September Spin

So far September had been a blur around here. Labor Day has come and gone and with it the tourists, but our personal tourists have been here in the past week.

Last weekend we hosted Nancy and Matt for a visit to attend my father-in-law's memorial service. Now that we live half a continent away we seldom see them. We saw at least every other week when we lived in Oklahoma and it has left a big hole in Shana's life not to visit with them often. I am in contact on Facebook, but there is no substitute for a comfortable chat with someone who has known you since you were a child, as everyone who lives far from family has reason to know. Being surrounded by her visiting step family Shana was especially glad to have her own family here for the weekend.

I had occasion to visit with a lot of Bruce's relatives who I had never met. It was interesting to see them and hear their memories of him as a young man. There are family mannerisms that surprised me, even in his nephews. It was good to talk with his friends too, and hear their stories of shared experiences. He had several close friends in Menahaunt who will miss him.

As soon as our family guests left my best friend in Oklahoma City and her partner came to stay for a few days. I say "stay", but their visit was all go-go-go! I wanted them to have a good time and to see as much of my new home as possible - I called it the "sampler tour" of Massachusetts.  Lucky for us the weather favored us, and Shana and I were able to take time off to spend with our guests. We really only had a short spell of rainy weather, and that during our dinner in Boston. We visited Sandwich with its charming downtown and  its beautiful boardwalk for our first day, then the astoundingly beautiful Cape Cod National Seashore the next. Because our tourist season is pretty much over the beaches were not at all crowded. Thursday found us doing a whirlwind tour of Provincetown including a stop at Buddha and Beads, which I have been dying to visit, and Friday in Boston for a bit of the Freedom Trail and dinner on the North end. I took them around the places I love and some things I had not found time to visit yet, but for me I think the best time was every morning having coffee with Sharon Jean. I have good friends here, but I miss my friends from Oklahoma City. A dinner and breakfast once a year does not really take the place of all those hours riding along together on our bikes in the country.

I has excited to be able to follow part of the Freedom Trail on this visit. I've often wanted to do it, but our trips into town are so few, and city attractions so numerous that we never made time for it. We were all very disappointed to find that the Old Corner Book Store on the Freedom Walk has been replaced by a Chipotle, but fortunately we were able to locate another used book store very nearby. Shana had to forcibly remove me from the premises.

I did some shopping while our guests were here, too. With the excuse of shopping with my friends I found the perfect object for the empty wall in our living room, a little pottery dish for our kitchen sink SOS pad, and 5 FIVE books, four from second hand stores and one a Freedom Trail Guidebook. That makes this week just about perfect.

I'll be loading up a bunch of pictures to Flickr later today.

Meat and Global Warming

At the end of April I stopped eating meat, with the exception of a very occasional serving of wild caught seafood. My concern was not the ethics of meat consumption per se, but concern about the ethics and safety of industrially produced meat. I have not suffered at all in variety of my meals, especially in summer when we have a generous bounty coming in from the garden. Whatever we are not growing we pick at a local organic farm, where we can also pick up organic and locally raised chicken and pork. Shana has turned her cooking creativity to meatless dishes with excellent results.


I knew that meat production required a lot of inputs, among them large amounts of water directly to the animal, in feed production, and in meat processing. I did not realize that the contribution to global warming was so significant. It's worth considering including meatless days in the weekly menu even if meat is still on your menu.

Go Outside!

It struck me this morning, looking at a blog post from a vacationing blogger, how consistent vacations snaps are. Nearly all are of lovely outdoor scenes. Some are grand and imposing, others are views from the porch of a rental cottage, but nearly all are outdoors. Now it is just possible that because of the person that I am I have chosen bloggers and Instagrammers to follow who are outdoor minded like myself. Surely there are masses of people whose vacations favor indoor pursuits like gambling and shopping; cruise ships embark with full complements of passengers daily. Still I choose to believe that it is the beauty of nature that people seek for their restorative vacations.

Indeed science is proving that humans need to be outdoors for optimal health.

Union Maid

Labor Day is here again, and once again labor unions are under attack by the oligarchy. Let's not forget who fought for and won our 40 hour week, child labor laws, OSHA, Workers' Compensation, weekends, and so many of the things we take for granted.




Union Maid Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called, And when the Legion boys come 'round She always stood her ground.

Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.

This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,
She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.
She always got her way when she struck for better pay.
She'd show her card to the National Guard And this is what she'd say

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
 Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
 A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

Dream Life

Dreamy garden which is not mine

This week I am preparing for having houseguests, dearly anticipated family and friends. Every night I dream of some new and fiendish combinations of guests, the most recent I remember being Lindsay Lohan and Betty White. Most of my house is unsatisfactory in these dreams. Of particular concern in my dream is my bathroom, which daytime examination reveals to be a perfectly ordinary and perfectly functioning room. In my dreams it becomes oddly configured and ill-functioning chamber of horrors, sometimes resembling in every particular the room that appears sometimes in my dreams that I call "the ugly bathroom".

