97 rides again

well, the times are in from last night.

i'll save you the trouble and tell you that this season i bumped up to the two-lap category, which was my race before i got sick and started sandbagging.

...except i guess it's really not sandbagging if you're, you know, too sick or too being out of shape from being sick to go the whole distance but you'd rather die than not take your start or even not make your finish, so you go out anyway in a shorter race.

at least that's what i did.

so i got out on the course last night entered in my proper division and it was maybe my slowest time EVER, but at least i was on the course. the wreck of the old 97.

there's only one way to get your conditioning back tough, and that's to take it by force.

so that's what i'm doing.

there was a little crisis yesterday afternoon; usually lucy sets aside my number so i can pick it up, but this year i showed up and they had just given it to someone else.


who is he? i asked. how much does he want for it? that last thing was silly, because i don't have the money to buy my number back.

but i know the guy, so i called him up and asked him if he'd trade, which you still can do before the opener, and he was willing, so i got my number. you know, the one i've had ever since my very first race?

if i didn't get my number, i was going to cry. right there in the shop. i may be all tough and sleep in my car in remote locations and race mountain bikes and stuff, but if i can't get my number, i will cry. right out in the open.

today i'm packing my bags and tomorrow morning i'm going out on the road again.

this time it's a vacation. it was maybe going to be the end of peregrination, but last week i came in from that and my campsite's paid for, so i might as well go back out. the weather will be moderately nice and the area pretty and come church sunday i'll be among friends.

it's hard to beat that.

if you want to follow me, you can come along with this spiffy little number.

where i was

i know you're dying to find out exactly where i was while i was out on the road.

i got started on this little project because cr asked for an itinerary and maybe a map, which only made me giggle, since i never know where i'm going until i get there, but i vary gamely figured out how to work a google map well enough to at least mark where i'd been, so if you want to follow along and look at the pictures, you can:


View may 2010 in a larger map

a little late

hey, i know we're already most of the way through may, but i've been kind of busy being out on the road.

and it takes time to organize all those pictures.

but here's april from my thirteen project. i can't believe it's already time to start clocking may!

accidental witness

have you ever been an accidental witness to a big moment in someone else's life?

maybe the worst moment of their life?

a moment in which you really hope this is the worst moment, because if they've lived anything worse you're not sure you want to know about it?

two days ago, sunday afternoon, i went out to look for a geocache and i stopped to take a picture of a pretty field with dandelions. i only mention it because i was looking up in an area of the sky that would become very interesting a few minutes later, when a little farther down the road i noticed billows of black smoke rising up in that same clear patch of sky.

black smoke is nearly always a structure fire or a big trash burn. wood burns clean, mostly. plastics and such burn black.

and i remember hoping -real hard- that it was a big trash burn.

please, oh please, please, please, don't let it be a structure fire.


and then about ten minutes later i started to hear all the sirens. right off i saw seven engines from two towns, and then more engines, and a lot of guys in pickups and SUVs driving the way only firemen do.

that has to be a structure fire.

well, part of what i'm doing is looking for a geocache but also part of what i'm doing is sitting in prayer, because i have a friend who's doing important and difficult work at this time and i want to be with her in that, and ask blessings on that.

so now i have this fire to add to that mountain of prayer. somebody just over the hill is having a very bad day.

i still hope it's a trash burn.

and then i'm on my way out and i can see the fire from the ridge, and all along the road cars are parked watching the fire and engines are still coming from surrounding towns. there's a lot of flame and i can see in my scope that it's a house. a nice one.

at this point i'm hoping that it's just an outbuilding, but it looks like the house is going up.

this morning, tuesday, i was back over there looking for an earthcache and i went by hoping to see a charred outbuilding and a standing house.

instead i saw the still burning ashpile, nothing left standing but the narrow chimney.

and the guy (i assume it's the homeowner) is sitting beside the smoking rubble in a lawn chair, reading the paper. his mailbox is still standing, and i guess they still deliver his paper.

it is so sad my heart will maybe break.

let me clarify...

i kept having dreams in which i have to go to princeton, maine.

so i packed up my car -for real- and went to princeton, maine. now i am travelling without itinerary or plan, and maine is a very big place. for the last two days i was up in the deboullie unit, which was recommended to me by four park rangers and three employees of north maine woods.

