‘Tis the season for winter blahs, endless cups of tea, difficult awakenings, and increased indolence. January lies within that particular limbo of “nothing going on yet” and recovering from too much going on. We are grateful to be healthy and to have the wherewithal to be a little bored. Bored right now is good.

2016 seems to be moving at a shocking clip — it seems inconceivable that we’re getting tax forms already, and looking at bills for car registration and insurance and all the other cyclical things that come round again and again. By this time of month, people have stopped going on about resolutions and have gone back to fearmongering about politics — what if my candidate doesn’t win? — fearmongering about the weather — what if after this El Nino, there’s another La Nina cycle with NO MORE RAIN?? — and in general bickering, unpleasant, cantankerous realities of American society. Definitely time to turn off the …everything, and go outside.

It’s odd how to think how much we’ve forgotten about a rainy season. We’ve been wakened by wind and rain more than once these past few weeks, have watched the previously dead square of yard tentatively take on a furred green aspect as tiny seeds of …something germinate. (Oh, please God, may it not be the ivy again. It took us WEEKS to dig that out. It’s probably ivy. *sigh*) Between the wooden slats of our deck, beneath the bird feeder, eight sunflowers stretch bravely toward the leaden sky. They’re all about four inches tall, but distinctive. If we could transplant them, we would. The dying pine trees — still standing, because the owner can’t decide on a company to come and remove them — seem like they’re shedding pine needles in thick carpets in order to provide hiding places for the tiny, darting birds which have multiplied by the hundreds. Even the hummingbirds – suspiciously hovering and glowering at all comers – have slowed their usual frantic circling to simply sit in the yard and watch this season unfold.

The Wees are selling oranges at their elementary school, and while our weekly farm box provides us with plenty of cabbage, root veg and citrus, we agreed to buy a bag. In the spirit of trying to use everything in the veg box that we can — we’re still making kimchi and pickling carrots and cauliflower — T. bodged a bunch of oranges in a pot the other afternoon and decided to make marmalade.

We’ve been in the marmalade frame of mind before. It didn’t go well. D. worked so hard to thinly slice oranges and lemons and carefully weigh out all the ingredients… and it never set. Worse, it bubbled over and made a mess, and we ended up tossing a lot of it after we scraped it off of the stovetop. This time, T. sliced the oranges by hand instead of with a mandolin, added some cloves, just because, put in a random amount of sugar, and … mainly forgot about it. This we call “serendipitous cooking.” As in, it’s serendipity that it didn’t scorch, boil over, otherwise implode, and it’s actually good. It worries T. when she manages things that D. hasn’t managed… mainly because she can’t figure out how it happened.

Marmalade aficionados suggest softening rinds with a long, liquid reducing boil, not overstirring the marmalade after it’s reached a boil, potting the jam when it’s warm, and not piping hot, and making sure the thinly sliced citrus fruits are not too thin. British marmalade is made with the peel separated from the fruit, but T. didn’t bother zesting the oranges, and ended up turning them off midway through the cooking process for an appointment. Putting them back up to boil afterward may have done good things for the pectin formation. Some marmalade makers add the sugar near the end of the procedure, to keep the end product clear and brighter in color. Others add brown sugar, to create a deeper flavor. Since we have a whole haul of frozen and sliced oranges in the freezer, we look forward to trying out a few of these ideas.

As it stands, this marmalade is quite good, reminiscent of the bittersweet and sticky Dundee marmalade we liked so well in Scotland. T promises next time to pot it in much smaller jars for sharing — until then, she encourages you to prep and freeze your own citrus glut; you never know what wonderful things marmalade can make better. D. likes it drizzled over pound cake or as a layer in a chocolate cake. Eventually, once we pull ourselves together to try angel food again, it will also go well with that…

A hazy winter sun is emerging from behind a bank of gray-edged clouds. A piquant tanginess elevating winter’s earthy root offerings, the abundant orange is a little bit of sun to offset the tough darkness of what may turn out to be a pretty long winter. For that we can be nothing but grateful.

Every once in awhile, D. & T. have those random conversations wherein it ends up one doesn’t know what the other is talking about. (Okay, let’s be real, here: it happens far more often than “once in awhile.”)

Late Sunday morning, T. was volubly holding forth on a girlfriend who had married outside of her culture, ending with, “She’s totally against the macho thing, you know, against the whole ‘brown-skinned girl, stay home and mind the baby’ thing.”

“What?” D. asked, who probably had only been half listening to begin with. “Who would even say that?”

“It’s a SONG. You’re the one that taught me the song.”

“Uh, no, I did not. I’ve never even heard that song.

“Yes, you have!”

“No, seriously – I haven’t.

“Um… I think… it was in that movie. It was Whoopie Goldberg, and… that guy. Sarafina?“

*D. taps on laptop keys* “That’s… a movie about South Africa. Whose baby is she supposed to be minding?”

“That doesn’t sound right…”

*more digging into the hivemind of the internet*

“Clara’s Heart! I think the kids at [school where T. taught] must have watched that for a class project… don’t know why I thought it was you.”

*D. watches short clip of Whoopie Goldberg singing*”Is that Patrick Swayze? Isn’t he dead?”

“Uh, no, that’s Neil…Patrick… Harris and no, he’s very not dead. Never mind. I’m still trying to figure out, whose babies? That’s got to be the most insulting thing to say to anyone, so why is she singing it to preschool kids?”

*D. on the internet, looking for something else by now* “No idea.”

Well, we still don’t know, and neither of us are willing to watch a movie from the 80’s to find out – but T. wanted to look up the lyrics to the song. Because it was a popular Harry Belafonte song in the fifties, it has turned up on the background music of more than one film. But, according to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s “Calypso: a World of Music” page:

“Brown Skin Girl” was composed by Trinidadian calypsonian King Radio in 1946, in response to the presence of American servicemen in Trinidad during World War II. The calypso commented on the practice of soldiers and sailors fathering babies and then returning to the United States. In the song’s chorus, a serviceman tells his paramour:

I’m going away, in a sailing boat
And if I don’t come back, stay home and mind baby.

While its social commentary was typical of calypso, the song undoubtedly became a favorite with audiences because of its infectious melody. Caribbean-American singer Harry Belafonte popularized the calypso in his smash-hit album titled Calypso (1956). Since then it has remained a standard part of the repertoire of Caribbean hotel entertainers. Meanwhile, jazz versions of “Brown Skin Girl” have appeared on recordings by Sonny Rollins and Roy Haynes.”

Both of us were a little sobered at finding the provenance of this lighthearted sounding song. They say that our culture is America’s greatest export… Hm. Maybe not.

You made it. You survived the holidays another year, which also means you survived another trip around the sun. A new year…! Technically, this is the last day to wish anyone such a thing, as it’s already Three King’s Day, and we’re meant to just be getting on with things by this point… and so we shall.

Between the endless holidays ads since Halloween, culminating in the Jenny Craig/Weight Watchers/local gym membership drives now, it was a relief to kick off our Holiday Blackout on Christmas Eve, and contentedly refuse much more interaction with media than playing a few games of Lexulous online. We avoided people, too, which isn’t what we usually do, but it was a blessed relief, this year, as we were both stricken with some sniffly thing which actually might have been …a cold. Since we deny the existence of the common cold in this household, we simply blamed the dry air, and made excuses to spend another day in bed with headache medicine.

It was unavoidable to do a bit of traveling, though, and we were happy enough to visit our favorite diner in Laguna Hills, Ruby’s. It’s adorable at any time of the year, with its shiny red and silver decor, model WWII planes slowly flying around the ceiling (one of which D. identified as the kind his father flew in the Korean War), and its vintage Coke ads, but it especially shone with all the holiday decorations flung around.

Ruby’s is like opening a door and stepping back into a cleaner, more technical and much more diverse version of the 1940’s. The earnest looking men wear soda jerk hats and wrap-around aprons, and the women in their fresh red and white pinstriped waitress mini-dresses, white caps, “natural” looking stockings and perky aprons. The service is really, really good, and you don’t often find people under twenty-five in the diner, unless accompanied by people over sixty-five. This might be because there’s a mall next door with other food options, or this might be because there are several doctor’s offices and a VA nearby, skewing the age group to the AARP side of things, but it’s never too crowded, and we’re often the youngest people in the joint. Which suits us just fine.

But, whatever else the decor and other patrons do or don’t do for us, you know we’d never be at a diner if it didn’t have really, really good food. Despite its being a chain, this isn’t just your usual Coke and Burgers joint, nope. We did mention it was by some doctor’s offices, yes? The food there is … healthy. For a given value of health, yes, but it’s got low carb options on the menu, calorie counts and diet cherry Coke. With a real cherry. You cannot help but feel spoiled with a real maraschino Cherry in your diet Coke…

T. always gets their low carb veggie tacos, which are mostly shredded cabbage, tomatoes, lettuce, and salsa with a very few black beans and a whole wheat, handmade taco shell. D. usually springs for the onion rings and a veggie burger of some sort. (You can even get your burger wrapped in just lettuce, if you’d like to cut carbs even more.) There are tons of Ruby’s throughout Southern California — and one in Hawaii, one in New Jersey, one in Vegas and a few more in Pennsylvania for some inexplicable reason — but if you ever get a chance to find one of the fifteen or twenty in SoCal, you should. It’s just one of those places that seems to be a place to be happy…

And, speaking of happy!

Or, happy in the food sense, anyway: we made a new food discovery last month! We didn’t actually cruise the Asian market for this one ourselves; T’s sister dubiously bought a couple of packages and then couldn’t get herself nerved up enough to eat them, so passed them along.

This may look, to you, merely like ramen-ish or pot noodles, but they’re better – they’re ramen-ish pot noodles made out of tofu and yam flour. Given that yam flour has, er… what they call an “organic” smell, you’ll want to rinse these thoroughly right out of the package. “Organic” apparently smells oddly rotten or like wet dog and seaweed, so yay! No, it’s not really appetizing, but keep in mind that tofu is made through a process of fermentation, so there’s that, plus whatever drying and rehydrating process which makes flour from the yam, which may or may not be a yam as the Western mind is familiar with — but it’s all food and safe, so soldier on, foodie.

These faux noodles come in macaroni, spaghetti, fettuccine and other variations from House Foods, and while we can’t speak to the other varieties, we know the ramen-ish stuff is reasonable for stir fry and Asian foods. We made a very simple mock duck, broccoli, onion and orange sauce (READ: marmalade and soy sauce, works a treat) for our first bag. It worked. Perfectly. D. was T’s taste tester in this (by the time she cooked it, she only wanted a cup of tea), and he surprised her by eating his entire serving – twenty calories – with every appearance of enjoyment.

BEWARE, however: from what we’ve read, if you eat these with the idea of real pasta in your head, you’ll be unhappy. Shirataki noodles have no taste but what sauce you give them, but the texture is very different from wheat pasta. Even al dente pasta mushes between your teeth when you chew it… but this has a slight rubbery texture which snaps strangely between your teeth to produce a cognitive dissonance as you chew. Conversely, if you’ve eaten squid, apparently you’ll be okay with this, as that’s one description – that it reminds people a bit of squid, except not so chewy.

(Okay, that didn’t really help, did it?)

Either way, this is not Italian food, but it is good, and worth experimentation. For three grams of carbohydrate and twenty calories a serving, it’s worthwhile for those times you feel like eating your weight in packaged ramen. Shiritaki provides that college-style comfort food without the extra load on your body.

Stay tuned for further experimentation!

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So, happy New Year, intrepid traveler through this world. Plug your ears when diet commercials come on. We love you just the way you are. If you’re happy with you, we’re happy with you.

Be well, and stay out of trouble.

Nope, this isn’t one of T’s book birthdays, but you’ll indulge her excitement as she fêtes a friend-she’s-never-met. She writes lots of book reviews for other blogs, and we normally keep them separate. However, she knows some of you will really love this book, so… enjoy.

