Meanders With Mammoth -- Movement and Return

                                            The borders between domesticated and wild are often fluid.
                                                                                                       -National Geographic
Instead of just sitting beside the house and sucking money out of our bank account, Mammoth got to go traveling today. She went to the gas station and the LP gas store. She did fine, even without me there to supervise her...until she returned home.

There she proceeded to bash into the corner of the house roof and demolish a chunk of fascia. The roof struck back, breaking a tail light and gouging a huge scrape in the paint near the top of her roof. Comparing the damage on the two contenders, I'd say the Mammoth won the battle.








One note to all you wannabe RV owners out there--when you park it with the slides extended, check that the rubber seals have all flipped out. Last night it poured down rain--quarts, gallons and buckets of rain--and this morning we found the only leakage was along one slide where the seal was rolled inward.  The leak on the driver's side roof appears to be fixed--not a drop of water over there.  But over by the slide, not so lucky. There's a space heater drying the carpet right now.

Kind of like a mystery

Mysteries of the Middle Ages

I can't say enough wonderful things about this book. I'm not sure he met his stated goal to explain how feminism, science and art arose from the dark ages, but he sure gave it a strong push. I suspect that "feminism" might have been a word his publisher  put into the subtitle, because he didn't write about the topic as we know it today, but instead wrote much about how medieval abbesses, nuns, and queens demonstrated that women can wield power and intelligently attack problem. I guess that foreshadows feminism.

     The circles of Hell are fairly crammed with the once rich and powerful, especially with kings and other titled personages and with members of the higher clergy...For Dante, as for all other thinking people of his time, the worldliness of churchmen and their constant craving after wealth and power were the most destructive forces looks in the world.

Later, in praise of Dante, he writes,

Dante may be circumspect about his own peccadilloes, but not about this satisfaction in seeing his tormentors punished nor in seeing those responsible for the chief political ills of the medieval world receive their eternal comeuppance. He is a medieval man and has no need to feign the pious sympathy occasionally evinced by our contemporary media figures. If he feels like chortling, he'll chortle.

Be warned--reading this book may send you off to re-read The Divine Comedy.

Gardening in my Roots, end of January edition

Yesterday I planted carrots with radishes as a "nurse crop" and then spinach and beets. I should have sprinkled the beds when I was done, but I was hoping for rain the next day.

Next day: no rain. The soil was damp but not consistently damp enough for good germination. With any luck tomorrow I'll get home before dark and I can sprinkle then.



Too soon, you think? I don't think so. For cold-hardy plants like these, lately I've been getting burned--pun intended--more by hot weather than cold. Lowes sells frost blankets for $10...so if they start to come up and a frost is predicted, I'll see about getting a couple.  Each is about long enough to cover half of one of my rows.  Also I can put out the homemade row cover over the beets.


Of course, at this point, the whole discussion is about hope and promise. The garden looks like dirt. Disturbed dirt. That's why there's no picture with this post--too disturbing.

Mammoth the Money Pit

    ...the happiness that buying something provides is derived not from acquiring the item,
                                                 or from the item itself, but from the targeting it, wanting it
                                                                               and anticipating its arrival into your life.
                                                                                           -Peggy Drexler, writing for CNN

Not sure if we'll be able to fit in a trial run before our long-scheduled South Korea trip, but we've been slowly getting her fitted out and ready to roll. Yesterday I had the bright idea of going down to an RV Supply Superstore to purchase the windshield curtain rollers. I'd found them online but didn't want to pay for shipping. I mentioned the shopping idea and Ed was right-on with it...not mentioning until later than he'd already ordered the rollers using his Amazon Prime free shipping.

So off we went, bright and early-ish Saturday morning, to go shopping!  What fun, huh?

First stop was the farmer's market. Second, Walmart. (Toaster oven, laundry basket, drapery hooks, cooking utensils)

Then I told my phone to take me to the RV Supply Superstore, and my phone politely mentioned that it was closed now. Oh, the wonder of hand-held devices. Saving us so much time and energy!

Except, of course, it allowed us to search out other RV supply stores which might not be closed on weekends. It found several. Since we were right by Cabela's, we stopped to look at their RV supplies (paltry) and ventured across the street to Target (flu shots, cooking utensils), then decided to visit the two RV supply stores in Mesquite. Mesquite was 30 miles away...but we were on a quest!

