Weekending From Home #2 Takeaways

Solitude is not the same as loneliness.

"Use your time wisely" is not the same as productivity.

Sitting around the dining table listening to humorous survival stories of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and WWII gave me powerful resource for this moment.

Creativity doesn't require a finished product.

Adaptation and change take a lot of energy, and sleep is a reasonable response.

Bacon is a powerful force for good. No Jedi required.

If I don't protect and take care of myself the people who love me are going to be seriously pissed off.

It's good to have a tire pressure/inflation kit in the trunk of the Buick.

Tastees:

1 lb. ground beef, not browned
1/2 cup water
2 T vinegar
1 t dry mustard
1/4 cup catsup
2 T horseradish sauce
1/4 t chili powder
(1 medium onion, chopped)
Ground black pepper

Worchestershire?

Mix together and cook 1 hour, uncovered. Serve on bun with sliced dill pickles. Inhale steam.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Scrabble eggs and bacon

The second grader held the plastic fork in front of his eye and squinted. His teacher suggested he wouldn't want to poke his eye out, and moved the fork away. The little boy held the fork back up to his eye. This time the teacher asked why. "I'm putting her in jail," he said, pointing at the little girl sitting on the other side of the cafeteria table.

Is that brilliant?! So very useful in these trying times.  I've been practicing for the next time I watch the news.

It would not work with a spork, the utensil of my sons' school lunch years. Glad kids get knife, fork, and spoon nowadays.

And speaking of sporks, a deceptively brilliant coworker complemented my new coffee cup while we were not riding in the elevator. "There's a name for that thing," he said. "Huh?," I said. "That thing around the cup," he said, "There's a name for it." Then he pushed the floor button, and the elevator was not as slow as it seemed.

As soon as he could look it up, he reported back. "Zarf. It's a zarf." "Is that like a spork, like a scarf for .......   for coffee?," I asked. He was smart enough to push the elevator button, but did not know the word origin.

Apparently zarfs are a thing, and way beyond Starbucks. Without knowing their name, I spotted some in an easy-to-knit book. The word is Turkish or Arabic dating from 1836 and meaning "vessel", and it's worth a lot of points in Scrabble. True, you would think many of the folks you see on the news would be in hot water. The idiom "to be hot water" may or may not date from the Middle Ages and trial by ordeal. We can be sure that watching the news is an ordeal.

Blame it on W.E.B.

My headache is enormous, and may yet hatch a dinosaur goddess--Athena cluck-plucking straight out of Zeus's forehead in full stegosaurus armor.

A continuing struggle with the cataloging Authority over the standardized name form for W.E. Butterworth, (William Edmund) , 1929-   aka  W.E.B. Griffin is the probable headache cause. He has about eleven pseudonyms and three variations of his name.

I find no indications W.E.B. is related to Oliver Butterworth, author of the wonderful children's book, The Enormous Egg.

Can't find on-line confirmation of the Mrs. Butterworth's pancake syrup advertising jingle stuck in my head. Self doubt enters sneering stage left. Am I maple-y, butter-y losing my marbles?

 I'm telling you this song was almost as major as the Oscar Mayer baloney jingle.

How do you do, Mrs. Butterworth's?
How do you do today?
You make pancakes delicious
When you bow down this way.
Maple-y, Maple-y taste.
Buttery, Buttery taste.
Delicious.
Mrs. Butterworth's! 

At least the bologna has a first name, O-S-C-A-R. The bologna has a second name, M-A-Y-E-R. 

Author, annoy not the cataloger, 

or your name will be baloney.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

When squirrels have drones

The squirrel is on the railing of the balcony just under the new birdfeeder monitoring my reaction. It is probably a grandchild of the squirrel that finally defeated and destroyed last winter's birdfeeder.

The young squirrel wants to know just how ballistic I will go. Is our upcoming struggle WWIII? A three-ring circus? Perhaps a departmental conflict/communication style assessment?

Gail Collins of the New York Times has me concerned that this young squirrel might receive an unregulated hobby drone for Christmas. 

In her op-ed, "Dreading Those Drones" of October 30, 2015 she writes:


Now it’s true that squirrels knock out power lines and nobody’s talking about regulating them. But squirrels don’t get in the way of passenger planes. 

My squirrel nemesis of last year.

Gail Collins did not mention the possibility of squirrels in bras in Home Depot in her column, but you just can't make this stuff up:

What if this had been a squirrel?

I had been contemplating a return to wire sculpture with hardware, door keys and rusty zipper pulls. But I HAD NOT got so far into my artistic plan as to enlist squirrels to collect 3D collage material in exchange for unlimited access to bird feed.

