the first time. Beat my score of 738!

Leaky DSL

2009-08-30T07:03:00.004-04:00

James Thurber wrote of his elderly mother's fear and suspicion that electricity might leak into the house through unused wall sockets.

Strange as it seems, it appears that if you have DSL (internet service that arrives through your telephone line) something similar could be happening. The DSL things (waves? molecules? particles?) don't understand that their only job is to travel efficiently and directly through the wire from the phone jack to the DSL modem. Having DSL means having it ready and available through every phone jack in the house.

I had blamed my lousy phone reception and haphazard, unreliable internet service on a long-ago lightning bolt. Cursed the phone company for not being able to fix it. It was my nephew in Oklahoma who casually asked whether I had a DSL filter.

A what? How is it possible that a little plastic gizmo attached to the end of a phone cord at the OTHER END OF THE HOUSE has made such a dramatic difference? It can only be that the DSL is no longer "leaking" out of that other jack. I'm sure of it.

Julia and eggs

2009-08-30T02:00:00.003-04:00

Surprise! I am back! Not that it's likely anyone's around to notice. I won't make excuses for the long absence except to say that part of the problem has had to do with iffy computer behavior which (too soon to say for sure) MAY now be a thing of the past.

Anyhow. Went to see the wonderful movie Julie and Julia the other day and it has sent me to revisit the old cookbooks, including the original 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking that I learned to cook from in those newlywed days of 1964 and 65 in Brooklyn (not so different from Julie in the movie, except that I certainly never attempted to make EVERYTHING!).

More importantly, I now see that many of the original French Chef TV programs are to be found on-line. Oh, the memories! Take a look at this one, the Egg Show, from 1964 and you who may NOT have seen any of these programs will understand what even today sets Julia apart from all her followers and imitators.

Still here

2008-12-31T16:25:00.003-05:00

Yes, I'm still here.

Time has passed, holidays have come and gone. There was a snowstorm. Now, after three days of blue skies, green grass, and at least one day of sixty-something temperatures, it seems that more snow is on the way. Sporadic huge gusts of wind are causing miscellaneous stuff (stuff that I didn't quite get around to putting away yet, like the lightweight plastic chairs) to fly all over the yard. On the plus side, the winter solstice has passed and the days are getting longer now.

Various holidays have come and gone, as have various daughters and grandchildren. The daughter who lives nearby (that would be H) will be presenting me with grandchild number three - a baby boy - in the very near future. I can't wait! In the meantime she has been afflicted with a rotten cold, requiring much TLC, including vats of lemon ice.

Recent preoccupation: the ipod that Santa brought! I must have been muttering about all the educational content that's available now on-line, through MIT and any number of other places. I had been thinking it would be very cool to be able to listen to these things while "on the go". Still some fine tuning to be done, but yes, this is indeed possible. In the meantime I discover that there is something called "itunesU" - a source of free academic content from all over.

There, for example, I found a terrific series of talks by Umberto Eco - the "Ellman lecture" - given just this past October at Emory University. Any writers who happen to be reading this (you know who you are) would particularly enjoy the first one, called "How I Write". And for the impatient, there's quite a nice summary here.

Lots of reading, much of it worth commenting on, but that's a lot of work and organization, and that kind of writing doesn't come easily to me. December tends to be a time for more cookbook and general recipe browsing than the norm, and I found myself re-reading Laurie Colwin's wonderful two volumes: Home Cooking, and More Home Cooking. In one of them she lets drop: "basically all I do is read". Hey - me too. That made me feel a little less like a complete lump.

Right now I'm making a big vat of her easier-than-easy black bean soup. She invites you to set it on a flame tamer - long a favorite gizmo of my own - and - daringly - LEAVE THE HOUSE for five hours, which I am not doing only because of the aforementioned wind, etc.

My new year's resolution: to be a better and more frequent blogger. We'll see how that works out. A happy 2009 to all!

Carmina Burana

2008-11-10T20:49:00.004-05:00

I'm a random concertgoer at best. It's usually a matter of a friend with an extra ticket. So it was for last Friday's remarkable performance of Carl Orff's cantata, Carmina Burana. I wouldn't have the musical vocabulary to describe such a work - but the rave review (at the link) does it well. You can see the setup in the photo: three vocal soloists in front, facing the audience; behind them, the conductor and the NJ Symphony Orchestra, and in the rear, the chorus, consisting of the combined voices of the Moscow Conservatory Chorus and the Montclair State University Chorale. 266 performers in total. What an undertaking it must have been to coordinate this!

My friend and I were both fighting the sniffles. She went for a cup of chamomile tea at intermission; I sucked maniacally on Cold-Eeze. I was OK until I got home, but spent the next forty-eight hours flat on my back.

Back among the living now, still savoring the memories of that exhilarating experience.

Dewey Defeats Truman

2008-11-05T13:18:00.002-05:00

Yes, I was only eight, but we were Trib readers and I remember the headline, and my midwestern father's horror when the error was revealed (even though he had briefly, in his youth, been an FDR democrat). Nobody thought Truman could win. I think that's why nobody has dared to call this race in advance, even when it seemed impossible to be wrong.

I couldn't vote in the 1960 election (you had to be twenty-one then, and I had just turned twenty) but I remember watching the famous JFK-RMN debate on a rented dorm TV set (TV wasn't at all a part of college life then), and going to see Dick and Pat in a motorcade in downtown Boston. I remember staying up for most of the night to watch the returns (a different rented TV) and feeling disheartened and a little frightened when that young, untested senator had prevailed. What about Qemoy and Matsu? Even in that hotbed of liberalism I was still my father's daughter.

I've voted since 1964 (12 times for President -why does it seem like more?) and I'd have a hard time remembering which candidate I actually voted for in many of those elections. More than once it was for the third-party candidate, or even a "wasted" vote on the Libertarian. I always felt as if I were voting "against" someone, rather than "for" someone.

Yesterday was the first time I can actually remember casting a vote with strong conviction and the fervent hope that my candidate would win. It was a great feeling. And now that he has won, I can participate in the national euphoria - so like the one that followed the 1960 election.

As my ten-year-old granddaughter told her father, while being tucked in (way past her bedtime), "now I understand why you wanted us to stay up".

Where has the time gone?

2008-10-29T22:51:00.003-04:00

When you haven't blogged for a while, it's hard to know where to start. It has been, and continues to be, a beautiful fall.

Just back from a good weekend with the kids in Boston. The usual gamut from the sublime (fabulous dinner with the whole gang at Blue Ginger, Ming Tsai's restaurant in Wellesley) to the ridiculous (spending an entire day sorting through 935,778 teensy and totally mixed up Legos -first separating by color and then transforming them into a fleet of helicopters, ambulances, fire trucks, various vehicles, houses....)

Dinner with H&D at Halcyon, the new "seafood brasserie" in Montclair. I don't envy anyone trying to open a new restaurant in this economy, but I predict that this one will endure. Can't wait to go back.

Several worthy NYC adventures. The Morandi show at the Met. The prefab housing at the MOMA. Bryant Park! Former druggie heaven, now one of the most civilized and urbane places in the city. The lunch scene is amazing, fueled by great HEALTHY take-out places that have sprouted up along Sixth Ave and beyond: Wichcraft, Pret a Manger, Pax...

A peaceful day of bridge with friends in Mantoloking - "down the shore".

A lot of good reading. Notably:

Telex from Cuba, by Rachel Kushner. National Book Award finalist, about Americans in Cuba in the fifties. Written from multiple points of view, including children. Outstanding.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande. Thought-provoking essays by MacArthur Fellow.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin. Zimbabwe memoir. Author, who grew up there and lives now in NYC, wrote previous memoir about childhood. In this one he returns to visit aging parents (physician and mining engineer), describes current horrors under Mugabe regime and discover's father's surprising past as a Polish Jew during WWII.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer. Epistolary novel about Channel Island residents who lived under Nazi occupation from 1941 to end of war. Light and charming, despite the grim subject (maybe inappropriately so?).

The Size of the World, by Joan Silber. Glowing review in Boston Globe led me to this one. Six stories that take place across time and space, but with characters who are all linked. I want to read more of this writer's work.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. An Oprah pick now, I see. "Hamlet with hounds", as described by Janet Maslin. I look at dogs differently now. But it's not really about dogs. How will they make it into a movie?

All highly recommended. And there are some others I'll save for another post.

