June 4, 2013 · 10:11 PM

Photo-a-Day: What the Weeds See

Photo-a-DayFinally. I mean, finally. I got in the yard. It’s been a spring of avoidance around here. I’ve made up every excuse not to get the garden ready. It’s the spring’s fault, really. Cincinnati’s spring has been cold. And buying plants has felt like splurging.

But yesterday I got paid and today was gorgeous: sunny and in the 70s. I had the great privilege of spending almost the entire day getting the garden bed ready (we have two raised beds in the backyard–one is fruit, and by “fruit” I mean an enormous, Godzilla-like blackberry, and the other is flowers and vegetables, mostly annuals.) The flower and vegetable bed suffers from clay-like soil which I vigorously amend every year. Due to my negligence, the bed had become home to what seemed like thousands of weeds.

Most of my day was spent just like this. Hunched over the earth, staring down the weeds, hacking through the clay. Amazing how good that makes me feel.

Later in the afternoon, I treated myself to a trip to the garden store. Granted, I looked like a shit storm at a volcano eruption–doused in manure and vermiculite–but garden stores are the only place you go where no one looks at you funny for not having showered and being shellacked in shit. Well, maybe not the only place.

Basking in the colors and mulling over my tomato options, I lost myself wandering up and down the aisles at the garden store. Because the soil is still so bad–and the past few years haven’t been very productive with vegetables–I limited myself to a few peppers and another tomato (I have a Mr. Stripey, my favorite, already growing the front.) I loaded up on petunias and impatiens, though. Can’t go wrong with pretty colors.

I got a few things in the ground this evening and my plan is to finish tomorrow morning. So, maybe that’s what tomorrow’s picture will be. I also leave town for a work trip tomorrow. Be warned that I may get a day or so behind. Hopefully not.

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June 3, 2013 · 7:11 PM

Photo-a-Day: Dirty Preference

20130603-190043.jpgToday was lucky. A couple of opportunities that I was not expecting (either because I simply wasn’t expecting it or because I thought the window of opportunity had shut tight) made themselves known to me. This is a good thing (these are work opportunities, I should say, but good work, the kind you want to do).
Yet, these opportunities required some good ol’ immediate attention. So my day was spent hurriedly “doing things.” I had planned to give the yard so TLC, hence the dirty shirt I’m wearing. That didn’t happen because I was doing things in advance of these opportunities.
I prefer to be dirty. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing you announce at a cocktail party or networking event. And it’s true. I like to be outside, dirty, working in the yard.
The garden needs to be weeded, the soil desperately needs some compost, flowers need watering, vegetables need planting, fruit needs picking. Heck, even the grass needs cutting. And the hedges definitely need a trim. I so wanted to be outside doing all that today and I know I’m lucky to even be able to plan my day that way.
So, tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will be out there, getting dirty, letting my opportunities gestate.

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June 2, 2013 · 8:58 PM

Photo-A-Day: Not-So-Still-Life

Photo-A-DayToday, I want to thank all of you who read and follow this blog. I really appreciate it! So, thank you.

I had high hopes for yesterday’s post. There was a lot I wanted to say about the light that shows the way, yet forbids it. But when I sat down to write, I discovered that there was nothing to say. Chopin’s words alone were powerful than anything I could come up.

And today, I am aware of the light that shows the way and forbids it. There is so much to do. So much I want to do (and, yes, tons of stuff I feel I have to do). This pretend “still life” photo of mason jars and The New York Times is full of movement; it’s full of things I want to be doing. Even though I can sense what I want to be doing, it’s hard to get there.

The jars are for my on-going kefir, kombucha, and sourdough project. I’ve made some kefir already and it’s pretty good. I’m most excited by the fact that it actually tastes like kefir. Tonight, I’m feeding and preparing my sourdough starter so I can make bread in a couple of days and I’m brewing some tea so that I can drop my kombucha baby in there. I’m pretty excited.

That light is shining. Can’t quite see the way, but I can feel it.

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June 1, 2013 · 11:41 PM

Photo-A-Day: Awake

Photo-A-DayI offer these words from Kate Chopin without comment.

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May 31, 2013 · 5:32 PM

Photo-A-Day: Rainbow Ice Cream Fantasy

Photo-A-DayAs much as this undertaking is at risk of becoming a blog of pet photos and weird food pictures, it’s perhaps more at risk of morphing into a catalog of Cincinnati murals. There are worse fates.

This gem–the title of which really is something like “Rainbow Ice Cream Fantasy”–is on the corner of 12th and Jackson, I think. It’s right around the corner from the Know Theatre. I was at the Know this afternoon, volunteering for the Fringe Festival. (I replenished the concession coolers for the smaller venues. So, if you see a Fringe show tonight somewhere other than the Know and they’re short on Sprites, blame me.)

This mural surprised me; I didn’t know it was there. And I thought it was pretty. I like the colors (how’s that for a sophisticated aesthetic analysis?). What I also like about it is how it captures the brightness and playfulness of summer from a child’s perspective.

Do you remember that? How much promise the summer held when you were little? The simplest things were so fun and exciting: catching a firefly, staying up late to watch the Dukes of Hazard, getting to play all day long because there was no school, going away to camp. Ice cream, especially, seemed to epitomize summer.

As working adults, it seems like the routine of our lives doesn’t change all that much, come summer (unless, of course, you’re a teacher or you have school-aged children). It takes a lot of effort to tap into that boundless joy and it likewise takes effort to justify that much ice cream. So, I welcome all the ways in which this mural is a reminder of how to be.

By the way, your guess is as good as mine as to what has impaled that poor bunny rabbit in the lower right corner. That’s a nice shout-out, though, to the dark complexities of childhood.

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May 30, 2013 · 11:50 PM

Photo-A-Day: Disappointed

Photo-a-DayThis is one of the worst sandwiches I’ve ever had. And I have no one to blame but myself. (And the bread and the peanut butter.)

First, I’m weird about peanut butter and jelly together. I don’t know why but something about the thickness of the peanut butter and the slime of the jelly just doesn’t sit right in my mouth. My mouth and I much prefer peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

Second, this afternoon, I was starving. This is never a good place to be. I needed something to eat and it’s nearing the end of the week which means the pickings are slim. There was an old loaf of sprouted bread and half a jar of peanut butter in the fridge. (We buy the natural kind of peanut butter that needs to be stirred and stored in the fridge–it’s a lot of work. But it’s not full of sugar.)

Sometimes, healthy food just doesn’t work. The fancy pants sprouted bread ripped when I tried to smear the fancy pants peanut butter on it. The peanut butter may have been organic and natural, but it was also cold and it just shredded the bread. An utter disappointment. And I ate it anyway.

Sadly, this photo really doesn’t capture the degree of grossness of this sandwich. And I apologize for harping on a first world problem. This nasty, torn-up sandwich, though, was really an apt metaphor for a day of confusion and disappointment (well, the whole day wasn’t that way). What am I doing here? And why am I wasting my time on this travesty of a lunch?

Tonight at dinner, my spouse says to me, “Why didn’t you just toast the bread?”

Well, hell. Why didn’t I just toast the bread? The bread would have been harder, more durable, and the peanut butter would have softened on the warm bread.

I promised myself the photo-a-day project wouldn’t become a catalog of food pictures or an advice blog. But now that I’ve shown a picture of food, I need to offer some advice, namely to myself: when life serves me a craptastic lunch, I am going to toast it first.

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May 29, 2013 · 11:20 PM

Photo-A-Day: Starters, Brains, and Babies

Photo-A-DayLet’s get it started. The sourdough, kefir, and kombucha, that is.

Tonight I went to a workshop to learn about how to make these cultured, fermented goodies. The workshop was organized by the herdshare I belong to. In Ohio, you can buy into a herd of dairy cows and because you “own” a portion of the herd, you get to share in a portion of the product (provided you pay your monthly “boarding” fee). Participating in a herdshare is a legal way to get raw milk and other raw dairy products.

[Raw Milk Sidebar: Raw milk has not been cooked; it is raw. It has not been pasteurized and it has not been homogenized. It is alive, teeming with enzymes and vitamins. When it’s cooked (i.e., pasteurized), all those enzymes die and many of the vitamins break down. When it’s forced through small tubes at high speeds (i.e., homogenized), the shape of the lipids gets altered, basically voiding the fats of any value. If you’d like to know more about raw milk, I highly recommend Ron Schmid’s The Untold Story of Milk. It’s a 500-page lesson in biochemistry and the politics of hysteria. And it’s a damn good read.]

So, we belong to a herdshare so that we can (legally) get raw milk, yogurt, cheese, butter, etc. The cows are “boarded” and cared for by an Amish farming family that lives about 2.5 hours from Cincinnati. Adam, the head of the Amish family, is a very enterprising young man: he relies on the assistance and technical know-how of a handful of “English” (non-Amish like me…and I’m guessing you, if you’re, you know, on the Internet reading this) folks to help him run his business. The herdshare has an ordering Web site, we’ve got a Facebook page, there’s a cell phone number we can call if we have questions and issues and someone (obviously not Adam) will answer the phone and help us out.

Anyway, the Facebook group decided an evening of fermentation was in order. So, tonight, we learned how to make sourdough bread, kefir, and kombucha. If you’re unfamiliar with kefir, it’s a fermented dairy drink that’s almost yogurt-like. It originated in Eastern Europe, I believe, and it has many lovely, living things that keep your gut healthy. Similarly, Kombucha is an ancient elixir and tea that comes from Russia (or China–I’ve heard both). It’s a fermented tonic. And sourdough bread is, well, sourdough bread. Easier to digest than other bread products because the culture helps break down the flour so it’s easier to digest.

