Folk Thursday: Unchained

Johnny Cash. Enough said.

Me and Bobby McGee

I picked up a tiny hitchhiker yesterday on the way to Mom and Dad’s. A small, filthy, reddish-brown dog was wandering around the parking lot at the Tastee-Freez in Mansfield, Mo., with a forlorn expression on her face. The employees said they thought she had been dumped, as she’d been hanging around all day, staring in the front door, darting in and out of traffic, and lying down next to people’s cars as if she expected someone to give her a ride. She was obviously in danger, and I think we have long since established that I am a sucker, so I bought her a hamburger and let her follow me into the car.

I think she’s a mix of Italian greyhound and possibly basenji. She’s built like an Iggy, but her coat is about the color and texture of a basenji’s, and she has a wrinkly little forehead like a basenji. She’s also extremely quiet, and her only vocalization thus far has been a peculiar little squeaky cry that didn’t really sound like a dog.

I have been referring to her as “Trillian,” after the character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Ron thinks that’s too obscure, so I guess I’ll just call her Bobby McGee. (The original Bobby, as you’ll recall, was a girl; Janis just changed the gender when she recorded the song.)

On an unrelated note, I got 42.25 mpg on the way out here yesterday. I was driving my Honda Fit, which is rated at 28 city/34 highway. My previous record for a non-hybrid vehicle was 41.7 mpg. Shell gas rocks….

Emily

Whipped cream and sprinkles

“… What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”
– Matt. 7:9-11

Since I was laid off from my cushy editing gig at the Tulsa World, we’ve had to tighten our belts a little bit here at the House of the Lifted Lorax. We live within our means, so the loss of my income didn’t result in a financial crisis, but we’ve definitely cut back on some of our luxuries lately, and with gas prices climbing higher and higher, I was beginning to wonder whether driving to Illinois to visit my family over Memorial Day weekend really represented the wisest use of my financial resources.

I was thinking about that last week when we went out to check on our beehive at The Living Kitchen Farm and Garden.

The girls at Living Kitchen happen to raise dairy goats, and before we left that morning, they gave us a half-gallon of fresh, organic goat milk. On the way home, Ron commented that Lisa and Bibi’s timing was good, as he had just used up the last of our milk that morning.

That wasn’t good timing, I thought. That was divine Love meeting every human need.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford to buy milk. We could. But that gift from our friends at the farm represented something much more important than the price of a half-gallon of milk. It was a clear demonstration that “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him,” as Jesus put it, and it was a nice reminder that He’s on the case, meeting even my smallest needs in a beautiful, harmonious, and sometimes even extravagant way.

I got the message. And I quit worrying about how to pay for my trip.

Half an hour later, I found myself on the phone with a bus tour coordinator from North Carolina, making arrangements to travel to Paducah, Ky. — about an hour from my parents’ house in southern Illinois — to meet up with his group and ride with them from Paducah to Oklahoma City, serving as a sort of hostess for the tour while providing narrative about Route 66 all the way from St. Louis to OKC. The arrangement would not only give me a nice paycheck and a way to visit my family on somebody else’s dime, but it would allow the travelers to have a Mother Road enthusiast on the bus for the entire Route 66 portion of the tour.

I think what really knocks me out about all this is the Father’s sense of style: Why mail a guy a Braum’s coupon when you can hand him a half-gallon Mason jar of raw, organic milk that just came from the goat yesterday? And why hand a girl gas money when you can give her a two-week, all-expenses-paid vacation — including a week on her favorite road — and a nice paycheck besides?

Those aren’t just blessings. They’re blessings with whipped cream and sprinkles on top.

May we all have a whipped-cream-and-sprinkles sort of week.

Emily

Katydid

I found this little critter — which I assume is a katydid nymph — resting (and probably snacking) on one of my lettuce sprouts in a hanging basket on the deck a minute ago and decided to give the macro feature on my new camera a spin.

I still wish I had a wide-angle lens for my Rebel so I could get really good shots of tiny things like this, but for a $249 camera, I thought the Fuji did a nice job. The actual image looks a bit better than this; it lost a little clarity when I optimized it for the Web.

Here’s a longer shot to give you a sense of scale. That’s my finger in the foreground; the katydid is on the sprout at the right-hand side of the frame, near the back of the pot.

I probably should have squished the katydid, as they can be quite destructive in the garden, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to kill such a cute little thing. Surely it won’t eat all my plants … and if it does, maybe Eric Carle will write a book about it.

I wonder if I could persuade Mom to let me repaint her barn with a mural of The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

Emily

Ham-Cam: Video edition

Thanks to the magic of my new camera, Gertrude the Office Hamster’s former colleagues can enjoy this special video edition of Ham-Cam. In this episode, Gertie climbs her water bottle, shows her teeth, and impersonates Marcel Marceau.

Gertie and I would like to congratulate Kelly on her new BAPD gig, and we hope Kris had a good interview yesterday.

Emily

The Birds

A hummingbird finally found the feeder on my office window. I saw it flit away this morning as I came in here to look something up on the computer. I love to watch hummingbirds fly. Their little wings beat so fast, and they look so pretty as they hover and dart through the air.

I’ve seen a lot of birds in the past couple of days. A big heron flew across the 23rd Street bridge as we were crossing it yesterday, and a goldfinch crossed 66 in front of me while I was cruising an old alignment near Sapulpa. On the way back, a barn swallow barreled across the road near Bowden.