News addiction

2008-10-11T19:43:00.001-04:00

I thought it was just me.

Link to NYT article.

The letters

2008-10-10T20:17:00.009-04:00

Still in need of peace and solace after a rocky week in the news. So here are a few more Adirondack pictures from last week.

A view of the field, from the road.

Same field, but looking toward the lake.

Another glimpse of the water, from down the road.

Here are the original main gates to the house. The driveway is kept mowed, but isn't really used any more.
Approaching from that direction, you'd see the house from this oblique angle. I can spend all day just walking around the house, and up and down the road. I think that by now I've taken hundreds of photographs. Always different, and yet always the same.

But remember those letters? Here we are in the attic. See that big box on the right, behind the wicker chair?

Here's a closer view.
This is the stash of letters I came across last summer. I knew I was going to have to revisit them sooner or later. I believe that they are mostly from the thirties and forties, covering the period when my mother and her sisters were in college (during the depression) and later, starting their families during the war. I assume that the letters are mostly from the three sisters to their mother, my grandmother, and to each other, and possible to Tante, their aunt. But I won't really know til I've managed to sort through them all. Where to begin?

The box is much too heavy to lift. You can see that the letters have been at least roughly sorted into groups, tied with string and ribbon. I finally decided to stuff a bunch of them at random into a black plastic bag and bring them home with me. I can barely lift the bag, and yet the box is still nearly full.

Never having done a project like this, I am not even sure how to begin. Will I want to arrange them chronologically? Or by writer? Or recipient? Subject? Stay tuned.

Stability and continuity

2008-10-06T13:24:00.004-04:00

The Adirondack house provided welcome relief from last week's financial turmoil. Abraham Beecher, my many-times-great-grandfather, walked here from Connecticut and settled here nearly two-hundred years ago. Here are the fields he first cleared, and the stone walls he built. A survivor of wars, depressions, recessions, and more, the place never changes. It is an oasis of calm.

And something good to eat is always in the works. Here's daughter G turning out a batch of doughnuts for Saturday breakfast.

The main project for the weekend: the chicken house. The always hard-working grandkids, C and L, want to turn it into a "bunkhouse" - a place where they and their cousins and friends can hang out. It's been years since there were any chickens in residence, so there are decades of debris to be removed. That's my father's old boat in there. We'll have to find another place for it, I guess.

Bar Pie

2008-10-01T16:21:00.002-04:00

Is this a common term? A New Jersey thing? Another place I could easily walk to (but don't) is the Star Tavern - an institution beloved by many, and believed by some to be the source of New Jersey's best pizza. I can't very well eat a whole one, and they don't sell it by the slice, so I never think of going there. But I had a craving today. And I found out that you can sit at the counter and order a smallish (and cheap!) "bar pie" - perfect! Who knew?

On the way I stopped at the high school recycling bins to load up on more big sheets of flattened corrugated cartons. The next phase of the lawn reduction program will be a large round strawberry bed in the middle of the upper back yard - at the base of the deck. To be planted in the spring. Is this getting out of hand or what?

Degrees of separation

2008-09-15T14:35:00.002-04:00

1. David Foster Wallace's wikipedia entry states:

In The Top Ten (2006), a compilation of "top ten novels" lists by different writers, Wallace named C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as his favorite novel.

2. I've forgotten the source (somewhere on youtube), but when Sarah Palin was asked about books, she claimed her favorite writer was C.S. Lewis.

What are we to make of this?

Steven Johnson

2008-09-13T17:03:00.003-04:00

I've written before about the book club. We don't all read the same book - we read whatever strikes our fancy, then meet to briefly describe what we've read to the others. As one member remarked, it's a little like fourth grade book reports. Part of the deal is that the books are often made available for borrowing by the member/reporters.

So it was that I snagged the three in the photo above.

The one on the far right, "Everything Bad is Good for You", by Steven Johnson, is the only one of the three I've read so far. His premise is that - contrary to expection -there are certain aspects of popular culture that are actually causing a marked and measurable increase in intelligence among the general population. He calls it the Sleeper Curve. To make his point he focuses primarily on video games - the elaborate kind, such as Sim City, and Grand Auto Theft - and television shows - the "multi-threaded" plot kind, such as The Sopranos and 24. He argues that the brainpower needed to understand their complexities is far greater, and of a different sort, than what was needed to play PacMan, or watch the formulaic I Love Lucy, or Leave it to Beaver. It's an easy and convincing read.

I was surprised I hadn't heard of Johnson before, but then I realized that I HAD in fact known about him. I had read rave reviews of his 2006 book about the terrifying 1854 London cholera epidemic, The Ghost Map, and had meant to read it. Now it's on my library reserve list. And there's a new book coming out in December - about JB Priestley and the discovery of oxygen.

Johnson, a champion of urbanism, wrote a provocative series of essays on this topic called Urban Planet in the NYT, also in 2006. Well worth a click.

The eight of us at this meet-up mentioned over forty books. Most of these I won't ever read (mysteries, for example, are not for me). But I'm pleased that Steven Johnson is on my radar now.

A good cookie recipe

2008-09-09T23:57:00.000-04:00

The read-what-you-want book club convenes here tomorrow, and I'll be setting these out. Not sure if you can tell from the hasty photograph, but these cookies are extremely thin and crisp and delicate. The kind that start out as tiny little blobs and spread out like mad while getting all bubbly and caramel-y. Very, very easy. And sort of healthy, because of the oatmeal. Here's the recipe:

Oatmeal Lace Cookies

1 c Rolled oats; quick-cooking
1/4 c All-purpose flour
1/2 ts Salt
1 1/2 ts Baking powder
1 c Granulated sugar
1/2 c Unsalted Butter; softened
1 Egg
1 ts Vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 degrees; cover baking sheets with foil (or use Silpat or equivalent sheets), then coat with nonstick cooking spray.

In a medium bowl, combine the oats, flour, salt and baking powder; mix well with a wire whisk and set aside.

In a large electric mixer bowl, combine the sugar and butter and beat on medium speed to form a grainy paste. Add the egg and vanilla extract; beat until smooth. Add the flour mixture and blend just until combined.

Drop the dough by teaspoonfuls 2 1/2 inches apart onto the cookie sheets. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until the edges begin to turn golden brown. Let cool (this is IMPORTANT - they will be very soft at first), then peel the cookies from the foil with your fingers. Be sure to respray the cookie sheets between batches. (Note: I used Silpat, didn't respray, and nothing untoward happened. Also, I was able to easily remove the cooled cookies with a thin metal spatula - no "peeling" needed.)

I baked the sheets one at a time on the top rack. Watch carefully so they don't get too dark. Makes about 40

Guest photos

2008-09-08T22:38:00.000-04:00

Daughter Z , back in LA, has just iphoned some of the photos she took of the gang.

So it wasn't all synchronized sliding. There was mini-golf, with G sinking impossible putts without ever putting down her purse. L thinks he's in Hawaii. C, newly interested in cooking and modeling her trendy new Hipchic outfit, prepared several wonderful meals for us. Here she's serving a sausage popover to H. Another night G and D took turns at the grill. Later there were Cranium matches - H and L were a formidable team. And checkers. Pigging out at Ginas - twice voted best bakery in NJ, and we could walk there, as well as to the market (middle bottom, taken by L) from H's house. Not shown: brunch at Raymonds, and, best of all, the amazing "helpers" - C and L - attacking my weedy brick path with vinegar, sharp knives, stone dust and a push broom for a truly professional result. Come back any time!

Synchronized sliding

2008-09-08T02:29:00.004-04:00

Can two posts in rapid succession make up for a long silence? Probably not, but I will never be more than an occasional blogger. So - whatever.

Earlier today I had drafted a cranky post that rambled on about how discouraged I was about the garden. The combination of the Adirondack trip, and a long visit from the daughters and grandkids made for too much garden neglect, and neglect is not good for gardens. But then I came across this reassuring post, in which another gardener confesses to having neglected HER garden. Not only that, but a stream of commenters chimed in to confess that they TOO had neglected their gardens. So now I feel better. Isn't that a very good thing about blogs?

Anyhow, I didn't think I had taken ANY photos when the children were here, but when I downloaded the egg pictures I found just this one, which reminded me of one of the favorite activities. Both of them appear here, about to embark on one of many "synchronized slides", with Aunt H "judging" from the sidelines: EIGHT POINT THREE! she would call out. "Eight point three!" C would exclaim to L, and they would swim to their respective ladders, climb to the top, and try again. And again, and again.

I can always catch up with the weeds and the mulch, but who would want to miss a minute of synchronized sliding?

Exotic eggs and locovores

2008-09-08T01:46:00.008-04:00

Does every Whole Foods Store have an exotic egg section? A LOCAL exotic egg section? Well, I already know that the answer is NO, because the smallish one in Montclair doesn't. But here we are in the West Orange megastore, which is much more fun when one is in a wandering, browsing mode, which is me, most of the time.

So - these are cute! Little quail eggs. I can imagine some fancy ways one might use these.

The duck eggs are recommended for baking, and for custards. "Eggier", and a little larger than chicken eggs, apparently. Now these I might actually try.

But check out the ostrich eggs! One egg feeds ten to twelve, they claim - scrambled or in a giant omelet. Hmmm. Would that justify the $40 price tag? I wonder who buys these.

No such goings on at the more pedestrian A&P. Still, it seems everyone wants to buy stuff that's LOCAL. I read not long ago that Walmart (oddly, one store that simply isn't to be found anywhere around here) is now a buyer of local produce on a very large scale. This seems to me to be a very good trend.

A wedding and a discovery

2008-08-27T22:44:00.004-04:00

Did I mention that there had been a wedding at the Adirondack house? Only the second in the history of the house, the first being daughter G's, in 1993. The bride this time is not a family member, but the daughter of the man who has helped maintain the property (plumbing, lawn, general repairs and upkeep) for years. Jim knows more about the house than all the rest of us put together. He knew, of course, that we still had the wooden arbor from G's wedding in the garage. (It's been borrowed for at least one local high school prom, as well. )

Some of us mingled with the invited guests; others (e.g. grandson L and I) decided to stay inside and view the proceedings from this unusual perspective:

A slightly different view from the library window. If we step back a few feet we would be able to see those old magazines, and the newspaper. But what 's that on the windowsill? In the tray. A little set of leatherbound nature and wildlife guides. They've been there pretty much forever, I imagine, but I've never noticed them before.

I pick one up:

And look inside. This was my mother's book! The inscription, in my grandmother's familiar handwriting, reads: "Catharine Justine Sinclaire. Oct 2, 1920. Gloversville, with her own money (received for taking castor oil.)" Notice that the book cost $1.00. I guess that was the going rate for castor-oil-taking in 1920. Seems like a lot!

Mom would have been almost seven then. And the family would be occupying the house for the very first season. Just two days later, baby Clothilde, the youngest daughter, would be born. In the house, of course. The only birth to ever take place on the premises, even now.

I did bring the little book home with me, after double-checking with a few sixty-something cousins. Kind of an unwritten rule, but we don't just TAKE stuff - even now. Maybe especially now. But I'm having second thoughts. Maybe I ought to take it back. What if somebody needs to look up a wildflower?

Back with a digression about sweaters

2008-08-25T23:22:00.005-04:00

As you might have guessed, I've been back for a while. Hiding. But you must know by now how long it takes me to shift gears, and get back into "home" mode. This seems to be particularly true when I visit the Adirondack house, which is not only a physical sort of trip (even though not that far) but - more importantly - a form of TIME travel.

And so much for idle promises. I took almost no photos, and the pastels stayed in their boxes. Worse yet, I didn't revisit the old letters except to ascertain that they were still there, and notice that there were quite a few more similar-looking boxes. One, that I just peeked into, appeared to contain all of my great-grandfather's bank statements and cancelled checks from 1938 and probably before. Things like $2.50 for auto repair.

Sorry, but I just couldn't get into it. I was really more interested, this time, in being around the children, living in the present. And it's not easy to do both. So I just brought down a couple of magazines (randomly chosen from stacks and stacks). A 1927 Vogue. A 1948 House and Garden. I put them casually on the desk in the library, thinking they'd make a nice complement to the 1952 NY Herald Tribune that's been there for years now, though not since 1952. Leafing through them there, I imagined that my grandmother (and others) must have read them when they were new in that very setting.

Except for the cast of characters, which is always shifting, from one set of third cousins to another, the activities and backgrounds stay the same. Children digging in the sand at the beach. Roasting corn off the kitchen porch. Picking blackberries. Playing games in the library (OK, this time it was watching the Olympics). I could post photos that were several years old and nobody would be the wiser. So, in fact, that's what I'll do:

Not all of these photos are related to the Adirondack House. The common theme is my sister, whose last visit was just three years ago, and who died suddenly and unexpectedly barely three months later. The photo in the top right shows the house as it must have appeared in the 1960's, and was taken by her. Until the advent of digital cameras (which never interested her), she was the family photographer, well-known for documenting pretty much everything. There she is with Supermom and the gang in the top middle photo, and in the middle right (in the Adirondack house kitchen. The bottom row photos are all from 2005 (I think), and the middle row (center and left) show her as a teenager and as a brand new college graduate.

Can you see why I might think that she really never aged or changed?

The reason I'm dwellling on all this is that while I was in the Adirondacks, there was an estate sale being held at her home in Wisconsin. Supermom and Quantum Void had taken what they wanted of the "good" things, but there was still a heck of a lot left over. Like EIGHTY shetland and Norwegian-type sweaters. Eighty!? Who knew that my sister was the Imelda Marcos of sweaters?

But then I started to think: most likely some, if not most of those sweaters dated from her high school and college years - maybe even earlier. Not one to follow fashion trends, she had, early on, found a look that suited her and stuck with it. And, since her size never really changed, what reason would she have had to get rid of any of those sweaters? And could you blame her for wanting to add a new one once in a while?

Letters from 1943? Bank statements from 1938? Eighty sweaters doesn't seem so unreasonable. It must be a family thing.

Hiatus

2008-08-08T19:36:00.002-04:00

Taking a blogging break for a while. It's unlikely I'll be able to post from the Adirondack house, though there's always the local library, should there be something urgently blogworthy. I'll be
connecting with family there - daugher, grandchildren, cousins - including two of the very youngest of the new generation, one of whom I haven't yet met. We are so lucky to have this beautiful and unchanging family refuge.

I'm anxious, of course, to get back to that stash of letters in the attic. There won't be any gardening chores, which will seem a little weird in a cold-turkeyish sort of way, especially since I'll be fretting nonstop about what's happening at home. Gardeners really can't just LEAVE! But I'm taking the pastels. And the camera, of course. Oh, and a little spade. You never know what you might want to dig up a little of. Last year it was the variegated bishop's weed. We'll see how it goes.

Jam

2008-08-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

This is the yummy jam I made out of the free peaches, along with a handful of supermarket raspberries. I'll have to keep it in the fridge and use it up fairly quickly, since I didn't have any official canning jars on hand. Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem, though there is quite a lot of it. One thing to note: I didn't bother to peel the peaches, and it didn't seem to be an issue. Nothing at all unpleasant about the texture or the taste. The skins just sort of dissolved, I guess, in the cooking. Another thing: most of the peaches were a bit underripe, but apparently that is a GOOD thing when it comes to jam-making qualities.

Blogging: doing it backwards

2008-08-05T23:27:00.003-04:00

What do I know of blogging, really? I kind of stumbled on it. Some of the first blogs I noticed were food blogs. After a while I began to see a pattern: blog often, blog well, and, with luck you'll end up with a book deal.

One of my new favorite bloggers has turned the tables. Margaret Roach, of A Way to Garden, had, after a long career in garden journalism, including the writing of numerous books, reached the pinnacle of success as the director of all editorial content for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Nowhere further to go. So, what does she decide to do, but chuck it all - ditch the corporate life, and retire to her gorgeous upstate New York garden and BLOG! What she really really likes to do is garden and write about gardening. So that's what she's doing. Lucky for the rest of us, she is really, really good at it.

Free mulch and peaches

2008-08-04T19:13:00.002-04:00

I should have taken a picture. I'm driving home through Bloomfield, on one of those little side streets off Broad St and suddenly, on the curb, I see an enormous pile of black plastic trash bags and a hand-written sign: Free Mulch.

So of course I pull over to investigate. (I had scored a super-huge bag of fresh grass clippings just the other day, so my yard waste radar is working full-time.) The bags are all neatly closed with little knots. I open one. Inside, there's one of those brown paper yard waste bags, tighly sealed with plastic packing tape. I peel off the tape. Inside I see what appears to be dark, finely ground up wood. Perfect for the lawn reduction project!

