Tweet.

An alert and faithful reader reports that the writer Susan Orlean tweeted today that she was up:
“to all hours last night trying to sort out the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Failed.”
My alert reader alerted me to this tweet because she knew it would make me feel absolutely OK with abandoning Salman Rushdie and his beautiful but way too complicated for me book Midnight's Children. Thank you alert reader.

And now I've seen one example of why Twitter is worth the effort. I have an account but I never check it and lord knows I've never tweeted.

Picture of sweet daughter and sweet future son-in-law at the pond next to our house the day after Thanksgiving. Don't they look like they're lost and a little uneasy? They're used to the streets of Brooklyn.

Don't let this happen to you.

I try hard to be open-minded, especially in matters of taste and style and personal preferences. But can anyone think this looks good? It's only barely less hideous at night, and some days I think I like it better during the day when everything is puddle-like. If you have one or two of these items in your yard, maybe because you have small children who find it charming, then I'm happy for you. But if you live in the house across the street or next door, you have my sympathies.

Nope, Rushdie will have to wait for another day.

I'd worked my way through 93 pages of Midnight's Children and this chart shows why I stopped at page 94. Way too much work. But I really do want to read something about Pakistan so I've got a couple of books on hold at the library, both nonfiction.

And I read this delightful little book about Starbucks today. Cleansed the palate. Thanks for the suggestion Shannon!

I've been Freecycling and the kitties are very happy.

Don't they look content? Lucy (all white below the eyes) and Georgette (the other one) were very pleased with my acquisition. I got it from an interesting lady whose cats died 3 years ago but she's been unable, for sentimental reasons, to get rid of this used-but-sturdy piece of kitty furniture.

I decided to use Freecycle to find good homes for:

1. 36 copies of Fine Gardening magazine donated to me by Gardener Susan -- about 4 years ago. If I haven't read them in 4 years I'm never going to.

2. 24 small cans of cat food that my picky kitties wouldn't eat.

3. 11 containers of partially used cleaning products that my neighbor no longer wants in her house. Toxic! says she, and she's right. I told her that I could find a good home for the stuff on Freecycle. Then I had to wrestle with the following question: is it better to find a toxic waste dump for such stuff or just pass it along to someone else who will breathe in the fumes while cleaning? I went with the latter of course, mostly because* I don't really believe that there are SAFE toxic waste dumps. All that crap we put in so-called safe dumps eventually ends up in the soil anyway (in my not-so-humble but ever-so-skeptical opinion). If not, why is there so much ruckus about Yucca Mountain? Back to the subject at hand. (But if you're interested in a discussion of toxic gardening products check out the comments on this blog post. Most of these people are so optimistic and trustful of what we're told about disposing of toxic products. I wish I could be so optimistic and trustful. But not in this lifetime, baby. Maybe the next.)

4. a couple of 2-way radios that belonged to Marv. I still have boxes of his books around here that I told his daughter I would either sell or find good homes for. I found the radios in the bottom of one of the boxes. Which is a good sign. It means that I at least opened the box and took something out. I give my buddies Anne and Susan credit for that. They're both in major cleaning modes and that led me to be in a minor cleaning mode.

*A more honest reason? Lazy.

Nicotiana wants to bloom, even in December!

I bought a couple of nicotiana plants in the spring and left them up close to the house, under an awning, where they were very happy. I do this every year. This plant doesn't like to have any direct sun, at least not under my care, and it blooms profusely all summer long. This year, the sweet little plant really thrived, and it's still green with buds trying so hard to open. I wonder if it would bloom if I set up grow lights on the front porch to give it a longer day?

I know this is a lame and boring post but I just had to remove that newt from the top of my posts.

Ugh. I know it's rude and will offend some people, maybe even people I know and love, but Ugh, Ugh. Ugh.

Books are supposed to challenge us, right?

You know you're in for a long ride when the novel you're reading has a Wikipedia entry for the characters alone. I've printed it out, along with two other study guides to the book, so reading is a physical challenge too -- keeping all those papers handy and flipping through them to find the exact piece of info you need to understand what's going on in the story. (Like whose sister married which brother of what main character?)

