zirconium

My first accidental project of the year: pandoro - literally "bread of gold," festively Veronese Christmas cake, and absolutely not what I'd planned to spend the first day of the year on, but having volunteered on New Year's Eve to bring a dessert to dinner on New Year's Day, I wanted to try something new, and its mention in Nigella Lawson's recipe for "Easy Holiday Trifle" (in Feast) caught my eye.

Fortunately, I am at this point experienced enough that I picked up a box of cake mix when I hit the store, and I did indeed end up assembling the trifle with backup cake rather than the pandoro, which was slow to rise and ultimately would have been too dense for a dessert that depends in part on syrup and time melding together stewed fruit and spongy carbs. I will confess to being inordinately pleased with how the pandoro turned out, though -- it smelled fantastic while it was baking, it tastes great, and rolling all the layers into it was a heck of a workout.





The trifle (apricots stewed in cardamom syrup) before the toppings (whipped cream, bourbon honey, pistachios and almonds) were added:

While I'm keeping "zirconium" at Twitter for the foreseeable future, I've set up http://mastodon.sdf.org/@zirconium (AKA "zirconium@mastodon.sdf.org") to get familiar with the landscape in case #ScienceTwitter and other key circles head on over. As with this blog, updates will be irregular and I don't -- can't -- read every item in my feeds, but establishing and keeping open lines of access is part of the battle.



I actually spent the bulk of my morning on handwritten correspondence, including this season's first holiday card, which is going to a Scandosotan friend I was reminded of when another friend (based in Stockholm) recommended Sallyswag, describing them as "the queer folk soul brass dancehall hip hop band":



(Yes, it's rather early to be sending December holiday cards, but this one is an Advent calendar, and given reports from other friends about letters taking scenic routes to, say, North Carolina, I am not sanguine about this one even arriving before Trinity term. Now that I've said it, watch it arrive before the GOTV postcards I put in yesterday's mail to Georgia...)

In the Department of Plus Ça Change, still feeling crummy but functional. Full-blown respiratory woe has sidelined me from work gatherings and choral commitments (and heavy-duty cough syrups now give me splitting headaches, great). But my sunroom remains a gorgeous sanctuary, I have lamb and Taiwanese spinach stew on my stove, Aaron Tveit is covering "Take Me Home Tonight" on the YouTube jukebox, and being home means other things get tended to, including the sorting of tomatoes (this year's harvest was entirely from volunteer plants, descended from seedlings Miel gave out last year). I'm planning on making green tomato-cheddar hand pies later today or tomorrow.

Tu b'shevat arrives tomorrow, and Middle Tennessee is supposed to get whumped by snow by then. Coincidentally, a crepe myrtle the Beautiful Young Man had ordered at the start of November was delivered this week, so he's planting it as I type.



The miniature rose bush I bought at the supermarket a year ago put out some glorious blooms. They were also havens for dozens of tiny bugs, though, so I chucked them into compost sooner than later. The Christmas cacti also put on a good show throughout December.

I'm going to chop up a fir wreath for mulch after I post this. I usually deal with it the day after Epiphany, but I'm still ill (!@#@!#@ lungs), though I'm managing a walk across the neighborhood most evenings. Many of my neighbors still have Christmas/fairy lights up, and I'm enjoying them as I stride through the gloom. There's also a new-to-me greenhouse in one of the alleys I tend to cut through, that may or may not be a commercial venture.

There's sorrow: relationships foundering, people dying. There's hilarity: recent reading has included K.J. Charles's Band Sinister ("You've been waiting your whole life for someone to write a Gothic novel about you, haven't you?"), Flight of Magpies, and A Gentleman's Position ("If you're obliged to cross a man at all, nail him to one while you're at it"), and I may confine my Instagram posts this winter to #CatsInPictureBooks. There's the annual gorgeous Lunar New Year card from a cousin in Kaohsiung. There are the tomatoes I canned and froze over the past two summers that I've been using now in soups and sauces. There's being terrified for the future of my city (those FUCKERS in the legislature . . .) and country and doing what I can anyway. There's pushing through paperwork and code, and trying to keep the pitcher plants alive, and adding smatterings of sparkle and substance to ongoing conversations when I can, and holding my peace and keeping my own counsel plenty of other times, and all this adds up to life being a lot even though the coughing + Omicron means I've been sidelined from singing since November, and I haven't seen anyone socially since December 18. (I do like plenty of time alone, but I object to my style being cramped. Grrrr.)

