slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

recent posts

about

About Me

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I guess this is what happens if you make it to your fifth year of blogging – you start feeling like you’ve said everything before. That’s the way I feel about the subject of food, pretty much.

    But, since I’ve run off most of my readers and most of my hits come from Google searches, here goes.

    In the Back Forty I am harvesting green beans and new Yukon Gold potatoes. I don’t buy seed potatoes. I cut up potatoes that have sprouted and plant the sections. Maybe I’d get a better harvest if I planted seed potatoes? Does anyone have any words of wisdom about this?

    I would have spring onions if I dug them up but this time of year Vidalia onions are in season and I am truly in love with Vidalias. So I’ve let my onions and leeks go to flower. They’re pretty in the garden and make good pollinators. They also reseed themselves and I transplant them for a new crop for harvest in winter.

    I didn’t plant squash this year since I wanted to dedicate most of my space to beans, field peas, and tomatoes. I don’t have a lot of luck with squash but other people do, so I tend to get a lot for free or can buy them cheap. This weekend I’ll make a squash casserole, and it will all be for me since my husband has a psychological aversion to squash. Summer squash and sweet onions is a great combination. When I freeze squash, I include Vidalias with it.

    When we were at Lake Waccamaw, we went to Dale’s a couple of times for lunch. Dale’s speciality is Calabash-style seafood, like most places in Southeastern N.C., but we were mainly there because of the fried summer squash. They deep fry thin slices and they are sweet and delicious. I have overdosed on fried squash before – seriously. When I cook it for myself I totally overeat it and get sick. I just dip very thin slices in a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper and saute it in oil in a skillet. They are really yummy if you can get them crispy like chips without burning them.

    It is really hot and steamy here after the deluges of rain this month. Today the forecast is for 95. Miserable. We turned on the A.C. Thursday night for the first time. We always wait as long as I can stand it. One year we made it to July 12. That’s my goal.

    Miss Jazz is making me crazy. She gets in the litterbox, and then sticks her butt over the side. Where is the logic, I ask her, but she just whines to be petted. And she is shedding like you wouldn’t believe. Throwing up hairballs. I can barely keep up with it. Today I started brushing her and now she won’t leave me alone. Her head is resting on my left hand right now. Makes it kinda hard to type.

    I had a meltdown about the trip to Alaska this week when I noticed that there is only a 45 minute layover in our flight schedule before the last flight that will get us to the cruise ship on time. Totally lost my temper with the customer service supervisor and nothing was resolved. They wouldn’t change it to an earlier flight gratis. It would cost over $100 for us to change it, plus we’d have to rent a hotel room or spend the night in the airport. So I’ve been trying to breathe and let it go. I get crazy before any big trip so giving me a reason to lose my mind is just plain cruel.

    I gleaned a lot of quality paper from the printing studio trashcans at the end of the semester, and I’ve been putting together text blocks for several sizes of books. Plus mining the free shelf at Ed McKay’s as usual. What I’m noticing is that I get these cool books that I plan to pull apart and find that I’m extremely reluctant to do so. So I’m trying to pick some books that I have no interest in other than the size and quality of the cover. I’ve covered a lot of them with crumpled tissue or other paper to give them texture, and yesterday I painted. I think that I’ll start binding some books today.

    My neighbor across the street is an abstract painter and has a nice studio. I asked him if he’d be interested in having a home show together before Christmas. I think that our work would combine nicely. He reacted positively so that gives me something to work toward.

    Okay, coffee pot is empty. Time to get moving and get to the farmer’s market before it is too hot to stand it!

  • Lots more rain today – a real gully washer this morning on my walk to work. Got soaked!

    Amazing number of green beans on the dozen little bushes I planted. I only gave them a glance when I left for the weekend and when I came back they were getting too big. Of course, with the Jacob’s Cattle beans I can eat them as green or for shell beans. I just snapped them and shelled the ones that were too tough. Now I wish that I’d left those on the bushes.

    They are simmering in a big pot with the green beans my mother gave me, and new Yukon Gold potatoes, dill, and garlic from the Back Forty. Some olive oil, too.

    The mosquitoes are out in full force with all the rain and it was difficult to pick them.

    I also have squash, zucchini, and onions that my mother gave me. Most of the part of the garden that I helped her plant was ruined when my brother sprayed it with Round-up. Grrrr.

    Went to the doctor today and I officially weigh the most that I ever have, so I guess I have to diet. She is referring me to an orthopedic surgeon about my hip and I’m going to ask him about getting a steroid shot in it. I am tired of the persistent pain, and I’d like to be able to walk without pain when we go to Alaska in July. I’m also going to a dermatologist and get checked out for skin cancer, and I have broken blood vessels on my face that I’m going to ask her/him about “fixing.” So I’m just gittin’ all fixed up, honeys. JQ put henna in my hair this weekend but it didn’t make much of a color difference. I can tell it though, and it is shiny and healthy looking.

    The lake was wonderful and relaxing, but for the first time since I started this blog, I am not writing about it. I didn’t take a single photo, although we tried to get another gator picture and by the time we had the camera it had moved on. I may not be going back again this year – I need my weekend for art work and it doesn’t happen down there unless I’m alone or just with Sandy.

    I read a great book that I got off the free shelf at Ed McKay’s – Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris. Now I’m back to Baudolino by Umberto Eco, which actually had some connection to the discussion in my History of Photography class today. We were talking about symbiotics, which is Eco’s field of study. I like this class, but it is WAYYYYY more philosophical and theoretical than I would have ever guessed.

  • Haircut, etc.

    I got a short hair cut. Boy do I feel better. Now I’m thinking about coloring it. I bought some henna and JQ offered to help me color it at the lake this weekend. When I was at Leon’s Beauty School, I had barely enough to donate to Locks of Love this time, and the instructor said that I could send it to them anyway and maybe they’d take it, or I could donate it to the school. I donated it to the school, and she is excited to get some “virgin” hair to do color samples on. Her class will color my hair swatch with lots of different colors and I get to see how my hair takes each color. So I might get them to color it instead, as long as they can do it without super harsh chemicals.

    I don’t care about grey hair (I have very little so far, unlike my brother and sister!) but I’m feeling fat and frumpy. I figure that I can’t do a whole lot about my weight so I’ll go fat and funky. We’ll see. The best of all possible worlds for me would be if I could totally change my wardrobe and dye my hair purple and spike it but not leave the house.

    Let’s see, what updates do I have. We left a bucket on the deck during last week’s torrential rainstorm and I measured nine inches when it was all over with, but we were lucky and had very little water in the basement. We bought a wet vac and that took care of it. Some condos in the neighborhood flooded so badly that they were condemned, and we’re not even in a flood zone, so nobody has flood insurance.

    I planted some more Roma tomatoes and a Sungold, bought from Pat and Brian. Also lots more beans and field peas and sunflowers. The Nanking cherries and sweet peas are done.

    I’ve been coming home and going straight to the studio, where I’ve been painting and covering old book covers with texture in preparation for binding them. I’ve also made paper about once a week. Last week I made a particularly nice brown batch in which I included basil blossoms. It gave the paper a nice smell. Right now I have an assortment of blue scraps of paper soaking in hopes of decent weather tomorrow so that I can make paper in the gazebo or on the front porch. A friend from work helped me cut some scrap wood to make a bookbinding sewing cradle. I used one of these at the Art & Soul classes. It makes punching the holes in the signatures much easier and more precise.

    I’m doing well in the History of Photography class, and the professor is wonderful, but I’m ready for it to be over. Every time I take a summer class, I remember that I don’t enjoy having too much of a good thing compressed into five weeks of classes.

    This weekend we’re heading to Lake Waccamaw, and I’m looking forward to kicking back sitting in a lawn chair in the water under the bald cypress tree with a novel and a beer or two or three!

  • Last night we had 4.5 inches of rain in the space of a few hours. I have never seen that much water in the Back Forty. There were streams of water running down the pathways and when the storm finally lessened there was a lot of standing water. This morning I found that most of the mulch on the paths had washed down to the side of the house. I hate to see what the basement might look like, but we might as well wait until Saturday to go down there because it’s raining again and will continue to rain through tomorrow, so they say.

    This is not generally a problem here. Drought is usually our problem, with flooding in the river basins during tropical storms and hurricanes.

    Anyway, since my neighbor ended up with a tree on his car, I guess I should count my blessings and hope for the best over the next 24 hours. It’s weird to see so much rain at once – you can even see that it flowed over some of my raised beds.

    The birds loved it though. And the plants, although a bit beaten down, seem to be okay.

