Technical difficulties

Sunday December 12, 2010:  If you are reading this that means that for some reason while en route to Honolulu (via a few days in San Francisco) or sometime after my arrival in Honolulu I neglected to log into Blogger & update Useless Ranch.  I am sure the problem must be computer related, some wireless versus dial-in thing, a freak weather pattern that makes me want to sit in a tropical garden & forget that this time next week I will begin interviewing contractors because it seems my sewing room (& A's office) are sliding into a sink hole.  Yes, it has been that kind of month, season & year.

Most happy times to everyone.  I will be back, clearing queued posts just as soon as I can get the sound of waves out of my ears.  Or maybe a day or two after that.

I see your snickerdoodles & raise you two buckeyes

Somehow in the haze that was last December, I never blogged about our first ever holiday cookie swap.  Probably because I never took pictures & I mostly only remember I meant to write about something when I upload the digital camera.  I have only two time frames: Now & the Distant Past/Future (they are the same thing right?).

Let me give you the highlights:

V** made buckeyes.  Dozens & dozens of buckeyes.  I did not know what a buckeye was but I do now-it's where Reese's got the idea & homemade is better.  Because she committed to buckeyes early, M****** was in.  Apparently they are a favorite of C****'s.

M****** made a variety which included these fantastic chow mein noodle peanut butter things.  She said "Let's call them manger cookies".

A***** made...I don't remember.  I DO remember starting this whole thing because A***** has access to a cache of Hungarian-family cookies recipes & I know I was not disappointed.

They brought with them E****'s cookies.  They were the snickerdoodles.  I think.

B*** mailed her cookies from Boston.  When choosing what went back to her, we left off everything with icing that would just get all smushed.  Lucky me!

I made my mother's nut balls.  I made enough for everyone at the table to get a Chinese takeout tray of them as a Thank You for Playing take home gift.  I also made sour cream jam prints using the last of my homemade cranberry sauce, toffee spoons & Irish toffee spoons.

For A***** & M****** the highlight of the evening was the Irish.  So much so that when they left for the gym, I offered them a to-go cup.  They thought they would stop at the liquor store on the way instead.  M****** went on to tell people it brought her milk in & A***** gave her father a bottle for Christmas.

We are doing this again for sure, although I do not yet have a date.  Who's in?  Long distance can be accommodated.

This old dog

While reports of his death may have been premature, I think we are in the home stretch.  Farley-boy has more or less stopped eating.  He had 1/4 can of cancer-dog food on Thursday afternoon (about 1/2 a twice-a-day serving) & since then nothing but bowls & bowls of water.  As for getting any medication into him, we have now gone injectable & while it is possible all of his problems stem from a really bad infection it is not really probable.  On the upside, the white's of his eyes are no longer rust-colored, so the antibiotics must be doing something.

I had high hopes of getting caught up on the blog; I have so many project & recipe entries queued that just need photos or tweaking I could post every other day in December & not run out...if only I added the photos or did the tweaking.  But just now my time is taken helping an old dog up & every few hours & making him as comfortable as I can when we get back in.  I am not complaining, & while I wish it did not need to be done, it is part of having a dog.  I think it was George Carlin who said every puppy was heartbreak waiting to happen.  I know he said "life is a series of dogs", which mine certainly is.  & I remember reading Sara Stein writing about her last dog as being her last dog. 

 & that is what I had written as of Sunday afternoon.  On Monday at 1:30/2ish the vet & his tech came out & in ten minutes we were done.  I think they beat mother nature by just a few hours.  We buried him with Josephina who loved him even more than I did & he loved her just as much.  I'm not much in the mood for typing now & will get caught up another time.

Hard laurel (not)

I have spent most of the last two months deep in the Boraginaceae family.  Not only would I not want to live there, it is not even a nice place to visit.  The blocks of wood have been, well, blocks of wood, but the notations & alterations to the original records are fatiguing.

