Author Archives: Rohvannyn

Seasonal Giving

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 21, 2012 at 12:15 AM

I attended an office gift exchange yesterday and my Secret Santa gave me the same thing I’d given her: Starbuck’s gift cards. That was okay except I’ve pretty much given up drinking coffee except in one or two contexts and I don’t need the sweets. The whole thing got me thinking about Holiday gifts in general and how stocking stuffers have transformed from oranges and Yo-yos and decks of playing cards when I was a kid (yes folks, really, truly) to palm pilots and cell phones.

A great deal has been said and written about how electronics pretty much rule the lives of young people in particular from computers large and small to personal communication devices to online networks which I don’t even particularly want to comprehend. Recent events which I’ve already spoken of in this blog again strongly suggest that among our most dangerous neighbors is a propensity for certain kinds of militaristic video games. Of course I’m not saying that anyone who plays a mass destruction video game is a sociopath or will become one but in the last 20 years or so I have noticed a tendancy toward turning Inward among younger people.

What I mean by Inward is a tendency to look into the system whether it be a computer game, a communication network such as Facebook, or a cellpphone which plays games with you and shows you the weather while you’re waiting for that all-important call. All this is going on Inside the system, network app, whatever.

I’m not decrying electronics. I’m a technologist myself and electronics are one of the most enormously transforming growth industries of the last century or so but shouldn’t we expect even more? Computers, phones, cyber nets do stupendous things within electronic memory. They certainly flummox me and I’m a reasonably good programmer. If you look at some of the things a person can dooutside the network, by this I mean from the network outward, we can see that we might be unnecessarily limiting ourselves.

This Christmas I bought matching lasers for my grown-up daughter and her friend. This is something I could only (and did) dream about when I was younger. What do you use a personal laser for? Hell, whatever you use a laser for, burn stuff, melt stuff, pop balloons!   Take a look at The Cupcake CNC at makerbot.com and you’ll see a way to externalize a computers thoughts into something you can hold in your hand and use for many, many purposes. There are teaching robots which are essentially mobile erector sets with access to PC brains which can be modified and augmented in myriad ways. It’s possible to fly a model airplane a hydroplane or a helicopter from the computer. All these things get give us the gritty, challenging, often frustrating texture of real world experience and since the science fiction days of the 1950s I haven’t heard of a roboticist who committed mass murder.

Certainly let’s give our kids, spouses, students, computers and communication devices but for Goddess sake let’s give them also things to hook up to them which help them understand and utilize the wondrous variety of phenomena, effects and processes going on in the world around us. Let’s build a miniaturized, electronically controlled winery with the output of which we may toast the future!

Glynda

Santa brought a tiny headstone this December

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 21, 2012 at 12:15 AM

I don’t usually cry out loud, but Friday after endless cycles of the gruesome news from Connecticut I broke.   I was fixing pizza in the kitchen and I suddenly began to sob, saying “Poor Babies!” I wrote a poem that was so sad I couldn’t read it aloud. If listening over and over to this terribly plaintive news would bring back even one of these little ones I would do so but after a while it’s pretty clear who the shooter was and that he brought a semi automatic rifle and two semiautomatic pistols with him. Once the numbers of dead and wounded stabilized there wasn’t much more to learn. I derived some comfort from the religious services which were broadcast but feel an angry pang each time I hear the story of this mass murder reported as if it’s a new story and we don’t all have the history so far.

There’s nothing much I can say about the event itself that hasn’t been said multiple times and perhaps better than I would have said them but not for the first time I’ve been thinking about not the 2nd amendment but the 1st. While as a gun owner and a proponent of reasonable gun rights myself, I’m not sure at all that I see any reason for any civilian person to own assault rifles, rifles which can fire as fast as one can pull the trigger and fire 30 or more times before being reloaded (itself a matter of a couple seconds) to keep firing. The revolvers I own can fire just as fast, six or nine times depending on the weapon but once that burst of mayhem is over there must elapse some time before I can do it again.

High volume of fire is strictly for attacking large groups of personnel or in some cases, interdicting territory through which you want nothing to pass alive. Neither of these are hunting or civilian or home defense functions. Okay I’ve said these things and may well offend some people but I think a lot of us are missing something pretty important.

While I don’t think assault weapons are necessarily a good idea in the hands of excitable folks I am not at all sure that their absence would prevent episodes such as the one which took place on the 14th in Connecticut. What is it that makes a young man, (yes, usually young and so far, pretty much always male) stoop to such a heinous not to mention cowardly act as to slaughter twenty tots basically, children who are hardly more than babies? Doubtless some internalized disgruntlement must be a factor because consequences will be significant and it’s probably not a lightly arrived upon course of action. Whatever the motivation though, I suspect the reason for committing the act has little to do with the identities of the victims. These acts are cries, shrieks! Of self pity and hatred at the world in general. The reason it is a cry that virtually the entire world can hear is that it is so well covered, over and over againwe hear factoids already burned into our memories and the name of the perpetrator is for a few days at least, one of the most famous in existence even if the killer no longer exists.

When anyone murder a classroom full, a church full, a theatre full or rain devastation on a shopping mall if this name was to be consigned to the ignominy it so richly deserves?

I recall the Marathon race of the ’72 Olympics when a young man appeared to be the winner of the race and eagerly charged the microphones and cameras to have his moment before the world. Just in time it was found that he hadn’t run the race at all, had merely taken a lap around the bleechers and was now poised to deliver some political manifesto. The anchor man said “Take the microphone away from him. Get those cameras off him. Don’t let him have any publicity for his views” or something very much like that. I don’t know what the kid wants. I doubt many people anywhere know.

If cowardisly vicious felons could be Unnamed so they were never spoken of outside their family’s home, no minute by minute coverage of his deeds, no few days of infamy, would we see so many potentially useful though now entirely useless individuals taking this route to newsworthiness? Of course we can’t challenge the Media’s right to report, over report and rereport, can we?

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Flashbacks

19 Monday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 13, 2012 at 12:15 PM

There’ve been three times in my life that I’ve thought I was close to death. The first I learned about in retrospect and involved a teenaged boy with mental health issues, I being myself about three years of age. At this point I’m going to ask you not to look down to the bottom of this entry because I’m making a point.

A few years ago I had my novel Secret Summers edited by a community college English instructor who charged me $350, letting me know it should have been $700. (I paid her $400. She complained about me “stepping out of the story” so I made the reader lose contact with the narrative. The story had been written from the standpoint of an older person remembering some very unusual childhood experiences and I felt some setting up was in order. Sometimes the childhood viewpoint needed supplementing from a wiser, more experienced eye and voice. Also in most of my stories I tend at one time or another to leave the major thread of the story and recall events which occurred at an earlier time. I generally tell part of that story then return to the major thread and provide the ending at some later, perhaps unexpected point in the story.

“Flashbacks.” (No looking!) Some teachers these days appear to think the only way to tell a story is to start from the beginning and plod, outlinewise from I. 1-A. through IL 13-X. The reader is so attention deficient that she or he cannot maintain interest long enough to absorb some possibly valuable information before diving back into the gripping narrative. I’ve even been asked when I was using what a believe is called an “anonymous Narrator Voice” how some distant event could have occurred in the story if none of the characters were present to experience them. This isn’t how we think. It’s not how we talk and it’s certainly not how I learned to write even though my writing training was admittedly somewhat hit and miss.

I love flashbacks because I know of no way better to build tension in a story. I will often stay with a story in order to discover a connection to something dangled but not entirely revealed when otherwise I might have put the book down. Mysteries are so often founded upon something which happened long ago, forgotten by nearly everyone.  It isn’t until David Balfour’s father dies and he meets his Uncle Ebenezer, the Clown returns to town, the reason why the Old House has lain empty all these years is finally uncovered. We are fascinated by faraway places and likewise with farawhen. Computers are good at linear thinking. If there is anything uniquely human in the way thinking is done, is is our wonderful ability to make connections where no logic processor would find anything to connect. This is one of the sub-plots of my current novel in process; The Void Between.

Okay, regarding the boy and my unknown at the time brush with death.  A family near to mine which included Jimmy and Mary, childhood playmates of mine; had taken in this “Troubled Boy”as a foster child. He was found missing from the family home one night and police found him around midnight (another good plot gambit) walking along a rural road, for some reason, wearing a pair of much too large men’s pants, fondling himself and swinging a heavy wrench on a chain. When questioned he said he was on his way to a particular woman’s house (relationship unknown to me) and he was evidently intent on rape and murder. Beyond that he stated he’d planned to kill Jimmy, Mary and myself evidently because he knew we were cared about and nobody had cared about him. Since I first heard about this story when I was perhaps in my 20s I’ve thought often about this boy and how flash-backs intrude into our lives whether we would or not. You may judge for yourself their effectiveness. (As to the other two brushes with death—more suspense—later.)

Glynda

Winter Brewing

19 Monday Sep 2016

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Originally posted  on December 12, 2012 at 12:00 AM

We recently moved into a house which has more carpeting than I’m used to so I resolved to do all of my beer brewing on the front deck.

Brewing involves heating a large kettle containing water and a cloth bag containing malted grain and holding it at about 145 degrees F.   Later the bag is withdrawn and the resulting extract is heated to a boil, hops and other ingredients added, boiled for about 30 minutes then chilled rapidly before yeast is added. I use a 32-gallon canner for my brewing pot and start out with about six gallons of water and 8-12 pounds of grain which has been “malted” or sprouted then roasted. My brewing deck idea worked pretty well until late October when temperatures had fallen to such an extent that my hot plate electric burner wasn’t up to the heat loss to outside air and my canner wasn’t reaching the boil.

I remembered that I’d recently bought a small, 3.5 cubic foot refrigerator. This came in a box with a cardboard and foam false bottom, held in place with packing strips. It also had a conventional box top with the usual four folding flaps strapping-taped closed. Leaving the false bottom behind I took the box outside, slipping it over my burner/brew pot assembly on the deck and closing down the flaps. In a short while I opened first the top flaps then removed the canner lid and found I had a fine boil. The heavy cardboard wall had insulated my brew sufficiently to combat Fall chill and this has continued to be the case into the Winter. When not in use my portable, mini brew house folds flat for storage. Winter Chill also makes a fine beer fridge for my pressure keg!

Blowing Hot and Cold

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Cooking and Home-making, Emergency Preparedness

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Originally posted on December 6, 2012 at 12:05 PM

American homes were never particularly designed for energy or water efficiency. Party of this is because in the wake of World War II with a national manufacturing industry ramped up for war and needing new customers for output, electrical appliances came cascading off the assembly lines in hitherto unheard of quantities. Energy using units such as refrigerators, stoves, water heaters, furnaces were manufactured as isolated entities without regard for anything else which might be going on in the modern home. So things stand mostly today.

Whether or not you’ve ever thought much about the efficiency of appliance design or the logic of operating household energy functions as an integrated system, you may have noticed certain illogics in how our appliances operate. For instance a refrigerator on a hot summer day, while chilling drinks and ice cream for us, blows hot air (usually out the bottom or radiating out the back) at an altitude calculated to be most irritating. Refrigerators used to have their radiating coils on top where the heat would rise toward the ceiling and the system wouldn’t need to labor to counteract it’s own waste heat. Bottom-blower fans were more aesthetic though so fridges were redesigned. During winter we fight against heated room temperature to chill our leftover turkey and cranberry sauce when there’s all that lovely cold outside, doing doing much but sucking heat out through the walls!

A note about how refrigerators work.  A compresser squeezes a fairly large volume of working fluid, formerly Freon, but many other substances also work, into a much smaller space. This makes the substance heat up. The heated up substance or Working Fluid is cooled (hence the hot air out of the fridge vents) and when allowed to expand again the substance is much colder than before. This uses up around six KWH of energy per day, costing around sixty cents. Meanwhile our water heaters electric or gas, are independently turning out heated water for showers, dishwashing, laundry.  The colder the groundwater coming into the home, the harder the heater must work.

It’s possible to combine the functions of refrigeration and water heating. Patents to this effect go back to at least 1975. Remember our substance going through the compressor and the heated output which must be cooled before reexpanding? The basic idea is to run the heated substance through coils located in the bottom of a water heater tank. Waste heat from the fridge goes into the bathwater then the working fluid is reexpanded to cool the fridge. The colder the ground water the better the fridge would operate. The warmer the ground water is, the less the heater needs to operate so if we can accept somewhat warmer fridge temperatures we can run our fridge with less power. Either way we save money.