    I think that maybe this is going to be one of those difficult gardening years. I’ve learned to expect them and take them in stride, pretty much. Maybe it is the life experience of being a farmer’s daughter.

    I remember the year that my daddy was sick. All the crops on the farms around our farm were brown and dead from lack of rain. But our farm got so much rain that the seeds and plants washed in gullies out of the fields and there was even a small tornado. That year my brother had a newborn son who was colicky all the time for the first year and their main employee who oversaw the tobacco crop was critically injured in a combine accident. It was the first and only time that my father ever asked me to work in tobacco. It wasn’t bad because it was just taking out a barn. But that year was so weird because it was like one strange disaster piled upon another.

    I expect an occasional flood down east, but not here in my neighborhood.

  • Yesterday was a wonderful day, all day long.

    I restrained myself at the Farmers’ Market – bought a whole hen which took most of my money, milk, popcorn cornmeal, and strawberries. I’ll put the hen in the slow cooker today. The mulberries that grow along the creek there are huge, sweet, and extra delicious.

    I constructed a tobacco stick trellis and planted all the Loudermilk butterbeans, this time poking holes in a paper mulched bed and then spreading compost on top. The trellis itself is very pleasing to my eye. It reminds me of the fun I had playing with tobacco sticks as a child. I took these from an old barn at the farm – my mother was using them for kindling. I went to a craft fair last year where someone was varnishing and selling them, and said that she had been featured in the magazine Southern Living! Funny how people see simple objects in different ways.

    Sandy and I went to lunch at Fishbones (I ate lunch there Friday with JQ too – one of those places where I’d happily eat every day – corner of Walker and Elam, Greensboro), went to Lowes and picked up a few items, went to Ed McKays where I had much success with the free shelf. Found a book on British Columbia, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, an old Golden Guide to Flowers (love those little Golden Guides), an old Rand McNally atlas (love maps!), a Truman Capote paperback of The Grass Harp and short stories, an old children’s dictionary with lots of illustrations and color plates of butterflies and fish, and various old cloth-covered books I’ll recycled into altered books and collage.

    Then we went to see Star Trek, which, as reported, was FANTASTIC. Makes me want to go back and watch all the old Star Trek episodes that I’ve already seen a zillion times again. They set it up very neatly for a totally new franchise.

    And then to Riva’s Trattoria, a very small Italian restaurant in downtown Greensboro. Riva’s is a Slow Food place, and according to the owners they use local ingredients when possible. However, they don’t put their sources on the menu other than the ubitiquous Goat Lady Dairy cheese, which many restaurants use not only for the delicious quality and taste, but also to claim to be local food buyers. I would love to see the names of the other farms that they buy their ingredients from on the menus. I hope that will be a requirement to get the new Slow Food Piedmont Triad “Snail of Approval” for restaurants. But I am out of that scene now. Anyway, I hate feeling compelled to ask where ingredients come from, but there are certain foods I don’t generally eat if I don’t know that the source is sustainable and humane.

    I had tilapia over linguini with a lemon and caper sauce that was wonderful and Sandy enjoyed his Giacomo’s sausage and peppers over penne. I know that Riva’s uses fresh tomatoes for their pomodoro sauce because that is on the menu. I suspect that they are local but it would be interesting to know the source(s).

    So that pretty much covers my lovely day yesterday. Now I need to get on with my lovely day today. I hope that it will also include a little more planting (skeeters stopped me as soon as I began to sweat yesterday) and working on a mica covered book that I began noodling around with yesterday. Maybe some weaving to justify that new yarn purchase last week? But first, I need to study and get that wool skirted. I can do the rest in between changing the wash water on the fleeces.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    My god, I’ve used this title so many times now that my blogging software auto-fills it.

    It’s sunny, 72 degrees with a light breeze at 8:26 a.m. in Greensboro, North Carolina. The moon is new. I have high hopes for this day.

    Since I spent our real anniversary watching my great-nephew play with a new friend (yay! “This has been the best day EVER!”) at Lake Waccamaw, Sandy and I decided to make today our 22nd anniversary. This morning, he will sleep as usual, while I do my solitary stuff. I love weekend mornings. It’s surprising to me that I became such a morning person. I’m not one of those who gets up super early, but since I quit smoking 14 years ago, I don’t feel the need to sleep very late.

