slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

recent posts

about

About Me

  • My bags are packed, I’m ready to go!

    I did have to simmer the butterbeans a little more on the electric stove, but they cooked enough to be edible on the woodstove without me stoking it up beyond normal. I left the pot on the woodstove all night and most of the “pot liquor” evaporated and the beans had a bit of a strange taste. They didn’t seem burned, and they weren’t bad-tasting, but I wasn’t especially pleased.

    I made a pot of meat sauce and a hamburger/potato casserole for my hubby so that he won’t spend all his money eating hot dogs and at Taco Bell. ::sigh:: That used up the rest of the ripe Amish Paste tomatoes and hot wax peppers on the counter.

    This will be an interesting week. I may be doing more woodworking than bookbinding – I don’t know at this point. I bought a nifty little cordless Dremel Stylus, and I’ve spent too much time looking for the extra drill bits I bought. This is because my house continually stays in a state of chaos. When we “clean up,” we really move our stacks of crap from one room to another, until that room is cleaned up, then we move our stacks of crap back to the original room. I am just as much of a crap-stacker as Sandy, so I have no one to blame except Miss Jazz, who is our scapecat for all unjust accusations.

    You should see my studio. Yikes.

    Projected departure time: 10 a.m. That should give me time to have lunch somewhere between Black Mountain and Franklin or maybe I’ll just eat my extra-special snack of dry jack cheddar cheese I bought at Slow Food Nation and a seckel pear. I like to get there right at the beginning of registration so that I can claim the bed the furthest away from the hallway door and the bathroom. Placement is everything. I’ll share a room with 5-6 other women.

    Sandy will be fine, we don’t see each other much during the week anyway, and I’ll be home Saturday night.

    Anyway, enough blathering. I have a little more to do, and then I’m off. I’m so excited. This is something that I’ve looked forward to for months.

  • Friday ramble

    I am officially on vacation. I leave on Sunday morning for John C. Campbell Folk School to spend one glorious week in a beautiful place learning to make wooden covers for books and Coptic and Greek binding. There will be autumn leaves, music, good food, great birdwatching, and dancing.

    This week I’ve made paper from the dried artichoke stalks in my garden. Susanne cooked them and beat the pulp with cotton and abaca fiber and brought it over to me, along with some delicious peppery macaroni and cheese. It’s almost dry now, it’s being pressed in the studio (under a pile of books, nothing technological going on here!). I only used a quarter of the pulp she brought me. When I expressed surprise at the enormous amount of pulp she made, she said, “I don’t play.” She says that a lot when it comes to making paper, but she is a playful person. Now that she sees that I’m really serious about making paper, she says that we will be working together a lot. I’m a very happy camper right now.

    I made two dozen beautiful sheets and when I get back I’ll be making more. I signed up for my first swap on the papermaking list – origami boxes. I’ve been making little origami boxes from junk mail all year. Some of you may have received them since I’ve been using them for seed giveaways and jewelry. This is a swap that I’m looking forward to.

    I picked the big green tomatoes left on my yellow Brandywine – man, I hated to do that. I’m not a green tomato fan at all, and they were HUGE. They’ll sit on the counter until ripe. We didn’t get a frost, but it sounds like it might happen when I’m gone. So I picked all the peppers too, and gave most of the hottest ones to my department head, who likes them hellishly hot.

    Anne-Marie is planning to take a nutrition class to Spannocchia, and Susanne said that she got a call from them about repeating her paper/book class that she cancelled this summer. Auggh! I want to go so bad!

    Anyway, tonight is for enjoying my time alone, and tomorrow is for time with Sandy and packing up. I will gather up my collection of magpie odds and ends in case I can find a use for them in class: worn starfish-etched shells, small pieces of driftwood, pieces of worn broken china, seeds and pods. I will be taking my laptop, but I’ll decide when I’m there whether to use it and how much.

    Now I’m going to go put a pot of butterbeans and field pea snaps on the wood stove, which is cranking out a very cozy heat.

    I’m very happy tonight, despite the passing of Miss Peanut earlier this week. She lived a good life, and now I’m seeing the bright side – when I heard a cat fight earlier tonight, I didn’t have to worry that it involved her. I can paint the front porch, and I dismantled and threw out the dirty trashy looking Peanut Shack. I don’t have to worry about rabies or her being too cold and my inability to care for her as I ordinarily would have. I will avoid getting involved with another feral cat colony in the future if I can help it, but I’ll adopt feral kittens for inside when the time comes. You have to earn their love, and once you have it, you’re in for a very satisfying and interesting animal-human relationship.

  • A sad song

    Miss Peanut had a sweet send-off last night. John and Susanne came by to see my garden and deliver some artichoke pulp she had cooked for me (we’re working together on making paper out of it). Upon hearing of Miss Peanut’s burial earlier that day, Susanne suggested that John sing a sad song. Without hesitation, he stepped up to her grave and sang in a sweet clear voice:

    From, this valley they say you are going;
    We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,
    For they say you are taking the sunshine,
    Which has brightened our pathway a while.

    Come and sit by my side if you love me,
    Do not hasten to bid me adieu,
    But remember the Red River Valley
    And the girl that has loved you so true.

    Just lovely. I am so lucky to have such good friends. Thank you all for your kindness over the past year. You have made my losses bearable.

  • Miss Peanut goes home

    Miss Peanut passed away sometime this weekend – I’m guessing around Saturday night or Sunday morning since I found her body in an area where I had been working on Saturday. It’s possible that I missed her since her fur blended in perfect camoflage with the earth and oak log that she lay across, but I don’t think that she had been dead that long. I’m glad that she chose to die in the Back Forty, but I wish that I could have done something for her. We buried her under the fig tree, since that was a place that she liked.

    I’d post a photo of her but I never could get a good one. She hated having her picture taken. I always wanted one of Mama Kitty and Miss Peanut walking away from me with tails entwined. I saw that many times. If I find one, I’ll post it, but she looked exactly like Mama Kitty except that she was fatter and had two brown back feet, her “peanut” feet.

    So that is the end of the Feral Family story. Mama Kitty brought Miss Peanut and Ozzie to our back door about 12 years ago. Mama Kitty was not even full-grown herself. About ten months later, she brought us Squirt and Nick, which was when I knew that something had to be done. A feral cat catch and release program helped us spay, neuter, test, and vaccinate all five cats (and later a couple more!). We kept Nick inside only a day before releasing him, and we never saw him again. Ozzie died unexpectedly at age four – he was a sweetheart and I had just tamed him so that he would sit on my lap and let me brush him. He looked like a long lean version of Squirt. My readers know the story of Squirt – my heart is still broken at his and Mama Kitty’s deaths.

    I never intended to end up feeding and caring for all these cats, but Miss Peanut was the one who was responsible for melting my heart. She would stretch way up and peep into our screen door while I was in the kitchen. One day I noticed that she had an extremely nasty scrape on the side of her face. I thought, “How will she survive that if she doesn’t get good nutrition?” That was the day I began feeding the feral cats.

    Mama Kitty taught Miss Peanut to hunt. It drove me crazy. Before she was blinded in one eye, I often chased her yelling at her to drop the squirrel/rabbit/bird she had in her mouth. Once the rabbit she had was almost her size. That’s the only prey I ever saw get away from her, but she ran with it in her mouth for about 50 feet.

    I loved Miss Peanut and I’ll miss her. But I began grieving for her when she lost her eye several years ago. She went through a lot of pain and misery, and she was never the same again. So in a way it is a relief for both of us.

  • Preparing for winter and hard times

    We’re making our preparations for winter. Yesterday we bought a truckload of firewood from a different man who brought us twice as much for the same price as last year’s firewood guy. And the wood is good quality – last year’s was too green and I ended up using much of it for borders around my raised beds.

