A highly prized pore-bearing mushroom

Bad pun. This large, stout mushroom (4″ across at the top, 3″ at the base) in a cereal bowl on our counter is Boletus edulis and had it been growing along our forest path in multiples, we’d have had it with eggs or steak or soup and gone back looking for more.

This mushroom species is widespread around the world (some distribution likely in the shipping of pines and other conifers across oceans) and highly prized. It dries well and retains its flavor and is “described as nutty and slightly meaty, with a smooth, creamy texture. This mushroom has a distinct aroma reminiscent of sourdough. It has a higher water content than other edible mushrooms. When dried, Boletus edulis has more protein than all other commonly consumed vegetables apart from soybeans.” wikipedia

Long ago and far away I filled a washtub with these beauties near Speedwell, Virginia. In our exuberance, we laboriously canned many quarts of them only to learn that they turn into slimy-sluglike things if you don’t remove the porous gills before canning. We didn’t get a bite. Should have strung pieces on a string over the woodstove. Ah well.

The Rural Reality Channel

I stole this from my daughter’s facebook page. I was at the Floyd Town Jubilee when our neighbor came to mow the pasture for hay–not something the grand daughters get to see from their suburban back yard high on the ridge overlooking Rapid City, SD.

So Abby and Taryn got front row seats near the stage. Ah, breathe in the fragrance of meadow: Smellivision with a gentle breeze in the shade. Life is good.

It consists of the black and white images from What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader that you may have already seen. What this has going for it are slide transitions (still studying works best for different kinds of images) and background music (which is not going to do for the long term as it is copyrighted. I’m looking for local replacements, with credits. Ideas?) I may someday elaborate on this, cut the number of images, slow it all down a couple of notches, add voice narration with some snippets from the book and some ambient sounds.

Slow Roads

I have a twenty minute color slideshow (including the Child in Nature photos of the g-daughters) with some built-in pauses (text frames with nature quotes, etc) where I can interject some conversation, readings from the book(s), and such. Still working on the logistics there but it can stand alone or serve as the basis for shorter cuts. The hard part is the long left-hand tail of the curve where mistakes and retakes abound.That was the past 48 hours.

The other piece of the puzzle is the operation of the digital projector (ViewSonic PJ557D) and it’s interaction with the laptop (MacBook) and the software (Fotomagico Home version.) It took a few false starts last night staging the first mock-program against the wall in the ANNex. I have to have it work seamlessly, predictably and with a minimum of stress hormones or hiccups. Somewhere to the right hand of the curve, that will happen.

Deer-free so far. Only mammal intruder: a chipmunk.

The garden is making lots of greenery, but so far, aside from the two-inch cucumbers climbing the fences and the two-inch green tomatoes, there isn’t much productivity yet.

What you can’t see here is how well the beans (heirloom goose beans, turkey gizzard, Christmas limas, etc) are doing.

After the shoots were up about a foot, I stuck “pea brush” in the row–rangy branch tops from a maple I cut last fall and heaped the brush out of the way near the garden. The bean vine tendrils wrap themselves with amazing speed around whatever support they can find, and they are up to the tips of the twigs and twining around the tomato cages, too. This will turn into a jumbled mess when the tops get heavy with beans (he said optimistically) but by then, aesthetics won’t matter. It’ll be all about getting in the harvest.

Tomatoes this year, heirloom Rutgers, German Johnson (not doing so well, won’t plant these again) and especially Mortgage Lifter. They could all blight between now and fruit ripening, but if they all mature the flowers they’ve set, we’ll be making salsa, juice and ketchup plus the whole tomatoes plus onions and peppers in quarts.

X-wing Pasture Patrol Hovercraft

So I open up my pro account at Flickr and find I’ve received (but not gotten email notification) of a number of messages largely from folks wanting permission to use the images here or there, some for pay, including the Green Hour efforts of the National Wildlife Federation whose efforts on behalf of RE-naturing our children I wholeheartedly support. Sorry folks, didn’t mean to diss ya.

So here’s the link to the most current SmugMug gallery I call Summer_09 that will carry on through fall I feel certain. Some of these of the girls and creek and such you’ll have seen on Fragments.

If you’re interested, the Flickr slideshow is sort of nice to sit back and watch. Early on, black and white images from What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader, then various color landscapes and nature shots going back a ways. I think there are about 600 images total.