The characters' names aren't identifiably male or female, nor are they identifiably first or last names; a son's name doesn't always have anything in common with his father's or mother's names (ditto for daughters of course); married people don't always share a name. Plus the narrator moves back and forth between decades, talking about his grandfather as a young man (about 1919 in Kashmir and other places in India) in one paragraph and his father as a young man in the next (1940s India). I think. I'm determined to finish it, but I know I'm missing a lot.

The guides and cheat-sheets for the characters are helpful but even they are confusing. One of them tells the story and keeps referring to "Pakistan." But the main action takes place when there was no official Pakistan, which kind of sets my teeth on edge. Did you know that the name Pakistan was created in 1933? I didn't.

The name was coined by Cambridge student and Muslim nationalist Choudhary Rahmat Ali, and was published on January 28, 1933 in the pamphlet Now or Never. He saw it as an acronym formed from the names of the "homelands" of Muslims in northwest India — P for Punjab, A for the Afghan areas of the region, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh and tan for Balochistan, thus forming "Pakstan". An i was later added to the English rendition of the name to ease pronunciation, producing "Pakistan"

From YahooAnswers.

Ha!

Florence + The Machine.

I've got this song in my head and it won't go away. What a voice. When you get to about 1.25 minutes into the song she really let's it fly! She was on SNL last week and Letterman has had her on at least once, maybe twice. (Husband Doug likes her a lot too -- and it's not just about those legs, although I'm sure they don't bother him one little bit.)

Reading The Internets I have discovered that she likes her tequila. Hope she doesn't burn out too soon.

New Gibson guitar arrives! Son is happy, kitty is happy (boxes to play in), so I'm happy.

It's called a Les Paul and it's really, really purty.

You meet the nicest people on blogs. I admired Kitt's columbine and she sent me some seeds. And what a beautiful card. Thanks Kitt!

Here are Kitt's columbine seeds, some of which traveled from Denver to DC and I hope will be blooming in my garden next summer.

The eccentric artist up the street adds a new sculpture to his front yard. When the wind blows so does this art.

Other shots from this house are here and here and here.

As suggested by an observant reader.

Anne of The Complaint Department had a good suggestion about MY complaint about reading books on an eReader -- I bemoaned the absence of an attractive cover to keep me tied to the book I'm reading. So I'm trying out a quick and cheap method of adding book covers to the Kindle. If I just had a color printer it would be more effective, but this works for now. And quite by coincidence, last Sunday's NYT Book Review section had a good article about the subject of book cover art. Here.

If you want to read the full NYT article but don't want to go through the paywall, you can click on the full story over on the right side of this blog -- see section called "Pam's Place for Items of Note." Click on The Art of the Novel.

Finally. I read my first full novel on my "new" Kindle.

Last Christmas, so approximately 11 months ago, Doug gave me a Kindle. I'd been muttering about them since before they were actually available for purchase. Typical Pam muttering: I don't think I like this; what about real paper and glue books? what will happen to them? how could you really enjoy reading a book on a tablet? gee, I'd love to try it out; no way would I pay over $100 for an electronic reader! sacrilegious. You know the kind of muttering I mean. Sort of talking to myself but Doug heard it all. So I was thrilled to get the Kindle. But so far all I've done is download tons of free books -- classics mostly -- and tons of free samples.

But a few days ago I finished my first novel. I choose something short, light, and simple. Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary, set in London just after World War I. Here's what I think so far: it was weird to not have an actual book with a cover. I never realized how much I connect with the covers of books. I read it very, very quickly, for me. I'm generally a slow reader because I still can't break the habit of reading as a copy-editor. It's a huge problem for me. I read many sentences twice: once to check on the grammar, style, and spelling, and a second time for the meaning. But with the Kindle, I seemed to do this much less often. I loved clicking the little button (one on the right, one on the left) to "turn" the pages. And the bottom of the screen tells you what percentage of the book you've finished, as well as how much you've read in each sitting. All of that data seemed to move me along much faster than is typical.

So the next test is to read something weighty. I've got plenty to choose from: novels that I should have read by this time in my life but haven't. Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Anna Karenina.

To be continued...

Can you find the kitty in the picture?

It's possible that this is a viral image and you've seen it dozens of times but I just found it and it took me a while to find the sweet kitty.

More from Brooklyn: James and his young parents.Does that girl love that kitty or what? Sean does too but he's engrossed. It's a familiar sight.

A few details:
No one is sure exactly what purpose that flak jacket once served -- see mannequin behind Becca's head -- but it has lots of pockets: for ammo? for bandages? Came from an army surplus store.

See the white skinny pipe behind the mannequin? That's part of the old radiator system that, when it's working--which it wasn't the night we were there a week ago, is the source of heat for much of the apartment. A couple of Slavic repairmen came in the morning and fixed it. With those accents and chattiness and quick work, they were a little Seinfeldian (and I'm not even sure what I mean by that).

See that trunk under Sean's feet? My dad got that from an Ambassador Bruce, this fellow or his wife or his family. My dad was a painter, a house painter, in Washington, DC, in the 40s, 50s, and 60s and he got a lot of work in Bethesda and Northwest DC and Georgetown. Sometimes he came across the most interesting people and sometimes these people were tossing things out -- like that old trunk. My dad genetically and/or culturally passed along his tendency to say "you can't possibly throw that out; I'll take it to my house and find a good use for it." Most of these items are now either in my house or my sister's house, or with his three grandchildren, of whom Becca is the youngest.

Note to JGH: I saw your comment a few days ago noting that your old neighborhood was at Plaza and Vanderbilt in Brooklyn. This apartment is about 6 or 7 blocks away, near Bedford Avenue and Plaza Place. Which is so funny, because you might remember that last year my daughter was in a tiny apartment just around the corner from where you work! It's usually a big world -- but not always.

Robert in black, James in gray.

New York, New York.

We were in Manhattan and Brooklyn for only 27 hours over the weekend but I took in enough visual, auditory, and emotional data to feed me for months, maybe years.

The reason for the trip was quite sad--a memorial service that Doug describes very well right here. But along with all that sadness came some joy, since we got to spend the night with our daughter and her fiance Sean (see how I worked that in oh-so-casually?) in their "new" apartment in Brooklyn. Saturday was the day that massive and ultimately destructive snow storm moved up the east coast. The top shot was taken on the 65th Street Transverse Road as we cabbed across Central Park from the memorial service on the West Side to the reception on the East Side. Looks like rain but it was actually a nasty snow-sleet mix. Bottom two shots were taken the next day in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights) as we walked to the subway to get back into Manhattan before we headed back to DC.

Robert and James, my grandkittens, were even more sweet than Becca told us. I love my girls (Georgette and Lucy) but a lifetime of cats tells me that boy kitties are simply more lovey-dovey to their humans than girl kitties. What's up with that?

Good thoughts from an interesting writer. This was a quick read and full of head-nodding moments.

The hero of Bradbury’s novel [Fahrenheit 451] is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over the country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroy records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the American I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representative, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.
I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

and then there's this:

I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. …He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Beeswax. For me to play with and maybe make candles with.

When Steve, my beekeeping neighbor, took away my hive (sob) I vowed that I wouldn't give up all the beekeeping activities I had planned. Candle making was one of those activities, so I asked Steve if I could have the wax leftovers from his honey harvesting. Here they (it?) are (is?). What you see are one nice clean piece of cappings and a whole lot of wax mixed with bee parts, honey, and propolis. I'm going to follow the advice found in the book Plan Bee by Susan Brackney. I'll stuff bits of this into old pantyhose, put the stuffed pantyhose into a pot of water, heat the water until the wax rises to the top, wait for it to cool, and then lift off a disk of pure wax. That's the theory at least. Then I'll slowly melt that wax and pour it into candle molds that I bought back in the days when I dreamed of being a real beekeeper. Before I learned that I'm a wus about the whole thing.

Butternut squash: I always thought they were used mostly for decoration and nobody ever ate them. Wrong.

A neighbor gave me some butternut squash and since everyone keeps saying that the yellow-orange vegetables are so full of vitamins and antioxidants I decided to look for a recipe. And I found a very easy one that was a hit in this house.

The hardest part is peeling the squash. Takes a good scraper and some muscle. And you gotta watch your fingers carefully.

--Peel one squash.
--Scoop out the seeds, etc, and chop into small cubes.
--Melt butter gently in a cast-iron skillet -- 2 or 3 tablespoons.
--Whisk in several tablespoons of freshly chopped thyme or dried thyme and stir for minute to mix.
--Toss in squash cubes and stir until they're covered with the butter-thyme mixture.
--Add salt and pepper to taste.
--Raise the heat a bit and spread the squash into a single layer, more or less.
--Cook for a few minutes until the squash is browned on one side.
--Flip squash over to brown the other side, more or less. Cook for a few minutes.
--Stir once more, cover skillet, and cook about 10 minutes or until squash is cooked through.


Low in calories, very high in vitamin A, high in fiber. And I guess you could use a healthier substitute for the butter but why? I can give up a lot of things but butter isn't one of them.

Fly like a bird (Cain), sink like a stone (Perry).

It's hard to see but the rapidly falling dark blue line is Rick Perry; the rapidly rising red line is Herman (Herb, to Sarah Palin) Cain. Sink Perry, sink!

You've probably seen it a lot by now but just in case you haven't...The Onion, from today.

Original here.

Guest worker visas, anyone?

"Alabama's strict new immigration law was touted as a job creation bill, a way to force illegal workers out of jobs and open them up for legal residents. Early indications are the plan is backfiring.

"The law is driving away many construction workers, roofers and field hands who do backbreaking jobs Americans generally won't. So far, few legal residents have stepped in to fill any of the vacancies, creating an absence that will surely deal a blow to the state's economy and could slow the rebuilding of Tuscaloosa and other tornado-damaged cities."

From here.


"Georgia's new immigration law is scaring migrant workers away and costing south Georgia farmers big bucks.

"Experts say the labor shortage could shrink Georgia's economy by nearly $400-million.

"Many farmers say that Georgia's new immigration enforcement law is putting their crops at risk. they are asking the federal government to make it easier for foreign workers to get guest worker visas."

From here.

It's October and finally my dahlias are waking up.

So so silly.

Every year the Gonzo Scientist blog, associated with Science magazine, sponsors a dance video contest. Entrants must do an interpretive dance that is supposed to communicate their PhD topic. This year one of the entries is by a biology researcher doing his dissertation on robbing behavior in honeybees.

Guarding and Robbing Behavior in Social Insects from Michael Smith on Vimeo.

The story of my cantaloupe.

I never plant cantaloupes or watermelons or any kind of squash because (a) they take up way, way too much gardening real estate, and (b) one or two will come up anyway, probably from the compost I use in my garden. This lope grew UP a fennel plant; that's the only support it had while it grew all summer. I finally picked it a few days ago and sliced it open. Voila! A perfect looking little baby cantaloupe. But alas it had absolutely positively no taste at all. So, I guess you get what you pay for.

Meanwhile, you've got to see the adorable little squash table that Kitt's husband built for one of her pumpkins. Here's what it looked like from the very start.

Itty bitty froglette. He's sitting on a pachysandra leaf so you can see how tiny he is. A peeper maybe?

The big guy in the bottom picture lives in my little pond along with a bunch of his brothers and sisters. They seem huge now, especially compared to the guy in the top picture, who is about as long as the end of my pinky finger--wider than my finger but no longer. On the brown frog, see the nipple-like thing below his eye? It's his ear. I think people would look cool with ears like that.

A friend passed this along to me.