Snips And Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Woke up.  Got out of bed...  Early morning sunlight in the city.  My weenies won't let me sleep here.  They wake me far too early (yesterday at 4:30 am.)  I just choked on my last swallow of cafe au lait and spewed it across the couch.  Need to shower, but I am putting it off as I don't like to get wet early in the morning.  Go figure.  Need to post and put off running around town to do errands.  

I ordered this display table because hey, I like to display my treasures and have to bring more to the city when I have room.  I look like the Beverly Hillbillies when I come up here.  My truck is loaded and tied down with stuff for the city house and my antique booth.  Can't wait to finish.  I am too old for this and can hardly climb up into the back of my truck to retrieve stuff nor lift it.

One thing I am having trouble with is putting things up on the walls.  Have to have more hands for correct spacing etc., but that's another story, so I keep putting it off and don't want to make unnecessary holes in the walls either.

So, little treasures, like a shorebird skull with a piece of lead shot in its head (Weaver and I don't like people shooting birds.)  An old Franklin Roosevelt presidential run pin - they don't make them like 

him anymore.  There's an old postcard from near where I grew up. A rattlesnake tail, a gourd shaman necklace containing my babies' teeth, herbs and secret things and a Joni Mitchell concert ticket from the seventies.  I guess I am more like the snips and snails lot than sugar and spice. 

 Okay, up and at em.  Can't put the day off any longer.  And, I raked the front lawn yesterday and have a catch in my side today to thank for it.  Raking sucks and I have the back yard and beds to do today.  The wind was blowing more leaves away from my piles than I picked up.  Think it will be windy today too, but a warm sunny day.  Can't beat that.

Hope your weekend is a treasure.

Follow Me

I have been reading others' blogs that I follow and they are reporting losing followers.  Must be something going on as last night, I lost five followers.  Didn't like my last Gather post?  I don't think that would offend anyone nor bore them silly.

Seems the developers at Blogger are rewriting the followers gadget.  If your followers are not following through the Google Friend Connect Gadget, they are gone.  

I understand little of blogging, even after more than 600 posts.  So, let me just give you a link to someone's blog who can explain this much better than I ever could.  Hope this works.  Miss Smarty Pants I am not.

blogging.nitecruzr.net

Well, I Never

I am at the city house this week and perusing the aisles at my local Barnes and Noble bookstore, a stop I always make when coming to the city.  I spied this periodical because of the title and thumbed through it.  Wow.  A cookbook that starts out with the launch in 1977 of the time capsule aboard the Voyager spaceship into deep interstellar space in hopes that one day another civilization might find it and know of earth and its inhabitants.  Natural history, geology, space, oceans, pot-feuled trips to the tune of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon to Stravinsky, origins of species, whew!  Sounds like the kind of cookbook I would write - unable to stick to topic and going from one thing to another.

How about a recipe for a Coconut Lychee Aquarium?  Gelatin, coconut milk with lychee juice and other ingredients; you use a syringe to add the things into the bowl shaped jello dish.  Gorgeous and tasty I am sure.

Beautiful; it just blows my mind.

How about an Encyclopedia of Nuts Bar with Chia Pudding for dessert.  Notice the snakeskin in the bottom righthand corner of the page.  I have them and vertebra from water moccasins.  So me.

Perhaps you'd like to try this bread which sounds and looks delicious.  It even has its own haiku.

Beauty, old as time.

Fossil's senior citizen,

Round and round it goes.

(Kind of like the recent post about Joni Mitchell's song The Circle Game.)

I put this in there because it is so me.  I have many nests like this.  They also have cocktail recipes like Quicksand Cocktail.

I added this picture because it is one of many gorgeous photos in the book; this one of crystals which I like to collect.  One of the recipes is Crystal Shrimp Dumplings which really are clear. From Lunar Pear Clafoutis (which does look like a pock-marked moon) to a Butterflied Chicken Diorama recipe, I kid you not, this book should have been aboard the Voyager.  So full of essays and the aforementioned topics and recipes.  On the last page of the book is a beautiful essay that begins:

Book Forgive Everything

First there's stellar wind.  A single star, like the pale hair of a girl.  The dim universe plucked with light...

This gorgeous, original book is out there.

Living Things

Outside this morning with the dogs, listening to birdsong and a woodpecker and a far off flock of Canada geese when I heard a strange sound.  Something like a street sweeper, though it is Sunday and they don't do that in the country anyway.  So, I decided it must be an oil or gas well letting off pressure.  The trees that wreath our home throw sounds and it was hard to tell where it was coming from.  I looked north as the sound came closer and saw a great flock of blackbirds flying toward me.  I downloaded this photo of a starling mumuration from google as my camera can not do a decent job (perhaps the camerawoman too.)

They were everywhere in the trees - up and down searching for food and startling I guess.

It was a thrill to watch them.

Startling starlings.  

I carried Midge out for a lie in the sun.  She didn't acknowledge the birds.  I have been giving her syringes of chicken broth mixed with cat food and water.  She won't eat and has gotten considerably weaker.  I've done all I can.  She did get better after the transfusion, but I can't keep doing them.  The medications have made no difference.  I am going to take her in the morning to the vet.  It is time.

Jello, Jelly, Gelee

For your reading pleasure on a cold Saturday morning.  As I've posted before, Ivan Day is a culinary wizard.  Historian, teacher, television and movies; they all come to him.  If you will go to the right side of my blog, you can click on his site and read for days.  His collections of antique eating/cooking implements is museum worthy.  Type in punch bowls.  It's all great.

My personal favorite, this Macedoine.  You can see a sideways slice on his blog.

Can you imagine?  This Belgrave jelly is just wonderful and you can see the beautiful old copper mold on his blog.

An Alexander Cross Jelly.  Sigh.

Here is another Macedoine.  I wonder if I can find a lost Haribo gummy bear in my pantry.

Oh well, maybe in honor of the nonexistent snow we're supposed to have this day, I'll attempt this salad with whipped egg whites atop rosemary for snow.  I think this was an Italian salad served to the English during the Grand Tour.  Now, I know where the two hour meals came from.  It was one of the things that surprised me traveling abroad.  In the US, meals are usually not long affairs and in other countries they take a long time.  I actually got tired of eating out while abroad for that very reason.

When we stayed in The Belgravia Hotel in London, a little lady was seated next to my daughters and me.  She was a dead ringer for the Queen Mother.  My throat was raw and I spent most of the trip coughing.  I started a coughing fit over a lovely Pavlova.  I was terribly embarrassed, but couldn't do a thing about it short of the Heimlich maneuver.  I couldn't run out as there was a long hallway before you could reach the lobby.  I'll not share what happened next - TMI - but I think the Queen Mum thought I was a heathen.

Happy Saturday.  I'll do anything not to do the things I am supposed to do, like pricing antiques, harvesting lemons, cleaning the house...

The Circle Game

Perhaps you could listen to this song whilst reading this post...   I was riding through the fields today with the weenies on the ATV.  Looked at the brambles (wild blackberries) that have grown up on the backside of our fifty acre wood.  They'll need to be brush-hogged or they will take over the field; create a thicket akin to a hedgerow that can't be mown down.  Driving alongside the woods, I looked where the mayapples will be growing soon.  Next to those, the morel mushrooms grow for about a week around easter, but though I have looked and looked, I have never found one.  I think the deer and wild creatures find them first.

Since we don't ranch or have cattle, pine trees have been growing up across the fields and I like that very much.  A beauty to behold.  Ranchers would never allow them as they would shade out pasture grasses and plants to feed their animals.  

I stopped by the ponds and cast a few slices of bread upon the waters, but no feeding fish.  It was warm so I thought perhaps a few takers would come to the surface.  The turtles I so love are asleep on the shore under the mud holes they have dug.

The birds are singing loudly today and one I couldn't identify louder than most.  I walked in that direction, trying to see it, but it moved farther away and I never did catch a glimpse.  I have found a lost parakeet and love bird before on the farm, so I wanted to make sure it wasn't another lost bird.  Of course, the crows had to caw annoyingly loud about my goings on. How anyone ever sneaks up on anything is a mystery to me.  I think maybe the unknown bird might have been from the woodpecker family.  Just a guess.

While I looked about the place, this song came to mind. I chose this version because it lists the lyrics. Joni Mitchell is a songwriter that comes around only once in a lifetime.  She had an aneurysm some months ago.  I haven't heard how she is doing or her prognosis. Sad. But, the seasons do go round and round and I can do nothing to slow them down.

La Chat

Midge the cat.  She is lying in a patch of morning light, peeping at me to see what the heck I'm doing.  Better not be anymore syringes of chicken broth and meds.  I got her to eat a few teensy bites of raw chicken liver from my finger.  

I came home from Christmas holidays and quickly surveyed the animals.  Midge and Teddy would usually be the first ones there.  No Midge.  Unpacked, etc.  Still no Midge.  Went to look for her and found her curled up in her bed in the garage.  Not a good sign.

Midge is the fattest and furriest animal of the lot.  Her fur is legend.  If you remember, I had a feral cat colony at the barn and fed and kept them on birth control for three years...  Five of them that were spayed etc. lived up at the house and came and went through the doggie door.  I tried everything, even once putting tin foil on all the countertops, trying to dissuade the cats from leaving dirt they roll in and cat hair all over the house.  Clothes, furniture and even in my mouth.  Finally, the doggie door was closed and the cats relegated to a life outdoors.

On New Year's day, I called the vet, but it was closed.  I put her on antibiotics for three days until Monday morning when I took her to the vet.  Checkup and tested for feline leukemia (neg) and given a long acting antibiotic shot.  Wed. morn she was worse instead of better.  Went back to vet.

She was in bad shape.  IV fluids, other meds and kept getting worse.  Her red blood cell levels extremely low.  Finally, a blood transfusion as a last resort.

Here she is curled up with Sister.  After a week at the vet, still on meds, she is not much better - weak and hardly eating nor drinking.  Went from healthy? to near death in two weeks.  

Midge isn't a cuddly cat.  Her mother's name is Mean Mom, who misses her terribly outside. If Midge wants contact, she'll usually just walk by my leg for a tiny swipe against it and I might get a swipe down her back.  It has to be her initiating the touch.  I love her anyway as I do all my animals (even Mean Mom who tried to scratch my eyes out once and slapped my glasses off.)  I'm not sure Midge is going to make it.  I certainly don't want to prolong the inevitable, if that's the case with Midge.  Maybe a false neg test, microplasmosis (I think that's what they called it), or infectious disease.  If that were the case, I would think all the antibiotics would have begun to work.

Meanwhile, I am stuck at the farm, caring for her and don't know what next week will bring.  I hate the worrying - makes my heart palpitate, so I try to keep busy.  Don't want to have to take her back to the vet to board her.  Some animals are not meant to be caged and I know Midge was miserable that week (even though the vet said at one point she was pretty loopy and out of it.)  I never board my animals as I know it is too stressful for them and me.

Oh Midge.  I don't want to lose her.

Who'd A Thunk

Citrus is ready to be plucked from my trees at the farm.  Small crop this year resulting from a deep freeze in the greenhouse last winter when the propane ran out.  I feared all my plants had died, but they survived though the crop output was affected.

Maldon Sea Salt from across the ocean and citrus rind from a greenhouse in Oklahoma combined to make a condiment for...  I rarely cook anymore.  May have to give this to my daughter, the cook.  I am amazed at global commerce in this day and age.  Wonder if they will be eating Solyent Green in fifty years?

It will be sunny and 60 degrees today.  I'll be all smiles.  

Rare As Hen's Teeth

I doesn't happen often.  Some people are as rare as hen's teeth and I have to share this modern day Tasha Tudor with you.  Jeri Landers is a true renaissance woman; she can do most anything.  On her farm, along with her animals and keen observations of creatures great and small, Jeri creates, paints, writes and designs her own books and animals and so much more.  She is also an expert at scherenschnitte, the lost art of paper cutting.  Jeri also sews, gardens and designs such beautiful tableaux, well, you will just have to go to her blog hopalonghollowgazette.blogspot.com to see, read, and be inspired by her creativity. 

Above is Esther, a starling Jeri raised.  I was so moved by the story of Esther, I just had to buy her when I saw her at Jeri's site.  Esther is a pinkeep and here, she sits at my desk in my city house watching the birds come and go at my bird feeders. 

Pippity Squeaky is a caroling mouse.  You must know that mice do sing.  Jeri designs and makes the animals all herself, with lace and bonnets and little vests and capes...  Pippity is singing on my shelves of whites and creams.  I just treasure her.

All Jeri's creatures come from her award winning books.  She cards and uses her own wool from her own flock, I could go on and on. I can't do Jeri justice.  You will just have to go visit her site and spend time reading posts old and new.  Jeri is the real deal; she's one of a kind.

Is there anything Jeri can't do?  She told me recently, she can't cook.  With all her work, artwork and shows around the country, I bet she just doesn't have the time. Go have fun and see what all this superwoman does.  See the most beautiful Christmas tree I've ever seen with all her creations. Go.

And, I forget to tell you about her exquisite paper gardens under glass domes.  Just another of her beautiful creations.

Windbag

 I wonder if the marketers that made this ad thought about the word windbag?  I would look up the etymology of the word, but I don't care that much. I just loved the page and have kept it for years.  

 I've been rifling through all the detritus and junk that piles up around here, tidily I might add.  Anyway, after more than a year and a half wait, I got a booth at an Antique Mall in Tulsa.  Nate Berkus and some other couple with an HGTV show shopped there.  Movies shot in the state also shop there and that is why the wait is so long for a booth plus they get a lot of traffic.

I have had booths before and do not enjoy it, but I have to get rid of stuff that has accumulated over the years, as I have posted about here. 

Which brings me back to the post. This scrap of paper is why I have too much stuff (though it doesn't take up much room tacked to a bulletin board - oh excuse me.  That is old fashioned.  I meant an idea board or a mood board.  I am a magpie you see. But I just loved this sentiment.   

Long Ago And Faraway

Could this ancient artifact actually be a form of communication in the 20th century?  I don't even remember coming across one of these.  A redneck version of texting perhaps?  And yet, this is the way people used to message each other, tacked up on doors across the country. 

This little beauty has leather for hinges and a hand carved latch to keep the note from blowing away.  The maker even made a little gravel shingled roof for it.

Kind of makes one nostalgic for a sweeter time: where a handshake sealed the deal, manners were the norm and hearth and home was your sanctuary; neighbors all knew one another; formed a community around friends and family...