The Calm Persistent ClickWe have put a clock in the room that we sleep in.
The significance of this is probably not immediately apparent; the room that we sleep in is very quiet. It is well sheltered from most of the noises of our semi-urban living. In that we have been trying to also reduce the general amount of noise in our home, at night, the room that we sleep in becomes very still. It amplifies creaks and groans, the odd pepper of noises that visit irregularly in the dark. During the warmer times, these things fade with the thanks of our fan, which keeps us cool and lulls us with its steady turn of noise. Here, now, when it is colder, the various noises might build a narrative: what is coming next? It can sometimes keep one up at night.
I have always found the ocean terribly calming, and I believe I better understand one aspect of its effect, now, in part because of this clock. There is definite rhythm to oceans. Living at the ocean, one is exposed to the cycles of wrack and patient, defiant rebuilding over the course of a lifetime, and punctuation of the seasons in the year, the visible swing of the Moon 'round the Earth in the troubled lap of the waters, and the daily manifest of the same, peeling back the foam and (from my youth) cold so children with calloused feet can walk the line of broken shell and pebbled rock to look for hints of purple or the calm white of sand dollars. Standing next to the sea at night in later years, just to feel the waves come in, and come in, and come in again, testing the pauses between each crash, listening to the wind move up and down, and getting lost in the impossible staccato of the wash as it dribbled out and over my feet. With the exception of the last (in which there is only rhythm that I myself would put there) all the wheels turn slow on calm days.
(The ocean in anger has a rhythm as well, but it is one I understand much less.)
The clock, then, sits at the other end of the room that we sleep in, up near the ceiling, partially obscured by a piece of the architecture. It is a simple, cheap clock. It has a plain black rim of plastic, and large, carefully professional numerals arranged in a ring. The hands are black and plain as well, and the unadorned second hand is done in the expected red. It is completely unremarkable, and during the day we neglect it, already forgetting. But at night, the soft, oddly variable chuff chuff chuff of the step second hand steps into the room we sleep in, filling the space with a regularity which has turned out to be assuring.
I do not wear a watch. A long time ago, a friend of mine (whom I have since lost, alas) attended sessions with a therapist. The therapist's eventual prescription (more or less): "You worry about being late. Wear a watch." I do not wear a watch, but I have a clock to keep me company.
The Universal Language of QueueingWe are remarkably lucky in where we live that, even though we do not have a large population, we live in a place that has a wide mix of cultures: sufficiently so to bless us with a fair amount of cultural groceries, many of which are within easy range by foot.
I will coin the term 'cultural grocery' here, instead of succumbing to the use of the more widely palated 'ethnic grocery'. I do so because it is fun to make things up. I do so also, because I wish to include in this category the corny, effortlessly common concept of the typical American food market. There is a culture even in those places, starting with the misted displays of produce to prime one's tummy for the high margin items in the cereal box and snack food sections, and ending always with the milk and meat. I do not mind it much, in as much as I understand it, and on the face of it all it's nice to have a place to buy food, so I do not complain. We have a Whole Foods now, too, and we like it very much, cultural baggage and all. But we have much more than that, and we are lucky for it.
We recently went on an exploratory spree to find all the Indian markets within reasonable use of the car. It is an enlightening experience, to find an entire set of shops that sell mostly the same things as each other, in much the way that typical hometown American grocery chain stores do, each a little different. The things that they sell! Isle after isle of completely different ways of eating...
Our current fascination is the highly concentrated collection of Asian markets in the district of the city that also serves as the wholesale food stomping grounds. Again, it is highly enlightening to attend store after store, making note of the patterns, making educated guesses at purchases, bringing it all home to cook, and trying it all over again the week after. Asking people what is good to eat. I would recommend this.
As usual, it is not too long before something astonishing happens. For me, that was a little while ago in our current favorite Asian market (those sands shift with every trip, it would seem) on an extraordinarily busy afternoon. The register lines formed a solid mingled crush out past the vegetables (you buy the vegetables last, yes!) and into the spaces between the banks of coolers filled with refrigerated sticky rice snacks and other assorted sundry that we have not yet managed to sample. The tangled strands of shoppers moved slowly but with patience, and it was some time before I managed to get to the counter.
The counter was quite small, and in an effort to help things along, I began to hand various things across to the woman at the register. With an economy of movement, she somehow managed to convey that if I was willing, it would be even better if I could place items directly on the scale for her. In general, I don't try to help in that sort of way, because it isn't my scale, after all, and I would find that sort of behavior to be presumptive on my part. This is it: I do believe she understood this, and took it into account, for I had no doubts about that part of her intent, and I still do not. It was a nearly perfect delivery of "Oh, just put it on the scale, you timid goof!", lightly done just right.
It was just a wave of her hand; neither she not I spoke one word.
There are other places: Mediterranean markets, and cheese mongers, and the food stuffs of Central America. We have a Central European place, wonderful for its steady lines of supply. They carry red currant jelly, which is a wonderful base for a tart glaze, and they carry gooseberry jam, which is excellent on toast.
