Beautiful Music and Lovely Herbs

As you all know I used to be in Led Zeppelin.  But now I have a new band called 'The Frankenstein Vikings' which is: Frankenstein, Kenny Rogers, plus Me!  WOW I know.  This is our hot new single  'Freebird'. (Now you have to hold up a lighter. Go find one.)


OK this is the song.


I was walking through the woods with my best gal Brenda
I had to make a move and I wanted it to send her
Maybe a bear would attack us, and then I could defend her-
But no bears showed up.  Then I found a blender.

Oh yeah! Found a blender!
Oh yeah! It was a Waring!
Oh yeah! Found a blender!
A sticker on the bottom said 'Return to Keith Haring'!

Went to Brendas' place in a green Cadillac
Stopped by the Safeway near the railroad track
Stole a pack of smokes and an Enquirer from the rack
The headline said 'Keith wants his blender back'

Oh yeah! Stole from Safeway!
Oh yeah! Down by the tracks!
Oh yeah! Stole from Safeway!
Plus I scored a canned ham and some Pringles Snacks!

I ran down the siding and I jumped a freight car
Just the clothes on my back and an old steel guitar
A blind man stole it just outside of Enumclaw
Then his monkey bit my ear off. It's name was Francois.

Oh yeah! Hit the road!
Oh yeah! No going back!
Oh yeah! Hit the road!
Too bad I lost my ear in a monkey attack!
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Nobody thinks about lovage. This is stupid. You should think about lovage now.

Lovage.

Lovage is about the easiest thing in the world to grow besides maybe dandelions.  It even has things in common with dandelions...it self-seeds, you can teach it to repeat simple words, and if you eat too much you'll piss your kidneys right out of your body.  USE LOVEAGE WISELY.  Don't wake up at 5:am tomorrow morning and decide today is the day you'll eat nothing but lovage for the rest of your life, because if you're stupid enough to do that then you deserve to have your kidneys land splat on the floor and I'm not going to stop you.
 
You can read all kinds of stuff about lovage on the 'net, and most of it is repetitive and doesn't help much.  Do you care that "The esteemed Irish herbalist K'Eogh noted that this highly aromatic and giant-sized perennial "expels flatulence; clears the sight; removes spots, freckles and redness; provokes urination and menstruation; and aids digestion." ??  I personally do not give a flying fuck.  Although I had no idea that the Irish had such quixotic surnames, or were interested in the expulsion of flatulence.  Don't they do it like everyone else does?  Is improper expulsion of flatulence a problem for the Irish?  If you take this guys' word for it the Irish have all kinds of things they should be worrying about, plus Enya, and the proper use of loveage, which is 'as a weapon'.

A CULINARY weapon. 

  Loveage has an aroma of celery, if celery smelled even better than it does now, and lets face it that's actually pretty darn good.  But now imagine celery, only more concentrated, more perfumed, with a hint of fennel, fresh green basil, and line-dried laundry of all things.  Oh yes!  Now you're interested!  Well it does smell that good.  And it tastes that good too. It tastes amazing. Just minced lovage in an omelet is unbelievable.  Oh hell yeah. Or in a Vietnamese lettuce wrap... or in pho, in salads, with tomatoes, on burgers, IN burgers, in stocks....and good heavens, what it does for a soup, particularly if there's chicken lurking about in the wings.  Get it? Because, chickens are like theatres, and soup.  I'm glad we've cleared that up.
What I am trying to convey to your brain is that lovage is something you need to eat more of now.  Right now.  This shit is delicious.

Lovage is a real meal-type vegetable, unlike supermarket celery which is crunchy water held together with fishing line.  Nobody would eat fried celery by itself because that would be flabby and revolting.  You can fry the crap out of lovage, slap it on a plate, and people will give you money for free! And even if the thought of food with too much delicious makes you feel sinful and dirty you can still just settle for chopping up the young leaves and stems and using them exactly the way you'd use celery.  I understand you can even eat the root.  I haven't done this.  No I will not tell you why.

Lovage wants rich, neutral, average soil that stays on the wet side.  Full sun, part sun, front yard, north side of the house, it's fine.  Basically you stick lovage in the ground, you water it, stick some steer compost on it, and it sulks for a year and doesn't grow very tall.  But then the next year and forever after it grows about 6 - 7 feet high.  Now if you live in someplace that's only a state because we felt sorry for it, like Nevada, it will just die after a year so you guys are stuck with both celery and Nevada.  But if you live in Washington which is super ten thousand times of coolness, then lovage will grow and come back every Spring for what they say is twenty years or more.  I believe it; I've had it for four years now in heavy clay soil, planted in the most unprotected, dank,  floods-every-year part of my back yard and it hasn't noticed a thing.  And the shit is 6 ft. tall.  Or it would be if I hadn't cut it back because it was 6 feet tall.

Mature lovage plants end up looking a lot like several other plants, one of which can kill you:  Water Hemlock. Please don't be dead.  Buy your lovage plant from a regular nursery.  DO NOT buy lovage from some random grange fundraiser. Those little old ladies have cataracts, man. They get all drugged up and go pull shit up out of the lawn and then they stick it in a pot and throw out the first name that comes to mind. Yeah, that's a tulip. That kind has thorns. They don't care.   I NEVER buy edibles from plant sales. Don't you do it either.
 
Have I scared you?  'OO!  I'm too scared to buy lovage! I could die!'  PLEASE.  Be scared of something worth being scared of. You could be Irish and have gas.

Hope you like jammin' too!

A message from the Assembly of God, Sumas, WA. 
(Note the Heefalump Dumpaloon showing a coy half-moon, stage left.)

  
I just took the last harvest off my blueberry bushes and made jam! My kitchen smells wonderful, and because I was forced to do so many, many 'taste tests', my teeth and tongue are almost black, just like my stony wizened little heart.  Anyway, I was standing there stirring the simmering berries, sipping a Pepsi, when suddenly I had an aneurysm. 

No no! Having laugh my face, silly persons! 

I had an inspiration. 

What's one of the ingredients in cola?  Cinnamon. That, and various types of sugar.  Things you'd add to blueberry jam anyway.  In it went.  Out came awesome.

RECIPE: BLUEBERRY JAM 'WHITE TRASH'
It's sisterfuckin' good!

Ingredients
-Maybe about 4 or 5 cups by volume of extremely ripe blueberries, washed and picked over
-Two 12 oz. cans of Pepsi
-extra sugar or fructose depending on how tart your blueberries run

...see, the idea here is to use the Pepsi instead of sugar water to cook the blueberries in.  Otay? Otay.

Follow these instructions exactly or the Blueberry police will tase the shit out of you and you'll wake up alone in Blueberry jail with Mr. Zucchini for a cellie :

Dump blueberries in saucepan
Dump Pepsi on blueberries
Mash blueberries.  A hand mixer works rully rully good for this. (NOT a bamix.)

Simmer for 45 minutes, stirring to prevent scorching.

Now youse place a fine wire strainer over a bowl and force this mixture through the wires, or use a mouli with a fine screen.  Save the juice, dump the squeezed-out glop down the front of your underpants.  Or discard it like a normal person.  I'm assuming my usual readership here, though.

Check the result and adjust seasonings as necessary.  Right here you could pour the juice back in the saucepan and reduce it further if you think that's necessary Picky Smith.  Actually I did, plus I added more sugar too. Um.

Dump into a clean glass jar, let it cool, then tighten down the lid and put in the 'fridge.  It will set by itself without the need to add pectin. 
_______________________________

I already posted up a picture of my first ripe tomato of the year, but what the hell; I'll post it up here too:


...and my!  What an attractive tattoo!

 There's only been five more since (indeterminate plants.) We made salsa, but there's just the two of us and these are big honkin' tomatoes. With the few that were left over I made this:

RECIPE:  'SUN-DRIED' TOMATOES FLOATING AROUND IN OLIVE OIL IN A JAR
Use them in dressings, use them in sauces, wear them like a hat; I don't care.

Ingredients:
 Tomatoes, washed, stemmed, cut into chunks
Olive oil

Equipment de tomateuille of submergeurine oui oui:
 Clean jar with lid
Food dehydrator, or a very sunny, hot location and a fan

Instructions
Dry tomatoes until they are still pliable...'leathery going toward potato chip' rather than 'gross warm mush'. Dump them in the jar, dump the olive oil in on top of them, put the lid on and then take it out in the sunshine and photograph it in front of some flowers.
________________________________

Still reading?  Oh good.  This next recipe is really complicated and requires special tools and presumes access to stuff that you probably don't have access to,  which will make you cry and cry so hard all like 'WAAAAAAAAAA'  and I'll ignore you.

Awhile back I decided to try and make some loose incense, because I have too much spare time and a food dehydrator.  Now a word needs to be said here about food dehydrators.  Yes, AGAIN:

Those cheapo dehydrators you see for sale in, say, Wal-Mart or Target, they only work for things like a handful of oregano leaves.  These ones are the ones I'm talking about:

OK.

They rely on a small light bulb in the bottom for heat generation.  When the inside heats up, cool air is drawn passively through vent holes in the bottom and circulates up through the food trays and out a hole in the top.  It takes a longass time.  If you load the thing up the way the picture shows, what you end up with is lots of humidity lingering inside and the real possibility of mold growth on the material in the outer ring before anything truly dehydrates.  But who's going to sit around and wait for three hours just to dehydrate one carrot, or a few slices of apple? Please.

This is the type of food dehydrator you need if you mean to deal with realistic amounts of stuff:

Oh fuck it I'm sick of dealing with the alignment. ANYWAY.  This type has a fan at the back that forces warm dry air through and around the food; draws cool air in through the back and blows the moisture-laden warm air out the front through gaps around the door.  It also has a temperature regulator so you can turn up the heat on really wet items like raw meat or tomatoes. Dry one carrot in 45 minutes.  Dry a whole load of carrots in 2 hours. Serious as a heart attack. THIS is the one you want. 

Anyway.  So I'm making loose incense, which is just stick incense minus glue and the stick.  

LOOSE INCENSE THAT SMELLS GOOD AND NOT BAD

Imagine it...you - yes, YOU - can experience the nasal ambiance of Rancho FirstNations just by following these simple instructions! 

-One standard pickle bucket of fresh, fully opened blossoms of Butterfly Bush (buddleia Davidii) ...blossoms left on central stem, excess + leaves trimmed away, UNwashed.

-Peels of 2 large lemons, just the yellow part (not the white pith or the flesh)

-Ginger root, 4 oz by volume, peeled and cut into extremely thin transparent slices (easier if you freeze it first; the peel rubs right off!)

-Powdered Sandalwood, 1/3 cup (purchase at hippie store or online)

BINDER:

-Organic, local honey, particularly if it is somewhat old and dark;  as much as it takes to aid dry ingredients in coming together into a meal. I'm serious about the local organic part too.  You know what one of the most adulterated, counterfeited things in the world is?  Big-brand honey.  (The other is olive oil. True facts.)

EQUIPMENT:

-Food dehydrator

-2 Glass or metal mixing bowls

-Small blade-style coffee grinder:

..clean it out really well afterward! 

-spoon

-spatula

-Dawn dishwashing liquid for washing your hands afterward; trust me

-Loose incense burner (or just use that spoon and candle rig you've got hidden behind the family Bible)

-A very clean jar with a tight fitting lid

METHOD THE MAKE FOR A SMELL OR ODOR IS PLEASING

- Stick the buddleia, the ginger and the lemon peel into the dehydrator, put the heat on medium-low, and leave it until everything inside is crackly potato chip - dry. This will have to be done in batches and the buddleia might have to be cut up a bit to fit into the dehydrator easily.  Using the recommended dehydrator, a full load with every tray covered loosely will take an hour or more depending on the humidity of the day. In my experience, a pickle bucket load of blossoms dehydrated down to about 1 1/4 cups by volume of ground material. 

-Wash your hands very thoroughly and keep your fingers out of your nose.

-Now strip all the buddleia blossoms off their stems and into one of the mixing bowls.

-Discard the stems and dead bugs NO SHIT REALLY. 

-Add the lemon peel and ginger, and crumble all the dry material with your hands

-Run it all through the coffee grinder in batches until powdered into as fine a dust as you can manage, dumping each batch into the second mixing bowl as you go. 

-Add the sandalwood powder to this.

-Mix these ingredients together using a whisk. Once mixed, put the whisk away. Now it's hands on time.

-Yes you have to wash your hands AGAIN. I saw what you did.

I saw it through your television set. You thought it was off.  And it is.

-Drizzle the honey over the whole surface in thin strands, then work it into the powder with  your fingertips as though you were rubbing butter into flour.  Keep drizzling in the honey and mixing until it all begins to feel just barely sticky and is coming together like coarse corn meal.  Your fingers will turn dark green and you'll have to scrape them off with a spoon so keep one handy.  A clean spoon. I CAN STILL SEE YOU.

Now comes the time-consuming part.

You have to work this stuff for a long time so all the different compounds release and start to mix. You'd think the coffee grinder would have done that but no.  It's heartbreaking. Now don't make that duckie face, c'mon now, it smells really really good and it isn't difficult.  Just stick your hands in there and squeeze, roll, crumble, squish, and crumble it again. When your hands give out, keep at it using a pastry cutting-in tool.  Use the spatula to scrape the bowl occasionally.  Make sure that every atom of material gets included.  It gets boring.  If I was you I'd get really wasted and sit in front of the TV with the bowl and just keep mixing it and dicking with it and squishing it until you straighten up enough to realize that you've been watching Telemundo and understanding it.

Now place the material into the jar and fasten down the lid tightly.  Store it someplace dry and dark.  No worries about spoilage!  Dehydrated materials don't rot, and honey, my honeys, has antibacterial properties, so it acts as a binder, an aromatic AND a preservative!!  The longer you store it unopened, the better it will smell.  I have no idea why this is; it just is.  But you can use it right away too and it will work fine.

CRAFT CORNER!!!

You can make an incense burner!  Or you could buy a special brass burner with a grill and a bunch of those hockey puck charcoal things and a special fan to get the hockey puck things burning and special long matches to light it with and a special cloth mat to sit it all on and seriously fuck that in the ear. 

A loose incense burner can be as simple as a soup can - minus the label, snoid. Take it off now. Then:

-Cut off the top and suck out all the soup with a vacuum cleaner

-Now fill the can full of water and freeze it.

-Once frozen,  poke the sides full of artistically arranged holes.  If you don't your goats shall bear young with human faces.

-Dump out the ice, dry it off, and stick a lit votive candle underneath it.

-Wait until all the coating has burned off. This will stink. So much in life does, though.

-Wash it down, set it back over the candle, and you're ready to roll! 

The incense goes in a little tablespoon sized heap on top and stinks real purdy.

Now look at you, banishing lingering assy aromas with your for free incense and your free soup can burner that you maded yourself! You are the greenest person EVER.



Elderly fucked-up people at the edge of America

This weekend before last we went to the Mt. Baker Rhythm and Blues Festival at the Deming Logging Show grounds.

....OK fine. Yes, there is such a thing as a 'logging show' and it is popular enough that they built a special fairground area for it in Deming, a town whose only other claims to fame are the Cedarville Solid Waste Site and the striking number of bald-headed women who live there. I am not shitting you. There are some bald damn women running around in Deming. Never actually been to a logging show myself, but I hear they're pretty cool, if you like seeing things like logs, antique logging equipment in action, wood, competition blacksmithery, log rolling,  competitive tree climbing, customized chainsaws, bar stool racing, sawdust,  top fuel lawnmower racing, logs, competitive axe throwing, logs, and big sweaty mens choppin' wood.  Dead serious, kats.

The showground is a really beautiful place.  You'd think it would be skanky, but it's incredibly well maintained, has a full compliment of amenities, and is surrounded by beautiful green hills and tall cedar trees...complete with picturesque lil' forest critters (chipmunks, deer, alcoholics) wandering around in a picturesque manner.

The Blues Festival is organized by a long-time acquaintance of ours, Lloyd, who basically does this for love of the music and the opportunity to party with musicians, get drunk, and talk on a microphone. It's always a fun event. Good music, good beer, good concessions, deliberately unobservant security personnel, everything you could ask for. If you love R&B, and you love partying with nasty, dirty bikers, armed vegetarians and other fringe types, this yearly event is worth a trip out of your way to come see. THIS is the America that I live in.

I was surprised as hell at the number of young people there. Ida thought they'd all be at home listening to Pitchfork.com, but no...there they were in their checkered shirts and little funky toques, digging the cougar love, partying alongside the rest of us. Made me proud.

The 'second string' acts were pretty good. One chick was bound and determined to bring back Janis via her vocal cords. The younger crowd practically stormed the stage when she started in. We hung out in the back at the beer garden, mainly because this girl did NOT need amplification and loooooved ripping out those Joplin screams wherever she could fit one in...and she most emphatically DID have amplification. There were small craft warnings in my beer.

The Fat Tones were shit hot. Just totally shit hot. Every one of them. The guy they had on the Hammond and Clavinet was extra super top secret shit hot, in fact. But the guitarist -! Holy whackamole. 90 lbs of perpetual motion with an electric guitar! Picture this amazingly talented crack squirrel in a rayon shirt playing so fast his little paws are just a blur. Just tore it the fuck up.

This year one of the two headline acts was supposed to be Hot Tuna (you have to be really, really old to remember the Tuna.) At the last minute they cancelled. Lo and behold, Lloyd comes up with COCO MONTOYA!!

Coco Montoya is one hell of a musician. He is also a hell of a performer. And he really connects with the audience. He got everyone involved and turned it into a huge party, like he was just jamming in the backyard at a barbecue or something. Only, you know, really good. He even got the Biker nodding his head in time, which is how Germans pogo. Coco and I made a true heart connection that night. Now he won't stop calling me. All he does is breathe. Probably shy. I understand that.

The other headliner was Guitar Shorty.
Guitar Shorty!!!!*
Little short fat dude in a Nudelmans' shirt and a cowboy hat. Little stubby fingers. Jeri curl. Just kind of stands there, doesn't hack and flail. But oh my God, he puts out the most evil! filthy! raunchy! sound! This is a guy that Hendrix admired, right; and you figure out why real quick. Gave me a case of the vapors.  AND the fantods.

He played, then disappeared for awhile, and then all of a sudden he showed up out in the audience with his guitar and started in playing, and just roamed all over the whole field with people following him in a big old hippified heap dancing and smoking him up and being insane.

It's that kind of venue. Waaaaaay better than a club. And I suppose it goes without saying that the Biker and I had a blast, huh.

....YES I kept my clothes on.
_____________________________________________


*I met the guy! Yeah I did! Shook his hand and talked to him after the show! It was pretty casual too. Only hit me afterward that HOLY FUCK I JUST MET GUITAR SHORTY. Couldn't wipe the grin off my face for HOURS.

Warthog Getaway Weekend: Methow Stylee

The wonderful thing about America is that you can drive a little ways and visit practically every kind of environment you can imagine, bar subtropical rainforest and anything having to do with the Maldives, or Australia, except for certain parts of Australia that look kind of like Eastern Washington only Eastern Washington has more fat people in sneakers.  Us fat people like to visit Eastern Washington to get our 'high desert' on.  We call out 'Kangaroo!' whenever we see a dog and then laugh hysterically, and call all the ducks 'koala bears' and feed them 'gum leaves' and 'scream' when they 'spit acid', which clears the campsites around ours like magic.

This year we visited the Methow Valley for a few days.  We left a town where it was 60 degrees and overcast.  Once we crossed over the pass we were in blue skies.  We just looked at each other and grinned in amazement.  It was pure bliss from that moment on. 

Just past the summit. Pure bliss beginning......NOW.

Yeah, we pussed out and took the van instead of the Victory.  This was as much a scouting expedition as a vacation, and it's nicer to be able to scout with a cup of coffee in hand.  That, and we wanted to sleep a. in campgrounds b. on a comfortable bed  c.inside a metal box that was d. safely above rattlesnake level, because  e. fuck rattlesnakes.  You're either in timber rattler country or desert rattler country out in Eastern Washington, and either one of them will bite you right on the hine and not give a fuck either way about it.  Nothing ruins a vacation like a snake hanging off your ass. Thus the van proved to be an excellent choice.  We only paid ten dollars on lodging and our butts remained reptile-free, unlike other we saw trudging around with five or six chomped on the back of them.

The Methow Valley is a different slice of Eastern Washington. The high forests are colder and damper than the Wenatchee side of the mountains, and there's a wider variety of plants...pine, fir, alder, spruce I think, vine maple, something that smelled intensely like juniper and a whole shitload of other stuff (yeah I know I should of brought my field guide but the dog ate it. Seriously.  And here you were so looking forward to a botany lesson too. )


Lotsa fuckin' trees really close together that are cold and wet.



What you notice most are the Ponderosa pines.You know, the ones I didn't take a picture of to put here. They're enormously tall and straight with close cinnamon-colored bark cut by black fissures.  The older the tree the higher up the trunk the  short limbs emerge, dividing into shorter downcurled branches, dark and sooty looking, covered in long green needles and gold buds. Nothing traps the sunset light like these trees.  .* 

The foothills descend into rolling plain, and the forest ends in yellow dog hills and grassy, gravelly plains scattered with small clumps of sagebrush.  The road you travel through them is edged with stunted oatgrass and short, silver artemesia.


Picturesque log cabin that we saw with hills arroyo trees etc.  And a bigass horse barn in the background.

 This is western kingbird country.  You see them on every fenceline shimmering in the heat.  Barn swallows, swifts and buzzards rise in circles up the hillsides, and osprey survey the lakes.  Ravens drop small rocks onto the picnic tables to chase you away.

One block off Main Street, Winthrop...the hardscrabble life of a wily forest denizen.

Elk and deer everywhere, even in downtown Winthrop, holding up traffic as they eat the municipal landscaping, wandering through the parking lot of the grocery store, wading up the creek to watch the bikers getting overserved at the Schoolhouse Pub.

We were those bikers. Us, and hundreds more funky nasty tattooed fuckers ambling around half lit, as it turned out.  We even met some hometown refugees and stood around in the middle of the street talking with them while all the other elderly miscreants baked in the sunshine, broke various misdemeanor laws,


Just a reminder from the Church of Christ, Winthrop.

  bought tchotchkes made in Indonesia, ate barbecue, and played their music too loud as they enjoyed the 'Western movie set' ambiance.

Yeah, Winthrop is a 'Western' theme town, and it's campy and touristy, but it's cool.


...and no western-themed town is complete without an abandoned hippie castle

  They could have gone the edelweiss splattered half-timbered Bavarian bullshit route, but they didn't, which means Winthrop beats the living shit out of Leavenworth in my book.  When I go on vacation I don't want to run into even the slightest chance of yodelling.  At all. Anywhere.  That's like first on my list of 'things to avoid while on vacation' in fact. 'Ebola' and 'rattlesnakes hanging off my ass' come next.

They have a craft show/farmers' market in the park every Saturday, and I failed to get a picture of it as well.  Imagine lots of old people with long grey braids and faded hand-dyed t-shirts selling organic honey and incredible outrageously gorgeous handmade jewelery and little crocheted outfits for your laptop.  It's a really good craft show. In fact the Methow is home to a rich and varied crafting legacy, one handed down not only from the primordial Native Americans but also the hippie scum that dried in a paisley ring around the valley back in 1969.  That, and you get snowed in for four months out of the year when the North Cascades highway closes,


..and closes with a bang I might add, with you stuck behind these battlements.

 it's probably a case of craft or die.  Anywho, there was some really good stuff there.  We even bought some of it.

We did a lot of exploring the backroads.  Saw a lot of ancient hippie dwellings, tepees, yurts, Victorian homes, double wides, and 'vacation gothic' mansions.  Saw some rivers. Saw lots of mountains. Saw this malachite green lake with the picturesque lightning-struck tree in front of it.




Diablo Lake.  As the very patient forest ranger with the fixed grin will tell you, it's that color because of all the 'glacier flour' suspended in the water which reflects this specific shade of green for a reason that you'd better not ask the patient forest ranger to tell you because it makes a vein in his forehead swell.


Then we came home. And here I is!



*The description I give here isn't of nursery-perfect specimens but trees that have survived fire at least once in their lives.  They generally survive a flashing-over and even lightning without noticing much, and come back green the next spring.  So there.

Methow Valley, Part Un: Rolling Huts

Last weekend we hit the road.  On our trip through the Methow Valley we stopped at took a look around at the Rolling Huts,  http://www.rollinghuts.com/, something I've wanted to do since I read about them in Dwell Magazine a few years back.  Now you need to be a good reader and go visit the site, and at least let the slideshow on their home page reel past........OK, done?

I was really interested in seeing how the years had treated their design concept.  Yes, I know how to party while on vacation. 

In the article I read, the original plan was to tow them around in the surrounding fields.  A client could request a certain view (and there are astounding views) or even daylight exposures, and they'd trundle the entire structure about to accommodate the request.

The Rolling Huts no longer roll, unfortunately.  Each one sits on an enclosed gravel pad, wired into service.  

Here's what I think happened: 

1. A Rolling Hut as massively overbuilt  (immense steel i-beams, gargantuan metal chassis and wheels) as these are probably became a Tilting Hut or even a Sinking Hut right around snowmelt.  Not to mention what their sheer passage must have done to the fields over time...'level' probably got pretty scarce.

2. The experience they were selling at the outset was 'aesthetic-spartan-rustic'. The design is gorgeously aesthetic. Wood heat is rustic.  But living without electric light and a place to plug into the 'Net is just too damn spartan for people who can afford to spend 135.00 a night on lodging.

I asked to take a look inside one of the vacant Huts and fell in LOVE.  These are beautiful objects both outside and in.  I have nothing but compliments for the layout, the style, the efficiency, the way natural light is  handled, everything.  Being inside feels good.  I could stay here happily and never feel awkward, isolated or cramped; no small feat given the square footage and the fact that there's a wood stove in the place.

Only problem for me: you have to go outside and use a tank toilet. 

Why they didn't build a door that communicated directly from the living space I do not know. As designed, you have to go completely outside and then enter a very chilly little separate chamber near the steps which contains a porta-potty.  Which smells exactly like a porta-potty.

This is where ideals and reality collide for me.  I'd GLADLY exchange the electricity for a propane incinerating toilet http://www.storburn.ca/storburn.html .  As for the 'go outside' aspect, I'm sure that anyone staying there with small children would appreciate not having to haul them out into the snow in the middle of the night one after the other to use the thing. It was a weird decision, but I wonder, given the 'turn three corners' layout of the toilet area, if the original idea might have been to leave it doorless so you could feel all 'al fresco' and peek out at the view.  It'd work...just not in an area that experiences blizzards.  Putting a door on the area was probably a last-minute thing.

I would have used more durable materials for the interior, given that these are rental units. They used plywood for the walls and built-ins, and cork composite for the floors.  There's a lot written on the 'room rules' card about being careful and not letting wet equipment, sharp equipment or dogs ruin things, but I have to admit that so far their guests have been pretty respectful. The places are holding up just fine.  Use has only burnished things a bit, to very attractive effect I have to say. Another point Rolling Huts!

I also noticed that the clerestory glass had cracked up in the corner where the woodstove stack passes through the roof. Woulda put an s-bend in the pipe to move it a little further out from that corner, but that's the kind of thing you note in retrospect. It doesn't leak.

Rolling Huts would work PERFECTLY in an area like the Southwest. I mean PERFECTLY. You'd only have to change out the existing glass for heat blocking glass ( http://www.solucecorp.com/product.html), and add some solar panels to the roof. They'd be neat little self-contained eco wagons.  'Burners would flock to them like lemmings to a tall cliff.

A private owner could take out the the bathroom door and open the area back up to the breeze;  even do away with the tank entirely; just leave it at a seat over a hole and let the chips fall where they may, which would make the coyotes happy. Not particularly welcoming if visitors happened to arrive while you were inside, though. But rustic as all git-out.

Yelling Night the White Ox: Terror Attack!

There really isn't a better way to spend an afternoon than digging through dead peoples' belongings.

  I spent the past week doing zackly that and having a total blast, on a quest to amass the record collection I never had.

Back in 1971 I saved up my allowance and bought a shitty Wurlitzer portable turntable for twenty-eight dollars at Sears.

I owned it through Jr. High and High School,  twenty moves, one failed marriage, several cats and a baby.  But despite all that it turned out to be a virtual Volkswagen Beetle of record players...beat it, abuse it, treat it like shit; it just kept on going.

The day came when the turntable started running at random speeds, going from a quaalude draaaaaawl to Alvin and the Chipmunks;  which was funny as shit  during one of the Bikers' records but completely unacceptable during Hendrix Live at Woodstock. Upon performing an autopsy, we discovered a lot of change, cigarette butts, bottle caps, Cheerios, a needle worn down to a stub, an interior packed tight with  a giant dusty...thing of some sort, and the white cotton string (!) that ran from the motor to the turntable so caked with grunge that it  had worn down to a thread. 

I  picked out all the change, consigned the carcass to the dumpster, and that was that. Since there wasn't any money to get another and there were bills to pay, it was time to sell the records too.

I had a chunk of bucks invested in those records, but they were surprisingly easy to let go of and I didn't miss them much.  Part of the reason why was that I didn't own anything that you couldn't hear on every pop-ass radio station in America every hour of the day.  Mainly it was because that, aside from Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, I hadn't actually owned any music I loved.
    
'Why' hit me years later. Back when I was buying albums, the music I really wanted wasn't carried on the west side of the Willamette. It wasn't even broadcast on the west side of the Willamette until late at night, so I owe at least some of my taste to an inability to sleep and a lack of late-night management presence at radio 101.9 .

Of course as soon as I discovered the Internet I started building some shit-hot playlists.  With that on tap, you might wonder 'why bother buying vinyl?' 

  I'm not a purist. I'm not a trophy hunter. I've been a volume abuser for 52 years so my eardrums probably look like iron manhole covers...but even I can hear the difference between music recorded in the 70's played back digitally, and the same music on vinyl played on a turntable. In that case, vinyl genuinely sounds better, with that lush, plummy tonal quality that only comes from liquid dinosaur.

 Analog recording wasn't done with a tin can on a string. It was a precise science, and a vast amount of research and money went into producing very specific, highly controlled results throughout, and that included taking into account how the ALL of the equipment and materials involved effected output.  After all, that output was the product they were selling...on vinyl, that went onto a record player, and came out the speaker.  It was the quality of what came out of the speaker, after all, which either brought customers back or drove them away.  To put it another way, if it was recorded to be ON VINYL, it's only going to sound the way it was meant to sound played off vinyl. That's why I'm buying record albums. Plus sometimes you find weed.*

Per my recent experience I can tell you that, if you hurry, you can still completely rebuild your record collection, no matter what the genre, from the 70's onward out of resale stores and garage sales, and you'll pay exactly what you paid back in the 70's too, if you're willing to look past the jacket condition.  If you're vigilant and lucky and willing to drive out where the aging longhairs roam and the Greatest Generation retired after seeing the world, you can find even older stuff too. But 'cha gotta hurry, because it's all disappearing as fast as the Internet generation can gobble it up.  For every dirty old crate digger out there gloating over Ish Kabibble 78's there are three skinny hipsters trolling the shallows.  It's  charming to hear someone one-third your age mention Ida Cox in tones of reverence, until you realize that  reverence is based on the price in yen.

That aside.  In a weeks' time I've scored some nice stuff, and all of it is in damn near pristine shape. I was really surprised, but in fact very little of what I looked at was damaged at all. That we knew how to take care of our records nicely speaks well for a generation of people who thought of Doritos as a food group.

 See, I know you're now asking yourself 'fine, you have records, but who has a turntable?'  Why, I do. I has a turntable.  An excellent turntable.


When the Playboy of the Western World went to that big bathhouse in the sky, we inherited his sound system. This thing was 20 years old when it came to us and solid as a fucking rock, with components (Pioneer) and speakers (Bose**) that still perform flawlessly.  Turn it up to 'eleven'? 'Eleven' means absolutely NOTHING to this device.  '6' on the volume control is loud enough to hear across the street, and although the calibration promises '30' I've never taken it past '18' because when I do I start ovulating charcoal briquettes. 

This is what a weeks' effort turned up; not connoisseur stuff but not too sad or lame either, I think, except for maybe Right On Time which I bought because I liked their shiny outfits, and that they gave their astrological signs in the liner notes:

Winelight...Grover Washington Jr.

Ray Charles Live In Concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles

Sweet Passion...Aretha Franklin

In the West...Jimi Hendrix

Right On Time...The Brothers Johnson   

Stompin' At The Savoy....Rufus and Chaka Khan

Headhunter...Herbie Hancock

Endless Boogie...John Lee Hooker

And chilluns, I got them for 3.00 APIECE.

 

___________________________________________

**Research in the field leads me to believe that hippies were a careless bunch of folks. LP jackets were a common hiding place, though; beside skanky old vegetation I've found love notes, dollar bills, cockroaches and antique blotter acid.  Imagine your cat getting ahold of that. Although with a cat it might be hard to tell.

**Bose advertising is not bullshit. We have the home range 'sound environment' package: quad wall mounts with  floor unit dual speaker boom chamber; pretty snazzy stuff for the era in which it was made.  

Yes I know I know I know ALL RIGHT ALREADY I haven't posted in a longass time I'M SORRY. Actually no I'm not.  It's been a very intense few months.


Awhile back I had to fill out an assessment form which was used to determine whether or not my grandson had ADD-ADHD.  Different behaviors, coping styles, things like that; rated them on a scale of severity or occurrence.  As I was going through I began to notice that not only did it describe my grandson, it described ME. 

Long story short, I gots it. Bigtime. Oh holy shit bigtime.

Now this is quite a paradigm shift.  You think of yourself as relating to the world directly, right; I mean why wouldn't you?...until suddenly you find out you've merely been coping with reality for 52 years through an intervening perceptual disorder? Yeah, you'd have your paradigm shifted too. 

Learning about ADD has been very illuminating, by which I mean 'comprehensively suck-ass.'  I haven't felt this kind of  crawling embarrassment about myself, looking back on my past actions, since I was a hormone-addled 12 - year - old.  On the other hand, there's finally being able to identify the problem and the relief of being able to change it...a relief that I've been clinging to like a tubercular steerage passenger clinging to a lifeboat surrounded by icebergs since it is the only  fucking thing that's been easy or pleasant about this.

Well fine, there's been the sudden dramatic decrease in the level of bullshit too.  I've gone from being an unwitting victim of ADD to being very proactive, relentlessly directed and able to maintain certainty.  And that last item has been key.  For me, the issue of 'certainty' has been the number one quality that made ADD so debilitating. 

When lack of certainty is hardwired into your experience of reality,  it means that every single waking moment of your life is ruled and defined by a constantly shifting ability to experience stable meaning... and the subsequent core drive to attain it.  Anything snares ones' attention, inspires repeated examination,  leads to questions which lead off into other avenues of unrelated inquiry, which leads to opening 15 different programs on your computer which is by your wallet which makes you wonder where your keys are and also reminds you of Francis Scott Key andOH LOOK A DACHSHUND.  It happens instantly.  All the time.  Just like that you're way off track, and there's a dachshund.

When I say 'a constantly shifting ability to experience stable meaning', I should point out that there are times when the range of shift is mild, and even times that it actually locks into the correct location on the scale and operates the way it's supposed to. Of course,  you can't depend on that happening either. Imagine the fun.

It's only since I've been taking Ritalin (Adderal ended in flames; made me barf all the time - Strattera turned me into an Emo, only not fun to be around or carefree and upbeat like an Emo, and 52) that I've really gotten a lock on this, and in the course of doing so I have come to two conclusions:


1.  I get a lot more things done now.

2. I am a lot happier now.


And that's a very good place to be, kats and kittens.  Better late than never.
_________________________________________


I am the last person on earth to discover Last FM, aren't I.  Yeah, it's sad. 

My husband and I were using Rhapsody, which turned out to be a complete boondoggle as far as I'm concerned.  You subscribe, thats nice, right up until they decide that their reconnection period should be two weeks long instead of a month every so often, just for shits and giggles, and you get hit with a dead player out in the middle of East Chucklafuck.  Their library was not as inclusive or complete as I would have liked it to be either. In general it glitched constantly, loaded slow and required an inordinate amount of time dicking around with settings and controls and updates and synching and using the less than helpful 'Help' pages.  I must say, though, their customer support people were very nice. 

Last FM, though, is pretty sweet.  I've been using the hell out of it.  It's nice to simply choose music and play music, instead of calling Bill Gates on the phone every five minutes and sobbing into a handkercheif while he burns sage on your cpu and dances around in a loincloth.  Tell you what, it definitely beats GrooveShark all to hell.  It does seem a little 'Skrillex-centric', but then everything is lately *bats away  nice sprites*.

6 - 5 - 12

Ray Bradbury died yesterday. 

Anyone who is not appalled that this news isn't  featured on the front fucking page of every newspaper in America has no soul.

How To Get An Opposum Out Of Your Dryer

It is 11:01 and I have just heard a gunshot, close, followed a second later by a man yelling 'Aaa!"

I didn't see anyone outside.  Before you castigate me for being a reckless dipshit, know that where I was sitting when these events occurred there are three huge picture windows.   If I was going to be seen by anyone, I would have already been seen, if you catch my drift.  All I had to do was turn my head slightly.  Nope. Nope. Nope.

So now what do I do?  Nothing is what I do.  Absolutely nothing.  Which freaks me the fuck out.

None of this would have gone through my mind when I lived in Seattle.  I'd have heard the noises, it would have been someone getting shot, and I would have unobtrusively slipped to the floor and butt-scooched my way into another room to call the police.  Same as when I lived in Portland.  That's what you did.  It was tough on pants.

But here, since I didn't see anything, I can't do anything...except sit here and worry about spree murderers.

The thing is, people fire guns a lot out here.  Back when I lived in a city, you heard gunfire anywhere, it meant one thing, you did one thing in response, and that was that. You at least were left with the illusion of safety, depending on the police department involved.  Situation finished.  Here...? Not so simple. 

Sound could simply be travelling particularly well that day.  It could be hunters up in the foothills, it could be a nearby farmer killing a bull calf, it could be smugglers, or just kids shooting bottles off a rock. It could be a drive-by across the border in Huntingdon (thats right Canada, don't be all smug like 'Oh, there's no gun crime here, we're a civilized country' damn old cheese-worshipping puck-humpers with your 'eh?' and your goofyass money.)  It could be someone putting down a dog.  It could be someone test-firing a bird cannon. Shit, for that matter maybe someone found a possum in their dryer.  Talking to the appliance recycler, he says this happens all the time. They come in through the outside vent (the possums, not appliance recyclers.)  You generally don't freak the fuck out about it, though; you leave the laundry room open to the outside and throw some dog food out there to bait him in the right direction. Then you slam the door behind him and buy a louvered metal vent cover. A surprising number of dryers get shot that way, though.  Imagine opening your dryer one morning and there's an ugly greasy possum in there with a mouth full of underpants;  you're going to freak the fuck out. Anyone would. 

When I first moved to the country I was played for a rube by an Australian Shepard dog, who herded me, in my car mind you, all the way down the street and into the driveway of his masters' home then ran around the house in furious circles barking.  "Aha!" I thought, veteran viewer of the old 'Lassie' series, "His master is probably in there seriously injured and unable to reach the phone!" (I've also seen one too many LifeAlert commercials.)  So I zoomed back to the police department and filed a report.  Eyes were rolled, my friends.  Then there was the time I called the cops one midnight because I thought someone was trying to break down my door, and it turned out to be another dog.  It can be said that I am known for goofy reports down at the cop shop.  It might also be said that dogs like to fuck with me.  I'll just sit here ignoring the impulse to call the police, and hope the next knock at my door isn't the worlds most polite spree murderer.  Or a possum.

A Note from Normal

As you may recall, I was recently diagnosed with ADD.  Nearly three hours ago I took my very first dose of Adderal ever.

This is the first time in my adult life that I've ever sustained the kind of mental focus I'm now experiencing for longer than 45 minutes at a stretch.  Not a narrow, intense focus either...a generalized, 'yeah, uh-huh' kind of focus.  And I'm not knocking that; it's interesting in a 'yeah, uh-huh' kind of way.  I'm also discovering just how much of my time and energy has gone into maintaining a whole battery of coping strategies.  Having that extra mental activity absent, letting those strategies go unused for this long is also mildly interesting; the key adjective so far being 'mildly'.  So far, 'normal' as a base state is kind of like moving from Castle Frankenfurter into an anonymous tract home.

What in heaven's name do you people get out of this?



When my life is going well and outside annoyances aren't being annoying, the inside of my head is entertaining as hell, vivid and colorful.  I experience the world as a succession of intensely interesting, surprising, and exciting things. This is not to say that it isn't also full of giant robot pterodactyls and  wiener dogs and Volkswagens and stuff, because it is. 

Apparently the average mind is an index that operates like a three-dimensional flow chart, and query 'x' will always, in the average mind, follow proscribed pathways through that flow chart to arrive at solution 'y'.  My mind, however, is like a latex Habitrail in a state of constant molecular passage through an intricate perpetual-motion sculpture filled with hummingbirds and random explosions. 
You will always reliably arrive at 'y'. 
I'll arrive at 'y' too, but the process will also trigger a hundred other operations along the way, so I'll simultaneosly arrive at w, r, q and d. And a small cow.

On the other hand, my learning and coping abilities, such as they are, have been forged by the kind of undersea pressures that would crush your average lifelong normal thudpucker.  Now that I've emerged from those aphotic depths, lurching like some unimaginably primeval beast from the midnight sea onto the innocent shore, garlanded with seaweed and emanating a presentiment of ancient evil like a foul aura beneath the frozen moons' averted gaze and so forth, beware all upon whom I turn my unswerving gaze.

I noted the same effect when I was treated for depression years ago (minus the seaweed.)    Once the fog was lifted, all the strength of will I had developed in the effort to simply survive catapulted me into the lead. I was able to process and internalize twice the recovery twice as fast.  Now I can feel the same potential for forward progress. I think that once I learn how to trust that my attention will remain undivided, anything that I train that faculty upon will eventually give way before it, or be whammed into chowder with a shovel, depending on the mood.

Still, I honestly fail to see what this state has to recommend for itself on a long-term basis. This is so...average.  But now I finally understand why the rest of you take drugs. 

You take drugs to feel like I do when I'm not on drugs.

Souptacular Recipes from Yesteryear

I'd have to nominate Campbells' Soup as the biggest negative influence on the average middle-aged Americans' diet. It was a soup, of course; although unless it was Chicken Noodle I am hard pressed to remember it being served as such.  More often, Campbell's Soup was used as a sauce, an extender, a binder...

....with a tip of the hat to DaNator

....and apparently as a cake ingredient.

In my house, as I suspect it was in many other homes, it was also used a culinary band-aid.  Don't throw away unrecognizably charred horrifyingly over boiled perfectly good food! Just blop a log of Campbells' Cream of Something on top and bake the sapsucker! And don't forget to stick some cheese, pearl onions, tater tots, Corn Chex, cornflakes, fried onions-in-the-can, Doritos, Fritos, Ritz crackers, soda crackers, coconut flakes, walnut chunks, whipped cream, miniature marshmallows or barbecue motherfucking potato chips on top particularly if what's underneath is extra disgusting.*   Take it from one who knows...you could hide a lot of evil under a thick coating of Campbell's.  Or a locomotive, or your mother.