The first store had nothing we needed but we bought a water heater cleaning wand. The second one had something we didn't even know we needed--a 50-amp to 30-amp power converter.  When I'd been searching for a nearby campground for a trial run, I noticed the sites with 30-amp hookups seemed a lot closer to the water than the ones with 50-amp, and there were more of them.  So we needed to be prepared. Also, while at the store, we had a chance to talk with a very knowledgable saleslady who explained that with 30-amp we could run pretty much everything but we'd need to shut off one of our two air conditioners.

Stops 5 and 6 complete, we headed back to our local Walmart to get a few things we'd seen at Target but didn't like. And yes, you heard right--two Walmarts in one day. I'd better cut this short--I'm starting to make myself nauseous. Then the grocery (stop 8) and Spring Creek Barbeque (stop 9) and Chipotle (10).

So, much to my surprise, this Mammoth Thing is not just a massive money-suck, it's a time-suck!  Not sure I like the looks of this....

Secret Marvels of the World:
360 Extraordinary Places You Never Knew Existed and Where to Find Them
   
by Lonely Planet

The sort of book you put in the john so you can read a few pages when you need to contemplate. Fun flipping through the pages and the short articles about each place are well written and entertaining. But unless you're preparing to do some world traveling, or at least traveling to Hawaii, not a necessity.

Gardening In My Roots, time begins again

(The time begins again quote was stolen from Barbara Kingsolver)

Last Sunday I wrote this:
It's January 20 and apparently the growing season has begun. After yesterday morning's cold front left us shivering all day, today dawned clear--but cold--and unwindy.  All morning the sky was bonnie blue and the air had no creepy cold movement, at all.

So after accidentally setting out on the noon-time dog walk without my coat on, having to backtrack to get it and if you know dogs on a walk, they don't like backtracking, by the time we came home I had a hankering to visit the garden. With a digging fork.

The ground was wet but not sodden. I turned over the spot designated for snap peas, dug a wheelbarrow of compost out of the pile and spread it, and planted peas. Yippee! Last year's leftover seed so it may not do so much, but the new seed is ordered and on the way.

I also dug and composted the beet bed.  My homemade compost is not of the best quality, but it does sort of look like compost.  By the way, does having lots of worms in your soil mean it's healthy?  Lots and lots?  Including a nightcrawler so fat he looked like a small snake.  The fish I could have caught with that one....

Buy this book now!

Identify Yourself:
The 50 Most Common Birding Identification Challenges (Paperback)
by Bill Thompson III

I want to own this book! It's invaluable. My only wish is that he'd included the great-tailed grackle in his section on blackbirds. I remain hopelessly confused between those two.

Otherwise it's full of useful information. For instance, I can stop looking at chickadees around here. They're always going to be Carolina.

Black-capped chickadees invade about once a decade, when they can be found south of their normal range. We know this only because bird banders are required to measure the birds to separate the species. Outside of these invasions, they're just not found south of their normal range.

Open any random page and you'll get great advice. And a chuckle.

For most bird watchers the biggest problem in identifying owls is finding one. Owls are nocturnal. Humans are diurnal, and when we are out at night, we can't even see well enough to avoid walking into trees.

Be careful: gaining confidence with the ringed plovers has been known to lead people to look at other shorebirds.

Trying to turn large female kestrels into merlins is a well-established form of entertainment among bird watcher.

Mammoth Outfitting

                          *** Warning ***  Do Not Overload Your Wagon!
                                          It Will Only Carry 2500 Pounds
     From the Platte River to the mouth of the Columbia the trail is strewn with discards.
                  Too heavy a load will wear down your stock and leave you stranded.
                                  But Don't Forget To Bring What You Need!
                                                                                    -Compiled by Prof. Jim Tompkins

The leaking roof seal isn't fixed yet. Ed thought he'd identified the spot but after a careful application of silicone sealer, it's still leaking. If I were an eternal optimist I'd say we were lucky that it's been raining every day since we brought it home.  Any leak or even suggestion of a leak is going to show itself right now--not when we're out on a trip.

Adding insult to insult, Ed discovered the black water tank wasn't draining.  He tried everything--wires, snakes, evil chemicals, hands and feet, all to no avail. Finally in desperation he decided to cut the pipe so he could get to the tank, but before doing so he needed to find the pipe. He peeked in the door that lets you access one of the other appliances and saw the tank was right there. And there was another valve on it.