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Two weeks ago, T. opened an email and read the following line: “If you are, at first, lonely be patient. If you’ve not been alone much or if, when you were, you weren’t okay with it then just wait…you’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.” She beamed to herself because, she could hear the poet reading the line. Yes. T. is one of Those People responsible for making Tanya Davis’s spoken-word song poem thingy, “How to Be Alone” have five million hits on YouTube. Visually jazzed up by artist Andrea Dorfman, this is a little video many have come back to over and over, the past couple of years. And now it’s a book, out October 22nd.

T first started kvelling about this particular piece of poetry in 2011, around about the time it was one of those short-lived viral video things. It was everywhere, because it was a poem that had come out recently in a Canadian chapbook called AT FIRST, LONELY, and the author, Halifax poet-spoken word artist, Tanya Davis, set it to music and video by the poet with a filmmaker friend, Andrea Dorfman (who also was part of the team working on the book). Only some of what we pass around the ‘net has any staying power, however, and this poem has had that for me. Readers have come back to it again and again. It is the eclectic imagery of the video, yes, the poet’s careful voice, yes, but it is also the words. The words – so lucid, so simple, so heart-full and honest – that speaks to the universal we. Readers wanted to take in that heady balance of perspicacity and intellect over and over again, until it became an intrinsic part of themselves.

And, now we can.

T thought she’d give away her copy of the book as a gift to a friend, but this isn’t that kind of book. It’s the kind of book you get for yourself – but you get two copies. Then, when someone picks up your copy and wants to take it away – which will happen, this is guaranteed – you can be calm enough to say, “Oh, sure, yeah, go ahead.” And you let it go – not like a book that’s going to be borrowed and returned, but like a book that you’ll never seen again, because you won’t. It’s not that type of book.

What it is: a short and concise bedside table book for introverts, one that you can pick up and reread and realize that you’re okay, that, living in your head is okay, and that if you’re happy there, or uncomfortable because you’re not sure it’s what you’re supposed to be doing, and it maybe doesn’t look like what everybody else is doing… it reassures you that Different isn’t fatal.

It’s a coffee table lifeline for extroverts, who might find themselves in the unenviable position of being in a place cut off from their old connections, and find themselves adrift and panicky, unable to pull in the old charm that used to work so well. It’s an under-the-pillow midnight read for the puffy-eyed, heart-cracked and bleeding newly abandoned and broken; it’s a sanity saver for the newly together and commingled – it speaks to all of us who need to find and claim space in our heads – whether it’s because we’re in a life jam-packed with people, or in a world where we seem to rattle along by ourselves – and within are clear instructions as to how.

Those who loved the video may have wondered if the its quirky brilliance would translate smoothly again to the printed page. It helps that the filmmaker is also the illustrator of the novel. Reminiscent of Maira Kalman’s work in the New Yorker and elsewhere, the hand-scripted poetic words convey an intimacy, as if this is a journal you’ve written yourself, filled with brilliance you’re ready to share. The illustrations show the journey of a single sock, a single knitter, a single tree-climber, all surviving their original-and-only-one status in a paired off and lined up world, all thriving on their differences. Especially in this world of political, financial and employment stresses we experience, where lockstep conformity is expected and desired by so many, we need to step back and reconnect with both solitude and sanity, and reaffirm our commitment to originality – even if that means going it alone. This book is an antidote for out-of-focus living. Stick a copy in your car, read it in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or in line at Starbuck’s, and regain your mental health.

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Happy Book Birthday, Tanya & Andrea! This book is out today, October 22, 2013. I received my early copy courtesy of the publicist, and Harper Collins, for which I’m grateful! You can find your copy of HOW TO BE ALONE by Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman online, or at an independent bookstore near you!

Move your eyes past the clutter of lace, rose petals, sea shells; past the near invisibility of glass plates, past the strangeness of orange sections on lunch-box lids, and a bottle of hot sauce, accompanied by, of all things, a Costco-sized bottle of honey; past the mess of laundry on the love seat. None of this is the point of the shot.

