Mushrooming out of control

• Met the mushroom Monday afternoon about four in big pot that holds a trumpet vine just leafing out. The roly-poly mushroom looked a lot like the ones I buy at the supermarket but I didn't have the nerve to taste it. 

Monday -- meet the mushroom 'neath the mint

• Tuesday evening Roly Poly was larger and splitting around the edges. The surface looked like layers of feathers.

• Wednesday evening I tried to see under the cap as Roly Poly stood up taller. I wavered between pulling the mushroom out to see it better, or letting it proceed through stages I didn't know.

 

• Vaguely hoping to find a way to make veggie ink prints of the mushroom cap, I stumbled upon spore printing.  Voila, Google! The supplies are budget-friendly:  paper, mushroom, Pyrex, patience, and AquaNet hairspray! True, I would have to interrupt the mushroom's progress. Also true, the spore print is not instantaneous. Thumb-twiddling and deep, cleansing breaths are necessary.

Mushroom interrupted

Can you find the snail?

• To make a spore print set cap on a piece of paper, and covering it with a bowl. Depending on your patience level, remove the bowl, and lift the cap off the paper in 2-24 hours. Spray the spore print with hairspray.

8 p.m.

7 a.m.

 First spore print 11 hours

 Second spore print just 1 hour.

Third spore print Thursday evening  (11 hours)

• After four days of rain, I should be able to find mushrooms for further spore print practice this weekend.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Lest we falter in our resolve

I make pretty darn good minestrone soup. Once decades ago when I had to write up personal life goals, I listed "learn to make minestrone soup". Probably not what the counselor had in mind when assigning this exercise, but it was an achievable goal. (The secret is the parmesan cheese rind.)

Achieving that goal continues to bring tasty satisfaction, unlike the New Year's resolution I made to match the plastic food storage containers and their lids. This is the Sisyphusian Rubbermaid resolution that can never really be completed. Still, life requires the repeated efforts.

Did I ever learn to make pie crust? No, but I learned to make savory potpies with refrigerated pie crust dough. Close enough.

As for last December's vow to construct a Lego version of the NYC High Line for my composting worms in 2015, sadly no. It's been a hectic year. The resolution made for some high quality daydreaming, even if the worms did not get an elevated urban park. My grandson is finally old enough for Santa to bring him Legos. That bring joy to his father, and joy to me.

Hereby resolving in 2016 to master the requirements of my new library cataloging job.

• achieve goals and replicate results
• take daily vitamins for the uphill boulder-rolling tasks
• know when close enough is good enough
• know when to take shortcuts
• understand when excellence is the only acceptable outcome
• apply creative approaches to stale routines
• keep whimsy in my mental toolkit
• know when to follow the printed directions and when to design my own tower

And always eat a healthy breakfast!


© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Worms on the map and in the corner office

Composting worms always amaze me with their interest in current events, architecture history, and contemporary design. Down in the dark of the worm bin I suspect they are reading Zinio digital magazines on teeny tiny devices. They tweet complaints about complete lack of progress on my New Year's resolution to build them a Lego version of the High Line. They follow Zillow and pin ideas to Pinterest.

When I added coffee grounds, torn newspaper, and cucumber peels to the worm bin this evening the tension was palpable. The eisenia fetida had learned Plano is #2 in the Top 10 Cities With the Largest Homes. Plus, the red wigglers had seen the drawings of the new Rolex headquarters under construction in uptown Dallas.

The worms are demanding a Lego map, a ridiculously large Plano Lego home, and a field trip to the construction site of the new Rolex headquarters in uptown Dallas. Yes, that would be the Kengo Kuma design that looks like a vertical vermicompost Worm Factory crossed with a spread deck of casino playing cards.

 

And yes, there should be under-the-desk vermicomposting in every office!


This development will set a new standard for work life in the US," said Harwood CEO Gabriel Barbier-Mueller. “We intend on creating an office that will feature a unique blend of innovative architecture and gardens that Dallas has never seen before.”





© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Lumosity, the gateway drug

After a hard day making the world a greener place, it's good to come home, plop down in front of the computer and zone out on some major Lumosity. Bring on "Splitting Seeds", a short test of eye-squint estimating with chirpy birds, a revolving stick, and sunflower seeds. Try a few rounds of "Trouble Brewing" as a drive-thru barista to reassess your competence and career importance. Then on to where Guy Noir, pet poop in plastic bags, and Car Talk converge! Yes, multiple rounds of "Pet Detective" until geezer bedtime about eight.


Om. I am not younger.
Om. I am not smarter.
Om. I am home. Om.
Om. I am humbled and can not sneer at people who invite me to play silly games on Facebook.
Om. I hope I'm not ready for The Home.

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder

Anatevka OR Red Wigglers on the Roof

This week some brave worms bundled their belongings in old coffee filters and set off to a new world. They said goodbye to family and friends, and left the only home they've ever known. They will create rich dirt in a new bin far, far away. And now I can't get the song "Anatevka" out of my head. Marc Chagall painted a backdrop. Tevye narrated the departure. Isaac Stern fiddled.

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder

Before this year is out...

...we will send a worm to the High Line and return it safely to the worm bin.

Hey! I'm  way behind on Christmas, but I've got that New Year's resolution done and signed in ink. Yes, in 2015 I will build a Lego replica of the High Line for my red wiggler demonstrations. No more of that floss daily, get fit, read Russian novels, save the world, clean out closets stuff. It's time for the big aspiration.

The worms love the challenges of Lego maneuvering almost as much as kids love the combo of composting worms and Legos. And I love amazing architectural replicas made of mashed potatoes, sushi, and recycled boxes. It's time to push myself to infinity and beyond.

Are you with me? Do you secretly need to make Lego landmarks for invertebrates more than you need to fight lime and mildew? To go where no eisenia foetida have gone before! To the big Lego gelato stand above the Manhattan hustle and/or bustle!

I'm going to have to pace myself, breaking the resolution into manageable sections spread over twelve months. After all, I still have two to three jobs. I need to deposit paychecks and unload the dishwasher. This stuff takes precious hours from work toward my goal.

Thanks to those who have inspired me to begin this mission:

• The son formerly known as the Woolly Mammoth for sorting the family collection of Legos by color into handy plastic storage drawers.
• The crazy storytime lady who introduced me to the High Line.
• My siblings for participating in hundreds of hours of Lego camper construction for Tonka pickup trucks and Liddle Kiddle dolls, plus Lost in Space Chariot astro-RVs.
• My preschool director and Bentley for humoring my creative endeavors with composting worms. You might still be able to get a Red Worm Composting tee shirt in your stocking.
• The Carrollton children's services librarian for convincing me kids would enjoy a worm program and bringing out my hidden stand-up (yet invertebrate) comedian.
• Howie, my structural engineer father, for keeping it practical.
• Fritzi, my mom, for her early commitment to recycling prescription bottles in the service of early childhood art.
• The son formerly known as Danger Baby for his dedication to dumpster diving in the pursuit of excellent styrofoam for building replicas.
• To my son formerly known as Speech and Debate for his keen sense of humor from birth pretty much.
• To my grandson, Mr. Short Stack, for convincing me the next generation needs recycling and crazy grandmothers.
• And to all the little red wigglers... who want to visit the big, decaying apple.

  

  

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder

Velvet Red Cake: Controversy is not usually my middle name

Speaking out against red velvet cake is as radical as I've gotten since representing the USSR at Model United Nations in college. Speaking out against beets was just rabble-rousing when my dad's meal trays featured the root veggie day after day. What would have occurred if a red velvet cake was delivered to the war room buffet table in Dr. Strangelove? You can't eat beets in the war room!





On Aug. 30, 1963, the hot-line communications link between Washington, D.C., and Moscow went into operation.

Beets are not the red ingredient in red velvet cake. A whole bottle of Adams Red food coloring give the cake that mildly toxic appearance with no hidden vegetable benefits. We can always justify another piece of carrot cake because we are consuming actual veggies that improve our night vision (and possibly delicious cream cheese frosting).

My history with beets is mixed. Pickled beets = thumbs down. Canned diced beets = satisfying building material pre-LEGO. Lovely stain, too, almost as beautiful as merthiolate and mercurochrome!

Vegetables sound better than mercury or insects in a dessert. A purple sweet potato velvet cake just needs some adjective rearrangement. Sweet velvet purple potato cake? Sweet purple potato velvet cake? Sweet purple velvet potato cake? Purple velvet sweet potato cake?

A Colorful History One common source of natural food coloring is cochineal, also called carmine, carminic acid, or Natural Red 4. The dye is made fromDactylopius coccus, commonly called a cochineal bug. It's a type of scale insect—tiny parasites that latch onto plants to drink their sap—that lives on cactus. "They kind of look like plant pimples," says entomologist Gwen Pearson, author of Bug Girl's Blog. "They don't have wings or visible legs; they're basically just little sacks of juice. Which means they need a powerful defense." That defense, in the cochineal bug's case, is a crimson-hued substance called carminic acid that tastes unpleasant to would-be predators such as ants. Humans have used this as a dye for centuries; the Aztecs put it in medicine, cosmetics, textiles, and even tamales, says Amy Butler Greenfield, author of the book A Perfect Red, about the history of cochineal. "It's the most intense natural red dye in the world, and it helped people and cultures in southern Mexico survive the devastation of the [Spanish] Conquest," says Butler Greenfield. "Nowadays it continues to be a key export for poor farmers in a number of disadvantaged regions. Big producers include Peru and the Canary Islands."

Slate's Dessert Map of the U.S. assigned red velvet cake to Arkansas, a state in need of cream cheese frosting with nuts. The over-the-top FABulosity trend of red velvet plus many years of preschool birthday cupcakes have driven me to take refuge on a safe tiny remote cakeless island. The only dessert on my island will be the perfectly roasted and golden brown marshmallow. I will be both queen and high priestess of the perfect marshmallow. You may bow or curtsy.

As to the problem of adjective arrangement, I offer this googlization of language example. Try searching the Go Big Red chant (performed by the Husker) drum line. You will get videos about fish (big red drums).

© 2014 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

Peter Peter Pumpkin-Eater

Why couldn't Peter keep his wife?


As a child I loved the alliteration and the little red-haired girl in the pumpkin. Then I grew up and got all righteous and offended about husbands keeping wives locked up in pumpkins.

This Halloween season I'm seeing it in a new light. Maybe Peter had the eye-burning pumpkin farts and his little red-haired wife banished him from their pumpkin house.




Bulldogs and pumpkins and gas, oh my!  I don't know if feeding dogs canned pumpkin puree really aids digestion or prevents constipation and diarrhea. My son says his English bulldog puppy has ghastly ghostly toxic pumpkin gas. Otherwise, she's a very nice puppy and smart as a whip.


After I carved this little house for today's art class I gave the composting worms some pumpkin. Sure hope they don't get gassy! It could get difficult to live together in this little crooked house.

 

Mr. Short Stack was getting sweet potatoes out of the kitchen cupboard when we had our Sunday Skype. I was flooded with memories of my sons finding baking  potatoes, sometimes throwing them, or pretend cooking them in the pots and pans. Vague memories, too, of a story about a Sweet Patootie Doll in my childhood. The book by Mary Calhoun and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin was published in 1957, but I wonder if it appeared first in Humpty Dumpty Magazine.

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Roadies stay just a little bit longer to watch moths

Guitar Center cashiers don't often deal with grandmas in need of DJ black lights. It's clear they spend a lot of time selling microphone stands to mind-blown very-aged hippies-turned-rural-Texas-carpenters/musicians-a bit-crispy-around-the-edges. They're not crazy, they're colorful.

24-inch black light

UV colorful, actually. I'm the eccentric the cashier will tell about at supper tonight, and that's refreshing. This old lady needed a black light to attract moths, he'll report, and she was gonna feed them over-ripe bananas, stale beer, smashed watermelon, and brown sugar. The cashier suggested I just buy mothballs. Nooooooo!

Ingredients plus $16 black light

Had to go on down the freeway to Academy to buy a headlamp. My kids would have loved headlamps to play spelunkers back in the day. Vulcanologists was one of their favorite make-believe games.

Glad the Dallas Morning News gave column space to the Texas Discovery Garden's "Black Light the Night" for National Moth Week.

Clothespins to hang the screen.

My cool new $9.98 headlamp.

 The headlamp has red LED for night vision and bright white LED.

Everything required for the moth observation station.

Made a special trip to the grocery store for the brown sugar. Now I can whomp up moth "sugaring" bait in the blender. And the roadies won't mind.


© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Spotted loitering

Mystery caterpillar alert! Suspect is large, alone, and doesn't appear to be eating. It's just loitering, going on two days now, in the Gregg's mistflower plant. That plant is not a known caterpillar food source, although the butterflies feed on flower nectar.

At first glance, suspect is rather nondescript, but on closer observation it has eyespots and a pattern of triangles along its stripes. Looks like a man's necktie. 

Probable identification is yellowstriped armyworm, (Spodoptera ornithogalli). If not eaten by a bird, it will go underground to pupate like a tomato hornworm.