i woke up in ashland and noticed that the regional office for maine parks and recreation is there, so i thought i'd just drop by and ask them some questions. they were very sweet.

so i went up to deboullie.

it's very remote up there.

very.

i'm kind of relieved to be back in a town, even if that town is fort kent.

never, not once in my life, did i ever think i would be approaching caribou, ME from the NORTH.

still, i'm having an interesting time.

here's a view of my campsite first thing in the morning.

in dreams

weeks ago  i started having dreams in which i have to go to princeton, ME.

i have no idea why i am here, but i am in princeton, ME. i have found a campsite somewhere nearby and this afternoon in calais i found a place that served up a pizza so good that all i could do was thank God for a creation in which such a thing could exist and a life in which i might be present to eat it.

it was a fourteen inch pie (i have some left over) with garlic sausage and onions, so good that it boggles your mind and under twelve dollars.

it is not my habit to endorse products or businesses here, but a pizza that good and that cheap deserves mention, you know?

key

i was too busy being dead to have any heart for cleaning up the mess.


but last week i finally went through my key ring and took off the keys i know i'll never use again: the key to an apartment that my last ex sold years ago, the keys from my job. my file cabinet, the storage locker from two classrooms ago, the outside key that only worked on that one door, the elevator key and the 10 key i had to fight so hard for.

funny, but when i left i turned in my 19 key (the first one given to me) and my key card, but nobody asked for the rest of them.

life's like that sometimes, i guess.

soup

i just like to say it: soup. i like the way it feels in my mouth.

...the word. soup itself is pretty good, too.

sunday afternoon i made some soup. it wasn't a classic hot-and-sour, but it resembled a hot-and-sour, only with more vegetables and stuff thrown in for a heartier kind of meal.

soup.

what happened?

yesterday the view from my window looked like this.

today it looks like this.
 













i'm kind of too depressed to talk about it.

red light, green light, 1, 2, 3!

View river road intersection in a larger map

i use this intersection a lot. sometimes i turn left here and get on the interstate, but most of the time i turn right and go along route two into williston, either to the church or to my preferred mountain biking venue.

used to be you could wait a looooooong time to turn onto route two there, and eventually they put in a traffic light which was very nice if you were turning OFF of river road, but now if you're turning ONTO river road from route two heading east, you could wait through two rotations of the light before you get a chance to break through, and while you're waiting, traffic is backing up behind you.

just wait, i said to myself. they will put in a protected green for turning left. they have to.

and then another small voice said nah, they won't do that. that would be too smart.

and guess what?

this morning i was on my way back from the church and noticed they've put up a second light, so when they get it connected, there's going to be a protected green! hooray!

dirty hands, dirty pants.

i still won't tell you what i'm working on, but i will tell you that today it involved some sandpaper, a disc loom, and a heat source. tomorrow there will be some power tools, maybe.

power tools are a girl's best friend, nevermind what they say about diamonds.

reeds

i have all this stuff that i can't show you yet or can't tell you about yet.

here's a thing, though: i'm working some new reeds. this wouldn't raise an eyebrow from anyone except that i don't think i've worked any reeds since -i don't know- 2001? it might have been earlier, but not much. i remember it because i was working in that room on the back side of the building, and 2001 was the last year i worked there.

i used to work reeds a lot. it's what i did. but a lot of things happened, including a broken right hand and the slow death of my soul and nothing felt right, not even the sweet and chunky feel of the pads of my fingers on that lower stack, and i kind of gave it up.

did you ever come to life after a long death?

last week joan's sermon was all about second chances. bit by bit i think i am returning to life.

and today i opened up that case and i played a little. i don't have the chops anymore, but i can build those muscles again.

do i even dare hope it?

and i had a moment or two of panic.

where are all my reeds? in the early 80's there was a fire in the cane fields in france and before the price of reeds went up, i bought cases and cases and i KNEW i still had them somewhere.

would my mom have thrown them out while i was sick? would i have left them back at the job i lost? would anyone have known they were mine? that they were important?

reed cane improves with age. it mellows if stored right.

so for the first time in years i opened a new box, familiar, purple.