So I cram what I can inside the car (trunk and back seat). Roughly half. I'll have to make a return trip. I zoom home, unload the bounty, and head back for more. While I'm loading up for the second time, a lady emerges from the house and greets me enthusiastically. I tell her how thrilled I am to be getting exactly what I need. A tree was taken down, she explains. She, having gone to all the work of bagging it all up, is equally thrilled that it is going to be put to good use.

She wants to help me load up the car. Then she wants to show me where the tree had been. (I am basically getting an entire ground up maple tree, neatly bagged.) It's one of those great old-fashioned back yards that makes you think it's 1952. Right in the middle is a peach tree, heavy with ripe peaches.

Wow! I say. Look at all those peaches! Want some? she asks. Of course! Aren't you going to use them? No - there might be bugs..... She has lived there for 45 years. Peaches aren't a novelty. Just a nuisance.

Sometimes I think I just live right. Don't ask about the swing, however.

Beets, Eggplant, and Apricots

2008-08-02T20:49:00.006-04:00

My tendency, at the market, is to buy what looks good, then figure out what to do with it later on. So it was that I found myself with a counterful of fresh apricots, eggplant (4 different colors), and beets.
The apricot tart recipe came from Orangette, and it's based on a Zuni Cafe recipe.

I made it exactly as described. Easy and wonderful. If only fresh apricots were more often available. The eggplant went into this poorly photographed but delicious concoction from Simon Hopkinson's "Roast Chicken and Other Stories", blogged about (and much more temptingly photographed) here by Adam Roberts, The Amateur Gourmet. It's one of those sweet/spicy things: currants, tomatoes, onions, cumin, coriander, mint.... I wouldn't call it a quick summer dish to be thrown together in a flash. Au contraire - I was standing over a hot cast-iron skillet for quite some time. But the end result is very much worth the effort.

And here are the beets. Can you believe I have never in my life made a salad of raw grated beets? It is about to be my new favorite thing. A simple recipe from the Everyday Food cookbook, it's just raw beets and carrots shredded in the Cuisinart in a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, honey, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, salt, cayenne, parsley.

Thankfully I am well fed, as the progress on the swing assembly is stalled for the moment. H and D came over and put together the A-frame end pieces. But they got stuck trying to attach the big top crosspiece to the ends. Perhaps those 6 inch bolts will grow an inch or so in the night, and I'll be able to properly attach the washer and nut on the other end in the morning.

Swing

2008-08-01T20:06:00.000-04:00

Another assembly job in the works. I got the seat part together with relative ease, but am having a little trouble with the A-frame. It will replace the plastic chair in the far northeast corner of the garden. Years and years ago the children had a swing there, hanging from a tree. Both the swing and the tree are long gone. Now it's my turn to swing.

Nature

2008-07-29T12:42:00.008-04:00

No complaints, really, as I have easy access to such a diverse range of activities. But one thing that's in short supply around here is open, untouched countryside. So I was surprised to hear from an acquaintance about this little nature preserve that is actually within walking distance (not that I'd be apt to walk there) and that I'd never known existed. I went over there this morning to check it out.Here we go!A more rustic trail leads off to the left:Water!And this pathway, back at the main entrance, leads to the pond:
And here's the pond. There's a concrete dam of some kind - apparently people fish there.
And so, that's pretty much it. A pond, and bit of woods squashed between a school playing field and the Garden State Parkway. Access is from a nondescript dead-end residential street. Nature in New Jersey. We take what we can get.

Lawn reduction update

2008-07-29T11:50:00.000-04:00

Big progress today on the lawn reduction. H&D were having some trees and shrubs trimmed and kindly thought to ask if I wanted the trimmings. Of course I did! Well, technically what I got were other peoples' trimmings - stuff on the truck that was already shredded and ready to go. So much the better. Now the "coverage" is complete - i.e. no cardboard or newspapers showing. Now just a matter of gradually building up the layers, aiming for October planting readiness.

Blue

2008-07-28T10:05:00.000-04:00

Painters have been at work across the street for weeks now. Scraping, sanding. I really liked the way it looked with the natural wood shingles (still visible at the left). But this is what confronts me when I open the front door this morning. Blue! It's hard to see in the photo, but the handsome old brick and stone chimneys have been painted DARK blue.

Looks like there will be some new street trees in my very near future. I am feeling very blue about this.

Catching

2008-07-27T21:02:00.003-04:00

Catching grass, that is.

When I bought the gas mower a few years ago, the idea was that I'd use it only until the lawn reduction program was advanced to the point that I could realistically just use the old-fashioned push mower. There was a grass-catcher included, but I didn't pay any attention to how to attach it since my intention was just to let the clippings fly.

Now, however, I desperately need clippings to layer over the cardboard and newspapers which are artfully and attractively spread all over the front lawn. So today I had to figure out how to attach the catcher. I am SOOO un-mechanical, and those multi-lingual user guides drive me nuts - the worst part being the way they COMBINE the instructions for a million different models so you aren't even sure which parts apply to you.

Well I finally got it figured out - just before the rainstorm (a daily event, it seems) began. Oh well. In the meantime I've been clipping and deadheading everything like crazy just to create other layering material. The neighbors are used to my "science experiments" by now. It will all come together in time.

What else? Oh, the pool. I actually went there three times in the past week, as compared to not at all up til then. This has to be the rainiest summer in history.

Technical difficulties

2008-07-25T23:00:00.008-04:00

A few weeks ago I was without on-line access for a few days. After conferring with Sid in India, it seemed that the best solution was to forget about the wifi/router thing and just connect the laptop directly to the modem. As in the olden days.

This would be fine. And it IS fine. Except that for no apparent reason the ethernet cable that connects the laptop to the modem is unreliable. I am constantly (like right NOW, for example), losing my connection and having to jiggle or otherwise reset the cable. In virtually every case there is absolutely no physical reason for the disconnect.

The minimalist in me likes the fact that I can just LOOK at the modem (it's right there, not in some far away room) and see whether all the lights are on. At least I know what to do about it. But the crabby old lady in me wishes they would just all STAY on.

Would a replacement cable help, o gurus who might be reading this....?

Update: After posting this I decided to root around and see if I had another cable. I did. And it seems fine now. Sometimes life is simple.

Update 2: Rarely is life simple. The second cable is also showing signs of flakiness. Which makes me wonder whether the problem is in the computer - maybe something wrong with the place where the cable connects? I dread having to go back to Sid, but it might be necessary.

Taking the bridge

2008-07-15T14:37:00.016-04:00

Having the new Starbucks to walk to is turning out to be a very nice thing. Until now, there was a choice of two routes: the busy, most direct, Bloomfield Ave way, and the "back way", along a shady residential street. No question which to choose.

But now there's a third way. There's a new bridge in the glen.

First, walk around the corner to the train station.

Walk down the steps to the westbound platform.

Here's the view of the station from down below. It's not actually in service as a station any more. For years (ever since we have lived here, and before) it was the local real estate office. More recently it has been acquired by the town to be used as a community center. Count me among the skeptics who thought nobody would use it. Count me among those who were WRONG!

Walk east along the platform, and you soon come to this.

And here we come to the new bridge. This will take us to the other side of the glen.

Looking back, after having crossed:
With a waterfall like this less than five minutes from home, why do I think I need a pond?

There's even a pretty gazebo to relax in. Probably I don't need one of those either.

In the glen, looking west from the gazebo:

Here's the last part of the trip. From here we emerge onto Bloomfield Avenue. I'll spare you the view of the final, ugly block. Not so bad, all things considered.

The Sun, and a Brooklyn itinerary

2008-07-10T06:04:00.004-04:00

I've mentioned the NY Sun from time to time. If I don't happen to be breakfasting at Raymond's (that would be most of the time), I have to read it on line. Even the libraries don't have it. It's a weekdays-only paper, so no thousand-pound Sunday behemoth to plow through. I must have subscribed, at one point, to a daily "recap" of some kind, since I now get a morning email with a roster of headlines and a brief summary of each article. Even THAT they do really well.

The puzzle is as good or better than the one in the Times, and respected as such by afficianados. The politics are conservative. (I'm still behind Obama, so far, but that doesn't mean I don't remain open to all points of view.) And among the real treasures are the "Abroad in New York" columns of Francis Morrone, the architectural historian.