    This morning I plan to go to the farmers’ market for the first time in weeks. I’ve been gone several weekends in the past several weeks and the weekends that I’ve been home it seems like I was either sick with allergies or I just didn’t have the extra money to spend. I still don’t have the extra money since I’m saving as much as I can for the Alaskan cruise, but I’ll try to just buy milk, beef, and chicken, if there is any. Ooh, and strawberries! Definitely strawberries.

    Tonight Sandy and I are going to Riva’s Trattoria for dinner and then to see the new Star Trek movie. I told him that I needed some extra TLC this weekend so I hope that a long backrub is in his plans. He’s really good at that and he thought seriously about going to massage therapy school for a while.

    As for myself, I have three main goals to accomplish this weekend.

    1. Skirt and wash the two fleeces that Beverly generously gave me over a year ago. I have a friend who is going to help me card the wool next weekend, and then I will probably send it to a spinning mill to be spun into yarn for tapestry. My tendonitis prevents me from making the repetitive motion that spinning requires. I admire and envy spinners.

    2. Plant the rest of my seeds. I lost all the Loudermilk lima beans, probably to the Critter, who I came face-to-face with the other day. But when I went to Pearce and Co. general store in Hallsboro, they had some black and white speckled beans that looked just like them, except they called them Florida pole beans. So I bought a few of them. I also have some sunflower seeds that CFSA sent me.

    3. Clean out the refrigerator. Really, I have waited 100 times too long to do this. It is unbearable.

    I also need to go on a shopping trip to Lowes’ or similar place because I finally burnt out the weed whacker, and I need some more mulch for the beds and the paths. I can do that on a weeknight if I don’t get to it, though. We have a reel push mower but it needs to be sharpened and some of the weedier places need more power.

    I made paper last night from scraps that I have gleaned from the trash in the printing studio at school. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but the printmakers have to use expensive, quality paper for their projects and they trim their papers in there. I even retrieved some pieces big enough to make pages for my small books. Making paper in my sanctuary is a calming, cool experience on a warm evening.

    I have become more attuned to the birds in the Back Forty since Mama Kitty and Miss Peanut died. There are some Carolina wrens that live near the gazebo that blow my mind. I watched a mama robin raise her babies over the rain barrel on the deck. A crazy mockingbird has taken up residence in the shed. Dove babies have flown up in my face, startling us all. The young cardinals chase each other and are nearly grown now. I love the sparrows that hop around in the brushy areas and along the fence with all the vines.

    My vegetable growing success has definitely been spotty. I guess not being focused on gardening I have missed a lot. It’s been rainier than usual, and I think that the raccoons who ate the slugs have moved on, intentionally or not. I haven’t used Reemay and soda bottle covers like I have every year. I need to remember to put bottles over the young okra seedlings as they come up this weekend. The tomatoes, well, I don’t know where I went wrong with them. We’ve salvaged a few that seem very healthy, and several more that are struggling but will probably make it. Then there are the volunteers, who I love the most anyway.

    I’ve been picking the red Nanking cherries and eating them for snacks. Now I’ve learned to wait until they are a very deep red to get the best flavor. There are enough that the birds don’t get them all, and they grow close to the branches where most of them are hidden.

    Okay, the coffee is gone and I’d better get on with my day while it is still cool and lovely.

  • Doom, despair, and agony on me

    Deep dark depression, excessive misery
    If it warn’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all
    Doom, despair, and agony on me!

    My luck is not really so bad but these are dark times around me. I’m having a tough time coping and I don’t blog much when I’m not feeling good. I feel exhausted and lonely in a strange way – not that I want to be around people but in the way that I feel that no one really understands me.

    I wiggle back and forth between celebrating my strangeness and wondering WTF is wrong with me.

    The main way I generally deal with stress is that I try to find things that I can let go. Lately, that means that I eat cereal for dinner. If I see something that “needs” to be done, I assess it and decide if it is necessary, and if it is not, I let it go. If it doesn’t need to be done, I say “It’s fine,” either to myself or to anyone else who is present, aloud or silently. It’s my way of reassuring myself that it is okay to let it go. Well, someone I love who copes with stress the polar opposite way took that personally this weekend and lost their temper with me, and it was a shock. I’m having a very hard time with that piled on top of everything else, because I don’t think that I can be around this person when I am tired and stressed out any more. I can’t be around constant worrying and activity and yelling when my nerves are shot.