and i set them to soak. just two, just for a start. sweet and beautiful and balanced. they have nice grain to them. they look like they'll play beautifully.

tomorrow i'll soak them again and try them for that first few minutes before i put them out for drying. you have to break reeds in. it's like a courtship. push them too fast and they won't bloom, won't last. take care of them and they'll take care of you.

sweet.

bow and balance

this is one of the things i've been working on, hot off the press.

you can listen to it here.

of course it sounds a lot better when connie plays it, but you'll get the idea.

catching up

i know easter was two weeks ago, but i've been busy.  you know, with projects.

i think at some point i threatened to update you with the candle project once i got them all finished.

the idea was that was making some lovely decorated candles (process described here) for people to take home at easter. i made up some of these little slips and put them in random hymnals so that when people opened to the first hymn, they might find that they'd gotten a surprise gift.

i've photographed this year's candles and posted the pictures here.

please, sir, may i have some more?

ok, ok, so i post a lot about custard here.

but i haven't said anything really about custard for DAYS and you can't yet see what's on my work table, and you can't yet see the photo project, and i'm not ready to post the new music i'm working on (nevermind some demure photos that i'm NOT talking about, but you know who you are), and not only is custard easy to make, but it's easy to talk about.

last week i was thinking of making a little dark chocolate mocha number, pure and simple, but then got the bright idea to reserve some of the chocolate base (pre-mocha), mix it with a little caramel milk, whip in an extra egg white and lay that in on top of the heavier, darker mix for a two layer custard thing.

so i did.

lightly sweet in the top layer; dark, rich, and not sweet on the bottom.

good all around.

brasshole.

for easter i polished the candlesticks and the plates at the church, which amazed people in how shiny they were and (i hear) prompted someone to ask if we'd gotten new plates.

no, just cleaned the old ones.

i also cleaned up the baptismal bowl, which nobody will notice but me and God, because it's pewter and therefore not all shiny when it's clean, but what was on it couldn't be described under any circumstances as "patina" but instead grotty filth. and pewter's soft, so the finish damages easily and it had acquired some bad scratches.

now when you're working with antique pieces you don't want to clean them up too much because that diminishes the value of them, but this is a contemporary piece and if someone doesn't clean it up and buff out those scratches now, it isn't going to develop a nice finish over time, you know?

the thing is that the "stuff" of the church should be kept beautiful and shiny. the things in and of themselves aren't important, but what we use in services to worship the Lord should be kept beautiful. it is part of our offering. we do not bring second best.

yesterday i took home the candle snuffers. they needed some polishing. they're not perfect, but now that i've taken on the job (and i told myself i wasn't going to do this) i'll just take home some of the pieces every week or so to maintain them and over time the last of the staining will come out and nobody will remember that they ever were nasty-looking.

ninety.

today we all trooped out to my grandmother's 90th birthday party.

the old girl looks pretty good, eh?

yeah, she does.

cattin' about

neighborcat is a friend of mine.


i used to think she was a stray in need of a place to crash, but it turns out she not only has a home, but she has a very busy social calendar, as well. she comes to my house, gets stoned, does a little light mousing, and has a nap.

and then she leaves.

she has never accepted food from me, although if i put down a saucer of milk, she will drink that.

i know from talking to the neighbors that she eats at some of their houses, and that she hangs out in over a half dozen homes; there are probably more. these days she's very busy cozying up the the men in my neighborhood; as i'm sitting at my desk i see her waiting for guys to come home in the afternoons and when they do, she puts on her pretty face and gets all touchy-feely, way more friendly than she usually is and they bend down and scratch her belly and she happily trots behind them and waits at their front doors for them to let her in.

i'm pretty sure that yesterday i saw her look back and wink at me.

today she was out in the driveway hunting and i couldn't see what she was stalking (she's not very good at it), but there was this moment in which she looked up and saw me watching her and i almost swear i heard her think "do NOT screw this up for me", so i moved quietly behind the window and didn't open it up to get a really clear picture.

ok, got yer back.

basket case

ok, so instead of giving you all the latest pictures of views from my desk -and there are a lot of them, since the fog is burning off and i've been taking pictures all morning- i think i threatened to write about last week's picnic baskets.

