Rolling On One

I have finally started my pepper seeds. Three years ago I bought one “Lemon Drop” pepper plant and got a great crop from it, more peppers than I had ever grown on one plant before. The next year I bought a plant labeled “Lemon Drop”, but it turned out to be some other variety, mislabeled. Last year I bought seeds and started my own Lemon Drop seedlings, heck, I bought a windowsill heating mat so the peppers would have nice warm soil to start in, and the rabbits ate all of those pepper plants before they produced. I’m trying again. I also have Serrano pepper seeds starting; so, a total of thirty peat pots of seeds planted, 10 Aji Limo (that’s the Lemon Drop) from Scheeper’s seeds, 10 Serrano from Scheepers, and 10 Hidalgo Serrano from Fedco.

I didn’t do much else constructive today except make a lot of progress on the statistics project (we have graphs! but the data needs some more crunching, to get statistics on a percent of population rather than absolute basis), cook supper, and bake another Passover cake mix.

We walked up the hill across the street and around the Andover-Newton Theological School campus. The crocus field behind the president’s house is still there, but the flowers are past their prime.

It’s also important that this evening was the start of my mom’s first yahrtzeit, the anniversary of her death according to the Hebrew calendar. It’s appropriate to go to synagogue and recite a memorial prayer, which we did as a zoom service. There were over thirty people on the zoom, because it was also the first yahrtzeit of Bernie Rubin, the Bernie of Bernie and Phyl’s furniture. A lot of his grandchildren and other family were there for that occasion. We’re not sure what his relationship to the synagogue was — when we reviewed his obit it said he lived a few towns away — but it seemed to be significant.

We walked around Horn Pond today! It’s the first time we’ve been there in several years, but more importantly, the farthest we’ve been from home since the last time we came back from Casco, which was probably in October.

Horn Pond is in Woburn, three towns away from here, an urban wild area that we’ve been birding in since we lived in Cambridge. There is a lot of wetland there with varied habitat. It’s particularly good for ducks in the fall.

We had already seen a lot of turtles (not the first for the year, but close)

…Coots, a water bird that we haven’t seen in a while, chickadees up close — someone seems to be feeding the birds at Horn Pond and left a handful of sunflower seed on the stump just off the trail on the left below; there were two chickadees going in and out of the hole in the top of the broken tree on the right. Maybe they’re digging out a bigger hole to nest in, maybe there are bugs to eat in there…

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…a swan that looked as if it was sitting on a nest

Then someone asked us if we had seen the owl. We hadn’t. He said, “there’s someone photographing it, just past that shack (it was really more of a birdwatching blind) — he’ll point it out to you.” And so it was!

See it? It looks as though the tree broke years ago and a branch became the new leader. Just above the break, in front of the newer part of trunk is the owl. Don’t see it yet? here —

As barred owls go, it wasn’t hard to see; but we wouldn’t have found it by ourselves.

I stocked up on Passover cake mixes so I would have something to snack on this week, and sure enough, today I made one of the cakes, a Manischewitz extra moist chocolate cake mix. It’s remarkably good. Of course I would never choose a Passover cake mix for any of the rest of the year (unless it’s marked way down after the holiday, which is worth keeping an eye out for) but this would be acceptable when it’s not Passover.

I made mushroom omelets for breakfast, which is so much a part of our Sunday morning routine for the past couple of years, not just the pandemic year, that I will probably not mention it in subsequent posts. In the summer, when we have fresh herbs from our garden, I am apt to substitute “scrambled eggs with garden green stuff”, but we have been ordering baby Bella mushrooms for omelets every week since we started with Imperfect Foodsand some fancier mushrooms, like Shiitake or Oyster mushrooms, to use in stir fries most weeks for the past couple of months.

Ari called me on Face Time this morning. Sometimes when he does that he doesn’t pay any attention to the call and I wonder what the point is, but today he was talking the whole time telling me what he was building with magnetic tiles, what shapes he could make with them, how there was a tunnel for Lego cars to go through in what he was building, and on and on.

We didn’t really do the first half of the Seder tonight, but I at least reviewed the section that describes a bunch of the ancient rabbis trying to outdo each other in describing how many plagues there really were in Egypt before the exodus. Of course the Bible says ten. What about at the Red Sea? One rabbi figured there were fifty plagues there, because the Egyptian magicians told Pharoh that the ten plagues was the finger of God, and later the miracle at the Red Sea is described as the hand of God — so ten plagues in Egypt, fifty at the Red Sea. Then another rabbi says, “don’t forget the verse that says ‘He sent forth against them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, indignation and trouble, a band of evil angels.’ Wrath, indignation, trouble, band of evil angels — each of those fifty was really four, making 200 total.” A third rabbi says, “You counted wrong, you left out ‘the fierceness of his anger’, it should really be 250 total.” After close to 2000 years, it’s impossible to know whether they were serious or the four glasses of wine at the Seder played some part in some friendly one-upsmanship. Anyway, I think that’s a fun section of the Haggadah that’s left out of the modern more meaningful editions.

We did have an extended zoom session after supper with Arlene’s siblings, one of her older cousins-once-removed, and her aunt Lee to sing some of the long songs at the end of the Haggadah and reminisce about family seders of long ago

It was the first evening of Passover and this was the second year when Passover was done by Zoom. It’s a lot easier to clean up, but that doesn’t really make up for not having a big group get together. Charley and Patsy hosted, because Patsy has a zoom account through work that can stay going for longer than hour at a time. Present for various parts of the time were their family in Belmont MA, Anne and Matt in Cambridge MA, David and Rachel from Southboro MA, Patsy’s parents in Palo Alto CA, Arlene’s brother and his wife in NJ, their son’s family in FL, Arlene’s sister & some of her family in NJ, Arlene’s aunt in Grand Island NY, and us in Newton.

I made something like Yemenite Charoset; by now I don’t feel that I need to follow a recipe particularly carefully so long as I get the general idea and can justify the spice mixture. I also made kneidlach, but started late and didn’t have much schmaltz; so I wasn’t at all sure how they would turn out without the normal intermediate refrigeration step. They held together much better than my normal ones and had a good texture; I think having a bigger proportion of egg to everything else made up for the things I expected to be problems.

Meanwhile, on my Shiny project, I found an R function “gather” that did just what I wanted for the data file; however, I’m still doing something wrong because I’m not seeing the numbers I expect.

Yesterday I tried printing a dried plant that was still standing in my garden when I turned it over a day before. It worked well enough to be worth working more on that paper, but I did not get the detail of the dried flowers that I was hoping for. I think a big problem was that the ink I used, the stamp indexing ink that works great for that purpose, is very thick and sticky and I tore up the plant in rolling the ink over it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of detail in the flowers that survived the inking.