Peeking into the rock

I got a cheerful letter and a check today from the county clerk for primary election day. One hundred and twenty-five dollars for election clerk. It's actually more than I make in a day of childcare.

On another front, I had five bruises in two weeks -- all but one of them mysterious, and all painless -- and I normally don't get five bruises in five years. I mean, really, I don't bruise easily. Naturally my first thought was leukemia or some damn thing, but my second thought was that five bruises isn't much evidence. I could construct a probable cause for each one. So I called the doctor and the doctor said, "No more monkeys jumping on the bed!" No, wait, he said it was probably a benign side effect of the meloxicam I take to minimize hand pain and so on. And I should bring it on in if it got alarming.

Phenological observations: my plum tree is about to crack its buds. Yesterday I sprayed with a stupid little pump sprayer because I couldn't find the miscible oil. Today the nice fellow bought me some miscible oil. It's not supposed to rain for several days so I guess I'll do some spraying in the morning. Since the apricot tree is in almost-full bloom, I guess I have to use the lower solution that I would use in summer.

Also, from the weekend I have this information: hors d'oeuvres with the use of an 18-mm melon baller:

cut in half and hollow out kumquats with the melon baller. Pick out the seeds and smash the pulp into cream cheese (or ricotta, which is what I had since the dog seems to have eaten a three-quarter pound lump of luxury cream cheese within minutes of me bringing it home!) with large quantities of very finely cut candied lump ginger and some tiny bits of whole kumquat chopped even finer. Stuff this into the kumquats, and chill.

slice a thin bit off the top of cherry tomatoes and scoop everything out with the melon baller. Put the cherry tomatoes upside down in a sieve for a couple of hours so they drain. Chop very fine the bits of cherry tomato tops and mix them with a very large amount of chopped parsely and dill and mix that with equal parts cream cheese (see above) and hummus and maybe a little grated extra extra sharp cheddar or other pungent or piquant cheese and stuff this into the cherry tomatoes, and chill.

hollow out small red radishes with the melon baller. Also with the melon baller cut balls of extra extra sharp cheese and force them into the radish holes, and chill. You can eat the radish balls or marinate them in Japanese seasoned vinegar. I ate them. These you may call radish eyeballs, or if you are too squeamish, you may call them radish acorns.

I also stuffed dates with blue cheese, but that did not use the melon baller. I also made a mash of grated extra extra sharp cheddar, jarlsberg, blue cheese, ricotta, and lots of finely cut parsely, dill, and sage, and a little Spanish paprika (I thought I had used agridulce but it tasted like ahumado), and put little balls of this on Belgian endive leaves and pushed a candied walnut half on that. You could use the melon baller to make the amounts of cheese mash the same on each leaf, but I did not do that. I also marinated little onions, artichoke hearts, button mushrooms, and carrot balls (melon baller!), garlic cloves, and bits of sweet peppers, and threaded all that on skewers.

Everybody ate them all up. Even the radish eyeballs which I thought might be a little too weird for some people.

Also, I do love gin, but I am a wimp and I cannot finish my drink.

I made another batch of peach leather, this time not as a side project to canning peaches. Yield: one big mesh orange bag of windfalls makes five trays of peach leather. Remember to line the trays with the drying mesh and the parchment. The mesh orange bag is for selling ten pounds of oranges, but peaches are much denser than oranges because of their respective peels. Connie still has too many peaches and I don't know if she wants me to make them into things. She could do peach wine, I suppose. I'm not going to. Anyway, lots and lots of them are windfalls, only really good for leather and sauce and stuff.

I racked the wine on Monday. This was eight days after putting it in secondary. It tasted, Frank said, "like Smirnoff ice." That is, it was sweet sweet, and kind of harsh tasting, but probably not very alcoholic. It was a raspberry-magenta color, and less murky than before, because it had left a pink smear on the bottom of the carboy (and the extra-wine jug, which is also fitted with an airlock and so therefore is getting almost the same experience as the carboy), but it is still opaque. I guess it must have some translucency because it looks less murky than before. It's rapidly fizzing yet. The nice lady at "Portable Potables" says we should let it get as alcoholic as we want it to be, and then kill the yeast with Campden tablets and adjust the sweetness. I like sweet wines more than I used to, but we'll see.

Emma's Jason's mother has too many Asian pears and I don't like the recipes for them I find online, but they make nice tasting juice. My too many apples are still coming online. I still havde some thinking to do. I think I may take Robyn's too many Asian pears and my too many apples and, surprise, make wine of them. Since I won't make cider. I do have another carboy so I can handle another five gallons of juice.

There are too many grapes coming along but not enough, and not consistently enough, to manage anything spectacular. I'm thinking odd bunches of raisins, maybe. No, I can't just eat them. There are too many. We will also have too manypomegranates this year and I really don't know. The pomegranate liqueur was good but we just aren't big liqueur drinkers.

Those are my fruit progress notes for September 5, 2007.

Also: I have pruned the plum tree way down. I have done almost half the work of pruning the apricot tree way down, including removing the stump of the diseased branch. I have initiated work on the apple tree, thinking that I'd really like to borrow a guy with a chainsaw because I have to remove some large stuff. The almond trees are going to be a big deal again. I'm planning a big attack on the pomegranate after the fruit is done, but I can do all that myself because the pomegranate is all small limbs except for a couple which are close to the ground. I need a new limb saw: Ted says the old one is too dull, and I don't think we can afford to have it sharpened (they have complicated teeth). Also the grape needs severe discipline, and a real arbor, not the haywired one of plastic piping and twine. I also pruned both lemons.

And the lemons need feeding.

The application fee for the Charles University medical program in Prague is $47: the tuition and fees are $14K/year.

The entrance exam must be taken in Prague, and the questions are written in Czechlish. (Which are vector?)

I made my first fresh apricot pie of the season yesterday, from windfall apricots, therefore mostly somewhat underripe, but they cooked up lovely. I think I may be able to spare the life of the apricot tree, by the way. Zak made the pie crust according to a new style derived from French style. This is how he did it:

1+1/2 c all-purpose flour (not pastry)
1/2 c almond meal
1 c frozen butter
couple tablespoons sugar, splash of vanilla

grate the butter into the flour, then cut it in
when it's pea size lumps and not too even pour a couple tablespoons ice water over it and knead it briefly.

Freeze it overnight preferably: we had an hour and a half

It rolls and handles nicely, it's tender, but I'm not sure that it isn't too rich. In this case, because the apricots were tart, it worked nicely. We ate the pie hot with half and half on it. I seasoned the apricots with vanilla, almond extract, Meyer lemon of course, and I meant to put in cardamom or cinnamon and forgot.


And finally: I have almost figured out everything that happens in the big party scene, and I think the stateroom doors aspect is diminishing and that very little of the action that doesn't directly involve our guys is going on the page. And that's all right. But I'm going to do some more choreographing before I write it.

I have a name issue.
A dozen and a half characters, of whom some are minor. A major character named Patrick and one named Parris. Is that confusing? Every time I try to rename one of them I hate the result.

Maybe I could do something with the confusion, if there is any. I've already changed several names in the story because they were too similar (Mary Anne, Marisa, Marie, all kind of minor characters of consequence)

On another front, I have figured out something for when I get back to Afterwar, and I'm noting it here for my own benefit.
First chapter: the war is over, pretty much as it is. Second chapter: "the first camp"

The day that Pablo learned the war was over was the day the war started for children in another town. The weather was the same: high and blue, with a brisk inciting wind. The school was similar, podded classrooms plumping into a bright green field. The children ran and ran in the wind, but they were not running from other children playing a game. They were running from the incidental fires started by precision missiles aimed at insurgent headquarters in the urgent care clinic next door to the school. Insurgent was the new word used for the people who refused to leave the towns so that the Puros could resettle their own people there. They used to be called other things.

The wind that blew the promise of peace through Pablo's town and fanned the flames through this town blew the children, still running, out of their hometowns and into the great valley.

Some of them fetched up at Maris Camp.
and then mumble mumble we somehow have to get specific while not naming this little girl who will become Resi's mother at fourteen and die before she's eighteen. It's important for the reader not to know her name or the town she comes from but my current understanding of the story indicates that the reader needs to see Resi's timeline concurrent with Pablo's, even though it naturally starts years later than Pablo's does.

for locals who care what I think: I have abandoned the John Boutelle strategy. He's gone off entirely and says nothing that is of use in pushing Chris Krohn and Neal Coonerty leftwards. Coonerty, the most conservative real candidate (I am not counting the poisonous loony nutter, I mean the other one besides Boutelle), is to the left of Boutelle, and not insane. And I'm not really mad at him anymore. But: I'm voting for Chris Krohn, because his policies are better.

I have decided for County Superintendent of Schools to vote for Michael Watkins. Of tyhe candidates, I know his work the best, and it's good enough. He comes out of alternative ed., which includes stuff like the court and community schools as well as the charter schools -- in our county we don't have the Edison plague (profit-making corporations sucking the life out of the school system by taking over charters and delivering bad schooling): our charters are real alternative schools, locally run, though there's something a bit weird with White Oak in Scotts Valley. Anyway, the Superintendent is not as political as some elected positions -- less policy-oriented than County Supervisors, more administrative, and experience counts for a lot.

On another front, the guy at the farmer's market said two weeks till apricot jam time.

On the writing front: I'm scatterbrained and exhausted these days so I'm doing this thing where I write what I can, on whatever project I can get traction with. The last couple-few days it's been this probable novella in the Esperanza Highway universe, which I think I can get away with because it's sort of a romance and there's several romance ebook markets which are happy with novellas and maybe happier with novellas than novels. It's another fish out of water thing, which appears to be one of my return-to situations, this time with schoolboys and the Biomes Authority. And jail lurking in the background.