zirconium

[Today's subject line quotes Stanislaw Jerzy Lee. I forget where I first encountered it.]

A morsel of lagniappe: working at home all day means I get to see these tiny starry flowers when they are open. They close up as night falls, which means I'd previously seen them only as buds.



Our governor says the safer-at-home order will expire on April 30. For those of you tracking my dithering about the Y: if the centers reopen on May 1, that will be the last straw for this camel. I will cancel my membership faster than you can chant "To the left, to the left..."

For those of you not on my Twitter TL: bacon coffee jam, y'all! (And other uses for coffee dregs and grounds) https://www.myrecipes.com/ingredients/leftover-coffee-and-coffee-grounds-uses?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social-share-article (via the https://littlewaves.coffee/ newsletter)

Hello to y'all and to 2020. Today's subject line refers to the Great Sardine and Maple Leaf Drop, a fine collaboration between Canada and the United States mentioned in a public radio roundup of Things Dropped yesterday.

I didn't kiss anything at midnight, truth be told. I was asleep, plus the Beautiful Young Man came home from Minnesota with a cold. I had a great time at the gym yesterday once I got myself there: although I woke up in time for the first class I'd intended to hit, I didn't get myself to the Y until the second class was already underway (and still managed to forget my shirt -- but, for a change, I wasn't the only woman dancing in just her bra, and it beats the time I had to improvise a skirt out of my cardigan because I'd left my shorts at the office). It felt good knowing some of the routines well enough to really get down, and the instructor (who gave birth just three weeks ago, and looks fan-freaking-tastic) high-fived me after I bounced up from a floor twerk. (And here you thought "get down" was merely a turn of phrase. ;) )



I had half the gym to myself for a good ten minutes after class, and a hoop to myself for twenty minutes beyond that. I'm terrible at el baloncesto -- especially when I try to shoot left-handed, which I worked on for a while yesterday -- but it's still fun even when I'm bricking 19 shots out of 20. I like the sound and feel of the ball hitting the floor and landing in my hands. (The opening poem in my book is "Practicing Jump Shots with William Shakespeare." The girl may not get to the court often, but it's definitely part of her (hi)story.)



Speaking of past publications, one might think that someone with a poem about thinning seedlings would have zero hesitation about culling Christmas pepper sprouts from an overcrowded pot. One would be wrong. It's a wonder that anything ever gets done around here.

The red raincoat I wore for that author photo (taken on the same trip as the photo in today's icon, if you're reading this on Dreamwidth) is one I purchased from a bookshop in New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighborhood umpteen years ago, possibly during a holiday visit. With green/blue streaks in my hair since 2010, I haven't worn that coat much (until this week, the last time may have been last year's Santa paddle), so I had put it in the "donate" pile earlier this fall. But then Jane Fonda's red coat showed up in my feed, and then Louisville was picked for the Music City Bowl, for which I had tickets (thanks to MCB's sponsorship of the Dragon Boat Festival and to my donors, whose generosity added up to my being the top fundraiser on my team).

Y'all. I haven't worn so much Cardinal red in forever (earrings, scarf, lipstick -- the works). The seats were fantastic -- behind the endzone, four rows back, aisle. The BYM was decidedly uninterested, so my date was another mouthy Southern gal who brought over a bottle of Huling Station Very Small Batch bourbon. For appetizers, I opened the Zingerman's pimento cheese friends had sent, and also the jar of garlic I had pickled last month. I fried maifun noodles with cabbage, mushrooms, and carrots for the main course (my friend was fascinated with the resemblance of the sesame oil bottle to Mrs. Butterworth's), and for dessert we had red bean mochi.