Today he is writing about Brooklyn's historic Brighton Line, part of the NYC transit system. Just when Mayor Bloomberg is exhorting New Yorkers to vacation at home this year (and I love that idea) comes a specific itinerary that really does sound like a vacation. And I've always wanted to try Di Fara's legendary pizza; now I know how to get there. I'm saving this one.

Passing, persicaria and ponds

2008-07-09T00:32:00.006-04:00

Today's main accomplishment was getting the car to - finally! - pass the state inspection. I had been driving around with a big "failed" sticker on the windshield, and a 45-day window to correct the various problems. The new sticker announces that I'm good til 2010. Hooray! Now I can think about something else. Ponds, for example.

I had to go all the way to Wayne for the reinspection, since the Montclair place where I've gone for 35 years has just closed down for good. But there's a big garden center up in that neck of the woods, and I hadn't been there for several years. And I needed to celebrate, right? Most likely they were having a sale, so better check it out.

So now the driveway is full of huge plants that have to be dealt with. Three "Fragoo" strawberries - a new hybrid designed for containers or hanging baskets. All are lush, healthy, covered with blooms and berries - and marked down from $15 to $2. How could I resist?

I've haunted garden centers for long enough now that it's not often that I see a plant that is completely unfamiliar to me. This gorgeous "firetail" persicaria, or "mountain fleece flower" completely won me over. I have a couple of ideas about where to put it, but I think it will somehow fit into the grass reduction program in the front. It's such a large clump that I may be able to divide it soon, and put some back on the plateau, since it would also look great among all the hydrangeas back there.

If you've been to any biggish garden center in recent years you've noticed the trend: more and more space is given over to "aquaculture". A garden is simply not a garden unless it has a pond, preferably with a waterfall, or some kind of bubbling action going on. Just seeing all the equipment and chemicals are enough to make you want to run very fast in the opposite direction.

But I've been reading a lot of Henry Mitchell lately. His books - compilations of his columns from the Washington Post - are garden classics. Hilarious, yes, but also full of wisdom and sound, practical advice. The centerpiece of his Georgetown garden was a rectangular concrete fishpond.

In "One Man's Garden", pp136ff he describes his criteria for the building of a such a pond in some detail. "The pool should be in full sun". OK. (The middle of my back yard would be fine.) "The pool should be twenty-four inches deep". OK. "The pool should always be larger than you thnk is right". Hmm. I had been thinking about 10x10 max, and round. He suggests 10x12'. OK.

But then we come to the important and far more radical stuff: "Some gardeners install filter systems to keep the water absolutely clear. I would not have one if it were free... the few I have seen in operation have not worked, and ... there is nothing uglier in the garden than crystal clear water with filter systems visible". "The pool should have seaweed in it - meaning oxygenating grasses that live beneath the water. He suggests "common ditch grass", or elodea. He "never puts chemicals in the pond and does not intend to". AND - get this - "The fewer pipes in the pool, the better. I have none." He cleaned the pool, he explains, once every year or two by siphoning out the water with a hose.

Well, Mitchell died in 1993, but what has really changed since then? I didn't have the book with me, but I tried to talk with the guy who was manning the pond department about this, and he pretty much told me I was an idiot. The fish will DIE without a filter, he explained. Of course I couldn't remember the name of the seaweed or any of the other details. But it is sounding to me as if it could be possible to just build a big concrete TUB in the yard and then just start filling it with water and fish and waterlilies and seaweed. How hard could that be?

Montclair wandering

2008-07-07T17:58:00.008-04:00

The appointment at the Volvo dealer for the repair of the mysterious emission problems that led to the failed state inspection (NJ is tough on these things!) was for 8:15. I knew it would be a long day. But it's pretty easy to kill time in Montclair, so I left the cell number and off I went.

First stop: Raymond's.

I usually go for the steel cut oats with caramelized banana, but today it was the orange ginger pancakes with fruit. Coffee is excellent and keeps on coming - you get your own little refill pot right on the table, and they are happy to refill the refill pot. Can you see the rack of papers? Always there with today's NYT, WSJ and - the best of all - the NY Sun. I catch up on the news and do the crossword and the sudoku in the Sun.

Next stop: the bookstore. What a luxury for a town to have TWO old-fashioned, independent bookstores. This one -the musty-dusty one - has a combination of new and old, similar to the Strand in NY, and to Powell's in Portland, OR. It's much larger than it looks from the outside. Because I have gardens on the brain, I settle mostly in the garden section.

I read the both of the following (both serendipitous discoveries) cover-to-cover.

The Nivola book tells the story of Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathi and her one-woman campaign to restore beauty and agricultural self-sufficiency to her devastated native land. Reminiscent of Miss Rumphius, with lovely illustrations by the author.

Then I stroll for a while: On a whim I go into the bike shop and ask if there's anything I could safely and comfortably ride - never having had such a thought before. Yes, it turns out! Well, perhaps another day there will be a test drive!

I never get tired of the beautiful Avis Campbell garden, behind the library.

I note that I really would like to get some of those pale pink poppies going in my own garden. The trick, apparently, is to scatter the seeds in February, in the snow. And I'm reminded that it would be very lovely to have a pond of my own.

Quite a few hours have now gone by, but the phone is silent. So - might as well hang out in the libary for a while. There is a new photography exhibit to see, and a well-stocked magazine section with big, comfy chairs. In contrast to my own library, these magazines don't circulate, so the latest copy is always availabe, in addition to all the earlier ones. I picked up the June 30 New Yorker and read a wonderful Alice Munro story called Deep-Hole, and a beautiful memoir, Altered State, by Andrea Lee, about growing up in a well-to-do black family in Pennsylvania. I wasn't familiar with this writer (now married to an Italian and living in Italy), but intend to seek her out. Also in that issue - an article by Paul Goldberger about the changing face of Beijing - specifically the most recent architectural mega-structures and their effect on the city. (For an ongoing view of present-day Beijing I try to keep up with James Fallows' wonderful blog.) I read a years' worth of Organic Gardening, flip through Real Simple, House Beautiful, Horticulture.

I check the time. 3:45! Surely the car must be ready! Might as well wander down there and check. Yes, it turns out it is "almost ready" - just the paperwork remains. They were about to call. Should I be resentful of having to "waste" a whole day on this? Well, probably. But the truth of it is that I had a very pleasant time. I should be forced to walk the streets of Montclair more often.

Currants

2008-06-27T16:27:00.006-04:00

Last summer I planted a red currant bush. We always had a row of them at the Adirondack house. I think that they were originally planted by my grandfather when the house was new, circa 1920. My grandmother and, later, Aunt Lucy, always made little jars of currant jelly. It was a big production, as I recall, involving a muslin "jelly bag" contraption. I'm sure all the paraphernelia is still there. And the recipe - most likely from Fannie Farmer.

So now, with no effort whatsoever from me, other than sticking it in the ground in the back of some other shrubs, I have my first crop. A bare two cups, as it turns out - so not enough for jelly.

But what? Currants are a northern crop - more common in places like Scandinavia than Provence. So off the radar, so to speak, from mainstream recipe sources. But a quick google led me to this tempting photo. Since I also have a productive rhubarb plant this idea seems worth exploring.

Can you even see the currants? What I ended up doing was freezing them in a plastic container, planning to use them by the decorative spoonful in compotes such as this. Besides the rhubarb, there are some Alpine strawberries in there (also from the garden, though I am losing out to the birds on this one), and some regular strawberries from the farmers' market. Very tasty. Very satisfying.

Weeds

2008-06-26T09:32:00.003-04:00

All this rain we've been having (pretty much every day, it seems) has brought with it a bumper crop of weeds. Once again, "showing up" is proving to be the answer. Getting out there and pullling what I can, usually early in the morning, is at least keeping them at bay.

I went the extra mile in the new shrub border next to the deck. One step up from the "newspaper trick" is the "corrugated cardboard trick". I can get plenty of ready-to-recycle (already flattened) cartons from behind the liquor store. Spreading them around, like mulch, in thick layers, to be covered with "real" mulch once it's well wetted down, is making quick work of that area.

Sad to say, some of the weeds are of my own making. Why did I ever think it was a good idea to try morning glories? Pretty, yes, but apparently once you have them you have them forever, and they twine themselves around everything they encounter, and not so charmingly, either. "Strangle" is a word that comes to mind. Now is their sprouting time, and, thanks to the birds, they are finding new and clever places to hide themselves. I found one just this morning coming up under a garbage can in the asphalt driveway.

