Musical notes

In response to C’s question about music: initially, we went looking for a Little House album because we were inspired by Little House in the Big Woods, with Pa playing fiddle during those cold winter evenings. (Truth be told, this is what has inspired me to stick with violin as well.) In any case, we discovered this album on Amazon: Arkansas Traveler: Music From Little House on the Prairie. After this we went to library, where we found an album entitled Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith. We also found an album by Peter Yarrow entitled Favorite Folk Songs. These three have become the soundtrack to our days outside of the house, and sometimes in the afternoon at home as well. We played the Peter Yarrow album over, and over, and over with no respite driving from here to Northern California this summer. In doing so, questions arose and we looked into the provenance of “The Golden Vanity” and talked about the Spanish armada and the war between England and Spain. We talked about gold miners in California and silver miners in Colorado. And of course he loved talking about the race to build the Transcontinental Railroad and how the two parts came together at Promontory, Utah. But I just let the songs play and play, and when the questions arose we explored them. It seemed, pretty often, that the songs he liked best were the most depressing, like some of the spirituals, or “The Golden Vanity,” in which the valiant cabin boy dies. This almost bothered me enough to stop playing them, but I think they appeal to his sense of narrative–they do tend to tell a story, and in a far more dramatic way than some of the more uplifting songs like “Skip to my Lou.”

It’s also interesting when two different artists cover the same song, so that he can hear how their different approaches affect the tone of the song. The Golden Vanity, for instance–the Peter Yarrow version is very somber, whereas the Harry Smith anthology version is far more foot-stompin’ and knee-slappin’. It helped to hear this, and then we drifted into a brief discussion of how people would learn songs from others as they traveled, or as travelers stopped to stay and visit.

I have really enjoyed all three albums, especially as they are “real” folk music, not cute-ified for children, which does mean that sometimes you have to address issues (“why does the Boll Weevil take the man’s home away?”). And sometimes I’ve just said, “Let’s just enjoy the music,” because there isn’t a way to address it in a way that I feel comfortable with at the time. (And sometimes, I need to check Wikipedia first.)

Moon

He came in tonight after nighttime walk to find me making up beds.

“Here,” he said, handing me an invisible tray and climbing up onto his bed. “It’s full of moon cookies and moon pies. The magic moon gave it to me, after I lifted the magic oven down out of the sky.”

“Why did you lift the magic oven out of the sky?”

“Oh, it needed to be done.”

“I’m never going to be able to eat all of these,” I said, putting the tray down on the bed. I selected a cookie. “This one is half-black, half-white. I’m going to eat the dark until I have a crescent.” I took a big bite.

“Mine is all dark, representing the new moon,” he said, taking one for himself, and then another. “This one is a full moon, but I’m eating it down to a crescent.”

I quoted,
The moon’s the North Wind’s cookie,
He eats it day by day,
Until there’s but a rim of scraps
That crumbles all away.

The North Wind–

“No, it’s the South Wind.”

The South Wind is a baker,
He kneads clouds in his den
And bakes a crisp new moon
That greedy North Wind eats again.*

“Greedy North Wind would eat all of these moon pies and moon cookies,” he said. “Come on, can we have some bathtime reading?”

*Vachel Lindsay

Week 2 of School

We’ve spent one week in school
and it’s been good
We’ve had a story or two
and beeswax animals
There’s jam and kale for lunch
a fairy bower on the grass
And Boy is having lots of fun
pretending he’s a cat
He wants to have some circle time
we will
He doesn’t know it yet but then
I haven’t got it down
So
This week is another story
Some puppets
Fractions
and French bread
Solar dyeing Otis wool
in giant garbage bags
We’ll start some Baum and
build a fort
And sing a few last summer songs
Then we’ll head off to MoA
to look for animals
in the art.

(Thanks to Marian Call for the music in my head.)

Distractions.

I’m in Pasadena. I have “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena” in my head. (If you don’t know what this song is, you should.) The title character was evidently the terror of Colorado Boulevard, which is where I am right now.