Unfortunately, all of them were moving so fast that I didn’t get a chance to photograph them. Gorgeous little things, though. The biodiversity around here is just spectacular.

Emily

My new toy

I’m getting ready to lead a bus tour down Route 66 from St. Louis to OKC next week, and I needed a good camera to bring along on the trip.

I realize that I already have a Rebel, which is the best camera a girl could want (short of a Mark III, of course), but the Rebel isn’t insured against loss or theft and would be quite expensive to replace, so I’m really not keen on bringing it along in situations where I can’t keep track of it constantly.

I’m also thinking of doing some wedding photography to supplement our income this summer, and I wanted a decent mid-range camera to keep in my bag as a backup in case some unspeakable horror befell the Rebel in the middle of a ceremony.

For less than the price of a decent flash unit, I was able to buy a Fuji Finepix S1000 — a very serviceable little 10 megapixel point-and-shoot with plenty of bells and whistles, including a video feature that allowed me to document Scout’s infamous “talking” trick for posterity.

I’ll be playing with my new toy quite a bit over the next few days and will post a full review once I’ve seen how it stands up to my incessant and generally unreasonable demands. Stay tuned….

Emily

P.S.: If you don’t get the feed, be sure to scroll down, because I’ve put up four entries in the last 24 hours. That ought to make up for all those days when I was too busy to blog….

Vegan spanakopita

I made something this evening that’s probably best described as a sort of vegan turnover with spanakopita filling.

As usual, I had one recipe and insufficient ingredients for either, so I made something up as I went along

Vegan Spanakopita

1 box frozen fillo leaves, thawed
2 boxes frozen chopped spinach, thawed
1 c. chopped onion
Olive oil
2/3 c. walnuts, chopped finely
2/3 c. fine breadcrumbs
5 cloves garlic, minced
Handful of fresh mint leaves, minced
1 tbsp. dried dill weed
3 tbsp. lemon juice
1 lb. extra-firm tofu (NOT silken)
1/2 tsp. smoked salt (probably fine with regular salt, too)

Preheat oven to 375 F. Oil a couple of cookie sheets. Drain spinach in a colander for a few minutes while you saute the onions in olive oil until they’re clear. Add spinach to skillet and heat thoroughly. Transfer spinach and onions to large mixing bowl. Add next six ingredients and mix thoroughly. Mash smoked salt into tofu. Add to spinach mixture.

Lay one fillo leaf on a sheet of waxed paper. Brush lightly with olive oil. Lay a second fillo leaf on top of the first. Fold in half. Place a small handful of spinach mixture on the fillo leaf, about three inches from the left edge of the fillo. Fold end over spinach mixture. Fold top and bottom edges over about 1/2 inch. Starting on the left, fold dough over and over until you have a neat little packet of filling surrounded by dough.

Place on cookie sheets and bake at 375 F for 30 minutes.

Makes about a dozen little spinach-filled turnovers.

This recipe is kind of a hybrid between two of Mollie Katzen’s recipes: spanakopita and spinach borek. The tofu stands in nicely for the cottage cheese in the spanakopita.

Emily

Holga time

Since March 4, I’ve been so preoccupied with projects and challenges that I’ve quite neglected poor little Joy, my beloved Holga camera.

I finally picked her up the other day, unloaded her, and took her most recent roll in for processing. Out of 12 exposures, I had only four printable shots, but one was a perfect example of why every photographer ought to own at least one Holga:

This stone elephant stands at the entrance to the Showman’s Rest part of the city cemetery in Hugo, Okla., which is the winter home for many traveling circus performers. Pay special attention to the slightly-off-center focus (Joy’s unique “fingerprint,” if you will — no two Holga lenses are alike), the soft distortion in the background, and of course the Holga’s signature vignetting at the corners. This is the one shot in 50 that makes the other 49 worth the frustration and expense.

I’m also fond of the surreal color effects I’ve been getting out of that expired Agfa film Ron bought me last winter:

The first person who can tell me where I was standing when I shot this will get a free print of any Holga shot I’ve posted on this blog — your choice.

Emily

Folk Thursday: Joan Baez

We heard this song today at a memorial service for the late Tomato Man, who slipped away to tend Eden’s vines a couple of weeks ago.

Darrell Merrell, better known as the Tomato Man, made a living — and a name — for himself by selling heirloom tomatoes out of his driveway on West 81st Street. We first met him in the spring of 2005, when we saw a promising-looking hand-lettered sign at 71st and Elwood and followed it to his place in search of plants worthy of my salsa recipe. We pulled into the driveway and found hundreds of gorgeous plants in dozens of fascinating varieties. Under a tent sat a bearded fellow sporting a straw hat, overalls, and an encyclopedic knowledge of my favorite nightshade.

We were instant fans, and our annual pilgrimage to the Tomato Man’s place has been the highlight of every spring since we met him.

A baker’s dozen of the Tomato Man’s beautiful plants are basking in the sunshine behind our garden gate this afternoon as I pour myself a glass of goat milk from his daughter’s farm and raise a toast to the only man I’ve ever known whose affection for homegrown tomatoes exceeds my own.

If there’s a vegetable garden in heaven, God is going to be awfully busy putting up salsa come July….

Emily