Actually, this shot had no point, except to take a couple of quick clicks to work on some focusing issues. BUT. Look at the color of the sky, out of both windows.

Maybe the best of lives are made up of such serendipity – a momentary glance through a viewfinder reclaims a perfect shade of periwinkle in the midst of the chaos of a life.

Other things to think about this weekend:

1. Email apnea. Oh, the sucking, black hole of the internet strikes again. Hat tip to the blog of Gwenda Bond.

2. Is the ordinary too boring?. This piece discusses the concept of “the unexotic underclass.” They might also be known as “the middle class” and — well, just read the piece. It’s a little longer, but well worth the effort of thought.
3. Never wanted to go to Australia? Too many things eager to kill you there (even solely via heart attack)? Australia says, “No, really, I’m HARMLESS!” with giant pink fluorescent slugs. No, really. You’re welcome.

The Hobbits wish you a blissful weekend, doing what we love best: finding a quiet corner, a hammock, and a book. Oh, and food. Second breakfast, if possible, and lashings of tea. ☺

Thought we were joking about the lawn, didn’t you.

When you have a 4’x 12′ strip of grass that masquerades as a lawn, it’s hard to become too exercised over it getting longish. It’s full of crab grass and clover, and provides us with tiny yellow flowers, and we rather like it the tangle that it tends to be – but we also try not to scare the neighbor too badly, so we’re bound to try and weed and feed and shoo away the mushrooms that grow luxuriantly in a weird patch toward one edge.

Suburban gardens can be so gorgeous. We’ve got such plans for container gardens and bird feeders (high enough so Evil Squirrel Trio doesn’t eat them all again) and bird baths – as soon as we finish doing yard things for others, and get our deck fixed. OY, the deck has been a long project – made longer still by the fact that this is a rental house, and you have to do acrobatics and stand on one leg to get things done, even if they were promised to be done when you moved in almost a year ago. The project was started then apparently it was abandoned for other emergencies in the cold snap of October, so we’ve had to start over with our property manager, getting bids and such. It’s a real pain, but this time we’re going to follow through with the time-honored NAG so it gets done.

We’ll have late veg this Spring – but that’s what comes of having to rely on the schedules of others to get your garden in! We’re happy enough to go with containers on the deck, flowers and butterfly grasses and rosemary and such. The prevalence of soil sold in tidy bags (no longer called “compost,” and we’ll miss the John Innes, to be sure) makes it all so easy.

Meanwhile the roses are blooming and blooming and blooming. We’re a little amused and slightly worried that each bush is now rocking two kinds of roses… yes, the rootstock, despite our wholesale whacking back this winter, has grown out. One particularly thorny, scrappy white bush has produced such loveliness in terms of smell – and now the perfectly creamy white blossoms – still way too thorn-ridden for “nice” gardens – are pulling that sweetness into more uniformly perfect petals – somehow a slightly different shade of white. Bone white roses? Who knew. And the reds are showing purples and peach centers, white what were huge pink roses are now also… pink and white. Don’t know what to do about this, or if one must DO anything – we’re just deadheading as fast as we can, and taking pitchers of them to friends and the few family members not currently inundated. Our fig tree is leafing up, but no figs on it just yet – possibly because of The Trio of Evil always leaping around in the branches, but we’re not sure. We certainly have bottlebrush and hummingbirds enough for anyone! The aerial battles continue unabated, as do the nosy visitations – these little upstarts rather like hovering while one is near the roses, and woe be unto you if you don’t fill their feeder fast enough. Between the fox, the raccoon, the woodpecker and the tiny dive-bombing hummers, it’s an active yard.

We’re still in the stage of being aware of just how easy gardening is in these parts – the Isle of Albion has so many shades of green it dazzles your eyes, but we’re pleased with any bit of warmth that brings out the shades of golden brown – and also makes the tomatoes non-crunchy. ☺ Contentment in all things, yes? Yes.