But! Neighbors brought by smoked cream cheese and Texas caviar, and friends sent galaxies and other goodies, and I made ginger tea with homegrown ginger root earlier this week and fixed a keyboard lag issue this morning. On to weeding and wreaths and mailings and daube marseillaise.

Today I retrieved my seam-ripper and extracted broken nosewires from three masks: they'd been washed and adjusted so often since March 2020 that the metal had snapped. I was off-camera during two of the three events I attended during my virtual college reunion today, and I liked being able to deal with much of the mending pile while listening to the presentations. (As for the on-camera social, I cackled out loud when a friend DM'd, "Dude you put on lipstick" . . . )

I had to bail on the two choral projects I mentioned in my previous post. That didn't feel good, nor did heading into today's Bach workshop with no real prep. But summer is not yet here. One of my former choir directors often ended our read-through rehearsals with "You know what you need to do." Yeah.

The front garden received several compliments this week. ("Your flowers are lookin' good, hon.") A volunteer French hollyhock is at its peak, front and center with tiers of blooms. Friends brought by a rosebush that I settled in the back yard, along with some tomato seedlings that Miel had culled from their garden. Some of the cherry tomato plants are showing clusters of tiny green globes. The radish seeds from 2013 or thereabouts have germinated, as have two of the basil seeds from a packet sent by the United Negro College Fund. The basil starters from the nurseries haven't thrived in my outdoor planters, but an aging tiny-leaved plant I'd been neglecting has now put forth a new cascade of white blossoms. It's too early to tell if the parsnips are going to materialize.

I harvested some mint and kale to go with the chicken tikka masala I pulled from the freezer, and doctored today's orange slushie with honey and sumac. I need to plow through a fair amount of work + paperwork tomorrow, but I am pleasantly achy from this morning's workout (2.5 hours of kayaking and paddleboard yoga), and I expect to sleep well.

The subject line's from Adrian Mitchell's "After the Third Election of Thatcher," which continues:

. . . and climb on my horse and ride away
And if I were Wales I would turn my back
And climb on my horse and ride away . . .

This is in the collection Blue Coffee: Poems, 1985 - 1996, which has this opposite the table of contents:

EDUCATIONAL HEALTH WARNING

None of the work in this or any other of my books is to be used in connection with any examination whatsoever. Reduce the size of classes in State schools to twelve and I might reconsider.

---

Today's household misadventure was a result of following directions: the recipe said to use a food processor to pulverize ginger in boiling water. Ow. I'm irritated not only at the mess, but by the fact that I'd already experienced this mishap before, when attempting to puree soup. On a less grouchy note, I have used up the aging ginger in the fridge, and there will be ginger-orange jello soon.

The rain let up now and then a few times today. I took breaks from the Scottish show to tug at weeds, thin out mallows, and tie up stems, as one of the "Sky's the Limit" rose bushes has become a rose sprawl. It is also producing red instead of yellow flowers this year.

Also entertaining: the Christmas cactus closest to the cyclamen now has a new bud.

---

My recent bathtub reading included the October 2001 issue of Sculpture, which included Anne Barclay Morgan's interview of Westen Charles. The installation that interested me most was Retirement. The artist provided some background:



I tossed the magazine into recycling after I was done . . . and then dug it out a day or three later, wanting to reread the description after seeing Patty Seyburn's Ode to John Hinkles, Junior and Senior, which begins:

A man filled the thumb hole of his favorite
bowling ball with his father’s ashes,
then bowled a perfect game.