It is not unusual for the original index cards to have some things crossed out & other information clearly added later & I am fine with that.   By & large, botanical taxonomy works on an almost glacial timeline (until very recently of course, when that whole DNA thing came into being).    The edits I found in this family, though, they were, well, special.  For example, a complete sub-set originally noted as having been collected in Guatemala were updated to reflect collection in Cuba.  I understand not being quite sure if you are in Brazil or Suriname.  I can imagine collectors listening carefully for Portuguese v Dutch to determine which side of the border they were on.  But Guatemala or Cuba?  One is more than twice the size of the other & the smaller one is a group of islands.  The other is, while not entirely landlocked, certainly not to be confused with an island.

I don't care how drunk you got on/off the plane, at some point during your expedition you will be absolutely sure you are not in one or the other.  If, for example you come across ancient looking pyramids above the water, you are not in Cuba.  You could be many many places other than Guatemala, but Cuba absolutely would not be one of them.  If you climb to the highest point you can find & discover you are in a chain of mountains, again you are not in Cuba.  Guatemala has enough mountains (& pyramids) that you would have a hard time walking straight ahead in any direction for any amount of time without encountering one or the other, so if you do walk straight ahead for a day & sight neither, well, welcome to Cuba.  Or at least to welcome to not-Guatemala.

It seems perfect that confusion reigns here in Boraginaceae.  Because I am not a botanist, I don't even pretend to be one on this blog, when I start to work with a new family I try to find something familiar in it.  Some something to hang by brain on while I get to know the others.  For Boraginacea, up popped borage.  This was both good & bad, because while borage was already known to me, it is unlikely to appear in the wood collection; it can sport woody stems, but it is not widely recognized as a tree.  Or even a shrub.  & by "not widely" I mean "never".   You can see how it would help to first acquaint myself with some specimen I am likely to encounter, but borage was just so easy, what with being right there in the name Boraginaceae, & because it also happens to be the name of the garden gnome that shocked (Shocked!) the officials at last year's Chelsea Garden Show.  Once I made that connection, it was all over as far as finding one more suitable.

& so finding something familiar has not helped as much as it usually does, what with we-don't-know-what-country-we-are-in collectors & my memory latching on to banned lawn ornaments.  Confusion is looking endemic for this family: so far almost 1/2 the specimens that have common names recorded have "laurel" somewhere in them.  You might think, well that should make things easier, but it doesn't.  True laurels are found in the Laurel Family is Lauraceae, making the laurels of Boraginaceae impostors.  Or maybe they are just lost.

Martin of Tours

The patron of soldiers (& horses & more) was, no shocker here, a military man (just in time for Veteran's Day).  What did catch me up was the one particular story of Martin of Tours:  he refused to take communion with bishops who had ordered the slaughter of heretics.  When he did finally take communion with the leader of the military action, it was because there was a threat to give the same treatment (torture, execution) to supporters of the former emperor.

Let me repeat this in plain words, the current leader slaughtered people who differed with his religion.  When embarrassed about this he threatened to slaughter people who SHARED his religious beliefs but differed from him politically.  Only a PR event on the part Martin of Tours prevented that slaughter.  That is: a man of the SAME religion & SAME politics, calling himself a man of g*d intervened.  When I think of the category "christian" this used to be the kind of person I thought of.  Now, I associate it more with the emperor.

An interesting choice for a man who was conscripted as a child (well, fifteenish).  He was already expressing a desire to be a christian monk, neither of which made any sense at all to his non-christian military family.  Lucky for them, it was the law of the land that sons of veterans spend some time in the army themselves.  According to his biographer, he was lead away in chains to take his oath & serve this country.   It came as no surprise to me (although same biographer said it was fortunate) that he was assigned to a largely ceremonial cavalry unit & saw little in the way of armed conflict.  After all, what else can you do with a soldier who does not want to be a soldier & keeps talking about pacifism except keep him as far from the rank & file as possible.

There are quite a few stories of him making a show of washing the feet of socially lesser men, giving away parts of his uniform to shivering paupers, etc.  I am guessing when his contract was up they were probably just as happy to watch him go.


The links have slews more stories, more or less on the same lines, including an explanation why this particular early saint is so well documented. 

As I said, he is the patron of horses & soldiers, cavalry specifically & is invoked against alcoholism more broadly.   As you would expect, vintners, innkeepers, & France also fall under his umbrella.  As do geese (go figure) & the Swiss Guard.  Martin was the first non-martyr made saint.