I’ve got a small plastic cup of Fat Tire at my elbow and I’m listening to the History Channel. Yes, I’m listening to television. I decided to see what was on. I’m not impressed. I allowed myself one spin through the available channels and found:

Commercials.
Bloody hands.
A tribute interview with Quincy Jones noting the death of Michael Jackson.
Boxing.
A television show in which two interior decorators critique a homeowner’s taste (I think that’s what they were doing. It wasn’t very nice).

And the program I am listening to, which seems to be a series of episodes about life on Earth if humans suddenly disappeared. So it talks about day one after humans, day five, five years, twenty, one hundred, etc. etc. Despite the despairing narrator (imagine the narrator of the movie trailers who says, “In a world…” and you know his voice) who talks about how everything will decay, rust, fall apart, become covered with water, or in the case of the mausoleums of New Orleans, human remains will turn to oil. I find it very cheerful, because I often worry about our crappy impression on the planet, like a large polyester leisure suit, making her sweat and wrinkle and all kinds of crud accumulate in unfortunate places.

But I’ve noticed that I have no tolerance for the lack of depth to the program. Every time I ask a question (I’m alone, I can talk to the screen, right?) something else becomes The Most Important Thing to Fall Apart and I’m just left with questions which fade because! Because! There is a breathlessness and speed to the pace of images that leave my eyes tired and my brain spinny. And then there are commercials. Ew. Even with the sound off, they are less than palatable.

So. Evidently Malaysia does not have an indigenous steel industry. But in 500 years, buildings with steel infrastructure will start to corrode and fall down, laden with green moss and vines. This is if people suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, so there was no one to maintain buildings.

Is this supposed to depress me?

Oh, and in 2000 years, the Mona Lisa will have been eaten by death-watch beetles. Just so you know.

Why we make the bed.

This is why we make the bed.

We make the bed because when we don’t make the bed, the cats, who would normally lie on the bed and leave their tufts of fur there, leave their tufts of fur on the sheets and pillowcases. If they are left on the pillowcases, then the Mites of Cataria, who live in the fur of the cats, will wait for their homes to return and when we lie down at night they become confused and crawl up into our noses to live. It is dark in there, and they will be sad.

However, if we make the bed in the morning then the cats lie on the top of the blankets and since we do not lie on the blankets, normally, but under them, then the Mites of Cataria will wait for their homes to return and when the cats return then they will reunite with their home colonies.

The Catarian Mites are known for their lovely colored clothes. They are expert dyers and they dye their clothes, then use their excess dyes (which, you know, will go bad if left to sit) on the cats, which is why Hershey is his lovely deep brown black color and Kahlua her cream, grey and brown. When the Catarian Mites grow old they get tired and do not dye so much, so there is not so much extra dye. The cats then have hairs that are left white or gray.

We do not want the Mites of Cataria, friendly and industrious little people as they are, to crawl up our noses and be sad.

This is why we make the bed.

Pa Ingalls’s wagon.

Close your eyes.

You are in an old, restored livery. A barn-like structure, it has large and small stalls, some open but barred by rope, some closed with plexiglass windows. All show some aspect of 1850s horse-drawn transportation.

Look! A giant replica horse. Seven feet tall, grey and serious, wearing black leather accoutrements, it is like the horse version of an older biker guy. It could step on you, but doesn’t. It enjoys its feed bag.

In the center of the room are giant wagons, the cross-country truckers of the animal-powered era. Imagine some fiercely strong oxen pulling these overland with your great-grandmother’s buffet table (and a lot more stuff) inside.

Along the wall stalls, more wagons. Wells Fargo mail wagons with niches for mail under legs, up top, and in back. Light about-town wagons. A delivery wagon, green, with red wheels and “Studebaker” written across the side.

This wagon is on the smaller side, no bigger than your Subaru. The wheels come to my chest. The seat is a two-plus size, just narrower than the wagon body, held aloft by a pair of leaf springs on either side. A quilt lays folded on the seat.