It's a good thing we did the pre-game thing, because the adult beverage options at Nissan Stadium are ... limited. My friend bought a Miller Lite for me during one of her trips to concessions, and all I can say is, why squander 96 calories on something with little flavor and zero buzz. My friend is not a fan of JD and that was the only bourbon on offer. But my hot cocoa hit the spot, and the bbq nachos were OK, and more important, we had fun taking in the whole scene. Two friends from high school with whom I'm still in touch are Louisville grads, and some of my favorite dance partners live there now, so I definitely had a preference, but not enough to feel distraught when Louisville's defense wasn't gelling during the first quarter. The crowd around us was mixed -- some hyped-up State and Cards fans, but also a row of local bros behind us who were just rooting for their bets (at least $500 on overs), so their cheering was wholly dependent on who was about to score. My friend and I agreed that they managed to stay on the right side of hilarious vs. obnoxious, but they were definitely on the line. State's cheerleaders were more on point uniform-wise than U of L's (the short-shorts and Minnie-Mouse-ish bows did not work); U of L's band (especially the announcer) had the more polished half-time presentation; State's flag runs were more impressive; Cards fans were louder (and not just because the Cards got their game going second quarter). Louisville's angry bird mascot is aesthetically more appealing than State's jowly dawg, although my friend spotted the real pup during one of her walks around.

In short: bad football, good time.

I'd prepped some bourbon balls for the party we ended up skipping yesterday because the BYM was snuffling (and even if he hadn't been, I had fallen asleep in the bathtub during my afternoon soak, so I changed right into pjs and my Grouse Grind t-shirt instead of going-out clothes). I'd like to curb some of my tendency to over-prep this next year, but it isn't a resolution because there are plenty of situations on the other end of the seesaw where I would do well to level up my prep. The issue is about calibrating the amount of prep to the expected ROI, and the mix includes acknowledging that I over-research things like hotel options because that's another-potato-chip quick and easy vs. really digging into an aria or a not-yet-finished poem because that's never quick or easy.



Anyhow, the BYM and I split a 2016 bottle of TRBLMKR during the evening, and I went to bed after a couple of Spanish lessons and a few chapters on sea kayaking. The plan for this morning had been to hit the gym for three hours (i.e., two classes, with a reading or rowing break between) but my shoulder is doing its occasional freezing-up thing, so instead I fried pancakes, eggs, and bacon, and I'm going to repot some plants now (including the very cramped aloe vera plant I picked up from Downtown Pres, which the BYM suggested sticking an octopus head on because its fronds looked to him like tentacles...). I could also just open a Yazoo Cinnamon Milk Stout or Blackstone Dark Matter IPA and then take an extended nap in the hammock. I do like this actually having the holiday off.

Today's subject line comes from an interview of Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape designer who "never met a tree I didn't like." Also: "When a new garden is being constructed, Van Valkenburgh has been known to use his body as a tree" to figure out where things should go.

We've had some weather this month. Not every tree on my tree made it through:



My foot injury from about a year ago is doing its flare-uppity thing. Some days I can bop and bounce with the best; some days, tree pose is out of the question. Most days, I stretch and limp and lope and swear and slide and shimmy (and in heels, too) depending on the hour, the surface, and how long I've been seated or supine.

On an upside, a kind friend who is an herbalist gave me a salve containing frankincense that I've been applying to the affected heel during breaks at work, and my office consequently smells fantastic.

Some evenings, it doesn't matter what's (over)due or how devil-long the damn list of other damn things to make has become, it's time to half-ass together a nectarine tart (loosely based on Brooklyn Supper's riff on Florence Fabricant's instructions; the linked-to tutorial on browning butter is a keeper):

Today's subject line comes from An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovksy In A Summer Cottage, which I recently learned was the source poem for Frank O'Hara's A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island. Here's a choice morsel from the Mayakovsky:

Give me tea, poet,
spread out, spread out the jam!

I baked bread tonight, which surprised me by rising higher than I'd expected...



... and provided both satisfaction and entertainment. It smelled good, made the BYM smile, and then there was this:

The BYM: *comes out of the shower, bows to the kitchen counter*
Me: *raises eyebrows to ask, You are genuflecting to the tortillas?*
The BYM: It looks like an altar.



OK. There is something of the sun about it. ;)

So, the show that hoovered up many of my waking hours (as well as hefty chunks of my sleep cycle) this past summer is up, and it's splendid. And me and my frock received many compliments throughout the day, and I dealt capably, competently, and/or creatively with assorted wrinkles and monkey wrenches prairie-dogging me through this and that ...

.. and then came home, and caused dealt with more mayhem, including the cooking of chicken livers, and then the BYM came home.