see, i have a lot of friends who are artists. and i was with one of them out in her studio recently and i was thinking about some things i've heard artists say about the basket lunches at the macdowell colony and i thought it would be a brilliant idea to make some picnic lunches and bring them to my artist friends when they're working.

and i have this friend who's trying really hard to do a lot of work in a hurry for a showing that's about six weeks away and she's kind of stressed about it. so when she said she was going to retreat to her workroom for a few days, i thought: basket time!

one thing you need to know about me, a thing you might already have guessed, is that one thing i can do (and there are a lot of things i can't do) is pack a picnic lunch. if you're ever road tripping with me, you would be smart to let me handle a lot of the refreshments.

and this artist friend of mine would have been happy enough (all right, overjoyed and overwhelmed) with a nice sandwich, but for the kind of money i'd spend on really nice cold cuts and a few amenities, i could "whip up a little something" that not only would give her several meals, but myself as well.

granted, it's time intensive, but one thing i have a lot of is time and if a thing is worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

one really great thing about chinese cooking is that a lot of the prep can be done way ahead of time, and aside from dishes that must be served NOW, fresh, there are a bazillion little side dishes and picnic foods that are simple to make (if you've got time, see above) and keep well for several days under refrigeration.

and they're only properly served as a collection of little dishes and not, say,  a big bowl of radishes, so when you make them, you have to make a lot of them, even if you're only serving up small portions of each thing. that's where the festivity is: the riot of tastes and colors and textures.

so i got to work.


if you can't follow the sequence of foods in the slideshow, bear in mind that in order to bring all the dishes off at once, there's a considerable amount of multitasking that needs to be done.

so.

start three days ahead of time.

cut the cabbage and salt it, leaving it in the bowl overnight. same with the radishes.
partway peel and slice cucumber, salt it, and set it aside. salting may or may not include sugar. it's a verb.
cut the carrots, and simmer them for hours in that lovely rich master sauce that just happens to be around.
drain cabbage. squeeeeze out as much water as possible!
add the remaining ingredients to the cabbage, put it in a sealed container, and set it aside.
make radish seasoning. set it aside to develop.
unpack and drain tofu. it needs to be pressed before it goes in the soup.
add seasoning to radishes. seal them and set them aside in with the cabbage, in the fridge.
remove carrots from sauce. put 'em away. you know, in the fridge.
strain sauce.
turn right around and simmer the mushrooms in the sauce. let them steep a loooooong time.
squeeze the excess water out of the cucumber slices. sauce them. put them away.
boil and cool eggs.
periodically return to the fridge and toss any dish sitting in a sauce to distribute the liquid evenly.
put the mushrooms away, strain the sauce, and return that to the freezer. you can use it again later.
crack eggshells; let eggs simmer three hours in tea mixture.
make the sesame peanut sauce. put it away to develop overnight.
make two kinds of custard (detailed elsewhere). let it set overnight in the fridge.
put tea eggs away to steep. eighteen hours, two days. whatever.
it's time to get going on the soup!
soak daylilly blooms
cut tofu, mushrooms, cabbage, whatever's going in.
soup is a process; some things go in sooner than others, but they all go in.
beat eggs, cut green onion (these are added to the soup last)
cook noodles. still warm, they go under the peanut sesame sauce.
assemble bean buns.
pack the cold dishes for transport.
simultaneously put the finishing touches on the soup and steam the buns.
pack it all up and out the door with you!

menu:

hot and sour cabbage
soy-dipped radish fans
salt cucumbers
carnelian carrot coins
master sauce mushrooms

peanut-sesame noodles
marbleized tea eggs

hot and sour soup

steamed red bean buns
banana custard with carmelized molasses sauce
dark chocolate coconut custard

black lichee tea

same day, three views

so, like, it's a riot of color out there. you know, if you have an eye for it.

i like the view from my desk, and i keep a gallery of that view over here, but i haven't decided yet if i'm going to post all three of today's pictures.

still, it's a nice view to have from one's desk. it really facilitates the staring-out-the-window-not-doing-anything process.

maybe if you're very nice to me, tomorrow i'll post my latest custard news, or the dispatch from the picnic baskets.