I am similarly responsible for the gooseneck loosestrife, black-eyed susans, and the yarrow, all of which seemed like good ideas at the time. Ack!

Showing up

2008-06-20T14:13:00.004-04:00

You have to assume that things I've blogged about in the past as regular occurrences are ongoing. Puzzles. Bridge. Cooking. Reading. Yawn.

But it's been a while since I've mentioned the figure drawing. It continues on a twice monthly basis. Last night was the most recent session. I had to swap for an afternoon bridge session, so I arrived a bit tired and unprepared. Still, I think it was Woody Allen who made the quip about 95% of life being about "just showing up". By just showing up, I'm realizing I've churned out quite a number of drawings, and am beginning to get my sea legs again.

These are a mixture of very quick gesture studies (1-2 min) and some slightly longer ones - mostly in the 15-20 min range.

Newspapers and firewood

2008-06-18T20:37:00.006-04:00

Bear with me. Soon gardening season will be over and we'll be on to other things. This is about the ongoing lawn reduction program. The huge hostas and three small hollies that I moved from the plateau to the "hosta border extension" (what should I call this new place?) appear to have survived. So I had to figure out a way to get rid of all the grass in the leftover spaces.

I decided to go with the newspaper trick, which I've had good success with in the past. It happened to be recycling day today. I was stuck at home, waiting for four new tires to be attached to my car. The recycling bins at the high school (right across the street) were brimming to overflow with New York Timeses and Wall Street Journals (suspiciously unread-looking, for the most part). I took as much as I could carry in four trips, and spread them thickly around the hostas and the redbud, working with the hose to keep them dripping wet.

Sun and wind are the dual enemies of the newspaper trick. Once the papers dry, there is nothing to prevent them from flying all over the place. I had a few rocks, for starters. But I needed more. Lawn staples? A possibility.

That's when I thought of the neighbors' woodpile - a virtual termite farm that has been there forever, and was only inches away from the site in question. The "logs" worked perfectly to anchor the papers! And as I began to remove the logs, one by one, it was apparent that there was going to be lots of leaf mold and compost available in the same general vicinity.

Sorry - getting dark and I realized I didn't have a good "after" photo. I'll add some bagged mulch to finish it all off, but it won't take much. Success! So much so, that I went off to buy a few boxwoods to start the lawn reduction program, "front yard version".

Aftermath

2008-06-11T11:47:00.002-04:00

The oppressive heat is gone. A brief but powerful storm - perhaps another "microburst" such as we experienced on another June day (was it two or three years ago?) - hit last night around 9:30 PM. By the time I got home from bridge - a little past ten - the streets were littered with tree debris and the power was out. Sirens and flashing lights went on for another hour or so. Then all was quiet, and blissfully cool. I sat out on the deck for a while and enjoyed the peace and the darkness.

My little portable generator enabled me to plug things in at random: a reading light, a fan... The power on my block came back at about six a.m. Others, I'm hearing, will have to wait - possibly until Friday.

And here's what our town looks like this morning. The worst of it seems to be within a block or two of H and D's house, which came through unscathed.

Heat watch and pool

2008-06-09T14:38:00.003-04:00

Temperatures are in the nineties and schools are closing for "heat days" (maybe some leeway to do so because of there having been no snow days?). A single rotating columnar fan is keeping me comfortable so far.

Summer can be oppressive here. But this year I'm ready for it. Nobody is more surprised than I am, but - get this: I joined a swim club!

Ever hear of a sand-bottomed pool? I hadn't. This place, in a pretty town just 17 miles southwest of here, is like a lake at one end with a sandy beach and shallow water, and like a pool otherwise, with "edges" and a deep end with diving apparatus. It's huge - so that there's an entire separate area for swimming laps, and for teenagers to play things like water basketball. It's surrounded by huge trees and provides plenty of lawn chairs so you can sit comfortably in the shade on either grass or sand (no concrete anywhere to speak of). It's a friendly, low-key, family-type place - nothing fancy. Just the spot for me to take a book, or a sketchpad and stay cool during the dog days.

I can't believe I had never heard of this place; surely it's been around forever, and the girls would have loved it had we been members when they were growing up. (We always took day trips to the shore - still a viable option, of course.) Well - too late for regrets! They can come now as my guests.

Part of the appeal for me, admittedly, is the super bargain membership rate for "seniors" - almost cheaper than staying home, especially when pitting the cost of gas against the cost of running the AC. It's kind of in the same league as the two dollar train fare to the city.

I grew up with access to a pool, and remember becoming bored with it after a while. It was something we took for granted. So, we'll see how it goes. But right now I like the idea of being able to say to myself, "I think I'll go to the pool today...."

Another tour

2008-06-08T19:41:00.014-04:00

It seems as if I've posted about a lot of house and garden tours; the main tour I make it a point not to miss is the Van Vleck, which has just taken place. This year's gardens were, for the most part, high-end professional endeavors, and, as such, they lacked "soul" (in my opinion).

Still, there was much to notice and admire. Plenty of details to record. Cute bird feeders! How did they make those holes, I wonder?

Here's a mature pair of shadbush (serviceberry, or amelanchier) trees. I have three of them, and only one of them actually could be mistaken for a "tree" so far. I always try to be aware of what my plants are going to look like in years to come. Even, so, I'm frequently startled.

The main event at this stop: the formal rose gardens. Each boxwood-edged bed contains a different, carefully named and dated variety of hybrid tea rose. This garden has been virtually unchanged for years. Not a do-it-yourself thing.

I thought of H&D's house here. This designer's solution to the "jagged" shape of the rear of the house was to resolve the geometry by plopping a huge square dining pavillion right in the middle of the yard, doing away with pretty much all the grass. The far corners of the yard are occupied by a large square pond with waterfall (almost de rigeur in these situations) and a round seating area.

The garden that drew the most comment was this one. Densely planted with a complex assortment of carefully chosen plants.

The best part of this same property was the "Zen garden" - reclaimed from a formerly neglected sloping side yard. The paving pattern was done using pieces of square wooden posts, laid upright and surrounded by gravel.

Throughout the garden we keep finding other examples of the square posts. Here, for example, they are used as a stair detail, and combined with stone to form a different kind of surface.

Birdhouses appear throughout the garden, all different, all simply mounted on the same square posts. Great look!

Even the small table here has been made by combining four larger posts, with the feet made by cutting them at an angle. The poured concrete slab was another example of over-the-top detail; there are tiny "pit" marks over the surface made by blasting with some kind of grit at just the precise moment.

Do those chairs look comfy to you? Hmmmm.

Martha

2008-06-02T22:15:00.002-04:00

Just recently realized that Martha Stewart has a blog. Well, why not?

Martha and I go way back. She's a year younger than I am. In 1962 I was a "guest editor" at Mademoiselle magazine. Think Sylvia Plath, Betsey Johnson.... it was my "Devil Wears Prada" moment, so to speak. For Martha, those were the modeling years. So the August 1962 issue that I "guest-edited" (I was the "features" editor) is peppered with fashion-y ads featuring Martha. For 35 years now I've lived just a few miles away from her childhood "Elm Place" house in Nutley, NJ.

We've never met. But I've always felt connected to Martha, somehow. So I will read her blog.

Garden update

2008-05-31T22:03:00.015-04:00

I live in a garden. When I open the front door, this is what confronts me. Sometimes I just stand there and breathe it all in. How lucky I am!

Since the last post, two weeks ago, the Siberian irises, baptisia, catmint, and roses have all started to bloom.

This is the sidewalk view now. Those gray-leaved things in the front are rose campion. They seed themselves all over, but particularly like growing next to concrete and brick. I usually move them around a little, making sure to have some clumps next to the brick fence posts.

This is also where the new rose garden is - the sunniest spot I could find.

The mock orange is in bloom, and the fragrance is wonderful! It is a little weedy, and I have less of it than I used to. But like so many other things, it's really not very interesting when it's not in bloom. Here it is in a narrow zone between the side of the garage and the neighbor's ugly chain link fence, along with some ferns, lily of the valley, and lacecap hydrangeas which will bloom later.

The sweetbay magnolias (two of them!) that I planted last summer are both covered with buds and starting to bloom. They are so gorgeous and fragrant!