Yes, it looks suspicious that I wrote on my departmental Secret Santa preference questionnaire that I liked Chex Mix, black coffee, butterflies, insects, postage stamps, rocks, and old door keys. It's just that uncompliant streak in my nature to push back at organized ho-ho-hoing.

And while Dave Barry, Molly Ivins, and Bart Simpson have all expressed the notion that you just can't make this stuff up, to my knowledge I'm the only person who has ever received this occupational title in a performance review:

KEEPER OF THAT STUFF

Which stuff? THAT stuff!

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Firing the imagination

Book reviews with bacon, what could be better? Library Journal and Kirkus reviews of Christopher Rothko's new book* about his father's art kicked me to make my first ever bucket list. No plans to kick the bucket anytime soon, but I was reminded that I've wanted to visit the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Being unable to breathe in Houston, the horrible drivers there, plus little details of work and finances have kept this goal on the hazy someday list for a quarter century or so.

The baker's dozen items on this evening's first bucket list draft are pretty tame. I still hope to visit Crystal Bridges in Arkansas with my old buddy, Library Janie. Caring for elderly parents have postponed this for years now, first mine and now hers.

Six destinations surprised me with a common theme:

1. Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska in honor of my mother, and a site on Smithsonian's Evolution World Tour
2. Mount St. Helens should be doable with a son in Oregon.
3. Knossos on the island of Crete has fascinated me since about 1966 along with
4. Santorini/Thera in the Aegean Sea
5. Iceland
6. Krakatoa 

Never realized I was a frustrated geothermal volcano seeker until now!

If I actually learned my demise was looming, I would ask to have bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs with salsa, fresh-squeezed orange juice, bottomless hot black coffee, gooey cinnamon rolls with pecans, and hash browns with mushrooms and bell peppers served on a screened porch every morning. It would be a fine countdown. Oh and maybe some watermelon and cantaloupe balls, not to be greedy.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Salad Season Sci Fi

Something snapped. Must have salad. All salad. The cute clamshell packaging for four miniature heads of lettuce drew me across the aisle with its tractor beams. Cute. Little. Four. Red. Green. Must have salad.

My love-hate relationship with plastic packaging was kicking in. Could the clamshell be a paint mixing pan, a mold, an alien space pod and trading post? Could Kirk and Spock contain the tribbles?

When let loose the four petite lettuces (let-tooses, of course) expanded exponentially. What looked like two or three lunches, now seems to be a whole lotta rabbit food lasting longer than my lifetime. And me with only six cherry tomatoes and the last pits of an olive bar attack. There's a pattern emerging. The olive bar container also had four sections and appeared potentially useful to art teachers, bead sorters, and hoarders.

Back in the Sixties, my dad Howie pronounced the Eastridge Iceberg Edict: No salad shall be served that consists of only lettuce and Zesty Italian dressing. French dressing was forbidden, as was jello fruit salad except the dark sweet pitted cherry one.

In junior high home ec class Mrs. Starr and Mrs. Meston tried to expose us to lettuce beyond iceberg. We had a lettuce tasting with bibb, romaine, loose leaf, iceberg, and curly endive. We wore the gingham aprons we had sewn.

Only Eeyore would eat endive, in my opinion. This photo is not really the Millard Lefler home ec classroom, but it's mighty close. From left that would be Janice, me, Debbie O. and Debbie B.! We practiced measuring vinegar and oil. We washed eggs before cracking them badly.

The group of mini-heads in the clamshell are petite green tango, petite red tango, petite gem and petite oak lettuce. They are O.K., but a little tickly, bitter, and lacy going down. They are not alone with the Zesty Italian. I gave them red bell pepper, steamed asparagus, cucumber, boiled shrimp, bacon fried with chopped garlic, cannellini beans, the final olives, and the six cherry tomatoes for friends. That's for Day One of Salad Season.

When I looked in the Tupperware crisper, I hadn't made a dent in the lettuce. It's still expanding. Soon it will be in all the air vents and hatches of the Enterprise. Adjust your rabbit ears and stay tuned.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Overnight Asparagus Strata

Breakfast served 24 hours

Lovely Friday evening putting together a cheese strata, and watching pinkish lightning to the west. Cheese strata is a sedimentary casserole. Are there igneous and metamorphic casseroles? It's been a long week, and I can't get my head around these possibilities.

"Can I borrow some rocks with sedimentary layers? The water educator from a nearby town needed loaner rocks from all the casserole categories. That's when the cheese strata took over all the layers in my brain.


Back in my hairnet hospital kitchen days we served up Mrs. Carey's cheese strata on patient trays along with red jello cubes and whipped cream, Sanka, canned pear halves, and broth.