The idea is an integrated stand-alone unit with the fridge on the bottom and a water tank on top. Insulated hoses could run directly from the tank to hot taps in kitchen, bathroom, laundry room. The same electricity which heats your water also runs your fridge. Such units would be ideal for vacation homes as well and could save a lot of money in new construction and would also be very appropriate for old construction. A unit such as this could be built by a small manufacturing firm or even by a sufficiently skilled do-it-yourselfer. The fridge/water heater would actually be an “intelligently designed” integrated household system. I want one; in blue. Why blue? Well according to my ceramic materials processing Prof Osgood J. Whittamore Jr. the “slip” or liquid clay used to enamel steel which forms the body of fridges or stoves, is most commonly blue in color but because most home makers preferred white appliances, several coats of white material must be added to cover the blue, bringing up manufacturing costs due to successive firing and making things heavier besides. Blue is good enough for me!

For Emergency Use

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 4, 2012 at 12:55 AM

In the wake of Katrina and other hurricanes, reinforced by the widespread meteorological disasters this Fall, people are talking again about emergency generators and other survival technologies.

Back in 1999 when the Y2K was looming I had a conversation with a friend who told me he was going to buy a generator and some canned food. I told him generators consume around a quart of fuel per hour so just buying a generator and trying to plug one’s house into it was hardly a solution. He asked what he should do then and I began talking about charging batteries to be used for modest lighting, communication and the like. I told him to examine the hook-ups on his car battery and he’d get an idea how to hook it up to a generator-powered battery charger. My friend said he didn’t really have any idea what I was talking about. The scary thing about that was my friend at the time was a Captain in the U.S. Army Infantry and I guess I sort of assumed those folks would have some basic techno-survival skills. (Evidently not.)

For those who want to build a generator-based power system you should keep several things in mind.   First, though generators often have a battery-charging circuit available they are often not all that efficient in terms of gas consumption. It’s generally better to plug in an off-the-shelf battery charger (10 amps or greater) to your generator to charge a battery. You can do other stuff like run a couple lamps, a radio, a laptop while you’re charging your battery.

A deep-cycle storage battery (ask your automotive department person) holds about one kilowatt hour of energy. You can get a lot of stuff done with 1KWH if you use low-energy bulbs, a radio instead of a TV and shut things off when not in use. There are a lot of DC (Direct current or batterypowered) devices which will run right off your battery though some of them will require some voltage regulation. In general it’s easier and probably cheaper to buy a little Inverter from Radio Shack or Walmart again in the auto section, which can hook to your battery and will make household-type current.

The problem with generator systems is though they throw off a lot of heat, the heat is usually made unusable for winter survival purposes because the exhaust port tends to put carbonmonoxide and gasoline fumes wherever the heat goes. Spending a quart an hour to keep wam isn’t too terribly expensive but running a generator around the clock just for lighting and communication is preposterous.

As an alternative I’ll suggest survival-minded folks investigate a propane heater with a 5-galloon tank and a propane light and cooking burner. You’ll need some ventilation in the room you’re heating but you’ll be able to stay warm and even heat some wash water on the cooking burner. For laptop or radio power get a storage battery with a plug-in battery charger (a low-powered one is fine) along with one of the inverters previously mentioned. Top up your battery every week or so. A system like this will give you a decent prospect of surviving in Winter for a few days without outside assistance. In a couple of days I will write some more about energy in general and how we can help ourselves survive on a more long term basis.

-Glynda

Those who teach us

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originaly posted on November 30, 2012 at 12:25 PM

I’m presently at work on a novel which starts with the viewpoint character Mardi Lamonte checking his Master’s Thesis in the University library and finding instead of the $20 bill he’d left in it, a message from his Third Grade teacher Sue Randall, which soon sends him on a mission which has life or death significance not only for him but for a significant portion of the Human Race. (By the way Sue Randall played the part of Miss Landers on the ‘50s/’60s TV show Leave it to Beaver.) Having so begun therefore it was incumbent on me to show what there was about this grade school teacher that would make anything she might have to say to a man who is five or more years out of graduate school; so crucial. This in turn brings up the question of what is outstanding teaching and who are outstanding teachers?

Mrs. Hazel Barns (6th/7th Grades) scared the living hell out of me but I always liked her. She was strict, exacting, would joke a certain amount but took crap-zero. She also let us know she loved us. She also made us staple in the back of our English books the various parts of speech (I still don’t remember them all but knew them then) and she taught us how to do bibleographies and to write formal reports. Beyond this she was just Mrs. Barns. She was an excellent teacher for me and I believe, most others at that time and place.

Genevieve Gorder 2nd Grade didn’t really teach me all that much but gave me opportunity to learn. She’d talked to me about subjects of interest to me and she shared with us things fun and significant to her. She was sweet and gentle spirited and when she irritated me it was generally that she insisted that certain kids were friends of mine who really weren’t at that place and that time. I called Miss Gorder up when I was 35 years old to tell her I still loved her.

Tom Hall with whom I studied first Physical Science, then Physics, then advanced Physics in high school, had many endearing quirks and in some ways was somewhat inept as a mentor. His organization was poor. His memory was poor especially for things that weren’t in his normal routine. Still he had a way of inspiring students to wonder and to search. He validated the inspiration we drew from elsewhere. He had a sort of “Wow that’s pretty neat!” way about him that might show as much appreciation for a novel toy as for a well-reasoned term paper. I did some of my most interesting speculating and reading while doing assignments for Mr. Hall.

Though I’ve heard of teachers who lead Outward Bound expeditions, found building projects for shop students, lead marches for social/political issues, take kids to Greece or Russia or someplace, none of the most significant teachers in my life did any of those things but still they made impressions which are still very much with me today. Miss Gorder was the first person to suggest that I might be a scientist some day and I did take a degree in engineering. Mrs. Barns told me once during a time when I was in trouble at school for reasons not entirely my fault; that when people said things about me that weren’t true this was hard but I couldn’t let it keep me from doing my class assignments. Mr. Hall wrote in my annual that “This student is able to take anything that someone says and pick out the profundity in it and if there isn’t any profundity this student takes what is said and somehow makes a profundity out of it.” Minor things? Perhaps but guideposts to live by as valid as any others I’ve seen.

It’s hard to convey in mere print that element that makes a good teacher good and a great teacher great because it’s not just a book sort of thing so Poor Sue Randall will be doing unusual, even outlandish things in my novel “The Void Between” but hopefully it will be more exciting to read than the things which really matter.  If anyone is reading this blog, please check in and let us know what your favorite teachers were like and why they were you favorites. Help us learn.

Glynda

Protein Food Drive

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 28, 2012 at 12:30 PM

I work quite a bit with low-income folks and am approached fairly often to help fund raise or collect food/hygiene items for charities such as the Salvation Army. Last year I spearheaded a mid-winter food drive, presenting it as a contest between various departments of my agency. Scoring was kept according to numbers of items brought in and cash rated as $1 = one item. I was dismayed to find that the winning department had scored higher than the rest largely because they submitted bottled water and packets of Ramen noodles scoring each bottle and packet as an item.

This year the director of our local Salvation Army post asked me if I’d have a food drive for them again but he asked me “please no Ramen, those folks are Ramened to death!” and he said what folks really needed was canned or packaged food which they could turn into a meal with minimal preparation such as the addition of hot tap water or perhaps heating of a can, but something containing nutrition. I thought about it and decided that the best way I could come up with to illuminate the empty calories and in some cases zero calories would be to rate contributions on Protein content. Protein isn’t the entire story where nutrition is concerned of course but most generally, foods with significant protein content will also include carbs and fats necessary for keeping warm and active during this Winter season.

This year’s food drive therefore is being scored in terms of grams of protein contained in a can or package. This is calculated by multiplying the number of servings, in a can of chili for instance, by the number of grams protein per serving. This total is marked on the container for easier tallying by contest helpers. I’ve provided a list of commodities which would be good protein sources such as canned stew, tuna, certain soups, granola, dry sausage sticks, canned chicken, sea foods, spaghetti with meat balls and so it goes.

I offer this as a new an improved way of collecting food for the needy. Let your potential contributors know that you don’t expect as many cans as sometimes are collected in previous drives but ask them to give some thought to what they’d like to have in the glove compartment if trapped on a mountain pass in mid-winter. Also Salvation Army and other helping agencies love to get can openers. We’ve had folks arrested in my town for using belt knives too publicly in preparing donated meals. (Let those of us who are able to eat well help some others to eat better.)

Glynda

Thanksgiving retrospective and some ideas for Solstice

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 28, 2012 at 12:00 AM

As we’ve been using home baked bread almost exclusively of late when it came to stuffing the turkey this year I was presented with something of a dilemma. Did it make a lot of sense to create dough, rise that a couple of times, bake it only to tear it up and sog it with broth to render it as stuffing? I wondered if I could just stuff with the raw dough and be done with it but several visits to the internet with every query combination I could think of rendered not one reference to stuffing a bird with uncooked dough.