But there is still work to be done. The self-imposed mowing reduction program continues. See where the curve of the hose is in the picture below? I'm going to continue the garden around to cover all that grass on the left, leaving just a nice little flat place in the middle - more like a "room". It would be better, I guess, if the room were in the BACK, but - oh well! There are pleasant spots there as well. The garden will just be more of the same easy stuff: hostas, boxwood, heuchera, cranesbill, sweet woodruff - maybe a few daylilies - all things that will fill in quickly and not be a lot of work. I think I'll be able to fill it all in using plants that I already have, for the most part. The new tree peony will be there - just to the left of the baptisia (the biggest plant in the foreground), allowing a little grass path for access to the "room" between the two.

And this is the mowing reduction back yard version. I rescued 3 small hollies from the depths of the plateau and put them here (hard to see in the photo, for some reason) and will continue the hosta border along the hose line. The wood stick marks the property line, more or less. The neighbors will now have to mow that part. Yay!

And here's another view of that problem area by the back door. Thank goodness for those big blue hostas! I found that clematis buried under a pile of leaves and helped it get started up the trellis. Maybe there is hope. The red cooler doesn't really need to be there.

For most of the year this spirea is just a big green blob and I wonder why I hang on to it. Then it does THIS, and I remember! I do like the way its form contrasts with the hosta.

But here's the big project of the last few days: the Japanese knotweed! With all the cool and rainy weather there haven't been any good Round-up days since the "helpers" were here. The ones we zapped then have stayed zapped, but in the meantime, there are serious six-to-eight footers in there. Lots of them. My MO is to cut them down now as I encounter them and go in later with the Round-up on a regular basis. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Sticks and screws

2008-05-31T21:21:00.003-04:00

So I had been thinking about the IKEA workbench more and more, and decided I ought to get it. Daughter H was kind enough to come along and do the heavy lifting. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had been marked down by twenty dollars. Still - what did I say about ending up with a pile of sticks and screws? Actually it's almost all together now. Maybe I'll have a burst of energy and finish it up tonight. Or maybe H will come over in the morning to do it for me!

Shelves redux

2008-05-21T12:16:00.003-04:00

Look what I forgot I had! These wire shelves from Target are exactly what I need, and I had two sets of them stashed away in the garage. I'm not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to put them together outside, except for wanting to enjoy BEING out there. I'll do the other one "on site".

Here it is in the hallway, en route to the basement. Hmmm. Maybe a good solution for the mail! (Just kidding, but not entirely....)

This is the worktable thing I was talking about. Still undecided, though feeling somewhat empowered after having had such an easy time assembling the shelves.

Shelves

2008-05-19T21:16:00.005-04:00

The demolition of the moldy storage room in the basement left me with a shortage of shelf space. And the garage door catastrophe left me without a handyman. As it stands, the old ping-pong table is groaning under the weight of all the stuff that was on the old shelves. I actually still HAVE the shelves themselves, and their brackets. Yes, I can get rid of a lot of the stuff - maybe even most of it - but I still need a few shelves down there.

My first thought was to just get a bunch of cement blocks and build some block-and-board shelves myself. That was before I went to Home Depot and tried to lift just ONE of those blocks.

My second thought was to look for a source of large used cans (like maybe the diner goes through a lot of big cans of tomatoes or something?) and fill them with sand or cement. But then I'd still have the problem of dragging heavy bags of sand or cement mix in and out of the car and down to the basement.

So then I thought of IKEA. Might as well check out the ready-mades. There were a few good options there. Once again, though, a lifting problem.

And, invariably, the trouble with IKEA is all the OTHER weird stuff you find yourself dragging home. Like this lamp, for instance:

Well, I was thinking it might be good in the art studio. The top part would add much needed overall light, and the little flexible bottom part could be directed wherever needed. Hey - it was only 9.95!

The other thing that caught my eye was an acacia workbench. I've been wanting something like this for the deck to double as a potting work surface and a serving table. Aside from the usual can't-lift-it problem, I could see that what I would actually be getting would be a pile of sticks and screws. And a cryptic little instruction booklet - in Swedish. Am I going to have the patience to tackle a project like that?

Somehow this adventure occupied almost the whole day. And the shelf problem is unresolved.

Garden photos - quite a lot of them

2008-05-17T19:41:00.018-04:00

Even now, when the garden is looking just about as great as it ever has or will, it isn't that easy to get good pictures. But for those who are interested, these will give you some idea of what's happening.

This is the brick front walk, and the "herb" garden alongside. That's a fig tree in the pot. Because a lot of herbs are pretty weedy looking, this garden has a lot of "fake" herbs in it, such as the little gold spirea, blue fescue, small hostas, baptisia, coral bells, lady's mantle and candytuft. There are lettuces, parsley, sage, alpine strawberries, a neat sort of basil, chives, lavenders, pinks, germander. Can you see the little squares? It's all looking very cute right now. This is the only part of the garden that I fuss over in any way.

Here's a recent impulse buy. On the day that the garage door crashed I had to calm down by going to the garden store. This star magnolia somehow jumped into the car, and now needs to be planted.
This is the "sidewalk" garden. Boxwoods and hellebores alternate, and, at the moment, they're underplanted with English ivy- probably not the best solution. It doesn't understand it's supposed to stay on the OUTSIDE of the fence. There are two big clumps of blue siberian iris about to bloom, some climbing white roses and 3 kinds of clematis, one of which you can see in the foreground.

Here's the "plateau", in the back yard with its lush hosta border. Hostas have become sort of a theme, as might be apparent.

I have even been potting them up! What could be easier?

Here's the "plant ghetto"; new acquisitions in the driveway, waiting to be planted. I've really bought very little this year. I did find a tree peony I couldn't resist. Otherwise there are some blue salvia (2 kinds) and cosmos (pink and white), dahlias (which I have never grown - that's the thing that's blooming in the back), a patio tomato, and 3 new kinds of clematis.

This hosta got plunked in its big pot last summer (it was outgrowing its spot on the plateau) and it came right back up this spring with no special attention from me. My first hosta-in-pot. I think I might try tucking some spring bulbs in around it this fall.

Lilacs are on the way out, and peonies are full of buds. These grow together around the edge of the deck.

The back yard is bisected diagonally by a huge hill that I got tired of mowing. It's now planted with daylilies, and the main project is swapping out the boring Stella d'Oros for more interesting kinds.

Herb garden vignette: chives, spirea, germander.

This is the "east garden", along my neighbor's driveway. There used to be a huge oak there. It was struck by lightning about four years ago. More hostas! And a good crop of sweet woodruff in bloom. Later there will be hardy geraniums weaving throughout.

Planting these aliums to look as if they are growing out of the hosta was a first-time experiment. In the fall I think I'll add some of the really big aliums. I like the effect!

Another view of the herb garden. You can see the last of the pale pink "angelique" tulips in front, planted among the "blue cadet" hostas, and more of them next to the rhubarb, a little further back.

And here's the area that needs the most attention right now. It's right outside the back door. Two of the new clematis are earmarked for the trellis in the rear where I've tried roses in the past without great success (not enough sun). The "east garden" is just on the other side of the trellis, in case you don't completely have your bearings. The big round bush is a white spirea which will bloom any minute. There are two sickly rhododendrons against the house, as well as a huge version of the dreaded Japanese knotweed (how did that get there?). Well, as I said - this is where the work is most needed!

Rain and garage door

2008-05-14T11:08:00.004-04:00

We have had some days of heavy rain, much needed in the garden (and surely in the reservoirs) so I can't really complain. Well, maybe a little ... as it turns out I am taking an intensive 3-session landscape pastel class (same teacher as before) in lieu of the official continuation which was cancelled (not enough takers, in the end). The first session was last Friday, the day of the most torrential downpour, and the second class is this Friday, more rain predicted then as well.

And the handyman turned out to be a little less handy than previously advertised. After he departed, I suddenly realized I couldn't open the garage door. I figured he had either tried to "fix" it (it has never closed properly, but otherwise worked fine), or else he had FORCED it to close and something had "snapped", or whatever it is that garage door mechanisms do.

So I called and yelled at him to come and make it right. To his credit he came right away. He was strong enough to be able to get it open. But too strong, it seems. With one mighty push, he rolled it up and up and up and up ... yes, it just kept GOING, and the whole door crashed down INSIDE the garage!!!! What a noise it made!!! Astonishingly, nothing broken - not even a flower pot. But still....

More yelling ensued. Handyman was banished forthwith.