A big treat this evening was that Adam, his wife, and two of their four children were at the workshop. It was refreshing to see him again–I had met him a couple of years ago when I drove out to his farm to meet the cows. That’s a good story–for another time.

So, what you see in today’s picture (left to right) is the sourdough starter, the kombucha “baby,” and the kefir “brain.” We’ll see how my adventures in fermentation go. I need to go ahead and put the kefir brain in some milk tonight. Better go get started…

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May 28, 2013 · 8:26 PM

Photo-A-Day: Viewfinder

Photo-A-DayThis is my viewfinder. These two pups and their floppy black ears.

One of the most amazing things about Cincinnati–and a huge selling point for me when I moved here 4 years ago–was the parks. Wow. The city proper has about 300,000 (the total for the suburbs and tri-state is about 2 million) and yet there are huge, beautiful parks everywhere. My favorite is Mt. Airy, a 1500 acre forest about 5 minutes from my house. Plenty of trails there for the dogs and me to hike on.

I’ve passed a lot of my time just like this: walking down a trail at Mt. Airy with these two cattle dog mutts in front of me. I’ve seen this sight so often, it’s such a ritual part of my life, that it’s almost weird to see it in a photo. I can close my eyes and see Prufrock and Scout marching down the trail, flopping their ears, and I ache knowing that one day I will cease to see this sight. (Pruf is about 11 and a half–that’s all I’m going to say.)

So, welcome to my viewfinder, the image that shapes my world. Both of these dogs are rescues and I’m grateful for the way their spirit and their form have framed my life.

(I warned you all that there would be a lot of dog pictures in this photo-a-day project.)

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May 27, 2013 · 8:15 PM

Photo-A-Day: Missing

Photo-A-DayWell, this post is about missed opportunities. It’s Memorial Day and we went paddle-boating on a big lake in a nearby park. Neither of us had our phones nor the camera. There were ample and amazing photo opportunities: a heron, a log full of mallards plucking at themselves, geese dancing in the water, grandpas and grandchildren fishing…

Yeah, I got pictures of none of it.

So, when we got home, Andrea suggested I walk down the street and take a picture of our neighbor’s house. H was an elderly gentleman and used to walk up and down the street every day, keeping his eyes peeled for trouble. When he was done walking, he’d sit on his porch, drinking beer, and he would call out to anyone who passed by, saying something he thought was very witty and clever. (Much of what passed for witty and clever for H seemed a bit on the offensive side to me and some of my neighbors.)

H was a Vietnam vet and despite being a bit culturally out of step with things like, you know, racial integration, women’s rights, and the gays, his heart was in the right place. He often insulted how I cut the grass in the front yard, yet buried in the insult was a tip for how to do it better next time. Once, he refurbished an electric weed whacker for me because he didn’t like the way I edged the lawn. I used that weed whacker today and I thought of him.

H had a lot of knowledge of what happened on our street. He knew who lived where and what people’s routines were. He held the cultural knowledge of our street in his, um, narrow little mind. I wonder how many streets and neighborhoods have that anymore. And we need these kinds of civic institutions–these neighbors who know.

Well, anyway, Scout and I walked down the street after dinner today to snap a picture of H’s house. His family had put the flag out front and it was waving in the breeze. The chair H used to sit on was visible along with the bag of charcoal that always sat next to him. This was going to be an epic, Americana photo.

Scout yanked her leash just as I mashed the button on the camera. I didn’t realize until I got home how badly I mangled the shot. Because it’s been a day of missed photo ops I decided to just go with my lousy picture.

So, hat off to you, H. May you rest well. Thank you for serving in Vietnam (though I’m sorry you had to go there at all), thank you for protecting our street, and thank you for the weed whacker.

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May 27, 2013 · 7:49 PM

Photo-A-Day: American Past Time

Photo-a-DayHere is our photo for Sunday, May 26 (yes, still a day behind). Over Memorial Day weekend, I got to engage in the ultimate American past time: baseball. The Reds lost to the Cubs in the 10th inning. Bummer.

The Ohio River really attracts me; I’m drawn to it. Yet, I rarely see it. Downtown Cincinnati, including Great American Ball Park (the Reds’ stadium), sits right on the Ohio but you don’t really know that unless you’re there. And yesterday, I was there.

It’s interesting to me that baseball is the great American past time because for all the number crunching and statistics, it’s really a game of luck and psychology. Players can be psyched or psyched out. Being able to hold that mental edge over your opponent seems (to me at least) to be the deciding factor in a baseball game. Since we’ve chosen this as a our national past time, I’m wondering what this says about us. America is the land of luck and chance? I don’t know for sure, but I know I need to keep my wits about me.

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