Peeking into the rock

I cut down the watersprout that was coming from below the graft on the almond tree in time for the gtreencycle pickup, which leaves me free to fill the can again this week, which I definitely ought to do.

I had a lot of sprouted garlic, so even though they say to plant in October, I put them in the window box with the alyssum. Also I planted snap peas, pole beans, and yellow chard, in paper egg cartons and a pierced tofu box respectively/  The kale I planted a few weeks ago is still at the cotyledon stage, but they are tall cotyledons and ought to bedeveloping true leaves any minute. Naturally, the parsley is still thinking about whether or not to sprout -- it looks like three or four have decided to try it out, and the others are waiting to see how it works out. I had a lead on free kale starts, but I have so much kale in the egg cartons and more seeds after that, so I don't think I should follow up on it.  Give the other guy a chance, you know.

Really, six vegetables is pretty optimistic, considering that most of my yard is still suffering under the piles of construction debris. Anyway, my absent-mindedness in years past is serving me well this year, because I have all these seeds to plant. And yes, they all seem to be viable.

Speaking of peas, I have a two-pound bag of shredded iceberg lettuce from Grey Bears, so I have decided to make peas, lettuce and herbs soup, especially after reading that this would be a way to use up the three cups of whey I have after converting my roommate's sour milk into ricotta (I thought I was making yogurt but I let it get too hot so I got actually quite nice ricotta, which is probably better, given that ricotta is more expensive than yogurt anyway). It's quite simple, by the way: I had three cups of sour low-fat milk, to which I added a third of a cup of natural sour cream and two-thirds of a cup of natural whole milk yogurt, and then I let is sit for a while, and then I warmed it up and tried to keep the temperature in the recommended range but it got a little hot and it separated more than yogurt ought to so I warmed it up some more and then I scooped it into a napkin spread on a sieve and squeezed all the whey out. I tried to make "whey ricotta" out of the resulting whey, but there wasn't enough left. I realized afterwards that the whey that the blogs were talking about was from making cheese with whole milk, and not low-fat milk, so not the same thing really.

Am I an insuifferable foodie? Or just bored and poor? I only make jam from free fruit. I only made my own peanut butter (at home, instead of in the machine at the hippie store) because decent peanut butter reached six dollars a pound. (it was not an unqualified success -- the nice inexpensive peanuts from Trader Joe's apparently have a lot less oil in them than regular peanut-butter making peanuts)

When I pruned the plum tree I brought in some budded branches, but they haven't advanced much. The almond tree looks like it's thinking about bursting out any moment. It's not long until other people's plum trees will be blooming, but mine is always last, and so are my plums (they are not ready until August). I had a dream about racking and bottling the wine, and among my stepmother's effects I found a half-drunk bottle of my best year's product, and it tasted pretty good.

Also: Andrew Marvell has been talking to my lemon trees. My, I have a lot of lemons. I have not counted them, but they seem as numerous as my mother in law's used to be, and she used to get a thousand lemons a year. These are not quite ripe, in general, but they have dropped a huge number of nice ones. That's unusual, and I think it is because of people trying to reach the best ones up top and knocking some off. My next door neighbor on the other side has carte blanche to use as many as she wants, and she is short like me and getting frail. Anyway, my kitchen has rather too many lemons in it at the moment, especially considering I still have a lot of marmalade left from last year.

head thing notes: I found a forty-six dollar check from the last time I was on unemployment a year and a half ago. It was good for a year. . .

I woke up at none: I had been up till 3 making seamless textures for no good reason.

It'sa bit after 10:30. I have made appointments for myself, the dog, the car, and the trees (more about that in a minute), half-assedly cleaned up a bit in the front yard, fed the animals, taken my medicine (there is an issue there, sometimes I forget till afternoon and that is not good), and applied for another, more interesting job. I have not eaten yet because I woke up feeling stuffed and fatter, as if maybe I've gained yet more weight, which would not be surprising.

So, the tree guy came. The almond tree that is scraping Hannelore's garage has to come out. It is a major limb that is doing the scraping which would mean that the tree would lose a very large portion of its canopy, and the tree has been overwhelmed by the wisteria and may die within a decade, and it has heart rot which would eventually make it fall over (probably not for a long time: it's not the deciding factor). The garage was only built a couple of years ago. Hannelore got kind o bad advice about how to build it. If it had been built a few feet back, or a couple of feet shorter (it's very tall for a garage), it would have been okay on that count. And honestly, I might have been able to control the wisteria if I had another foot or two of maneuvering room, not that I probably would have. Between the head thing and my hands and the fact that the tree is very large there's not much I can do with it.

The good news is that I don't need a heritage tree permit for the removal. If the tree is fourteen inches in diameter at 54 inches (the guy had the gall to call that chest height. It is not. It is chin height) you need a permit to remove it. At 54 inches the tree has two trunks, one of which is twelve inches and the other is ten. In some communities the heritage tree law states that the requirement is thesum of the diameters of the trunks of the tree at that height, but not in Santa Cruz. But they're going to change the rule in three months, so it's a good thing that the tree guy came when I called him. Because if he didn't I might have forgotten about it for another few weeks, and I might have gotten myself into that whole process which costs money (not a lot, but we're getting into close times here( and takes time, potentialy a lot of time if the city arborist is busy or disagrees with my tree guy (in which case there's an appeal process where you get to make your case: I have observed this when I was observing the planning commission and the city council for other reasons. Both bodies are inclined to agree with the arborist but they can sometimes be swayed).

The tree guy is originally from New Zealand. We get a lot of New Zealanders here. I wonder why? Is there a special connection between Santa Cruz and New Zealand that I don't know about? I know there's a special connection with Hawaii that goes back to the nineteenth century when there was a Christian college here that a lot of Hawaiian royalty went to. The first mainland board surfing occurred here and then, introduced by those guys. Which is one of several reasons why Huntington Beach shouldn't make an issue about owning the title "surf city." The most important reason is that it's a dumb, dumb, dumb thing to waste money on lawyers about, and the second most important reason is that it's a misuse of trademark law.

The best news for last.

I played a thermemin yesterday, and I have an invitation to play it again!

It was the 50th of the son-in-law elect's father and he has a friend who's been playing it for a year. He's not so perfect with tunes but his tone is great. I couldn't get a tune out of it the first time but I could get the pitch to rise when I wanted it to rise.

It's fun. It's disconcerting because the only tactile feedback is your own body: so tactilely you have to be aware of your positioning in reference to yourself, not the instrument: but at the same time, kinetically, you have to be aware of your positioning in reference to the instrument. It's not like walking blindfolded, because you do have all your senses, but that's the closest I can come to it.

Maybe like drawing pictures onscreen with a mouse, which I have not mastered, because I have a regular old mouse that has to be coaxed to move a pixel sometimes and other times overshoots by a long ways (a tablet is on my list of indulgences, now that I have the camera. And that I think is all the indulgences I want: I want to go on the water, but I can rent a kayak). With computer graphics, my workaround is to do collages, geometrics, and pixel by pixel drawing, all of which are fine for some purposes but not all.

But. Gee whillikers, a theremin!
(it turns out they're not rare, after all, as I had been solemnly assured many times).

Oh, and in the four hours since I started this post, I have called two mills besides spending all this time electronically recreating old linoleums (pixel by pixel).