It was easier than I imagined to get it fixed properly. Turns out there are people who specialize in garage door repair, and mine wasn't anything unusual. The guy came within an hour, got it all rehung and working better than ever before. (It closes perfectly now.)

So today it's a glorious day and I spent all morning enjoying the garden, which looks better than it ever has, if I do say so. I must post some pictures... I will! I will!

But first... off to book club!

A hugely productive day

2008-05-07T22:01:00.002-04:00

For quite some time I've had a few dreary household projects that seemed to be beyond any do-it-yourself abilities I might possess. There was a poorly ventilated storage room in the basement that needed to be dismantled, including disposing of the moldy old sheetrock, shelving and 2x4's. There was a problem with the garage roof. Was it a roof problem? A flashing issue? A gutter problem? A paint thing? All of the above? And there was the matter of the railings on the deck that needed to be repaired and replaced. Not to mention a leader that needed to be reattached, and some other minor paint touch-ups.

Astonishingly, these things are all suddenly DONE! A handyman I'd used in the past happened to be working next door yesterday, and happened to be available, along with two helpers, today, and PRESTO! Well, it's mostly done. He'll come back tomorrow to finish the painting, and there's still a mountain of debris piled in the driveway waiting for the "removal guy".

And don't think I was just idly twiddling my thumbs while this was all going on. I got the lawn mowed, front and back, using the "green" push mower which I so much prefer to its gas-eating cousin. Isn't walking, after all, the most recommended exercise for all ages? And isn't walking back and forth in my own garden infinitely preferable to walking around the neighborhood, or on a treadmill?

Boxes

2008-05-06T10:13:00.002-04:00

Did you think those Priority and Express mail boxes that the post office provides were "free"? Well, so did I, til I found out that I could save money by providing my own box. So I saved $1.50 yesterday, mailing the grandkids' forgotten items back to Boston. Not a big deal, but it's another way to recycle, and it could add up if you do a lot of package sending.

Tour

2008-05-04T22:31:00.008-04:00

There was a house tour today - an annual fundraiser for a local group. I'm not sure what prompted me to go, as I'd never done so before. I know there are beautiful houses in my town, because I've been in plenty of them. But these - I dunno - it was somehow all about "look what we bought!" All the state-of-the-art kitchens and expensive furniture leave me cold. Still, there were some high points:

I very much liked this simple kitchen. The big cupboard just inside the back door solves the "no mud room" problem. I loved the concrete countertops.

Just opposite this long table is the main working area. This is a room where a family could happily hang out in any number of comfortable scenarios.

I think the blackboard paint idea is a great one for a child's room. I understand that you can get the same paint now with built-in magnetic properties. What next?

This back yard's simple wood platform appealed to me. It was a part of the most modest house (by far) on the tour - but also the one with the most clever design ideas.

And I am always drawn to ponds - particularly simple ones like this. There was a small pumping action going, which meant there had to be electricity coming from somewhere, but I couldn't figure out from where, as it was in the most remote corner of the yard (as mine would/will be when I get to it, sooner or later....)

May Day

2008-05-03T21:51:00.007-04:00

Lots going on around town today.

I hit a couple of plant sales - first, the Master Gardeners in Edgemont Park, then the one at Van Vleck. Astonishingly I came away from both empty-handed, though I was tempted by a Chinese fringe tree (too exotic, I decided) and might have succumbed to a tree peony had the good ones not already been tagged and set aside. One thing good: I've come to the realization that I've finally reached a point where I don't actually need any more plants; if I find a bare space I can easily just dig up and move something around from another place.

Mostly I hung out at Art in the Park, an annual juried show held for the first time on the grounds of the Art Museum.

It's always a big draw for families and kids. There was juggling, face painting, tie-dying, beading, hatmaking and more.

Music, of course. And food.

But for me, the art was the main draw. Many of the exhibitors had come from quite a distance, and had put considerable effort and expense into their displays. Particular favorites for me were:

William McCarthy who does exquisite landscapes completely from memory and imagination. He showed me the tiny sketchbook he uses for the little black and white thumbnails that he uses as points of departure.

Linda Adato, a printmaker who makes beautiful and highly detailed colored etchings, many of which are quite small. She often combines multiple plates on a single page.

Deborah Colter, who creates mostly geometric abstract mixed media paintings and collages.

Claire Malloy, who showed some lovely pastels done on rice paper.

Donna Grande, also a pastel artist, who has a great color sense.

Carol Schepps, a fabric artist who makes gorgeous quilts and wall hangings. My favorites were the various "suns" - concentric fabric circles machine-appliqued to larger background squares.

It was a special pleasure to talk with all of these artists about their work and their techniques. They all have easy-to-find websites that are worth looking at.

It wasn't until I was ready to leave that I realized that the end-of-the-year show from the pastel classes had been hung in another part of the museum. That's mine, there, in the center. I griped about having to go to the quite considerable expense of framing something that I deemed less than perfect. Still, I'm pleased to have been asked to include a piece. So - ta-da!!!

Stopover

2008-04-29T08:25:00.002-04:00

After a week of kid stuff, I was ready for a different kind of eye candy, so, on the way home, I decided to stop off in New Haven. Primary destination: Louis Kahn's wonderful Yale Center for British Art.

Right now there's an unusually good show there called A New World: England's First View of America. These are drawings and watercolors by John White, an artist who first visited the shores of present-day North Carolina in 1585 and recorded what he saw there, with a view toward encouraging settlement. I had read about this in the NY Sun when it opened, but hadn't seriously thought I'd ever manage to see it. It will be there through June 1 and is worth a special trip.

And - sheer serendipity - it was the last day for two very interesting exhibits about "Orientalism" in British painting. One, organized by the Tate Gallery, focused on the nineteenth century and the other, comprised entirely of Yale holdings, dealt with the seventeenth and eighteenth. I was glad that there were detailed illustrated handouts to study later, as none of this work was familiar to me.

I also enjoyed a very small show of portraits of women curated by current undergraduates. And as much as I could handle of the permanent collection, especially the birds-eye "estate" portraits. I took my time poking around in the tempting gallery shop, after which I decided to take a quick look at the main Yale Art Gallery (also by Kahn) right across the street.

More serendipity! I had expected it to be closing momentarily, but it was open for an extra hour on Sunday. And - it was the final week of a wonderful multi-media (paintings, photos, letters, films) show called "Making it New", all about the lives of Sara and Gerald Murphy who were at the center of the group of artists and writers in Paris in the 1920's that included Picasso, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stravinsky, Dos Passos, Leger, Le Corbusier, Cole Porter, and others. A friend had seen and raved about this when it was in Williamstown last summer - I had no idea that it was there or that I'd ever see it. And to think I nearly didn't!

My one-hour stop somehow turned into five hours, and included a delicious Thai dinner for the road. A great day - utterly unplanned.

Boston and back

2008-04-28T23:54:00.007-04:00

When the neighborhood is teeming with professors, there's sure to be an eminent biologist around to organize a walk in the woods. Such was the case. We identified garlic mustard, skunk cabbage, marsh marigolds, and cinnamon fern. We unearthed salamanders.

Some of us veered from the approved path.

And were rewarded, at the end, with a place for jumping.

There was a fourth grade soccer game. And piano practice (New World Symphony, and some hot New Orleans jazz).

And there was, of course, the birthday!

And now there's a new chemistry set to figure out. Good thing Dad's there to help!

Helpers

2008-04-24T06:34:00.006-04:00

It's been a busy week with lots of family back and forth. Mulching, mowing, painting, weeding. Sushi with a side of mac and cheese. Brunch at the creperie. Dinner at Amazing Hot Dog. Miniature golf. Whoopee cushion fun ("too bad" it broke, finally). Slingshots. Basketball. Not much time left for blogging.

Off to Boston today to return helpers to their keepers and celebrate a seventh birthday tomorrow.

War

2008-04-16T11:37:00.004-04:00

You can probably guess where I've been. It's that time of year again. Garden time. All the usual spring clean-up chores. Digging up and dividing hostas to share with a neighbor. Hacking out the wild roses before they take over again, as they had for years before I realized what a menace they were and are.

No complaints. These are glorious days, and it's a pleasure to be outside, moving, trying to beautify my little corner of the world.

Biggest mission: this is the year that I intend to defeat the Japanese Knotweed that wants to take over the plateau. . Once and for all. Finding out what it is called was an important first step. Next step: full strength Round-up. The war is on.