Latkes. As good as they look. No, better.

Thanks to Anne for the inspiration and directions.

A Friend brings food, and more.

It was such a treat to meet and greet and spend a while yesterday with my friend A. of The Complaint Department. A. visited my home, met my kitties, toured my small gardens, saw my beehive, and generally relaxed, drank coffee, and schmoozed with Doug and me for a nice long while. So for the first time, I've met, in the flesh, someone I've known only through blogging -- I highly recommend it to others!

A. brought the delights you see before you. Apple/walnut (?) bread -- she will speak up I hope to confirm or correct my memory and tastebuds -- and Blondies, those most decadent and wondrous bars of everything tasty.

It was a wonderful visit! And she didn't complain once. Not once.

(Please note the Black Midnight Cake on her very interesting and well-written blog. So far, I've managed to avoid making this cake but I'll eventually lose the battle with my brain and bake one. And for meat-eaters out there, you really should try her Rouladen. It's a very easy recipe and oh-so-yummy.)

From somewhere out there in the Big WWW. Sweet! Brave! Probably rescued by the human behind the camera.

This is such a great book.

An excerpt, lifted from NPR. Sarah is describing a conversation about the play Assassins, which she saw in the Berkshires. My favorite part is when she gets into Maureen Stapleton.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes. There they were — John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz — in tune and in the flesh. The men who murdered Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were elbow to elbow with Lee Harvey Oswald and the klutzy girls who botched their hits on klutzy Gerald Ford, harmonizing on a toe-tapper called "Everybody's Got the Right to Be Happy," a song I cheerfully hummed walking back to the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying.

Not that I came all the way from New York City just to enjoy a chorus line of presidential assassins. Mostly, I came to the Berkshires because of the man who brought one of those presidents back to life. I was there to visit Chesterwood, the house and studio once belonging to Daniel Chester French, the artist responsible for the Abraham Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial. A nauseating four-hour bus ride from the Port Authority terminal just to see the room where some patriotic chiseler came up with a marble statue? For some reason, none of my friends wanted to come with.

Because I had to stay overnight and this being New England, the only place to stay was a bed-and-breakfast. It was a lovely old country mansion operated by amiable people. That said, I am not a bed-and-breakfast person.

I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're "quaint," a polite way of saying "no TV." They are "romantic," i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're "cozy," meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.

The real reason bed-and-breakfasts make me nervous is breakfast. As if it's not queasy enough to stay in a stranger's home and sleep in a bed bedecked with nineteen pillows.

In the morning, the usually cornflake-consuming, wheat-intolerant guest is served floury baked goods on plates so fancy any normal person would keep them locked in the china cabinet even if Queen Victoria herself rose from the dead and showed up for tea. The guest, normally a silent morning reader of newspapers, is expected to chat with the other strangers staying in the strangers' home.

At my Berkshires bed-and-breakfast, I am seated at a table with one middle-aged Englishman and an elderly couple from Greenwich, Connecticut. The three of them make small talk about golf, the weather, and the room's chandeliers, one of which, apparently, is Venetian. I cannot think of a thing to say to these people. Seated at the head of the table, I am the black hole of breakfast, a silent void of gloom sucking the sunshine out of their neighborly New England day. But that is not the kind of girl my mother raised me to be. I consider asking the Connecticut couple if they had ever run into Jack Paar, who I heard had retired near where they live, but I look like I was born after Paar quit hosting The Tonight Show (because I was) and so I'd have to explain how much I like watching tapes of old programs at the Museum of Television and Radio and I don't want to get too personal.

It seems that all three of them attended a Boston Pops concert at Tanglewood the previous evening, and they chat about the conductor. This, I think, is my in. I, too, enjoy being entertained.

Relieved to have something, anything, to say, I pipe up, "I went to the Berkshire Theatre Festival last night."

"Oh, did you see Peter Pan?" the woman asks.

"No," I say."Assassins!"

"What's that?" wonders the Englishman.

To make up for the fact that I've been clammed up and moping I speak too fast, merrily chirping, "It's the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president."

"Oh," remarks Mr. Connecticut. "How was it?"

"Oh my god," I gush. "Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush." Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is "too personal," but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

Now, a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast's teapot collection, they probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I'm around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

I continue. "But the main thing that surprised me was how romantic Assassins was."

"Romantic?" sneers a skeptic.

"Totally," I rebut. "There's a very tender love scene between Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz."

Blank stares.