    The plan is to put off turning on the heat for as long as possible by firing up the woodstove every night. With the fan pushing the heat to the back of the house, our thermostat went up five degrees last night and we didn’t use much wood. This morning the temp in the house is 66. Tonight the low is supposed to be around 38. We dress warmly in the house and make use of throws and quilts if we’re sitting on the couch or at the computer. So until we get into some serious cold, we’ll be able to put off turning on the gas heat. If it came down to it, we could move the futon into this room and shut off the right side of the house.

    It’s important to plan for these things. I’m a lurker on several discussion lists where the people are very, very serious about it. I feel okay about my preparations, but I realize that I could do more. For example, I have stored water in gallon glass juice bottles in the studio, but I don’t have enough. If it really came down to an absolute crisis, I could boil water from my rain barrels on the woodstove, though.

    I could improve my food storage. I have a lot of grains, beans, and dried foods, but water is always the key. I could do better on my canning if I would break down and buy that pressure canner – that way I could can anything that I grow or barter for.

    Here’s the thing – I’m really an amateur in this area, mainly because like most people, I don’t want to dwell on the negative. So I piddle about with it enough to make me feel a little more empowered so that I feel better. But so many people have given this absolutely no thought at all, and don’t want to. Not only that, they have children! I don’t know, I think that if I had children I would be totally obsessed with peak oil.

    Perhaps part of my concern stems from growing up with parents who grew up during the first Great Depression. My mother didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, but she was lucky enough to have an college-educated agriculture teacher for a father and they produced all their own food. They got along better than most people in her area because they understood that food is the priority. I learned a lot from listening to my mother and grandmother.

    I wish that either of our presidential candidates understood the food crisis. It’s about more than higher prices. It’s about power concentrated in the wrong places.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I didn’t take a single photo this week with my new camera! But I will get lots of photo-worthy opps at John C. Campbell Folk School the last week of October. I haven’t been there in the fall before, so add another reason I am thrilled to be going there again. Some of my best photos have been taken at JCCFS.

    In fact, I don’t have a lot to report about my week about me. I went to the dentist and had my tiny cavity filled, and I still have the same pain so that told me that my teeth grinding has got to have a lot to do with it. The over-the-counter mouth guard I bought is quite uncomfortable and I can’t afford a custom-made one.

    Because I’m going to be spending a buttload of money on Guido’s teeth, I’m afraid. I took him to the vet for the first time in years yesterday. I dread taking Guido to the vet because he gets so freaked out even when you pick him up. He cried so loud on the way there you would have been convinced that he was being tortured to death. He actually hurt my ears. At least he didn’t pee all over the cat carrier, and he was pretty well-behaved once we got there.

    I already knew that there would probably be dental issues, but the main reason I took him was fleas and a rabies shot. He throws up a lot, but this is nothing new. I had him checked out before for throwing up and they couldn’t find anything wrong then. Sandy and I figured that it was that he gulped his food down too fast. This time I was able to get a good look at his teeth, something I hadn’t been able to accomplish at home.

    Whew. Poor baby. He has a mouth full of rotten teeth, and one abcessed one. So I have to give him antibiotics for a couple of weeks, and then Dr. Hunt will probably pull a bunch of them. Guido is difficult to medicate, to say the least. I won’t be here during the second week, and Sandy will have to manage it by himself. I haven’t mentioned this to him yet.

    I knew when we adopted all these cats around the same age that the vet bills would begin to be significant around now. Miss Jazz has already been through it, but she does fine with the few teeth she has left and I’m sure that she feels much better.

    Guido weighs 13 pounds. Lucy is much bigger than he is. She is the other one that hasn’t seen a vet in four years, when Sandy first found her as a kitten in a parking lot. I don’t know why Lucy is so huge. She doesn’t eat more than the others. If Guido weighs 13 lbs, then I’ll bet that Lucy weighs 17-18 lbs.

    Here’s some other bad cat news – Miss Peanut hasn’t shown up for the past five meals. I may have seen her out of the corner of my eye yesterday, but Guido was distracting me with his yowling and it could have been another neighborhood cat or a squirrel. It’s possible that someone else on the street is feeding her, because she hasn’t been very interested in eating lately. Or the other possibility is that she is holed up sick somewhere, possibly dead. I might run by the animal shelter later today, but I doubt that she would go into a trap. She would get euthanized very quickly since she is feral and old and one-eyed. It might be the best thing, I don’t know.

    As far as the weekend goes, I’m looking forward to doing some more garden clean-up. A cold front came through last night and although we still won’t get a frost, it might be chilly enough to keep the skeeters at bay. With West Nile virus close by, I definitely don’t want to get sick at all, especially before my trip. I can’t believe that the only diagnosed case in the whole state was someone I knew living about a mile from my house.

    Tomorrow will be fun. Susanne is going to help me cook the dried artichoke stalks and flowers that I’ve gathered and she is going to beat the pulp in a very expensive Hollander beater, which is a tool I won’t be able to afford unless I win the lottery! She is a master papermaker, though, and does large commissions. Right now she is working on a large order that includes buffalo hair and sage for a Lakota customer. I’ve been separating the seeds from the fluff in the heads, so I will have lots of violetto artichoke seeds to give away. They’re large, beautiful plants and attract bees like crazy. Leave me a comment and I’ll email you for your address if you’re interested.

    Then Sandy and I will go to the pottery festival at the curb market, most likely, but it’s hard to go to these things when you don’t have any money to spend! I love it, though, and maybe I’ll limit myself to buying one tumbler. I love the ones that I have, and I never got to the point that I could throw a tall form on the wheel. I did several tall slab forms, but they were too slim to wash easily and were really vases or art objects.

    Okay, I have to go back to the vet and get the second bottle of antibiotics I left behind yesterday. I’m such a ditz. First I have to give Guido his medicine. Pray for me.

  • Debate commentary (brief)

    John McCain must think that we all are morons.

    Here’s a message for Joe the Plumber. Get the hell away from John McCain as fast as you can. He is insane.

    I don’t think that I can listen to the rest of this debate. It’s like getting “Hey Jude” caught in your head, except it’s “Hey Joe.”

    ACCCCKKKK! Joe, again! I’m outa here.

  • Sunday morning second coffee pot post

    I consumed the first pot, spent a couple of hours in the Back Forty weeding and doing general clean-up, then decided that I deserved a second pot. So here I am, after all.

    I’ve been a little freaked out at the amount of money I’ve spent lately, and I would have had to go into frugal mode despite the eminence of the second Great Depression. However, one thing that I consider to be essential for mental and emotional health purposes is my camera! How I missed it during September! So last weekend, I bought a display model that was on clearance that is not the latest thing, but an update from my old Canon. They threw in a two-year replacement warranty since it was a display model.

    So here are a few highlights from my week.

    Wednesday I went to the dentist, where they found a little cavity that was no surprise. I decided to treat myself to lunch at Sushi Republic, where I had a bento box with vegetable tempura. I sat at the bar and watched the sushi chefs. For the first time ever, I was tempted by the octopus in the display. And this was so beautiful I had to snap a photo:

    On Saturday, the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market relocated to the Greensboro Coliseum Pavilion for Farmers’ Appreciation Day. I set up an information table about Slow Food and it was worthwhile – usually I feel that I’m preaching to the choir but quite a few people had not heard of Slow Food. I put my groceries on the display – organic corn from a backyard market gardener (organic corn is rare for a reason), yellow stoneground grits milled at the Old Mill of Guilford, with corn grown near Yanceyville.

    I loved this vendor’s booth – what a beautiful variety of local produce!

    Then I wandered around Artstock, an open studio event held each year in Greensboro. I just went to the five nearest stops, one of which was my friends Susanne and John Martin. On my walk down Fairmont St., I encountered these beautiful fungi on a willow oak between the sidewalk and the street:

    One of my visits was to a printmaker who showed me and a couple of other visitors two methods for making multi-color prints. (And she doesn’t have a press – she presses with by hand!) My heart began to beat a little faster and stronger and I knew that I am right to move into this book art direction. Then my friend Susanne told me that a couple of other local bookbinders had come by her place, and they were thinking of forming a small group. My heart filled up.

    Sandy and I went out to eat at Fishbones, ending a perfect day.

    Earlier this week, my co-workers and I posed for this picture for our department newsletter. I’m “See No Evil” – appropriate since I’m shutting out the politicial ads.

  • “Good work as a source of pleasure”

    Seven incredible food activists and writers on one stage at Slow Food Nation: Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Carlo Petrini, and Corby Kummer. Wendell Berry, as always, is a fount of wisdom and is not to be missed. Corby Kummer is a wonderful moderator and his exchanges with Carlo Petrini are often very funny. See the video and others at the Slow Food Nation blog, or you can come back and see it here– I embedded it on its own page because I want to rewatch it every time I need some inspiration.

    Forget Obama and McCain – Wendell Berry for President!

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I love these crisp mornings that we are finally beginning to have. But even more, I love that I was able to sleep late this morning. This is rather new for me.

    I’ll go to the curb market a little later and do a bit of shopping, but I’ve mainly been living off what I bought earlier this year and put in the freezer. It was packed and I need to make some room. I also have to remind myself that frozen food doesn’t stay good forever and not follow my mother’s footsteps in making my fridge and freezer into a museum of food.

    Here’s what I like about the Back Forty right now. Picking butterbeans and field peas is like a treasure hunt. They are unruly and I have them planted in different places all over the garden. The willow and Loudermilk beans have crawled up to the top of the fig tree. I will have to get a ladder to pick them! Every time I walk through, which is often, I try to lift up a tangle of vines in a different spot or look at it from a different angle, and every time I find more that I missed. There will be ones that I miss even so, and those will be saved for next year’s crop.

    Yesterday I sat and read in the playhouse, and Miss Peanut meandered back there and hung around nearby. I am always thrilled to see any sociability from Miss Peanut. She used to be more friendly before she lost her eye, still not wanting to be touched, but if I was sitting quietly in the back yard she would lay down nearby, even to the point that once I was on a blanket on the ground, and I looked up to see her laying on the blanket with me. I knew that she would like the cement pavers. I have them outside the playhouse now, and they generate warmth and are a little rough so that she can roll on them.

    So I talked to her a lot and she responded. That is a family trait that she shared with Mama Kitty and Squirt and Ozzie. Mama Kitty taught them all to meow conversationally. Now she is the only one left and I know that she must be lonely, so Sandy and I sit and meow with her now and then. She relaxed and I watched her wash herself. A cat washing her face is one of the cutest things ever, but it is particularly nice to see Miss Peanut do this because she was so sick and looked so terrible for about two years after her eye accident, matted and dirty and there wasn’t a thing that I could do about it. Now she is plump and clean, and her bad eye no longer looks like a poster from a horror movie.

    Ditching any unnecessary obligations seems to have done me some good. I still have a few left – I promised to do a Slow Food table at the market on Oct. 11 – but dropping my Sierra Club duties and dropping my class helped a lot. I’m going to talk with Anne-Marie later today about our upcoming annual election for Slow Food and try to come up with a plan for my replacement for at least a year. I’ll still be the techie, but I need a break from folks thinking that I’m the point person (I am the list mama and send out the emails, but I’m not the leader). The new Slow Food chapter structure suggests four year term limits, and I think that’s a good idea as long as someone will come along to replace the person! And I’m at the end of my four years. I don’t want to get totally burnt out.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about my wants and needs. I still don’t have a solution, but I know that I have a great life and a great situation, and that if I concentrate on the present moment, I feel pretty good. So I think that it’s more of an attitude adjustment that is needed. And I need to do more art, but I want to think about it more than I want to start doing it. “Start” is the key word here. If I can just get started, I am off and running.

    Anyway, I’m feeling better.