Do not attempt to take into custody. Go on about your business, folks.

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

New do for you?

Why did the caterpillar cross the sidewalk? To get to the other salon.**

Caterpillar haircut needed before Worm Show. No regular stylist. Go to no-appointment-needed fifteen dollar. 

We be with you sit down.

I sit down, check the magazines. Instead delete a shaggy collection of sent and received text messages.

Ready you sit. What we do?

Negotiating with beauticians has never been easy for me.  I envy guys who can say "buzz cut #3" and then zone out. There's always that temptation to say, "Well, just shave it all off 'cause it's hot on the playground!"

You want straight or fringy more feminine? 

Let's go with fringy. That's a good word. All I could think of was feathery.

Fringy brings to mind Sixties/Seventies suede hippie shoulder bags, macrame plant hangers, Twiggy and Yardley white lipstick  Like my flowered corduroy Nehru jacket, I shoulda kept that stuff and I'd be rich today. 

But babbling now. The stylist keeps a sharp object in her hand and between us, just in case I get more unfringed. Don't tell her I'm going next to buy four cartons of nightcrawlers at Academy. She doesn't call the nice young men in their clean white coats. 

Each worm has about two hundred segments.  Each segment has eight bristles that can be extended or retracted and feels a lot like the Velcro straps on your shoes.

Nightcrawlers can be eight inches long and live eight years. Most people don't distinguish between caterpillars and worms.

Heck, most people can't even figure out that Sonic styrofoam soda cups and Colonel Sanders chicken bones shouldn't be put in the recycling carts. I get irrational when wasps fly at me from the recycling cart. It's not at all "a little like having bees live in your head.*" It's so much more feathery, or fringy.

Origin: 
1325–75; Middle English frenge  < Old French  ( French frange ) < Vulgar Latin *frimbia,  metathetic variant ofLate Latin fimbria, Latin fimbriae  fringe

Related forms

fringe·less, adjective

fringe·like, adjective

fring·y, adjective

un·der·fringe, noun

un·fringe, verb (used with object), un·fringed, un·fring·ing.

** Oak Point Nature Preserve.

*  Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But, there they are.

Happy Pollinator Week!

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Audience participation

No end to volunteers at today's Worm Show! The kids were all excited to guess how many worms were in the bottom half of a coffee cup*, and then queue up by their numerical guesses ranging from five to one hundred twenty. "What do we get if we're right?", one girl asked. All I could offer was The Thrill of Victory, but that was okay by her.

• Tear newspaper to make worm bedding? You bet!

• Crush egg shells by sitting on them? Absolutely!

• Demonstrate the sound effect of Velcro shoes? Squwckkk.

• Sniff vermicompost?** Very brave.

• Open the box, grab a book from Dave the Giant Worm, and then pull Dave out of the bin? Sure. Just say when!

• Stand in front of the group and read aloud silly joke questions about worms beside the alleged worm expert, Dr. Chicken? Nearly all the kids were excited to participate no matter what their reading level. (The Worm Show was for kids ages six and up.) The kids listened respectfully to their peers. It did this old WormMama's heart good!

It was all a ridiculous amount of fun, and that was even before we started watching worms wandering Lego mazes, and touching night crawlers. "Can we check out some worm books, Mom?" I'm betting there will be worm/Lego science fair projects next winter.

*   Two hundred two red wigglers aka Eisenia foetida.
** "It smells like soil." Bingo!


© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Ask Dr. Chicken about your gizzard

Which came first? The egg? Or the media celebrity expert?

During contemplation of gizzards, a new celeb expert was hatched. Dr. Chicken will be my professorial silent sidekick for this Wednesday's traveling worm show. This poultry paper sack will be the Mr. Peabody to my Sherman.

Born in the era of Dr. Spock, I've survived many experts:

• Dr. Laura and Dr. Oz
• Dr. Phil and Dr. Ruth
• Dr. Frasier Crane and Dr. Henry Kissinger
• Zbigniew Brzezinski
• NPR's Click and Clack
• "The Doyenne of Dirt", Ketzel Levine* 

Now I need an inanimate expert on earthworms with personality plus that can be created from very simple materials in under two minutes while kids dance the Chicken Dance, and volunteers from the audience assist.

Crazy?

Yes, but still not ready for the Ed Sullivan Show.

 

Bwuck,  bwuck-bwuck, BWUCK!

*She has the best name ever!


© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder with all rights reserved.