Author: girl

no zen for Joe Lieberman

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I think it’s fair to say that no one yanks my political chain quite like Joe Lieberman. I don’t know why, if I’m being honest. If I were more enlightened, I might be able to find it in myself to be more compassionate and accepting of Joe. Even if I’m not there yet, there are plenty of other smarmy lying position-shifting power-hungry old white dudes in Congress that I could be hating on. Except.

Except none of them are quite like Joe. Back when he was just a Republican in Democrat clothing, I gave him the same derision I shared with the other panderers to the right who remained Democrats because that’s what their home states and regions demanded in order to continue to be elected. That was, generally speaking, the problem for Democrat true believers, not so much a problem for me. The Democrats in general, and Joe in particular, really started to get my goat when he was selected as the Democrat candidate for vice-president. Surely they could have found an actual Democrat for that position? Bygones, water under the bridge, et cetera. Let’s move on.

Having been the millstone around the Democrats neck — why vote for a Republican in Democrat clothing when we can just vote for an actual Republican? being what any thinking person would say — Joe just carried on voting with the other party. Until, you know, the Democrats back in his home state got tired of that and he lost his party primary as an incumbent. Oops. Not to be deterred, Joe left the party.

That’s right, Joe. It sounds like you need to be reminded of this: you LEFT THE PARTY, which makes you NOT A DEMOCRAT. Now, if you had joined the Republican party, in accord with both your stated politics and your voting record, I might have a little more respect for you (it would be hard to have less). But you didn’t. Because that would be career-ending for you, a Senator from a state in the Northeast, and you know it. Instead you just vote with them, shuck and jive for them, and lie about your party affiliation on national TV. Way to stand by your convictions, Joe! Not.

Of course, it would be a little harder for Joe to lie about his party affiliation with a straight face if the Democrats hadn’t rewarded his defection from the party and his Republican voting record by making him a committee chair. That’s right: Joe Lieberman, the Democrat incumbent that his party didn’t want, who is no longer a Democrat at all, holds a committee chair position of the majority. Please tell me you knew that already. This right here is why I leave the Democrat-praising to the true believers. When the party stops rewarding Republicans in Independent clothing with chair positions — positions they only have to dole out because a lot of people worked their arses off two years ago to get actual Democrats elected to office — that’s when I might consider supporting the party as a whole.

Of course, by the time that unlikely scenario happens we’ll likely have a whole new actual opposition party on the left for me to get behind.

no zen for Joe Lieberman

‘George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People’

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It’s hard not to be thinking about Katrina, the flooding, and the breach of the neglected levees, with the Republicans doing their lying jiving schtick in Minnesota this week and the Louisiana gulf coast being evacuated ahead of flooding rains. It’s not easy to forget the outpouring of support and help, the way people across the country opened their homes to refugees, some of my neighbors among them, and others traveled to the region to help clean up and begin to rebuild, some of my students among them. It’s also not easy to forget the ensuing messes such as the toxic FEMA trailers and the embezzlement of funds from the Red Cross.

Not that we should be forgetting this stuff. We absolutely should not, and further, we should apply these lessons to the future. This was not an anomaly. This is the way Republicans run things in the new world order. This is the kind of thing John McCain will do, because this is what John McCain did do. Don’t be fooled by the appearance of a person with a uterus — but not one who believes in exercising her legally protected right to make her own choices about what to do with it — on the ticket or a former Democrat — but not one who is willing to take the career-ending step of becoming an actual Republican — at the convention. What we saw three years ago was the real deal, and to all of us who said on the morning of November 8th, 2000 — right after ‘dude, wtf happened while I was asleep?!’ — oh, how bad can it actually be, I want to say: a whole lot worse than it is already.

This wasn’t meant to be a political post per se. It was just to say, lest we forget: you can’t polish a turd. I know that, the Legendary K.O. knows that, and I hope that you all know that, too.

‘George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People’

trials and tribulations : resolved!

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This calendar year has been a bit one-thing-after-another and when-it-rains-it-pours, which has led despite my best intentions to quite a bit of kvetching and moaning around our household. I’m happy to report that our various unfortunate developments have all been resolved quite nicely.

Most recently, Carefirst has correctly reprocessed the remainder of my claims and sent me a letter clarifying that there is not and should not have been a waiting period on my account. It required the intervention of the Better Business Bureau: while Carefirst wouldn’t discuss my actual medical coverage with them, filing a claim led to contact with a real live person at Carefirst with the authority to just make things happen correctly. I appreciated that, was (I hope) very polite to her on the phone, while being grateful that she was very polite back to me. That’s all taken care of, without me needing to file a claim with the Maryland Insurance Administration as well, and I’m now established with Kaiser. Let’s hope I never have to return to the BlueCross network again.

Just before that came through, we successfully challenged the charges Speakeasy levied against our credit card for the failed installation of our DSL service. Thanks to my partner’s compulsive saving of webpages via the CutePDF Writer, we had access to the trouble logs after our account and its attendant access to Speakeasy’s website was discontinued. When we formally disputed the charges we could therefore submit some 60 pages documenting our communications with the company (wherein we explicitly decline to accept the service as satisfactorily installed no less than four times over the course of six weeks). Not surprisingly, the credit card company found in our favor there.

And, some months ago now, we did manage to successfully install the EasyCloset system to convert our small hall closet into a pantry of sorts. It still wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend the system for plaster walls unless you have a large closet such that you can’t just get a standard bookshelf and plunk it in there (which is effectively what we ended up doing, with a lot of cutting and remounting to fit the shelves in around the mouldings). The company did, however, exchange the uprights for longer ones that would sit on the floor at no extra cost to us, for which we are very appreciative.

While all that was going on, I arranged to have my grandmother’s dining room furniture shipped internationally, with much help from my aunt and uncle up north. The furniture arrived safely this past week, so that’s one less worry outstanding. For the last few weeks of summer I’ll work on wrapping up my remaining tasks in progress: mailing out marriage announcements, writing thank you cards for the receptions, submitting newspaper notices, and ordering and installing new toilets commodes for all three bathrooms. Good times.

trials and tribulations : resolved!

summer of pie

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My first cherry pie.

This summer has been full of pies, and I expect I’m not quite done yet as I’ve promised a friend a peach pie for her September birthday. The peach pie will be the sixth pie of the summer, and I think that’s a nice round number. I’m sure there will be apple pies and sweet potato pies and the like in autumn, but we’ll take those when they come.

To kick off the pie making, we celebrated the 4th of July by having dinner with the family of my good friend from college, to which my contribution was a cherry pie. I had planned to make a peach pie, knowing that was a favorite of our host, but the folks at the fruit stand assured me that the only local peaches good for pie-making didn’t ripen until later in the summer. Despite my best efforts to seek assurances that the peaches they sold for eating fresh would be fine in pies, they held steady and advised me to go with their fresh tart cherries. I wasn’t a hard sell; cherry pie is my favorite. Knowing that tart fresh cherries are hard to find and wouldn’t be available long, I took the plunge and snapped up ten quarts, enough for five pies. Two of those quarts I made into a delicious pie, and eight of those quarts I pitted and froze for use later in the year.

Despite what we might assume about pie, it wasn’t a given that the cherry pie would be delicious. Mostly because I have been experimenting with whole wheat crusts and wasn’t entirely sure how that was going to turn out. Using the newly widely available Organic White Whole Wheat flour from King Arthur, I can say that their ‘just like white flour but brown!’ advertising is truthful. Unlike with traditional whole wheat flour, the white whole wheat flour performs pretty much the same in recipes; it has a subtly different taste, but it’s not as grainy or flat as replacement with traditional whole wheat flour tends to be. It’s more brown, which bothers some people but I personally like. I’ve also discovered that the crust recipe I use is perfectly suited for assembly in a food processor, which boosts the performance of the wheat flour as the dough is only minimally handled. The other factor in the cherry pie, which wasn’t likely to impact the taste, was the lattice top, another first for me. I went, shall we say, rustic with it: I made the strips of dough wider and included fewer of them, making the whole lattice assembly go more quickly and easily. In the end, of course, it was a delicious homemade cherry pie and nobody noticed any of the things I’d worried about (the above plus my concern that there was more juice than there should have been in the filling and my overcompensating by adding in some tapioca).

Following the cherry pie success, I made an apricot-ginger pie just because the fruit folks had fresh apricots that reminded me of the tree my grandparents used to have at the side of their house. That pie was ok — it was a homemade pie — but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy apricots again in the future. If I had a tree in my yard, the pie would be a perfectly reasonable way of using them if I weren’t planning to spend hours making jam. Since I don’t, it was a good experiment that I fed mostly to my partner’s weekly gaming crew.

After a lull in pie-making during which we traveled around and recovered from being ill, I made three blueberry pies in the course of a couple of weeks. In the past I’ve been loathe to use the fresh blueberries for pies, but by the time they make it back to our fridge the oldest ones are invariably starting to wilt a bit, making them ideal for baking. Blueberry pies are always an appreciated contribution to a dinner with friends, which was the destiny of two of the pies, and a handy way to welcome new neighbors, which was the destiny of a portion of the third pie. Not all pies get more tasty after a day in the fridge, but I find that my favorites typically do: cherry, apple and blueberry (now you know).

In the course of all this pie-making and transporting, I had the opportunity to use my handy pie carrier — for which I was heartily mocked last year when I purchased it, I must say, the phrase of choice being something like ‘how often are you taking a pie somewhere really?’ I still think it’s one of the best investments of $8 I’ve made for the house, and have found that almost every time I make a pie it’s headed to someone else’s house. I was, though, disappointed to discover that the crust guard I received as a gift a couple of years ago doesn’t fit on my large pie plates, but I’m hopeful that it will still fit on the smaller metal one. And, I can continue to heartily recommend the Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart cookbook, as the blueberry and apricot-ginger recipes came from them (the cherry pie recipe did not, but instead from Bon Appétit via the internet, as the Williams-Sonoma recipe called for canned cherries).


Pie never lasts long at our house.

summer of pie

garden log : insects

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Male Polyphemus Moth in our backyard.

This has been a great summer for sighting large insects in our backyard! I can’t take too much credit, as they’re attracted to food sources already present that I simply leave alone. The cicada killers love our yard, possibly more so than other sandy-soiled backyards in our town because I don’t use pesticides on our lawn which makes the ground a friendly habitat for them to make their burrows. I imagine they can find cicadas pretty much anywhere, but clean ground is more rare out here in the suburbs. We’ve had several swooping around our backyard these past couple of weeks, and little hills of dirt are starting to pop up. Not to be confused with the mole mounds that are also appearing, although I’m now wondering if some of last year’s hills that I attributed to the mole were actually from the wasps. For the first time this year I also spotted dragonflies in our yard, which tells you how bad the mosquitoes have been around here. Not just in our yard: on a recent walk through the town park, I saw at least a dozen dragonflies and damselflies swooping over the grass.

The most exciting find, however, was something totally new. Yesterday, the contractor who’s repairing our rear wall alerted me to the presence of a male Polyphemus Moth outside on his scaffolding. While I’ve heard all about these giant moths that don’t eat and die shortly after breeding — the Luna Moth being the most celebrated — I’d never seen one before. I can see why people get so excited about them: they are so cool! Besides being as big as my hand, the predator wing-snap reflex is something else. One small twitch of a neighboring leaf as I tried to get a better photo, and BANG out come the wings with the little cat eyes staring right at me.

This is the second insect I’ve seen this year that prefers sassafras for food. We have a small sassafras tree on the south side of our house, and two saplings springing up next to it. Sadly, the sassafras is in the area that might have to go the way of a dead tree if we decide to do exterior waterproofing work around our house. For now, though, it’s apparently providing habitat for not just an enormous moth but the Spicebush Swallowtail, several of which I’ve seen in our yard this year. The moth apparently also enjoys quince leaves, so it’s possible it was hanging out in the small grove of those this summer.

Besides these exciting newcomers, we have a gazillion crickets in the lawn, which means I am constantly startling little flocks of sparrows up out of the grass when I go outside. The odd Jiminy-type cricket makes its way into the basement — by which I mean LARGE — and when that happens we rescue it from the risk of the glue-traps (set out for the completely squicky camel crickets to meet their slow dooms) and toss it back into the lawn for the birds. Speaking of birds, having sprayed for the Eastern Tent Caterpillars this year, the cherry trees were healthy enough to actually set fruit, and we have loads of birds munching away in the heights. All of which assures me that I am providing plentiful food sources even with the discontinuation of my bird feeders following our various rat and cat problems.

garden log : insects