Carbohydrates Are Bad For MeObviously, this cannot be an Atkins rant. It must instead be a cute tale, ending in injury. Comic injury, but injury, nonetheless.
I have learned over the years various small patches of the vast quilt of knowledge that is "knowing how to bake bread". On a recent trip to the grocery honoring both whim and request I stocked up on various odd grains to throw into bread loaves. We always have plenty of wheat flour about (along with a seemingly unkillable container of corn meal) so I came back with some rye and buckwheat flours and some flax meal, and proceeded to make loaves of bread with all of this stuff in one of those heady early flailing experiments before hunkering down and measuring carefully and taking notes.
I forgot to put in the salt. I hate it when I do that; I am firmly in the "bread with salt in" camp. Other people may not be, for medical or cultural reasons. I am, but I forgot the salt. I also managed to turn out a very moist dough, so it spread a bit on second rise. But it took to the stone in the oven nicely, and came out very well, if a little flattish.
The crust on the bottom of the loaf was a happy result; thick and crisp and richly brown. A little tricky to cut, however, and it took several light passes of the blade to make a clean slice all the way through. All of this motion nicely set up a sway in the shelving the bread board was on at the moment, and a tiny three ounce can of tomato paste wiggled off of its brethren and fell, from above my head, and nailed me in the toe.
Dim Blue Lines on the MapFor a very long time, the weather has been chill, and a series of snow and ice and sleet and what all else had fallen upon us all, a layer cake of winter on every surface.
In more ways then ever in my memory, this has done a terrible toll on our roads. Where cars would park and plows could not go, the slush turned black, froze, and tamped down leaving an undulating surface that was often higher than the sidewalk. There were berms a good eight inches high, again of that black compaction. In places where the sidewalks had not been cleared quickly enough, there was now no point. Water mains popped like corks under the salt-stained asphalts, bubbling up from beneath in a churn of cracks and new gravel to send fast streams down the gutters that would freeze to solid blocks in the overnight, embedding the tires of cars in two inches of hard murk.
Would that I were telling the story, I would claim that the city buses have absentmindedly buried some totem of great importance down there someplace, and are peppering the city infrastructure with a maniac archeologic survey, using very bad technique (although, to be fair, their only digging tools are large rubber balloons). In one section, Public Works has used sealant-coated concrete slab instead of asphalt for the bus lane, and it is mostly fairing better, but the busses have found a way: I watched one afternoon as a steady trickle of oily melt water ran down the gutter and then turned a corner and dribbled away beneath the edge of one of those concrete slabs which had been crushed into large gravel by the fist of traffic, the stream disappearing into the earth to fuel the next frost heave. Equally odd are the splashes of tarred gravel strewn across the sidewalk next to some recently patched hole, some large vehicle having driven the patch right out again.
In places, the skin of the streets has been peeled back by the violence, exposing the muscles below of streets past. It is something to look down into a pothole and see old cobble, seemingly indestructible and bleached white as bone. We still have some streets that sport brick and cobble on their surface, and it is interesting to see what other courses ran with whole stone, long ago.
Very near to us we have a street surface made up entirely of old railway ties, compressed and upended, grain toward the sky. The wood is very dark with age. The street is never plowed. it seems to have held up just fine.
The guy who comes over and cooks butter for usWe have been gifted with a truly remarkable discovery. There is a taste, a flavor, a powerful undercurrent in store bought baked goods that makes them difficult to eat in moderation. I speak in shady particulars of those paper bags of cookies that are produced by the folks with the vaguely Orwellian boast about their recall abilities, but that taste shows up in other product as well. I have been aware of it, but never able to define it, or even speak articulately about it. I have been shown the way of it now, and it is this:
Toast the butter.
I have been noticing that, more often than not, the good food that tends to linger in the memory does so because of a specific technique that is neither labor nor time saving. This is one of those joyful cases. Toasting butter is very easy: melt butter over low heat, bring heat to high and stir, stir until the solids fall out and begin to brown a little. Remove from heat immediately (the carry over will deepen the browning). Because it is an extra step, this might be seen as a pain in the ass, but it's very, very worth it (just don't burn the butter). Use the browned butter in cookies or cakes or frosting or on toast or whatever. The results are astonishing.
An associate of mine sees the world of food in terms of 'yum': butter generally yields 'yum', as do Maillard reactions yield 'yum'. Butter done in this way is most powerful yum.
AdditionsWe have acquired a new radio. The make and model of the machine is the Grundig FR-200; it is billed as an emergency radio, and it would seem to excel at that. We have not actually had any emergencies for it as yet, but it performs admirably with regular use. It is a thoughtful piece of hardware.
The thing is highly flexible when it comes to power sources; like most consumer appliances, one can plug it into the wall, using a (lamentably unsupplied, but as we go, less and less necessary) standard alternating to direct current wall wart adapter (of the particular spec, of course). But, you may say, what if a large bear has knocked down the power lines? If there is no power in the wall, then the radio can run off of three AA batteries in the battery compartment. You may counter that one may never have gone to the store to purchase the batteries, what with the bears roaming the streets, or perhaps the batteries bought some years ago in those happier, bear-free times have long since bled out their power to time and neglect? This thing has a hand crank, attached to a dynamo, which powers a separate, internal rechargeable battery. Ah, you might say, the bears are clever, and they have broken into my home and charged and drained the battery pack in the radio so many times as to render it useless. That is fine, I say; the radio can be powered directly off the crank. The crank makes a racket, to be sure, but the radio may be turned up. And thus, I may listen to the bear propaganda in relative comfort.
The radio is full of other nice touches. There is a flashlight incorporated into the case, which can be run off of any of the above power sources in addition to (or along with) the radio. Attention has been paid to to things like the battery compartment cover; it is attached to the case with a stout hinge, and I think it would take a great deal of trauma to break it away completely. The internal rechargeable battery pack is user replaceable, bless them (I have not checked, but it appears to be a reasonably common three-cell cordless phone type battery pack; if nothing else, it uses a familiar cordless phone battery connector). The flashlight assembly can be popped free with a coin or better, revealing a backup bulb. The plastic knobs are a little bit wibbly, but solid knobs on radios are difficult to come by these days, and these seem to hold up well under moderate use.
The speaker is small, but more than serviceable for voice traffic. An earphone jack is provided. There are no tone controls. There is no indicator of battery power, but with the crank that is less of an issue. The whip antenna extends to 65 cm.
The radio itself is pretty reasonable. The particular listening conditions in our home are not very suitable for DXing, so I cannot speak to that. The radio pulls in all the local FM stations admirably, and does a good job with AM as well. The shortwave reception is packed into two bands, from 3200 KHz to 7600 KHz and 9200 KHz to 22 MHz. The tuning scale is quite small, so finding stations on the shortwave bands takes a bit of a deft fingertip with the fine tuning knob, but the radio fares well even with the small whip. I can reliably get the BBC and the CBC and RNL and CRI and VOA and RHI; much else comes and goes. It does not cope as well as the grand-daddy Grundig with weak signals or crowds, but it is quite serviceable.
I am not sure I wish to ponder too long on the nature of a disaster that would require my information be gotten from another continent, but it's nice to have bases covered.
In any event, this little radio has supplanted the Baygen FreePlay (a fine thing itself, yet) as the go-to radio when our fragile local power infrastructure heaves heavy sighs and sags into despondence for whatever reason. It also makes a fine radio to roam around the house for those times away from the other Grundig. 'Tis good work.
This Clean ExpanseSo I sit, out here under the stars with my magic recording device becoming ever more rapidly chill, my fingers complaining about the lack of gloves, the wind, the lack of gloves. It is a beautiful night.
We are out away from the urban pool again. I do not know if it is due to the absence of the thick embrace of the city's heat, or just because there was more of it, but there is still a fair amount of snow up here. It is most apparent in the places of shade: one can mark the sun's passage with it. It is white up here, a clearness unkissed by exhaust fumes or sand or salt. In places, yes, flecked with the dinge of old leaves or guilty of where the dogs go, but these are aberrations. For fields and unbroken fields worth, it is a untrampled sun bone white. The cliffs give up water in great frozen gouts, limning ghosts.
It is cold, cold enough to clear the sky all the way up. The moon hangs high, half full and all bright. Orion swings through, proud, trophy held high. When I first came out, I could see few stars, but now the street lights have been blown, and I see more. If I remain out here long enough, the Milky Way may attend from behind that damn moon and wave hello. Plenty cold enough for that.
The guests have gone and the dogs are now still, and outside the silence settles over everything. In the far distance across the valley in the summer one can hear the cows low after evening, but I do not hear them now. There is the smell of good hardwoods burning in the air. Dim lights spill from our porch, another porch. The night is tired and has settled in, like it never can under the sodium lamps and sirens of the city in these times. Down the hill over the fallow and into the treed valley lurks a shadow black, an ink too deep to associate with modern life. Men would come to erect bright yellow lights and a parking lot to chase it from there and secure the area. I want none of these things tonight.
Ah! There we are.
The UI of SpinI am having a bit of a problem with one of my radios.
I have had many radios; many have had tuning knobs on the side. In every instance of those, turning the knob clockwise (whilst facing the knob) has caused the frequency selector to move to the right (whilst facing the scale). This makes perfect sense to me, or something of that sort, for it would seem to map nicely to the behavior I see when using a front faced knob; the top of the knob spins right as the selector does, etc. I must wonder, then, if this is a cultural bias, and if there are other cultures that understand the dominant part of the knob to be the underside.
Because I have this radio, and it works in exactly the opposite way of every other.
And it's driving me nuts.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Commentary accepted at comment@goob.com, although the traps are agressive and the pointy bits simply drip with dark liquour. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.