[The subject line is from June Jordan's It's Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean.]

It's a sunny Saturday morning, the sky is a beautiful blue, and the forecast for this afternoon is in the 50s, with the wind below 10 knots per hour. But I have seven chapters and a fifty-page bibliography to finetune for a volume editor and image manager before the end of the day, and a dozen-plus other files to power through before the start of Monday.

Younger Me would mutter "Tae hell wi' y'all!" and hop on the paddleboard and string the kite anyway, and then grind through the lot overnight. Current Me is cranking up Rameau, Monteverdi, and Anderson .Paak and getting on with it -- after I placate my peasant brain by dealing with a bundle of limp carrots. I combined some of the greens with asparagus this morning to go with scrambled eggs . . .



. . . and the roots are in the slow cooker with other ingredients for beef stew. It feels good to have the wherewithal to make things happen, even when they weren't in our plans when we got out of bed a few hours ago.

This week I also baked a chocolate soufflé (because this past Sunday was National Chocolate Soufflé Day, which I used as my prompt for Day 28 at the Tupelo 30/30 challenage) and two loaves of cranberry bread (because I'd ordered a bag from Misfits Market with a vague idea of making relish, but then hadn't followed through with picking up related ingredients when I went to the store). I picked up our monthly Chinese feast from Lucky Bamboo on Monday, and dumped cheese (blue, American, pizza blend . . .) on various leftovers and vegetables for lunch, dinner, and snacks. The BYM resorts to frozen meals when I don't feel up to cooking, and one night brought home a mushroom pizza from Smith & Lentz that rated an awww yeah when he reheated what was left the next day.

In other happenings, our larger hellebore is blooming beautifully (the smaller one probably needs another year or two . . .), and indoors some of the Christmas cacti and cyclamen are still producing buds and flowers. The aloe plant I'd brought home from Downtown Pres in 2019 was again in need of repotting, so that happened as well:

Today is crowded with overlapping possibilities. Newark Museum's virtual Carnival Celebration runs all day, with the samba/capoeira session at the same time as Iowa's English country dance gathering. Says You's Kisses and Quips show was on my calendar for a long time, but my church's cabaret for Habitat for Humanity streams at the same time. Plus, there's tomorrow's Tuupelo poem to draft, doing enough Chinese/Welsh/Spanish/French to stay in Duolingo's Diamond League, putting ten postcards to voters in the mail, doing something about the butternut squash I roasted two or three nights ago before the next Misfits Market box arrives . . .

This week had a lot of crud. I'm trying not to brood about the things I cannot change, but I am reminded of other bloggers greeting February with EVERYBODY BRACE NOW There's something about the months before the equinoxes that make them feel like a long haul, even though in my case they also feature the birthdays of some of my favorite people. And fatigue with both the pandemic and the equally unrelenting and life-threatening banality of evil is also a thing. It took me five times as long to get to things I normally enjoy dispatching with ease, and some things that would literally make me feel better (working out, dancing, ironing . . .) keep getting shafted because it's easier to stay in the rocking chair for one more Duolingo/Mimo/Earpeggio lesson.

Anyhow, I do like the Befruary take on this gloomy gray stretch of the season, and I did my metal-dawg / Taurus-with-Virgo-rising thing and herded/hauled my mental sheeps to meadow and market. New poems up at Tupelo:

Day 6: "More than a Single Bound" (prompted by a motorcycle stunt)
Day 7: "Gazing at Tennessine" (prompted by Periodic Table Day)
Day 8: "Free As . . ." (prompted by National Kite-Flying Day)
Day 9: "Sweet Spot" (prompted by the Feast of St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache sufferers)
Day 10: "Imperfect Fragment" (prompted by Edmond Halley)
Day 11: "Gathering Up All the Fragments" (prompted by Lydia Maria Child)
Day 12: "A Foot-Long Tongue" (prompted by Charles Darwin)
Day 13 (up later today): "Through a Screen, Darkly" (prompted by Absalom Jones, a Black Episcopalian priest and essential healthcare provider during a yellow fever epidemic)

