Fa-la-la-la-la la-la la la!

It's Thanksgiving weekend and that can mean only one thing: overeating and decorating a tree. Two things! Overeating, decorating a tree, and shopping. Three things!

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, we set up the tree. We have an artificial tree that is strung with lights. We just have to take it out of the box, put the sections on the stand and plug each section's lights into the lower lower section's line.

Jerry rearranged the family room a bit. The chaise longue portion of the sofa got moved into the bedroom and the recliners shifted into the space that that made.

Here's the newly emptied space:

Here's the first section of the tree:

And the second:

And the last section with the lights burning:

We then paused to give thanks. Jerry's cousin moved to Las Vegas so we had to start a new Thanksgiving tradition. We fixed the whole spread for just the two of us. Jerry got us a Tofurky roast (Oh, look, it's made by Turtle Island Foods! Is that cool, or what?) that was roasted with carrots from our garden. We made dressing (from cornbread made from corn we ground ourselves), mashed potatoes (well, butter with some potatoes to keep it from being too runny), green bean casserole (what Thanksgiving dinner is complete without green bean casserole?), cranberries and French Silk pie (we haven't come down with salmonella poisoning yet).

Today we stimulated the economy at the Arts 'n Crafts fair at Bates Nut Farm. Our usual post-Thanksgiving Arts Festival wasn't done this year. Shoot!

We came home and napped. Then we decorated the tree. Here's the finished tree.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

A little autumn color

My Haemanthus albiflos is blooming. It is a confused plant. It doesn't really know when to bloom. I remember that it was blooming around my birthday one year. It blooms when it wants to. It knows best.

It's got white petals (or are they bracts?) with a bunch of bright yellow stamens poking out. I gave it a bigger pot this year and I think it appreciated that. It's putting on its best show ever.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Concrete and tile stepping stone.

MLM: NOT (thank God!) Another Priest in the Family!

Peggy tells me when I was very young that I was introduced to one of our relatives on the religious side of the family. She exclaimed "Another priest in the family!" I have no idea who that was but she must have been disappointed. Religion and I never got together.

I went through the motions for a while because I didn't have much of a choice. When you are born to a Catholic parent you are raised a Catholic.

The best thing about growing up Catholic (until Vatican II changed the rules) was that I couldn't eat meat on Fridays. I got to eat more peanut butter! Yay, Friday! (Oh, my! I just checked and apparently it's a myth that Vatican II let us eat meat on Friday! Oh, well.) I went to Neil Gardner's birthday party one year that happened to be on a Friday. Mrs. Gardner served hot dogs. Later that day I realized that I had committed a mortal sin. I was terrified. I wonder if I confessed that. Was Mrs. Gardner trying to send this Catholic to hell?

One of the worst things about growing up Catholic was having to go to catechism class every week after school. Didn't they know that kids would rather play after school?

In our early years we got to memorize the answers to many questions so that we could prove to the priest that we deserved to take our First Communion. Later, we got to memorize answers to many questions to prove that we deserved to get our Confirmation. One of the things that we do when we get confirmed is take the name of a saint who is special to us. I didn't know one saint from another. (Did they teach us about saints? Did I miss that lesson?) Beth had been appalled that none of the boys in her group had taken the Archbishop's name so I took the Archbishop's name. What was the Archbishop's name?

I think that this is one of the tests I took that prepared me for confirmation. I aced it!

The catechism teacher gave me a good assessment (but she couldn't spell my name).





When she sent us off to summer vacation, she gave us a little card with reminders of what to do after we were released from her care.
There is no record of my going to mass on First Fridays or any other times. And my parent or guardian didn't attest to my fulfilling these duties. I'm off to hell.


Sometime during my catechism career, I was taken from class to be a model in a photo shoot. I have no idea what the pictures were going to be used for but I got a copy of one of them! I'm fiddling with a little model of an altar or something. How inspiring!
I'm the one on the left. I don't know who the others are. I don't know what I did to deserve this honor.

Another honor I had was to have my birthday fall on the Feast of the Ascension, a Holy Day of Obligation, a couple of times. Geez! I had to go to church on my birthday and it wasn't even a Sunday! NOT FAIR!