There was no escaping it! The stuff was everywhere! Any family or group event you attended - weddings, funerals, picnics, reunions, potluck dinners and birthdays - half the food on the table would have been made using Campbell's soup.

And so, in the spirit of sharing the dark side of our American culinary heritage, I'd like to present this recipe to posterity: 

AUNT LILLIANS' BISQUICK, CAMPBELL'S AND VELVEETA PIZZA
... My cousins used to tear this shit up like wild pigs. 

CRUST: 
-2 cups Bisquick
-1/2 cup water...knead for 1 minute then roll out and shape into circle 1/4 inch thick on pan. Pinch dough around edges to form slight rim.
TOPPING:
-1 can Campbell's Tomato soup, undiluted, shlooped out of can directly onto raw dough and spread with a rubber spatula to cover thinly
-1 lb hamburger (crowd pan and boil until grey. DO NOT DRAIN.)
-Velveeta cheese, sliced, to cover every single square inch
-1 can black olives, sliced in half
Bake at 425 for 30 minutes.

The thing about this recipe is that it would probably be marginally edible if the cheese was anything but Velveeta. 

Velveeta does not melt well when baked.  What it does, is burn.  And at this temperature, it burns rather spectacularly, complete with flames, black smoke and little specks of ash floating around the kitchen; and this is exactly what happened every single time my Aunt Lillian served it.   The smell was exactly what you'd expect any milk product in flames to smell like (i.e a sweaty t-shirt covered in baby formula barf and then used to clean a wood stove.)  In presentation this dish resembled a well-used manhole cover, the hamburger sticking up in craggy lumps beneath a fragile vitreous glaze of burnt processed cheese-food, the olives laid out all shiny and wizened up on top of the thing like little black Volkswagens caught out by an asteroid strike.

I trawled the back alleys of my cookbook collection, and here's the closest printed thing I could find right offhand to the above:

...from 'Favorite Mormon Recipes' p.o.box 3075 Montgomery, AL 36109...in case anyone wants the address

You see? I'm not making this shit up.

Neither am I making this up:

Heres' the thing about the Campbell's recipe books c. 1940-1970 (and I have several)...they suck.

 Campbell's Inc. clearly gave less than a lukewarm, runny shit about what went between the covers as long as there was something there besides clip art.  Now you market this shit to newlywed girls with little to no clue, and put it on the table in front of a public who all smoked like fiends anyway, who's going to know any different, right?

Campbell's is responsible for popularizing such staples of the mid-century table as:

And...

Green bean casserole, from the kitchen of someone who likes food, is really delicious and something to look forward to. This one will give you something that looks and smells like the aftermath of a nuclear incident nearby a tiny alien logging operation.

 I don't remember anybody ever making this with Cream of Chicken soup, probably because that would have been marginally tasty. No, they always made it with gross-ass Cream of Mushroom because vegetables are supposed to be obligatory and disgusting, not delicious.

The Campbell's version of stuffed peppers was something I used to dread... a slimy, wrinkled, parboiled punishment on a plate. You stuck a fork in them and they burst, and this liquid that tasted like over-boiled green beans ran out and filled up your dish as the pepper deflated and laid there  like a gross saggy wrinkled Jolly Green Giant scrotum.

Here's the cookbook picture:

Looks pretty good, right?  Until you look closer.  That pan has never seen the inside of an oven.  Those peppers are raw. That's right. This is fucking staged.  And  you know why; because they took the first pan out of the oven, recoiled in horror, and called in a professional.  You make this dish according to their recipe and the peppers come out all pale and squatty and freaky, the tomato soup on top burns black because it's full of corn syrup.  Remember?

And what about these taste temptations?

...this wins, hands down, as the defining gross childhood dish of the 20th century.

I have no idea why this even exists as a recipe. But this is the actual Ur-tuna casserole recipe, right here. Lucky you!

Everyones' parents LOVED this shit. Absolutely loved it.  I have no idea why. Not only did it look disgusting and taste disgusting, it smelled like a taxicab seat. And there's fucking PEAS floating around in it.


And vying for number one with 'Pressure-Cooked Anything' on my childhood list of culinary horror:

This isn't out of the Campbell's cookbook.  It's out of this one again:

...published by people who really, really did not like Mormons, although that's just my opinion.

  This recipe is absolutely the most horrible thing that's ever been done to a piece of beef in the history of food.  It's absolutely revolting.  Our house version was, you took the steak and dumped the seasoned flour all over it and then beat it to death with a toothed mallet for about 20 minutes, turning it over and scraping all the frag and flour off the board and dumping it back on and whamming it in until the meat was pale gluey Easter pink and thin and holey enough to read a newspaper through; and so huge you could use it as a bathmat.  Then you just flopped in in the pan with everything else and let it boil for an hour while you stood over the stove with a Pall Mall dangling from your lips and poked it with a fork.

So remember, middle-aged America, the next time anyone tries to face you up about some of your food horror stories, you just show them this.  And don't forget to tell them...it gets worse.
Much, much worse.


________________________________________________________________
*ever notice that? You could always tell which casseroles were the nasty ones; they were the ones with the most delicious toppings.

Old Cookbooks: Why, God, Why?

I've been collecting old cookbooks for years and years and years and years.  Just lots and lots of years.  Lots of them. 

I have good cookbooks, average cookbooks, old cookbooks, and new cookbooks...but mostly, I have weird cookbooks and I have very, very BAD cookbooks.

Here's a few of the weird ones. 

I got this one at a YMCA thrift store in Sequim. Sequim, for those of you unfamiliar with the PNW, is where lifelong residents of the Northwest go to die. Now we know how.

The title is 'Cooking With Condensed Soups'. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a CAKE on the cover.

I haven't even cracked the thing yet. I just love knowing I own it.

You gotta clickie for the biggify on this one. It's worth it.

This is like a bad acid trip you'd have after reading the Wizard of Oz books. Seriously, if you opened your oven and found these things climbing around inside it you'd ask the landlord for a refund on your cleaning deposit, wouldn't you? Irregardless of which, you really want the recipe, don't you.

Your Worst Nightmare

 I have a bad haircut, no patience for bullshit,  a drivers license and a handgun.

Furthermore...

I'VE JUST BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD.

Be very afraid.

Why I Live Here Redux - a - go-go

This is real, this is not Photoshopped, this really appeared on the church readerboard down the street:

..it was a barbecue. What do you suppose was on the grill that day?