Pied Beauty
~ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
First published in 1918, the above poem can be found in:
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Happy National Poetry Month!
Rode hard, put up wet, still smiling
Friends in the East are having very different weather than ours today. “Oh, spring has sprung,” one said Tuesday. “The rest is just details.” Another crowed on her blog the other day, “The air is glorious like wine! Saw my first tiger swallowtail, and all the frogs are singing!”
Our friends are reveling in their gardens, sitting on front stoops with cider and books, and stretching their limbs in the sun. “Must be nice,” we sigh, as another gust of wiiiind slaps a handful of rain into our faces, but then we look over our shoulders nervously. We are NOT, repeat, NOT tired of the rain. No, no! Californians who whine are subject to lightning strikes about the head and shoulders, so we are NOT whining, not when we’ve finally seen a light at the end (well, the beginning of the end) of the nastiest drought tunnel in years. Even in the face of a potential Category 3 storm (the weather person who said this was met with bewildered, “What?” faces), we are sucking it up to relearn appropriate rain behavior. We first met this in Seattle, and really learned the ropes in Scotland. The Just Do It school of rainy weather behavior is “if you let the rain chase you indoors, you’ll never come out again ’til July,” so we’re managing the trick of being out/about anyway when we’d rather stay in and read and bake and schlepp around the house. One of the ways we keep moving, as Lake Shasta and the reservoirs, creeks and rivers are filling – or in poor Sebastopol/Guerneville/Monte Rio’s case, overfilling AGAIN – is to step outside and remember one of the ten thousand reasons to be happy right now.
So, go outside. We’ll wait.
You out there? Good. Listen.
In the daytime, in between the soughing of the wind and the plink and prickle of raindrops against the earth (and the unfortunate wail of sirens, as people collide and slide across the road) you can hear something else. Birdsong. Millions of birds, tweeting and squeaking and singing. And, of an evening, you can hear this:
Okay, this is two hours from our house, on the edge of a meadow facing a great thousand acre swath of woods, true, but the frogs are singing at our house, too- even in the damp and cold and wet (why would that make a difference to them??) – singing. Singing aloud – I’d say with joy, but no point in waxing ridiculous; they’re singing aloud with an “I’m an available mate” tune going on. 😈 It’s what Spring is all about.
As the traffic snarls and you watch the eejits in front of you speed, then hydroplane and fishtail up the road (note to people who own pickups – in high wind and rain, put something in the truck bed; didn’t they tell you that in Driver’s Ed???), remember the birds. Remember the frogs. Drive carefully, stay out of the wind, if you can, and remember to take a little bit to listen – and be grateful.
Happy storm weekend.
Old Code Lives On
Occasionally I remember how old I am. Thinking about how I got into computer programming, I usually tell the story about how I was working doing data entry and got tired of the repetitive nature of the job, so automated a piece of it and ended up drawing the attention of the IT department as a result. (I still keep in contact with that guy, 20 years later.) Thinking about it, though, I realized that my start was a lot earlier than that. I realized this when reading an article on The Law of Accelerating Returns. Something in there struck me as being … well, wrong.
The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movie’s Marty McFly was in 1955.
Now, I don’t know about you, but my first DOS-based computer resembled something like the PC3 “LunchBox” Portable Computer, and came to me in something like 1984. Of course, somewhere around the same time we were playing with the Commodore Vic-20 (came out in 1981), Commodore 64 (1982), and the Commodore 128 (1985). So, no, going back to 1985 wouldn’t be all that shocking. Yes, it’d be annoying to have to use a card catalog in order to find something, rather than asking teh interwebs. It’d also be strange not to have call waiting, or cell phones, but I can’t say that it’d be particularly troublesome overall. Nor can I really say the world was all that much different.
I got to thinking about how long I’ve been writing software (this time) because I’d been asked to pull together some screenshots and instructions for a database application I built back in 1998. This application is still running, 18 years later, and still the “system of record” for the company. This and a couple other systems I’ve written are still ticking over in some form or another (this one’s running on a virtual machine just to keep it alive, because nobody can get the software any more, and nobody really knows how to replace it – I had to install an older development tool just to convert it to what it would have been in 2003’s format so that I could convert it to the current format and have a look through things.).
In any event, I think it’s important to point out that yes, the rate of technological change is ever-increasing. On the other hand, there are these bedrock systems which keep on running that nobody is willing to replace because they aren’t broken – they still do their job just fine, and there really is no need to change them. (Have a look at this PCWorld article, for instance.) In parallel with these systems, old code keeps on ticking over, and continues to work (e.g., just about the entire Banking sector of the UK runs on COBOL, or the VA Hospital’s Electronic Medical Records system is .NET wrapped around Java wrapped around Delphi wrapped around a file-based storage system – so, your medical record is just a text file somewhere, when all’s said and done). Other, operating-system type foundations have also not shifted – there really are only 2 operating systems in use today, *NIX and Windows NT – and those have been around for decades – everything added to them is just window-dressing.
It’s only the surface of things which has really shifted – the core remains as it was 20 or even 40 years ago. Yes, computers are much faster. Yes, computers are way smaller, and in seemingly everything. But I just don’t see the level of technological change being all that huge even now, nor do I think it’s changing as rapidly as Kurzweil thinks. Or, rather, I don’t think that the entire ecosystem changes as rapidly as all that – it’s that the outliers are arriving faster, but their adoption depends upon their incorporation into the devices and technologies we already use, which is necessarily slowed by our very humanity.
So. Take the time to look back at all the computing you’ve done, and realize how much things haven’t changed, despite the new names and different packages. Ignore the window-dressing and really think about the technology and you may be surprised at how, really, things haven’t changed. Sure, if they implanted teh interwebs into your head you’d be hugely changed – and, yes, they’re working on that somewhere – but do we really see it happening in our lifetimes? I really don’t think so, because I really think that the rate of change is not solely governed by tech, but by the economics of the matter, and by our ability to incorporate that change.
-D
Aside from reading for a book award, reviewing other books and pretending to be a competent writerly being…
I’m told the candy does NOT, in fact, taste like peas or carrots. Bummer.
…I’m up to a few other things:
February is not just when the groundhog emerges (albeit with a LOT of help from people pulling it) from its hole to find its shadow – it’s apparently the month when introverts Make An Effort (also with a LOT of help from people… pulling). I’ll be booktalking, and being visible this February here and there – first, I’m presenting a webinar February 2nd for The National WWII Museum on Mare’s War as part of their WWII emphasis this year. Teachers and families who do homeschooling, you’ll want to jump on this! The week following, I’ll be on the blog STACKED and then the tumblr Size Acceptance in YA; at BN Teen Blog’s Open Mic project sometime next month, and on John Scalzi’s WHATEVER blog’s Big Idea project on February 9th, which is the same day that PEAS AND CARROTS has its book birthday.
I’m grateful to everyone who asked me to show up and hang out next month, and given me the opportunity to talk about what I do and how I do it.
X-posted from {fiction, instead of lies}
– T
{the people that walked in darkness}
when you walk through the storm, keep your head up high,
and don’t be afraid of the darkAt the end of a storm is a golden sky, and the sweet silver song of the lark –
…Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain
though your dreams be tossed and blown –Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
and you’ll never walk alone… you’ll never walk alone.
To the people still walking in darkness, and waking in darkness, and whose spirits are flattened beneath the hideous orangish glow of sodium lights — hang in there.
And to those who are buckling down for wind, sleet, storm and blizzard this weekend — see you on the other side. Stay warm!
The More Things Change
In the major house clean after the holidays, T. found a newsletter from 2005 which commented on the torrential, Ark-inducing rainfall. Those were the days, and the return of the rain to this rather dry state – this week’s “conga line of storms” as one forecaster deliriously burbled – is still too much of a novelty to provoke much complaint about the snarled traffic and the inconvenience of a sudden ploot, as the Scots call a downpour (though we WILL complain about the eejits who don’t understand that one cannot drive a wet road at the same speed as one dry). At work this week, D. discovered that his thick wool cardigan indeed smells quite like wet sheep when thoroughly drenched. Funny, that.
It’s always nice to do a bit of baking when being outdoors is not an option, and D. took the opportunity to use a recent gift of an Angel Food pan for the first time. Whether it was the lemon zest he added to the carefully folded froth or the fact that he – strictly following a recipe for once, since he’d not made an angel food cake for over 20 years – used Egg Beaters instead of cracking fresh eggs, or the Egg Beaters had frozen previously — something made this cake weirdly almost soggy, with huge bubbles, and an appalling…coarseness. Since an angel food cake is normally light, airy, firm, yet tender of crumb, this was a definite MAJOR fail – the first of the New Year, which amused us greatly. It was frustrating, but angel food is just such an easy cake that we were sort of gobsmacked that it had somehow not come out right. From Cook’s Illustrated we learned that Egg Beaters are twice pasteurized… of course, we checked with them AFTER we’d made our error. Well. Live and learn. We have some ideas for what to do next time, and will begin by using a different recipe, in-shell, non-carton egg whites… and going from there.
As you can see, it looks more like bread than cake…
At least our Lavender Lemon Shortbread turned out. Of course, D. doubled both the lemon and the lavender because he feared they’d simply taste like really rich sugar cookies if he didn’t. T. felt the spices fought each other, and would have preferred one merely complementing the other, OR, Lavender sugar cookies and Lemon shortbread, separately. D. found them reasonably tasty, and T. decided, as she often does, that they’d be improved with a tart lemon frosting glaze. Lemon juice, with a soupçon of icing sugar, covers a multitude of sins.
All that needs to be added is a cuppa and a fire, and all’s well that ends well. Well…mostly. Happily D. got a new EvenGrind – a hand-powered coffeebean grinder – and while he is quite pleased with it, he and a coworker have discussed making it work with an electric drill… so, once the whirring stops, and the cuppa’s brewed, THEN all is well. Apparently.
So. A fire, a cookie, a game, and thou. Looking back at every January, wet or dry, we’re pretty much the same as we always are. Cheers to that.
Journey to the Center South of the Earth.
Finding ourselves with a rare gift of a few days with no appointments or expectations, we decided to head down to Southern California to visit with D’s family. Rather than fly, we figured we’d just drive, as SoCal remains about 8 hours distant, barring traffic. Given the choice between being in airports on Christmas or sitting in our own vehicle? Not that difficult a decision, really. We caught up on chitchat and podcasts (NPR’s Latino USA has an amazing piece on Jewish Latino culture that was really worth hearing) and made surprisingly good time.
Our one concern was the roads – the changing season has brought oddly torrential rains and some floods to the lowlands, and freezing temps even to our little neck of the woods, which is at sea level, and we wondered how much it was going to snow, heading over the Grapevine. We found that for Southern California, it was snowy … meaning there were maybe 3 inches built up, in spots, and the road was a wee bit wet, in spots. (It was a bit odd finding ice on the top of the car in San Bernadino, though). It was gorgeous and we were grateful to arrive when it was already on the ground, with no issue of the road being closed.
Our time was mostly spent watching D’s sibs and their various children (7 nieces and nephews!) enjoy their various aerial toys and putting together an evil trampoline that took far longer than it should have (never underestimate the power of people not reading directions). There was plenty of interesting food (potatoes, sliced thinly, on …pizza? Surprisingly tasty, with an Alfredo sauce), many, many, many citrus and palm trees, and a trip to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, to which we hadn’t gone since …2002 or so. An old photograph shows us there in high summer, shivering as we snap a photograph. We’d forgotten that it wasn’t just the cold that had chased us down last time… it was a few other details, like the fact that it’s very high!
The last time we were in one of the trams, they had much smaller cars (you can see one in the picture above). Nowadays, the cars are round, and the floor rotates around 360° over the course of moving up nearly a vertical mile, from 2,643 feet elevation at the embarkation station to 8,516 feet at debarkation. D. thought this would be fun (T was, as she always is in trams, dubious). We found that having the windows constantly sliding to the side, while trying to brace and take pictures, wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Though it did tend to distract from the disturbing bits (going over the pylons and swinging nauseatingly baaaack and forth), overall we think that it would have been nice, for the photographers, to be stable rather than slowly rotating about. Ah, well, the kids got a kick out of it.
Though some of our party were unprepared for the realities of snow (one child discovered that Crocs and bare feet do not make for enjoyable snow play) and certainly neither T. nor D. expected Southern Cal to be cold enough to have brought scarves or ear-covering hats (T. counted herself fortunate to find an extra pair of knit gloves in the car and D. was very grateful for his flannel-lined cardigan), it was a pleasant trip up, but one we won’t be taking again soon. While it’s quite a wonderful view from the top of Mt. San Jacinto, both T. and D. were struggling with the altitude more than they remembered (which is probably why we only made a brief visit the summer of 2002 – yeah, it was snowy up there and we were in shorts, but we couldn’t breathe), and T’s lungs didn’t really enjoy the hike from the parking lot in dry 29°F/-1°C air (her ten-minute coughing jag reminded her why she’d never choose to live in a high desert). We were a bit disappointed in our performance, but high altitude fans we are not. *waves to our friends in Denver*
The air was astoundingly clear for Southern California. We could see all the way to the Salton Sea (which was just cut out of the photograph on the far right in the shot below).
This trip also gave D the excuse to break in his new camera. It was a treat to hold onto something so much smaller and lighter, and get some truly detailed and clear pictures — but focus is tricky — as he realized when T. met a friend from Iowa for lunch (the joys of others traveling to see family nearby!) and he took a picture of them which left them both blurry, but the road behind in sharp focus. We also realize we need to get an additional battery pack for the new rig – at the top of the mountain, D. ran out of power, so spent some time hanging about in the lodge with the charger plugged into a free socket. Ah, well. We’ll be better prepared next time.
And now we take stock of our lives, and tumble into the new year. Joy to you, friends — stay dry and WARM.
-D & T
In lieu of the pie…
Not every use of pumpkin this time of year ends in pie or a hideously over-sweetened “spiced” coffee drink of red cup fame. (There’s no pumpkin in those things, actually, so never mind…) D’s friend, Rainer, who emigrated from Germany, recently enjoyed some of D’s carrot cake and reminisced about a cake he ate growing up, made with Hokkaido pumpkins. It was, he described it, rich, dense, and spiced similarly. He then gave D. the recipe in …German. Fortunately, there’s Google.
The first thing we had to decipher is what a Hokkaido pumpkin is… and where to find one. The name easily enough identified it as yet another varietal of Japanese pumpkin, but it’s known in this part of California as a Red Kuri (or kari) squash. At our usual market we found something that looked … KIND OF like a red kuri in shape, but it was too large, and the color was more butternutty… and the grocery store brilliantly labelled it “Winter Squash.” Um. Yes. Full of detailed, helpful information, that name.
Red kuri – or Hokkaido squash – as you see in this cheater picture from Wikimedia Commons – are beautiful. Their small size and intensely colored rind are notable, and their inner flesh is kind of …pink. They’re on the sweeter side, and are carried locally at various farm markets, Whole Foods, Sprouts, and the like, though with the before-Thanksgiving run on hard squash and gourds, we couldn’t source any this time. We bought our “winter” squash for Tuesday soup and grated a kabocha instead. Another Japanese favorite, used in tempura, kabocha are hard and sweet and have the same bright orange flesh, so we figured it was a decent substitute.
Rainer’s Kürbiskuchen
200g soft butter —> 7/8 cup
150 g sugar —> 3/4
100 g of honey or maple syrup —> 1/3 c honey
4 egg yolks
500 g pumpkin flesh —> 17 oz
300g Hazelnuts —> 2 c. hazelnut flour
100 g flour —> 1 c. AP flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch of salt,
1 teaspoon cinnamon,
nutmeg
some black pepper.
4 egg whites200 g chocolate —> 1 c
dried pumpkin seeds for garnishThis recipe records the equivalents which we used – please note that they are not exact, nor did we entirely follow the recipe, though we were as faithful as we could be.
The what-to-mix-first portion of the recipe didn’t translate very well, but once you’ve made carrot cake, you can pretty well make this. As we had a few hopeful vegans around this holiday, we opted to make the cake vegan — so we made flax eggs and used Smart Balance. We cut the butter called for by half because …well, it just seemed like a lot, and there’s really nothing worse than a greasy cake. We baked it in an angel food cake pan and were astonished at how much oil there was left still in the pan afterward. We were actually a little worried, but it all came right …
” The instructions mentioned something about having chocolate flake scattered on the top of this cake. D. made a deep, rich ganache instead, and we skipped the pepita garnish because if you didn’t see pumpkin seeds, you’d have no idea that pumpkin was the flavor of the cake! Though too soft for T. – she’d like to try the recipe again with the right kind of pumpkin, with eggs, and with a different balance of hazelnut flour to AP flour, just to test some hypotheses – the cake was a hit with the guests over lunch on the weekend, and the remainder was quickly snarfed up by workmates. The ganache contrasted amazingly well with the bland sweetness of the pumpkin. This was a “ten minute cake,” it was literally gone before Rainer even got to taste any! Oh, well. Good excuse to make it again.
Anyone weary of the traditional uses of pumpkin during the holidays might swap out carrots (and raisins) in a traditional carrot cake recipe, and enjoy the results!
Baking Like the Babes: Russian Chrysanthemum Bread
When you bake bread every week, or every-other, you lose the ability to really… blog anything interesting about it. Oh, yes, this week the dough had a GREAT gluten! This week we used a little more White Whole Wheat, and a pumpernickel instead of a blended rye…. Yeah, we know we have the ability to gabble on endlessly about that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, we love you too much to expose you to our sheer nerdishness. I mean, we’re the people who peruse the King Arthur Flour catalogue over breakfast! So, we bake – a great deal – and it’s usually wholemeal bread which we use for absolutely everything – toast to sandwiches. Sometimes we’re inspired to branch out by seeing images of some wonderful thing, and that was the case this time. Blogging Baker Babe Lien is rounding up the Bread Baking Babes this month, and while we’re rather short on babe-ishness around here this week, we happily played along with this gorgeous looking bread.
Russian Chrysanthemum bread seems like one of those holiday breads that is just perfect for this time of year. The simple dough calls for using strong flour, which is simply a high gluten flour, and the recipe follows. The filling for the original bread Lien (and many others) made is savory, which you know we’ll have to try before winter is over, but you know we mavericks can never simply follow a recipe properly the first time — we made ours of tartly sweet cranberries and clementines with dark chocolate — basically leftovers from the cranberry sauce T. had just made, with shards of dark chocolate thrown in. It is a TASTY filling – not terribly sweet, not too tart, smooth and richly chocolaty. T. thought this looked like a pull-apart bread to us, but a lot of the Baking Babes – and D. – thought it made more sense to actually slice it. This bread is open to a great deal of variation – it’ll be interesting to see where it lands in our whimsy next! And we do look forward to trying it in a springform pan, or with some more flower-y shapes.
500 g strong flour/bread flour (with some extra for dusting the board when you roll out the dough)
7 g dry instant yeast
125 ml milk, lukewarm (1/2 cup)
125 ml kefir or yogurt (1/2 cup)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
90 ml olive oil (3 oz.)
We used whole wheat flour and instead of sugar, maple syrup. We also forgot the yogurt and skipped out on the egg in the glaze and in the dough, as several guests this weekend are vegan. We’ll give it another try at some point as written.
When making her bread, Babe Elle wisely rolled her dough all out and used a biscuit cutter to get the perfectly sized rounds. Would this have made our lives much easier? Oh… sure. *cough* Maybe. Probably. However, D rolling the dough out individually suited the graduated sizes of the petals on his mums.
Overfilling the petals is really the worst thing you can do, with a loose filling – you need just a schmear of filling to show, and just enough so that it won’t squish out when you’ve pinched the dough together… it should stay in place, allegedly. T. started filling with a tablespoon initially, but switched to about a teaspoon full of filling – enough to taste, not to make a meal on (sadly). And the round of dough is simply folded in half and then the folded edges pinched together to make a petal. This would be a great job for small children with clean hands and a need desire to avoid other work and participate in the making of the treat.
We topped our bread with sugar crystals, colored with saffron, just to add a little crunch and color. Though T. really did kind of over-do it on the filling, the dough turned out to be very excited about proofing, which made the whole thing a bit more forgiving than it could have been. The tender, toothsome dough baked up looking golden-brown and delicious and was really well received by eaters of all ages this past weekend.
It’s too easy to be busy lately, and the holiday throws its own craziness into the mix of the daily things we have to do. We’d lately forgotten the fun of baking with others, so we’re grateful for the Babes for being the first to try this easy – yet complex – frilly bread. Can’t wait to try it again!
We’re still around; Fermenting things
So, it’s been a while since we’ve written here. T., of course, has been writing over at Writing YA and on her own blog, but D. has been tinkering about with twitter rather than trying to scrape up the energy to actually write anything. So, in the interest of at least letting you know that we’re still here, a brief post.
A few months back, D. got a fermentation crock. In that, we’ve made three batches of kimchi, 2 batches of sauerkraut (one traditional with green apples and caraway seeds, the other Indian inspired), a batch of root beer, and two batches of ginger beer. We’re right now fermenting some green beans and carrots with dill seeds and garlic, for Thanksgiving. They’ll have been in for a solid week, brined, so they should be mildly sour.
Because we have the crock (ginger beer was the initial motivation), D. picked up The Art of Fermentation, and we’ve been enjoying the reading of it far more than any other cookbook we’ve ever had. We’ve come to love kimchi (mix it with rice, yogurt, cheese, and bake it – you’ll be surprised). We’ve also started to look about and say, “what else can we ferment?” In a culture which doesn’t eat that many veggies (check out this infographic), we’re quite happy to be adding more veggies to our diets, packed with flavor.
Anyway, that’s enough gushing about fermenting things. May you have a happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are.
-D & T