I agonized over this for some time wanting especially to avoid the mouthful of dough sensation you get when biting into a piece of half baked bread (such as during an oven failure.) I did recall though how once upon a time when I had no oven at all, only a trash burner stove on which to cook, I made some excellent steamed loaves which sliced and tasted pretty much like baked bread.

I made my decision late Wednesday afternoon and that evening began turkey preparations.

I used essentially the recipe given in a recent blog entry but I had a 2-cup can of chicken broth to use as liquid so I began with that and 2.5 cups of white flour, the sugar, salt, oil and yeast; plus a couple teaspoons of powdered sage. When that foamed I began adding a home ground whole grain flour of about one part barley to three parts wheat, adding about 2.5 cups before I had a dough I wanted to work with, perhaps a little softer than what I generally use for bread.

I let this rise, punched it down and formed it into a thin, flat sheet rather like pizza dough then began folding in 2-cups chopped onion, ½-cup sliced mushroom, 1/2 –cup grated cheddar and finally the turkey giblets. I divided this into one quantity about 2/3 of the dough and the other the remaining 1/3, stuffing the smaller amount in the neck of the turkey and the larger in the tail area. I closed the legs of the turkey as usual and let it sit in a cool place until early Thursday morning when I put it in to bake at 350 F.

I had a problem with dough continuing to rise out of the cavity and mushrooming atop the bird. Though I repeatedly pushed it down and in I ended up with some overdone stuffing exterior to the turkey, which was excellent as dog treats but not for much else. I’d say next time I’ll be a little more conservative about the amount I stuff in the bird. The dressing which stayed inside was moist, tasty and gave no hint of being unbaked. Now that I know it will work I’d have no hesitation doing this again next year.

Glynda

Useful Things

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 21, 2012 at 8:00 PM

Thanksgiving and the process of giving thanks of course means different things to different people and at times like this when I try to take time to check in with my thankfulness subroutine I tend to think about progress made. Not just things accumulated though that’s part of it, but ways of doing things, remembering to get things done, quality of living emotional as well as physical.

Back in the ‘80s we were quite poor by most standards but we were thrifty and imaginative. We bought a wheat grinder, a Foley food mill, built a dehydrator and set about turning sacks of wheat into bread and cake, culled apples into sauce and juice. We turned waste meat from the meat saw at our local butcher’s into soap and cat food. We dried everything from throwaway grapes to boxes of nectarines found at the top of the grocery dumpster. This was also one of our more successful writing/publishing periods. As I wrote at the time “We would roothog or die (preferably roothog.)”

A tiny rental house in Sedro Woolley, Washington was our learning ground to accumulate skills needed in the back woods of Northern Idaho Where we juiced Serviceberries, made pemmican from prunes and ground beef heart which leftover fat from doughnut making. I could start with a pile of wood and a sack of wheat from the local feed store and turn them into bread loaves. In 1985 we returned to Seattle and things were a little easier in some ways. Eventually we increased our monetary income several fold and now we own three acres and two houses.

With everything there are tradeoffs. When we were underemployed we had lots of time for turning whatever we could get into something closer to what we wanted. As more and more time was spent away from the old homestead stalking salary, less and less time seemed to go into those old and dear processes which had sustained us when we were much younger. It didn’t happen immediately or all at once, but bit by bit Lenore and I began around 2000, reclaiming the best of what we’d had when we were poor. First we reclaimed our fruitcake, always made Sunday after Thanksgiving Thursday, accompanied by a rescreening of “The Homecoming,” pilot to “The Waltons.” We bought a greenhouse, a large steamer. I’ve ground hundreds of pounds of grain, legumes and nuts entirely by hand over the decades and decided that time constraints justified an electric mill. We revitalized our interest in gardening, moved into the County so we could have chickens, planted herbs as well as vegetables and fruit.

Looking at things this Thanksgiving I find I have less to miss and I’ve done not a bad job of keeping faith with my earlier self. I know how to do a great many of the things I wanted to do when I was 25. At this end of harvest time I am thankful for hand-cranked food mills, a 32-gallon sparging vessel, a grain mill, numerous sacks of varied grain in my home office, a cute chicken coop with six hens, food steamer, the skills of hand and mine to transform a piece of property and much else I could hardly even imagine in 1985.

Goddess be praised.

Glynda