Rolling On One

I finished reading Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jitney, two plays by August Wilson. They were my reading assignment for Black History Month this year. I posted my reactions to them as a comment on Sister Judy’s blog at Mrs Hammer’s House: The Black History Month Contest. And thanks, Judy, for calling me Brother Dean B. I usually only hear that kind of thing at rehearsals for the Project Manna concert (and I’m not in the habit of using that form of address myself; I had to go back and edit this post to put it in).
As a bonus for reading them, I was googling “August Wilson Jitney”, I think, at work, and that screen was up when my mentor walked in. He said his wife would have been delighted to see me reading that — she teaches African-American history. Honest, though, I gave myself that February reading assignment out of my own interest.

About a month ago there was a user conference here at work, that is, a conference for users of our product. In conjunction with it, the company arranged with a customer to display something nifty they had designed using our product — an Indy Car. Photos were encouraged. When I see it on TV on memorial day, or a twin of it, I can remember that they let us turn the steering wheel. It was effortless. The thing is remarkably small, just enough room for a driver, a huge engine, and fuel.

The sky was particularly beautiful just before sunset in Casco last Sunday. By the time I ran outside with my camera the clouds had closed up a little and the colors weren’t so nice. I settled for a picture looking down the driveway towards the lake, about 300 feet away.

Here, three weeks after the event, is my Chinese New Year postcard. The jumping dog was drawn from in image on the internet; the flaming hoop was drawn freehand out of my imagination (except that the circle was computer-generated); the Chinese characters for “Year of the Dog” and “Happy New Year” were carved from text printed from the internet; the top chop is pressed rubber; and the bottom chop is carved stone, from a stone I bought in San Francisco chinatown.

This was one of the funnier pieces of mail I’ve got in a long time. The name is something I was called occasionally in junior high school.

So for anyone who hopes this is a part-time knit blog, here I hope is a progress picture of a pair of mittens I’m making from Lopi-Lite. Fabric Place in Woburn, which was two (three? who cares) stops up 128 from where I used to work from July to October, had their Lite-Lopi on sale sometime back then. I picked up several balls of it in navy, brown, slate blue, tan, and white, thinking I’d make some mittens out of Anna Zilboorg’s _Magnificent Mittens_. I did a lot on them back in December and early January, in fact got both of them done down to where the thumbs get added. My hands have been bothering me for several weeks and I didn’t do anything on the mittens until maybe ten days ago, when I started just a little at a time. I was pulling the yarn really tight starting a new needle (working on DPs) and stretching the work to keep the floats from being too tight and puckering. I thought all that might have contributed to the hand problems. On the thumb I decided, I’d rather have my hands working, I could stand ladders where the needles switched and puckers in the floats, so I’m trying to hold everything in a very relaxed way. So far so good, but “so far” just means fourteen rows of 24 stitches on one thumb.

So I guess what I did this evening was go food shopping, fix and upgrade this blog (it was down for 24 hours, give or take one), and baked a batch of potato-sour cream bread. That’s a recipe from a recent book. It’s a recipe that’s good enough to buy the book for, if you like fairly substantial white bread like Pepperidge Farms or Arnold. That’s The Flying Biscuits Cafe Cookbook by April Moon.

But, oh no! I just peeked in the oven. I let the loaves rise too long before starting to bake them, and the bread is poufing over the top. It’s likely to be fluffy white bread. Oh well.

Usually I like to make bread with whole wheat, or rye flour, or cornmeal, or maybe oatmeal, but every once in a while I want some toast that’s bland enough to taste the jelly without the bread flavor getting in the way.

I was worried for a while there! This morning I did a full backup of the database, and could see all my old posts, so I knew that what I had written wasn’t lost. I didn’t know how hard it would be to get the whole thing running again. Turned out, it wasn’t.

Now it finally looks like winter again, after all the unseasonably warm weather we’ve had since mid-January. I measured 14 1/2 inches in our front yard in Newton, only half as much as New York City got.

The news was saying that this snowfall had surpassed the 1947 snow in New York. I remember waist-deep snow when I was a toddler in New York. That must have been a couple of days after the storm, because anything close to the 29 inches they got would have been way more than waist deep on me at the time.

This was a good deep snow, but so light and fluffy that it was a breeze to shovel and brush off cars. I wouldn’t rate it as a monumental storm, at least not here, by any means.

Blogging about a grouse, not grousing about a blog. Just to be clear.

Up in Casco — I looked up from the jigsaw puzzle of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse that we’ve almost finished (we started it last weekend but couldn’t finish it in one weekend) to see a bird running across the grass (OK, the snow over the grass) between the house and the woodpile. Much too big for a mourning dove, and too upright. Not big enough for a turkey. A ruffed grouse! We ran to the bedroom window and were able to see it walking off into the woods. I’ve seen one before, off one of the trails up the Great Blue Hill, when I used to walk there with Sajive Sarin on lunch hours from LTX, so that was basically 20 years ago. So it wasn’t a life bird, but a second view ever bird.

We (Arlene, Anne, Matt, and I) were out early this afternoon cutting more trail around the property. We got out to the left back corner, which Arlene and I had found our way to last weekend, and maybe fifty feet to the right from there, just about to where we had worked in from the other way around. Later in the afternoon we went out to walk around (from the other way) and were pleased that the trails pretty much connect. We need to define it better and cut it wider around the back, but you can walk all the way around now.