garden : no rain, no weeds

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After one of the coldest and wettest months of June in a decade, we’ve had a cold dry month of July thus far. As a result, I traveled a sine wave of worry and stress about the weeds. They took off in the month of June, creeping into the side beds that I’d covered with leaves and was barely keep clear. At the same time, the clover was overtaking the yard, which is fine in itself but the combination of nitrogen-rich clover clippings and buckets of rain made the lawn a jungle in that needed to be mown far more frequently than I’d like. So, the weeds were neglected and grew and grew along with my stress about whether we’d ever be able to beat them back again.

Then July came and I began to consider the nuclear option. I rejected that choice, but remained stressed about the amount of time the actual weeding was going to take. Enter my partner. Once it was established that we were not going to be poisoning the weeds, he took the weekend before last and went outside and weeded. For two days straight, everything that could be dug out was. He cleared 85% of the side beds, generating two trash cans and four contractor bags full of weeds and returning our backyard to a state more reflective of the hours (and hours [and hours]) of work we’ve put into it over the past three years. I was so pleased!

Since this great de-weeding, it still hasn’t rained which means that nothing is cropping up in the bare patches that we he created. It’s conceivable that we might make actual further forward progress this year; while the clear beds are nice, they’re the beds that we’ve progressively cleared each year, just with a few more stumps and saplings removed. Next up is the patch under the dogwood and sassafras, a corner of the yard that is remote from where the fence will be replaced. I’ve been loathe to add new plants in the areas that will invariably be trampled when we put in the new fence, but I can’t look at all that lovely cleared space without imagining flowerbeds.

For once, the timing has worked out splendidly and we’re looking at a ten-day stretch of thunderstorms in the area. With a little more garden luck, we’ll have a clear enough day on Friday that will allow us to get the second rain barrel installed and the poison ivy sprayed.

garden : no rain, no weeds

PG Pool

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Upon the urging of my yoga teacher, I joined PG Pool, a local private pool in Mount Rainier. I’m not really a private pool kind of person, having spent nearly every summer at my local public pool, first as a swimmer and later as a lifeguard. But, neither is she, and she assured me that it’s a very open pool full of hippies. The ‘hairy-legged breastfeeding pool’ is how it was described to her 18 years ago; that might not be as true these days, since they’ve redone the filter system and the pool liner and our area has gotten a bit more hip in the intervening time. Still, though, there’s a sign at the entrance that says they won’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or veteran status or disability, so that’s a pretty good indication that there are still some hippies kicking around.

Since we’ve joined, I’ve been swimming about every other day. It’s a small miracle that I am able to swim laps at all without having a nonfunctional shoulder, a result I attribute to a decade of body work and physical therapy. More recently, credit is due to the aligning and strengthening effects of 8 months of twice-weekly yoga classes. So I’m back in the pool and the pool is lovely; I’m only doing 600 meters at a time, but this is the most I’ve swum in over a decade so I’m happy. I never thought I’d be glad to have Speedo ™ tanlines, but I am! Truly, any visible marker of my progress is fine with me, and they come with my hair getting back to its ‘normal’ color. (You know, the color it is when I spend all day every day outside in the sun all summer…not something that people could confuse with brown!)

In addition to my regular swims, we’ve been going on weekend evenings to use the gas grills and hang out for the music and late night events. We keep running into people we know from other venues—neighbors, friend of a friend from college, more students of my yoga teacher—and we’re getting to know some new folks as well. We haven’t yet met any other members without kids, and that definitely makes us an anomaly there. I get the impression that the other adults who joined to swim laps go to the early morning swim; I suppose we probably are anomalies as non-parents who don’t mind spending an evening surrounded by hordes of kids.

One of the nice things about the pool is getting to share it with our friends, and we’re looking forward to another picnic dinner there on Saturday. If you show up then, you may get to witness the rare event of my partner drinking beer from a can! (No glass allowed.) Yes, it will probably be some weird imported stuff, but a can is a can.

PG Pool

food : first attempts at canning cherry jam

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The first attempt at making cherry jam did not go well, at least if you wanted the outcome to be cherry jam and not very sweet cherry sauce in a jar. There were a few things I did the first time that I did differently the second time that led to the second attempt being recognizable as jam (whether it’s still runny jam remains to be seen). One, I used frozen cherries and didn’t let them thaw first. Two, I didn’t cook the cherries long enough before adding the sugar. Three, I misoverestimated the volume of cherries I had and correspondingly added way too much sugar. As a result, I got cherry sauce, more cherry sauce than I have any idea what to do with as we regularly eat neither pancakes nor ice cream.

The second time around, I did all of those things differently. I used fresh cherries, cooked them until they were all coming apart, and then added a proportionate amount of sugar. Thus far what’s in the jars looks like jam and it’s already less runny than the cherry sauce; yes, I keep tipping the jars to the side even though you’re not supposed to touch them while they gel up for 24 hours. As I was boiling and stirring the second batch for what seemed like a really long time, I did some math in my head and concluded I could use four of the jars of cherry sauce and a quart of fresh cherries as the base for the cherry-walnut conserves that I’m planning to make tomorrow, and have just about the correct amount of fruit and sugar. That will leave me with only four jars of cherry sauce—a number that seems manageable and like an amount we could work into desserts over the course of a year—and with two quarts of fresh cherries to make another batch of jam.

The very last canning-related thing that happened today was that one of my pickle jars exploded when I put it in the hot water. Which was really frustrating because (1) pickles are supposed to be easier than jam and (2) I never know whether to boil the jars in sticky water or try to skim out the stuff and add fresh water or what. This happened with one of the jars of apple chutney in the fall, suddenly the pot was full of floating raisins and bits of onion, and I went with the skimming and dilution with fresh water approach. This time around I just boiled them in sticky water and wiped down the jars when they came out.

So, tomorrow we will redo today. I will prep the cukes first, so that the four hour soak happens early in the day, for which I will also prepare by refilling the ice cube trays before I go to bed. I will then one quart of cherries and make the cherry-walnut conserves, pit two more quarts of cherries and make another batch of jam, and then do another round of bread and butter pickles. I will then be done with all of the fresh cherries I have remaining and the cherry season will be behind us; I passed on the last few quarts were at the farmers’ market yesterday due to the many I already have. My shoulder will certainly be glad to move on to a tool besides the cherry pitter, that’s for sure.

food : first attempts at canning cherry jam

food : cherries, cherries, cherries

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Cherries on the porch.

This is the time of year I’ve been waiting for: sour cherry season! I like sweet cherries fine, but you can’t bake with them, and it’s the sour cherry baked goods that I love. Pie, mainly, but also strudel and turnovers and muffins and croissants and danishes. When they’re well done, that is; there’s nothing I like less than a chemical-tasting dyed imitation of any of these fine products. Which is why I was so excited to discover a local source of sour cherries—besides the backyard of a woman I know, whose sour cherries are already spoken for—so that I can make all these things myself.

My first cherry pickup was ten quarts. That seems like a lot when you’re pitting and storing them, but really isn’t that much when you think about all the stuff you want to make with them. Including a recipe that I found online for something in between chocolate cake and brownies filled with cherries, which was absolutely mouthwateringly moist and delicious (I think all the naysayers must have just used sweet cherries, which we all know are for eating not baking). And jam. How could I forget jam? I didn’t forget jam, I just neglected plan for jam in the first round. Which meant that this week I picked up even more sour cherries at the market and continued the pitting through the week. Jam-making will be today (and possibly also tomorrow, depending on how many more cherries are available at today’s market). I plan to use David Lebovitz’s no-recipe recipe. While I’m making jam this week, I may as well also try the Cherry Walnut Conserve in the all-purpose Ball canning book, right? I mean, she gives me a discount if I buy in bulk, so it’s better to get more quarts than fewer. Having cherry jam in the dead of winter will make all the pitting worthwhile!

food : cherries, cherries, cherries

Sonic Youth at the 9:30 Club

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So, we saw Sonic Youth last night at the 9:30 Club. They were good; we were at the second of two sold-out shows and I’d guess a lot of the audience was repeaters. Except for the times when we were all focused on the woman in the opposite balcony who was first leaning over the railing in her bra, then getting in a fight with her (pretty obnoxious) boyfriend who was trying to control her, and then getting physically dragged out, we were all glued to the stage and happily nodding our heads in time. (We were old, tired, and in the balcony; plus, the band played some pretty mellow stuff.) The performance was solid; I suppose after sixteen albums and tours and thirty years of playing together you get to be pretty comfortable with each other. And, it was actually quite cool to see them produce all the funky sounds they’re known for, using their actual instruments rather than a Macbook.

Before this show, I hadn’t listened to Sonic Youth in fifteen years, and I’d definitely skipped all that 90s stuff (the phase when they became what someone called ‘more experimental’). Everything they played sounded vaguely familiar but I didn’t know any single song well enough to sing along; I don’t actually own any of their CDs despite recognizing their musical greatness. (If I hadn’t already lost my hipster card by not liking The White Stripes and finding The Mountain Goats to be atrocious, now would be the time for it to be recalled.) Which is to say, I can’t tell you what the set list was or how their live performance diverged from their studio recordings or whether the time that Kim had to swap out her instrument because she either broke a string or the tech brought the wrong one was a point when she was actually supposed to be playing.

You can, however, listen to the concert on NPR and answer all those questions for yourselves.

Sonic Youth at the 9:30 Club