I was shocked. In central Alabama where I grew up, tornados are normal. But not here!

The trouble with norms is that they are simply the peak of a curve, a “measure of central tendency.” Today’s norms are my no means fixed forever. They can fluctuate towards drastically greater or lesser measures that would seem inconceivable by current standards. As one my favorite Bruce Cockburn songs from the 70s puts it, “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”

A few important things are getting worse, and a century’s-worth of statistical records of heat and cold, wind and rainfall may be destined for the history books.

Humankind is facing the consequences of decades of ignoring or deferring the future. We have not possessed the will or wisdom to do what seemed so apparent that we must do starting in the earliest days of our environmental consciousness: to live within our means; to accept that there are limits to growth; to recognize we will always depend on the soil-water-air more than on Wall Street; to pay as we go with regards to natural resource use and to play fair. Now we’ve made our bed, and our children will lie in it.

At (or slightly beyond) the very brink of possible catastrophic shifts from normal, we are faced now with a grotesque, science-fiction kind of predicament (this is NOT a test!): we’ve got very little energy currency with which to do future business; and we’re tipping toward the point of no return for global climate disruption that can turn today’s norms (and every living and economic system dependent on them) upside down.

But let’s gather our wits and focus. In spite of dire warnings recently from Nobel laureates meeting on climate change, there is still a chance we can limit average global warming to not more than 2 degrees C.

Granted, this sounds like such a small change, but those norms of our ordinary industrial-age biological and meteorological world that we’ve been talking about are very finely tuned, hence our narrow “normals.” And we simply must understand that this thermal creep is the single most serious challenge and threat that humankind will have faced in all its history. It’s almost impossible for me wrap my head around this, but I must. We must.

It is possible that if we all act together, we can nudge the enormous atmospheric barge of CO2, alter its forward momentum just enough to divert it from the rocks ahead. We can’t stop it cold in its tracks in our lifetimes, and even with extraordinary, consistent cooperation and common purpose it will take decades to bring CO2 levels back to what most scientists believe to be the balance point: 350 parts per million.

Did you know that number? Bill McKibben argues that it is the most important number mankind might ever bring into our common language. Why? Because according to NASA’s Jim Hansen and co-authors, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

You will certainly be hearing more about this number in the months ahead. It is an abstraction really. We haven’t words big enough to express the magnitude of our predicament. But numbers are universal. This figure will give ordinary people around the globe a common place to look, a common goal to which to insist all world leaders move. And if we can change in that direction, we just might be able to give our children’s children a life that is normal–by any recent historical measure.

In the concluding words of those same Nobel Laureates I mentioned before:

“We know what needs to be done. We cannot wait until it is too late. We cannot wait until what we value most is lost.”

Apologies N8 but I needed your help with this post

The mind: who can fathom what must be in there when the stimulus of a simple kitchen utensil can send the search and retrieval software of the brain back into the vaults of untouched storage from fifty-plus years back.

Last night washing dishes, I put way the same green kitchen funnel our son is wearing in the bathtub almost thirty years ago.  I told Ann “Tell me the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the visual image FUNNEL–what is it. Quick!” It was this image from our son’s bathtime around 1980.

But what came to my mind out of deep left field and fifty years–and I had to come right away and see if the odd memory was accurate–was Tom Terrific wearing his funnel-shaped “thinking hat” that he used to become whatever he wanted. Where has this memory been all this time? And why is it taking up space that could be used for something essential to survival, for gosh sakes?

…“and Mighty Manfred, Tom’s ever-faithful companion” I found myself mouthing ahead of the character as I watched the short video. And Crabby Appleton “he’s rotten to the core.” Dear lord, what an attic-load of memories must be in there. I’m not sure I want to know.

Oh no. Guess who just joined the Ancient Useless TV Memory Vault Party? The character that was part animation and part disembodied lips who spoke the character’s words. Okay. Let’s just get this over with. All of you, come on out of your hiding places and show yourselves. Winky Dink. Kookla and Ollie. Beany and Cecil. Might was well join the rest of them on the Goose Creek morning stage. There’s no going back now.

So, who else should we invite from that era of the small, round screen, test patterns and crude animation, slap-stick and blissful multimedia naivete?

Smooch the Pooch

Tsuga was born near Allisonia about an hour’s drive from here. He came into the world a little more than a week before Buster left it. He is the dog we swore we could never have again, the pain of losing our Black Beast just too hard to ever repeat.

By the middle of July, we’d softened. Word reached us of a litter of 10. We drove to see them. They were numbered with a magic marker, odds males (of course) and evens were females. Our dog was the second largest, the most curious and friendly.

On August 17 when he was seven weeks old, we brought him to this two story dog house. He is turning six today, probably at least half way through his life. Chances are, we’ll outlast him by a little.

I hope he’s been half as happy to be here as we’ve been happy (mostly) to have him.

Grand daughter Taryn, who was terrified of their small dog Mia when it first came to their house a few months, has quite gotten over that fear. She grabbed Tsuga’s large labrador head by the jaws and planted one on him. He loved it.

I guess it was meant to be. Sometimes blog topics just fall out of the air.

Realizing that I was slumped and resting on my upper lumbar spine instead of my ischial tuberosities (or butt bone to the lay person) I got up from my ergonomic chair (that can only do so much without engagement by the sitter therein) and fetched a small pillow from the couch to put behind my back.

There, that’s better. The pillow supports my low back maintaining the healthy “lordosis” or gentle inward curve, lets me use the chair back and arms for support, has me sitting with much better balance, less energy, and improved placement for my typing fingers without undue shoulder or neck strain.

And I sit down to a feedreader screenful and up pops this nice piece at Lifehack.org on pain and posture. Physical therapist heal thyself.

I see it in the clinic every working day: making posture a conscious and intentional way of carrying ourselves can make a world of difference. I’ve “healed” people of compliaints by adjusting their canes (as in the story at the link), by suggesting the hip-suffering gentleman remove the two-inch wallet from their hip pocket, and by giving them 8 to 10″posture spots” that facilitate re-education for a number of defects, making the sufferer pay attention to posture usually beyond their conscious awareness, a bad habit gone under the radar.

The latter are simply office-supply adhesive colored circles. I advise the teenager, office worker or posture-naive housewife to place the spots anywhere they might see them: bathroom mirror, kitchen sink, computer monitor, hallway mirror or rear-view mirror of their car.

“When you see the spot, imagine there’s a cable to a hook on the top of your head” (and I act it out, starting from a typical sullen-teenager slump) “and it’s pulling you as tall as you can sit, walk or stand. That will correct the forward shoulders and head, the upper back and lower back loss of normal, efficient curvature. Practice keeping that alignment consciously for 3 minutes, then 5, first while simply sitting or standing, then while doing housework, gym exercise, office tasks. When you can see a spot, do a check and find you’re already where you need to be, you’re good for life.”

I can’t tell you how many people have benefitted from that simple posture-mindfulness advice.

Read this article at Lifehack.org, then eliminate ergonomic stressors from your day (and night!)…and I tell you this even though it will mean fewer of you will ever need to see your local revenue-needy physical therapist.

Sorry about the title. I couldn’t resist playing off the name of the book, a merger of my working self and my Writing Muse (who is sitting up straight!)

Because it's there

It was a kind of safety valve behavior I suppose, though I barely remember the days when I had so much surplus energy that I set about finding a way to get rid of it so I could rest.

“Watch me jump over the hay!” she said and raced off for the pasture at dusk as the grownups sat on the front porch in the cool of the evening.

She made several passes across the dozen rows of raked hay before she felt less threat to explode in sheer exuberance and joy. How could she still have any energy left after a full day in the sun and water? What a gift to watch her left alone to enjoy a day fully her own.

She was actor, director, narrator and audience as she made up the story about which fish (and crayfish) and how many of each went in a certain bucket and why. She decided when they had served her secret purpose and could be released–only to be caught from the same sandy pool again several more times before dinner.

Hours pass, she is oblivious. Wet to the knees? She neither notices nor cares. Her plan for the afternoon, to do whatever comes next to mind; and the dog’s: to stand ready in the cold water for as long as she might need him.

A place near home. A simple game, she makes the rules. The easy flow of mind and hands. So little space to be for her a wilderness, so little time to be Abby’s eternal present, an afternoon lost in play. ~ from Better Without Batteries in What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader.