Now Then

The yearly mouse invasion, one in all three traps this morning, reset with peanut butter. I set the bucket trap too, which is a five gallon bucket with a narrow shingle plank, dab of peanut butter on the end. They love to walk the plank. An inch of water in the bottom drowns the little fuckers. Every year it's the same, I'll catch eight or ten. Blue-tailed skinks have moved in again, two of them, which bodes a family, and lots of little skinks. I don't bother them much, but I will not abide them on the island when I'm eating. Like llamas and pigs, they always poop in the same place. Their scat is a dark tapered tube, half to three-quarters of an inch, with a bright white dot at one end. Haven't found out what the dot is, but have dissected several larger ones. What you would expect, little hard parts of bugs. Dirty sock smell, not the skink crap, but my dirty socks, a lovely day, off to the laundromat and points east. Clear running water in all the streams, even my Low Gap Creek is flowing, Mackletree Creek, where it goes through the forest was quite beautiful. Last spring's fire has cleared the banks. Now understand what the Forest Crew were doing, where Mackletree flows into Roosevelt Lake; they were creating a settling basin, to catch the fines, to keep the lake from silting up as fast. Turkey Creek still carrying a lot of water, lovely waterfalls, all the way to Rt. 52 and the Ohio. Frisky young boy at the laundromat, completely out of control, came over to me when I was putting clothes in the dryer, and starting hitting me on the leg, hard. I picked him up by the ankles and told him I was going to put him in the dryer. Told him in a stern voice that he was not to hit strangers. A lot of kids, anymore, don't behave very well. It wasn't allowed when I was a child, is it supposed to be ok for your children to go around hitting people? Clean clothes though, and I stop at Big Lots to look for lamp oil (I need four quarts for the supply closet) but there's none there. Several more half-gallons of juice, though, shelf-life into January, some chicken broth, a back-up self-grinder of black peppercorns. At Kroger I buy some designer potatoes, the fingerling heirlooms, because I need to run an experiment in the area of crab cakes. Instant mashed potatoes have gotten very good, just don't read that ingredients section, and I use them as a binder. I wonder if using really good potatoes would make any difference. So I make really good mashed potatoes from scrubbed not peeled fingerling oddly colored potatoes, which takes 40 minutes, AND a batch of instant mashed potatoes, which takes 4 minutes in the microwave. Listen, in my own defense, I'm only looking for a binder here, what I'm after is crab cakes. It's so easy to be distracted. The fingerling mashed potatoes are fantastic, I eat a pound and feel positively Irish; but the instant potatoes are a better binder for the crab cakes. These are the best I'm ever made, and so easy: open a can of premium crab meat, make a pouch of instant mashed potatoes, chop a scallion. Eat half the potatoes with a couple of slices of bacon and some green peas. Then mix maybe three tablespoons of warm potatoes with a small can of crabmeat, add the scallion, push them into shape, chill them (I put them outside) then fry them in the bacon fat that remains. This could be my legacy. These crab cakes. What'd you do? Well, I once made some crab cakes. By the tracks, I saw the fox was back. How could she avoid the fun?