BYM [peering suspiciously at the stove]: Is that organ meat?
Me: Yep.
Me [after wincing during a hug, points to blister on collarbone]: Burned myself.
BYM: How did you manage that?
Me: Flying organ meat blood.

---

On a slightly less ridiculous note, here are two glimpses of the dancing at last month's Fandango. I'm wearing a short white lace dress and long white leather gloves.

A New Leaf
Marjorie's Sou'wester

I was drawn into Christian Wiman's "He Held Radical Light" excerpt at Poetry Daily earlier today because I became curious about where he was going after calling a good chunk of another writer's body of work "flavorless as old oatmeal." But the part where I sat up straight was when my own dour mutterings about eventual nothingness ("Look, I'm not going to get wound up about not getting anywhere with x when humans are going to be extinct within a few hundred years...") suddenly showed up on my screen like a mirror:

Nothing survives, I suddenly realized. Dante, Virgil, even sweet Shakespeare, whose lines will last as long as there are eyes to read him, will one day find that there are no eyes to read him. As a species, we are a microscopic speck of existence, which, I have full faith, will one day thrive without us.

Still, abstract oblivion is a small shock as shocks go. When over lunch one day my friend and then poet laureate Donald Hall turned his Camel-blasted eighty-year-old Yeti decrepitude to me and said as casually as he bit into his burger, "I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last," I felt a galactic chill, as if my soul had chewed tinfoil. I was thirty-eight. It was the very inverse of a calling, an ex post facto feeling of innocence, death's echo. In a flash I knew it was true, for both of us (this is no doubt part of what he was telling me), and yet the shock was not in that fact but in the nearly fifty years of further writings Don had piled on top of that revelation. "Poetry abandoned me," he writes in his little masterrpiece Essays After Eighty, the compensatory prose of which is so spare and clear it seems inscribed on solitude itself. If there were any justice in the world, this book would be read by my great-great-great-granddaughter as she gets ready to die. But of course there is no justice in the world.

I submitted two new poems today. I filed a rejection for four others, and made notes about a handful more to craft by the end of the month if mind and fingers and electronics cooperate. And, like quite a few other locals, I could not resist whisking out my phone yesterday when I saw this from the parking lot at work:





My being in the parking lot at that point was a compromise -- because of bloody honking deadlines needing to be met, I stayed at the office past the point of getting to the dance lesson on time, but I did go to the lesson, which ended up being a fine time -- the group was practicing "St. Margaret's Hill" when I arrived, and there was enough room in the studio for me to walk through the figures on my own. The rep for the rest of the evening included "Miss De Jersey's Memorial" (the dance of the month), "Kelsterne Gardens" (as a 4-couple dance), "Key to the Cellar" and several others in Scottish sets, "The Introduction" (which I requested after we collectively struggled with right and left diagonals during "The Weevil"), "The Young Widow" (which I requested when given three dances to choose from because it was the one I hadn't done yet), and "Bonny Cuckoo." We talked about regional differences/practices, including "the Philadelphia rule," which is when you're not the caller of the dance, shut up and don't "correct" the person who is leading the dance if no one is about to get hurt. Very sensible people, those Philadelphians.

I am too tired at the moment to be sensible, so while I knew full well that I needed to sit tail in chair and fingers to laptop to get to bed earlier, I went ahead with baking a cake (along with chicken that needed to be roasted sooner than later) and scrubbing this and that. Pacing will out. Anyhow, there are worse fates than snacking on chicken skins and listening to Monteverdi while editing docs on Italian art...

During this afternoon's driving around, I caught part of the TED radio hour's rerun of a feature on a boiling river that didn't appear on any maps before a Texas grad student's aunt connected him to a shaman who has allowed him repeated access to it.

On a far more mundane level, my cabin at Splashdance didn't appear on the map. Finding it -- while hauling a tub and duffel with my weekend bedding and clothing -- was an adventure; I've never been so happy to wear a headlamp (originally purchased for night padddling) in my life.