Open the valve, it drained straight away. Yahoo!  No cutting, slicing, or expensive repairs.  Just a twist of the secret valve.

Next we need to clean out the toilet and flush all the plumbing, install a windshield curtain, and start decking it out.  As much as I want to run out and buy a new set of dishes, pans, and cooking utensils, I know that would be stupid. We have twice the dishes we need right here in our cupboards. And how many pans do you need for a three-burner stove?  Honestly, all I really need to purchase is a spatula and a ladle.

The issue with the windshield curtain is that there isn't one. I didn't mention that we'd gone to one of those huge RV dealer lots a few months ago. We were just shopping; it was long before we were ready to buy. All the salesmen were busy, so they loaned us a little golf cart and let us loose to tootle around and climb in any and every RV we wanted to. We spent an astonishing long time there and climbed in a lot of RVs. Most of them had cloth curtains you could pull over the windshield at night--a necessary item, and once we recognized that, we assumed they all did.

But--oddly--when we took possession of ours it instead had heavy plasticized pads the exact size and shape of the windshield and side windows. The corners of these pads were fitted with large, round magnets.  Very cool--we tried one out in a window and discovered the magnets exactly matched the ones installed in the glass. Thrilling, no?

No. The windshield had been replaced, by the dealer, at no cost to us. He volunteered to--we didn't even have to ask. But he replaced it with a standard RV windshield--no magnets.

So the sensible thing would have been to take it back and insist he put in the Thor standard magnet-equipped windshield, but we chose not to bother.  We'd already seen the curtains on all the other models, and there was already a curtain runner installed just where it needed to be.  So we simply spent a few bucks on some lovely, blackout panels at the store and sewed them together with velcro at the center. Of course, our incompetent seamstress had to rip the seams and re-sew them correctly, but eventually it worked.  Lighter weight and less trouble than the heavy plastic pads would have been.

Lovely curtains!

Inspiring and funny too

Nothing Good Can Come From This
by Kristi Coulter

I was shocked when I started this--I'd already read it. But I had no record of it and it was worth a do-over, so I continued. And after the first two chapters, I discovered I hadn't.

What appears to have happened is that she wrote the first part into one or more blog posts and I'd read them there. Either a blog or a webpage of some sort. I'd enjoyed it very much the first time and I enjoyed the re-reading and especially the new sections that followed. It's sort of an "episodic memoir."  She takes us through parts of her life in whatever order that appeals to her--beginning with stopping drinking, then onto a challenging run up a cliff, sexism at her job, unhappy family life, attending an AA meeting because she wants to find a friend who understands what it's like.

If you want a sample of her writing, go read her hilarious--and strident--post about the Enjoli woman. She's not always this bitchy, but in this case, it's well-deserved. The link below is to a 'listen' site but if you scroll down, you can read it and not get caught laughing with your headphones on at work.
https://medium.com/@kristicoulter/https-medium-com-kristicoulter-the-24-hour-woman-3425ca5be19f#.rzye72lcn

Mammoth At Home

                    The first few days in your home are special and critical. Your new friend
                                  will be confused about where he is and what to expect from you.
                                                                                                                -petfinder.com

For you RV enthusiasts out there, I'll quote the specs. It is a 2011 Thor Serrano 31V, diesel, about 45K miles, 32 feet long, two slides. Huge storage areas; full-sized bed in the back; sofa with two footrests. On the minus side, a dinky little 3-burner stove with no oven; basic fridge without icemaker, and a TV positioned such that anyone on the sofa would have to crane their head sideways to watch it. Ed's going to fix that.

It had the expected wear and tear for its age but we were worried about unseen defects. So we had it inspected. Nothing serious was found and the dealer's cleanup team fixed almost every problem the inspector reported.

They even fixed a couple of things we wouldn't have asked them to fix, like the awning--it had a little tear but they replaced the whole thing. The radio was missing so they put in a state-of-the art model with USB ports.  They did a great cleaning job, too.

So if a leaking roof seal is the worst thing we have facing us, we will be well set. First stop will be an over-nighter at a local lake.  But not today--it's still raining.



AN UPDATE about the inspection: While I am glad we did it and I don't begrudge the people the price they charged for the hard, hot, all-day task, they didn't catch everything.


1. They didn't hook up the sewer line and test it because--they said--there was no dump station. But all they had to do was ask. The dealer would have gladly pointed it out to them or moved the RV over to it. So when we later had issues draining the tanks, we assumed we'd found a defect. (more later)

2. They didn't test the heating system, probably because the temperature was in the mid-90s that day. So they missed the fact that--duh--it didn't work. I'm sure there's some way they could have tested it.  We were out over six hundred dollars fixing that one.

3. There were a couple of other minor issues they missed; nothing serious enough for me to even remember what they were right now, but annoying to have to fix on our own.

Marvelous, my dear, marvelous

A Garden of Marvels:
How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants

by Ruth Kassinger

A marvellous work! Starting with her garden, she explores the history of plant science through the ages. We mourn the loss of Theophrastus' De Plantis, an ancient Greek work written on papyrus which eventually disintegrated. one surviving observation noted that plants were unlike animals in that they keep growing throughout their lives and can be reproduced by cutting in half.

But soon she moves into modern times, like her interview with Dr. Rufus Chaney, a founding father of phytoremediation. I assume that is the study of how to clean up mankind's messes using well-chosen plants, because the question she presents to him is, "Why do brake ferns pull arsenic out of soil, and such can be used to decontaminate soil and water."  (And at the same time, create fern gardens)

Although it turned out his work was primarily on nickel and the Alyssum bertolnii which, under certain conditions, takes up nickel from the soil into the leaves at levels that should have been toxic. Later she notes,

(The discovery of this dual system for taking up inorganic nutrients--effortless osmosis of some molecules and the selective uptake of others--answered a question that had troubled scientists since the ancient Greek era: Do roots actively choose nutrients form the soil or only passively receive them? The answer, we now know, is both.)

So if you're fascinated by plants, you need to read this book. And if not, read it anyway. You'll become so.

Gardening in my Roots, unexpected bonus

Those poor, sad, neglected broccoli plants I left in the ground after they buttoned in the spring and totally failed to produce a decent head?

Well, they're still Buttoning.  (That's where they produce tiny heads) But it didn't stop me from harvesting a small crop, along with another lovely turnip.

Meanders with Mammoth

                                Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large.
                                                                                             - the encyclopedia

Mammoth, short for Mammoth Money Eater, is an RV. Parked next to anything normal--like a house--it looks gi-normous.  Parked out by itself, if you're far enough away...it still looks gi-normous. But on the lot next to the other machines, it looked reasonably small. And approachable.

And--more important--affordable.  Borrowing a little from an employee stock fund and cleaning out our savings account pretty much did the trick. And now it's at home, sitting beside our house and dwarfing it by comparison.

The roof is leaking because it's been raining all day. It wasn't leaking when we looked at it and clearly hadn't been leaking before we looked at it or we'd have seen the water damage. So we can only hope that when they re-sealed the roof, they first cleaned off the old seal and then missed a spot with the new one.

But that's not such a big (no pun intended) deal. The big deal is that my husband and I finally decided we were too old and too lazy to haul out the camping gear on any sort of regular basis. In fact, we had been using that as an excuse not to go camping at all. We used to go practically all the time, even after we bought a house and "settled down."  But then we did the childbearing thing, so we were bound by the schedule of the school year--we could only go traveling during spring break, fall break, and the hottest part of summer. Plus, since kids are people two, the places needed to be entertaining, kid friendly, and have a swimming pool. Oh, the sacrifices we made!

After the kids grew up, my husband went back to work but the job he found allowed only a week of vacation per year.  And then, when he finally retired for good, other things hit. Our daughter died and we didn't care much about anything for a while. Our son joined the army and was sent to Hawaii. We really liked Hawaii. But it cost a lot to visit him here--if we went once a year, there went the year's vacation budget. And then our son moved to Korea, where one visit cost us two year's of vacation money.  We were finally starting to have time to start traveling again, but no money.

One day a friend of my husband's started talking about an old RV he wanted to sell. A seed was planted; a tiny spark flamed. No more tents, camp stoves, motels, restaurants, or dog boarding--just wash the sheets, stock the fridge and load in the dog cages. With that kind of convenience, wouldn't we'd start camping again?

But the friend's RV, a 40-footer, was too big and too old. He's a great guy and offered to fix some of its issues, but the one issue he didn't offer to fix was the slide. Whenever he needed to close the slide, he had to take a long metal rod and lift it up. We watched him do it and it worked...but how long would it go on working?

Still, the seed was growing. We starting thinking we'd look around for something newer and shorter and when the time and price were right, we'd buy.

Then came "the vacation from bleah." We took a four day, motel-based road trip to see some wildlife and birds and just about anything different from the same old, same old.  We saw a little wildlife and a couple of birds, but what we mostly saw was our windshield and white lines on pavement. The motel balcony looked out over highway traffic. The restaurants were over priced and under par. The distance from motel to wildlife area meant that we could only go viewing during the hottest, most boring part of the day.

On the drive back home Ed started checking RV resellers.

A journey is supposed to change you, and this was no exception. You've heard the expression, "There's no place like here--there's no time like now"? The place was now here, the time was now now--and the price was now negotiable. The first RV that met most of our criteria was going to become ours.

Birds--and where to see them

Birds of Texas
by Keith A Arnold and Gregory Kennedy

This was my Christmas vacation reading and now it needs to go back to the library. But I want to keep it!  Unfortunately, no one gave me a bookstore gift card.

The pictures are not great. Barely adequate in some cases, and they don't consistently show adult male, adult female, and immature for each bird. It's the descriptions that make the book worth-while. Much like allaboutbirds.com, the Cornell University BIrding web site, this has separate bullets for ID, size, status, habitat, nesting, feeding, voice, similar species, and--my personal favorite--best sites. For example, the best places to see a Clapper Rail are Sea Rim SP, Anahuac NWR, Galveston Island SP,...

Now I need to go look up the locations of all these places.

Learned my lesson recap

Recipe Reduction started on January 24 of this year with 199 recipes. The rules were:
1. I had to write about each one, humorously--unless it's just too sad. That happens sometimes. Cooking can turn ugly.
2. I was allowed to cull a recipe if it turned out to be very similar to another one that I tried.
3. I reserved the right to change a recipe slightly, such as reduce the amount of oil, provided I didn't bad-mouth the author when my results turn out dry and insipid.
4. No black pepper unless it truly belongs.
5. No bellyaching.

I've had to eliminate a few duplicates, replace a few that I added out of complete and total insanity, and correct my countdown timer when I started increasing it instead of decreasing. But on the whole, I ended up cooking about 199 recipes, mostly all collected over the course of several years. And now, I'm so glad it's over!!!
I didn't always follow the rule about writing humorously. It's hard to say funny things about a Rosemary Foccacia that turned into a rock too hard for the birds to peck--the best words I could come up with were !#@%#.  Or a Vegan Shepherd's pie that was little more than a bunch of overcooked vegetables with mashed potatoes on top. Or the time I almost wasted an expensive pastured pork roast by slow cooking it with homemade ranch dressing on top.

When I looked back to see the good stuff, I was surprised at how much good there had been--I'd mostly remembered the bad. Highlights: Japanese Stir-Fried Vegetables, Mirin Glazed Tofu, Indian Curry Paste with Vegetables, Potato Chowder with Miso Broth, Flank Steak Kebabs in Asian-style Marinade, Snap Peas Daikon Egg Soup, Miso Tofu Noodle Soup, Zucchini Fritter Omelet, Stir-Fried Beef with Chiles and Basil, Dark Chocolate Quinoa Bark, Eggplant Salad Pitas, Black Sesame Otsu With Soba Noodles, Sardine Fritters in Lettuce Leaves with Sriracha-Soy Sauce, Tofu and Lobster Mushrooms in Ginger Broth.

Clearly, from this list, I'm really into Asian cooking. Not so obvious is my discovery that the simplest treatments of fresh garden produce are the best. Take zucchini--zucchini frittata with onion, eggs and cheese is good; but zucchini sauteed with a bit of olive oil and salt is heavenly.  And even in Asian cooking, the lightest sauces are the best.
 
Other things I've learned:

Professional cooks use too much acid. Either that or their lemons are smaller than mine and they don't squeeze them hard. Maybe I should watch cooking shows and find out. I mean--I don't dig out the juicer or anything, but if a recipe calls for "juice of one lemon", I squeeze out all the juice.

Time estimates are universally useless. But I'm getting pretty good at making my own--count the number of ingredients, multiply by seven (not three, per my original estimate), and double it.

Raw kale is inedible to human beings.




Aggressively attack junk that tries to accumulate on your work area.

Dump lime juice, cumin, garlic and olive oil in a bottle and you've made a better salad dressing than nine out of ten you can buy at the grocery store.

There are a lot of dodgy recipes for hummus out there.

And last, don't save stupid recipes anymore!