zirconium

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.

[The subject line's from Thomas Hardy's "The Phantom Horsewoman."]

Shuffling to my study at 2:30 am to get a poem out of my head hasn't happened in a good long while. I'm not thrilled about the timing, but I should be able to sneak in a disco nap before I have to drive anywhere, and there are worse fates than communing with Thomas Hardy (while looking up rondeaux and triolets) and the indoor rose over a mug of valerian-camomile tea.



I do not need a Maestro Wu knife, but I am glad to know about it. (Via Grub Street's profile of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry, in Brooklyn. The blades are "forged from scrap metal and bombshells that mainland China fired on Taiwan.")

A new word to me, via Joelle Taylor: lemniscate. She highlights it as one of the six words that summarise her.

Dwelling on this a bit: the first six words that come to mind for myself form a portrait of whom I want to be, not an accurate resume of me as I am. So I shall make myself another mug of tea and then snatch some sleep, with an eye towards the former. (Not that I'm inclined to write specifically about me in my poems these days, but amused, buff, calm, dangerous, elegant, glorious lend themselves to better arrangements of words, and sleep is a means...

In peering at the news: I am laughing immoderately at Russ Jones's characterisation of Jacob Rees-Mogg as "the harrowing outcome of a bout of hate-sex between a Dalek and a bassoon" (and, predictably, someone in the replies has already protested that that's unfair to bassoons; h/t aunty_marion).

I have not been paying attention to Wimbledon. I do miss some of the craic, but my current headspace would rather dwell on transplanting tomato and pepper seedlings and spreading pine straw, so that's what's happening between coding, corresponding, and tumbling into lakes.

Over the past 2+ years, the wires in some of my masks broke outright, from all the fiddling, washing, etc. I'd held off extracting the ones that had become uncomfortable but were still intact, but two days ago finally reached for the ripper. (Is this perhaps a metaphor for other things I should be getting on with? Yes. Might I have a tendency to view my life through a Free Will Astrology filter? Yes.)



Contending with the ever-swarming legions of private brain weasels and public sphere / pundit weasels has been tiresome, to say the least. But there have also been compliments from colleagues and clients, lively chats with friends, and some sublime dancing:





In the yard, the hyacinths are waning, and the overcup white oak looks dead as the proverbial doornail (but apparently it's a really late bloomer), but there are swathes of violets and patches of star of bethlehem, and I have been harvesting wild chives and snacking on fresh mint. Also in bloom: buttercups, ferns (tiny purple flowerets), tomatoes. The six rosebushes all survived the winter, and I planted two white azalea bushes (a farewell gift from a museum colleague) last week. Indoors, the flower show includes cacti, white roses, shamrocks, and cyclamen.

Last night's cooking experiment wound up as phyllo-almond-walnut "cake." It started out as an attempt at Tunisian almond cigars but the phyllo sheets had been languishing in my fridge too long. So the stale bits went into the compost bowl, and the rest were layered with the filling, and I'm happy with the result.

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.

Saturday had a number of "I am the daughter of my ancestors" moments -- those instances where being extra wasn't in the game plan, but putting the kitchen trash and recycling bins (and a couple of plastic hampers as well) on the driveway to get a free pre-scrubbing soak in the rain, that happened. There was also vacuuming the floor of the trash drawer and freezer, and studying date and time units in Mandarin, as well as the more routine using up of aging ingredients/leftovers, plus some saving of styrofoam trays to use as plant saucers.

The outdoor plants survived this week's plunge in temperature. I wrapped one of my mother's skirts around the Jacob's ladder and draped t-shirts over the parsley and chives. The photinia is in bloom, as is a neighbor's honeysuckle. The first round of mallow and zinnia seedlings are far enough along for thinning; I extended the patch today, emptying out the soup container where I'd kept the mallow pods. Most of my energy, though, went toward weeding around the rosebushes, and scattering garlic scraps around them.



I started all the chocolate cherry tomato plants at the same time, but as these snapshots illustrate, the seedlings are growing at distinctly different rates. I didn't track if/when or how often I moved the plants between shelf/counter/floor and yard, but the ones furthest along likely spent the most time on the sunroom shelf.



Spending money on a non-utilitarian plant would have been out of character among the ancestors, but the Floof basket is earning its keep as entertainment. (It's generally known as a chenille plant, but the BYM greets it as "Floof!" every time he catches sight of it.) The fuchsia, too:



A show I am working on calls fuchsias "disordered." I raised my eyebrows at that claim, but hey, maybe Scottish flowers are more punk? (Or the SME more genteel. . . .)

One of these years, I will sew for myself some gardening smocks with pockets. In the meantime, here's what I harvested from the back yard this afternoon between dances:



The patch didn't show any ill effects from a deer prancing around in it before breakfast. Then again, those shells are tough.

The BYM: Why is there a mallet on the kitchen counter?

Me: The saw didn't cut it.

The subject line is from Yehuda Amichai, whose poem "God Full of Mercy" is among those I bookmarked in Into English, which I finally returned to the library this morning. The book was recommended by Marissa Lingen earlier year, and I posted about it Monday morning and yesterday night at Vary the Line.

Reading Robert Alter's compilation of Amichai poems would fit my mood right now, but I'm not ready to borrow print books from the library, so it will go on my someday list. It's not as if there isn't plenty to read and do in and to this house. I am almost-put-my-phone-in-the-washer tired, I will be working this weekend on tasks I'd hoped to go yard on a week ago, I didn't make time for the three e-books the library will reclaim today, I missed a meetup with Asheville dancers because my shift went past twelve hours, and both my workout and mindful eating practices went to hell.

But! And! I met a bunch of deadlines and planted more tomatoes, and sowed seeds for basil and cornflowers, and poured two bags of cedar mulch around the roses. I have a fresh stack of postcards. And I did in fact remember to look at the moon tonight (as well as smelling and sipping good coffee all week).

Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute posted some lovely clips from the archives to SoundCloud last month. I especially enjoyed the "Chamber Bach" concert, which included Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's Concerto a duoi cembali concertanti, F10 (a double harpsichord showpiece), and the real find was what happened to be next in the queue - Trio Rosa Mundi's rendition of Anthoine Boesset's "Je voudrais bien ô Cloris," which in turn sent me down a rabbit-hole with future distractions such as the 1629 French Court Aires with Their Ditties Englished by one Edward Filmer, as well as Wikipedia's mention of an entire festschrift chapter devoted to the song's "notational and performance problems." Maybe. My nerdiness only goes so far, and I have a history of falling asleep while others happily truffle around for author-composer-choreographer intent for hours, but I'm enough in love with this piece that I tracked it down at the IMSLP (where Book 6 of Boesset's many court songs is archived under Bataille, who arranged the lute parts):



Anyhow . . . my workspace is lit in such a way that SoundCloud's "upgrade" menu label looks like "upgrace" during the afternoon, which is an almost-word I'd like to play with more some other time. It came to mind as I patted dirt around some of the tomato plants as night fell, having cleared enough room for two A. J. Reds, three Celebritys, and one Mary Huddleston. Some of the vines have tiny yellow flowers, and there are tiny white flowers on some of the pepper plants; the more mature ones seem bushier than their predecessors. There's one mallow (aka French hollyhock) that's putting out a blossom every few days, new buds on the Sky's the Limit rosebush, and the start of a really nice cluster of balloonflowers. The fireflies were out in force as I detangled vines, and there was a loud extended ruckus among the owls next door and some other critters a few minutes after midnight. I hope it didn't involve the bunny the BYM has been saying hi to almost every evening.

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.