The "someday" reading list is getting new titles added to it pretty much every day. There's an orchid display at Cheekwood this month; with Darwin's Contrivance by which British and Foreign Orchids . . . now in my Google library, I'd be keen to see it, but it's indoors, so I'll have to content myself with old photos instead, like these:



Ironically, as a household, we are not hugely into holidays. My belle-mère and closest cousin are by far more into (and better at) decorating; I mailed a Valentine to the BYM last year mainly to yank his chain (it was an adorable design, but it also had glitter); there have often been professional and/or performance obligations that had me on duty instead of at gatherings. That said, I'm weak for stickers and ribbons (even though they too often leave the ironing board and cutting mat weeks or even years after the festival they were originally purchased for), and every third year or so I work up the energy to donate something related to Lunar New Year to the church auction. This year's donation wasn't directly tied to LNY, but the winners of the bao subscription were easily gracious about me wanting to skip January, so I expanded yesterday's delivery of shrimp bao to include Taiwanese tea eggs, radish cake, and pineapple-ginger bubble tea:



The photos show my second take at mixing the tea; the first batch tasted fine but looked revolting. "Failing better" is definitely a thing here. ;)

[The subject line is from a valentine by Emily Dickinson that may be the most daft thing (outside of political/medical misinformation or art historical polemics, natch) I read this week.)]

I'm such a sucker for kawaii packaging. I hadn't planned on buying more mooncakes this season, having already splurged on two boxes and a CAAN festival feast last month. But, BUNNIES!!!

(The cakes are gorgeous, so I placated my household budget gods by designating three of the four as gifts to colleagues/family. And I subsequently received a box of four from a vegetarian friend who had purchased them before realizing that they contained lard.)

Autumn Sky Poetry Daily published my poem "Vinegar" this week.

Herding deliverables to their destinations has been grueling, and I missed dances, chats, and services this week. And an alternate service I attended for a few minutes was off-key enough that on five hours of sleep across two days, I couldn't take it. On an un-whiny note, though, it's indeed a silver lining to have multiple options for all three, and to be able to catch some of the recordings later. This week's video sessions also included London Art Week's webinar on 15th-century frames, whose presenters in turn recommended Closer to Van Eyck, which may be of interest to the medieval/Renaissance, restoration/conservation, and interactive programming nerds who happen to be reading this. Today's dance (hosted by Iowa English Country Dance) included "Hazelfern Place," which I had not encountered before, and a breakout-room craic with dancers/musicians in Atlanta (with bonus rubber chicken) and Bristol (UK).

Pounding through piles of pages (and spending hours de-snarling some tech tangles) also meant not restocking on groceries until today, so we'd run out of eggs, bacon, waffles, lettuce, and other staples by this morning. But I was able to produce Uncle Nearest jello cups and deviled eggs for a tiny outdoor gathering, and spiced banana muffins to cover a couple of breakfasts, so go me. I have more work and correspondence to whale through tonight, but first I'm going to make chili with some of the tomatoes I grew:


The green bananas are to help ripen the green fruit I'll have to bring in early because of rodents or frost. speaking of which. . .

The BYM (gestures toward scrabbling in the walls): Can you do something about that squirrel?
Me: Burgoo.
The BYM (shouts at the scrabbling): Hear that, mf? KENTUCKY IS IN THE HOUSE.

Today's subject line comes from this weekend's Live from Here broadcast, in a reading by Lulu Miller, I think around 1 hour and 40 minutes in.

Today's photo is of a jar full of stars -- a birthday gift recently delivered to me:


I do not like having to multitask as often as I do, but being able to fry bacon and mushrooms while attending my church's congregational meeting is a plus, especially as it trundles through its second hour. The meeting started with an exceptionally good tutorial, and I've been jotting down Zoom navigation tips from other members (new to me: to change your name within the Participants list while in a meeting, put the cursor over your name and click "More ->").