"You know. He was the anarchist who killed McKinley. Buffalo? 1901? Anyway, the authorities initially suspected Goldman had helped him, but all it was was that he had heard her speak a couple of times about sticking it to The Man. He'd met her, but she wasn't his co-conspirator. Anyway, the play dramatizes the moment they meet. He stops her on the street to tell her that he loves her. The guy who played Czolgosz was wonderful. He had this smoldering Eastern European accent. Actually, he sounded a lot like Dracula — but in a good way, if you know what I mean." (They don't.)

"He told her, 'Miss Goldman, I am in love with you.' She answered that she didn't have time to be in love with him. Which was cute. But, this was my one misgiving about the performance, I thought that the woman playing Goldman was too ladylike, too much of a wallflower. Wasn't Emma Goldman loud and brash and all gung ho? Here was a woman whose words inspired a guy to kill a president. And come to think of it, one of her old boyfriends shot the industrialist Henry Frick. Maybe I'm too swayed by the way Maureen Stapleton played Goldman in the film Reds. She was so bossy! And remember Stapleton in that Woody Allen movie, Interiors? Geraldine Page is all beige this and bland that so her husband divorces her and hooks up with noisy, klutzy Maureen Stapleton, who laughs too loud and smashes pottery and wears a blood-red dress to symbolize that she is Alive, capital A. Wait. I lost my train of thought. Where was I?"

Englishman: "I believe Dracula was in love with Maureen Stapleton."

"Oh, right. I haven't even mentioned the most touching part. Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley sing this duet, a love song to Charles Manson and Jodie Foster. Hinckley and Squeaky sang that they would do anything for Charlie Manson and Jodie Foster. And I really believed them! Squeaky's like, 'I would crawl belly-deep through hell,' and Hinckley's all, 'Baby, I'd die for you.' It was adorable."

Mr. Connecticut looks at his watch and I simultaneously realize that I've said way too much and that saying way too much means I might miss my bus back home. And I really want to go home. I yell, "Nice meeting you!" and nearly knock down the teapot collection in my rush to get away from them.

Clutter as you enter my house: three scarves (Resolution No. 8), a stack of miscellaneous books, and a bowl from the Southwest, pre-1920.

The bowl is OK there. But the scarves and the stack of books should go some place else.

Resolution No. 8: Try to finish most of the 20+ scarfs I've started.

Spotted at the local Amish market.

I've read that cooked cow's head is a traditional Mexican breakfast dish. For a particularly disgusting view, go here. Or not. I recommend not.

Lucy and boyfriend.

The outside kitty sometimes comes to visit late at night. I don't know that he's a he, but I'm pretending he is. Lucy is always the interested party. She's got a crush on him....

[With Stephen Colbert in the background.]

Some hope for the so-called health care system?

I'm generally a pretty pessimistic person. Or maybe I'm just a realist. For example, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about climate change, and I have reached absolutely no conclusions about anything. I feel like no one can have an informed opinion on the subject because there are just too many variables and unknowns.

I feel sort of the same way about health care in this country. As a ER doctor friend said to me recently "there is no system" in the health care system.

But Atul Gawande, a physician who writes for the New Yorker, has the power to make me less pessimistic. He did it last summer when he wrote about end of life choices. He did it 2 years ago when he contrasted health care in a smallish place in Texas with care given in Rochester, MN.

Now he's done it again by writing about medical hot spots: specific places and specific types of people who account for huge gobs of health care $$. And how some very smart people are using common sense and grass roots techniques to keep those specific people healthier. If you're interested in this kind of (wonky?) thing, you gotta read it; I can't summarize it.

Photograph by Phillip Toledano.

More bees.

This illustration is from an 11th century Arabic medical book. I think it's so beautiful.

From Wikipedia:
The Tacuinum (sometimes Taccuinum) Sanitatis is a medieval handbook on wellness, based on the Taqwim al‑sihha تقويم الصحة ("Maintenance of Health"), an eleventh-century Arab medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad. Aimed at a cultured lay audience, the text exists in several variant Latin versions, the manuscripts of which are characteristically so profusely illustrated that one student called the Taccuinum "a trecento picture book," only "nominally a medical text". Though describing in detail the beneficial and harmful properties of foods and plants, it is far more than a herbal: listing its contents organically rather than alphabetically, it sets forth the six essential elements for well-being:

* sufficient food and drink in moderation,
* fresh air,
* alternations of activity and rest,
* alternations of sleep and wakefulness,
* secretions and excretions of humours, and finally
* the effects of states of mind.

Illnesses result from imbalance of these elements, therefore a healthy life is lived in harmony.

Boy could I use a manicure. Not very likely.

This possibly elderly worker landed on the ground in front of the hive with a pretty heavy load of pollen. I put her on top of the hive hoping she could get home from there. When she showed no signs of moving, I helped her get back to the front door. Just one lady of a certain age helping another.

Pollen gathering.

(a) The crocuses are blooming.
(b) Bees are landing on the crocuses and wrapping their bodies around the stamens.
(c) Bees are bringing bag-loads of something yellowish back to the hive.
Can I conclude that the bees are bringing crocus pollen back to the hive? Not sure. Beekeepers say that skunk cabbage (AKA false hellebore) is also blooming now and bees love it. There may be skunk cabbage in the park next door but I've never seen it -- never really looked for it. Maybe I will soon. My yard has real hellebores, and they are beginning to poke up and out.

I'm really glad I put up that mouse guard, and the girls had no trouble at all navigating over it.

Guess where?

"The abandoned backstreets of [---] ...have turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that [a car] pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale."

Sounds lovely, right? Looks healthy, right? Chernobyl, 2010. Good story from Outside Magazine.

I learned about the story from Longreads.com, which is a nice place to find meaty articles on a lot of subjects.

Yeah, yea, yeah. I'm going to read it.

I thought the first book in this series was bad. Although I read it to the very last page. Then I read the second book in the series. Also violent and full of rage (and I read it to the very last page). At that point I thought I had gotten them out of my system. But I guess not. These novels just fly by when I'm reading them. And I like to be swept up and taken away by books, so I guess that's why I'm giving in and reading the third, and last, novel. The publishing fallout over the author's sudden death is just as interesting as the novels themselves. Which presumably means more of the damn things in the future.

Evidence of serious hoarding issues.

This crayon has been rattling around in my house for years, and before that it rattled around in my parents' house for decades. It's a kind of crayon that was (is?) used to make metal zippers work more easily. I've never used it, and in fact it looks like no one has ever used it. It's so old that the addresses don't have zip codes and the phone numbers still use words (DUpont 7-1111). But I can't throw it out. It connects me to the past I guess.

Catalog question.

Does this cover bother anyone else? It makes me dizzy. I'm guessing that the designer deliberately oriented the photo this way, or the arts center wouldn't have mailed out the brochures -- although I've worked in enough bureaucracies to know that the mailing COULD have been a mistake. Or they decided they couldn't afford to reprint it. The cover design did cause me to look through the catalog with more attention than usual, trying to see if any other pictures are so oddly placed. Answer: no.

So that's my little rant for the day.

What is this?

It looks sort of other worldly.

Thirsty bees.

I built the little pond in the lower left (middle picture) on a whim about 3 years ago. During the summers I tried to keep it free of leaves and other debris but I see now that I may want to consider letting it age naturally because the bees love to use the leaves as landing strips while they slurp up water. And I'm told by more experienced beekeepers that the bees prefer aged water to so-called fresh water from the tap.

I don't want to say it too loud but I think the girls may have survived the worst of the winter. I peeked under the top the other day and it sounded like there were plenty of them in the hive, and I just ordered a food source called pollen patties, which I'll slide under the top soon just in case they are running out of honey.

I continue to feel like I'm wandering alone in the desert on this bee business, and every decision I make is sort of a guess. No one warns you, in the beekeeping classes, about the anxiety factor in all of this.

Basil in mid-winter. Wish these plants were growing in my family room.

These healthy plants are growing in a friend's family room. They get southern exposure but no other special treatment. They grew outdoors in those pots all summer, but before the first frost my friend just picked up the pots and plopped them down near a sunny window. Now she has fresh basil all winter. Note: she doesn't have kitties or doggies, which might be a key to such success. I know my kitties would make a nice meal of that entire crop. And I'm not giving up kitties for basil.

It's Art.

'Grow Your Own' - from the Policing Genes Project from Thomas Thwaites on Vimeo.

From a London exhibit.
I heard about it first from my daughter's friend who works for an artist. Next, I heard about it from my beekeeping listserv group. Today NPR did a story on it. Oh those Brits and their humor.

King's Speech was very good. The wallpaper was the star of the show.

Scottish Deerhound (not this exact one) wins it all. A sweet-looking dog.

Photo from greatdogsite.com

Westminster Dog Show tonight and tomorrow!

Don't miss it.

Home-made bookmarks by Margo H.

My Clever Friend Margo H. makes these sweet bookmarks and sends some to me occasionally. She cuts up old greeting cards, prints out a nice quotation about reading for the back of each bookmark, and laminates the whole thing. I may have to buy myself a little laminator (I think I can get one for under $30) and a little paper cutter and go into the bookmark-making business myself. Thanks Margo!

Hat repair. I can do this.

This hat has been everywhere, coast to coast, and it's gotten a little banged up, but I told My Lovely Daughter that I could fix it. Maybe clear matt-finish fingernail polish to hold down the frayed straw, then some black stitching over that to reinforce it and blend in with the existing two rows of black stitching?

I'll try.

Temperatures got high enough today -- high 40s -- and the sun peeked through enough for some bees to get out briefly. "Bring out your dead!"

Top shot taken at about noon. Bottom shot taken at about 3. This tells me that the colony is still alive. If they are still cleaning house by dragging out bodies that's got to be a good sign (right?). But I think the big question is the size of the colony by April.

I think the hive had 30,000, maybe 40,000 bees in the fall. If babies are being born to replace the bees that die of natural causes over the winter, and if the total population is high (over 20,000?) in April, I think that would be called a success. But it's a long time until April, and I don't know if baby bees are being born. Or if the Queen is laying eggs, or is even still alive. If she did die in the winter, I don't think the bees would necessarily swarm (or abandon the hive) in search of a new Queen, but I guess it could happen. And I don't know how much honey is remaining. It's so much about the food, I gather. Winter losses are often about starvation.

I've got to find that mental place in beekeeping where you do what you can but then you stop speculating on what may or may not be going on inside that hive.

Sunny tomorrow with a high of 55! They'll be out for sure, "cleansing" and undertaking.

A peony pokes up his head. First sign of Spring -- in mid-February? Maybe.

I admit it. This gets me excited.

I'm going to fix these signs -- from the park next to my house.

In each case the number at the bottom is missing a zero and a decimal point. I can fix that. I'm such a rebel.

Check out the coat of arms for Fergie's family---the Fergie who is still the Duchess of York, not the Black Eyed Peas' Fergie (of SuperBowl "fame").

I would never have learned about this coat of arms if Ms. Complaint Department, in the course of musing on the term "time sink," hadn't led me to this very useful website.

My sister-in-law's sister-in-law's bumper sticker.

Credit to Dave P. (brother-in-law of my sister-in law) for the term.

Then -- August -- and now.

Isn't that an awful sight?
Today I finally took down all that shabby fencing, and most of the posts. There's nothing there for the deer anyway. I'll put back some fencing in March. I'm sure my neighbor is relieved that I finally got around to taking down that mess. If I were she I would be cursing me for having a trashy side yard.

These fish magnets keep getting more complicated.

This either means life is a puzzle and the pieces don't fit, or it's a puzzle and if you just put the pieces together dummy you'll see how it all hangs together, or it means nothing. The missing left hand is my favorite part.

"Do you hear her back there, saying that we look 'well-fed'? I know what she's trying to say."

Power out from ice-snow storms: 13 hours. We were among the luckier in the DC area.
Internet out from ice-snow storms: 3.5 days. We were among the most unlucky in the DC area.

As I keep telling friends & family: it was odd being offline so long. A little unsettling, but also a little pleasant. I've concluded that I have a mild Internet addiction but not a full-blown one. Yet.

While I was offline I kept imagining posts -- both mine and others. Not so sure that's healthy. Would have been much better to just dig down and read. But when you don't know when, if ever, the juice will be turned back on, you can't really settle down. I can't. And what about Egypt! I had radio so I knew basically everything going on, but I didn't know as much as I wanted to.

Possibility of more ice pellets tonight. I love the winter, I love the winter, I love the winter.

I'd like to take this pledge but I'm not sure I can do it. I'm apparently addicted to Palin news.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is boldly going where every journalist worth the name should go. He's swearing off writing about or talking about Sarah Palin for a month. I could not talk about her, and for sure I could not write about her, but could I stop myself from reading the latest bit of non-news about her?? Very, very doubtful. But I'll decide on February 1. It IS a short month after all.

I bought this very neat seltzer water maker (SodaStream) to help me with Resolution No. 5. It will pay for itself by April.

Status report on Resolutions:
1. Don't eat after midnight. (a tiny bit of success, but not really enough to count)
2. Walk each day. (got off to a great start....)
3. Eat only fruit or yogurt before dinner. (some success at this)
4. Read each New Yorker as it arrives and never skip an issue. (100% success so far!)
5. Don't bring soft drinks into the house. (90% success!)
6. Read only one novel at a time and one non-fiction book at a time. (some progress; I have high hopes about this one)
7. It's OK to start knitting a new pair of socks but it's not OK to start any new scarfs or quilts. (100% success so far)
8. Try to finish most of the 20+ scarfs I've started. (nothing to report yet, but hey it's only Jan 22)
9. Finish at least two of the 20+ quilts I've started. (see above--too soon to tell)
10. Be better about replying more promptly to emails and acknowledging birthdays and gifts. (tiny bit of success)
12. Post something every day on this blog. (total failure so far)