As a newlywed beginner cook I had a recipe for Asparagus Cheese Casserole from the 7th Day Adventists at Lincoln's Union College. It was cut out of the newspaper and glued on a yellow lined index card. If I squint I can almost remember the amounts of eggs, frozen cut asparagus, cottage cheese, condensed milk, dry bread cubes, and grated cheddar. Those were the days before recipe googling!

Difficult to believe California vineyards used to snail mail slick newsletters with family recipes. I forgot Sebastiani Vineyards long ago, but still have Vicki Sebastiani's "Christmas Breakfast" strata recipe.  The combination of raisin bread, dry mustard, bacon, cheddar and eggnog is delicious.

Asparagus and April go together. The strata rested overnight and is in the 375 degrees oven, smelling fabulous.


© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

For just a bit of bacon

With a lemon and some bacon my weekly casserole could become a piece of art, Pine nuts, or maybe sliced almonds I was musing as I pulled into the Tom Thumb parking lot after dark. And there he was, a strange man obviously speaking to me. "How much do you want for your Buick?," he asked. "I used to have a LeSabre," he added. He was maybe eighty years old. Had he escaped from the nursing home like my dad always wanted to do? Had his kids taken away his car keys?

"I love my Buick," I told him. "It is not for sale. Before this I had a Skylark." Maybe I would not get the reusable shopping bags out of the trunk, although the man seemed harmless. What was he doing in the parking lot at night?

"Ah, Skylarks! They were wonderful cars. You were lucky," he replied.

When I came out of Tom Thumb he was gone.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Crispy bacon, smiling yolks

The kids were having BLT in the school library. Books, Lunch, Talk--what a great concept!

Books, Lunch, Talk!

We were touring the Richard J. Lee Elementary School in Coppell Independent School District. The Lee Spurs library is added to my life list. In this high tech model, it was good to see  kids still curled up with a good book to savor on cushioned window seats.

The school is a net-zero energy facility. Our tour was for environmental reasons, but we are also educators, gardeners, vegetarians, scientists, techies, artists, parents, grandparents, debaters, bacon and library junkies. Sometimes we are a team, other times we're a diverse pizza pie of personalities, and this was a team-building adventure. Full disclosure here, half the team had difficulty with the seat belts in the van, so we were late arriving for our tour.

Books, Lunch, Talk!
The trio is classic, just like bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toast. Or if you overslept it could be Breakfast, Literature, Tardy!

I added three libraries to my life list, one each public, school, and long-forgotten academic. Stared, too, up at the wind "sculpture" AKA turbine near the school garden.

So many storytellers are full of hot air we should find a way to power libraries with their gusts....


© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Albert Eisenia Fetida and Bacon Justification

I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'll play one at next week's worm presentation. Costumed one of my tie-dye red wigglers as an Einstein Eisenia Fetida. This year's summer library reading program is Fizz, Boom, Read.

I'm not a pharmacist, either, but I'm charged with safely disposing of prescription and over-the-counter medications for a dear friend. Searching websites of several nearby cities has not yielded a take-back event. Now I'm scanning safe DIY Rx disposal recommendations.

Albert

Flushing drugs down the toilet is not the right answer. We don't want to pollute the water stream. So I'm not a foreign policy negotiator, either, but the transfer and disposal of Syria's chemical weapons at sea makes me queasily uneasy.

If you can wait until a local pharmaceutical take-back event, that seems to be best. Otherwise, these DIY disposal instructions come from AARP, and the Medical Center of Plano. Since I have no kitty cats to provide disgusting litter, I'm going with Plan B. The pills are in the Trader Joe's coffee can with some soggy coffee grounds and some bacon grease. Peeled the labels off the bottles and recycled the pill bottles. [Yes, removed those darn kid-proof lids!]

And now? Now I must get bacon and lettuce and tomatoes for BLT sandwiches. Why? Because I need more grease for the Rx disposal! Never mind that it is summertime and we all need homegrown tomatoes. This is a civic bacon emergency. I am willing to step up.

Trash Disposal

You can throw away expired or unused medication in the trash. First you will have to “prepare” the medication so that it will be in a safer form. These instructions apply to both pills and liquids.

• Remove the medication from its original bottle. Mix the drugs with something that would make them unappealing to people or pets who may go through the trash. You can use kitty litter or used coffee grounds.
• Next, place the medication in a plastic bag with a seal or in a container with a lid. The goal is to make sure that the medication does not spill out of this packaging. You can also use tape to further secure the bag or container.
• Do not forget about the original bottle that the medication came in. Your privacy is important. Remove the label or use a black marker to hide your name and any other information. Before placing the bottle in the trash, check to see if it has a recycling code on the bottom. If it does and your city or town’s recycling program accepts this type of plastic, place the bottle in your recycling bin.

2014 Nancy L. Ruder