The frying is for a quiche I'm pulling together, since there were carrot and kohlrabi tops from last week's market bag. In looking up how to prepare kohlrabi, I ended up giggling at this bit from Martha Rose Shulman [NYT]:

Every time I work with kohlrabi I wonder why I don’t buy it more often.

If you receive it in your CSA basket and you’ve never worked with it before, you may find the thick-skinned vegetable puzzling, maybe even daunting. As the nutritionist Jonny Bowden describes it in his book The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, kohlrabi “looks like a cross between an octopus and a space capsule.” That’s true, especially if the greens are still attached. If they’re not, it just looks like a space capsule.

As I told a friend last night, I'd like fewer bugs (both literal and figurative) and more sleep. I'm saying "no" and "later" to various projects to make the more sleep possible, but the docket still overfloweth. The congregation meeting hit the two-hour mark right before the chalice extinguishing. Up next, in my Franklin-Covey-ish blocks:

[A]

finish assembling the quiche (with a substitute for the heavy cream we don't have on hand)

prep for Monday presentation to interns

mark edits to wills/directives

attend an online birthday celebration

write Postcards to Voters

participate in a CalTwerk or Limon workout

do enough Duolingo to stay in Diamond League

log into an SFEMS workshop (aka getting my butt kicked in both theory and sight-singing to get better at both)

laundry

[B]

pick up batteries, mayonnaise, and other sundries

whale through more work

collect library holds

financial housekeeping

yardwork

some personal correspondence

[C] (aka not tonight but this week)

finish three library books, with a Vary the Line post related to the one on translation

yet more paper slinging and filing

research for a nonprofit task force

dance homework

start learning The Armed Man for Stay At Home Choir. First UU's choir sang it 11 years ago for Music Sunday, but I remember very little about it and may well have jumped in on soprano or tenor instead of alto.

continue working on the pieces already assigned to me

more cards and notes, including to some addresses on the Americans of Conscience list

figure out what to plant in the straw bale

:



[D] (aka things I might not have time for but may do anyway if I get too crispy around the edges)

watch Stratford's Love's Labor Lost

improve the peanut-butter-whisky + coffee slushies I started mixing last week. I totally admit that I bought the bottle because of the label. (Netting an appalled look from the BYM was merely a bonus.)

Signal boosts:
The Okra Project
Wiggle Room (disclosure: a friend is on their team)
The SIJS (Special Immigrant Juvenile Status) Project (disclosure: a friend runs this)

Onward, y'all. Stay safe (within what's feasible, especially considering the demands made by both the rest of society and our individual souls) and keep in touch.

Literally. As in, this turned up when I tugged at a mess of dead and live plant matter (tangled with curls of dried paint and mulch from two or three seasons ago) near the roses:



Once I get that corner cleaned up, I plan to sow mallows there, or zinnias, or marigolds (Rae sent packets of the latter two for my birthday). The Lenten rose (aka hellebore) looks great, and I'll be asking my mom-in-law for more after I finish reading the Emily Carr catalogue I borrowed from her more than a year ago. The fireflies are out, the peppers have started to fruit, and the zinnias are about to pop:



I missed this morning's workout with José both because of imminent deadlines and because my ankles were still twanging a bit from Saturday's samba and CalTwerk double. From the livechat:

YoFit: How r u peg?
Me: the usual: sheltering in place and tryna save the republic. and you?
YoFit: Gurlll SAME.

There will never be enough hours in the day. Some mornings I roll out of bed and steamroll through work and working out and homework in t-shirts and pajama bottoms. Today I put on a corporate-appropriate dress and worked, twerked, and weeded in it (though I did shed the accessories before grabbing my weights). I have it together in some respects, but I also sent this warning before a meeting:

Me: Hey, if you see me choking on my coffee, it's because I spilled Slap Ya Mama in it while prepping dinner. #TeamHotMess
Boss: That's quite the flavor profile.

Harvested: some mint, some spinach, and a bowlful of vetch pods, the last in hopes of beautifying more of the yard with thatches like this one: