Hot Spell

Another day of brutal weather. Even a small walk has me coming home and pouring a gallon of water over my head. Picked enough blackberries for a yogurt/granola bowl and listened to the rehash of speeches from the Democratic Convention. There are several words for the round stick used to stir porridge, if you'd been best kid that day, you got to lick the thibble, which certainly sounds better than licking the spurtle. People ask me what I do with my time. I have several hundred new words which I haven't run through the OED nor any of the other dictionaries, Oldest English Words, Slang And Unconventional English, Webster, Random House. An average day, I probably spend a half-hour or an hour looking up words. The last couple of weeks, that dictionary from Jude, Glenn's visit, words are all but consuming me. I've been spending hours a day with heavy books on my lap. I get up and walk around, go outside to pee. Got just a wee dram of the Japanese single-malt, Hibiki, it's great whisky (without the 'e' in Scotland). I couldn't access the inter-net, I'm in the one percent, so I called a friend, and he fed me information. Said he'd print out a copy, and leave it in the usual place. A rubbish bin on Sixth Street. B is already ahead of me on this, he's made a tubular pillow to distribute the load. A fucking book pillow, why hadn't I thought of that? It's the perfect solution, also, to raising the book a couple of inches, to prevent that crick in the neck. You could spend an hour on 'crick', which, by my standards would be an hour well spent, or you could wonder how to slide printed data into a hole in the wall. Glenn mentioned data several times, and I get it, the way information is parsed, but I use a false identity when I buy anything, pay cash for almost everything, and never use my real name. No one can say it anyway. A guttural that means dried dung. I don't actually mind being called a 'small white turd' though it might be considered hurtful, it seems to me a term of endearment. Storm front moved in and I had to shut down. Rain all night and then a fairly violent front in the morning. I needed water, so I cleaned and sat out three buckets, cleaned my water-heating pot, and got rather well rinsed in the process. The greenery is all drooping and a haze fills the hollow, not as thick as river fog, but dense enough that visibility is limited. Quite comfortable in a wet tee-shirt and boxer briefs, Shoeless Joe, I get together another load of recycling and stuff it in the Jeep. Dripping rain on the roof, the leaves are all free of dust, and there's a wonderful bright sweet smell. Between showers I leave the back door open. Still aware that I could lose power, I made a salsa/cheese omelet to have as a sandwich later. I'm experimenting with a Styrofoam cooker that I tricked up with ethafoam and duct tape. I remember seeing something like this on Cape Cod. Laminated together four pieces of the foam, cutting a hole in three of the pieces that snuggly fit the pot I use most often to cook a pound of dried beans, made a tight-fitting lid of foam, dished to accept the pot's lid, and wrapped everything in a couple of layers of duct tape. Soak a pound of beans overnight in salted water, with a diced onion and a cup of cracklings, bring to a roiling boil and put the pot in the Styrofoam cooker. I lined the inside of the cooker with canvas, but the great thing about ethafoam is that it doesn't pill and flake off. The bad thing is that it's quite expensive. It's used in the art trade as archival packing, and I had saved what I could salvage over the years at the museum. My thinking on this cooking method is that on marginal cold days I usually let the fire in the stove go out after breakfast. First mess of beans are damned near perfect, eight hours. They might have been done in four hours, but I didn't want to break the seal. You could, I think, improve the system by using a ceramic pot and sealing it with a rope of bread dough. The version of this I saw on Cape Cod was a wooden chest filled with either sawdust or hay. The ethafoam works very well. Next experiment is going to involve ox-tail and root vegetables. There's so little energy invested in this system that it's amazing to me. The issue becomes not making heat, but holding it. Boston baked beans, or even something as simple as chicken broth. One hit of heat, while I'm frying an egg, and dinner is simmering. I eat three or four bean meals a month, Great Northern, Black Beans, Pintos, Butter Beans. Beans and cornbread, with fried salt-pork, a couple of pickled hot peppers, is one of great meals ever.