Not mine but lovely

Maybe it is a function of getting older. Even in my dreams I don't devote a lot of energy to creating things from scratch when I don't need to. If a dream requires a grocery store it takes place in "the ugly grocery store" - a dream rearrangement of a grocery store in Columbus Ohio (I'm sure it is gone now) that occupied a defunct roller rink. There is a house that appears often whose odd configuration is complicated by a suite of secret rooms that are sometimes completely ignored and sometimes provide the major plot of the dream. My grandfather's back yard is a common backdrop, being long and sloped with a shed behind the garage and an empty chicken coop. Dreams of urban confusion often take place in what I take to be a university building whose floor plan I can never quite remember. In some dreams it is a college building, in others a government building or an office building. Driving around dreams most often take place in a dreamscape altered Manhattan Kansas. A seaside arrangement of roads, marshes and beaches serves as a vacation destination or quest setting. It's like Dream Tarot - a limited set of images combined in a different configuration every time. Maybe it's just that my head is so full of junk that there isn't even room for an original dream! Maybe the dream shorthand of familiar but imagined landscapes frees my mind up to busy itself with the real purpose of the dream.

Someone's dreamy garden

In a dreamy aside, in one of my recent dreams I was at work at the Major Retailer who pays me to appear. A new company policy had been created to add more satisfaction to the customer service experience. We were to offer our "guests" foot massages, even to lure people in off the street with the promise of foot massages. We were short handed on the floor because one person had walked off the job rather than rub random people's feet and another was in the process of setting up for a massage. I guess I must be ready for Labor Day weekend, when the tourists and Summer People go home and leave the Cape to the year round residents.

The garden pictured here is not mine, but I am green with envy every time I see it. I am pretty sure it is professionally maintained and occupies a lot which probably would sell for close to a million dollars. It's one of the very few possessions of the wealthy that just makes me sick to my stomach with desire.

Dog Days

The Amazing Roxanne

We are still winding down the summer. Tomato Land is finally producing ripe fruit, and the tomato plants at the House of D have to be picked, so we are eating tomato bruschetta and tomato sandwiches and tomatoes in our salads and tomatoes out of hand. I don't even feel bad about the fact that very few of our cherry tomatoes make it into the house because I pop them into my mouth on the spot. We have had green bean casserole (the deluxe home made version) and three bean salad with our own beans and as much salad greens as we could use. Next year I think we should add green peppers and radishes to see how they do in this climate. I think the most luxurious thing about the garden is that I have as much fresh herbs as I want. Fresh herbs are so expensive at the grocery that I never buy much, and never the large variety that I have in the garden. When the bean salad called for a tablespoon of parsley I used about half a cup, plus some dill, cilantro, and oregano.

Mitzi

This is our last weekend before the house guests arrive, so projects will be proceeding apace. It's good to have deadlines; otherwise I might sit around watching Pride and Prejudice, knitting along with my feet up and happy to be on schedule with my holiday knitting. Even the dogs will have deadlines - a haircut for Mitzi, baths all around, and nail trims for everyone. As far as I know the queen of England is not coming so prep will be reasonable, but I do want the house and garden to look as good as possible. I want us to make a good impression!

I also have a grooming scheduled for myself. I decided to stop coloring my hair this year, and simultaneously decided to grow out the pixie. I wanted to go classic bob, but of course that means an ugly grow out. The usual procedure for grown ups would be to enlist my stylist in the process, but I think that actually takes longer because your stylist cannot be content without cutting something and creating a style at every step. Instead I have been cutting it myself - just cutting off the mullet the shaggy bits and putting up with a certain lack of style. Jennifer pointed our kindly that I looked like Moe at one point.  I want to look like a human when my company comes, and I think I have (barely) enough length for a short bob, so it's time to cut. I will be keeping my natural color.

Sunday Beach Life

We have spent the last few Sundays at the beach - A beach, to be more exact. I love the Atlantic beaches of Cape Cod. Although they are a little drive away it's well worth the drive. It's late in the season, so if we are on the road by 9:00 am we can choose our beach.

This time we chose Nauset Light Beach. We were fortunate enough to see large numbers of seals early in the day, and also fortunate enough that the seals left the area soon after we arrived. Seals are very interesting to see, but you must maintain a distance of at least 150 feet from them. When they are hanging around the beach you can't get into the water near them. Also, seals in large numbers draw sharks. Shark sightings will close the beach. Although you can stay on the sand, you are not permitted to go into the water. As if you would want to swim with the great white sharks that come every summer. This was a nice beach for sitting on the sand, but going into the water was not as nice as it is at some beaches. There was a combination of steep dropoff and large rocks that was unpleasant for me. The drop, the shifting rocks, and the undertow pulled me down more than once. throwing me onto the shifty rocks (bottom first, I am happy to say).

Shana and Dea complained of rocks being thrown at their legs when waves came in. Either way, the cold water and tumbling large rocks made us all have sore toes. When I say rocks I mean baseball to cantaloupe sized rocks. We brought boogie boards to play with, but never did use them because of the general ouchiness of the rocks.

One nice feature of Nauset Light Beach is the Three Sisters Lighthouses. Currently there is one brick lighthouse at Nauset. Two decommissioned lighthouses from Nauset and one from Chatham have been moved to a configuration much like the original three sighted at Nauset a short distance from the beach, accessible by a paved path.

And for something completely different: a mashup of Get Lucky and Soul Train!