Next to this wagon is a flight of stairs, leading up to another display area. But you pause on the stairs, looking down into the green wagon. The green wagon has a brake on the side, painted red, which attaches just above the front right wheel and has an extension that reaches to the rear right wheel. In its bed are some farm implements and a wooden box filled with canning jars.

Imagine you are Laura Ingalls, age 5.

Imagine that you have just ridden to town, the town of Pepin, on Lake Pepin, your first visit to a town in your life. You are riding on a board nailed across the wagon bed, directly behind the wagon seat where your Pa and your Ma and your baby sister Carrie are sitting. Beside you is your older sister, Mary, sitting upright, her blue-and-white dress smooth and clean. You are dusty and untidy, and your pocket has torn.

You are driving home. The sun is low in the sky, and the horse ambles slowly on the bumping, unpaved road. The wagon seat in front of you squeaks softly as the wagon lurches a bit to one side, then the other. Your hands hold you to the plank of wood you sit on. You feel the splinters of the fresh wood. You are tired from a long day of new things, but you cling to the board so as not to slide with each jolt.

The wagon bed is filled with things Pa and Ma have bought. New implements for the farm, perhaps a new blade for Pa’s cradle; he’ll begin harvest soon. A saw. A box of canning jars, for blueberries will be ripe soon and Ma will need them. A bundle of fabric, to be used to make sheets and underwear. Some tea, some store sugar. Pipe tobacco for Pa. The little wagon is nicely full of things to take home to the little cabin. It lurches, and the contents slide just a bit, first to one side, and then the other, but the horse is surefooted and the journey home is not long.

Imagine you are a small boy, age 5.

Imagine you have just heard this story, standing on the stairs, staring at the wagon. Imagine you have been re-reading Little House in the Big Woods for perhaps the eighth or ninth time.

When we emerge from the stable, blinking in the sunlight, G stands for a moment, holding Shnork. He turns to me, a fierce look upon his face.

“I need to go home,” he cries. “I need to go home now.”

What is it? Does he need a restroom? Is he ill? The fierceness of his words arrests my attention.

“I need to go home,” he repeats vehemently, seriously. “I need to make a wagon.”

The coming of Shnork.

Imagine… a Lego man. A wee character. Two blocks for legs. Single-bob pieces make a torso. A single piece with bobs on three sides for a head, and a smaller bit for a hat. He’s no more than two inches high.

With him, imagine two pieces, each a bowed almost-half-circle with two bobs, connected by a four-bob piece.

This is Shnork, and his desk. Shnork is an alien, from the solar system of the planet Goofidon, only not from the Goofidon planet (which is an Earth-like planet) but from their equivalent of Saturn. They have flowers, but not so many and not like ours.

Shnork is a small alien foreign exchange student/tourist. Imagine him as a piquant Twoflower. He is living with us for now and occasionally makes sketches at his desk, or writes postcards to his mama and daddy. He sends these through Interstellar Mail, which tries to eat him. Occasionally. It’s a little scary. (I imagine Interstellar Mail as a kind of Galactic Pneumatic-tube System. A GPS, if you will, by which Shnork’s mama and daddy keep an eye on him. He’s very small, you know.)

When he is not writing postcards, he uses his desk as a jetpack. Like you do.

I introduced Shnork to the wee guy yesterday morning. He fell for Shnork like gangbusters. Shnork’s postcards became more frequent (because his postcards are me “reading” them: “Dear Mama and Daddy, …”). But I explained to the Boy that for Shnork to have things to write about, G had to explain the world to Shnork.

We took him to Old Town (here in San Diego) and introduced him to all kinds of interesting 1850’s S. California life. We met a gathering of old-man trees, great big trees, gnarly and twisty with rough, ridged gray bark like it had been striated vertically with forks, and long, slender, twisted limbs and clouds of fern-like leaves, like fingers and hands covered by the fluffy hair that grows from the forearms and ears of very old men.

We introduced Shnork to mail wagons and a delivery wagon very much like Pa Ingalls’s wagon (so much so that it inspired a story–more later). He was impressed by horses. He wrote that they are “giants with shining shoulders who could step on us but don’t. They jingle and wear the skins of other beasts. Love, Shnork.” Shnork liked that I forgot my wallet when we ate and had to go back to the car for it. He wrote that I “forgot my currency in the gray conveyance and needed it for food.”

The idea was that Shnork has many questions and Geeklet was responsible for telling him all about the world. Who would have lived in the bedrooms of the hacienda museum? What were these wagons for? What is an outhouse? When the boy didn’t know, he asked me, and we talked about it–how wells were dug, what hurricane lamps were for, how to tell if someone was wealthy and what made them wealthy in those days. Why the outhouse would have been so much further from the house. Then he’d tell Shnork, and Shnork would reiterate it in foreign/visitor language (imagine a digitized E.T. voice talking about “Earth history”).

I think we’ll let him stay. He’s a lot of fun, he has a jet pack for goodness sake, and he encourages my guy to look around for interesting things to introduce to Shnork. And his room and board are minimal.

Take me back to kumquat land.

The word “kumquat” means nothing to me anymore.

A loving and lovely friend gifted to me many pounds of kumquats. I have asked for them and desired them and should she say “I have more!” I would thrill with delight. That is why I write this post tonight, when I should be sleeping, my paws sticky with dreams and sugar. To remind me.

Last night I looked at those lovely piles of golden fruit and realized that, nice however they look mounded in bowls (yes, plural) on my kitchen table, they would begin to turn (unfortunately, on me) should I ignore them much longer. I began washing, slicing, de-seeding.

Kumquats have a lot of seeds.

Hours later, TMoTH had given up on me and gone off to bed. I had just arrived at the place in Return of the King (unabridged audio) where Aragorn and Gandalf lead their hardy warriors to what is believed to be their doomed last stand. They meet with the mouth of Sauron. I sliced my last kumquat.

Twenty-two cups o’ kumquat.

Each recipe calls for 2.

I use more orange in each batch of Kumquat Marmalade than I use kumquats.

See? The word means nothing to me any longer.

Here is the pot:

I love chemistry.

Here I am cooling the marmalade, while not disturbing its “fast boil”, by raising ladlesful.

Burned sugar.

Here I am with gross burned sugar stove, thanks to boiled-over marmalade. Raising ladlesful did not work. Hmm… internal temperature of the whole bucket must have just reached a fun peak, and laughed at my pioneer efforts.

But finally,

Jars in mid-process.

five hours later, I began to see the light at the end of the glass jar.

Look! Stuff.

Jars of marmalade.

I will give my friend a jar.

And I will try to figure out how to use up the remaining 18 cups of kumquat.

Another batch will likely be made. But then? Anyone? A good bread recipe, perhaps?

On the schooling front:
Geeklet has really been into the weather lately. We’ve been reading The Magic School Bus in a Hurricane and The Magic School Bus Visits the Waterworks and both talk about clouds, the water cycle, storms, etc. So the Boy has been doing daily weather observations and posting them. He reports to me his findings, I write them on a chalkboard in our kitchen, and he draws what he has seen. If he has a drawing that fits the day already, we post that.

He’s been tying knots in everything today, a fine-motor skill that has not been all that interesting to him until today.

As yesterday was baking day and today was evidently marmalade day, there was a lot of counting to be done. (Oh, and I worked on a warp, too. More counting.) He helped me with the fractions–a third of a cup of lemon juice per recipe, and I’m making two, makes two-thirds of a cup of lemon juice. If I have to measure out oats, and I need a cup of oats, which measuring cups can I use? Which one will fit through the opening in the jar? The 1/4c. How many of these do I need to make one cup? He also played in his kitchen, playing that he was making apricot preserves, and mimicking my actions, except that he was adamant that he would use a 4-cup measure instead of using the 1-cup measure four times.

He helped me weed, and we saw many ladybugs, and some aphids, and an interesting striped insect. Boy G took out the magnifying glass gifted to him on Beltane and was describing each insect to me, trying to find damage done by aphids or other insects, and trying to find very new baby peas on the vines.

He played with the video camera. He told the camera a story about a train in trouble, then used the camera to “introduce” the camera to Hershey, in essence telling a short documentary about Hershey. He was very gentle with the camera, and asked a lot of questions about telling stories.

He played in the water a lot in the bathroom sink, and at one point brought an empty bottle out, which he’d filled with soapy water. I gave him a clear jar (he wanted to “examine” a “sample”) and he poured it in, then we talked about why the little tiny bubbles rose to the top, what the bubbles were filled with, how it looked, and so forth.

Silky. Webby.

I recently learned that you can spin spider silk. I am inspired, and yet intimidated by the gathering of materials. Not so much the spiders–I have a healthy respect for spiders, but am not so much of the squealy-fear-of-spiders camp. No, it’s because spiders can spin 5 or so different kinds of silk and I’d hate to destroy a perfectly good web just to find out that it was Web Silk #5, Super Sticky for the Bugs That Go Crunch, and not (as I’d want) Silk #2, Raceway Silk, for the easily-replaced leaders that go up to the web and are themselves not sticky.

Also, I think it’d take a while to gather even enough to make, oh, anything. I have other things to do.

The next time I find myself on some kind of Indiana Jones-type adventure with many spiderwebs just hanging around, I won’t get all grossed out by the skeletons. While Indy plucks some priceless artifact in preface to mayhem and much running, I’ll gather some of the multitude of waving spiderweb banners.

That’s the problem with sidekicks. They just aren’t all that pragmatic.

Yeasty. Poor bees.

I did a yeast experiment. I promise it’s a nice thing.

So I found two different places that promised to show me how to grow my own yeast. You know, for bread. Instead of the jar/envelope kind. Well, hey, why not? I’m a make-it-from-scratch kind of girl. So I started the yeast as recommended here, with 2 T. of orange juice and 2 T. of flour. (I used fresh squeezed and rye, respectively.) I covered the bowl and left it out. The other recipe was found here, and required a cup of flour and half a cup of water to start, cover and leave out.

Each day after I had to add to the original batch, until day 4, when I began taking away from the original batch and then adding to.

At this point, evidently, I was nurturing a colony of yeasty beasties if I saw bubbles and evidence of rising every day, and a winey smell was a good thing. Well, I saw said evidence, though smell was less authoritative, as I’ve been sick and can’t smell anything. (I usually stuck the uncovered bowl under TMoTH’s nose and said, “What does this smell like?” Given that I was warned of the possibility of rather strong odors this probably was not the kindest thing to do.)

In any case, both colonies were doing fine. See?

After a few days, the second batch (the larger one, on the left) was supposed to be turned into a barm. A barm, according to my handy OED, is

1. A bosom, or a lap.
2. A fermenting agent, yeast or leaven, or the head on a beer.

To go barmy is to become frothy-headed. Perhaps.

My favorite use comes from 1580. Montgomerie to R. Hudson, “This barme and blaidry buists up all my bees.” Poor, poor bees.

So I made the barm out of the one successful frothy mass, mixing it with more flour and water and putting it in the refrigerator. Now I can make sourdough bread with my own local yeast whenever I like. I just need to do it.

The other yeast sat on the table for several days, being fed. Then one day I realized that I would never make enough bread to warrant keeping two separate bread starters and I just cut bait. It was a successful experiment. I could successfully culture yeast and leaven bread without a commercial product. Yay. Into the trash it went.

Now I have barm in the fridge and I need to bake with it. Hmm… Walnut scallion bread is sounding very tasty right about now…

By the way, here is the Pane Siciliano.

Just out of the oven. I made it with no sesame seeds (we couldn’t find any at the store, sigh) and using Kamut flour instead of semolina. It was awesome.

Here it is again.

Beautiful, no? I want to make it again, but the down side is that it gets eaten so darn fast. Three loaves gone in two days. It takes longer than that to make the stuff. Maybe I could make it, and hide it.