    And my nerves are shredded.

    Thank god for this gazebo, where I am writing this right now. I’d almost forgotten that the reason I bought this was to give me a bug-free refuge similar to the screened porch at the lake house. Here I can look at the beauty of my garden and listen to all kinds of songbirds, watch the squirrels play and glimpse the occasional rabbit. I figure the only elements missing are the sounds of water and the breeze. I think that I’ll get a little fountain for in here and when it gets hot, I run an electric line out here for a fan, or I can go into the studio where I have an air conditioner.

    I made paper out here last week and it was very pleasant. What’s great about this space is that I can work wet and sloppy and “it’s fine.” Yes, it is.

    I’ll get through it but with the state budget crisis my nerves will likely be on edge for quite some time.

  • Belated Mother’s Day card

    I honestly didn’t forget Mother’s Day. I just thought that it was next Sunday. I didn’t see last week’s Sunday paper, I don’t watch TV (at least, not on the television set), I don’t pay any attention to ads, and I’ve been so spacy that if anyone has talked about it in front of me I guess I missed it. I’ve always associated it with the same weekend as graduation.

    Anyway, I made this card for Mama out of my handmade paper, mica, and a button. Hope that she will forgive me.

  • Art & Soul 2009 part deux

    Made in Traci Bunkers’ “Revival: Restoration to a Visual Life; An Awakening” class at Art & Soul, Hampton, Virginia, May 3, 2009. This recycled book cover is filled with all kinds of groovy papers and stuff, including a pamphlet from the 1956 Pennsylvania Dutch Festival in Pottstown, PA, music from a 1923 gospel book, and a kid’s atlas. I love this book. I want to cuddle up and sleep with it.

    I love Traci Bunkers’ style, and I admire how she puts herself out there. I can’t share that much of my personal life, but I like it when others show their humanity because it makes me feel better that others share my emotions.

    She does some really interesting things with photography too…

    Website: http://www.tracibunkers.com/

    Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracibunkers/

    I’ve also put the link to her blog in my ever-increasing “Idea Farm” on the sidebar.

  • Art & Soul 2009

    This is the book that I made in Chrissie Hines’ “Longstitch Variations” class at Art & Soul in Hampton, Virginia on Monday. The cover is made from Scrabble boards that were joined with Tyvek and then painted, stamped, and stenciled. The inside is bound with nice cardstock, which I proceeded to muck up with my paint and ink-covered hands, but I hope that I’ll paint in it anyway. Chrissie was a real sweetheart and made me feel loved, even though I was a pain-in-the-ass because I worked through my lunch and ahead of the others because I wanted to leave before rush hour and get home early enough to get my woodcut portfolio finished. (Turned out it was due today, duh.)

    Anyway, as much as I think that this book is beautiful, I have a problem with using stamps and stencils made commercially or by other people and calling the art mine. I mean, I realize that I’m making the choices to put this together in my own particular way, but it violates my obsessive compulsive rules. My very “one”-ness tut-tuts this away as “very nice, but it ain’t art.” This bugs me a bit, because I’ve really tried to loosen up. All my rules had me very tightly wound. If I let myself, I could really go to extremes – where could it end? Would I have to make the paper, the bookboard, spin the linen thread, make the glass beads? Grow the flax for the linen? Gather dyes and pigments for the paint?

    Despite all the neurotic OC thoughts, I had fun with it and Chrissie’s method of binding will be extremely useful to me in recycling and binding old books in a new life as journals and sketchbooks.

    The other class I took was from Traci Bunkers, whose style is closer to my own. But I want to save that for its own post, with photos of the cover of that book. First I want to pimp up the spine with some beads and stuff.

    I am so excited over this new technique. It has helped me get over the funk that another instructor left me in. He was there. Do you remember that scene in Animal House when Boon and Otter go into the roadhouse and yell “Hey, Otis! My man!” at the band, and the singer gives him a look like WTF are you? Yeah. Whatever. There are other teachers, and he’ll get old one day like everybody else.

    I went to Ed McKay’s both nights since I’ve been back and raided the free shelf, this time looking more for the condition and size of the covers as well as content inside. Tonight I scored a bunch of National Geographics for collage. I didn’t find as many maps as I’d hoped, but it’s enough to keep me really happy and busy for a long time.