Frog and Goat

Yesterday I turned a year older and I think when people ask me how old I am, I may have to tell them I’m the first and only 39 because I think it is silly to say 39 again–like 40 won’t come if you don’t mention its name. Whatever. Next year I’ll be 40 so effing what.

We didn’t have any big plans but we did buy tickets to go to the Best of the Wurst cook-off and we planned to recycle electronic equipment–hot times I tell you. We did neither. Instead the lawn guy showed up with a power spreader and we borrowed it for a few hours. So I got to ride around on one of these:

and spread fertilizer/weed killer/crap I’m not real interested in continuing to put down.

We’re following the grass guy’s instructions this year to get the grass to grow on our former wasteland and then I think once the grass is healthy and established we’ll backslide and just make sure something green is growing out there. I like to garden but I don’t want to be responsible for one of those perfect lawns. We have a yard not a lawn and definitely not one of those golf course look-a-likes.

After the power spreader was picked up and more instructions given, we went to the fish monger and got an awesome piece of tuna and drove by the Wurst festival only to think it looked lame from the road and high-tailed it to the grocery store. Where, upon entering the store, found the biggest bottleneck of zombies. It was an amazing display of clueless, shopping zombies. The better-half had the cart and I turned around to give him a smile because it is rare to see so many stupefied shoppers in their native environment like that.

The Niece and her mother stopped by late in the afternoon and gave me a coffee mug that says “Aunt, like mom only cooler.” Heh. I liked the mug a lot. We hung out with them for a little while and then continued with our low-key birthday celebration.

The better-half made an encrusted tuna dish (encrusted with mustard, poppy and sesame seeds–then seared and sliced thinly) served over fava beans, roasted red pepper, corn and bacon. Delicious. He also made a rice pilaf from scratch. We had raspberries and macaroons for dessert.

Here are two shots of our new dining room rug. It makes the room a little more formal–although it already had the formal thing going on. We use our dining room nearly every night for dinner–which may seem weird.

Here’s a close-up:

And, here’s a longer shot–our dining room isn’t that big so it is hard to take a picture of the whole room. The thing in the lower right-hand corner is an old cobbler tool…I don’t know the “real” name but cobblers would put the leather shoe on this form and cobble away. We use it as a door-stop.

We ordered a dining room rug a couple of weeks ago and the better-half got a call yesterday saying the rug would be delivered between 10 & 2 today. As the clock downstairs struck 2, the better-half dialed the phone to find out where the rug is since it isn’t here. I started to laugh when I heard the numbers being dialed. That’s something I would do…raise the riot-act flag at the stroke of 2.

Now the better-half is explaining where we live. Honestly, in this day and age, there’s no excuse–hook up the GPS, look up the directions on Google or Mapquest, just get your ass here and quit screwing the customer over. Thanks UPS Freight.

My Wednesday night class wrapped up last night and in addition to getting our papers back we also found out our final grades. Usually that takes a week or more after the class ends, but this professor had it going on. Now, if my other (dreaded) class could just hurry up and get over, I’d be very happy.

Today is my last day at work this week as I’m taking of tomorrow. I am not quite sure what I’m going to do but I know getting up at 6am is not one of those things. The car needs an oil change so I’m sure I’ll be seeing the guys at the J-Lube. What a crazy life I live.

Yesterday I was locked away in my room working on a paper but I cheated and had all the windows open. Yes, one of the nicest Saturdays this year and I was writing a paper. It stinks.

For most of the day one of the male turkeys around here gobbled and called to the hens. It’s time to make baby turkeys and that male had the need to spread his love around. A serious need.

The funny thing? We have two different flocks and the males hovering around the flocks strut and call and beg the hens and the hens pay absolutely no attention. They keep scratching the ground and eating the seed we put out. I start to feel bad for the males and all the trouble they go to for a little play.

Here’s one of the boys:

I went to a lecture this morning called “Component Skills in Reading: Linking Research and Practice”. John Strucker of NCSALL-Harvard Graduate School of Education was the speaker. He was introduced as the rock star of literacy research.

I don’t know anything about literacy except to know that illiteracy is a very bad thing. It cascades into less health care, less money, less community involvement, nearly less everything. I’ve also never been a reading teacher and like most professions there are plenty of acronyms which I had never heard of and couldn’t even pretend to decipher.

With all my deficits, I found his talk to be interesting and engaging. I don’t know that he was very rock star-ish but I am going to look up a few things he talked about to get a better understanding of the John Strucker fan club. I just wish I could figure out how to take what I learned and incorporate it into my own work. I’m not sure that a solution will readily present itself as everyone we teach has at least an undergraduate degree.

Some of the ideas discussed:

Invented Spelling: I don’t remember doing this because I really don’t remember not knowing how to read which means I don’t remember how not to spell. Which means I was too young to remember, I didn’t do this or I jumped into reading and writing pretty quickly.

Transparent Orthography (languages like Italian, Portuguese, Spanish)

English is an opaque writing system—it is a little more difficult to teach someone how to read English. There are 26 letters in the alphabet but something like 40 fundamental phonemes. Just goes to show you I should have spent more time paying attention in the Linguistics class I had to take as an undergraduate. It seems like linguistic concepts keep cropping up.

After our massive success with taking someone else’s sausage and putting it through the Porkert, we went to the grocery store and got ingredients to make our own. I think we’re onto something now.

We made Hot Italian Sausage and here are some pictures that you will either love or hate, depending on whether or not you are sick of my pork stories. I love the pork. It’s the other white meat, you know.

Here’s the basic mixture after one pass through the grinder:

Here’s a test portion cooking so we could check the seasoning:

All full and twisted:

I didn’t like the way my twists were holding and we wanted to cut the long link string into smaller batches so I tied them with kitchen twine, I know, I’m an amateur:

In other news, the rosemary plant we’ve had for a few years and that has finally started to look hale and hearty, bloomed:

Everyone likes to eat out of the bird feeder:

There’s a lot of discussion going around about what VT officials shoulda, woulda, coulda done to prevent more carnage on their campus. I think we all need to STFU and quit pointing fingers at regular men and women dealing with something that is so far outside of what anyone expects or anticipates.

It is very easy to be the armchair quarterback on Sunday and it is very easy to sit in the comfort of our homes and blame someone in charge for what happened on Monday. Who do we need to blame–we can start with the asshole who took guns on campus and started shooting people. I’m sure there will be tons of discussion about how to prevent people from snapping and turning to violence to resolve personal problems. That’s valuable information to have if you are ever witness to someone close to you who may be on the verge of harming himself or others.

What we really need to do is to quit second-guessing the VT officials and let them figure out what happened. Let’s hold off on the judgment for a little while. Can’t we expand our attention spans for more than the time it takes to listen to some sound-bites–before we’re ready to move on to another story? We spend months on a bleached-blonde train wreck and yet we jump to conclusions and finger-pointing as soon as we catch a whiff of something so tragic. Let VT have a minute to catch its collective breath.

For some disclosure:
I work for a very large urban university in Virginia. I’m also a student there. We spent a great deal of time watching teevee yesterday as the events unfolded. We spent a lot of that time in silence. Many of the people I work with have kids and many of them have kids who are either in college or about to go. Some of the people I work with also have grown children who work in a university system. My husband and close friends went to VT. This hits close to home.

When the better-half was at the Butchery the other day, they greeted him with “we’re glad you are here, because look what we have for you”. He came home with two chunks (I’m sure there’s a more technical term than this) of bacon soaking in a soy sauce mixture. They said they’d cooked up some rice, chopped some romaine and then lightly heated the bacon, chopped it and feasted on this dish for lunch.

We decided to give the dish a whirl yesterday. We didn’t have romaine on hand so I chopped up some green leaf and made some Texmati rice. We used one of the chunks o’ bacon and about half of the soy mixture. Oh, my sweet baby Jesus, it was good.

Yes, we have a thing for pork:

This didn’t last very long:

We had the crazy idea many, many years ago to make our own sausage. Flash forward more than 6 years and here we are finally breaking out the Porkert.

While the better-half was at the Belmont Butchery earlier this week, he got about a pound of bulk merguez. Last night we pulled out the Porkert, gave it a good washing, assembled and then ran the merguez through and into collagen casing. While technically we haven’t actually made sausage yet, we have formed sausage. We need practice twisting the casing into sausage pieces and making sure we get rid of air pockets, so naturally we’ll have to actually make the sausage from scratch next time just so we can practice our forming.

Here’s a photo of my hand and the first few links:

The long shot of the finished product and Porkert:

And, finally, just before we ate. Delicious: