Semi Wordless Wednesday: Food Commentary

One of my birthday cards this past week came with the following little cards stuffed inside (as well as a bit of confetti too.) They made me smile, so I thought I'd share them with you too. Happy Wednesday!

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Like Fishing, Like Life

I’ve heard it said that there are two great metaphors for life: a river and a garden. Last night I decided there might be a third great metaphor for life: fishing.

You know, you make sure you have everything ready, you hope everything works, and then you head off, knowing that anytime, your motor may fail, forcing you to paddle back to shore. Once you’re out on the water, you throw in your line, bob around a bit, and wait for something to come to you. Maybe not a metaphor for the most proactive of lives, but a slice of life, nonetheless.

We weren’t the most patient fishermen last night. We caught a lot more snags than we caught fish (okay, so there wasn’t even a nibble), which was fine by me. After a busy and sticky hot day at work, I was happy just to be floating about in a boat, enjoying the light breeze and the cooler evening temperatures.

After the relaxing time in the middle of the lake, we came back home, where I made popcorn over the stove and managed to get a potholder on fire. Nothing like starting off days off with a bang. The popcorn was really good though, and the flaming potholder was immediately flung into a basin of dishwater.

Today’s my first day off in eight days (I realize that since I work increasingly as a freelancer, days off are a highly arbitrary concept) and while that fact doesn’t exactly signal “the end of the world,” I’m looking forward to not spending the next two days at work, per se. There are blueberries to pick, a commentary or two to write, some fishing, and a baby loon in the bay to watch grow up.

It’s heating up to be another scorcher outside. Better add swimming to the agenda.

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Weeding

Tomorrow marks my return to gainful employment. That is, tomorrow I will leave the house, perform assigned tasks, record my hours, and after couple weeks, get a check. This is as opposed to my current form of employment in which I plunk down and type away at the computer for hours on end, get a headache, check Facebook, check blogger, eat lunch, go for a walk, eat my second lunch (I may actually be half hobbit), type away at the computer some more and every once in a while get a check in the mail.

To prepare myself for this drastic switch in income method I’ve spent the weekend weeding. Not only did I tackle the quack grass in the garden, I sifted through various other projects that have been languishing around the cabin, trying to weed out and complete what I could. I got all my freelance work finished (well, the deadline is tomorrow), got myself a commentary commentary ahead of schedule, finished a sweater, and even did a semi-final edit on the first radio script.

This weekend was Fishing Opener and it’s hard to imagine a more ideal weekend. Right now there’s a fishing boat bobbing out in the bay in 75 degree weather with just a touch of breeze. It’s really not about the fish on days like this. I bet on openers when it’s spitting snow and rain, it’s a little more about the fish.

The garden loves the warm weather. A bunch of onions poked up yesterday morning and I think there might be some peas joining their ranks as well. Some of the seedlings have spent their weekend out on the deck in the true sunlight for the very first time.

The sweater I finished this afternoon is also sunning itself. I had to block the snot out of the sweater (yep, a technical term meaning to pin the knitted garment down to a flat surface to “set” the stitches so the garment hangs right when it’s worn) because the garment is just ever so slightly too large and I’m trying to shrink the sweater in the sunlight. This might be the equivalent of trying to jam a square peg into a round hole, but it seemed worth a try.

It feels too much like summer to be fussing about a sweater. The whole weekend has had a contented, “Anne of Green Gables” sort of feel, filled with good friends, family, laughter and simple pleasures. If this is summer, I say bring it on.

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A Day Off of Sorts

The seedlings are starting to pop up!

Things have been kind of nutty around here lately. (To think the full-time job hasn’t begun yet!) We’re pretty well settled into the new living space for the summer, but there still remains a sense of transition. This morning, as I prepared to help out with a filming about my summer employer, I realized I didn’t know where my matching mittens, hat, and scarf were. It was 40 degrees and I was supposed to be filmed outside. All I could find was a black polka dot scarf, teal gloves, and a navy blue beret. So I went bareheaded and sans mittens and sniffled my way through it. Now I’m back in the cabin, nursing a cup of cocoa. The weather which was so unseasonable for the last two months has taken a turn for the seasonable. We have rain/snow mix predicted today.

It seems lately, my days have been disintegrating into splinters of themselves. It’s been feeling as though I’m back in college, cramming for finals once again. I have fond memories of college, but those three weeks or so leading up to finals every college semester are not times in my life I would voluntarily repeat. On two separate occasions, I wrote a ten + page paper over a weekend, from outline to bibliography, doing all of my research on Saturday and all of my writing on Sunday.  (I should note that in both cases, the professors had outlined their courses so you were meant to work on the paper over the course of, pretty much, the entire semester.) Somehow, no matter how things get planned out, I always end up with cram sessions. And it is a cram session in which I exist at the current moment.

But there’s only so much running around for interviews and research and phone tag, a person can take. So I’m taking the day off. I wrote a radio commentary this morning, did the filming thingamajig before lunch, and now I am blogging. I think that will be it for the day. I might even stoke the fire and sit down with the Anne Lamott book I’ve been meaning to read since December. If the weekend goes as I think it may, it’s going to be busy. So I think I’ll tuck in a quiet moment before the last big push of freelance work takes place next week.

For one thing, it’s been ages since I’ve read through an entire Funds for Writers newsletter. C. Hope Clark’s weekly newsletter comes out every Friday afternoon and it’s pretty much the definitive guide out there for writers looking for any sort of funding for their craft: be it grants, freelance markets, residencies, you name it. Since the start of April, I’ve skimmed through the weekly emails (and the bi-weekly Total Funds for Writers). Although I’m currently not searching for funding, I always look forward to reading Hope’s editor comments and I feel like the newsletters help me keep on top of the writing industry as a whole. I’ll be glad to take the time it takes to read through today’s newsletter in its entirety this afternoon.

Whatever this weekend finds you doing, I hope you at least have a moment or two filled with whatever makes your heart happiest. Happy Friday!

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Who Wants to Transcribe an Interview?!

We finally got some form of April showers! Fire danger in the area is currently considered “extreme.” We just need another week of showers (no wind) and maybe there will be moss in the forest that actually squelches when you step on it instead of making an ominous “snap, crackle, pop” noise.

I went into the studio yesterday to record a commentary and to get some work done on the radio documentary I’m producing. After about six hours of work (I had expected to work for about four hours) I had one 45 minute interview about ¾ transcribed and I had conducted and recorded another hour-long interview for the project. I should mention that I have another hour-long interview that needs to be transcribed and on Tuesday, I will conduct another lengthy interview. I’m accumulating long interviews for the project at a frightful pace, so frightful that I’m not sure how I’m going to transcribe them all (someone told me Wednesday that transcription takes abut 5x the length of the actual interview, and I believe them!) and produce the first documentary for June broadcast.

I might just become the schmuck who makes the summer intern do the majority of my transcribing. As a former intern of the organization, I would have jumped at the chance to take on this tedious and time consuming task. Okay, so that’s a lie.

But . . . I also know, that as an intern, people often overestimated the amount of time it takes for assigned tasks to be completed and that a large portion of time is always spent nervously twiddling thumbs in your work space while you pray that someone will remember you and give you something to do. It was always nice to have to have “something to do” to fill the times when you ran out of actual interesting tasks.

At least, that’s how I’m justifying it.

When you spend as much time as I did yesterday in a teeny production studio which really just a glorified way of saying “ill-ventilated closet,” you start to get a little twitchy. Yesterday, as I typed away, stopping and starting recording over and over again, I kept feeling something: a twitch, a tickling on my upper thigh. The sensation came from near my pocket where I kept my keys and chapstick. Probably just those objects shifting around, I told myself.

But, although it had been several months since I’d had a feeling like this, I had my suspicions about what it really was. Finally, I pinched a bit of my jeans fabric together. I felt something small and hard trapped between my thumb and forefinger. I reached into my pants and pulled out a wood tick.

Turns out transcribing does give you ticks!

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s tick season. Those hateful, awful little insects are out there lurking in the tall, dead grass, waiting for you to pass through so they can jump on your pant leg and subsequently, suck your blood. I apologize for the gross imagery, but I have long harbored a deep dislike of ticks, so much so that I once wrote a little ditty called “Ode to a Tick.” It went something like: Ode to a tick. You are an ‘ick.’ Probably not my best effort, but I never claimed to be a poet.

Years ago, this region of the world was free ticks, but it seems the warmer, dryer summer we’ve been having seem to have brought them in droves. They’re one of the most disgusting harbingers of spring, but there’s also not a whole lot you can do about them.

Now that I've grossed you all out, here’s this month’s travel, in album form.

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I Will Buy You A Garden

“I made you something,” Andy said when I got back to the Shack on Sunday. Cranky from my five-hour drive back from the Twin Cities and feeling (somewhat melodramatically) as though I’d arrived up at the very end of the world, I raised my eyebrow.

“Yeah? What?” I asked.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe, a necklace made out of bubble gum wrappers?

It turned out to be a lot better than a bubble gum wrapper necklace.

While I gallivanted in New York City, Andy constructed a raised garden bed at the cabin where we’ll be spending the summer. My mother gave me some flower seeds for my birthday in March and at the time, I didn’t know quite what to do with the seeds. While I’ve been dreaming of a garden all winter, the Shack is located in a shady valley that doesn’t appear particularly agriculturally viable. But my new summer job has lead to shift in residencies for the summer where the raised bed Andy built as well as the pre-existing terraced beds with warrant plenty of digging in the dirt this summer.

Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

Now that the means exist to have a bit of a garden, we’re faced with the dilemma of deciding what to plant. Although it’ll still be awhile before any seedlings can be put out in the garden, we’re a little behind on starting seedlings. I really don’t want to bite off more than we can chew when it comes to garden maintenance, so I want to be as smart about this project as possible. One of my concerns is that the garden is as sustainable as possible.

Gardening seems the ultimate sustainable act, but gardening can generate a ton of largely unusable plastic waste. Just think of all the dinky little plastic 4/6-pack containers you accumulate on a trip to the greenhouse. Molly over at the Snyder 5 has a great idea on how to use egg cartons to start seedlings: Composting for Newbies. That’s so smart! I need to pick up some potting soil from my parents’ house tomorrow and then I plan to start a batch of flowers in an egg carton tomorrow evening.

We plopped a few tulip bulbs – excess favors from coworkers’ wedding last September – in the perennial garden last fall. Like most things you “plop” in the ground, I promptly forgot about them. So it’s fun to see all three tulips poking up now.

I have a cold, probably just travel fatigue catching up with me. We’re also in the process of moving out of the Shack for the summer. Our bedroom currently looks like a suitcase vomited in it and my desk space is a teetering cityscape of notebook towers and paperclip ponds. I should spend the evening organizing, but I’m more keen to plant my sweet pea seeds in the far corner of the raised bed.

I’ve gotten back to work. I have some calls out for an article that needs to be done by the end of the week and as long as I actually get some calls back, I think it has potential to be a really good article. I’m also in the process of setting up some interviews for my radio project and my current priority needs to be hammering out a draft of a commentary.

Speaking of commentaries, here’s my recent effort.

A college colleague got in touch with me yesterday regarding a freelance opportunity for the website he edits. My interest is piqued, but I need more details before I make a commitment to any more work.

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The Wonders of Ice

We do a bit of bickering at the Shack. Usually it’s about dishes and bedtimes and why the laundry on the floor never hops into the laundry basket. Sometimes though, it’s about blogging.

Andy’s not a blogger, but as the number one fan of “Of Woods and Words,” he has plenty of insight on what should get posted in this space. For example, he felt this recent blog entry should be called “Of Woods and Turds.” I had something slightly more poetic in mind.

But why “Of Woods and Turds?” Well . . .

We’ve unseasonably warm weather over last week and except from crusty piles here and there, our snow is done for. It’s bad, bad news for local businesses (well, at least for the restaurant; everyone else seems to be plugging along) but it’s made for some beautiful ice conditions on the lake. On Tuesday we headed out on the spongy ice. We found some beautiful designs in the ice. As we headed back towards the Shack, we found something else.


We took to hiking back along the path the dog sled teams used this winter. As the sled dogs start to run, they have a tendency to empty their bowels. Not really a big deal when there’s always the promise of fresh snow to cover up the evidence, but now that we’re almost down to just lake ice, there are tell-tale signs of the trail’s use as a mass toilet all over the ice. In clear pockets of ice along the path rest brown puddles flecked with straw. It is not pleasant. I declined to take any photos.

As you move into the bay, much lovelier ice conditions appear.

There are feathery fingers of frost all across the ice rink.

My favorite feature however is the risen paths that have appeared where the paths and ski trails compacted snow on top of the ice. Now as the rest of the snow melts off the lake’s surface, the trails remain as risen ice bridges across the bay’s surface.

 They remind me of the causeway that connects St. Michael’s Mount to the Cornish mainland near Penzance.

When the tide is out, you can walk the one-mile causeway out to old castle and monastery on the Mount. When the tide’s in, you have to take a boat. St. Michael’s Mount has a mythology wrapped up with giants (though the causeway out to the Mount is not to be confused with Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland), but the ice bridges outside my window right now look more like the work of Jack Frost and fairies.

As much as I like spring, this is far too early for highs in the mid 60s. We are not too far removed from a major wildfire incident to be nervous about dry early springs. In the past few days I’ve seen flies and beetles out. I worry about the natural cycle of things getting too far ahead of itself with this warm weather.

Maybe worrying about the environment is a luxury afforded only to those with little else to worry about. I’m not so sure. Many people have mentioned that in recent years the once pristine water quality of local lakes has declined. I think we have a moral responsibility to think about the effect of the living an everyday life in the woods has on the natural environment and to consider whether the negative changes we note in the environment are tied to our actions. While I fully acknowledge that I’m calling the kettle black here, you have to wonder if this is a corner of the world that’s really meant for septic systems. Should we be here?

This morning it’s spitting snow outside. I’m glad to see it. At least it’s slightly normal March weather. The lake ice has firmed up considerably and now it’s frightfully slippery!

It’s officially cram session at the Shack. On Wednesday night we made a reservation for a rental car. Apart from figuring out how exactly we’re getting to the airport, we’re pretty much set for April travel. But there’s still plenty to do around here before we go. On Wednesday I recorded three radio commentaries to get me through until the end of April. (The commentary is biweekly and the latest commentary is found here.) Yesterday, I turned in my April batch of articles and will likely receive my May assignments today to make up for my April absence. Although there’s a mere 6300 words to revise in the novel WIP, it still needs to get done before the end of the month. Should get some research in at some point too . . . .

Your intrepid blogger, hard at it. Hot . . . or not? ;)

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