The weekend was a blast. I would have liked to have arrived much sooner and much more rested (having been warned that the camp was off the grid, and wanting 48 hours away from redlines and deadlines anyhow, I worked more than 45 hours while fitting 14 hours of driving prior to reaching Flat Rock). But I had energy enough for exhilarating waltzes and frisky contras (with a bit of blues and some squares in the mix, along with my beloved English country figures), and I snuck in naps on the bleachers, on a paddleboard, and in a hammock (heartfelt thanks and apologies to Cameron, who was very gracious about my mistaking her hang for community property -- it was a revelation to snooze between and beneath the pines, and I've since added "camping hammock" to my wishlist). The 6 a.m. breakfast prep assignment was a perfect fit for me, as I spent half of the shift cracking dozens of eggs while chatting with a whitewater guide, and the other half scrambling them eggs. I loved getting dipped by Shep (a carpenter I first danced with at an Orange Peel waltz night a few years ago), and grinning at Bill every time he soulfully yet wholly unseriously clasped my hand between his palms, and enjoying a few more turns with Dan, one of my favorite partners during the July workshop at Brasstown we'd attended. I'm not yet much of a lead, but that workshop gave me enough confidence to ask more women to waltz, which resulted in some memorable conversations as well.


Posing in the photobooth during the Saturday night dance

It is fun to be a more confident dancer in general. I screwed up plenty of times, but there were also plenty of smiles and compliments. One I'm still glowing about: one partner's pleased murmur about how people were actually dancing to "Sapphire Sea," not merely walking their way through it.

The rest of the week was even more "wait-what-whoa-JESUS" than usual, although I managed to avoid bellowing "Sonnnnnn!" at anyone (which happened last week when a particularly hapless Carolina driver veered into my way. Sometimes the South just leaps from my mouth...). Though some of my Congresscritters (TM Marissa) and other so-called representatives need to be deluged with more than mere exasperated hollerin', but that's a rant for another time/venue.



Today's moment of culinary inspiration: making aioli with leftover anchovy oil. (That's galangal sprinkled onto the sauce. It didn't add much, but hey, points to me for experimenting.)

Tonight's subject line comes from the first line of a letter Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell on April 1, 1958. It was actually a sunny day here, but I liked seeing the phrase just now, as well as the pleasure of peeking at a letter written sixty years ago (replete with frustration about a worker stealing apples and singing awful songs, a snotty jab at my beloved Ciardi, and kinder talk of work and mental health, along with paragraphs on babies, birds, books, and cities).

It would have been nice to go singing, shopping, or simply walking/biking around in the sunshine, but my body was tired, my brain fried, and my kitchen filthy, so I put on a nightgown when I rolled out of bed and have spent the day moving slowly between chores and diversions. I wrote a postcard poem and postcards to voters:



I abandoned my plan of trying a new recipe with the chicken thighs in the fridge; instead, I tossed them into a pot with bay leaves (from my big sister), carrots (that had been in the fridge for weeks), a yam (that had been on the counter for weeks), the dregs of a jar of pasta sauce, and garlic (from Penzeys) and let it all stew for a while. Tomorrow I may add lima beans and an onion, but I may also just let it sit some more, as there will also be two services to sing in and tax paperwork to tend to. Plus I'd like to paint my nails and retouch my hair and sleep for about a week more before heading back to the office. Wishes, horses, la la la.

The timing is not right for me to sign up for The Iteration Project Partner Program, but it sure sounds cool.

Toward the end of last month, a close friend ordered me to sleep more in 2017. Which I agreed would be a good idea, so I am hitting the hay in a few minutes instead of seeding kumquats for marmalade. But I have sterilized some lids and put the pint jars in the dishwasher, so "guessing game jam" may be on the horizon.( Read more... )

The kumquats, Meyer lemons, and grapefruits (plus an orange) are from the New Orleans backyard grove my big sis shares with her ex. I made sorbet last night with some of the lemons (using a Mark Bittman recipe as a base, with the advice of several blogs on making ice cream sans machine), and spiked a pitcher of water with slices of lemon and ginger.



Today's attempt at dinner was passable, even though the BYM later commented that the salad "smelled like feet." Really, the preparation of everything is experimental. I'm going to sleep on that. :)

Today's mailman asked about the dog, having not seen her for a while. He said she was one of the few who didn't bark at him. I might be snuffling as I type. ( Read more... )
Finally: I started this entry some hours ago. Night has fallen, so let there be light.