Around the seventh or eighth grade I somehow got to make the decision that I wasn't going to go to church anymore. How did I get to decide that? Children can't decide things like that for themselves.

Except for weddings and funerals, the last time I can remember going to church was when we visited Tucumcari and I went along to let our grandmother see that she had good grandkids following the right path.

Halloween, Christmas, Birthdays, Christmas, Christmas

Here's the third carousel of family slides. Halloween, 1955, from the second set continues. Then we see Christmas and a couple of birthdays.

Then we run into a little trouble...mostly naked little girls. They make me nervous so I blacked out a lot of them. I don't want to contribute to sick people's fantasies.

Quick update already: The naked girls make me really nervous so they're gone. If any of you grown up girls want to see yourselves in just your panties, let me know.

Then more Christmases.

We're seeing some of the line-up-an-smile! style of picture taking. And there are some pictures of kids not having a good time at Christmas.

Ah, such memories! (Well, not yet for me. I was only two and a half at the end of this set.)

Carousel-03

I want to know more about that nifty washing machine in the living room.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A tile, 3¼" square.

MLM: Taking a bye

I'm tired and won't dredge up a reminiscence this week. (Please see my three previous posts to see why I'm tuckered out.)

I've been macerating all day and, boy, are my arms tired!

It's that time of the year again...time for The Dreaded Fruitcake.

For several years I've been making fruitcakes using Alton Brown's Free Range Fruitcake recipe. He's tweaked the recipe for his book "I'm Just Here For More Food" (I'm sure you can get it at Otowi Station) and I've followed those tweaks again this year.

Last year I made three fruitcakes. One for Jerry and Me and two for my New Mexican family members to divide four ways. This year I decided to be more ambitious.

Today I made six fruitcakes. One for each of my sisters and my mother. And one for Jerry and me.

The day started with macerating the dried fruit in rum.

After the fruit has plumped up it is cooked in apple juice, apple cider (hard), sugar, and butter.

After it cools for half an hour, eggs are mixed in and the wet ingredients are added to the flours, leavenings, and cinnamon (using the Muffin Method (see AB's book)). The cakes are baked for an hour. After they come out of the oven they are doused with brandy.

Here are the first two fruitcakes.
It was another hot day (it got up to 91°F) so they got baked in the convection oven out in the garden room. I have three big loaf pans so I baked a third cake after the first two came out of the oven.

They have to cool completely before taking them out of the pans so I couldn't bake the other three right away. And big fruitcakes take a long time to cool. But they finally cooled and I got to do it all over again.

This time I baked in the kitchen. It cooled off by evening time so I didn't mind heating up the house. I baked them in two shifts again since I didn't want to crowd the oven.

It's been a long day and I'm beat. The sixth fruitcake is about to come out of the oven and I'll be able to finally take a nap!

So, unless I hear pleas from any of you sisters or mother demanding otherwise, you should be getting a fruitcake in about a month. That's how long it takes for me to finish the process. Brandy spritzes, you know.

Harvest Time

It is autumn and that means pomegranates are getting ripe. Today was pomegranate harvest and canning. Here's the bush before the harvest.

Too bad it didn't perform as well as it did last year. This is the entire harvest.

And here is what was inside the fruits.
The pomegranate is a "Utah Sweet." This type has very sweet, light pinkish pulp and nonstaining pink juice.

I made pomegranate jelly. First I had to get the juice out of the seeds. I fed them through the food strainer attachment of the KitchenAid mixer. I made a little video of the process and shortened it so show only the start and the finish. Blogger's video processor thought it was still too long and sped it up a lot. That's OK, you get the gist of the process. They didn't speed up the audio part. So, if you have 47 seconds to spare, you can watch my latest little movie.



I ended up with 3¼ cups of juice.
The recipe for a batch of jelly calls for 4 cups of juice. Since I knew the harvest was not great, I had a contingency plan. I bought a bottle of Trader Joe's pure pomegranate juice from concentrate. I added some of that to bring the juice up to 4 cups.

I then stood over the hot stove on this hot day (it got up to 88.4 today) stirring the juice, pectin, and sugar and ended up with six half-pint jars of jelly.
Yum!

Been there, done that

Well, I seem to have had some free time tonight. While doing puzzles and browsing through some New Yorker magazines, I scanned another carousel of slides. The scanner does four slides at a time so there was some time between loads of slides to do something else.

This time we go from Easter, 1952, to Halloween, 1955. As more and more kids arrived, fewer and fewer pictures of the newborns were taken. And, strangely, Bobbie's first Christmas was not photographed (at least not with slides that made it to this carousel).

I hope you have your insulin ready...here comes some major sweetness!

Carousel-02

I have this notion that I will catalog all these pictures and put the details in a database that will be used to let people use their favorite browsers to search for pictures containing selected people in special occasions and the likes. So, if anybody can identify the guests at Peggy's birthday party, could you let me know? Email would be fine if we don't want to identify them publicly.

More Picture Torture

Here's another installment of family photo fun.  This is the carousel number 1 of the slides.  We go from Mom and Dad's wedding day to Peggy's second Christmas.  (There are no pictures of her first Christmas here.  What's up with that?)

Carousel-01

(Somehow I don't think I'll get a whole carousel of 100 slides scanned every two days.  I need to take a nap.)

Sirius XM

The Sirius and XM channels with similar programming were consolidated today. Sirius didn't have a channel devoted to music of the '40s so that is a nice thing to get from XM. Other than that there wasn't much coming from XM that I noticed that I'm excited about.

But you with XM receivers are now getting Met Opera Radio. I am so happy for you! From September to May you'll be hooked to your radio four times a week. Tonight they're broadcasting "La traviata" for the umteenth time this season but I listen again and again. The intermission interviews are always interesting (except when Will Berger gets involved).

Tomorrow you have your last chance to hear Doctor Atomic. Don't miss it. I'll probably listen again but I haven't been thrilled with it. Even seeing it at the broadcast to the movie theaters last weekend didn't help much. The music was interesting but the vocal parts never interested me. Except the Act I finale, "Batter my Heart," was almost interesting. But you Los Alamosers should listen just because it happened there.

Welcome to Met Opera Radio!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Our kitchen clock.

A missed opportunity

Today was the 20th Anniversary of Jerry and my becoming the owners of our house. I forgot about that until this afternoon when I was discussing septic systems with Francine at work. How that triggered my memory of the events of 20 years ago I don't know.

I dug through our box of haphazardly (dis)organized pictures with the hopes of finding some pictures of the changes to the house over the years. I found some of the remodeling projects but couldn't find any that showed the house as it was when we moved in. There must be some of those somewhere.

You'll just have to be picturelessly impressed that we've been here 20 whole years. And there's no way we're moving now. There's just too much stuff to pack (see here for a very small sample of what would have to be packed).

Maybe before the next 20 years pass we'll get hooked up to a sewer.

MLM: Edmund Scientific

I loved the Edmund Scientific's catalog when I was a kid. It was filled with all sorts of fascinating stuff. They had scientific toys and fun pseudoscientific stuff (I got my Pyrex crystal ball from them). They had magnets and iron filings that let you see magnetic lines of force.

They had stuff that was way out of my reach that I could only dream about. There were the motor-driven Celestron telescopes with equatorial mounts! There were the oil immersion microscopes.

How I wished we were rich so I could have all of neat things in the catalog.

But it was a thrill getting less expensive things. It started with filling out the order form. You'd enter the quantity, the item's descripton, the catalog number, the unit price, and the total amount for the quantity ordered (usually just the unit price, darn it!). You'd add up all the lines and Mom or Dad would write a check (thanks Mom and Dad!) and send it off.

Then you'd wait.

Some time later the mailman would deliver a package and you'd get to live your dreams!

One of those packages had a set of fluorescent crayons.
I had a black light. This was back in the age of DayGlo posters that lit up spectacularly under black light. But those were for Hippies. I had better use for my black light. I had rocks and minerals that fluoresced (after all, the word comes from fluorite!). But while I was at it, do-it-yourself black light posters were a fun thing to make. Thus the crayons. Cool, huh?

You'll notice that three of the crayons are missing. Well, either Pough or Dough got into my box of fluorescent crayons and ate some of them. This made for an exciting tour of poop patrol duty. Crayons, you know, don't digest. They come out pretty much the way they go in. With a long extension cord and my black light, the bits of crayons in the Pough poo-poo (or the Dough doo-doo) made for easy pickins.

(By the way, I convinced Mom to throw that black light away instead of giving it to Casa Mesita. It had only a little cardboard taped to its back to keep little kids from being electrocuted.)

Slide Show!

It's finally time to begin the dreaded slide show of our family pictures.

When I helped Mom move stuff from her old house to her new condo, we boxed up all the carousels and trays of the bazillion slides that have been living in the cold room for all these years. I brought them home with me. Well, I missed a box that got lost in the commingled pile of stuff Mom was taking out and the stuff Poss was bringing in.

I spent a couple of hours scanning two trays of slides from the 1940s and put them in my Picasa Web Album. So far there aren't a lot of pictures really worth looking at. The first tray has some wartime pictures that are worthwhile but the second is probably interesting only to those who were there at the time (and since there are few people in the pictures I have no idea who those might be).

These albums probably won't be permanent. I'll replace them with new pictures as I scan them. I'll keep all the pictures and send out DVDs with them to interested people when I get enough to make that worth the trouble.

The names, places, and dates that were written on the slides are the pictures' captions. You can add comments to the pictures where you can correct or enhance the descriptions. I'll try to save the corrections for the final collection of the pictures.

Click on these pictures to be taken to the albums:

1940s Tray 1 Wartime pictures and White Sands

1940s Tray 2 More outings and Highlands Homecoming

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Canteen signed Dawavendewa.

MLM: How I Make My Home a Happy Home

In third grade we seem to have had an assignment to write an essay on how we make our homes happy homes. We seem to have had to illustrate it as well.

I got a B.

(This really doesn't qualify for a memory lane outing. I have no recollection of this assignment. Mom saved it in my box of memories and here it is.)

For you who don't want to read my terrible writing, here's an edited transcript:

How I make my Home a happy home

April 15, 1964 yours truly

I like to help my mother wash dishes? It's fun, but my hands [get] water logged.

I help clean up [the] backyard. It's not fun.

I clean up my room. It's not easy because my mother puts all the old junk in my room.

I share with my sister's. I don't have any brother's.

I don't believe that I really enjoyed helping with the dishes.

By the way, while I was in Los Alamos a couple of weeks ago, Peggy gave me a recollection of my cleaning the backyard. When we were kids we had poop patrol where we had to clean up the three dogs' poop and sign the calendar to verify that we'd actually done our chore. (Dad was way ahead of Sarbanes-Oxley in accounting for time!) After I did my patrol one evening I came in and announced to Dad, "I cleaned up the Pough poo-poo, the Dough doo-doo, the Chris crap, and signed the shit sheet." (The schnauzers' names, "Pough" and "Dough," are pronounced "poo" and "doo.") Dad, she says, was not amused.

Back to the happy home essay...here is the brochure that accompanied it.

How I make my home a happy home
Take a look inside

Front cover

Inside

I can't figure out the "Cleaning up my room" illustration. That might be my bed but I don't know what the black part of the picture is. Some of the junk that got stored there?

I'm using a rake in the "Cleaning Up the Backyard" part. It looks like a shovel would have been the appropriate tool (see Peggy's recollection above).

I don't know why Peggy is being a grouch. I'm sharing with her. Poss doesn't seem to be excited. Bobbie's happy with me, at least. Karen was only five months old at the time so I didn't have anything to share with her yet.

We had a happy home, didn't we?

Yma Sumac

Along with Judy and Babs, we had Yma Sumac to be enthralled with. Or so a friend who lived through her heyday told me. On his recommendation, I got her first album, "Voice of the Xtabay," and was completely bewildered by what could be the attraction. All I heard was a bunch of wailing.

Was it camp? Or was she like Florence Foster Jenkins and was loved for the sincerity of her performances? Or was she great and I just didn't get it?

Yma Sumac died yesterday. There is now a room in heaven where her fans will be eternally enthralled with her. (And there is a room in hell that will get a broadcast of the performance in HD with surround sound where people with my appreciation of her Art will be in agony.)

So, until we get to have our seat in one of those rooms we'll just have to dream about Yma.

For samples of her singing you might try some that you can find on YouTube.

And here is another version of Yma Dream:


Her obituary from The New York Times.